The Icon and the Axe

spelling of Jesus' name. He was praying directly to God for the only Christ he had ever known: the Christ of the Russian frontier. This Christ was not a teacher like the pagan Greek philosophers, nor the bearer of a sacred book like the Tatar Mohammed, but the original suffering hero, or podvizhnik, in whose name and image Muscovites had taken the rudiments of civilization far out into a cold and forbidding wilderness. If the Holy Spirit was no longer to be described as "true and life-giving" in the creed, then its sanctifying presence must be cut off from the Church. But the tongues of fire with which the Spirit first came upon the apostles at Pentecost cannot be extinguished by the hand of man. They wUl, on the contrary, come again in the purifying fire that prepares man for the final judgment of God.

Thus, changes in church practices led directly to the "eschatological psychosis" of the mid-seventeenth century. This psychosis arose directly out of the emphasis on the concrete and historical in the Muscovite ideology. The intensified spirituality of monastic asceticism and holy folly was directed not primarily toward establishing private, ecstatic union with God but rather toward receiving the concrete guidance and reassurance which God was believed to be continually offering his chosen people through voices and visions. Amidst the confusion and upheaval of the First Northern War, God's seeming silence led the overpopulated monastic estate into a "sensual hallucinatory cast of mind."49 The exhumation and canonization of St. Cyril of the White Lake late in 1649 set off a veritable panic of efforts to possess relics from the uncorrupted bodies of saints. The officially sponsored austerity and asceticism of Alexis' early years intensified the psychological pressure to find spiritual compensation for material privation. Meanwhile, historical memory, or patniat', the supreme source of authority and wisdom in Muscovy, was becoming an increasingly confused "nervous reservoir"50 of sensual impressions and wish projections. In mid-seventeenth-century Europe Muscovy had come to resemble the house of a stubborn but powerful eccentric in a fast-changing city. Rooms were cluttered with vast quantities of unsorted memorabilia which were, strictly speaking, neither antique nor modern. The more insistently that apostles of change and rationalization came knocking at the door, the more fanatically the unkempt inhabitants burrowed back into their congenial world of illusion.

At the end, there is, of course, nothing but chaos suitable for rodents or combustion. Everyone noticed the rats in congested and plague-ridden Muscovy; and fire continued to be a menace in the wooden city. As the city slowly came to the conclusion that the living God was no longer present in the agitated voices and visions of its holy men, the most fanatical of its fundamentalists pressed on to a conclusion which-however shocking to

modern rationalism-was entirely consistent with its emphasis on a concrete and historical Christianity. In the popular imagination as well as the monastic chronicles, all history was permeated with God's presence. God's silence and withdrawal from present history, therefore, could mean only that history was at or near its end. Those who looked desperately for some final, tangible way to fulfill His will in this unprecedented situation could find but one act left to perform: the committing of oneself to the purgative flames which, according to tradition, must precede the Last Judgment.

Before turning to this final, desperate expedient of self-immolation, however, the fundamentalists sought an explanation in the ancient idea that adversity heralded the reign of the Antichrist and was to precede the true Christ's Second Coming and final, thousand-year reign on earth. Already at the time of Alexis' coronation, a lonely hermit in Suzdal contended that the new Tsar was a "horn of the Antichrist."51 Russian prophets found many more signs that this terrifying last stage of history was about to begin in the reforms, plagues, and wars of the following decade. Ukrainians and White Russians brought with them prophetic ideas that had been developed in the course of the long Orthodox struggle with Catholicism in those regions. The learned Deacon Fedor, of the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Moscow Kremlin, wrote that "a dark and impenetrable pagan god" which had "taken Lithuania captive" had now come to Russia to "devour the condemned within the churches."52 The original anti-Uniat treatise from White Russia, The Book of Cyril, with a long epilogue on the coming reign of Antichrist, was published in a Moscow edition of six thousand copies. The Book of the One True and Orthodox Faith, a later anti-Uniat compilation from Kiev, was also published in a large edition. It blamed Roman Catholicism not only for attacking Orthodoxy but for letting loose in the West the spectre of "evil-cunning {zlokhitrykh) and many-headed heresies."53