The Diary: My Life in Christ

My Life in Christ (Russian: Moya zhizn vo Khriste) is St. John of Kronstadt’s spiritual diary — not a treatise but a lifelong daily journal, of which the published book is a body of extracts first issued in 1893 and translated into English by E. E. Goulaeff in 1897. This chapter sets out the diary practice, the publication history of the extracts against the complete archival diaries published only in the post-Soviet period, the journal as a literary form, and several of its best-known passages in the standard English translation.

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

The Diary Practice

Through nearly all his adult life, amid an exhausting public ministry, John kept a spiritual diary — daily entries across decades, in which he set down his thoughts, feelings, and prayers. The practice began near the start of his priesthood and continued, with the diaries’ own internal evidence, until the year of his death in 1908. Kizenko makes this diary the central source of her biography and the very record of “the making of a modern saint.” The diaries, she writes, document his struggles with doubt, his ascetic practices, and his growing awareness that others saw him as a saint; they were among the “rich and virtually unknown documents from the Russian archives” — together with thousands of letters from his followers and police reports — on which her study is built (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint; publisher description and book overview, psupress.org). John, she observes, attributed a symbolic significance and moral value to every event, however commonplace, and amid his labors “devoted careful time to his inner life of prayer and kept a diary in which he set down his thoughts, feelings, and prayers.” The diary, in other words, was not an occasional literary project but a sustained ascetic discipline, the inner counterpart to the public liturgist of Kronstadt — a daily reckoning in which the most sought-after priest in Russia returned again and again to examine his own soul.

What Survives: Extracts and the Complete Diaries

It is essential to distinguish two things that share a name: the published book My Life in Christ, and the complete manuscript diaries from which it was drawn.

The published book is a body of extracts. My Life in Christ first appeared in Russian in 1893, in two volumes, under a title that names its own character: Moya zhizn vo Khriste, ili minuty dukhovnogo trezveniya … izvlecheniya iz dnevnika protoiereya Ioanna Ilyicha Sergieva — literally, “My Life in Christ, or moments of spiritual sobriety … extracts from the diary of the archpriest Ioann Ilyich Sergiev” (azbyka.ru; predanie.ru). The book is thus a selection from the diaries, not the diaries entire; the English title page preserves the point, reading “Extracts from the Diary of the Most Reverend John Iliytch Sergieff.” Before 1917 the Russian text went through more than ten editions.

The complete diaries were published only after the Soviet period. The full surviving diaries — distinct from the My Life in Christ selections — remained in manuscript in Russian state archives through the Soviet decades and began to appear in print only after 1991. The publishing house Otchii Dom (“The Father’s House”) has issued the first complete edition of the surviving diaries from 2001 onward, under the blessing of Patriarch Alexei II, including the early volumes of 1856–1864 and the premortem diary of 1908 (Predsmertnyi dnevnik 1908 goda). The manuscripts are held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), fund 1067; most of the diary material of 1856–1894 “had never been published anywhere, remaining in storage in State Archives in the form of manuscript author’s text” (Otchii Dom, otdom.ru; Sretenie, sretenie.com; azbyka.ru diaries index). This is the archival diary material Kizenko worked from, and it is the post-Soviet recovery of these late diaries that made her humanizing portrait possible (see Key Themes).

The distinction matters for how the saint is read. The published My Life in Christ was a selection John himself sanctioned — a curated and edifying gathering of his most luminous reflections. The complete diaries, by contrast, are the unedited daily record, and they preserve much that no edifying selection would include: the petty irritations, the bouts of self-disgust, the quarrels at home, the anxieties of a man becoming a living cult in his own lifetime. To read only the extracts is to meet the wonderworker of the Lives; to read the diaries is to meet, in Kizenko’s phrase, a man in the very act of being made into a saint. The repository follows the methodology in keeping both before the reader, with the register of each named.

The English Translation (1897)

The standard English translation is by E. E. Goulaeff, My Life in Christ (London: Cassell, 1897). Its title page reads: “Translated, with the Author’s sanction, from the Fourth and Supplemented Edition by E. E. Goulaeff, St. Petersburg” (Internet Archive, archive.org/details/mylifeinchristex00serguoft). The phrase “with the Author’s sanction” is significant: the translation was made while John was alive and was authorized by him, so that the English text carries the saint’s own approval rather than reaching readers through a later, independent hand. The volume runs to some 558 pages in two parts. Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, New York, reprinted Goulaeff’s translation repeatedly from 1953 onward, keeping it continuously available in English (Orthodox Life, “Like Rain from the Clouds,” orthodoxlife.org). Goulaeff’s remains the translation through which English-speaking Orthodox readers have known the book for over a century, and it is the version cited throughout this compendium.

Genre: The Journal as Form

My Life in Christ is not a systematic treatise, and to read it as one is to misread it. It is a spiritual journal: aphoristic, composed of short discrete units — single sentences up to a few paragraphs — each an independent meditation, unsystematic in arrangement, most anchored to a verse of Scripture, and frequently written in the first person (“I have learned”; “I have proved by experience”). The very title names it as extracts from a diary; commentators describe it accordingly as “a great number of brief entries on a variety of subjects” (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, ccel.org; Orthodox Life, orthodoxlife.org). The form has a practical consequence for citation: because the book is a diary of unnumbered aphorisms, it is normally cited by the page number of a specific edition rather than by chapter and verse, and pagination differs between the 1897 Cassell text and the Jordanville reprints — so the edition must be named with the page.

The genre also shapes how the book ought to be read. It does not build an argument toward a conclusion; it offers, instead, a great many starting points, each meant to be paused over rather than read through. The work belongs, in this respect, to a recognizable Orthodox ascetical tradition of short, intensely concentrated sayings — kin to the apophthegmata of the desert fathers and to the chapters of the Philokalia, where the spiritual unit is the sentence, not the chapter. What is unusual in John’s case is that the sayings are not the distilled counsel of a desert solitary but the day-by-day jottings of a married parish priest at the busiest cathedral in Russia, written between liturgies and pastoral visits. The form is ancient; the setting is wholly modern, and that combination is part of why Kizenko can call the diary the record of “a modern saint.”

Some Famous Passages

The following are given verbatim from the Goulaeff translation (Cassell, 1897), with the printed page numbers of that edition; readers using the Jordanville reprint should check its differing pagination.

On prayer, and the worth of few words said from the heart:

“When praying, keep to the rule that it is better to say five words from the depth of your heart than ten thousand words with your tongue only.” (My Life in Christ, trans. Goulaeff, p. 113)

On attending to every word and never racing past it:

“When you are saying your prayers … do not hurry from one word to another without feeling its truth, without laying it to your heart.” (Goulaeff, p. 132)

On the Eucharist as union with Christ:

“Through the Sacrament Thou art wholly with us, and Thy Flesh is united to our flesh, whilst Thy Spirit is united to our soul … we become one spirit with Thee.” (Goulaeff, p. 22)

On the name of God present in every word of prayer:

“When you say a prayer, He is in every word of it, and like a Holy Fire, penetrates each word … He is wholly in the names belonging to Him: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” (Goulaeff, p. 89)

On reverence for every man as the image of God:

“Accustom yourself always to look upon every man with deep respect, as upon the image of God … However insignificant and unimportant the man may be, honour in him the image of God.” (Goulaeff, p. 77)

On the worth of every man as the image of God, even the most lowly, the entry continues: “However insignificant and unimportant the man may be, honour in him the image of God, especially when he speaks with love, and, above all, when he speaks of and does the works of love” (Goulaeff, p. 77). And on the passions seen most clearly at home, where no audience screens them: “Watch yourselves — your passions especially — in your home life, where they appear freely, like moles in a safe place” (Goulaeff, p. 33).

These are not abstract propositions but entries — moments of a working priest’s inner life, written down at the desk between liturgies. The well-known passages on the name of God, cited above and treated more fully in the next chapter, are sometimes located in the Jordanville reprint at its own pagination (the name-of-God material appears around p. 358 of the 1984 Jordanville edition); the divergence between that pagination and the 1897 Cassell pages cited here is precisely why the edition must always be named with the page. The underlying theology of these entries, and the candid self-reproach woven through the same pages, are the subject of the next chapter.

See Also

References

  • John of Kronstadt, St. My Life in Christ: Extracts from the Diary. Translated, with the author’s sanction, from the fourth and supplemented edition by E. E. Goulaeff. London: Cassell, 1897. Full text at archive.org/details/mylifeinchristex00serguoft; also at ccel.org/ccel/kronstadt/christlife.ii.html. Reprinted Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1953 and later.
  • John of Kronstadt, St. Moya zhizn vo Khriste (Russian original, 1893). azbyka.ru/otechnik/Ioann_Kronshtadtskij/moja_gizn_vo_hriste; predanie.ru/book/71700-moya-zhizn-vo-hriste.
  • John of Kronstadt, St. Dnevnik (complete diaries, incl. Predsmertnyi dnevnik 1908 goda). Moscow: Otchii Dom, 2001– . otdom.ru/avtory/k/ioann-kronshtadtskiy; sretenie.com; azbyka.ru/otechnik/Ioann_Kronshtadtskij/dnevnik.
  • Kizenko, Nadieszda. A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. (On the diary as source; publisher description, psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01975-1.html.)
  • “Like Rain from the Clouds” (review of the Jordanville My Life in Christ). Orthodox Life. orthodoxlife.org/reviews/my-life-in-christ-kronstadt-english.