The Icon and the Axe

Since numbers were still written by letters in seventeenth-century Russia, the Russians found it easy to apply the ancient practice of gematria: adding together the numerical value of the letters in a man's name to find his "number." The early Christians had found that the Greek form of Nero's name written in Hebrew characters added up to 666; and Zizanius at the time of the forming of the Uniat Church in 1596 had started the Orthodox community speculating about the possible meaning for their plight of the figure 666. In the course cf the theological crisis of the sixties, Russians

found that this magic number could be reached by adding together the numbers for the Tsar (Alexis = 104), the Patriarch (Nikon == 198), and one of Nikon's suspect foreign editors (Arsenius the Greek = 364). Later computations showed that the letters in the word for "free thinker" iyol'nodum) also added up to 666.07

Signs of the coming Antichrist were found in the natural world by Theoktist, former hegumen of the Chrysostom monastery in Moscow, who had moved to distant Solovetsk and used his erudition and association in prison with Neronov to provide ideological support for that monastery's resistance to the new forms of worship. In his On the Antichrist and His Secret Reign, Theoktist contended that the reign of the Antichrist had already begun and appended a catalogue of signs to watch for: a kind of program guide for the last days.68 Another shadowy figure, Abraham, Avvakum's "spiritual son" and constant companion in his last days of prison, saw signs of the Antichrist not only in the name "New Jerusalem" but also in the fact that Nikon called the river Istra "Jordan," a nearby mountain "Golgotha," and young monks his "seraphims." Frontier superstition was blended unconsciously with apocalyptical symbolism as Nikon was variously said to be the child of a water sprite (rusalka) or of the pagan Mordvin or Cheremis tribes.69 The atmosphere was charged with expectation that 1666-7 was t0 brmg portentous new events. The expectations were justified, for 1667, the first year in the expected reign of the Antichrist, was in many ways the beginning of a new order in Russia.

The Great Change

The decisive turning point in the religious crisis of seventeenth-century Russia was the church council of 1667, which excommunicated the fundamentalists en bloc. It was, superficially, a victory for Nikon, because the council upheld the central authority of the hierarchy and all of Nikon's reforms except his "our God" form of address in the Lord's prayer and his elimination of a dual blessing of the waters on Epiphany. Moreover, the ecclesiastical administration was greatly enlarged by the addition of twenty new dioceses to the already existing fourteen, and by the addition of four metropolitans, five archbishops, and nine bishops to the hierarchy.70

Yet defeat for the fundamentalists did not mean victory for the theocrats. On the contrary, the council devoted most of its attention to the final deposition and exile of Nikon. Its main result was to establish the clear subordination of church to state by flooding the church bureaucracy with

new priests who were, in effect, state appointed. One new Ukrainian metropolitan admitted with remarkable candor in sentencing Avvakum that "wc have to justify the Tsar, and that is why we stand for these innovations-in order to please him."71 Joachim, the new patriarch, was blunt in addressing the Tsar: "Sovereign, I know neither the old nor the new faith, but whatever the Sovereign orders I am prepared to follow and obey in all respects."72

A cosmopolitan, primarily Ukrainian and western Russian hierarchy was replacing the older Great Russian Church administration, just as Muscovy, having wrested from Poland key sections of these regions, was rapidly being transformed into a multi-national empire. The ideal of an organic religious civilization-whether fundamentalist or theocratic in structure-was becoming as anachronistic as the ill-defined economic and administrative procedures of patriarchal rule.

The defenders of the Muscovite ideal of an organic, religious civilization were being confronted in their own land with a sovereign secular state similar to those of Western Europe. The year 1667 accelerated this trend through the formal transfer of Kiev from long years of Polish overlordship to Muscovite control and the promulgation of a new decree to insure national control over all foreign trade.73 The process of freeing autocratic authority from any effective restraint by local or conciliar bodies had already been accomplished in the early years of Alexis' reign by the crushing of town revolts and the abolition of the zemsky sobers.