The Conversation with Motovilov

The November 1831 “Conversation on the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit,” as recorded by Nicholas Motovilov and published by Sergei Nilus in 1903, is the most widely read text associated with St. Seraphim of Sarov. This file presents its content faithfully — the aim of the Christian life, the means of acquiring grace, and the transfiguration scene in the forest — together with an account of Motovilov himself and of why the text became, for many, the summary of Orthodox spirituality. The source-critical questions surrounding the text are treated separately in the transmission problem.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1903)

The Setting

The conversation is presented in the text as having taken place on a winter day at the end of November 1831 — roughly fifteen months before St. Seraphim’s repose on January 2, 1833 — in a forest clearing near his hermitage, with snow falling and lying on the ground (St. Seraphim, Conversation with Motovilov, trans. in Little Russian Philokalia I; cf. orthochristian.com/47866). Nicholas Alexandrovich Motovilov, a young Simbirsk landowner who regarded himself as Seraphim’s spiritual son, records that he had long wished to ask the elder a single question: what is the true aim of the Christian life? The text is framed as Motovilov’s first-person memoir of Seraphim’s answer and of what followed.

It must be stressed at the outset that the wording quoted below is the wording of a text recorded by one man and edited, decades after his death, by another; it is cited here as the received text of the conversation, not as a verbatim transcript. The reasons for that caution are set out in the transmission problem.

The Aim of the Christian Life

Seraphim’s central teaching, as the text gives it, is that the things ordinarily taken to be the goal of Christian life are in fact only means:

“Prayer, fasting, vigil and all other Christian practices, however good they may be in themselves, do not constitute the aim of our Christian life, although they serve as the indispensable means of reaching this end. The true aim of our Christian life consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God” (St. Seraphim, Conversation with Motovilov; trans. as at orthochristian.com/47866, and in Rose, Little Russian Philokalia I).

The good works of the Christian, Seraphim continues, are valuable in exact proportion as they bring the grace of the Spirit — and “of these good deeds it is only those done for Christ’s sake that bring us the fruits of the Holy Spirit” (ibid.). He likens the Christian life to commerce: one acquires the grace of God as a merchant acquires capital, choosing in each circumstance whichever good work — prayer, almsgiving, fasting, vigil — yields the greatest “profit” of the Spirit (ibid.). The framing is striking precisely because it refuses to make asceticism an end in itself: the whole moral and liturgical life of the Church is reoriented toward a single goal, conscious participation in the Holy Spirit.

This is the passage that Bishop Kallistos Ware, citing Vladimir Lossky, says “sums up the whole spiritual tradition of the Orthodox Church” (Ware, The Orthodox Church, on St. Seraphim; cf. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church).

The “commercial” imagery deserves a further word, because it is easily misread. Seraphim is not reducing the spiritual life to a transaction in which good works purchase grace; the point is the opposite. A merchant does not love money for its own sake but trades in whatever yields the best return; just so, the Christian is not to love prayer or fasting for their own sake but to practice whichever, in a given circumstance, best opens the soul to the Spirit. The disciplines are instruments, and an instrument is honored by being used toward its end, not by being mistaken for the end. This is why the teaching can be at once intensely ascetical and entirely free of works-righteousness: the whole apparatus of ascesis is held loosely, in service of a single gift that God alone bestows (St. Seraphim, Conversation with Motovilov, trans. at orthochristian.com/47866).

The Transfiguration in the Forest

When Motovilov asks how a person can know with certainty that he is “in the Spirit of God,” Seraphim — according to the text — answers not with an argument but with a demonstration. He grips Motovilov firmly and says:

“We are both in the Spirit of God now, my son. Why don’t you look at me?” (St. Seraphim, Conversation with Motovilov, trans. at pravoslavie.ru/47867; also in Rose, Little Russian Philokalia I).

Motovilov records that he could not, because the elder’s face had become unbearably bright:

“I cannot look, Father, because your eyes are flashing like lightning. Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes ache with pain” (ibid.).

What follows is the description that has fixed the scene in Orthodox imagination. Despite the cold and the falling snow, Motovilov reports an extraordinary inner state — a calm and peace “which no words can express,” a warmth “such as there is in a bath-house when the water is poured on the stone and the steam rises in clouds,” a sweetness, and a fragrance unlike any earthly scent, which he understood to be “the fragrance of the Holy Spirit of God” (ibid.). The decisive detail is that the snow continued to fall and did not melt on either of them: the grace was experienced within, not as a change in the surrounding air (ibid.). Seraphim then explains that this is exactly the state of Adam in paradise and the inheritance promised to every Christian — not a special endowment of monks alone (ibid.).

For the Orthodox reading of this scene, the light Motovilov saw is identified with the uncreated light of Tabor (cf. Matthew 17:2) and with the divine energies described by St. Gregory Palamas (Triads), making the conversation a vivid, experiential illustration of the doctrine of deification (see Little Russian Philokalia).

Two features of the account are worth drawing out because they are doctrinally load-bearing. First, the experience is presented as fully bodily as well as spiritual: Motovilov does not merely understand something but feels warmth, smells fragrance, and is bathed in light — the whole person, body and soul, is drawn into the grace. This is consonant with the Orthodox refusal to spiritualize salvation into a purely interior or intellectual event; the body, too, is destined for glory. Second, the snow that does not melt is the hinge of the whole scene. It marks the grace as uncreated and divine rather than a natural or psychological warmth: the light and heat do not radiate outward into the physical world to alter it, because they are not of that world; they are God’s own energy, perceived by a man whom grace has made able to perceive it (cf. Palamas, Triads; and the reading in Little Russian Philokalia). Seraphim, on this telling, is not performing a wonder for its own sake but answering Motovilov’s question in the only adequate way — by letting him taste the thing itself.

Nicholas Motovilov

The witness deserves his own portrait, because so much depends on him. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Motovilov (May 3, 1809 – January 14, 1879) was a landowner of the Simbirsk region who entered government service in 1827 and later served as a Justice of the Peace (Nikolay Motovilov, biographical summary, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Motovilov, drawn from Russian hagiographic and Diveyevo sources). The hagiographic tradition records that he came to Seraphim gravely ill — paralyzed and bedridden — and was healed; he thereafter regarded himself as bound to the elder, and is remembered in Russian piety as “the servant of Seraphim and of the Mother of God” (ibid.; the healing is a hagiographic claim, recorded in the Diveyevo material and not independently documented).

In 1840 he married Elena (Yelena) Ivanovna Meliukova, connected to the circle of Seraphim’s Diveyevo disciples (ibid.). Motovilov devoted much of his life and fortune to the Diveyevo convent, which Seraphim had spiritually fathered, earning the nickname “the breadwinner of Diveyevo” (ibid.). His later years were marked by behavior his neighbors took for mental illness — he is sometimes counted among the yurodivye, the fools-for-Christ — and the Wikipedia summary, following the Russian sources, records an attempted suicide in his youth said to have been halted by an apparition of the Theotokos (ibid.). He died in 1879 and was buried at Diveyevo, twenty-four years before the canonization of the saint whose memory he had labored to promote (ibid.). His widow Elena Ivanovna preserved his papers; their fate is the subject of the transmission problem.

This biography matters for source criticism in two directions at once. On the one hand, Motovilov’s instability and his decades-long zeal to advance Seraphim’s cause are exactly the features a critic notes when weighing his testimony. On the other, his lifelong, costly fidelity to Diveyevo is the kind of fact that defenders cite for his basic sincerity. The compendium states both and adjudicates neither.

Why the Text Became the Summary of Orthodox Spirituality

Several factors converged to give this one conversation its outsized place.

First, its timing. Nilus published the text in 1903, the very year of Seraphim’s glorification in the presence of Tsar Nicholas II — so the conversation entered Orthodox consciousness fused with the canonization itself, at the high-water mark of pre-revolutionary Russian religious feeling (cf. Little Russian Philokalia; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov).

Second, its theology. The twentieth-century Orthodox theological revival — Lossky, Ware, and the neo-patristic movement — found in the opening saying a single, memorable formula for what it wished to recover: that the goal of Christian life is not moral improvement but real, conscious communion with God the Holy Spirit. Ware’s judgment that the saying “sums up the whole spiritual tradition of the Orthodox Church,” made on Lossky’s authority, is representative of how the modern Orthodox tradition has elevated the text (Ware, The Orthodox Church; Lossky, Mystical Theology).

Third, its experiential vividness. Where the patristic doctrine of the uncreated light is often stated abstractly, the forest scene gives it a face, a temperature, and a fragrance. Fr. Seraphim Rose included the conversation as the centerpiece of his Little Russian Philokalia volume precisely because it served as a concrete illustration of theosis and of the continuity of the hesychast tradition into the modern era (Rose, Little Russian Philokalia I; see the Rose volume).

The result is a paradox the next file confronts directly: the text that the modern Orthodox tradition treats as a summary of its whole spirituality is also the text in the Seraphim corpus whose chain of transmission is the most fragile.

References

St. Seraphim of Sarov. Conversation with N. A. Motovilov on the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit. English translations consulted: orthochristian.com/47866 and pravoslavie.ru/47867 (standard English rendering); orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/wonderful.aspx. As included in Rose, Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. I.
Rose, Seraphim, ed. and trans. Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. I: St. Seraphim of Sarov. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1978.
Zander, Valentine. St. Seraphim of Sarov. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. London: Penguin Books, rev. ed.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976.
“Nikolay Motovilov.” Biographical summary at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Motovilov (used to locate dates and Diveyevo-source claims; hagiographic details cross-referenced to the Diveyevo Chronicle tradition, not independently documented).