The Enduring Lives of the Saints

The afterlife of St. Dimitri’s great work: how the Cheti-Minei became and remained, for some two centuries, the standard Lives of the Saints of the Russian Church — the favorite devotional reading of the Orthodox people, repeatedly reprinted and editorially revised, reset into the familiar twelve monthly volumes, drawn on by Pushkin and generations of readers — and its translation into English as The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

The Standard Lives of the Russian Church

From its appearance, Dimitri’s Cheti-Minei displaced its rivals and became the Lives of the Saints of the Russian Church. The OCA life records that the work “quickly ranked among the favorite reading of Russian Orthodox believers,” and so it remained for some two centuries — read aloud in monasteries and households, mined by preachers, and turned to as the common devotional reference for the saints of the calendar (St. Demetrius of Rostov, oca.org). To grasp what this meant it helps to recall the place of such reading in Orthodox life. The Cheti-Minei — the very name means “reading menaia,” lives appointed for reading rather than for the chanted offices — were the books from which the faithful learned their saints: read in the refectory of a monastery while the brethren ate, taken up in the home on the eve of a feast, opened to the day’s commemoration so that a household might hear the story of the saint whose memory the Church kept that day. For long stretches of Russian devotional life, to read the life of the saint of the day was a settled practice, and the volumes that supplied it were Dimitri’s. They formed, generation upon generation, the imagination of ordinary believers about holiness — what a saint was, how the saints had lived and suffered and died — and they did so in a continuous, accessible narrative shaped for exactly such reading.

No other Slavonic collection rivaled it for completeness, readability, and authority; where the older collections had been partial or unwieldy, Dimitri’s gave a continuous, edifying, calendar-ordered Lives that an ordinary reader could follow through the year (see The Cheti-Minei). The great sixteenth-century menaia of Metropolitan Macarius had been vast and authoritative but were compilations for the Church’s reference rather than books a layman could read through, and the field before Dimitri held nothing that combined his scope with his readableness. His achievement was to make of the whole year’s saints a single, flowing, edifying account that an unlettered or modestly lettered reader could take up and follow — and it was this combination of completeness with warmth and narrative clarity that carried the work into two centuries of use. It became, in effect, the Russian Church’s collective memory of its saints in literary form, the standard against which any later telling would be measured.

Revisions and the Twelve-Volume Form

Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Lives passed through a series of editorial revisions as it was reprinted by the Synodal presses. Editors including Timofei (Timothy) Shcherbatsky (1745), Joseph Mitkevich, and the hierodeacon Nicodemus revised and corrected the text, and the Holy Synod ordered the language “Russified” — edited away from Dimitri’s Ukrainian-inflected Church Slavonic toward a more standard Great Russian register (Dimitry of Rostov, en.wikipedia.org; Tuptalo, Dymytrii, Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com). The “Russification” of the text is itself a telling episode, for it touches the very fault line of Dimitri’s career. He had been a Kyivan, formed in the learning and the language of the Kyivan school, and his Church Slavonic carried the marks of his Ukrainian origin in vocabulary and turn of phrase. As the Russian Church consolidated a single literary norm centered on Moscow, the Synod’s editors smoothed these Kyivan inflections toward a Great Russian standard — a small philological revision that mirrors, on the page, the larger absorption of the Kyivan inheritance into the Russian Synodal church to which Dimitri’s own life belonged. The work that taught Russia its saints was made to speak in a more uniformly Russian voice than its Kyivan author had given it.

The four great seasonal volumes of Dimitri’s original were reset into the now-familiar twelve-volume arrangement, one volume to each month of the year — the form in which the Cheti-Minei is most often encountered, and the source of the loose description of it as a “twelve-volume” work (see The Cheti-Minei). The resetting was a matter of convenience and use: a volume to the month fitted the rhythm of the calendar and the reader’s need, since one who wished to read the saints of a given month could take up a single, manageable book rather than search a bulky seasonal tome. Through all the revisions the substance remained Dimitri’s, and the work continued to be published under his name as its compiler. The editorial hands corrected, smoothed, and rearranged; they did not displace him. The Lives that went out from the Synodal presses across two centuries were, in their matter and their shape, the Lives he had made, and they bore his name as long as they were printed.

A Treasury for Russian Culture

The reach of the Cheti-Minei extended beyond the strictly devotional. Alexander Pushkin drew on it for the saintly and chronicling materials of his drama Boris Godunov (1825) and praised it as an “inexhaustible treasury” — a measure of how deeply Dimitri’s Lives had entered the common stock of Russian literary culture (Dimitry of Rostov, en.wikipedia.org). The judgment is striking precisely because it comes from Pushkin, the central figure of secular Russian letters and no devotional writer, who turned to Dimitri’s volumes not for piety but for the very stuff of his art — the diction, the cadence, the manner of the old chronicles and lives — when he sought to give Boris Godunov its early-seventeenth-century voice. That the foundational poet of modern Russian literature should mine the Cheti-Minei for his historical drama, and should call it inexhaustible, marks the degree to which Dimitri’s Lives had become not merely a church book but a reservoir of the national literary language and historical imagination. For generations of Russians, religious and secular alike, the cadences and stories of the saints came first through Dimitri’s volumes; the Cheti-Minei was a formative book of the culture, not only of the Church. Through it the narrative habits of Slavonic hagiography — its turns of phrase, its way of telling a holy life — passed into the bloodstream of Russian prose, so that the influence of the compilation reaches well past the bounds of devotion into the literature of a whole people.

The English Translation

In the late twentieth century Dimitri’s Lives began to reach the English-speaking Orthodox world. The occasion was the growth of an English-speaking Orthodoxy — converts and the children of immigrants for whom Church Slavonic was no longer a living tongue — that needed its devotional inheritance in English, and the rendering of Dimitri’s Lives answered that need with the most comprehensive single account of the saints the tradition possessed. The principal English rendering is The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, translated by Fr. Thomas Marretta and published by Holy Apostles Convent (Buena Vista, Colorado) in monthly volumes — translated from the Church Slavonic edition issued by the Christian Printshop of the Transfiguration Almshouse, Moscow, in 1914, itself a descendant of Dimitri’s Kyiv original (The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, Holy Apostles Convent / Chrysostom Press; listing data via amazon.com). The line of descent is worth tracing: from Dimitri’s Kyiv volumes of the turn of the eighteenth century, through the Synodal revisions and the 1914 Moscow Church Slavonic edition, to a monthly English series produced in Colorado at the century’s end — three hundred years and an ocean lie between the Kyivan monk’s manuscript and the English reader’s volume, yet the work passed across that distance still recognizably his. [Disputed: the complete English Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints is the work of Holy Apostles Convent / Chrysostom Press (trans. Marretta); it is sometimes attributed to Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, which has published other material related to St. Dimitri but is not the publisher of this set — the Jordanville attribution appears to be an error.] A related companion volume, The Lives of the Holy Apostles (Holy Apostles Convent, 1988, trans. Reader Isaac E. Lambertsen), drew on “the Menology of St. Dimitri of Rostov in Russian and the Great Synaxaristes … in Greek” (The Lives of the Holy Apostles, Holy Apostles Convent; via abebooks.com). The method of that companion volume — setting Dimitri’s Russian menology beside the Greek Great Synaxaristes — is itself a small echo of Dimitri’s own practice, for he too had worked by gathering and weighing the Greek and Slavonic accounts of a saint’s life; the modern English compilers, in drawing on him alongside the Greek tradition, repeated in their own labor the comparative gathering that had made his. Through these editions, the compilation a Kyivan monk made at the turn of the eighteenth century continues to serve Orthodox readers in a language and a world he never knew — read now by English-speaking faithful who come to the saints, as Russians once did, through the work of Dimitri of Rostov.

A Living Inheritance

More than three centuries after Dimitri set to work at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, his Lives of the Saints remains in use — reprinted in Russian, translated into English, read in monasteries and homes, and still the most comprehensive single account of the saints in the Slavonic-Orthodox tradition. Its endurance is the deepest measure of his achievement. The other works of his hand and the other labors of his life have had a more mixed fortune: the school he founded closed for lack of funds; his anti-schism polemic was overtaken by the Church’s own reconciliation; the historiographical debates over his Kyivan learning continue without settlement. By the ordinary reckoning, much of what a busy metropolitan does in his years of office is undone or forgotten within a generation. But the Cheti-Minei lives on, doing exactly what he made it to do — telling the Russian Church, year by year and day by day, the lives of its saints. It is a rare thing for a book to outlast its author by three centuries and remain in active use, still serving the purpose for which it was made; and it is the measure of Dimitri that the work of his that endures is the one into which he poured two decades of his life and the whole of his devotion. The compiler is now himself among the saints his book commemorates, and the book goes on commemorating them, his own labor of love continuing to do its quiet work long after the hand that made it was stilled in death.

See Also

References

  • St. Demetrius (Dimitri), Metropolitan of Rostov. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, October 28. (“Quickly ranked among the favorite reading of Russian Orthodox believers.”)
  • Dimitry of Rostov. Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (Editorial revisions by Shcherbatsky, Mitkevich, Nicodemus; the twelve-volume monthly arrangement; Pushkin’s use in Boris Godunov and “inexhaustible treasury.”)
  • Tuptalo, Dymytrii. Encyclopedia of Ukraine, encyclopediaofukraine.com. (The Synodal “Russification” of his text.)
  • The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints (trans. Fr. Thomas Marretta). Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent / Chrysostom Press; from the 1914 Moscow Church Slavonic edition. (Listing data via amazon.com.)
  • The Lives of the Holy Apostles (trans. Reader Isaac E. Lambertsen). Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent, 1988. (Drawn from “the Menology of St. Dimitri of Rostov”; via abebooks.com.)