The See of Rostov (1701–1702)

How St. Dimitri became Metropolitan of Rostov: summoned from the Hetmanate to Russia by Peter the Great, appointed Metropolitan of Tobolsk and all Siberia in 1701 but unable to take up that vast and distant see — both for his frail health and because it would have ended his life’s literary work — and reassigned in 1702 as Metropolitan of Rostov and Yaroslavl, an ancient see he reached in the spring of that year and held until his death.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

Summoned to Russia

Peter the Great, in the early years of his reign, drew the learned hierarchs of the Kyivan church northward to staff the Russian episcopate — a policy that brought a generation of Kyiv-Mohyla men, Dimitri among them, into the Great Russian sees (see The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia). The reasoning behind the policy was practical as much as it was cultural. The schools of the Hetmanate — above all the Kyiv-Mohyla collegium — had given the south-western clergy a formal Latin-and-Greek education of a kind the Muscovite Church had never systematically possessed, and Peter, remaking the Russian state along Western lines, wanted bishops who could preach, dispute, organize, and teach. The Kyivan hierarchs were the readiest instrument to hand. For Dimitri the summons northward also meant a parting from the monastic and literary world of the Hetmanate in which his whole life had until then been spent — a displacement that would set a learned southerner over an ancient northern see whose conditions were wholly unlike those he had known.

Dimitri’s reputation as scholar, preacher, and the compiler of the Lives of the Saints made him an obvious candidate, and in 1701 he was summoned to Moscow (Dimitrii Rostovskii, Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). His Cheti-Minei — the great cycle of saints’ lives arranged for the months of the year, already partly in print — had carried his name far beyond his own province and marked him as perhaps the most accomplished man of letters in the Russian Church of his day; it was as much this labour as his preaching that recommended him to the tsar. OrthoChristian records that he had in fact first met Tsar Peter as early as 1689, at the Holy Trinity–St. Sergius Monastery (Saint Dimitri of Rostov, orthochristian.com/163753.html) — so that when the call came in 1701 it fell on a man already known, by reputation and in person, to the sovereign who issued it. The summons came, moreover, at a moment of upheaval in the government of the Russian Church: the patriarchal throne, vacant since the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700, was being left unfilled while Peter reshaped the relation of Church and state — a process that would culminate, after Dimitri’s death, in the abolition of the patriarchate and the establishment of the Holy Synod. It was into a Church under reform, and increasingly under the hand of the reforming tsar, that the learned monk from the south was now drawn.

The Siberian Appointment Declined (1701)

On 23 March 1701 Dimitri was consecrated and appointed Metropolitan of Tobolsk and all Siberia — the immense eastern see covering the whole expanse of Russia’s Asian territories (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Tuptalo, Dymytrii, Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com). The Tobolsk metropolitanate was the most extensive jurisdiction in the Russian Church, stretching from the Urals across the breadth of Siberia toward the Pacific, a missionary frontier of vast distances and thin settlement where a bishop laboured among newly converted peoples and scattered Russian colonists far from any centre of learning. For a younger man of robust health and missionary temper it might have been a fitting field; for Dimitri it was not.

He never took it up. His health was poor, the journey and the climate were beyond his strength, and — as the sources stress — the remote Siberian see would have cut him off from the books, presses, and correspondents he needed to finish the Cheti-Minei, of which the third volume had appeared in 1700 and the fourth was not yet written (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com). The last consideration was decisive in its own way: to send the compiler of the Lives of the Saints to Tobolsk would have been to suspend, perhaps to abandon, the work of two decades just as it approached completion, since the great printing houses, libraries, and the learned company on which such a labour depended were all in the west and the centre, not beyond the Urals. Whether by his own plea or by the tsar’s accommodation, the appointment was set aside before he ever departed for Tobolsk — and the unfinished fourth volume, which would have lain dormant in Siberia, instead went with him to Rostov, where it was brought to its end.

Metropolitan of Rostov and Yaroslavl (1702)

In place of Siberia he was named Metropolitan of Rostov and Yaroslavl — the appointment dated 4 January 1702 — and he arrived in his see on 1 March 1702 (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). The exchange could hardly have been greater. Where Tobolsk was a remote frontier, Rostov lay in the very heartland of old Russia, a short journey north-east of Moscow, among the towns and monasteries that had been Christian since the first centuries of the Russian faith. Rostov the Great (Rostov Velikii), on the shore of Lake Nero, was one of the most ancient and venerable sees of the Russian Church — a bishopric reaching back to the conversion of the land, set in a city whose kremlin, with its white-walled cathedral and its ring of churches above the still water of the lake, was among the glories of medieval Russia. To hold the see of Rostov was to stand in a long succession of hierarchs in a place saturated with the memory of Russian sanctity; for the compiler of the Lives of the Saints it was, in its way, a fitting place to end his days.

To it Dimitri brought both the unfinished fourth volume of the Lives — which he completed there in 1705 (see The Cheti-Minei) — and the pastoral energies he would spend on the diocese for the remaining seven years of his life. The years at Rostov were thus doubly laden: the scholar finished the work of his lifetime, and the bishop took up the cure of a diocese that needed all that he could give it. The two labours ran together, and the same man who closed the great hagiographical cycle in 1705 was at the same time founding a school, visiting parishes, and contending with a schism that had taken deep root in the forests of his territory.

Rostov the Great and Its Antiquity

Some sense of the place is needed to weigh what the appointment meant. Rostov was among the oldest towns of Russia, named in the earliest chronicles, and its bishopric was among the first established as Christianity spread north and east from Kyiv. Long before Moscow rose to greatness, Rostov was a princely and ecclesiastical centre of the upper Volga lands, and it kept, even after the political centre of gravity had shifted to Moscow, the dignity of an ancient and honoured see. Its territory took in Yaroslavl, the larger and busier town on the Volga, so that the metropolitan’s title joined the venerable name of Rostov to the commercial weight of its neighbour.

On the shore of Lake Nero stood the architectural ensemble for which the city is still known: the cathedral with its great dome, and the bishop’s residence — the so-called kremlin of Rostov — a walled complex of churches, halls, and gate-churches that the seventeenth-century metropolitans had raised into one of the most striking monuments of Russian church architecture. Into this setting, dense with the memory of saints and hierarchs and rich in the visible furniture of the Church, came a man whose life’s work had been the gathering of the Lives of the Saints. The juncture was apt. Yet the splendour of the see’s buildings and the antiquity of its honour stood in sharp contrast to the spiritual condition Dimitri found among its clergy and people, and it was to that condition, not to the stones, that he turned his energies.

The Diocese He Inherited

What Dimitri found in the Rostov diocese troubled him deeply. He came to it as a Kyiv-trained scholar accustomed to the learned, school-formed clergy of the south-west, and he encountered instead a clergy and laity he judged poorly instructed — priests who could barely read the services they sang, a people sunk in ignorance and superstition, and the Old Believer schism (the Raskol) entrenched in parts of his territory and in the forests beyond it (St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org, which records that he was “painfully aware of the ignorance of both his parishioners and priests”; Saint Dimitri of Rostov, orthochristian.com/163753.html).

The contrast that struck him was not a matter of personal severity but of two different worlds of clerical formation. In the Hetmanate from which he came, the parish priest was likely to have passed through a school where he learned grammar, the catechism, and at least the rudiments of theology; in the Great Russian heartland of the early eighteenth century the priesthood was still largely hereditary and self-perpetuating, a son succeeding his father in the cure with little schooling beyond what he had picked up at the lectern, and with no institution to form him for the office. A man might be ordained who could chant the offices from memory and habit yet scarcely read an unfamiliar text or expound the faith to his people. It was this — not malice or even gross unworthiness, but an unlettered, unformed clergy set over an untaught people — that Dimitri encountered, and that he found, as the OCA life puts it, painful to behold. The superstition he deplored among the laity was the natural fruit of the same soil: where catechesis was absent, the line between the faith of the Church and the half-pagan usages of the countryside grew faint.

The condition of the diocese set the agenda for his episcopate: the founding of a school to form a literate clergy, a campaign of preaching and catechesis, and the writing of his great anti-schism treatise — the work taken up in Pastor and Reformer, in The Sermons, and in The Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith. Each of these answers met a part of what he had found: the school to remedy the unlettered clergy, the preaching and visitation to reach the untaught people directly, and the treatise to confront the schism that had grown in the gap between Church and faithful. They were, in his mind, a single program, and they occupied the remaining seven years of his life.

References

Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (Summoned 1701; Metropolitan of Tobolsk/Siberia 23 March 1701, not taken up for ill health and the literary work; Metropolitan of Rostov and Yaroslavl, appointed 4 January 1702, arrived 1 March 1702.)
Tuptalo, Dymytrii. Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com. (Siberian appointment declined; Rostov and Yaroslavl from 1702.)
St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, October 28. (“Painfully aware of the ignorance of both his parishioners and priests.”)
Saint Dimitri of Rostov. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/163753.html). (First meeting with Peter in 1689; the state of the diocese.)