Feast and Scholarship

St. Dimitri’s place in the calendar and in modern study: his feast days — 21 September (the uncovering of his relics) and 28 October (his repose) — kept in the Russian Church since his glorification; and the modern scholarship that continues to examine his work, from Derzhavin’s foundational study of his hagiographic method, through Florovsky’s contested placing of him among the “Latinized” Kyivans, to the recent re-evaluations of his baroque spirituality.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

The Feast Days

The Russian Church keeps two commemorations of St. Dimitri of Rostov, both established with his glorification (see The Incorrupt Relics and Canonization):

21 September — the uncovering of his relics, the day in 1752 when his incorrupt body was found during repairs to the cathedral of the Spaso-Yakovlevsky Monastery (Uncovering of the Relics of St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org).
28 October — his repose, the day of his death in 1709 (Dimitrii Rostovskii, Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru; St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). In the Orthodox reckoning a saint’s day of death is his true birthday — his birth into eternal life — and so it is the repose, not the natural birth, that the calendar keeps as the saint’s feast.

The two feasts, on the Old Style calendar, fall on these dates; on the New Style (Gregorian) calendar used in civil life they correspond to early October and early-to-mid November respectively. The doubling of the commemoration follows the common Orthodox pattern for a saint whose relics have been solemnly uncovered: one feast keeps the day of his repose, his passage out of this life, and another the day of the uncovering of his relics, the disclosure of his glory to the Church. To keep both is to hold together the two moments of his sanctification — the hidden death and the public manifestation — and to honor the saint at each.

He is also commemorated among the synaxes of the Rostov-Yaroslavl saints and, by his Kyivan origin, among the saints of the Ukrainian lands. A synaxis, in the Orthodox calendar, is a joint commemoration that gathers a company of saints under a single day — here the saints of a region or a land, assembled so that the local church may honor together the whole cloud of its holy ones. That Dimitri appears in two such synaxes reflects the double belonging of his life: a saint of Rostov and the Yaroslavl land, where he served as metropolitan and where his relics rest, and a son of the Kyivan church, numbered among the saints of the Ukrainian lands of his birth and formation. The two regional commemorations hold in the calendar the same Kyivan-and-Russian span that runs through his whole story. Across the Russian Orthodox world — the Moscow Patriarchate, the Orthodox Church in America, the Russian Church Abroad, and the diaspora — these are the days on which “the Russian Chrysostom” and compiler of the Lives is honored.

The Hagiographic Scholarship

The serious scholarly study of Dimitri centers, naturally, on the Cheti-Minei and the question of his method. The foundational work is Archpriest Aleksandr Derzhavin’s monograph Chetii-Minei sviatitelia Dimitriia, mitropolita Rostovskogo, kak tserkovno-istoricheskii i literaturnyi pamiatnik (“The Chetii-Minei of St. Dimitri of Rostov as a Church-Historical and Literary Memorial”), which examines his sources and his way of working and frames the Lives as exactly that — a church-historical and literary monument rather than a modern critical history (Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru). That the foundational modern study should be the work of an archpriest, written from within the tradition that venerates Dimitri, is itself characteristic of how this scholarship has proceeded: much of the closest and most careful study of his sources and method has come from churchmen and scholars who approach the Cheti-Minei as a living monument of the Church they share, rather than as a dead object of merely antiquarian interest. The very title of Derzhavin’s study carries an argument. To call the Cheti-Minei a “church-historical and literary memorial” is to set the terms on which it ought to be judged: not as a work of modern critical historiography, to be faulted where it preserves a legend or follows an uncertain source, but as a monument of the Church’s tradition and of its literature, a gathering and shaping of the inherited memory of the saints. Derzhavin’s patient examination of where Dimitri’s materials came from and how he handled them established the framework within which the work has since been studied — as the deliberate literary and ecclesial achievement it was, rather than against the anachronistic standard of a later, secular historical method. Modern academic engagement, in Russian and increasingly in Western scholarship, continues to treat the Cheti-Minei as the most comprehensive Slavonic hagiographic corpus and to study its handling of particular lives and legends, its publication history, and its place in the literary culture of its age (see Method and Source Criticism). The questions that occupy this scholarship — how Dimitri weighed his Greek and Slavonic sources, where he chose among variant accounts, how the work was revised and reprinted, what place it held in the devotional and literary life of its readers — are the questions of a corpus too large and too consequential to be exhausted, and the study of it remains active three centuries on.

The Historiographical Debate

Dimitri also stands at the center of the larger historiographical debate over the Kyivan, “Latinized” learning in the Russian Church — a debate framed for the twentieth century by Georges Florovsky’s Ways of Russian Theology (1937), which placed Dimitri among the Kyivans whose theology Florovsky judged a “Latin pseudomorphosis” of Orthodoxy (see The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia). Florovsky’s term repays a moment’s attention. By “pseudomorphosis” — a word borrowed from mineralogy, where a crystal takes the outward form of one substance while its inner matter is another — he meant that the theology of the Kyivan school had taken on the forms and categories of Western, and specifically Latin scholastic and baroque, divinity, so that an Orthodox content was, in his judgment, poured into an alien mold and thereby distorted. The charge fell on the whole Kyivan inheritance, and Dimitri, formed in that school and writing in its baroque idiom, stood squarely within its scope. Florovsky’s reading long dominated, shaping how a generation understood the Kyivan moment as a deviation to be regretted and corrected. But recent scholarship has pushed back, defending the Kyivan baroque as a legitimate Orthodox inculturation — an authentic clothing of the faith in the forms of its age, no more a betrayal of Orthodoxy than the Greek Fathers’ use of the categories of Hellenic philosophy had been.

On Dimitri specifically, the study Jesus Crucified: The Baroque Spirituality of St Dimitri of Rostov (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press) re-evaluates his Christ-centred, Passion-focused devotion as authentic Orthodox spirituality in a baroque idiom, rather than as a deviation to be excused (svspress.com; reviewed at anothercity.org). Its argument is that the very features Florovsky’s school read as Western intrusions — the focus on the crucified Christ, the meditation on the Passion, the affective and dramatic cast of the piety — are not borrowings to be apologized for but a genuine Orthodox devotion expressed in the living idiom of Dimitri’s time and place. The debate over how to read Dimitri’s formation and devotion is, in this sense, live and ongoing — a sign of his continuing importance as a test case for the whole question of Orthodoxy’s encounter with the West (see The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia). That so much of the modern argument over the Kyivan inheritance should turn on the figure of Dimitri — a canonized saint of the Church, and the maker of its standard Lives of the Saints — gives the question a particular edge: it is not a marginal Latinizer but one of the most honored and most read of the Kyivan churchmen whose Orthodoxy is at issue, and how he is read decides much of how the whole encounter is to be judged.

A Saint Still Studied and Venerated

More than three centuries after his death, St. Dimitri of Rostov remains both venerated and studied — honored on his feasts as a saint and the giver of the Russian Lives of the Saints, and examined by scholars as a compiler, a preacher, a polemicist, and a figure of the contested Kyivan-Petrine moment. These two lines of his afterlife do not run apart but answer each other. The veneration rests on the holiness the Church discerned in his life and death and the signs that followed; the scholarship turns on the same life’s learning and labor, on the great work that the same Church reads to honor its saints. He is venerated for what he was and studied for what he made, and the two are one man. The combination is fitting for a man who was himself both a saint and a scholar — who gathered the lives of the holy with a critical and discerning hand, and who took his own place among them. His memory endures along both lines: in the church’s calendar, where his feasts return each year, and in the continuing conversation about what his great work was, and how the Orthodox encounter with Western learning is to be judged. Few figures hold those two kinds of remembrance together so completely — the saint kept in the calendar and the scholar argued over in the journals — and that he holds both is the fullest measure of his standing in the tradition he served.

References

Uncovering of the Relics of Saint Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, September 21. (The feast of 21 September.)
St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, October 28. (The feast of 28 October.)
Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (Feasts; the Derzhavin monograph; biography.)
Derzhavin, Aleksandr (Archpriest). Chetii-Minei sviatitelia Dimitriia, mitropolita Rostovskogo, kak tserkovno-istoricheskii i literaturnyi pamiatnik. The standard study of his sources and method.
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology (Puti russkogo bogosloviya, Paris 1937; Eng. trans. R. L. Nichols). On the Kyivan “Latin pseudomorphosis.”
Jesus Crucified: The Baroque Spirituality of St Dimitri of Rostov. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, svspress.com; reviewed at anothercity.org. (The modern re-evaluation of his spirituality.)