Succeeding Filaret (1868)

The improbable final ascent: in 1868 the missionary bishop of the Aleutians, by then an old man, was elevated to the most senior see of the Russian Church — Metropolitan of Moscow — succeeding the towering St. Philaret (Drozdov), who had died in 1867 and who, nearly thirty years before, had tonsured Innocent a monk and sent him out as a bishop. The chapter traces the death of Filaret, Innocent’s reluctant appointment to the throne of Moscow, and the symmetry by which the man Filaret had raised up came to sit in Filaret’s own place.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

The Death of Filaret of Moscow

For nearly half a century the dominant figure of the Russian Church had been Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow (1782–1867) — theologian, author of the Longer Catechism, the man who drafted the manifesto emancipating the serfs, and the unrivaled hierarch of the age. It was Filaret who, in 1839–40, had taken the widowed Alaskan missionary under his wing, urged him toward monastic vows, secured the care of his children, tonsured him with the name Innocent, and seen him consecrated the first bishop of the American diocese (see Widowed and Consecrated). The whole episcopal career of Innocent had, in a real sense, begun in Filaret’s hands.

To grasp the weight of the succession, one must grasp the stature of the man Innocent followed. Filaret occupied the Moscow see — and with it, in practice, the leadership of the whole Russian Church — for more than four decades, from 1821 until his death in 1867, and was without serious rival the leading churchman of nineteenth-century Russia (Filaret (Drozdov), biographical surveys [stjohndc.org; en.wikipedia.org]). He was the dominant intellectual force of the Russian Church: the author of the Longer Catechism that shaped the religious formation of generations, a driving figure behind the Russian-language translation of the Bible (the work that became the Synodal Bible), and a churchman whose reputation for integrity made him the government’s chosen draftsman of the 1861 manifesto ending serfdom (Filaret (Drozdov) [en.wikipedia.org; encyclopedia.com]). His influence reached beyond the Church into Russian culture at large. The Moscow metropolitanate was not merely a large diocese; under Filaret it had become, in effect, the moral and theological center of gravity of Russian Orthodoxy. To succeed to that throne was to be set, at the very end of one’s life, at the head of the Church.

Filaret died on 19 November 1867 (Old Style), leaving the senior see of the Russian Church vacant (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; Innokentii (Veniaminov), Drevo / Orthodox Encyclopedia [drevo-info.ru]). The question of his successor was momentous, and the choice that the Holy Synod and the Emperor Alexander II made was, on its face, surprising.

The Missionary Called to Moscow

They chose Innocent — the seventy-year-old missionary archbishop of the Aleutians and Yakutsk, a man who had spent his whole ministry on the farthest frontiers of the empire, far from the corridors of Petersburg and the great cathedrals of Moscow. In the synodal system of the Russian Church the disposition of so senior a see lay with the Holy Synod and, ultimately, with the Emperor; the appointment of Innocent was an act of the Church and the state together, and it carried him, in his seventieth year, from the edge of the empire to its ecclesiastical heart. He was appointed Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna in early 1868, succeeding to the throne of his own spiritual father and patron (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki [orthodoxwiki.org]; Repose of St. Innocent, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]). [Disputed: the lives commonly date his succession to the see of Moscow to 5 January 1868 (Old Style), following Filaret’s death on 19 November 1867, with his formal entry into Moscow’s Dormition Cathedral on 26 May 1868; one source (OrthodoxWiki) gives the appointment date as 19 November 1867, but that is Filaret’s death-date and appears to be a conflation. The safe statement is that Innocent succeeded to Moscow in early 1868.]

By the accounts, Innocent received the appointment with reluctance. He was old, increasingly infirm, and his life’s work and love lay in the mission field, not in the administration of the empire’s premier diocese. But he obeyed, and in 1868 the priest who had set out from Irkutsk for the Aleutians forty-five years before came at last to Moscow as its chief shepherd (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, Part 2, OrthoChristian.com [orthochristian.com]).

The choice itself bears thinking about. In the Russian Church of the synodal period, the great metropolitan sees were ordinarily filled from the ranks of hierarchs schooled in the ecclesiastical academies of European Russia and seasoned in its central administration — not from the missionary periphery. Innocent was an anomaly: a married parish priest by origin, self-taught in much of his learning, who had spent his episcopate among the Aleut, the Tlingit, the Sakha, and the peoples of the Amur, as far from the capital as the empire reached. That such a man should be raised to the throne of Filaret was, in the judgment of the lives, a recognition that the frontier apostle had become, by the sheer weight of his labors and his sanctity, one of the foremost figures of the Church (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9). The reluctance was genuine and of a piece with his character; the Notes and letters of his Alaskan years show a man who measured himself by the work to be done rather than by rank, and who saw in high office chiefly a heavier burden of service. He came to Moscow not as a courtier rewarded but as a missionary conscripted to a last and unwelcome post.

The Symmetry of a Life

There is a striking symmetry in this that the tradition has not failed to notice. The young widowed missionary had been raised to the episcopate by Filaret of Moscow; the old missionary bishop now succeeded Filaret of Moscow. The man Filaret had sent to the ends of the earth returned, at the end of his life, to occupy Filaret’s own throne. The boy from a Siberian village who had been given the name of one Irkutsk hierarch (Bishop Veniamin) and the monastic name of another (St. Innocent of Irkutsk) ended as the first hierarch of the Russian Church (see Irkutsk and the Young Priest).

The bond between the two men gives the succession its human depth. It was not a stranger Innocent followed but his own patron and spiritual father — the hierarch who had counseled the bewildered widower in 1839, arranged for his children, tonsured him, and consecrated him a bishop. Whatever providence the tradition reads into the symmetry, the plain fact is that the missionary’s whole hierarchical life had unfolded under Filaret’s hand, from the tonsure to the episcopate, and now closed by his taking up Filaret’s own office and burden. The relationship runs through these chapters like a thread: the young priest raised up by the great metropolitan, the old bishop set in the great metropolitan’s place. That Filaret should have lived to see his protégé become an archbishop, and that Innocent should have succeeded him within months of his death, gives the careers of the two men an almost deliberate shape — the patron and the protégé occupying, in turn, the same throne of Moscow.

But Innocent did not come to Moscow to rest, nor did he forget the mission that had been his life. If anything, the elevation gave him, for the first time, a position from which to institutionalize the cause of mission across the whole Russian Church. The chief act of his Moscow years would be precisely that: the founding of a society to carry the missionary work he had pioneered to every frontier of the empire (see The Missionary Society). The frontier apostle had become a metropolitan, and he used the metropolitanate to serve the frontier.

The Moscow Years and the View Eastward

If the call to Moscow ended Innocent’s life as a missionary in the field, it did not end his missionary mind. From the senior see of the Russian Church he continued to think as the man who had crossed the Bering Sea by baidarka. Two great preoccupations marked his Moscow years, and both reached outward from the cathedral city toward the frontiers he had served. The first was the organization of the Church’s whole missionary effort, realized in the Orthodox Missionary Society he founded in 1870 (see The Missionary Society). The second was his continuing care for the American diocese, by then severed from Russia by the 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States — a care expressed in his striking counsel that the mission’s future lay with an English-using, American-facing Church (see Toward the American Church). The boy from the Siberian village of Anga, who had been named for one Irkutsk hierarch and tonsured with the name of another, governed from Moscow with his attention still fixed on the rim of the world.

There is in this a deeper point about the office he held. The Moscow metropolitanate gave Innocent leverage that no frontier bishop, however zealous, could ever have commanded: access to the resources of European Russia, the ear of the Synod and the Emperor, and the standing to make mission a permanent, funded, Church-wide undertaking rather than the lonely improvisation it had been in his own youth. The elevation that he received with such reluctance became, in his hands, the instrument by which the cause of his life was secured for the generation after him. He did not abandon the frontier when he came to Moscow; he brought the frontier to Moscow.

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The death of Filaret; Innocent’s reluctant appointment to Moscow in 1868; the symmetry with his 1840 consecration.)
Innokentii (Veniaminov). Drevo / Orthodox Encyclopedia tree (drevo-info.ru). (Filaret’s death 19 November 1867; Innocent’s succession to the Moscow see in early 1868.)
Innocent of Alaska. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (Elevation to Metropolitan of Moscow, 1868.)
Repose of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, March 31. (Succession to Filaret as Metropolitan of Moscow.)
The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity (Life of St. Innocent), Part 2. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com). (Innocent’s reluctance and his entry into the Moscow see.)
Filaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow — biographical surveys: St. Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow (stjohndc.org); Philaret Drozdov, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Filaret Drozdov, Metropolitan (encyclopedia.com). (Filaret’s four-decade leadership of the Russian Church, 1821–1867; the Longer Catechism; the Russian Bible translation; his drafting of the 1861 emancipation manifesto; his cultural stature.)