The Missionary Society (1870–1879)

The crown of St. Innocent’s Moscow years and the institutional legacy of his life: the founding in 1870 of the Orthodox Missionary Society, which mobilized the whole Russian Church for the support of missions at home and abroad and which he chaired as Metropolitan of Moscow; his blindness in old age, borne with the equanimity that had marked his whole life; and his death on Holy Saturday, 31 March 1879, and burial at the Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

A Society for the Whole Church’s Mission

Innocent came to Moscow in 1868 (see Succeeding Filaret) as the most experienced missionary in the Russian Church, and he used the authority of the metropolitanate to do what no frontier bishop could have done alone: to organize the support of mission as a permanent task of the entire Church. The instrument he created was the Orthodox Missionary Society (Pravoslavnoe Missionerskoe Obshchestvo).

The Society was founded in 1870, with its charter formally approved on 21 November 1869 and its operations beginning the following year; Metropolitan Innocent became its first chairman and led it for the rest of his life (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, Part 2, OrthoChristian.com [orthochristian.com]; Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki [orthodoxwiki.org]). [Disputed: the Society is generally dated to 1870 (its founding and the start of operations), while one detailed life dates the charter’s formal approval to 21 November 1869; “founded 1870, charter approved 1869” reconciles the two.] Its purpose was to gather support — funds, personnel, and prayer — from across the empire for the missions among the non-Christian and newly-Christian peoples of Russia: the peoples of Siberia, the Far East, Central Asia, and the American diocese. Through a network of diocesan branches it drew the ordinary faithful of European Russia into the support of distant missions they would never see, turning the lonely frontier labor that Innocent had once carried almost alone into a shared work of the whole Church. The Society remained the chief engine of Russian Orthodox mission until it was swept away by the Revolution in 1917.

That the great missionary of the Aleutians should end his life as the founder and chairman of the Church’s missionary society is the most fitting possible capstone. The man who had once been the only priest for a thousand miles of the Bering Sea built the structure that would send out and sustain his successors.

The Society and the Russian Mission of the Nineteenth Century

The founding of the Society must be set against the wider awakening of Russian Orthodox mission in the nineteenth century. Through its local chapters across the empire, the Society raised funds to support churches, schools, hospitals, and the publication of Scripture and service-books in native tongues, both within the Russian Empire and beyond it (History of Missiology: Innocent (Veniaminov), Boston University [bu.edu/missiology]; The Alaskan Mission (1794–1870), Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]). It was part of a broader effort that included figures such as Nikolai Il’minskii, whose system of educating native peoples in their own languages — close in spirit to Innocent’s own vernacular method — shaped Russian missionary practice among the Tatars and other peoples of the Volga and the East. Innocent’s Society did not invent Russian mission, but it gave that mission, for the first time, a permanent institutional home and a Church-wide base of support.

The genius of the arrangement was its breadth. By drawing the ordinary faithful of European Russia — through diocesan branches, parish collections, and the prayer of those who would never see a mission field — into the support of distant work, the Society made mission the concern of the whole Church rather than the vocation of a heroic few. It is the difference between the young Innocent setting out almost alone for islands no one else would serve, and the old Innocent presiding over a network that could send and sustain many. The Society remained the principal engine of Russian Orthodox mission, funding work among the peoples of Siberia, the Far East, Central Asia, and the American diocese, until the Revolution of 1917 swept it away along with so much else of the institutional Church (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; History of Missiology [bu.edu/missiology]).

Blindness and Old Age

Innocent’s last years were marked by the failure of his eyesight. He had strained his eyes for decades — over manuscripts, translations, and the close work of his crafts, often in poor light and harsh weather — and in his old age he went largely blind, requiring constant assistance to carry on the work of his great see (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, Part 2, OrthoChristian.com). His son aided him. The accounts dwell on the equanimity with which he bore this affliction, of a piece with the simplicity and patience that had characterized him from his frontier days; the title of the standard OrthoChristian life — The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity — captures the impression he left.

Blind, aged, and worn by a life of almost incredible labor and travel, he nonetheless continued to govern the Moscow metropolitanate and to direct the Missionary Society to the end.

There is a particular fittingness in the cause of the blindness. Much of it, the lives note, was the price of his own labors: the years bent over manuscripts and translations, the close craft-work — carpentry, clock-making, the making of instruments — at which he had been so skilled, carried on in the dim light and harsh conditions of the Alaskan and Siberian winters. The very industry that had given the Aleut their first book and built churches with his own hands had, over decades, worn out his eyes. That he bore the loss without complaint, governed on, and let his son serve as his eyes, struck those around him as the natural last chapter of a life marked throughout by what the standard life calls “holy simplicity” — the same unforced humility and equanimity that had carried him across the Bering Sea by baidarka and that now carried him, sightless, through the duties of the empire’s first see (The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, Part 2, OrthoChristian.com; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9).

Death on Holy Saturday (1879)

Metropolitan Innocent died on 31 March 1879 (Old Style) — Great and Holy Saturday, the day of the Lord’s repose in the tomb before the Resurrection (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; Repose of St. Innocent, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]; Innokentii (Veniaminov), Drevo [drevo-info.ru]). He was eighty-one years old. To die on Holy Saturday — at the very threshold of Pascha, the feast of resurrection — was felt by the faithful to be a grace befitting his life, and the coincidence is dwelt on in the tradition.

Holy Saturday holds a particular place in the Orthodox understanding of death. It is the day on which the Church keeps the Lord’s body lying in the tomb and, in the same breath, sings of the harrowing of hell — the descent by which Christ, dead in the flesh, breaks open the gates of Hades and leads out the captives. It is the threshold day, the hinge between the Cross and the empty tomb, when the Church already begins to turn toward the Resurrection it has not yet proclaimed. For a Christian to die on that day is, in the reading of the faithful, to fall asleep precisely where the whole hope of the Gospel is concentrated: in the confidence that death is not an end but a passage, and that the tomb is the antechamber of the Resurrection. The tradition does not treat the coincidence as a mere accident of the calendar but as a sign — a last fittingness granted to a life spent carrying the Paschal proclamation to peoples who had never heard it. Here too the methodology of this collection applies: the meaning read into the date is reported as the tradition’s reading, pinned to its sources, not certified as a fact about providence (see METHODOLOGY.md).

He was buried on 5 April 1879 at the Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit (Svyato-Dukhovskaya church) at the Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra at Sergiev Posad, near Moscow, the heart of Russian monasticism — where his relics rest (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9; Innokentii (Veniaminov), drevo-info.ru). The choice of resting-place was itself eloquent. The Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra, founded in the fourteenth century by St. Sergius of Radonezh, is the great mother-monastery of the Russian Church and the spiritual heart of Russian Orthodoxy — the place from which, by long tradition, the renewal of Russian monastic and missionary life has flowed. To lay the apostle of the Aleuts there, among the springs of Russian holiness, joined the newest frontier of the Church to its most ancient center: the missionary who had carried the faith to the edge of the world was gathered home to the place where Russian sanctity had its source.

Nearly a century later, the man buried there as a beloved missionary metropolitan would be glorified by the Church he had served as a saint Equal-to-the-Apostles (see Canonization 1977).

So ended the life of the boy from Anga: parish priest, baidarka missionary, linguist and scientist, builder and clockmaker, bishop of an Alaska-to-Amur diocese, Metropolitan of Moscow, and founder of the Church’s missionary society — fifty-six years after he had set out from Irkutsk for the Aleutian Islands that no one else would serve.

The shape of that ending repays a last reflection. The man who died at the Lavra in 1879 had begun as a married village priest with no expectation of greatness, had crossed an ocean to serve peoples his Church had barely reached, and had been carried by his own labors — almost against his will at the last — to the summit of the Russian Church. Yet the two works of his Moscow years were not a turning-away from his beginnings but their fulfillment. The Missionary Society universalized the lonely frontier vocation of his youth, making the support of mission the standing task of the whole Church; and his counsel for the orphaned American diocese carried his vernacular principle onto a new continent (see Toward the American Church). Even his blindness and his death held the marks of his character — the eyes worn out in the Church’s service, the repose granted on the threshold of Pascha. The last chapter, in other words, did not interrupt the story but completed it: the frontier apostle ended as the Church’s chief shepherd, and used that office, to his final breath, to serve the frontier.

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The founding of the Orthodox Missionary Society; the blindness of his last years; death on Holy Saturday 1879; burial at the Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra.)
The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity (Life of St. Innocent), Part 2. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com). (The Missionary Society and Innocent’s chairmanship; his blindness and holy simplicity.)
Innocent of Alaska. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (The Orthodox Missionary Society, 1870.)
Repose of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, March 31. (Death 31 March 1879 on Holy Saturday.)
Innokentii (Veniaminov). Drevo / Orthodox Encyclopedia tree (drevo-info.ru). (Death 31 March 1879; burial 5 April 1879 at the Holy Spirit church, Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra.)
Innocent, Veniaminov (1797–1879). History of Missiology, Boston University School of Theology (bu.edu/missiology). (The founding of the Russian Orthodox Missionary Society in 1870 and the funding of churches, schools, hospitals, and publishing across and beyond the empire; the Society’s continuance until the Revolution.)
The Alaskan Mission (1794–1870). Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Orthodox Christians in North America, ch. 1. (The Missionary Society’s support of home and foreign missions through local chapters.)