Kyiv and Formation (1651–1684)

The making of St. Dimitri of Rostov out of Daniel Savvich Tuptalo: born in December 1651 in the small town of Makarov near Kyiv, son of a Cossack officer; schooled at the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium under Ioannikii Galyatovsky in Greek, Latin, and the rhetorical learning of the age; tonsured a monk at the St. Cyril Monastery in 1668 at the age of seventeen, taking the name Dimitri; ordained and then, through the 1670s and early 1680s, a celebrated young preacher and abbot across the Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Hetmanate.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

Birth Near Kyiv (1651)

The future Metropolitan of Rostov was born in December 1651 — the Russian scholarly sources give the precise date as 11 December (21 December New Style) — in the small town of Makarov (Russian Makarov; Ukrainian Makariv), in the territory of the Kyiv regiment of the Cossack Hetmanate, west of Kyiv (Dimitrii Rostovskii, Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Tuptalo, Dymytrii, Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com). English-language lives often render the place and date more loosely, as born “in December 1651 in the locale of Makarovo, not far from Kiev” (St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org).

He was baptized Daniel — Daniil Savvich Tuptalo in the Russified form, Danylo in Ukrainian (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com). His father, Savva Grigoryevich Tuptalo (c. 1599–1703), was a Cossack officer — a sotnik (сотник, “centurion”) of the Kyiv regiment — a man of long life who reportedly reached past a hundred years and ended his days in monastic profession near Kyiv; the family was pious, and Daniel’s mother, Maria Mikhailovna, died in 1689 (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). OrthoChristian’s life likewise calls the father a “Cossack centurion” (Saint Dimitri of Rostov, orthochristian.com/163753.html). The sotnik was no minor figure: in the regimental order of the Cossack Hetmanate, a centurion commanded a sotnia — a company drawn from a town and its surrounding villages — and held both military and civil authority over his district, a man of standing within the self-governing Cossack society that had taken shape after the upheavals of the mid-century. That such a man should live near a hundred years and lay down his sword for the monastic habit at the end is itself a parable of the world Daniel was born into, where the soldier’s life and the life of prayer stood close together and a long earthly course could be crowned by withdrawal into the cloister.

The household belonged, that is, to the Orthodox Cossack society of the mid-seventeenth-century Ukrainian lands — a world under the political pressures of the Commonwealth, the Hetmanate, and Muscovy, but spiritually anchored in Kyiv and its great monastery, the Caves Lavra. Daniel’s birth in 1651 fell in the very thick of those pressures: it was the decade of the Khmelnytsky rising and the wars that followed, the years in which the Hetmanate was carved between Poland and Muscovy and the land west of the Dnieper, where Makarov lay, passed through repeated devastation. To be born into a pious Cossack family in that place and time was to inherit both an embattled Orthodoxy — pressed on one side by Catholic and Uniate Poland, drawn on the other toward Moscow — and the conviction that the faith was worth the defending. The piety of the Tuptalo household, and the long monastic crowning of the father’s life, suggest the soil from which the son’s vocation grew.

The Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium

When the family moved into Kyiv, the boy was given over to the city’s celebrated school — the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium (the Kyiv Brotherhood school, Kievo-Bratskaya kollegiya, the institution that would become the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy). He studied there in the early 1660s, roughly 1662–1665, mastering the curriculum of the Kyivan school: Church Slavonic, Latin, Greek, grammar, poetics, and rhetoric, under the rector Ioannikii Galyatovsky (Ioannikii Golyatovskii), himself a noted preacher and homiletician (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com; Saint Dimitri of Rostov, orthochristian.com/163753.html). His years there were brief — a handful, not the full course — for the disturbances of the time and his own early turn toward the monastic life cut short the schooling; yet they were enough to set the shape of his learning for the rest of his days. That his teacher was Galyatovsky is worth pausing over, for the rector was one of the most influential preachers of the Kyivan revival and the author of a homiletical manual, the Kliuch razumeniia (“Key of Understanding”), that taught a whole generation how to build a sermon. The young Daniel thus took his first lessons in the art of preaching from a master of it, and the gift that would later earn him the name of a second Chrysostom was nourished at its root by the Kyivan homiletical school (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru).

The character of that school matters for everything that followed. The Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium, reorganized by Metropolitan Peter Mohyla in the 1630s on the model of the Jesuit colleges of the Commonwealth, taught theology by the Latin-scholastic method and largely in Latin — a Western pedagogical form pressed into the service of Orthodox defense against Catholic and Uniate polemic. The paradox sat at the heart of the institution: the very weapons of the adversary — Latin tongue, scholastic logic, the disputatio and the rhetorical handbook of the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum — were taken up and turned to the defense of Orthodoxy, on the principle that one cannot answer an argument one cannot understand. A student passed upward through the classes of grammar, poetics, and rhetoric to philosophy and at last theology, drilled all the while in Latin composition and oratory, so that by the end he could dispute on either side of a question with equal facility. This is the formation that later critics, above all Georges Florovsky, would call a “Latinization” of Orthodox learning — a Western crust, in his reading, laid over the Eastern substance; the question is taken up directly in The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia, where Florovsky’s verdict and the modern counter-argument are set side by side. What belongs here is the simple fact: Dimitri’s mind was trained in a school that gave him fluent Greek and Latin and a thorough command of patristic and Western sources alike — the very equipment that would let him compile a Lives of the Saints from Greek, Latin, and Slavonic originals (see The Cheti-Minei). Whatever one makes of the Florovsky charge, the practical fruit is plain: without the Latin and Greek of the Mohyla school there could have been no Cheti-Minei of the kind Dimitri made, for the sources lay locked in those very tongues.

Tonsure at St. Cyril’s (1668)

On 9 July 1668, at the age of seventeen, Daniel was tonsured a monk at the St. Cyril Monastery (Kirillov monastery) in Kyiv, by the hegumen Meletii Dzik, and given the name Dimitri — in honor of the Great Martyr Demetrius of Thessalonica (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com; St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). [Disputed: the standard scholarly sources — the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, and the OCA life — place the tonsure at the St. Cyril (Kirillov) Monastery in Kyiv; some condensed summaries instead name the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, which appears to be an error, the Lavra being where he settled only in 1684.] In the monastic tradition the new name given at tonsure is a sign that the old life has been laid down and a new one taken up, and the choice of patron is rarely incidental. That the schoolboy Daniel rose from the rite as Dimitri, named for the soldier-martyr Demetrius of Thessalonica — one of the most venerated of the great-martyrs of the Eastern Church, a saint of warriors and of the defense of his city — joined the son of a Cossack centurion to a heavenly patron of the same cast, and gave him, by a quiet providence, the name under which he would himself be numbered among the saints. He was still a youth of seventeen, but the decision was not a child’s: it set the whole direction of a life, exchanging the career open to an educated son of the Cossack officer class for the narrow way of the cloister.

He advanced quickly through the orders of ordained ministry. He was ordained hierodeacon on 25 March 1669 by Metropolitan Iosif Nelyubovich-Tukalsky, and hieromonk in 1675 — the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya gives 23 May 1675 — by Archbishop Lazar Baranovich of Chernihiv, at the Gustyn (Hustynia) monastery (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com; St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). [Disputed: the priestly ordination is dated 23 May 1675 in the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya; some lives give only “1675” or “June 1675.”] The six years that separated the diaconate from the priesthood were the ordinary measure of a monk’s ripening, and they place the young hierodeacon within the orbit of two of the leading hierarchs of the Kyivan church — Iosif Nelyubovich-Tukalsky, who ordained him deacon, and Lazar Baranovich, the long-serving Archbishop of Chernihiv, who ordained him priest and would soon make him his preacher. To be ordained by Baranovich was to be brought under the patronage of one of the great churchmen and writers of the south-western Rus’ lands, a builder of presses and schools; the connection would open the next decade of Dimitri’s life.

The Young Preacher and Abbot

From his ordination as hieromonk, Dimitri’s gift for preaching made him known well beyond Kyiv. Lazar Baranovich appointed him preacher at Chernihiv (roughly 1675–1677), at the cathedral and the Trinity–St. Elijah monastery; from there he carried his preaching into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Belarusian lands of the Commonwealth, preaching at Vilnius and serving at the Transfiguration monastery in Slutsk around 1677–1679 (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com; Saint Dimitri of Rostov, orthochristian.com/163753.html). This was no small journey for a young hieromonk. To preach at Vilnius and Slutsk was to carry the word into lands that lay outside the Hetmanate altogether, deep in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where the Orthodox were a pressed minority living shoulder to shoulder with Roman Catholics, Uniates of the Union of Brest, and Protestants, and where the pulpit was a contested ground. The Orthodox of the western Russian and Lithuanian lands, living among Catholics, Uniates, and Protestants, prized a preacher who could hold his own in the rhetorical idiom of the age — who could meet a learned adversary on his own terms and yet feed the simple faithful — and Dimitri’s reputation as an orator, the seed of the later title “the Russian Chrysostom,” was made in these years (see The Sermons). The skills of source and argument honed in this borderland preaching were the same that he would later bring to the desk of the hagiographer.

Returning to the Hetmanate, he was given a succession of abbacies (the office of igumen, hegumen) over Ukrainian monasteries through the late 1670s and early 1680s — among them the Maksakiv monastery (1681) and the Krupytsky St. Nicholas Monastery at Baturyn (around 1682), with associations also recorded to the Hustynia Trinity, the Chernihiv houses, and others (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com). [Disputed: the exact dates and sequence of his early abbacies differ slightly among the sources — e.g. the Krupytsky abbacy is variously dated to 1679–1681 and to 1682 — reflecting the unsettled, mobile character of his service in these years.] An igumen was the spiritual father and administrator of his house, responsible at once for the souls of his brethren and for the lands, books, and revenues of the monastery; to hold such an office in his early thirties marks the regard in which Dimitri was already held. Baturyn, moreover, was the residence of the Hetman, so that the abbot of its Krupytsky monastery stood near the political center of the Hetmanate — a proximity to power that would recur in his later years. What this restless decade gave him, beyond standing, was a working knowledge of the Ukrainian monastic libraries — exactly the holdings of lives and chronicles that a future compiler of the Lives of the Saints would need to know — and a name throughout the Orthodox lands of the south-west. This was the standing that, in 1684, would bring him to the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra and the commission that defined his life (see The Call to the Great Work).

References

Dimitrii Rostovskii [Dimitri of Rostov]. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya [Orthodox Encyclopedia], pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (Birth 11 December 1651 in Makarov; father Savva Tuptalo, sotnik of the Kyiv regiment; education at the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium under Galyatovsky; tonsure 9 July 1668 at St. Cyril Monastery by Meletii Dzik; hierodeacon 1669; hieromonk 23 May 1675; early abbacies.)
Tuptalo, Dymytrii. Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine), encyclopediaofukraine.com. (Makarov birthplace; Kyiv Collegium; tonsure name Dimitri; preaching and abbacies in the Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian lands.)
St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, Lives of the Saints, October 28. (Birth “December 1651 … not far from Kiev”; tonsure; ordination 1675.)
Saint Dimitri of Rostov. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/163753.html). (Cossack-centurion father; the Kyiv school; the preaching reputation; “the Russian Chrysostom.”)