Forest Hermitage: The Far Wilderness

St. Seraphim’s withdrawal into the “far hermitage” from 1794 — the solitary cell in the Sarov forest, the Holy Land names he gave to the woods around it, his garden and his bees, the wild creatures who came to him (including the bear of Matrona Plescheeva’s celebrated account, examined here with its attestation problems), his rule of reading the whole New Testament weekly, and the robbers’ attack of 1804 that left him bent for the rest of his life. This file follows the saint through the long middle period of hidden ascetic struggle.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1903)

The Far Hermitage (from 1794)

Not long after his ordination as hieromonk in 1793, and with the blessing of the Sarov abbot, Seraphim withdrew from the common life of the monastery to a solitary log cell in the forest, beginning the eremitic phase of his life around 1794 (OCA, Lives of the Saints; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 3). The hermitage stood about five versts (the sources commonly say roughly five kilometers — some five thousand paces) from the monastery, on a wooded hill above the Sarovka river. Here he lived alone, supporting himself by the labor of his hands, coming in to the monastery church only on Sundays and feasts to receive the Holy Mysteries (Chichagov, Chronicles, ch. 3; OCA, Lives of the Saints).

The Holy Land in the Forest

One of the most characteristic features of these years is the way Seraphim transfigured the wilderness around his cell into a living map of the Gospel. He gave to the places of his forest the names of the holy places of Palestine — one spot was Bethlehem, another the Jordan, another Tabor, another Golgotha, another the Mount of Olives — so that as he moved among them his daily round became a continual pilgrimage through the mysteries of Christ’s life (OrthodoxWiki, citing the Life; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 3). The reading is consistent across the tradition: “one place was Jerusalem, another Bethlehem,” and at each he would recall and pray the corresponding event of salvation, so that “his every action outside his hut was thus also an act of pilgrimage.” This sanctification of place is one of the gentlest and most distinctive notes of the Seraphim Lives.

The Garden and the Bees

The Lives describe a hermitage of simple, fruitful labor. Seraphim kept a vegetable garden and a small apiary, tending his bees and his beds of vegetables, and he gathered wood and hay; the produce supported him and supplied a little for visitors and for the birds and beasts he fed (Chichagov, Chronicles, ch. 3; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 3). His diet was famously austere — for a long period, the Lives say, he lived chiefly on a wild plant (snyt, goutweed) that he gathered and dried, refusing for stretches even the bread sent from the monastery. The garden, the bees, and the hard manual labor are reported as the steady, unspectacular ground beneath the more dramatic feats: the hermit is shown not as idle in ecstasy but as a working man whose toil was itself a form of prayer.

The rhythm of the days was set by the typikon of the cell rather than of the church. Coming to the monastery only on Sundays and feasts for the Holy Mysteries, Seraphim kept the cycle of services in his hermitage by the Jesus Prayer and by his own prayer rule, the unceasing invocation of the Name running beneath the manual labor (Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 3). The forest years are thus the hesychast heart of his life: the long, hidden practice of inner prayer out of which the later gifts of clairvoyance, healing, and the visible light flowed. To this period the Lives also assign extremes of self-denial — the spare food, the heavy iron and the great cross he is said to have carried, the prostrations — always governed, in their telling, by humility rather than by any wish to be seen.

The Wild Creatures and the Bear

The Lives record that wild animals came to the hermit without fear — bears, wolves, foxes, hares, and lynxes — and that he fed them from his hand, sharing his bread with them (OCA, Lives of the Saints). The most famous of these accounts concerns a bear that the saint is said to have fed regularly, and it is preserved chiefly through one witness: Matrona Plescheeva, later a nun of Diveyevo, who described seeing the elder feed a great bear from his hand and, overcome, fainting at the sight (Chichagov, Chronicles; pravoslavie.ru, “From the Life of St. Seraphim”).

The account deserves an honest note. Matrona Plescheeva’s testimony is the principal source for the bear, and the Lives themselves preserve her admission that she “fell senseless” at the moment — that is, the very witness who reports the scene reports also that she lost consciousness during it, a tension the Chronicles do not conceal [Disputed: the bear narrative rests substantially on the single late recollection of Matrona Plescheeva, who states she fainted during the event she describes; it is reported in the Lives and the Chronicles as her testimony, not as independently corroborated fact]. The wider claim — that animals came peaceably to the hermit — is attested more broadly in the Lives; the specific bear-feeding scene is pinned here to Matrona’s account, with its self-acknowledged fragility stated plainly. The tradition reads the episode as a sign of the restored Edenic peace between the saint and creation, a peace the Fathers attribute to the dispassionate (apatheia).

The Weekly Gospel Rule

Among the labors of the hermitage, the Lives record a fixed rule of Scripture: Seraphim read through the whole of the New Testament in the course of each week, assigning the four Gospels and the Acts and Epistles across the days, so that the entire apostolic witness passed before him every seven days (Chichagov, Chronicles, ch. 3; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 3). He called the Gospels and Epistles his “rule,” and this saturation in the New Testament — alongside the unceasing Jesus Prayer — is the textual ground of the scriptural fluency that later marked his counsels.

The Robbers’ Attack (1804)

In September 1804 the hermitage was attacked by robbers. Three peasants, believing the elder must be hiding money given him by wealthy visitors, came upon him in the forest. Though Seraphim was strong and held an axe — he had been cutting wood — he refused to defend himself, set down the axe, and crossed his arms upon his breast. The robbers beat him savagely, striking him on the head and chest with the back of his own axe and with a log, fracturing his skull and ribs and leaving him for dead; they ransacked the cell and found nothing but a few potatoes and an icon (OCA, Lives of the Saints; Chichagov, Chronicles, ch. 4; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 4).

Seraphim survived, dragging himself to the monastery, and lay near death for days; the Lives place here another appearance of the Mother of God with the Apostles Peter and John (“This one is of our kind”), echoing the vision of his novitiate (see Sarov Entry), after which he began to recover. He never fully regained his former frame: from the beating he remained stooped and bent, leaning on a staff or axe-handle for the rest of his life. When the robbers were later caught, Seraphim refused to prosecute them and interceded that they not be punished, declaring he would leave the monastery if they were — an act of forgiveness the Lives present as the moral center of the episode (OCA, Lives of the Saints; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 4). The dates, the bent back, and the refusal to prosecute are firmly attested in the Lives and the Chronicles.

The attack is the hinge of the wilderness years. It cost Seraphim his bodily strength and his upright frame, yet the Lives read it as gain rather than loss: the forgiveness offered to his assailants is the visible proof of the apatheia his hidden labors had worked, the love of enemies (Matthew 5:44) made concrete in the one place where it could not be feigned. The stoop he carried ever after became, in the iconography and the popular memory, an emblem of the cross he bore — the bent old man leaning on his staff, who would yet greet every visitor as “my joy.” It is also out of the suffering and the renewed vision of the Theotokos that the Lives bring him to the most extreme of his labors, the thousand days upon the rock, treated in the companion file.

The Sojourn at the Monastery and the Return

The wilderness years were not unbroken. After the death of the abbot Isaiah, to whom Seraphim was bound in obedience, and as his own health failed under the labors and the lingering effects of the beating, the new abbot recalled him for a time to the monastery; the Lives describe a tension between the call of the solitary life and the demands of obedience, which Seraphim resolved always in favor of obedience even when it cost him the wilderness he loved (Chichagov, Chronicles, ch. 4–5; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, ch. 5). This deference is theologically pointed: the most extreme of solitaries is shown subordinating even his asceticism to the authority of his superiors, so that the wilderness never becomes self-will. The pattern guards the whole of his later feats from the charge of spiritual pride — the recurring danger (prelest) against which the Russian ascetic Fathers warned (see Sts. Theophan and Ignatius).

The Threshold of the Greater Struggle

The robbers’ attack did not end the wilderness years; it deepened them. Out of the suffering and the renewed vision came the most extreme of his labors — the thousand days and nights of prayer upon the rocks, and then the long silence and reclusion — treated in the companion file. The stooped figure who emerged from the forest a quarter-century later, greeting every visitor as “my joy,” was formed in these hidden years of garden and bees, Scripture and beasts, blood and forgiveness.

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.
“From the Life of St. Seraphim of Sarov.” Pravoslavie.ru / OrthoChristian.com (Matrona Plescheeva’s account; used to locate the source within the Lives).
“Seraphim of Sarov.” OrthodoxWiki (used to locate sources; Holy Land place-names and dates cross-checked against the OCA life and Zander).