Becoming a Schismatic: The Concepts of the “Schism” and “Schismatic” in the Church and State Discourses of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century Russia

Abstract

This dissertation explores the role of language in the identification and consequent persecution of Russian religious dissent, known as the “Schism” (Raskol), or the Old Belief (staroverie). In the mid-seventeenth century, the Russian patriarch Nikon (1652-1666) imposed changes in the liturgical books, spurring opposition from some clerics and lay people. The church hierarchy condemned this “mutiny” in words and strove to suppress it through the vehicle of state power. Nonetheless, in the next century and a half the “Schism” spread dramatically throughout the Russian empire, eliciting considerable debate. Church and state authorities produced numerous polemical as well as regulatory documents as officials struggled to figure out how to identify dissenters, and how to categorize them within the intensely bureaucratic structures of the modernizing Russian state. This study investigates the rhetoric of these debates in order to draw a comprehensive picture of the changes in the official discourse of the “Schism” throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The dissertation challenges the validity of the concept of the “Schism” itself. First and foremost, since its inception it was a polemical and pejorative construct rather than an analytical category. More significantly, this concept’s meaning changed dramatically over the decades and centuries following its inception. What started in the seventeenth century as the language of ecclesiastical ostracism and stigmatization by the beginning of the eighteenth century had transformed into the language of social order and discipline. From the mid-eighteenth century the concept of “Schism” was linked directly to the doctrine of religious toleration, which the Russian elite adopted from the French Enlightenment. The history of the concept of “Schism” is not just a story of a stereotypically Russian exercise in subjugation. On the contrary, the people, whom the state and the church tried to squeeze into the category of “schismatics,” actively appropriated the discourse of the “Schism” themselves. They turned the language of exclusion and persecution into a vehicle to manifest their social rights and religious liberties.