Editor’s Introduction

Six short homilies, gathered here as they were in the 1911 collected edition, each preached for one of the great Marian feasts of the Orthodox calendar: the Annunciation (two sermons, a formal address and a shorter instruction), the Dormition, the Protection of the Mother of God (again given twice, from different years), and the feast of the Kazan icon. Unlike the sustained public controversy of the Tolstoy pieces translated earlier in this collection, these are ordinary parish preaching: pastoral, devotional, aimed at deepening a congregation’s love for the Mother of God rather than answering any opponent.

Read together, the six sermons return again and again to the same handful of themes from different angles: the incomprehensibility of the incarnation, the necessity of Mary’s intercession for sinners who cannot approach God’s justice unaided, and death itself reimagined, through the image of her own falling asleep, as a doorway rather than an ending. The sermon for the Dormition in particular, with its long meditation on how the horror of death dissolves once faced through the lens of the resurrection, is among the most pastorally tender pieces in this campaign.