Spiritual Father in the Time of Terror

Through the 1920s, as the Soviet state dismantled the Russian Church, the monk Seraphim served as a confessor and spiritual father at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, and there — the biographies relate — his eldership began: clergy and laity came to him for confession and counsel in a city where the open practice of the faith had become dangerous. This file describes that early eldership and the tradition of starchestvo in which it stood, set against the terror of the first Soviet decade.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (20th-c. elder; Soviet period)

The Confessor of the Lavra

After his tonsure as Varnava and his ordination, the future elder Seraphim was appointed a confessor at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra — and, the Life relates, became one of the Lavra’s principal confessors, hearing the confessions of monks, parish clergy, and the laypeople who continued to crowd the monastery’s churches (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim; Moscow Patriarchate notice, 2000). The biographies describe long hours in the confessional, streams of penitents, and a gift for reading hearts and giving the word each soul needed — the marks, in the hagiographical idiom, of a true starets (Filimonov). These accounts are the Life’s testimony to the beginning of his reputation; they are reported here as what the biography relates, not as independently documented fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5; the wider source problem is treated in The Problem of Embellishment).

What gives the picture historical plausibility is the setting. In the 1920s the Lavra was one of the last great centers where the faithful of Petrograd/Leningrad could still gather, confess, and receive counsel, even as the surrounding church-life was being strangled. A gifted confessor in such a place would inevitably draw the burdened — and the burdens of the 1920s were extreme.

The Tradition of Eldership

Seraphim’s confessorship stood within the Russian tradition of starchestvo — the eldership revived in the nineteenth century at Optina, Sarov, Valaam, and Glinsk, in which an experienced monk becomes the spiritual father of others, guiding them through the disclosure of thoughts (logismoi), obedience, and the Jesus Prayer (on the tradition, see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction; on the Jesus Prayer, Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). The biographies place Seraphim consciously in this lineage, naming the elder Varnava of Gethsemane, the elders of Valaam, and St. John of Kronstadt among his influences (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim; the reliability of these named connections is weighed in The Biographies).

What distinguished his eldership from that of the nineteenth-century elders was its setting: not the ordered monastic peace of imperial Optina but the disorder and danger of the persecuted church. Spiritual direction in the 1920s and 1930s carried risk — both for the elder, who could be denounced as a counter-revolutionary, and for the penitent, who could be informed upon. The eldership of the Soviet period was necessarily a more hidden, more perilous thing than its imperial predecessor, and the biographies present Seraphim’s work in exactly these terms (Filimonov; on the danger, Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1984, vol. 1).

Counsel Amid the Terror

The first Soviet decade brought a series of blows the faithful had to be helped to bear: the civil-war repression, the 1921–1922 famine and the church-treasure confiscations that accompanied it, the Renovationist schism of 1922 that split the Church under state sponsorship, the arrest and trial of Patriarch Tikhon, and the steady criminalization of religious activity (on these, Orthodoxy: Soviet Persecution; Pospielovsky 1984, vol. 1, chs. 3–4; on Tikhon, St. Tikhon of Moscow). The biographies present Seraphim as a steadying presence through all this — counseling endurance, repentance, and trust in providence, and (the Life relates) refusing the Renovationist schism and remaining loyal to the canonical Church and to Patriarch Tikhon and his successors (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim).

These accounts anticipate the spiritual teaching that would become his signature — the counsel of humble endurance under persecution, of accepting all that befalls as from the hand of God, later crystallized in the prose-poem “From Me This Has Come” (see From Me This Has Come and The Counsel of the Elder). The teaching was forged, the biographies imply, in exactly the furnace the 1920s provided.

The Approach of Withdrawal

By the end of the 1920s two pressures converged: Seraphim’s own health was failing (the biographies speak of rheumatism and exhaustion from the ascetic regime and the confessor’s labors), and the Lavra itself was being closed down around him (see The Lavra under Assault). The combination drove him, around 1930, to retire to the town of Vyritsa south of Leningrad — where, far from ending his eldership, the withdrawal would deepen it, as the streams of visitors followed him out of the city (see Retirement to Vyritsa). The confessor of the Lavra was about to become the hidden elder of Vyritsa.

See Also

References

  • Filimonov, Valentin P. Вырицкий старец преподобный Серафим [Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim]. St. Petersburg, 1990s–2000s. (Confessorship at the Lavra; the named spiritual influences; loyalty to the canonical Church against the Renovationists; failing health.)
  • Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). Hagiographical notice, glorification of August 2000.
  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1984. (The 1922 confiscations; the Renovationist schism; the trial of Tikhon; the danger of spiritual ministry.)