Orthodoxy in Russia and the Ottoman World

The Third Rome

When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 (see The Late Medieval Crisis), the only large independent Orthodox state left in the world was the Grand Duchy of Moscow. Russians had already been shocked when Byzantine leaders accepted union with Rome at the Council of Florence (1439). The Russian church had rejected it and in 1448 chose its own head without waiting for Constantinople. To many Russians, the fall of the "Second Rome" looked like God's punishment for that betrayal.

Grand Prince Ivan III married the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle, and began calling himself "tsar" (from "Caesar"). Around 1510 a monk named Philotheus of Pskov wrote to the ruler of Moscow: "Two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be." Moscow was now the protector of true Christianity. In 1589 the Moscow church became a patriarchate, joining the ancient five.

The "Third Rome" idea gave Russian Orthodoxy a powerful sense of mission, and a close, sometimes suffocating, bond with the Russian state.

Monks and holy elders

Russian spirituality was rooted in monasteries. Sergius of Radonezh of Radonezh (c. 1314–1392), a humble hermit, founded the Holy Trinity monastery near Moscow and became Russia's most beloved saint. He blessed the prince who first defeated the Mongols in 1380. The icon painter Andrei Rublev, a monk of his tradition, painted the famous icon of the Holy Trinity (c. 1410s), showing the three angels who visited Abraham. It is often called the greatest of all Russian icons.

Around 1500, Russian monks argued over whether monasteries should own vast lands and serfs. The "Possessors" said wealth let monasteries do charity and support the state. The "Non-Possessors," led by the hermit Nil Sorsky, wanted poverty and inner prayer in the hesychast tradition. The Possessors won. The church grew rich and tied to the tsars.

Nikon and the Old Believers

In the mid-1600s, the energetic and autocratic Patriarch Nikon (patriarch 1652–1658) set out to correct Russian liturgical books and rituals. They had developed differences from Greek practice over centuries of copying, and Nikon wanted them brought into line with the contemporary Greek church. The changes looked small:

• making the sign of the cross with three fingers (for the Trinity) instead of two (for Christ's two natures);
• spelling the name of Jesus Iisus instead of Isus;
• singing "Alleluia" three times instead of twice;
• processing around the church against the sun instead of with it.

But for many Russians, these rituals were the very substance of their faith. To change them was to admit that Holy Russia, the Third Rome, had been wrong for centuries, and to submit to the Greeks, who had betrayed Orthodoxy at Florence. The fierce archpriest Avvakum Petrov led the resistance. He was exiled to Siberia, imprisoned for years in an underground pit, and finally burned at the stake in 1682. His autobiography is a masterpiece of Russian literature.

A church council in 1666–1667 confirmed the reforms (though it also deposed Nikon for his arrogance toward the tsar). Those who refused, the Old Believers (Raskolniki, "schismatics"), were persecuted. Some fled to the forests and frontiers. In the late 1600s, thousands of Old Believers, expecting the Antichrist, burned themselves alive in their churches rather than submit. Old Believers survived in many groups, some without priests, and they still exist in Russia and abroad, from Alaska to Brazil. The schism (Raskol) deeply wounded Russian Orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy from the fall of Constantinople to 1917

Peter the Great's state church

Tsar Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725) was determined to modernize Russia along Western lines. He built a new capital, St Petersburg, as a "window on the West." He saw the church, with its wealth, its conservative clergy, and its patriarch who could rival the tsar, as an obstacle.

When the patriarch died in 1700, Peter left the post empty. In 1721 he abolished the patriarchate altogether. In its place he created the Holy Synod, a committee of bishops supervised by a lay government official, the Chief Procurator. It was modeled on the state-controlled Lutheran churches of Sweden and Prussia. Clergy were required to report anything learned in confession that threatened the state. Monasteries were restricted. The church became, in effect, a department of government. This system lasted until 1917.

Later in the 1700s, Catherine the Great confiscated most monastic lands. Yet there was also renewal. Bishop Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724–1783) was a gentle preacher and writer who inspired Dostoevsky. Russian missionaries pushed east across Siberia, and in 1794 a mission of monks from Valaam monastery reached Alaska, then Russian territory.

The Philokalia and the elders

A quiet but powerful renewal came from the hesychast tradition of prayer (see Byzantium and the Icons). On Mount Athos, two Greek monks, Macarius of Corinth and Nicodemus the Hagiorite the Hagiorite, compiled the Philokalia ("love of the beautiful"), a collection of writings on prayer from the 4th to the 15th centuries. It was published in Venice in 1782. The Ukrainian monk Paisius Velichkovsky Velichkovsky translated it into Slavonic (1793) and revived the tradition of the starets, the spiritual elder who guides disciples.

In the 1800s, elders such as Seraphim of Sarov and the elders of Optina monastery drew crowds of pilgrims, including writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The anonymous Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim describes a wanderer learning the Jesus Prayer. This spirituality later spread to the West and is now loved far beyond Orthodoxy.

Christians under the Sultan

After 1453 most Orthodox Christians outside Russia, in Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, lived under the Ottoman sultans. Sultan Mehmed II made the patriarch of Constantinople the head of the whole Orthodox Millet ("nation"), responsible to the sultan for all Orthodox subjects, whatever their language. This gave the patriarch more power over other Orthodox churches than ever before. But he served at the sultan's pleasure. Patriarchates were often bought and sold, and several patriarchs were deposed or executed.

Christians, as Dhimmi, paid special taxes and faced restrictions. Under the devshirme system, Christian boys from the Balkans were taken, converted to Islam, and trained as soldiers (Janissaries) or officials. Yet Orthodoxy survived and preserved Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian and Romanian identity. The church became the guardian of national culture.

The Orthodox world was not sealed off from Western debates. Patriarch Cyril Lucaris of Constantinople (d. 1638), who had studied in Protestant Geneva, published a Confession (1629) with strongly Calvinist ideas. He was strangled by the Ottomans, partly due to intrigues by Catholic and Protestant ambassadors. Orthodox councils then condemned his Calvinism, notably at Jerusalem in 1672. Meanwhile, Catholic missionaries won some Orthodox communities to union with Rome while they kept their own rites. This created "Eastern Catholic" or "Uniate" churches, such as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (Union of Brest, 1596). Orthodox Christians bitterly resented it.