Seminary, Tonsure, and First Episcopate

The teacher Timofey Sokolov was tonsured a monk with the name Tikhon on 10 April 1758, rose within a year to seminary prefect and then to archimandrite and rector at Tver, and on 13 May 1761 was consecrated Bishop of Kexholm and Ladoga, vicar of the Novgorod eparchy — a rise from sexton’s orphan to hierarch in three years, characteristic of the learned-monk fast track of the synodal church. This file follows the tonsure and the brief first episcopate to the eve of Voronezh.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1861)

The Tonsure of 1758

Timofey Sokolov taught at the Novgorod seminary from 1754, and the Lives describe the pull toward monasticism growing through these years — nurtured, they say, by nights of prayer and by two experiences he later recounted to his cell-attendants: a night vigil in which the heavens seemed to open in light, which he recalled as decisive for his vocation, and a near-fatal fall averted when a rotten bell-tower railing gave way moments after he stepped back (OCA, Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk, oca.org, August 13, recording both episodes; per METHODOLOGY §3.5 these are the saint’s own recollections as transmitted by the attendants’ memoirs, reported as attested, not certified — on the sources see The Boy from Korotsk).

On 10 April 1758 he was tonsured a monk with the name Tikhon by Archimandrite Parfeny (Sopkovsky), later bishop of Smolensk (Tikhon Zadonskii, ru.wikipedia.org, giving the date and the tonsurer; drevo-info.ru, confirming 1758 and Parfeny; the English Lives give simply “1758” — OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org). He was ordained hierodeacon and hieromonk in the same period, and in January 1759 appointed prefect of the Novgorod seminary — the second post in its administration (ru.wikipedia.org, dating the prefecture 18 January 1759; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org).

Promotion followed at the pace the eighteenth-century church reserved for its learned monks. In 1759 Tikhon was transferred to the Tver diocese, elevated to archimandrite of the Zheltikov Dormition Monastery, then made superior of the Otroch Monastery in Tver and rector of the Tver Theological Seminary, where he taught the course in moral theology — notably, the Lives record, choosing to lecture in Russian rather than the customary Latin, to audiences that came to include laymen from the town (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; sttikhonsmonastery.org, The Life of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk; ru.wikipedia.org). The detail of the Russian lectures is worth flagging: it anticipates the whole later career of the writer who would produce, against the Latin grain of his schooling, the first major body of Russian-language devotional theology (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, trans. Robert Nichols, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979, Part I, on Tikhon’s “living theology” against the scholastic idiom; see On True Christianity).

Bishop of Kexholm and Ladoga

On 13 May 1761, at about thirty-seven, Tikhon was consecrated Bishop of Kexholm and Ladoga, vicar (auxiliary) of the Novgorod eparchy, in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg (ru.wikipedia.org, with the date and place; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; stjohndc.org, Life). The Lives attach to the election a story the tradition has loved: at the Synod’s selection by lot among seven candidates, Tikhon’s name came out three times running, and Metropolitan Dimitry (Sechenov), who had thought him too young, took the triple lot as God’s answer (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; stjohndc.org — attested in the standard Lives from the early biographical stratum; reported per §3.5 as the tradition gives it, the Synod’s procedural records not being available to this collection).

The vicariate was brief and administrative — he governed the Novgorod eparchy’s affairs during the metropolitan’s absences, residing at the Khutyn Monastery — but it returned the sexton’s orphan to Novgorod as its acting hierarch, and the Lives note the reversal with quiet satisfaction: the seminary classmates who had once waved their bast sandals at the poor boy in mock incensing now came to him for a hierarch’s blessing, and he reminded them of it with a smile (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org, preserving the scene; stjohndc.org). In 1763, the newly crowned Catherine II’s Synod named him to a vacant major see: on 3 February 1763 Tikhon was appointed Bishop of Voronezh, a vast, rough, under-churched diocese on the empire’s southern steppe frontier (ru.wikipedia.org, giving 3 February 1763; en.wikipedia.org, Tikhon of Zadonsk, concurring; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org). The four years that followed — the reforming episcopate — are the matter of Section 03.

The Shape of the Rise

Three observations belong to this hinge of the life. First, the speed: tonsure to episcopate in three years was not sanctity’s doing but the system’s — the synodal church was chronically short of educated monks for its sees and seminaries, and a gifted teacher-monk was promoted almost automatically (Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977, on the learned-monk career track; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky, London: SPCK, 1951, ch. 2). Tikhon’s later insistence, at Zadonsk, that he had never sought rank — and his repeated petitions to be released from it (see The Cell at Zadonsk) — reads credibly against this background: the career happened to him.

Second, the pattern of the tonsure generation. Tikhon belongs to the same eighteenth-century cohort as St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794), his almost exact contemporary, who solved the problem of the Latin schools by fleeing them — abandoning the Kyiv academy for Athos and the Philokalic revival — where Tikhon stayed inside the system and worked his transformation from within it (on Paisius see St. Paisius Velichkovsky; the contrast is drawn in Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part I, treating the two as the twin counter-currents of the century; see also The Synodal Period). The two men never met, but the nineteenth-century revival — Optina, Seraphim of Sarov, the teacher-bishops — would stand on both of their foundations (see Legacy and Assessment).

The tonsure itself, it should be added, was in Tikhon’s case the ratification of a long-tested intention rather than a career step, however much the career then used it. The Lives place the desire for monastic vows years earlier — the OCA Life records that he had wished to enter a monastery already as a young teacher and had been dissuaded for a time by a friend’s counsel — and the attendants’ memoirs present the 1758 decision as the release of a held desire, not a calculation (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; per §3.5, the inner-intention claims are the attendants’ attestation). The sequel supports the reading: everything rank gave him he later shed — the vicariate’s honors, the Voronezh see itself, and at Zadonsk even the hierarch’s liturgical prerogatives, standing in church as a simple monk (see The Cell at Zadonsk). The monastic vocation, not the episcopal career, proved to be the life’s true line.

Third, the name. The monastic name Tikhon — after St. Tikhon of Amathus — became, through this saint, one of the resonant names of Russian church history: the boy from Korotsk was its first great Russian bearer, and Patriarch St. Tikhon of Moscow (1865–1925), who closed the synodal period this Tikhon lived at the head of, took the veneration of his predecessor with him into the patriarchate. The two saints are regularly confused in English sources and must not be: see the disambiguation in the master README and the collection St. Tikhon of Moscow.

See Also

References

  • Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk and All Russia. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 13. (The vocation episodes; tonsure 1758; the Tver posts and Russian lectures; the triple lot; the vicariate; Voronezh.)
  • Tikhon Zadonskii. Russian Wikipedia, ru.wikipedia.org (used to locate the precise dates — tonsure 10 April 1758 by Parfeny (Sopkovsky), prefecture 18 January 1759, consecration 13 May 1761 in the Peter and Paul Cathedral, Voronezh appointment 3 February 1763 — as given in the Russian biographical literature).
  • Tikhon Zadonskii. Drevo-info Orthodox encyclopedia, drevo-info.ru/articles/243.html. (Tonsure 1758 by Parfeny; the Tver appointments.)
  • 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 consecration; the triple lot; the classmates’ blessing scene.)
  • The Life of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk. St. Tikhon’s Monastery, sttikhonsmonastery.org. (The Tver rectorship and teaching.)
  • Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. (The learned-monk career track.)
  • Gorodetzky, Nadejda. Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky. London: SPCK, 1951 (repr. SVS Press, 1976). Ch. 2. (The rise; the unsought career.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979. Part I. (Tikhon and Paisius Velichkovsky as the century’s counter-currents.)