The Icon and the Axe

The Grecophile faction acquired new strength with the arrival from Constantinople in 1685 of two well-traveled and educated Greeks, the Likhudy brothers. They undermined Medvedev's position with doctrinal attacks and wrested away, for the use of their Greek school, stone buildings originally designed for Medvedev's Latin academy. Rapidly stripped of his various positions, Medvedev was soon arrested for alleged treason and, after two years of torture and mistreatment, burned for heresy in 1691. As in the Nikon-Avvakum controversy, however, the Medvedev-Likhudy affair resulted in mutual defeat rather than clear victory for either side. The Lik-hudies themselves soon became suspect as foreign intriguers, and their influence declined precipitously in the early 1690's.1

There were two important issues with long-term implications for Russian culture lying beneath the sordid external details of the controversy. Each side was vindicated on one issue: the Latinizers on that of the basic language and style of theological education and discourse, the Grecophiles on fundamental matters of dogma.

The Latin bias in theological education represented the final victory of the new clergy over the traditional Greek-oriented monastic establish-

ment of Muscovy. Henceforth, Russian theological education-almost the only form of education in eighteenth-century Russia-was far more Western in content than before. Latin replaced Greek forever as the main language of philosophic and scientific discourse; and Russia adopted through its church schools a more sympathetic attitude toward secular learning and scholastic theology than the more patristically inclined Grecophiles would have tolerated. It is not accidental that the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century saw a flood of learned treatises on the Russian Church by Western theologians, and that most of the important theological writing and teaching in the Russian Church during this period was the work of Russian priests originally trained in the Latin-speaking theological academies of Western Europe.2

The vindication of the Greeks in matters of dogma was in many ways more surprising than the victory of Latins in matters of form. The scholastic theology of Roman Catholicism has always attracted those in search of rational order and synthesis. Moreover, for the Orthodox, Catholicism was doctrinally far closer than Protestantism. A number of Catholic positions had been endorsed by the Orthodox Church generally at the synod of Bethlehem in 1672;3 and others were quietly accepted by the post-1667 Russian Church without any sense of contradiction or betrayal. The Catholic definition of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was widely accepted. Leaders of the new Church even proposed that the long-proscribed Catholic phraseology on the procession of the Holy Spirit be reinserted in the Russian creed and that the Russian Church appoint a pope and elevate its four metropolitans to patriarchal rank.1 But the critical doctrinal issue over which the Latinizers came to grief was the nature of the eucharist, or holy communion.

Behind the seemingly technical debate over this sacrament, this commemorative re-enactment of the Last Supper, lay the deeper question of man's relationship to God in a changing world. The nature of God's presence in the bread and wine had deeply bothered the reformers of the West, most of whom had retained this rite while changing its form or redefining its nature. The Hussites had sought to make the "common service" (the literal meaning of "liturgy") truly common by making the elements readily available to all. Luther spoke of con- rather than trans-substantiation, in an effort to reconcile the concurrent fact of Christ's real presence and of essentially unchanged bread and wine. The Roman Catholic doctrine of the eucharist was systematically drawn up only when the need came to deal with the varying challenges of the reformers. It contended (1) that Christ was really, and not merely symbolically, present in the sacrament; (2) that

a total change in the substance of the elements (transubstantiation) took place at the time the priest repeated Christ's original words of institution: "This is my body .. . This is my blood"; and (3) that only the purely "accidental" aspects of the bread and wine remain unchanged.5