The Making of Holy Russia by John Strickland

Author:John Strickland [Strickland, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-88465-347-9
Publisher: Holy Trinity Publications
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nor in their mission to the nationalists were they content with rhetoric alone. They made use of the entire program of Orthodox patriotism as it had been developed during the past generation. Theological resources such as the national saints and cultural engagement such as historiography and orchestrated pilgrimages to the past were used as well.

All of these were ultimately brought to a focus in the person of Patriarch Germogen. His seventeenth-century personality offered an excellent case for creating a historical image that embodied ideals common to both clerical Orthodox patriots and ethnic nationalists. Though originally a missionary among Muslims near Kazan, he had become famous as a Russian patriot during the legendary Time of Troubles. According to medieval chronicles, he had called upon Russians to rise up against the invading Roman Catholic Poles, and thus helped to preserve both national autonomy and the Orthodox faith. Furthermore, he had personally blessed the Russian army that defended the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and other holy places, and though he died in the Moscow Kremlin's Chudov Monastery before the final victory of 1613, he helped prepare medieval Rus for the founding of the Romanov Dynasty.

These deeds were especially significant to Vostorgov, who took the opportunity in an address to a patriotic union in 1907 to discuss the example of Germogen. Delivered among the “national holy objects” of the Moscow Kremlin's Uspensky Cathedral, it directed the attention of the nationalistic audience to the sepulcher in which Germogen's relics lay. Expressing regret that so illustrious a figure as Germogen was “still not glorified” as a national saint, Vostorgov recounted his service to “Holy Rus.” His adherence to the twin ideals of “ecclesiality and nationality” (tserkovnost i narodnost) were praised and were said to have constituted a formula for the “Russian faith.” Germogen therefore offered an example to modern Russians prepared to translate Orthodox patriotism into political activity. “At present Russian troubles have again been unleashed,” Vostorgov warned. Germogen's example “offers a means for conducting our struggle, and this struggle is perhaps even greater than that which was conducted by Russian people for faith and fatherland three hundred years ago.”106 Indeed it was.

In 1913, six years after this address and three hundred years after the end of the first Time of Troubles, Patriarch Germogen was finally glorified by the Church as an official national saint. Vostorgov, Skvortsov, Antony, and other Orthodox patriots all rallied to participate in the canonization festival organized in the Moscow Kremlin. Before we turn to this last act of prerevolutionary clerical Orthodox patriotism, however, it is time to consider the influence of the movement upon some of Russia's leading lay intellectuals.

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