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

Nine—The Historical Framework of the Vyg Fathers

Nine The Historical Framework of the Vyg Fathers Any community that lives within the Judeo-Christian tradition must have a historical understanding of human experience. Christians and Jews share the conviction that God has acted and acts through the ongoing events of human life. Moreover, the traditional Christian understanding of history ultimately positions all significant events on a continuum stretching from Creation through the climax of history—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—to the End of the World. The Old Believers were no exception. In fact, they had at least two particularly urgent reasons for seeking to define their place in the universal scheme of Christian history. First, their movement arose in reaction to specific historical events as well as broader institutional, social, and cultural changes in the fabric of Russian life in the seventeenth century. Second, in their struggle to survive and establish the legitimacy of their cause, they competed with several other visions of historical development. Among these were the works of the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries containing what might be called the Muscovite imperial vision of history, the historical assumptions through which Patriarch Nikon justified his reforms, and the new historical and cultural mythologies of the regime of Peter I. In short, the Old Believers urgently needed a coherent understanding of history, a usable past. As the intellectual leaders of Old Belief in the first half of the eighteenth century, the Vyg fathers responded to the challenge with a series of compositions, placing their community and its followers in the stream of 130 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 universal Christian history.1 The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the broad historical framework in which the writers of Vyg set their concrete narratives of their community’s development and their devotional reflections on the meaning of these stories.2 The Vyg fathers’ view of history appears in its simplest form in the introduction to Semen Denisov’s Vinograd rossiiskii.3 From the moment of conversion under St. Vladimir until the middle of the seventeenth century, the Orthodox faith in the Russian lands was perfect and uncorrupted. In a word, Russia was “worthy to be called the second heaven.” As Orthodox hierarchs from other lands and even Roman Catholic writers testified, Russian Christians did not esteem false wisdom but guarded a “sound faith and simple piety.”4 Monasteries flourished, and the country produced many saints, whose uncorrupted remains proved their sanctity. Then God allowed Patriarch Nikon to corrupt Russia’s faith. Driven by the promptings of Satan and his own demonic ambition, Nikon introduced novelties in worship and belief that destroyed true faith in the Russian church. Some of the faithful were not deceived. Beginning with Bishop Paul of Kolomna and Archpriest Avvakum and his friends, defenders of the true faith spoke out against Nikon and suffered martyrdom. Their acts of resistance inspired others, like the monks of the Solovetskii monastery, to fight against the new order in the church, and soon the whole country was engulfed in a chaotic struggle for the soul of Russia. It was to remind his readers or hearers ofthesufferingsofthoseearlymartyrsforthetruefaithandtodrawinspiration from their heroic example that Denisov composed the individual reflections that made up his martyrology. The framework in which Ivan Filippov placed his history of the Vyg community is very similar. Once again, the author begins with the assumption that Russian Orthodoxy remained pure for roughly seven hundred years, from the conversion until the Nikonian reforms. The activities of the Stoglav council of 1551 and the creation of the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1589 prove that the leaders of the Russian church guarded the true faith and that foreign witnesses recognized their achievement. Then the rest of the chapter comprises a detailed description of how Nikon’s reforms destroyed the true faith and inspired its defenders to fight against the new order. After a very brief reprise of these same themes, the second introductory chapterofFilippov’shistoryemphasizesthecentralmessageoftheentirework— theemergenceoftheVygcommunityasacitadeloftrueChristianityinacorrupt and hostile world.5 The founders of Vyg drew inspiration from the example and teachings of the early martyrs to the Old Faith. In particular, Filippov stressed The Historical Framework of the Vyg Fathers 131 that the new community was the direct successor of the Solovetskii monastery whose residents resisted the Nikonian...