The Immense Diocese (1840–1868)

The twenty-eight years of Bishop (from 1850 Archbishop) Innocent’s rule over one of the largest dioceses in Christian history: a see stretching from the Aleutian Islands across Kamchatka to the Lena and the Amur; his elevation to archbishop in 1850; the transfer of his residence to Yakutsk in 1853 and the great program of translating Scripture and the services into Yakut, crowned by the first Liturgy in the Sakha language in 1859; and his role, through his friendship with Governor-General Muraviev, in the Russian advance to the Amur.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

A See Beyond Measure

The diocese to which Innocent was consecrated in 1840 (see Widowed and Consecrated) was almost beyond imagining in its extent. The Diocese of Kamchatka, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands reached from the Aleutian chain and the Alaskan mainland in the east, across the whole North Pacific, to the Kamchatka peninsula and the vast interior of the Russian Far East — and over the following decades it expanded further still, to take in the Yakutsk region and the Amur. To govern it, a bishop had to be a traveler on an epic scale, crossing oceans, tundra, taiga, and mountain ranges by ship, sledge, horse, and boat. Innocent did this for nearly thirty years, returning to America, crossing Siberia repeatedly, and pushing the frontier of the Church eastward and southward as the empire itself expanded (Garrett, St. Innocent, chs. 6–8; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), Canadian Orthodox History Project [orthodoxcanada.ca]).

He returned to Sitka as bishop in 1841 and made it his base for the next decade, founding there a seminary to train clergy — including native and creole clergy — for the American mission, the institutional seed of an indigenous Alaskan Church (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 6; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 5; see Toward the American Church). It was from this seminary, and on the strength of the episcopal power to ordain that his 1840 consecration had conferred, that Innocent raised up the first native Alaskan priest, the Aleut-creole St. Jacob (Iakov) Netsvetov, who carried the Gospel to the Yup’ik of the Kuskokwim and was glorified by the Church in 1994 (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 5; see The Principles of Mission). On 21 April 1850 he was raised to the rank of archbishop (Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki [orthodoxwiki.org]; Repose of St. Innocent, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]).

The Peoples of the See

To name the diocese is to name a roll-call of peoples and lands almost without parallel in any single bishop’s charge. At its eastern edge stood the Unangan (Aleut) and the creoles of the island chain, the Alutiiq and Yup’ik of the Alaskan mainland, and the Tlingit of the southeastern coast, among whom the mission had only begun to make headway (see Smallpox and the Turning). Across the North Pacific lay the Kamchadal (Itelmen), Koryak, and Chukchi of the Kamchatka peninsula and the far northeast; the Tungus (Evenki and Even) of the taiga; and, when the see expanded inland, the Sakha (Yakut) of the Lena basin — a numerous Turkic-speaking, cattle- and horse-herding people quite unlike the maritime hunters of the coast. Later still came the mixed Russian, indigenous, and migrant populations of the Amur valley. No single language, climate, or way of life held this multitude together; the bishop who governed them had to move between sea-otter hunters in baidarkas and Yakut herdsmen on the frozen Lena, and to think the same missionary thought — the Gospel in the people’s own tongue — across the whole impossible breadth of it (Garrett, St. Innocent, chs. 6–8; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska).

The Move to Yakutsk and the Yakut Translations

The Labor of Governing

What it meant, in practice, to be the bishop of such a see can scarcely be exaggerated. A diocese is governed by visitation — the bishop must see his clergy, confirm his churches, ordain, and judge — and here the routes of visitation ran for thousands of miles across some of the harshest country on earth. To cross from the American to the Asian half of his charge was to cross the North Pacific by sailing ship; to reach the interior mission was to travel the rivers and the post-roads of Siberia by sledge in winter and boat in summer, over distances that swallowed months. Innocent did this for nearly three decades, well into old age and failing eyesight, with the physical hardihood of the Siberian-born priest he had always been. The episcopate of the immense diocese was not an office of the desk but of the road, and the wonder is less that the mission advanced unevenly than that one man held so vast a territory together at all (Garrett, St. Innocent, chs. 6–8).

As the diocese’s center of gravity shifted toward the Asian mainland, so did its bishop. The Yakutsk region was attached to his diocese in 1852, and in September 1853 Archbishop Innocent took up residence at Yakutsk, on the Lena River in eastern Siberia, to be closer to the immense interior mission (Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 7). There he repeated, on a grand scale, the work he had begun among the Aleuts a generation earlier: the giving of Scripture and worship to a people in their own tongue.

He established, in 1853, a committee for translating the sacred and liturgical books into Yakut (Sakha), and under his direction the work proceeded with remarkable speed and scope. The committee drew on the labors of native and Russian clergy who knew the language — most notably the archpriest Dmitrii Khitrov, who at Innocent’s prompting compiled a Yakut grammar and dictionary, furnishing the scholarly apparatus a writing enterprise required (The Influence of Church Translations on Subsequent Sakha (Yakut) Literature, Orthodox Research Institute [orthodoxresearchinstitute.org]). By the summer of 1859 there had been translated and printed at the Moscow Synodal Press: the New Testament (apart from Revelation), Genesis and the Psalms, and the chief liturgical books — the Sluzhebnik (Liturgy), the Trebnik (Book of Needs), the Canonnik, and the Horologion (Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki; Orthodox Research Institute materials). On 19 July 1859 (Old Style), in the Trinity Cathedral of Yakutsk, Archbishop Innocent celebrated the first Divine Liturgy ever served in the Yakut language — a day the Sakha tradition remembers as a turning point in its Christian history (Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki; Orthodox Research Institute). The vernacular principle worked out on a single Aleutian island had become the policy of a diocese spanning a continent.

Why the Yakut Books Mattered

The significance of the Yakut enterprise reaches beyond the Church. To translate the Scriptures and the services into Sakha, the committee had first to fix the language in writing on a scale not attempted before — to settle an orthography, to coin or stretch vocabulary for unfamiliar theological matter, and to commit a hitherto largely oral tongue to print. The Gospel was published in Yakut in 1857 and the body of liturgical books soon after, and scholars of Sakha literature have credited this church translation work with helping to lay the foundations of a Yakut literary language and of native literacy: through the translated books the Sakha gained not only the faith but the instrument of a written culture (The Influence of Church Translations on Subsequent Sakha (Yakut) Literature, Orthodox Research Institute). Here the deepest logic of Innocent’s method shows itself. The vernacular principle was never merely a tactic of conversion; it was a conviction that a people meets God most truly in its own speech, and that to give a people Scripture in its language is to dignify the language — and so the people — as a fit vessel of the holy. The same act that made the Sakha Christian made the Sakha a literary nation. This is the Orthodox missionary instinct in its purest nineteenth-century form, and the day in the Trinity Cathedral when the Liturgy was first chanted in Sakha was its high point in Siberia, answering across thirty years and a hemisphere to the first Aleut book on Unalaska (see Language and the First Aleut Book and The Principles of Mission).

The Amur and Muraviev

The last great expansion of Innocent’s diocese followed the Russian Empire’s advance to the Amur River in the 1850s. Innocent had a long and warm friendship with Count Nikolai N. Muraviev (afterward Muraviev-Amursky), the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia and the architect of the Russian acquisition of the Amur basin (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 8; The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, Part 2, OrthoChristian.com [orthochristian.com]). Innocent traveled the river, supported the settlement of its valley, and on 9 May 1858 joined Muraviev in laying the foundation stone of a church at the Ust-Zeya settlement — the future city of Blagoveshchensk (“Annunciation”), named in memory of the Annunciation church in Irkutsk where Innocent’s own ministry had begun (see Irkutsk and the Young Priest). Within weeks, on the Russian side, the Treaty of Aigun (May 1858) confirmed Russian rights to the Amur and Ussuri lands.

Honesty about this requires a distinction. Innocent was a churchman, not a diplomat; he was no party to the Aigun negotiations, which Muraviev conducted with the Qing officials. What the sources attest is his friendship with Muraviev, his advocacy of the strategic and pastoral importance of the Amur, and his on-the-ground presence at the founding of Blagoveshchensk — the moral and ecclesiastical wing of the Russian advance, not its negotiator (The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, OrthoChristian.com; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 8). It is a part of his story that belongs to the candid account of a mission entangled with empire: the same bishop who gave the Sakha their Liturgy also blessed the imperial expansion that carried the Russian Church to the Pacific frontier. The episcopal see itself moved with the frontier, shifting toward Blagoveshchensk on the Amur as the diocese’s eastern Asian work grew.

The candor should cut both ways, and not collapse into a single verdict. On the one side, the Amur episode shows how thoroughly the mission was woven into the fabric of empire: the Church followed the soldier and the surveyor down the river, the new diocesan town rose where the strategic frontier was being drawn, and the bishop’s enthusiasm for the Amur was inseparable from the state’s. To pretend otherwise would falsify the record. On the other side, the same continuity of conviction runs through the imperial frame as through the missionary one. The man laying the foundation stone at Ust-Zeya was the man who had refused to baptize the unwilling on Unalaska and was even then printing the Liturgy in Sakha; the Blagoveshchensk he helped found was named, at his wish, for the Annunciation — for the Irkutsk church of his own beginnings, not for a conquest (see Irkutsk and the Young Priest). The honest account neither launders the entanglement nor reduces Innocent to its instrument: he was a pastor who believed the advance of Russia opened a field for the Gospel, and who carried into that field a method markedly gentler than the imperial setting around it. The tension between the two is not resolved in his story; it is his story.

By the mid-1860s the immense diocese had been carried about as far as one man could carry it. In 1867 Russia sold Alaska to the United States, severing the American limb of the see; and in 1868 the death of Filaret of Moscow would call Innocent away from the frontier altogether, to the very center of the Russian Church (see Succeeding Filaret).

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The extent and travels of the diocese; the Sitka seminary; the move to Yakutsk; the Yakut translations; the Amur and Muraviev.)
Innocent of Alaska. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (Archbishop 21 April 1850; Yakutsk region attached 1852; residence at Yakutsk from September 1853; Yakut translation committee 1853; first Yakut Liturgy 19 July 1859 in Yakutsk’s Trinity Cathedral.)
The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity (Life of St. Innocent), Part 2. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com). (The friendship with Muraviev; the Amur travels; the founding of Blagoveshchensk on 9 May 1858.)
Oleksa, Michael J. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992. (The Sitka seminary and the formation of native clergy.)
Repose of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, March 31. (The episcopate and its expansion.)
Saint Innocent (Veniaminov). Canadian Orthodox History Project (orthodoxcanada.ca). (The diocese and its travels.)
Burtsev, A. A. The Influence of Church Translations on Subsequent Sakha (Yakut) Literature. Orthodox Research Institute (orthodoxresearchinstitute.org). (The 1853 translation committee; Archpriest Dmitrii Khitrov’s Yakut grammar; the publication of the Gospel in Yakut in 1857 and of liturgical books; the role of the church translations in forming a Yakut written and literary language.)