Student and Teacher at Halki and Kiev

For his higher theological education Raphael was sent to the Greek-run Theological School of Halki at Constantinople, where he was ordained deacon in 1885 and received his certificate of theology in 1886; he then served the Patriarchate, headed its representation church in Moscow, studied at the Kiev Theological Academy, and taught Arabic at the Kazan Theological Academy until his call to America. These years bound the Arab monk to the Russian Church that would send him to the New World.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora)

Halki: Theological School under the Ecumenical Patriarchate

Because the Patriarchate of Antioch had no functioning higher seminary of its own — Balamand having been closed since 1840 (see Formation in Damascus and the Arab Awakening) — the young monk Raphael was offered a scholarship to the Theological School of Halki, the famous seminary of the Ecumenical Patriarchate on the island of Halki (Heybeliada) in the Sea of Marmara off Constantinople (Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org). Halki was in the later nineteenth century the premier Greek Orthodox theological institution of the Ottoman world, and study there placed the Arab student within the elite Greek theological culture of the age — the very culture whose dominance over his own Arabic-speaking Church he would come to resist.

At Halki Raphael pursued the full theological course. He was ordained to the diaconate on 8 December 1885 while a student there, and received his certificate of theology in July 1886, after which he returned to the service of the Patriarchate of Antioch (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). He was thus, by his mid-twenties, a theologically educated Antiochian deacon — one of the small number of Arab clergy of his generation with a formal higher theological training, and precisely the kind of learned Arab churchman whom the Arab party in Antioch needed and the Greek hierarchy could find inconvenient.

Return to Antioch, and the Turn Toward Russia

Raphael’s return to Antioch coincided with the sharpening of the Arab-Greek struggle within the Patriarchate, and it was in this period that his advocacy of the Arab cause brought him into conflict with the Greek-dominated hierarchy (treated fully in The Antiochian Arab Cause). The conflict is the hinge on which his geography turns: a learned young Arab partisan, at odds with the Greek leadership of his own see, found in the Russian Orthodox Church a great sympathetic patron. Imperial Russia in these decades cultivated close ties with the Arab Orthodox of the Ottoman East — through the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, through scholarships to Russian academies, and through political sympathy for the Arab party against Greek dominance — and Raphael, like many able Antiochian clergy, was drawn into that orbit (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; on the Russian cultivation of the Arab Orthodox, the general histories of the Church of Antioch and of Russian involvement in the Orthodox East).

The concrete form this took was an appointment in Russia itself. Around 1889 Raphael was made head of the Antiochian representation church (metochion) in Moscow — the podvorye through which the Patriarchate of Antioch maintained its presence and its fundraising in the Russian capital — and there he was ordained to the priesthood and, by the Russian hierarchy, raised to the dignity of archimandrite (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The Life records the practical competence he brought to the post, reducing the representation church’s substantial debt over his first years in charge (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The Arab scholar-monk had become an Antiochian archimandrite resident in Moscow, a figure of the Russian ecclesiastical world while remaining a cleric of Antioch — exactly the dual standing that would later make him the natural choice to shepherd Arab immigrants under the Russian mission in America.

The Kiev Theological Academy and the Kazan Instructorship

Within the Russian Church’s academic world Raphael continued both to study and to teach. He attended the Kiev Theological Academy, one of the four great theological academies of Imperial Russia and a center of Orthodox learning, deepening the theological formation he had begun at Halki now within the Russian scholarly tradition (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Raphael of Brooklyn,” listing “the Theological Academy in Kiev” among his three formative institutions). His time in Russia thus spanned both of the great Orthodox theological cultures of the age — the Greek at Halki and the Russian at Kiev — and left him, unusually, at home in both, and fluent across a remarkable range of tongues: Arabic, Turkish, and Russian, to which he would add English in America (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org).

His scholarly standing was recognized in a teaching appointment: until 1895 he served as an instructor in Arabic studies at the Kazan Theological Academy, another of the imperial academies, where his native command of Arabic made him a valued teacher of the language and of the Christian Arab world (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). It was from this position — an Antiochian archimandrite, Halki- and Kiev-educated, teaching Arabic in a Russian academy — that he would be called to America. The call, when it came, went not to a stranger but to a man the Russian Church already knew and trusted, and who already stood at the meeting point of the Arab and Russian Orthodox worlds (see Call to the Syrian Mission (1895)).

A Formation That Explains the Man

The itinerary — Damascus, Halki, Antioch, Moscow, Kiev, Kazan — is not a wandering but a preparation, and it explains the bishop Raphael became. From Halki he had Greek theological learning; from Kiev and Kazan, Russian; from his Antiochian roots, the Arabic language and the loyalty of a partisan of his people. He was, by 1895, the rare churchman who could stand credibly in three Orthodox worlds at once — Arab by birth and cause, Greek by his best schooling, Russian by his ordination to the priesthood, his academic home, and his patrons. It is this triple standing that made him uniquely fit for the multiethnic mission he was about to join, where under a Russian archbishop he would shepherd an Arab flock within a Church of many nations (see The Russian Mission and the Many Nationalities). His learning, in short, was not incidental to his mission but the very thing that made it possible.

References

Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (The scholarship to Halki; ordination as deacon on 8 December 1885; the certificate of theology in July 1886; the return to Antioch; the headship of the Antiochian representation church in Moscow c. 1889, ordination as priest and elevation to archimandrite; the reduction of the church’s debt; study at the Kiev Theological Academy; the instructorship in Arabic at the Kazan Theological Academy until 1895; his languages.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Raphael of Brooklyn.” orthodoxwiki.org. (The three institutions of his formation — the Patriarchal School in Damascus, Halki, and the Theological Academy in Kiev; used to locate, per METHODOLOGY not a terminal citation.)
Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. The Life of Our Father among the Saints Raphael Hawaweeny. (His Russian years and the ties between the Arab Orthodox and the Russian Church.)
On Imperial Russia’s cultivation of the Arab Orthodox of the Ottoman East (the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society; scholarships; sympathy for the Arab party): the general histories of the Church of Antioch and of Russian engagement in the Orthodox East, as context for Raphael’s turn to Russia.