Character and Style

The temperament of St. Tikhon as the sources record it: the documented humor and accessibility, the deliberately non-political instinct he professed in his own statements, the “faith of steel” beneath the mild exterior that the confessor years would reveal, and the assessments of contemporaries and historians who knew or studied him.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified 1989)

A Portrait in His Own Register

More than most of the hierarchs of his generation, Tikhon is remembered less for a body of theological writing than for a manner — a way of bearing office and meeting people. The consistency of the portraits across very different witnesses (American journalists, Russian émigré clergy, Soviet-era observers, and later historians) is itself notable, and it is the warrant for treating the following traits as characterization rather than hagiographical convention.

Humor and Accessibility

The most frequently attested trait is his humor joined to what Russians call his dostupnost’ — his accessibility. The standard accounts describe him as “simple, accessible,” a man who “loved to joke” and could lighten “even the most ridiculous and tragic situations with humor”; it was a commonplace, the lives say, that “anyone — be he bishop or priest or the most obscure layman — who had real need of his advice could get to see the Patriarch” (OrthoChristian, “The Quiet Courage of Patriarch Tikhon,” orthochristian.com).

Contemporaries who met him reach for the same notes. The journalist Korovin, writing in 1918, recorded that “the Patriarch fascinates one by his ease of communication, approachability and the sincere gentleness of his tone” (quoted in OrthoChristian, “Contemporaries on Patriarch Tikhon,” orthochristian.com). The Archpriest Valentin Sventsitsky described an encounter in iconographic terms: “I saw an icon in front of me — a living saint of God” (ibid.). The émigré Protopresbyter Michael Polsky distilled the moral shape of the man: “He humiliated himself, but never anybody else, and didn’t exalt himself by humiliating others… a very meek creature, an exclusively flawless, holy personality” (ibid.).

His American years (1898–1907) leave the same impression in a different idiom: American observers fixed on his “accessibility” and his “well-developed sense of humor,” which “helped him retain his poise and cheerfulness through difficult years” (OrthoChristian, “The Quiet Courage of Patriarch Tikhon”; cf. the 1923 American interview reproduced at alexanderpalace.org). The humor was not a mask over an empty interior: “behind his light-hearted and humorous character was a profound inner life,” the accounts insist, and “people would leave their visit with the Patriarch softened and bright” (ibid.).

The Non-Political Instinct

A second documented trait is a principled reluctance to align the Church with political faction — an instinct Tikhon stated in his own words and acted on at great cost. During the Russian Civil War (1918–1921), caught between the Bolsheviks and the White armies, he insisted that the Church stand “above politics,” refusing to bless the White cause even as he condemned the Bolshevik persecution (see The All-Russian Council of 1917–1918). His pastoral epistle of January 19 / February 1, 1918, anathematized those carrying out “bloody reprisals” against the Church, but named no party as such, and he later moderated his public stance precisely to deny the regime a pretext for harsher repression (The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia).

This non-political instinct had been formed early. In America he had governed a diocese of many nationalities and many civil loyalties without making the Church an instrument of any of them, and his conciliar, lay-inclusive vision there (see American Legacy) was of a Church whose authority was spiritual rather than coercive. The same instinct, exercised under the Soviet state, would be read by his persecutors as obstruction and by the faithful as fidelity.

The Steel Beneath

The mild manner deceived observers — sometimes deliberately. “His humble, gentle manner gave the impression that he was weak and ineffective,” the accounts note, “but behind his mild façade was a faith of steel ready to confront the persecutors of the Faith” (OrthoChristian, “The Quiet Courage of Patriarch Tikhon”). A Paris-based correspondent of Informations who observed him wrote that “a strong will, the energy to endure all trials, and steadfast faith are discernible in him” (quoted in OrthoChristian, “Contemporaries on Patriarch Tikhon”).

This is the trait that can only be fully read backward, from the confessor years. The man who joked his way through audiences was the same man who refused to surrender consecrated liturgical vessels during the 1921–1922 church-valuables campaign, who was arrested and held under house arrest, and who — under intense pressure in June 1923 — signed the statement declaring himself “henceforth no enemy of the Soviet power,” a concession whose sincerity and voluntariness have been debated ever since (The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia; The All-Russian Council of 1917–1918). The “steel beneath” is not a hagiographical flourish; it is the evidence of those years read into a character that had always concealed firmness behind gentleness — the “kindly firmness” that contemporaries called proverbial (OrthoChristian, “The Quiet Courage of Patriarch Tikhon”).

Assessments: Contemporaries and Historians

Among contemporaries, the assessments quoted above — Korovin, Sventsitsky, Polsky, the anonymous Informations correspondent — converge on a single figure: meek but unbreakable, humorous but grave, approachable but unyielding on the things that mattered. Britannica’s summary judgment is that he was “mentally and temperamentally well fitted for the task of leading the Orthodox Church through these years of disorder and suffering in Russia” (Britannica, “Saint Tikhon”).

Among historians, the standard modern Russian biography is Mikhail Vostryshev’s Patriarkh Tikhon (Moscow, Molodaya Gvardiya, Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh lyudei series), which assembles the documentary record of his life and the testimony of those who knew him. The scholarship on his Soviet-era trials — Dimitry Pospielovsky’s The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime and Edward Roslof’s Red Priests on the Renovationist schism — treats the 1923 statement and the circumstances of his death with the caution the documentary gaps require. The historian Andrei Kostryukov of St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Humanitarian University in Moscow, a leading scholar of the Russian Church of this period, was among those who addressed his life at the 2015 symposium “St. Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow: His Life and Times” at Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville (Holy Trinity Seminary, “St. Tikhon… symposium,” hts.edu, as locator). What unites the church historians — figures as different as Archpriest Vladimir Vorobiev, who calls Tikhon “one of the greatest universal saints” (Vorobiev, Pravoslavie.ru, April 2015) — is the reading of his gentleness not as the absence of strength but as its disciplined form.

See Also

References

  • OrthoChristian.com. “The Quiet Courage of Patriarch Tikhon” (orthochristian.com/86631.html; Russian original Pravoslavie.ru/86631.html). — Source of the “simple, accessible,” “faith of steel,” and “kindly firmness… proverbial” characterizations.
  • OrthoChristian.com. “Contemporaries on Patriarch Tikhon” (orthochristian.com/119491.html). — Quotations of Korovin (1918), the Informations correspondent, Archpriest Valentin Sventsitsky, and Protopresbyter Michael Polsky.
  • “A 1923 Interview with Patriarch Tikhon by an American.” alexanderpalace.org and OrthoChristian.com — used as locator for American-era characterizations of his accessibility and humor.
  • Vostryshev, Mikhail. Patriarkh Tikhon. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya (ZhZL series). — the standard Russian biography.
  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
  • Roslof, Edward E. Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905–1946. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
  • Vorobiev, Vladimir, Archpriest. “Patriarch Tikhon Is One of the Greatest Universal Saints” (interview). Pravoslavie.ru, April 2015.
  • Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville. “St. Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow: His Life and Times” symposium (October 2015), hts.edu — locator for Andrei Kostryukov’s participation.
  • “Saint Tikhon.” Encyclopædia Britannica.