Legacy

The enduring legacy of St. Herman of Alaska: his standing as a patron saint of North America, the troparion and kontakion that sing him, St. Herman’s Seminary in Kodiak, the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood and Press at Platina, the living pilgrimage to Spruce Island, and the meaning that an unordained simple monk should be America’s first glorified saint.

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

Patron of North America

Since his glorification in 1970 (see The 1970 Glorification), St. Herman has been venerated as a patron saint of North America — the cornerstone of the continent’s synaxis of saints and the figure to whom the whole later American story is anchored (see The Saints of North America). The OCA titles him “Wonderworker of All America,” and his veneration is pan-Orthodox: he is honored across jurisdictions, in the calendar of the Russian Church and the Greek Archdiocese as much as the OCA and ROCOR. His commemorations are August 9 (his glorification) and December 13 / 25 N.S. (his repose), and he is named among the Synaxis of All Saints of Alaska (OCA, “Glorification of Venerable Herman of Alaska,” troparia, oca.org). That a saint who never left the far edge of the colonies should become patron of an entire continent’s Church is itself part of the meaning the tradition has drawn from him (see the closing section below).

The Troparion and Kontakion

The hymns appointed for St. Herman’s glorification give the tradition’s own reading of him: the missionary star, the planter of the Cross in America, the intercessor for “his land and its people.” The standard OCA translation reads:

Troparion (Tone 4):

O blessed Father Herman of Alaska, / north star of Christ’s holy Church, / the light of your holy life and great deeds / guides those who follow the Orthodox way. / Together we lift high the Holy Cross / you planted firmly in America. / Let all behold and glorify Jesus Christ, / singing his holy Resurrection.

Kontakion (Tone 3):

The eternal light of Christ our Savior / guided you, blessed Father Herman, / on your evangelical journey to America / to proclaim the Gospel of peace. / Now you stand before the throne of glory; / intercede for your land and its people: / Peace for the world and salvation for our souls!

(OCA, “Glorification of Venerable Herman of Alaska, Wonderworker of All America — Troparion & Kontakion,” oca.org. The OCA service books also carry an alternate troparion in Tone 7 — “Joyful North Star of the Church of Christ… adornment of the Orthodox Church in America” — used alongside the Tone 4.) The imagery is deliberately American and missionary: the “north star” guiding by, the Cross “planted firmly in America,” the “evangelical journey” west. The hymns do not dwell on Herman’s asceticism in the abstract; they read his hidden life on Spruce Island as the seed of a continent’s Church.

St. Herman’s Seminary, Kodiak

The chief institution bearing the saint’s name stands where his relics rest. St. Herman Theological Seminary in Kodiak, Alaska, grew from a resolution of the Alaskan Diocesan Assembly in September 1972 to establish a pastoral school for the training of Alaskan clergy — a leap of faith undertaken, in the school’s own account, “without funds, without buildings, without faculty, and even without a resident bishop.” Its first classes began February 1, 1973, at leased facilities near Kenai with fourteen students; the school moved to permanent facilities in Kodiak, near Holy Resurrection Cathedral, in 1974, was recognized by the OCA Holy Synod as a theological school in 1975, and was renamed a Theological Seminary in 1976 (St. Herman Theological Seminary, sthermanseminary.org; “Saint Herman Theological Seminary,” Wikipedia, used as locator). Its purpose is exactly the one the saint’s life prefigured: the formation of Orthodox clergy, catechists, and readers for the Alaskan native Church and beyond — the indigenous priesthood that Herman, and after him St. Jacob Netsvetov, had pointed toward (see Alaskan Orthodoxy After Herman).

The St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood and Press, Platina

The second great institution under Herman’s name belongs to a very different stream of American Orthodoxy: the convert and monastic movement of the late twentieth century. In 1963, two ROCOR converts — Eugene Rose, the future Fr. Seraphim (Rose), and Gleb Podmoshensky, the future Abbot Herman — founded the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood in San Francisco, naming it for the saint who was, in their reckoning, the first Orthodox saint of North America and the model of Orthodox missionary witness in the New World. From 1965 the Brotherhood published the influential English-language journal The Orthodox Word, and in 1969 it relocated to a remote wilderness hermitage near Platina, California, modeled on the Russian skete tradition (Christensen, Not of This World; see Fr. Seraphim Rose: Life and Context).

The Brotherhood’s St. Herman of Alaska Press at Platina became the principal English-language publisher of Russian hagiography and patristic spirituality of its generation — and, of direct relevance to this compendium, the publisher of the English St. Herman material itself: the Little Russian Philokalia, Volume 3, rendering the 1867 Valaam Life, is the St. Herman Brotherhood’s translation, and is the text on which much of this collection’s narrative depends (see The 1867 Valaam Life). It is a notable circularity worth naming: the brotherhood that did most to make Herman known to English-speaking America took its name from him, published his Life, and helped prepare the ground for the very glorification (1970) that the convert movement then celebrated. The connection to Fr. Seraphim Rose is thus not incidental — Herman was the patron under whose name a whole current of American convert Orthodoxy organized itself.

Spruce Island Pilgrimage Today

The veneration that began at a graveside (see Local Veneration) is, today, a living continental pilgrimage. Since 1973, when Bishop Gregory (Afonsky) instituted it, an annual pilgrimage to Kodiak and Spruce Island has been held each year around St. Herman’s August 9 feast, drawing Orthodox Christians from across North America (OCA, “The Saint Herman Pilgrimage in Alaska,” oca.org). Pilgrims venerate the major portion of the relics at Holy Resurrection Cathedral in Kodiak, then cross the strait to Spruce Island — to the Sts. Sergius and Herman of Valaam Chapel over the original grave, to the spring near the hermitage whose water pilgrims carry away, and to the forest where Herman kept his “New Valaam.” The shape of the pilgrimage preserves the cult’s exact continuity: the faithful still come to the place the Alutiiq kept and Archimandrite Gerasim guarded across the lean decades. The island remains a hermitage, not a developed shrine — a deliberate fidelity to the saint who chose obscurity.

America’s First Saint Was a Simple Monk

The final and most reflected-upon fact of the legacy is what kind of saint Herman was. The first Orthodox saint glorified on American soil was not a bishop, a martyr-hierarch, or a learned theologian, but an unordained simple monk — never a priest, never an abbot, holding no office, leaving almost no writings, living his last forty years as a hermit caring for orphans and defending the Aleuts on an island most of the empire never heard of.

Commentators within the tradition have made this central. Fr. Alexander Schmemann, reflecting on the 1970 canonization, read the glorification of so hidden and humble a figure as itself the lesson — that the American Church’s first saint testifies to sanctity as the gift of God to the lowly rather than the achievement of the powerful, and that a Church which begins its calendar with an unordained monk has its priorities ordered rightly (Schmemann, “Days of Light and Joy: On the Canonization of St. Herman,” oca.org). The convert movement around Platina read him the same way: Fr. Seraphim Rose’s brotherhood took Herman as the type of the poustinik, the wilderness-dweller whose missionary power lay in holiness and love rather than institutional position (Christensen, Not of This World; see Fr. Seraphim Rose: Life and Context). These are reflections of named authors, not claims of the 1867 Life; but they converge on a point the Life itself makes — that Herman’s whole authority was the authority of love (see Teaching on the Love of God). That a continent’s Church should rest its synaxis on such a man is the heart of the legacy.

References

Orthodox Church in America. “Glorification of Venerable Herman of Alaska, Wonderworker of All America — Troparion & Kontakion” (the Tone 4 troparion, Tone 3 kontakion, and Tone 7 troparion); “Days of Light and Joy: On the Canonization of St. Herman” (reflections of Fr. Alexander Schmemann); “The Saint Herman Pilgrimage in Alaska — A Long Tradition.” oca.org.
St. Herman Theological Seminary, sthermanseminary.org (founding 1972–73, Kodiak relocation, 1976 renaming); “Saint Herman Theological Seminary,” Wikipedia (used as locator, cross-checked against the seminary’s own history).
Christensen, Damascene (Hieromonk). Not of This World: The Life and Teaching of Fr. Seraphim Rose (and Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works). Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (The 1963 founding of the Brotherhood, The Orthodox Word, and the 1969 move to Platina.)
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.