Pastor and Reformer

St. Dimitri at work in his diocese: the grammar school he founded at Rostov in 1702 for the sons of his clergy, teaching Slavonic, Greek, and Latin; his unceasing visitation and preaching across the diocese; and his campaign against the ignorance, moral negligence, and superstition he found among priests and people — the reform of an under-formed clergy by a Kyiv-trained scholar-bishop.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

A School for the Sons of the Clergy

Dimitri’s first and most characteristic reform was educational. Convinced that the root of the diocese’s troubles was an unlettered clergy, he opened, on 1 September 1702 — within months of his arrival — a grammar school at Rostov for the sons of clergy and others, teaching Church Slavonic, Greek, and Latin in the manner of the Kyivan and Slavic-Greek-Latin schools he had known (Dimitrii Rostovskii, Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). That he set this in motion so soon — the school open by the first autumn of his episcopate — measures how clearly he had diagnosed the diocese’s central want, and how he proposed to meet it not by exhortation alone but by building the institution that could form a different kind of clergy.

The school was a deliberate transplant of the Kyiv-Mohyla model into the old Russian heartland: a place to form a literate, catechized future clergy where none had existed. The model itself is worth describing, for it was the great educational innovation of the seventeenth-century Kyivan church and the formation Dimitri had himself received. The Slavic-Greek-Latin school took the structure of the Western grammar school — a graded course rising through the languages and the liberal arts — and turned it to the service of the Orthodox Church: Church Slavonic for the offices and the Scriptures of the Russian rite, Greek for the patristic and liturgical inheritance of the East, and Latin as the common scholarly tongue of Europe and the language in which theology and rhetoric were then taught. A clergy so formed would be able not merely to chant the services but to read, to understand, to preach, and to answer the arguments of the schismatics. By planting such a school at Rostov, Dimitri sought to give the northern Church the instrument that had transformed the southern one, and to break the cycle by which an unlettered priesthood reproduced its own ignorance from father to son.

Dimitri gave the school close personal attention. He examined the pupils, supplemented their lessons with his own teaching, and provided for poor students out of his own slender means — a care of which the sources make much, and which is of a piece with the poverty in which he died (see Repose 1709). This was not the distant patronage of a bishop who founds an institution and then leaves it to others; it was the personal labour of a scholar-teacher who came down to the schoolroom himself, heard the boys recite, and carried in his own purse the cost of those too poor to pay. The detail is characteristic of the man and of his understanding of the office: the formation of the clergy was not a matter of administration to be delegated but a pastoral work the bishop owed in person to his diocese.

The school operated for about three years; it was closed in 1705, the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya records, for lack of funds — the chronic problem of a poor see and a reforming bishop without resources to match his vision (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). Here the limits of his situation showed plainly. Rostov was an ancient and honoured see but not a rich one, and the income that might have sustained a school year by year was the same income Dimitri was spending on the students themselves and would leave so depleted at his death. A reform of this kind required endowment, a settled source of funds, the backing of state or hierarchy — and these the moment did not supply. Its brief life did not diminish its significance as a token of his whole program: the answer to ignorance is instruction. What the three years at Rostov could not do for the diocese, the principle they embodied would do, slowly, for the wider Russian Church, as the schooling of the clergy became, over the Synodal century, the settled policy that Dimitri had anticipated.

Visitation and Preaching

Beyond the school, Dimitri governed his diocese by going through it. The lives record a bishop who travelled the territory teaching and preaching in person, unwilling to leave the instruction of the people to a clergy he knew to be unequal to it (St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org; Saint Dimitri of Rostov, orthochristian.com/163753.html). The choice was deliberate and costly. A bishop of failing health might easily have governed from his residence, content to issue decrees and receive reports; Dimitri instead took the road, carrying the teaching office to the parishes themselves, because he judged that a people whose priests could not instruct them must be reached by the bishop directly or not at all. His preaching — for which he was called “the Russian Chrysostom” — was the principal instrument of his reform, and it is treated in its own place (see The Sermons and The Pastoral Program).

He also issued written instructions to his priests on the proper celebration of the services and the care of the Holy Mysteries, addressing the practical disorders of an untrained clergy. This was the necessary complement to his preaching: where the sermons reached the people, the written instructions reached the clergy, and they descended to the concrete matters in which an unformed priest was most likely to err — the right ordering of the offices, the reverent handling of the consecrated Gifts, the discipline of confession and communion, the care of the sick and dying. Such directives were, in effect, the bishop teaching his priests how to be priests, supplying in writing the formation the diocese had never given them in the schoolroom. Together the visitation, the preaching, and the written instructions made a single pastoral effort to raise both clergy and people from the ignorance in which he had found them.

Against Ignorance and Superstition

The target of Dimitri’s reform was, in a word, ignorance — the under-catechized state of both clergy and laity, and the superstition and moral negligence that grew in its soil. The OCA life sums up his concern as the “ignorance of both his parishioners and priests,” and OrthoChristian frames his whole episcopate as a war on that ignorance, waged by education, preaching, and example (St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org; Saint Dimitri of Rostov, orthochristian.com/163753.html). It is worth being precise about how he understood the disorders he confronted. In Dimitri’s diagnosis ignorance was the root, and the moral and devotional failings of his flock were its branches: a people who did not know the faith would inevitably fall into superstition, mistaking the half-pagan customs of the countryside for piety, and into a negligence of the moral demands of the Gospel that they had never been taught to recognize. The remedy therefore had to strike at the root. To preach, to catechize, to school the clergy was not merely to add knowledge but to drain the soil in which superstition and vice grew. This is why the sources, careful in their language, name ignorance rather than any single vice as the great object of his struggle.

[Disputed: popular accounts often add that he campaigned specifically “against drunkenness”; the major scholarly and hagiographic sources emphasize his struggle against ignorance, superstition, moral negligence, and the Old Believer schism, and do not foreground drunkenness as a distinct theme — so the safest statement is that he attacked the ignorance and disorder of which such vices were, in his view, the fruit.]

Bound up with this was his confrontation with the Old Believer schism (the Raskol), strong in parts of his diocese and in the Bryn forests to the south. The schism had grown from the liturgical reforms of the mid-seventeenth century, when a part of the Russian faithful, refusing the corrections of the service-books and rites, broke from the established Church and clung to the older usages; in the decades since, persecution had driven many of them into the forests and remote settlements, where they formed communities outside the bishops’ reach. For a reforming hierarch the Raskol was the gravest of the disorders he faced, because it was not mere ignorance but ignorance hardened into a rival allegiance, and because it fed precisely on the under-instruction of the people Dimitri was labouring to remedy. His response was both pastoral and literary: instruction and preaching against the schism, and the composition of his major polemical work, the Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith, in his last years — the subject of Section 05 (see The Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith and The Schism in His Time). That he undertook a sustained treatise against the schismatics in the same years that he was finishing the Cheti-Minei and failing in health is a further measure of how central the struggle was to his sense of his charge.

A Reformer’s Portrait

The portrait that emerges is consistent: a learned, gentle, indefatigable bishop spending the energies of his last years — and the small income of a poor see — on the formation of his clergy and the instruction of his people. He completed the Cheti-Minei at Rostov in 1705 (see The Cheti-Minei), wrote his sermons and his anti-schism treatise, founded and funded his school, and travelled his diocese teaching, all while his health failed. The several labours were not separate occupations but facets of one vocation — that of a man who believed the cure of souls was inseparable from their instruction, and who gave to that conviction everything he had, including the income that ought to have provided for his old age.

The poverty in which he died is the seal of the whole. He left no estate, the sources tell us, but his books and manuscripts; the wealth a metropolitan might have accumulated had gone instead to the school and its poor students (see Repose 1709). That a bishop of an ancient see should die with nothing to leave but the instruments of his learning is, in its quiet way, the truest summary of his episcopate: he had spent himself, and his means, on the work of teaching. The reform was cut short by his death in 1709 and by the limits of his means, but it set a pattern — the scholar-bishop forming a literate clergy — that the Russian Church would pursue, fitfully, through the whole Synodal age that was just then beginning (see The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia). What he could not finish at Rostov became, in the generations after him, the settled aspiration of the Church he had served: that those who stood at the altar should also be able to teach.

References

Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (The grammar school opened 1 September 1702, teaching Slavonic, Greek, and Latin to clergy sons; his personal care for the pupils; the school closed 1705 for lack of funds.)
St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, October 28. (The “ignorance of both his parishioners and priests”; his teaching and preaching through the diocese.)
Saint Dimitri of Rostov. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/163753.html). (The reforming program against ignorance and schism; example and instruction.)