Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Letters and Documents

Autobiographical Note

Saint Innocent of Alaska

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: Автобиографическая записка

Cover: A Sea Storm on the Norwegian Coast by Andreas Achenbach (German, 1815–1910), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:autobiographical_note:en:1

Introduction

St Innocent of Alaska

He was born on 26 August 1797 in Anginskoye, a village in the Irkutsk region of eastern Siberia, and christened John—the son of a church sacristan who died when the boy was six. Poverty and early loss shaped him; so did the seminary at Irkutsk, which he entered at nine and a half. There, according to a custom of the time, he was given a new surname in honour of the recently reposed Archbishop Benjamin of Irkutsk, and so John Popov became John Veniaminov, the name by which the Church would come to know him before his monastic tonsure. He married, was ordained deacon in 1817 and priest in 1821, and was serving a prosperous parish at the Church of the Annunciation in Irkutsk—respected, comfortable, and by every worldly measure well placed—when the decision came that would carry him to the far edge of the world.

In 1823 he left Irkutsk for Russian America, arriving on the Aleutian island of Unalaska in the summer of 1824. What followed is among the great missionary careers of the modern age. For fifteen years he lived among the Aleut (Unangan) people, learned their language, devised an alphabet for it, compiled a grammar, and translated the Gospel and the catechism into their tongue. In 1833 he wrote, first in Aleut, the little spiritual classic that became famous across Russia in translation, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven. In 1834 he transferred to Sitka to work among the Tlingit. He built churches with his own hands, kept clocks and made instruments, studied the weather and the peoples he served, and travelled by boat, sledge, and on foot across distances that still seem scarcely credible.

The turn of his life came in the late 1830s. Travelling in Russia to press the cause of the Alaskan mission, he learned that his wife had died. He was tonsured a monk in 1840, taking the name Innocent after St Innocent of Irkutsk, and within weeks was consecrated the first Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kuril Islands, and the Aleutians—a diocese stretching from Siberia across the sea to the Alaskan mainland. Raised to archbishop in 1850, he extended his labours to the Yakut and other peoples of the Russian northeast. In 1868 he was called, unexpectedly, to the highest post in the Russian Church, succeeding his friend Metropolitan Filaret as Metropolitan of Moscow. Even then his missionary heart did not cool: in 1870 he presided over the founding of the Orthodox Missionary Society, which gathered support for missions until the Revolution, and he encouraged the young Nicholas Kasatkin, the future apostle to Japan. He reposed on Holy Saturday, 31 March 1879, and was buried at the Trinity–St Sergius Lavra. In 1977 the Russian Orthodox Church, at the request of the Orthodox Church in America, glorified him as a saint, and he is honoured as Equal-to-the-Apostles, Enlightener of the Aleuts, and Apostle to America.

The six short writings gathered here belong to this life at its various stages—the working priest, the field missionary, the reigning bishop, the aged hierarch composing his last words. None is a treatise. Together they let us hear, in his own unguarded voice, the practical wisdom of a man who spent forty-five of his eighty-two years in journeys for the Gospel.

Occasion and Purpose

These are minor pieces by design, and they are best read together—not as a system but as a set of samples from a single, coherent pastoral mind. They were not composed as a book, and they come from widely separated occasions.

The two Instructions to missionaries are the earliest in spirit and the most celebrated. Both grow directly out of Innocent’s own field experience in Alaska. The Instruction to the Nushagak Missionary, Hieromonk Theophil was written in 1842, when the newly consecrated bishop dispatched a mission to the Nushagak redoubt on the Bering seacoast—a place he himself had first visited as a priest years before. It is a concrete field order to one man setting out for one station. The longer Instructions to the Priest Appointed to the Conversion of Non-Christians is a generalized redaction of the same counsel, expanded and reordered so as to serve any missionary priest; its opening chapters run almost word for word with the Nushagak text before broadening into a fuller manual. Taken together they form the document that later readers have regarded as a small classic of Orthodox missiology—the distilled method of a missionary who never disturbed the customs of a people without first understanding them.

The Homilies for Fasting Penitents belong to the parish and the confessional. They are four short sermons—with an opening dedication prayer—addressed to govelshchiki, the faithful keeping a fast in preparation for confession and Holy Communion. Here Innocent is not the strategist of missions but the ordinary pastor, catechizing plain people in the barest essentials of the Christian hope.

The Note on the Religious Education of Children comes from the end of his life, written at St Petersburg on 13 February 1869, when he was Metropolitan of Moscow. It addresses not a frontier but the Russian heartland, and takes up a question then much debated: how are the great mass of ordinary people, and above all their small children, actually to be taught the faith?

The Autobiographical Note (1863) and the Spiritual Testament (dated 14 December 1869) are the most personal. The first was provoked by a published article about him that he judged inaccurate and, worse, flattering; he set out to correct it, and in doing so left almost the only first-person account of his early years. The second is his literal last will—the practical and spiritual dispositions of a man preparing to die. What unites all six is the sensibility of a working missionary bishop who never lost the parish priest’s directness, and who insisted, again and again, that the whole work is God’s and the labourer only an instrument.

The Six Writings

The two instructions to missionaries may be treated as one work in two forms, and they are the centre of gravity of this collection. Both open with the same solemn preamble: to leave one’s homeland for wild and comfortless places in order to enlighten those still in darkness is “a work truly holy and equal to that of the Apostles,” blessed for the faithful labourer and terrible for the negligent one who makes his converts “sons of Gehenna, twofold more than himself.” Both cite the imperial edict of 1777 warning that hasty baptism without instruction is “an abuse of one of the greatest sacraments.” From there the counsel unfolds in numbered rules. Preparation comes first, and it is inward before it is outward: begin with prayer; keep “a modest and humble disposition of spirit,” promising oneself no guaranteed success, for grace is not given to the proud; approach the work calmly and never with carelessness; and above all preach with love, “for love alone builds up.” Practical wisdom follows—go to people when they are gathered, never begin the services in a new place without first offering at least a brief word, choose a devout interpreter and keep the same one. Then comes the heart of the method: “Christianity is a need, satisfaction, and consolation of the heart above all, not of the intellect alone,” and so one must “act more upon the heart than upon the mind” and “speak from the heart.” The order of teaching is to follow the order of Providence itself—first the Creator known from the visible world, then the moral law written on every heart, then the consequences of keeping or breaking it, and only then the Gospel proper, beginning as Christ began, with the call to repentance. The fuller Instructions to the Priest carries this into further chapters on the conduct of church services, on bearing patiently with new and imperfect Christians, and on relations with the local civil authorities; the Nushagak text divides its matter explicitly into the priest’s “spiritual” duties as a preacher and his “external” duties as a member of the settlement’s ordered society.

The Homilies for Fasting Penitents open with a shepherd’s prayer—“O Jesus Christ! My Good Shepherd!… teach me to do Thy will”—and then move through four brief sermons of rising sequence. The first, On the Kingdom of Heaven, begins with the largest question a plain person can be asked: “For what was man created?” Not to be born, toil, and vanish like the animals, Innocent answers, but for blessedness—and no earthly thing, not even Solomon’s wealth and wisdom, can supply it; only the Kingdom of Heaven, which is simply “life with God,” and which the poor and unlettered may reach as surely as the great. The second homily turns to the receiving of the Holy Spirit and to repentance; the third lays out, with a catechist’s clarity, the five conditions for a fruitful confession; the fourth prepares the penitent for Holy Communion. The movement is exactly that of the preparing soul—from the goal of life, through repentance and confession, to the Eucharist itself.

The Note on the Religious Education of Children is a short piece of pastoral argument. Innocent asks who is really responsible for teaching the faith—parents, godparents, or clergy—and observes, without bitterness but without illusion, that parents mostly do not, godparents never, and so the whole burden falls on the pastors, whose sermons and school lessons reach only those already able to understand them. The great mass of the people, and above all children under six or seven who cannot yet enter any school, are left in “ignorance of the most necessary matters of the faith.” Schools alone cannot answer this, he argues, because they “enlighten and cultivate only the mind, and not the mind and heart together,” and because they will take generations to reach everyone. His remedy is the Church herself, “that most loving of mothers,” and above all the ordinary parish priest, who needs no special learning to gather the little children and teach them the sign of the cross, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the commandments “in simple words.” It is the mature reflection of a man who had spent his life teaching the unlettered.

The Autobiographical Note is unlike the rest—occasional, wry, and self-effacing. Correcting a laudatory article, Innocent disputes small facts (the day of his birth, the age at which he first read the Epistle aloud in church) precisely in order to prevent anyone thinking “something extraordinary” of him. But the corrections become the occasion for a remarkable confession of Providence. He recounts how every human calculation had counted against his going to America—a good parish, esteem, his own house, a larger income—and how he refused the appeal of the old Aleut settler Ivan Kryukov, until one day, overhearing the same man speak to the bishop of the Aleuts’ zeal for prayer, he was “suddenly and, one might say, wholly inflamed with the desire to go to such a people.” Even the accident of a spring ice-break, which cut the seminary rector off from the city and let the young Veniaminov marry, he reads as the hand of God turning him from the Academy toward Alaska. The refrain of his life sounds here plainly: “from the Lord are a man’s paths made straight,” and “all of us, servants of His Church, are nothing other than instruments in His hands.”

The Spiritual Testament, the shortest of the six, is his literal last will, written in 1869 as his eyesight failed. It begins with thanksgiving to God and a full, mutual forgiveness—of all who had wronged him and by all whom he had wronged—and then disposes of simple matters: burial in the common brotherly cemetery, no funeral orations, no monument beyond “a plain cast-iron slab with a most simple and brief inscription.” Strikingly, the same text he asked to be preached from in the Instruction and the Autobiographical Note returns here as the only permitted eulogy: if anyone must speak, let him speak from “From the Lord are a man’s paths made straight,” pointing to the departed only as an example, “to the glory of God, but without any praise of me.” A metropolitan of Moscow arranges to be buried like the humblest monk.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

For all their variety of occasion, these pieces are held together by a single conviction, stated most fully in the missionary instructions but present in every one of them: that the salvation of a soul depends “in no wise on us or on our skill, but directly and solely on God,” and that the preacher is “nothing other than an instrument in the hands of God.” This is the theological root of Innocent’s famous humility, and it is not false modesty but a working doctrine of grace. It frees the missionary from anxiety about results and forbids him pride in success; it makes prayer, not eloquence, the first tool of the trade; and it grounds the astonishing patience of his method.

That method is the collection’s most enduring contribution. Against every temptation to force or hurry conversion—a temptation the 1777 edict itself had condemned—Innocent insists that Christianity is first a matter of the heart, that one must “speak from the heart” to reach the heart, and that the faith must be unfolded gradually, in the order in which God Himself unfolded it to humankind, meeting people where their own conscience and their own dim memories of the truth already stand. He assumes that the “natural law” is written on every heart, even the most primitive, and that the missionary’s task is partly to “awaken this feeling” and build upon it rather than to demolish. This respect for the person being evangelized—his language, his understanding, his pace—is what has led later readers to regard the Instructions as a small classic of Christian missiology, and it anticipates by more than a century much of what the wider Church would later say about the inculturation of the Gospel.

The pastoral and personal writings translate the same convictions into other keys. The homilies show the doctrine of the Kingdom made plain enough for a fisherman or a child; the Note on Children’s Education shows the same pastoral realism turned on the Christian heartland, refusing to trust that mere schooling can form the heart; the Testament and Autobiographical Note show a man who preached that the labourer is only an instrument, and who then arranged his own death and reputation to say exactly that. Read together, they are an unusually unified witness: the theology of the instructions is simply the life of the man, seen from the inside.

Reception and Influence

Innocent’s missionary method outlived him. The Orthodox Missionary Society he founded in 1870 carried his approach into the wider Russian Church, and his counsel directly shaped the young missionary Nicholas Kasatkin, later the apostle to Japan, whom he urged to master the Japanese language exactly as he himself had mastered Aleut. His larger devotional work, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, became beloved across Russia; the shorter writings gathered here, long available in Russian in his collected Works, have circulated more quietly, chiefly among those interested in the history and practice of mission. His glorification in 1977—jointly cherished by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church in America—set the seal of the Church’s veneration on the whole of this labour, and secured for these modest documents a permanent place among the memorials of one whom the Church now numbers among the equals of the Apostles.

The Text and This Edition

The six writings in this volume are presented together in a fresh modern English translation prepared for this edition and rendered from the Russian originals as preserved in the public-domain text of St Innocent’s collected works. Each piece was translated on its own terms—the numbered rules of the instructions, the plain homiletic flow of the sermons, the argumentative prose of the note on education, the personal registers of the autobiography and the testament—with care to keep the directness and warmth of the saint’s own voice rather than to smooth it into a uniform style.

This edition follows the house conventions of the series. The author is named as the Church receives him—St Innocent (Veniaminov) of Alaska—and any who assisted in bringing the text into English are credited as translators, never as authors. Scripture and chapter references are given in the modern style. Where the original divides a work into parts, chapters, or numbered points, those divisions are preserved so that the reader can follow the structure the saint himself gave. Because these are minor pieces, best introduced and read as a group, they are gathered under a single introduction; but each retains its own integrity, and the reader may take them in any order—beginning, perhaps, with the Autobiographical Note, to meet the man before hearing his counsel, or with the missionary Instructions, to encounter first the work for which he is most remembered.

Autobiographical Note

I had seen that article in the Amur journal itself, and had seen that it contained errors (the principal one of which I attributed, in any case, to an oversight of the printer). But I left this without any consequences, believing that the article would die along with the newspaper. But things did not turn out that way. And therefore it would now be, on my part, almost unforgivable not to point out these errors.

1) The register books kept in the Irkutsk diocesan chancellery do indeed record that I was born on 11 September (1797). But my late mother told me that I was born on the feast of Adrian and Natalia, that is, 26 August; and this day she remembered very well on account of a certain notable circumstance that occurred in our village at that time. A further confirmation is that my name-day fell on 2 September, that is, the eighth day after my birth—and in former times many people named their children thus, following the letter of the Trebnik. My father died not in April but in August: this I remember myself—by the time of the ripening of the vegetables. But these are not the errors I wish to point out. It would not be worth taking up a pen merely for that. Of what concern is it to anyone, except my own relatives, whether I was born on one day or another, or in which month my father died?

2) But the article goes on to say that at the age of four going on five I was already reading the Apostle at the Liturgy. That is greatly overstated! This cannot be allowed to pass; otherwise it may give some people occasion to think something extraordinary about me, or to compare me—God knows—to whom! No, it was nothing of the sort. At the age of four going on five I had only just begun to learn to read, and not from anyone else, but from my own father, who, being long ill, almost always lay in bed. I read the Apostle not at Pascha, but at Christmas. I remember this very well; and it was at a time when I was studying under my uncle, that is, after the death of my father (in 1803). Consequently, I was reading the Apostle when I was six going on seven—if not on eight.

One could have ended this little article here, since the further inaccuracies are quite trivial. But it may be that I shall not again have the occasion or opportunity to say something about myself. And so I shall go through the whole article as printed in the Dukhovnaya Beseda, correcting it where necessary, and shall supplement it with certain information—to the glory of God. May my example serve as fresh proof of the truth that from the Lord are a man’s paths made straight, and that all of us, servants of His Church, are nothing other than instruments in His hands. It was His pleasure to appoint me to a field of service in America—and this came to pass, despite even the resistance of my own will.

3) I entered the seminary at the age of nine and a half, and after several attempts by my mother to place me in my father’s position as sexton. These attempts were fruitless, notwithstanding that my mother was left in a helpless situation with three children besides myself. An attempt of the same kind was made two or three years after my entering the seminary, but again without success. And this, of course, was because I was destined to serve not in my native place, but in America.

4) The author of the article on whose account I am writing this will himself say that it was not someone else, but I, who would have had to go to the Academy, had I not already been married at the time when the order came to send two students from the Irkutsk Seminary; and all the more so because our rector himself had me in mind for this purpose, as he told me afterwards. As for why he did not prevent my marriage, the reason was a very rare and even extraordinary circumstance, namely: the Angara River, which separates the seminary from the monastery (where our rector lived and from which he came to the seminary for the whole day on every school day), in that year (1817), at the time of the ice-break, cut off all communication between the monastery and the city for many days. The ice had at first almost completely broken up, but then stopped again for several days, and so solidly, that Ivanushko, a monastic novice well known in Irkutsk at the time, walked across it from one bank to the other. And at this time the thought came to me of marrying, and I managed to submit a request, obtain leave to marry without the rector’s permission, and even begin the courtship. Had it not been for this circumstance, the rector would of course not have allowed me to submit a request for marriage. And in that case I should have had to go to the Academy, not to America.

5) But the will of God concerning me was most visibly at work in my transfer from Irkutsk to Unalaska, that is, to America. I was ordained deacon on 13 May 1817, and priest on 18 May 1821, to that very church mentioned by the author, where I served until my departure for America. And indeed, the settler (from Unalaska) whom he mentions was the visible cause of my going to America. But it was not his stories to me personally that won me over. The matter was otherwise—or rather, it was both so and not so.

This settler (one Ivan Kryukov, who had lived among the Aleuts for forty years), upon arriving in Irkutsk, stopped in our parish, where he lived from November until almost mid-February. I was his spiritual father and that of all his family, and so I knew him quite well. And indeed, there was nothing he did not tell me, both about America in general and about the Aleuts in particular, and there was nothing with which he did not try to persuade me to go to Unalaska; but I was deaf to all his stories, and none of his arguments touched me. Indeed, could I, or would it have been at all prudent for me—judging by merely human reckoning—to go off heaven knows where, when I was in one of the best parishes in the city, held in respect and even affection by my parishioners, noticed and esteemed by my superiors, already owning my own home, and receiving a greater income than the salary appointed for Unalaska?

And therefore, when by order of the late Bishop Mikhail all the clergy throughout the diocese were asked whether anyone would wish to go to Unalaska, and if not, why precisely—I too, among the others, signed that I did not wish to take this post, on account of its remoteness. And I wrote this with entire sincerity, bearing in mind that if our widows, living even ten versts from the authorities, are left without anything (there was no welfare board at that time), what would become of them ten thousand versts away? So I thought, and so I told my fellow-clergy.

But when this same settler—who had already taken his final leave of me and was still trying in parting to persuade me to go to Unalaska (this I remember vividly)—began, on that very same day, when taking leave of the bishop (at whose house I happened to be present at the time, even in the drawing-room, which had never happened to me before), to tell of the Aleuts’ zeal for prayer and for hearing the Word of God (which I had doubtless heard from him before, perhaps more than once): then—blessed be the name of the Lord!—I was suddenly and, one might say, wholly inflamed with the desire to go to such a people. I remember vividly even now how I was tormented with impatience, waiting for the moment to declare my desire to the bishop; and he was indeed surprised, but said only: “We shall see.”

After all this, can I, speaking in all fairness, count it to my credit, or regard as any kind of exploit, that I went to America?

Equally, can I claim for myself anything of the good and useful that was accomplished in my time or through me in the places where I served? Of course not; at the very least, I ought not. God sees how hard it is for me to read or hear myself praised for anything, and especially when what was done by others, or at any rate not by me alone, is attributed to me alone. I confess, I should wish—if only it were possible—that my name be mentioned nowhere except in ordinary lists and commemorations, or diptychs. But since this wish of mine cannot easily be fulfilled (for example, in enumerating episcopal sees, even the briefest history of the Russian Church cannot fail to mention me), I should sincerely wish that in such cases what is said of me should be similar to what appears, for instance, in the preface to the Gospel translated into the Yakut language—namely, that this was done under such-and-such a bishop: nothing better, simpler, or more just than this is possible, to my mind. “But how then,” the author of the article on whose account I am writing this will ask me, “how does one speak or write of your journeys? There one cannot say ‘under.’” How? Very simply! They conveyed him, or carried him—at most, he travelled from there to there—and nothing more: because in truth all my travelling exploits consist precisely in this alone: to stir from the spot, that is, to resolve to seat oneself in a carriage or on a ship; and once there, even if one wished to turn back, one could not; and who would not so resolve, and in whom would the strength for it be lacking, when duty or obligation demands it?

6) After I declared my desire to the bishop, a resolution from him soon followed to this effect: “Many of the clergy have declined service in so important and apostolic-like a mission on entirely insufficient grounds, and therefore the chancery is to cast lots among the following deacons (four, not two), and whoever draws the lot must depart without fail.” The day of the lot-casting arrived; the bishop himself had informed me of it beforehand, inviting me to be present. But no one summoned me—this grieved me greatly, and even drove me to despair… But it was not anyone else but me whom the Lord then destined for America. The one upon whom the lot fell (a former seminary classmate of mine, a close acquaintance) refused, putting forward various grounds: his sacred obligations to his elderly parents, and so forth—but chiefly the ill health of his wife, who, it must be said, outlived him and is perhaps alive even now; whereas he died in 1839 in Krasnoyarsk—as a soldier—bitterly regretting his stubbornness!

7) I set out for St Petersburg from America not merely out of curiosity, as the author says, but more—and almost solely—in order to see the Aleut translations of the Holy Books through the press under my own supervision, arriving there on 25 June 1839.

8) No, it was not the death of my wife that opened for me the path to the episcopate, for she died exactly a year before that, namely on 24 November 1839. Until 6 November 1840, that is, until the time when I began to prepare to return to America, neither word nor thought of establishing an episcopal see in America was entertained by anyone… But as to how and to whom the first idea of this came—may, in time, be told by our diligent and well-meaning writer A. N. Muraviev, who took the most active part in the matter; and as to all else concerning me, my successor may tell it, after examining all my papers and files.

Colophon

Autobiographical Note
by Saint Innocent of Alaska.

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
A Sea Storm on the Norwegian Coast
by Andreas Achenbach (German, 1815–1910), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 16, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction
- Autobiographical Note
- Colophon