The Daily Crowds

The texture of St. Ambrose’s thirty-year ministry of reception: the documented queues that converged on his cell from every corner of Russia — peasants and merchants, intellectuals and senators, all received without distinction; the celebrated story of the peasant woman and her dying turkeys, in which the elder of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy gave his counsel to a poultry-keeper; the distinctive pastoral method of the rhymed proverb and the half-joke, which lifted the despondent without diminishing the weight of the word; the testimonies of discernment (prozorlivost’) that the Lives report; and the vast correspondence — tens of letters answered daily, dictated from the sickbed, gathered after his death into published volumes.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Reception: A Multi-Class Register

The single most striking fact of Ambrose’s eldership is the sheer human range of those who came to his door. The Lives describe a continuous flow that ran the entire social register of the Russian Empire: “People from all the ends of Russia converged on the hut of the Starets — poor and rich, the intellectuals and the plain folk” (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). Pilgrims arrived by the hundreds daily and waited, sometimes for days, in the guesthouses of Optina for their turn; the cell-attendants were, in the Life’s phrase, “run off their feet” by the unending press (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). The scale is suggested by the funeral: when Ambrose died in October 1891, some eight thousand people gathered (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com).

At one end of this register stood the most celebrated figures of Russian letters and thought. Fyodor Dostoevsky came to Optina in June 1878, grieving the death of his young son Alyosha, and met the elder; the encounter fed directly into his portrait of the starets Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov (Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA; see Spiritual Direction on the Dostoevsky connection). Leo Tolstoy visited on at least three occasions; the philosophers Vladimir Soloviev and Konstantin Leontiev (who eventually settled near Optina and was secretly tonsured) were among those drawn to the elder (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com; Venerable Ambrose of Optina, OCA). At the other end — and far more numerous — stood the ordinary faithful: peasants from the surrounding villages, merchants, soldiers, widows, the sick, the poor, the simple. The point on which the Lives insist is that Ambrose made no distinction. The senator and the serf received the same attention; the elder belonged to all of them equally. This is the meaning of the often-repeated image of “hundreds of people” flocking “daily to his humble cabin” — the humility of the cabin and the breadth of those who filled it are the same fact (Chetverikov, Elder Ambrose of Optina; Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy).

The Turkey-Woman

No single story pins this multi-class register so well as the one the Lives preserve about the turkeys — precisely because it is so far from the world of Dostoevsky and Soloviev. A poor woman who kept turkeys for a mistress came to the elder in tears. The birds were dying despite all her care: “I am running out of strength giving all my time to them,” she said. “I look after them as I would after a treasured one — yet still they fall ill. The mistress wants to replace me” (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). Her whole livelihood hung on the health of the flock.

Ambrose did not send her away, and he did not spiritualize her trouble into something more dignified. He gave her practical feeding instructions for the turkeys, blessed her, and sent her home; and the Lives report that the birds thereafter were free of sickness (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). The episode is told and retold because it captures the whole character of the eldership in miniature. The most sought-after spiritual director in Russia, the model for Zosima, an invalid receiving thousands, turned the full attention of his discernment to a peasant woman’s poultry — and the same attention that answered the questions of philosophers answered hers. (Hagiographical accounts of this kind are reported here as what the Lives attest, with their source named; the standard collections give a number of such homely instances — the landowner’s failed irrigation, the failing harvests, the practical detail set right — as signs of the elder’s gift turned to the ordinary needs of ordinary people.)

The Method: The Rhymed Joke and the Half-Smile

Ambrose’s pastoral method had a distinctive and well-documented form: he taught in short, often rhymed, often humorous sayings, delivering the gravest counsel in a half-joking register that disarmed the proud and lifted the despondent. The Lives describe the technique exactly — he wrapped his meaning in a “semi-humorous format, thereby lifting the person from despondency, yet not diminishing the deep meaning of his words” (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com).

The recorded sayings show the manner. On the right posture of the soul in the world: “We must live on earth just as a wheel turns, where only one point is in contact with the ground, while the rest reaches upward” (St. Ambrose, quoted in The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). On simplicity against the spiritual danger of cleverness: “Where there is simplicity, there are a hundred angels; but where there is cleverness — there are none” (St. Ambrose, ibid.). And a saying that survives best in its Russian rhyme, a warning against pride aimed in homely vegetable terms: “Do not boast, peas, that you are better than beans — once you are soaked, you too will burst” (St. Ambrose, ibid.). The form is not incidental to the content. The proverb is memorable; the joke gets past the defenses; the rhyme fixes the word in the hearer where a sermon would slide off. It was the same gift of speech that had made the young seminarian the soul of every gathering (see The Youth of Alexander Grenkov) — now wholly converted to the cure of souls. The native temperament had become a pastoral instrument.

Behind the humor stood discernment (prozorlivost’), the charism the starets tradition prizes above eloquence (see Spiritual Direction). The testimonies the Lives gather attribute to Ambrose the reading of souls he had never met — answering the unspoken question, naming the hidden sin, knowing the visitor’s circumstance before it was told, foreseeing the outcome of a course of action. As one summary of the tradition puts it, “men’s souls held no secrets from him,” and “abundant testimony exists of his clairvoyance” (roca.org, Optina’s Elders, summarizing the hagiographical record). In keeping with the methodology of this collection, such accounts are reported as what the Lives attest, on the authority of those who recorded them, and not asserted as independently documented history; the consistency of the testimony across the early Lives and the memoirs of those who knew him is itself the historical datum. The humor and the discernment worked together: the joke opened the door, and through the open door the elder saw.

The Correspondence

Reception was only half of Ambrose’s labor; the other half was the letters. From every part of Russia came written appeals from those who could not travel to Optina — spiritual children, monastics, nuns of distant convents, troubled laypeople — and Ambrose answered them in a flood that did not stop even when his body failed. The Lives record the daily volume in round terms: tens of letters arriving and being answered every day, “not counting fellow monks” (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). Because the invalid could rarely write at length himself, the letters were largely dictated: he gave the answers and his secretary — chiefly Father Clement (Zederholm) — and his cell-attendants set them down (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com). The Lives marvel at the sheer persistence of it: confined to his bed and exhausted, the elder “continued daily to receive multitudes of people and respond to tens of letters” (The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina, OrthoChristian.com).

This correspondence is not lost. Ambrose’s letters of spiritual counsel were gathered after his death and published — the letters to monastics and the letters to laypeople forming the substance of several printed volumes that became, alongside the Lives, a primary channel of his teaching to later generations (Chetverikov, Elder Ambrose of Optina; the published Letters of the Elder). The letters carry the same voice as the spoken sayings: terse, concrete, proverbial, rooted in the Fathers he had spent years editing, warmed by the humor that never quite left him. They are the written deposit of the same eldership the queues received in person — and they extended its reach far beyond the cell by the belfry, into convents and households across the empire, and on, through translation and reprinting, to Orthodox readers today.

Taken together — the queues that ran from peasants to senators, the turkey-woman and the philosophers received with one attention, the rhymed jokes that carried the weight of the Fathers, the discernment the testimonies report, and the tens of thousands of letters dictated from a sickbed — the daily crowds of Optina are the visible form of a single thing: an invalid hieromonk, unable to serve the altar, spending himself completely on the souls God sent him, for thirty years, until the strength was gone.

See Also

References

  • Agapit (Belovidov), Hieromonk. Zhizneopisanie v Boze pochivshego optinskogo startsa ieroskhimonakha Amvrosiia [Life of the Optina Elder Hieroschemamonk Ambrose]. The standard nineteenth-century Life; principal source for the reception, the sayings, and the correspondence.
  • Chetverikov, Sergius. Elder Ambrose of Optina. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood (English translation of the Optina-edition Life of 1912). On the crowds, the method, and the published letters.
  • The Life of St. Ambrose of Optina. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/42293.html). (The flow of people “from all the ends of Russia,” poor and rich; the turkey-woman; the rhymed and proverbial sayings and the “semi-humorous format”; tens of letters dictated daily; secretary Clement Zederholm; circa 8,000 at the funeral.)
  • Venerable Ambrose of Optina. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, October 10. (Dostoevsky’s 1878 visit and the Zosima connection; Tolstoy’s visits; the dictation of letters.)
  • St Ambrose of Optina (“Love Bears All Things”). Saint Elisabeth Convent, obitel-minsk.org. (The breadth of those received; the daily reception.)
  • “Optina’s Elders: Instructors of Monks and Conversers with Angels.” Orthodox America, roca.org. (Summary of the hagiographical testimony to Ambrose’s discernment/clairvoyance — reported as attestation, not independent documentation.)
  • Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (On the crowds, the literary visitors, and Ambrose as the model for Zosima.)
  • Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eya epokha [Optina Pustyn and Its Era]. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970.
  • Ambrose of Optina, St. Letters (Pis’ma) to monastics and to laypeople. Optina editions; collected and published after the Elder’s death.