Peasant-born Nikon remade Russian rites—and split the church
Nikita Minin (1605–1681), Patriarch Nikon of Moscow from 1652 to 1666, rose from a Mordvin farming village to dictate liturgical reform. Greek and Kievan scholars convinced him Muscovite service-books and icons had drifted from Constantinopolitan models. The bold corrections helped fracture Russian Orthodoxy into reformers and Old Believers.
Born Nikita on 7 May 1605 in Veldemanovo, about 96 km from Nizhny Novgorod, he lost his mother early and suffered under a stepmother. A parish priest taught him to read, and at twelve he fled to Makaryev Monastery, staying as a novice until 1624. Called home, he married and became a village priest, until Moscow merchants visiting the monastery's great fair admired his preaching and brought him to a large parish in the capital.
By 1635 all three of his children had died. Reading that as a sign, he persuaded his wife to become a nun and withdrew to a hermitage on Anzersky island in the White Sea, taking the name Nikon. After a quarrel in 1639 he fled by boat, a storm threw him onto Kiy Island, and by 1643 he was abbot of Kozheozersky. On a visit to Moscow in 1646 he so impressed young Tsar Alexei that he was made head of the Romanov-linked Novospassky monastery.
There he joined the Zealots of Piety around the tsar's confessor Stefan Vonifatiyev, a circle including Protopope Avvakum that blamed the Time of Troubles on divine anger at slack faith. As metropolitan of Novgorod from 1649 he was badly beaten by rioters yet calmed the city by leading a procession. Knowing the nobles disliked him, he refused the patriarchate several times after his election on 1 August 1652, yielding only when tsar and boyars knelt and swore to obey him on doctrine and ritual.
His liturgical reforms angered conservatives and opened the lasting schism called the Raskol. For years he rivalled or even eclipsed the tsar, but in December 1667 a church synod stripped him of all priestly office and left him a plain monk. He died in 1681.
Source: Patriarch Nikon of Moscow
