Becoming the Elder (1848–1860 and after)

How the invalid hieromonk Ambrose became the principal starets of Optina: the long apprenticeship in which he assisted the failing Elder Macarius with the flood of correspondence and stood in for him when he traveled; the death of Macarius in September 1860, leaving no named successor, and the gradual, almost reluctant recognition that the charism had passed to Ambrose; and the form the eldership then took — the move to the building by the skete gate, the lean-to (khibarka) added for the reception of women, the daily order recorded in the Lives, and the regimen of an invalid who governed all of Russia’s spiritual traffic from a sickbed.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Apprenticeship: Assisting Macarius

The eldership of Ambrose did not begin with a commission; it grew, quietly and over years, out of his service to Elder Macarius. Having survived the collapse of 1846–48 as a permanent invalid (see Under Leonid and Macarius), Ambrose could no longer carry the obediences of a healthy hieromonk, but the disability freed him for the work that mattered most. He became Macarius’ closest assistant in the two labors that defined the elder’s later years: the publishing of the Fathers (treated separately in The Optina Editions) and, above all, the vast correspondence.

By the 1850s Macarius was the most sought-after spiritual director in Russia, and letters reached him by the hundreds from spiritual children scattered across the empire — monastics, landowners, nuns, ordinary believers seeking a word. Ambrose assisted with this correspondence directly, and in doing so served an apprenticeship in the very heart of the eldership: he learned, letter by letter, how Macarius discerned a soul’s condition from a few written lines, how he answered, what he counseled, where he was firm and where gentle (Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA; The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). The training was not theoretical. When Macarius traveled to Moscow in 1852 in connection with the publishing work, he designated Ambrose to act in his place at Optina — a public sign of the trust placed in him (Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA). The visitors, too, had begun to gravitate to the younger man even while the elder lived; Macarius’ affectionate complaint — “Look, Ambrose is taking my bread away from me!” — registered a transfer of weight that everyone could see (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com).

This is the crucial point about the Optina succession, and it distinguishes the starets from any ordinary office. Ambrose was not appointed elder; he was formed into eldership by a living elder, day by day, in the work itself — exactly as the tradition holds the charism must pass, person to person, from one who has walked the path to one who is learning it (see Spiritual Direction). Leonid had handed Ambrose to Macarius; Macarius, without saying so in a single decisive act, was handing the eldership to Ambrose.

The Death of Macarius (1860) and the Gradual Recognition

Elder Macarius reposed on September 7, 1860. Significantly, he died without naming a successor (Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA). There was no appointment, no installation, no transfer of an office — because the eldership is not an office. What happened instead was a gradual recognition, in the months after Macarius’ death, that the charism had in fact already passed. The spiritual children of Macarius, the brethren, and then the widening public turned to Ambrose because he was manifestly the one in whom the gift now lived; “the slowly changing events,” in the words of the Life, “developed in such a way that saw Fr. Ambrose appointed in his place” — appointed, that is, by the consent of those who came to him rather than by any decree (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com).

There was, too, a practical dimension to the recognition that the Lives are candid about. The transition was not instantaneous, and it was not without friction; an eldership is not a thing that can simply be conferred, and the brethren and the spiritual children had to find their way to the new elder over time, as confidence accumulated and as the visitors who had already been coming to Ambrose during Macarius’ last years became the visitors who now came to him as their principal guide. The Optina abbacy and the eldership were distinct things — the abbot governed the house, the elder cured souls — and Ambrose held only the latter; his authority rested on nothing but the manifest presence of the gift and the consent of those it served. That is precisely why the succession could be “slow”: there was no lever to pull, only a recognition to ripen.

The unforced character of this recognition is itself a testimony. Ambrose did not seek the position; an invalid hieromonk who could not reliably serve the Liturgy had every natural reason to shrink from it. He understood the burden providentially. “The Lord has arranged it so that I would have to talk to people all my life,” he said — the same man who had been born in a crowd, lived his seminary years in a crowd, and now would spend thirty years in the press of pilgrims (St. Ambrose, quoted in Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA; cf. The Youth of Alexander Grenkov). From 1860 until his death in 1891 he was the undisputed principal elder of Optina, and the most celebrated starets in Russian history.

The Form of the Eldership: The Building by the Skete

Forty days after Macarius’ death, Ambrose moved out of the skete proper to a building close to the monastery courtyard, to the right of the belfry — the cell he would occupy for the rest of his life, and from which he received all of Russia for thirty years (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). To this building was joined, on its western side, a small annex or lean-to that the Lives call the “Shanty” (Russian khibarka) — a humble wooden addition built expressly as a reception area for women (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com).

This arrangement reflects a real innovation in the form of the Optina eldership, and it is worth being precise about. Women were not permitted to enter the skete itself; the khibarka, standing at the edge of the monastic enclosure, allowed Ambrose to receive female pilgrims without breach of the monastic rule. The result was that Ambrose received both men and women — the men in his cell within the monastery’s reach, the women in the lean-to at the gate — and so opened the eldership to the whole people without distinction of sex (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com; St Ambrose of Optina, obitel-minsk.org). It was the same openness, extended further, that Leonid had pioneered when he first received laypeople at all: the otkrytoye starchestvo of Optina reaching its widest embrace. Out of this same pastoral concern for women would later grow Ambrose’s foundation of the Shamordino convent (1884), for the poor, the sick, and the destitute among them.

The Daily Order of an Invalid

The Lives preserve the shape of Ambrose’s day in some detail, and it is the order of a man governing an immense spiritual traffic from within a broken body. He rose at four in the morning and rang for his cell-assistants, who read the morning prayers, the Twelve Selected Psalms, and the First Hour; after these he would withdraw into the Jesus Prayer (the Lives’ “wise prayer”), rest briefly, and attend the Third and Sixth Hours and the Typika (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). The reception of visitors then filled the day. The accounts give the rhythm: pilgrims received through the morning, a pause for a little food and a short rest in the early afternoon (around two to three o’clock), and then reception resuming and continuing late — by some accounts to eleven at night or past midnight, the elder giving up to twelve hours a day to the people at his door (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com; St Ambrose of Optina, obitel-minsk.org). The day closed with the evening rule — Small Compline, the canon to the Guardian Angel, and the evening prayers.

Through all of this he remained the invalid of 1846. His diet was that of a small child — the Lives say the amount of food he took “equalled to that given to a three-year-old child” (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). For long stretches he could not go to church at all and communicated of the Holy Mysteries in his cell. In his last years he received much of the time lying down, “totally fatigued in a state of debilitating infirmity,” and yet “continued daily to receive multitudes of people and respond to tens of letters” (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). To manage the flood he depended on a small staff — two cell-attendants, Father Michael and Father Joseph (the future Elder Joseph of Optina), and as his principal secretary the convert Father Clement (Zederholm) (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com).

The contrast between the regimen and the output is the spiritual fact the Lives insist upon. Here was a hieromonk medically retired in 1846, who ate like a toddler, who often could not stand for the services or serve the altar he had been ordained to — and who from that sickbed became the spiritual father of an empire, receiving thousands and dictating letters until his strength gave out each night. The eldership of Ambrose is, in this sense, an extended demonstration of the ascetic principle that the power of God is made perfect in weakness: the very disability that should have ended his usefulness was the cell-door through which all Russia entered. The texture of that reception — the queues of peasants and senators, the rhymed jokes, the discernment, the mountain of correspondence — is the subject of the next file (see The Daily Crowds).

References

Agapit (Belovidov), Hieromonk. Zhizneopisanie v Boze pochivshego optinskogo startsa ieroskhimonakha Amvrosiia [Life of the Optina Elder Hieroschemamonk Ambrose]. The standard nineteenth-century Life; source for the daily order and the form of reception.
Chetverikov, Sergius. Elder Ambrose of Optina. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood (English translation of the Optina-edition Life of 1912). On the apprenticeship under Macarius and the succession.
Venerable Ambrose of Optina. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, October 10. (Assisting Macarius with correspondence; the 1852 stand-in at Moscow; Macarius died 1860 without naming a successor; “the Lord has arranged it so that I would have to talk to people all my life.”)
The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/42293.html). (Macarius’ death 7 September 1860; the move forty days later to the building by the belfry; the “Shanty”/khibarka for women; the daily order — 4 a.m. rise, the hours, reception, the child-sized diet; cell-attendants Michael and Joseph; secretary Clement Zederholm.)
St Ambrose of Optina (“Love Bears All Things”). Saint Elisabeth Convent, obitel-minsk.org. (The first Optina elder to receive women; the twelve-hour reception; the daily rhythm with rest at 2–3 p.m.)
Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (On the eldership and its place in Russian spiritual life.)
Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eya epokha [Optina Pustyn and Its Era]. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970.