The Icon and the Axe

Intertwined with their objections to Nikon's authoritarianism was the archpriests' profound opposition to any change in the familiar forms of worship. Changing the two-fingered sign of the cross (the form used on Russian icons and in all the reverences of the Russian peasant) and the double hallelujah meant to them destroying symbols of Christ's divine-human nature. Changing the spelling of Jesus (one of the few words that all could read in old Muscovy) implied a change in God Himself. Changing the form of address in the Lord's Prayer from "our Father" to "our God" seemed to remove God from the intimate relationship most easily understood in a patriarchal society.

Many of the changes seemed to shorten and simplify the worship service at a time when the puritanical archpriests felt there should be more rather than less demands. Changes in the creed seemed to weaken the relevance and immediacy of God to human history. Nikon changed the traditional Russian reading in the creed that Christ's kingdom "has no end" to "shall have no end." From representing Christ as "sitting" at the right hand of God, the new creed read "was seated"; and from affirming belief in the "true and life-giving Holy Spirit," the new creed substituted "life-giving Holy Spirit." Though these changes were intended merely to rid the Russian church of uncanonical accretions, their effect to the fundamentalists was to imply that Christ was now sometimes on and sometimes off his throne (like a seventeenth-century monarch) and that the Holy Spirit merely participates in truth (like any student of the worldly sciences). The most passionate and irrational defenders of fundamentalism were women. Indeed, without the initial support of influential noblewomen, no coherent movement of schismatics would probably have emerged from the religious crisis. The attachment of women to the old ways was more deep

and purely spiritual than that of the men; for they shared none of the earthly rewards and glory that Muscovy had to offer. Left to the isolation of the upper chamber (terem) and relegated to an inferior position in every aspect of Muscovite life, many of them nonetheless developed a passionate attachment to the religious ritual which gave meaning and sanctity to their world. The most tender and saintly devotional passages in all of Old Believer literature are found in the letters of Avvakum's feminine supporters in Moscow, such as the Boyarina Morozova, widowed scion of the wealthy Morozov family. Avvakum was indebted to his own mother for his religious upbringing; and the most moving figure in his Autobiography is, in many ways, his long-suffering wife, who accompanied him on all his arduous missions. The greatest retrospective artistic study of an Old Believer theme is, appropriately, Surikov's large canvas of the black figure of Morozova on a sledge taking her to martyrdom, with her hand extended upward in a defiant, two-fingered sign of the cross.47

If the women simply clung to the old ways, the restless men required some kind of explanation, or program for resistance. As the archpriests' despair deepened over securing repeal of the reforms, they began to turn to the belief that Russia was entering the last stage of earthly history.

The natural connection between Byzantine fundamentalism and apocalypticism provides a key to understanding the formation of the schismatic tradition in Russia. However animistic their identification of faith with form, however confused their understanding of tradition, the fundamentalists stood on solid Byzantine ground in insisting that inherited church traditions were begun by Christ, sanctified by the Holy Spirit at the early church councils, and must be preserved inviolably until His coming again. Jesus' last assurance to the apostles that "I am with you always, even to the end of time" applied to the ideas and forms of His Holy Church. If these were to be changed on a large scale by human decree, it must necessarily mean that the "end of time" is at hand.

Unlike Protestant fundamentalists these fundamentalists of Russian Orthodoxy identified God not with the words of scripture but with the forms of worship. Indeed, the only parts of scripture they knew were the psalms and those passages from the prophets and New Testament which were read orally in regular worship services. Some extremists among the Russian fundamentalists even took the position that the Bible itself was a secular book, since it contained many worldly and even pornographic stories and had first come to Russia by means of the "guileful" printing presses of corrupted Western Slavs.48

When Avvakum cried "Give us back our Christ!" he was not speaking figuratively; nor was he rhetorically addressing those who had changed the