Editor’s Introduction

This little book is not, strictly speaking, a single work by Father John of Kronstadt. It is a compiled pamphlet built around one. Its first pages reproduce a newspaper profile from 1900 and a separate biographical sketch, both written by admirers describing his relentless daily round of services, confessions, and correspondence, and both preserving, secondhand, some of his most striking sayings. Only after this does the book turn to its real substance: 138 short, aphoristic ‘Thoughts’ (reflections on prayer, malice, almsgiving, illness, temptation, and death) set down by Father John himself.

Read consecutively, these aphorisms have the texture of a private notebook rather than a treatise: recurring, restated, sometimes contradicting their own earlier phrasing as the same handful of concerns are turned over from a new angle each time. Anger and self-love are named as the root of nearly every fault; almsgiving, prayer offered ‘from the heart,’ and a settled hatred of one’s own sin recur as the only real remedies. The effect, across so many short entries, is less a system of ethics than the record of one man’s daily combat with himself.