The World of the Clerical Estate

St. Tikhon was born in 1724 into the lowest stratum of the Russian clerical estate — the family of a village sexton in Korotsk, Novgorod province, so poor that after the father’s early death the mother nearly gave one of her sons away to a neighbor to raise. This file describes the hereditary clerical estate of the eighteenth century, its poverty and its single ladder of escape (the seminary), as the social ground of the saint’s life and of his lifelong identification with the poor.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1861)

The Clerical Caste

Eighteenth-century Russia was a society of legally defined estates (sosloviya), and the clergy formed one of them: a closed, hereditary caste whose sons were expected to follow their fathers into church service and whose daughters married within it. Gregory Freeze’s standard study describes the parish clergy of the period as an estate set apart — exempt from the poll tax and from conscription so long as they held a clerical position, but bound to the church settlement, dependent for income on land they worked themselves and on fees from parishioners, and stratified internally from the priest at the top down through the deacon to the lowest rank of all, the church servitors: the dyachok (sexton-reader) and ponomar (sacristan) (Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977, chs. 1–2, on the estate’s structure and the churchmen’s economy). These lowest clerics were, in economic fact, peasants with a church function: they plowed, sowed, and reaped like their neighbors, and a dyachok’s family that lost its breadwinner fell at once into destitution, since the position — and the plot that came with it — passed to whoever was appointed to serve (Freeze, The Russian Levites, 1977, chs. 1–2).

Sons of the clerical estate who did not obtain a church position were in constant danger of being “registered” out of the estate altogether — entered on the poll-tax rolls as peasants or townsmen, or swept into the army by the periodic “sorting” (razbor) of unplaced clerical sons that the state conducted through the century (Freeze, The Russian Levites, 1977, on the razbory). The seminary, once the Petrine church built one in each diocese, thus became more than a school: for a poor clerical boy it was the one ladder that led anywhere — to a church position, to teaching, and exemption from the tax rolls and the recruiter. This is the precise social machinery visible in Tikhon’s own boyhood, where the threat of being taken as a soldier and the hope of a state-funded seminary place decide the whole course of the life (OCA, Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk, oca.org, August 13; see The Boy from Korotsk).

The Sexton’s Family at Korotsk

Into this world Timofey was born in 1724, in the village of Korotsk (Korotsko) in the Valdai district of the Novgorod diocese, one of the children of Savely Kirillov, the village dyachok (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; Tikhon Zadonskii, drevo-info.ru, which names “the dyachok Savely Kirillov”; the Russian sources render the father’s office variously — Drevo and the OCA give sexton/cantor, Russian Wikipedia a psalmist-reader — variants of the same lowest church rank). The family’s surname was Kirillov; the name Sokolov, under which the saint appears in the reference literature, was assigned to Timofey years later by the administration of the Novgorod seminary, in the common eighteenth-century practice by which seminaries gave their pupils new surnames (Tikhon Sokolov, born Kirillov, stjohndc.org; drevo-info.ru; the full form “Timofey Savelyevich Sokolov” — Savelyevich being the patronymic from his father Savely — is the one most modern reference works use).

Savely died when Timofey was a small child, leaving a widow with several children and no income beyond what the eldest son, who inherited the sexton’s position, could provide (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky, London: SPCK, 1951, ch. 1). The Lives preserve two scenes of the family’s destitution, and per the repository methodology they are reported as what the hagiographical tradition attests — they descend from the early Lives and the saint’s own recollections recorded by his cell-attendants, and are given in the standard modern accounts (METHODOLOGY §3.5). First: a childless neighbor, a coachman, offered to take the boy and raise him as his own, and the mother, unable to feed her children, was ready to give him up; the eldest brother Peter met her on the road and begged her on his knees to turn back — “we will teach him to read and write; better that he become a sexton” — and the boy was kept (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; stjohndc.org, Life). Second: in the hungry years of his boyhood, Timofey would hire himself out to the peasants, harrowing and plowing a whole day for a piece of black bread (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; stjohndc.org, Life).

The saint himself, at Zadonsk decades later, recalled these years to his cell-attendant; the recollections passed into the first biographies compiled from the testimony of his attendants Chebotarev and Ivanov, on which all subsequent Lives depend (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 1 and her discussion of the sources; see Sources note in the master README). The attestation chain is thus short and comparatively good for a saint of his period — first-person recollection recorded by named contemporaries — though the scenes retain the shaping typical of edifying biography, and this collection reports them as attested rather than photographically certain.

Poverty Remembered

The biographical tradition is unanimous that Tikhon’s childhood poverty was not incidental to his sanctity but formative of it. The bishop who at Voronezh and Zadonsk gave away his entire pension to the poor, who visited the prisons of Yelets in a simple monk’s habit, who was easier with peasants than with the gentry and said so, was a sexton’s orphan who had plowed for bread; the almsgiving of the Zadonsk years (see The Cell at Zadonsk) reads in the Lives as the reflex of a man who never forgot what hunger was (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, on the continuity between the childhood and the almsgiving). Gorodetzky observes that his writings, too, carry the mark: their imagery is rural and domestic — bread, fields, debtors, beggars at the door — and their most characteristic doctrine, that Christ is encountered in the poor, is autobiographical before it is literary (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, on the imagery of the writings; see A Spiritual Treasure and the Letters).

There is also a sharper historical point. The Russian church of the eighteenth century drew its saints from the opposite ends of its social world: St. Dimitri of Rostov from the Cossack officer class and the Kyivan academy, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov (in the next century) from the nobility, St. Theophan the Recluse from a priest’s family of the middling sort — and Tikhon from the very bottom, the one canonized Russian hierarch of the period who had known peasant destitution from inside (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951; on the triad with Theophan and Ignatius see The Teacher-Bishop Triad). When the crowds — the sources speak of hundreds of thousands — came to his glorification in 1861, in the very year of the emancipation of the serfs, they came to a saint who was one of their own; the coincidence of the emancipation year and the glorification of the plowboy-bishop was not lost on contemporaries (see The Glorification of 1861; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org).

See Also

References

  • Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. (The clerical estate’s structure, the churchmen’s economy, the razbory and the seminaries.)
  • Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk and All Russia. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 13. (Korotsk 1724; the father’s death; the coachman and brother Peter; plowing for bread; the surname.)
  • St. Tikhon (Sokolov, born Kirillov), Bishop of Voronezh and Eletsk, Wonderworker of Zadonsk. Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Washington, DC, stjohndc.org. (The Kirillov/Sokolov surnames; the childhood scenes in the traditional Life.)
  • Tikhon Zadonskii. Drevo-info Orthodox encyclopedia, drevo-info.ru/articles/243.html. (The father “dyachok Savely Kirillov”; the seminary’s assignment of the surname Sokolov.)
  • Gorodetzky, Nadejda. Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky. London: SPCK, 1951 (repr. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976). Ch. 1. (The childhood and its sources — the cell-attendants’ testimony; the poverty’s mark on the writings.)
  • Methodology — METHODOLOGY.md §3.5 (hagiographical scenes reported as attested, not certified).