Prokhor Moshnin was born into a merchant family at Kursk in 1754 and entered the monastery of Sarov, in the forests of central Russia, at nineteen. He was tonsured with the name Seraphim, ordained, and then withdrew from the community into a cabin in the woods, where he lived for years in the pattern of the older ascetic literature: long prayer, manual work, extreme fasting, and almost no speech. He was attacked and badly beaten by robbers during this period and refused to press charges against them. He returned to the monastery and lived enclosed in his cell, seeing no one, for a further long stretch.
What made him a figure of national importance was the reversal. In the last part of his life he opened the door, and the visitors came in numbers: peasants, landowners, officers, people with practical troubles and people with none. He is remembered for greeting each of them the same way, my joy, and for a directness at odds with the severity of what came before.
Irina Paert's study places him beside the elders of Optina as part of a single Russian revival of spiritual direction, transmitted from Paisius Velichkovsky and his Slavonic translation of the Philokalia. Seraphim stands slightly apart within it. He belonged to no famous school, left no writings prepared for publication, and his reputation travelled by word of mouth and by the accounts of people who had sat in his cell.