The Lot

November 5/18, 1917: in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, after Liturgy and before the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, the blind Elder Alexy of the Zosimova Hermitage drew one of three names from an urn — and drew Tikhon. This file narrates the scene, his acceptance words drawn from the scroll of Ezekiel “of lamentations, and mourning, and woe,” and his enthronement in the Dormition Cathedral of the shelled Kremlin.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified 1989)

The Scene in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior

The lot was drawn on Sunday, November 5/18, 1917, in the great Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow — eleven days after the Bolshevik seizure of power, with the Kremlin scarred from the recent street fighting. The Divine Liturgy was served by Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev — who would himself be martyred outside the Kiev Caves Lavra within three months (see The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia). The three names selected by the Council’s ballots — Antony of Kharkov, Arseny of Novgorod, and Tikhon of Moscow — had each been written on a slip and sealed; the three slips were placed together in a casket or urn set before the wonderworking Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, the most venerated palladium of Moscow, brought to the cathedral for the occasion (OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon”; orthodoxlife.org, “‘Weeping, Sighing, and Sorrow’: The Election of Patriarch Tikhon”).

After the Liturgy and a moleben, the lot was drawn not by a bishop but by an ascetic withdrawn from the world: the Elder Alexy (Soloviev) of the Zosimova Hermitage, a hieromonk and recluse of great repute, by then aged and nearly blind. The choice of the drawer was itself significant. The Council did not want the lot drawn by any of the candidates’ partisans or by a member of the hierarchy who might be thought to have an interest; it wanted a holy man whose whole life was a renunciation of ambition, so that the hand reaching into the urn would be as nearly as possible the hand of God alone. Elder Alexy, a starets in the Optina mold who had withdrawn into reclusion (zatvor) at Zosimova, was exactly such a man. Having prayed before the icon, the Elder reached into the casket and drew out one of the three slips. It was handed to Metropolitan Vladimir, who opened it and read aloud the name: “Tikhon, Metropolitan of Moscow — Axios!” The cathedral broke into shouts of “Axios! Axios!” (“He is worthy!”) as the choir took up the thanksgiving (OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon”; orthodoxlife.org). The whole record of the scene — the icon, the urn, the blind elder’s hand, the reading of the name — rests on the Council’s acts and the memoirs of participants, and is repo-consistent with the verified account that the Elder Alexy of Zosimova drew the lot before the Vladimir Icon (see The All-Russian Council of 1917–1918).

That the name drawn was the one of the three with the fewest votes was not lost on contemporaries. By the human reckoning of the ballots, Antony of Kharkov had been the Council’s choice; by the lot, God had chosen otherwise. For those who believed the lot, this only deepened its force: the office had been given not to the man the Council would have elected but to the man God had selected from among the three it had deemed worthy — and the man so selected was “the kindest” (see Moscow and the Council).

Tikhon was not present in the cathedral; following the custom, the man whose name might be drawn did not stand by the urn. The news was carried to him at the Trinity podvorye by a solemn delegation of the Council, headed by the senior hierarchs, who came to announce the lot and to greet the new Patriarch-elect. It is from this moment — the formal blagovestie, the “good tidings” brought to a man who had not sought them — that his recorded acceptance words come.

The Acceptance: the Scroll of Ezekiel

When the Council’s delegation formally announced his election, Tikhon’s response was not exultation but lament — and the lament took the form of a scriptural image he chose with care. He likened the news of his election to the scroll given to the prophet Ezekiel, which the prophet was commanded to eat, and which was written within and without with words of grief. His words, as preserved in the Council’s record, run:

“Your news of my election to the Patriarchate is for me that scroll on which was written ‘lamentations, and mourning, and woe,’ which scroll the prophet Ezekiel was made to eat (Ezekiel 2:10; 3:1). How many tears and sighs I too shall have to swallow in the patriarchal service that lies before me, and especially in this grievous hour!” (the Acts of the Council, quoted in OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon”; orthodoxlife.org, “‘Weeping, Sighing, and Sorrow’”).

The quoted phrase is the prophet’s own: in Ezekiel 2:10 the unrolled scroll is found written “with lamentations, and mourning, and woe” (KJV; Slavonic плачь, и стенаніе, и горе), and in 3:1–3 Ezekiel is told to eat it. Tikhon joined to it the lament of Moses from Numbers 11:11–14 — “Wherefore hast thou afflicted thy servant?” — and found his one consolation, he said, in the fact that he had not sought the office: “I am strengthened by the fact that I myself did not seek this election; it came apart from me, and even apart from men, by the lot of God” (orthodoxlife.org). The prophecy in the image was exact. The seven and a half years of his patriarchate would be lamentation, mourning, and woe.

The choice of Ezekiel is worth dwelling on, because it tells us how Tikhon understood the office he was receiving. Ezekiel is the prophet of the exile, called to speak to a captive and rebellious house, made to eat a scroll bitter with grief and then to find it “sweet as honey” in his mouth (Ezekiel 3:3) — the bitterness of the message and the sweetness of obedience held together. Tikhon, a man not given to dramatic gestures, reached for precisely this image at the hour of his elevation: not the language of triumph or of a Church restored to its dignity, but the language of a prophet sent to a people under judgment, to speak words they would not heed, and to swallow the grief of it as his daily bread. He did not yet know the shape the woe would take — the decree, the famine, the confiscations, the arrest, the false council — but he named its character at the outset, and named it from Scripture. The Church has read the acceptance ever since as the first act of his confession.

The Enthronement in the Shelled Kremlin

The enthronement followed on November 21/December 4, 1917 — the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple — in the Dormition Cathedral (Uspensky Sobor) of the Moscow Kremlin, the historic seat of the metropolitans and patriarchs of Moscow (see The All-Russian Council of 1917–1918). The setting was heavy with meaning and with damage. The Kremlin had only weeks before been shelled in the fighting between Bolshevik and cadet forces in late October and early November 1917; its cathedrals and walls had been struck by artillery, the Chudov and other shrines damaged, and the Bolsheviks now held the citadel. That the Bolsheviks permitted the enthronement to take place inside the Kremlin at all was a brief, almost accidental concession of a moment before the iron came fully down — the last patriarchal enthronement Russia would witness in that place. The ancient regalia of the Moscow patriarchs were brought out for the rite — the vestments, mantle, white cowl, and above all the staff of St. Peter, first Metropolitan of Moscow (†1326), placed in Tikhon’s hand as the sign of his pastoral authority and as a living link to the Moscow primates who had governed before the Petrine suppression — and the great bells of Ivan the Great were rung over a Kremlin that was no longer the Church’s own (OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon”; orthodoxlife.org; Vostryshev, Patriarkh Tikhon).

What Restoration Meant at That Hour

The juxtaposition is the whole point. At the very moment the Russian Church recovered, after two centuries, the canonical fullness of its head — a Patriarch enthroned in the Dormition Cathedral with the staff of St. Peter of Moscow — that head was being enthroned amid a shelled Kremlin under a government that within ten weeks would strip the Church of its legal existence (the Decree on Separation of January 20/February 2, 1918) and within three months would see the first bishop murdered. The restoration of the Patriarchate was not the crowning of a triumphant Church but the giving of a visible father to a Church about to enter its passion. The Council had argued that the Church needed a single visible head “to face the coming storm”; the lot had given it the kindest of its hierarchs to be that head. The Patriarchate restored in 1917 was, from its first hour, a confessor’s office — and Tikhon received it as one who had already tasted, in the scroll of Ezekiel, what it would cost (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, vol. 1, ch. 1; see Confessor-Patriarch).

References

Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. Vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
Vostryshev, Mikhail. Patriarkh Tikhon [Patriarch Tikhon]. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya (ZhZL), 1995. (In Russian.)
Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, Enlightener of North America” and “Glorification of Saint Tikhon.” oca.org. (Citing the Acts of the All-Russian Council for the acceptance speech and enthronement.)
“‘Weeping, Sighing, and Sorrow’: The Election of Patriarch Tikhon.” orthodoxlife.org/lives-of-saints/patriarch-tikhon-election-1917/.
Scripture: Ezekiel 2:10; 3:1–3; Numbers 11:11–14.