Ecumenical Commemoration
Patriarch of Moscow, Confessor & Ecumenist
April 7 · d. 1925
also known as Tikhon of Moscow, Vasily Belavin
Tikhon (1865-1925) was a Russian priest's son who served nine years as the Orthodox bishop of America, then returned home to be elected, by lot, the first Patriarch of Moscow in nearly two hundred years. Within months a revolution had taken the country. He condemned the killings and the seizure of the churches, was imprisoned for it, and died in 1925 with the Church still standing.
Vasily Bellavin was born in the Toropets district of Pskov province in January 1865, the son of a village priest. That is the whole of his advantage: a hereditary clerical household, a district school at nine, a seminary, an academy in St Petersburg, no money and no noble name. His father is remembered in his own church's telling as having slept in the hayloft with his sons and woken with a word about the third of them, Vasily, that he would be a great man. Tradition keeps that scene; no document carries it.
He was tonsured a monk in 1891 and took the name Tikhon, after Tikhon of Zadonsk. He taught, and then ran, a seminary. In 1897 he was made a bishop. And in 1898, at thirty-three, he was sent to the far end of the world: the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, seated at San Francisco, an ocean and a continent away from everyone he knew. Three days before Christmas that year he stood up in Holy Trinity Cathedral in front of a congregation of strangers and said, in the words of the prophet Hosea, "I will call 'beloved' the one called 'not my loved one.'" He told them he had left his country, his elderly mother, his kinsfolk and his friends, and travelled to a far-away country and a people unknown to him, "in order that henceforth you may become my people and my beloved."
He meant it. In nine American years he renamed the diocese to fit what it had become, blessed the cornerstone of the cathedral on East 97th Street in Manhattan, consecrated Raphael Hawaweeny for the Syro-Arab immigrants (the first Orthodox bishop ever consecrated on American soil), and authorized the first Orthodox monastery in the country, in the Pennsylvania hills. He preached that spreading the faith was not the clergy's private business: Saint Paul, he said, compares the Church to a body, and the life of a body is shared by all its members. He made a friend of an American Episcopalian, Isabel Hapgood, who was putting the Orthodox service books into English, and he backed her work. When he left in 1907 he told the small American flock what he feared for them. "How easily the candle can be extinguished by the wind coming through the open window."
Then Russia. Yaroslavl and Rostov, Vilnius, and in the summer of 1917 Moscow, with the Tsar gone and the country coming apart. That autumn a great Council met, the first since the seventeenth century, and voted to restore the Patriarchate that Peter the Great had abolished in 1721. Three names went forward. Tikhon's was the weakest of them; Antony of Kharkov had led the ballot with 159 votes of 309. But the Council did not finish by counting. On 5 November 1917 an elder, Alexiy of Zosimova Hermitage, drew a lot before the wonderworking icon of the Vladimir Mother of God, and it came out Tikhon. The office of Patriarch of Moscow, empty for nearly two centuries, was handed to the man who had wanted it least and been chosen for it by God.
He held it for seven years, and they were the worst years the Russian Church had ever had. In January 1918, with priests being killed and churches and monasteries and schools being taken, he issued an encyclical in his own name. He wrote of "the astounding and beastly murders of wholly innocent people, and even of the sick upon their sick-beds," of cathedrals shelled, of monasteries seized by "the atheistic masters," of church schools turned into "nurseries of immorality." And then he did the only thing a bishop can do to men who will not hear him: "By the authority given us by God, we forbid you to present yourselves for the sacraments of Christ, and anathematize you, if you still bear the name of Christians." That year he also condemned, publicly, the murder of the Tsar and his family. He knew what it would cost. He ended the letter by quoting the promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church.
They came for him. Interrogations through the spring of 1922, then arrest, then something over a year in detention, while an agent named Tuchkov worked on him and, outside, a rival church put together by the state tried to take over the buildings, the parishes and the name. His own senior bishops began to sign. One of them, Sergius, recognized the schismatics in June 1922 while Tikhon was locked up. Released in the summer of 1923, having said in some form that he was no longer an enemy of Soviet power, Tikhon declared the schism's acts and sacraments empty of grace. And on 27 August 1923 he received Sergius back. Not merely pardoned him: the following spring he gave him Nizhny Novgorod. That is the measure of the man toward those who had failed him, and it is better attested than anything else in his life.
He knew he would not last, and no council could be called to elect anyone after him, so he wrote out, in secret, three names in order to carry the office when he was gone. He served his last liturgy on Sunday, 5 April 1925, and died two days later, aged sixty. Tradition holds that it was a quarter to midnight, that he crossed himself twice and died before the third, and that his last words were "Glory to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee." They buried him at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow on the twelfth, and something close to a million people are said to have come out into the streets of a city where the state had just declared God finished.
A painter named Pavel Korin stood in that crowd, and spent the next forty-two years preparing an enormous canvas of the vanished Russian church he had seen gathered at that funeral, and never laid a single brushstroke on it. The prepared, empty canvas hangs in his old studio still. But the men Korin painted studies of were not the end of the story, and neither was the funeral. The relics lost for seventy years were found in a hidden crypt in 1992 and carried up beside the sanctuary; and the Church that a government had set out to abolish was there to carry them.
You will probably not be handed an office in a year when everything is falling down, but you will be handed something, and the pattern of Tikhon's life is that almost nothing in it was chosen. Alaska was an assignment. The patriarchate came out of a lot, drawn by a stranger before an icon, after he had finished third in the voting. What he chose was narrower and harder: what to say when it would cost him, and what to do with the man who signed against him while he sat in a cell. He said the true thing in 1918 and paid for it, and in 1923 he took Sergius back and then gave him a diocese. Consider the place you did not choose to be standing, and the person who has already let you down there: what would it look like to receive them back, not merely to excuse them?
The documentary situation for Tikhon is unusual, and worth naming before anything else: he is a saint of the twentieth century whose life is heavily reported and thinly edited. Only one text of his own was read directly for this account, the encyclical of January 1918, which survives here in an English rendering reprinted by William Chauncey Emhardt in 1929. The connected narratives all come from modern devotional compilations, chiefly the Orthodox Church in America's life of him, with Russian-language and partisan émigré compilations supplying detail the English ones lack. Several of those apparent second witnesses are copies: OrthodoxWiki reproduces the OCA account sentence for sentence and cannot corroborate it.
Dates come in two calendars. Russia kept the Julian reckoning until 1918, and the sources mix the styles freely. His birth is 19 January Old Style, 31 January New; his death 25 March Old Style, 7 April New, which is the date Commontide keeps.
Where the sources disagree, they disagree in small ways and one large one. He left Pskov Seminary in either 1883 or 1884; he was made Metropolitan of Moscow on either 14 or 15 August 1917. The consecration year of the New York cathedral is given variously as 1902 and 1903 and cannot be settled here. The 1922 arrest is genuinely unresolved: the English devotional tradition dates house arrest from April 1922, a Russian account gives a formal arrest on 6 May with detention at the Trinity Compound on Samotyoka Street, and a third source dates the arrest to 19 May. The legal disposition of the case was never established, and the text of the February 1922 epistle on church valuables that occasioned it has not been recovered.
Two matters are contested rather than merely uncertain. The first is his declaration of June 1923 that he was "no longer an enemy to the Soviet power," which reaches us only as an unfootnoted fragment; a claim that its wording resembles Politburo documents circulates but is made without citation, and should be described as such rather than as evidence. The second is the so-called testament published under his name at his death, urging loyalty to the Soviet state. One substantial strand of the tradition, the Russian Church Abroad and the True-Orthodox writers, holds it a forgery engineered by Tuchkov, on five grounds including its resemblance to a Renovationist appeal of 1922 and its never having been proclaimed to any assembly of bishops. That case is argued at length by Bishop Gregory (Grabbe). No mainstream or Moscow-aligned treatment of the question could be reached, so the counter-position is simply absent from this account rather than weighed against it. It should not be treated as settled either way, and it should not be confused with the uncontroversial secret succession will naming Kirill of Kazan, Agathangel of Yaroslavl and Peter of Krutitsy. Peter was affirmed Locum Tenens on the day of the burial and arrested eight months later.
Veneration of Tikhon began with the crowds at his funeral in 1925 and continued underground for the whole Soviet period, long before any formal act. Under that regime, those who held to the patriarchal Church against the state's rival "Living Church" were called Tikhonites by their opponents: his name became the name of an allegiance.
He was glorified twice, by two bodies not then in communion with one another. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified him in New York on 1 November 1981, among the New Martyrs and Confessors; the Moscow Patriarchate followed on 9 October 1989, in the thaw, sixty-four years after his death. Orthodox glorification produces no dossier and requires no counted miracles: a council of bishops numbers among the saints a man the faithful already venerate.
His relics were located in a hidden crypt at Donskoy Monastery in February 1992 and translated that April to a reliquary beside the sanctuary of the monastery church, where they remain. In 1990, before the relics were found, representatives of the Orthodox Church in America came to Donskoy to keep his feast with Patriarch Pimen for the first time: the daughter church and the mother church together.
The feast falls on 7 April, the day of his repose, kept by the Moscow Patriarchate and, in the West, by the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America; Old Calendar jurisdictions keep 25 March. The Russian Church also marks his glorification on 26 September (9 October), and the OCA keeps 9/22 February for the finding of the relics and 5/18 November for his election. He is commemorated as well among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia on the Sunday nearest 25 January.
The one text of Tikhon's own quoted above, the encyclical of January 1918, is given here from William Chauncey Emhardt, Religion in Soviet Russia: Anarchy (Milwaukee: Morehouse, 1929), pages 21 to 23, where the whole document is printed; the anathema stands before the catalogue of destruction, not after it. Emhardt reprinted rather than made the translation, crediting it to Vvedensky, The Church and the Government, pages 114 to 116; the reader should know that the best-known bearer of that surname in those years was Alexander Vvedensky, leader of the Renovationist schism, so the English may come from a hostile hand, though nothing puts the document's authenticity in doubt. The 1929 volume is public domain and freely readable at https://archive.org/download/religioninsoviet00emha/religioninsoviet00emha_djvu.txt.
The American sermons are quoted from two modern devotional articles, neither of which names a translator. The 1898 arrival sermon at Holy Trinity, San Francisco, and the image of the waves and the ship come from Metropolitan Tikhon (Mollard), "'Blood and Soul': Metropolitan Tikhon on Saint Patriarch Tikhon," Pravmir, 15 February 2017, https://www.pravmir.com/blood-soul-metropolitan-tikhon-saint-patriarch-tikhon/, where the arrival sermon is printed as two separate passages divided by the speaker's own commentary. The Sunday of Orthodoxy sermon of 1903 and the 1907 farewell come from Hieroschemamonk Ambrose (Alexey) Young, "Saint Patriarch Tikhon: His Missionary Legacy to Orthodox America," Pravmir, 6 April 2009, https://www.pravmir.com/saint-patriarch-tikhon-his-missionary-legacy-to-orthodox-america/, at its footnotes 8 and 14 respectively; footnote 8 cites Orthodox Life No. 1 (1988), and footnote 14 is a bare "Ibid." whose chain cannot be traced.
The deathbed words and the American narrative follow the Orthodox Church in America's life of St Tikhon, https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2019/04/07/101016-repose-of-saint-tikhon-patriarch-of-moscow-enlightener-of-north, which reports them devotionally and without apparatus.
For the documentary corpus: M. E. Gubonin, comp., Акты Святейшего Патриарха Тихона (Moscow: St Tikhon's Theological Institute, 1994). The forgery case against the 1925 testament is argued in Bishop Gregory (Grabbe), Завет Святого Патриарха (Moscow, 1996). The only English biography traced is Jane Swan, A Biography of Patriarch Tikhon (Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1964). None of these three was consulted directly for this account. John Shelton Curtiss, The Russian Church and the Soviet State 1917-1950 (1953), the standard scholarly treatment of the 1922-23 sequence and the testament, could not be obtained.
Modern readers raise two further objections worth stating plainly. That the relics were found "almost entirely incorrupt" in 1992 rests on a devotional bestseller, with no forensic examination cited anywhere; the deathbed scene, with its two completed signs of the cross, is transmitted by one devotional line and repeated by a site that copies it. Both belong to what the tradition holds, and are given above in those words.
His own writings survive as administrative and pastoral documents, not as a literary corpus: sermons, epistles, synodal decrees. The standard documentary collection is M. E. Gubonin's Акты Святейшего Патриарха Тихона, published by St Tikhon's Theological Institute in Moscow in 1994. No critical edition and no history of English translation could be established; Jane Swan's 1964 biography from Jordanville is the only English-language book on him that surfaced.
British (Received Pronunciation): Tikhon /ˈtiː.kɒn/
Almighty God, we give you thanks for the ministry of Tikhon, who labored that the Church of Jesus Christ might be one: Grant that we, instructed by his teaching and example, and knit together in unity by your Spirit, may ever stand firm upon the one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for an Ecumenist
Ezekiel 34:11–16Psalm 133Ephesians 3:14–21John 17:10–26