Miracles in Life and After

The marvels attributed to St. Herman of Alaska: the flood turned back at the line of a Theotokos icon, the forest fire halted at a strip of overturned moss, his prophecies of an epidemic, a future American bishop, and a future monk on Spruce Island, and the pillar of light seen above the island at his death. Each account is reported as the sources attest it and pinned to its earliest written attestation, principally the 1867 Valaam Life.

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

Reading the Accounts

Almost everything known of St. Herman’s wonders descends through a single channel: the Life of Our Holy Father Saint Herman of Alaska, compiled at Valaam Monastery and first published in 1867, some three decades after his repose. The Valaam compilers worked from the written testimonies they could gather — chiefly from Herman’s surviving disciples on Spruce Island and from the visiting officials who had known him — and from the questionnaire-style report assembled in Alaska. Herman’s closest disciple, the Creole Gerasim Ivanovich Zyrianov (†1869), carried much of this information to Valaam, where his account was set down in writing for the abbot (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life; the same chain is described in the OCA’s “Repose of Venerable Herman,” oca.org). This means the miracle reports are, by their own internal logic, second-hand and pious in intent. The Methodology of this repository (§3.5) forbids treating them as documented history; what follows reports each as what its named witness or the Life attests, and says where the attestation is thin.

The Flood Turned Back by the Icon

The best-known of the wonders concerns a tidal surge — in the Life a great flooding of the sea — that threatened the settlement on Spruce Island and frightened the Aleuts who lived near Herman’s hermitage. According to the Life, Herman took an icon of the Mother of God, carried it to the shore, set it in the sand at the water’s edge, and told those with him not to be afraid: the water would come no farther than the place where the icon stood. The flood rose to the icon and went no farther (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life; OCA, “Repose of Venerable Herman,” oca.org). The same source records that Herman afterward entrusted this icon to his disciple Sophia (Sofia) Vlasova (†1861/62), instructing her that should the sea ever flood again she was to carry the icon to the shore as he had done — which is why the account is preserved: it comes through Sophia, who lived on as one of the keepers of his memory on the island. The flood account is thus pinned to Sophia Vlasova’s transmission, as recorded in the 1867 Life; there is no independent documentary record of the event.

The Forest Fire Halted at the Moss

A parallel wonder concerns fire rather than water. The Life relates that Herman and his disciple Ignaty Aliaga (Ignatius Aligyaga, †1874) cleared a narrow strip — about two feet wide — through the brush near the hermitage, turning over the moss along it, and that Herman said, “Be at peace, the fire will not cross this line.” When a forest fire driven by a strong wind bore down on the place the next day, Ignaty (by whose testimony the Life explicitly records the event) judged there was no hope; but the fire ran up to the strip of overturned moss, ran along it, and stopped, leaving the forest beyond untouched (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life). The fire account is pinned to Ignaty Aliaga’s named testimony in the Life. As with the flood, the structure of the account — a fire-break of cleared ground, which is also a practical measure — sits alongside the miraculous framing without the Life pretending to separate them; the account is reported as Ignaty gave it.

The Prophecies

The Life gathers several sayings of Herman that it presents as prophecies fulfilled. Each is attributed to a witness, and the wording matters for honest attribution.

The epidemic. Herman is reported to have told the Aleuts, “After my death there will be a plague and many people will die from it, and the Russians will bring the Aleuts together.” The Life records that a smallpox epidemic struck roughly half a year after his repose, and that the Russian-American Company consolidated the surviving native population from many villages into a handful — a consolidation the historical record independently confirms for the great Alaskan smallpox epidemic of 1835–1840 (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life; on the epidemic itself, see Black, Russians in Alaska). The prophecy is attested in the Life; the epidemic and the village consolidation are documented history, which is why this account is among the more secure.

A future American bishop. The Life records, on the report of Bishop Peter (Ekaterinovsky) of the Aleutians, that Herman often said America would one day have its own bishop — at a time when, the Life stresses, no one was contemplating such a thing. A resident bishop for the Aleutians and Alaska was indeed established in 1840, four years after Herman’s repose, with St. Innocent (Veniaminov) as its first occupant (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life; on the see, see The Saints of North America). This prophecy is pinned to Bishop Peter’s report as recorded in the Life.

A monk on Spruce Island; a monastery on the chapel site. The Life preserves two related sayings about the island’s future. To his disciples Herman said: “Although much time will pass after my death, I will not be forgotten, and the place where I lived will not be empty: a monk similar to me, fleeing the glory of men, will come and will live on Spruce Island. And Spruce Island will not be without people!” And to a twelve-year-old boy, Constantine Larionov — who as an adult was among those who supplied testimony for the Life — Herman is said to have asked whether the chapel then being built would be abandoned, and then answered his own question: “My child, remember that on this spot there will be a monastery in time” (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life). The repository notes, without adjudicating, that the prophecy of a future solitary monk is widely held within the tradition to have been fulfilled in Archimandrite Gerasim (Schmaltz), who lived alone on Spruce Island from 1935 until 1969 as guardian of the grave (see Local Veneration); this identification is a pious reading of the prophecy, attested in twentieth-century accounts, not a claim made by the 1867 Life itself.

The death of a hierarch. The Life adds that a year before news reached Kodiak of the death of a metropolitan in Russia — which one is not specified — Herman told the Aleuts that their great spiritual leader had died (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life). This account is the least anchored of the prophecies, naming neither the hierarch nor a precise date, and is reported here as exactly that.

The Pillar of Light at His Death

The Life dates Herman’s repose to the evening of November 15, 1836 (on the contested date, see Local Veneration). Those present — among them the disciple Gerasim Zyrianov, whom Herman had directed to light a candle and read the Acts of the Apostles as he died — reported that his face shone with light at the end (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life). The most celebrated sign is reported not by those at the hermitage but by witnesses across the water. The Life records that on that same evening, in the village of Katani on neighboring Afognak Island, an extraordinary pillar of light reaching to the heavens was seen standing over Spruce Island; the Creole Gerasim Vologdin and his wife Anna, seeing it, said to one another, “It looks like Father Herman has left us,” and began to pray. The same source adds that in another Afognak village that evening people saw what looked like a man being borne up from Spruce Island into the clouds (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life; OCA, “Repose of Venerable Herman,” oca.org).

Two points of attribution must be kept clear, since popular retellings garble them. The witnesses named for the pillar of light are the Vologdins of Afognak, not Gerasim Zyrianov; Zyrianov is the disciple at the deathbed who carried the whole account to Valaam, and is thus the channel of the report rather than the witness to the pillar. The pillar of light is therefore pinned to the testimony of Gerasim and Anna Vologdin, as transmitted through Zyrianov and recorded in the 1867 Life.

Posthumous Healings

The veneration that grew up at the grave is inseparable from accounts of healing attributed to Herman’s intercession, reported at his burial place at the Sts. Sergius and Herman chapel on Spruce Island and at the spring near his hermitage, whose water pilgrims have long carried away. These accounts are diffuse — gathered over more than a century of local devotion rather than fixed in a single early text — and the repository reports them as the cult’s living testimony rather than as documented cures: the kind of attestation that, accumulating from the 1840s onward, formed the popular basis the Church later recognized in the 1970 glorification (OCA, “The Saint Herman Pilgrimage in Alaska,” oca.org). The earliest such account anchored in the record is the 1842 deliverance of Archbishop Innocent’s ship from a storm, in thanksgiving for which Innocent served a memorial at Herman’s grave — the first recorded act of official veneration (see Local Veneration).

See Also

References

  • St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, trans. The Life of Our Holy Father Saint Herman of Alaska (the 1867 Valaam Life; repr. in Little Russian Philokalia, vol. 3). Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (Source of the flood, fire, prophecy, and pillar-of-light accounts and of the named witnesses Sophia Vlasova, Ignaty Aliaga, Constantine Larionov, the Vologdins, and Gerasim Zyrianov.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Venerable Herman of Alaska, Wonderworker of All America” (oca.org); “The Saint Herman Pilgrimage in Alaska — A Long Tradition” (oca.org).
  • Black, Lydia. Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004 (for the 1835–1840 smallpox epidemic and village consolidation).
  • Korsun, Sergei, and Lydia Black. Documentary scholarship on the Kodiak records and the dating of Herman’s repose (2012).