Ambrose in the Line of Optina

St. Ambrose of Optina (Alexander Grenkov, 1812–1891) is the summit of the Optina eldership — the disciple of both St. Leonid and St. Macarius who became the most famous starets in Russian history. This file places him in the lineage and traces the succession that runs through him; the full account of his life, counsel, illness, and reception is deferred to his own collection, which this file links throughout.

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

Note: the Full Life Is Treated Elsewhere

St. Ambrose is the one Optina elder who already has a dedicated collection in this repository. The purpose of this file is not to duplicate that account but to fix Ambrose’s position in the lineage of Optina elders that this compendium follows. For his youth and his conversion, his formation, his eldership and the daily crowds, his rhymed counsel and letters, his lifelong illness, his relation to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the founding of Shamordino, the publishing work, and his glorification, see the full guide: St. Ambrose of Optina (Alexander Grenkov, 1812–1891; canonized 1988).

From Grenkov to the Elder Ambrose

Alexander Mikhailovich Grenkov was born in 1812 in the village of Bolshaya Lipovitsa in Tambov province, the son of a church sacristan, and studied at the Tambov seminary, where he was brilliant, lively, and popular (Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, Nordland, 1972, ch. 1; see St. Ambrose of Optina: Grenkov’s Youth). A grave illness and a vow made during it turned him toward the monastic life, and in 1839 he came to Optina, where he was received into the eldership tradition at its living source (Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, 1972, ch. 2). This much belongs here because it fixes the crucial fact for the lineage: Ambrose was formed under both of the first two Optina elders.

He came first under St. Leonid, who received him and began his direction; and when Leonid, near his death in 1841, directed the young monk onward, Ambrose passed to St. Macarius, becoming Macarius’s cell-attendant, his secretary in the great correspondence and the publishing work, and at length his chosen successor (Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, 1972, ch. 2–3, on Ambrose under Leonid and Macarius; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn i eyo vremya, Jordanville, 1970; see St. Leonid the First Elder and St. Macarius and the Publishing Work). In Ambrose, therefore, the two founding streams of the Optina eldership — Leonid’s earthy, popular directness and Macarius’s cultivated, bookish refinement — met and were fused; and this fusion is part of why he could speak with equal power to an illiterate peasant woman and to Vladimir Soloviev (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on Ambrose as heir of both elders; see St. Ambrose of Optina: Under Leonid and Macarius).

The Summit of the Line

When Macarius died in 1860, Ambrose — though himself a chronic invalid, confined for much of his life to his cell and often to his bed — became the principal elder of Optina, and for the next thirty-one years, until his death in 1891, he was the center of its life and the most sought-after spiritual guide in Russia (Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, 1972, ch. 3–4; see St. Ambrose of Optina: Becoming the Elder). The scale of his eldership exceeded anything before it at Optina: where Leonid and Macarius had received many, Ambrose received a nation. Peasants, merchants, nobles, bishops, and the leading writers and thinkers of the age came to the little window of his cell; the daily crowds are a phenomenon in their own right (see The Shamordino Convent and the Crowds; and St. Ambrose of Optina: The Daily Crowds).

Within the lineage, Ambrose is rightly called the greatest of the elders — not because holiness admits of simple ranking, but because in him the Optina eldership reached its fullest development and its widest reach, and because the elders who followed him were, almost without exception, his own disciples (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on Ambrose as the summit; Paert, Spiritual Elders, Northern Illinois University Press, 2010, ch. 4–5). The line does not end with him but flows through him: the later elders — Anatoly (Zertsalov), Joseph (Litovkin), Barsanuphius, Anatoly (Potapov), Nektary — were formed in his shadow and carried his spirit into the twentieth century (see The Later Elders and The Last Elders).

Ambrose’s Continuation of the Publishing Work

One thread of the lineage that runs directly through Ambrose is the publishing work. As Macarius’s secretary he had labored on the Optina editions of the fathers, and after Macarius’s death he continued and extended the enterprise, overseeing further patristic editions and the diffusion of the Paisian corpus (see The Published Inheritance and, for the full account, St. Ambrose of Optina: The Optina Editions). In this too he is the hinge of the line: the eldership and the publishing of the fathers, joined under Macarius, were carried together into the later century by Ambrose.

The Zosima Question — Treated in His Own Collection

The single most famous fact about Ambrose in the wider culture — that he stands behind the Elder Zosima of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov — is a matter of scholarly debate that must be handled with care, and it is treated at length, from both sides, in Ambrose’s own collection (see St. Ambrose of Optina: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy). This compendium takes up the question again only in its proper place, as part of the larger theme of Optina and the Russian intelligentsia, and there too soberly and without adjudication (see Optina and the Russian Intelligentsia). The essential caution belongs here as well: Zosima is a literary character drawing on Ambrose and on St. Tikhon of Zadonsk and on Dostoevsky’s own theology, and the historical elder must never be collapsed into the fictional one (Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, 1972, the principal study of the question; Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination, Peter Lang, 1995).

See Also

References

  • Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (Grenkov’s youth; formation under Leonid and Macarius; the eldership; the Zosima question — the principal English study.)
  • Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (Ambrose as heir of both elders and summit of the line.)
  • Stanton, Leonard J. The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. (Ambrose and Russian letters; the Zosima debt as reception.)
  • Paert, Irina. Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. (Ch. 4–5: Ambrose and the later Optina elders.)
  • The full collection: St. Ambrose of Optina, governed by the repository METHODOLOGY, on which the biographical particulars above draw.