Under Leonid and Macarius (1839–1860)

Alexander Grenkov’s twenty-one years of formation at Optina Pustyn: the monastery he entered in October 1839, then in the full flower of its revival; the great Elder Leonid (Lev Nagolkin), who received the lively young man, tested his humility, and predicted his future greatness before handing him on; the obediences of bakery and kitchen and cell; the tonsure of 1842 under the patronage of St. Ambrose of Milan; the passage to Elder Macarius and a place in the literary circle translating the Paisian Fathers; ordination in 1845; and the health catastrophe that began on the road to Kaluga in 1846, leaving him a permanent invalid — the disability that would frame the eldership to come.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

Optina at His Arrival (October 1839)

The Optina Pustyn that received Alexander Grenkov on October 8, 1839, was a monastery in the midst of one of the great revivals of Russian spiritual history. Two decades earlier the hermitage had been a poor and obscure house near Kozelsk in the Kaluga region; under Abbot Moses (Putilov) and his brother Anthony, head of the skete, it had been rebuilt physically and — more importantly — spiritually, by the planting at Optina of the startsy tradition that descended from St. Paisius Velichkovsky through his disciples (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com; on the wider revival, see Russian Monasticism).

The institutional heart of that revival was the skete (skit) of St. John the Baptist, founded in 1821 a short walk into the pine forest behind the main monastery. The skete was the home of the elders, and it was there that the practice of otkrytoye starchestvo — open spiritual direction, the reception not only of monks but of laypeople — had been inaugurated by Elder Leonid (see Spiritual Direction, which sets out the starets tradition into which Ambrose was now entering). When Alexander arrived, the monastery held an extraordinary concentration of holiness: Abbot Moses governed; in the skete dwelt the two great elders, Leonid (Lev Nagolkin, 1768–1841) and Macarius (Mikhail Ivanov, 1788–1860). The Lives single out the moral atmosphere of the place — “simplicity, meekness and humility” — in which the junior brethren humbled themselves before the seniors and feared even “to offend by looks” (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). Into this disciplined, prayerful, crowded world stepped the brilliant, talkative former seminary teacher, twenty-six years old.

Elder Leonid Receives Him

Elder Leonid received Alexander after the Liturgy and blessed him to remain (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). Leonid — the first of the Optina elders, a disciple of the Paisian line through Schemamonk Theodore — was a man of immense spiritual stature and a blunt, fiery manner, and the relationship that formed between the old elder and the young intellectual is one of the best-attested episodes of Ambrose’s formation. Leonid called him affectionately by the diminutive “Sasha,” but he also subjected the gifted and self-aware young man to the deliberate humiliations by which the tradition burned out vanity: he fastened on him a mocking nickname — the sources render it “chimera” and “barren flower” — and would at times put on a show of anger toward him before others (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com; St Ambrose of Optina, Saint Elisabeth Convent / obitel-minsk.org).

The young monk understood the method and submitted to it; the elder, for his part, saw what he was forming. To others Leonid said of Alexander, “He will be a great man” — a prediction the Lives record as the first attestation of the eldership to come (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). And as his own death approached in 1841, Leonid handed his disciple over to Elder Macarius with words the tradition has carefully preserved: “Here is a man that has sought refuge in us elders… I am now handing him over to you completely; guide him as you will” (Elder Leonid, quoted in The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). The whole arc of Optina’s eldership — the passing of the charism from Leonid to Macarius to Ambrose — is compressed into that sentence.

The Obediences

Alexander’s first years were spent not in study but in labor, in the ordinary humbling round of a novice’s obediences. He was first set to transcribe spiritual texts in the guesthouse; he worked in the monastery bakery, making yeast and baking bread; transferred into the skete in November 1840, he served for a whole year as an assistant cook, running constantly to Elder Macarius for the blessing on each detail of the work; and he acted as cell-attendant and reader to Elder Leonid himself, attending the old man in his last illness (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). The point of these obediences, in the logic of the tradition, was precisely their ordinariness: the brilliant talker who had been the soul of every seminary gathering was set to knead dough and tend a pot, and to take correction from elders who would not let his gifts become a snare. Reflecting later on Leonid’s harsh treatment, Ambrose gave the rationale himself: “For a monk, rebuke and moral instruction are like brushes for rusty iron” (St. Ambrose, quoted in St Ambrose of Optina, obitel-minsk.org).

Tonsure (1842): The Patron of Milan

In 1842 Alexander was tonsured into monasticism and given the name Ambrose, in honor of St. Ambrose of Milan, the fourth-century bishop and Father of the Church, whose memory falls on December 7 (Old Style) (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com; Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA). The name proved fitting in a way the tonsure could not have foreseen. The Western Ambrose had been a pastor of the city, a bishop besieged by the affairs and the souls of a whole population; the Russian Ambrose would become a pastor of all Russia, besieged in his cell by the press of pilgrims. He advanced through the orders of the diaconate, becoming a hierodeacon in 1843 (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com).

Transfer to Elder Macarius and the Translation Work

When Leonid reposed in 1841, Ambrose passed, as the dying elder had directed, under the guidance of Elder Macarius, becoming his cell-attendant and disciple (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com; Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA). Macarius — gentle where Leonid had been fiery, and a man of great learning — was the elder who would shape Ambrose most decisively, and who, the Lives note, gradually and deliberately prepared him as a successor, while never sparing him the humbling treatment of the tradition. Surrounded by the visitors who increasingly sought the younger monk out, Macarius would joke, “Look, look at that — Ambrose is taking my bread away from me!” (Elder Macarius, quoted in The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com) — a jest that was also a recognition.

It was under Macarius that Ambrose’s learning was put to use. By the mid-1840s Macarius had begun, in partnership with the Slavophile Ivan Kireyevsky, the great Optina enterprise of translating and printing the ascetical Fathers in Russian — carrying into the literary language of the nineteenth century the Slavonic translations made at Neamţ by St. Paisius Velichkovsky and his school. Ambrose, who knew Greek and Latin and had taught at the Lipetsk clerical school, was drawn into this literary circle as one of Macarius’ close fellow-workers; his best-documented single contribution was the preparation of the Russian Ladder of Divine Ascent of St. John Climacus (Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA; The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). The publishing program itself — the Paisian manuscripts, the Kireyevsky partnership, the catalogue of editions, and Ambrose’s exact part in it — is treated in its own place and is not repeated here (see The Optina Editions). What belongs to the present story is that this labor formed him: the texts he edited — Climacus on obedience and the warfare of the thoughts, and later Isaac the Syrian on tears and humility — became the very substance of the counsel he would give for thirty years. The terse, proverbial, Father-rooted quality of his eldership was first laid down at the editor’s desk.

Ordination (1845) and the Health Catastrophe

Ambrose was ordained to the priesthood — made a hieromonk — in 1845, with the ordination performed at Kaluga, the diocesan see (Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA; The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). The brethren noticed the reverence and recollection with which he celebrated the divine services. But almost at once the central physical fact of his life intervened. On a journey to Kaluga in connection with the ordination — the sources place the decisive episode in the cold of December 1846 — he caught a severe chill that struck inward, affecting his internal organs and breaking his health permanently (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com).

What followed was a collapse so grave that his survival was doubted. From the autumn of 1846 into the summer of 1848 his condition deteriorated dangerously; in the extremity he was given the Mystery of Holy Unction, and — a measure normally reserved for the dying — he was tonsured into the Great Schema in his cell, retaining the name Ambrose (Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA; The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). He did not die. By 1848 he had begun to recover enough to walk with the aid of a cane, and he himself read the recovery, and the unexpected return of some strength, as “a clear sign of God’s will” (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). But he never recovered his health. From this point he was a permanent invalid, frequently unable to stand through the services and, for long stretches of his later life, unable to serve the Liturgy at all, receiving the Holy Mysteries in his cell (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com).

The theological significance of this catastrophe is hard to overstate, and the Lives draw it out deliberately. A hieromonk who cannot reliably serve the altar has, in the ordinary reckoning, been removed from the front rank of monastic usefulness. In 1846 Ambrose was in effect retired from his obediences by his illness. Yet it was precisely this broken man — the invalid who could not serve the Liturgy — whom God set up as the principal elder of Optina and the most sought-after starets in Russia. The disability did not merely accompany the eldership; it framed it. Confined and weak, Ambrose was kept in his cell, and the cell became the place to which all Russia came. The labor he could no longer give at the altar he gave, hour upon hour for thirty years, to the souls who crowded his door (see Becoming the Elder).

References

Agapit (Belovidov), Hieromonk. Zhizneopisanie v Boze pochivshego optinskogo startsa ieroskhimonakha Amvrosiia [Life of the Optina Elder Hieroschemamonk Ambrose]. The standard nineteenth-century Life.
Chetverikov, Sergius. Elder Ambrose of Optina. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood (English translation of the Optina-edition Life). On the formation under Leonid and Macarius and the 1846–48 illness.
Venerable Ambrose of Optina. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, October 10. (Tonsure 1842, name of Ambrose of Milan; cell-attendant of Macarius; ordination 1845; Holy Unction 1846; walking with a cane by 1848; the Ladder translation.)
The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/42293.html). (Arrival 8 October 1839; Leonid’s reception, nickname, and the prediction “he will be a great man”; the obediences; the December 1846 cold on the Kaluga journey; schema tonsure; inability to serve the Liturgy.)
St Ambrose of Optina (“Love Bears All Things”). Saint Elisabeth Convent, obitel-minsk.org. (Leonid’s testing of the young monk; “rebuke and moral instruction are like brushes for rusty iron.”)
Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eya epokha [Optina Pustyn and Its Era]. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (On the skete of 1821 and the Optina revival.)
“Ambrose of Optina.” Wikipedia / OrthodoxWiki (used to locate dates; chronology cross-checked against the OCA and OrthoChristian Lives): arrived Optina October 1839; guided first by Leonid, then by Macarius whose cell-attendant he was; tonsured 1842; hieromonk 1845.