The Childhood Signs

The early reputation of the blind child of Sebino: the infant who is said to have taken icons down from the corner at night, the gift of prayer from her earliest years, the clairvoyance and healing the tradition reports from age seven or eight, and the icon “Vzyskanie pogibshikh” she is said to have had painted for the village church. Every one of these signs first reaches print in the late Life — Zinaida Zhdanova’s Skazanie of 1993 and the canonical Life corrected out of it — recorded some fifty years after the events, and each is reported here as what that devotional tradition attests, never as documented fact. They are, in this collection’s framework, class-(c) late devotional tradition, and they are read as such.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1999/2004)

A Foreword on Pinning

This file is, of all the foundations material, the one that most demands source-critical discipline, because its content is precisely the kind that the conventions of a saint’s Life supply almost automatically: the holy child who prays beyond her years, who sees what others cannot, who heals. Such episodes are the stock of the zhitie genre, and their presence proves nothing about whether they occurred. What can be stated with confidence is far narrower: that the late Life records them, that it records them late — gathered in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the recollections of Matrona’s surviving fellow villagers and kin, some five decades and more after a childhood none of the compilers had witnessed (Zhdanova, Skazanie, 1993, azbyka.ru; Matrona Nikonova, en.wikipedia.org).

In the attestation framework this collection follows (set out in Attestation and Method), all of the childhood signs below are class (c) — late devotional tradition: oral memory of the village decades and childhood, gathered fifty years on and shaped by the conventions of the genre, reliable at most for the shape of the cult’s memory and least secure in its most circumstantial detail. None of it is certified here as event. Each claim is pinned to the source that records it, and reported as that source’s testimony. The reader who wants the full account of why this discipline is necessary should read the companion source-problem files; what follows assumes it.

The Icon Corner

The earliest of the signs the tradition reports belongs to Matrona’s infancy. As a small child, the Skazanie relates, she would rise at night, make her way to the icon corner of the peasant house — the krasny ugol, the “beautiful corner” where the family’s icons stood — climb up, and take the icons down, playing with them or holding them through the night (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/79033.html; Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru). The mother, in the account, would find the blind infant in the morning among the images.

The episode is told as the first manifestation of the child’s affinity for the holy — the blind infant drawn, before she could understand, to the icons she could not see. It is a characteristic zhitie motif of the saint-from-the-cradle, and it reaches print only in the late Life. It is reported here as what that Life attests: a story the tradition tells of her infancy, not a witnessed fact.

The Gift of Prayer

From her earliest childhood, the tradition holds, Matrona was given to prayer. Excluded by her blindness from the ordinary work and play of village children, she is said to have spent her days in and around the village Church of the Dormition (the Uspensky church), where she came to know the services so thoroughly that she could follow and even sing them, and where she was a constant presence (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/79033.html). The Life presents the church as her true home and prayer as her native element from the first.

Of all the childhood material, this is the least extraordinary and the most plausible on ordinary grounds: a blind peasant child, unable to work, who found her place in the parish church and learned its services by ear is a wholly natural thing, and it requires no wonder to credit. But even here the precise claims — the constancy, the knowledge of the services — come through the same late recollection, and are reported as the tradition’s portrait of her childhood rather than as documented record. The portrait is consistent and may well preserve a true memory; its evidentiary character is still that of devotional memory set down fifty years on.

Clairvoyance and Healing from Age Seven or Eight

The most consequential of the childhood claims is that, from about the age of seven or eight, Matrona began to manifest the gifts for which she would be known all her life: prophecy, insight into the sins and thoughts of those who came to her, and healing (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/79033.html). The Life reports that word of the blind girl spread through Sebino and the surrounding villages, and that the sick and the troubled began to come to the Nikonov house seeking her prayers and her counsel — the first of the streams of visitors that would follow her for the rest of her life (the village ministry is taken up in The Stream of Visitors and The Manner of Her Counsel).

Here the discipline of this collection is at its strictest, and the rule is the one stated in METHODOLOGY §3.5 and in Attestation and Method: a miracle, prophecy, or clairvoyance account is reported as what the named source attests, with the source named, and is never certified as fact. This collection therefore makes no claim that the child of Sebino prophesied, read souls, or healed. It states what the record actually contains: that the late Life, gathered from oral recollection fifty years on, attests that she began to do these things from age seven or eight, and that the cult’s memory of her gifts traces them to her childhood. Whether the gifts were real is a question of faith and of the Church’s own discernment in glorifying her; it is not a question this collection’s sources can settle as history, and the collection does not pretend otherwise.

It bears noting, too, that it is exactly in this register — the blind girl who reads minds, foretells, and heals — that the unedited Skazanie drifts, in places, toward the folk-magical: toward the figure of the village znakharka or wise-woman rather than the Christian ascetic, a tendency the canonization commission found in the book and corrected against (see The Zhdanova Life and Its Corrections). The childhood clairvoyance is the headwater of that whole strand, and is one more reason to hold it at the careful distance of attested-tradition rather than fact.

The “Vzyskanie Pogibshikh” Icon

The tradition attaches to Matrona’s youth one concrete, churchly act that has left a tangible trace in the cult: the commissioning of an icon for the Sebino church. The Life relates that, around 1915, Matrona asked that an icon of the Mother of God of the type “Vzyskanie pogibshikh” — “Seeker [or Recovery] of the Lost,” sometimes rendered “of the Perishing” — be painted for the village Church of the Dormition. In the account, she knew of the image by inner knowledge, named it, and directed that money be gathered from the villagers to have it written; the icon was painted and brought to Sebino, and it became, in the tradition, an object of special veneration associated with her (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/79033.html).

This episode, too, is class-(c) late tradition, first reaching print in the 1993 Life, and it is reported as such: the account of how the icon came to be is the cult’s account, not a documented commission. But it is worth marking that it differs in kind from the clairvoyance claims, because the devotion to a “Vzyskanie pogibshikh” icon in connection with Matrona is itself part of the historical cult — the image-type is a real and venerated one in Russian Orthodoxy, and its association with her is a feature of how she is remembered and venerated. The collection separates the two carefully: that an icon of this type is bound up with Matrona’s cult is part of the cult’s documented shape; the narrative of the blind girl naming it and gathering the money for it around 1915 is the late Life’s telling, attested by that Life and reported as its testimony.

What the Childhood Signs Establish

Held to what the sources can carry, the childhood signs establish one firm thing and one careful thing. The firm thing: the late Life and the canonical Life derived from it trace Matrona’s holiness to her childhood — the icon corner, the gift of prayer, the gifts of insight and healing from age seven or eight, the icon for the Sebino church — and this is how the cult remembers her beginning. The careful thing: every one of these signs reaches print only in that late Life, gathered fifty years and more after the fact, and is therefore reported here as devotional tradition pinned to its source, never as documented event. None of the prophecies, soul-readings, or healings is asserted as fact; all are reported as what the named Life attests. This is not skepticism about the saint but fidelity to the record — the same fidelity the Church itself showed when, in preparing her glorification, it corrected the very book these stories come from rather than ratifying it whole.

References

Zhdanova, Zinaida V. Skazanie o zhitii blazhennoy startsy Matrony [The Tale of the Life of the Blessed Eldress Matrona]. Moscow, 1993; many later printings. azbyka.ru/fiction/skazanie-o-zhitii-blazhennoj-staricy-matrony. (The principal late Life; the source of the icon-corner story, the gift of prayer, the childhood clairvoyance and healing, and the “Vzyskanie pogibshikh” icon.)
Pokrovsky Stavropegic Convent. “The life of the Blessed Matrona.” pokrov-monastir.ru. (The canonical Life: childhood at the Dormition church, the early gifts, the icon for Sebino.)
“The Life of Blessed Matrona of Moscow.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/79033.html). (The canonical Life in English: the icon corner, the early prophecy and healing, the “Vzyskanie pogibshikh” icon.)
“Saint Matrona of Moscow.” johnsanidopoulos.com. (English devotional account of the childhood gifts and the icon, drawn from the canonical Life.)
Matrona Nikonova. Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org). (The childhood reputation; the Skazanie of 1993 as the source; the dating of the recollections.)