church at the expense of the state. Within the Kremlin, he behaved more regally than the Tsar; not only churchmen and commoners but the great nobles of Russia came beneath his sway.
Paul or Aleppo described Nikon's imperious treatment of Alexis' ministers of state: 'We observed that, when the council met in the council chamber, and when the Patriarch's bell rang for them to come to his palace, those officials who were late were made to wait outside his door in the excessive cold until he should order them to be admitted. When they were allowed to enter, Patriarch Nikon would turn to the icons while all the state officers bowed before him to the ground, bareheaded. They remained uncovered until he left the hall. To each he gave his decision on every affair, commanding them how to act.' The truth, Paul concluded, was that 'the grandees of the Empire do not entertain much dread of the Tsar; they rather fear the Patriarch and by many more degrees.'
For a while, Nikon ruled serenely and it began to seem that the exercise of power gave him the power itself. But this assumption had a fatal weakness: True power still rested with the Tsar. As long as the Patriarch retained the Tsar's devotion and support, no one could stand against him. But his enemies continued to accumulate, like the slow piling up of an avalanche, and they worked to stir up the Tsar's jealousy and distrust.
In time, signs of friction between Nikon and Alexis became more numerous. Even as Macarius and Paul were leaving Moscow to return to Antioch, they were overtaken by a royal courier summoning Macarius to return. On the road back, they met a group of Greek merchants who reported that on Good Friday the Tsar and the Patriarch had had a public argument in church on a point of ceremony. Alexis angrily called the Patriarch a 'stupid clown,' whereupon Nikon retorted, 'I am your spiritual father. Why then do you revile me?' Alexis shot back, 'It is not you who are my father but the holy Patriarch of Antioch, and I will send to bring him back.' Macarius returned to Moscow and managed to close the breach temporarily.
By the summer of 1658, however, Nikon's position had been severely weakened. When the Tsar began to ignore him, Nikon attempted to force Alexis' hand. Following a service in the Assumption Cathedral, he dressed as a simple monk, left Moscow and retired to the New Jerusalem Monastery, asserting that he would not return until the Tsar reaffirmed confidence in him. But he had miscalculated. The Tsar, now a mature twenty-nine, was not unhappy to be rid of the imperious Patriarch. Not only did he let the surprised Nikon wait in his monastery for two years, but then he called a synod of churchmen to accuse the Patriarch of having 'of his own will abandoned the most exalted patriarchal throne of Great Russia and so having abandoned his flock and thus having caused confusion and interminable contention.' In October 1660, this synod declared that 'by his conduct the Patriarch had absolutely abdicated and thereby ceased to be Patriarch.' Nikon rejected the synod's decision, sprinkling his rebuttal with abundant references to the Holy Scriptures. Alexis sent both the accusations and Nikon's replies to the four Orthodox Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria, pleading with them to come to Moscow 'to review and confirm the case of the ex-Patriarch Nikon, who had ill-administered the stewardship of the patriarchal power.' Two of the Patriarchs, Pasius of Alexandria and Macarius of Antioch, agreed to come, although they did not arrive until 1666. In December of that year, the trial of Nikon was convened with the two foreign Patriarchs presiding over a synod of thirteen metropolitans, nine archbishops, five bishops and thirty-two archimandrites.
The trial was held in a hall of the 'new patriarchal palace which Nikon had built in the Kremlin. Nikon was charged with exalting the church above the state, illegally deposing bishops and 'having left the church to nine years of widowhood caused by his disorderly departure from his chair.' Nikon defended himself by arguing that his office was clearly superior to that of the temporal ruler: 'Has thou not learned that the highest authority of the priesthood is not received from kings and tsars, but contrariwise it is by the priesthood that rulers are anointed? Therefore it is abundantly plain that the priesthood is a very much greater thing than royalty. For this reason, manifestly, the tsar must be less than the bishop and owe him obedience.' The synod, however, rejected this view and reasserted the traditional balance of church-state power: the tsar was supreme over all his subjects, clergy and patriarch included, except in matters of church doctrine. At the same time, the synod confirmed and sustained Nikon's changes in the Russian ritual and liturgy.
Nikon himself was condemned to exile. Until the last days of his life, he lived as a monk in a remote monastery, in a tiny cell at the top of a winding staircase so narrow that a single man could scarcely pass. His bed was a square of granite covered with a blanket of cut rushes. In mortification, he wore a heavy iron plate on his chest and chains attached to his arms and legs.
In time, Alexis' anger faded. He did not overturn the decision of the synod, but he wrote to Nikon to ask his blessing, sent gifts of food and, when Peter was born, a sable coat in the name of his new son. Nikon's final years were spent as a healer; reportedly, he achieved 132 miraculous cures within one three-year period. On Alexis' death, young Tsar Fedor tried to befriend Nikon. When, in 1681, it was reported that the aging monk was dying, Fedor granted him a partial pardon and freed him to return to his New Jerusalem Monastery. Nikon died peacefully on the road home in August 1681. Afterward, Fedor obtained from the four Eastern patriarchs letters of posthumous rehabilitation; and in death Nikon regained the title of patriarch.
Nikon's legacy was the opposite of that he had intended. Never again would a patriarch wield such power; thereafter the Russian church would be clearly subordinate to the state. Nikon's successor, the new Patriarch Joachim, well understood his designated role when he addressed the Tsar saying: 'Sovereign, I know neither the old nor the new faith, but whatever the Sovereign orders, I am prepared to follow and obey in all respects.'
Nikon had been deposed, but the religious upheaval he brought to Russia was only beginning. The same synod which condemned the Patriarch for attempting to raise church power over royal power had also endorsed the revisions in liturgy and ritual which Nikon had sponsored. Throughout Russia, the lower clergy and the common people cried out in anguish at this decision. People who had cherished the old Russian practices of their fathers, who had been taught that theirs was the only true, uncontaminated faith, refused to accept the changes. For them, the old forms were the key to salvation; any suffering on earth was preferable to damnation of their eternal souls. These new changes in their services in church were the work of foreigners. Had not Nikon himself admitted, even proclaimed, 'I am Russian, the son of a Russian, but my faith and religion are Greek'? The foreigners were bringing the Devil's works to Russia: tobacco ('bewitched grass'), representational art and instrumental music* Now, bolder and more wicked than ever, the foreigners were trying to subvert the Russian church from within. It was said that Nikon's New Jerusalem Monastery was filled with Moslems, Catholics
*During the anti-foreign riots of 1649, six carriages of musical instruments had been found and burned by the mob. This prejudice was not new, nor has it changed. The Russian Orthodox Church, believing that God should be praised only by the human voice, still does not permit instrumental music in its services. The result is its superb a cappella choirs.
and Jews busily rewriting the sacred Russian books. It was even said that Nikon (some said it was Alexis) was the Antichrist whose reign presaged the end of the world. In essence, the religion these Russians wanted was that preached by an earlier, fundamentalist priest: 'Thou simple, ignorant and humble Russia, stay faithful to the plain, naive gospel wherein eternal life is found.' Now under attack, devout Russian believers could only cry out, 'Give us back our Christ!'
The result was that Nikon's attempt to reform the church produced—even after Nikon himself was gone—a full-scale religious rebellion. Thousands of people who refused to accept the reforms became known as Old Believers or Schismatics. Because the state was supporting the church reforms, revolt against the church widened into revolt against the state, and the Old Believers refused to obey either authority. Neither persuasion by the church nor repression by the government could move them.
To escape the rule of the Antichrist and the persecution of the state, whole villages of Old Believers fled to the Volga, the Don, and shores of the White Sea and beyond the Urals. Here, deep in the forest or on remote riverbanks, they formed new settlements, enduring the hardships of pioneers to build their communities. Some did not flee far enough. When the soldiers followed, the Old Believers declared themselves ready to be engulfed in purifying flames rather than renounce the ritual and liturgy of their fathers. Children were heard saying, 'We shall be burned at the stake. In the next world, we shall have little red boots and shirts embroidered with golden thread. They will serve us as much honey, nuts and apples as we want. We will not bow down to the Antichrist.' Some communities, tired of waiting, crowded together—men, women and children—into their wooden churches, barricaded the doors and, singing the old liturgies, burned the buildings down over their own heads. In the far north, the monks of the powerful Solovetsky Monastery won over the garrison of soldiers to fight for the Old Beliefs (in part by stressing the Nikonian ban on drink). Together, monks and soldiers endured an eight-year siege, repelling all the might that the Moscow government could send against them.
