The Icon and the Axe

even over the men in power and in the offices of the Government."112 Nikon, he complained, had arrogated to himself the Tsar's traditional right to name the archimandrites of Russia's leading monasteries and had increased the number of serfs bonded directly to the patriarchate by 250 per cent. Although Nikon was careful not to claim pre-eminence of the patriarch over the Tsar, he did at times argue that the spiritual power was higher than the temporal. In his new edition of the canon law in 1653, he cites the Donation of Constantine, the forged document that had been used to sustain extreme papal claims in the late Middle Ages. Although Nikon at no time suggested the establishment of a Russian papacy, he claimed that the authority of the Muscovite patriarchate derives from its replacement of the lapsed see of Rome, seeming to imply that some of the pretensions of the latter have been transferred to the former.118 His quasi-papal ideal is revealed in a vision he claimed to have had of Metropolitan Peter, the founder of the Muscovite hierarchy, appearing to him through the imperial crown on a throne with his hand on the holy gospel.114 In the long and adamant defense of his position throughout the early sixties, Nikon insisted that the patriarch possessed a kind of papal infallibility. "The first primate is the image of Christ and all the others pupils and apostles, and a slave is not entitled to the seat of a sovereign."115

A final indication of catholicizing tendencies in Nikon lies in the area of foreign policy. Whereas the fundamentalists particularly hated Rome and the Poles, Nikon appears to have been more fearful of Protestantism and the Swedes. He opposed the war against Poland of 1653 and the re-baptism of Catholics. Some of his assistants in the correction of books were former Uniats from White Russia and the Ukraine; and the decision of the council in 1667 to confirm his abolition of the requirement of 1620 for rebaptising Catholics was one of many concessions to these non-Great Russian priests. Nikon compared the situation in Russia to that produced by the "Latin heresies" in the West, lamenting that "we have come to those times when we [priests] are fighting one another like lay people."116 He called Nikita Odoevsky, the principal author of the Law Code of 1649 and leading apologist for the subordination of church to state, "a new Luther."117

The multiple ironies as well as the confessional confusions of the age are demonstrated by the fact that the principal collaborator of this "new Luther" in the trial of Nikon was Ligarides, a former Vatican agent wearing the robes of an Orthodox metropolitan. It seems only fitting that this erstwhile Grecophile from distant Gaza ended up destroying Nikon's Greek revival and posing as the defender of Muscovite tradition. Ligarides summoned up the distinctively Russian symbol of the icon screen as the model

for an ordered hierarchical society to challenge Nikon's concept of a symphony of powers between civil and ecclesiastical authority. Recognizing the patriarch as in any way equal to the Tsar would, Ligarides warned, place two icons in the center of the chin, where only the "Christ enthroned" is traditionally found; and man "cannot serve two masters . . . pray through two icons."118

In contrast to Ligarides, both Nikon and Awakum devoted much of their lives to such prayer and were constant in their loyalties. They were both profoundly Muscovite in temperament and training, "unlearned in speech, yet not in thought; untaught in rhetoric, dialectic and philosophy, but with the mind of Christ our guide within us."119 Thus, it would be misleading to end a consideration of the original schism between them on any note of comparability with the West. The conflict between Nikon and Awakum was not a theological debate, but a death struggle between two towering frontiersmen in a world of one truth. Only after they had destroyed one another did Russia become a safe place for Ligarides' doctrine of state service and many, shifting truths.

The idea that there is but one truth in any controversy was Byzantine; and both Nikon and Awakum thought of themselves as defending its apostolic heritage from either foreign corruption or domestic debasement. Each sought to make that truth relevant to Russian society through the force of his own prophetic personality. Each underwent severe physical suffering and spent his last years in lonely isolation from Muscovy. Each was ascetically indifferent to the bourgeois virtues of cleanliness and moderation. Neither of them was ever outside of Russia.