Paschal Joy and the Theotokos

The inner key to St. Seraphim’s eldership is joy — the gladness of the Resurrection lived not on Pascha only but through the whole year. He greeted every soul with “Christ is risen, my joy!”, and his counsel was steeped in the conviction that the acquisition of the Holy Spirit fills a person with a peace and joy not of this world. This joy was inseparable from his lifelong devotion to the Mother of God, who (the Lives relate) appeared to him many times and at the last summoned him home. He died kneeling before Her Umilenie (“Tenderness”) icon on January 2, 1833, discovered when the candle that had set his books smoldering was smelled by a passing monk. This file treats that spirituality and St. Seraphim’s place in the renewed Russian eldership.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1903)

The Perpetual Pascha

The most recognizable note of St. Seraphim’s life is his year-round Paschal greeting. He addressed everyone who came to him — at any season — with “Christ is risen, my joy!” (OCA, Repose of Venerable Seraphim, Wonderworker of Sarov). The greeting was not a mannerism but a confession: that for one who has begun to acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit, the joy of the Resurrection is a permanent condition, not an annual feast.

This is the experiential center of his teaching as recorded in the conversation with Motovilov: the aim of Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, and the sign of that acquisition is an overwhelming, inexpressible peace and joy flooding soul and body (St. Seraphim, Conversation with Motovilov; see Reception of Pilgrims). The greeting “my joy” (radost’ moya), with which he met each person, extended that inner gladness outward as a way of seeing every human being as a cause for rejoicing — the joy of the Resurrection recognized in the face of the visitor.

The other half of his most famous saying carries the same logic into mission: “Acquire the Spirit of peace, and thousands around you will be saved.” Joy and peace are not private consolations but the very means by which a holy person becomes a source of salvation for others — a teaching that places St. Seraphim’s joy at the heart of his eldership rather than at its decorative edge.

It is worth marking how unusual this emphasis is against the background of much ascetic literature, which dwells by preference on compunction, mourning for sin, and the fear of God. St. Seraphim does not deny these — his own life was one of extreme penance — but he subordinates them to their end, which is the joy of the Holy Spirit. The mourning of repentance is, for him, the seed; the harvest is gladness. This is why he could greet a grieving or frightened pilgrim with “Christ is risen, my joy!” without mockery of their trouble: the greeting was a reorientation, a turning of the visitor’s eyes from their grief to the Resurrection in which it is already, in principle, overcome. The Paschal greeting is thus not a denial of the cross but the announcement that the cross has issued in the empty tomb — and that the same passage from death to life is offered to the one standing before him.

Devotion to the Mother of God

St. Seraphim’s joy was bound up with an intense, lifelong devotion to the Theotokos. The Lives relate that the Mother of God appeared to him repeatedly across his life — Russian tradition counts these visitations as twelve appearances, beginning with a childhood healing and culminating in the final vision shortly before his death (the counting of “twelve” is the traditional reckoning preserved in the Diveyevo and hagiographical literature; the OCA Life enumerates several without fixing the total at twelve). Among those the Life names:

a healing in childhood, when (the tradition holds) the Mother of God promised through the Kursk-Root icon to visit and heal him;
a healing of a grave dropsy in his early monastic years, when “the Mother of God appeared to him accompanied by the holy Apostles Peter and John”;
a visitation after his beating by robbers, healing his injuries;
the November 25, 1825 appearance directing him to end his seclusion (and, in the Diveyevo tradition, to found the Mill community and dig the Kanavka);
a final vision, in the last year of his life, in which the Mother of God came with St. John the Baptist, St. John the Theologian, and twelve virgin-martyrs, telling him: “Soon, My dear one, you shall be with us” (OCA, Repose).

This devotion shaped Diveyevo’s whole life — the Theotokos as Abbess, the Kanavka as Her path, the rule of 150 salutations — treated in the companion section (see Holy Canal and Mantle).

Death Before the Umilenie Icon (January 2, 1833)

St. Seraphim reposed in his cell on January 2, 1833 (Old Style; the OCA commemorates the repose on January 2). He had told the sisters and brethren that his end was near, and the final vision of the Mother of God had announced it. He was found kneeling in prayer before the icon of the Mother of God that had accompanied his whole life — the Umilenie (Умиление, “Tenderness”) icon, which he called “Joy of all Joys” — his arms crossed upon his breast (OCA, Repose; Tenderness Icon: Inspiration of St. Seraphim).

The discovery is recorded in detail. Early on the morning of January 2 — about six o’clock, before the early Liturgy — Hieromonk Pavel (Paul), whose cell was near the saint’s, smelled smoke as he passed St. Seraphim’s door. Receiving no answer to his knock — the door was latched from within — he summoned others; the novice Anikita broke the door from its hinges, and the monks found that some coarse linen, with books and cloth, had begun to smolder, apparently from a fallen candle, and there St. Seraphim was found kneeling dead at prayer before the icon, his hands crossed on his breast (OCA, Repose; full-of-grace-and-truth, accounts of the discovery). The candle that had burned down and ignited his books became, in the tradition, an emblem of a life consumed in prayer.

The saint had prepared for this end with characteristic deliberateness. He had kept a coffin in his cell, hewn from a single oak, and had bidden the brethren bury him in it; in his last weeks he had spoken openly of his approaching death, had taken leave of the sisters and of his closest disciples, and — the Diveyevo tradition holds — had entrusted to the sisters the candle-end from before his icon with the prophecy that he would one day be greeted at Diveyevo with it, a prophecy fulfilled at the translation of his relics in 1991 (see Holy Canal and Mantle). His repose, far from being an accident of a stray flame, is remembered as the deliberate completion of a life: a man found on his knees before the “Joy of all Joys,” in the posture of prayer he had never abandoned.

The Umilenie Icon and Its Later History

The Umilenie (“Tenderness”) icon of Diveyevo, before which the saint died, was venerated thereafter as one of the convent’s chief treasures; St. Seraphim had kept a perpetual lamp before it and anointed the sick with oil from that lamp. After the saint’s death the icon passed into the keeping of the Diveyevo community. In the upheavals of the twentieth century the original was removed for safekeeping; it survived and is, by the tradition’s account, preserved within the Russian Orthodox Church’s patriarchal keeping (the icon long associated with the Moscow patriarchal residence), while a venerated copy remains at Diveyevo and the “Joy of all Joys” type has been widely reproduced (Tenderness Icon: Inspiration of St. Seraphim; iconrussia.ru, “Joy of All Joys”). The icon’s iconographic type — the Virgin alone, hands crossed on her breast in the posture of the Annunciation “Be it unto me” — became inseparable from St. Seraphim’s memory.

St. Seraphim in the Startsy Tradition

St. Seraphim stands among the founders of the great renewed Russian eldership of the nineteenth century — the same movement, fed by the Philokalic and Paisian revival, that produced the Optina elders. He belongs to it not by institutional connection but as a parallel and kindred manifestation: the charismatic starets whose authority is personal holiness and the gifts of the Holy Spirit rather than office (see Spiritual Direction).

The continuity with Optina is real: like the Optina startsy, St. Seraphim received all who came — peasants, nobles, the educated and the simple — exercised the discernment of hearts, healed souls and bodies, and grounded his counsel in the ascetic and hesychast tradition of the Fathers. He was an exact contemporary of the first Optina elder, St. Leonid (Lev) Nagolkin (1768–1841), and the two represent the same renewal flowering at once in different places.

There is also a direct line of transmission joining the two. Both St. Seraphim and Optina drew on the Philokalic revival carried into Russia by St. Paisius (Velichkovsky) and his disciples — the recovery of the texts and practice of inner prayer that reanimated Russian monasticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. St. Seraphim’s own formation at Sarov, a house renowned for its strict cenobitic and contemplative discipline, belonged to the same renewal that, transplanted to Optina through the disciples of Paisius, produced the line of elders there. The two centers are therefore not rivals but parallel springs rising from one source; later Russian writers on the spiritual life, such as I. M. Kontzevitch in his study of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, treat St. Seraphim and Optina together precisely as joint witnesses to a single recovered tradition.

The contrast is one of mode rather than substance. The Optina eldership was a collective, institutional phenomenon — a continuous succession of elders receiving in the skete attached to a great monastery, with an outward apostolate of publishing patristic texts and engaging the Russian intelligentsia (Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima drew on it). St. Seraphim was a solitary — desert-dweller, pillar-stander, and recluse before he was an elder — whose eldership flowered late, briefly, and intensely out of decades of withdrawal, and whose distinctive notes are the Paschal joy, the luminous transfiguration witnessed by Motovilov, and the Marian cast of his whole work at Diveyevo. He is not “Optina-style,” yet he flows in the same stream: the recovery, in nineteenth-century Russia, of the ancient charism of the spirit-bearing elder. St. Seraphim was glorified by the Russian Church in 1903; his repose is commemorated on January 2, and the uncovering of his relics on July 19.

References

Orthodox Church in America. Repose of Venerable Seraphim, Wonderworker of Sarov (life, January 2). oca.org.
St. Seraphim of Sarov. On the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit: A Conversation with Motovilov. Recorded by N. A. Motovilov; published 1903.
Chichagov, Archimandrite Seraphim. Chronicles of the Seraphimo-Diveyevo Monastery. Moscow, 1896; St. Petersburg, 1903.
“Tenderness Icon: Inspiration of St. Seraphim.” A Reader’s Guide to Orthodox Icons (iconreader.wordpress.com), 2011; and “Joy of All Joys” (iconrussia.ru) — on the Umilenie icon and its later history.
“The Uncovering of the Relics of St. Seraphim of Sarov” and accounts of the discovery of his repose. full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com; OCA, Uncovering of the Relics.
For the Optina parallel: Spiritual Direction (this repository), drawing on Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn and Its Era (Jordanville, 1970), and standard accounts of the nineteenth-century Russian eldership.