The See of Voronezh

On 3 February 1763 Tikhon was appointed Bishop of Voronezh — a vast steppe-frontier diocese stretching toward the Don, thinly churched, with a barely literate clergy, a rough and recently colonized population, and surviving pockets of pre-Christian custom. This file describes the diocese he received and the pastoral analysis he made of it, as the setting of the four-year reforming episcopate treated in the companion file.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1861)

A Frontier Diocese

The Voronezh diocese to which Tikhon was appointed on 3 February 1763 (Tikhon Zadonskii, ru.wikipedia.org; en.wikipedia.org, Tikhon of Zadonsk) was young, huge, and unlike the old church heartland of Novgorod where he had been formed. Erected only in 1682, it covered the southern steppe frontier — Voronezh itself, Yelets, and lands running down the Don toward the territories of the Don Cossacks — a region colonized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by runaway serfs, Cossacks, garrison soldiers, and Old Believer refugees, where parishes were scattered, churches poor, and the writ of diocesan administration weak (OCA, Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk, oca.org, August 13, describing the diocese’s extent “along the Don” and its condition; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky, London: SPCK, 1951, ch. 3, on the state of the diocese). The first bishop of the see, St. Mitrophan of Voronezh (d. 1703), had been glorified in 1832 — between Dimitri of Rostov and Tikhon himself in the short synodal-era calendar of canonizations — and his memory was the diocese’s chief spiritual possession (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org, noting Tikhon’s veneration at Mitrophan’s tomb; on the sparse synodal canonizations see The Glorification of 1861).

The Lives and the scholarship agree on the diagnosis Tikhon made on arrival, because he wrote it down in his circulars: a clergy ordained for lack of anyone better, many barely able to read, some never instructed in the meaning of the services they performed; a laity baptized but catechized hardly at all; monasteries in disorder; and among the people — most notoriously — the survival of the pre-Christian spring festival of Yarilo, kept publicly in Voronezh itself with games, drink, and license (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; stjohndc.org, Life; drevo-info.ru, Tikhon Zadonskii; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 3). Gregory Freeze’s study of the eighteenth-century parish clergy confirms that the picture, however hagiographically pointed, was the ordinary condition of the southern dioceses: clerical education was new, thin, and concentrated in the north; the frontier sees were the system’s last to be reached (Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977, on regional disparities in clerical formation).

The Pastoral Analysis

What distinguishes Tikhon among eighteenth-century diocesan bishops is that his response to this diagnosis survives in his own words, because he governed by writing. From the first months he issued instructions and circular letters to his clergy — documents that became, in effect, his first books. The earliest, an instruction on the duties of priests concerning the sacraments, was followed by a short work composed expressly because his priests could not be assumed to own or read any theology: On the Seven Holy Mysteries and the instruction The Office of Priesthood (the Russian titles and sequence are given in the biographical literature; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 3, discusses the diocesan writings; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org, lists the instructional works of the Voronezh years). In 1765 he composed a brief catechetical work for the schools he was founding, and his Flesh and Spirit (Plot’ i dukh), a collection of short chapters pairing a vice of the flesh with its spiritual remedy, belongs to the same governing-by-teaching impulse (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 3; on the mature development of this method see Section 05).

Two features of the analysis deserve notice, because they persist into the great Zadonsk writings. First, Tikhon treated ignorance, not malice, as the root disease: the clergy did not teach because no one had taught them, and the people kept Yarilo because no one had ever shown them why they should not. His remedy was therefore instruction before discipline — schools, catechesis, preaching in Russian — with canonical penalties reserved for the incorrigible (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 3; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org, on the priority of instruction). Second, he identified the deeper problem as the divorce of baptism from life — a society formally Christian whose gentry read Voltaire and whose peasants kept fertility feasts — and this diagnosis, generalized, became the thesis of On True Christianity: that Christianity is not a status conferred by baptism and nationality but a life, and that its absence among the baptized is the specific spiritual catastrophe of the age (Tikhon, On True Christianity, composed 1770–72; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, chs. 3, 5, drawing the line from the Voronezh experience to the book; see On True Christianity).

The Bishop and His People

The Lives preserve the pastoral style alongside the program. Tikhon traveled the diocese; preached constantly — the first bishop of Voronezh to make regular preaching central to the office, reviving a practice that had lapsed there (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; stjohndc.org); received the poor at his residence and was, by every account, more at ease with them than with the notables; and kept the ascetic personal regime — plain food, plain dress, incessant work — that his attendants would later describe at Zadonsk (stjohndc.org, Life; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 3). The administrative labor was, however, visibly consuming him. The diocese’s size, the poverty of its chancery, the resistance of entrenched habits, and his own scrupulous conscientiousness — the biographers’ word is that he could not do anything by halves — wore his always-fragile health down across four years, and the physical and nervous collapse that ended the episcopate in 1767 is treated honestly by the tradition itself (OrthoChristian, “St. Tikhon of Zadonsk: Victor Over Melancholy,” orthochristian.com/105992.html, on the symptoms — dizziness, tremor, insomnia — that forced the retirement; see Meekness, Almsgiving, and Melancholy for the full §3.5-pinned treatment).

One relationship of the Voronezh years deserves separate notice: the bond with Yelets, the diocese’s second city, some ninety versts from Voronezh toward Zadonsk. The Lives record that Tikhon found in Yelets’s merchant and artisan population a piety warmer than the diocesan capital’s, singled the city out in his visitations, and formed there the friendships — merchants who became his lifelong correspondents and almsgiving partners — that would sustain the Zadonsk years, when Yelets became the destination of his incognito prison visits and the channel of much of his charity (stjohndc.org, Life, on Yelets and the prison visits; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, chs. 3–4, on the Yelets friendships). The Church remembered the bond in his very title: the pre-revolutionary style of the see was “Voronezh and Yelets,” and the saint’s traditional title joins him to both cities (stjohndc.org, giving the title “Bishop of Voronezh and Eletsk”).

The episcopate thus lasted barely four years and ten months; its reforms are assessed in The Reforming Episcopate. But its brevity should not mislead. Voronezh gave Tikhon the pastoral experience on which everything he later wrote drew; the diocese, for its part, never relinquished him — he remained within its bounds at Tolshevsky and Zadonsk for the rest of his life, the retired bishop a more formative presence in the diocese’s memory than most ruling ones, and Voronezh and Zadonsk keep his name jointly to this day (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; on the retirement geography see The Cell at Zadonsk).

See Also

• The Reforming Episcopate — the seminary, the clergy instructions, and the Yarilo affair
• Seminary, Tonsure, and First Episcopate — the appointment of 3 February 1763
• Meekness, Almsgiving, and Melancholy — the health collapse that ended the episcopate
• On True Christianity — the Voronezh diagnosis generalized into the great book
• The Synodal Period — the church system within which the diocese operated

References

• Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk and All Russia. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 13. (The diocese’s condition and extent; the instructional works; the preaching; the schools.)
• Tikhon Zadonskii. Russian Wikipedia, ru.wikipedia.org (the appointment date of 3 February 1763, as given in the Russian biographical literature).
• 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 pastoral style; the diocese’s disorder; Yarilo.)
• Tikhon Zadonskii. Drevo-info Orthodox encyclopedia, drevo-info.ru/articles/243.html. (The diocesan reforms and the Yarilo suppression.)
• Gorodetzky, Nadejda. Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky. London: SPCK, 1951 (repr. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976). Ch. 3. (The state of the diocese; the diocesan writings; the pastoral program; the line to On True Christianity.)
• Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. (Regional disparities in clerical education; the condition of frontier dioceses.)
• Sapaeva, Elena. “St. Tikhon of Zadonsk: Victor Over Melancholy.” Trans. Jesse Dominick. OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/105992.html. (The health collapse of 1767.)