Introduction

The Author

Of all the figures who carried the Christian faith across the Pacific into the New World, none is remembered with more tenderness than the humble monk of Spruce Island. St Herman of Alaska was born near Moscow, in or around the town of Serpukhov, into a family of the merchant class. The year of his birth is not certainly known; it is usually placed about 1756, though some accounts reckon it earlier, near 1751, and his baptismal name has not come down to us. What is remembered is that he entered the monastic life young—by tradition at sixteen—first at the Trinity–St Sergius Hermitage on the Gulf of Finland near St Petersburg, where he received the name Herman, and afterward at the great island monastery of Valaam on Lake Ladoga. He remained to the end of his days a simple monk, never ordained to the diaconate or the priesthood, and this is worth holding in mind: the letters gathered here were written by a man who claimed no office and no authority but that of a servant.

At Valaam his abbot was the Elder Nazarius, himself formed in the tradition of Sarov, who between 1782 and the turn of the century rebuilt the monastery in body and in spirit and restored to it the fullness of monastic life—cenobitic, skete, and eremitic together. It was under Nazarius that Herman was schooled in obedience, prayer, and the love of stillness, and it was Nazarius who would send him to the ends of the earth. In 1793, at the request of the Russian-American Company and with the sanction of the imperial court, Valaam was asked to furnish a company of missionaries for the newly opened Russian settlements in Alaska. Herman was among those chosen. The party crossed the whole breadth of Siberia and, after nearly a year of travel, first sighted Kodiak Island in September 1794.

The mission met with astonishing early success among the native peoples, but its human cost was severe. Its head, the Archimandrite Joasaph, was consecrated a bishop and then lost at sea, with others of the brethren, when his returning ship went down. One by one the missionaries died or departed, until Herman alone remained of the original company. He drew apart, at length, to Spruce Island, a short distance from Kodiak, which he named New Valaam after the monastery of his profession. There, from about 1808, he built himself a cell, a chapel, a school, and a guesthouse, and there he spent the long remainder of his life—nursing the sick through epidemics, teaching orphan children, keeping a garden, and standing between the Aleut people and those who would exploit them. He was known among the natives simply as Apa, “Grandfather.” He foretold the hour of his own death, which came on 13 December 1837 (some older reckonings give 1836), and asked to be buried where he had lived. On Spruce Island his relics remain.

Occasion and Purpose

This is a small book, and its smallness is part of its truth. St Herman wrote no treatises. He founded no school of theology and left no rule. The surviving correspondence amounts to five short letters, addressed to three men, and it is only by the providence of preservation that we have even these. Two survive because they were written home to Valaam and kept there; the rest survive because their recipients—officials of the Russian-American Company—valued them enough to save them, and because a later generation, recognizing the sanctity of their author, gathered what remained. Together they span more than twenty years, from the first months after his arrival in America to the settled years of his hermitage.

The occasions are ordinary and unliterary. The first two letters, both written in May 1795 to his abbot, Igumen Nazarius, are the reports of a missionary newly landed: an account of a safe crossing, of thousands of baptisms, of the needs of the young mission. Two more, addressed to Simeon Yanovsky—the naval officer who governed the colony as Chief Manager of the Russian-American Company from 1818 into 1820—arise from Herman’s long labor on behalf of the Aleuts and from his friendship with a man who came to America a self-described freethinker and returned to Russia to end his days as a monk. The last, to Kirill Khlebnikov, the company’s able administrator and future chronicler at New Archangel (Sitka), is briefer still, a single line of accepted humiliation. None of these was composed for publication; each was a private word, spoken to a particular person for a particular need. That they now stand as spiritual reading is a thing their author never intended and would likely have found astonishing.

Argument and Structure

Because the letters are occasional, they have no single argument; but read in sequence they trace a recognizable arc, from the outward work of the mission to the inward life of the soul.

The two letters to Nazarius (19 and 22 May 1795) are the voice of the missionary at his post. In the first, Herman writes with the warmth of a son who has not forgotten his father: the benefactions of his abbot, he says, will not be effaced from his heart by the “dread and impassable places of Siberia,” nor by the terror of the ocean, and across that ocean he beholds “beloved Valaam” always in his mind. He reports plainly that all ten who set out reached America safely, and that the native people come to baptism so eagerly that nearly seven thousand have already been received—a figure his own letter records at first hand. The second is a single practical plea: that if some help were to come from the sovereign, “a very great deal of good could be accomplished.” Here is the whole outward situation of the mission in a few sentences—its harvest and its poverty side by side.

The two letters to Yanovsky are the heart of the collection. The first, on the protection of the Aleuts (datable to about 1818–1820), is Herman’s great act of intercession. He casts the native people as a newborn infant, given by the Creator to Russia, unable even to make its own petition known, and he presents himself as their “most humble servant and nurse,” writing on their behalf “with tears of blood.” “Be to us a father and protector,” he pleads in their name; “wipe away the tears of the defenseless orphans.” The second letter to Yanovsky, on the nature of Christianity (20 June 1820), turns wholly inward. It opens with a small wonder Herman had witnessed—a young woman, a recent hearer of the Gospel, so kindled with love for Christ that she would not leave him—and unfolds from it a compact teaching on the Christian life: that a true Christian is made by faith and love, that sins are no impediment to Christianity by the Saviour’s own word, that the Christian is a soldier pressing through the ranks of an unseen enemy toward a heavenly homeland. It closes with a disarming confession of his own plainness: “I speak without clarity.”

The final letter, to Khlebnikov (28 December 1818), is a single sentence, and it is the darker side of the mission’s story: from his own countrymen, Herman writes, he has met “more contempt, reproach, and mockery,” to which he has now grown accustomed. Set beside his tender advocacy for the Aleuts, it shows at what personal cost that advocacy was maintained.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

For so slight a body of writing, these letters carry a remarkable weight, because they are the direct testimony of a saint to the two loves that governed his life: love of God and love of neighbor, held together without strain.

The letter on the nature of Christianity is, in effect, a miniature ascetical treatise. Its teaching is entirely traditional and entirely personal. Herman grounds the hope of the sinner in the words of Christ Himself—that He came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance (Matt. 9:13), and that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous (Luke 15:7)—and in the Gospel scene of the woman who washed the Saviour’s feet, to whom much was forgiven because she loved much. Against despair, which he plainly knew from within, he sets “the shield of faith.” His image of the Christian as a soldier in unseen warfare draws directly on the Apostle Paul—that our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers (Eph. 6:12), and that our citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20)—and his counsel to strip off “the outer man” and put on “new desires” for the age to come belongs to the oldest stream of Christian spiritual writing. What makes it arresting is not novelty but authenticity: this is not a monk expounding a system, but one soul telling another how the battle is actually fought, and confessing at the end that he cannot say it clearly. The clarity is in the life.

The letter on the protection of the Aleuts is of a different order but flows from the same source. It is one of the earliest and most eloquent defenses of an indigenous people to come out of the colonial Pacific, and it is entirely without political program. Herman does not argue rights; he pleads mercy. He makes himself small—a “nurse,” a servant, a man who “knows not eloquence”—and speaks in the voice of the voiceless, “with the tongue of infants.” The theology here is the theology of the Incarnation applied to the weak: that God has entrusted these people, “for a time unknown to us,” to those who hold power over them, and that the account will be asked. Taken with the bitter single line to Khlebnikov, the letter shows the price of such love—the contempt of one’s own—and so illumines the meaning of the sanctity the Church would later recognize. These are not the words of a reformer but of a father, and it is as a father that St Herman is remembered.

Reception and Influence

St Herman’s influence in his own lifetime was quiet and local, exercised through presence rather than print. Its most consequential fruit was the transformation of Simeon Yanovsky, the colonial governor who arrived a skeptic and, under the monk’s influence, was drawn back to the faith; Yanovsky afterward became a monk himself and preserved recollections of Herman that would help to shape the saint’s later Life. Around Herman’s hermitage a devotion grew that never faded among the people of Kodiak and Spruce Island, who continued to keep his memory and to seek his intercession long after his death.

That local veneration became universal in the twentieth century. On 9 August 1970, in the Church of the Resurrection on Kodiak Island, St Herman was solemnly glorified—the first saint to be canonized by the Orthodox Church in America, with parallel services held the same year by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. He is commonly honored as the “Wonderworker of All America,” and is commemorated on 9 August (his glorification) and 13 December (his repose). His example stands at the head of a long line of North American saints and missionaries, and his defense of the Aleut people has given him a particular resonance far beyond the bounds of any single community. The letters printed here are, for most readers, the closest they will come to his own unmediated voice.

The Text and This Edition

The five letters have no autograph tradition available to the general reader; they survive through nineteenth-century Russian printings, and it is from these that the present edition is made. This is a fresh modern English translation prepared from the public-domain Russian sources—the account associated with Igumen Damascene of Valaam (1868) and the text published in the Amerikansky Pravoslavny Vestnik (the American Orthodox Messenger, 1899)—rather than a reprint of any earlier English version. The aim throughout has been a readable, dignified modern English that keeps the plainness and warmth of the original without archaizing it, so that Herman sounds, as he did on the page, like a man speaking directly to a friend.

Following the conventions of this series, the saint is named as the Church has always received him—St Herman of Alaska—and those who prepared the translation are credited as translators, never as authors. Scriptural citations are given in a clear modern form, with book, chapter, and verse in Arabic numerals (for example, Matt. 9:13). The letters are presented in a sensible reading order, each with a heading identifying its recipient and, where it is known, its date; the reader will notice that the dates are not strictly sequential, since one of the Yanovsky letters can be placed only approximately, and they have been arranged for coherence rather than forced into a single timeline. Where a date is uncertain, that uncertainty is marked rather than concealed. No attempt has been made to expand these letters into more than they are, or to supply from other sources the connective narrative they lack; the reader meets them as they have survived, five brief windows onto a hidden life.

Suggestions for Reading

The reader coming to St Herman for the first time should not expect a book in the ordinary sense, but a handful of letters to be read slowly and more than once. It helps to read the two letters to Yanovsky together and near the center of one’s attention, for in them the whole man appears: the fierce tenderness of the advocate in the one, the gentle interior wisdom of the elder in the other. The single line to Khlebnikov, easy to pass over, repays a pause—it is the shadow that gives the rest its depth. And the reports to Nazarius are best read not as history but as the first words of a long obedience, written by a young monk who had just crossed the world and could still see, across the whole Pacific, the island where his heart remained. In the end these letters teach less by what they explain than by whom they reveal, and the right way to read them is the way one reads a letter from a father: not for information, but for love.