The Incorrupt Relics and Canonization

The glorification of St. Dimitri: the finding of his incorrupt relics on 21 September 1752, during repairs to the cathedral church of the Spaso-Yakovlevsky Monastery at Rostov, where his body was discovered preserved though the coffin had decayed in the damp; the Holy Synod’s investigation and the cures attested at the tomb; and his solemn glorification in 1757 — the first canonization of the entire Synodal period. The relics and miracle accounts are presented as what the sources attest, per the repository methodology, not certified as historical fact.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

The Finding of the Relics (1752)

Forty-three years after his burial, on 21 September 1752, during repairs to the cathedral church of the Spaso-Yakovlevsky (Yakovlevsky) Monastery where Dimitri had been laid in 1709 (see Repose 1709), his grave was opened and his body found incorrupt. The finding was not sought; it came in the course of building work, when the floor of the cathedral was disturbed for repairs and the grave beneath it was reached. The oaken coffin had decayed in the damp situation of the cathedral floor, but the body, together with the vestments — the omophorion, sakkos, and mitre of a bishop, and a silk prayer-rope — was found preserved (Uncovering of the Relics of St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org; Dimitrii Rostovskii, Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). That the very signs of his episcopal office and his life of prayer — the omophorion and sakkos and mitre of a bishop, the silk vervitsa of one who prayed — should be found whole upon the preserved body gave the discovery a particular eloquence: the man was found, as it were, still vested for his office and still holding the cord of his prayer.

The contrast — the rotted coffin and the preserved body — was taken at once as a sign. In the Orthodox tradition the incorruption of a body is read as one of the marks by which God may glorify his saints, a visible token that the holiness of the soul has touched even the flesh; it is not held to be required for sanctity, nor automatic proof of it, but where it is found it is received as a summons to reverence and a ground for closer inquiry. The discovery did not declare Dimitri a saint by itself; rather it opened the question, and set in motion the formal process by which the Church would weigh the matter. Per the repository methodology (see the methodology, §3.5), the incorruption is reported here as what the sources attest, with the source named, not certified as a historical-scientific finding. [Disputed: the standard sources, including the OCA and the Russian sources, give 21 September 1752 as the date of the finding — the date that became the feast; some accounts instead cite early October 1752 for the moment of discovery during the repairs, the Church having fixed the commemoration on 21 September.]

The Synod’s Investigation and the Attested Cures

The finding was followed by an official investigation, as the procedures of the Synodal church required. The Russian Church, especially after the reforms of Peter the Great had placed its governance in the hands of the Holy Synod, did not proceed to the veneration of a newly discovered saint on rumor or local enthusiasm; the recognition of holiness was a matter for inquiry and decree, and a report of incorrupt relics and healings was the occasion for examination, not the end of it. A commission — including Metropolitan Sylvester of Suzdal and Archimandrite Gabriel of the Simonov Monastery — was accordingly sent to examine the relics and to verify the reports of healings occurring at the tomb (Uncovering of the Relics of St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). The composition of such a commission, drawn from the ranks of the hierarchy and the heads of monasteries, reflects the seriousness with which the matter was treated: men of standing were charged to look upon the relics themselves and to test the accounts of cures against witnesses, that the Church might act on examined testimony rather than report alone.

The sources record that numerous cures were attested at Dimitri’s relics, and that these, together with the incorruption, were the grounds on which the Church proceeded to glorification. The pairing is significant within the tradition’s own logic: incorruption alone might be received with reverence, but it was the healings — the relics’ continuing power, as the faithful understood it, to do good to those who came to them — that were taken as the living sign that the saint was active and interceding, and not merely preserved. These miracle accounts are presented here as what the sources record — the testimony gathered and accepted by the Synod’s commission — and not as independently certified events, in keeping with the repository’s treatment of such claims (METHODOLOGY §3.5). What the historian can affirm is that the cures were reported, gathered, examined by an appointed commission, and accepted by the Synod as grounds for glorification; the repository names this testimony as testimony, and leaves the further question where the methodology leaves it.

The Glorification (1757)

On the basis of the finding and the investigation, the Holy Synod glorified St. Dimitri of Rostov as a saint of the Russian Church in 1757 (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Saint Dimitry of Rostov, obitel-minsk.org). Glorification — the act by which the Church numbers one of the departed among the saints — is in the Orthodox understanding not the making of a saint but the recognition of one: the Church does not confer holiness but acknowledges what God has wrought and what the signs disclose, appointing thereby that the person may be openly venerated, his feast kept, his icon written, his relics honored, and his intercession publicly sought. In the Synodal order such an act belonged to the Holy Synod, the body that after 1721 governed the Russian Church in place of a patriarch, and it was by the Synod’s authority that Dimitri’s name was entered among those the Russian Church holds for saints. [Disputed: the sources give somewhat different dates within 1757 for the act of glorification — the decree is variously dated 1 April, 22 April, and 29 April 1757, the differences reflecting distinct stages (the Synod’s decree versus the solemn proclamation) and Old/New Style reckoning; all sources agree that the glorification took place in April 1757.]

The significance of this date is not merely biographical. Dimitri’s glorification was the first formal canonization of the entire Synodal period — the first saint proclaimed by the Russian Church since Peter the Great had abolished the patriarchate and established the Synod in 1721, and indeed the only Russian canonization of the whole eighteenth century (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; Saint Dimitry of Rostov, obitel-minsk.org). That a span of more than three decades had passed without a single glorification, and that more than a half-century would pass after Dimitri before another, sets his canonization apart: the Synodal church, often charged with a cool and bureaucratic temper in matters of piety, proceeded to glorify a saint only once in the entire century, and the one it chose was Dimitri. The synodal church, in its first exercise of the Church’s power to glorify a saint, chose this Kyivan compiler of the Lives of the Saints — a recognition whose quiet irony is drawn out in Faith Under the Reforms. The same Petrine settlement that had reshaped the Russian Church, and under which Dimitri had lived and labored with so guarded a heart, now in its institutions reached back to lift up one of its own subjects as the age’s single saint.

His relics were enshrined at the Spaso-Yakovlevsky Monastery, which became a place of pilgrimage; the Empress Elizabeth herself commissioned a silver shrine for them. The personal involvement of the empress — daughter of Peter the Great, and a sovereign of conspicuous and demonstrative piety — gave the glorification a public, imperial character; the commissioning of a costly silver shrine by the crown set Dimitri’s veneration under the patronage of the throne and made his monastery at Rostov one of the notable pilgrimage sites of the Russian land. There is a further symmetry in the shrine of silver: the bishop who had died with no silver of his own, his only estate his books and papers, was laid at last in a reliquary of precious metal given by an empress, the poverty of the man answered by the honor of the Church and the state alike.

The Two Feasts

From the glorification, the Russian Church kept two commemorations of St. Dimitri: 21 September, the day of the uncovering of his relics in 1752, and 28 October, the day of his repose in 1709 (Uncovering of the Relics of St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org; Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). The keeping of two feasts is the usual pattern for a saint whose relics have been solemnly uncovered: one day marks the repose, the passage out of this life, and another the uncovering or translation of the relics, the moment at which the Church received the bodily token of the saint’s glory. The two dates frame the whole arc of his veneration — the death of the poor and praying bishop, and the finding, two generations later, of his incorrupt body — and they remain his feasts in the Russian calendar to this day (see Feast and Scholarship). Between the two lies the whole movement of the story: a man dies in obscurity and poverty in 1709, and forty-three years later the same man is found whole beneath the cathedral floor and lifted into the calendar of the saints — the one feast looking back to the hidden end, the other to the public disclosure.

The Saint and His Work

The glorification of 1757 set the seal on the life and work alike. The Church that venerated Dimitri also read its saints in the Cheti-Minei he had compiled, so that the compiler of the Lives of the Saints took his own place among the saints whose lives those volumes told. The coincidence is more than rhetorical. A Russian believer of the later eighteenth or nineteenth century, turning the pages of Dimitri’s Lives to read the entry for a saint of the day, was reading a book made by a man who was himself by then a saint of that same calendar — so that the very volumes that taught the faithful to honor the saints had been compiled by one now honored among them. The hagiographer had become a subject of the hagiography he had labored to write. There is a fitting completeness in this: the man who had spent twenty years gathering and honoring the memory of the saints was himself gathered into their number, and his relics enshrined where his unfinished papers had once been his only estate. The enduring use of his Lives, and the modern scholarship that continues to study him, are taken up in Section 09.

References

Uncovering of the Relics of Saint Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, September 21. (Finding 21 September 1752; the preserved body and vestments; the commission of Metropolitan Sylvester of Suzdal and Archimandrite Gabriel; the attested cures.)
Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (The finding; the 1757 glorification; the first canonization of the Synodal period; the two feasts.)
Saint Dimitry of Rostov, Enlightener of the Faithful. Saint Elisabeth Convent, obitel-minsk.org. (Glorification 1757; the first of the Synodal period; the shrine.)
Methodology: Citation Standard and Verification Protocol, METHODOLOGY.md, §3.5 (relics and miracle claims reported as attested, not certified).