Jim Deitsch

Eastern Churches

October 22, 2018

Professor Avvakumov

Assignment #8
“I wrote a long letter to the Tsar, asking him to re-establish the old ways of piety, to defend our

common mother, Holy Church, against heresy, and to place on the patriarchal throne an

Orthodox pastor instead of the wolf and apostate Nicon, scoundrel and heretic…” (Avvakum

136) From this passage, we can get a pretty clear idea of Avvakum’s beliefs – modernizing was

wrong, which meant that all acts of modernization that had occurred were heresy, and it was in

the best interests of the Russian Church to return to the time before they had taken place.

Ware echoes this sentiment when he writes that “Russian Dissent was the protest of

Conservatives against an official Church which in their eyes had carried reform too far.” (Ware

109) Although Avvakum terms Nikon a heretic, Ware does not, and says that they dissented on

ritual, not doctrine.

When Moscow came to be considered the “Third Rome”, a whole host of political and

theological implications arose as well. Both Rome and Constantinople (the first “Romes”)

operated in systems which closely blended secular and religious governing bodies. In this sense,

it is not hard to see how Moscow evolved from the Third Rome to Nikon to the Holy Synod.

Whenever things change, there are inevitably people who find those changes undesirable –

when Nikon began to change religious rituals away from Eastern traditions into the Greek

realm, the Old Believers were upset. When Nikon tried to exert influence on politics, the Tsar

became upset. Because both parties were upset by Nikon, neither gave him the backing he
needed to fully achieve his goals, and he eventually was exiled. The balance of Church and State

is difficult to find, and Nikon was not the man to find it. The government seized control of the

church and created the Holy Synod, a government body tasked with managing the spiritual and

religious affairs of the Russian people.

A quote from Avvakum’s autobiography is particularly illuminating: “This is the time of

tribulation: you must suffer without weakening.” (131) Not only does this show that Avvakum

believed he had a divine mandate, it also showed that what some people call “modernizing”,

Avvakum called “weakening.” I do not think modernizing and weakening are synonymous.

Rituals are beautiful and helpful, but they do not have a theological mandate. Even the oldest

Orthodox ritual has many differences from those precited by Jesus and during Jesus’ time, so to

place an inordinate amount of value on a ritual seems to me to be approaching heresy. It is

certainly not wrong to have preferences for particular rituals, but to say that a ritual is the core

of the Christian faith seems problematic. I think religion and modernity can be allied if religion

is used to guide modernity, rather than the other way around.

Catalyst: The Josephites believed that “Russia was the stronghold and norm of Orthodoxy.” In

the past weeks, we generally have discussed radicalism and not conservatism, but it seems to

me that conservatism can often be the stronger force, since people are loathe to give up their

held beliefs. It could also be argued that radicalism is stronger, for other various reasons. Which

do you think is stronger, and why?