that Nikon had encountered; but Medvedev lacked the personality, the patriarchal power, and the authority of Byzantine precedent to carry out his reforms. He was soon attacked by a rival faction supported by the Patriarch Joachim and by a rival Greek school attached to the Moscow Printing Office.
The Grecophile faction acquired new strength with the arrival from Constantinople in 1685 of two well- traveled and educated Greeks, the Likhudy brothers. They undermined Medvedev's position with doctrinal attacks and wrested away, for the use of their Greek school, stone buildings originally designed for Medvedev's Latin academy. Rapidly stripped of his various positions, Medvedev was soon arrested for alleged treason and, after two years of torture and mistreatment, burned for heresy in 1691. As in the Nikon-Avvakum controversy, however, the Medvedev-Likhudy affair resulted in mutual defeat rather than clear victory for either side. The Lik-hudies themselves soon became suspect as foreign intriguers, and their influence declined precipitously in the early 1690's.1
There were two important issues with long-term implications for Russian culture lying beneath the sordid external details of the controversy. Each side was vindicated on one issue: the Latinizers on that of the basic language and style of theological education and discourse, the Grecophiles on fundamental matters of dogma.
The Latin bias in theological education represented the final victory of the new clergy over the traditional Greek-oriented monastic establish-
ment of Muscovy. Henceforth, Russian theological education-almost the only form of education in eighteenth-century Russia-was far more Western in content than before. Latin replaced Greek forever as the main language of philosophic and scientific discourse; and Russia adopted through its church schools a more sympathetic attitude toward secular learning and scholastic theology than the more patristically inclined Grecophiles would have tolerated. It is not accidental that the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century saw a flood of learned treatises on the Russian Church by Western theologians, and that most of the important theological writing and teaching in the Russian Church during this period was the work of Russian priests originally trained in the Latin- speaking theological academies of Western Europe.2
The vindication of the Greeks in matters of dogma was in many ways more surprising than the victory of Latins in matters of form. The scholastic theology of Roman Catholicism has always attracted those in search of rational order and synthesis. Moreover, for the Orthodox, Catholicism was doctrinally far closer than Protestantism. A number of Catholic positions had been endorsed by the Orthodox Church generally at the synod of Bethlehem in 1672;3 and others were quietly accepted by the post-1667 Russian Church without any sense of contradiction or betrayal. The Catholic definition of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was widely accepted. Leaders of the new Church even proposed that the long-proscribed Catholic phraseology on the procession of the Holy Spirit be reinserted in the Russian creed and that the Russian Church appoint a pope and elevate its four metropolitans to patriarchal rank.1 But the critical doctrinal issue over which the Latinizers came to grief was the nature of the eucharist, or holy communion.
Behind the seemingly technical debate over this sacrament, this commemorative re-enactment of the Last Supper, lay the deeper question of man's relationship to God in a changing world. The nature of God's presence in the bread and wine had deeply bothered the reformers of the West, most of whom had retained this rite while changing its form or redefining its nature. The Hussites had sought to make the 'common service' (the literal meaning of 'liturgy') truly common by making the elements readily available to all. Luther spoke of con- rather than trans-substantiation, in an effort to reconcile the concurrent fact of Christ's real presence and of essentially unchanged bread and wine. The Roman Catholic doctrine of the eucharist was systematically drawn up only when the need came to deal with the varying challenges of the reformers. It contended (1) that Christ was really, and not merely symbolically, present in the sacrament; (2) that
a total change in the substance of the elements (transubstantiation) took place at the time the priest repeated Christ's original words of institution: 'This is my body .. . This is my blood'; and (3) that only the purely 'accidental' aspects of the bread and wine remain unchanged.5
In the course of the seventeenth century the Orthodox Church also felt the challenge of the reformers and adopted the Catholic term 'transubstantiation' as 'the only possible word to deny Protestant heresy and at the same time affirm the Orthodox belief.'6 The Russian church hierarchy, which was especially fearful of divisive heresies, played a leading role in the general hardening of doctrinal positions and the increased use of dialectic method and scholastic casuistry in dogmatic writing. Catholic, and more specifically Jesuit, theological technique and terminology is evident in the two small efforts of the Orthodox Church of the Eastern Slavs to provide a systematic catechism for its communicants: Mogila's catechism of 1640 and the catechism of 1670 of Simeon Polotsky, Crown of the Catholic (Kafolkheskaia) Faith. Medvedev was, thus, only continuing the tradition begun by his teacher Polotsky in speaking of transubstantiation and echoing other aspects of Roman Catholic teachings about the eucharist in his long dogmatic dialogue Bread of Life and in a second more polemic work, Manna of the Bread of Life.
Medvedev's exposition of the Catholic position offended Russian Orthodox sensibilities in two important ways. First of all, the distinction between accidents and substances introduced a kind of terminological hair splitting into something which the Orthodox considered a holy mystery (literally, 'secret,' tainstvo). It was celebrated behind the closed doors of the sanctuary during the third, most hallowed part of the Orthodox mass, the liturgiia vernykh, or 'service of the believers.' Second, it specified the exact time at which God comes down to man through the transformed elements.
On this latter point Medvedev was challenged and eventually anath-emized; for it related to an issue that had been at the heart of the original split between the churches: the Eastern refusal to accept the Western version of the Nicene Creed, in which the Holy Spirit was said to descend from the Father and Son. A certain awesome if mysterious primacy within the unity of the Trinity was reserved for the Father in the East, and this primacy seemed once more jeopardized by Medvedev's position. Insofar as one can define the precise moment at which God becomes present in the elements, Medvedev's critics insisted that it came after the priest's call for the descent of the Holy Spirit, following the repetition of Christ's words of institution. In other words, the miracle of God's presence in the sacra-
ment was not assured by a priest's re-enactment of Christ's sacrifice, but rather by the 'common work of the believers' in supplicating God for the descent of His Holy Spirit.7
Thus, behind all the venality of intrigue which eventually doomed Medvedev lay the reluctance of the Russian Church to accept fully the detailed doctrinal formulations of post-Reformation Roman Catholicism, however much they were to borrow from its language and methods of instruction. The Russian Church displayed a stubborn determination to reassert the uniqueness of its doctrinal position even at a time when it was losing its independence from the state and rejecting its original orientation toward Greek culture.
On one point the Latinizers and Grecophiles had been in agreement: their opposition to the Western churches. Medvedev had inveighed against the heretical ideas he had found among foreign book correctors in Moscow; the Likhudies had written a series of tracts against Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists.8
The xenophobia of the Russian Church, which they helped thus to fortify, was to claim two foreign victims in the waning years of the seventeenth century: Quirinus Kuhlmann and Yury Krizhanich. Each came from the western borderlands of European Slavdom to Moscow with high expectations of the role Russia could play in the religious regeneration of Europe. Each was a prophet without honor in his own country, who was to be rejected as well in
