The Icon and the Axe

Even further afield, from the anti-scholastic Hesychasts on Mt. Athos, came reinforcement for the anti-intellectualism of the fundamentalists. As early as 1621, Ivan Vyshensky, a Ukrainian elder, had returned to lead the fight against union with Rome and had urged the "Russian, Lithuanian, and Polish people" to leave their "different faiths and sects" for a revived Orthodoxy. In his Council on Devotion (Blagochestie), this "Savonarola of the Ukrainian renaissance" juxtaposed the Roman "Church of Jezebel" with an idealized Orthodoxy in apocalyptical terms:

I say to you that the land under your feet weeps and cries aloud before the Lord God, begging the creator to send down his sickle as of old in Sodom, preferring that it stand empty and pure rather than populated and corrupt with your ungodliness and illicit activity. Where now in the Polish land can faith be found?54

There were two opposing forces in his world: the devil, who dispenses "all worldly graces, glory, luxury and wealth," and "the poor pilgrim," who renounces the temptations offered by "a wife, a house, and an ephemeral piece of land."55 The Latin academies of the Jesuits and even of Mogila were part of the devil's campaign to destroy the true Eastern Church and lead men away from the world of the early fathers and hermits. "Thou, simple, ignorant, and humble Russia, stay faithful to the plain, naive gospel wherein eternal life is found," rather than the "phrase-mongering Aristotle" and "the obscurity of pagan sciences." "Why set up Latin and Polish schools?" he asked. "We have not had them up to now and that has not kept us from being saved."56 The introduction of Aristotelian concepts into the discussion of divine mysteries was a form of "masquerade before the portals of our God Christ." Following Vyshensky's line of thought (and quoting many of the same patristic sources), Avvakum inveighed also against "philosophical swaggering" and "almanac mongers" (almanashniki) with his statement "I am untutored in rhetoric, dialectic and philosophy, but the mind of Christ guides me from within."57

One of the original Muscovite correctors of books, Ivan Nasedka, suggested that the turn of the Greek Church to Latin philosophizing indicated the approach of Antichrist. "We have no time now to hear your philosophy," he proclaimed to the learned Lutheran theologians who accompanied the Danish crown prince to Moscow in 1644. "Don't you know that the end of this world is coming and the judgment of God is at the door?"58 Reinforcement for these ideas was also found in the prophetic sermons of Ephrem the Syrian, who had fought the saturation of the Byzantine Church with pagan philosophy in the fourth century, warning the Syrian church in his Seven Words on the Second Coming of Christ that impending doom awaits those who stray from the simplicity of Christ. Never before printed in any Slavic language, Ephrem's sermons suddenly appeared in four different editions in Moscow between 1647 and 1652. Part of his impact upon the fundamentalists came from the fact that his work had been the basic patristic source for the pictorial representation of the Last Judgment in Russian icons and frescoes. The sudden discovery of his text, therefore, seemed to offer the unlearned Russian priests "confirmation" of their traditional image of coming judgment-and led them to believe that the hour itself might be approaching. Renewed reverence was also attached to Ephrem's prophecies because of the fact that Nikon was believed to have "insulted" this early ascetic by eliminating the prostrations that had traditionally accompanied his famed Lenten prayer of humility.59 The fundamentalists were also stirred by the writings of Arsenius Sukhanov. Sent by three successive patriarchs to examine the practices and

procure the writings of other Orthodox Churches, Arsenius returned with a lurid picture of corruption and of craven submission before Latin authority and Turkish power. In all of the East, Arsenius seemed to find but two sources of hope: Muscovy, the third and final Rome, in which alone "there is no heresy,"60 and Jerusalem, the original font of truth.