The Manner of Her Counsel

How St. Matrona is said to have counseled and prayed: the insistence that the help came from God and not from her — “Only God helps!” — the requirements she laid on visitors (to wear a cross, to go to church, to confess and commune, to pray), the prayers she read aloud over people, her use of blessed water, and her short, practical, sometimes sharp counsel. This file reports that churchly manner as the Life attests it, pinned to the 1993 Skazanie and the canonical Life — and then takes up, soberly and explicitly, the crucial source-critical matter: the folk-magical register in the unedited Skazanie that critics said made Matrona look like a village znakharka, and that the canonization commission corrected out.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1999/2004)

“Only God Helps”

If the stream of visitors tells who came to Matrona and what they brought, this file concerns the part the Church affirms most readily and most emphatically: the manner in which she is said to have received and answered them. And the manner, in the Life’s telling, has a single governing principle from which everything else follows — that the help did not come from her.

The Life is insistent on this, and the insistence is attributed to Matrona herself. She is reported to have rebuffed any notion that she healed or worked wonders by her own power, returning again and again to the formula remembered as her watchword: “Only God helps!” — that it is God who heals, God who answers, and that she did nothing but pray (Zhdanova, Skazanie o zhitii blazhennoy startsy Matrony, 1993, azbyka.ru; the canonical Life, Pokrovsky Convent, “The life of the Blessed Matrona,” pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian, “The Life of Blessed Matrona of Moscow,” orthochristian.com/79033.html). This is reported here, as throughout, as what the named source attests; per METHODOLOGY §3.5 the collection does not certify that any healing occurred. But the theology of the manner — the deflection of all power onto God, the refusal of the wonder-worker’s role — is the firmest and most affirmed thread in the whole account of how she counseled, and it is the thread against which the disputed material at the end of this file must be measured.

The Requirements She Laid on Visitors

The same churchly frame shows in what the Life says Matrona required of those who came to her. She did not, in this telling, simply dispense help; she made demands of the visitor, and the demands were the ordinary disciplines of the Church. The Life consistently reports that she required those who sought her to wear a cross — to put on or restore the baptismal cross many had abandoned under Soviet pressure — to go to church, to confess and receive Communion, and to pray (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian). The pattern is unmistakable and, for the Church, decisive: a person who answers every petition by sending the petitioner to the sacraments is not functioning as a folk healer but as a kind of lay confessor, turning the need that brought the visitor into an occasion for return to the Church.

This is, in the Soviet context, more than piety. To press a stranger to wear a cross, attend the liturgy, and commune in the years of the militant-atheist state was to press a costly and dangerous fidelity (see Ministry Through the Terror and War). The Life’s portrait of the requirements is, in this respect, of a piece with its portrait of Matrona as a confessor of the faith under persecution, and it is the aspect of her counsel the canonical Life most fully retains.

The Prayers Read Aloud, and the Blessed Water

The Life is specific, too, about the form her prayer over people took, and the specifics matter — both because they are concrete and because they are unambiguously the Church’s own prayers, not incantations. Matrona is said to have read prayers aloud over those who came to her — naming, in the tradition, the “Our Father”, Psalm 90 (in the Slavonic numbering, “He that dwelleth in the help of the Most High,” the psalm read over the sick and the endangered throughout Orthodox practice), and the resurrectional prayer “Let God arise” (Da voskresnet Bog, the verses against the demonic that open the prayer to the Cross) — and to have given people water she had prayed over (blessed water) to take and to use (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian). Every one of these is a standing element of Orthodox piety: the Lord’s Prayer, the two best-known protective texts of the Slavonic Psalter and prayer book, and the use of holy water. The Life thus presents her prayer not as private spell-work but as the recitation of the Church’s own texts over the suffering — the practice of any praying Orthodox layperson, done with unusual concentration.

Alongside the prayer, the Life portrays her counsel itself as short, practical, and concrete — and at times sharp. She is remembered giving brief, direct answers to the dilemmas brought to her: do this, do not do that, go here, wait, be patient, go to confession. The tradition does not paint her as discoursing at length but as cutting quickly to a plain instruction, sometimes with a bluntness that the Life records approvingly (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; OrthoChristian). And the Life is firm that she refused payment — that she took nothing for herself, treated the help as a spiritual matter rather than a transaction, and lived in poverty on what those who loved her provided (Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian). The refusal of payment is, again, a mark the Church reads as separating her from the folk healer, who took her fee.

Taken together, these elements — only God helps; cross, church, sacraments, prayer; the Church’s own prayers read aloud; blessed water; short practical counsel; no payment — compose the churchly manner of counsel that the canonical Life affirms and that the cult venerates. This is the band of the tradition that sits in its firmest, most affirmed register. But it is not the whole of what the unedited Skazanie contained, and honesty about the manner of her counsel requires turning to the rest.

The Folk-Magical Register, and Its Correction

Here this file must do the source-critical work that the subject demands, and it must do it plainly. The unedited Skazanie — the 1993 book in the form Zhdanova published it — did not contain only the churchly counsel described above. It also contained a body of material of a quite different flavor: episodes of Matrona wrestling with demons in palpable, near-physical struggle; passages in which she appears to read minds and recite back to visitors the registers of their thoughts and secret deeds; and a general atmosphere, in places, of fortune-telling and thaumaturgy — the cataloguing of sins not confessed, the diagnosing of curses, the dispensing of the kind of help that shades from prayer toward the seer’s craft (the material described and criticized in Argumenty i Fakty, “Chudoverie, Stalin i Pokrov,” kuban.aif.ru; and AsiaNews, “Devotion to the Blessed Matrona Moskovskaya,” asianews.it). This is the register that turned the stream of visitors — the cows gone astray, the things lost, the curses suspected — from the ordinary petitions of peasants into the trade of a folk specialist.

The criticism this material drew, from within and around the Church, was sharp and specific: that in these passages Matrona appears less as a Christian ascetic than as a village znakharka — a wise-woman, sorceress, or seer of the kind Russian folk religion knew well — and that a popular cult fed on the unedited Skazanie risks venerating exactly the half-pagan thaumaturgy the Church has always condemned (the znakharka criticism reported in Argumenty i Fakty, kuban.aif.ru; AsiaNews characterizes the Patriarchate’s own corrected Life as “purged of all superstitious aspects,” asianews.it). The point of the critics was not, in the main, that Matrona was a fraud; it was that the Skazanie as written blurred the line between Orthodox prayer and folk magic, and that the blur is dangerous wherever the cult takes the book as it stands.

This is precisely the material the Synodal Commission for the Canonization of Saints corrected out. As the companion source-files set out in full (see The Zhdanova Life and Its Corrections), when the Patriarchate prepared Matrona’s glorification it entrusted the work to Hieromonk Iov (Gumerov), who examined the Skazanie, found in it “accounts not corresponding to Church tradition” — “fairy-tales” (skazki) — and produced a canonical Life on the basis of what remained after the unreliable material was removed (Argumenty i Fakty, kuban.aif.ru). The folk-magical register is part of what fell away in that correction; the canonical Life the Patriarchate disseminated, through the Pokrovsky Convent that holds the relics, carries the churchly counsel — only God helps, the sacraments, the prayers, the blessed water — and not the demon-wrestling-and-mind-reading atmosphere of the unedited book (Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; AsiaNews, asianews.it).

[Disputed: how to characterize the folk-magical material in the unedited Skazanie — demon-wrestling, mind-reading registers, fortune-telling flavor. Critics (AsiaNews; Argumenty i Fakty, kuban.aif.ru) read it as evidence that the popular cult tends toward the znakharka / occult and away from Orthodox tradition. The canonization commission, through Iov (Gumerov), judged the relevant accounts “not corresponding to Church tradition” and removed them from the canonical Life. Defenders of the cult read the same episodes devotionally, as a hagiographer’s idiom for spiritual warfare and discernment rather than literal sorcery. This collection does not adjudicate Matrona’s interior life; it reports that the material exists in the unedited book, that it drew the znakharka criticism, and that the Church’s own commission corrected it out — and it follows the commission in treating the churchly counsel, not the folk-magical register, as what the Church affirms.]

Holding the Two Apart

The discipline this file follows, then, is the one the Church’s own commission modeled: to hold the two registers apart rather than collapse them. The churchly manner of counsel — the deflection onto God, the requirements of cross and church and sacrament, the Church’s own prayers read aloud, the blessed water, the short practical word, the refusal of payment — is multiply attested across the Life and is the part the canonization commission retained and the part the Church venerates; it is reported here as the Life’s affirmed portrait of how Matrona counseled (Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian). The folk-magical register — demon-wrestling, mind-reading, fortune-telling flavor — is real in the unedited Skazanie, drew the znakharka criticism, and is exactly what the commission set aside; it is reported here as contested and corrected-out, never as the Church’s portrait of her (Argumenty i Fakty, kuban.aif.ru; AsiaNews, asianews.it).

The collection follows the commission’s line because the commission’s line is the Church’s act: in glorifying Matrona the Patriarchate did not ratify the Skazanie as it stood but corrected it, and venerated the holy life that remained when the half-magical accretion was removed (see Attestation and Method on the theology of glorification, and cf. the new-martyrs’ confessors of the same Soviet century, New Martyrs and Confessors). To report the manner of her counsel faithfully is therefore to report both things and to keep them distinct: the churchly counsel the Church affirmed, and the folk-magical register the Church refused. Doing less than that — flattening her into either a pure ascetic with no awkward material in her popular Life, or a village sorceress the Church somehow canonized — would falsify both the saint and the act by which the Church received her.

See Also

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. Text at azbyka.ru/fiction/skazanie-o-zhitii-blazhennoj-staricy-matrony. (The principal late source; the source both of the churchly manner of counsel and, in its unedited form, of the folk-magical register the commission corrected out.)
  • Pokrovsky Stavropegic Convent. “The life of the Blessed Matrona.” pokrov-monastir.ru. (The canonical, corrected Life; the churchly counsel — only God helps, cross, church, sacraments, the prayers and blessed water, the refusal of payment — that the Patriarchate disseminated.)
  • “The Life of Blessed Matrona of Moscow.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/79033.html). (The canonical Life in English; the requirements laid on visitors and the prayers read aloud.)
  • “Chudoverie, Stalin i Pokrov. Pravda o chudesakh svyatoy Matrony Moskovskoy.” Argumenty i Fakty (kuban.aif.ru). (The commission’s assessment of the Skazanie as containing “fairy-tales not corresponding to Church tradition”; Iov (Gumerov)’s correction; the znakharka / folk-magical criticism.)
  • “Devotion to the Blessed Matrona Moskovskaya, Stalin’s saint.” AsiaNews (asianews.it). (The thaumaturgic / “superstitious” critique; the Patriarchate’s corrected Life “purged of all superstitious aspects.”)