Repose (1709)

The death of St. Dimitri: his repose on 28 October 1709 at Rostov, found on his knees in prayer before an icon of the Saviour, in the poverty of a bishop who left no estate behind him — his books and manuscripts his only possessions; and his burial, against his own expressed wishes, in the cathedral church of the Spaso-Yakovlevsky Monastery, where his relics would be found forty-three years later.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

His Death at Prayer

St. Dimitri reposed on 28 October 1709 (8 November New Style) at Rostov, in his fifty-eighth year (Dimitrii Rostovskii, Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). He had completed the fourth and final volume of the Cheti-Minei four years earlier (see The Cheti-Minei) and had spent his last strength on his diocese and on his anti-schism Inquiry, finished in March of that same year (see The Inquiry into the Brynsk Faith). The two labors stand as a kind of summary of his life: the great work of devotion that had occupied twenty years, and the last polemical task pressed on him by his office and his age. To finish both and then to die within months of the second is the shape of a life worked to its end; the great compilation was sealed, and the diocese’s most urgent controversy answered, before his strength failed. By this last year he was an old man by the reckoning of his time, worn by two decades of writing and a decade of episcopal labor, and his health had long been uncertain.

The tradition records that he was found dead on his knees, in the attitude of prayer before an icon of the Saviour — a death that gathered up the inner life of prayer he had taught (see The Life of Prayer) (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). The detail is more than a pious flourish. In the Orthodox reckoning, the manner of a death is read as a last word about the life — and to die in the very posture of prayer, alone before the image of Christ, was understood as a death given to the man who had taught the prayer of the heart and the unceasing remembrance of God. The whole of his interior writing had urged the gathering of the mind into the heart and the standing of the soul before its Saviour; that he should be found so, kneeling before the icon of that same Saviour, struck those who told the story as a confirmation written into the circumstances of his end. [Disputed: the Old Style date of repose is 28 October 1709 (New Style 8 November 1709); some English sources erroneously render the New Style date as “November 10,” and at least one devotional source mistakenly gives the year as 1708. The correct date is 28 October (O.S.) / 8 November (N.S.) 1709.]

A Bishop Who Left No Estate

The most striking fact of Dimitri’s death is his poverty. He was a metropolitan, an office that in his age and church could mean substantial revenues and possessions; yet when he died it was found that he had almost nothing. The OCA life records simply that “it was discovered that he had few possessions, except for books and manuscripts” — his library and his own writings were his entire estate (St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). The contrast with what such an office might have yielded is sharp. A metropolitan’s see in the early eighteenth century controlled lands, peasants, and revenues; the higher clergy of the Russian Church were, by the standards of the day, men of substance, and an episcopal estate at death might be expected to include plate, vestments of value, money, and the furnishings of rank. That Dimitri left none of this — no hoarded silver, no accumulated wealth, nothing that the world counts an estate — was remarkable enough that it was remembered and recorded as a mark of the man.

This was not accident but a settled way of life. He had spent the income of his see on his school and his poor students (see Pastor and Reformer), and he had kept for himself only the tools of his work — the books he read and the papers he wrote. A man’s possessions at death are a kind of last account of how he held the goods of this life; and Dimitri’s account showed a bishop who had passed the wealth of his office through his hands and out to others, retaining nothing but what his labor required. The poverty of his death thus testifies to the use he had made of his office in life: the revenues that might have made him rich had been turned outward, to the teaching of an unlettered diocese and the relief of those too poor to study. His poverty is of a piece with his whole interior orientation: a man whose treasure was elsewhere (see Faith Under the Reforms). In the long tradition of Orthodox holiness, voluntary poverty and non-acquisitiveness — the refusal to lay up treasure on earth — are counted among the marks of the saints, and Dimitri’s empty estate placed him, in the church’s later reading, in that company before ever a relic was found or a feast appointed.

[Disputed: a widely-repeated devotional tradition holds that Dimitri asked to be buried together with his unfinished rough drafts, his manuscripts laid in or under his coffin. This vivid detail captures the truth of his poverty and his devotion to his work, but it could not be confirmed in the major scholarly or hagiographic sources; what those sources record is that his manuscripts and books were his only estate, and that in his will he had designated a particular place for his burial. The “buried with his draft papers” detail is therefore noted as a pious tradition rather than asserted as established fact.]

His Burial

In his will Dimitri had chosen a place of burial — by the accounts, a corner of the Spaso-Yakovlevsky (St. Iakov / Yakovlevsky) Monastery in Rostov that he had selected for himself. The choice was characteristic: not a place of honor but a humble corner, the kind of unregarded spot a man might ask for who reckoned himself the least rather than the chief of the church he served. In the event, his wishes about the manner of burial were not followed. There was an interval of nearly a month between his death on 28 October and his funeral; Metropolitan Stephen (Yavorsky) of Ryazan — his fellow Kyivan and the locum tenens of the patriarchal throne — had to travel to Rostov to officiate, and it was with him presiding, amid the gathered clergy and people, that Dimitri was buried within the cathedral church of the Yakovlevsky monastery on 25 November 1709 (Uncovering of the Relics of St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org; Saint Dimitry of Rostov, obitel-minsk.org). That Stephen Yavorsky — the most eminent of the Kyivan churchmen in the Russian Church, locum tenens of the vacant patriarchate, and Dimitri’s friend and ally in the controversies of the age — should come to bury him marks the regard in which Dimitri was held; the two men had shared a formation, a learning, and a place in the church of the Petrine years, and it fell to the one to lay the other in the ground.

A makeshift wooden coffin was used — a further sign of the poverty and haste in which a poor bishop’s burial was managed. For a metropolitan one might have expected something more substantial; that a rough wooden coffin served instead is consistent with the whole picture of a man who had left no money for such things, and whose interment was accordingly plain. The choice of the cathedral floor, in a damp situation, would prove providential in an unexpected way: it was the decay of that coffin and the dampness around it, set against the preservation of the body within, that would make the finding of his incorrupt relics in 1752 so striking (see The Incorrupt Relics and Canonization). What was, at the time, simply the modest interment of a metropolitan who had left no money for anything grander, became in the church’s later telling the providential setting of a sign: the plain coffin that rotted away, and the body that did not.

The Meaning of the End

Dimitri’s death sealed the pattern of his life. The compiler of the saints’ lives died as one of the figures his own Lives would have honored — at prayer, in poverty, his life’s work finished and his only wealth the books and papers of that work. There is a quiet symmetry here that did not escape those who told his story: the man who had spent two decades gathering the deaths of the saints, recording how each had ended and what each end revealed, died a death of the very kind his volumes praised. The hagiographer became, in his own ending, a fit subject for hagiography. The bishop who had spent himself teaching an unlettered diocese left it nothing but his library and the memory of his labors. And the man whose interior teaching had been the prayer of the heart in its secret closet was found, the tradition says, on his knees before his Saviour.

What followed — the incorrupt relics, the glorification, the centuries of veneration — would confirm in the church’s reckoning what his death already showed: that here was a saint. But it is worth marking that the death came first, and stood on its own. Before any relic was uncovered, before any commission examined the tomb, before any synod decreed a feast, the bare facts of the end — the prayer, the poverty, the finished work, the humble grave — already carried the weight of a holy death. The events of 1752 and 1757 did not create that holiness; in the church’s understanding they disclosed and ratified it. The saint was made not in the glorification but in the living and the dying, and the long aftermath only set the seal of the Church on what the man’s own end had spoken first.

References

Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (Repose 28 October 1709; found at prayer; burial at the Yakovlevsky monastery.)
St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, October 28. (“Few possessions, except for books and manuscripts”; death at prayer.)
Uncovering of the Relics of Saint Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, September 21. (Burial in the cathedral church; Metropolitan Stephen Yavorsky officiating.)
Saint Dimitry of Rostov, Enlightener of the Faithful. Saint Elisabeth Convent, obitel-minsk.org. (The chosen burial corner; burial in the cathedral 25 November 1709; the makeshift coffin.)