At the end, there is, of course, nothing but chaos suitable for rodents or combustion. Everyone noticed the rats in congested and plague-ridden Muscovy; and fire continued to be a menace in the wooden city. As the city slowly came to the conclusion that the living God was no longer present in the agitated voices and visions of its holy men, the most fanatical of its fundamentalists pressed on to a conclusion which-however shocking to
modern rationalism-was entirely consistent with its emphasis on a concrete and historical Christianity. In the popular imagination as well as the monastic chronicles, all history was permeated with God's presence. God's silence and withdrawal from present history, therefore, could mean only that history was at or near its end. Those who looked desperately for some final, tangible way to fulfill His will in this unprecedented situation could find but one act left to perform: the committing of oneself to the purgative flames which, according to tradition, must precede the Last Judgment.
Before turning to this final, desperate expedient of self-immolation, however, the fundamentalists sought an explanation in the ancient idea that adversity heralded the reign of the Antichrist and was to precede the true Christ's Second Coming and final, thousand-year reign on earth. Already at the time of Alexis' coronation, a lonely hermit in Suzdal contended that the new Tsar was a 'horn of the Antichrist.'51 Russian prophets found many more signs that this terrifying last stage of history was about to begin in the reforms, plagues, and wars of the following decade. Ukrainians and White Russians brought with them prophetic ideas that had been developed in the course of the long Orthodox struggle with Catholicism in those regions. The learned Deacon Fedor, of the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Moscow Kremlin, wrote that 'a dark and impenetrable pagan god' which had 'taken Lithuania captive' had now come to Russia to 'devour the condemned within the churches.'52 The original anti-Uniat treatise from White Russia, The Book of Cyril, with a long epilogue on the coming reign of Antichrist, was published in a Moscow edition of six thousand copies. The Book of the One True and Orthodox Faith, a later anti-Uniat compilation from Kiev, was also published in a large edition. It blamed Roman Catholicism not only for attacking Orthodoxy but for letting loose in the West the spectre of 'evil-cunning {zlokhitrykh) and many-headed heresies.'53
Even further afield, from the anti-scholastic Hesychasts on Mt. Athos, came reinforcement for the anti- intellectualism of the fundamentalists. As early as 1621, Ivan Vyshensky, a Ukrainian elder, had returned to lead the fight against union with Rome and had urged the 'Russian, Lithuanian, and Polish people' to leave their 'different faiths and sects' for a revived Orthodoxy. In his Council on Devotion (Blagochestie), this 'Savonarola of the Ukrainian renaissance' juxtaposed the Roman 'Church of Jezebel' with an idealized Orthodoxy in apocalyptical terms:
I say to you that the land under your feet weeps and cries aloud before the Lord God, begging the creator to send down his sickle as of old in Sodom, preferring that it stand empty and pure rather than populated and corrupt with your ungodliness and illicit activity. Where now in the Polish land can faith be found?54
There were two opposing forces in his world: the devil, who dispenses 'all worldly graces, glory, luxury and wealth,' and 'the poor pilgrim,' who renounces the temptations offered by 'a wife, a house, and an ephemeral piece of land.'55 The Latin academies of the Jesuits and even of Mogila were part of the devil's campaign to destroy the true Eastern Church and lead men away from the world of the early fathers and hermits. 'Thou, simple, ignorant, and humble Russia, stay faithful to the plain, naive gospel wherein eternal life is found,' rather than the 'phrase- mongering Aristotle' and 'the obscurity of pagan sciences.' 'Why set up Latin and Polish schools?' he asked. 'We have not had them up to now and that has not kept us from being saved.'56 The introduction of Aristotelian concepts into the discussion of divine mysteries was a form of 'masquerade before the portals of our God Christ.' Following Vyshensky's line of thought (and quoting many of the same patristic sources), Avvakum inveighed also against 'philosophical swaggering' and 'almanac mongers' (almanashniki) with his statement 'I am untutored in rhetoric, dialectic and philosophy, but the mind of Christ guides me from within.'57
One of the original Muscovite correctors of books, Ivan Nasedka, suggested that the turn of the Greek Church to Latin philosophizing indicated the approach of Antichrist. 'We have no time now to hear your philosophy,' he proclaimed to the learned Lutheran theologians who accompanied the Danish crown prince to Moscow in 1644. 'Don't you know that the end of this world is coming and the judgment of God is at the door?'58 Reinforcement for these ideas was also found in the prophetic sermons of Ephrem the Syrian, who had fought the saturation of the Byzantine Church with pagan philosophy in the fourth century, warning the Syrian church in his Seven Words on the Second Coming of Christ that impending doom awaits those who stray from the simplicity of Christ. Never before printed in any Slavic language, Ephrem's sermons suddenly appeared in four different editions in Moscow between 1647 and 1652. Part of his impact upon the fundamentalists came from the fact that his work had been the basic patristic source for the pictorial representation of the Last Judgment in Russian icons and frescoes. The sudden discovery of his text, therefore, seemed to offer the unlearned Russian priests 'confirmation' of their traditional image of coming judgment-and led them to believe that the hour itself might be approaching. Renewed reverence was also attached to Ephrem's prophecies because of the fact that Nikon was believed to have 'insulted' this early ascetic by eliminating the prostrations that had traditionally accompanied his famed Lenten prayer of humility.59 The fundamentalists were also stirred by the writings of Arsenius Sukhanov. Sent by three successive patriarchs to examine the practices and
procure the writings of other Orthodox Churches, Arsenius returned with a lurid picture of corruption and of craven submission before Latin authority and Turkish power. In all of the East, Arsenius seemed to find but two sources of hope: Muscovy, the third and final Rome, in which alone 'there is no heresy,'60 and Jerusalem, the original font of truth.
Influenced by his friendship with Patriarch Paissius and deeply impressed by such rites as the lighting of candles on Easter Eve from the 'heavenly flame' in the church at the Holy Sepulcher, Arsenius sought in his writings to link Muscovy with the pre-Hellenistic church. Christ had lived and died and the Apostolic Church grown up around Jerusalem. The first gospels were not written for the Greeks; Russia was converted not by Byzantium but by the apostle Andrew; and, in any case, 'from Zion came forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.' The 'word of the Lord' had been muffled in Byzantium since the seventh ecumenical council of the church; and it was not accidental that the white cowl given by Pope Silvester to Constantine the Great was now in Moscow, or that the icon of first the Tikhvin and then the Georgian Mother of God had been miraculously transferred from Athos to Moscow.61
Jerusalem became-both literally and figuratively-a kind of alternative to Constantinople and Athos for the excited Muscovite imagination. Nikon, who had first sent Arsenius to the Holy Land, sent him back to Jerusalem to make a model of the Church of the Resurrection that sheltered the Holy Sepulcher; and sent a visiting Serbian metropolitan to Jerusalem to provide additional details on the rites and services of the Church. The new Muscovite theocracy was to be nothing less than the New Jerusalem. With this lofty vision in mind, Nikon set about building his 'holy kingdom,' the Monastery of the New Jerusalem, on a spot of great beauty by the Istra River outside Moscow. Giant bells, gilded gates, and a central cathedral modeled on the church over the Holy Sepulcher-all were part of Nikon's plan for bringing heaven to earth in Muscovy.62
For the puritanical fundamentalists, however, this New Jerusalem suggested the kingdom of the Antichrist, who was to establish his universal reign in Jerusalem. Rumors spread that Nikon's translators and editors were secret Moslems, Catholics, and Jews. Given the large numbers of refugees employed and the fluidity of confessional lines in the East, there were enough recent converts and mysterious personalities to lend some credence to this charge. Meanwhile, two well-educated brothers, the Potemkins, came to Muscovy from Smolensk, the advanced base for Uniat efforts to win the Pastern Slavs to Catholicism, warning that Latinization of the Greek ( Inirch indicated the imminent coming of the Antichrist. Spyridon Potemkin wiin hailed as a friend and prophet by the fundamentalists for his ten
