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Name & Status

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Biography

Short Description

Vladimir Alekseyevich Troitsky, later Archbishop Hilarion, was born in 1886 in the village of Lipitsy in the Kashira district of Tula Governorate, in the Russian Empire. He was the son of a parish priest and grew up in a clerical family that directed him toward church education. After studies at the Tula Theological Seminary he entered the Moscow Theological Academy, graduating in 1910. He stayed on at the Academy and in 1912 defended a substantial dissertation on the history of the dogma of the Church. In that work, and in related essays such as his well-known treatment of whether Christianity can be separated from the Church, he insisted that the Church is the Body of Christ rather than a mere voluntary association of believers, and that Christian life cannot be detached from her sacramental and hierarchical unity. These writings made him one of the most cited younger theologians of the pre-revolutionary Russian Church.

In 1913 he received monastic tonsure with the name Hilarion and was ordained deacon and priest; he was soon made archimandrite and inspector of the Moscow Theological Academy, where he taught and preached. He took part in the All-Russian Local Council of 1917-1918 and supported the restoration of the patriarchate and the election of Patriarch Tikhon. After the Academy was closed he remained in Moscow in Tikhon's circle. In 1920 he was consecrated Bishop of Vereya, a vicar bishop of the Moscow diocese, and was later raised to the rank of archbishop. He became a leading public opponent of the Renovationist (Living Church) schism, which the Soviet authorities favored as a means of splitting the Church. His preaching drew large congregations, and he worked to receive repentant Renovationist clergy back into the patriarchal Church.

Soviet organs arrested him on several occasions. From the mid-1920s he was held in the Solovki camp, where many bishops and priests were imprisoned together. Fellow prisoners regarded him as a theological and spiritual authority. He was brought to Moscow at times in connection with the administration of the patriarchal Church after Tikhon's death in 1925, then sent back into confinement. In 1929 he received a sentence of exile to Kazakhstan. During the journey he contracted typhus, was removed from the convoy in Leningrad, and died in a prison hospital on 28 December 1929, at the age of forty-three. He was buried quietly in the Novodevichy Cemetery of Leningrad.

The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a hieromartyr, first for local veneration in the Moscow diocese in 1999 and then for general veneration at the Jubilee Bishops' Council of 2000. His relics were uncovered at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg and translated to the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow. He is commemorated on 28 December, with the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, and on several diocesan synaxes. His treatises on the nature and unity of the Church remain in print and are still used in Orthodox theological education.

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