Russia’s Beloved Saint

St. Seraphim’s place in Russian and world Orthodoxy: the frequently repeated assessment that he is the most widely beloved of modern Russian saints (reported here as an attributed judgment, not a measurable fact); the iconography that fixed his image — the rock, the bear, and the Umilenie (Tenderness) icon of the Theotokos before which he died; the two feast days, January 2 (repose) and July 19 (glorification and uncovering of relics); and his unusual reception in the West through the early English Lives and the long literature comparing him with Francis of Assisi.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1903), with pan-Orthodox and Western reception

“The Most Beloved Modern Russian Saint”

It is commonplace, in both popular and scholarly writing, to call St. Seraphim of Sarov the most beloved of modern Russian saints. The English Little Russian Philokalia introduces him as “one of Russia’s best-loved saints” (Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. 1, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood); the same superlative recurs across catechetical literature, parish lives, and academic surveys of Russian spirituality. The historian Gregory Freeze, writing on the contested politics of the 1903 glorification, takes for granted the extraordinary breadth of his cult even before canonization — the popular pressure for his glorification was itself a political fact of late imperial Russia (Freeze, “Subversive Piety,” Journal of Modern History 68, 1996; see Canonization 1903).

This guide reports that assessment as an attributed judgment rather than a measurable claim. “Most beloved” is not a quantity one can verify; what can be said with confidence is that the assessment is widely and independently made — by Russian churchmen, by Western translators who first carried his name abroad, and by twentieth-century émigré writers — and that the institutional facts (a glorification attended by the Tsar; a cult that survived seventy years of Soviet suppression and re-erupted in 1991) are consistent with it. The reasons commonly given for his reach are his accessibility — a hieromonk who greeted every visitor as “my joy” and with the paschal “Christ is risen!” (see Paschal Joy) — and the universality of his central teaching, the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, which is addressed to layfolk as much as monks (see The Conversation).

Iconography: The Rock, the Bear, the Umilenie

Three images dominate the iconography of St. Seraphim, and each is tied to an episode in the Life.

The rock. The most theologically weighted image shows the saint kneeling on a great stone, hands raised in prayer, often by night in the forest. It depicts his thousand days and nights of prayer on a rock — the podvig of standing in prayer, by tradition repeating the Publican’s words “O God, be merciful to me a sinner,” recounted in the 1839 Life and elaborated in Chichagov’s Chronicle (see Thousand Days on the Rock). The image fixes the saint as a hesychast — the ascetic labor that grounds the later teaching on the Spirit.

The bear. The most affectionately popular image shows St. Seraphim in his forest hermitage feeding a bear from his hand. The episode descends from the recollection of a Diveyevo nun (Matrona Pleshcheyeva in the tradition) who came upon the elder feeding the wild bear bread “as though it were a lamb,” and was reassured by his calm; the scene is among the most reproduced of all Seraphim icons and prints (Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. 1; cf. the standard iconographic types). The motif of the saint at peace with the wild beast is exactly the point at which the comparison with Francis of Assisi is most often drawn (below).

The Umilenie. The third image is the icon before which he died. St. Seraphim had a particular devotion to an icon of the Mother of God of the type Umilenie (“Tenderness” / “Of the Loving-Kindness”), which he called “Joy of All Joys,” and he was found dead on January 2, 1833, kneeling before it (Wikipedia, “Seraphim of Sarov,” cross-checked against the Life; OCA, oca.org). His personal Umilenie icon became one of the great treasures of the tradition; in the twentieth century it passed into the keeping of the Russian Church’s hierarchy and has been kept at the Patriarchal residence — a relic of the second order alongside his bodily relics. Icons of St. Seraphim frequently set him beside or beneath this image of the Theotokos, binding his whole spirituality to the Mother of God who, in the Diveyevo tradition, walked the earth of her “fourth lot” (see Founding and Guidance).

The Two Feasts

St. Seraphim is commemorated twice in the year, and the two dates frame the two halves of his story.

January 2 (Old Style; January 15 New Style) — his repose in 1833, kneeling before the Umilenie icon. This is his “death-day” feast in the ancient sense, the day the Church keeps as his principal commemoration (Wikipedia; OCA, oca.org).
July 19 (Old Style; August 1 New Style) — his glorification and the uncovering of his relics, which took place at Sarov in 1903 in the presence of Tsar Nicholas II and the imperial family (OCA, “Uncovering of the relics of Venerable Seraphim of Sarov,” oca.org; see Canonization 1903). Because the Russian Church keeps the Julian calendar, this falls on August 1 by the civil Gregorian reckoning — the date around which the great modern Sarov–Diveyevo pilgrimages cluster (see Diveyevo Today).

A note on the birth year that the feasts do not settle: the Life tradition gives his birth as 1754, while some accounts give 1759; this guide reports the range rather than collapsing it [Disputed: the 1839 Life tradition and most lives give 1754; a minority of accounts give 1759].

Reception Beyond Russia

St. Seraphim has had a reception in the West unusual for a saint so embedded in a particular Russian landscape, and that reception came largely through a small number of early translations that introduced English readers not only to him but, through him, to Orthodox spirituality itself.

Valentine (Valentina) Zander. The most widely read modern English Life is Valentine Zander’s St. Seraphim of Sarov, translated by Sister Gabriel Anne and published by SPCK in London (and by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975). Zander, a Russian émigré, built her account from the recollections of those who knew the pre-1917 cult and from her own pilgrimages to Sarov before the Revolution, giving the book the character of a witness to a world the Soviet state had erased (Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, SPCK/SVS, 1975).

The Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. 1. On the American side, the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood at Platina made St. Seraphim the first volume of its Little Russian Philokalia series — a deliberate statement that he stood at the head of the modern Russian ascetic tradition the Brotherhood wished to carry into English. The volume gathers the Life, the Spiritual Instructions, the Motovilov “Conversation on the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit,” and the Diveyevo material in one place (Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. 1: St. Seraphim of Sarov, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood/SVS Press). For a generation of English-speaking converts, this book was their introduction to Orthodox spirituality, with Seraphim as the door.

Iulia de Beausobre. A different, more literary reception came through Iulia de Beausobre’s Flame in the Snow (London, 1945), perhaps the best-known account in English of its time. De Beausobre, who had survived Soviet prisons and labor camps, drew on the stories and legends of the saint that circulated among Russians in extremity, and her book carried Seraphim into the wider Western literary imagination as a figure of light against darkness (scholarship notes that her account and Zander’s depend largely on the same underlying sources). The fact that Flame in the Snow was written out of the Gulag experience is itself part of the saint’s reception: he became, for the persecuted Russian Church, a sign that holiness outlasts the state.

That reach extended even beyond Orthodoxy: Pope John Paul II named St. Seraphim among the saints he revered in Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), and the Anglican Communion commemorates him on January 2 (Wikipedia, “Seraphim of Sarov,” used as locator).

The Comparison with Francis of Assisi

No comparison is drawn more often, or more carefully qualified, than the one between St. Seraphim and Francis of Assisi. The surface parallels are real and have invited the pairing for over a century: both are remembered for tenderness toward wild animals (Francis and the wolf, Seraphim and the bear), both for a spirituality of joy and light, both as figures of radical poverty and gentleness who reoriented the piety of their nations.

But the most influential Orthodox treatment of the comparison — that of Mitrophan Lodyzhensky, in his book Light Invisible (Nevidimyi Svet, ch. 4) — exists precisely to insist on the differences, and they are differences of mystical theology, not temperament. Lodyzhensky contrasts:

Humility versus presumption. Seraphim’s whole interior life, on Lodyzhensky’s reading, was governed by the recognition of his own unworthiness and the Publican’s prayer; the uncreated light came to him unsought, during repentance, leaving him astonished. Francis, by contrast, prayed to receive the marks of Christ’s suffering, and his vision of the seraph-crucifix Lodyzhensky reads as the fruit of an active, deliberately cultivated imagination rather than a passively received grace (Lodyzhensky, Light Invisible, ch. 4).
The stigmata. The Franciscan stigmata — bodily wounds reproducing the Passion — have no counterpart in Seraphim or in Orthodox sanctity generally; Lodyzhensky and the wider Orthodox literature read sensible, somatic phenomena of this kind with suspicion, as the kind of thing the tradition warns against rather than seeks.
Sobriety versus ecstasy, and prelest. The governing Orthodox category in the comparison is prelest (spiritual delusion) — the demonic suggestion that one has already attained sanctity, breeding vainglory. Lodyzhensky argues that Francis’s pattern of seeking and presuming spiritual experience exposed him to exactly this danger, whereas Seraphim’s nepsis (watchful sobriety) and self-accusation guarded against it (Lodyzhensky, Light Invisible, ch. 4; orthodoxinfo.com, “A Comparison: Francis of Assisi and St. Seraphim of Sarov”).

This is, plainly, an Orthodox polemical reading, and it should be received as such: it is a tradition-specific interpretation, not a neutral history of two mystics, and Western writers (and some Orthodox ones) have found it unfair to Francis. The point worth carrying forward is that the comparison is a genre of its own in the literature — and that within that genre the Orthodox contribution is less interested in the parallels than in using them to articulate, by contrast, what Orthodox mystical sobriety means. Other comparisons in the same vein have set Seraphim beside Western contemplatives more sympathetically (e.g., Michael Plekon’s pairing of Seraphim with Thomas Merton of Gethsemani), showing that the comparison need not be polemical to be illuminating.

References

Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. 1: St. Seraphim of Sarov. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood (also SVS Press) — “one of Russia’s best-loved saints”; the Life, Instructions, Motovilov “Conversation,” and Diveyevo material; the bear episode.
Zander, Valentine. St. Seraphim of Sarov. Trans. Sister Gabriel Anne. London: SPCK; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975.
de Beausobre, Iulia. Flame in the Snow: A Life of St. Serafim of Sarov. London: Constable, 1945.
Lodyzhensky, Mitrophan. Light Invisible (Nevidimyi Svet): Satisfying the Thirst for Happiness, ch. 4 — the Seraphim/Francis comparison; trans. excerpted at orthodoxinfo.com, “A Comparison: Francis of Assisi and St. Seraphim of Sarov,” and orthochristian.com/90893.html.
Freeze, Gregory L. “Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia.” Journal of Modern History 68, no. 2 (1996) — the politics and breadth of the cult around the 1903 glorification.
Plekon, Michael. “Two Monks: Thomas of Gethsemani and Seraphim of Sarov.” The Merton Seasonal 40, no. 2 — a non-polemical comparison.
Orthodox Church in America. “Uncovering of the relics of Venerable Seraphim of Sarov” (July 19); life and repose (January 2). oca.org. Wikipedia, “Seraphim of Sarov” (used to locate feast dates, the Umilenie icon, and the John Paul II / Anglican commemorations; cross-checked against the Life and OCA).