The Monastery and the Skete

Optina Pustyn — the Vvedensky (Entrance of the Theotokos) Hermitage near Kozelsk in Kaluga province — was an ancient but obscure forest monastery until, in 1821, a skete dedicated to St. John the Forerunner was built beside it to shelter a community given wholly to prayer. The skete, planted by hermits from the Roslavl forests under the encouragement of Bishop Philaret of Kaluga, became the physical cradle of the Russian eldership revival.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Optina synaxis glorified 1996 local / 2000 general)

The Place: the Vvedensky Hermitage near Kozelsk

Optina Pustyn stands in a pine forest on the right bank of the river Zhizdra, across from the small town of Kozelsk in what was then Kaluga province, about two hundred kilometers southwest of Moscow. Its full name is the Vvedenskaya Optina Pustyn — the Hermitage of the Entrance of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple — “pustyn” being the Russian word for a “desert” or wilderness hermitage (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn i eyo vremya, Jordanville, 1970, on the site and name; cf. Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, Nordland, 1972, ch. 1, on the geography of Optina). Tradition connects the foundation with a repentant fourteenth-century brigand named Opta (in monasticism Makary), from whom the name “Optina” is popularly derived, though the etymology is uncertain and the monastery’s early history is thinly documented (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the legendary foundation; the derivation is traditional and not securely attested). What is certain is that by the eighteenth century Optina was a small, poor, and undistinguished house, at times nearly extinguished, one among hundreds of Russian monasteries and in no way marked out for what it would become.

The transformation of Optina belongs to the nineteenth century and above all to a single institution built beside the monastery: the skete. The rise of Optina cannot be understood apart from the skete, because it was in the skete, and not in the larger cenobitic monastery, that the eldership was housed and guarded for a hundred years (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the centrality of the skete; Paert, Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy, Northern Illinois University Press, 2010, ch. 3, on the institutional shape of Optina startchestvo).

The Founding of the Skete of St. John the Forerunner, 1821

The decisive figure in the establishment of the skete was the diocesan bishop, Filaret (Amfiteatrov) of Kaluga — later Metropolitan of Kiev — a fervent admirer of the Paisian ideal of monastic prayer and a supporter of the eldership (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on Bishop Filaret of Kaluga; Elder Anthony of Optina, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, on the skete’s foundation). In 1821 Bishop Filaret encouraged the building of a skete near Optina as a dependency of the monastery — a small, enclosed settlement where a handful of monks could devote themselves more completely to solitude and prayer, apart from the traffic of the larger house (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; “The Skete of St. John the Forerunner, Optina Monastery,” OrthoChristian.com, following the Optina hagiographies). The skete was dedicated to St. John the Baptist and Forerunner — the patron of hermits and the desert — and set a short walk from the monastery, screened by the forest.

To build and inhabit it, Bishop Filaret turned to a group of hermits then living in the Roslavl forests in the neighboring Smolensk region: forest-dwellers who had spent years in the eremitic life under spiritual fathers formed in the tradition of St. Paisius Velichkovsky (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the Roslavl hermits; Elder Anthony of Optina, St. Herman Brotherhood, on the Putilov brothers’ years in the Roslavl forest). Among them were two brothers who would become central to Optina’s story and are counted among the glorified elders: Timothy Putilov, the future Abbot Moses (St. Moses of Optina, d. 1862), and his younger brother Alexander Putilov, the future St. Anthony of Optina (d. 1865). The Putilov brothers, with a few companions, arrived at Optina in 1822 to begin the work of building the skete (the standard accounts place their arrival on 6 July 1822; Elder Anthony of Optina, St. Herman Brotherhood; “Moses (Putilov) of Optina,” St. John the Baptist Cathedral, following the Optina Lives). They cleared ground, built cells, enclosed the settlement with a fence, and raised a small wooden church, which was consecrated to St. John the Forerunner about a year later (Elder Anthony of Optina, St. Herman Brotherhood).

Moses and Anthony Putilov

The two brothers gave the skete its first order of life. St. Moses (Putilov) was made superior of the whole Optina monastery in the mid-1820s — the standard Optina Lives place his appointment in 1826, though some accounts give 1825 [Disputed: Elder Anthony of Optina, St. Herman Brotherhood, and “Moses (Putilov) of Optina,” St. John the Baptist Cathedral, give 1826; other summaries give 1825] — and he governed it for some thirty-seven years, until his death in 1862 (Elder Anthony of Optina, St. Herman Brotherhood; “Moses (Putilov) of Optina,” St. John the Baptist Cathedral). It was Moses, as abbot, who welcomed the great elders into the monastery and shielded the eldership from the suspicion it aroused; his administrative protection was the indispensable condition of Optina’s flowering (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on Abbot Moses as protector of the elders; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 3). St. Anthony (Putilov), the younger brother, was placed in charge of the skete itself when Moses became abbot, and he governed it for some fourteen years, a monk of great gentleness who bore a painful illness in his legs for much of his life (Elder Anthony of Optina, St. Herman Brotherhood, on Anthony’s superiorship of the skete and his infirmity).

Moses and Anthony are among the fourteen glorified Optina elders, and their labor is the foundation on which the more famous elders built; but they were builders and abbots more than they were, in the strict sense, startsy of the confessional type. The eldership proper — the daily reception of monks and laypeople for the disclosure of thoughts and the direction of souls — begins at Optina with the man Abbot Moses invited to the skete in 1829: St. Leonid (see St. Leonid the First Elder).

The Skete as the Cradle of the Eldership

The architecture of Optina expressed its spiritual order. The large monastery, with its cathedral and its guest quarters, faced the world and received the crowds; the skete, hidden in the forest behind its own wall and gate, was the place of stillness where the elders lived, prayed the Jesus Prayer, and — through the small window of the elder’s cell or the skete gate — received those who came for counsel (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the skete’s seclusion and the elders’ reception of visitors; Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, 1972, ch. 1, on the physical setting of Ambrose’s eldership). Over the skete gate was later inscribed a verse of the Psalter, and within its garden the elders’ cells stood among apple trees; the whole was, by design, a “desert within the desert” (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970). The library of the skete became one of the treasures of Russian monasticism, for it was here that the patristic manuscripts and the great Optina publishing work of the mid-century were housed and produced (see St. Macarius and the Publishing Work; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the skete library).

For roughly a century — from the arrival of St. Leonid in 1829 to the closure of the monastery in the early 1920s — an almost unbroken succession of elders occupied this small enclosure. That continuity, elder handing on the eldership to elder within a single skete, is what makes Optina unique in Russian church history: not one holy man but a lineage, a school of prayer maintained across four generations (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the succession; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, on Optina as a school of eldership; see Startchestvo and Spiritual Direction). The next file traces the spiritual source of that lineage back beyond Optina, to St. Paisius Velichkovsky and the Holy Mountain.

References

Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya [Optina Pustyn and Its Era]. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (The site, the name, Bishop Filaret of Kaluga, the Roslavl hermits, Abbot Moses, the skete as cradle of the eldership.)
Elder Anthony of Optina (Optina Elders Series). Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (The Putilov brothers, the Roslavl forest years, the founding and consecration of the skete, Anthony’s superiorship.)
Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (The geography and physical setting of Optina and the skete.)
Paert, Irina. Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. (The institutional shape of Optina startchestvo; the skete as a school of eldership.)
“The Skete of St. John the Forerunner, Optina Monastery”; “Moses (Putilov) of Optina, founder of the Optina Skete.” OrthoChristian.com and the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist (Washington, DC), following the Optina hagiographies — used to locate the foundation date (1821) and the Putilovs’ arrival, cross-checked against Kontzevitch and the St. Herman Lives.