Priestmartyr Valentin (Sventsitskiy) of Kansk

New Priestmartyr Valentin (Sventsitskiy)

Recently I published a piece on OrthoChristian about the left-conservative thought of Dr Aleksandr Shchipkov, who is currently one of the Moscow Patriarchate’s representatives to the press. Dr Shchipkov’s thought is remarkable, as it synthesises the Vekhi thought of the early twentieth-century post-Marxist conservative circle around Berdyaev and Bulgakov, the leftist world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, and the poets of the late Soviet Russian religious revival – in particular Oleg Okhapkin. Dr Shchipkov also connects his left-conservative thought to a particularly intriguing religious figure in Russian Orthodoxy: a new martyr and saint of the catacombs, Archpriest Valentin (Sventsitskiy), the New Martyr of Kansk.

An aristocratic Pole by birth, raised in Moscow by his parents, he very early on – his hagiography says the age of 15 – came to question the reigning ideologies of his time and the various strains of German idealist philosophy which undergirded them. He had a definite sensitivity to the contradictions between a comprehensive Christian worldview and practice, and the mode of life in the societal ‘mainstream’, particularly among his own class: he published two periodicals in his youth addressing the problems of living an Orthodox life in such a society. He left Moscow in the midst of the upheavals of 1905 and travelled to Saint Petersburg, where he sought after supporters for a ‘Christian Brotherhood of Struggle’. The programme of this Christian Brotherhood had strong quasi-Tolstoyan undertones of restorative justice and ethical non-violence, and private property among the Brothers was to be abolished and redistributed as the need arose. The political witness of Saint Valentin’s Christian Brotherhood favoured progressive taxation and firmly asserted the rights of labour to organise for collective bargaining, to strike against bosses, to an eight-hour workday and to a living wage.

Always in Father Saint Valentin’s thought and in his writing there are mingled a certain firebrand socialist sentiment, but the torch in his hand carries not a sæcular or nihilistic but instead a Patristic light. Saint Valentin was guided by a vision of freedom which followed not the outward, voluntarist bourgeois political ‘liberty’ presented by the classical liberals, but over-against libertarian ‘liberty’ he held to the very different vision of inward freedom which was propounded by Metropolitan Saint Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow, wherein the content of choice determines as much the degree of freedom as the formal choice itself. One noteworthy fact is that during this time, Father Valentin became a notable public supporter within the Church of the ‘extreme left parties’ (‘крайних левых партий’), by which (according to Dr Shchipkov) he meant the agrarian-populist Socialist-Revolutionary Party. In 1907 he wrote an ‘open letter’ to the Russian bourgeoisie, which opens with the Gospel denunciations of the rich, and goes on to excoriate not only the pretensions of bourgeois piety (‘you self-satisfied, soulless, bloodthirsty owners!’), but the institution of private property itself, the division of the world into warring nation-states, the contamination of the land by industrial technologies. The letter ends with a stirring call to repentance, calling the bourgeoisie to forsake the ‘perishable treasures of this world’ and to ‘seek the new life – seek Christ!’

Saint Valentin married, was ordained, and became the rector of the Church of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker the Great Cross in Moscow, where his sermons drew large gatherings in the wake of the Revolution. Father Valentin visited the famous Optina Monastery, with which he became very intimately associated: Elder Anatoly II (Potapov) of Optina became the spiritual father of Father Valentin. It was to this Elder Anatoly that Father Valentin dedicated his Six Readings on the History of the Mystery of Repentance, a broadside against the then-common practice of general confession. Father Valentin championed the use of the Jesus Prayer, the ‘prayer of the heart’, even by the laity – and held forth strongly that the laity could and indeed should adopt some forms of monastic discipline in their everyday lives – and to this end he conducted a series of homilies on the monastic teachings of Saint John of the Ladder and how they could be adapted to the life of the layperson. As his friend Sergei Iosifovich Fudel put it:

Father Valentin Sventsitskiy on the one hand seemed to be a regular priest with a family, and on the other – an experienced teacher of continuous prayer. He did much for the general defense of the faith. But his main significance was that he called all people to conduct ceaseless prayer, an uninterrupted burning of the spirit.

Father Valentin, though he was a regular priest and not a monastic, nonetheless radiated the same warmhearted, humble presence of the Optina elders he respected and strove so much to follow. And he was deeply devoted to the sobornyi, canonical order of the Church. When Metropolitan Sergei of Moscow issued his infamous declaration to the Soviet government pledging the Church to absolute loyalty to the state and its ideology, Father Valentin – despite his avowedly far-left politics – refused to adopt the Sergianist compromise. He issued a letter to Metropolitan Sergei to the same effect, denouncing Sergei’s ‘renovationism’ and predicting that he would be considered a schismatic for his actions. He was, unfortunately, proven right. Father Valentin was caught up in a wave of arrests prompted by the Metropolitan after the widespread outcry at his declaration. He was branded a ‘counter-revolutionary’ and sentenced to exile in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Father Valentin contracted, on account of his condition in exile, an acute case of hepatitis, for which he was refused medical treatment – and in this way the saintly priest met his repose. His relics were later found to be incorrupt.

Saint Bunakov and Mother Maria of Paris both sought a synthesis of Orthodox spirituality in modern, contemporary life – and both intuitively grasped a confluence between Orthodoxy and the aspirations of the poor. Like Mother Maria in particular, Father Saint Valentin (Sventsitskiy) not only preached but lived this confluence: a kind of new monasticism which could be adapted to the lives of laypeople. His Optina-mentored, monastic-inspired Christian radicalism – too ‘red’ for ROCOR and not the proper shade of ‘red’ for the Sergianists – can and should serve as a model for Orthodox social witness in the present day. Holy New Priestmartyr Valentin of Kansk, we beseech you earnestly to pray to Jesus Christ our Lord on behalf of us wretched sinners!

EDIT: Holy Father Valentin’s feast day is actually not on 26 January, but instead on 20 October (7 October OC).