Seraphim of Sarov

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.

Seraphim was glorified as a saint by the Russian church in 1903, seventy years after his death, and the process is itself part of the history. Nicholas II and Alexandra pressed the Holy Synod hard for it, against reservations within the church, and the ceremony at Sarov became an occasion of state with an enormous crowd and the imperial family present. Historians of the late Russian church read the event as much for what the monarchy wanted from it as for what the church decided.

The teaching most closely attached to his name comes from a text with a genuinely unresolved history. Sergei Nilus published in 1903 what he presented as a record kept by Nikolai Motovilov, a landowner who had known Seraphim, of a conversation in the snow in which Seraphim told him that the aim of Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, and in which Motovilov describes seeing his face become unbearably bright. Nilus said the papers came to him from Motovilov's widow.

The text has shaped Orthodox theology in the twentieth century well beyond Russia. Its transmission has never been established. The manuscript Nilus worked from is not available for examination, the interval between the conversation and the publication is roughly seventy years, and Nilus was an editor with strong commitments of his own who is known for other publishing decisions that do not encourage confidence. Nobody has reached a conclusion on how much of the wording is Motovilov's and how much is Nilus's, and the atlas records that as an open gap rather than a scholarly disagreement, because there are no camps: there is simply no answer.