The Spiritual Alphabet and the Inner Man

St. Dimitri’s writings on the inner life, with an honest treatment of authorship: The Inner Man in the Closet of the Heart (Vnutrennii chelovek v kleti serdtsa), his genuine ascetic treatise on hidden prayer and the heart; the Spiritual Alphabet (Алфавит духовный), the much-loved ascetic handbook printed for centuries under his name but, by the scholarly consensus of the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, the work of the earlier Kyivan hierarch Isaiah Kopinsky; and his prayers, meditations, and diary.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

The Inner Man in the Closet of the Heart

Among Dimitri’s authentic ascetic writings the most characteristic is the short treatise The Inner Man in the Closet of the Heart (Vnutrennii chelovek v kleti serdtsa, Внутренний человек в клети сердца), listed among his genuine didactic-ascetic works (Dimitrii Rostovskii, Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Demetrius of Rostov, en.wikipedia.org). The title’s image — the “inner man” withdrawn into the “closet” or inner chamber of the heart — is drawn from the Lord’s word, “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6), read in the patristic manner as a counsel of interior prayer: the closet is the heart, the shut door the recollection of the senses. The phrase “the inner man” itself reaches back to St. Paul, who prays that his readers may “be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man” (Ephesians 3:16) and contrasts the inward renewal of the believer with the outward man that perishes — so that Dimitri’s title gathers two scriptural strands at once: the Pauline inner man and the Matthean closet, the secret self and the secret place in which it prays. The distinction between the “inner” and the “outer” man, and the summons to dwell within rather than to be scattered abroad in the senses, is one of the oldest commonplaces of Christian ascetic literature, running from the Desert Fathers through the whole tradition of watchfulness; Dimitri inherits it and gives it a Russian voice.

The treatise teaches the turning of the mind inward to pray to God in the secret place of the heart — the gathering-in of a soul ordinarily dispersed among its cares and sensations, and its standing, recollected and quiet, before the God who is present in its own depths. The “closet of the heart” is not a place to be reached by travel or even by solitude alone but a discipline of attention: the door is shut against the noise of the world when the mind ceases to wander and returns to itself and to God. Within this frame the treatise sets out Dimitri’s central counsel on unceasing prayer, developed in The Life of Prayer — the teaching that ceaseless prayer is reached not by a single technique but by praying often, until the turning to God becomes the soul’s settled habit. It has been translated into English as The Inner Man (trans. Nun Christina / A. Skoubourdis, 2022), making this most intimate of Dimitri’s works available to readers who know him otherwise only as the great compiler of the Lives (The Inner Man, goodreads.com; benjaminasimpson.com). [Disputed: the precise redaction-history and authorship of this short ascetic piece are less studied than those of the Spiritual Alphabet below; it is traditionally attributed to Dimitri and generally accepted as his, but a critical edition would be needed to settle the question fully.]

The Spiritual Alphabet: A Beloved Book, a Corrected Attribution

The most famous of the ascetic works circulating under Dimitri’s name is the Spiritual Alphabet (Alfavit dukhovnyi, Алфавит духовный) — a handbook of the ascetic and spiritual life, ordered as a kind of alphabet of counsels for monks and laymen “who wish to live in a manner pleasing to God.” The “alphabet” of the title is the old device of the spiritual primer: a book that proposes to teach the soul its first letters in the science of salvation, taking the reader step by step through the rudiments of the godly life as a child is taught its ABCs — a genre with deep roots in Byzantine and Slavic ascetic literature. It has been printed in countless editions and remains in devotional use to this day; many of these editions name Dimitri of Rostov as the author, and the book is so widely read under his name that the attribution has the feel of long-settled fact. Here, however, honesty requires a correction that the scholarly literature has established and that this guide will not propagate uncorrected — a correction that costs the book none of its worth while restoring it to its true author.

[Disputed: the Spiritual Alphabet (Алфавит духовный) is, by the consensus of the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya and modern scholarship, not the work of St. Dimitri of Rostov but of Metropolitan Isaiah Kopinsky (Isaiia Kopinskii, c. 1580–1640, Metropolitan of Kyiv); it was first printed anonymously at the Kyiv-Caves Lavra in 1710 and circulated anonymously through some fourteen editions. St. Dimitri took great interest in the work, identified Kopinsky as its author, and made an abridgment of it (published only in 1879 as the Short Spiritual Alphabet of Dimitri of Rostov). A nineteenth-century translation by Bishop Justin (Polyansky), 1898, attributed the full work to Dimitri, and this misattribution still appears in many devotional editions and on devotional websites today (Mitropolit Isaiia Kopinskii i ego kniga “Alfavit dukhovnyi”, drawing on the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, dimitryrostovsky.ru; Isaiia (Kopinskii), pravenc.ru/text/674836.html).]

The corrected picture, then, is this: the Spiritual Alphabet is a genuine and valuable monument of Kyivan spirituality, but its author is Isaiah Kopinsky, not Dimitri; what is properly Dimitri’s is his abridgment of it and his evident esteem for it. The two facts are worth holding together, for they explain how the error arose and why it is not a scandal but a tangle. Kopinsky (c. 1580–1640) had himself been Metropolitan of Kyiv, a hierarch of the generation just before the Mohyla reform, and his Alphabet belongs to the same Kyivan ascetic milieu that would later form Dimitri. When the book was printed anonymously at the Kyiv-Caves Lavra in 1710 — the year after Dimitri’s death — it entered circulation without an author’s name, and across some fourteen anonymous editions a reader’s natural question, who wrote this?, had no answer printed on the page. That Dimitri himself had taken the work seriously enough to study it, to identify its author, and to make an abridgment of it left his name associated with it in the manuscript and printing tradition; when a nineteenth-century editor needed a name to attach, Dimitri’s — already famous, already linked to the book through his abridgment — was the one that suited. The attribution to Dimitri is thus an honest mistake with a traceable history, not a forgery; but it is an established error all the same, and a serious account states so plainly while honoring both the book and the saint who loved it. To name Kopinsky is not to take anything from Dimitri — his abridgment and his discernment remain his own — but to give the Alphabet back to the hierarch who actually wrote it.

Prayers, Meditations, and the Diary

Beyond these, Dimitri left a body of prayers and meditations that entered Russian devotional use — short prayers, meditations on the Passion of Christ (his spirituality was markedly Christ-centred and given to contemplation of the Crucified, a trait that later scholarship has gathered under the heading of his “baroque” piety; see Feast and Scholarship), and reflections for the soul’s daily turning to God. These are not systematic treatises but the overflow of a praying life: brief, affective, made for use rather than for the schools, and shaped by the same Passion-centred warmth that runs through all his devotion. They reveal the inward face of a man whose public labors were so vast — the Lives, the sermons, the polemic — that it is easy to forget he was first of all a monk at prayer.

He also kept a Diariush (Diary), a personal and partly autobiographical record written in the Ukrainian-Polish idiom of his formation — a reminder, in its very language, that the bishop of Rostov had been formed in a Kyivan world where the learned tongues were Latin and Polish as much as Slavonic. Scholars use the Diariush to date the stages of his life and work — including the start of his great labor on the Cheti-Minei in 1684 (Demetrius of Rostov, en.wikipedia.org; Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). As a document it is doubly valuable: a source for the chronology of his career, and a small window onto the private temper of a man who left little else of a purely personal kind.

[Disputed: a work sometimes listed under the title Spiritual Manna (Духовная манна) is occasionally attributed to Dimitri in devotional contexts, but no authoritative catalogue entry for an original work of his by that title could be located; it appears more likely to be a later devotional anthology or compilation drawn from his writings than an original composition, and is noted here as uncertain rather than asserted as his.]

The Spiritual Writer Behind the Compiler

Taken together, the authentic ascetic writings — The Inner Man, the prayers and meditations, the abridged Alphabet — reveal the contemplative who stood behind the great compiler. The corrected authorship of the Spiritual Alphabet does not diminish this portrait; if anything it sharpens it, for once the borrowed book is set aside what remains is unmistakably Dimitri’s own: a treatise on the inner man, a sheaf of Passion-centred prayers, an abridgment made in love of another man’s good work, a diary in the idiom of his Kyivan youth. The same Dimitri who gathered a Lives of the Saints for the formation of the Russian people, and who preached and wrote to instruct an untaught clergy, was himself a man of interior prayer who taught the turning of the heart to God in its secret chamber. The public works and the hidden prayer were never two things in him but one: the catechist labored so that other souls might come to the very interior life his own writings describe. His teaching on that interior prayer — its content, and its place in the Orthodox tradition of unceasing prayer — is the subject of The Life of Prayer.

References

Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (His ascetic works including The Inner Man; prayers and meditations; the Diariush.)
Demetrius of Rostov. Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The Inner Man in the Closet of the Heart; the diary used to date the Lives.)
Isaiia (Kopinskii). Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/674836.html; and Mitropolit Isaiia Kopinskii i ego kniga “Alfavit dukhovnyi”, dimitryrostovsky.ru. (The Spiritual Alphabet is by Isaiah Kopinsky, printed anonymously 1710; Dimitri’s interest, his identification of the author, and his abridgment; the 1898 misattribution by Bishop Justin.)
The Inner Man (trans. Nun Christina / A. Skoubourdis, 2022). Goodreads, goodreads.com; summary at benjaminasimpson.com. (English translation of Vnutrennii chelovek; teaching on unceasing prayer.)