Old Believers - The Reforms of Patriarch Nikon

The Reforms of Patriarch Nikon

By the middle of the 17th century Greek and Russian Church officials, including Patriarch Nikon, had noticed discrepancies between contemporary Russian and Greek usages. They reached the conclusion that the Russian Orthodox Church had, as a result of errors of incompetent copyists, developed rites and liturgical books of its own that had significantly deviated from the Greek originals. Thus, the Russian Orthodox Church had become dissonant from the other Orthodox churches. Later research was to vindicate the Muscovite service-books as belonging to a different Greek recension from that which was used by the Greeks at the time of Nikon, and the unrevised Muscovite books were actually older than the current Greek books, which had undergone several revisions over the centuries and ironically, were newer and contained innovations.

Nikon, supported by Tsar Alexis I (reigned 1645–1676), carried out some preliminary liturgical reforms. In 1652, he convened a synod and exhorted the clergy on the need to compare Russian Typikon, Euchologion, and other liturgical books with their Greek counterparts. Monasteries from all over Russia received requests to send examples to Moscow in order to have them subjected to a comparative analysis. Such a task would have taken many years of conscientious research and could hardly have given an unambiguous result, given the complex development of the Russian liturgical texts over the previous centuries and the lack of textual historiographic techniques at the time.

The locum tenens for the Patriarch, Pitirim of Krutitsy, convened a second synod in 1666, which brought Patriarch Macarios III of Antioch, Patriarch Paisius of Alexandria and many bishops to Moscow. Some scholars allege that the visiting patriarchs each received both 20,000 rubles in gold and furs for their participation. This council officially established the reforms and anathematized not only all those opposing the innovations, but the old Russian books and rites themselves as well. As a side-effect of condemning the past of the Russian Orthodox Church and her traditions, the messianic theory depicting Moscow as the Third Rome appeared weaker. Instead of the guardian of Orthodox faith, Russia seemed an accumulation of serious liturgical mistakes.

Nevertheless, both Patriarch and Tsar wished to carry out their reforms, although their endeavours may have had as much or more political motivation as religious; several authors on this subject point out that Tsar Alexis, encouraged by his military success in the war against Poland-Lithuania to liberate West Russian provinces and Ukraine, grew ambitious of becoming the liberator of the Orthodox areas which at that time formed part of the Ottoman Empire. They also mention the role of the Near-East patriarchs, who actively supported the idea of the Russian Tsar becoming the liberator of all Orthodox Christians and who suggested that Patriarch Nikon might become the new Patriarch of Constantinople.