The Acquisition of the Holy Spirit

“The true aim of our Christian life consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God.” St. Seraphim of Sarov’s answer to Nicholas Motovilov has become, for Russian and then for world Orthodoxy, the shortest available statement of what the Christian life is for. This file gives the teaching, pins the text’s attestation honestly — it was published by Sergei Nilus in 1903 from Motovilov’s papers, and the transmission has been questioned — shows that the doctrine does not depend on the disputed text, and traces its patristic pedigree.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (the saint and the text); the doctrine, Pan-Orthodox

The Saying

The Conversation with Motovilov opens with a question about the aim of Christian life, and with an answer that reverses the order most people assume:

“Prayer, fasting, vigil and all other Christian practices, however good they may be in themselves, do not constitute the aim of our Christian life, although they serve as the indispensable means of reaching this end. The true aim of our Christian life consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God.”
(St. Seraphim of Sarov, Conversation with Motovilov; received text, first published by S. A. Nilus, 1903; trans. in Seraphim Rose, ed., Little Russian Philokalia I, Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1978.)

The Russian noun rendered “acquisition” is стяжание (styazhanie), an ordinary commercial word for accumulating capital, and the text goes on to develop the metaphor deliberately: the Christian is to trade in whichever good work yields the greatest “profit” of the Spirit in his particular circumstances, as a merchant deals in whatever commodity is currently most profitable. Good works count in exact proportion as they bring the grace of the Spirit, and “of these good deeds it is only those done for Christ’s sake that bring us the fruits of the Holy Spirit” (Conversation, received text).

The metaphor is easily misread as spiritual mercantilism, and the misreading should be blocked at once. The point of the merchant image is the opposite of transactional: a merchant does not love his stock, he loves the return, and holds every commodity loosely. Just so the Christian is not to love prayer or fasting for their own sake but to use whichever, here and now, most opens him to the Spirit. This is why the teaching can be intensely ascetical without being works-righteousness — the entire apparatus of ascesis is demoted to instrumental status in the service of a gift that God alone gives (see The Conversation with Motovilov).

Seraphim reinforces the point from the Gospel. The five foolish virgins had lamps and had oil; what they lacked, he says, was the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the oil of the parable is that grace (Matthew 25:1–13). And he cites a reading of the Lord’s Prayer in which the second petition is not “thy kingdom come” but “may thy Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us.” That reading is not his invention: it is a genuine textual variant of Luke 11:2, attested in the minuscules 162 and 700 and quoted as the Lucan text by St. Gregory of Nyssa and by St. Maximus the Confessor (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Lord’s Prayer, Homily 3; Maximus, Commentary on the Our Father). It is not the reading of the received text of the Gospel, and this collection does not treat it as such; but a Russian hermit of the 1830s appealing to it is repeating a patristic tradition, not improvising.

The Attestation

Methodology §3.5 is binding here, and the text requires it more than most.

The conversation is internally dated to the end of November 1831. It is a first-person memoir by Nicholas Motovilov, written at an unknown date after the event, with no second participant and no contemporary corroboration. Motovilov died in 1879 without publishing it. His papers passed to his widow, Elena Ivanovna, and were obtained around 1902–1903 by Sergei Aleksandrovich Nilus, who published the conversation in 1903 — the year of St. Seraphim’s glorification — in the press and in his book Velikoe v malom (“The Great in the Small”), and issued a revised version in 1905 after some passages were criticized. Nilus is the same editor who gave the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion their first wide circulation, and by his own account the Motovilov papers were recovered in a damaged and partly illegible state.

That is the chain: Seraphim → Motovilov’s undated notes → seventy years unpublished → Nilus → print. Two single points of failure in series. The full source-critical dossier, with the defences stated as fairly as the objections, is set out in the collection devoted to the saint, and this collection does not repeat it (see The Transmission Problem; Attested vs. Attributed).

The disposition adopted here is the same one that collection adopts, and it is uniform:

The conversation is cited as a received text, with the translation named, never as a verbatim 1831 transcript.
Its earliest attestation is stated: published by Nilus in 1903 from Motovilov’s papers.
The transfiguration scene is reported as what the text attests, with the source named.
Where the teaching is invoked as St. Seraphim’s, it is cross-checked against the independently attested Spiritual Instructions, first printed in 1839 — and that corroboration, not the conversation’s transmission, does the evidentiary work.

This last point is the decisive one for a doctrinal collection. The teaching that the disciplines of the Christian life are means and that grace is the end is present in the 1839 Spiritual Instructions, published from Sarov’s own records within six years of the saint’s death and long before any Motovilov material surfaced (see The Spiritual Instructions; Teaching Themes). A reader may hold the conversation to be an edited and partly reconstructed text and still hold the doctrine to be St. Seraphim’s, because the doctrine is attested elsewhere. And the doctrine’s standing in the Church rests, in the end, not on Motovilov at all, but on its being the received teaching of the Orthodox tradition, which it can be shown to be.

The Transfiguration in the Snow

When Motovilov asks how one can know with certainty that he is in the Spirit of God, the text has Seraphim answer not with an argument but by taking him by the shoulders and saying, “We are both in the Spirit of God now, my son. Why don’t you look at me?” Motovilov records that he could not, because the elder’s face had become brighter than the sun; that he felt an unearthly calm, warmth, and sweetness, and smelt a fragrance he took for the fragrance of the Holy Spirit; and — the detail on which the whole scene turns — that snow was falling on both of them and did not melt (Conversation, received text; trans. in Little Russian Philokalia I).

The Orthodox reading identifies the light with the uncreated light of Tabor and the divine energies as defined by the Palamite councils, and the snow that does not melt is what makes the identification possible: the light and warmth do not alter the physical world around them, because they are not of it (see The Palamite Settlement; Tabor Light).

Two features are doctrinally load-bearing and are worth naming. The experience is bodily as well as spiritual — Motovilov feels, smells, and sees — which is consonant with the Church’s refusal to spiritualize salvation into an interior or intellectual event, and with the Tome of 1351’s insistence that the saints behold the divine light with bodily eyes. And Seraphim tells him that this is the ordinary Christian inheritance, the state of Adam in paradise, and not a special endowment of monks. The teaching is universal in scope or it is nothing.

That a theologically untrained provincial landowner produced, unaided, a scene so precisely consonant with Palamite theology is one of the arguments the text’s defenders make for its substantial authenticity; that Nilus was a literary man with an editorial hand and damaged copy is one of the arguments its critics make. Both are set out where they belong (see The Transmission Problem).

The Patristic Pedigree

The doctrine is not a nineteenth-century Russian novelty, and this is the strongest reason for treating it as the received teaching it has become.

St. Basil already makes the Spirit’s indwelling the substance of salvation: “Through the Holy Spirit comes our restoration to Paradise, our ascension into the Kingdom of Heaven, our return to the adoption of sons, our liberty to call God our Father, our becoming partakers of the grace of Christ, being called children of light, sharing in eternal glory” (On the Holy Spirit 15.36; trans. NPNF II/8).

The Macarian Homilies — the fourth- or fifth-century Syrian corpus transmitted under the name of St. Macarius the Great — make the conscious possession of the Spirit the whole theme, and were among the most widely read ascetic texts in the Christian East and, in translation, in the West. Their emphasis on the perceptible working of grace is the immediate ancestor of the language Seraphim uses.

St. Diadochos of Photike supplies the criteria for distinguishing the Spirit’s consolation from its counterfeits (On Spiritual Knowledge, in The Philokalia, vol. 1) — material this collection uses in section 08.

St. Symeon the New Theologian insists in the eleventh century, against a resistant monastic establishment, that a Christian who is unaware of any conscious working of grace should not be complacent about it, and was accused of extravagance for saying so (see Experience of Grace; Against Formalism).

And St. Gregory Palamas and the councils of 1341–1351 gave the whole complex conciliar standing: the grace by which the saints are deified is uncreated, and the light they behold is God’s own energy (see The Palamite Settlement).

Seraphim stands at the end of this line, and the reason his formulation displaced the others in the modern Orthodox imagination is that it is short, that it is addressed to a layman, and that it makes the aim of the Christian life a person rather than a state.

“Acquire the Spirit of Peace”

The best-known sentence attached to St. Seraphim’s name — “Acquire a peaceful spirit, and thousands around you will be saved” — belongs to the same teaching and should be handled with the same care. The doctrine is firmly attested: the Spiritual Instructions of 1839 teach at length that nothing is more precious than peace of soul and that the one who acquires it draws others toward salvation. The crisp one-line formula as universally circulated is harder to pin to a single dated primary passage, and the treatment devoted to the saint states this and cites the saying accordingly, as the traditional epitome of a well-attested teaching rather than as a dated quotation (see Teaching Themes). This collection follows that disposition.

Objections Worth Answering

That “acquisition” is acquisitive. The word is commercial and the metaphor is deliberate, and it can be made to sound like a spirituality of accumulation. Two things answer it: that the Gospel’s own images for the kingdom are commercial (the talents, the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field), and that Seraphim’s condition — “only those done for Christ’s sake” — removes the possibility of trading on one’s own account.

That it is individualist. The charge has been made against the whole Russian ascetic revival, and it is not baseless: the Conversation is a dialogue between two men in a forest, and it says nothing about the Church. But the same saint’s life was spent founding and directing a monastic community, his teaching is unintelligible apart from the mysteries, and the grace he describes is the grace given in chrismation and renewed in communion (see Chrismation and the Seal). The acquisition of the Spirit is what the Church’s sacramental life is for; a private acquisition outside her would be the very thing section 08 exists to warn against.

That it makes experience the criterion. It does not, and the distinction matters. Seraphim does not tell Motovilov to seek the experience; he tells him to seek the Spirit, and the experience is given to answer a question. The Church’s criteria for judging such experiences are the subject of the next section (see The Criteria and the Counterfeits).

References

St. Seraphim of Sarov. Conversation with Motovilov (received text; first published by S. A. Nilus, 1903, from Motovilov’s papers; revised 1905). Trans. in Seraphim Rose, ed., Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. I: St. Seraphim of Sarov. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1978.
St. Seraphim of Sarov. Spiritual Instructions (first printed 1839). Trans. in Little Russian Philokalia I.
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 15.36. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Lord’s Prayer, Homily 3. (For the Lucan variant “may thy Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us.”)
Maximus the Confessor. Commentary on the Our Father. Trans. in Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
Pseudo-Macarius. The Fifty Spiritual Homilies. Trans. George A. Maloney, Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1992.
Diadochos of Photike. On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination. In The Philokalia, vol. 1. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Price, Richard. “The Canonization of Serafim of Sarov: Piety, Prophecy and Politics in Late Imperial Russia.” Studies in Church History 47 (2011).
Zander, Valentine. St. Seraphim of Sarov. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1975.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.