Introduction

St Innocent of Alaska

He was born on 26 August 1797 in Anginskoye, a village in the Irkutsk region of eastern Siberia, and christened John—the son of a church sacristan who died when the boy was six. Poverty and early loss shaped him; so did the seminary at Irkutsk, which he entered at nine and a half. There, according to a custom of the time, he was given a new surname in honour of the recently reposed Archbishop Benjamin of Irkutsk, and so John Popov became John Veniaminov, the name by which the Church would come to know him before his monastic tonsure. He married, was ordained deacon in 1817 and priest in 1821, and was serving a prosperous parish at the Church of the Annunciation in Irkutsk—respected, comfortable, and by every worldly measure well placed—when the decision came that would carry him to the far edge of the world.

In 1823 he left Irkutsk for Russian America, arriving on the Aleutian island of Unalaska in the summer of 1824. What followed is among the great missionary careers of the modern age. For fifteen years he lived among the Aleut (Unangan) people, learned their language, devised an alphabet for it, compiled a grammar, and translated the Gospel and the catechism into their tongue. In 1833 he wrote, first in Aleut, the little spiritual classic that became famous across Russia in translation, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven. In 1834 he transferred to Sitka to work among the Tlingit. He built churches with his own hands, kept clocks and made instruments, studied the weather and the peoples he served, and travelled by boat, sledge, and on foot across distances that still seem scarcely credible.

The turn of his life came in the late 1830s. Travelling in Russia to press the cause of the Alaskan mission, he learned that his wife had died. He was tonsured a monk in 1840, taking the name Innocent after St Innocent of Irkutsk, and within weeks was consecrated the first Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kuril Islands, and the Aleutians—a diocese stretching from Siberia across the sea to the Alaskan mainland. Raised to archbishop in 1850, he extended his labours to the Yakut and other peoples of the Russian northeast. In 1868 he was called, unexpectedly, to the highest post in the Russian Church, succeeding his friend Metropolitan Filaret as Metropolitan of Moscow. Even then his missionary heart did not cool: in 1870 he presided over the founding of the Orthodox Missionary Society, which gathered support for missions until the Revolution, and he encouraged the young Nicholas Kasatkin, the future apostle to Japan. He reposed on Holy Saturday, 31 March 1879, and was buried at the Trinity–St Sergius Lavra. In 1977 the Russian Orthodox Church, at the request of the Orthodox Church in America, glorified him as a saint, and he is honoured as Equal-to-the-Apostles, Enlightener of the Aleuts, and Apostle to America.

The six short writings gathered here belong to this life at its various stages—the working priest, the field missionary, the reigning bishop, the aged hierarch composing his last words. None is a treatise. Together they let us hear, in his own unguarded voice, the practical wisdom of a man who spent forty-five of his eighty-two years in journeys for the Gospel.

Occasion and Purpose

These are minor pieces by design, and they are best read together—not as a system but as a set of samples from a single, coherent pastoral mind. They were not composed as a book, and they come from widely separated occasions.

The two Instructions to missionaries are the earliest in spirit and the most celebrated. Both grow directly out of Innocent’s own field experience in Alaska. The Instruction to the Nushagak Missionary, Hieromonk Theophil was written in 1842, when the newly consecrated bishop dispatched a mission to the Nushagak redoubt on the Bering seacoast—a place he himself had first visited as a priest years before. It is a concrete field order to one man setting out for one station. The longer Instructions to the Priest Appointed to the Conversion of Non-Christians is a generalized redaction of the same counsel, expanded and reordered so as to serve any missionary priest; its opening chapters run almost word for word with the Nushagak text before broadening into a fuller manual. Taken together they form the document that later readers have regarded as a small classic of Orthodox missiology—the distilled method of a missionary who never disturbed the customs of a people without first understanding them.

The Homilies for Fasting Penitents belong to the parish and the confessional. They are four short sermons—with an opening dedication prayer—addressed to govelshchiki, the faithful keeping a fast in preparation for confession and Holy Communion. Here Innocent is not the strategist of missions but the ordinary pastor, catechizing plain people in the barest essentials of the Christian hope.

The Note on the Religious Education of Children comes from the end of his life, written at St Petersburg on 13 February 1869, when he was Metropolitan of Moscow. It addresses not a frontier but the Russian heartland, and takes up a question then much debated: how are the great mass of ordinary people, and above all their small children, actually to be taught the faith?

The Autobiographical Note (1863) and the Spiritual Testament (dated 14 December 1869) are the most personal. The first was provoked by a published article about him that he judged inaccurate and, worse, flattering; he set out to correct it, and in doing so left almost the only first-person account of his early years. The second is his literal last will—the practical and spiritual dispositions of a man preparing to die. What unites all six is the sensibility of a working missionary bishop who never lost the parish priest’s directness, and who insisted, again and again, that the whole work is God’s and the labourer only an instrument.

The Six Writings

The two instructions to missionaries may be treated as one work in two forms, and they are the centre of gravity of this collection. Both open with the same solemn preamble: to leave one’s homeland for wild and comfortless places in order to enlighten those still in darkness is “a work truly holy and equal to that of the Apostles,” blessed for the faithful labourer and terrible for the negligent one who makes his converts “sons of Gehenna, twofold more than himself.” Both cite the imperial edict of 1777 warning that hasty baptism without instruction is “an abuse of one of the greatest sacraments.” From there the counsel unfolds in numbered rules. Preparation comes first, and it is inward before it is outward: begin with prayer; keep “a modest and humble disposition of spirit,” promising oneself no guaranteed success, for grace is not given to the proud; approach the work calmly and never with carelessness; and above all preach with love, “for love alone builds up.” Practical wisdom follows—go to people when they are gathered, never begin the services in a new place without first offering at least a brief word, choose a devout interpreter and keep the same one. Then comes the heart of the method: “Christianity is a need, satisfaction, and consolation of the heart above all, not of the intellect alone,” and so one must “act more upon the heart than upon the mind” and “speak from the heart.” The order of teaching is to follow the order of Providence itself—first the Creator known from the visible world, then the moral law written on every heart, then the consequences of keeping or breaking it, and only then the Gospel proper, beginning as Christ began, with the call to repentance. The fuller Instructions to the Priest carries this into further chapters on the conduct of church services, on bearing patiently with new and imperfect Christians, and on relations with the local civil authorities; the Nushagak text divides its matter explicitly into the priest’s “spiritual” duties as a preacher and his “external” duties as a member of the settlement’s ordered society.

The Homilies for Fasting Penitents open with a shepherd’s prayer—“O Jesus Christ! My Good Shepherd!… teach me to do Thy will”—and then move through four brief sermons of rising sequence. The first, On the Kingdom of Heaven, begins with the largest question a plain person can be asked: “For what was man created?” Not to be born, toil, and vanish like the animals, Innocent answers, but for blessedness—and no earthly thing, not even Solomon’s wealth and wisdom, can supply it; only the Kingdom of Heaven, which is simply “life with God,” and which the poor and unlettered may reach as surely as the great. The second homily turns to the receiving of the Holy Spirit and to repentance; the third lays out, with a catechist’s clarity, the five conditions for a fruitful confession; the fourth prepares the penitent for Holy Communion. The movement is exactly that of the preparing soul—from the goal of life, through repentance and confession, to the Eucharist itself.

The Note on the Religious Education of Children is a short piece of pastoral argument. Innocent asks who is really responsible for teaching the faith—parents, godparents, or clergy—and observes, without bitterness but without illusion, that parents mostly do not, godparents never, and so the whole burden falls on the pastors, whose sermons and school lessons reach only those already able to understand them. The great mass of the people, and above all children under six or seven who cannot yet enter any school, are left in “ignorance of the most necessary matters of the faith.” Schools alone cannot answer this, he argues, because they “enlighten and cultivate only the mind, and not the mind and heart together,” and because they will take generations to reach everyone. His remedy is the Church herself, “that most loving of mothers,” and above all the ordinary parish priest, who needs no special learning to gather the little children and teach them the sign of the cross, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the commandments “in simple words.” It is the mature reflection of a man who had spent his life teaching the unlettered.

The Autobiographical Note is unlike the rest—occasional, wry, and self-effacing. Correcting a laudatory article, Innocent disputes small facts (the day of his birth, the age at which he first read the Epistle aloud in church) precisely in order to prevent anyone thinking “something extraordinary” of him. But the corrections become the occasion for a remarkable confession of Providence. He recounts how every human calculation had counted against his going to America—a good parish, esteem, his own house, a larger income—and how he refused the appeal of the old Aleut settler Ivan Kryukov, until one day, overhearing the same man speak to the bishop of the Aleuts’ zeal for prayer, he was “suddenly and, one might say, wholly inflamed with the desire to go to such a people.” Even the accident of a spring ice-break, which cut the seminary rector off from the city and let the young Veniaminov marry, he reads as the hand of God turning him from the Academy toward Alaska. The refrain of his life sounds here plainly: “from the Lord are a man’s paths made straight,” and “all of us, servants of His Church, are nothing other than instruments in His hands.”

The Spiritual Testament, the shortest of the six, is his literal last will, written in 1869 as his eyesight failed. It begins with thanksgiving to God and a full, mutual forgiveness—of all who had wronged him and by all whom he had wronged—and then disposes of simple matters: burial in the common brotherly cemetery, no funeral orations, no monument beyond “a plain cast-iron slab with a most simple and brief inscription.” Strikingly, the same text he asked to be preached from in the Instruction and the Autobiographical Note returns here as the only permitted eulogy: if anyone must speak, let him speak from “From the Lord are a man’s paths made straight,” pointing to the departed only as an example, “to the glory of God, but without any praise of me.” A metropolitan of Moscow arranges to be buried like the humblest monk.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

For all their variety of occasion, these pieces are held together by a single conviction, stated most fully in the missionary instructions but present in every one of them: that the salvation of a soul depends “in no wise on us or on our skill, but directly and solely on God,” and that the preacher is “nothing other than an instrument in the hands of God.” This is the theological root of Innocent’s famous humility, and it is not false modesty but a working doctrine of grace. It frees the missionary from anxiety about results and forbids him pride in success; it makes prayer, not eloquence, the first tool of the trade; and it grounds the astonishing patience of his method.

That method is the collection’s most enduring contribution. Against every temptation to force or hurry conversion—a temptation the 1777 edict itself had condemned—Innocent insists that Christianity is first a matter of the heart, that one must “speak from the heart” to reach the heart, and that the faith must be unfolded gradually, in the order in which God Himself unfolded it to humankind, meeting people where their own conscience and their own dim memories of the truth already stand. He assumes that the “natural law” is written on every heart, even the most primitive, and that the missionary’s task is partly to “awaken this feeling” and build upon it rather than to demolish. This respect for the person being evangelized—his language, his understanding, his pace—is what has led later readers to regard the Instructions as a small classic of Christian missiology, and it anticipates by more than a century much of what the wider Church would later say about the inculturation of the Gospel.

The pastoral and personal writings translate the same convictions into other keys. The homilies show the doctrine of the Kingdom made plain enough for a fisherman or a child; the Note on Children’s Education shows the same pastoral realism turned on the Christian heartland, refusing to trust that mere schooling can form the heart; the Testament and Autobiographical Note show a man who preached that the labourer is only an instrument, and who then arranged his own death and reputation to say exactly that. Read together, they are an unusually unified witness: the theology of the instructions is simply the life of the man, seen from the inside.

Reception and Influence

Innocent’s missionary method outlived him. The Orthodox Missionary Society he founded in 1870 carried his approach into the wider Russian Church, and his counsel directly shaped the young missionary Nicholas Kasatkin, later the apostle to Japan, whom he urged to master the Japanese language exactly as he himself had mastered Aleut. His larger devotional work, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, became beloved across Russia; the shorter writings gathered here, long available in Russian in his collected Works, have circulated more quietly, chiefly among those interested in the history and practice of mission. His glorification in 1977—jointly cherished by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church in America—set the seal of the Church’s veneration on the whole of this labour, and secured for these modest documents a permanent place among the memorials of one whom the Church now numbers among the equals of the Apostles.

The Text and This Edition

The six writings in this volume are presented together in a fresh modern English translation prepared for this edition and rendered from the Russian originals as preserved in the public-domain text of St Innocent’s collected works. Each piece was translated on its own terms—the numbered rules of the instructions, the plain homiletic flow of the sermons, the argumentative prose of the note on education, the personal registers of the autobiography and the testament—with care to keep the directness and warmth of the saint’s own voice rather than to smooth it into a uniform style.

This edition follows the house conventions of the series. The author is named as the Church receives him—St Innocent (Veniaminov) of Alaska—and any who assisted in bringing the text into English are credited as translators, never as authors. Scripture and chapter references are given in the modern style. Where the original divides a work into parts, chapters, or numbered points, those divisions are preserved so that the reader can follow the structure the saint himself gave. Because these are minor pieces, best introduced and read as a group, they are gathered under a single introduction; but each retains its own integrity, and the reader may take them in any order—beginning, perhaps, with the Autobiographical Note, to meet the man before hearing his counsel, or with the missionary Instructions, to encounter first the work for which he is most remembered.