American Legacy

What America did to Tikhon and Tikhon to America: the historians’ argument that the experience of a free, conciliar, voluntary church without an established state prepared him for the conciliar work of 1917; his enduring American veneration as “Apostle to America” and “Enlightener of North America”; the OCA’s claim on him and the living institutions that bear his name; and the American dimension of his 1989 glorification.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified 1989)

A Two-Way Formation

Tikhon’s nine American years (1898–1907) are usually told as the story of what he did for American Orthodoxy — the see moved east, the 1905 plan, the Mayfield Sobor, the monastery (see Bishop of North America). But the historians of the period make a second, subtler argument: that America also did something to Tikhon, forming the bishop who would, a decade later, preside over the most conciliar council in Russian history and lead the Church into the catacomb era. The legacy runs both ways.

The Church Without a State

In Russia, the Orthodox Church Tikhon had served was an established church — bound to the state since Peter the Great’s abolition of the Patriarchate in 1700/1721, governed by a state-controlled Synod under an imperial ober-procurator, its clergy effectively state functionaries (see The All-Russian Council of 1917–1918). In America Tikhon governed, for the first time, a church without a state — a voluntary body in a religiously plural republic, sustained not by establishment but by the free adherence of its people, organizing itself through the participation of clergy and laity rather than by imperial decree.

The historians argue that this experience was formative for the conciliar program of 1917–1918. Fr. Leonid Kishkovsky and the Stokoe–Kishkovsky history observe that “in America, the practice of convening clergy and laity to meet with their hierarchs to make common decisions in ecclesial life even preceded the decisions of the Russian Church Council of 1917–1918”; the American Orthodox experience, “under the guidance of the future saint and confessor, drew clergy and laity into co-responsibility with their hierarchs even before” Moscow did the same (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America, ch. 3; Kishkovsky, “Orthodoxy in America: Diaspora or Church?”, orthodoxytoday.org; “St. Tikhon, the Russian Council of 1917–18, and the Metropolia,” orthodoxhistory.org). Tikhon himself, the sources note, valued such lay participation because it would “give to the function of church life the character of a council, and also would tend to enliven it” (quoted in orthodoxhistory.org). The Mayfield Sobor of 1907 was, in this reading, a rehearsal: the man who had already gathered clergy and laity to govern conciliarly in Pennsylvania was the natural figure to be drawn by lot to lead a Church that had just restored conciliar governance in Moscow.

This is an interpretive claim, advanced by the church’s own historians rather than stated in the diocesan lives, and it should be held as such — but it is the standard reading of why the American chapter matters beyond America. The same non-political, voluntary, conciliar instinct that the 1905 plan embodied (see Bishop of North America) is the instinct Tikhon carried into the crucible of the Revolution (see Character and Style).

“Apostle to America”

In America, Tikhon is venerated under titles that no Russian patriarch before him could have borne. He is commemorated as “Apostle to America” and as “Enlightener of North America” (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon, Apostle to America,” and “Repose of Saint Tikhon… Enlightener of North America,” oca.org; St. Tikhon’s Monastery, “Life of St. Tikhon the Apostle to America,” sttikhonsmonastery.org). The Antiochian Archdiocese, heir to St. Raphael’s Syro-Arab mission, likewise honors him as “Tikhon, Saint, Enlightener of America” (Antiochian Archdiocese, ww1.antiochian.org). The titles mark a recognition that crosses jurisdictional lines: the saint belongs to the whole of American Orthodoxy, not to any one of its successor bodies.

The OCA’s Claim and the Living Institutions

The Orthodox Church in America (OCA), the autocephalous heir of the Russian missionary diocese Tikhon governed, has a particular claim on him. The OCA understands its own conciliar, lay-inclusive constitution — and the 1970 autocephaly that gave institutional reality to a self-governing American Church — as the realization of the very vision Tikhon articulated in 1905 (OCA, Orthodox Christians in North America, ch. 3; see Twentieth-Century Fragmentation). Tikhon’s name is woven into the OCA’s institutional life:

  • St. Tikhon’s Monastery, South Canaan, Pennsylvania — the oldest continuously operating Orthodox monastery in North America, blessed by Tikhon himself in 1905 (see Bishop of North America).
  • St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, founded beside the monastery at South Canaan — today one of the OCA’s seminaries, perpetuating his name in the formation of American Orthodox clergy.

These are not memorials but functioning institutions, and they make Tikhon’s American legacy a living rather than a commemorative one.

The American Dimension of the Glorification

Tikhon was glorified by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church on September 26 / October 9, 1989, held in connection with the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon, Apostle to America”; see The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, where the glorification of October 9, 1989 is recorded, distinct from the 1988 millennium glorifications and from ROCOR’s earlier 1981 inclusion of him among the New Martyrs). His feast in the American calendar is kept on October 9, the date of that glorification.

The glorification had an unmistakable American dimension. Among the saints of the Russian Church, Tikhon is the one whose holiness was forged in part on American soil, who consecrated the first Orthodox bishop in America, who blessed America’s oldest Orthodox monastery, and who first sketched the blueprint of an American Orthodox Church. His canonization is therefore claimed by American Orthodoxy as in some measure its own — the glorification of a saint who is counted among the American saints even as he is the Confessor-Patriarch of Moscow. In him the two stories — the immigrant Church in America and the martyric Church under the Soviets — meet in a single person.

See Also

References

  • Orthodox Church in America. “Glorification of Saint Tikhon, Apostle to America.” oca.org — locator for the glorification of September 26 / October 9, 1989, and the “Apostle to America” title.
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, Enlightener of North America.” oca.org — locator for the “Enlightener of North America” title.
  • Stokoe, Mark, and Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995, ch. 3 — the argument that the American conciliar experience preceded and prepared the 1917–1918 Council.
  • Kishkovsky, Leonid. “Orthodoxy in America: Diaspora or Church?” orthodoxytoday.org.
  • “St. Tikhon, the Russian Council of 1917–18, and the History of the OCA.” orthodoxhistory.org (July 1, 2009) — Tikhon on lay participation giving church life “the character of a council.”
  • St. Tikhon’s Monastery. “Life of St. Tikhon the Apostle to America.” sttikhonsmonastery.org — locator.
  • Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese. “Tikhon, Saint, Enlightener of America.” ww1.antiochian.org — locator.
  • Vostryshev, Mikhail. Patriarkh Tikhon. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya (ZhZL series).