The Kronstadt Assignment: Marriage, Ordination, and the Turn to the Poor

St. John of Kronstadt’s marriage to Elizaveta Nesvitskaya and his ordination in 1855, the contested question of their celibate marriage presented in both its hagiographic and its archival registers, the social character of Kronstadt as a naval fortress and a dumping-ground for the capital’s exiled poor, his early shock at its destitution and the radical generosity that followed, and the ridicule his innovations drew from his own colleagues. The chapter follows the methodology’s “present both positions” rule on the marriage question.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified ROCOR 1964, Moscow Patriarchate 1990)

Marriage and the Door to the Priesthood (1855)

On graduating from the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1855, John married Elizaveta Konstantinovna Nesvitskaya (also transliterated Nesvitskaia; rendered Nesvidskaya in some sources), the daughter of Archpriest Konstantin Nesvitsky of St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Kronstadt (Aristotle Pisiotis, lecture on St. John of Kronstadt, jordanville.org, drawing on Kizenko; “John of Kronstadt,” en.wikipedia.org). Under the Russian hereditary-clergy system, a clerical post commonly passed with a marriage into the family that held it: Nesvitsky was retiring, and marriage to his daughter was effectively the condition of taking the vacancy at the cathedral (Antiochian Archdiocese of Los Angeles, devotional life of “Elizabeth Constantinovna,” antiochianladiocese.org). John was thus ordained to the very cathedral the tradition says he had seen in his dream.

The Celibate Marriage: Two Registers

The character of this marriage is the single most contested point in John’s biography, and the methodology requires that both the devotional and the critical accounts be set out side by side.

The hagiographic tradition holds that John resolved, at the very outset, to live with Elizaveta as brother and sister — an unconsummated “white marriage” — so as to free himself wholly for pastoral and charitable labor. The marriage produced no children and was never consummated. The widely circulated saying of this register has John telling his bride, “Happy people, Liza, can get along without marriage. Let us dedicate ourselves to serving God.” (The affectionate “Liza” is independently attested in the memoir of the couple’s niece Rufina Shemyakina, who records him calling her “Liza”; the exact wording of the full sentence, however, is traditional and not located in a primary source, and should be treated as devotional.) This register concedes an initial unhappiness but resolves it into willing sacrifice: “although at first his wife was unhappy with this idea, she came not only to accept it, but to be an invaluable help and support to him,” cherishing John as a “common treasure” (Antiochian Archdiocese PDF, citing the niece’s memoir).

Kizenko’s archival treatment frames the same union far less smoothly. She presents the celibate marriage as a choice John made unilaterally — “without much regard for his wife’s opinion” and “much to his wife’s dismay” — and reads it through her larger interpretive frame of the saint’s “two bodies,” the private body of his personal ascetic striving colliding with the public body of his sacramental and celebrity role, the two “clash[ing] almost as often as they complemented one another” (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint; cf. publisher description, psupress.org, and reviews at ishmaelite.blogspot.com and myrtleskete.com). Reviewers working from her text summarize the marriage in starkly un-hagiographic terms — “a terrible marriage,” in which “John and his Matushka certainly do not appear as an inspiring couple” (Myrtle Skete review). The concrete, archive-grade instance of Elizaveta’s grievance is the salary episode treated below: she petitioned the cathedral administration and succeeded in having John’s salary paid directly to her, to protect a household his charity and open door were stripping bare.

It is worth dwelling on why this matters for a saint’s compendium. The hagiographic instinct is to resolve every tension into edification: Elizaveta’s initial reluctance becomes her eventual joyful consent, and the marriage becomes a shared ascetic triumph. Kizenko’s archival instinct is the reverse: to let the documented friction stand, because it is true and because it makes John more, not less, comprehensible as a man under the strain of his own vocation. The methodology this collection follows refuses to choose one register and suppress the other. It records that the marriage was, by the saint’s own arrangement, celibate and childless; that Elizaveta’s distress at this is documented, not merely a hagiographic concession; and that her later support of him, which the devotional sources stress, is also part of the record. A saint is not diminished by an unhappy spouse; the candor is itself part of the picture.

On the most dramatic claims of the tradition — that Elizaveta complained to Metropolitan Isidor of St. Petersburg of John’s refusal of marital relations, that she threatened divorce, or that the metropolitan rebuked him — the careful verdict is one of caution. Pisiotis, who has read both Kizenko and the diaries, notes: “There is no corroborating evidence for any of these stories; moreover Fr John kept painstaking records of every contact he ever had with Metropolitan Isidor, and never mentioned anything about his marriage in that context” — while adding that the diaries do contain “descriptions of arguments they had,” so that “evidence exists of both their marital contentedness … and of their marital discord” (Pisiotis, jordanville.org). One named source does assert the complaint as fact: Metropolitan Benjamin (Fedchenkov) states that after marrying, John refused marital relations “despite her complaints to the church authorities” (cited in en.wikipedia.org). The disposition this collection adopts, per §4: the fact of an unconsummated marriage and of Elizaveta’s documented distress is well attested (Kizenko’s “dismay,” the diary arguments, the salary intervention, Fedchenkov); the specific lurid episodes — the appeal to Isidor, the divorce threat — are uncorroborated tradition.

Ordination (December 1855)

John was ordained deacon on December 10, 1855, and, two days later, priest on December 12, 1855 (Old Style), and assigned to St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Kronstadt (OCA, “Repose of Saint John of Kronstadt,” oca.org; Pisiotis, jordanville.org). He would serve there for more than half a century, until his death in 1908 — an unusually stable ministry for the period, the whole of it spent at a single cathedral in a single hard town. Some devotional summaries compress the ordination to “deacon in November, priest in December”; the precise December 10 / December 12 pairing, two days apart, is the better-attested form, and the pairing itself reflects the ordinary canonical sequence of consecutive ordinations to the diaconate and the priesthood.

Kronstadt: Naval Fortress and the Capital’s Dumping-Ground

Kronstadt is the naval port and fortress town on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, the Baltic Fleet base guarding the sea approach to St. Petersburg. But its social character was defined less by the garrison than by its role as a receptacle for the capital’s unwanted. Beggars, vagrants, unemployed laborers, and persons administratively banished from St. Petersburg were routinely deposited there — the capital exporting its destitute to keep its own streets presentable — producing extreme slums, endemic drunkenness, and earthen dugout and cellar hovels. As Pisiotis puts it, “the problem of poverty in Kronstadt was even worse than in the capital, St Petersburg, because vagrants from the latter were routinely deposited in Kronstadt in order to improve the cosmetic appearance of the capital” (Pisiotis, jordanville.org; cf. trueorthodox.eu, noting beggars “sent out of the capital for drunkenness and begging”). Semenoff-Tian-Chansky’s tradition speaks simply of “the slum that was Kronstadt.”

The Shock and the Turn to the Poor

Both registers agree that John was shocked by the destitution behind the cathedral and that he answered it with a radical, indiscriminate generosity. From the first he went into the slums and the poorest hovels — visiting the sick, sitting with drunkards, carrying food and medicine “from hovel to hovel” for hours, his own home becoming “practically an open house” (Pisiotis, jordanville.org). He gave away his money, his clothes, his overcoat, and his boots, sometimes returning home barefoot; the Lives report parishioners bringing shoes to his wife with the warning that “your husband has given away his shoes to someone, and will come home barefoot” (OCA, “Repose”; trueorthodox.eu). He treated drunkards and the destitute not as cases but as persons, on the principle that “one must love every person, both in his sin and in his shame” (trueorthodox.eu).

What distinguished John’s charity from ordinary almsgiving was its refusal to condescend. The men he sought out in the Kronstadt cellars were precisely those the capital had judged worthless and expelled; John addressed them as bearers of the image of God, sat with them, learned their names, and credited them with the capacity to rise. This turn to the poor would mature into the great charitable institution of his ministry, the House of Industry (Dom Trudolyubiya), which sought not to relieve the poor with handouts but to give them work, a trade, and dignity (see the eucharistic-revival section). The same theology of the divine image in every man runs through his diary (see Key Themes); the slums of Kronstadt were where it was first put into practice.

The Early Ridicule

John’s innovations and his eccentric charity drew mockery and even persecution in his early years — from his own family, from fellow clergy, and from his ecclesiastical superiors. He was chastised at home, mocked by colleagues, and “berated by his spiritual superiors”; he was called a yurodivy, a fool-for-Christ, and an “abnormal person” (trueorthodox.eu). The signature institutional act of control was the salary order: because he gave his pay away “to the very last penny,” the diocesan administration forbade his salary to be placed in his own hands and paid it instead to Elizaveta — who had herself petitioned the cathedral administration to receive it directly, in order to keep the household running and support the nieces she was raising (Pisiotis, jordanville.org; trueorthodox.eu). His response to losing access to his salary was to take additional work as a religious instructor. Kizenko notes that the church authorities at first received his innovations — the expressive manner during services, the frequent liturgies, the promotion of frequent confession and communion — negatively (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint, as summarized at en.wikipedia.org). The ridicule of the 1850s and 1860s is the dark background against which the nationwide veneration of his later decades stands out.

References

Kizenko, Nadieszda. A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. (Early chapters on the marriage, Elizaveta, and the Kronstadt ministry; the “two bodies” frame; publisher description at psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01975-1.html.)
Pisiotis, Aristotle. Lecture on St. John of Kronstadt (synthesizing Kizenko’s archival findings; notes the absence of corroboration for the Isidor and divorce stories). jordanville.org/files/St_John_kronstadt.doc.
Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint John of Kronstadt.” oca.org/saints/lives/0202/12/20/103598-repose-of-saint-john-of-kronstadt.
“Saint John of Kronstadt and Elizabeth.” Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, Diocese of Los Angeles (devotional life drawing on the niece Rufina Shemyakina’s memoir). antiochianladiocese.org.
“The Life of St. John of Kronstadt.” True Orthodox Diocese of Western Europe. trueorthodox.eu/the-life-of-st-john-of-kronstadt.
Semenoff-Tian-Chansky, Alexander. Father John of Kronstadt: A Life. London: Mowbrays, 1955; repr. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
“John of Kronstadt.” Wikipedia (used to locate Kizenko’s and Fedchenkov’s claims on the marriage and the early reception of his innovations). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Kronstadt.
Reviews of Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: ishmaelite.blogspot.com/2010/05/prodigal-saint-1-of-2.html; myrtleskete.com/2017/03/20/book-review-a-prodigal-saint-father-john-of-kronstadt.