Teaching on the Love of God

A thematic synthesis of St. Herman’s attested teaching — the love of God above all things, self-reproach and the refusal of despair, and mercy toward the weak — drawn explicitly from the small recorded corpus rather than read into it. Through these few sayings the spirituality of Valaam and of Sarov shows plainly: the Paisian revival of the Jesus Prayer and patristic reading, transplanted to a North Pacific island. This file frames the synthesis as synthesis, names where each theme is grounded, and links it to the broader tradition.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (glorified by the OCA and ROCOR, 1970)

A Synthesis, Not a System

St. Herman left no treatise and no rule. What follows is a synthesis — an attempt to draw out the coherent teaching implied by the handful of attested sayings and the two surviving letters — and it must be read as such. The danger in writing about a saint of so thin a record is to lend him a fullness of doctrine he never claimed; the discipline of this file is to build only on what the corpus actually contains (see Recorded Sayings and, for the grading of the sources, What Is Attested). Three themes recur across the genuine material, and they hang together. They are not a system Herman propounded but a shape his recorded words take.

Love of God Above All Things

The center of everything attributed to Herman is the love of God set above every other love. It is the burden of the shipboard conversation, where the Elder leads the officers from the things they love most — riches, honor, a wife, a ship — to the One who is “better, higher than all, more superlative and most worthy of love,” and presses them to a resolution: “from this day, from this hour, from this minute we shall strive to love God above all else and to fulfill His holy will” (1867 Valaam Life, on the testimony of Yanovsky; Little Russian Philokalia vol. 3; orthochristian.com, The Life of Our Holy Father Saint Herman of Alaska). The same primacy governs the nights with Yanovsky, whose record of their conversation is a list of exactly these themes — “the love of God, eternity, the salvation of the soul, and Christian life” — and it governs the answer about solitude, where the cell is not empty but full because God and the angels are there (see Yanovsky Correspondence).

Two features mark Herman’s version of this commonplace. First, it is ordered: he does not begin with abstract command but with desire, asking what each man already loves and then redirecting that desire upward, so that the love of God is shown to be the truest satisfaction of the love the hearer already has. Second, it is a labor, not a sentiment — a striving renewed “from this minute,” confessed by Herman himself to be incomplete after forty years. This is why love and asceticism are, for Herman, one thing: the chains, the board bed, and the unceasing prayer described in New Valaam are the body of a love that calls itself a beginner.

Self-Reproach and the Refusal of Despair

The second theme is the saint’s relation to his own sin, and it is double-edged. On the one side stands the confession that anchors the shipboard saying: “I, a sinner, have been trying for more than forty years to love God, and I cannot say that I love Him perfectly” (1867 Valaam Life; Little Russian Philokalia vol. 3). This is self-reproach in the classic monastic key — the more advanced the ascetic, the more he counts himself a beginner — and it is the native idiom of Valaam and Sarov, where humility was measured by how little one claimed.

But self-reproach is not, for Herman, despair, and his most doctrinal saying exists precisely to guard the line between them. “A true Christian is made so by faith and love toward Christ. Our sins do not in the least hinder our Christianity, according to the words of the Savior Himself” — for Christ came to call sinners, rejoices over the one who repents, and forgives much to the one who loves much; therefore the Christian “should bring himself to hope and joy, and not in the least accept an inflicted despair … Here one needs the shield of faith” (1867 Valaam Life; Little Russian Philokalia vol. 3; orthochristiantools.com, Saint Herman of Alaska). The two movements are held together: a man may reckon himself the chief of sinners and still refuse the despair that sin invites, because the ground of his standing is not his record but Christ’s love. This is the Pauline “shield of faith” (Ephesians 6:16) turned against acedia.

Mercy Toward the Weak

The third theme is less a saying than the consistent direction of Herman’s life, and it follows from the first two. The God to be loved above all is “Himself love,” and the Christian whose sins do not bar him is to extend the same mercy outward. Herman’s decades of advocacy for the Alutiiq and Aleut — the complaints to St. Petersburg, the confrontation with Baranov, his self-description as “the humble servant of these people and their nurse,” his care for the orphans of his school — are the practical form of the teaching (see Conflict with the Company and Orphanage and Flock). The love of God above all did not withdraw him from the weak; it bent him toward them. In this Herman embodies the patristic conviction that love of God and love of neighbor are not two loves but one, and that the test of the first is the second (cf. 1 John 4:20).

Valaam and Sarov Showing Through

What this synthesis reveals is not an original doctrine but a faithful transmission. Herman was formed at Valaam under Abbot Nazarius and earlier at Sarov, in the very generation of the Russian revival that St. Paisius (Velichkovsky) had kindled — the recovery of the Jesus Prayer, of patristic reading, and of eldership that the Philokalia carried into Slavic monasticism (see Valaam Formation). His teaching is that spirituality in compressed form. The primacy of the love of God, the unceasing prayer that makes solitude full, the self-reproach without despair, the joining of contemplation to active mercy — these are the marks of the Paisian school, and Herman carried them across the Pacific intact. It is fitting that the brotherhood which republished his Life titled the volume a Little Russian Philokalia: Herman is presented, accurately, as the man who brought the Paisian inheritance to America (Orthodox Wiki, Little Russian Philokalia, locating the editorial intent of the St. Herman Press series).

The synthesis, then, claims nothing the sources do not. It only sets the few attested sayings side by side and notes that they cohere — and that the shape they make is the shape of the tradition that formed him. A larger doctrine would have to be invented; this one can be read off the corpus, which is why it is offered as synthesis and not as a system put in the saint’s mouth.

References

The Life of Our Holy Father Saint Herman of Alaska (the 1867 Valaam Life), reprinted in Little Russian Philokalia, vol. 3: St. Herman of Alaska — A Treasury of Spirituality. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood / St. Herman Press, 1989. Online edition: orthochristian.com/47984.html.
Yanovsky, Semyon Ivanovich. Letters to Abbot Damascene of Valaam, 1865, as published in the Valaam Life.
“Saint Herman of Alaska: Apostle of North America and Saint of Living Faith.” orthochristiantools.com (used to locate the fuller “faith and love toward Christ” passage).
“Little Russian Philokalia.” OrthodoxWiki (used to locate the St. Herman Press series and its presentation of Herman as bearer of the Paisian inheritance).
Korsun, Sergei, and Lydia Black (trans./ed.). Herman: A Wilderness Saint — From Sarov, Russia, to Kodiak, Alaska. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2012.
Scripture: Luke 5:32; 7:47; 15:7; Ephesians 6:16; 1 John 4:8, 20.