The ''Book of One Hundred Chapters'', also called ''Stoglav'' (''Стоглав'') in Russian ("Hundred chapters"), is a collection of decisions of the Russian church council of 1551 that regulated the canon law and ecclesiastical life in the Tsardom of Russia, especially the everyday life of the Russian clergy. The book is shaped in the form of answers to some 100 questions posed by Ivan IV of Russia. A constant theme running through the chapters is the Byzantine '' symphonia'' (harmony) between the ' priesthood' and the ' kingdom'. The ''Book of Hundred Chapters'' canonized the native Muscovite rituals and practices at the expense of those accepted in Greece and other Eastern Orthodox countries. As a result this church code was never accepted by the Russian monks residing on

Mount Athos Mount Athos (; el, Ἄθως, ) is a mountain in the distal part of the eponymous Athos peninsula and site of an important centre of Eastern Orthodox monasticism in northeastern Greece. The mountain along with the respective part of the penins ...

. In the mid-17th century, the

Old Believers Old Believers or Old Ritualists, ''starovery'' or ''staroobryadtsy'' are Eastern Orthodox Christians who maintain the liturgical and ritual practices of the Russian Orthodox Church as they were before the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow bet ...

championed the ''Stoglav'' in order to undermine Patriarch Nikon's authority and his ecclesiastical reforms. The Great Moscow Synod of 1667 condemned the ''Stoglav'' and its practices as heretical and banned the book from usage for 200 years. This contributed to a great

schism A schism ( , , or, less commonly, ) is a division between people, usually belonging to an organization, movement, or religious denomination. The word is most frequently applied to a split in what had previously been a single religious body, suc ...

of the Russian church known as the Raskol. There are at least 100 manuscripts of the ''Stoglav'', all of them produced by the Old Believers. The official church historians of the 18th and 19th centuries (such as Platon Levshin) discarded these texts as spurious. Their authenticity was reasserted by historian Ivan Belyayev in 1863.

References

{{Muscovite Constitution Russian Orthodox Church in Russia 1551 in Russia 1551 books Canon law of the Eastern Orthodox Church History of the Russian Orthodox Church it:Stoglav