From Persecuted Minority to Confessional Church

The essay argues that Old Belief did not emerge as a popular movement giving voice to the aspirations of ordinary Muscovites but rather as an elite culture that drew its inspiration from erudite churchmen closely affiliated with the Kremlin. The popularization of Old Belief occurred only during the last two decades of the seventeenth century, and was not completed even until the third decade of the eighteenth century. Most important in this process – which one might call the confessionalization of Old Belief – were the systematic dissemination of manuscripts, the canonization of Old Believer saints (such as the martyred Avvakum), and the development of an efficient school system. The author draws attention to the little-studied fact that Old Believers – both the founding fathers of the 1650s and eighteenth-century community leaders such as Andrei Denisov – drew inspiration from Ukrainian Orthodox models: they assimilated ideas from polemical texts against the Union of Brest (such as the idea of the Antichrist) and adopted the teaching methods of the Ukrainian seminary school which Denisov and other Old Believer intellectuals observed while studying at the Kievan Theological Academy

Art · Confessional · Elite · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Ukrainian · Central European and Russian historical studies · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity