Timothy, of Korotsko The Bishop Who Resigned

He was born Timothy in the village of Korotsko in the Novgorod region in seventeen twenty four, the youngest son of a village sacristan who died and left the family destitute. The poverty of that childhood is not a pious flourish; the family came near to giving him away to a coachman for food, and he worked in the fields for bread as a boy.

At sixteen he was taken into the Novgorod seminary on a state place. He was very good at it. He stayed on as a teacher, first of Greek, then of rhetoric and philosophy, and in seventeen fifty eight, at thirty four, he was tonsured a monk with the name Tikhon. Advancement came fast after that: rector, archimandrite, then in seventeen sixty one a vicar bishop, and in February of seventeen sixty three, bishop of Voronezh.

Voronezh was a hard diocese: enormous, poor, thinly clergied, with a half-pagan folk festival still running in the town and a clergy many of whom could barely read the service. He spent four and a half years on it. He founded a seminary, wrote instructions for the priests in language they could actually use, preached constantly, and shut down the festival by walking into it. Then his health broke and he asked to be released.