Startchestvo and Spiritual Direction

Optina eldership (startchestvo) was a definite spiritual practice, not a vague reputation for holiness: the voluntary submission of a disciple to an elder (starets) through the open disclosure of one’s thoughts and the cutting off of self-will in obedience, in order to be healed of the passions and taught to pray. This file describes that practice, its roots, its safeguards, and the dangers the tradition itself recognized in it.

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

What an Elder Is

The Russian word starets (elder; plural startsy) does not mean simply an old monk, nor a title of office, but a spiritual father recognized — informally, by the discernment of the faithful and the brotherhood — as having received the gift of guiding others in the inner life (Paert, Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy, Northern Illinois University Press, 2010, ch. 1, on the meaning of starets; see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction). The eldership is charismatic rather than juridical: an elder holds no rank by virtue of being an elder, and is often not the abbot; his authority rests on the recognition, by those who come to him, that God speaks and heals through him (Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 1; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn i eyo vremya, Jordanville, 1970, on the character of Optina eldership). This is why the eldership could exist in the skete alongside, and independent of, the monastery’s administrative structure — and why it periodically aroused the suspicion of an institution that could not easily control it (see St. Leonid the First Elder).

The practice reaches back through St. Paisius Velichkovsky to the earliest monastic tradition — to the abbas of the Egyptian desert, to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, to the Ladder of St. John Climacus, and to the hesychast fathers of the Philokalia, in whom the relation of spiritual father and disciple is fundamental (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the patristic roots; see The Paisian Root of the Eldership). Optina’s achievement was to restore this ancient practice in full vigor and to extend it, through the great elders, beyond the monastery to the whole people.

The Disclosure of Thoughts

The core discipline of the eldership is the disclosure of thoughts (Russian otkrovenie pomyslov; Greek exagoreusis). The disciple opens to the elder not only his sins, as in sacramental confession, but the whole movement of his inner life — the thoughts, impulses, temptations, imaginations, and stirrings of the passions as they arise — holding nothing back and interpreting nothing on his own (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the disclosure of thoughts at Optina; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 3). The practice rests on a diagnosis found throughout the ascetic fathers: that the passions grow in secrecy and darkness, and that a thought brought into the light and named before the elder loses its power, while the same thought hidden and pondered alone festers and enslaves (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; the teaching is that of the Philokalia and of St. John Climacus, whose works Optina printed — see The Published Inheritance). The disclosure of thoughts is not sacramental confession, though it is often joined to it; it is a distinct ascetic exercise of transparency, undertaken frequently — ideally daily — as the ordinary medicine of the inner life (Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 3, distinguishing the disclosure of thoughts from confession).

Obedience and the Cutting Off of Self-Will

The second pillar is obedience (poslushanie) — the voluntary submission of the disciple’s will to the elder’s word, so that the disciple learns to “cut off self-will” (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on obedience in the Optina eldership). The rationale, again patristic, is that the deepest root of the passions is the fallen self-will — the ego that makes itself the center and judge of all things — and that this cannot be healed by the self, since the self is precisely the disease; it must be gradually surrendered, in trust, to another who can see what the disciple cannot (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 3, on the logic of monastic obedience). Obedience at Optina was not blind subjection to arbitrary command but the training of humility: the disciple learns, through the small daily surrenders of his own preference, to stop clinging to himself, and so becomes capable of love and of prayer (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; see The Optina Spiritual Legacy).

The end of the whole practice is not dependence but freedom — the healing of the passions and the acquisition of the inner peace and continual prayer (the Jesus Prayer) in which the person becomes able to love God and neighbor (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the goal of the eldership; see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

The Safeguards and the Dangers

The tradition was clear-eyed about the perils of so intimate a relation, and Optina practiced it with safeguards. The eldership was to be entered freely, not imposed; the elder was to point the disciple always to Christ and away from himself; and the whole was set within the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church, not offered as a substitute for it (Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 3, on the safeguards; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970). The elders themselves warned constantly against two opposite dangers. On the elder’s side lay the danger of spiritual pride — the elder who begins to believe in his own gifts, who binds disciples to himself rather than to God, and who thereby falls into prelest (spiritual delusion) and drags others with him (Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010; the danger of prelest is a constant theme of the ascetic tradition Optina inherited). On the disciple’s side lay the danger of a false, self-willed “elder-seeking” — the restless pursuit of a wonder-working starets to relieve one of the burden of responsibility, or the treating of the elder as an oracle or a magician rather than a physician of the soul (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction, which carries the repository’s cautions against the abuse of eldership; and, on the reception of Ambrose, St. Ambrose of Optina: The Eldership Model).

The early opposition to Optina startchestvo — the denunciations that dogged St. Leonid and, later, St. Barsanuphius — arose partly from real abuses elsewhere and partly from a legitimate ecclesial anxiety about a charismatic authority not fully under hierarchical control (Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 3 and 5; see St. Leonid the First Elder). Optina’s answer to this anxiety was not argument but example: elders of manifest humility, submitting to the restrictions placed on them, refusing cult, pointing beyond themselves, and producing the fruit of transformed lives. It was this fruit — sober, humble, and enduring across four generations — that made Optina the model by which healthy eldership is measured, and against which its abuses are judged (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010).

The Optina Model

What distinguishes Optina within the history of startchestvo is the combination of intensity and sobriety maintained over a century. The eldership was fervent — daily disclosure of thoughts, deep obedience, continual prayer — and yet it was guarded from fanaticism by its rootedness in the Church’s sacraments, by the plurality of elders (several at once in one skete, correcting and balancing one another), by the protection and discipline of the abbots, and by the elders’ own relentless self-accusation (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the balance of the Optina eldership; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010). It is this balance that the collection’s other sections illustrate in the lives of the individual elders, and that the next file will show meeting, and being tested by, the sharp and skeptical minds of the Russian intelligentsia (see Optina and the Russian Intelligentsia).

References

Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (The character of Optina eldership; the disclosure of thoughts; obedience; the safeguards and the balance of the tradition.)
Paert, Irina. Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. (Ch. 1: the meaning of starets; ch. 3: the disclosure of thoughts, obedience, and the ecclesiastical anxiety about charismatic eldership; ch. 5: the later disputes.)
The patristic roots — the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, St. John Climacus’s Ladder, and the Philokalia — cited as the tradition Optina inherited and printed; see The Published Inheritance.