The Elder and the Disciple

At the living heart of monasticism is a relationship: the spiritual father or mother and the disciple. Through the elder — the geron of the Greek tradition, the starets of the Russian — the monastic tradition is handed on not as a book but as a life, by the disclosure of thoughts, obedient counsel, and the discernment born of experience. This file treats spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, the practice of revealing the thoughts, the nature and limits of monastic obedience, and the charismatic authority of the elder.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Charismatic Transmission of the Tradition

Orthodox monasticism is not primarily transmitted through institutions or texts but through persons — from a spiritual father or mother to a disciple, and from that disciple to the next generation. The technical relationship is that of the elder (Greek geron, “old man”; Russian starets) and the spiritual child. The elder is not necessarily aged, nor necessarily ordained, nor an office-holder; he or she is one who, having been formed and tested in the ascetic life, has received the gift of discernment (diakrisis) and can therefore guide others through the perils of the spiritual way (Kallistos Ware, “The Spiritual Father in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, SVS Press, 2000; and Irénée Hausherr, Spiritual Direction in the Early Christian East, Cistercian, 1990, the classic study). This personal transmission is why the desert placed such weight on finding a father and why the Apophthegmata Patrum consists so largely of a disciple’s request — “Abba, give me a word” — and the elder’s response (the pattern is pervasive in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Ward, Cistercian, 1984). The word is not general teaching but a word given to this disciple, in this condition, at this moment; its authority is the elder’s discernment of the particular soul.

The tradition insists that no one can safely walk the spiritual path alone. The desert saying “if you see a young monk climbing up to heaven by his own will, catch him by the foot and pull him down” expresses the conviction that self-direction is the shortest road to delusion (plani / prelest), and that the beginner above all needs a guide who can distinguish the movements of grace from those of the passions and the demons (Ware, “The Spiritual Father,” 2000; Hausherr, Spiritual Direction, 1990). This is a chief reason the tradition subordinates the eremitic to the coenobitic for the unformed (see The Three Forms) and treats the psychosomatic method of the Jesus Prayer as unsafe without an experienced elder (see Hesychasm and the Prayer of the Heart).

The Disclosure of Thoughts

The characteristic practice of the elder–disciple relationship is the disclosure of thoughts (Greek exagoreusis ton logismon, the “manifestation of thoughts”). The disciple opens to the elder not only his sins but the whole movement of his inner life — the thoughts (logismoi), impulses, imaginations, and temptations that arise in the heart — regularly and without concealment (John Cassian, Conferences 1–2, on discretion and the disclosure of thoughts to the elders, deferred to St. John Cassian; Hausherr, Spiritual Direction, 1990). The rationale is at once diagnostic and therapeutic: a thought brought into the light before a discerning father loses its power, whereas a thought hidden and cherished festers and grows into passion and act. The desert fathers taught that the demons are strong in darkness and secrecy but flee exposure; to name a temptation to one’s elder is already half its defeat (the theme is constant in the Apophthegmata and in Cassian, Conf. 2; Ware, “The Spiritual Father,” 2000). This practice is distinct from sacramental confession and absolution — the elder need not be a priest — though the two are related and often converge; the disclosure of thoughts is a continual, formative opening of the heart, the raw material on which the elder’s discernment works.

Obedience and Its Limits

The counterpart of disclosure is obedience. The disciple entrusts his will to the elder, obeying his counsel as a means of cutting off self-will — the root, in the ascetic analysis, of all the passions. St. John Climacus devotes the longest step of the Ladder to obedience, presenting it as the disciple’s voluntary “tomb” of his own will, in which, dying to self-direction, he is raised to freedom and humility (Climacus, Ladder, Step 4, “On Obedience”; trans. Luibhéid and Russell, Paulist Press, 1982). The tradition can speak of this obedience in very strong terms — the classic image is of obedience even in what seems unreasonable, as the test that breaks self-will most thoroughly.

But the tradition also guards the relationship against abuse, and honesty requires that these limits be stated. First, obedience is owed within the bounds of the Gospel: no elder may command what is contrary to the commandments of God and the faith of the Church, and such a command is not to be obeyed (the principle is already in Basil, Great Asketikon, on the superior bound by the Scriptures; see Saint Basil and the Asketikon). Second, the elder is himself under a grave responsibility — he answers before God for the souls entrusted to him, and he is to be a physician who heals, not a tyrant who dominates or a substitute for the disciple’s own conscience (Ware, “The Spiritual Father,” 2000, who warns explicitly against the corruption of eldership into domination). Third, the tradition distinguishes the true, God-given elder from the self-appointed or deluded guide, and warns that the gift of spiritual fatherhood is rare and cannot be assumed at will; a false elder does more harm than none (Ware, “The Spiritual Father,” 2000; the same caution runs through the modern literature, e.g. the warnings against “elderism,” mladostarchestvo, in contemporary Russian Orthodoxy). The relationship, rightly lived, is not the crushing of the person but its healing and its liberation into sonship.

Spiritual Motherhood

Spiritual direction is not the preserve of men. From the beginning the desert had its ammas — the desert mothers Syncletica, Sarah, and Theodora, whose sayings stand in the Apophthegmata beside the fathers’ — women whose discernment made them guides of others (the ammas are deferred to The Desert Fathers; The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Ward, 1984). In the great convents, the abbess and the experienced nun exercise the same spiritual motherhood over their communities, and the Russian tradition of the staritsa (the female elder) is a living reality. The gift of spiritual parenthood follows holiness and discernment, not gender or office (Ware, “The Spiritual Father,” 2000).

The Russian Eldership and Its Fruit

The elder–disciple relationship, though universal in the tradition, reached a particular flowering in the Russian institution of the starets. Renewed through St. Paisius Velichkovsky’s Paisian revival (see Possessors and Non-Possessors), the eldership became the glory of nineteenth-century Russian monasticism, above all at the Optina Pustyn monastery, where a succession of elders — Leonid, Macarius, Ambrose, and their successors — guided not only monks but a great stream of laypeople, from peasants to writers such as Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, who came seeking a word (the Optina eldership is deferred to The Optina Elders; the figure of the starets Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is drawn from this world). The wider place of spiritual direction in the life of the whole Church — the dukhovnik who guides the laity as well as the monk — is treated in the hub essay, Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction. What belongs here is the recognition that this personal, charismatic bond is the true channel of monastic tradition: the desert’s wisdom, the hesychast’s prayer, and the ascetic’s discernment pass down the centuries not chiefly through books but from father to child, living voice to living ear (Ware, “The Spiritual Father,” 2000; Hausherr, Spiritual Direction, 1990).

References

Ware, Kallistos. “The Spiritual Father in Orthodox Christianity.” In The Inner Kingdom (Collected Works, vol. 1). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (Spiritual fatherhood, discernment, obedience and its limits, the warnings against abuse.)
Hausherr, Irénée. Spiritual Direction in the Early Christian East. Trans. Anthony P. Gythiel. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990. (The classic study of the disclosure of thoughts and the elder–disciple bond.)
John Climacus, St. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibhéid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Step 4, “On Obedience.”)
John Cassian, St. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Conf. 1–2, discretion and the disclosure of thoughts.)
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI / London: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (“Give me a word”; the ammas; the perils of self-direction.)