This sermon was delivered on July 11, 1908 in the Kiev-St. Michael Monastery, and made an enormous impression on its listeners. It was printed in the periodical, Mirny Trud (Peaceful Labor), No. 10, 1908.
His Eminence Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev and Galicia (March 17 [O.S.,] 1863–August 10, 1936) was famous hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, and a renowned author and theologian. After emigrating from Russia, he soon became the founding First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.1
Great is the power of Thy martyrs, O Lord, who lie in their graves, yet act in the world and cast out demons, destroying the enemy’s power.
With these words, brothers, we glorify in various sticheras the martyrs of Christ, confessing our faith in their grace-filled prayers for us, in their invisible help in our struggle with the evils of this life and the wicked demons. But besides this invisible power of the holy martyrs, their visible power on earth is at times also revealed in their effect upon human hearts, and the life of people. Such was the power of the spiritual countenance of St. Barbara in the life of Russian society, and especially in the life of the Malorussian2 tribes.
If you wish to know how our Malorussians, in part, the inhabitants of the mainly Uniate southwestern lands, love St. Barbara, then depart in your thoughts from this beautiful church with its rich paintings, precious utensils, numerous clergymen, and well-trained choir, and go to one of those tiny, poor little churches that are left in Volhynia, Podolie, and Galicia from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These churches do not tower over hillocks as they do in Great Russia; they hide in the brush beyond the hill in the woods, amidst other buildings, in order remain unnoticed by the strong, former enemies of Orthodoxy—against whose oppression our people could find neither legal defense nor justice. Enter such a church, and you’ll find in it neither space nor grandeur. At times its disenfranchised parishioners during those hard times would have managed to collect no more than ten simple, artless, often even almost unsightly icons amongst them. But amidst these few icons will always be found an icon to St. Barbara, mainly on the side or rear wall of the church,—also artlessly painted by a homespun iconographer, but nevertheless dear to the parishioners in their love for it. Take your time walking out of the church after the service and you will see how the humble worshippers stop before this image, how mothers raise their children in their arms and point to the depiction, whispering their unlearned explanations of the drawings in their babes’ ears. Yes, this is truly something to see. The icon is seven by seven feet in size; in the center stands the holy martyr in incorruptible glory, being blessed from heaven by the Savior, Who reaches His hand down to the righteous virgin betrothed to Him. Around this depiction, above it, below it and on all sides are small pictures of the holy maiden’s Life. Frightful pictures! And these do draw the attention of the simple folk.
Who doesn’t know this life? Brought up by her aristocratic father, a wealthy widow who placed all the joy of his pagan life in his daughter and admired her beauty and good sense, St. Barbara met during his absence some Christians who were persecuted by the authorities. And learning the Gospel truth from them, she renounced pagan impurity, gave everything she could to the poor, wondrously marked a cross with her finger in the stone floors of her chambers and baths, and signed all those symbols of her father’s vainglory, all those signs of luxury, with the symbol of Christian truth. When her godless father found out about it, he beat her, tore out her hair, and dragged her mercilessly across the ground; there was no end to the devices of his cruel wrath by which he tormented the maiden’s pure body, sparing neither her tender age nor her virginal shame. The heartless tormentor himself became the denouncer and witness against his own daughter at the court, but was not satisfied even with that. Taking pleasure in the torments to which she the impious pagan lords subjected Christ’s little lamb, he cried out to them to make him his daughter’s executioner. And the evil father’s hand did not even tremble as it cut off the head of his own innocent child.
The defenseless, abandoned by all but God, pure, and beautiful virgin, practically still a child, subjected to such terrible tortures and executed by her own father, joyfully and without the least regret turned her face away from riches, marital delights, and earthly glory, and directed her gaze to Sweetest Jesus alone, suffering unmurmuringly and silently, courageously enduring inhuman tortures, and voluntarily, unwaveringly going to meet death from her father’s hands. Oh, of course this image can warm the heart; this image can draw gazes! But blessed also are those hearts that are drawn to similar sacred remembrances, blessed eyes bedewed with tears of sympathetic compunction, blessed arms raising children to the tender image, and the lips that reverently kiss the depictions of the wounds received for faith in Christ.
However, we have not exhausted the full significance of St. Barbara’s Life for our peasant’s forebears. There was yet another reason why they preferred her over all other saints, why out of all others, her icon always adorned each of their churches. Our ancestors themselves were martyrs for the faith, and like St. Barbara, they were martyrs who were absolutely alone, absolutely defenseless. Lacking not only any real protection, they could not even find moral support from anyone outside their immediate circles, other than God and the saints. Their princes and gentry, not rarely ancestors of Rurik,3 had renounced the true faith, the old monastic Orthodoxy. “They were seduced and enticed by Poland’s noisy feasts,” and instead of protectors, they became their own peoples’ fierce torturers and enemies. The people’s spiritual masters, archpastors and archimandrites, were first distanced from them by the false Latin school, and then the purer and more honest of these were removed from them into exile and imprisonment. In their place the Polish kings appointed known revelers and godless men, sometimes secret Uniates, and later openly Uniate. Christians, our forebears, were not only economically destroyed, locked up in prisons, beaten, and killed, but even morally humiliated; the faith was blasphemed and the people’s sacred shrines were desecrated, their confession derided as the “fruit of Asiatic ignorance”, as expressions of peasant crudeness. Their churches were given to the Jews as renters; the sacred and joyous feast of the Resurrection of Christ, as well as all the other feasts of our redemption, was always preceded by the Russian people paying humiliating bribes to the Jewish renters in order to obtain the keys to the church. The latter would intentionally take their time in arriving at the churchyard, and would spitefully force the Orthodox flock to stand several hours on the church steps in expectation of the longed-for festive bell-ringing. But oppressed and insulted as they were, the people did not abandon Christ or the Gospel; they only asked God for patience. They knew that Christians are not humiliated by slavery or suffering, but by sins and impious passions. They knew that their God, Who came to earth to save the human race, was subjected to all these and even worse humiliations and torments.
The Lord suffered for others and that is why He came, but He crowns with eternal glory those who for their faith in Him also drink the cup of His suffering. In the holy city of Kiev, so dear to the Russian heart, is a beautiful golden-domed church, and in it is a sacred reliquary of the once defenseless, abandoned by all, maiden martyr Barbara. Here also, in the village, before us is her image with the depictions of her terrible tortures and her incorruptible glory earned through those sufferings. Our ancestor-martyrs also looked at this icon, and couldn’t get enough of looking, just as their descendants cannot get enough of looking. They looked and drew courage for carrying the heavy cross of their slavery to the Polish lords and Jews; they gazed at and tenderly kissed those innocent sufferings, and taught their descendants, now free but still very timid, to honor and love these sufferings. True, even now they are forced to kiss the hands of Jewish creditors, kiss the feet (knees or boots) of their arrogant Catholic lords,4 to kowtow to them with needs and woes, with helplessness in sickness, crop failure or fires—but the face of St. Barbara shines upon them. They are not slaves in their humiliation or calamities; they bear offense submissively, but they bear it like a cross sent to them by God for the cleansing away of passions and the acquisition of eternal glory. They are submissive but they are not slaves; they are free in spirit, knowing that ruling over all is the righteous Lord, without Whose pain not a single hair will fall from a man’s head.
This is what St. Barbara has taught them from her artless icons in the village churches throughout many centuries. This is why in cherished Kiev, they rush to no other sacred shrine so quickly and with such contrite impatience as to St. Barbara’s reliquary. Take a look at the faces of the pilgrims from the villages—you will read in their gaze an exalted hymn, in which is united compassionate feeling, exalted tenderness of feeling, prayer for help, and submission to their difficult lot before the sight of the voluntarily sufferings of Christ’s bride, Barbara. And this compunction, this people’s faith, like an electric shock, like a flash of lightening, like a rush of sea waves bursts forth in the hearts also of those strata of society who are little given to folk piety, who are ashamed to pray together with ignorant peasants, who say that our people are only outwardly Christian while ignorant of the Christian faith and sunk in pagan superstitions.
But here, in that holy temple, people of society, immersed in our common prayer, would not talk that way. Here, gazing at the inspired faces of the worshippers, they would understand that although the peasant may not be able to explain the Creed, and knows few prayers by heart (and do the “enlightened” people themselves know many prayers by heart?), he is a Christian not only in appearance but in the essence of his convictions and attachments; and of course, he is a Christian in the more perfect sense than those who call him a pagan. The essence of the Christian is his renunciation of life’s pleasures; it is noticeable in his striving for purity, his readiness to suffer for the truth, his acquisition of a feeling of constant love for God and people, and in his forgiveness of his enemies’ insults. These commandments, these dogmas of piety are what our people know and venerate, they venerate innocent sufferings for the truth; their treasure is in heaven, in the future and blessed age—and in this consists all Christianity. They know the first commandment of the New Testament, Christ’s first commandment: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. But people of society, to the contrary, from childhood, from their first school years and even earlier, hear different, pagan, anti-Christian commandment: “Have noble self-esteem, preserve a feeling of your own worth.”
Christianity does not consist in accepting Jesus Christ as a great emissary or even as the Son of God; Moslems also recognize Him as such, the Cheremisy5 pagans pray to him, but His spirit, His humility and call to life’s cross is something they do not know, just as our Russian contemporaries do not want to know it. But the Russian people, the simple folk, know this. They know it unshakably and submit to it.
But we will not reproach society for that inner paganism for which it, in the words of the Germans, unrightly reproach our Christ-loving people. We will only say, that it is not for the heretic Lutherans—who consciously discarded from their teachings any understanding of life’s podvig—it is not for them, the sensual and indifferent, to judge you, our dear people!
“The foreigner’s proud and haughty eyes
Can’t understand or fathom rightly
What sparkles forth, and mysteriously shines
In your humble simplicity.”
It would be better for us to point to the gladdening picture of that spiritual unity and mingling of society and the people, which can be observed continually before the sacred relics of Martyr Barbara in that holy temple. There we have not only village pilgrims who came on foot. Together with them, being imbued with their faith, pray also the important noblewoman, the Petersburg officer, and the student timidly looking around from side to side, afraid that his comrades might see him—those false strugglers for freedom of conscience and all other freedoms in general—and have him punished as a progromist and reactionary. May Christ’s threatening words not befall him: Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels (Mark 8:38). It would be better for us to wish that he perfect himself in the faith and confession gradually, like Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, and Joseph of Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews. That when he be converted, he might strengthen his brethren (cf. Lk. 22:32).
May this saint give also to all of us, to all strata of society and the people, the unifying grace of her bold confession, her total devotion to Christ. No matter how far our reality apparently is from manifesting these prayerful desires, Russian society cannot ossify in that betrayal of its own self, to which the revolutionary rebellion of the last years have subjected him;6 Russian society cannot be at peace for long with that crude worldliness, with that rapacious pursuit of everyday pleasures and worldly success, which has so utterly swallowed it up and so deeply penetrated the moral and intellectual levels of his life, and made him god. Now, for the majority there as if does not exist any higher interest in knowledge and virtue. Now people have even forgotten to cite moral or scholarly truth when they try to convince each other of something, but only look and seek the side that brings the greatest outward success and profit, and run in that direction without looking back on their own recent contradictory pronouncements, not in the least ashamed of their own hypocrisy. It is a shameful, pitiful time, but it will not dominate the mood in society for long. The Russian soul, the Russian heart, although long departed from obedience to the Orthodox faith, has preserved as a counterbalance to Western foreigners the striving for the higher, albeit not clearly articulated podvig of life. It cannot long refuse moral values and life, or its own self; and in the last year of our time, it has become completely disenchanted with the rubbish of new pagan teachings brought over here. Now everyone is looking for people who are steadfast and righteous, who have remained true to their convictions amidst the maelstrom of life. Perhaps incorruptible conviction has never been so appreciated as it is now. Like fresh raspberries in winter, like pure snow in summer—that is how surprised people are now when they encounter the fearless scrupulousness of an unselfishly convinced man. Everyone makes way as he walks, everyone bows to him. There is no one to fight him face to face—the frenzied fanaticism of the enemies of the faith and fatherland have evaporated, and against the confessor of faith remains only a dirty pile of moral trash. Of course, his struggle for faith and the historical Russia of the people may even now end for him in many deprivations, and even the violent loss of his own life. But his idea, his conviction will shine triumphantly amidst the dusky haze of societal lassitude, and will call new followers to himself.
May St. Barbara not deprive us either, brothers, of that inspiration in the struggle with society’s apostasy from the faith and from the national awareness in which she has preserved our people and still preserves them, from generation to generation! May she give us also to partake in the people’s exalted worship of her martyric struggles, her love for Christ, and her disdain for all worldly good things! May she not allow us to bow our heads before the modern paganism that is rearing its head, may she cast it down through the people’s faith, just as she and the other martyrs cast down the ancient idols in her own fatherland. Amen!
Source (Russian): Metropolitan Antony. Homilies, Discourses, and Talks. (On life according to the inner man). Posthumous publication with a forward by Archbishop Nikon (Rklitsky). (New York: Printing Shop St. Iov of Pochaev Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, 1968), 204–211. [Life and Works of His Beatitude Antony, Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia, v. 15.]
