Russia's Catacomb Saints Archbishop Barlaam
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consisting of the difficult outward situation of pastoral activity. The world
and the devil rise up against the servants of Christ, and from this come every
kind of slander, offense, vexation, and even persecution. If even a simple
pastor often grows faint under this cross, what must an archpastor suffer? Who
can describe his torments of soul, and his frequent tears, seen and unseen?
Moreover, terrible times have now come: many go away from the Faith, rise up
against Christ and His Holy Church. Now, when many speak evil of the path of
truth (II Peter 2:22), a pastor can no longer be silent and endure sorrows in
silence; he must defend the truth and loudly testify of it, he must be a kind of
confessor. And to be a confessor means to be a priest-martyr. This is precisely
the path of a bishop.
Again I remember the divine Paul, who describes thus his confessor's path:
For Christ and His work, he says, I was in wounds above measue, was often in
prison and near death; many times I was in danger from my fellow countrymen,
frjom the heathen, from false bethren; many times I was in labors and weariness,
often in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness-all while in ceaseless care
for the churches, in the daily presence of many brethren (II Cor. 11:23-28).
What faith and hope one must have in God, what purity of personal life, what
renunciation of oneself and love for the flock, in order to endure in a fitting
way this struggle: to fearlessly declare the truth of Christ, to endure sorrows
and sufferings with joy, not lose courage even in persectuons, to burn with zeal
according to God, seeking the salvation of one's brethren! Finally, what good
sense and experience one must have to guide safely the ship of the Church into
the harbor of salvation! The bishop is the pilot of the ship.
A true pilot, says St. John of the Ladder, is one who has received from God
and through his own struggles such spiritual strength that he can save the ship
of the soul not only from violent storms, but even from the abyss itself (
Homily to Pastors, ch. 1:2),
Again, I acknowledge my infirmity and I see all my unworthiness, but all the
same, with humility, I submit to the will of God and banish despondency from
myself, for it is God which worketh in us (Phil.2:13), and the pastor is not
alone; with him and through him the almighty grace of God works, healing the
infirm and making up what is lacking. God hath not given us the spirit of fear,
but of power, and of love, and of chastity (II tim. 1:17).
It is in this grace that I have hope; I have hope also in your holy prayers.
Pray, O hierarchs of God, that the Holy Spirit might cleanse every defilement of
my soul, that He might grant me wisdom and power to shepherd well the flock of
Christ to the glory of God and for the salvation of the Church's children, that
I also might be vouchsafed at the Last Judgment to stand at His right hand and
hear that unutterable voice calling the faithful to the inheritance of the
Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.
Hardly had he begun his archpastoral activity when the First World War broke
out, with sorrowful consequences especially for the south, which became the war
front. However, prior to this, his participation in the missionary activity of
the Pochaev Lavra was the happiest time in his whole llife as a bishop. The
Lavra of St. Job had just seen a great spiritual revival due to the printing
Brotherhood within it, headed by another of his classmates-Archimandrite Vitaly
(later of Jordanville, NY). With his apostolic zeal, Father Vitaly stirred up
the local people, who for years had been forced to be Uniates, and led thousands
of them into the Orthodox Church. Bishop Barlaam took an active part in this
truly Orthodox phenomenon and used to lead huge crowds of pilgrims to the
Pochaev festivities, delivering flaming sermons calling the Orthodox people to
be genuine Christians striving during their earthly life towards the heavenly
homeland. Stirring indeed were the moments when a crowd
of a thousand or more pilgrims spent all-night vigils on the monastery grounds,
singing hymns with one heart and soul either before the Pochaev icon of the
Theotokos or to St. Job, or a special "Vitalian" Our Father, while enormous
slide projections were shown on the walls of the Cathedral, illuminating the
glorious Orthodox past of the Lavra and the whole of Holy Russia as a bastion of
pure, unadulterated Christianity. One, Bishop, Seraphim, walked to these Pochaev
festivities with his whole flock in a procession with banners for a hundred
miles-such was the fervor of the Orthodox people then. The whole of Russian
monasticism at that time was on a very high level; many monasteries had saints
within their walls, and the monastics, inspired by Egyptian and Athonite ascetic
practices, treasured the coenobitic discipline for the sake of mystical
experience, quite unlike the politial orientation of the bickering Orders of the
West.
But the Revolution was not far behind. It stormed across the nation like
some nightmarish whirlwind. Bishop Barlaam knew well the significance of what
was going on in Russia; the satanic nature of the uprooting of Christianity was
apparent. The very system of utilizing spying and lies and the reign of terror,
at first by the GPU and then the NKVD, was undeniably patterned after the
activity of the demonic powers, which exist in a slavish hierarchy of domination
and subordination, as is revealed in patristic literature (see, for example, the
revelation of the Fallen Theophillus in the Lives of the Saints). Lenin's
blaspehmous plan to change humanity by destroying the dignity of man as the
image of God was clear enough, and it was effective on many who were not rooted
in patristic wisdom. He understood that what was going on was a spiritual and
not only a political change in Russia. This is where the White Army failed, not
recognizing this sufficiently. Wherever he could, he spok
e out, but concentrated mostly on mobilizing the spiritual powers of himself and
those of like mind, growing in the wisdom of humility.
From September 3, 1923, Bishop Barlaam was placed in Pskov, a town dear to
him because his brother, the future Bishop Herman, who afer completing the Kazan
Academy in 1906 became administratively involved in the Pskov Seminary. The town
also reminded them of their mutual elder from Kazan, Father Gabriel, who spent
his last years in the St. Eleazar Monastery near Pskov. But Elder Gabriel did go
to die in Kazan amidst his beloved spiritual children, and Herman went there to
take part in his burial.
Herman's life was not much different from his brother's. Before the
Revolutiion he was rector of the Vladimir Seminary and then was transferred to
the Bethany Seminary in the vicinity of St. Sergius' Lavra and the Moscow
Theological Academy. There he was in contact with local saints, men of high
spiritual striving, and he remembered this whole region of the vanishing Holy
Russia years later in the remote northern plains of Siberia with warm feelings
and tears-as if the Bethany Seminary had been Paradise for him.
In the winter of 1924 Bishop Herman was arrested and exiled to Tobolsk, and
then followed a perpetual way of the Cross, by way of concentration camps in
Solovki, Central Russia, Sarov, and Kulma, ending in 1937 in the Far North. But
he was well prepared to accept his lot.
Bishop Herman had always been drawn to the solitary life of an ascetic.
While in exile in Arzamas he met holy clairvoyant women of the closed Diveyevo
Convent, and one of them prophecied that his dream of solitary ascetic life
would be fkulfilled-only in banishment instead of in a monastery. His was a
preciously refined soul, endowed with a poetic outlook on life. His Academy
dissertation, "The Moral Teaching of St. Symeon the New Theologian," highly
praised in Academy circles, had undoubtedly much to do with the formation of his
spiritual outlook on life. With what humbleness and humor he recounts in his
letters how he was scooping and cleaning out outhouses, thereby receiving the
honor if imitating St. John Damascene! Together with his brother he left a
multitude of letters, addressed to his spiritual daughters, members of the
catacomb convent, where much was concealed in code due to the strict postal
censorship. But what a wealth of spiritual refinement and wisdom are conta
ined in these letters! What beautiful classic language, exalted and lyrical!
Truly, these are treasures coming out of the 20th-century catacombs.
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1927-1942
From December, 1924, for a year Bishop Barlaam was bishop of Mogilev in the
South. How everything had changed by then! He was moved because of the constant
arrest of bishops. By July 13, 1927, he was bishop of Perm, and while he was
temprarily in Yaroslav, the infamous Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius came
out. This document was not a surprise to him, but it was entirely unacceptable
for any Orthodox soul. Together with the local hierarchs, Bishop Barlaam signed
this document of protest:
From The Epistle of the Yaroslav Bishops
To Metropolitan Sergius, Feb. 6, 1928
Your Eminence:
In your appeal to the children of the Orthodox Church of July 29, 1927, you
declare in categorical form a program of your future leadership, the realization
of which would inevitably bring the Church new misfortunes and would deepen the
infirmities and sufferings which have possession of it. According to your
program, the spiritual and Divine principle in the Church's economy is entirely
subordinated to the worldly and earthly principle, whose cornerstone is not a
concern by all means possible for the defense of the pure faith and Christian
piety, but a totally unnecessary pleasing of those who are "outside," leaving
no room for the most important condition for the ordering of internal church
life in accordance with the commandments of Christ and the Gospel-the freedom
given to the Church by her Heavenly Founder which is a part of her very nature.
You oblige the children of the Church, and first of all, of course, the
episcopate, to have a loyal attitude to the civil authority
.
We welcome this demand and testify that we have always been, are, and shall
be honest and conscientious citizens of our native land; but this, we affirm,
has nothing in common with the politics and intrigue with which you have bound
it up, and it does not oblige the children of the Church to voluntarily refuse
the rights which have been given to it by the civil authority itself (the
election by communities of believers of spiritual leaders for themselves).
In place of the internal Church freedom which had been restored, you make
broad use of administrative arbitrariness, from which the Church suffered much
even earlier. At your own personal discretion you practice a purposeless,
unjustifiable transferral of bishops, often against their own desire and that of
their flock, you assign vicars without the knowledge of the ruling bishops of
the dioceses, you suspend bishops who are not pleasing to you, etc.
All this and much else in your governance of the Church which is, we are
profoundly convinced, a clear violation of the All-Russian Council of 1917-1918,
and ever more increases the disorders and destruction in chuch life, compels us
to declare to Your Eminence:
We, the bishops of the Yaroslav church region, acknowledging the
responsibility which lies on us before God for those things which have been
entrusted to our pastoral guidance-the purity of the Holy Orthodox Faith, and
the freedom for the ordering of inward church-religious life which Christ has
given us as a testament-in order to calm the disturbed conscience of the
faithful, having no other way out of the fatal situation which has been created
for the Church, from this time onwards separate from you and refuse to
acknowledge for you and your Synod the right to the higher administration of the
Church.
Our present decision will remain in effect until you acknowledge the
incorrectness of your acts and measures as leader and openly repent of your
errors, or until His Eminence, Metropolitan Peter, should return to power.
Agathangelus, Metropolitan of Yaroslav
Seraphim, Archbishop of Uglich (Vicar of the Yaroslav Diocese, former
Substitute of the Patriarchal Locum Tenens)
Archbishop Barlaam, formerly of Perm, temporarily governing the Lyubinsk
Vicariate
Eugene, Bishop of Rostov (Vicar of the Yaroslav Diocese)
As a reaction to this protest, Metropolitan Sergius did not find anything
better to do than to issue an ukase in which all those hierarchs who disagreed
with his Declaration were automatically proclaimed " counter-revolutionaries,"
and as such quite legitimately were to be arrested by the GPU agents as enemies
of the people. Bishop Barlaam, together with the others, issued immediately
another epistle, stating that they did not protest against Metropolitan Segius'
right of administration but that they disagreed with his policy. Nevertheless,
all the hierarchs who in some way or another disagreed and did not blindly
follow Metropolitan Sergius were indeed arrested and most of them vanished
forever without a trace. Bishop Barlaam was then temporarily governing the
Liublin diocese, a vicariate of Yaroslav. In November of that same year, he was
officially relieved of his archpastoral duties. In 1930, however, for his
opposition to Metropolitan Sergius, he was arrested and imprisoned
, and his sufferings began in earnest-lasting, with short intervals of relative
freedom in exile, for the rest of his much-suffering life. Yaroslav prison in
later years was considered one of the most cruel and sadistic places of the
Soviet system, but his exile was not much better. In 1931 he was in Solovki, and
in 1933 on Bear Mountain near Petrozavodsk.
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these years was so intense that few made any distinction between it and death.
They knew that they had been condemned to execution, and it was only a question
of time before the sentence would be fulfilled. In that respect it was the
happiest time in their life-for the meeting with Christ so close.
One witness, who years later knew Fr. Dimitry Dudko, stated: "In the camps
we often encountered our brother-clergymen and secretly served Liturgy,
sometimes on a wooden crate, sometimes on somebody's back; at that time we did
not stop to think whether such things were persmissible. The thirst to be in
union with Christ was stronger than any hinderance. Sometimes our people from
outside would send us the Holy Gifts. There, behind the bars and barbed wire, as
in some Orthodox mission, we secretly performed all the church sacraments. I
baptzied, performed weddings and burials, and preached. It has been recorded
that a certain anti-Sergianist priest, Father Alexander, every day would come to
work early, at dawn, and on a tree stump, kneeling, would serve the Divine
Liturgy. Several people saw how a beam of light descended from heaven and
entered his chalice, transfiguring him and those around him." (Memoirs of N.
Urusova).
An innocent man, a humble and kind monk, a man with a soft, loving heart who
loved long church services according to the monastic typicon, Archbishop Barlaam
suffered terribly at being separated from his spiritual children, who regarded
him as an elder and irreplaceable spiritual instructor. He wrote letters of
instruction to them whenever possible. For those in "freedom" these letters
exuded a breath of fresh air in the stifling Soviet reality. They breathe the
spirit of true Christian humility. Together with the letters of his brother,
they constitute what today might be called a Christian teaching on the enduring
of suffering in a society that has grown hostile and hateful towards just plain
human beings.
IV
Letters From Exile On Spiritual Life
The letters which have survived and reached the free world, thanks to
Samizdat, were written from 1923 up to 1936, after which there is no trace
whatever of Bishop Herman. There are seven letters of Archbishop Barlaam and 39
of his brother. They were written to encourage their spiritual children, having
one main theme: sobriety and guidance in acquiring the principle virtue-the
humility of wisdom. They also reveal, in a disguised form, some bits of
information about their authors: their perpetual harassment, from prison to
exile and back again to prison, and their amazing absence of bitterness. Here
are some major points of their teaching:
1. The letters contain a perceptive analysis of the behavioral patterns of
our fallen nature from the patristic, spiritual, and psychological points of
view.
2. The lessons they give come from personal experience in the deeply tragic
situation they were forced to endure: exile, a constant lack of daily essential
needs, harassements, perpetual banishment (in the case of Bishop Herman) and
physicall ailments (Archbishop Barlaam).
3. There is demonstrated in them a remarkable peace, a deeply poetic inward
inspiration, interspersed with paraphrases (due to the absence of books in
exile) of exalted patristic writings on ascetic life, or with melanchoy lyrical
retreats into past reality or into the hidden beauty even of the present. In
short, the letters give an ascetic philosophy of love for God and for life.
4. The meaning of suffering: Suffering is when our spirit or "self" must
separate itself from its own righteousness and must accept God's righteousness,
which is hard and confining to our soul-in other words, it means to accept God's
will rather than our own, so that we might become instruments of God.
5. The meaning of spiritual happiness: "What happiness and what endless and
everlasting joy, to be at least partial participant in those Wounds by which all
have been healed, and to be at least a minute particle of that mighty eternal
Power which indicates to all creation the eternally ancient and eternally new
path to the Resurrection through self-denial and love"-writes Bishop Herman.
Here are some excerpts from the teaching of the brother-bishops.
The Letters of Bishop Barlaam
1. On The Correct Spiritual Attitude (Letter to Archbishop Barlaam to Abbess
M.)
You wish to see your correction from weakness and negligence and thereby to
be justified; but this is not quite correct. Study again what I wrote earlier;
your soul has not taken in everything I said there. But don't be surprised-this
can't be done all at once; it becomes clear gradually with God's help. I will
repeat briefly:
1. We are not justified by correcting ourselves, not by good deeds; all this
is undermined by our common sinfulness, and in any case we are obliged to do it
by our God-like nature. But we are justified by humility and repentance: A
sacrifice to God is a broken spirit; a heart that is is contrite and humble God
will not despise. Your will find this somewhere in the letters of Optina Elder
Macarius. Therefore, it is good that you have failings and weaknesses; with
repentance and contrition they will lead you into Paradise. But if you do not
have any, then a trust in your own correctness can hinder you greatly through
secret self-esteem and a pharisaical trust in the labors and virtues you have
borne: "I have earned it-pay me."
2. Further, you write: "I am afraid to receive Communion often; I do not get
better; my sins are always the same." Well and good, but you wash your clothes
often, and do you get angry because they don't get better but are always covered
with the same dirt? Is it not the contrary? So look in the same way at the
purity of the soul: the more a man takes care of it, the more often he washes
away the dirt, the more pleasing it is to the Lord. And do not be disturbed if
the dirt is always the same-it is good enough it if only doesn't get worse. It
makes no difference what it is that has soiled the purity of the soul; the time
comes and one must clean it and wash away the uncleanness with repentance. And
to the Lord a single repenting sinner is more pleasing than ten self-satisified
righteous men,