The Sources for His Life

St. Raphael is among the better-documented saints of this repository: a modern figure of the age of print, he left his own books, articles, and pastoral letters; he founded a magazine that recorded the life of his diocese; and he governed an institution that kept administrative records. His life is therefore recoverable with a confidence impossible for ancient or thinly-attested saints — though the record is fuller for his public deeds than for his inner life.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora)

A Modern Saint of the Age of Print

The methodological situation of St. Raphael stands at the opposite pole from that of a saint like Blessed Xenia of Petersburg, whose dates are back-computed from a single undated epitaph and whose anecdotes first reach print a century late (see the repository’s flagship treatment at St. Xenia: Methodology). Raphael lived and died in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the United States, in the full light of the age of print. He was himself an author and publisher; he headed a diocese that produced periodicals, minutes, correspondence, and financial records; his consecration, travels, and death were public events reported in the press of the day. As a result, the principal facts of his life — his dates, his movements, his foundations, his writings — are attested by contemporary documents to a degree that requires no straining and permits no serious doubt (Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org, which reflects this documentary richness in its detailed year-by-year chronology). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, the attestation-pinning discipline that must labor so hard for the ancient saints here has an easy task: the sources are contemporary, named, and abundant.

The Categories of Source

Raphael’s own writings. The most valuable sources are those from Raphael’s own hand. These include his service books — above all The Book of True Consolation in the Divine Prayers (1898) — and the further books he authored for his people; his contributions to the magazine he founded; and his pastoral letters, of which the substantial 1912 letter on the Episcopalians survives in full (see His Own Words; The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work). These give us Raphael in his own voice — his convictions, his pastoral concerns, and his theological judgment — a first-person access that the thinly-sourced saints do not afford.

Al-Kalimat / The Word. The diocesan magazine Raphael founded in January 1905 is a source of the first importance, both for his own articles and for the record it keeps of the life of his diocese — its parishes, its clergy, its events (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; see Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep). That the magazine has continued in unbroken publication to the present day, as the official magazine of the Antiochian Archdiocese, means the archive of the community’s life reaches back continuously to Raphael himself.

Diocesan and administrative records. As a functioning modern diocese, the Syro-Arab mission generated the ordinary administrative paper of an institution — records of ordinations and parish foundations, of the cemetery purchase, of the property transactions by which St. Nicholas Brooklyn was acquired, of clergy conferences (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). These records underlie the precise dates the canonical Life is able to give.

The canonical Life and the glorification materials. The Orthodox Church in America’s Life, compiled in connection with the glorification of 2000, is the fullest single synthesis of the documentary record, notable for its detailed chronology; it is the principal secondary source used throughout this collection. It rests, in turn, on the three-year study of Raphael’s life, works, and ministry undertaken by the Joint Canonization Commission of the OCA and the Antiochian Archdiocese — a serious historical inquiry into the sources (Orthodox Church in America, The Proclamation of the Holy Synod of Bishops on the Glorification of Saint Raphael of Brooklyn, 2000; see Glorification 2000).

The Antiochian biographical tradition. The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese‘s own Life of Our Father among the Saints Raphael Hawaweeny preserves the community’s memory of its founder, drawing on the same documentary base and on the living tradition of the Archdiocese he created.

The standard histories. Finally, the scholarly histories of American Orthodoxy — Tarasar’s Orthodox America 1794–1976 and Stokoe and Kishkovsky’s Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994 — situate Raphael in the documented institutional history of the American Church and provide the frame for his significance.

The Limits of the Record

The abundance of the record has its own shape, and honesty requires marking its limits. The sources are fullest for Raphael’s public and institutional life — his movements, foundations, publications, and official acts, which the documents record in detail. They are thinner for two things. First, for his earliest years: the Damascus childhood before he entered the Patriarchate’s service, and even the exact day of his birth, are less securely documented than his American career, and the collection accordingly flags the birth-date as reported by tradition rather than by record (see Born in Exile (1860)). Second, for his interior life: Raphael left no autobiography or spiritual diary of the kind that gives us the inner world of a Sophrony of Essex; his surviving writings are pastoral and liturgical, not confessional, so that his sanctity must be read from his deeds and his public words rather than from any first-person account of his prayer (contrast the autobiographical corpus discussed at St. Sophrony of Essex: We Shall See Him as He Is). This is no defect in the man; it is simply the shape of the evidence, and the collection reads him accordingly — a saint known richly in his works and thinly in his soul.

The Disposition This Warrants

The documentary richness warrants a confident but disciplined treatment. The dates, deeds, and writings are asserted as the well-attested facts they are, with the contemporary source cited. The few genuinely contested points — the exact birth-date, the Old-Style/New-Style form of the consecration and repose dates, the precise glorification date — are handled with [Disputed: ...] or [Corrected: ...] notes rather than smoothed over (see First Orthodox Bishop Consecrated in America (1904); Glorification 2000). And the interior life, where the sources fall silent, is not filled in with invention but left as the record leaves it. Raphael is thus a case where the repository’s method operates in comfort: the facts are there to be cited, and the honest task is mainly to cite them accurately and to mark the few real uncertainties — a welcome contrast to the limit-cases where the method must strain to say anything at all.

See Also

References

  • Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (The detailed chronological Life reflecting the documentary record: dates, foundations, writings, and travels.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. The Proclamation of the Holy Synod of Bishops on the Glorification of Saint Raphael of Brooklyn. 2000. oca.org. (The three-year study of his life, works, and ministry by the Joint Canonization Commission.)
  • Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. The Life of Our Father among the Saints Raphael Hawaweeny. (The Archdiocese’s biographical tradition.)
  • Tarasar, Constance J., ed. Orthodox America 1794–1976. Syosset, NY: OCA, 1975; and Stokoe, Mark, with Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995. (The scholarly institutional history.)
  • Raphael Hawaweeny. The Book of True Consolation in the Divine Prayers (Arabic Service Book). New York, 1898; and Al-Kalimat / The Word magazine, from January 1905. (Raphael’s own liturgical and periodical publishing.)