Byzantium and Orthodoxy: Icons, Athos and the Old Believers

The church that the Latin West called “Greek”, and that called itself Orthodox, was for a thousand years the church of the Roman Empire in the East, ruled from Constantinople. It shared the creeds and the councils of §6 with the West, but it developed its own shape: a liturgy at the centre of religious life, icons as a way of seeing the holy, monks as its spiritual authorities, and an emperor whose role in the church was never fully defined. From the ninth century it spread north among the Slavs, who received the faith in their own language. After Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453 the patriarch served under a Muslim sultan, and the largest Orthodox church became that of Muscovy, which had its own patriarch from 1589. In the 1650s an attempt to bring the Russian rite into line with Greek practice split the Russian church, and the dissenters, the Old Believers, kept the old ways through two centuries of persecution.^[1]​^[2]​^[3] Consensus

This chapter follows that tradition on its own terms, from Justinian to Peter the Great. The quarrels with the West that end in the excommunications of 1054 and the sack of 1204 are told in §8; the churches beyond the empire, the Oriental Orthodox and the Church of the East, in §6 and §7; and the Orthodox churches under Soviet rule in §13.

Timeline

Where: from Constantinople to Moscow

For its first half-millennium the Orthodox world was the Byzantine Empire itself: Constantinople, Asia Minor, Greece, the islands and, until the Arab conquests of the seventh century, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Its spiritual centres were the patriarchate in Constantinople and, from the tenth century, the monasteries of Mount Athos in northern Greece. From the ninth century the faith spread north into Bulgaria, Serbia and the lands of the Rus’ around Kiev, a world Dimitri Obolensky called the “Byzantine Commonwealth”: peoples outside the empire who took its religion, law and art.^[8] Consensus on the spread; Majority on the term.

The centre moved twice more. After 1453 the patriarch lived under Ottoman rule, and the Orthodox of the Balkans and the Middle East with him. Meanwhile Muscovy, which had thrown off Mongol overlordship, became the one large independent Orthodox state, and its church the largest in the Orthodox world. Smaller Orthodox principalities survived as Ottoman vassals, above all Moldavia and Wallachia, whose princes became the chief patrons of Athos and of the patriarchate after 1453.^[1]​^[17] Consensus

The church of the empire

Justinian and Hagia Sophia

Justinian (527–565) rebuilt the great church of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, “Holy Wisdom”, after riots destroyed its predecessor in 532. It was dedicated on 27 December 537. His historian Procopius wrote that the dome seemed not to rest on masonry at all but to hang from heaven (see Primary sources). The first dome collapsed in 558 and was rebuilt higher.^[4]​^[2] Consensus

The building fixed an idea of worship. In Orthodox Christianity the liturgy, above all the Eucharist celebrated in the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, is the centre of religious life, and the church building is meant to be heaven on earth. Teaching, preaching and doctrine matter, but the tradition has always presented itself first as a way of worshipping.^[1]​^[3] Majority

Emperor and patriarch

Byzantine law spoke of a harmony, symphonia, between the emperor, who governed human affairs, and the priesthood, which served divine ones. In practice emperors called councils, appointed and removed patriarchs, and legislated on church matters; patriarchs and monks sometimes defied them, and some emperors who imposed doctrine, such as the iconoclast emperors, were later condemned. Western writers called this “caesaropapism”, the emperor as pope. Gilbert Dagron’s study argues that the label is a Western polemic: the emperor’s claims to a quasi-priestly role were real but always contested, an unresolved tension rather than a system.^[28] Majority

Icons after iconoclasm

The quarrel over images, from the 720s or 730s to 843, is told in §8. It ended when the regent Theodora, governing for her son Michael III, and the patriarch Methodios restored the veneration of icons in March 843. The restoration is still celebrated each year on the first Sunday of Lent, the Sunday of Orthodoxy, when the Synodikon is read: a list of acclamations for those who defended images and anathemas for those who attacked them.^[5]​^[6] Consensus on the event; Majority on the exact date of 11 March, which rests on the liturgical tradition.

The theology behind it had been set out by John of Damascus and the Second Council of Nicaea (787): an icon is venerated, not worshipped, and “the honour passes to the prototype”, to the person shown. Because God became visible in Christ, he could be depicted. From then on icons were not decoration in Orthodox churches but part of worship, arranged by the later Middle Ages into a screen, the iconostasis, between the nave and the altar.^[1]​^[6] Consensus Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon argue that much of the traditional story of iconoclasm was written afterwards by the victors, so the scale of the destruction is uncertain. Majority

Monks and the holy mountain

Athos

Monasticism began in Egypt and Syria (§6), and in the Byzantine world monks were the people believers most trusted. The peninsula of Mount Athos in northern Greece had hermits by the ninth century. In 961–963 Athanasios the Athonite, with the backing of the emperor Nikephoros Phokas, built the first great monastery there, the Great Lavra, and around 971–972 the emperor John Tzimiskes issued a rule for the whole mountain, known as the Tragos (“goat”) because it was written on goatskin.^[10]​^[9] Majority on the date of the typikon. Athos became, and remains, a self-governing monastic republic with twenty ruling monasteries, seventeen Greek and one each Russian, Serbian and Bulgarian (Iviron was founded by Georgians), from which women have been excluded since the Middle Ages.^[9] Consensus

Hesychasm and Gregory Palamas

The monks of Athos practised hesychia, “stillness”: silent, inward prayer built around the repeated Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”), sometimes with controlled breathing and posture. Some reported seeing a divine light, which they identified with the light that shone from Christ at his Transfiguration. In the 1330s the Calabrian-born monk Barlaam attacked them: no one could see God, and the monks’ methods were superstition. Gregory Palamas, an Athonite monk and later archbishop of Thessalonica, answered him in the Triads (1338–41).^[13]​^[14] Consensus

Palamas distinguished God’s essence, which no creature can know, from his energies, his activity in the world, which are uncreated and are God himself, and in which human beings can truly share. The light the monks saw was one of these energies. Councils in Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 upheld him, after a period of civil war in which his opponents briefly condemned him (1344); he died in 1359 (some date it 1357) and was proclaimed a saint in 1368.^[14]​^[1] Consensus The distinction between essence and energies, and the goal of theosis, becoming divine by grace, remain characteristic of Orthodox theology, and one of the points on which it differs most from Western, scholastic theology.^[1]​^[3] Majority

The Slavic commonwealth

Cyril and Methodius

In 862 Rastislav, ruler of Great Moravia (in today’s Czech Republic and Slovakia), asked Constantinople for a teacher who could explain the faith to his people in their own language, partly to be less dependent on Frankish missionaries. The emperor sent two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine (who took the name Cyril as a monk shortly before his death) and Methodius, who knew the Slavonic of the Thessalonica region. Constantine created an alphabet for it, now called Glagolitic, and the brothers translated the liturgy and the Gospels.^[7]​^[8] Consensus

The mission ran into the Frankish bishops, who held that the liturgy could be said only in Hebrew, Greek or Latin. The brothers went to Rome, and in 868 Pope Hadrian II approved the Slavonic liturgy. Cyril died in Rome in 869; Methodius, made an archbishop, died in 885, and soon afterwards his disciples were expelled from Moravia, which turned to the Latin rite.^[8]​^[29] Consensus

Bulgaria and the Rus’

The expelled disciples found a welcome in Bulgaria, whose ruler Boris I had been baptised in 864 or 865 and had weighed Rome against Constantinople before choosing the Greek church. Clement and Naum arrived in 886; Clement taught in the region of Ohrid and Naum at the royal centres of Pliska and later Preslav. In this Bulgarian circle, probably at Preslav under Tsar Simeon (893–927), a new alphabet based on Greek letters was developed. It was named Cyrillic in Cyril’s honour, though he did not create it, and it became the script of the Orthodox Slavs.^[8] Majority

The Rus’ of Kiev took the same faith a century later. The Primary Chronicle, compiled around 1113, tells how Vladimir, about 986–987, sent envoys to examine the religions of his neighbours, and how they chose the Greek one because in Hagia Sophia “we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth” (see Primary sources). Vladimir was baptised, probably in 988, and married the emperor’s sister Anna.^[11]​^[12] Consensus on the baptism; Majority on the year. Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard read the “testing of the faiths” as a literary set piece written long after the event; the alliance with Byzantium, and the marriage, explain the choice better than the envoys do.^[12] Majority The Slavs received the liturgy and the Scriptures in Church Slavonic, a language close to their own speech, unlike the Latin of the West; it later became a learned language in its turn, and some historians argue that it cut the Slavs off from Greek learning.^[8]​^[1] Majority

The churches founded this way became national churches with heads of their own. Bulgaria had a patriarch from 927, and again from 1235; Sava, son of the Serbian ruler, obtained an independent archbishopric for Serbia in 1219, raised to a patriarchate at Peć in 1346.^[8] Consensus The “commonwealth” was a family of churches, not a single one run from Constantinople.

Under the Ottomans

1453 and the patriarch

The union with Rome agreed at the Council of Florence in 1439, in the hope of Western help against the Turks, was rejected by most of the Greek clergy and people (§8). The help that came was too little. On 29 May 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque.^[17]​^[15] Consensus

Mehmed needed the Orthodox to be governed, and in January 1454, on the traditional date of 6 January, he invested the monk Gennadios Scholarios as patriarch. Gennadios had supported the union at Florence before becoming the leader of its opponents. The Greek historian Kritovoulos is the only contemporary account of the appointment; the date and the ceremony, modelled on the one an emperor had once performed, come from later sources.^[18]​^[17] Majority Over the following centuries the patriarch became responsible to the sultan for the Orthodox under Ottoman rule: for their church courts in matters of family and inheritance, and for the taxes and loyalty of the community.^[17]​^[30] Majority Christians were tolerated as protected subjects, paid higher taxes and faced restrictions, including, from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth, the devşirme, the levy of Christian boys who were converted to Islam and trained for the sultan’s service. Most Orthodox did not convert, and those executed for returning to Christianity after conversion were venerated as new martyrs.^[17] Consensus

Was there a millet system?

Older histories said that Mehmed founded a “millet system”, a formal arrangement dividing the empire’s subjects into self-governing religious nations, the Orthodox millet under the patriarch. Benjamin Braude argued in 1982 that no such system existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the word millet meant something else then, arrangements varied from place to place and were negotiated case by case, and the formal system was largely an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century development, projected back onto the conquest, including the story of a charter given to Gennadios.^[30] Majority

Under the Ottomans the patriarchate grew more powerful within the church even as it grew weaker outside it. From the seventeenth century it was dominated by wealthy Greek families of the Phanar district of Istanbul, and patriarchs were frequently deposed and reinstated as factions paid for office. In 1766 and 1767 Constantinople abolished the autonomous patriarchate of Peć and the archbishopric of Ohrid and absorbed their dioceses, a centralisation that Serbian and Bulgarian historians have long criticised as Hellenisation.^[17] Consensus on the events; Political on how to judge them.

Moscow, the Third Rome

A church on its own

Moscow’s church, under a metropolitan of “Kiev and all Rus’”, had been appointed from Constantinople. Its metropolitan Isidore signed the Union of Florence; when he returned to Moscow in 1441 and proclaimed it, Grand Prince Vasily II had him arrested. In 1448 the Russian bishops consecrated their own metropolitan, Jonah, without Constantinople’s consent. From then on the Russian church was in practice independent, and after 1453 Muscovy was the one great independent Orthodox state.^[16]​^[1] Consensus

Filofei’s letter

Around 1523–24 Filofei, a monk of the Eleazar monastery near Pskov, wrote to a Muscovite official, Mikhail Misiur-Munekhin, that the first Rome had fallen into heresy, the second, Constantinople, had fallen to the Turks, and that Moscow was the third, “and a fourth there shall not be” (see Primary sources).^[19] Majority on the date. The phrase became one of the most quoted in Russian history, read as the creed of Russian imperial and messianic ambition. Marshall Poe has argued that it was nothing of the kind in Muscovy. The formula did enter one official text, the 1589 charter founding the Moscow patriarchate, and was printed again in a church book of 1648 that the Old Believers later prized; but otherwise it was rare, a churchmen’s idea rather than a state ideology, until nineteenth-century writers made it famous after the letters were published.^[20]​^[21] Majority among historians; the older reading survives in popular accounts.

The patriarchate, 1589

In 1589 the patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremias II, visiting Moscow to raise funds, was persuaded, under considerable pressure, to consecrate the metropolitan Job as patriarch of Moscow, on 26 January 1589. Synods of the eastern patriarchs confirmed the new patriarchate in 1590 and 1593, ranking it fifth after Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.^[21]​^[1] Consensus

The Union of Brest

The Orthodox of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in today’s Ukraine and Belarus, lived under a Catholic king. In 1595 most of their bishops agreed to enter communion with Rome while keeping the Byzantine liturgy, Church Slavonic and married priests, and the union was proclaimed at Brest in October 1596. A rival synod at Brest rejected it, and the Orthodox and the new united church, called “Uniate” by its opponents (a name its members find pejorative), competed for the same people for centuries; today’s Ukrainian and Belarusian Greek Catholic Churches descend from it.^[22]​^[1] Consensus Its Catholic defenders long presented it as a model for reunion; many Orthodox see it as a defection achieved under pressure. In the Balamand statement of 1993 the official Catholic–Orthodox commission rejected such unions as a method for the future while accepting that the Eastern Catholic churches have the right to exist, and Brest remains a sore point between the churches. Political

In 1686 the patriarch of Constantinople allowed the patriarch of Moscow to consecrate the metropolitan of Kiev, and from then on the metropolis was in practice governed from Moscow.^[31] Consensus What the documents of 1686 granted became, three centuries later, the centre of the dispute over the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (§14): Moscow reads them as a permanent transfer of jurisdiction, while Constantinople holds that they gave only a conditional permission to ordain, which it revoked in 2018.^[32] Political

Nikon and the Old Believers

The reforms

By the seventeenth century Russian and Greek practice had diverged: Russians made the sign of the cross with two fingers, sang “alleluia” twice rather than three times, spelled the name of Jesus Isus rather than Iisus, and walked processions clockwise.^[23]​^[16] Consensus Since the work of the Russian church historians Golubinsky and Kapterev in the nineteenth century, scholars have accepted that much of this was older Byzantine usage that Russia had kept and the Greeks had since changed; the two-fingered sign, for one, had once been Greek practice too. Many Russians believed that their own rite was the pure one and that the Greeks, who had accepted Florence and fallen to the Turks, had lost theirs, and on the history they were partly right.^[23]​^[1] Majority

Nikon, patriarch from 1652, set out to bring the Russian rite into line with current Greek practice, with the backing of Tsar Alexei. Before Lent in 1653 he ordered that the sign of the cross be made with three fingers and that full prostrations in the Lenten prayer of St Ephrem be replaced by bows. New service books were issued, corrected from Greek and Ukrainian printed editions rather than from the ancient manuscripts the dissenters later appealed to.^[23]​^[16] Consensus Nikon also claimed for the patriarch a dignity close to the tsar’s; he quarrelled with Alexei, left his post in 1658, and was deposed in 1666.^[16] Consensus

The council of 1666–67

The tsar kept the reforms while dropping the reformer. The Great Moscow Council of 1666–67, attended by Patriarch Paisios of Alexandria and Patriarch Makarios of Antioch, deposed Nikon and, on 13 May 1667, anathematised everyone who kept the old rites. The dissent became a schism, the raskol, and its adherents were called raskolniki, schismatics; they called themselves the Old Believers, or Old Ritualists.^[24]​^[23] Consensus

Persecution

The state treated refusal as rebellion. The Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea held out against the new books from 1668 until it was betrayed and stormed in January 1676. The archpriest Avvakum, the movement’s most famous voice, spent years in Siberian exile and an earthen pit at Pustozersk, where he wrote his Life, often called the first Russian autobiography, before he was burned at the stake with three companions on 14 April 1682 (see Primary sources). The noblewoman Feodosia Morozova died of starvation in prison in 1675. In the 1670s and 1680s thousands of Old Believers, expecting the end of the world, burned themselves to death in their wooden churches rather than submit.^[26]​^[25]​^[23] Consensus on the events; Majority on the scale of the self-immolations.

Ritual, or something more?

Why would anyone die for two fingers rather than three? For the Old Believers the rite was the faith: a church that changed the sign of the cross had changed what it confessed, and a tsar who enforced it might be the Antichrist. Older histories therefore treated the schism as a single religious movement of conservatives against reform. Georg Michels has argued that in the seventeenth century there was no united Old Belief: resistance was scattered and local, led by monks, hermits and unemployed priests, and often a refusal of the church’s and the state’s authority rather than of the new books as such; the unified movement took shape later.^[23] Contested Robert Crummey’s study of the priestless community on the Vyg River in the far north shows how one such community built an organised life, and a working relationship with the state, over the eighteenth century.^[33] Consensus

Priests, the priestless and toleration

Without bishops, the Old Believers could not ordain priests. The popovtsy (“priestly”) accepted priests who came over from the official church, and from 1846 had their own bishops through the Belokrinitsa hierarchy, founded in Habsburg Bukovina when a deposed Orthodox metropolitan joined them. The bezpopovtsy (“priestless”) concluded that the true priesthood had ended and lived without priests or most sacraments, divided into several groups.^[25]​^[33] Consensus Persecution eased under Peter III and Catherine II from 1762, returned under Nicholas I, and ended with Nicholas II’s edict of toleration of 17 April 1905.^[25] Consensus

How many Old Believers there were is uncertain, because people under persecution do not answer census-takers honestly. Official counts around 1900 were about two million, and historians generally regard them as far too low.^[25] Majority

Peter the Great and the synodal church

When Patriarch Adrian died in 1700, Peter the Great allowed no successor to be elected. In 1721 his Spiritual Regulation, drafted by Bishop Feofan Prokopovich, replaced the patriarch with a “Spiritual College”, soon renamed the Most Holy Governing Synod, a committee of bishops supervised from 1722 by a lay official, the chief procurator. The Regulation argued that a council was less likely to err than one man and could not become a rival to the sovereign (see Primary sources).^[27]​^[1] Consensus The Russian church was governed this way, as something close to a department of state, until 1917, when a church council restored the patriarchate and elected Tikhon, weeks after the Bolsheviks took power (§13).^[1]​^[31] Consensus

The evidence

Primary sources

What is absent

• Ordinary believers before the modern period. Almost everything we know of Byzantine and Muscovite religion comes from churchmen, monks and rulers. How peasants in Thrace or Novgorod understood icons, fasts or the liturgy has to be inferred.
• The early Old Believers’ own writings. Many were destroyed, confiscated or kept hidden; the movement’s early history is known disproportionately from its persecutors and from a few famous authors such as Avvakum.
• Numbers. There are no reliable figures for Orthodox populations under the Ottomans, or for Old Believers at any point before the twentieth century.
• Women’s religious lives, beyond a few exceptional figures such as Theodora, the regent who restored the icons in 843, or Feodosia Morozova, and the convents whose records rarely survive.

Debates

Was Byzantium “caesaropapist”?

Western historians long described the Byzantine church as subordinate to the emperor, a “caesaropapism” contrasted with the papacy’s independence. Dagron argues that the emperor’s religious role was real but never settled, contested by patriarchs and monks and denied by the councils that condemned iconoclast emperors; the label says more about Western polemic than about Byzantium.^[28] Majority

Was Moscow really “the Third Rome”?

For a century and a half historians read Filofei’s formula as the key to Russian political ideology. Poe’s reading, that apart from the 1589 charter it was marginal until the nineteenth century, is now widely accepted, though some historians still find echoes of it in sixteenth-century court culture.^[20] Majority

Was there a millet system?

Braude’s argument that the classic millet system was a later construction is the current majority view; historians still debate how much autonomy the Orthodox community actually had in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and how far it depended on place and period.^[30]​^[17] Majority

Were the Old Believers about ritual or about the state?

The older view saw a religious movement defending the true rite; Michels sees diverse, local protest against church and state authority, only later unified as Old Belief. The two are not exclusive: for the dissenters, a state that imposed a new rite was itself a religious problem.^[23]​^[33] Contested

Further reading