The Icon and the Axe

In the course of the seventeenth century the Orthodox Church also felt the challenge of the reformers and adopted the Catholic term "transubstantiation" as "the only possible word to deny Protestant heresy and at the same time affirm the Orthodox belief."6 The Russian church hierarchy, which was especially fearful of divisive heresies, played a leading role in the general hardening of doctrinal positions and the increased use of dialectic method and scholastic casuistry in dogmatic writing. Catholic, and more specifically Jesuit, theological technique and terminology is evident in the two small efforts of the Orthodox Church of the Eastern Slavs to provide a systematic catechism for its communicants: Mogila's catechism of 1640 and the catechism of 1670 of Simeon Polotsky, Crown of the Catholic (Kafolkheskaia) Faith. Medvedev was, thus, only continuing the tradition begun by his teacher Polotsky in speaking of transubstantiation and echoing other aspects of Roman Catholic teachings about the eucharist in his long dogmatic dialogue Bread of Life and in a second more polemic work, Manna of the Bread of Life.

Medvedev's exposition of the Catholic position offended Russian Orthodox sensibilities in two important ways. First of all, the distinction between accidents and substances introduced a kind of terminological hair splitting into something which the Orthodox considered a holy mystery (literally, "secret," tainstvo). It was celebrated behind the closed doors of the sanctuary during the third, most hallowed part of the Orthodox mass, the liturgiia vernykh, or "service of the believers." Second, it specified the exact time at which God comes down to man through the transformed elements.

On this latter point Medvedev was challenged and eventually anath-emized; for it related to an issue that had been at the heart of the original split between the churches: the Eastern refusal to accept the Western version of the Nicene Creed, in which the Holy Spirit was said to descend from the Father and Son. A certain awesome if mysterious primacy within the unity of the Trinity was reserved for the Father in the East, and this primacy seemed once more jeopardized by Medvedev's position. Insofar as one can define the precise moment at which God becomes present in the elements, Medvedev's critics insisted that it came after the priest's call for the descent of the Holy Spirit, following the repetition of Christ's words of institution. In other words, the miracle of God's presence in the sacra-

ment was not assured by a priest's re-enactment of Christ's sacrifice, but rather by the "common work of the believers" in supplicating God for the descent of His Holy Spirit.7

Thus, behind all the venality of intrigue which eventually doomed Medvedev lay the reluctance of the Russian Church to accept fully the detailed doctrinal formulations of post-Reformation Roman Catholicism, however much they were to borrow from its language and methods of instruction. The Russian Church displayed a stubborn determination to reassert the uniqueness of its doctrinal position even at a time when it was losing its independence from the state and rejecting its original orientation toward Greek culture.

On one point the Latinizers and Grecophiles had been in agreement: their opposition to the Western churches. Medvedev had inveighed against the heretical ideas he had found among foreign book correctors in Moscow; the Likhudies had written a series of tracts against Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists.8

The xenophobia of the Russian Church, which they helped thus to fortify, was to claim two foreign victims in the waning years of the seventeenth century: Quirinus Kuhlmann and Yury Krizhanich. Each came from the western borderlands of European Slavdom to Moscow with high expectations of the role Russia could play in the religious regeneration of Europe. Each was a prophet without honor in his own country, who was to be rejected as well in Russia. From a purely Western point of view they represent only curious distant echoes of the Reformation and Counter Reformation respectively. Yet in Russia they stand as harbingers of important new ideas and developments. Each bears witness to the extent to which "uniquely Russian" movements and ideas can be traced to Western, or at least non-Russian, origins.