St. John Maximovitch: The Nineteenth Anniversary of the Repose of His Beatitude, Metropolitan Anthony of Kiev

Eulogy delivered at Lesna Convent, July 28/August 10, 1955. [1]

 

 

This evening, nineteen years ago, Metropolitan Anthony reposed. A great hierarch not only of our century: in the life of the Church few have been the hierarchs as gifted as he, or who have given so much to the Church. His Holiness Varnava, Patriarch of Serbia, while serving in the Russian Church of the Holy Trinity, in Belgrade, said that Metropolitan Anthony was a hierarch like unto the great hierarchs of antiquity. [2]

In theological circles in Serbia, he was called the Athanasius of our time.

He spoke, having been made wise by the Holy Spirit.

His teaching on the Trinity and on the Church, which revealed Divine Truth, sounded like something novel. But this was not some new, hitherto unknown, teaching, but rather those Truths, according to which the Church lives, expressed anew, which, however, had been forgotten by many. On account of the calamities in the historical life of the Orthodox peoples, theological scholarship declined in those lands, and upon the re-establishment of scholarship and schools, they were formed according to the patterns of other confessions, and were under their influence.

His Beatitude Metropolitan Anthony regenerated Orthodox Theology.

He was called Athanasius the Great. Saint Athanasius the Great is known as “The Father of Orthodoxy,” not, of course, in the sense that Orthodoxy began with him, but because he lucidly expressed Orthodox doctrine at a time when the Truth was obscured by the cunning sophistries of the human mind. Like unto him, there appeared in our day the hierarch Anthony, and in his [i.e., Saint Athanasius’] power [3] he expounded that same Truth.

Metropolitan Anthony possessed the all-encompassing heart of Saint Basil the Great. A hierarch offers up prayers for the entire Orthodox Church, and each part of Her is dear to him. Metropolitan Anthony, following the bidding of Saint Basil the Great, knew the life of each Local Church. That is why he took so very much to heart the life of each of them, why he so loved and understood them. He was an Ecumenical Hierarch in the full sense of the word.

He was the teacher and preacher of love, and many, through him, came to an awareness of love, and those who formerly had been wandering in a mist discovered themselves through faith and love.

He inaugurated a new life for the Russian schools, having indicated the educational and creative power of love, and he called upon others to abandon the dry and formal attitude toward children.

Young people, one might say, flocked to him, and when others, seeing this, inquired of His Beatitude Metropolitan Anthony how, by what pedagogical method, he achieved this, he would reply that he had no method whatsoever, but in his contacts with the youth, he sought to be found in the grace of God, which enlivens the heart and draws people together.

He was a mentor of the young people, who, even upon reaching maturity, remained under his guidance. With time he became not only “the honored teacher of a multitude of monastics”, [4] but also a pastor of pastors and a hierarch of hierarchs, so many of them being from among his disciples.

Always, in all the circumstances of life, he was a persistent confessor of the Truth, which he lived, bore about, and guarded in his heart.

In exile, living for years as the guest of the Patriarch of Serbia, he preserved his inherent majestic humility and his faith and devotion to the Church. As before, he was a teacher of the Church. On one occasion His Holiness Patriarch Varnava, while present at some solemn assembly, said that, after the First World War, when the wave of modernism rushed upon the Local Churches and submerged many, in Serbia that wave broke against the lofty promontory of Metropolitan Anthony, who at that time saved the Serbian Church.

In our evil times many are submitting themselves to various influences and demands of forces alien to the Church, or even openly hostile to Her. But all those who have not submitted, who have preserved their freedom, all of them had turned to Metropolitan Anthony during his lifetime and are now following the paths indicated by him.

Always being straightforward — even from his early childhood, he looked upon all events and evaluated them from a position firmly within the Church, having an integral Orthodox world-view. And he stated that the healing of Russian society lies precisely in the adopting of an Orthodox understanding of life.

His Beatitude Metropolitan Anthony clearly perceived the anti-Church currents in Russian life, and when he sensed that they might shake the foundations of Holy Rus, and the Tsarist authority which was safeguarding them, then he — twelve years before the collapse of Russia — in the Cathedral of Saint Isaac, in St. Petersburg, foretold what threatened Russia. Subsequent events fully justified his prophetic words. [5]

He never curried favor with anyone; being aware of his inexorable straightforwardness, they sometimes purposely did not invite him to sessions of the Synod. [6]

Himself being a Great Russian, he was likewise bound by ties of kinship to Little Russia, [7] and that helped him to understand and love the latter.

But, in general, he understood all the Orthodox peoples, together with their distinct forms of piety: Great Russians, Little Russians, Greeks, Serbs, and so forth — all were dear to him.

One of the concepts most precious to him was that of the unity of the Church. The one and united Church, the Body of Christ, the union in the faith and Holy Communion of many people and nations; a unity in the likeness of the Holy Trinity — this Divine Truth was the wellspring of his spiritual exultation and preaching. The life of each Church was dear to him.

When during the First World War, after severe trials, our military might began to wax strong, and the possibility of capturing Constantinople arose, the matter of how to arrange Church life there was discussed in the Synod. Metropolitan Anthony firmly pointed out that in deciding this issue it must be remembered that the Patriarch of Constantinople is the first among the hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, and by no means could any disparagement of him be permitted. At the same time, it should also be borne in mind that the annexation of Constantinople to Russia would deprive the Greeks of the hope that the latter should once again become their capital, and the Greeks would have taken that quite painfully.

At that time, it was expected that the annexation of Constantinople would open to Russia an outlet to the sea. Metropolitan Anthony said that such a plan, entailing, as it did, the humiliating of the Greeks, also contradicted the inclination of the Russian common people. The latter (i.e., the Russian people) aspire not to Constantinople, but to Jerusalem, and an outlet to the sea in that direction would be more acceptable to the people. Constantinople, however, — once the Cross has been raised on Hagia Sophia — should be handed over to the Greeks.

Jerusalem, the Holy Land, where the Lord Jesus Christ accomplished His Divine podvig of love, where the saving life in Christ began, and where, according to the prophecy of the Prophet Ezekiel, the fate of the world will be decided — thither aspires the heart of the Russian Orthodox man.

That heart was dear to His Beatitude Metropolitan Anthony.

He well knew that as long as faith and a striving toward God was alive in that heart, as long as there was a consciousness that this is the one thing needful8 — then all else would be added unto it.

The Orthodox Autocratic Tsar was dear to Metropolitan Anthony precisely because the Tsar was the embodiment of the Russian people’s confession of that consciousness and their readiness to submit the life of the state to the righteousness of God: therefore, do the people submit themselves to the Tsar, because he submits to God. Vladyka Anthony loved to recall the Tsar’s prostration before God and the Church which he makes during the coronation, while the entire Church, all its members, stand. And then, in response to his submission to Christ, all in the Church make a full prostration to him.

His Beatitude Metropolitan Anthony saw in the compulsory abdication of the Tsar the abdication of Russia from such a consciousness, a rejection of her entire historical life.

Metropolitan Anthony remained true to historical Russia. Firm as granite, he remarked that no one could have forced him to cease commemorating the Tsar, if it had not been for the Tsar’s own Manifesto.

Metropolitan Anthony was not a martyr; however, he was always prepared to become a martyr. But a confessor he can undoubtedly be reckoned.

We do not know how the Lord has crowned His confessor. But for us he is the icon of meekness, a teacher of the faith, an image of one rightly dividing the word of truth. [9]

Innumerable is the multitude of people whom he raised up, instructed and strengthened, and all of them with gratitude pray for him.

Metropolitan Anthony himself would recall how Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk once beheld in a vision that in order to be saved he must ascend an exceedingly lofty ladder, and that whenever he began to grow weak, there appeared a multitude of people whom he had earlier aided spiritually, and they helped him to ascend. In this very vision the Hierarch perceived the lesson that his duty was not to abandon his pastoral service. In this vision Metropolitan Anthony more than once perceived instruction for himself too.

At first, after the Revolution, Metropolitan Anthony wished to retire to Valaam, but circumstances demanded his return to Kharkov. And then later there always arose various obstacles to his leaving his pastoral service. Finally, already in Serbia, he received authorization to settle on Mount Athos, and he decided to depart. The Russian exiles begged him to remain. He did not consent. Then the wonder-working icon of the Mother of God of the Sign was brought into his quarters as an expression of their hope and certainty that the Mother of God herself would not allow him to depart. A few days later news was received that precisely on that very day the given authorization had been revoked.

Metropolitan Anthony remained at the head of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and thus began the last period of his life and of his heavy moral trials.

A number of his disciples and adherents took other paths.

It grieved him, but his deeply loving heart did not judge them. He prayed for them and called upon others to do the same.

And now, recalling his life, his great podvig, we can in truth state that those words, chanted by the Church to the Holy Apostle John the Theologian, are likewise applicable to him: “he, being filled with love, also became filled with theology.” [10]

 

NOTES

1. Pravoslavnaya Rus, No. 19, 1955, pp. 3–4. Translation by Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston. The paragraph divisions given here are those of the Russian text; perhaps they reflect Saint John Maximovich’s manner of delivery.

2. See also the most edifying account: “Patriarch Varnava and Metropolitan Anthony – Remembrances of a Christian Friendship”, Orthodox Life, No. 1, 1972, pp. 15–23.

3. Cf. Luke 1: 17.

4. A paraphrase of the Vespers Doxasticon for a monastic saint: “We the multitude of monastics honor thee our teacher…” This text would, of course, have been very familiar to those who had gathered at the Lesna Convent to hear Saint John speak.

5. Sermon delivered on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, February 20, 1905: “Concerning the Dread Judgment and Current Events” (Complete Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 135.).

6. That is, the Holy Synod of pre-Revolutionary Russia.

7. I.e., Russia Minor, Ukraine.

8. Luke 10: 42.

9 .2 Tim 2: 15.

10. Vespers Doxasticon of May 8.