We continue today our reflections on Church leadership and the episcopate and Church organization and structure through history by taking another look at the 17th century, of what occurred in Great Russia at that time, which was of tremendous impact on the Orthodox Church just down to the present day again. Last time we spoke about what was happening in that same century in Constantinople and in the Phanar, and then in Ukraine. And we saw the great influences of the Western—Protestants, Roman Catholicism—on Eastern Orthodoxy at that time. But now we have a different phenomenon in the Moscow area, in northern Russia, in the 17th century, and it was during this century that you had the great schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, where millions of believers—some think as many as one-third of the population of Russia—actually went into schism from the established patriarchal Church over reforms that were forced and introduced by force and power by the very powerful Patriarch Nikon.

The 17th century in Great Russia began with a terrible time. It was called in Russian history the Smutnoye Vremya, the time of very great troubles. There [were] problems with the Western Church, invasions, political turmoil, famine, national disaster, Patriarch Germogen was starved to death in 1612. And at that time, there began a history in Russia that was to last just down until Nicholas II in the 20th century in the Communist Revolution, and that was the establishment of the house of Romanov; the Romanov dynasty began in that particular century.

The beginning was Michael Romanov [who] was kind of elected and became the tsar in 1613. In fact, just last year was the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Romanov tsardom, the successive emperors from the house of Romanov just down to the present time. The first Romanov was the Emperor Michael Romanov, a very interesting man. His father was actually the patriarch. I’m not quite sure how that works; perhaps widower or whatever. But Michael was crowned in 1613, and his father was the patriarch of Moscow, and the two of them together, with the house of Romanov, kind of took over the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church.

When Michael Romanov died in 1645, Alexis Romanov became the emperor, and he served as the emperor from 1645 until 1676, right in the middle of that century, 21 years. He was a very devout and pious man. He was kind of a real leader, and he was for reforming the Church and putting things in order. One of the things that he did was that he found a man to be what he thought would be the great leader of the Russian Orthodox Church as patriarch, and this was a priest-monk by the name of Nikon. Now, Nikon was born in Nizhny Novgorod, in 1605. At the age of 20, 1625, he was married and was ordained a priest. And he was very prominent, and he was very well known and very activistic, this Nikon. He was a huge, tall, handsome man and very powerful and had a great presence, and they needed a leader. The patriarch at that time was a very weak man named Joseph.

Nikon was tall, dark, and handsome and [had a] magnificent voice, deeply devout, humanly very strong, inexhaustible source of energy, and very demanding and very authoritative actually as a person. Well, what happened is that he and his wife had three children and they all died, and when they died, he and his wife joined monasteries: she entered a women’s monastery, and he went up north to Solovki, Solovetsky, that became the famous prison camp under the communists. He was there for a while, got into trouble with the bishops, the monks there, about some misuse of funds and alms and so on. And then he went to another place and became the abbot, north of Moscow up there in the monastery, and had a great reputation of this New Jerusalem Monastery abbot.

When he was there, Alexis heard about him and he met him, and he met Nikon in 1646, and in 1648 Nikon became the metropolitan of Novgorod. And then in 1652, Alexis offered him the patriarchal throne, and he became the patriarch of Moscow. Now, at that time Alexis was fighting a war in the West, and he left for the front and was not there; he did not get back to Russia until 1657. And those years between 1652 and 1657 were critical years in the Russian Church, because immediately upon becoming the patriarch, the very next year—he became patriarch in 1652, and in Great Lent in 1653, Nikon began his reform of the liturgical life of the Russian Church.

Now, this reform had already begun a little bit earlier in looking at the Church books and saying there are some mistakes in the printing. For example, in the psalm, “God is the Lord and has revealed himself to us,” which is sung at matins and at other times, it was written in the Russian service books as one word. “God” is B-o-g, Bog and “Lord” is G- or H-o-s-p-o-d: Bog gospod or Bog hospod, if you use g or h there sound in English. It was written as one word with one g. You know, the scholars looked and said, “You know, this is not right. It should be two words.” So they were correcting it.

And there were other things, like “Alleluia” was sung three times at Liturgy. Well, the Russians would do “Alleluia” twice and then say “Glory to thee, our God,” because “Glory to thee, our God” meant “Alleluia,” so you got your three “Alleluia"s. So if you did three “Alleluia"s plus “Glory to thee, O God,” you actually had four. Things like that.

Then there were other elements as well. For example, making the sign of the cross. The Greeks at that time did it with three fingers, but we know up until that time even in Byzantium the sign of the cross was made with two fingers. And that perhaps even had more sense than three fingers, honestly, although you say, “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” for the Holy Trinity, but the claim was we are putting the cross on our self only by one of the Holy Trinity: the Lord Jesus Christ who is both God and man, and those two fingers stand for the humanity and the divinity of Jesus who was crucified for us. So when you are speaking about the cross and putting the cross on you, it should be the cross of Christ. So there was a debate about those kind of things.

And Nikon decided that the Russians should follow the practice of the Byzantine Church, of the Church in Constantinople, the Greek Church. And he enforced these reforms in the Church by power and authority, and they were not accepted! Here we have perhaps almost in the first time of Orthodox Church history a revolt on the part of the presbyters, on the part of the priests. They were very prominent priests in the Moscow Church, Moscow diocese, Protopope Avvakum is perhaps the most famous. There was Stefan Vonifatiyev and others, and they simply revolted. They said, “Byzantium fell to the Turks! They were punished for their misbehavior. The first Rome fell to heresy, the second Rome…” And there was that theory about Moscow, however one really interpreted the “third Rome” theory, maybe not saying that it should be the head of the universal Christian Church on earth, and there would be not a fourth Rome.

But still there was this great sense that the Russians had kept the tradition of faith and that they were serving, and of course those service books and those practices were those by which their saints were hallowed. These Moscow presbyters, they said, “Our father, Sergius of Radonezh, the great savior of Russia, he used these service books, and he crossed himself with two fingers.” If you notice the Rublev icon, for example, Christ is blessing the chalice with two fingers.

They also wore the tonsure; they didn’t wear the long hair like the Greeks. The Greeks adopted the long hair because it was a sign of civil power in the Ottoman Empire, but we Russians, we keep the tonsure. If you see icons of St. Sergius, for example, or even Gregory Palamas, they have like a bald head. Well, it wasn’t because they were bald; it was because the top of their head was shaved. When you became a monk, you had your hair cut off. You showed that you were weak in this world. And then, of course, under the Ottomans, the clergy began to dress differently. They began to wear—because they had civil, secular power, they wore in public their dignified uniform. It was the riassa with the big flowing sleeves that Orthodox priests still wear in church.

And they began to adopt in church, especially the bishops, the practices which were once exercised by the emperor, the Byzantine emperor, and not the patriarch, for example, wearing a mitre, wearing a sakkos, a big fancy robe. Until that time, the normal dress of the bishops was a phelonion with an omophorion on top. Like in the ancient icons we see sometimes Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian—sometimes they put Chrysostom in a sakkos, I notice on the Three Hierarchs icon, but the other two have on phelonia, with their omophors on the top. And the bishops did not wear a crown; they didn’t stand on an eagle rug. They didn’t hold a staff and those kind of things that were all taken over by the bishops and assigned by the Phanar to dress in this manner.

There was also the adoption in the monastic clergy of the new dress under the Turks, which was that the monk or the priest would wear a cylindrical hat like a fez, and then the monk would have the veil on the cylindrical hat, and that’s what we have in the Orthodox world today all over. Nikon enforced that in Russia, that the old monastic type of headgear would be replaced by this cylindrical hat with a veil on the top, and that’s of course how the bishops, being monks, would dress with the other monastics.

However, if you look again at the old icons, even again of St. Sergius, and in Byzantium, the monastic headgear was like the headgear that the modern patriarch of Moscow wears, because the patriarch of Moscow was the only one who retained the old headgear; the other bishops and monks copied the Byzantine dress, where the head of the monk was covered by a roundish type of hat with the veil on it. And we can see that when we just see the pictures of the Moscow patriarch today. He wears a white one. There’s a cross on top, of course; the monks didn’t have that cross on top. But if you see, like I was saying, the icons of St. Sergius, that’s the kind of headgear he had. That’s the kind of headgear we see on the icons of St. Anthony the Great, for example, or Gregory Palamas. That was the normal headgear, was this rounded type of hat with the veil on top. It was not the kind that we see now. That was introduced under the Ottoman Turks. And then, of course, the long hair as well. That was a civil power sign.

So we see that this, even the external views—the presence of the bishop in society had a different type of clothing on. And it seems that until that particular period, in Russia… I once saw some photographs of the Old Believer bishops, those who didn’t accept the reform, and basically they had phelonia with an omophor on top, and didn’t have that kind of a mitre either, or that kind of a monastic hat. So there was a changing in the dress of the clergy, and this was resisted, again, by the people in the Russian Church saying, “Our fathers dressed in that way. These new people are dressing like Turks.”

In fact, there’s a story that once this schism took place where people did not accept the Nikonian reforms, the monks of the Solovki Monastery up in the north for ten years would not let the bishop or other monks enter their monastery because they said, “We don’t want them coming here dressed like Turks.” So you had this whole problem of the external image of the Church in public and what their dress and what they wear at the Divine Liturgy, what they wear in public life—all this was changed by the reform that Nikon, manu militari, so to speak, by just power, you might almost say inflicted upon the Russian Church.

Well, that view was absolutely not accepted by a great number of people, beginning with those Moscow archpriests. They said, “This cannot be. We are the bearers of the real traditions. We are the ones who kept the faith. We are the ones who are carrying on according to the ways of Orthodoxy and God’s will for people. Our holy saints, again, like Sergius, they were canonized saints, and they used these books and they dressed in this way, and they had these kind of services, and they— How can we change all of that? We know that that manner saves you; we know that the old style saves you. It’s a powerful saving factor. We see the holiness of our saints. How do we know if this new style and these new books are going to save us in the same way? We are risking our spiritual life by changing books in the pattern of those who have fallen to Turks, who have been punished by God for their immorality and their unifications with the Western Church” and all that kind of thing. So there was a great sense that the Russian Church had kept the real traditions of Orthodoxy.

And I might dare say that that particular understanding of things existed within the Russian Orthodox Church just down until the present time, even though they adopted the Nikonian reforms and had to by force, what happened was that they still had this attitude that, like the true Orthodoxy, the right faith and the right worship, pravoslavie, the right opinion and the right worship, the right doctrine and the right worship are kept by the Russian Church in its purity, in its depth, in its power, where all of this has fallen apart and decomposed in the Byzantine Church, and then you brought in all those Latinisms. They knew very well that there was a Calvinistic patriarch in Constantinople at that time, and why should they follow a church whose leader is an out-and-out Calvinist?

So there was this tremendous sense of the affirmation of the Russian tradition over and against the Greek tradition at that time. And so what happened was these leaders simply refused to go along with the reform. They wouldn’t do it. So the place was in turmoil.

Now, the Emperor Alexis returned to Russia in 1657, and he saw all of this going on, this chaos and this problem and the revolt on the part of the people and the reforms that Nikon was implementing, even inflicting, on the Russian people, and he tried to stop it down, to close it a bit. And Nikon, of course, would not accept that at all. He was right, he did things right, he knew what had to be done, so he resigned immediately. In July of 1658, Nikon resigned. And so from ‘58 to 1668, there was no patriarch in the Russian Orthodox Church. But what happened at that time was that the churches that were in the Phanar, in Constantinople, the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, the Chalcedonian patriarchs who were pretty much living in the Phanar and exchanging titles back and forth—one day they were patriarch of Alexandria; the next day they were patriarch of Constantinople, like Cyril Lukaris that we mentioned—they got involved in this whole debate, and they entered into Russia.

And there was a particularly adventuresome priest, I think an archimandrite or something, named Paisios Ligarides, and he really stirred up everything in Russia. At first he was a great favorite of Nikon, a supporter of Nikon, but then when he saw that this wasn’t being accepted, he kind of switched sides and then began to support and to propagate the Greek forms that were being accepted then in Russia. So what happened was that there was a whole controversy about how all that should be done, and those who opposed Nikon were kind of excommunicated. The patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria had a council in 1666; they excommunicated those who were against Nikon’s reforms—several million believers were excommunicated. They refuted the Council of the Hundred Chapters, the Stoglav Council, which was very important for the understanding, self-understanding of the Russian Orthodox Church in the previous century.

So then you had such a kind of a turmoil and a disaster with tremendous persecution of those who did not accept the Nikonian reforms. So Nikon refused to return, and he just died in 1681 with the Stoglav Council of 1551 being refuted, the third Rome idea was put to rest, the Phanar remained the leader of world Orthodoxy, and it was their patterns that should be kept throughout the Church, including the Church of Great Russia. This is what happened, and then finally these priests were persecuted so much so that there’s a famous autobiography of the Protopope Avvakum, with his wife suffering for the sake of the old belief and the old practices and the old icons and the old music and resisting all these changes that came in. Avvakum was actually exiled from Russia into Siberia in 1653, and he was in exile until 1663; then he was burned at the stake. He was burned alive with three other leading priests in 1682, so you actually had the death penalty being inflicted upon the leaders who supported the old belief.

And so you had a huge schism in the Russian Church. This was going to persist into the next century in the time of Peter the Great, who would simply be an out-and-out Westernizer, bringing in Roman Catholic and Protestant church structure and organization in the next century. And the Old Believers, who existed practically right down through the present day—I mean, there’s a church in America, in Erie, Pennsylvania, that was following the old belief until just a few years ago—10, 20 years ago, I can’t remember.

Because there was a policy later in the Russian Church to reunite the Old Believers, who were called Starovery or Starobryadtsy, and they became allowed to use their practices within the Russian Orthodox Church patriarchate, and there’s a kind of an attempt at reconciling them back to Orthodoxy by allowing them to hold on to some of their liturgical practices and their ways of singing and the ways of doing icons and the way of dressing and the way of crossing themselves and the service books. So they were kind of reunited later on, but not even totally successfully. So this was a huge wound in Russian Orthodoxy that took place in the middle of the 17th century. It was a whole kind of consciousness change.

Now we should mention also that there were, besides the councils of Alexandria, Antioch, and that excommunicated the Old Believers, there were other councils that took place in Russia at that time, affirming the reform and insisting that the reform be accepted. But basically, it was almost as if those who came from Byzantium at that time, led by this very, very questionable Paisios Ligarides, it was almost like it was a demolition of the Russian Church tradition, the change was externally so great.

On the other hand, the Church life went on, and we know that those reforms ultimately were adopted and the dress was adopted, the long hair was adopted, the clothing and the liturgical reforms of the books. Now here again we want to mention that the reforms of the books were probably something that was really very important to be done. There was Maxim the Greek who was there previously already looking at these books and saying, “There are mistakes here,” just misrepresenations and misspellings and all kinds of things that could be touched. Well, the Russian tradition was: “You don’t touch anything. You keep it. That saved our fathers and that’s going to save us, and that’s what we’re going to do.” So when they had this 1666 council of the Eastern Church leaders, of course Nikon himself would not cooperate.

So what happened was the council, besides condemning the old belief, they also unfrocked Nikon for deserting his office and for disrespecting the tsar, and then Nikon died that way in 1681, where his reform, in some sense, it basically won, but on the other hand the cost that was paid for it and whether or not it was really essential and important…

However, a kind of a brighter side of that was that the Russian Church did want to kind of stay in connection to the churches under the Ottoman Empire, which were all the ancient patriarchates and the whole Balkans and Bulgaria and Romania and Serbia and all those, which were now simply being forcefully led by Constantinople. And so they wanted to bring a— There was a kind of a desire to have unity in these particular practices—dress, the sign of the cross, the Church services, and so on. So there was a kind of a noble view there, but it was a view that was certainly rejected by as many as one-third of the Russian people, and not only the priests but their followers. There was a famous [Feodosia] Morozova, I think her name was, a princess, who suffered valiantly and was also persecuted and exiled, and I think she might even have been executed because of her defense of the old belief and the old rituals.

So you had this terrible event taking place in the 17th century in Russia, and then it’s going to be followed by the ascension of Peter the Great, who was just, again, in the Russian style, just by force and violence practically, Westernizing the Russian Church and bringing in the practices of the West. And then that Ukrainian theology that was done in Latin, that was so developed in that century in Kyiv, it spread to northern Russia also. So you had the Westernization of the Russian School of Theology. So in Great Russia also the seminaries began teaching in Latin, using the Scholastic method, following the methods of basically the Roman Catholic Church’s explanation of things in their catechism. They adopted the Mogilan catechism, even, in Russian language; it was translated into Russian and propagated throughout the empire.

So there was this forced Westernization. First you had the enforced Byzantinization on the Russian Church which led to this great schism, and then you later had the imperial power enforcing Western Christian traditions. I think I mentioned already how ironic it was in the next century, the 18th century, that in doctrine and theology and style and explanation of liturgy and so on, you would have Roman Catholic teaching simply infiltrating Orthodoxy. And on the other hand, in Church structure and organization, you would have the Dutch Reformed Protestant organization imposed upon the Russian Church. So in 1700 when the Patriarch Adrian died in Moscow, Peter the Great never replaced the patriarch, and for 217 years there was no patriarch in the Russian Orthodox Church until the time of the Communist Revolution when Tikhon—our Tikhon who served in America as the archbishop here—became the first patriarch of Moscow in 217 years! And then there was tremendous, tremendous persecution and control of the Russian Church by the government, beginning with the time of Peter the Great.

Well, we’ll get to Peter the Great next time, and we’ll move into the 18th century, which was of great significance. But Peter the Great himself was actually born in the end of the 17th century, and he grew up then and finally took over the country’s leadership. It was in 1696, at the end of the 17th century, that the 14th child of Alexis Romanov, who was Peter, co-ruled from 1682 to 1696 with his brother John, and then in 1696 Peter the Great became the sole tsar of Russia at the age of 24 years old. And then by 1721, he renamed himself the emperor of all Russia, and then did his Petrine reforms, so-called reforms in the Russian Church, which were in some sense almost more radical than what was done in the reforms of Nikon. Well, we’ll get to that next time, but what we have to see just for today is what that disastrous occurrence took place in the Russian Church in the 17th century.