The Choice

Once ordained, Father Valentin refused to keep his priesthood and his surgery in separate rooms. He lectured to medical students in his cassock with a pectoral cross on his breast, kept an icon in the operating theatre, and would not begin to operate without prayer — at a time and in a state where this was a deliberate provocation. The choice cost him: a student petition and the hostility of the Soviet academy stripped him of his university chair. This file gathers the visible signs of his refusal — the riasa in the operating theatre, the lectures in the cassock, the icon over the table — and the price he paid for declining to separate the scalpel from the cross.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / New Martyrs and Confessors (canonized 2000)

The Riasa in the Operating Theatre

The most striking image of these Tashkent years — the one the later iconography would seize on — is of the surgeon in priestly dress. Father Valentin did not regard his ordination as a private devotion to be set aside at the hospital door. He came to the operating theatre and to the lecture hall as a priest, and he made the fact unmistakable. By his own account he lectured in his cassock, with the cross on his breast: “I read my lectures in a cassock with a cross on my chest: at that time the impossible was still possible” — «Лекции я читал в рясе с крестом на груди: в то время еще было возможно невозможное теперь» (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering). The wistful clause — “at that time the impossible was still possible” — measures, from the vantage of his old age, how narrow even the early Soviet window had been and how completely it later closed.

In the operating theatre he kept an icon, and before he cut he made the sign of the cross over the patient and over himself, refusing to begin without prayer (Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon). This was not eccentricity but theology in practice: the patient on the table was the suffering Christ, the surgery a work offered to God (see Medicine as Vocation). When the icon was once removed from the theatre by the authorities, he is said to have refused to operate until it was restored — an episode carried by the devotional biographies and reported here as their tradition rather than as an archivally pinned event [Disputed: the "refused to operate until the icon was restored" episode is recounted in the devotional biographies (Marushchak; pravoslavie.ru) and is reported here as their tradition, not as a document-verified incident].

The Cost: The Loss of the Chair

The Soviet academy could not for long accommodate a professor who lectured in a cassock and prayed over his patients. The pressure mounted as the state’s grip tightened, and it found its occasion. In 1923 a student petition and the hostility of the new academic order brought about the loss of his university chair — he was forced out of his professorship at the Turkestan (later Central Asian) State University (ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)) [the loss of the chair is dated to 1923 in ru.wikipedia; the autobiography does not give an exact sentence on the dismissal, and the date is reported on the secondary source]. He thus surrendered the worldly summit of his medical career — the professorial chair, the academic standing — rather than surrender the visible profession of his faith. He kept operating; what he lost was the university.

This was the first of the many costs the union of priesthood and surgery would exact. It was also the first clear instance of the pattern that would govern the rest of his life: presented, again and again, with the demand to choose between his medicine and his Church, he refused the demand itself. He would be both, and he would pay for being both. The student petition of 1923 stands at the head of a sequence that runs through three exiles and an interrogation “conveyor,” and that ends, paradoxically, with the same state pinning its highest scientific honor on the books of the bishop it had tried to silence (see The Stalin Prize (1946)).

Refusing to Separate the Two

Underneath the cassock and the icon lay a settled refusal of the very premise the state pressed on him — that religion and science, priesthood and surgery, belong to separate and incompatible spheres. For St. Luke they were one service of the one God, and he would later argue the point at book length in Spirit, Soul and Body and Science and Religion (see Spirit, Soul and Body and Science and Religion). In Tashkent in the early 1920s he argued it not on paper but with his body: by wearing the cross into the place where the state most wanted faith excluded, and by accepting the loss of his chair as the price of the witness.

The choice was, in the end, the same choice his whole life turned on, made first here in miniature. Confirmed soon after by Patriarch Tikhon, who told him not to abandon his surgery (see Medicine as Vocation), it became the rule of his existence: the priest-surgeon, operating in the cassock he would not take off, through every prison and every exile that the choice cost him.

The Provocation in the Lecture Hall

It is worth dwelling on how deliberate the gesture of the cassock was. In the early 1920s the Soviet state was not yet able to do everything it would later do, but its direction was already plain: religion was to be driven out of public life, confined — where it survived at all — to the private conscience and the closed church, and above all excluded from the institutions of science and the formation of the young. The medical lecture hall and the operating theatre were precisely such institutions. For a professor to mount the rostrum before students of medicine wearing a riasa and a pectoral cross was therefore not a neutral act of piety but a public confession made in the citadel of the new materialism (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering). St. Luke understood this, and his own retrospective phrase — “at that time the impossible was still possible” — registers that he knew he was using a window that was closing (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering). He did not hide the cross and reveal it only in church; he carried it into the one place where the regime most wanted faith invisible, and let the students see that the man who taught them anatomy and operative surgery was a priest.

The point of the provocation was not defiance for its own sake but witness. The state’s demand was that faith be privatized — kept indoors, kept silent, kept out of the public square where it might be seen and might persuade. To wear the cross into the lecture hall was to refuse that demand at its root: to insist that the truth of the faith was not a private taste but a public claim, and that a man of science had no obligation to be ashamed of it. The materialist program required believers to behave as though their faith were a secret vice; St. Luke behaved as though it were the most evident thing about him (Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon).

The Theology Beneath the Refusal

The visible signs — the cassock, the cross, the icon — rested on a theological conviction that ran deeper than any gesture. St. Luke did not hold that priesthood and surgery were two compatible occupations that a sufficiently energetic man might pursue in parallel, like a doctor who also keeps bees. He held that they were one service. The surgeon’s work was itself a priestly work, an offering made over the body of the suffering, and the priest’s work did not stop at the church door but followed him to the operating table (see Medicine as Vocation). To separate them — to be a surgeon by day and a priest only on Sundays, or to lay aside the cross when he entered the hospital — would not have been a prudent division of labor but a denial of the unity he believed God had joined in him (Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon).

This is why the icon in the operating theatre was not decoration. It declared whose work the surgery was, and before whom it was performed. The patient under the knife was the image of God and, in his suffering, the image of the crucified Christ; the surgeon’s skill was a gift to be exercised in His sight and offered back to Him in prayer (Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon). To remove the icon, as the authorities are said to have tried, was to demand that the surgery be secularized — performed as though God were not present and not concerned. The refusal to operate without the icon, carried by the devotional tradition (see above, and the [Disputed: ...] note), expresses in act the same conviction the cassock expressed in the lecture hall: that there was no room in his life from which God could be required to withdraw.

A Pattern Set in Miniature

The loss of the chair in 1923 was, in worldly terms, a defeat, and the state surely intended it as one. But it set the template by which the rest of his life would be read. Every subsequent demand to choose — between his orders and his liberty, between recanting and exile, between silence and the prison “conveyor” — repeated the structure of this first one, and met the same answer (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). He would not privatize the faith; he would not lay down the scalpel; he would be the priest-surgeon at whatever cost, and the cost would be exacted in chairs lost, in years of exile, in interrogations endured. The wistful old man who wrote “the impossible was still possible” had, by then, spent four decades proving that even when the public window closed, the refusal itself remained possible — carried now not in a lecture hall but in a prison cell, an exile’s hospital, and at last a cathedral. The choice made here in Tashkent, in the small theatre of a university chair, was the choice his whole confession turned on.

References

Voino-Yasenetsky, Valentin (Archbishop Luke). «Я полюбил страдание» [I Loved Suffering]. Autobiography. (azbyka.ru.) — “I read my lectures in a cassock with a cross on my chest: at that time the impossible was still possible.”
Marushchak, Archdeacon Vasiliy. The Blessed Surgeon. Divine Ascent Press, 2002. — The icon in the operating theatre; prayer before surgery; the refusal to operate without the icon (devotional tradition).
Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий). ru.wikipedia.org. — The loss of the university chair (1923) under the student petition and Soviet academic pressure.
Святитель Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий). pravoslavie.ru/62067.html. — The Tashkent priest-surgeon and the icon in the operating theatre (devotional account).