О. Иоанн в семинарии

At the seminary Fr. John was senior over the bishop's singers. This position - over the most uncultured, drunken and formerly dissolute part of the bursa - almost ruined Ivan Ilyich. He was saved by his great love for his mother and the help of God. At the very turn to life “in the image and likeness” of the singers, he suddenly turned in the opposite direction - finally facing God and His will. In recent years, Sergiev has taken up theology with ardent love: he is in a hurry to stock up on knowledge, although he does not yet know where he will have to apply it. His thought especially often dwells on the mystery of redemption, the economy of salvation. A conscious religious feeling grows in him. With high school Fr. John (he graduated from the seminary first) said goodbye with the following speech, prepared in advance and, therefore, not as characteristic and lively as his later sermons, but dear to us, like his first “word.” - “The Most Reverend Bishop and you, most venerable visitors!” - this is how Fr. began his speech. John. “There are few such days for us as this one, when to encourage the spiritual youth being formed here, everything has been done that can have a special and pleasant effect on the young mind and heart of a young man, to excite, support and strengthen his aspirations for everything good and useful. Called here from the modest, silent life of a student, we consider for ourselves happy and precious those hours in which, so inappropriate for our previous state, you have now so brightly and variedly decorated this important field of testing for us. Rarely in our lives are days so solemn for us; but the rarer they are, the more they increase the power of impressions on our minds and hearts; the more they awaken in us the consciousness of our own well-being; all the more, they arouse in us feelings of lively gratitude to the heroes of this celebration. There is no need to say that your presence here, your attention to us now constitutes our joy, our pleasure and our triumph.” “But with these feelings, so gratifying to the heart, we are disturbed by one thought that the fruits of the education we received may be far from meeting your expectations; They may even seem very meager, with little reward for the work and care of the trustee authorities. Fully presenting to your court our successes in the field of education, we are consoled, on the one hand, by the thought that your deep experience will not judge us in comparison with yourself. It was only necessary for us to act in your works ourselves for complete success in the matter. Your concerns, your efforts to provide us with useful information were obvious to each of us. How many treasures of learning have been laid before us, so that everyone can take from them what he wants to enrich his mind! How, when instructing, you tried to add variety and pleasantness to your speech, so that the truths you communicated would be easier and more convenient for the mind and heart to perceive! We felt the sweetness of your instructions in our hearts and tried to imprint them in our memory, so that later in due time we could use them to benefit ourselves and others. But most of all, you cared, like good fathers, about preserving good morality among us, for which, on the one hand, the opportunity was taken away for committing vices that could creep into the soul from the outside; on the other hand, the need for purity of life was constantly instilled, as the surest and most reliable means of being happy in any condition and age. And we have seen how dangerous vice is always and how reliable and precious virtue is. After such active care of the guardian authorities for us, all that remains is, if we know how to use the education we have received, to be satisfied and happy in life, for those of us who have now completed the difficult field of education and are completing the course of seminary sciences. How many times will we owe you the most precious moments of happiness and delight in the knowledge of the benefits that enlightenment has brought and will bring us! Sciences, says Cicero, constitute our consolation and happiness in all conditions and ages. Yes, repeated experiments confirm this truth! But what is most pleasant and precious for us in the sciences is the thought that they will always constitute our inalienable property, that they have come to us as a result of long-term, intense labor: and what is obtained through labor is always pleasant and sweet. To fulfill on our part the duty of justice towards you, to testify to you our deepest gratitude for your good deeds, we have only a heart and a tongue. Accept at least this fruit of heartfelt gratitude to you; you yourself know that the pupils cannot give any other gratitude; as loving fathers, you consider yourself satisfied if your upbringing efforts were not in vain, but brought at least some fruit.” “Bless, Your Eminence Bishop, the pupil who tried his best to fulfill the sacred duty of justice in relation to benefactors, and seal and sanctify with an archpastoral blessing the end of the education of twenty-two people.” In his later life, Father John was one of the most grateful students to the theological school that educated him. When his fame reached its highest development, when he had to travel to many cities of God-saved Russia, the great man of prayer willingly accepted invitations from the seminary authorities, came to the seminaries, spoke heart-touching and sincere instructions to the assembled seminarians and the crowd surrounding him, prayed with them and, having given a blessing, departed from the seminary, leaving in the hearts of the seminarians an indelible memory of his visit. Here we cannot refrain from touching upon the somewhat deplorable state of our seminaries. The ancient seminary, of course, had significant shortcomings compared to the later seminary, but our outstanding hierarchs came from the ancient seminary, and the famous Kronstadt lamp also came from it... On the contrary, in the seminaries of the later, closest to our time, there were strikes, shooting with revolvers at the seminary authorities, underground reading of revolutionary pamphlets and proclamations, blasphemous attacks against religion, etc., etc. It seems impossible to go further than this, but almost nothing is being done to heal this evil. The main evil is the bureaucratic spirit, like a malignant ulcer, corroding the core of our seminary education. The archpastors, who are the direct guardians of seminary upbringing and education in the Dioceses under their jurisdiction, are bound hand and foot by a network of various circulars and regulations, and they themselves, to be honest, sometimes get carried away with bureaucracy and do not take energetic measures to eliminate seminary unrest, fearing “auditors from St. Petersburg.” And these auditors, secular people in frock coats, flesh from the flesh and bone from the bones of the bureaucracy, rarely engage in useful activities during the audits they carry out, collecting used money. h. gossip, avoid giving any direct instructions regarding the conduct of seminary business and think in every possible way about how to better and more tactfully write a report on the audit they are carrying out to the Synod, how to more successfully “maneuver” in the audit report between the bishop (especially if he has weight on the banks of the Neva) and the seminary authorities... When an audit is carried out, then usually the highest leaders of the local seminary pedagogy “dump blame" on the switchmen, the lower service teaching staff, and they, in turn, slander the highest leaders of the seminary business in the diocese, etc., etc. endlessly. It turns out, so to speak, a mutual dump, general chaos, but there is little sense. The seminary is headed by a special institution - the Educational Committee of the Holy Synod, but this institution is entirely secular. The members of the Training Committee are the same officials in frock coats “with a decent salary,” etc. etc., limiting themselves to simply signing papers and empty word debates, and to the very foundations of seminary education, regarding the way to ecclesize our secular anti-church seminarians, they, in essence, have absolutely nothing to do with it. The inability of the frock coat, bureaucratic bureaucracy to support the collapsing seminaries was clearly reflected in the above-mentioned sad phenomena of seminary life - strikes, revolvers, seminarians’ passion for revolutionary literature, etc. In view of this inability, a special pre-conciliar commission was convened to discuss the improvement of the seminary, but this commission absorbed a lot of money, and only “things are still there”, it did nothing serious for improving seminary life. Meanwhile, seminaries absorb a lot of people's money. A peasant buys a wax candle with his last penny from his labor and does not suspect that this penny will go from the church to collapsing seminaries. In many seminaries, such a custom as the initiation into the surplice of 6th grade students has been discontinued. When we inquired about the reason for such a termination, they answered us: “Well, somehow the Right Reverend began to ordain the surplice, one seminarian laughed, the Bishop took it, and stopped ordaining.”... Of course, the bad seminarian is the one who laughs when he is initiated into the surplice, but there are seminarians who are religiously minded and treat this sacred rite with reverence. If there are one or two scoundrels, then it is enough to fire them from the seminary and that’s all. Why should the rest suffer because of one unfit student?! Finally, cannot the Eminence, in advance of initiation into the surplice, give appropriate instructions to seminarians on how to behave during initiation; really, “the matter of initiation into the surplice” should be reduced to one bishop’s resolution: “to present for initiation” (on the report of the seminary rector) and the rite of initiation without deliberate personal instructions from the bishop preceding the initiates and subsequent to the initiates?! Yes, there is a great decline in the religious spirit in seminaries, but it must be cured not with the medicine prescribed by the official bureaucracy, not by members of the educational committee, by secular people who hate learned monks - rectors and inspectors and are incapable of improving seminary life, not through frock coat auditors who absorb a lot of “raising” and “passing” money through their audits, but as a result only pounding water in a mortar. Curing seminary evil is a very simple thing and consists of two words - faith in God and love for the church. When this is evident from the seminary authorities and the recipients, then everything else will follow by itself, and when not, no auditors or members of the Educational Committee will help... Dear Father Fr. John of Kronstadt used to come to the seminary, say a few heartfelt simple words, pray for 2-3 minutes, and the seminarians would experience an enormous uplift in spirit, often for the rest of their lives, such an uplift that all the auditors and officials taken together could hardly have produced at the seminary. Let the seminarians, seminary teachers and all those who are supposed to be in charge of this matter more often, with fervent prayer, remember the wondrous, gracious appearance of the great shepherd of the Russian land, let them diligently carry out his covenants in their lives, and through the prayers of dear Father Fr. John, their labor will not be fruitless before the Lord (1 Cor. 15:58).