The Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith

St. Dimitri’s major polemical work against the Old Believer schism: the Rozysk o raskolnicheskoi brynskoi vere (Розыск о раскольнической брынской вере, “An Inquiry into the Schismatic Brynsk Faith”), completed in March 1709 and published posthumously in 1745 — a systematic, deliberately harsh refutation of the Old Believers of the Bryn forests, in three parts arguing that their faith is false, their teaching soul-harming, and their deeds not pleasing to God. This file presents the work and its Petrine-era context, and — per the repository’s both-sides rule — sets beside it the Old Believer perspective and the modern reassessment by which the Russian Church itself, in 1971, recognized the old rites as salvific and equal in honor to the new.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

The Work

The full title declares its purpose without softening: Rozysk o raskolnicheskoi brynskoi vere, o uchenii ikh, o delakh ikh, i iziavlenie, iako vera ikh neprava, uchenie ikh dushevredno, i dela ikh ne bogougodna — “An Inquiry into the Schismatic Brynsk Faith, into their teaching, into their deeds; and a demonstration that their faith is false, their teaching soul-harming, and their deeds not pleasing to God” (text in Rozysk o raskolnicheskoi brynskoi vere, azbyka.ru/otechnik/Dmitrij_Rostovskij; Dimitrii Rostovskii, Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). The very word rozysk (розыск) — “inquest,” “investigation,” with a juridical and even an inquisitorial coloring — sets the tone: this is a prosecution as much as an inquiry, and the title’s threefold verdict on faith, teaching, and deeds is the conclusion the book sets out to prove rather than a question it leaves open.

Dimitri completed it in March 1709, in the last months of his life — the labor of a dying bishop who had met the schism as a daily pastoral reality in his diocese, and who gathered into one work the case he had been making from the pulpit and in person for years. It circulated in manuscript in the Rostov diocese during his lifetime, so that its arguments were in use well before they were in print; it was first printed at the Moscow Synodal Press in 1745, more than three decades after his death, after review by Archbishop Platon of Krutitsa (azbyka.ru; Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). The delay and the official review are themselves telling: by the mid-eighteenth century the Rozysk had become a standard weapon in the established Church’s controversial armory, printed under synodal authority for use against the schism it described.

“Brynsk” (brynskaia) names the Bryn forests (Brynskie lesa) of the Kaluga region, one of the principal refuges where the Old Believer communities gathered and their “old piety” spread; Dimitri uses the term metonymically for the Old Believers generally (azbyka.ru; ru.Wikipedia, ru.wikipedia.org). The choice of name is itself revealing of the world the schism inhabited. The deep, roadless forests south-west of Moscow offered exactly what the persecuted Old Believers needed — concealment from the state’s officers and room for the skity, the small woodland hermitages and communities, in which their priests and elders kept the old rite alive. To name the schism after the Bryn woods was to evoke this whole hidden geography of refuge and resistance: the schism as Dimitri’s contemporaries pictured it, harbored in the wilderness beyond the reach of church and state.

The treatise is built in three parts, following the title’s three charges: Part I, On the schismatic faith (thirty chapters); Part II, On the schismatic teaching (thirty-three chapters); Part III, On the schismatic deeds (twenty-three chapters) (azbyka.ru). The architecture is methodical, almost forensic — each part taking up one of the three accusations and prosecuting it through its many chapters, so that the whole reads as a sustained, ordered case rather than a loose collection of arguments. Written, the sources note, in language “accessible to common folk,” it marshals scriptural, patristic, and historical argument to refute the Old Believers point by point — and the accessibility was a strategy, not an accident: Dimitri wanted the work to reach and to win back the very people, mostly unlettered, whom the schism had drawn away. Yet the popular register did nothing to soften the verdict. The book proceeds in an uncompromising, polemical, at times harsh register that reflects both the man’s conviction and the temper of the Petrine state’s campaign against the schism — declaring without qualification, as its title promises, that the Old Believers’ faith is false, their teaching soul-harming, and their deeds not pleasing to God (azbyka.ru; Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru).

The Petrine Anti-Schism Context

Dimitri wrote as a bishop of the established Church under Peter the Great, at a moment when the state treated the Old Believers as both a religious schism and a focus of disaffection. This double character of the conflict shaped the Inquiry from within. Under Peter the Old Believers were not merely a body of dissenting believers but, in the eyes of the regime, a standing reproach and a potential nucleus of resistance to the reforming, Westernizing order the tsar was forcing upon Russia — set apart by a special tax, marked out and burdened, suspected as much for their stubborn old-Russian conservatism as for their rejected rite. The Inquiry belongs to that official anti-schism literature: it defends the reformed Church and rites against the Old Believer rejection of them, and it served the broader Petrine effort — through preaching, treatise, and at times coercion — to contain and reduce the schism. Dimitri’s part in that effort was the part proper to a bishop and a scholar, the part of argument and persuasion rather than of fine or prison; but his book moved within, and lent its authority to, a campaign whose other instruments were the state’s. To read the work fairly is therefore to recognize it as a partisan document of the reformed Church in a bitter, century-old conflict, not a dispassionate inquiry; its very title pronounces the verdict in advance, and its purpose was not to weigh the schism but to defeat it.

The Old Believer Perspective

Justice to the topic — and the repository’s both-sides rule (see the methodology, §4) — requires setting the Old Believer view beside Dimitri’s, and weighing it with the same seriousness. The Old Believers (starovery, staroobriadtsy) held that the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon in the 1650s had needlessly altered the received Russian rites — the two-finger sign of the cross (dvuperstie), the spelling of the Saviour’s name, the number of prosphora and alleluias, the direction of processions — and that to anathematize the old usages as heretical was a grave injustice to the piety of their fathers and the saints who had prayed by them. At the heart of their grievance lay a conviction that the form of prayer is not indifferent but is bound up with the faith itself: the two-finger sign, by which Russians had crossed themselves for centuries and by which their canonized saints had been sanctified, could not, they urged, be suddenly declared heretical without condemning those saints along with it. To curse the old rite was, in their eyes, to curse holy Russia’s own fathers. From their standpoint, then, it was the reformers who had broken with Russian Orthodox tradition, abandoning the inheritance of the Russian Church for the sake of conformity to a contemporary Greek usage that had itself, they suspected, drifted from antiquity. They paid for this conviction with everything: they suffered persecution, exile, imprisonment, and execution, and in their most desperate communities chose self-immolation — the gari, the great burnings — rather than abandon the old rite, accepting death as a witness to the faith of their fathers. Modern Old Believer scholarship reads the later official reconciliation as the established Church’s eventual admission that the reforms — and above all the anathemas — had been wrong, and the persecution unjust (Old Believers, orthodoxwiki.org; the Old Believer historiography summarized at rpsc.ru). This is a confessional reading, presented here as the Old Believer position rather than as neutral fact; but it is a serious one, held at the cost of centuries of suffering, and it is essential context for any honest account of Dimitri’s polemic — which the Old Believers would have read, and many did read, not as the loving correction it meant to be but as one more blow from the church that had cast them out (the schism itself is treated in The Schism in His Time).

The Modern Reassessment

The deepest qualification on Dimitri’s Inquiry comes not from outside but from within the Russian Church. Over the centuries the harsh verdict on the old rites was progressively softened, then reversed — a movement from condemnation, through grudging toleration, to a final recognition of the old rite as the equal of the new. The first step was the Edinoverie (Единоверие, “same-faith”) arrangement, formalized in 1800 by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin), which allowed communities to keep the pre-Nikonian rites under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate (Edinoverie, en.wikipedia.org). Edinoverie was a real concession, opening a door back into the established Church for those who could not part with the old usages; but it was a limited and unequal one, extending toleration to the old rite while still treating it as a permitted exception rather than as fully equal to the reformed. The decisive word came only much later. In 1971 the matter was settled at the highest level: the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church (30 May – 2 June 1971), meeting at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and ratifying a little-enforced Synodal decision of 1929, formally abolished the anathemas of the Moscow councils of 1656 and 1667, declared them “as though they had never been” (яко не бывшие), and recognized the old rites as “salvific … and equal in honor” (спасительными … и равночестными) to the new (resolutions of the 1971 Council, summarized at rpsc.ru and ru.wikipedia.org). With that act the Church withdrew the very condemnation that the Inquiry had labored to uphold — not merely relaxing it in practice, as Edinoverie had, but declaring it null from the beginning. [Disputed: the seventeenth-century anti-schism position embodied in Dimitri’s Inquiry — that the old rites and those who held to them stood under the Church’s anathema — was formally reversed by the Russian Orthodox Church itself: the 1971 Local Council annulled the 1656 and 1667 anathemas and recognized the old rites as salvific and equal in honor to the new. Old Believer sources read this as a vindication of their cause; the Moscow Patriarchate frames it as a healing of the schism’s “tragic division” rather than a repudiation of the seventeenth-century reform as such.]

This reassessment does not erase Dimitri’s Inquiry; it places it. The treatise remains a witness to a real and bitter conflict and to one learned bishop’s conviction within it — and Dimitri’s standing as a canonized saint of the Russian Church is untouched by the later reversal, for the Church that abolished the anathemas has never ceased to honor the man who once defended them. What has changed is not the saint but the question he addressed: the Church no longer holds the old rites to be the false and soul-harming things the Inquiry called them, and so the book can no longer be read as the Church’s final word on the old rites, for the Church has spoken a later and gentler word. A serious account holds both at once, without forcing them into agreement: Dimitri’s polemic, sincere and learned and harsh, and the reconciliation that has since relativized its harshest claims — the saint’s conviction and the Church’s later self-correction together, each given its due.

See Also

References

  • St. Dimitri of Rostov, Rozysk o raskolnicheskoi brynskoi vere [An Inquiry into the Schismatic Brynsk Faith]. Full text at azbyka.ru/otechnik/Dmitrij_Rostovskij/rozysk-o-raskolnicheskoj-brynskoj-vere/. (Full title; three-part structure; completed 1709, first printed 1745; “accessible to common folk.”)
  • Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (The Rozysk as his major anti-schism work; the Bryn forests; manuscript circulation and 1745 printing.)
  • Old Believers. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The Nikonian reforms, the two-finger cross, the Old Believer rejection.)
  • Edinoverie. Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The 1800 same-faith arrangement under Metropolitan Platon.)
  • Pomestnyi sobor Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi 1971 goda [Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1971]. ru.wikipedia.org; and the analysis at rpsc.ru. (The 1971 abolition of the 1656/1667 anathemas; the old rites recognized as salvific and equal in honor; ratification of the 1929 Synod decision.)
  • Methodology: Citation Standard and Verification Protocol, METHODOLOGY.md, §4 (both-sides handling of disputed and sensitive topics).