There has never been a more confused time for Orthodoxy. There is not a single question that is not open to debate, creative of schism, or otherwise disruptive. The hierarchy has taken advantage of this situation to create new jurisdictions and schism entirely under their control. This era is an unfortunate one in that, among other things, it must sort out the disasters of World War I, the post-Constantian political idea (yet to be formulated, but one of the purposes of this journal), the relation between Orthodoxy and capitalism and the remnants of Orthodoxy after Marxism. While scholars might have some clue as to these divisions and their origins, average laymen have not an idea, and, it seems, must suffer the competing claims of jurisdiction after jurisdiction. It is within this cauldron of confusion that the Old Belief shines as a pristine, traditional and quiet Orthodox vision: a unified vision, one based on the medieval experience of Muscovy as the Third Rome, and preserves a religious aesthetic that is often overpowering in its beauty, speaking directly to the soul, to use a timeworn phrase. It is surprising that within all the polemics among old calendarists, the Old Belief is conspicuously absent, suggesting that the rather ambitious old calendar hierarchs wold rather not speak of this peculiar challenge to their authority. If for no other reason, your author began, some years ago, to look into the claims of the Old Faith, claims having little to do with the well worn cliches of the “two fingers” and other such nonsense.
To hold the view that the Old Belief concerns itself with the mode of making the sign of the cross is to be vulgar and ignorant. The Old Belief centers around the “Struggle for the Russian Mind,” as +CORNELIUS or the Moscow Metropolia of the Old Faith has written. It presents a medievalist, monastic and decentralized agrarian vision of Israel, the seamless mix of religion, morality and high politics, as opposed to the centralized, secular, European vision of the Petrine system and its Bolshevik successor. The Old Belief stands for Russia as the Third Rome, while the Petrine idea holds Russia as merely another European empire, albeit one with a peculiar religious bent. The Petrine state radically altered Russian life, and eliminated Russia’s role as the Third Rome, the last free bastion of Orthodoxy in the world. In its stead, Peter created a secular, ideological European empire based on coercion. The product was 19th century Russia, a confused amalgam of Europe, Asia and Israel that never succeeded in defining itself despite well-intentioned efforts of Nicholas I and II, and not so well intentioned efforts of Alexander I and the Masonic “Bible Society.”
This paper will provide a thematic framework, and that only, for understanding Russian history from the point of view of the raskol–Peter’s schism from Orthodoxy and his dragging Russia along with him. The fact is that both Peter’s state was incommensurate with Russia’s tradition, and his church hierarchy, dominated by the state at the higher levels, was uncanonical, strictly speaking.
i.
Peter I was a legitimate claimant to the throne, having the support of both boyars and patriarch as a young man. It is fairly clear that Sophia, his half sister (in that Tsar Alexis married twice), had sought a reestablishment of the Old Faith solely to appeal to the elite streltsy corps, rather than it deriving from any internal impetus. Peter was soon to alienate that support, however. Peter, as is well known, abolished the patriarchate, creating a “synod ,” initially called a “college,” under the state over-procurator, who acted largely as an accountant, overseeing church finances. The Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, under Turkish control at the time and needing Russian help, supported this move. It should be noted that Peter created the synod with no clerical input, hence it was an uncanonical body, a pure creation of Peter for the sake of political expediency.
Peter tortured and executed hundreds of the streltsy, the Old Believing segment of the Russian elite military for their brief flirtation with Sophia. He then proceeded to torture and execute several canonical hierarchs who had opposed him, most notably the Metropolitan of Rostov and the Metropolitan of Kiev, both of whom were tortured to death by Peter’s agents for possibly supporting the political program of Peter’s son, Alexis, who, as he realized the monster that his father was, began to seriously consider taking the throne and re-institutionalizing the Old Faith. Oddly, neither of these two hierarchs were ever glorified as martyrs, or even mentioned at all. Further, Peter brutally tortured and murdered the saintly Abbot Avvarram, whose sole crime was that he condemned the black masses Peter mockingly engaged in while drunk. Prior to this, Peter tortured and murdered the priest Alexander Medvedev, largely because he had been confessor to Sophia. When the Bolsheviks did this, it was condemned by the Orthodox church. When Peter does it–silence.
Peter began a secularization program for the monasteries similar to that of Henry VIII in England, closing many and depriving others of their lands, many of these lands then granted to his favorites. Monasteries were closely regulated by the state, and ordered to perform secular tasks, such as housing army veterans, now without any means of financial support. Monks needed to be middle aged men before Peter would permit them to take vows. In 1724, the number of monks was roughly 25,000, by 1724, it was 14,000 and dropping until the 19th century (cf. Popspielovsky’s The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia).
Peter was a Freemason, and thus can, under no traditional theory of Russian monarchy, be considered a true tsar after his “conversion,” which was done in Amsterdam, according to his chief biographer, Robert Massi. Peter III later was also a Freemason, by his own admission, and hence was not a true monarch either. It is debatable whether or not Alexander I was a mason, or just their patron. Keep in mind that the 13th degree of Masonry requires an oath to Prometheus/Lucifer, the “Bearer of Enlightenment.” It was not an accident then, that Peter required of his clergy an oath to Peter personally, as their “ultimate judge,” as Peter styled himself the “Bearer of Enlightenment” to Russia. It should also be pointed out that Peter’s synodal system, under Alexander I, was controlled by a high ranking freemason, Nechayev, albeit later replaced. His reign, and that of many of his successors, permitted the police surveillance of hierarchs, so as to keep them loyal to the Petrine revolution and modernism.
As if to continue to mock Old Russia, Peter built St. Petersburg on the bones of tens of thousands of Cossack Old Believers, which itself is the Masonic ritual of the conquest of nature (or the channeling of Her energies), which includes the traditional aspects of society, suitably represented by both the Streltsy and the Cossacks, both murdered en masse. Stalin murdered hundreds of thousands in forced labor camps and was called a monster; Peter did the same and was called “Tsar.” This is a serious gap in the knowledge of traditional Russian hierarchs.
In the writings of mainline Masonic writer Manley Hall, we read:
When The Mason learns that the Key to the warrior on the block is the proper application of the dynamo of living power, he has learned the Mystery of his Craft. The seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands and before he may step onward and upward, he must prove his ability to properly apply this energy.
And in addition, the chief of Masonic writers in America states in his Instructions to the Supreme Councils of the World, 1889.
That which we must say to a crowd is - We worship a God, but it is the God that one adores without superstition. To you, Sovereign Grand Inspectors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the Brethren of the 32nd, 31st, and 30th degrees - The Masonic Religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the Luciferian Doctrine.
It might be noted that this is the mentality sworn to by metropolitan +CHRISTOPHER of the Serbian church in America, as well as nearly al 20th century “Patriarchs of Constantinople," among numerous other mainline hierarchs
Modernist Russian historian Popspielovskii writes:
Fr. Georges Florovskii affirms that Theophan Prokopovic [chief hierarch under Peter] succeeded in raping the church, but not in becoming her leader. His legacy was so alien to Orthodoxy that he could never become an organic part of the Orthodox church. The legacy he did leave, however, was, in Florovskii’s words, a legacy of fear: the Russian clergy became an intimidated estate.That intimidation was originally caused by the executions, tortures and imprisonments of the clergy perpetrated in the era of Prokopovic, with his active participation and often at his initiative. . .The terror began under Peter, reached its extremes under Empress Anna (Peter’s niece 1730-40) and did not end even under Catherine II.
To further the mockery, Peter chose his serf-whore, Catherine I, as “Empress of Russia.” No serious theory of monarchy can ever accept her as legitimate. She was not of royal blood, was not Orthodox, and was a whore throughout her “reign.” She spent millions of roubles on herself and her many lovers, eventually dying of liver failure given her constant drinking. As these pseudo-reigns tightened the screws on the peasantry as they continued to spend millions on building palaces for their lovers. The recognition of Peter or “Catherine” by the hierarchy was identical to +SERGIUS recognizing Lenin. There is no moral or canonical difference here.
The only chance for the re-establishment of the monarchy died with Peter II, who succumbed to smallpox in 1730. Both Peter II and Alexis Petrovich had promised the reestablishment of the Old Belief and Russian medieval tradition. Alexis was tortured and murdered by his own father, while Peter II died at 17.
After Catherine the Whore, the next two monarchs were also illegitimate, the two Annas (r. 1730-1746). Both were completely debauched: drunken orgies, mockery of the church and profligate spending typified both “reigns.” Again, there can be no legitimacy for these reigns given the established traditions of Russian royalism. To hold the view that royal legitimacy is independent of behavior is preposterous.
While the two Anna’s “reigned” power was placed in the hand of the German nobility, non-Orthodox and haters of everything Russian. Eventually, Peter III will attempt to impose Lutheranism on Russia. Monasteries continued to be secularized, the money being spent on luxuries for “royal lovers” and their palaces, liveries and endless parties.
If the church that accepted Bolshevism was “graceless” according to Metropolitan St. PHILARET of the ROCOR, then why not this church? What’s the difference? As it turns out, six bishops were tortured and murdered for refusing to accept Anna’s coronation (and, again, none of the six were ever entered into the martyrologies). Under Anna’s German lovers, hundreds of monasteries were destroyed. There seems to be no real difference between this era and that of the Bolsheviks, albeit one of scale.
ii.
The Church was granted a respite by the reestablishment of the monarchy under Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter. She released thousands of monks, bishops and clergy from jail and from the torture chamber. She refused to permit any more Ukrainian bishops in Russia, for she thought it was their influence that permitted the state-sanctioned genocide of the Orthodox church. Her successor was Catherine II, and for her part, Catherine II’s theology can best be summed up as “Enlightenment Deism,” hence, by that charge alone, she cannot be considered a legitimate “Empress.”
This reestablishment of the monarchy was eliminated by the ascension of Peter III and then his murder by the supporters of the German princess Elizabeth, tho took the name Catherine II. The Russian monarchy was not reestablished, and this was because Paul I, though a competent ruler, became Grand Master of the Masonic Knights of Malta. Since Catharine II was not a legitimate monarch in that she took the throne over the body of her already illegitimate husband, Peter III, her issue was also illegitimate. Masonry flooded the country under Alexander I, Catherine’s grandson, and Russia gradually became more and more secular under the remaining monarchs, despite their efforts to the contrary. By 1900, according to such figures as St. John Maximovitch and St. John of Kronstadt, Petrograd was completely secular and soaked in the occult.
Russia never regained her old identity. Old Believers considered the Russia state, created by Peter, as “anti-Christ” in that it rejected Russia’s theocratic mission. The Old Faith condemned Russia on the very same grounds Isaiah condemned Israel: seeking a worldly empire at the expense of her tradition and covenant with God. She was not longer the Third Rome, but an European empire, based on secular politics, high taxes and the tight control of her purged and frightened church. The Old Believers remained as the last truly canonical part of Russian Orthodoxy, hiding in caves, caverns and scattered communities throughout Russia. They maintained the old medieval Russian way of life, and proved that it could become economically prosperous. Old Believers were successful in farming and trading far beyond the Nikonian Russian peasant. The Old Believer was literate and articulate, while the Nikonian was not. When +SERGIUS supported Lenin, he was doing nothing new.
How can this be summarized thus far? There are several points that need to be made to bring the above all together:
iii.
Few Russia scholars realize how far the Nikonians were willing to go to “reform” the faith. The Nikonians had, for a time, banned the three-barred cross, advocated the elimination of fasting and prayers for the dead (under Catherine II’s “Legislative Commission”), use Renaissance art principles in the writing of “icons,” creation of churches that use Roman architecture (see St. Isaac’s cathedral for confirmation of this), short hair for priests, introduction of Latin hymns, the banning of the Sarum rite (the Old Faith performed the Sarum rite on the feast of St. Gregory, from which the Synod of Milan takes its own Roman Rite), the radical shortening of services, loosening of divorce laws and the separation of baptism and communion. The new faith also began to use pouring in place of immersion. For these reasons, the Old belief numbered, by some estimates, a solid 30% of the Russian and East Slavic population by 1800.
Many of these “recommendations” were formulated under Catherine II, but the rising of Pugachev changed her mind. Pugachev was a revolt of several elements in the population. First, the peasants whose labor dues were now impossible to meet. Their taxes were unbearably high to support the wild spending of the pseudo-monarchs in “Petrograd.” Second, they were also opposed to the constant introduction of foreigners into Russia’s military service. Third, the Old Ritualists were very prominent in Razin and Pugachev’s movements. Fourth, the Cossacks, themselves Old Believers by and large. They formed the military core of these uprisings. They were rebelling to some extent (at least under Pugachev) because of the violation of the terms of the Treaty of Peraslavl between Russia and the Hetmanate. This treaty joined Bogdan Khilmenitskii’s Cossacks to Russia under Tsar Alexis for protection against both Poles and Turks. In itself, it was a legitimate agreement based on the cultural commonality of the two peoples. It merely asked the Russian tsar to maintain the autonomy of the Hetmanate. Under Peter and Catharine, it was violated, and serfdom, the new faith and foreign military advisors were imposed on the Cossacks. This was the immediate, effective cause fo the rebellion. Hence, the uprising of Pugachev was not only legitimate, but is what forced Catherine to renege on her “proposals” for the church.
Pugachev, unfortunately, was an undisciplined man, and commanded a radically disparate and unruly force. Their agenda was properly Russian: the reinstatement of the Old Faith and the creation of truly Russian, decentralized free communes of labor. Absolutely nothing revolutionary here; this is the mind of medieval Russia. At the time, it was stated in a crude way, but truly represented Russian tradition over the Petrine revolution.
Hence, the issues is not one of the “two fingered sign,” but rather, the entire vision of Russia. Peter was a revolutionary in every sense fo the word. He sought a New Russia based on Swedish models, a powerful empire based on high taxes, secularization and a serfdom violent even by serfdom’s earlier standards. He sought the re-creation of Israel under Solomon. The church was a fairly secular institution in the 18th century, with a handful of exceptions. Peter sought to place himself in the place of Christ, a near identical copy of the fallen Israelite king Solomon, who, because of his political agenda, introduced pagan worship in the palace and the temple and made himself master of the law. Solomon died a pagan, as did Peter. On this basis did the Old Faith regard Peter I as anti-Christ. There is good reason for this charge. Peter was a heretic, Mason and murderer to a great degree. He could be considered nothing else, and his church needs to be considered “irregular” at best, graceless at worst (though your author leans to the former alternative).
The Old Faith, then and now, stands for free peasant communes, a minimizing of technology, large, extended families, strict religious ethics and a love of church singing and proper church order. The Old belief stands for the medieval over the modern. And as a result, the abuses of church order throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th century were predicted by the Old Faith. The question is then, what of the 19th century church and state? The state was irregular, in that it was an amalgam of old and new, medieval and modern, Muscovite and Petrine. Nicholas I and Nicholas II did seek to create a hybrid identity of the two (though Alexander II did not), but Crimea sidetracked Nicholas I, while the revolution sidetracked Nicholas II. These monarchs derive from those who themselves were ill-legitimate monarchs, and hence, the validity of the Russian monarchs of the 19th century are themselves open to question, but it is a question that does not erase the competence of their rule. A solid, good faith effort was made from Nicholas I to the end of the empire to reinstate an older version of Holy Russia, but other political issues continually sidetracked these efforts. A recognition of this was only forthcoming after the revolution, among the diaspora.
What of the revolution? The Old Ritualist view is the following: the schism took away from the official church the most traditional and royalist element of the population and placed them in opposition to the Petrine revolution, itself overthrown in 1917-1921. As a result, both church and state, with a few exceptions such as Sts. John of Kronstadt or Tikhon of Zadonsk, were distant and unaccessible to the population, existing uneasily in the liberal, modernist and irreligious capital of Petrograd. They became the easy targets of the revolutionaries. Thus, the bureaucracy, church and monarch itself were considered alien impositions, foreign elements hoisted upon traditional Russia rather than relics of holiness that needed to be preserved.
Ultimately, Russia lost her identity under Peter I, and she never regained it. The monarchy was tainted my modernism and the radical withdrawal from Russian tradition. Tsar Nicholas, a martyr, was murdered for the same reason the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, he inherited a monarchy that had redefined itself in relation to holy tradition, and became a hodge-podge of modern and medieval, leaning to one way, then to another, but never making a clear declaration. Perhaps, had Nicholas II lived longer, more constructive action may have taken place, but apparently, God had decreed that the Constantian era was over.
In this author’s view, the Orthodox hierarchy in Russia from the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700 was tainted and irregular. However, they maintained the grace of the sacraments given the fact that the violation of canonical order was a sin of the state primarily, not that of the church. As the Russian people had no part in this, they were granted the graces necessary for salvation and a life pleasing to God. However, the true canonical order, to the extent humanly possible, was preserved by the priested Old Believers, who merely maintained the old ways. The priestless were also pleasing to God, but, without priests, had only the grace of prayer, rather than the sacraments themselves.
Therefore, the conclusion here is a moderate one. The Nikonian church maintained grace and the sanctity of the saints. Nevertheless, they remained an un-canonical body due to their purges and state manipulation of bishops and dioceses. This body collapsed in 1918-1921, to be replaced in Russia with a “church,” that under Patriarch Sergius, a creation of the NKVD and promoted as a political expediency under Stalin (though Sergius was a successor to Tikhon, after his two designated successors, Kyrill and Peter, were murdered before they could be consecrated, Sergius was Vice Locum Tenens). The Orthodox church existed in the diaspora (where they apologized to the Old Believers in the 1950s), and in the catacomb church in Russia. The MP has also apologized to the Old Belief and lifted the anathemas against them.
Therefore, in strictness, the Old Belief remains the only canonical church of Russia, maintaining, under severe circumstances, their hierarchy and way of life. Nevertheless, there is no reason to reject the notion that, by economy, the Patriarchy retained the grace of the sacraments, even given its compromised position. Therefore, to conclude, the evidence seems to suggest that canonical regularity in Russia was only maintained by the priested Old Belief. Hence, they remain the standard of the Russian Orthodox Church.