It probably should be noted first of all that the Old Ritual is distinct from the “Old Believers.” The former is a part of the Russian Orthodox Church, while the latter, strictly considered, is a sect. The Old Ritual traces its roots to the post-Troubles “Zealots of Piety,” interested in liturgical renewal, book correction and the general moral uplift of society. Whenever a society is stripped to its roots, as Russia was during the Polish/Swedish occupation and the Troubles, morals are normally corrupted. Hence, both Nikon and Avvakum were part of the same movement. It is only known by a handful of specialists that Avvakum was as interested in book correction and the changes in liturgical singing as Nikon. But the Zealots of Piety quickly took divergent paths, assisted along the way by the Tsar Alexeii.

Book correction was abandoned, truth be told, in favor of “liturgical reform.” These are two very different things, and it was this divergence that created the Old Rite, at least from the specifically liturgical point of view. Liturgical reform was revolutionary in its implications, for it touched on all aspects of life: daily prayer, church governance, parish life and even the very nature of the state. Today, as “liturgical reform” is the order of the day among the novus ordo Orthodox, it impinges on little, since liturgy is “what you do in church.” For a truly Orthodox society, liturgy is a way of life, a concept so foreign to the deans of “world Orthodoxy” that is often is rejected as “romanticization.” When book correction turned into liturgical reform, nothing was spared. It was nothing other than an Orthodox novus ordo and a frontal assault on the orthodox life per se.

The Old Ritual can never be reduced to slogans about “two fingers” or “two alleluias,” as its opponents have regularly done. The Old Ritual was counter-revolutionary, both deeply religious and–as all religious dissent is–deeply political. For the zealots surrounding the court, open revolution against Old Russia was in order, assisted by the Greeks, and brought to fruition by peter I. By the beginning of Peter’s reign, church governance was completely altered. The synod ran parish life and appointed priests. Seminaries on the Swedish model were built throughout Russia, and the chief language of instruction was Latin. Iconography was recast into Italian models. The eight bar cross was banned, later to be reinstated. The state became more distant, more violent and more exacting. The Cossacks were murdered in huge numbers in Peter’s building projects in the far north. All of this was a single movement of reconstruction, based loosely on the French model of “Enlightened Absolutism.”

The Old Ritual is medievalist at root, and hence rejects the “scientific” assumptions of the Enlightenment, including, but not limited to, Enlightened Absolutism, or the “modernizing” of the society by force. The Russian state from Michael to Peter I shifted in a way that is absolutely revolutionary in its implications. It would not be recognizable to someone raised from the dead in Ivan’s time. The state became a totalizing entity, physically removed from the mass of the population, viewing the peasants as “black masses” used as cannon fodder and tax payments. Of course, serfdom was strengthened, as the nobles needed to be bought off in exchange for loyalty to the New Order. Hence, the acceptance of the Old Ritual meant the rejection of the new state, and therefore, ipso facto, became a political crime.

The Old Believers were another movement entirely from that of the Old Ritual. I hold that these former sects would have rejected the Russian Orthodox Church whether or not Nikon had ever existed. By “Old Believers,” I refer only to those who became priestless on principle; viz., that no priests were possible, and, necessarily, that no priests were necessary. Within less than a generation, these sects began confessing sins to the “earth,” to birch trees, rejected marriage and began self-immolation practices in anticipation of the end times. The “Old Believers” then, are different from the Old Orthodox, who maintained the priesthood and sought to reform the Russian Orthodox Church from below, a measure at which they were largely successful by the middle of the 19th century, though many errors still remained. What had started as a rejection of the Enlightenment, in terms of the Old Belief, became a millennial and chiliastic cult.

Within a very short time it became necessary to cut off all contact with the Old Believers and carve out a distinct space for the Old Orthodox counter-revolution. The Priestless became more and more radicalized, and, eventually, became so extreme that they bore no relationship to the Old Russia that the Old Ritual came into existence to defend. The innovations of the priestless sect became far more radical than anything that Nikon ever dreamed. Of course, the priestless on principle should be strongly differentiated from the priestless by necessity. Many of the latter came to settle in remote places, places where the census takers and the tax gatherers (of course, two highly related phenomena) could not reach, and many were already living in such remote places. Prior to Nikon, they only received the sacraments once a year from priests sent into these locations, but they never had permanent priests.

Nevertheless, the Old Ritual continued to defend the ways of Old Russia. They held that Old Russia was basically communal-democratic in form. Princes held littler power over the individual commune, or extended family structure, and most of the communities were self-governing. Given the time period, the princes themselves did not have the resources or technology to build a state like that of Peter, even if they were so inclined. Russia was based on the autonomous commune, the autonomous parish and the small skete. This is the Russia the Old Ritual sought to rebuild. They, religiously speaking, sought the monastic, rather than the seminary form of education and saw life not as a continued battle for material gain and plastic prestige, as the Petrograd nobility came to see it, but as a constant liturgical offering to God. It is not out of line to view the Old Russian idea as, epistemologically speaking, liturgical and iconic to its core: viewing life as an organic and integral whole, with each element praising God in a different way, from work to feasting to sex to the harvest, each reinforcing the other in the liturgical web of life. Devotion, love and simplicity were the cardinal virtues rather than “progress.”

The Old Ritual never rejected the idea of book correction. Avvakum, to repeat, was an advocate of this. But the objection was raised that these Greek books were not of ancient origin, but were modern translations from the transferred Greek presses in eastern Italy, where many Greeks had fled after the disaster of 1453. Highly westernized (which in itself, is no evil) monks such as Satanovskii and Ptitskii were brought in from Kiev to translate the new Greek books into Slavonic, without an understanding that these books, too, were part of a “liturgical reform” movement launched in Constantinople that few Russians had any real interest in. Beginning under those patriarchs of sorry memory including Joseph II and Metrophanes early on, and reaching its zenith under Jeremiah III. The latter, to illustrate the centralizing tendencies of Constantinople, had appointed a Greek in 1724 to the see of Antioch rather than accept Cyril, who had been canonically elected. This led to the schism of the “Melkite unia.” This same vision, that of centralization an liturgical reform, came to Moscow just a few years earlier in 1665. In fact, the events that led to the Melkite schism can be traced to the activities of the Greeks in Russia that led to the Old Ritualist movement.

In more basic terms, Constantinople under the Turks united a group of wealthy Greek collaborators who sought a full Grecification of Orthodox life throughout the world, this is why there is only one Greek rite in Antioch, Constantinople, Athos and Alexandria, replacing the other, semi-Greek and more localized rites. It was a Greek “Gregorian reform.” It was this movement that sought the same uniformity in Russia. In fact, most of the 14 Greek bishops that ruled at the 1665 council were referring to themselves as “ecumenical doctors,” (and in other highly papalized terms) while at the same time referring to the Russians as merely a “renegade province” of the Great Church of the Phanar, and occasionally, even “schismatics.” It was clear that the bishops in attendance, most notably the Greek Michael III of Antioch and Paisius of Alexandria, rejected the Muscovite Patriarchy and sought a return of Russia to the Phanar. Even worse, Bishop Dionysus of Athens made the claim, seconded by the foreign bishops, that ever since Russia went “into schism” (i.e. a reference to the establishment of the Patriarchy under Tsar Boris) with the Greeks, the books were then falsified by “obscurantist Russians.” In other words, the “liturgical reform” was a war of jurisdiction, and the manipulation of the Russian hierarchy given the political demands of the Turks, under whose control all the Greeks of the Phanar (and elsewhere) were.

The synod went on to overthrow the all-Russian Synod of the 100 chapters (1551), and sanctioned the rewriting of the Russian services. In face, several Greeks went so far as to claim this synod never existed. It will be these patriarchates later that will sanction Peter’s rule and his creation of the “synod,” and, as a matter of course, accept anything the Russian state demanded so long as the subsidies kept flowing.

As Peter had been initiated into a Masonic lodge in Amsterdam during his “grand embassy,” the official church was forced to take an oath of obedience to him, holding him as the “Chief Judge” of the church. However that phrase might be interpreted, it is void in that Peter was not Orthodox. Further, Peter I created precedent for non-Orthodox people to hold the throne of Russia, which itself is a major prop to the Old Ritualist idea of resistance and Christian, peasant anarchism. The two Annas were Orthodox only in name, living profligate lives without the slightest interest in Orthodox life. Peter’s serf mistress, called “Catherine I” by secular historians, herself could not care any less about Orthodox life. The same could be said about the deist “Catherine II” who openly rejected Orthodoxy and the two Masons Paul and Peter III (the latter also openly rejected Orthodoxy). Alexander I’s religious focus is very difficult to determine, but it is clear that he at least flirted with Masonry early in his reign. It is clear that throughout the 19th century, Masonry was the dominant religion among the Peter elite, with the official church registering not a peep in protest, with the famous exception of Metropolitan +Arsenii, who rejected Catherine’s policies against the church and spent the rest of his life in prison as a result.

Therefore, even if the Old Ritual was interested in eventual rapprochement with the state church, it was made impossible by the precedent of the dark 18th century, where the totalist and secular Russian state declared war on the monasteries, destroying over half of them and confiscating their property and treasures by 1800, a clear precedent for the later Bolshevik excesses. For the Jordanville crowd, this constitutes “Old, Orthodox Russia.” This might explain why, after almost 100 years in existence, the ROCOR has yet to release a comprehensive work on the Russian monarchy that they defend with their lips. While they (used to) rightly condemn the pseudo-patriarch Sergii for his collaboration, they refuse to utter a word about the synodal system, which also collaborated with the secular, “Enlightened” state that warred upon monastics, and was controlled either by profligate women, tyrants or Masons.

Regardless, after accepting fugitive priests for some time (which was always risky business), the Old Ritualists received a canonical hierarchy through the agency of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1846, where Patriarch +Anthemois II permitted the single handed consecration by St. Ambrose (Popovic), a Serbian metropolitan under Constantinople, removed from his see in Bosnia by the Turks. It was only after an inquiry from Vienna to Constantinople, where the Austrian authorities received explicit permission for the metropolitan to consecrate this hierarchy, that they permitted the first hierarchs of the Old Ritual on Austrian territory. (Cf. this essay for more information).

There is no question, therefore, as to the canonical legitimacy of the Priested hierarchy. Sometime later, in 1927, several fugitive bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church after the “declaration” of Sergius, became part of the Old Ritualist church, forming another branch thereof. This branch had accepted fugitive priests even during the time of the Austrian hierarchy, but was doubtful of the canonicity of that same hierarchy (much of the information from Constantinople was not able to reach Old Ritualists in Russia proper, hence this is not a schism, but part of the reality of persecution). It is this group that erected Patriarch +Alexander several years ago, who retains the proper title of “Patriarch of all the Russias” to this day. Both groups have a legitimate hierarchy, and both recognize the sacraments of the other, but retain two distinct hierarchies and organizations, with the Patriarchate being the smaller of the two. Together, they count roughly 2.5 million faithful. They are differentiated only by the limitation of information permitted about the Austrian hierarchy in Russia. Hence, they are administrative differences only at play here.

A few comments need to be added. It should be noted that the Accord that traces its roots to St. Ambrose of Bosnia accepts the sacraments of the Nikonian clergy while condemning their errors and their servility. It does not accept the sacraments of the collaborationist Sergian hierarchy, however, after 1927. Hence, there is no canonical reason why this hierarchy could not cooperate with the synods of VALENTIN and AGAFANGEL for the rebuilding of Orthodox Russia and her peasant life. The Patriarchate of Moscow (+Alexander) itself accepts the sacraments of the Bela Krinitsa accord, and also fully anathematizes the Sergianist heresy. Nevertheless, the Patriarchate permits several opinions on the sacraments of the pre-revolutionary hierarchy. However, both groups accept converts through chrisimation, largely because of the intense Masonization of the Orthodox churches after Peter. It exists solely as a precautionary measure.

Further, on the question of the antichrist, the priested groups did not hold, as a matter of course, that they were living in the end times, though it was an important opinion. This is largely a creation of the priestless sectarians, and in fact, is largely at the root of their becoming priestless in the first place. Both priestly accords hold the moderate view (as does this writer) that, at the present time, Antichrist does not exist in bodily form, but that there is a “mystical body of Satan” that exists on earth, mirroring and parodying the mystical Body of Christ, i.e. the Orthodox church. This mystical body of Satan is the Enlightenment: scientific rationalism and materialism, evolutionism, the centralized state, the materialist ideologies of liberalism, socialism, conservatism and capitalism; mechanization, the cult of youth, rabid technophilia, feminism, Zionism, globalization, and all its attendant movements and elite societies, loosely organized themselves into the Bildeberg organization. In short, the mystical body of Satan is modernist globalization and cosmopolitanism. This is the first “manifestation” of Antichrist, and the Old Ritual remains agnostic on the actual appearance of Antichrist as a person in this era. It remains the case that the introduction of the novus ordo did bring an end to Old Russia, and in this respect the “end of the world” scenario was correct.

The return of Old Russian styles is the result of the Old Faith merchant classes. Since the “sectarians” could not legally own land, the Old Ritual went into trade, becoming very successful. Throughout Russia, the Old Ritual was synonymous with hard work, the family and literacy. But what made the Old Faith merchants so successful is their wares: previously banned symbols, texts and artifacts of Old Russia. The Old Ritual survived at least in part due to this trade, and the great Slavophile interest in Old Russia came from the sale and commerce in these items. In fact, after Peter, the ancient Russian aesthetic was preserved solely in the Old Ritual and among the Ukrainian nationalists, who were peasant nationalists by definition. In modern Russia itself, the old aesthetic was rejected and replaced by a bizarre amalgam of French, British and German fashions. Hence, there is an aesthetic connection between Old Ukraine and her peasant tradition, and the Old Ritual, who centers herself around the same lifestyle.

There can no longer be any question that the great Slavophile teachers, Khomiakov, Kerivskii, Aksakov and Shchapov were Old Ritualists in their view of church governance, but could not remain landholders if they admitted so in public. There can be no common ground between Kerivskii and the Petrine state. In fact, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin said of Kerivskii, “his hostility to the state goes even beyond my own.” A compliment if there ever was one. One cannot accept the Petrine state and be a follower of the Slavophiles. The latter were Old Ritualists, and held to a view of church life completely at variance with the Petrine version of a regimented, mechanized military society. The Jordanville crowd has for a long time attempted to square this circle, attempting, in a dilettantish fashion, to join Slavophile Christian anarchism with the murderous Petrine state, and, even more perversely, now under the new first hierarch Hilarion, joining the Slavophile world view to the Sergianist hierarchy in Russia, a hierarchy that just yesterday, the Jordanville sect had anathematized. Proving that the Jordanville crowd is woefully misinformed about Russian history and Russian philosophy, building a completely mythic edifice of Old Russia with a Petrine and Masonic head, and a strong 19th century bias. It is likely that this derives from the emigre, noble support the ROCOR had traditionally been given, since the Petrograd Orthodox nobility often sought to attempt a synthesis of Slavophile communitarianism with Romanov absolutism, something reaching its head in the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, an experiment, born from good intentions, that was doomed to failure, since the old peasant anarchism is the polar opposite of Petrine absolutism. This synthesis might have some merit if it were to confine itself to the Paisian counter-revolution, where Athonite hesychasm re-vivified the corpse of Russian monasticism in the late 18th century, culminating in Optina. Nevertheless, these groups, while manifestly saintly, existed on the fringes of Russian life, and were held in suspicion by the increasingly secular and servile Synod. These elders were saints despite the synodal system and western European-style state, not because of them.