the year 1654, during the patriarchate of Nikon, a council determined that the revision should be undertaken.
Nikon, supported by the power of the tsar, set about the task, introducing simultaneously additional liturgical innovations and improvements in hymnology, etc. His reforms, however, encountered opposition from the clergy and the laity, leading in the end to a schism, that of the raskol'niki (dissenters). Nikon introduced a number of reforms from the Greek church, thus increasing the hostility of the Old Russians, who distrusted the orthodoxy of the Greeks; whilst, since a number of Kiev scholars participated in the work of correction, the reforms came to be regarded as Roman Catholic in tendency. Nikon, in contrast with his predecessor Maxim, was church politician rather than reformer. A man of autocratic temperament, he made many enemies, so that he ultimately lost the favour of the tsar, who had hitherto followed him blindly. Nikon endeavoured to transform the patriarchate into a kind of "national papacy"—the phrase is used by Samarin. In the year 1660 occurred the patriarch's first condemnation by a council, whilst in 1666 came a second and severer sentence. He died in 1681. Ultimately, therefore, the papistical tenets which, in accordance with Nikon's theory, would deduce priesthood directly from God, and tsardom from priesthood, thus making tsardom subordinate to the patriarchate, were confined to an inconsiderable minority.
In these circumstances conservative "old belief," which was properly speaking "old custom" or "old ritual," became ecclesiastical and political schisms (raskol).[1] In contradistinction to what happened in the reformation of the west, in Moscow it was the dominant church which carried out reforms, whilst the minority clung to tradition. Only in the subsequent course of development did the schismatic minority come to adopt heretical views, which did not always take the direction of reform.
It is characteristic of the moral and social condition of Moscow that at the opening of the seventeenth century
- ↑ The raskolniki are not identical with the "old believers" known as staroobrjadcy (literally, "old ritualiats"), for not all the old believers are definitely opposed to the state church. The old believers clung to the liturgy and prayer-books of the days before Nikon, and diverged in respect of certain ceremonial practices, making the sign of the cross with two fingers, whereas the Orthodox use three, singing two hallelujahs in place of the three sung by the Orthodox, and so on.
