Teaching on Suffering

Out of his own decades of illness, St. Ambrose of Optina formed a counsel on suffering that was at once thoroughly ascetical and relentlessly practical. He taught the bearing of small daily irritations as the real school of patience, redirected self-pity toward trust in providence, and read skorbi — afflictions — as the narrow way to the Kingdom; and he did so while dispensing medicine, money, and matchmaking, refusing any split between the soul’s healing and the body’s needs. This file gathers his teaching on affliction from the letters and the Lives, sets the spiritual counsel beside the documented material help, and traces the line from his teaching to the wider Orthodox tradition of suffering and spiritual direction.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

Afflictions as the Narrow Way

The Russian word that organizes Ambrose’s teaching on suffering is skorbi — afflictions, sorrows, the griefs that come unbidden. He did not treat them as interruptions of the spiritual life but as its very road. The Gospel’s “narrow way” (Matt. 7:14) he understood concretely as the way of skorbi: the path to the Kingdom runs through affliction borne in faith, not around it. In the letters he reads even sudden loss as the act of a wise and loving Father: “The All-good Lord, in His infinitely wise Providence… [brings] about unexpected deprivations and sorrow, in order that we might come to our senses and turn our spiritual gaze to the acquisition of good things which are not transitory but eternal, everlasting and unchanging” (St. Ambrose, Letter LXXXIII, in Orthodox America, “Letters of Spiritual Counsel”). Affliction, on this reading, is providence’s instrument for prying the soul’s attention off the perishable and fixing it on the eternal.

He insisted, accordingly, that the Christian receive his sorrows “not only un-murmuringly but with gratitude,” reading them as evidence of divine sonship — for the Lord chastens those He loves (Heb. 12:6) — rather than as signs of abandonment (roca.org, Letters of Spiritual Counsel). The afflicted soul is not a forsaken soul but a son under a father’s correcting hand. This is the interior counterpart of the wheel image he used so often: a man fixed to God at the single point of contact is carried over his troubles, while one who leans into the world meets the very circumstances that “push him back onto the right track” (Mileant, Elder Ambrose of Optina). Suffering, even when self-incurred by straying, is providence’s way of steering the wanderer home.

The School of Small Irritations

Ambrose’s most distinctive note is the redirection of the ascetic struggle away from heroic suffering and toward the patient bearing of ordinary, daily vexations. He did not send souls looking for great crosses; he told them to begin with the small ones already at hand: “Learn, and begin by being patient with the disappointments that you find and meet” (Mileant). The school of patience is not the martyr’s arena but the friction of common life — the irritating neighbor, the failed plan, the minor humiliation. Patience built there, irritation by irritation, is the real thing; patience imagined for some future ordeal is fantasy.

This is why he paired patience so insistently with humility, naming the two as what will “spare you from much evil” (roca.org). The bearing of small slights without resentment is humility in act. And it is why he attacked suspicion as a chief enemy of the suffering soul — the habit of reading injury into others’ deeds, which manufactures fresh affliction out of nothing: “Stay away from suspiciousness as from fire, for the enemy of the human race catches people in his net by this” (St. Ambrose, Umudryaysya i smiryaysya, Sretensky, 2006). The cure he gave was the same curt redirection that runs through all his counsel: do not investigate why others act as they do, but ask only, “What is that to me?” (Umudryaysya i smiryaysya).

The Redirection of Self-Pity

Against self-pity — the “why does this always happen to me?” of the aggrieved soul — Ambrose deployed two moves. The first was to deny the excuse of circumstances. To those who pleaded that their surroundings made the spiritual life impossible, he held up the prophet Samuel, raised in the household of the priest Eli “among his debauched sons, yet [who] preserved himself and was a great prophet” (Mileant): sanctity is possible exactly where one stands, and blaming one’s situation for one’s spiritual failure is, he taught, useless. The second was to relocate the soul’s confidence from itself to God. To a priest paralyzed by spiritual fear he gave the arithmetic of faith: “Christ God and you — see, that comes out to two. And the enemy — he is one” (orthodoxphotos.com, St. Herman Brotherhood selections). The self-pitying soul counts only its own weakness against the trouble; Ambrose taught it to count God on its side and the enemy outnumbered.

Self-pity, in his diagnosis, is a failure of providence-trust dressed as grief, and the remedy is the same trust he prescribed for anxiety: “if you trust in God’s Providence and hope in God’s omnipotent assistance, then you will not meet with such problems as you suppose” (roca.org). The point is not that the trusting soul escapes affliction but that it stops manufacturing the secondary suffering — the resentment, the comparison, the despair — that self-pity heaps on top of the original cross.

The Practical Realism: Medicine, Money, Matchmaking

What guards Ambrose’s teaching on suffering from any taint of pious abstraction is the documented fact that the same elder who counseled patience in affliction also handed out, from the same couch, medicine, money, and practical solutions. He held that “insignificant matters do not exist” for the soul that brings them in faith (Mileant), and he acted on it. He prescribed herbal remedies and read up on practical questions; he is recorded giving advice on agricultural irrigation, dispensing a treatment for alcoholism, and famously prescribing a cure for tobacco addiction that combined confession, Communion, and daily Gospel reading — or, failing that, “thirty-three full prostrations in memory of the earthly life of the Savior” — on the principle that “that which is impossible for man is possible with the help of God” (St. Ambrose, letter on tobacco, October 12, 1888, orthodoxphotos.com; Mileant). He arranged marriages, settled family disputes, found money for the destitute, and — in the often-told scene — took with full seriousness the peasant woman grieving over her dying turkeys, questioning her, instructing her in their care, and blessing her, after which the birds recovered (Mileant).

This is not a digression from his teaching on suffering but its completion. Ambrose refused the false spirituality that would tell an afflicted person to “offer it up” while ignoring the curable cause of the affliction. Where the suffering had a practical remedy, he gave the remedy; where it did not, he gave the counsel of patience and trust. The discernment lay in knowing which was which — and that discernment, the refusal to apply one answer to every sorrow, is itself the heart of his pastoral realism (see The Letters). The body’s medicine and the soul’s medicine came from the same hand.

The Line to the Tradition

Ambrose’s teaching on suffering is not idiosyncratic; it is the Optina restatement of a settled Orthodox understanding of affliction, and it connects forward and backward along the tradition. Backward, it rests on the Fathers he had himself edited — Isaac the Syrian on the necessity of trials for the soul that loves God, Climacus on the daily bearing of the cross, Abba Dorotheus on self-reproach (see The Optina Editions). Forward, it anticipates the strikingly similar counsel of later elders who taught suffering from their own sickbeds: St. Paisios of Mount Athos, likewise teaching from chronic and finally fatal illness, taught afflictions as spiritual medicine, the cross as the only road to the resurrection, and patience (hypomonē) as the central virtue — the same configuration, in Greek idiom, that Ambrose taught in Russian rhyme (see St. Paisios: Suffering and Trials).

And the whole of it is finally an instance of the Orthodox practice of spiritual direction: the affliction is not handled by the sufferer alone but brought to an elder who discerns its source, prescribes the fitted remedy — material, ascetical, or both — and bears the burden with the one who carries it. Ambrose’s teaching on suffering is inseparable from the relationship in which it was given; it was never a doctrine dispensed at large but counsel cut to a single soul (see Orthodoxy Guide: Spiritual Direction). This is why it has worn so well: it is not a theory of suffering but a record of how one suffering elder helped particular sufferers, one cross at a time.

References

“Letters of Spiritual Counsel by Elder Ambrose of Optina.” Orthodox America (roca.org), Vol. X, Issue 96, incl. Letter LXXXIII. (Source for the providence/afflictions passages, reception of sorrows “with gratitude,” and the providence-and-anxiety counsel.)
St. Ambrose of Optina. Umudryaysya i smiryaysya: Pis’ma o dukhovnoy zhizni [Grow Wise and Be Humbled: Letters on the Spiritual Life]. Moscow: Sretensky Monastery, 2006. (Source for the counsel against suspicion and “what is that to me?”)
Mileant, Bishop Alexander. Elder Ambrose of Optina (booklet). fatheralexander.org. (Source for the wheel imagery, “begin by being patient with the disappointments,” the Samuel counsel, the practical helps — irrigation, addiction cures, the turkeys — and “insignificant matters do not exist.”)
“Addendum — Selections from the Optina Elders series.” orthodoxphotos.com. (Source for “Christ God and you… that comes out to two,” and the October 12, 1888 letter on tobacco addiction.)
Agapit (Belovidov), Schemarchimandrite. Zhizneopisanie… ieroskhimonakha Amvrosiya. The standard nineteenth-century Life (reprint, Sretensky Monastery, 2010).
Chetverikov, Sergius. Elder Ambrose of Optina. Platina, CA / Crestwood, NY: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood / St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Venerable Ambrose of Optina. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, October 10.
Isaac the Syrian. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984. (The patristic background of trials borne in faith.)
Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.