The Icon and the Axe

To counter the power of the civil estate, Nikon issued a revised edition of the Pilot Book in 1653, and in the following year persuaded the Tsar to instruct provincial voevodas to make more general use of canon law in criminal matters.37 Nikon brought in a steady stream of foreign patriarchs to approve his reforms and foreign relics and icons to sanctify them (beginning with the Georgian Mother of God, which Nikon had procured from Mt. Athos as early as 1648). He set up an academy in the Zaikonospassky Monastery for translating Greek and Latin texts and instructing priests in useful secular knowledge as well as theology. During the plague of 1653-4, for instance, the best of his imported Kievan translators, Epiphanius Slavinetsky, was diverted from a proposed translation of the Bible to a translation of Vesalius' work on human anatomy; and Nikon's book purchaser in the Greek East spent much of his time seeking out savants and manuscripts that would offer additional medical guidance.38

Nikon had the profound misfortune of introducing his program into Russia at a time of great suffering through plague and war. He soon became a focal point of resentment for those who were anxious for a scapegoat and jealous of his closeness to the Tsar. His position was made untenable by the opposition of influential boyars, bureaucrats, and monastic leaders (often one and the same person) and by his own mixing of political and religious considerations. In his campaign against new trends in icon painting, for instance, Nikon ordered the streltsy to confiscate icons forcibly, to gouge out the eyes of the painted figures, and parade them through Moscow-warning that anyone henceforth painting similar icons would be treated in the same way. Nikon himself publicly shattered each of the mutilated pictures- naming just before each "burial" the high state official from whom it had been taken. This action terrified the bureaucracy and led the confused and superstitious Moscow mob to conclude that Nikon was a complete iconoclast responsible for the plague. In his campaign to gain acceptance for the new rituals, Nikon censured uncooperative boyars and anathemized priests during regular church services. He aroused opposition to his program among the proud and conservative monks of Solovetsk by trying to establish patriarchal control even over such sensitive disciplinary matters as drinking habits. He solidified popular feeling in the north behind the monks of Solovetsk by trying to found a rival monastery in the area and giving it a Greek name {Stavros, "cross").

Solovetsk was thus emboldened to begin the organized resistance to Nikon, refusing to accept his new service books in 1657. A few months later three appointed heads of newly created provincial dioceses refused to leave their Moscow sinecures for the distant posts to which Nikon had assigned them. In the following summer the head of the Tsar's imperial household

beat Nikon's chief official assistant as the latter was in the official act of arranging the order of religious procedure for a dinner in honor of the Orthodox crown prince of Georgia. When the Tsar failed to rebuke his official and subsequently the Tsar himself failed to appear at several worship services, Nikon reacted with a characteristic sense of drama.

Following a special liturgy in the Cathedral of the Assumption, Nikon announced that he was retiring to his new monastery, the New Jerusalem, outside Moscow until the Tsar reaffirmed confidence in him and his program. Not for eight years, however, did Nikon receive the Tsar's summons; and then it was to appear before a church council to be formally deposed as Patriarch and sentenced to life exile in a distant northern monastery. Most of his modifications of church worship were formally approved by this council of 1667; but the heart of his program-the attempt to establish a theocratic state under a powerful and disciplined hierarchy-was rejected definitively. It is a tribute to the power and magnetism of Nikon that it took the prikaz of secret affairs and other servants of the new secular state nearly a decade to depose him formally.39 But never again was the church hierarchy to exercise or even claim comparable political power in Russia. The abolition of the patriarchate and the thorough subordination of church to state was to follow in a few decades under Peter the Great.

The Fundamentalist Answer