Stephen of Perm

Origins at Veliky Ustyug

Stephen was born about 1340 at Veliky Ustyug, at the confluence of the Sukhona and the Yug in the far north-east of the Russian lands — the frontier town of the Rostov diocese, and the trading point at which Russian settlers met the Permian peoples of the forests beyond. His father, Simeon, was a cleric of the cathedral church of the Dormition there; his mother was named Maria, and his Life makes much of her piety and of her part in forming him. A local Ustyug tradition, well attested in the town's own hagiography, has the holy fool Procopius of Ustyug bow to the ground before Maria when she was a child of three and greet her as the mother of a bishop who would enlighten Perm — a prophecy the townspeople remembered when it was fulfilled.

The boy was quick past the ordinary: his Life says he mastered the reading of the sacred books within a single year, and served in his father's church as canonarch and reader while still a child. Just as important for what came after, he grew up bilingual by ear. Zyrians came down to Ustyug to trade, and Stephen learned their speech as a boy learns a neighbour's language — not as a scholar's acquisition but as a native possession.

Rostov: the monastery of St Gregory the Theologian

Still young, he left Ustyug for Rostov the Great and was tonsured at the monastery of St Gregory the Theologian, called the Grigoriev zatvor — "Gregory's Recluse" — a house then famous in the north for the size of its library and the seriousness of its learning. There Stephen did what almost no Russian monk of his century did: finding that the Fathers he wanted were in translations he could not trust, he learned Greek, and read them in the original. The monastery was at that time also home to Epiphanius, later called the Wise, who knew Stephen there as a fellow monk and who would afterwards write his Life — which is why the record of Stephen is not a bare synaxarion notice but the testimony of a man who had argued theology with him in the same cell-block.

The Permian alphabet

At Rostov, out of that learning and that childhood ear, came the decisive work. The Permian tongue had no writing. Stephen made it one — the script called Abur or Anbur after the names of its first two letters, of about twenty-four characters, built from Greek and Cyrillic letter-shapes together with the incised property- and clan-marks (pasy) which the Zyrians already cut into wood and used as signs. It is a genuine adaptation rather than a transliteration scheme: the letters are shaped to a people who were used to reading marks, and it can be dated to about 1372, before his mission began.

Into this alphabet Stephen translated the liturgical books — the accounts name the Horologion and the Psalter, and the necessary lections — so that the mission arrived not with an interpreter but with a library. The principle at work is exactly that of Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs five centuries earlier, and Stephen appears to have understood himself as their successor. Bishop Arsenius of Rostov (1374–1380) ordained him hierodeacon for the work.

The road to Perm, 1379

In 1379 Stephen went to Moscow to seek a blessing and a commission for the mission. The metropolitan throne was then vacant and disputed — St Alexis had died in 1378 and the succession was tangled between Cyprian, Pimen and the ill-fated Mityai — and so the request was heard by Gerasimus, bishop of Kolomna, who was administering the metropolitanate. Gerasimus ordained Stephen hieromonk, gave him the antimension, the chrism and the vessels, and sent him out.

He travelled north down the Northern Dvina and then up the Vychegda, into the country of the Zyrians: a land of river-settlements, of bear- and elk-cult, of sacred groves and of sacrifices hung on trees. He settled at first about Pyras (later Kotlas) and then made Ust-Vym, at the mouth of the Vym on the Vychegda, the centre of the mission and afterwards his episcopal seat.

The sacred birch and the sorcerer Pam

Two episodes carry the whole of the mission's method in the memory of the Komi.

The first is the prokudlivaya bereza, the "mischief-working birch" — a great tree at Ust-Vym hung with the pelts of sacrificed beasts, the chief sanctuary of the district, before which offerings were made. Stephen cut it down and burned it. The Zyrians came with axes and bows to kill him, and he did not run; he stood and argued, and the argument was the one that mattered to them: your gods could not save their own tree; a god who cannot defend himself cannot defend you. They did not kill him. Many were baptised, and on the site of the birch he built the church of the Archangel Michael.

The second is his contest with Pam, the chief kudesnik or sorcerer of the Zyrians, called in the Komi tradition Pam-sotnik, "Pam the centurion." Pam saw plainly that the new teaching was destroying his standing, and rather than argue he proposed an ordeal: let the two of them pass together through a burning hut, and then be lowered through a hole in the ice of the Vychegda and drawn out through another downstream, and let the people believe whichever came out alive. Stephen agreed, took Pam by the hand, and went to the fire. Pam would not go in. The people, seeing their sorcerer's nerve fail, called for his death; Stephen refused it and had him only expelled from the country. The mercy is the point of the story as the Life tells it, and a second church — of St Nicholas, at Vishera — was built to mark the day.

Bishop of Great Perm, 1383

In 1383 Stephen went again to Moscow and was consecrated bishop of the new diocese of Perm — Malaya Perm, Little or Vychegda Perm, later styled Great Perm — with his seat at Ust-Vym. What he did as bishop is the least dramatic and the most substantial part of his life:

• He built churches along the rivers and staffed them with Zyrian clergy: he trained, ordained and settled priests, deacons, readers and singers from among the Zyrians themselves, so that the church among them should not be a Russian institution served by strangers.
• He founded schools beside the churches, in which children were taught to read the Permian script and the Slavonic letters together — the beginning of Komi literacy.
• He continued translating, and had the divine services celebrated in the Permian tongue.
• He founded monasteries as centres of the mission: the Saviour's Ulyanov hermitage on the upper Vychegda, the Stephen's monastery, the Archangel monastery at Ust-Vym, and the Archangel house at Yarenga.
• He acted as the people's protector in the civil order: he brought grain up from Vologda when famine struck the Vychegda, stood between the Zyrians and the extortions of the grand prince's tax-farmers, and interceded for them against the raids of the Vyatka men and the Novgorod river-pirates. This is why the Komi remember him not only as the man who baptised them but as the man who fed them.

Stephen and Sergius of Radonezh

In 1390, travelling to Moscow on the business of his diocese, Stephen's road passed some ten versts from the monastery of the Holy Trinity. He had no time to turn aside, and so he stopped in the road, faced the monastery, bowed, and said, "Peace be unto thee, my spiritual brother." At that moment Sergius of Radonezh was at table with his brethren; he rose, stood in silence, bowed in return, and said, "Rejoice, thou also, shepherd of the flock of Christ." The monks who had seen nothing asked, and were told.

The Trinity–St Sergius Lavra keeps the memory to this day: at the appointed point in the refectory meal a bell is rung, the brethren rise, and the greeting of the two saints is renewed. It is one of the most attractive incidents in the Russian record, and it places Stephen exactly where he belongs — inside the great generation of Russian holiness that produced Sergius, Cyprian of Kiev, Andrei Rublev and Epiphanius the Wise.

Repose and relics

Stephen died at Moscow on 26 April 1396, having come there again on diocesan business, and was buried in the Kremlin in the church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour "on the Bor" (Spas na Boru), the old monastic church within the palace precinct. The Zyrians sent to ask for their bishop's body and were refused: Moscow kept him. In 1933 Spas na Boru was demolished, and Stephen's relics were lost with the building — one of the more grievous of the losses of that decade, and the reason he has no shrine today.

Glorification and legacy

Veneration began at once and locally, and his service was composed in the first half of the fifteenth century by Pachomius the Logothete (Pachomius the Serb), the professional hagiographer of the Muscovite church; the Discourse on the Life and Teaching of Saint Stephen, Bishop of Perm was written by Epiphanius the Wise, probably within a year or two of Stephen's death, and is the single source for almost everything known of him. General canonisation followed under Metropolitan Macarius, in the great glorification council of 1547.

His work outlasted him. The diocese of Perm continued under his successors — Isaac, and then the three martyred bishops Gerasimus, Pitirim and Jonah, commemorated together on January 29 — of whom Jonah completed the conversion of Great Perm proper on the Kama. The Abur script remained in use for church and administrative purposes into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and survives in inscriptions and marginalia; the celebrated Zyryan Trinity icon, with its long dedicatory inscription in Permian letters, is traditionally attributed to Stephen himself. Among the Komi he became a figure of folk memory under the name Stepan Khrap, and their literary language, when it was created afresh in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was consciously understood as a resumption of what he had begun.