On True Christianity

Tikhon’s major work, On True Christianity (Ob istinnom khristianstve), composed at Zadonsk in 1770–72, is the first large-scale work of Russian-language devotional theology — Florovsky called it “less a dogmatic system than a book of mystical ethics” and the first attempt at a living theology of experience against the Latin scholasticism of the schools. Its deliberate echo of Johann Arndt’s True Christianity opens the Western-influence question treated in Section 06; this file treats the book itself: its origin, argument, and place.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1861)

The Book and Its Dates

On True Christianity (Russian Ob istinnom khristianstve; the transliteration O istinnom khristianstve also circulates) was composed at Zadonsk in 1770–1772, out of material reaching back to the moral-theology lectures Tikhon had delivered in Russian at the Tver seminary in the late 1750s (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky, London: SPCK, 1951, chs. 5–6, for the composition dating; Ivanov, “The Impact of Pietist and Anglican Spirituality in Catherinian Russia: The Works of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk,” Vivliofika: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies 5 (2017): 40–72, on the Tver roots). [Corrected: several popular reference sources (the OCA calendar notice, English Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com) attach the single year 1776 to the work; this reflects publication history, not composition — the scholarly biography’s dating of the writing to 1770–72 at Zadonsk is followed here.] The work is large — six books, in the standard editions filling several volumes of the collected works — and was written, precisely, not in Latin and not for the schools: it is Russian prose addressed to any literate Christian, and its whole posture presumes the reader of the Cell Letters rather than the seminary disputation (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, trans. Robert Nichols, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979, Part I, on the book’s address; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 5).

The title is a deliberate echo of Johann Arndt’s Wahres Christentum (True Christianity), the Lutheran devotional classic that Tikhon knew in Simon Todorskii’s 1735 Slavonic-Russian translation and prized — he recommended it to correspondents with the famous proviso to “read Arndt, but visit other books as a guest” (Ivanov, Vivliofika 5 (2017), documenting the Todorskii translation, the recommendation, and the verdict that after the Bible no book held more devotional value for the saint; the whole question of what the borrowing means is treated, with all named positions, in Section 06 and is not adjudicated here).

The Argument

The book’s thesis is in its title, taken polemically: there is a true Christianity and, by implication, a false one, and the false one is the ordinary religion of baptized Russia. True Christianity, Tikhon argues across the six books, is not the possession of correct doctrine, nor the performance of external observance, but a living faith active in love — the new birth visible in a changed life; and its absence among the baptized is the specific catastrophe of a nominally Christian society (Tikhon, On True Christianity, passim; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 5, summarizing the argument; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part I, characterizing the work as “mystical ethics”). The structure moves from sin and the misery of the fallen state, through repentance and faith, to the life of active love; sustained meditations on the Passion anchor the whole — Tikhon’s Christology is relentlessly kenotic, fixed on the humiliated Christ, and his most quoted pages set the love of God shown in Christ’s abasement against the ingratitude of nominal Christians (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 5, on the Passion-centered piety; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part I).

Florovsky’s summary judgment has become the standard frame: On True Christianity is “less a dogmatic system than a book of mystical ethics,” and its significance is that it was the first attempt in Russia at a “living theology… based on experience, in contrast and as a counterweight to scholastic erudition” — theology done in the vernacular of the heart while the academies still disputed in Latin (Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviia, Paris, 1937, pp. 123–125 in the YMCA-Press edition; trans. Nichols, Ways of Russian Theology, Part I). The judgment cuts both ways and is meant to: the same pages in Florovsky note the book’s Western devotional scaffolding, and the tension between “first living Russian theology” and “built with borrowed tools” is exactly the debate of Section 06.

Within the book’s ethics, two emphases mark it as Tikhon’s own. The first is the poor: the doctrine that Christ is received or refused in the beggar runs through the work with an insistence that the biographers connect to the sexton’s son who wrote it (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, chs. 1, 5; see The World of the Clerical Estate). The second is consolation: long tracts of the work are pastoral medicine for despondency, affliction, and the fear of death, written — as the Zadonsk biography makes plain — by a man treating a condition he suffered (see Meekness, Almsgiving, and Melancholy; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, chs. 4–5).

The book’s manner is as characteristic as its matter. Tikhon writes in short chapters built for slow, devotional reading rather than argument; he reasons by accumulated scriptural citation and by homely comparison — the debtor and the creditor, the invited guest who will not come, the son who forgets his father — rather than by the syllogism of his training; and he addresses the reader in the second person, as a pastor and not a lecturer, with recurring refrains (“What does this teach you? …”) that give the prose its catechetical pulse (the manner is visible throughout the work and is described in Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 5, and in Florovsky’s characterization of the style’s grace and tenderness, Ways of Russian Theology, Part I). The form was itself a decision with a history: the man who had chosen to lecture in Russian at Tver against the Latin custom (see Seminary, Tonsure, and First Episcopate) here carried the same choice to its conclusion, producing theology whose accessibility was not a simplification of the schools’ content but a different conception of what theology is for (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part I, making precisely this point about the “living theology” of experience).

Place and Afterlife

The work’s Russian afterlife was enormous. It circulated in manuscript, was printed after the saint’s death in the collected works (the Synodal edition of Tikhon’s works went through repeated nineteenth-century printings), and became a staple of literate Russian piety across the nineteenth century — the book, more than the biography, is what “Tikhon of Zadonsk” meant to the reading public that included Dostoevsky, who absorbed it and named Tikhon’s teachings as the source for Elder Zosima’s discourses (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, on the nineteenth-century readership and Dostoevsky; see The Documented Trail). In the twentieth century Fr. Georges Florovsky’s treatment fixed the book’s historiographical position, and the modern scholarship (Ivanov’s 2017 textual study above all) has made it the principal exhibit in the study of Protestant–Orthodox devotional exchange in eighteenth-century Russia (Ivanov, Vivliofika 5 (2017); see Arndt and Hall).

English readers should note what does and does not exist: there is no complete standard English translation of On True Christianity; the Jordanville volume Journey to Heaven: Counsels on the Particular Duties of Every Christian (Holy Trinity Publications, trans. George D. Lardas), sometimes mistaken for it, translates a different and much shorter catechetical work — Nastavlenie o sobstvennykh vsyakogo khristianina dolzhnostyakh (“Instruction on the particular duties of every Christian”), a manual that had gone through some forty-nine Russian editions before 1917 (Holy Trinity Publications, Journey to Heaven, holytrinitypublications.com, identifying the Russian original and its edition history). Selections from On True Christianity reach English mainly through anthologies and through Gorodetzky’s generous quotation (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, whose chapters translate extensive passages).

See Also

References

  • Tikhon of Zadonsk. Ob istinnom khristianstve [On True Christianity], composed Zadonsk, 1770–72; in the collected works (Tvoreniya izhe vo svyatykh ottsa nashego Tikhona Zadonskogo, Synodal editions, 19th c.). (The work itself: thesis, structure, the Passion-meditations, the poor, the consolations.)
  • Gorodetzky, Nadejda. Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky. London: SPCK, 1951 (repr. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976). Chs. 5–6 and pp. 95–117. (Composition dating 1770–72; the argument; the Arndt/Hall discussion; extensive translated passages; the readership.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviia. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1937 (ed. 1983, pp. 123–125); trans. Robert L. Nichols, Ways of Russian Theology, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979, Part I. (“Mystical ethics”; the first living theology of experience; the Western scaffolding.)
  • Ivanov, Andrey V. “The Impact of Pietist and Anglican Spirituality in Catherinian Russia: The Works of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk.” Vivliofika: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies 5 (2017): 40–72. (The Tver-lecture roots; the Todorskii translation of Arndt; the “read Arndt” recommendation; the textual borrowings.)
  • Holy Trinity Publications. Journey to Heaven: Counsels on the Particular Duties of Every Christian, by St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, trans. George D. Lardas. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1991/1994. Publisher’s description, holytrinitypublications.com. (The distinct Russian original — Nastavlenie o sobstvennykh vsyakogo khristianina dolzhnostyakh — and its ~49 pre-revolutionary editions.)
  • Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk and All Russia. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 13. (The popular dating and the work’s standing in the Lives — corrected above on composition.)