Sarov Entry: The Wilderness Monastery

St. Seraphim’s entry into the Sarov monastery in 1778, his years of novitiate labor under the abbot Pachomius and the elder Joseph, the grave illness and the vision of the Theotokos that the Lives record, his tonsure as Seraphim in 1786, and his ordination as hierodeacon and hieromonk — set against the history and strict tradition of the Sarov wilderness itself. This file follows the future wonderworker from postulant to priest, pinning the visions and wonders to the sources that attest them.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1903)

The Sarov Wilderness

The monastery Prokhor Moshnin entered was among the most austere in Russia. The Sarov Dormition Hermitage (Sarovskaya pustyn) stood in the forests of the Tambov region (on the border of the Nizhny Novgorod lands), on a site where the hermit Theodosius had first settled in the seventeenth century; the monastic community was formally established at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with its rule formulated and approved by 1711 (Sarov Monastery, historical summaries; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 1). From the start Sarov was known for the strictness of its cenobitic rule and its strong eremitic tradition: alongside the common life of the monastery, monks were permitted, with the abbot’s blessing, to withdraw to solitary cells in the surrounding forest. This double character — rigorous community discipline together with a living tradition of wilderness solitude — is precisely what shaped St. Seraphim and made his later “far hermitage” a development of Sarov’s own custom rather than a departure from it (Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, chs. 1–2).

The choice of Sarov over a more illustrious house is itself part of the saint’s hagiographic shape. In the eighteenth-century Synodal Church, when monastic numbers were being curtailed by the state and many houses had grown lax, Sarov stood as a deliberate island of rigor, attracting men who sought the older, harder way. To send a fervent young postulant to Sarov, as the Kiev recluse did (see Kursk Childhood), was to send him not toward fame but toward the most demanding available form of the common life — a fittingly austere beginning for the future hermit of the rock.

Arrival in 1778 Under Pachomius and Joseph

Prokhor arrived at Sarov on the eve of the feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple — November 20, 1778 — and was received as a novice (OCA, Lives of the Saints; Chichagov, Chronicles, ch. 2). The monastery was then under the Igumen Pachomius, who took the young man under his care, and Prokhor was placed in obedience to the elder Joseph, the monastery’s treasurer and his immediate spiritual director (OCA, Lives of the Saints; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 2).

The Novitiate Labors

For eight years Prokhor lived as a novice, passing through the round of obediences by which Sarov formed its monks. The Lives describe him serving in the bakery, the prosphora kitchen, and the carpentry shop — he was skilled with wood and was known in the monastery as “Prokhor the carpenter” — as well as in the wake-keeping and the offices (Chichagov, Chronicles, ch. 2; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 2). From the beginning he added private labors to the common rule: long vigils, the Jesus Prayer, and, with his elders’ blessing, withdrawals into the forest for solitary prayer that anticipated his later eremitic life.

This early discipline of the Jesus Prayer places Seraphim squarely within the hesychast tradition then being revived in Russia through the labors of St. Paisius Velichkovsky and the Dobrotolubie (the Slavonic Philokalia, published 1793 — the very year of Seraphim’s ordination to the priesthood). Though Seraphim left no treatise on the prayer, his whole life is its embodiment: the unceasing invocation of the Name was the substance of his forest years and of the reclusion, and the uncreated light that later shone from his face during the conversation with Motovilov is the hesychast teaching on theosis made visible (see Russian Monasticism). The Lives also place in these novitiate years his deepening attachment to the Mother of God, the recurring presence in every decisive moment of his life.

The Dropsy Illness and the Vision of the Theotokos (c. 1780–83)

Early in his novitiate Prokhor fell gravely ill with a dropsy (edema) that swelled his body and kept him bedridden for some three years, the monastery’s physicians despairing of his life (OCA, Lives of the Saints; Chichagov, Chronicles, ch. 2). The Lives record that at the height of the illness, after he and the elders had prayed, the Mother of God appeared to him, accompanied by the Apostles Peter and John. Pointing to the sick novice, she said of him words the OCA life renders, “This one is of our kind” (Sei nashego roda) — and touched him, and he was healed; a fluid is said to have flowed from his side at the place she touched, and his recovery followed (OCA, Lives of the Saints; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 2).

This vision is among the most important in the Seraphim tradition, marking him out from his novitiate as singularly the Theotokos’s own; she would appear to him, the Lives say, a dozen times across his life. It is reported here as the Lives attest it — first set down in the written Lives gathered in Chichagov’s Chronicles (1896) — and pinned to those sources rather than asserted as documented history. In thanksgiving for the healing a hospital church was later built at Sarov, and Prokhor himself is said to have made its altar from cypress wood with his own hands.

The Slavonic words rendered “This one is of our kind” (Sei nashego roda) became, in the later tradition, a kind of summary of his whole identity. The phrase is read not as a claim that the saint is more than human but as the Mother of God’s adoption of him into the intimacy of her household — the same intimacy that explains why she, and not only Christ, is the recurring agent at every turning point of his life. The repetition of the formula after the robbers’ attack twenty years later (see Forest Hermitage) deliberately links the two healings, so that the reader sees a single relationship unfolding across the decades. The careful student will note that the formula and the accompanying Apostles (Peter and John) are constant across the retellings, a stability that is itself a feature of the attestation, even as the historical event remains, by the methodology’s standard, a matter of what the Lives report.

Tonsure as Seraphim (1786)

After eight years as a novice, Prokhor was tonsured into monasticism on August 13, 1786, receiving the name Seraphim — “the flaming” or “fiery one” (from the Hebrew root for the burning seraphim of Isaiah 6), a name the tradition has always read as prophetic of his ardor in prayer and the warmth of his charity (OCA, Lives of the Saints; Chichagov, Chronicles, ch. 2; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 2). He was about thirty-two.

Hierodeacon (1786) and the Liturgical Visions

Shortly after his tonsure, Seraphim was ordained hierodeacon (OCA, Lives of the Saints). For some six years he served in this rank, and the Lives describe these as years of intense liturgical life, in which he spent nearly the whole of his time in the church, serving the daily cycle of services and scarcely leaving the altar. The Lives stress that his ardor at the Liturgy was such that the brethren marvelled at it; it is against this background of unbroken liturgical devotion that the diaconal vision is set, as its natural fruit rather than an isolated marvel. To this period the Lives assign one of his most celebrated experiences: while serving the Divine Liturgy on Holy Thursday, at the words “O Lord, save the pious,” Seraphim beheld the Lord Jesus Christ entering the church in glory, surrounded by the heavenly hosts, and blessing the worshippers, before passing into the icon of the Savior by the royal doors. So overcome was he that he could not move or speak for some time (OCA, Lives of the Saints; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 2). The vision is reported as the Lives attest it and pinned to them; it stands in the tradition as a sign of the heights of grace given him already in the diaconate.

Hieromonk (1793)

In 1793 Seraphim was ordained hieromonk (priest-monk) (OCA, Lives of the Saints; OrthodoxWiki, locator). With the priesthood his pastoral and Eucharistic ministry deepened, but it also opened the way to the next and most austere phase of his life. Not long after his ordination — and following the death of his elder Pachomius, to whom he had promised to care for the nearby sisters of Diveyevo — Seraphim sought and received the blessing to withdraw from the common life of the monastery into the forest, to take up the solitary, eremitic struggle for which Sarov’s tradition had prepared him. That withdrawal, from 1794, is the threshold of the forest hermitage and of the great ascetic feats that made him a wonderworker.

The Shape of the Sarov Vocation

Seen whole, the years from 1778 to 1794 trace a deliberate ascent through the grades of the monastic life — postulant, novice, monk, hierodeacon, hieromonk — each rank received not as advancement but as a deeper binding to prayer. What distinguishes Seraphim from a merely exemplary monk, in the reading of his Lives, is that at every grade he pressed past the common measure into the eremitic: the novice already withdrew to the forest, the deacon already saw heaven open in the Liturgy, the new priest at once sought the wilderness. Sarov’s particular gift to him was the room to do this without leaving obedience — its rule permitted, under blessing, exactly the solitary intensification he craved, so that his radical asceticism remained inside the monastery’s authority rather than against it. This is the pattern the later sections develop: a holiness that is extreme yet never self-willed, hidden yet finally given wholly to the world. The foundations laid at Sarov — the strict cenobitic discipline, the living eremitic option, the hesychast prayer, and the constant patronage of the Theotokos — are the soil from which the wonderworker of the last years grew.

References

Chichagov, Leonid (Hieromartyr Metropolitan Seraphim). Letopis Serafimo-Diveyevskogo monastyrya [Chronicles of the Seraphimo-Diveyevo Monastery]. St. Petersburg, 1896.
Zander, Valentine. St. Seraphim of Sarov. Translated by Sister Gabriel Anne. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975.
“Repose of Venerable Seraphim, Wonderworker of Sarov.” Lives of the Saints. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), commemorated January 2.
Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. I: St. Seraphim of Sarov. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood Press.
“Seraphim of Sarov” and “Sarov Monastery.” OrthodoxWiki / reference summaries (used to locate sources and dates; chronology cross-checked against the OCA life and Zander).