Retirement to Nikolo-Babaevsky (1861–1867)

In October 1861 Bishop Ignatius, his health broken by the Caucasus, was released from his see and granted retirement to the Nikolo-Babaevsky (St. Nicholas Babaevsky) Monastery in the Kostroma diocese. There he spent the last six years of his life in seclusion, devoting himself to the editing, completion, and publication of his collected works and to a wide spiritual correspondence. These were the most fruitful years of his life: the sick bishop became, in retirement, the great ascetical writer of nineteenth-century Russia.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Release (1861)

After less than four years on the Caucasus frontier (see The Caucasus See), Bishop Ignatius petitioned to be released from the active governance of his see on grounds of failing health. The petition was granted, and he was permitted to retire to the Nikolo-Babaevsky Monastery (the Monastery of St. Nicholas of Babaevo) in the Kostroma diocese, on the Volga; the OCA Life dates the retirement to October 13, 1861 (Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, OCA, Lives of the Saints, April 30; Ignatius Brianchaninov, en.wikipedia.org). He retained his episcopal rank but laid down the burden of administration. The retirement was not disgrace but release: the Church, recognizing both his condition and his gifts, freed him from the diocese so that he could give it something only seclusion would permit.

Six Years of Seclusion

The years from 1861 to 1867 at Nikolo-Babaevsky were years of withdrawal into the stillness he had sought his whole life and rarely been allowed. Freed at last from the administration that had filled his decades at the St. Sergius Hermitage and the strain of the Caucasus see, he lived in monastic quiet, gave himself to prayer, and turned the whole of his remaining strength to his writing and his correspondence with spiritual children (Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, OCA; johnsanidopoulos.com). The sources describe these as years of intense and concentrated literary labor: he revised earlier essays, composed new ones, and arranged the body of his work into the collected form in which it would reach the Church.

There is a fittingness in the shape of it that the tradition savors. The man whose deepest desire had always been for stillness, and who had been pulled out of it again and again by his abilities and his obediences, received in the end exactly what he had wanted — and used it not for himself alone but to produce the books that would guide others. The seclusion he had longed for as an escape from the world became the workshop of his service to it.

The Harvest of the Writings

The retirement years are when Brianchaninov’s corpus took its final form. The materials worked out over the St. Petersburg decades were now edited, completed, and published. It is from this period that the collected works as the Church knows them issue: the multi-volume Polnoe sobranie tvorenii (Complete Collected Works), with The Ascetical Experiences (Asketicheskie opyty) as its heart (see The Ascetical Experiences), the Ascetical Sermon, The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism (Prinoshenie sovremennomu monashestvu; see The Arena), the Patericon, and — composed and refined in these years — A Word on Death (Slovo o smerti) with its Supplement on the nature of created spirits, the work that contains his most influential and most contested teaching (see The Aerial Toll-Houses and Against Rationalism and Romanticism).

The first major collected editions of his works appeared at the very end of his life and in the years immediately following — The Arena, his offering to monasticism, is associated with the year of his death, 1867 (“The Arena,” Holy Trinity Publications; biblio.com edition note). The retirement, in other words, did not merely give him leisure; it gave the Church the finished books. Without these six years of seclusion, the essays would have remained scattered and incomplete; with them, Brianchaninov became a coherent body of teaching.

Correspondence

Alongside the editing of the works, Ignatius carried on a wide spiritual correspondence from Nikolo-Babaevsky, directing monastics and laypeople by letter (Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, OCA; johnsanidopoulos.com). This correspondence is itself part of his legacy: the letters extend the same sober, patristic, repentance-centered counsel found in the formal works to particular souls in particular circumstances, and they form a significant portion of the collected writings. The bishop who had lamented the scarcity of living elders (see The Search for an Elder) became, in his seclusion, a kind of elder-by-letter to those who wrote to him — the very model of guidance-through-writing that his diagnosis of the age had called for.

The Shape of the Collected Works

It is in these years that the architecture of the Polnoe sobranie tvorenii — the Complete Collected Works as the Church now reads them — was settled, and it is worth setting out that architecture, because it is the map of his whole achievement. The standard arrangement gives the corpus a shape that mirrors the movement of the spiritual life itself: the first two volumes, The Ascetical Experiences (Asketicheskie opyty, Parts I–II), gather the essays on the active and contemplative life — repentance, prayer, the passions, the reading of the Fathers, the Jesus Prayer, weeping, discernment (see The Ascetical Experiences); the third volume carries A Word on Death (Slovo o smerti) with its Supplement on the nature of created spirits — the eschatology and the metaphysics of spirit (see The State of the Soul and Against Rationalism and Romanticism); the fourth volume holds the Ascetical Sermon (Asketicheskaya propoved’) and The Arena (Prinoshenie sovremennomu monashestvu; see The Arena); and the fifth volume the Patericon (Otechnik), his compilation of the desert Fathers (see Reading the Fathers). From the active life, through prayer, to death and the world of spirits, to the monastic offering, to the patristic foundation: the order of the volumes is itself a catechesis.

This editorial labor — the revising of decades-old essays, the completion of unfinished treatises, the arrangement of the whole into a coherent body — was the specific gift of the retirement. The materials existed before; the book did not. What the six years of seclusion added was form: the transformation of a life’s worth of scattered ascetical writing into the ordered corpus that could function, for generations who would never meet him, as the elder he believed the age could no longer supply.

Stillness Achieved and Given Away

There is a quiet irony, fully in keeping with his teaching, in the way these years resolved the great tension of his life. For thirty years Brianchaninov had longed for stillness and been denied it, pulled out of the cell again and again by his gifts and his obediences (see Archimandrite Near the Capital). When stillness finally came, it came not as a reward to be enjoyed in private but as a workshop to be spent in service. He did not use his seclusion to disappear into wordless contemplation; he used it to write, edit, and correspond — that is, to give the stillness away in the form of books and letters that would bring others toward the prayer he had sought. This is the very pattern he taught: that the goal of the inner life is not private spiritual enjoyment but the love that pours itself out, and that the fruit of stillness is meant to feed others. He had taught it for decades; in the Nikolo-Babaevsky years he enacted it, turning the long-deferred gift of solitude into the lasting gift of his corpus.

The end of these years — his quiet death on the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women in 1867, and the glorification that came more than a century later — is told in Repose and Canonization.

The Letters as a Genre of Eldership

The spiritual correspondence of the Nikolo-Babaevsky years (and indeed of his whole life) deserves to be considered as a distinct and important part of his legacy, for it is here that the abstract counsel of the formal treatises becomes concrete, personal, and pastoral. In the letters Brianchaninov addresses particular souls in particular circumstances — a monk struggling with a specific temptation, a layperson bereaved or anxious or in spiritual confusion, a directee uncertain how to pray — and gives them the precise word their condition requires. The same sober, patristic, repentance-centered teaching found in The Ascetical Experiences appears in the letters adapted to the individual: gentler where gentleness is needed, firmer where firmness is needed, always grounded in the Scriptures and the Fathers and always pointed toward humility and the mercy of Christ. The letters form a substantial portion of the collected works and are among the most beloved and accessible of his writings, precisely because they show the doctrine in application, addressed to a real person with a real problem.

This epistolary ministry is the fullest realization of the very thing his diagnosis of the age had called for. He had lamented the scarcity of living elders and prescribed, in their place, guidance by the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the counsel of the prudent (see Discernment for a Weakened Age). In his correspondence he became himself exactly such a counselor — not a charismatic elder claiming infallible authority, but a wise, learned, humble guide directing souls by letter according to the patristic norm. The model of “eldership by the pen” that his whole career embodies is most literally visible here: a sick bishop in seclusion, answering letters, functioning as a spiritual father to people he would mostly never meet, through the written word.

See Also

References

  • Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, Bishop of the Caucasus and Stavropol. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, April 30. (Retirement October 13, 1861, to the St. Nicholas Babaev Monastery, Kostroma diocese; the years of literary labor and correspondence; repose there April 30, 1867.)
  • Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov), Bishop of the Caucasus and Black Sea (+ 1867). John Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com (2018). (Retirement to Nikolo-Babaevsky in seclusion for the remaining six years; devotion to writing and correspondence.)
  • “The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism.” Holy Trinity Publications (holytrinitypublications.com) and the edition note at biblio.com. (The Arena published from the Russian Prinoshenie sovremennomu monashestvu, associated with the year of his death, 1867, after some forty years of monastic life.)
  • “Ignatius Brianchaninov.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org (used to confirm the retirement to Nikolo-Babaevsky in 1861 and the death in 1867; cross-checked against the OCA Life).
  • Brianchaninov, Ignatius. Polnoe sobranie tvorenii [Complete Collected Works]. (The collected works given final form in the Nikolo-Babaevsky retirement.)