The Optina Editions

The publishing enterprise of Optina Pustyn — the systematic translation and printing of the ascetical Fathers in Russian — was begun under Elder Macarius in 1846–1847 in documented partnership with the Slavophile Ivan Kireyevsky and his wife Natalya. The young hieromonk Ambrose, proficient in Greek and Latin, was one of Macarius’ closest fellow-workers in this labor, preparing in particular the Russian Ladder of St. John Climacus. The program carried the Paisian inheritance — the Slavonic translations made at Neamţ by St. Paisius Velichkovsky — into the literary Russian of the nineteenth century and placed the patristic tradition before educated Russia.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Program Begun Under Macarius

By the 1840s Optina Pustyn held a treasure that lay largely unread: the corpus of patristic translations made on Mount Athos and at the Neamţ Monastery in Moldavia by St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794) and his school — Slavonic renderings of the Greek neptic and ascetical Fathers that had reached Optina through the disciples of the Paisian revival (see the Paisian line in the Little Russian Philokalia). Elder Macarius (Mikhail Ivanov, 1788–1860) had himself copied many of these translations while at the Ploshchansk hermitage, from the manuscripts in the possession of Schemamonk Athanasius, a direct disciple of St. Paisius (Kavelin [Archimandrite Leonid], Elder Macarius of Optina, ch. on the literary labors).

The decisive turn from private copying to public printing came through a layman. Ivan Kireyevsky (1806–1856), the Slavophile philosopher, and his wife Natalya Petrovna (née Arbeneva) lived on the nearby estate of Dolbino and had become spiritual children of Elder Macarius. Natalya, herself formed by spiritual reading, is credited with first urging that the Paisian translations be brought into print; Ivan supplied the editorial intelligence, the literary Russian, and the contacts with the Moscow censorship and the university press (Chetverikov, Optina Pustyn; Müller, Russischer Intellekt in europäischer Krise: Ivan V. Kireevskij, on the Optina collaboration).

The collaboration is documented and concrete. In 1846 the brotherhood issued, as the program’s opening volume, the Life of St. Paisius Velichkovsky (the Life and Writings of the Moldavian Starets Paisius Velichkovsky), edited from the Optina materials. From 1847 the editions proper began: through Kireyevsky’s arrangement — he was connected to the journal The Muscovite (Moskvityanin) and to the Moscow University Press — the patristic series went forward under Macarius’ supervision, with a team of learned monks and lay collaborators revising the Slavonic translations of St. Paisius and putting them into Russian (OCA, Life of Venerable Macarius of Optina; Kavelin, Elder Macarius of Optina).

The Editions: The Documented Catalogue

The Optina program of 1846–1862 produced a graded library of the ascetical tradition. The documented titles include:

  • The Life and Writings of St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1847), the foundation-stone, which set the Paisian transmission before the reading public.
  • St. Nilus of Sora — his Rule and writings, central to the Russian non-possessing and hesychast tradition.
  • Sts. Barsanuphius and John — the Questions and Answers, one of the great correspondence-corpora of Gazan monasticism.
  • St. Isaac the Syrian — the Ascetical Homilies, perhaps the most influential single text of the series for Russian spiritual life.
  • St. Symeon the New Theologian — selected discourses.
  • St. Mark the Ascetic, St. Abba Dorotheus of Gaza, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Thalassius, St. Isaiah the Solitary, and St. Theodore the Studite.
  • St. John Climacus — the Ladder of Divine Ascent (Lestvitsa), in Russian.

(OCA, Life of Venerable Macarius of Optina; Kavelin, Elder Macarius of Optina; Chetverikov, Optina Pustyn.) Optina continued and expanded this work long after Macarius’ death; by the end of the century the monastery had issued on the order of one hundred-twenty-five titles in hundreds of thousands of copies, distributed throughout Russia (OrthodoxWiki, Optina Monastery, locating the standard figure — “some 125 books with over 225,000 copies”; verify against the monastery’s own bibliographies).

Ambrose’s Part

Alexander Grenkov — the future Elder Ambrose (1812–1891) — came to Optina in 1839 and was made a member of Macarius’ literary circle precisely because of his learning: he knew Greek and Latin and had taught at the Lipetsk ecclesiastical school. He became one of Macarius’ closest fellow-workers in the editions of the Fathers (OCA / Wikipedia, Ambrose of Optina, both locating his languages and his role on the editorial team).

His best-documented single contribution is the Russian Ladder of St. John Climacus: Ambrose translated and prepared for printing the Ladder of Divine Ascent, the classic of monastic ascesis (OCA, Life of St. Ambrose of Optina; Wikipedia, Ambrose of Optina). The editorial method of the circle — and so of Ambrose’s labor within it — was not fresh translation from the Greek but the careful revision of St. Paisius’ existing Slavonic into a literary Russian that an educated nineteenth-century reader could follow: comparing the Slavonic against the Greek where the text was obscure, smoothing archaisms, and supplying the apparatus a printed book required, while guarding the ascetical sense against dilution (Kavelin, Elder Macarius of Optina; cf. the Paisian-Slavonic background in the Little Russian Philokalia). The work formed Ambrose: the texts he edited — Climacus on obedience and the passions, Isaac the Syrian on tears and humility — became the substance of the counsel he would give for thirty years as Optina’s principal elder.

There is a continuity of office as well as of subject-matter. Ambrose had been drawn into the literary circle in the 1840s as a junior member, learning the discipline of the editions under Macarius; when Macarius reposed in September 1860, Ambrose succeeded him as the principal elder of Optina and carried the publishing program forward, so that the patristic editions of the later decades stand under his oversight as the earlier ones stood under his pen (OCA, Life of Venerable Macarius of Optina; Wikipedia, Ambrose of Optina, locating the 1860 succession). The editions were thus not an interlude in Ambrose’s life but a thread running through the whole of it: he came to Optina a learned young hieromonk, was made an editor, and remained — as the most sought-after elder in Russia — the head of a monastery that was also a publishing house.

The choice of texts is itself a teaching. The series did not aim at completeness for its own sake; it was a graded curriculum of the inner life. Climacus’ Ladder supplied the architecture of ascetical progress; Abba Dorotheus and Mark the Ascetic gave the practical psychology of the thoughts (logismoi); Barsanuphius and John modeled the relation of disciple to elder in their very form, a correspondence of questions and answers; Isaac the Syrian opened the heights of compunction, stillness, and the prayer of the heart. That this was the reading Ambrose had himself prepared and absorbed explains the texture of his recorded counsel — terse, proverbial, rooted in the Fathers rather than in his own invention. The Optina editions are, in this sense, the library from which the elder spoke.

The Cultural Significance

The Optina editions did something no Russian monastery had done at that scale: they put the unbroken ascetical tradition of the Christian East — Climacus, Isaac, Barsanuphius, the Gazan and Sinaite Fathers — into the hands of an educated, literate, partly secularized public, in a Russian they could read. This was patristics for the intelligentsia, and it ran through a deliberately Slavophile channel.

The Kireyevsky partnership is the hinge. The Slavophile circle held that Russia’s vocation lay in the recovery of a patristic, ecclesial mode of knowing — “believing reason” or “integral reason” (tselnoye myshleniye) — against the rationalism of the Western Enlightenment. Ivan Kireyevsky’s own late philosophy, worked out in the very years of his Optina labors, drew explicitly on the Fathers he was helping to print; one strand of scholarship reads him as, in effect, the lay intellectual heir of St. Paisius Velichkovsky’s work, carrying the Philokalic inheritance from the cell into the seminar (Maslov / researchers on “Ivan Kireyevsky as the Successor of St. Paisy Velichkovsky’s Work”; Gleason, European and Muscovite: Ivan Kireevsky and the Origins of Slavophilism). Through Optina, the ascetical Fathers became a living source for Russian religious philosophy rather than a museum of Byzantium.

The scholarship of the editions is properly attributed to the circle rather than to any one man: Macarius gave the spiritual oversight and the Paisian manuscripts; Kireyevsky gave the literary-philosophical editorship and the access to the press; the learned monks — Ambrose, Leonid Kavelin, and others — did the comparative and preparatory labor. The result was a monument of nineteenth-century Russian patristic scholarship produced not in a university but in a hermitage, and it stands behind the whole Russian spiritual revival that Optina anchored (see the wider Optina-and-Russian-culture story).

The historical importance of this is hard to overstate. Before Optina, the ascetical Fathers existed in Russia chiefly in Church Slavonic — venerable, liturgical, and increasingly opaque to a public educated in a Westernized literary Russian. St. Paisius Velichkovsky’s labors at Neamţ had renewed the Slavonic; St. Theophan the Recluse would later produce the great expanded Russian Dobrotolubie (Philokalia) of 1877–1889. But it was the Optina editions of the 1840s–1860s that first made a substantial body of the neptic and ascetical Fathers available in a readable modern Russian, and they did so at the precise moment when the Russian intelligentsia was searching for spiritual foundations. The editions therefore sit at the head of the chain that runs from Paisius’ Slavonic, through Optina’s Russian, to Theophan’s Dobrotolubie, and on into the twentieth-century English renderings of the same tradition (see the comparative table and the Paisian line in the Little Russian Philokalia). For the broader nineteenth-century Russian ascetical revival of which this was a part — Sts. Ignatius Brianchaninov and Theophan the Recluse — see the ascetic fathers.

A word on attestation is in order. The outline above — Macarius’ Ploshchansk copying, the 1846 Life of Paisius, the 1847 turn to printing through Kireyevsky, the named patristic titles, and Ambrose’s Ladder — is well supported across the standard hagiographies (Kavelin’s Elder Macarius, the OCA Lives) and the monastery’s own tradition. The aggregate publishing figures (“some 125 books,” hundreds of thousands of copies) come through reference aggregators and should be treated as an order-of-magnitude claim pending the monastery’s own bibliographies. The precise division of editorial labor among Macarius, Kireyevsky, Ambrose, and the other learned monks is, by the nature of collaborative nineteenth-century editing, only partly recoverable; the safe statements are that the program was Macarius’, the literary-philosophical editorship and access to the press were Kireyevsky’s, and the Ladder of Climacus is specifically credited to Ambrose.

See Also

References

  • Kavelin, Archimandrite Leonid (Lev). Elder Macarius of Optina. Translated by Valentina V. Lyovina. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1995.
  • Chetverikov, Sergius. Optina Pustyn’. Paris: YMCA-Press (and reprints). (On the monastery’s history and the publishing program.)
  • Chetverikov, Sergius. Starets Paisii Velichkovskii: His Life, Teaching, and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1980.
  • Gleason, Abbott. European and Muscovite: Ivan Kireevsky and the Origins of Slavophilism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.
  • Müller, Eberhard. Russischer Intellekt in europäischer Krise: Ivan V. Kireevskij (1806–1856). Cologne: Böhlau, 1966.
  • Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya [Optina Pustyn and Its Era]. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970.
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Venerable Macarius of Optina” and “Venerable Ambrose of Optina.” Lives of the Saints, oca.org. (Used to locate the 1847 Kireyevsky arrangement, the patristic titles, and Ambrose’s Ladder; cross-checked against Kavelin.)
  • “Optina Monastery” and “Ambrose of Optina.” OrthodoxWiki / Wikipedia. (Used to locate the publishing figures and Ambrose’s languages; not the terminal citation.)
  • Maslov, S. I., et al. “Ivan Kireyevsky as the Successor of St. Paisy Velichkovsky’s Work.” (Scholarship locating the Paisian-Slavophile link; consulted via ResearchGate.)
  • Stanton, Leonard J. The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in Works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Others. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.