Repose and Canonization

St. Ignatius reposed quietly at the Nikolo-Babaevsky Monastery on April 30, 1867 — by the tradition, on the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women — after six fruitful years of seclusion and writing. His relics, later translated, now rest at the Tolga Monastery near Yaroslavl. He was glorified as a saint by the Jubilee Council of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) in June 1988, at the Millennium of the Baptism of Rus’, and is commemorated on April 30.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Repose (1867)

After six years of seclusion at the Nikolo-Babaevsky Monastery in the Kostroma diocese (see Retirement to Nikolo-Babaevsky), Bishop Ignatius died on April 30, 1867 — “quietly and in peace,” in the words of the Life (Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, OCA, Lives of the Saints, April 30). The Russian tradition records that his repose fell on the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, the third Sunday of Pascha — the feast of the women who came to the tomb of Christ — a fitting day, the hagiographers note, for the death of a bishop whose greatest work had been A Word on Death and whose whole teaching had set the remembrance of death at the center of the spiritual life (johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, OCA). He was sixty years old. The years that had begun in a brilliant renounced career and passed through long illness, restoration of monasteries, a difficult episcopate, and a fruitful seclusion ended in the quiet that he had sought all his life.

The shape of the death matches the shape of the life. The man who had been freed for monasticism by illness, who had written from a sickbed as often as from a desk, who had taught that the keeping of death before the eyes is the great sobering discipline, met his own death in peace, having spent his last strength giving the Church the books that would outlive him. The Lives present the end without drama: the sober writer died as soberly as he had lived.

The Relics

Brianchaninov was buried at the Nikolo-Babaevsky Monastery. In the Soviet period the monastery was closed and devastated, as were so many Russian houses, and the fate of his grave was bound up with that destruction. His relics were later recovered and translated, and now rest at the Tolga (Tolgsky) Monastery near Yaroslavl, on the Volga, where they are venerated (Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, OCA; johnsanidopoulos.com; Ignatius Brianchaninov, en.wikipedia.org). The translation of the relics and their enshrinement at Tolga belong to the revival of Russian church life that accompanied and followed his glorification.

The Glorification (1988)

For more than a century after his death Brianchaninov was revered unofficially — read, quoted, and loved across the Russian Orthodox world and in the diaspora — but he was not yet formally glorified. His formal canonization came in 1988, when he was glorified as a saint by the Jubilee Council (Local Council) of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) held in June 1988 to mark the Millennium of the Baptism of Rus’ — the thousand-year anniversary of the Christianization of the Kievan lands under St. Vladimir (Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, OCA, which dates the glorification to the Jubilee Council of June 6–9, 1988; Ignatius Brianchaninov, en.wikipedia.org). The 1988 council was a watershed in modern Russian church history: meeting as the Soviet grip was loosening, it glorified a group of saints — Brianchaninov among them — who together represented the spiritual depth of the Russian tradition the Church was emerging to reclaim. He is commemorated on April 30, the day of his repose.

The same Millennium council figures across this repository as the moment of glorification for several of the great modern Russian saints (St. Ambrose of Optina among them; see St. Ambrose of Optina), and Brianchaninov’s place in that company is significant: his glorification set the Church’s formal seal on the ascetical and theological tradition he had labored to transmit, recognizing the patristic writer and bishop as himself a Father and a saint.

It is worth registering what a canonization means and does not mean in the Orthodox understanding, because it bears directly on the disputed parts of his legacy. The glorification of a saint is the Church’s recognition that this person lived in genuine holiness and is now with God, an intercessor and a model — it is the certification of a life, not the canonization of every opinion the saint held. Orthodox saints have held theological views that were later not received, or that remain contested, without this in any way impugning their sanctity; holiness of life and the entire correctness of every theological judgment are distinct things. This distinction is precisely why the 1988 glorification of Brianchaninov does not settle the toll-houses dispute (see The Aerial Toll-Houses): the Church canonized the holy bishop and ascetical master, not a particular interpretation of the mytarstva, and his defenders and critics alike venerate him as a saint while continuing to debate that one element of his eschatology. To be glorified is to be recognized as holy; it is not to be declared infallible.

Commemoration and Veneration

Brianchaninov is commemorated liturgically on April 30 (his repose), and, where the Synaxis of saints of particular regions is kept, among the saints of Vologda, Kostroma, and the lands associated with his life and his relics. A service and akathist to the saint have been composed, and his veneration is widespread across the Russian Orthodox Church, ROCOR, and the wider Orthodox world. The Tolga Monastery near Yaroslavl, where his relics rest, is a place of pilgrimage; and his memory is honored, fittingly, less at shrines than in the continual reading of his books, which remain in print in Russian and English and are placed in the hands of novices, seminarians, and serious lay Christians as a primary guide to the spiritual life (Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, OCA; “Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov),” Holy Trinity Publications). The most characteristic form of his veneration is the one most in keeping with his life: a reader, with one of his volumes open, learning from the bishop who became an elder by the pen.

The Soviet Devastation and the Recovery

Between Brianchaninov’s death and his glorification lies the catastrophe of the twentieth century, and the fate of his memory and his relics cannot be understood apart from it. The Nikolo-Babaevsky Monastery, like the overwhelming majority of Russian monasteries, was closed and devastated in the Soviet period; the church life of which Brianchaninov had been an ornament was subjected to seventy years of persecution unprecedented in Christian history. That his writings survived this period at all — read in the emigration, preserved in private hands, smuggled and recopied within Russia, kept alive in the diaspora monasteries — is itself part of the story of his legacy (see Influence and Reception). His relics were recovered from the ruin of the old monastic world and translated to the Tolga Monastery near Yaroslavl, where they are venerated today (Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, OCA; johnsanidopoulos.com). The recovery of the relics and the glorification of 1988 belong to the same movement: the Russian Church, emerging from the catacombs, reclaiming the saints and the spiritual inheritance the Soviet state had tried to erase.

There is a providential fitness, often remarked, in the fact that Brianchaninov — the great teacher of how to keep the faith and the inner life in a weakened, hostile age — should have been glorified precisely as the Russian Church emerged from the hardest persecution it had ever endured. The bishop who had written for a generation he judged spiritually impoverished became a patron, in effect, of a generation that had been violently stripped of its monasteries, its elders, and its institutional supports, and that had to rebuild the spiritual life almost from the texts up. His counsel — rely on the Scriptures and the Fathers, distrust your own experience, proceed with sober humility, expect no elder and build on the written tradition — was counsel uncannily suited to the post-Soviet situation. The 1988 glorification gave the Church not only a saint but the very teacher its circumstances most required.

A Saint Who Is Read

There is a particular character to Brianchaninov’s sanctity that the reception history makes clear: he is, above all, a saint who is read. Unlike the wonderworking elders whose holiness is known chiefly through their miracles and their disciples’ testimony, Brianchaninov is known to most of the faithful through his books — through The Ascetical Experiences, The Arena, On the Prayer of Jesus, A Word on Death. His canonization is, in a real sense, the Church’s recognition of his teaching as well as his life: the glorification of a writer whose writings had already done, for more than a hundred years, the work of an elder for souls who had no elder. The afterlife of that teaching — its reach into the diaspora, into the convert world, into English, and back into post-Soviet Russia — is the subject of Influence and Reception.

References

Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, Bishop of the Caucasus and Stavropol. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, April 30. (Repose April 30, 1867, “quietly and in peace,” at the St. Nicholas Babaev Monastery; glorification by the Jubilee Council of the Moscow Patriarchate, June 1988; relics at Tolga Monastery near Yaroslavl; commemoration April 30.)
Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov), Bishop of the Caucasus and Black Sea (+ 1867). John Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com (2018). (The repose; the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women; the relics.)
“Ignatius Brianchaninov.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org (used to confirm the 1988 glorification and the relics at Tolga; cross-checked against the OCA Life).