From Me This Has Come

The single most famous text associated with St. Seraphim of Vyritsa: the prose-poem “От Меня это было” (“From Me This Has Come”), a meditation in which God is heard addressing the soul, declaring that every trial and affliction comes by His permission and should be received as from His hand. This file presents the poem and its providential message, and confronts the genuinely contested question of its authorship and transmission — for the attribution to the Vyritsa elder, though traditional, is not secure.

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

The Text and Its Message

“От Меня это было” — “From Me This Has Come” (sometimes rendered “This Was from Me,” “It Was I,” or “All This Was Sent by Me”) — is a prose-poem or spiritual testament cast as a direct address from God to the soul. In a series of parallel clauses it tells the soul that whatever has befallen it — its circumstances, its hardships, its place, the people around it, its sicknesses, its losses, its persecutions, even the betrayals and injustices it suffers — has come not by chance but by God’s permission and providence, and is to be received from His hand with peace and trust: “Hast thou not considered that all that concerns thee concerns Me also? … this trial has come from Me … be still, and know that I am God” (the text exists in several Russian and English versions; the wording varies by recension). Its refrain — from Me this has come — presses upon the soul the doctrine of providence: that nothing reaches it outside the will or permission of God, and that therefore everything can be borne, and offered back, in peace.

The message is deeply traditional. It is the doctrine of providence and of holy submission to the will of God that runs through the whole ascetic tradition — through Abba Isaiah, John of the Ladder, the Philokalia, and the Russian elders — distilled into a form of great pastoral directness. It is easy to see why the poem became beloved in the persecuted Soviet church and why it attached itself to an elder whose whole counsel was the endurance of affliction as from God (see The Counsel of the Elder). For a people enduring the Terror and the war, a text that named their sufferings as permitted by God and bearable in Him was a powerful consolation.

The Authorship Problem

The attribution of “From Me This Has Come” to Seraphim of Vyritsa is traditional and very widespread — it is repeated in countless devotional editions, prayer cards, and websites as “the spiritual testament of the Vyritsa elder,” often dated to 1937. But the attribution is not secure, and the honest treatment must flag it.

Several considerations unsettle the attribution. First, the text circulates in multiple forms and under multiple ascriptions, which is the classic sign of a floating devotional text rather than a fixed authored work. Second, there is a substantial case that the piece derives from an earlier source: closely parallel “It is I” / “from Me this is” meditations existed in Western devotional literature, and the Russian text has been argued to be a translation or adaptation of such a piece (associated in some accounts with the nineteenth-century English devotional tradition), reworked and Orthodoxized — in which case the elder’s role, if any, was as transmitter or adapter, not original author. Third, the firm attestation linking the specific text to the elder’s own hand is wanting: it rests on the devotional tradition and the later Life, not on a securely dated autograph.

[Disputed: the prose-poem "От Меня это было" ("From Me This Has Come") is very widely attributed to St. Seraphim of Vyritsa (and dated 1937) in the devotional literature and the *Life* (Filimonov, *Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim*); however, the text circulates in variant forms and under variant ascriptions, and a substantial view holds that it is an adaptation or translation of an earlier (including Western) devotional meditation of the "It is I / from Me this is" type, the elder's role being at most that of transmitter or adapter rather than original author. The attribution should therefore be reported as traditional but contested, and the text's authorship regarded as unsettled.]

How to Handle It

The right posture is neither to assert the attribution as fact nor to dismiss the text. It is to say what can be said: that “From Me This Has Come” is a beloved meditation on providence, traditionally associated with the Vyritsa elder and treasured as expressing his spirit, whose precise authorship and origin are unsettled and probably not original to him. Its spiritual authority does not depend on the attribution — the doctrine of providence it teaches is the Church’s, not one man’s — and so the uncertainty about authorship need not trouble the soul that finds consolation in it. But its historical attribution to Seraphim of Vyritsa is exactly the kind of claim the methodology requires to be flagged rather than repeated as fact (METHODOLOGY §4; on the wider problem, The Problem of Embellishment).

This case is, in fact, a model of the whole source problem of the cult: a genuinely edifying and traditional text, swept up into the elder’s dossier by the devotional tradition, attached to his name and a precise date, repeated everywhere as securely his — when the actual provenance is tangled and probably points elsewhere. The discipline is to love the text for its truth while telling the truth about its authorship.

See Also

References

  • Filimonov, Valentin P. Вырицкий старец преподобный Серафим [Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim]. St. Petersburg, 1990s–2000s. (The traditional attribution of “От Меня это было” to the elder, dated 1937.)
  • “От Меня это было” / “From Me This Has Come” — the text in its several Russian and English recensions (devotional editions; the variant wording and ascriptions noted in the [Disputed: …] note above).
  • Scripture echoed in the text: Psalm 46:10 (“Be still, and know that I am God”); Romans 8:28 (“all things work together for good to them that love God”); Job 1:21; Matthew 10:29–31.
  • METHODOLOGY.md, this repository, §4 (handling disputed attributions).