Old Believers in a Changing World: Polish Narratives of World War ll

Six—The Miracle of Martyrdom: Reflections on Early Old Believer Hagiography

Six The Miracle of Martyrdom Reflections on Early Old Believer Hagiography The true Orthodox faith . . . is sealed with the blood of the martyrs. —Avraamii This I consider to be great and truly miraculous [divno] that God would find me worthy to be burned in His name. —The Tale of Boiarynia Morozova Hagiography forms an integral part of the cultural life of Old Belief. Like other Christians in the East and the West, the Old Believers have treasured the stories of the lives and the martyrdom of defenders of the faith. When they rejected the reforms of Patriarch Nikon and began their struggle to preserve rigorous and authentic Russian Orthodoxy as they understood it, the Old Believers not only continued the cultural traditions of Russian Orthodoxy but also added to them works honoring the memory of the saints and martyrs of their own movement.1 The Old Believer variant of Muscovite Russian culture was the creation of a group of conservative clergymen and a few lay supporters in the mid- to 86 O l d B e l i e v e r s i n a C h a n g i n g W o r l d late seventeenth century. Judging by their works, the first Old Believer writers struggled to defend the Russian Orthodox culture of their time, which they equatedwiththetimelessecumenicalOrthodoxtradition.Atthesametime,in defending Muscovite Orthodoxy, they had to define and codify it—a process that consisted in part of setting themselves in opposition to the liturgical enactments and theological arguments that Patriarch Nikon and his allies advanced in support of their program of liturgical and administrative reform in the church. Thus their act of negation was simultaneously an act of creation. The polemical writings of the first generation of Old Believers were part of a largerdesign.Fromthebeginning,theyandtheirfollowersaspiredtomaintain an authentically Christian way of life. Their polemical attacks on the Nikonian reforms directed attention to the liturgical observances that their words defended. For in their view liturgy, not theological conviction, was the center ofChristianlife.Moreover,byimplication(andtosomeextentexplicitly),their polemics told followers how they should live in the apocalyptic circumstances in which they found themselves. Thus, within a generation or two, the Old Believers created their own liturgical cycle, elaborate institutional structures, ideological and polemical statements, a rigorous moral code, and a distinct artistic culture. In short, they built a separate world with its own culture.2 In creating a cultural world of their own, the early Old Believers drew heavily on Muscovite ecclesiastical culture of the mid-seventeenth century.3 As they defined the canon of acceptably Orthodox texts, the early Old Believers included writings of the Eastern church fathers available in Russian translations or miscellanies and many classics of the Russian Orthodox tradition. To this collection of acceptably Christian works, they gradually added defenses of their own position and edifying works for their followers.4 Similarly, they made the classic tradition of Russian icon painting and the plainchant of the pre-Nikonian church their own. This remarkable burst of creativity took place in circumstances of deprivation and persecution. The official church and the state gave the first Old Believers ample reason to believe that the apocalyptic expectations common in seventeenth-century Russian Orthodoxy applied to them—that they were martyrs and that their sufferings were the prelude to the End Time. Driven into the “desert” or the catacombs, the first Old Believers adopted ever more rigorous tests of true Orthodox belief and practice, since their very souls depended on holding correct belief and observing precisely the forms of worship that embodied it. To illustrate these propositions, I propose to examine selected works of the early Old Believer canon, which were not ideological texts or polemics The Miracle of Martyrdom 87 in the strict sense. Like all groups of Christians, the Old Believers defined themselves not only by liturgical observances or theological propositions but also by their stories. The Eastern Orthodox tradition provided them with a large repertoire of biblical and patristic stories and saints’ lives.5 To this canon the first Old Believer writers added their own narratives, usually written in a direct manner in a mixture of exalted and popular language (in contrast to the convoluted complexity of their formal treatises and polemics). Although none of these works follows strictly the usual pattern of the saint’s vita, all of them are in some sense works of hagiography for they describe the saintly...