Old-Believer Martyrs and Religious Discipline at the Turn of the 17th–18th Centuries

Abstract

The study is devoted to strategies for polemics with the martyr discourse constructed by the Old Believers in relation to themselves and their own saints in the late 17th — early 18th centuries. Anti-Old Believer literature denounced the glorification of martyrs who suffered because of persecution or self-immolation as superstitions. It was part of the religious discipline. The article demonstrates that the veneration of “false” martyrs was characterized as hypocrisy long before the spiritual reform of Peter I. Opponents of the schism at the beginning of the 18th century (Feofan Prokopovich, Feofilakt Lopatinsky, Dimitry Rostovsky, I. T. Pososhkov) used the same ideas and techniques as the writers of the patriarchal circle (Afanasy Kholmogorsky, Ignaty Rimsky-Korsakov, etc.) and other authors of the 17th century (Simeon Polotsky, the creators of the Acts of the Moscow Councils, Juraj Križanić and the author of “Brozda Dukhovnaya”). They were all united in their opposition to the Old Believer ideas about holiness and soteriology. The disengagement of official polemicists became apparent in the Petrine era, when the ideas of rationalizing Christian piety and the monopoly of state power on martyrs became widespread, while other points of view on the path to the salvation of the soul were on the periphery.