The Icon and the Axe

Other minority religions of the expanding Russian empire may have melted into the schismatic tradition, for the new secular state tended to produce a sense of community among persecuted dissenters. One of the earliest and most influential defenders of the Old Belief in Siberia was an Armenian convert to Orthodoxy, who had been conditioned by his previous Nestorianism to make the sign of the cross with two fingers rather than three.107 Nor can the possibility of some interaction with the Jewish community be excluded. The year 1666, in which the Antichrist was expected by the fundamentalists, was the same year in which Sabbatai Zevi claimed to have become the long-expected Messiah of the Jews. Using many of the same prophetic passages and computations as the Old Believers and influenced perhaps by a wife who was a Ukrainian survivor of the Khmelnitsky massacres, Sabbatai attracted a greater following for his claim than any Jew since Jesus, particularly within the decimated Jewish community of Poland and Russia. The Ukrainian hierarchy which was dominating the new Russian Church denounced Jews along with Old Believers. One Ukrainian priest wrote the first major Christian refutation anywhere of the claims of Sabbatai, The True Messiah, in terms that indicated that Sab-bataian ideas were finding some response within the Orthodox community.108 Since Sabbatai himself became an apostate to Islam and the entire movement was resolutely condemned by Orthodox Jewry, absorption into other

creeds became the norm rather than the exception. Sabbataian ideas influenced Polish thought; and it must have infected the substantial numbers of Jews who sought anonymity and shelter in Muscovy amidst the confusion and massive repopulation of the mid-seventeenth century.109 At the very least, there is a striking similarity between the Sabbataians and the Old Believers in their apocalypticism, fascination with occult numerical computations, ecstatic sense of election, and semi-masochistic acceptance of suffering.

If the Old Believers show a certain kinship with radical Protestantism and Sabbataian Judaism, the theocratic party bears a curious resemblance to Counter Reformation Catholicism. Although Patriarch Philaret was a prisoner and then a diplomatic foe of Catholic Poland, he nonetheless adopted many Catholic ideas-just as Peter was later to borrow heavily from his Swedish adversary. In establishing centralized control over ecclesiastical publication and the canonization of saints, in expanding the bureaucracy, jurisdiction, and landholding power of the hierarchy, Philaret was following Catholic rather than Russian precedents. The same was frequently true of Mogila, whose opposition to Catholicism was purely external and political, but whose conflict with Protestantism was profoundly ideological.

A Swede in Moscow in the early fifties described Vonifatiev, the Tsar's confessor and heir apparent to the patriarchate, as "a cardinal under a different name";110 and an Austrian likened Nikon, who was chosen over Vonifatiev, to the Pope himself.111 Nikon's attempt to provide rigid dogmatic definition in matters of phraseology is more reminiscent of the Council of Trent than of the seven ecumenical councils. Many of the Greek texts he used for models came from Venice or Paris, with Catholic accretions. His sense of the theatrical in court and ecclesiastical ceremony, his calculated reburials and canonizations, his orders to bring back secular classics along with church books from Greece, his opposition to any council which challenged the authority of the first primate-all have more the ring of a Renaissance pope than of a return to Byzantine purity. His program for building and embellishing new monasteries in spots of great natural beauty climaxed by the creation of his monastery of the New Jerusalem seems strangely reminiscent of Julian II and the building of St. Peter's just before the great split in Western Christendom.

In defending the ecclesiastical realm from civil authority, Nikon used traditional Byzantine texts. But his actual policies as patriarch went beyond established Orthodox practice. An Orthodox visitor who accompanied the Patriarch of Antioch to Russia in 1654-5 complained that Nikon had in fact become "a great tyrant over . . . every order of the priesthood and