While one group was pursuing moral reform, a second, represented primarily by
Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, his close associate F. M. Rtishchev, his confessor Stefan
Vonifat’ev, and the cosmopolitan metropolitan of Novgorod Nikon, focused on
preparing Russian Orthodoxy to take its rightful place of leadership over eastern
Christianity (in 1685 the Kyiv metropolitanate was made subordinate to Moscow,
not Constantinople). Associated with a newly sanctioned printing press (Pechatnyi
dvor), they returned to a key problem identified by the 1551 Church Council:
standardizing liturgical books so that Slavic-speaking Orthodox would worship
with the same words and rituals. They embarked on the difficult task of identifying
authentic texts in a tradition that had been developing for centuries. They were
most influenced by Greek advisors and patriarchs, who pressed upon them the
service books of the Greek diaspora, often printed in Venice and influenced by
post-Tridentine Catholicism. Guided by such sources, on issues of ritual and text
Moscow’s editors often contradicted the 1551 Church Council, whose rulings the
Church repudiated in the 1660s.
In 1652 Metropolitan Nikon was made patriarch, and with his new position he
pushed forcefully ahead to reform texts. In 1653 he issued a revised canon law
book,Nomokanon; in the next few years a raft of reformed books appeared—a
Psaltyr, a book of Hours, New Testament, Acts of the Apostles, and other service
books. They, and myriad decrees, contained changes in wording and ritual that
subtly but substantively changed Orthodox practice, if not belief. They included a
three-fingered sign of the cross, a Greek four-pointed crucifix (in place of the
traditional eight-pointed shape), a different number of prostrations and bows in
Lenten services, a new transliteration of the name of Jesus, and small but significant
changes in the Nicene Creed. Abrasive and ambitious, Nikon sent the new books to
all parishes, cathedrals, and monasteries with orders to adopt them or face (by a
decree of 1656) charges of heresy. He made no effort to prepare the ground or
explain to far-flung monastic and parish communities the rationale for the changes.
In these reforms the Orthodox Church was following Russian tradition, fulfilling
pastoral goals it had set itself in church councils since 1551. But it was also
paralleling self-disciplining processes occurring across Catholic and Protestant
Europe since the sixteenth century, processes of which some of these reformers
were aware. In many ways, Nikon’s new books and the Church’s interventions into
lay moral life constitute a kind of confessionalization like that being done by
Protestant sects and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Confessionalization
involved an institutional Church’s effort to define its creed in vernacular catechisms
and bibles, to instruct the faithful in belief and ritual practice, and to discipline
church members in moral behavior and adherence to the creed. In Russia, however,
this disciplining process was less successful than that of Catholic, Lutheran, and
Calvinist Churches in Europe because it lacked resources. Nikon’s new books were
disseminated byfiat, but little was done to bring the laity on board. Key elements of
European confessionalization were not even tried: founding seminaries, improving
clerical education, creating a parish school system, publishing vernacular pietistic
works, and expanding literacy for the laity. An importantfirst step would have been
to create a denser parish network, but a 1680s effort to create smaller dioceses was
256 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801