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1 Miraculous Healings Christine D. Worobec An examination of religious literature published in the last decades of imperial Russia reveals the tangible hope of a cure that Russian Orthodoxy offered to the disabled and diseased, as well as to their relatives and, indeed, all believers who feared they might fall ill.Through their prayers for the intercession of the Mother of God, Christ, the saints, and other holy persons, and with vows to visit saints’ graves, the sick and disabled often believed they could receive God’s mercy and grace. Miraculous cures at the graves of saints or through visions of holy persons in dreams were regular occurrences in late imperial Russia. The narratives describing these cures reveal a Russian Orthodoxy not stuck in medievalism and obscurantism but relevant to people’s lives, regardless of gender and class.The sacred stories demonstrate individual or collective experiences with the divine. Miraculous cures, to be certified as such, had to be witnessed by others, and some posthumous miracles ascribed to holy persons had to be verified through an investigation by the Holy Synod. Print culture not only disseminated the stories of the miraculous throughout European Russia but also beckoned the infirm to visit local and national shrines that enjoyed the imprimatur of the Russian Orthodox Church and the support of pilgrims who believed that prayers at a shrine were “more efficacious.”1 In addition to recording healings ascribed to divine forces, the miracle tales demonstrate the ways that the Orthodox Church in later imperial Russia confronted and embraced elements of modernity. The Holy Synod tried to shape popular piety in the face of formidable challenges posed by competing faiths and ideologies, including Old Belief, sectarianism, Shtundism (or Evangelical Christianity), secularism and scientific rationalism, and atheism. Its use of mass communications, verification of miracles, the demotion of demon possession from acceptable to fraudulent behavior, and representation of a shrinking percentage of peasants among recipients of the miraculous pinpointed a religious establishment that had adopted modern notions and means, even though its 22 belief in the possibility of miracles was decidedly antimodern.2 By simultaneously promoting pilgrimages, trying to control the definition of what constituted a miracle, and catering to the aesthetic needs of the upper classes, the Church may have helped to exacerbate the tensions between upper and lower classes in imperial Russia. The turn of the twentieth century in Russia is a rich period for examining miracle narratives, for the Russian Orthodox Church canonized six holy men in the reign of Nicholas II, beginning with the glorification of Archbishop Feodosii of Chernigov in September 1896 and ending with that of Metropolitan Ioann of Tobolsk in 1916.The Holy Synod also confirmed Anna Kashinskaia’s sainthood in 1909.This flurry of canonizations represented a departure from the Synod’s reticence in recognizing posthumous miracles of holy persons, as attested by its recognition of only four new saints over the course of the entire nineteenth century. Unwittingly influenced by secular rationalism, in spite of their railing against it, late-eighteenth-century ecclesiastics had become skeptical of the possibility of miracles in the modern age, particularly those reportedly experienced by commoners.They were also wary of acknowledging miracles because of the growing numbers of schismatics, sectarians, and converts to other Christian denominations who questioned the legitimacy of Orthodox saints and were prone to attack the Russian Orthodox Church for exploiting holy relics for financial gain. At the same time, the scrutiny of popular practices with regard to miracles had the unintended and undesirable consequence by the early nineteenth century of turning the faithful away from the Orthodox Church and into the hands of Old Believers and sectarians. In response, the Holy Synod relaxed its skepticism toward miracles. By the mid-nineteenth century the Synod began to publish regular accounts of miracles in the religious press, even though it remained cautious about recognizing new saints and continued to assert its control over miracle-working icons.3 As Gregory Freeze has demonstrated, many of the early-twentieth-century canonizations came about because the state sought to re-sacralize the failing autocracy and bring it closer to the masses of Orthodox believers. Tensions between the Holy Synod and the autocracy, the dubious character of some of the candidates for sainthood, and the scandal surrounding the corrupted remains of Serafim of Sarov resulted in a disastrous public relations campaign for both government and Church.4 A counter-narrative, however, may be found at the level of the miracles stories...

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