Widowed and Consecrated (1838–1840)

The turning that lifted the missionary priest into the episcopate: the 1838–39 voyage to St. Petersburg and Moscow to report on the mission and arrange the printing of his translations and his Notes; the sudden death of his wife Ekaterina in Irkutsk in 1839 while he was in Russia; the decisive influence of Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow, who saw in the loss a sign of God’s will and urged him to monasticism; his tonsure as the monk Innocent in November 1840; and his consecration as Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands in December 1840.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

The Journey to Russia (1838–1839)

By 1838 Veniaminov had been fifteen years in America and had a great deal to show for it: a Christianized and partly literate Aleut people, translations and an alphabet, a scientific masterwork awaiting publication, and a hard new mission begun among the Tlingit. To advance all of this — to arrange the printing of his translations and his Notes, to report on the state of the mission to the Holy Synod and the Russian-American Company, and to press for more priests and a firmer church structure — he needed to go to Russia in person.

He left Novo-Arkhangelsk on 8 November 1838 aboard the brig *Sv. Nikolai* (St. Nicholas), taking his young daughter Feofila (Thekla) with him, and sailed the long way round the world — via Honolulu, Tahiti, around Cape Horn, to Rio de Janeiro, and on through Europe — reaching St. Petersburg in 1839 (Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), Canadian Orthodox History Project [orthodoxcanada.ca]; The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, OrthoChristian.com [orthochristian.com]). [Disputed: the sources give his arrival at St. Petersburg as either 25 June or 25 July 1839; the divergence is of weeks only.] In Russia he presented his “Review of the Orthodox Church in the Russian Settlements in America,” saw his translations and his Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District through the press, and made the rounds of the church and company authorities (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 5).

The voyage itself measures the strangeness of his situation. To reach the capital of his own empire, the priest of Unalaska and Sitka had to sail the better part of the way around the globe, because the sea lanes of the Russian-American Company ran east and south across the Pacific to Cape Horn rather than west across the closed Siberian interior. He travelled, in effect, as a passenger of the commercial machine that the mission was bound up with — the Company’s ships were the only road home — and the route is a small emblem of a recurring fact of his life: that the Church’s reach into Russian America was carried on the keels of the fur trade. The journey gave him, too, a long enforced interval of detachment from the daily mission and a first sight of the wider Orthodox and European world he had served from its furthest margin. He arrived in St. Petersburg not as a petitioner from nowhere but as a man whose scientific Notes and Aleut translations had begun to make his name; the doors of the Synod, the Academy of Sciences, and the great hierarchs were open to him (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 5).

The Death of Ekaterina (1839)

While he was in Russia, the central sorrow of his life befell him. His wife Ekaterina (Catherine), who had returned with their children to Irkutsk, died suddenly there on 25 November 1839 (Old Style) (Innokentii (Veniaminov), Drevo / Orthodox Encyclopedia [drevo-info.ru]; The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, OrthoChristian.com). He learned of her death far away, in European Russia, with no chance to have been at her side — the same separation by vast distance that the mission had imposed on the whole of their married life.

The loss left him a widower with young children and, by the discipline of the Orthodox Church, opened — or rather forced — a question about his future. A widowed priest does not remarry; for a man of Veniaminov’s stature and gifts, the natural path now lay toward monasticism and, very possibly, the episcopate, which in the Orthodox Church is reserved to monks. But that path meant leaving his children, and it was not one he sought.

Widowhood, Monasticism, and the Episcopate

The crisis was not merely personal but canonical, and it is worth pausing on the church order that framed it. In the Orthodox tradition a man may be ordained to the priesthood while married, but he may not marry after ordination, and a priest who is widowed does not take another wife. The married parish clergy and the celibate monastic clergy thus form two distinct paths, and the episcopate belongs to the second: since roughly the rise of monasticism in the fourth century, and as fixed by the canons of the church (the matter is regulated by the Council in Trullo of 691), bishops have been chosen from among the unmarried, and in the Russian practice a candidate who is not already a monk is tonsured to monasticism before his consecration (cf. the Orthodox canonical norm summarized in OrthodoxWiki, Consecration of a bishop). A widowed priest of exceptional gift therefore stood at a fork: he could remain a celibate widower-priest in the world, or he could embrace the monastic life and with it the whole hierarchical ministry. Veniaminov’s bereavement did not create the vocation, but it removed the one tie — a living wife — that had until then closed the monastic and episcopal door to him. This is the church-legal logic beneath what the hagiography presents as providence: the death of Ekaterina freed, even as it wounded, the man the Russian Church now wished to make a bishop.

The Hand of Metropolitan Filaret

The man who turned the loss toward the episcopate was Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow — the towering churchman of nineteenth-century Russia, the author of the imperial Catechism and the chief hierarch of the age (see Succeeding Filaret for the later connection). Filaret took the Alaskan missionary under his wing in Moscow, lodged him at the Trinity metochion, and pressed on him the conviction that his wife’s death was “an indication of God’s will” pointing him toward monastic vows and the leadership of a new American diocese. Crucially, Filaret also undertook to see that Veniaminov’s orphaned children would be cared for and educated — removing the chief obstacle in the widowed father’s mind (Innokentii (Veniaminov), drevo-info.ru; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 5). Provision was made for his daughters to enter an institute and for his sons’ schooling.

To grasp the weight of that counsel one must reckon with who Filaret was. Vasily Drozdov, in religion Filaret (1782–1867), was for some four decades — from his elevation to Moscow in 1821 until his death in 1867 — the most authoritative voice in the Russian Church, a theologian, preacher, and administrator of the first rank (Philaret Drozdov, Encyclopedia.com; OrthodoxWiki, Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow). His Longer Catechism, first issued in 1823 and revised thereafter, became the standard doctrinal handbook of the Russian Church and shaped Orthodox teaching far beyond Russia. So great was his reputation for integrity and judgment that the imperial government turned to him to compose the manifesto emancipating the serfs, promulgated in 1861 — a measure of the moral authority he commanded in the state as well as the Church. For such a man to take a frontier missionary into his confidence, to read his bereavement as a summons, and personally to guarantee the welfare of his orphaned children, was no small thing; it placed the whole prestige of the Russian Church behind the call. The relationship begun in 1840 would prove the hinge of Innocent’s later life: it was to Filaret’s own cathedra of Moscow that, on the old metropolitan’s death, Innocent would in 1868 be called (see Succeeding Filaret).

With his children’s future secured and Filaret’s counsel before him, Veniaminov consented. The decision is not to be sentimentalized: it cost him the daily fatherhood of his surviving children, who would be raised in institutions and in Filaret’s care rather than at his side, and it bound him for the rest of his life to a hierarchical office of crushing labor across a near-limitless diocese. The widower gained a church and lost a hearth.

Tonsure and Consecration (1840)

On 29 November 1840 (Old Style), the widowed archpriest Ioann Veniaminov was tonsured a monk by Metropolitan Filaret, receiving the name Innokentii (Innocent) in honor of St. Innocent (Kulchitsky), the first Bishop of Irkutsk — a fitting patron for a man of Irkutsk now to be a missionary bishop (Innokentii (Veniaminov), drevo-info.ru; Repose of St. Innocent, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]). The next day, 30 November 1840, he was raised to the rank of archimandrite.

Two weeks later, on 15 December 1840 (Old Style), Archimandrite Innocent was consecrated bishop — the first Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands, a vast new see created to govern the church of Russian America and the Russian Far East (Innokentii (Veniaminov), drevo-info.ru; Repose of St. Innocent, oca.org). The consecration took place in St. Petersburg, at the Cathedral of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God. [Disputed: the date of consecration is given as 15 December 1840 in the authoritative Russian sources (Drevo, the Orthodox Encyclopedia) and by the OCA; one devotional account gives 14 December — a divergence of a single day. The year and the title are not in question.]

The choice of monastic name was itself a kind of commissioning. To receive at his tonsure the name of St. Innocent (Kulchitsky) of Irkutsk — the eighteenth-century bishop who had himself once been bound for a mission to China and had instead labored in the very Siberian see-city where Veniaminov had begun and where Ekaterina now lay buried — was to be marked as the heir of a missionary line in eastern Siberia. The name knit the new bishop to Irkutsk, to the eastward apostolate, and to a sainted predecessor whose own diocese had touched the edges of the world Innocent was now to govern. In Orthodox understanding the consecration that followed conferred not a mere promotion but the fullness of the priesthood: by the laying-on of the hands of the consecrating bishops in succession from the apostles, the new bishop received the grace not only to celebrate every sacrament but to ordain others — to be, for his diocese, the source of its priesthood and the principle of its unity (cf. the Orthodox theology of episcopal consecration, OrthodoxWiki, Consecration of a bishop). For a missionary territory that had until then depended on priests sent from afar, this was decisive: Russian America would now have within itself the power to make its own clergy, and the seed of an indigenous Church (see The Immense Diocese on the Sitka seminary).

So the married parish priest who had volunteered for the Aleutians seventeen years earlier returned to America in 1841 as its first resident bishop. The name he carried back — Innocent — would become, in the next century, the name of a saint. And the man who had given it to him, Filaret of Moscow, had set in motion a chain that would end, nearly thirty years later, with Innocent himself sitting on Filaret’s own throne in Moscow (see The Immense Diocese and Succeeding Filaret).

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The 1838–39 journey to Russia; the printing of the translations and Notes; the death of Ekaterina; Filaret’s role; tonsure and consecration.)
Innokentii (Veniaminov). Drevo / Orthodox Encyclopedia tree (drevo-info.ru). (Ekaterina’s death 25 November 1839 in Irkutsk; tonsure 29 November 1840 by Filaret; name Innocent for St. Innocent of Irkutsk; archimandrite 30 November; consecration 15 December 1840 as Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands.)
Saint Innocent (Veniaminov). Canadian Orthodox History Project (orthodoxcanada.ca). (The 1838 departure aboard the Sv. Nikolai; the round-the-world voyage; arrival at St. Petersburg 1839; care of the children.)
The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity (Life of St. Innocent). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com). (The journey, the wife’s death, and Filaret’s counsel.)
Repose of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, March 31. (Tonsure and consecration as bishop.)
Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org); and Filaret (Drozdov), Encyclopedia.com. (Filaret’s dates 1782–1867; the Longer Catechism of 1823; his authorship of the 1861 emancipation manifesto; his standing as the leading Russian hierarch from 1821 to 1867.)
Consecration of a bishop. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (The Orthodox theology and canon law of episcopal consecration: the requirement that bishops be monastics, the tonsure of a non-monastic before consecration, and the bishop as the fullness of the priesthood with the power to ordain.)