Innocent (Borisov)

Innokenty, known in the world as Ivan Alekseyevich Borisov, was a leading hierarch, preacher, and theological writer of the Russian Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century. He was born in 1800 in Yelets, in the Oryol Governorate of the Russian Empire, the son of a parish priest. He received his education in the ecclesiastical schools of that region and then at the Kiev Theological Academy, a principal center of Orthodox learning in the empire. After completing his studies he was tonsured a monk with the name Innokenty and ordained to the priesthood. He remained at the academy as a teacher of theology and later served as its inspector and rector, gaining a reputation for learning, administrative ability, and eloquence in the pulpit.

In the mid-1830s he was consecrated to the episcopate and first served as vicar bishop of Chigirin in the Kiev diocese. He was subsequently transferred to the sees of Vologda and of Kharkov. In 1848 he was appointed Archbishop of Kherson and Taurida, a large southern diocese that included Odessa and the Crimean peninsula. There he encouraged the building and restoration of churches and monasteries, supported missionary work among the mixed populations of the region, and took a particular interest in the Christian antiquities of Crimea, which Orthodox tradition associated with the early spread of Christianity among the Slavs.

Archbishop Innokenty became widely known for his sermons, which were issued in several published collections and read throughout Russia. Contemporaries compared his preaching with that of the Church Fathers, and he was sometimes called the Russian Chrysostom. He also wrote on scriptural, liturgical, and historical subjects. During the Crimean War of the 1850s his diocese lay in the theater of operations. He remained in the region, visiting troops, celebrating services, and organizing relief for the wounded and for civilians. His wartime homilies combined spiritual exhortation with appeals for endurance and charity.

Innokenty died in Odessa in 1857 and was interred in the city’s Cathedral of the Transfiguration. In the Soviet period that cathedral was destroyed; the later recovery and veneration of his remains are tied to the church’s reconstruction at the end of the twentieth century. In 1997 the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate glorified him as a locally venerated saint. He is remembered as a hierarch who joined academic theology to active pastoral care in a strategically important part of the empire. Many details of his inner life are known chiefly through his published works and official records, but his standing as a preacher has been consistent in Orthodox historical writing since the nineteenth century.