The Icon and the Axe

The essential similarity of these two Muscovite prophets becomes particularly striking in their years of tribulation and exile. Each viewed himself as the suffering servant of God. Each was fortified in his convictions by visions. Each continued to seek vindication in history, appealing to the Tsar and other authorities for restitution of the True Church rather than engaging in disputations with the new hierarchy. Each sought to prove the Tightness and sanctity of his own cause by deeds rather than words. Denied access to the councils of the great, they sought to prove themselves by working miraculous cures on the humble believers who came to their distant retreats.

Of the two, Awakum has become better known to posterity because of the magnificent autobiography he wrote in the early years of his exile. In it, the old hagiographic style is fully adopted to the vernacular idiom, and the prophetic Muscovite ideology is transformed into a deeply personal profession of faith. Named for the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk, whose name means "strong fighter," Awakum reacts like a true prophet

to persecution, asking for God's help rather than men's mercy. Even while being beaten with the knout in Siberia by the leader of a military expedition,

I kept saying, "O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God! Help me!" And this I kept repeating without pause, so that it was bitter to him in that I did not say, "Have mercy!"120

Inveighing tirelessly against "lovers of new things who have fallen away from truth," Awakum calls for active witness to the truth rather than talk about it:

What matter that they talk vanity of me; in the day of judgment they shall all know of my deeds, whether they be good or evil.121

Awakum represents in many ways a culminating expression of the Muscovite ideology: a passionate prophet seeking to fill his life with "deeds of devotion" (podvigi blagochestiia). He combines within himself both the kenotic and the fanatic strains of early Russian spirituality. His polemic style is as pungent and polemic as that of Ivan IV, yet his message is conservative and his counsel compassionate. He bids men simply to preserve the old faith and accept suffering gladly in imitation of Christ, rather than fight back with the sword as do followers of "the Tatar God Mohammad," or with the "fire, knout and gallows" of the new faithless state.122 His own martyrdom gave his writings a special crown of authority, which tended to .perpetuate among Russian religious dissenters Awakum's semi-Manichean view of the world. Awakum called himself not an Old but a "True Believer," insisting (in objection to a Nikonian deletion from the creed) that

It were better in the Creed not to pronounce the word Lord, which is an accidental name, than to cut out "True," for in that name is contained the essence of God.123

Awakum places light first among the "essential names" of God and sees Christianity as "the first light of truth" now darkened by Western heresy. In advocating self-immolation he develops a dualistic dissociation of the body from the soul. "Burning your body, you commend your soul into the hands of God,"124 he wrote to one martyr. Shortly before he was burned at the stake, his attitude became almost masochistic: ". . . run and jump into the flames. Here is my body, Devil, take and eat it; my soul you cannot take!"125 Awakum was rebuked for his heretical views by his more learned prison mate, Deacon Fedor;126 but the archpriest's fanaticism and dualism were to exercise great influence on native Russian traditions of religious dissent.

Nikon also left an admiring life written in the hagiographical style by a seventeenth-century follower,127 and he too emerges as a deeply Muscovite figure. A Dutch visitor at his Monastery of the New Jerusalem in 1664 found nothing but Slavic and Russian books in his personal library.'-* Everywhere he went Nikon had special retreats from the world for meditation and prayer. Like Avvakum, he disciplined himself with strenuous physical labor. During his final monastic exile he actually built a small island retreat in the lake by hauling huge stones down through the water and building a synthetic island. He was fascinated with bells and had a large number cast with mysterious inscriptions at the New Jerusalem monastery. Almost the only question about the outside world that he asked his Dutch visitor pertained to the size and nature of bells in Amsterdam.129 Nikon was as opposed as Awakum to new icons, and had visions in which Christ appeared to him as He did in the icons. Nikon was said to have achieved in his last years even more miraculous cures of the sick than Awakum: 132 in one three-year period.130