rebuffed by bishops jealous of their power. Even so, in Russia many in the laity
rebelled at these reforms, precisely because they changed what they considered the
most integral part of the faith, namely ritual.
Opposition broke out immediately, starting with the Zealots of Piety themselves.
Avvakum and Ivan Neronov had consistently protested that the Greek books were
not antique originals but were influenced by the heretical Catholic west; they
protested that the changes in ritual were not justified by religious precedent and
that the mandate of Orthodoxy was to change nothing of the sacred heritage; they
embraced the 1551 Church Council protocols as authentic Russian tradition.
Avvakum, Neronov, and others immediately rejected the 1653Psaltyrand subse-
quent revised books, bringing down the Church’s wrath. Ivan Neronov was
declared an apostate in 1656 and sentenced to monastic exile; hefled confinement
and continuedfiery preaching against the reforms until called to the Church
Council of 1667 as a heretic. There he recanted, but many others did not.
Avvakum became the exemplar of this opposition; exiled to Siberia in 1653, he
proselytized there and continued to do so when he returned to Moscow in 1664.
Brought before the Council of 1667, he and a group of compatriots refused to
recant and were exiled to Pustozersk and executed there in 1682. Patriarch Nikon,
meanwhile, had resigned his position in 1658 in a stand-off with the Tsar over his
assertion that Church was superior to state. Fittingly, in his defense Nikon cited
two analogies, one of the Church and state as sun and moon and one defining“two
swords”of Church and lay power, that both were arguments used by medieval
popes against European kings. Nikon’s arguments did not succeed.
The Church Council of 1666–7, dominated by visiting Greek patriarchs, was a
turning point in Russian Orthodox Church history. While it deposed Patriarch
Nikon, it affirmed his reforms, anathematizing those who resisted. This prompted
open revolt by dissenters; hundreds of communities joined the movement, which
has become called the Old Belief. By 1684 a draconian law threw the weight of the
state on dissenters, up through the death penalty, construing dissent as disobedi-
ence to the state.
Open opposition to the Church was a difficult step for ordained churchmen like
Avvakum and Neronov, and they were able to justify it only by reference to
apocalyptic thinking. Prevalent in Russia in the sixteenth century, millenarianism
took on greater force in the seventeenth century with an influx of Ukrainian
apocalyptic writings and illustrated works. Already in the 1620s, a millenarian
movement of religious dissent emerged in central Russia under the charismatic
leader Kapiton that presaged much of the Old Belief’s views and structures. In a
time of tremendous social and cultural change in Russia (serfdom, taxation, a more
bureaucratic state, religious reform), Kapiton and his followers identified their era
as the End Time, declaring Church and state heretical. Theyfled to the forests,
living in small monastic-type communities, emulating early Christian fathers in
extreme asceticism, condemning the state as heathen.
The Old Belief similarly drew upon apocalyptic belief when it rejected the
official Church. Dissenters declared that Nikon’s reforms, the Church Council’s
condemnations, and the Tsar’s political persecution signified that Christian history
Varieties of Orthodoxy 257