Repose and Canonization

The end of St. Theophan the Recluse on the feast of the Theophany in 1894 — the providential symmetry of the name, the chapel, and the feast; the burial in the Kazan church of the Vysha Monastery; the secret recovery of his relics in the Soviet years; and his glorification at the 1988 Local Council that celebrated the Millennium of the Baptism of Rus, the same council that canonized his lifelong counterpart St. Ignatius Brianchaninov.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Feast of His Name (6 January 1894)

St. Theophan the Recluse died on the feast of the Theophany, 6 January 1894 (Old Style) (Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov, Orthodox Church in America [OCA], Lives of the Saints; Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia; St. Theophan the Recluse, OrthoChristian.com/158312.html). [Disputed NS date: the literal Julian-to-Gregorian conversion for 1894, with its twelve-day gap, yields 18 January NS; the modern Church Menologion renders his repose as “January 6/19,” pairing the Old Style 6 January with the present thirteen-day offset, so that both 18 January NS (literal) and 19 January NS (Menologion convention) appear across the sources. The repose is given here as 6 January 1894 (OS); 18/19 January NS.]

The tradition has never failed to mark the providential fitness of that date. His monastic name, Theophan — Greek Θεοφάνης, “manifestation of God” — had been given him at his tonsure in 1841 (see Govorov and Formation); the small cell-chapel he had built within his locked apartments at Vysha, where for the last years of his reclusion he served the Liturgy alone, was dedicated to the Baptism of the Lord — that is, to the Theophany itself (see Vysha Hermitage). The recluse who had borne the name of the feast from his tonsure, and who had consecrated his hidden altar to it, was taken to God upon its day. The symmetry of name, chapel, and feast became, for those who told his life, the seal set on a hidden ascetic labor.

The Day of His Death

The accounts are quiet and exact. On the afternoon of 6 January the bishop was still at his writing-desk; when his cell-attendant came to him at about half past four to prepare the evening meal, he found that St. Theophan had already reposed (Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov, OCA, Lives of the Saints). He had served the Liturgy alone in his cell-chapel daily through the last stretch of his reclusion, but the sources do not pin a celebration of the Liturgy to the day of his death itself; what they record of his last hours is the writing, and then the stillness in which he was found.

When the body was vested in the bishop’s vestments for burial, those who prepared it observed a detail that passed at once into the devotional memory of his veneration: “the face of the dead man was brightened by a joyful smile,” his left arm laid upon his breast and his right hand folded as though raised for a blessing (The Repose of St. Theophan the Recluse, johnsanidopoulos.com [Mystagogy Resource Center], January). He was buried in the Kazan church of the Vysha Monastery (Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia), the hermitage to which he had withdrawn in 1866 and within whose walls he had spent the last twenty-eight years of his life in deepening seclusion.

Feast Days

The Church keeps several commemorations of St. Theophan. His principal feast is the day of his repose, 6 January (OS), rendered as 19 January NS in the Menologion convention; alongside it stands the commemoration on 10 January (OS) — 23 January NS, the day of his birth, under which the OCA lists his liturgical service (Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov, OCA, Lives of the Saints, January 10; St. Theophan the Recluse, OrthoChristian.com/158312.html). A summer feast of the translation of his relics falls on 16 June (OS) / 29 June (NS), marking the solemn return of the relics to Vysha in 2002 (treated below).

He is further numbered among several regional synaxes: the assemblies of the saints of Tambov, Voronezh, Ryazan, Kiev, St. Petersburg, and Lipetsk (List of Relics, stjohndc.org; Феофан Затворник, drevo-info.ru). One point requires correction against a natural assumption: although St. Theophan had been Bishop of Vladimir before his retirement, he is not counted in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir — a detail in which the regional reckoning does not follow the line of his hierarchical service (Феофан Затворник, drevo-info.ru).

Glorification at the Millennium Council (1988)

St. Theophan was glorified — canonized — on 6 June 1988 at the Local Council (Pomestny Sobor) of the Russian Orthodox Church, which met from 6 to 9 June 1988 at the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius (the Trinity-Sergius Lavra) under Patriarch Pimen. The council was convened to mark the Millennium of the Baptism of Rus, the thousandth anniversary of the conversion of 988, and its glorification of saints was the spiritual centerpiece of that celebration (Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia; 1988 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, en.wikipedia; Saints Glorified at the 1988 Council, OrthoChristian.com/104752.html).

The same council canonized nine saints together, a roll that gathered some of the most luminous names of Russian Christianity: the prince Dmitry Donskoy, the iconographer Andrei Rublev, Maximus the Greek, the metropolitan Macarius of Moscow, the Athonite restorer of hesychasm Paisius Velichkovsky, the fool-for-Christ Xenia of St. Petersburg, and the Optina elder Ambrose of Optina (see St. Ambrose of Optina). Most significant for this collection, the council glorified at the same session St. Theophan’s lifelong counterpart, the other great episcopal systematizer of nineteenth-century Russian ascetical theology, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov (1988 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, en.wikipedia; Ignatius Brianchaninov, en.wikipedia). That the two bishops who had each resigned a see to retire and write the ascetic teaching of the Fathers for the modern age were raised to the altars in a single act is a fact the tradition has not failed to register (see Influence and Translations).

The deeper significance of the 1988 council lies in its timing and its meaning as a public act. For some seventy years the Russian Orthodox Church had endured a persecution that closed her monasteries, scattered her clergy, and drove her veneration of the saints underground — the very years through which St. Theophan’s own relics had to be hidden at the Lavra (above). The Millennium of the Baptism of Rus, falling in 1988 at the threshold of the Soviet state’s collapse, became the public turning point at which the Church, after that long passion, was at last able to glorify a whole constellation of her own and so to reclaim her tradition in the open. The roll of those canonized was itself a deliberate gathering of the strands of Russian holiness — the iconographer Andrei Rublev, the Optina elder Ambrose, the fool-for-Christ Xenia of St. Petersburg, the hesychast restorer Paisius Velichkovsky, and the two episcopal teachers Theophan and Ignatius Brianchaninov among them (1988 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, en.wikipedia; Saints Glorified at the 1988 Council, OrthoChristian.com/104752.html). To canonize Paisius Velichkovsky, who had carried the Philokalic revival into the Slavic world, and Theophan, who had completed it in Russian, was to affirm in a single conciliar act the very tradition of interior prayer the persecution had tried to silence. The glorification was thus not only an honoring of individual saints but a corporate reclamation: the Church declaring, at the close of her century of suffering, that the ascetic and Philokalic inheritance she had been forbidden to teach was hers still and would be venerated again.

The Meaning of a Death on the Theophany

It is worth pausing on the full weight of the date, for the tradition has read it as the providential summary of a whole life. The Greek Theophany — Θεοφάνεια, “manifestation of God” — is the feast of the Lord’s Baptism in the Jordan, when the voice of the Father and the descent of the Spirit made the hidden God manifest in the flesh. That a bishop named Theophan, “manifestation of God,” who had borne the name since his tonsure in 1841, should be taken to God upon the feast of that name is the kind of symmetry the Church does not treat as coincidence (Saint Theophan the Recluse, OCA; Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia). The coincidence is deepened by the small cell-chapel he had built within his locked apartments, dedicated precisely to the Baptism of the Lord — the Theophany itself — so that the altar of his hidden Liturgy and the feast of his death bore one and the same name (see Vysha Hermitage). A life lived to make God manifest in the soul, hidden from the world in a reclusion of twenty-eight years, was sealed on the day the Church proclaims God made manifest; name, chapel, and feast were drawn into a single providential unity, and the joyful smile observed on the face of the reposed bishop was read as the visible token of that unity (The Repose of St. Theophan the Recluse, johnsanidopoulos.com).

The Soviet Odyssey of the Relics

The history of the relics runs through the whole tragedy and recovery of the Russian Church in the twentieth century. It can be read as a small parable of that century’s passion and resurrection. The hermitage of St. Theophan’s hidden labor was seized in the anti-religious campaign and turned into a psychiatric hospital — a sacred place of prayer converted, with grim symbolism, into an institution of the secular state, and so it remained until 2012 (The Return of St. Theophan’s Relics, OrthoChristian.com/104752.html). Through the years of persecution the saint’s body did not rest undisturbed in its church but had to be secretly recovered and hidden by faithful churchmen: uncovered in an on-site expedition led by Igumen Mark (Lozinsky) and carried away to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, where it was concealed in the Church of All Saints beneath the Dormition Cathedral, guarded with the blessing of Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov) until the Church could once more venerate it openly (The Return of St. Theophan’s Relics, OrthoChristian.com/104752.html; The Relics of St. Theophan, johnsanidopoulos.com). The relics of a glorifier of the spiritual life thus passed the Soviet years in concealment, kept safe by the same hidden fidelity that had marked his own reclusion — and were brought home in 2002, to a monastery restored, in a translation led by the Patriarch himself. The passage from a desecrated and shuttered hermitage to a restored monastery enshrining its saint mirrors in miniature the passage of the whole Russian Church through her own twentieth-century death and rising (The Return of St. Theophan’s Relics, OrthoChristian.com/104752.html; ria.ru, 2010).

The Fate of the Relics

The dates and stages of that recovery may now be set out in order. The Vysha monastery was closed in the 1920s during the anti-religious persecution; its buildings were turned over to secular use and became a psychiatric hospital, which occupied the site until 2012 (The Return of St. Theophan’s Relics, OrthoChristian.com/104752.html; The Relics of St. Theophan, OrthoChristian.com/76729.html).

[Disputed exhumation date: the relics were secretly uncovered in the fall of 1972, in an on-site expedition led by Igumen Mark (Lozinsky); many sources round this to 1973, the year the relics were secured and removed. The recovery is given here as secretly recovered in 1972/1973.] The relics were brought to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and kept hidden in the Church of All Saints beneath the Dormition Cathedral, with the blessing of Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov), until after the canonization of 1988 (The Return of St. Theophan’s Relics, OrthoChristian.com/104752.html; The Relics of St. Theophan, johnsanidopoulos.com, January). From the Lavra they were then translated to the church in the village of Emmanuilovka near Vysha.

The final translation came in the new century. On 29 June 2002 Patriarch Alexei II led the solemn return of the relics from Emmanuilovka to the restored Holy Dormition-Vysha Monastery, the hermitage of St. Theophan’s reclusion and death (The Return of St. Theophan’s Relics, OrthoChristian.com/104752.html; ria.ru, 2010). There they rest today, in the Kazan Cathedral of the monastery — in the same church in which he had been buried in 1894 — so that the place of his hidden labor, his repose, his burial, and his enshrined relics are one and the same (see Vysha Hermitage).

References

Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, January 10. (Death on the Theophany, 6 January 1894 OS; the attendant finding him reposed at about 4:30 in the afternoon while he had been writing; the service listed under January 10, his birthday.)
Theophan the Recluse. English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophan_the_Recluse). (Repose 6 January 1894; burial in the Kazan church of the Vysha Monastery; glorification at the 1988 Local Council.)
1988 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church. English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Local_Council_of_the_Russian_Orthodox_Church). (Council held 6–9 June 1988 at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra under Patriarch Pimen for the Millennium of the Baptism of Rus; the nine saints glorified, including Theophan and Ignatius Brianchaninov.)
Ignatius Brianchaninov. English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Brianchaninov). (Glorification at the same 1988 council.)
St. Theophan the Recluse. OrthoChristian.com/158312.html. (Repose date and rendering; feast days and regional synaxes; the non-inclusion in the Synaxis of Vladimir saints.)
The Return of St. Theophan’s Relics and related accounts. OrthoChristian.com/104752.html and /76729.html. (Closure of Vysha in the 1920s and the psychiatric hospital until 2012; the secret recovery of the relics in 1972/1973 by Igumen Mark (Lozinsky); their keeping at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra under Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov); translation via Emmanuilovka; the 29 June 2002 return led by Patriarch Alexei II to the Kazan Cathedral of the Vysha Monastery.)
The Repose / Relics of St. Theophan the Recluse. johnsanidopoulos.com (Mystagogy Resource Center), January 2010 and January 2019. (The joyful smile on the face of the reposed bishop; the position of the arms; the relics’ history.)
List of Relics. stjohndc.org. (Regional synaxes of Tambov, Voronezh, Ryazan, Kiev, St. Petersburg, and Lipetsk.)
Феофан Затворник [Theophan the Recluse]. drevo-info.ru. (Feast days, regional synaxes, and the non-inclusion among the Vladimir saints.)