Russian saints

Throughout Christian history many monks have had to abandon the tranquility of their monasteries and serve the Church as missionaries, bishops and popes. There were also itinerants in withdrawal, when so many ecclesiastics of action took refuge in a cloisters to seek God in prayer, penance and solitude. In many cases, these retreatant’s exercised important apostolate’s as directors of souls or writers of texts on spirituality. Still fresh is the memory of Canadian Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger pss, whom Pope Paul VI allowed to leave his episcopal See and enter into seclusion in a distant African mission as chaplain for a leper colony in Yaoundé, Cameroon.  The author of this paper recalls Monsignor Tomás Aspe o.f.m., (Oct. 9, 1885 - † Jan. 22, 1962) bishop of Cochabamba, Bolivia, who as a thanksgiving for being cured of leprosy, dedicated the rest of his life to his ex-companion’s  with this terrible infirmity. The topic of interest now is of Theophan the Recluse (†1894), Russian Orthodox dimissory bishop of Tambov and  a hermit for 24 years.

The article is devoted to the menologion (calendar of saints) compiled in the 20th century for Russian Byzantine Catholics. The latter are a church community with its own Byzantine-Slavic worship and piety, which follow both the Catholic and the Eastern spiritual traditions. Like the entire liturgical literature of the Russian Eastern Catholics, the menologion was created in Rome under the auspices of the Congregation for Eastern Churches, as part of the activities of the Russian Catholic Apostolate, i.e., of the mission of the Catholic Church addressed to Russia and the Russian diaspora in the world. The corpus of service books for Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian Eastern Catholics was called Recensio Vulgata. The menologion under study is in the books of Recensio Vulgata and was compiled on the basis of the Orthodox menologia of pre-revolutionary Russia. The compilers of the Byzantine-Catholic menologion did not just select Russian liturgical memories in a certain way, they also included the names of several martyrs of the Eastern Catholic Churches and some additional commemorations of Western saints. According to the compilers of the menologion, the history of Catholic (orthodox) holiness in North-Eastern Russia ended at the turn of the 1440s, when the Principality of Moscow and the Novgorod Republic abandoned the Union of Florence. The menologion reflects the era after the Union of Florence in the events that show the invariable patronage of the Mother of God over the people and the Russian land. The Recensio Vulgata menologion (RVM) contains twelve Russia-specific holidays that honor icons of the Mother of God, nine of which celebrate the events of the period from the late 15th to the 17th centuries.The compilers of the menologion created a well-devised system in which the East Slavic saints, the ancient saints of the Byzantine menologion, the Latin teachers of the Church, the saints of the Byzantine Catholic churches of different eras all are subject to harmonious logic, and harmony serves to organize the whole.

Филаретовский альманах. Вып. 12. – М.: Изд-во ПСТГУ, 2016. с. 110-123.
Between many others who wrote about count Michael Speransky St. Theophan the Recluse was the only author who defended the position that Speransky was purely orthodox thinker. St. Theophan expressed his views on this subject in the «letters about the spiritual life» where he comments the correspondence between Speransky and F. Seyer. Along with Speransky and St. Theopan author deals with F. Fenelon, who was the representative of the classic quietist tradition. As a result author presents a number of ideas: we can agree with St Theophan when he
insists that this is impossible to fully understand the mystical terminology from the heterodox tradition which was used by Speransky. St. Theophan tries to find the proper orthodox synonyms for the mystical terms that use Speransky in the correspondence. Also we can see that St. Theophan’s understanding of these terms is close to that of Fenelon. But this proximity not only the result of direct descending but means the interconnection through the Fathers of the Ancient Church (including eastern monastic tradition). This fact means that Fenelon’s Quietism may be regarded as a step toward eastern Spirituality.
Keywords: M. Speransky, St .Theophan the Recluse, F. Fenelon, Quietism,
Hesychasm, Tabor Light, Pure Love, Inner Word.

In the era of the Maсariev Councils, after the canonization of a whole host of Russian saints, it became necessary for them to compose liturgical texts. Saint Macarius decided to establish a common day of remembrance for all Russian miracle workers, whose service was performed by the monk Gregory of Suzdal. However, due to the prevailing circumstances, the veneration of all Russian saints was not widespread and soon completely forgotten. Several centuries later, at the Local Council of 1917–1918. the question of restoring the lost holiday was initiated. It was decided to establish a widespread celebration of the day of all the saints who shone forth in the Russian land, the compilation of the service of which was entrusted to Professor B.A. Turaev and the future Saint Athanasius (Sakharov). This article provides a historical background on these events. Also, in the course of the study, the authors examined the further fate of the text of the service to all Russian saints and carried out a partial poetic analysis of selected liturgical hymns from the services of the 16th and 20th centuries.

Since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy has increasingly become the captive of its nationalist and fundamentalist wing. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the remarkable career and dramatic downfall of the priest and monk Sergii (Nikolai Vasil’evich Romanov, b. 1955), a former policeman and convicted murderer who embraced Orthodoxy in the 1990s while serving his 13-year prison term in a colony near the city of Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains.

St. Philaret throughout all his life was a faithful admirer of the St. Sergious.Not only the sermon corpus but also the variant of his biography had become a fruit of the devotion of the one saint man to another. Evidently the life of the St. Sergious was a role model for St. Philaret. In this article we take St. Philaret’s text devoted to Abba Sergious looking for the «way of saint» which was reconstructed by St. Philaret according to the St. Sergious experience.

Keywords: St. Philaret, St. Sergious, Russian Saints, Russian monasticism, Sainthood, silence.