The Pastoral Program

The catechetical vision behind St. Dimitri’s preaching and reform: his diagnosis that the diocese suffered above all from ignorance — of clergy and people alike — and his answer in instruction at every level, from the grammar school for clergy sons, to written catechetical guidance for priests, to sermons aimed at the rudiments of the faith. A program of formation, conceived by a Kyiv-trained scholar appalled at the unlettered state of the old Russian heartland.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

The Diagnosis

Dimitri’s pastoral program flowed from a single diagnosis: that the disorders of his diocese — moral negligence, superstition, the inroads of the schism — grew from ignorance, the under-catechized state of a clergy and laity who had never been properly taught the faith. This was a characteristically Kyivan way of reading the problem. Where another bishop might have seen the disorders as failures of discipline to be met with discipline, Dimitri traced them to their root in an untaught mind: people sin, fall into superstition, and drift into schism, he reasoned, in large part because they have never been instructed in what they believe and why. The OCA life records him as “painfully aware of the ignorance of both his parishioners and priests” (St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). The phrase joins clergy and laity in one indictment, and deliberately so — for the deeper scandal in Dimitri’s eyes was that the priests themselves, the very men charged with teaching, had too often learned their office by rote and could not instruct what they had not been taught. For a man formed in the learned, school-disciplined church of Kyiv (see Kyiv and Formation), where clergy passed through a rigorous course of letters before they served, the contrast with the unlettered state of the old Russian heartland was stark, and it fixed his priorities: where the people are untaught, the bishop’s first work is to teach.

Instruction at Every Level

The program addressed every level of the diocese, and its genius lay in its completeness — it sought to mend the chain of instruction at every link, from the formation of the priest to the teaching of the child at the font. For the future clergy, Dimitri founded his grammar school at Rostov on 1 September 1702, in the first months of his episcopate, teaching Slavonic, Greek, and Latin to the sons of priests — a deliberate effort to form, for the first time, a literate and catechized clergy in his see (see Pastor and Reformer). The three languages were chosen with care: Slavonic for the liturgy and the Russian books, Greek for the patristic and Byzantine sources of the faith, Latin for the learned theology of the age — the very curriculum of the Kyivan school transplanted to the old heartland. For the serving clergy already in their parishes, beyond the reach of any school, he issued written instructions on the right celebration of the services and the reverent handling of the Holy Mysteries, correcting the practical disorders of priests who had learned their office by rote — the careless or ignorant performance of the sacraments being, for a bishop, the gravest of the disorders ignorance bred. For the people, he preached — travelling the diocese to teach in person the rudiments of the faith, the meaning of the feasts, and the call to repentance (see The Sermons). That a metropolitan should take the road himself, rather than rest content with directives sent down to his clergy, was itself a mark of the seriousness of the diagnosis: where the priests could not be relied on to teach, the bishop would teach in their stead and, by his example, show them how. The three works thus formed one design — the school to raise up future priests who could instruct, the written instructions to mend the practice of those already serving, and the preaching to reach the people directly in the meantime, that no level of the diocese might be left in the ignorance from which all the rest of its troubles flowed.

Teaching by the Written Word

Dimitri’s catechetical instinct ran through his whole literary output, not only his sermons; indeed his books may be read as the same pastoral program carried on by other means, reaching where his voice and his presence could not. The Cheti-Minei itself was, at bottom, a catechetical project — a Lives of the Saints made to be read through the year for the formation of ordinary Christians, supplying in edifying narrative the doctrine and example that catechism teaches in precept (see The Cheti-Minei). His Letopis — a Chronicle, a digest of sacred history from the creation — served the same end of grounding the reader in the biblical and ecclesiastical story, giving the unlettered a frame within which the whole drama of salvation could be held in order (Tuptalo, Dymytrii, Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com). His school dramas, staged at Rostov, taught the same sacred history through the eye and ear, turning the feasts and the Scriptures into living spectacle for pupils and townsfolk alike. His anti-schism Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith was a work of instruction as much as polemic, written, the sources note, in language accessible to common folk — a deliberate choice of register, aimed at the very people the schism had reached (see The Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith). Even his ascetic writings on the inner life served to teach the serious Christian how to pray (see The Spiritual Alphabet and the Mirror). Across every genre — narrative, chronicle, drama, polemic, and spiritual counsel — the whole corpus is the work of a teacher.

The Inner Aim

It would mistake Dimitri to read his program as merely the imposition of book-learning, as though literacy and right doctrine were ends in themselves. The instruction he sought was ordered to a deeper end — the formation of a praying, repenting, sacramentally serious Christian people. Knowledge, in his understanding, was the servant of conversion: one must know the faith truly in order to love it rightly and live it fully, and the catechism, the sermon, and the school were the means by which a soul was made ready for that deeper work of grace. His own spiritual writings, with their insistence on inner prayer and the constant remembrance of God (see The Life of Prayer), reveal what he hoped the catechesis would serve: not information but conversion, the turning of the heart. The school, the sermons, the Lives, and the instructions to priests were all instruments of that one pastoral aim — to make of an untaught flock a Church that knew, and loved, and lived its faith. The learning was never the goal; it was the road to a God-fearing people.

The Program in Its Time

Dimitri’s pastoral program belongs to the dawn of the Synodal age, and it anticipated one of that age’s defining concerns: the formation of a learned, catechizing clergy through seminaries and schools. In this he stood at the very threshold of the change that would remake the Russian clergy over the following century — the rise of the diocesan seminary as the normal road to the priesthood — and he pursued in his own see, on his own initiative and at his own cost, what the church at large would later organize on a national scale. He did not live to see it carried far. His grammar school, founded with such hope in 1702, closed for want of funds in 1705, and he died in 1709, the project unfinished and his diocese still far from the literate, well-formed body he had labored to make of it. The disappointment was real; the model was not lost. The scholar-bishop forming his clergy and instructing his people would be pursued, with the Kyivan schools as its template, across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia). And the great pastoral preachers of the later Synodal church — St. John of Kronstadt above all — inherited the catechetical concern that Dimitri voiced at its beginning, so that what looked in his own lifetime like a program cut short proved instead a first sketch of the church to come.

References

St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, October 28. (The “ignorance of both his parishioners and priests”; teaching through the diocese.)
Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (The grammar school of 1702; instructions to clergy; the corpus of works.)
Tuptalo, Dymytrii. Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com. (The Letopis/Chronicle and the catechetical and dramatic works.)
Saint Dimitri of Rostov. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/163753.html). (The reforming and instructing program.)