Introduction

The Author

The man the Church now honors as Saint Innocent, Enlightener of the Aleuts and Apostle to America, was born on 26 August 1797 in the Siberian village of Anga, in the diocese of Irkutsk, and given at his baptism the name John. His father was a church server of modest means who died when the boy was young; by the age of seven John was already reading the Epistle aloud in church, and in 1806 he was sent to the seminary at Irkutsk. There, in 1814, a rector who was reassigning the surnames of certain students gave him the name Veniaminov, in memory of the recently reposed Archbishop Benjamin (Veniamin) of Irkutsk. It was under that name—John Veniaminov—that he would become known across two continents. Ordained deacon in 1817 and priest in 1821 at the Church of the Annunciation in Irkutsk, Father John seemed destined for the ordinary rounds of a Siberian parish.

Instead, in 1823 he volunteered for the Russian mission in America, a decision that would fill the next forty-five years of his life. Together with his wife, his aged mother, and his infant son, he crossed the whole breadth of Siberia and the northern Pacific, arriving at the island of Unalaska, in the Aleutian chain, on 29 July 1824. What he did there opened one of the notable chapters in the modern history of Christian mission. Rather than oblige his flock to learn Russian, Father John set himself to learn them. He mastered the Unangan (Aleut) tongue and several of its dialects, devised an alphabet for a language that had never been written down, compiled a grammar, and rendered into it the Catechism, the Gospel of Matthew, and the daily prayers. His careful studies of the Aleut people—their speech, their customs, their island world—and later of the Tlingit of Sitka, earned him a reputation as an ethnographer and linguist of the first rank quite apart from his priestly labors.

His wife died in 1839 while he was in Russia on the business of the mission, and in 1840 Father John was tonsured a monk by Saint Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, receiving the name Innocent in honor of Saint Innocent of Irkutsk. Almost at once he was consecrated the first bishop of a vast new diocese of Kamchatka, the Kuriles, and the Aleutian Islands, with his cathedra at Sitka; he was raised to archbishop in 1850. Still he traveled—by kayak, dogsled, and open boat—across distances few churchmen have ever had to cover, carrying the Gospel over the years to the Aleutian Islands, to the Tlingit of Sitka, to the peoples of Kamchatka and the Yakutsk region, and into the Amur country, and seeing to it that each of them might hear the services in a tongue of their own. At the beginning of 1868 he succeeded his own tonsurer, Saint Philaret, as Metropolitan of Moscow, the senior see of the Russian Church. From that height he did not forget the missions of his youth: he helped bring into being the Orthodox Missionary Society and encouraged the young Archimandrite Nicholas Kasatkin, the future Saint Nicholas of Japan. He fell asleep in the Lord on Holy Saturday, 31 March 1879, and was buried at the Trinity–Saint Sergius Lavra. In 1977 he was numbered among the saints, glorified by the Church of Russia at the request of the Orthodox Church in America.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the earliest and most fruitful years of that Aleutian ministry. Father John composed it in 1833, while still a missionary priest on Unalaska, and he wrote it first not in Russian but in Aleut—for the very people he was catechizing. This is the fact that gives the book its peculiar character. It was not written in a study for an educated public and then simplified for the mission field; it was born on the mission field, shaped from the outset to the ear and the life of newly baptized islanders who had heard the good news of Christ but needed to be shown, plainly and patiently, what now lay before them.

The title states the purpose exactly. Innocent set out to indicate the way — to point, as a guide points down a road, toward the Kingdom of Heaven and to describe how a person actually walks there. His readers were not skeptics to be argued into belief but converts to be led into a life. And so the book assumes the gospel and expounds its consequences: that human beings were made for eternal life with God, that this life was lost in Adam and restored in Christ, and that a real, walkable path now runs from the font to the Kingdom. Innocent writes as a father to children, addressing his hearers as “brethren,” anticipating their objections, meeting their weariness, and never presuming more learning than a fisherman or hunter might possess.

The little book did not stay on the islands. Carried back to Russia with its author, it was printed in Russian at Saint Petersburg around 1839–1840, and there it began a second life altogether. What had been composed as a missionary handbook for the Aleuts was received by the wider Russian Church as a small classic of the spiritual life, plain enough for a child and searching enough for a monk. Within Innocent’s own corpus—which includes his ethnographic Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District, his Aleut translations, and his later addresses and instructions to missionaries—it is the distilled heart of his pastoral vision: the conviction that the whole of Christian doctrine exists to place a person on the one road that leads home.

Argument & Structure

The book unfolds with the clarity of a good sermon. A brief introduction sets the premise: nothing on earth can satisfy the human heart, which was made for God alone. Innocent presses this home with the example of Solomon, who possessed everything the world can give and still found it all vanity, and with the image of the Christian as a stranger and traveler whose true homeland lies in heaven. There is, he insists, only one way there—Jesus Christ Himself, who said “I am the way.” He then announces the fourfold plan that governs the whole.

Part One asks what blessings Christ won for us by His death. Innocent first draws the contrast between Adam’s original blessedness in Paradise and the ruin that his sin brought upon the whole race—the darkening of the soul, the hostility of the very elements, sickness, death, and bondage to the devil. Against that dark background he sets the work of Christ: by His teaching He dispelled ignorance, by His life He showed the way, by His death He paid our unpayable debt, by His resurrection He broke open the gates of hell and Paradise, by His ascension He glorified our human nature, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit He made the road passable. These blessings, Innocent stresses, are offered to every people without exception, and they call for gratitude and love in return.

Part Two portrays how Christ lived and what He suffered. Here Innocent gives a moving meditation on the humility of the Incarnate Lord—the King of heaven born in a cave, the Lawgiver circumcised, the Almighty obeying His Mother—and on the whole course of His Passion, ending with the sobering reminder of who it is that suffered: the true God, Creator and Judge.

Part Three, the longest section, defines the way itself through Christ’s own words: deny yourself, take up your cross, follow Me. Innocent explains what it means to examine the foundations of faith soundly—illustrated by his memorable parable of a vast building whose top is hidden in the clouds, which one enters by trust rather than by prideful measurement—and then distinguishes the outward crosses, borne by all people, from the inward crosses of self-knowledge and repentance, which are the true medicine of the soul. Following Christ, he shows, means imitating Him point by point in humility, obedience, love of enemies, and contentment.

Part Four turns to the help without which none of this is possible: the grace of the Holy Spirit. Innocent describes what the Spirit works in a person—faith and light, love, freedom from the world, wisdom, joy and peace, humility, and true prayer—and then lists the appointed means by which the Spirit is sought and received: purity of heart, humility, attentiveness to the voice of God, prayer, self-denial in fasting and almsgiving, the reading of Scripture, and the Mysteries of the Church, above all Holy Communion. A concluding exhortation gathers the argument into four plain conclusions and closes with practical counsels for the traveler: do not measure yourself by others, bear mockery, ignore those who would dissuade you, resist the devil, and cultivate diligence and patience.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

For all its simplicity, Indication of the Way carries a coherent and deeply traditional theology. Its governing insight is that salvation is not a doctrine to be assented to but a road to be walked, and that the road is a Person: to be saved is to follow Christ along the very path He Himself trod. This keeps the book from ever becoming abstract. Every dogma it touches—creation, the fall, redemption, the Church, the sacraments—is presented for the sake of the journey, as something a person must know in order to take the next step.

Two emphases give the work its enduring spiritual weight. The first is Innocent’s account of the cross, and especially of the inward crosses. Long before the reader reaches any triumphant note, he is led through a searching examination of his own soul, taught to expect sorrow and self-knowledge as the beginning of healing, and warned against both despair and premature confidence. Innocent handles this with a physician’s care, insisting that God never permits more than the soul can bear and that the whole painful work aims at making a person like Christ. The second is his theology of the Holy Spirit. The book refuses to leave the Christian to his own strength; it makes grace the hinge of everything, describing the Spirit’s gifts with a warmth that reads like personal testimony and grounding the reception of grace in the ordinary, appointed means of the Church’s life.

Woven through it all is a balanced vision of human freedom and divine grace—what the Eastern tradition calls synergy. Innocent repeats that Christ compels no one, that salvation and perdition alike hang upon a person’s own will, and yet that no one can take a single step without the help of the Spirit. The genius of the book is that it holds these together without strain, in language a hunter could follow. Its scriptural citations are woven into the plain register of the whole, never quoted as ornament but pressed into the service of the road. Written for a specific Orthodox mission, and unembarrassed about its Orthodox convictions, the work nonetheless speaks to the common Christian task of conversion and discipleship with a directness that has carried it far beyond the islands where it began.

Reception & Influence

Few catechetical works of the nineteenth century have traveled so widely from so remote a beginning. Having started as a text for one small island people, Indication of the Way was translated into a range of the languages of Siberia and appeared, in Russian, in more than forty editions—a measure of how quickly the wider Church recognized in it something both elementary and profound. It became, in effect, one of the standard introductions to the Christian life in Russian devotional literature, valued precisely for the plainness that its missionary origin had required. In the English-speaking world it has gone through numerous printings and has, by the reckoning of its later publishers, never been out of print since its first appearance. Part of its authority is inseparable from the life of its author: a book about walking the narrow way carries a particular force when its writer crossed frozen wastes and stormy seas for forty-five years to preach that way, and was himself received by the Church as a saint. The work endures as the most beloved and accessible expression of the vision of the Apostle to America.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven in a fresh modern English translation, rendered directly from the public-domain Russian text of the work—Saint Innocent’s own Russian recension, as preserved in the digital library of azbyka.ru—in a literary English suited to devotional reading. A word about the text’s own history is owed to the reader, for it is unusual. Innocent first wrote the book in Aleut in 1833; the Russian version from which most later editions descend, and from which the present English is made, is his own carrying-over of that original into Russian, printed at Saint Petersburg around 1839–1840. The English here therefore stands at one remove from a Russian text that itself looks back to a lost first draft in the Unangan tongue—a lineage that is itself part of the book’s witness to Innocent’s conviction that the gospel should be spoken to every people in words it can understand. This is an English-only edition; it does not set the Russian alongside the English or present itself as a parallel text.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the author is named as the Church receives him—Saint Innocent (Veniaminov) of Alaska and Moscow, glorified in 1977—while those who carried his words into English are credited as translators and never as authors. Scripture references are given in the modern Arabic style (for example, John 14:6) for ease of use, and the wording throughout has been rendered into clear contemporary English while preserving the direct, fatherly voice that has made the book so loved. The paragraph structure and the fourfold division of the original have been kept intact, so that the reader follows exactly the road that Innocent laid out for his first hearers on Unalaska nearly two centuries ago.

Suggestions for Reading

The book rewards being read the way it was written—slowly, as counsel rather than information, and preferably a section at a time. Its four parts build upon one another, and a reader who is tempted to begin with the practical instructions of Part Three or Four will find them oddly demanding without the foundation that the first two parts lay: the sense of what the human heart was made for, and of what Christ has already done. It is worth resisting the urge to skip ahead.

A newcomer should not be dismayed by the searching passages on the inward crosses and on self-knowledge in Part Three. Innocent does not mean to crush his reader but to heal him, and he takes pains, again and again, to add that God permits no trial beyond our strength and that despair is never warranted. Read those pages together with the account of the Holy Spirit that follows, and the balance of the whole becomes clear: the road is steep, but the traveler is not left to climb it alone. Those who come to the book from outside the tradition in which it was written will still find in it a plain and bracing map of the Christian life—the same map its author spent his years commending, in whatever tongue his hearers could understand.