The Glorification of 1861

On Sunday, 13 August 1861 — the seventy-eighth anniversary of his repose — St. Tikhon was glorified at Zadonsk, Metropolitan Isidore of Novgorod and St. Petersburg presiding, before crowds the sources describe as enormous (English accounts give some 300,000 pilgrims). It was one of only a handful of canonizations in the entire synodal period, and it fell in the year of the emancipation of the serfs — the plowboy-bishop glorified in the emancipation year, under Alexander II.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1861)

The Act

The Holy Synod, on the basis of the examinations of the relics and the verified reports of cures (see The Incorrupt Relics), determined upon the glorification of Tikhon in 1861, and the act received the confirmation of Emperor Alexander II, as the synodal order required. The solemnity was set for 13 August 1861 — deliberately, the anniversary of the repose of 1783, and in that year again a Sunday, as the death itself had been (OCA, Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk, oca.org, August 13; Tikhon Zadonskii, ru.wikipedia.org, on the determination, the date, and the rite). The glorification was celebrated at the Zadonsk monastery by Metropolitan Isidore (Nikolsky) of Novgorod and St. Petersburg, first hierarch of the Synod, with a concelebration of hierarchs and clergy; at the appointed moment the relics were uncovered for veneration and the first services to the saint — no longer panikhidas for the departed, but molebens to a glorified intercessor — were sung (ru.wikipedia.org, naming Isidore and the concelebration; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org). His feast was fixed on 13 August (Julian; 26 August on the civil calendar), with the 14 May commemoration of the relics’ first opening retained alongside it (OCA, both notices; on calendar reckoning see The Church Calendar).

The crowds became part of the event’s meaning. The Russian accounts speak of “an enormous concourse of pilgrims from all corners of Russia”; the English-language literature descending from the church historians ventures a figure — some 300,000 pilgrims at Zadonsk, a town of a few thousand, for the days of the solemnity — and higher figures circulate. [Disputed: the attendance is given as about 300,000 in the standard English accounts (e.g., the Holy Trinity Publications literature), while figures up to 400,000 appear elsewhere; the Russian sources this collection could check give no number, only the “enormous gathering.” The order of magnitude — hundreds of thousands — is uniform; no precise count exists.] However counted, the scene was, by every account, among the largest religious gatherings of nineteenth-century Russia, and the memoir literature dwells on the sea of peasant pilgrims camped around the little town on the Don (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky, London: SPCK, 1951, final chapter, on the glorification and the crowds; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org).

One of a Handful

The rarity of the act gives it its historical weight. In the entire synodal period — 1721 to 1917, two full centuries — the Russian Church proceeded to formal glorification only a handful of times: St. Dimitri of Rostov (1757, the first and the eighteenth century’s only one), St. Innocent of Irkutsk (1804), St. Mitrophan of Voronezh (1832), St. Tikhon (1861), followed by St. Theodosius of Chernigov (1896) and the cluster of the last reign — St. Seraphim of Sarov (1903) at Nicholas II’s personal insistence, and the few that followed to 1917 (the list and its brevity are standard in the church-historical literature; the repository’s treatments at The Synodal Period and, for Dimitri and for Seraphim, the respective collections St. Dimitri of Rostov and St. Seraphim of Sarov). Tikhon’s was thus the fourth formal canonization in a hundred and forty years of synodal governance — and the first of the reform era of Alexander II, whose reign began in 1855 after the long Nicholaevan freeze (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, final chapter; ru.wikipedia.org).

Historians have read the rarity variously — as the synodal bureaucracy’s caution, as the ober-procurators’ rationalist distaste for popular cults, as procedural scruple — and the reading belongs to the historiography of the period rather than to this file (see The Synodal Period; Freeze’s and Cracraft’s studies cited there). What belongs here is the observation the repository has made once before, at Dimitri of Rostov, and can now complete: when the synodal church did canonize, it canonized — in Dimitri and Tikhon — precisely the two learned bishops of the Latin schools who had turned their learning into Russian devotional teaching for the people. Whatever the era’s “captivity,” its own rare acts of glorification honored the men who had transcended it from within (the point is developed for Dimitri at Faith Under the Reforms; for the Tikhon-side debate see Florovsky and His Critics).

The Emancipation Year

The date carries one more resonance, which contemporaries did not miss and the literature has kept: 1861 was the year of the emancipation of the serfs — Alexander II’s manifesto was published in February; the glorification followed in August. The saint whom the Church lifted up in the emancipation year was a sexton’s orphan who had plowed for bread beside serfs (see The World of the Clerical Estate), whose writings taught that Christ is met in the poor, and whose pilgrims that August were overwhelmingly the newly freed. The conjunction was providential rather than planned — the glorification’s timetable was set by the verification process, not the politics (see The Incorrupt Relics) — but as symbol it was, and remains, irresistible: the freed people’s first national festival, in effect, was the glorification of a saint of the poor (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, final chapter, noting the conjunction; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org).

The days of the solemnity themselves are described in the memoir and church-press literature of the time with details the tradition has kept: the pilgrim encampments stretching along the Don for versts around the town; the continuous services in the monastery and in the open air, since no church could hold a fraction of the crowd; the sick carried on litters to the relics; the good order of the multitude, which struck official observers accustomed to fear such gatherings (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, final chapter, drawing on the contemporary accounts; per METHODOLOGY §3.5 the healing reports of those days are the sources’ attestations, reported as such). For the Church’s own self-understanding the scene mattered as much as the act: a synodal establishment often accused — not least by its own bishops — of having lost the people demonstrated, for one August week on the Don, that the deepest layer of popular Orthodoxy was intact and could be summoned by a saint of its own kind. Historians of the period have read the glorification as an early sign of the popular religious vitality that the last synodal decades would repeatedly reveal — Kronstadt’s crowds around St. John, Sarov 1903 — and that the Revolution would test but not extinguish (see St. John of Kronstadt and St. Seraphim of Sarov; the repository’s survey at The Synodal Period).

Veneration after 1861 spread with the man’s books. Churches and monasteries took his dedication across Russia; his icon — the thin-faced hierarch in white klobuk, hand raised in blessing or holding the Gospel — multiplied; and the flow of pilgrims to Zadonsk continued until the Revolution closed the monastery, resuming when the relics returned in 1991 (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; zadonsk-monastyr.ru; the twentieth-century fate of the relics is in The Incorrupt Relics). Among those shaped in the veneration’s first generation was the novelist then planning The Life of a Great Sinner: Dostoevsky’s 1870 letter calling Tikhon the “positive Russian type” was written nine years after the glorification had made the saint a national possession (see The Documented Trail).

See Also

References

  • Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk and All Russia. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 13. (The glorification of 13 August 1861 on the anniversary of the repose; the feast; the veneration.)
  • Tikhon Zadonskii. Russian Wikipedia, ru.wikipedia.org (Metropolitan Isidore (Nikolsky) presiding; the concelebration; the “enormous gathering of pilgrims”; the Synod’s determination and imperial confirmation — as given in the Russian church-historical literature).
  • Gorodetzky, Nadejda. Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky. London: SPCK, 1951 (repr. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976). Final chapter. (The glorification, the crowds, the emancipation-year conjunction.)
  • Holy Trinity Publications, Journey to Heaven, publisher’s biographical material, holytrinitypublications.com. (The ~300,000 pilgrims figure in the English literature.)
  • Zadonsky Nativity of the Mother of God Monastery, zadonsk-monastyr.ru. (The continuing veneration; the 1991 return.)
  • The repository’s treatments of the synodal canonizations: orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/history/synodal-period.md; st-dimitri-of-rostov; st-seraphim-of-sarov.