St. Tikhon (Belavin) (1865–1925)

KONSTANTIN GAVRILKIN

Vasilii I. Belavin was born into a priestly family in the Pskov diocese. He studied at the Pskov Seminary and St Petersburg Theological Academy, became a monk with the name Tikhon in 1891, and was ordained to the diaconate and priesthood shortly after. After a few years at the Kholm Seminary, where he became the dean, he was consecrated bishop of Lublin, vicar of the Kholm-Warsaw diocese, in 1897, but a year later was sent to the United States as bishop of the Aleutians and Alaska, and he remained there until 1907. In his nine years in America, Tikhon reorganized and expanded the diocese, initiated a number of missions, and encouraged the use of the English language (instructing that Angli­can prayer books should be used until trans­lations of Orthodox texts could be published). He provided pastoral care for diverse ethnic groups of Orthodox immi­grants from the Old World, since the Russian Church was the only autocephalous church with a proper administrative presence and resources in the United States at the time (the situation dramatically changed after the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, when its material support of the church also evaporated). By 1907 the now archdiocese of the Aleutians and North America had two vicar bishops (in Alaska and Brooklyn) and St. Tikhon’s Monastery in Pennsylvania was under construction, together with new churches in various regions.

In 1907 Tikhon was summoned back to Russia and appointed first to Yaroslavl’, then to Vilnius (1913), and finally to Moscow (June 1917). When the Council of the Russian Orthodox Church was convened in Moscow in August 1917 for the first time since the 17th century, Tikhon was elected its chairman and elevated to the rank of metropolitan. The council contin­ued its work despite the Bolshevik coup d’etat in October and the beginning of the new regime’s persecution of the church, which intensified after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1918. Among the council’s primary goals was reestablishment of canonical order in the administration of the church and, first of all, the restoration of the office of patriarch, which had been abolished by Peter the Great in the early 18th century. After a few rounds of voting, Tikhon was elected out of the three leading candidates by the drawing of lots.

Tikhon led the Russian Church in the period of persecution by the hostile regime, when virtually all of its infrastructure was destroyed and internal divisions weakened its unity. In addition, the Bolshevik govern­ment used various provocations to under­mine Tikhon’s authority and legitimacy, and his condemnation ofthe violent repres­sion of the church was widely publicized as anti-Soviet ideology. Eventually, in order to protect thousands of people from certain death, the patriarch appealed to the clergy to abstain from direct involvement in the political struggle, but this measure did not change the Bolsheviks’ attitude to the church or alleviate mass repressions of the Orthodox clergy and laity. Between 1922 and 1925 Tikhon was practically under house arrest in the Donskoi Monas­tery in Moscow, where he died in 1925. He was canonized in October 1989. His shrine is today in the Donskoi monastery church.

SEE ALSO: New Martyrs; Russia, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of; United States of America, Orthodoxy in the

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Gubonin. M. (ed.) (2007) Sovremenniki o

Patriarkhe Tikhone, 2 vols. Moscow: PSTGU. Lobanov, V. V. (2008) Patriarkh Tikhon i sovetskaia vlast’ (1917–1925 gg.). Moscow: Panorama. Swan, J. (1964) The Biography of Patriarch Tikhon. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Monastery.

St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724–1783)

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

Russian bishop and spiritual theologian of the baroque era. He was born Timothy Sokolov, son of a village church lector, who died when he was a child, leaving the family impoverished. He entered the Novgorod seminary (with a very pro-western curriculum) where his extreme poverty evoked ridicule from other students, but eventually became a professor, and rector of the Tver seminary. His lectures on dogmatics were later published and focus on the doc­trine of the redemption in western terms of atonement. In 1758 he was tonsured as a monk and priested, and in 1760 he became head of the Otroch monastery. In 1761 he was consecrated as assistant bishop in Nov­gorod, and two years after that was appointed bishop of Voronezh. He was active in restor­ing the diocesan seminary and trying to insti­tute schemes to raise the standard of the diocesan clergy. But in 1767 he suddenly, and without explanation, sought permission to retire into an obscure monastery, settling at Zadonsk, where he stayed until he died in 1783, aged 59.

Plate 69 Portrait of St. Tikhon (Belavin). Topfoto

All his life he found it difficult to engage with people. He suffered from irritability, and what his first biographer, Bishop Eugene Bolkhovitinov, described as a “melancholy nervous illness” and which we today would probably call serious bi-polar disorder. One of his monastic assistants, after his death, spoke about his nervous hypochondria. His forced involvement in the state-mandated deposition of Metropolitan Arseniy Matsievich in Moscow in 1763 deeply disturbed him. Tikhon always preferred to avoid social engagement, making an exception (which he had to force against his inclination) to visit the imprisoned, and minister to the peasants, whom he helped from his state pension while living in great personal simplicity.

Tikhon was canonized in 1861. His spiritual work, mostly composed in solitude in Zadonsk, is typical of much that was happening in 18th-century Russia, and shows familiarity with western pietistic and evangelical trends. His Spiritual Treasure is an Orthodox adaptation of Occasional Med­itations by the 17th-century Anglican theo­logian Joseph Hall, bishop of Norwich. Johann Arndt’s treatise True Christianity also was a strong influence on him, though in his own book, of the same title, Tikhon moderated Protestant pietism with deep currents from Russian Kenoticism that were familiar to him. Fedotov, in his study of Russian spiritual masters, says that his “personality is much more interesting than his writings. He is the first ‘modern’ among the Russian saints, with his interior con­flicts, his painful groping for his spiritual way – the constant shift of light and shadow, of ecstasy and depression” (Fedotov 1950: 183–4). At Zadonsk, Tikhon devoted every night to prayer, sleeping only at sunrise. When he was overcome with depression he would ceaselessly chant: “Lord have mercy on me. Lord forgive. Giver of life have mercy on me.” And when he was happy he would replace the invocation with “Praise the Lord in heaven.” Late in life he received ecstatic visions of Christ, the Theotokos, and the joy of heaven. In his writing pro­found devotion and love for Christ cruci­fied are manifested. His path to sanctity was one that was navigated through many psy­chological fragilities; a fact that makes him unusual in the annals of Orthodox spiritual writing of the modern period. Dostoevsky saw in Tikhon a model of spirituality that he reflects in several of his writings.

SEE ALSO: Russia, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Bolshakoff, S. (1980) Russian Mystics. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, pp. 61–78.

Fedotov, G. P. (ed.) (1981) A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 3rd edn. London: Sheed and Ward, pp. 182–241.

Spidlik, T. (1991) “Tikhon de Zadonske,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualite, Vol. 15. Paris: Beauchesne, cols. 960–4.