Faith Under the Reforms

St. Dimitri’s own situation as a man of faith within Peter the Great’s reordering of the Russian Church: a Kyivan monk summoned to serve a state-driven reform he did not author, who spent his episcopate not on the politics of the synodal restructuring but on the perennial work of a bishop — the Lives, the school, the preaching, the care of souls — and whose holiness was recognized by the very church the reforms produced.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

A Reform He Served but Did Not Make

Dimitri lived and died inside the great transformation of the Russian Church under Peter the Great, but he was not one of its makers. He was summoned north in 1701 and given the see of Rostov in 1702 (see The See of Rostov) as part of Peter’s drawing of learned Kyivans into the Russian episcopate — the same general movement that placed Yavorsky and Prokopovich in the highest offices of the church. But to be a beneficiary of the policy is not to be an author of the reform, and Dimitri was the former and not the latter. The architecture of the reform — the abolition of the patriarchate, the Spiritual Regulation, the subordination of the Church’s government to the state — was the work of others, above all Feofan Prokopovich, and came in 1721, after Dimitri had been dead twelve years (see The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia). He neither designed the new order nor lived to see it completed; he was an instrument of one phase of Peter’s church policy, the recruitment of learned hierarchs, and stood quite apart from the later phase that remade the Church’s government.

What Dimitri did with his place in the reforming church was to do the ordinary, perennial work of a bishop: compile the Lives of the Saints, found a school, preach, catechize, and write against the schism. None of this was novel or reformist; it was the timeless labor of a pastor, the work bishops had always done, carried on in an age that happened to be remaking the institutional Church around him. The school at Rostov, the long labor over the Cheti-Minei, the sermons preached against ignorance and vice, the patient teaching of a clergy that could barely read — these were the concerns of a man who measured his episcopate by the salvation of souls, not by the reordering of institutions. His witness was pastoral, not political — and the contrast between the perennial work he chose and the political reordering he ignored is itself a kind of statement, the more eloquent for being unspoken. In a generation of churchmen swept up in the great questions of church and state, Dimitri kept his eyes on the older questions of sin and grace, ignorance and instruction, the soul and its God.

The Tensions of the New Order

That witness was not free of friction with the new order. The Petrine reforms pressed hard on the Church’s wealth, autonomy, and ways — confiscating revenues, regulating monasticism, taxing and counting and conscripting in the name of the modernizing state, bending ecclesiastical life to purposes the Church had not set for itself — and a serious, conscientious bishop of the old devotional temper could not always be at ease in it. The reform regarded the Church in good part as a resource of the state, a body whose lands, men, and moral authority could be turned to the work of the new empire; a bishop who regarded it instead as the Bride of Christ, charged with the salvation of souls, was bound to feel the strain between the two visions even where he did not openly resist. Dimitri’s own deepest energies went into things the reform neither commanded nor especially valued: a vast devotional Lives of the Saints, a Christ-centred piety of the inner life, the patient formation of an unlettered clergy. None of these served the state’s purposes; all of them served the Church’s. There is in his career a quiet implicit witness to the priority of these things over the political reordering — a bishop who, in an age of state-church machinery, spent himself on the prayer of the heart and the lives of the saints (see The Life of Prayer and The Cheti-Minei). He did not denounce the new order, but neither did he give himself to it; he simply kept doing the older and deeper work, and let the doing of it speak.

His relations with the state were, by the sources, those of a loyal but independent-minded hierarch. He had known Peter since 1689 and accepted the tsar’s appointments; he served where he was sent and did not set himself against the sovereign’s authority. But loyalty was not servility, and obedience in the matter of his appointment did not mean that the tsar’s priorities became his own. He pursued his own pastoral and literary priorities throughout his episcopate, and his poverty at death — a metropolitan who left no estate but his books (see Repose 1709) — speaks eloquently of a man unentangled in the rewards of office. In an age when high churchmen could grow rich and powerful in the service of the state, Dimitri died owning little more than the volumes he had read and written. He was neither a courtier of the reform like Prokopovich, who rose with it and shaped it, nor an open opponent of it who broke himself against it; he was a third thing, harder to classify and in its way more telling — a pastor who served the church he was given, rendered the state its due obedience, and quietly kept his treasure elsewhere, in the lives of the saints and the prayer of the heart.

Holiness Recognized by the Reformed Church

The deepest fact about Dimitri’s place under the reforms is the one most easily missed: the church the reforms produced recognized his holiness. When his incorrupt relics were found in 1752 and he was glorified in 1757, it was the Holy Synod — the very institution Peter had created in place of the patriarch — that canonized him, and his was the first canonization of the entire Synodal period (see The Incorrupt Relics and Canonization). The detail is worth dwelling on. The Synodal church, in the whole two centuries of its existence, canonized very few saints; that the first of them all should be this Kyivan compiler, dead at the dawn of the period, gives his glorification a peculiar weight. The new order, in its first act of that kind, reached back to one of its own founding generation and proclaimed him holy.

There is a quiet irony, and a quiet vindication, in this. The synodal church, for all the strictures later laid on its “captivity” — Florovsky’s among them — knew a saint when it found one, and the saint it first proclaimed was this Kyivan compiler of the Lives, formed in the very Latin-scholastic school that the critique indicts. The institution that the historiography would treat as the very emblem of the Western captivity of Russian theology opened its long career by venerating a man of that school; and the people of the Synodal church, who knew nothing of pseudomorphoses, simply received him as a saint and kept his feast. Whatever the historiographical verdict on the Kyivan learning (see The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia), the sanctity of Dimitri himself was affirmed — by the Church, formally, at the very opening of the age his generation began. The judgment of the schools on his “form” and the judgment of the Church on his holiness are, once more, two different judgments; and on the second the Church spoke early and without hesitation.

A Bridge Figure

Dimitri stands, finally, as a bridge between worlds — and the figure is more than ornamental, for a bridge is precisely what joins two banks without belonging wholly to either. He carried the learning of seventeenth-century Kyiv into the church of Petrine Russia, bringing the school-trained mind of the Mohyla academy into a Muscovite world that had known nothing like it. He joined the Western critical and rhetorical tools of his schooling to a thoroughly Orthodox devotional and pastoral substance — the very joining that the historiographical debate turns upon, embodied in a single life. And he handed to the whole Synodal age its Lives of the Saints and a model of the scholar-pastor: the learned bishop whose erudition served not the state nor his own advancement but the formation and salvation of his people.

The Synodal period he stood at the opening of would close in 1917 with the restoration of the patriarchate under St. Tikhon (see St. Tikhon of Moscow) — the office Peter had abolished restored at last, the long synodal experiment ended. But through all the two centuries between, the Russian Church read its saints in the volumes Dimitri had compiled, and venerated Dimitri himself among them. Whatever later judgment fell on the age and its “Latin captivity,” his Lives nourished the piety of millions across those two hundred years, and his own memory was kept with love. The bridge held; and the church that crossed it carried his books, and his name, the whole way over.

References

Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (His appointment, episcopate, and relations with the Petrine state and church.)
Most Holy Synod. Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The 1721 reordering of the Church, after Dimitri’s death.)
Synodical Period, 1700–1917. churchmotherofgod.org. (The Kyivan hierarchs in Peter’s church; the synodal structure.)
St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, October 28. (His pastoral priorities and poverty; the canonization of 1757.)