The Russian Orthodox Church has recently celebrated the feast of St John of Kronstadt. I suspect that for many in the West, he must seem an unlikely saint. Yes, he was a shining example of great piety. He rejuvenated the Russian Orthodox Church’s attitude to communion. Arguably, he was a key factor in the late nineteenth-century revival of that Church. And he invested considerable time and energy over decades caring for the physical and spiritual needs of the people of Kronstadt. But he was also closely associated with the Black Hundreds – a network of reactionary Russian groups that instigated pogroms and carried out assassinations of their political opponents. He even went so far as to publicly bless the banners of the Union of the Russian People – an important part of the Black Hundreds – giving spiritual legitimacy to a group denounced as a terrorist organization by the then Metropolitan of St Petersburg. It is clear from his writings that he endorsed their ideology of ‘autocracy, Orthodoxy, and the Russian people’ (beliefs all too familiar from the contemporary Russkii Mir ideology used to justify the invasion of Ukraine). And, while not directly involved in its creation, he was associated with the circle of antisemitic intellectuals that gave rise to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
So, saint or sinner? To the Western mind, this is clearly an either/or issue. This either/or approach is seen clearly in Karl Barth’s reaction to the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three endorsing Germany’s stance in the First World War: seeing his teacher Adolf von Harnack’s signature on the manifesto led him to reject the liberal theology he had learned at university. For Barth, ‘by their fruits shall ye know them’: Harnack’s endorsement of German aggression completely vitiated the theology he had taught.
Over the past century, this either/or approach has only become more extreme in Western culture. Today, it seems that we are either saints or sinners. An intemperate email from their youth is enough to destroy the career of a senior politician. And the discovery of criminal behaviour or an association with criminals will effectively cancel anything good that a person might have achieved in their life. In short, in its treatment of good and evil, Western culture has become dualistic, if not Manichaean.
So, how can the Orthodox Church continue to venerate John of Kronstadt? And he is by no means the only sinful saint in the Orthodox calendar. Think of St Constantine the Great (who had several family members murdered), or St Olga of Kiev (who instigated the genocide of the Drevlians), or the recently canonized St Dumitru Stăniloae (who was associated with the Nazi Iron Guard of Romania). It is a given of Orthodox anthropology that even the holiest of individuals remains a sinner. This is why in all our worship we approach God as repentant sinners. It is a patristic principle that holiness does not imply infallibility; even the greatest saints remain vulnerable to the passions and ideological delusions of their historical context. Thus, the Church venerates saints for their authentic struggle toward theosis, not for their perfection of judgement in temporal affairs. But this implies that we can only continue to venerate such men and women if we adopt what John Meyendorff called a ‘critical traditionalism’, remaining rooted in patristic faith while honestly confronting historical failures. This means:
- Recognizing that sanctity is found in the struggle for theosis, not in political judgements.
- Explicitly repudiating their sins, critically examining ourselves for similar tendencies, and repenting whenever they are venerated.
- Studying their spiritual and theological writings critically in light of the Church’s living tradition.
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