The Shamordino Convent and the Crowds

Two phenomena mark the height of St. Ambrose’s eldership: the immense daily crowds who came to the little window of his cell, and his founding, in 1884, of the Kazan-Ambrose women’s convent at Shamordino, a house for the poor, the sick, and the aged women whom other convents could not take. Both are treated here in the lineage context; the full account is deferred to Ambrose’s own collection.

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

The Crowds

By the 1870s and 1880s the fame of Elder Ambrose had made Optina a place of pilgrimage on a scale unprecedented in the history of the eldership. From early morning until he could no longer sit up, Ambrose — a permanent invalid who conducted his eldership largely from a reclining position in his cell — received a stream of visitors that ran into the many thousands over the course of a year: peasants with questions about a marriage, a lawsuit, a sick cow, or a wayward son; merchants and landowners; monks and nuns; bishops; and the writers and philosophers of the age (Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, Nordland, 1972, ch. 4, on the daily crowds; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn i eyo vremya, Jordanville, 1970; for the full treatment see St. Ambrose of Optina: The Daily Crowds). The women waited in the khibarka, the small guest annex; the men in the outer areas; and Ambrose moved among the visitors in his mind and heart, often answering a question before it was asked, giving to each a word suited to that soul (Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, 1972, ch. 4; the clairvoyance accounts are reported as the hagiography attests them — see St. Ambrose of Optina: Becoming the Elder).

The crowds are not a mere biographical curiosity; they are the visible form of what Optina eldership had become — an eldership no longer confined to the monks of a skete but poured out on a whole people. In Ambrose the “eldership for the world” reached its fullest expression, and the phenomenon of the crowds is the reason the meeting of Optina with Russian society, high and low, could happen at all (Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination, Peter Lang, 1995, on the “eldership for the world”; see Optina and the Russian Intelligentsia). The physical toll on a sick man was enormous; Ambrose’s illness and his bearing of it under this daily weight are a theme of his own collection (see St. Ambrose of Optina: The Invalid Elder).

The Founding of Shamordino, 1884

The Shamordino convent grew directly out of the crowds — specifically out of the women among them whom no one else would help. Among the multitudes who came to Ambrose were poor, sick, elderly, and disabled women, widows and orphans, for whom the existing convents, which generally required a dowry or contribution, had no place (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the origin of Shamordino; for the full account see St. Ambrose of Optina: Founding Shamordino). To provide for them Ambrose founded, in 1884, a women’s community at Shamordino, a village some twelve kilometers from Optina, on an estate that had come into the hands of one of his spiritual daughters; it was formally the Kazan-Ambrose (Kazanskaya Amvrosievskaya) Hermitage, dedicated to the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, dating the foundation to 1884; the Optina hagiographies; see St. Ambrose of Optina: Founding Shamordino).

What distinguished Shamordino was its charitable character. Unlike the ordinary convent of the period, Shamordino was expressly a refuge for the destitute: it took in women who had nothing, the sick and the aged, and it ran an orphanage, an almshouse, and a home for the incurable, so that it functioned as much as a work of mercy as a monastic house (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the charitable foundation of Shamordino; the Optina Lives). It grew rapidly, numbering many hundreds of sisters by the end of Ambrose’s life, and it became the great work of his last years, absorbing his care and, at the end, his physical presence (see St. Ambrose of Optina: Death at Shamordino).

Death at Shamordino, 1891

The founding of Shamordino also determined the manner of Ambrose’s death. In his last years, over the objections of some in the church administration who thought an elder should not lodge among nuns, Ambrose spent extended periods at Shamordino attending to the convent’s affairs; and it was there, at Shamordino rather than at Optina, that he died on 10 October 1891 (the date of his repose; Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, 1972; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; the fuller account, including the tension over his residence at the convent, in St. Ambrose of Optina: Death at Shamordino). His body was carried in a great procession back to Optina for burial; the crowds that had come to him in life followed him in death (Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, 1972). Shamordino survived him and remained a living convent until the Soviet closures; like Optina it was suppressed, and it too was returned and revived after 1990 (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; see The Closure and the Rebirth).

The Place of This in the Lineage

Shamordino and the crowds together show what the Optina eldership had become by the 1880s: not a hidden discipline of monks but a public spiritual and even social force, reaching from the skete window to the founding of a charitable convent for the poorest women in Russia. This outward expansion is Ambrose’s particular signature within the line — the elder who not only received the world but built for it. The later Optina elders would inherit both the crowds and the care of Shamordino: St. Anatoly (Zertsalov) and others served as spiritual fathers of the convent, so that the two houses, Optina and Shamordino, remained bound together to the end (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the later elders and Shamordino; see St. Anatoly the Elder and St. Hilarion).

See Also

References

  • Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (Ch. 4: the daily crowds; the death at Shamordino, 1891; the procession to Optina.)
  • Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (The founding of Shamordino in 1884; its charitable character; the later elders and the convent.)
  • Stanton, Leonard J. The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. (The “eldership for the world” and the crowds.)
  • The full collection: St. Ambrose of Optina, especially Section 06 (Shamordino) and Section 04 (Illness and Cross).