Editor’s Introduction

A late work of St. John of Kronstadt, drawn from his personal diary entries of 1899-1902 and first published in St. Petersburg in 1902 under the title Christian Philosophy. Unlike the collections of Sunday sermons, this is continuous reflective prose—five chapters tracing the whole arc of the Christian life: man created in beauty and harmony with God and the world; man’s fall and its consequences; God’s own goodness, wisdom, long-suffering, and almighty power in restoring fallen man; the Church as the treasury of salvation, with extended reflection on the Mysteries and the sacred hierarchy; and finally man’s own part in working out the salvation Christ has accomplished, through the struggle against sin, the cleansing of the soul in repentance, the cultivation of love and the other virtues, and a closing Christian ethical worldview.

The author writes throughout in the first person, out of his own experience as a pastor and penitent, and does not soften the polemical edges of his own convictions—there is extended argument against Roman Catholic and Protestant doctrine and practice, and against the freethinking of his own day, alongside firsthand accounts of answered prayer and of what he took to be a Marian apparition. Readers coming from the more famous diary excerpts of My Life in Christ will recognize the same voice, here given over to a single sustained meditation on nature, sin, and grace.