Theodoritus of Kola
Our Venerable Father Theodoritus of Kola, Enlightener of the Lapps
Venerable · Priest · b. c. 1481 — d. 17 August 1571, at the Solovki Monastery
Commemorated 17 August — Repose at the Solovki Monastery
Theodoritus (c. 1481 – 17 August 1571) spent twenty years among the pagan Lapps of the Kola peninsula, at the very edge of the inhabited world, learned their language, translated the prayers of the Church into it, and baptised them — the first sustained Christian mission to the Sámi, and one of the very few missions of the Russian sixteenth century that proceeded by persuasion and translation rather than by the arm of the state. A Solovki monk from the age of thirteen and the disciple of the elder Zosimas, he founded a monastery at the mouth of the Kola river, was made archimandrite, and later served as the envoy of Ivan the Terrible to Constantinople in 1558 — the embassy that obtained the Patriarch's recognition of the Russian tsardom. He reposed, in old age and stripped of everything he had ever been given, back at Solovki, where he had begun.
Solovki and the elder Zosimas
He entered the Monastery of Solovki, on its island in the White Sea, at thirteen, and was tonsured the following year. His formation was the doing of one man: the elder Zosimas, an experienced ascetic of the house — not the founder Zosimas of Solovki (†1478) but a later monk of the same name — to whom he was given as a disciple and with whom he lived fifteen years. He was ordained deacon by the Archbishop of Novgorod in his late twenties.
After a further year with his elder he went to see other houses. He spent time at the Kirillo-Belozersky (White Lake) monastery, then lived four years as a solitary in the forests of the north, learning what he could from the hermits he found there. It was in this period, according to the tradition, that he formed the intention of going to the pagans of the far north. Recalled by a message that Zosimas was dying, he returned to Solovki and nursed his elder through his last year.
The mission to the Lapps
With an elder named Metrophanes — remembered as the companion, and afterwards famous in his own right — Theodoritus went north to the mouth of the Kola river, on the peninsula between the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean, among the Lapps (Sámi). The account is frank about what they found: a people who worshipped idols, who did not live in towns or cities, and who moved with their herds across an enormous and almost empty country.
The method the two adopted is what makes the mission notable. They did not preach through interpreters or attach themselves to a punitive expedition. They learned the Lappish language, lived among the people, taught the faith in that language, and translated the prayers of the Church into it, so that the Sámi could pray as Sámi. The work took twenty years before it bore its harvest — a figure the sources give plainly, and which should be read as it stands: two decades before the baptisms began in earnest.
Theodoritus was afterwards ordained priest at Novgorod, returned, and founded a monastery at the mouth of the Kola for the converts and for the monks who joined him, becoming its archimandrite. The tradition records that the severity of the rule he laid down provoked a revolt among his own brethren, who drove him out — one of those episodes the northern Russian hagiography does not conceal.
Later years, and the embassy to Constantinople
He was afterwards igumen of other houses, and his reputation as a man of learning and of independent judgement reached the court. In 1558 Ivan IV sent him to Constantinople on the embassy that sought the recognition of the Russian ruler's imperial title by the Ecumenical Patriarch — a mission of the first political importance, which he discharged successfully.
The return is the part of his life the tradition dwells on. Offered rich rewards for the embassy, he refused them; a sable coat given him he sold at once and gave the money to the poor. He was, by then, an old man. He went back at last to Solovki, to the monastery he had entered as a boy, and died there on 17 August 1571, at about ninety years of age.
Feast and commemoration
August 17 (church date; New Calendar civil August 17, Old Calendar civil August 30), within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. The commemoration is kept in the Russian north and by the OCA, which enters him as Venerable Theodoritus, Enlightener of the Lapps, of Solovki; the Greek and Antiochian calendars do not carry him. He is honoured with the other saints of the Kola north and among the Saints of Solovki, whose synaxis is kept on the Saturday after the feast of the Protection.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was preserved unfailingly that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passes away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Theodoritus, thy spirit rejoices with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Theodoritus is written as a Russian monastic elder of the far north: long white beard, mantle and klobuk or the great schema, the right hand raised in blessing or holding a scroll. As an enlightener of a people he may hold a scroll or book in place of the blessing hand, and the fuller compositions set behind him the low tundra, the Lappish tents and reindeer, and the wooden church at the mouth of the Kola — the same convention by which Stephen of Perm and Trifon of Pechenga are shown with the peoples they baptised. He appears in modern compositions of the Synaxis of the Saints of Solovki and of the Kola north. No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection; his veneration never produced a widely copied icon-type.
Disputed questions
- Not formally glorified. Theodoritus has never been the subject of a general glorification by the Russian Church. His veneration is local — of the Kola north and the Solovki tradition — and he is entered as blessed or venerable on the OCA calendar and in the northern Russian menologia rather than in the general Menaion. He has no proper service.
- Which Zosimas? The elder who formed him is named Zosimas in the sources, and is frequently confused with Zosimas of Solovki, the monastery's co-founder, who died in 1478 — three years before Theodoritus was born. They cannot be the same man.
- Theodoritus and Trifon of Pechenga. The Kola mission is usually associated in popular accounts with Trifon of Pechenga (†1583), the better-known apostle of the Lapps. The two were contemporaries working the same country, and the sources are not always careful to distinguish their foundations; Theodoritus's mission is the earlier, and Trifon's the more lasting. Neither account should be used to correct the other.
- Not to be confused with Theodoretus of Antioch, the priest-martyr of the Syrian capital under Julian (March 3): the names are the same word in Greek, and Slavonic sources render both as Ѳеодоритъ.
- The sources are late. Most of what is known comes through Prince Andrei Kurbsky, who knew Theodoritus personally and wrote an account of him in his history — a source of high value but written by a bitter enemy of Ivan IV, with an interest in contrasting the saint's disinterestedness with the tsar's rapacity.