The Schism in His Time

The Raskol — the great schism of the Russian Church — as the background to St. Dimitri’s polemic: the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon in the 1650s, the anathemas of the Moscow councils of 1666–67 that fell on the old rites and those who held to them, the grievances and sufferings of the Old Believers, and the long aftermath that ran from persecution through the Edinoverie arrangement to the Russian Church’s own reversal of the anathemas in 1971. Presented with both sides set out, per the repository methodology.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

The Reforms of Nikon

The schism that Dimitri confronted had opened a generation before his episcopate, in the patriarchate of Nikon (patriarch 1652–1666). To understand it one must recall the peculiar confidence of the Russian Church in that age. Russia had come to see herself as the last bastion of true Orthodoxy — the “Third Rome,” whose books and rites preserved the ancient faith that had, in the Russian imagination, grown dim in a Greek East fallen under the Turk and tainted, after the Council of Florence, with the suspicion of compromise with Rome. It was into this self-understanding that Nikon’s reforms struck, and that is why a quarrel over ritual could become a wound that has never fully healed.

Seeking to bring the Russian service-books and rites into conformity with contemporary Greek usage — and, behind that, to assert the dignity and authority of the Russian Church and its patriarch — Nikon ordered, from 1652–1653, a sweeping revision of the liturgical books and a series of changes to received practice. The most visible were the replacement of the two-finger sign of the cross (dvuperstie) with three fingers; alterations to the spelling of the name of Jesus (Iisus for Isus); changes to the number of prosphora, the number of alleluias, and the direction of liturgical processions (Old Believers, orthodoxwiki.org; Old Believers, britannica.com). These look, to a modern eye, like small matters of form; but to the seventeenth-century Russian the form was inseparable from the faith it carried, and to change the manner in which one made the sign of the cross or spelled the holy Name was to touch the very substance of received Orthodoxy. To Nikon and his supporters these were corrections, restoring the Russian rite to its Greek source and purging it of the errors that copyists’ carelessness had let creep in over the centuries. To a large body of clergy and laity they were the reverse — a violent and unwarranted breach with the piety by which Russia’s own saints had prayed, an upheaval imposed from above with little patience and less consultation, by a patriarch whose imperious manner made the medicine harder to swallow than the disease.

The Anathemas of 1666–67

The breach was made formal and irreparable by the Moscow councils of 1666–1667. By the time they met, Nikon himself had already fallen — deposed in his quarrel with the tsar over the bounds of patriarchal and royal power — yet the councils upheld his reforms even as they condemned the man, a separation of the reform from the reformer that shows how far the changes had become the policy of the church and crown together rather than of one overbearing patriarch. Meeting with the participation of the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, whose presence lent the reforms the authority of the wider Orthodox East, the councils confirmed Nikon’s reforms, and — fatefully — anathematized both the dissenters and the old rites and books themselves (Old Believers, orthodoxwiki.org). This was the decisive over-reach. The anathema fell not only on persons but on the dvuperstie and the pre-Nikonian usages as such, declaring them not merely superseded but accursed — so that the very gestures and books by which generations of Russian Christians, saints among them, had worshipped were now pronounced under the ban of the Church. This was the act that turned a dispute over rites into a schism: those who would not accept the reforms now stood, by the Church’s own pronouncement, outside it, and could be reconciled only by renouncing as accursed what they held to be holy. From this point the Old Believers (staroobriadtsy, starovery) existed as a separate body, holding to the old rite and rejecting the reformed Church as having fallen from the true faith — and the anathemas of 1666–67 would stand for three centuries, until the Church that pronounced them at last took them back.

The Old Believers and Their Grievance

The Old Believers’ grievance was not antiquarianism for its own sake but a conviction that the form of prayer was bound up with the faith, and that to curse the old forms was to curse the holy fathers and saints of Russia who had used them. Behind the particular disputes lay a whole vision of history: that Russia had been entrusted with the pure faith, and that the reforms — undertaken to match a Greek usage they distrusted — were not a return to antiquity but a falling-away from it, even, in the reading of their most apocalyptic teachers, a sign of the last times and the coming of Antichrist into the Russian Church. They endured severe persecution under the state — exile, imprisonment, and execution; the archpriest Avvakum, their great early leader, whose fierce and vivid autobiography became the classic testament of their cause, was burned in 1682 after long imprisonment — and in their most desperate communities they chose mass self-immolation, gathering in their wooden churches and chapels to die by fire rather than submit to a church they believed had abandoned Christ. They withdrew to the forests and the borderlands, beyond the reach of the state, the Bryn forests of Kaluga among them — the very communities Dimitri would address in his Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith (see The Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith). From their standpoint, recorded in their own historiography, it was the reformers who had broken with tradition, and the suffering they bore — the burnings, the exiles, the long centuries of disability under the law — was not the just penalty of schism but a witness, a martyrdom, to the old Orthodoxy they would not betray (the Old Believer reading is summarized at rpsc.ru; Old Believers, orthodoxwiki.org). Their position is presented here as their own — a confessional account, not a neutral verdict — but a serious and historically weighty one, and one that the later history of the Church would, in its own measured way, go far toward acknowledging.

The Schism in Dimitri’s Diocese

By the time Dimitri came to Rostov in 1702, the schism was four decades old and firmly rooted in parts of his diocese and the regions beyond it. It was no longer a fresh wound but a settled fact of Russian religious life — communities, lineages, and whole districts that had lived a generation and more apart from the established Church, with their own elders, their own clandestine clergy or none at all, their own jealously guarded books. He met it as a pastoral emergency — a body of his nominal flock cut off from the Church’s sacraments and, as he saw it, deceived in their faith and endangered in their souls — and he answered it with the means proper to a reforming bishop rather than to the state: preaching, instruction, the patient correction of error, and, in his last year, the great refutation of the Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith (see Pastor and Reformer and The Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith). His treatise belongs to the high tide of the official Church’s anti-schism literature under Peter the Great — the work of a man who saw the schism not as a political nuisance to be suppressed but as a multitude of souls to be won back, however harsh the language in which he pressed his case.

The Long Aftermath

The conflict did not end with Dimitri, and its later course casts his polemic in a particular light. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the official Church moved gradually from coercion toward accommodation, as the futility — and the cruelty — of trying to crush the schism by force became plain, and as the Old Believers persisted, generation upon generation, in numbers no persecution could extinguish. The Edinoverie (Единоверие, “same-faith”) arrangement, taking shape from the 1780s and formalized in 1800 by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) through his “Eleven Points,” permitted communities to keep the pre-Nikonian rites under the Moscow Patriarchate’s jurisdiction — a partial reconciliation that opened a real path back into communion for those who could accept it, yet one that nonetheless still treated the old rite as tolerated rather than equal, a concession granted to weakness rather than a recognition of the old usages as the new rite’s peer (Edinoverie, en.wikipedia.org). For many Old Believers that lingering inequality, and the unrenounced anathemas that still hung over their forebears, kept Edinoverie from being the true reconciliation it might have been. The decisive reversal came only in the twentieth century. The Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church of 1971, gathered at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and ratifying a 1929 Synodal decision that had never been put into wide effect, abolished the anathemas of the 1656 and 1667 councils, declared them “as though they had never been” (яко не бывшие), and recognized the old rites as “salvific and equal in honor” (спасительными … равночестными) to the new — at last placing the old rite on a footing of full equality with the reformed, and lifting from the Old Believers’ fathers the curse that had stood over them for three hundred years (resolutions summarized at rpsc.ru and ru.wikipedia.org). [Disputed: the seventeenth-century councils’ condemnation of the old rites, which Dimitri’s Inquiry defended, was formally annulled by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1971; the old rites are now recognized as salvific and equal in honor to the new. Old Believer sources read the 1971 act as vindicating their stand; the Moscow Patriarchate presents it as healing the schism rather than disavowing the reform itself.]

Reading Dimitri in This Light

Set in this long arc, Dimitri’s anti-schism polemic appears as a sincere and learned intervention in a conflict whose hardest edges the Church itself would later file away. His conviction was genuine, his pastoral concern real, and his canonization in 1757 was never put in question by the later softening of the verdict he had defended; the Church honors the saint while it has revised the judgment. And the Old Believers’ grievance was also real, sealed in centuries of suffering, and has since been substantially acknowledged by the very Church that once anathematized them. To hold both of these truths at once is the difficult thing the history demands. The honest account refuses to flatten the story into either a tale of heroic orthodoxy crushing error or a tale of innocent traditionalists persecuted by reformers; neither caricature does justice to a conflict in which sincere and pious Christians stood on both sides, each convinced they were defending the faith of the fathers. It was a tragedy of a divided Church, not a contest of the godly against the wicked — and the saint who wrote against the schism, and the schismatics he wrote against, are both part of the Russian Orthodox memory that the 1971 reconciliation sought, however belatedly, to heal.

References

Old Believers. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (Nikon’s reforms from 1652–53; the two-finger cross and other changes; the 1666–67 councils’ anathema on the dissenters and the old rites.)
Old Believers. Encyclopædia Britannica, britannica.com. (The character and course of the schism.)
Edinoverie. Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The same-faith arrangement formalized by Metropolitan Platon in 1800.)
Pomestnyi sobor Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi 1971 goda [Local Council of 1971]. ru.wikipedia.org; analysis at rpsc.ru. (Abolition of the 1656/1667 anathemas; “as though they had never been”; old rites “salvific and equal in honor”; ratification of the 1929 decision.)
Methodology: Citation Standard and Verification Protocol, METHODOLOGY.md, §4.