Introduction

The Author

Ivan Ilyich Sergiev—remembered by the world as Saint John of Kronstadt—was born on the nineteenth of October, 1829, in the remote northern village of Sura, in the Archangel province, far up toward the White Sea. His parents were poor and pious, and the boy who would one day be sought out by an emperor was named for Saint John of Rila, the great hermit of the Bulgarian mountains. Poverty and the long, hard winters of the Russian North left their mark on him early: he learned in childhood what it was to go without, and he never forgot it. Neighbors, it was said, already asked the young John to pray for them, sensing in him a gift they could not quite name.

He made his way through the church schools of Archangel and then to the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1855. As a student he dreamed for a time of the foreign missions—of carrying the Gospel to distant China—but he came to see that the harvest was great enough at home, among his own people, and that the office of a faithful parish priest was itself a full apostolate. In the year of his graduation he was ordained and appointed to Saint Andrew’s Cathedral in the naval town of Kronstadt, the island fortress guarding the sea approach to the imperial capital. He would serve there for more than half a century, until his death, and the town’s name became inseparable from his own.

Kronstadt in those years was not a comfortable posting. The government used it as a place of exile for criminals and the destitute, and the priest found around his cathedral a population living in dugouts and hovels, sunk in drink and despair. Father John did not treat these people as a problem to be managed. He went into their shacks and stayed for hours—talking, weeping, rejoicing with them, treating each as, in his own phrase, a priceless soul. He spent his own money on food and medicine for them, and more than once came home barefoot, having given his shoes away; his wife grew used to parishioners returning his cast-off things. Out of this pastoral care grew works of remarkable scale. In 1882 he founded in Kronstadt a House of Industry—a complex that offered the poor honest work in its workshops, together with a canteen, a school, a shelter, a hospital, and a library—turning almsgiving into a system that could restore dignity as well as relieve hunger.

Two features of his priesthood pressed most deeply on his contemporaries, and both stand behind the present book. The first was the Liturgy. Father John strove to celebrate the Divine Liturgy every single day, and to stand at the altar was for him the center and the fire of his whole existence. The second followed from the first: he labored to draw ordinary Christians back to frequent Communion, condemning without softness the lukewarm habit that had reduced the Eucharist to a once-a-year formality. So many came to him seeking confession before the Chalice that individual confession became physically impossible, and he adopted a general confession—the whole church confessing aloud together, a scene that eyewitnesses described as overwhelming in its intensity. His reputation as a man of prayer spread across the empire and beyond it; the sick were brought to him and healings were reported in such number that he came to be spoken of as a wonderworker on a scale few saints have matched. In 1894, when Tsar Alexander III lay dying at the Livadia palace in the Crimea, it was John of Kronstadt who was summoned to his side.

His written legacy is considerable, but its heart is the spiritual diary published as My Life in Christ — a book of luminous fragments on prayer, the sacraments, and the presence of God that has been read far outside the Russian Church. He reposed on the twentieth of December, 1908 (the second of January, 1909, by the Western calendar), and was buried in the convent he had founded on the Karpovka in Saint Petersburg, where pilgrims came at once in great numbers. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad numbered him among the saints in 1964, and the Russian Orthodox Church did so on the eighth of June, 1990; he is commemorated on the day of his repose, the twentieth of December, and on the nineteenth of October. A married parish priest rather than a monk or a bishop, he remains one of the most widely loved figures of modern Christianity, honored well beyond the borders of his own communion as a witness to what an ordinary pastorate, wholly given over to God, can become.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

Great Lent (Velikiy post) gathers the Lenten preaching of a priest who preached constantly and who took the Church’s calendar as the natural shape of the Christian year. It is not a treatise composed at a desk, nor a single sermon-cycle delivered across one spring. It is a compiled anthology—nearly forty sermons and discourses drawn from Father John’s parochial ministry and arranged to follow the liturgical road of the fast from beginning to end. The internal evidence is plain: for several of the great Sundays the book carries not one homily but several—two on the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, more than one for Forgiveness Sunday, a whole cluster for the Veneration of the Cross—sermons plainly preached in different years and then set side by side because they belong to the same station on the journey. The book is therefore a preacher’s Lenten companion assembled from the accumulated harvest of many seasons at Saint Andrew’s altar.

The occasion of the collection is the great fast itself, the most solemn stretch of the Orthodox year. In the tradition in which Father John served, Lent is preceded by a series of preparatory Sundays that ease the faithful into the discipline—the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, the remembrance of the Last Judgment (Meatfare), and the expulsion from Paradise (Cheesefare, or Forgiveness Sunday)—and it runs through weeks named for their Sunday themes toward Holy Week, the commemoration of Christ’s Passion, and Pascha. The sermons here are keyed to exactly those days. They were spoken aloud to a living congregation, and the page still carries the heat of the spoken word: the sudden turn to the conscience, the cry of woe over sin, the direct address—“Brethren and sisters!” — the paschal greeting flung out at the end.

The purpose that governs every page is pastoral and singular. Father John preaches Lent not as an end in itself but as a preparation—a season whose whole point is to clear and empty the soul so that it can receive. Fasting, self-examination, the sorrow of repentance, the confession of sin: all of these he presents as the road to the Chalice and, through it, to the risen Christ. He is not interested in the fast as a feat of endurance or a matter of dietary rule; he is interested in what it opens the soul to. This gives the collection its urgency. He is a physician who has seen the disease at close range in the exiles of Kronstadt and in himself, and who knows exactly what the cure is and where it is to be found. Within his own corpus the book sits alongside his eucharistic diary and his other pastoral writings as the seasonal, calendar-bound expression of the single conviction that animated his whole priesthood: that the ordinary Christian is called to genuine, frequent, life-changing communion with God, and that the Church’s appointed means—the fast, confession, the altar—are given precisely so that this can happen.

Argument & Structure

The book’s structure is the structure of Lent, and to read it in order is to walk the season from its first summons to its far horizon. It opens in the preparatory weeks, before the fast has even begun, with the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee. Here Father John lays the foundation stone of everything that follows: humility. Setting the two men of the parable against each other, he anatomizes pride as the root sickness of fallen humanity—the passion by which Adam wished to make himself equal to God—and holds up the publican’s broken and contrite heart as the only disposition in which prayer is heard. Whatever good we have, he insists, is God’s gift and not our achievement; the moment we count and display our virtues we have lost them. The theme is not incidental. It is the doorway to the whole fast, because a soul that will not humble itself cannot repent, and a soul that cannot repent cannot be filled.

From humility the collection turns to return. The Sundays of the Prodigal Son give Father John the parable he loves best, and he reads it as a mirror in which every hearer sees himself: the far country of sin, the husks that do not satisfy, the coming to oneself, and above all the Father who is already running down the road. His pastoral genius shows here in a single insight he presses again and again—that repentance is not hard but easy, that God is “not far from any one of us,” and that the very first inward movement of the heart back toward Him is met at once with mercy. He maps the passions one by one—unbelief, pride, envy, wrath, gluttony—and shows that for each there is a path home. The preparatory arc then closes with the Sundays of Meatfare and Cheesefare and with Forgiveness Sunday, which stand at the threshold of the fast and turn the soul toward the mutual forgiveness without which the discipline is empty.

With the first week of Lent the sermons enter the fast proper, and their center of gravity shifts to repentance and the sacraments. Here stand the discourses on repentance and on receiving the Holy Mysteries—the pastoral heart of the book. Father John examines the fruit of a well-kept fast with searching honesty: after confession and Communion, has anything actually changed? Have we grown gentler, freer, more merciful, more heavenly-minded, or have we merely performed a rite? The Sunday of Orthodoxy, which crowns the first week, draws him to the truth of the faith and the guilelessness of the true Israelite. Through the middle Sundays the road climbs toward the Cross. The Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross, at the midpoint of the fast, draws the largest gathering of homilies in the book, and here the preaching darkens and deepens: the Cross is set at the very center of the season as the instrument of our redemption, the tree by which the debt of sin was paid and, in his own striking phrase, our own acquittal secured.

The last movement follows Holy Week. The fourth and fifth Sundays give way to the great images of the approaching Passion—the song “Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight,” the sermons of Great Monday, and then the homilies for Great and Holy Friday, several of them preached before the Epitaphios, the winding-sheet that bears the image of the crucified Lord to the center of the church. The tone at the tomb is hushed and grief-stricken. And then, at the very end, the book breaks the calendar open: its closing homily is spoken after Pascha has come and gone, with the paschal cry “Christ is risen!” on the preacher’s lips—but it is a sermon of holy anger and grief, a lament that so many received the feast of the Resurrection with drunkenness and dissipation, trampling underfoot the repentance and Communion the fast had won for them. It is a fitting close, and a characteristic one. Father John will not let the reader mistake the season for a performance that ends when the fast is broken. The whole point of Lent, he insists to the last, is a life actually changed—a soul that has itself risen from dead works to living ones.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The abiding significance of Great Lent lies in the way it fuses a rigorous doctrine of repentance with an incandescent eucharistic faith, and refuses to let either stand without the other. Father John is, first, a great physician of the conscience. His analysis of sin is neither vague nor sentimental. Pride, for him, is a diagnosable sickness with a known origin in the fall, a known progress through the soul, and a known cure; the passions are mapped like symptoms; the self-deceptions by which we launder our motives and admire our own virtue are exposed with a precision that can still make a reader wince. This is the ascetic realism of the Christian East applied not to monks in the desert but to ordinary townspeople—sailors, laborers, the exiled and the comfortable alike—and offered to them as something within their reach.

But repentance in this book is never an end. It is always preparation for the Chalice, and it is at the altar that Father John’s preaching catches fire. His eucharistic realism is total and unembarrassed. To this day, he cries, the living and life-giving Blood of Christ steams upon the altars—the Eucharist is not a symbol or a memorial but the true Body and Blood of the Lord, received for the cleansing and renewal of the faithful. Around this center he lays out the whole ladder of the Mysteries—Baptism, Chrismation, the Liturgy, repentance, the priesthood, and the rest—as the appointed channels of grace by which heaven is opened to the soul. His constant refrain, that the doors of heaven shut by our sins are opened again by repentance and Communion, gives the fast its stakes: this is not religious housekeeping but the difference between a soul locked out and a soul let in.

The theological weight of the collection rests, finally, on the Cross. Father John sets the crucified and risen Christ at the center of the whole Lenten enterprise. The Cross is the ground of the mercy he keeps promising the penitent; it is because the Lamb of God has taken the sins of the world upon Himself that the blows of divine justice do not fall, that the sinner’s cry is heard, that the far country can be left behind. Redemption, in his preaching, is not an abstraction but the living engine of pastoral hope—the reason a priest can look at the worst of Kronstadt’s exiles and address a priceless soul. It is worth adding that this is preaching, not system-building. The book’s theology is delivered at the pitch of exhortation, aimed at the will and the heart rather than the speculative intellect, and its power is inseparable from that homiletic urgency. What it engages is less a controversy than a crisis Father John saw all around him—the reduction of a living faith to custom and routine—and against that reduction the whole book is a sustained, passionate protest.

Reception & Influence

Few modern pastors have been so widely venerated in their own lifetimes. Father John was known across the Russian empire and beyond it as a man whose prayers healed the sick and turned sinners around, and the pilgrimage to Kronstadt became a phenomenon of the age; correspondence and requests for his prayers reached him from every quarter, and his summons to the deathbed of Alexander III set the seal on a fame that was already immense. His example did lasting work in the wider Church’s sacramental life. The recovery of frequent Communion, against the entrenched habit of the once-a-year obligation, owes an enormous debt to his preaching and his practice, and the very shape of the general confession he adopted at Kronstadt has continued to be discussed and, in places, adapted as a pastoral response to the same needs he faced. His diary My Life in Christ passed early into other languages and has been read by Christians of many traditions as a modern spiritual classic. Numbered among the saints by the Russian Church Abroad in 1964 and by the Church in Russia in 1990, he is today commemorated liturgically, has churches dedicated in his name on several continents, and is honored—as a witness to prayer, charity, and the sacraments—well beyond the boundaries of the communion in which he served. The Lenten sermons gathered here belong to that living reception: they are among the texts through which his voice still reaches the ordinary Christian for whom he spent his life.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents Great Lent in a fresh, modern English translation made directly from the Russian. The source is the public-domain Russian text of Father John’s Lenten sermons as preserved in the pre-revolutionary edition and served in digital form by the Orthodox library azbyka.ru; the underlying work has long been in the public domain, its author having reposed in 1908. The nearly forty sermons are arranged, as in the source, to follow the order of the Lenten calendar, from the preparatory Sundays through Holy Week to the far side of Pascha.

The aim throughout has been a readable, contemporary English that keeps faith with the preacher’s own voice—direct, urgent, and made to be heard aloud—without smoothing away its fervor or modernizing its convictions. The translation follows the house conventions of this series. Saint John of Kronstadt is named as the Church has always received him, and is credited as the author of his own sermons; the translators appear as translators and never as authors. Scripture is rendered as Father John himself quotes it—from the Slavonic and Russian of his own Bible, in the register of his preaching—rather than being conformed to any standard English version, so that the citations read as he meant them. Biblical references are given in a plain modern citation style (for example, Lk 18:11, Rom. 6:22) with Arabic numerals for chapters and verses. Where the working drafts had at any point abridged or garbled the Russian, those passages were collated afresh against the source and restored in full—including the great eucharistic loci, so central to this preacher, in which the living and life-giving Blood is said to steam upon the altar and the whole enumeration of the Mysteries is set out. The result is an English-language edition intended for study and for devotional reading across the weeks of the fast—a companion, as its author meant it to be, for the Church’s great season of return.

Suggestions for Reading

The natural way to read this book is the way it was preached: in step with the season. A reader keeping Lent can take the sermons as the weeks turn—the Publican and the Pharisee first, then the Prodigal Son, and so on toward the Cross and the tomb—letting each homily mark the distance still to be walked. Read this way, the collection becomes what its author intended, a weekly companion rather than a volume to be finished at a sitting.

The newcomer to this tradition should not be put off by the intensity of the tone or the vividness of the sacramental language. Father John preaches at full voice because he believes the stakes are real, and his repeated theme is not condemnation but mercy: the Father already running to meet the returning son, the door of heaven that repentance reopens. It helps to remember that these are spoken sermons, and to hear them as such—to let the direct address, the sudden questions to the conscience, and the closing cries of “Amen” and “Christ is risen!” do their work. Those who come to the book from outside the Orthodox world will find much that is particular to it—the calendar of preparatory Sundays, the Veneration of the Cross at Lent’s midpoint, the Epitaphios on Great Friday—but they will also find, beneath the particulars, a plainly Christian summons that reaches across every division: humble yourself, turn back, and be filled.