The Call to the Great Work (1684)

How the labor of St. Dimitri’s life began: his settling at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in the spring of 1684 at the invitation of Archimandrite Varlaam Yasinsky, and the commission — long in the planning at the Lavra and reaching back to St. Makary of Moscow’s sixteenth-century vision — to compile a complete Lives of the Saints for the whole liturgical year out of the Greek, Latin, and Slavonic sources the Lavra could gather.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

The Need the Lavra Felt

By the 1680s the Russian Church possessed no single, complete, readable set of saints’ lives covering the whole calendar. The reading of saints’ lives — the Cheti-Minei, the “reading menaion,” distinct from the liturgical menaion of services — was an old and beloved practice of Orthodox piety, reaching back through the Byzantine tradition of hagiography to the great tenth-century compilation of Symeon Metaphrastes, who had gathered and polished the lives of the Greek Church for reading on each saint’s day. The Eastern Church had always told its own story through its saints, and a household that read their lives through the year lived, in a sense, inside the calendar of heaven. But in the Russian lands the inheritance was scattered. The great sixteenth-century compilation of St. Makary, Metropolitan of Moscow — the Velikie Chetii-Minei (Великие Четии-Минеи, the “Great Reading Menaion”) — had gathered an enormous body of lives, but it was a vast archival assemblage, uneven, often in difficult or antique language, and never widely copied or printed (Saint Dimitri of Rostov, orthochristian.com/163753.html, noting that Makary “had long since begun the task of collecting the Lives … in his great volumes of the Menaion”). Makary’s twelve folio volumes, one for each month, were a monument of devotion and labor, but they were monastery and cathedral pieces, too few and too cumbersome ever to reach the ordinary believer; they preserved the lives rather than circulated them. What was wanted was something else — a Lives that an ordinary literate Orthodox household or parish could read through the year, in a tongue and a compass they could manage, the saints made companions of daily devotion rather than treasures locked in an archive. And the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, with its press and its library, was the natural place to make it: of all the houses of the Russian Church it possessed both the printing house to multiply such a work and the gathered learning to compile it.

Varlaam Yasinsky’s Invitation (1684)

The man who set the project in motion was Varlaam Yasinsky (Varlaam Iasinskii), Archimandrite of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra and later Metropolitan of Kyiv. Recognizing in Dimitri exactly the combination the task required — a monk of proven learning in Greek and Latin, a gifted writer, and a man already steeped in the monastic libraries of the south-west — he invited him to leave his abbacy and take up residence at the Lavra to undertake the Lives of the Saints (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). The choice was shrewd and, as the event proved, providential: the compilation of a complete Lives demanded gifts rarely found together — the patience of a scholar to collate manuscripts in three languages, the judgment of a critic to weigh conflicting accounts, and the pen of a writer who could render the result in prose that would hold a reader through the long year of the calendar. Dimitri’s decade of preaching and abbacy had displayed all three. The OCA life records that Varlaam “entrusted the hieromonk Demetrius with organizing the Menaion, the Lives of the Saints for the whole year,” and OrthoChristian dates the blessing precisely: “In 1684, he was blessed for this endeavor by Metropolitan Barlaam (Yasinsky) of Kiev” (St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org; Saint Dimitri of Rostov, orthochristian.com/163753.html). The word blessed is exact and not merely formal: in the monastic life a labor of this magnitude was undertaken not as a private project but under obedience and benediction, received from a superior as a charge laid upon the soul. Dimitri came to the Lives not as an author seeking a subject but as a monk given a task.

Dimitri settled at the Lavra in the spring of 1684 — the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, drawing on his own diary, gives 23 April (3 May) 1684 — and began the writing within weeks; the same source dates the actual commencement of the Book of the Lives of the Saints to May–June 1684 (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). That he kept a diary at all, and recorded in it the day of his settling and the day he set pen to the first life, tells something of the man: methodical, aware that he stood at the threshold of his life’s labor, conscious of the weight of the beginning. He was thirty-three years old — the age, the old writers liked to note, at which the Lord began his public ministry — and the task before him would occupy the better part of the next two decades, accompany him into the episcopate, and follow him to his grave, the final volumes completed only in the years before his death (see The Cheti-Minei).

The Charge and the Resources

The commission was not vague. Dimitri was instructed to gather as many manuscripts and books as could be found and to build from them a continuous Lives arranged by the church calendar (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). The Lavra opened to him its own holdings — its library, the Kievo-Pecherskii Paterik (the Caves Paterikon of local monastic saints), and above all its printing press, which would issue all four of the great volumes (see The Cheti-Minei). The press was the decisive asset, for it was the difference between a manuscript copied a few times and a printed book carried into homes across the Russian and Ukrainian lands; the Lavra’s printing house was among the most important in the Orthodox East, and to attach the Lives to it was to secure their future circulation from the start.

The sources Dimitri would draw upon spanned the whole Christian inheritance, East and West. Through the Kyivan and Polish-Lithuanian scholarly world he would reach the Western collections — the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum, the great critical labor of the Jesuit hagiographers of the Low Countries; the Annals of the cardinal-historian Caesar Baronius; and the Żywoty świętych (“Lives of the Saints”) of the Polish Jesuit Piotr Skarga, itself a popular vernacular collection that offered Dimitri something of a model. Through Greek channels he reached the lives of Symeon Metaphrastes, the classical Byzantine corpus; and through Slavonic channels, Makary’s Great Menaion and the older Russian lives (see Method and Source Criticism). The very range of this bibliography — Greek, Latin, Polish, and Slavonic, Orthodox and Catholic side by side — shows how the Latin learning of the Mohyla school became the instrument of the work: a compiler who could not read the Bollandists or Baronius would have been shut out of half his materials. It also shows where the difficulties would come, for drawing the lives of the Eastern saints partly through Western books meant carrying over, at times, Western turns of phrase and Western frames of thought.

There was also, the tradition records, a sense of vocation that exceeded the institutional commission. Dimitri came to the work as the calling for which his whole formation had prepared him, and he pursued it with a single-mindedness that did not relent even when the duties of an abbot, and later a metropolitan, pressed upon him; he carried the unfinished volumes from house to house and from the Lavra to Rostov, returning to the desk whenever the burdens of office allowed (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). One sees, in this image of a bishop bent over the lives of the saints in the hours stolen from administration, the inner unity of the man: the scholar and the pastor were not two persons but one, and the Lives were for him not an antiquarian exercise but an act of the cure of souls, the saints set before the faithful as patterns to be imitated and companions to be loved. It is this fusion — a Lavra project and a personal vocation, an institutional charge and a labor of love sustained over a lifetime — that gives the Cheti-Minei both its institutional authority and the unmistakable stamp of one mind. The collection has the coherence of a single sensibility precisely because, behind the great machinery of sources and presses, one man carried the whole of it in his heart for twenty years.

There is a fitness, too, in where the work began. The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, was the cradle of Russian monasticism and the resting place of its first ascetics, whose lives the Caves Paterikon preserved; to set down the lives of all the saints within the walls that already guarded the relics of the founders of Russian holiness was to root the new labor in the oldest soil of the tradition. Dimitri did not invent the veneration of the saints; he gathered and ordered an inheritance, and he gathered it in the very place where that inheritance had first taken Russian form.

A Work Begun Under Watchful Eyes

From the start the project carried a delicate edge. To compile a Lives of the Saints in the 1680s, drawing on Latin Catholic sources, was to invite the scrutiny of Moscow — and in fact Patriarch Joachim of Moscow would later examine the early volumes critically and require corrections, objecting to Western-leaning formulations: among them, language touching the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God in the Latin sense, and the calling of Western fathers such as Augustine and Jerome “saints” in terms that troubled Muscovite sensibility; certain printed leaves had to be replaced (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; see Method and Source Criticism and The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia). The episode was not a mere quarrel over words. It reveals the fault line running through the whole enterprise — the meeting of two Orthodox worlds, the Latin-schooled Kyiv of Mohyla and the older, more guarded piety of Moscow, each suspicious of what the other had absorbed or failed to absorb. The call to the great work was thus also a call into the very tension that would define Dimitri’s place in history: a Kyiv-trained scholar, fluent in the Western learning, laboring to serve and to be received by the Russian Church of Moscow, and obliged to prove that the fruits of his Latin learning could be made wholly Orthodox.

That he succeeded — that his Lives became the Russian Lives for two centuries, read in monastery and manor and peasant cottage alike, the book through which generations of believers came to know the saints — is the measure of what was begun at the Lavra in the spring of 1684 (see The Enduring Lives of the Saints). What looked, at its commencement, like the entrusting of a difficult scholarly commission to a promising hieromonk proved to be the planting of one of the most enduring works of Russian religious literature, and the beginning of the labor by which a Cossack centurion’s son from a small town near Kyiv would be remembered through the whole Orthodox world.

References

Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (Settled at the Lavra 23 April 1684; began the Book of the Lives of the Saints May–June 1684; the charge to gather manuscripts; Varlaam Yasinsky’s role; the later scrutiny by Patriarch Joachim of Moscow and the corrections required, including the objected formulations and replaced leaves.)
St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, October 28. (Varlaam “entrusted … the Menaion, the Lives of the Saints for the whole year.”)
Saint Dimitri of Rostov. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/163753.html). (“In 1684, he was blessed for this endeavor by Metropolitan Barlaam (Yasinsky) of Kiev”; Makary’s earlier collecting.)