Introduction

The Author

Dimitri Alexandrovich Brianchaninov was born on 15 February 1807 in the province of Vologda, in the Russian north, the son of an aristocratic landowning family. He was, by the recollection of those who knew him, a gifted and inward child—quick in the sciences, accomplished in drawing and music, and from his earliest years drawn to prayer and to the stillness that would define the whole of his later life. His father intended for him the career proper to a young nobleman of the reign of Alexander I, and at the age of fifteen enrolled him in the Imperial School of Military Engineers in Saint Petersburg. There Dimitri excelled, graduating at the head of his class and attracting the notice of the imperial family itself, including the future Emperor Nicholas I. Every worldly path lay open to him.

He chose another. Even as he advanced through the engineering school, the young man’s heart was set on the monastic life, and he sought out spiritual guidance among the monks and elders of the capital and its surrounding monasteries. This was no small decision in his time and station: for a nobleman marked out for state service to withdraw into a monastery was almost unheard of, and Dimitri undertook it against the wishes of his family and at the cost of the career for which he had been so carefully prepared. Illness, which would shadow him for the rest of his days, cut short his brief military service; he was granted his discharge and spent the next several years as a novice, moving among various monasteries without settling permanently in any of them, in part because of his frail health and in part because he could not find a spiritual father in whom he might place the whole of his trust. The scarcity of true elders in his generation was a grief he would name again and again, and it shaped his lifelong conviction that, in an age when living guides are few, the writings of the Fathers must be sought out as the surest counsellors.

In 1831 he was professed a monk by Bishop Stephen of Vologda, the ruling hierarch of his home region, and received the name Ignatius; shortly afterward he was ordained deacon and then priest. His gifts were quickly recognized. In 1833—still a young man—he was raised to the rank of archimandrite and appointed to lead the Sergius Hermitage near Saint Petersburg, a monastery that had fallen into decline and that he was charged with restoring to genuine monastic life. He governed it for some twenty-four years, and it was during this long and demanding tenure that he composed the greater part of the spiritual writings for which he is remembered.

In 1857 he was consecrated Bishop of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, with his cathedral city at Stavropol; the consecration took place on 27 October of that year in the Kazan Cathedral in Saint Petersburg, and he arrived in his diocese early in 1858. The see was vast, newly organized, and administratively raw, and its burdens fell heavily on a man of chronically poor health. His episcopate lasted only a few years. Worn down by the work and by serious illness, he asked to be relieved, and in 1861 he withdrew to the Nikolo-Babaevsky Monastery in the Kostroma diocese. There he passed the last years of his life in seclusion, giving himself wholly to writing and to a wide correspondence with those who sought his counsel. He reposed on 30 April 1867.

More than a century later, in 1988—the year of the millennium of the baptism of Rus—the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint; he is commemorated on 30 April. He is remembered today, together with his contemporary Saint Theophan the Recluse, as among the foremost teachers of the spiritual life in the nineteenth-century Russian Church, and as one of the great transmitters of the ascetic and Philokalic tradition of the Fathers into the modern age.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

Ascetic Sermons (Аскетическая проповедь) gathers the preaching of Saint Ignatius from his years as a ruling bishop. These are not treatises composed in the quiet of a monastic cell but homilies delivered—or written to be read—from the cathedral and parish pulpits of his Caucasian diocese in the years around 1858 to 1861, addressed to ordinary Christians living in the world. In the collected edition of his writings the book is the fourth volume; when the whole corpus was later rendered into English it was fittingly retitled The Harvest: Spiritual Nourishment for the Church Year, a phrase that captures at once its liturgical shape and its pastoral aim.

The saint himself tells us how the book came to be. A number of his sermons had already appeared in print in 1863; a few years later he gathered them together, revised and augmented, adding discourses that had never been delivered aloud but were “written for reading in church and for private devotion,” and he set over the whole the title Ascetic Sermons, which, he judged, had proved wholly suitable to their character. He signed the preface as “Bishop Ignatius” in 1866. The book we have, then, is not a stenographer’s transcript of occasional preaching but the author’s own considered teaching, arranged and corrected by his hand near the end of his life in the form in which he wished it to endure.

Its place within his corpus he was at pains to make plain. The two volumes of the Ascetic Experiences (the Аскетические опыты), written during his years as archimandrite, were addressed chiefly to monastics and to the labour of the interior life. The Ascetic Sermons, he writes in the preface, flow from the same source and stand in “unbreakable bond” with that earlier work—they serve as its supplement and illumination—but they are not meant for monks alone. They are fitting, he insists, “for all Orthodox Christians who wish to become acquainted with the ascetic life according to the wisdom of the holy Fathers, according to the wisdom of the Church.” Herein lies the particular purpose of the book: to take the exacting spiritual science of the desert—repentance, watchfulness, the unseen warfare against the passions, the sober discernment of one’s own fallen condition—and to set it within reach of the merchant, the soldier, the labourer, and the household, of every hearer who came to church on a Sunday or a feast. What Saint Ignatius offers is not a diluted asceticism for the laity but the same ancient wisdom, translated into the idiom of the parish and the rhythm of the ordinary Christian year.

Argument and Structure

The sermons are ordered not by topic but by the moving calendar of the Church’s worship, so that the book unfolds as a companion to the liturgical year. It opens with an address delivered on the bishop’s arrival in his diocese—a greeting of the peace of Christ to his new flock—and then follows the feasts and Sundays in their turn.

The cycle begins at Theophany, with an instruction on hearing the voice of the Son of God in the Gospel and in the sacraments of the Church. From there it moves through the preparatory Sundays of the Lenten Triodion—the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, the Last Judgment on Meatfare Sunday, the reconciliation of Cheesefare Sunday—each drawing its lesson from the appointed reading. Then come the weeks of Great Lent themselves, and here the pace slows and the teaching deepens: discourses on the preparation for confession, on the harm of hypocrisy, on the human body, an address to those who have just communed; then the Sundays of the Fast in sequence, unfolding the meaning of Orthodoxy, the true meaning of fasting both for man and in relation to the fallen spirits, the bearing of the cross, and the joining of fasting with mercy and prayer. The Lenten journey arrives at Palm Sunday, at the Holy Mysteries of Great Thursday, and at the Cross of Great Friday.

After Pascha the book continues through the Sundays of the Paschal season—Thomas Sunday and the nature of Christian faith, the Myrrh-bearing Women and the deadness of the fallen human spirit, the Paralytic and the chastisements by which God heals, the Samaritan Woman and worship in spirit and truth, the Man Born Blind and the peril of self-conceit—and on to All Saints and the Sundays counted after Pentecost. In this longer stretch the sermons take up salvation, the causes of men’s falling away from God, the rich man and the beggar, love for God and for neighbour, covetousness and the kingdom of God, thanksgiving, and the sober question of miracles and signs. Toward the end stand two of the fullest and most sustained pieces in the collection: a homily explaining the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father,” and, as a kind of capstone, an extended exposition of the Church’s teaching concerning the Mother of God. Interspersed throughout are occasional sermons tied to particular events—the opening of a convent near Stavropol, a visitation among the common people, a discourse on the renunciation of self-conceit as the condition of fruitful repentance.

Across this liturgical framework certain themes return with the force of a single, repeated summons. First among them is repentance, which Saint Ignatius presents not as one stage of the Christian life but as its entire substance: repentance is necessary to come to faith, necessary to remain in it, necessary to advance, and necessary to inherit the kingdom of heaven. Bound to this is a relentless exposure of self-conceit and hypocrisy—the subtle self-satisfaction that persuades a soul it is well when it is perishing—and a corresponding insistence on the “blessed poverty of spirit” that is born when a person honestly measures himself against the commandments of the Gospel and discovers his own weakness. A third recurring note is the remembrance of death and of the judgment to come, and with it the conviction that the afflictions and chastisements of this life are the disciplines of a God who wounds in order to heal and chastens in order to save. Running beneath them all is the saint’s governing method: to read every Gospel through the eyes of the Fathers, and to warn the hearer against trusting his own untutored reason with the words of the Spirit.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The lasting importance of the Ascetic Sermons lies in what Saint Ignatius attempted and, in large measure, achieved: to recover the authentic ascetic and Philokalic tradition of the Fathers and to make it usable in a modern world he judged to be spiritually impoverished. He lived at a time when, by his own frequent lament, spirit-bearing elders had grown rare, and when the fashionable religion of the educated classes was increasingly sentimental, rationalist, or merely conventional. Against this he set the sober, hard-won wisdom of the desert—the teaching of such Fathers as the two Macarii, Isaac the Syrian, John of the Ladder, and the ascetic masters gathered in the Philokalia—not as antiquarian revival but as the living medicine of the soul. His genius was to distil that inheritance into clear, dignified Russian prose, so that the Ascetic Sermons have been described as a book that may be read in place of the Philokalia by those for whom the Philokalia itself is too dense.

The heart of his teaching is a repentance-centred understanding of salvation, grounded in an unsparing realism about fallen human nature. Saint Ignatius will not flatter the hearer; he insists that the interior life is a warfare, that the passions lie hidden until the effort to keep the commandments provokes them into the open, and that the first genuine fruit of trying to live by the Gospel is the humbling discovery of one’s own helplessness. From this discovery, and only from it, he teaches, grow compunction, the prayer of the contrite heart, and true dependence on the grace of Christ. Closely joined to this is one of the themes for which he is most valued: his acute analysis of spiritual delusion — prelest, the self-deceived and inflated piety that mistakes its own imaginings for the workings of grace. His warnings against pursuing exalted spiritual states, visions, and consolations, and his counsel to remain in the safe and lowly path of repentance and attention, have made him a trusted guide precisely on the questions where the untrained soul is most likely to go astray.

Not least, the book carries a pastoral and even democratizing significance within the ascetic tradition. By preaching the full rigour of monastic spirituality to congregations of lay Christians, Saint Ignatius quietly insisted that the summons to interior transformation is not the private property of the cloister but the common vocation of the baptized. He did so without softening the demand and without pretending the road was easy—but also without leaving the ordinary Christian outside the door. In this he stands beside Saint Theophan the Recluse as one of the two great channels through which the deep tradition of Orthodox spirituality was carried into the nineteenth century and, through the translations of the following age, into the wider Christian world.

Reception and Influence

Saint Ignatius wrote toward the end of his life and did not live to see the full extent of his influence. In the generations after his repose his works were reprinted and read ever more widely, and he came to be regarded, together with Saint Theophan the Recluse, as a principal authority on the spiritual life in the modern Russian Church. His glorification as a saint in 1988 set the seal of the Church’s veneration on a reputation that his readers had long anticipated. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries his writings have travelled far beyond their original language: works such as The Arena and On the Prayer of Jesus found early English translations, and a complete English edition of his collected works has since made the whole of his teaching—the Ascetic Sermons among it—available to readers who share his search for an authentic and sober path in the Christian life. That his sermons, composed for a particular Russian diocese in the middle of the nineteenth century, continue to be sought out across the Christian world is itself a measure of how faithfully he transmitted a tradition older than himself.

The Text and This Edition

Ascetic Sermons is Saint Ignatius’s own original composition in Russian, and so, unlike a translation of an ancient Greek or Latin father, the words themselves are his and the primary text is the Russian. This edition presents a fresh modern English translation prepared from the public-domain Russian text of his collected works—the pre-revolutionary Complete Collected Works as preserved in the standard digital edition of the source—rendered in a dignified contemporary register that aims to carry his cadence and his precision into readable English.

A few conventions of the edition deserve mention. Following the practice of this series, the work is attributed to its author as the Church has always received him: the discourses stand under the name of Saint Ignatius, and those who prepared this English rendering are credited as translators, never as authors. Saint Ignatius preaches with the Scriptures constantly in hand, quoting the Bible in its Church-Slavonic form; his scriptural citations are here translated afresh in the same faithful modern register as the rest of the text, rather than being replaced with the wording of any existing English version, so that the Scriptures sound in his own voice as he heard and cited them. Scriptural references are given in a plain modern style—book, chapter, and verse in Arabic numerals—for ease of use. Several of the longer sermons, which run to considerable length in the original, have been given an interior division into parts so that they may be read in reasonable stretches; where this has been done, the parts are clearly marked, and the author’s own titles—each keyed to the day or feast on which the sermon was appointed—are preserved throughout, so that the reader may always follow the book along the path of the Church’s year for which it was written.

Suggestions for Reading

The newcomer need not read the Ascetic Sermons straight through. Because the book is ordered by the liturgical calendar, it rewards being taken up alongside the Church’s own seasons—the Lenten sermons in Lent, the Paschal sermons after Pascha—a homily at a time, slowly and with attention. Those who wish to grasp the spine of the saint’s teaching at once might begin with the instructions on repentance for the Sundays after Theophany, the sermon on the harm of hypocrisy, and the discourse on the renunciation of self-conceit, in which the central themes of the whole collection are most concentrated. Read this way, unhurried and in step with the year, the book becomes what its author intended: not a manual to be finished but a companion for the ascetic life.