Nikon

Russian church leader and church reformer

• Born: 1605
• Birthplace: Veldemanovo, Russia
• Died: August 27, 1681
• Place of death: En route to Moscow, Russia

Nikon contributed to the liturgical reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church, the introduction of Western intellectualism in Russia, and the definition of the role of the church in the Russian state. Critics argue that his ultimate downfall came out of his hunger for more power for the patriarch, and the church, over that of the czar, and the state.

Early Life

Nikon (NYEE-kuhn), the future patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church, was born Nikita Minin in the Nizhni-Novgorod province of northern Russia to landless peasants. Nikon, as he would come to be known, was born during a period in Russian history called the Time of Troubles. This historical era was marked by a succession crisis that resulted when Czar Fyodor I Ivanovich died without an heir. Nikon was educated in a local school until the age of twelve. After this, because of parental abuse, he ran away to the Makariev Monastery.

Nikon’s parents persuaded him to leave the monastery and be married. In 1625, at the age of twenty, he became the village priest of Kolychevo. A year later, Nikon assumed control of a parish in the Moscow province, where he remained for the next ten years. He had three sons during this time, none of whom survived. In 1634, Nikon persuaded his wife to enter a Moscow convent, thus clearing the obstacles for Nikon to go to the north and live as a hermit.

For several years, Nikon lived in utter solitude, preparing himself to become a monk. He entered the monastery at Kozheezero, in the Kargopol district in the northern tundra region. Between 1641 and 1646, Nikon was the administrator for the monastery. In 1646, while on monastery business in Moscow, Nikon met Stephen Vonifatiev, the confessor of Czar Alexis. Through Vonifatiev, Nikon, a 6-foot, 6-inch-tall, forty-two-year-old monk from the north, met and awed the seventeen-year-old ruler of Russia with his spiritual bearing. Alexis was so impressed with his newfound friend that he named Nikon to the position of archimandrite (head) of the Novo-Spasski Monastery in Moscow.

Nikon soon became involved with church reform. A group led by Vonifatiev established a printing press in Moscow for the purpose of increasing the number of religious texts available. The aim of the reformers was to increase the level of intellectual life in Russia by raising the literacy level of the clergy. Members of this reform group were first to support and later to disassociate themselves from Nikon’s ideas concerning church reform.

Life’s Work

In 1648, serious riots erupted in Moscow. The surface cause of the riots was a higher salt tax, but the root of the popular disturbances was the inefficiency of the state. The modern Russian state was formed in 1613, amid the debris accumulated from years of internal conflict (the Time of Troubles). Alexis inherited the problems of the fledgling state: debts from years of warfare, a state without a consistent form of collecting taxes, and rulers who relied on others to make decisions. In 1648, Alexis replaced his boyar adviser with Nikon. This rise in station of a religious man to the position of the czar’s adviser initiated the struggle between church and state that dominated Russian history until the rule of Peter the Great.

The metropolitan of the Novgorod Church district died in 1649. Using his power as the secular head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexis appointed his friend Nikon to the vacant post. Nikon proved his loyalty to and gratitude for the czar’s confidence during an armed uprising in Novgorod in 1650. This revolt was against the power of the czar to absorb Moscow’s former great rival, the free city-state of Novgorod, into the ever-expanding Russian state. Nikon, appointed as the czar’s overseer in Novgorod, brutally repressed the rebelling Novgorodians in Alexis’s name. In 1652, Nikon returned to Moscow after the death of Joseph, the patriarch (spiritual leader) of the Russian Orthodox Church. Alexis begged Nikon to become Joseph’s successor and to help guide the czar in secular decisions. Nikon accepted the patriarchy on condition the czar give him a free hand in the reordering of the Russian Orthodox Church.

As patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Nikon’s first reform was to bring uniformity to the worship service. He accomplished this by publishing service books to be used by all the clergy. As patriarch, Nikon controlled the printing press, and through it he was able to direct the mission of the church. The Kormchaia Kniga (the pilot book), published in 1650, not only was a polemic against Judaism and other religions deemed to be false but also was a work based on canon law. Nikon used this book as the basis for the Russian Orthodox mission to become the center of all religious life in the East.

During the previous two centuries, since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Russian Orthodox Church had remained in an intellectual vacuum from the Western world. Through isolation and ignorance, two centuries of silence had led to many alterations in the way in which Christianity was practiced in Russia. Indeed, the fall of the Byzantine Empire, after the earlier fall of the western Roman Empire, led to the idea that pure Christianity and the legacy of Rome itself continued to survive only in Russia, an idea known as the Third Rome.

In his efforts to purify Russian religious texts, Nikon invited scholars from Kiev to aid him. Unlike Russian religious leaders, the Kievan scholars had been trained in both Latin and Greek, which enabled them to correct the Russian deviations from Western and Greek developments. The Nikonian corrections were intended to standardize the texts and in so doing to eliminate the various heresies being practiced as a result of differing versions of the psalter.

Nikon also reformed church services. He changed not only the form but also the substance of church rituals. He added theatrical dimensions to the worship service with expensive robes for the clergy, a grand processional, and a featured sermon given weekly. The Palm Sunday procession of Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem before Easter became an important ritual of the church, with the czar leading a donkey on which the patriarch was seated. This ritual was repeated in towns and villages throughout the empire with the civil leaders in attendance to the spiritual leaders of each community.

Another reform of the church service was a change in making the sign of the cross; it was changed from two fingers to three. Nikon also changed the number of loaves of bread consecrated for communion from seven to five. He altered the common people’s traditional perspective on the Holy Trinity: God became the Lord, the name of Jesus was spelled differently from the way it had been spelled in previous texts, and the Holy Spirit was openly discussed instead of implied in the service.

The purpose of all the Nikonian reforms was to increase the power and authority of the patriarch. Indeed, Nikon agreed to become patriarch only after the czar and the boyars had taken an oath of loyalty to him. The oath was traditional in the Orthodox Church and had been handed down to the Russian state as part of their Byzantine heritage, but Nikon took their oath of loyalty much more seriously than prior Russian patriarchs. He thought and acted under the assumption that their oath was indeed made in the original Byzantine context. Nikon had read and understood the ninth century Byzantine document that stated that the patriarch and the emperor were corulers and answerable only to God. The emperor was to be the secular leader and the patriarch the spiritual leader of the state. The patriarch was always to put the salvation of souls first, even if he had to go against the will of the emperor. Nikon thus used his position as patriarch, defined by the ancient Byzantine law, to become coruler with Alexis.

Nikon’s downfall was the result not of his reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church but of his attempt to garner more power for the office of the patriarch. During the Polish conflict (1652-1655), the czar went to the front, leaving Nikon as the sole ruler. The patriarch acted as an autocrat, becoming repressive and domineering toward everyone, including the czar’s wife, the boyars, and influential monastic leaders. Nikon acted as both czar and patriarch, no longer concerned with the separate spheres of power defined in Byzantine law. He condemned boyars and church leaders alike whenever they opposed his ideas. By 1655, the reformers with whom Nikon had associated in the 1640’s disassociated themselves from his policies, which were more radical than they were prepared to support. The czar, growing older, preferred increasingly to rule on his own. A crisis between the two men emerged and sharpened. When Alexis stopped attending church services, Nikon retreated to the Voskresenskii Monastery he had built outside Moscow. He vowed not to set foot in Moscow until the czar declared confidence in him and his reforms. Eight years later, Nikon returned to the nation’s capital but not in the glory he dreamed. He was brought before a church council, stripped of his title, and sent to a monastery in the north. In 1681, Nikon died on his way back to Moscow after having received a partial pardon from the czar.

Significance

Nikon attempted to elevate the office of Russian patriarch to the same height as that held by the Byzantine patriarch in the original Orthodox Church that had converted the Ukraine and Russia after 988. He worked throughout his career as metropolitan and patriarch to duplicate within the Russian state the splendor and pomp of the Byzantine Empire, in which religion and politics were so intimately linked. Nikon believed that Russia was the true inheritor of the glories of Constantinople. All of his programs of reform were aimed at creating a Russian state in which the religious sphere would be equal to the secular sphere in all matters. The conflict that resulted between church and state was ended in 1701, when Peter the Great declared that he was secular head of the church and replaced the office of patriarch with a Holy Synod, a group of officials appointed by the czar to make church decisions.

Although a failure in the realm of politics, Nikon was successful in the area of church reform. The changes he introduced in church texts and worship services were to have lasting importance. In the short run, the Church Council of 1666 found in favor of Nikon’s religious reforms, while condemning his political aspirations. It upheld and mandated his religious modifications, which were then given the force of law by the czar. Yet the practice of generations was not so easily discarded. Led by the archpriest Avvakum Petrovich , many devout Russians refused to adopt the revolutionary religious laws. The resulting break is known as the great schism. The dissenters contravened state law and thus rejected not only the authority of the church but also that of the czar. The Russian traditionalists viewed Nikon’s reforms as Western impositions—foreign impurities thrust upon the pure faith of Russia. Nikon himself was condemned by them as the Antichrist. Avvakum’s supporters, known as the Old Believers, were ruthlessly persecuted as religious heretics and dangerous political subversives.

Nikon’s religious reforms thus led to a serious split and to a conflict that provokes discussion in Russian Orthodox circles into the twenty-first century. The political objectives sought by the Russian patriarch between 1652 and 1658, when he was head of the church and coruler with Alexis, resulted in the firm subordination of the church to the state, which characterized relations between the two until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Bibliography

Baron, Samuel H., and Nancy Shields Kollman, eds. Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995. A collection that examines seventeenth century church history; articles created during a workshop about early eastern Slavic culture held at Stanford University in 1993.

Billington, James H. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. Section 3, “The Century of Schism,” is not only a detailed account of Nikon’s historical role but also an excellent source for discussion of the religious and social debates of seventeenth century Russian history.

Bushkovitch, Paul. Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Bushkovitch explains the fundamental changes that took place in the Russian Orthodox Church, describing how these changes were influenced by Western European ideas and how they eventually led to Peter the Great’s secularization of Russia.

Kluchevsky, V. O. A History of Russia. Vol. 3. Translated by C. J. Hogarth. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1960. The second half of this volume explains Nikon’s reforms and the reasons for the great schism. Kluchevsky examines the roots of the notion that Moscow is the inheritor of Byzantium and the incipient problems this notion created for the Moscow state.

Luprinin, Nickolas. Religious Revolt in the Seventeenth Century: The Schism of the Russian Church. Princeton, N.J.: Kingston Press, 1985. Recounts Nikon’s reforms and other events leading to the great schism.

Meyendorff, Paul. Russia, Ritual, and Reform: The Liturgical Reforms of Nikon in the Seventeenth Century. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. Historical overview of the events and people of the reforms. Meyendorff argues the reforms were initiated not by Nikon but by the czar.

Miliukov, Paul, Charles Seignobos, and L. Eisenmann. From the Beginnings to the Empire of Peter the Great. Vol. 1 in History of Russia. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968. Essays written before Miliukov became leader of the Cadet Party in 1905. Although Miliukov wrote about Nikon, his work discusses the Nikonian reforms as preparation for the later reforms of Peter the Great.

Vernadsky, George. The Tsardom of Moscow, 1547-1682. Vol. 2. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969. An excellent source for Nikon’s activities as metropolitan and patriarch, with more information on Nikon’s contemporaries than other sources. The conclusions about Nikon’s impact on Russian history are tied to Vernadsky’s prejudice that Russia was a copy of the Byzantine state.