OLD, BELIEF (RASKOL)-OLD BELIEVERS

OLD, BELIEF ( RASKOL)-OLD BELIEVERS. The Old Belief arose in 17th c. Russia in direct response to the liturgical-translational reforms of Patriarch Nikon (q.v.). The origins of the need for translation reform in the Russian Church in the 17th c. is most usually attributed to mistakes and translation errors from Greek to Church Slavic, which had affected Muscovite liturgy (q.v.) over an extended time span, a situation confirmed by Tsar Michael’s commission for an investigation of such and by visiting Greek clergy. When Patriarch Nikon initiated the process of translation reform in 1652, he encountered tremendous resistance. Only in about the last century has the premise been taken seriously that some of the resistance might have been justified. From a scholarly point of view, the Greek liturgical books (q.v.) themselves had evolved in content and expression since the time the Church Slavic translations had been made from them. Examples of the rubrical practices reformed included the singing of a threefold Alleluia (q.v.) instead of two and the making of the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two.

Nikon mustered support for his reforms from various quarters: Church councils (1654, 1656), the patriarch of Constantinople, Mt. Athos, the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch (qq.v.), scholarly Greek and Ukrainian monks, etc. After hopes were raised of defeating the movement among the opposition when Nikon fell into disfavor with Tsar Alexis (1658), two subsequent Moscow church councils upheld the reforms but deposed Nikon (1666–67). This set the stage for the raskol, the schism (q.v.) of the starovery or staroobriadtsy, of the Old Believers or Old Ritualists.

The reforms had the full backing of Church and state, and opposition to them was falsely interpreted as rejection of both-punishable by death. Those who opposed the reforms appealed to the faith of Novgorodian and Muscovite (qq.v.) Christian forbears, as well as to the Council of One Hundred Chapters (1551; Stoglav), which was quite explicit on how many times Alleluia was to be sung and how many fingers were to be used in making the sign of the cross-two! (This fact was so distressing to later Russian historians through the mid-19th c. that it was considered an Old Believer forgery.) Old Believers perished at the stake, whole monasteries were besieged and captured, and the twenty-five years following the Council of Moscow saw new apocalyptic Old Belief expectations as self-fulfilling prophecies, when dozens of their communities destroyed themselves in mass suicides. The most curious aspect of the schism was that both sides thought the disputed matters were of life and death importance, although nothing of a dogmatic nature was discussed-only ritual.

Old Believers survive to the present, and communities may be found in the United States and Canada. The first major division occurred early among them between the popovtsy, those with clergy, and the bezpopovtsy, those without clergy. Most of the later sects emanating from the Old Believers (see Doukhobors) came from the “priestless” group-a circumstance that resulted from the sect’s lack of bishops to ordain clergy. The entirety of the Old Belief was largely reorganized in the 18th c. and numbered in the millions before the Russian Revolution. Nicholas Riasanovsky has recently pointed out that the tragedy of both Nikon’s Muscovite Church and the Old Belief is that both tended to focus on the form of the faith to such a degree as to eclipse the content. To this may be added the observation that what began as a somewhat legitimate protest to Nikon’s reforms became, in the priestless sects, a manifestation of the most extreme cultic, self-destructive behavior. Mistakenly, Westerners sometimes classify all of these sectarians together as types of Protestants-tantamount to mixing Old Catholics and Mennonites together with Branch Davidians and followers of Jim Jones.