The Optina Spiritual Legacy

Across four generations and many temperaments, the Optina elders taught one thing: the way of humility. Their common counsel — humility and self-reproach, obedience and the cutting off of self-will, the unceasing Jesus Prayer, the patient bearing of sorrows, and active love of neighbor — is the settled spiritual legacy of Optina, transmitted more in brief sayings and letters of direction than in systematic treatises.

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

A Teaching in Counsel, Not System

The Optina elders were not, for the most part, systematic theologians; they were physicians of souls, and their teaching reaches us in the form fitted to that work — brief counsels, answers to particular questions, rhymed sayings, and above all letters of spiritual direction, of which the elders wrote thousands (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn i eyo vremya, Jordanville, 1970, on the form of the elders’ teaching; see The Published Inheritance). Because their teaching was pastoral and occasional, it must be gathered from many small sayings rather than read off a treatise; and because much of it circulates as compiled aphorism, individual sayings must be traced to their collections and, where they cannot be, treated with the caution the repository methodology requires for compiled oral tradition (METHODOLOGY §2.4; on the aphorism-attestation discipline as applied to Ambrose, see St. Ambrose of Optina: The Rhymed Wisdom). Yet when the sayings are gathered, a remarkably consistent teaching appears — the same across Leonid and Nektary, across a century and a revolution.

Humility and Self-Reproach

At the center stands humility (smirenie). The elders taught, with the whole ascetic tradition, that humility is the ground of all the virtues and the condition of every grace, and that its practical form is self-reproach (samoukorenie) — the habit of blaming oneself rather than others, of expecting nothing and accusing no one, of regarding oneself as the least (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on humility and self-reproach in the Optina teaching). St. Ambrose’s famous rhymed counsels compress this into homely proverbs about living simply and not judging, and the same teaching runs through the letters of Macarius, Anatoly, Joseph, and Nektary (see St. Ambrose of Optina: The Rhymed Wisdom; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970). Humility, for the elders, is not self-hatred but realism — seeing oneself truly before God — and it is the opposite of the spiritual pride that is the great danger of the ascetic life (see Startchestvo and Spiritual Direction).

Obedience and the Cutting Off of Self-Will

From humility flows obedience — the cutting off of self-will, the surrender of one’s own preference and judgment to the elder and, more broadly, to the providence of God in the circumstances of one’s life (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on obedience). The elders taught that self-will is the deepest root of the passions and that its patient surrender, in the small things of daily life, is the school in which humility is learned and the heart is freed (see Startchestvo and Spiritual Direction). This teaching extended beyond the monastery: to laypeople the elders counseled the acceptance of one’s God-given circumstances — one’s station, family, and duties — as the appointed place of one’s salvation, a teaching sometimes summed up in Ambrose’s counsel to live where God has placed you and do the good at hand (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; the Ambrose sayings as attested in Chetverikov and the Optina Life).

The Jesus Prayer

The elders were, before all else, men of prayer, and the prayer they lived and taught was the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” — received from the Paisian revival and the Philokalia (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the Jesus Prayer at Optina; see The Paisian Root of the Eldership and Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). They taught it soberly: not as a technique for extraordinary experiences, and with warnings against seeking visions or bodily sensations, but as the humble, persistent invocation of the Name that keeps the mind in the presence of God and unites the heart to Him (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; St. Anatoly Zertsalov’s letters of direction on the prayer are a notable Optina guide — see St. Anatoly the Elder and St. Hilarion). The prayer was to be practiced always within humility and obedience, under guidance, and never as a self-willed ascent — the safeguard the Philokalia itself insists on.

The Bearing of Sorrows

Because so many who came to the elders were suffering — the sick, the bereaved, the poor, and, in the last generation, a whole people entering the furnace of revolution — the Optina teaching gives a large place to the patient bearing of sorrows (skorbi). The elders taught that afflictions, accepted with faith and thanksgiving and without murmuring, are the God-given means of purification and the path to humility, and that the Christian is to bear his cross in the confidence that God permits nothing beyond what is for his good (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the teaching on sorrows; St. Ambrose’s teaching on suffering is treated in St. Ambrose of Optina: Teaching on Suffering). This teaching was not abstract: Ambrose taught it from a bed of chronic illness, and the last elders lived it under persecution, so that in Nikon and Isaac II the teaching on the bearing of sorrows passed into the bearing of martyrdom (see The Hieromartyrs of Optina).

Love

The end of the whole way is love — love of God and, as its inseparable sign, active love of neighbor. The elders’ humility and prayer issued not in withdrawal from people but in an extraordinary availability to them: the crowds Ambrose received, the poor women Shamordino sheltered, the grieving whom Anatoly the Younger consoled (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on love as the fruit of the Optina way; see The Shamordino Convent and the Crowds). The elders taught that love is learned, not merely felt — that it grows precisely through the humility, obedience, and self-emptying that seem at first its opposite, because these empty the self that stands in love’s way (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970). In this the Optina teaching is one with the whole hesychast tradition: the purification of the heart through prayer and humility is for the sake of love, which is the presence of God in the person.

The Unity of the Legacy

The Optina legacy is thus not a doctrine but a way — a short, hard, and joyful way of humility, obedience, prayer, patience, and love, taught alike to monk and layman, and held unchanged across the whole life of the monastery. Its coherence is itself part of its authority: the same counsel comes from the first elder and the last, from the invalid Ambrose and the martyr Nikon, so that Optina speaks with one voice. That voice was preserved not only in memory but in print — in the letters of the elders and in the patristic editions on which their teaching was nourished — and it is to that published inheritance that the next file turns (see The Published Inheritance).

See Also

References

  • Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (The common teaching of the elders: humility and self-reproach, obedience, the Jesus Prayer, the bearing of sorrows, and love.)
  • The letters and recorded counsels of the Optina elders, as gathered in the Optina Lives (Agapit and others) and the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood “Optina Elders Series” — cited by collection per METHODOLOGY §2.4 for compiled sayings.
  • The full treatment of Ambrose’s counsel in St. Ambrose of Optina, Section 03, and of his teaching on suffering in Section 04.