The Sermons

St. Dimitri as preacher — “the Russian Chrysostom” of the Western Russian lands: the oratorical gift that made his name from his first years at Chernihiv, Vilnius, and Slutsk through his episcopate at Rostov; the baroque homiletic form he learned in the Kyivan school; and the catechetical purpose that bent all his eloquence toward the instruction of an under-formed clergy and a half-taught people.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

The Russian Chrysostom

Of all his titles, the one the tradition gave Dimitri for his preaching is “the Russian Chrysostom” — or, more precisely, “the Chrysostom of the Western Russian lands” — coupling him with the great fourth-century preacher St. John Chrysostom (Saint Dimitri of Rostov, the Chrysostom of the Russian Church, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Dimitri of Rostov, orthochristian.com/163753.html). The comparison carried real weight in an Orthodox ear: Chrysostom — “the golden-mouthed” — was the patristic measure of all preaching, the bishop whose homilies the Church read at her liturgies and whose name was a byword for eloquence wedded to pastoral love. To call a Russian preacher a second Chrysostom was to claim for him not merely fluency but the whole Chrysostomic union of rhetorical power and care of souls; and the tradition pressed the claim because Dimitri’s preaching struck its hearers as exactly that.

The epithet is no idle compliment. Dimitri’s reputation as an orator was made early, in the 1670s, when as a young hieromonk he preached at the cathedral of Chernihiv under Lazar Baranovich and then in the churches of Vilnius and the Transfiguration monastery of Slutsk in the Lithuanian and Belarusian lands (see Kyiv and Formation). These were not provincial backwaters. Chernihiv under Baranovich was a center of the learned, book-producing Orthodoxy of the Hetmanate; Vilnius and Slutsk lay in the contested confessional borderland of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where Orthodox communities held their ground amid an aggressive Catholic and Uniate ascendancy. In a region where the Orthodox lived among Catholics, Uniates, and Protestants and prized a preacher who could match the rhetorical standards of the age — for in that world the pulpit was itself a field of confessional contest, and a church that could not preach lost its people — his gift drew notice “far beyond the borders of Kyiv and Chernihiv” (Dimitrii Rostovskii, Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). The young Dimitri thus learned his craft not in the relative quiet of the old Muscovite church but in a world where preaching was a public, competitive, and consequential art.

The Form of His Preaching

The form of Dimitri’s sermons was the elaborate, image-rich, structured homiletic that the Kyiv-Mohyla school had taken over from the Western — especially the Jesuit — rhetorical tradition and pressed into Orthodox service (see The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia). To grasp what this meant, one must picture the baroque sermon as a deliberate art form rather than a simple exhortation. It opened from a stated “theme” — a scriptural verse or a feast — which the preacher then unfolded through a tightly ordered sequence of points, each developed with concordances of Scripture, sayings of the Fathers, examples from sacred history, and, characteristically, vivid images and emblems: the sermon would seize on a symbol — a sun, a vine, a precious stone, the wood of the Cross — and turn it over and over, drawing from it a cascade of spiritual meanings. This was the manner the Catholic preaching of the Counter-Reformation had brought to a high polish, and which the Kyivan school, schooled on the same Latin handbooks the Jesuits used, had naturalized in Orthodox dress.

His rector at the Collegium, Ioannikii Galyatovsky, had himself written a handbook of this “baroque” sacred rhetoric — the Kliuch razumeniia (Ключ разумѣнія, “The Key of Understanding”), a manual of how to build and ornament a sermon that was among the foundational texts of the new Ruthenian homiletics. Dimitri’s sermons display its features throughout: a developed “theme,” ordered argument, vivid imagery and emblem, and an affective, often Christ-centred warmth that keeps the elaborate apparatus from hardening into mere display. This baroque homiletic is exactly what later critics like Florovsky pointed to in calling the Kyivan learning “Latinized” — Western in form, schooled on Jesuit and scholastic models, distant from the plainer patristic and Byzantine inheritance. Yet in Dimitri’s hands the form served a thoroughly Orthodox and pastoral end: the imagery led always back to Christ, the structure carried doctrine and moral summons rather than rhetorical self-display, and the whole was bent toward the conversion of the hearer. The form was Western; the use to which Dimitri put it was the ancient one of the cure of souls (the question is weighed in The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia).

Preaching as Catechesis

At Rostov, the gift became an instrument of reform. Dimitri found a diocese whose clergy and people he judged poorly instructed (see The See of Rostov), and he turned his preaching directly to their catechesis — travelling the diocese to teach in person, unwilling to leave the instruction of the people to priests unequal to it (St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). This was a notable redirection of his art. The baroque sermon, in its native Kyivan setting, had often been an occasional and ceremonial performance, delivered to congregations already steeped in the learned church culture of the south-west. In the old Russian heartland Dimitri faced hearers of a different kind — many of them barely catechized, the more so where the schism had drawn them away from the reformed Church’s instruction — and he set his eloquence to a humbler and more urgent task. His sermons aimed to supply what the parishes lacked: the rudiments of the faith, the meaning of the feasts and Mysteries, the moral demands of the Gospel, and the call to repentance and a serious Christian life. The eloquence that had once held the cathedrals of the south-west was now spent on forming a half-taught flock in the old Russian heartland — preaching as the most direct answer to ignorance, and as the living, spoken counterpart of the written catechesis he pursued through every other channel of his pastoral work.

His preaching also carried his anti-schism concern, set out at length in his treatise against the Old Believers; from the pulpit as in the Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith he argued the case of the reformed Church against the schism that had taken root in his territory (see The Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith). The spoken word and the written treatise here worked in tandem: the Inquiry gathered into one systematic refutation the arguments Dimitri had long been pressing in person, while the sermon carried those same arguments live into the parishes, where the contest for the loyalty of half-instructed people was actually waged. For a bishop facing a schism rooted in the ignorance of his flock, the pulpit was not an adornment of his office but a front line.

The Surviving Corpus

A substantial body of Dimitri’s sermons survives and was gathered in the collected editions of his works printed through the Synodal period; his homilies, together with the Cheti-Minei, his anti-schism Inquiry, his Letopis (a chronicle of sacred history from the creation), and his school dramas — the last composed and staged at Rostov in the years 1702–1705 for the instruction and edification of his pupils and people — make up the corpus of a strikingly productive pastoral writer (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Tuptalo, Dymytrii, Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com). It is worth seeing the sermons within that whole. They were not an isolated talent but one expression of a single teaching purpose that ran through every genre Dimitri touched: the spoken homily, the year-long cycle of the Lives, the dramatized sacred history of the school stage, the chronicle, and the polemic against the schism all served the formation of Christians, each by its own means. The sermons are valued both as devotional reading and as evidence of the Kyivan-baroque preaching at its most accomplished and most pastorally directed — the school’s elaborate form bent, in Dimitri, wholly toward the salvation of his hearers. The wider catechetical vision behind them is treated in The Pastoral Program.

See Also

• The Pastoral Program — the catechetical vision the sermons served
• Kyiv and Formation — the early years in which his preaching gift was made
• The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia — the baroque homiletic form and the “Latinization” question
• The Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith — the anti-schism case he preached and wrote
• St. John of Kronstadt — the great pastoral preacher of the late Synodal church, heir to the catechetical concern Dimitri voiced at its dawn

References

• Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (Preaching reputation “far beyond Kyiv and Chernihiv”; the corpus of sermons, Letopis, and dramas; training under Galyatovsky.)
• Saint Dimitri of Rostov, the Chrysostom of the Russian Church. johnsanidopoulos.com (Mystagogy). (The “Russian Chrysostom” epithet.)
• Saint Dimitri of Rostov. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/163753.html). (Chrysostom of the Western Russian lands; preaching and instruction.)
• St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, October 28. (Preaching and teaching through the diocese.)
• Tuptalo, Dymytrii. Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com. (Sermons, chronicle, and dramatic works among his output.)