Description

In seventeenth-century Russia, Patriarch Nikon introduced sweeping liturgical reforms—including changing the sign of the cross from two fingers to three—sparking a bitter schism unlike any seen in the West. Rather than grassroots believers challenging church authority, it was the established hierarchy that imposed the changes, and the common people who resisted. These dissenters, known as Old Believers, faced imprisonment and martyrdom for their refusal, as immortalized in Vasily Surikov's monumental painting Boyarina Morozova. For centuries this "inverted reformation" remained a hotly contested wound in the Russian Church, with many Old Believers declaring the Patriarch a heretic and forming their own para-church communities to preserve what they saw as the traditional way. It was the tireless work of Archimandrite John Malinovsky—a former Old Believer monastic of over thirty years—that provided the rhetorical force to heal it. His polemical writings, directed at Old Believing military communities across the Russian Empire, significantly mended the schism and led many back into the Russian Orthodox Church. This volume presents his complete known works in English for the first time, including Evidence of the Antiquity of the Three-Fingered Sign of the Cross and The Name-Bearing Arrangement of the Fingers for Blessing—personal letters originally written in Church Slavonic, translated here with full fidelity to the original texts and all footnote citations preserved.