Glorification 1994

St. Philaret of Moscow died on 19 November (Old Style) 1867, after nearly forty-six years at the head of the Russian Church; the devotional tradition holds that he foresaw the day. His glorification — his formal recognition as a saint — was decreed by the Bishops’ Council (Arkhiereisky Sobor) of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1994, the Council of the Moscow Patriarchate that also glorified several other figures of the Synodal age. His feast is kept on 19 November / 2 December (Old Style / New Style), and his relics were translated to the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. This file sets out the repose, the canonization, the feast, the relics, and the growth of his veneration and iconography — with miracle and hagiographic material reported as what the sources attest, never certified as historical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5), and the relic question flagged where accounts differ.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

The Repose of 1867

Philaret died on 19 November 1867 by the Old Style (Julian) calendar then in use in Russia — 1 December by the New Style of his own century, the Julian and Gregorian calendars standing twelve days apart in the nineteenth century (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow,” 1978). He was eighty-five years old and had governed the see of Moscow since 1821, the longest and most commanding hierarchical tenure of the entire Synodal period (see Metropolitan of Moscow (1821)). He did not live to see the completion of the work that would prove his greatest monument: the Russian Synodal Bible, which he had steered to the threshold of completion, appeared whole only in 1876, nine years after his death (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6; see The 1876 Synodal Bible).

The devotional accounts of his last days report that Philaret foresaw the date of his death. The tradition, recorded in the hagiographic literature, holds that his departed father appeared to him in a vision or dream and told him to “keep the nineteenth,” which Philaret understood as the announcement of the day on which he would die — and that he thereafter prepared himself, receiving Communion and ordering his affairs, and died on the nineteenth of November as foretold. This account is to be received as what the hagiographic and devotional sources attest of his repose, not as a fact this guide independently certifies (METHODOLOGY §3.5): such foreknowledge-of-death narratives are a standard feature of the genre, and the chain of attestation should be weighed accordingly. What is securely documented is the bare date and the great public mourning that attended the passing of the man who, for a long generation, had simply been “the Metropolitan” to Russia (Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow,” 1978; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One).

He was buried at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the great monastery near Moscow of which he had been the superior throughout his metropolitanate and to which he was deeply attached — at the Church of the Holy Spirit (Dukhovskaya), within the Lavra’s grounds, where his tomb was honored through the late imperial period (on his lifelong bond with the Lavra, see Metropolitan of Moscow (1821)).

Veneration Before the Glorification

Philaret was venerated long before any conciliar act. In his own lifetime he was widely regarded as a man of exceptional sanctity as well as exceptional authority — an ascetic in his personal life, a man of prayer, and a spiritual guide whose counsel was sought across Russia — and the reverence for his memory did not lapse with his death (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow,” 1978). The early biographical literature that gathered after 1867 was frankly devotional, presenting him as the wise and holy Metropolitan; that this hagiographic image stands beside a critical historiography of a formidable church-statesman is itself a theme of this collection (see Sources and Portraits). The point for the history of his cult is that a strong popular and clerical veneration existed well before the formal glorification, which gave conciliar form to a reverence already long alive.

The Soviet period suspended the public machinery of canonization for most of the century, and it was only with the revival of Russian church life under perestroika and after 1991 that the Moscow Patriarchate resumed glorifications on a large scale (see Post-Soviet Revival). Philaret’s glorification belongs to that wave of recovered memory, in which the Russian Church reclaimed the saints of its imperial past alongside the new martyrs of its Soviet ordeal.

The Glorification of 1994

Philaret was glorified — formally numbered among the saints — by the Bishops’ Council (Arkhiereisky Sobor) of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1994, the Council of the Moscow Patriarchate that met at the end of that year (Acts of the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1994). The act recognized him as a saint of the Russian Church, to be venerated liturgically and commemorated on his feast-day. In the Russian usage, this conciliar decree of proslavlenie (“glorification”) is the Orthodox equivalent of canonization: not the making of a saint, which is God’s act, but the Church’s authoritative recognition that a departed Christian is to be honored as one of the saints, with the establishment of a feast, the writing of services and an icon, and the veneration of relics.

The 1994 Council glorified Philaret together with certain other figures of the Synodal era; in particular, he was glorified at the same Council as the missionary St. Innocent (Veniaminov) of Moscow, the apostle of Alaska and Siberia who had succeeded to the Moscow see — the two great Moscow hierarchs of the nineteenth century recognized together (Acts of the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1994). [Disputed: the precise list and grouping of those glorified at the 1994 Bishops' Council, and the exact date within the Council's sessions on which the act of glorification of Philaret was promulgated, are given with minor variation across reference sources; the secure facts are that the Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church of 1994 decreed his glorification and that his feast was fixed to his day of repose (Acts of the Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1994). Where a source gives a precise day of the conciliar session or a fuller list, it should be checked against the published acts rather than asserted here.]

The glorification was not the result of a dramatic discovery of incorrupt relics or a sudden surge of reported miracles, as with some saints, but the conciliar ratification of a long-standing veneration of a hierarch universally regarded in the Russian tradition as one of its greatest — the author of its standard catechism, the architect of its Russian Bible, and a man held to have been holy as well as commanding. The grounds of his glorification, in the Russian Church’s own understanding, were his sanctity of life, his theological and pastoral service to the Church, and the enduring veneration of the faithful (Acts of the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1994).

The Feast: 19 November / 2 December

His principal feast is kept on the day of his repose, 19 November (Old Style) / 2 December (New Style). The two dates are the same day reckoned on the two calendars: 19 November Julian, which the Russian Church continues to use for its fixed feasts, corresponds in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to 2 December on the civil Gregorian calendar, the two calendars now standing thirteen days apart. (The reader should note that the death itself, in 1867, fell on 19 November Old Style / 1 December New Style, because the Julian–Gregorian gap was only twelve days in the nineteenth century; the feast is fixed to the Julian 19 November and so falls on 2 December today. The single Old-Style date, 19 November, is the constant; only its Gregorian equivalent shifts with the century.) Devotional and parish sources almost always cite the feast as “19 November / 2 December,” and that is the form used in this collection’s master entry.

The Relics and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

The most significant act of veneration after the glorification was the translation of Philaret’s relics. With his glorification, his remains were taken up as the relics of a saint, and they were eventually enshrined in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow — the great cathedral that had been dynamited under Stalin in 1931 and rebuilt in the 1990s as the foremost symbol of the post-Soviet revival of the Russian Church (on that cathedral and the revival it embodies, see Post-Soviet Revival). The placing of the relics of the great Synodal-era Metropolitan in the rebuilt cathedral joined the saint of the imperial Church to the chief monument of its resurrection.

The exact custody and movements of the relics, however, should be stated with care, because the sources are not uniform. [Disputed: accounts of the relics differ on detail. Philaret was buried at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra (the Church of the Holy Spirit) in 1867, and his relics were associated with the Lavra through the late imperial period; after the 1994 glorification his relics were translated to Moscow and enshrined in the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where they are commonly reported to rest today. Some sources, however, describe the relics as remaining at, or being returned to, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, and devotional literature sometimes speaks of portions venerated in more than one place. The secure points are the original burial at the Lavra and the post-glorification association of the relics with the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour; where a single source asserts one location exclusively, it should be checked against others rather than taken as settled.] What is not in doubt is that, after 1994, his relics were honored as those of a saint and that the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour became a principal place of his veneration.

The Growth of His Veneration and His Iconography

Since 1994 the veneration of St. Philaret has grown within the ordinary life of the Russian Church. He is commemorated liturgically on his feast; services and an akathist have been composed in his honor; churches, chapels, and church-school institutions have been dedicated to him; and his name is invoked particularly in connection with theological education and the study of Scripture — fitting for the author of the catechism and the champion of the Russian Bible (see The Longer Catechism; The Battle for the Synodal Translation). The renewal of academic theology in the post-Soviet Russian Church has tended to honor him as a patron of the very enterprise — the patristic and scriptural turn — that the historiography credits to him (see Theology and Preaching).

His iconography follows the established Russian pattern for a sainted hierarch. He is depicted in the vestments of a metropolitan — the white klobuk (the metropolitan’s white monastic veil and cowl) and the omophorion — with the right hand raised in blessing and the left holding a Gospel-book, the book a natural attribute for the saint most associated with giving Russia the Scriptures in its own language. Icons render his recognizable features from the portraits and photographs of his last years: an aged, lean, ascetic face. A halo marks him as a glorified saint. The iconographic type is sober and conventional, in keeping with a figure venerated as a teacher and hierarch rather than as a wonderworker or ascetic of the desert.

Reports of miracles and answered prayers at his intercession circulate in the devotional literature, as they do for venerated saints generally; consistent with the methodology, these are noted as part of the cult’s devotional record and pinned to that attestation, not advanced here as independently established facts (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The character of Philaret’s veneration is, on the whole, less that of a popular wonderworker than that of a great teacher and father of the Russian Church — honored above all for what he wrote and what he built, a veneration whose substance is the subject of the companion file (see The Enduring Synodal Bible).

References

Acts of the Bishops’ Council (Arkhiereisky Sobor) of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1994 (Деяния Архиерейского Собора Русской Православной Церкви, 1994). (The conciliar act glorifying Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow among the saints, with the establishment of his feast; the grounds of glorification; the glorification at the same Council of St. Innocent (Veniaminov) of Moscow.)
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979. (Philaret’s sanctity, stature, and repose; the devotional and critical assessments of his life.)
Nichols, Robert L. “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and the Awakening of Orthodox Russia.” In Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. (The repose of 1867; Philaret’s standing as the dominant hierarch of the Synodal Church and the reverence in which his memory was held.)
Batalden, Stephen K. Russian Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. (The completion of the Synodal Bible in 1876, nine years after Philaret’s death — ch. 6.)
The Calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church (Православный церковный календарь). (The feast of St. Philaret of Moscow on 19 November / 2 December [Old Style / New Style].)