transferred to the former.118 His quasi-papal ideal is revealed in a vision he claimed to have had of Metropolitan Peter, the founder of the Muscovite hierarchy, appearing to him through the imperial crown on a throne with his hand on the holy gospel.114 In the long and adamant defense of his position throughout the early sixties, Nikon insisted that the patriarch possessed a kind of papal infallibility. 'The first primate is the image of Christ and all the others pupils and apostles, and a slave is not entitled to the seat of a sovereign.'115
A final indication of catholicizing tendencies in Nikon lies in the area of foreign policy. Whereas the fundamentalists particularly hated Rome and the Poles, Nikon appears to have been more fearful of Protestantism and the Swedes. He opposed the war against Poland of 1653 and the re-baptism of Catholics. Some of his assistants in the correction of books were former Uniats from White Russia and the Ukraine; and the decision of the council in 1667 to confirm his abolition of the requirement of 1620 for rebaptising Catholics was one of many concessions to these non-Great Russian priests. Nikon compared the situation in Russia to that produced by the 'Latin heresies' in the West, lamenting that 'we have come to those times when we [priests] are fighting one another like lay people.'116 He called Nikita Odoevsky, the principal author of the Law Code of 1649 and leading apologist for the subordination of church to state, 'a new Luther.'117
The multiple ironies as well as the confessional confusions of the age are demonstrated by the fact that the principal collaborator of this 'new Luther' in the trial of Nikon was Ligarides, a former Vatican agent wearing the robes of an Orthodox metropolitan. It seems only fitting that this erstwhile Grecophile from distant Gaza ended up destroying Nikon's Greek revival and posing as the defender of Muscovite tradition. Ligarides summoned up the distinctively Russian symbol of the icon screen as the model
for an ordered hierarchical society to challenge Nikon's concept of a symphony of powers between civil and ecclesiastical authority. Recognizing the patriarch as in any way equal to the Tsar would, Ligarides warned, place two icons in the center of the chin, where only the 'Christ enthroned' is traditionally found; and man 'cannot serve two masters . . . pray through two icons.'118
In contrast to Ligarides, both Nikon and Awakum devoted much of their lives to such prayer and were constant in their loyalties. They were both profoundly Muscovite in temperament and training, 'unlearned in speech, yet not in thought; untaught in rhetoric, dialectic and philosophy, but with the mind of Christ our guide within us.'119 Thus, it would be misleading to end a consideration of the original schism between them on any note of comparability with the West. The conflict between Nikon and Awakum was not a theological debate, but a death struggle between two towering frontiersmen in a world of one truth. Only after they had destroyed one another did Russia become a safe place for Ligarides' doctrine of state service and many, shifting truths.
The idea that there is but one truth in any controversy was Byzantine; and both Nikon and Awakum thought of themselves as defending its apostolic heritage from either foreign corruption or domestic debasement. Each sought to make that truth relevant to Russian society through the force of his own prophetic personality. Each underwent severe physical suffering and spent his last years in lonely isolation from Muscovy. Each was ascetically indifferent to the bourgeois virtues of cleanliness and moderation. Neither of them was ever outside of Russia.
The essential similarity of these two Muscovite prophets becomes particularly striking in their years of tribulation and exile. Each viewed himself as the suffering servant of God. Each was fortified in his convictions by visions. Each continued to seek vindication in history, appealing to the Tsar and other authorities for restitution of the True Church rather than engaging in disputations with the new hierarchy. Each sought to prove the Tightness and sanctity of his own cause by deeds rather than words. Denied access to the councils of the great, they sought to prove themselves by working miraculous cures on the humble believers who came to their distant retreats.
Of the two, Awakum has become better known to posterity because of the magnificent autobiography he wrote in the early years of his exile. In it, the old hagiographic style is fully adopted to the vernacular idiom, and the prophetic Muscovite ideology is transformed into a deeply personal profession of faith. Named for the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk, whose name means 'strong fighter,' Awakum reacts like a true prophet
to persecution, asking for God's help rather than men's mercy. Even while being beaten with the knout in Siberia by the leader of a military expedition,
I kept saying, 'O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God! Help me!' And this I kept repeating without pause, so that it was bitter to him in that I did not say, 'Have mercy!'120
Inveighing tirelessly against 'lovers of new things who have fallen away from truth,' Awakum calls for active witness to the truth rather than talk about it:
What matter that they talk vanity of me; in the day of judgment they shall all know of my deeds, whether they be good or evil.121
Awakum represents in many ways a culminating expression of the Muscovite ideology: a passionate prophet seeking to fill his life with 'deeds of devotion' (podvigi blagochestiia). He combines within himself both the kenotic and the fanatic strains of early Russian spirituality. His polemic style is as pungent and polemic as that of Ivan IV, yet his message is conservative and his counsel compassionate. He bids men simply to preserve the old faith and accept suffering gladly in imitation of Christ, rather than fight back with the sword as do followers of 'the Tatar God Mohammad,' or with the 'fire, knout and gallows' of the new faithless state.122 His own martyrdom gave his writings a special crown of authority, which tended to .perpetuate among Russian religious dissenters Awakum's semi-Manichean view of the world. Awakum called himself not an Old but a 'True Believer,' insisting (in objection to a Nikonian deletion from the creed) that
It were better in the Creed not to pronounce the word Lord, which is an accidental name, than to cut out 'True,' for in that name is contained the essence of God.123
Awakum places light first among the 'essential names' of God and sees Christianity as 'the first light of truth' now darkened by Western heresy. In advocating self-immolation he develops a dualistic dissociation of the body from the soul. 'Burning your body, you commend your soul into the hands of God,'124 he wrote to one martyr. Shortly before he was burned at the stake, his attitude became almost masochistic: '. . . run and jump into the flames. Here is my body, Devil, take and eat it; my soul you cannot take!'125 Awakum was rebuked for his heretical views by his more learned prison mate, Deacon Fedor;126 but the archpriest's fanaticism and dualism were to exercise great influence on native Russian traditions of religious dissent.
Nikon also left an admiring life written in the hagiographical style by a seventeenth-century follower,127 and he too emerges as a deeply Muscovite figure. A Dutch visitor at his Monastery of the New Jerusalem in 1664 found nothing but Slavic and Russian books in his personal library.'-* Everywhere he went Nikon had special retreats from the world for meditation and prayer. Like Avvakum, he disciplined himself with strenuous physical labor. During his final monastic exile he actually built a small island retreat in the lake by hauling huge stones down through the water and building a synthetic island. He was fascinated with bells and had a large number cast with mysterious inscriptions at the New Jerusalem monastery. Almost the only question about the outside world that he asked his Dutch visitor pertained to the size and nature of bells in Amsterdam.129 Nikon was as opposed as Awakum to new icons, and had visions in which Christ appeared to him as He did in the icons. Nikon was said to have achieved in his last years even more miraculous cures of the sick than Awakum: 132 in one three-year period.130
Nikon was, of course, less decisively rejected by the new church than was Avvakum. In contrast to the fiery martyrdom of the archpriest, the dethroned patriarch died peacefully on his way back to Moscow in 1681 with a
