The Published Inheritance

Optina’s influence outran its walls because the elders were also publishers. From the 1840s the monastery issued careful editions of the ascetic and hesychast fathers — above all St. Isaac the Syrian, together with the Paisian corpus and a series of the Philokalic fathers — and, later, the letters and Lives of the elders themselves. This published inheritance carried the Optina teaching to the whole Russian Church and, in the twentieth century, to the Orthodox world in English.

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

Why Optina Published

The Optina publishing work was not an antiquarian hobby but an extension of the eldership. The elders lived by the fathers on prayer, and they understood that the revival St. Paisius Velichkovsky had begun could be secured only if those fathers were available — in correct texts and in a language educated Russians could read — to the whole Church, not merely to the few who could travel to a skete (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn i eyo vremya, Jordanville, 1970, on the purpose of the Optina editions; Paert, Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy, Northern Illinois University Press, 2010, ch. 4). The enterprise began under St. Macarius in partnership with Ivan and Natalia Kireevsky in the 1840s and was carried on by St. Ambrose and the learned Optina monks for the rest of the century (see St. Macarius and the Publishing Work). The skete library was its workshop, and the elders’ own discernment governed what was printed and how (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970).

The Paisian Corpus

The programmatic first fruit was the recovery of St. Paisius himself. The Optina press issued, in 1847, the Life of St. Paisius Velichkovsky together with his writings and his translations — an act that proclaimed Optina’s descent from the founder of the revival and restored Paisius’s own labors to circulation (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, dating the Life of Paisius to 1847; see The Paisian Root of the Eldership). Through this and subsequent editions Optina became the chief Russian channel of the Paisian and Philokalic inheritance — the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie tradition — extending and correcting Paisius’s translations and making them serviceable to a nineteenth-century readership (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 4).

St. Isaac the Syrian and the Ascetic Fathers

The greatest single monument of the Optina press is its edition of the Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian — the seventh-century Syriac father whose homilies on repentance, humility, and the love of God are among the most beloved texts of Orthodox spirituality. Optina produced a careful Russian edition of St. Isaac (issued in 1854), which became the standard by which generations of Russians read him, and which stands behind the affection for St. Isaac evident throughout later Russian spiritual writing — including, famously, the reading of Zosima’s monastery in Dostoevsky (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the Optina edition of Isaac the Syrian; on Isaac in the Russian literary imagination, Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination, Peter Lang, 1995). Alongside Isaac the Syrian, the Optina series over the years included editions and translations of the fundamental ascetic and hesychast fathers — among them St. Nilus of Sora (the Russian hesychast whose rule Optina restored to print; see St. Nilus of Sora), St. Symeon the New Theologian, St. Mark the Ascetic, the correspondence of St. Barsanuphius and John of Gaza, St. Theodore the Studite, the Ladder of St. John Climacus, and abba Dorotheus of Gaza — the very texts on watchfulness, the guarding of the heart, and the disclosure of thoughts that the Philokalia had gathered and that the Optina eldership itself was built upon (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, listing the Optina editions; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 4; the full listing is treated in the Ambrose collection — see St. Ambrose of Optina: The Optina Editions).

The editorial method was serious: the Optina monks, working with academic collaborators and the Kireevskys, compared manuscripts, checked the Slavonic against the Greek, and rendered obscure passages into usable Russian, so that the editions were not mere reprints but genuine works of scholarship in the service of prayer (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the editorial method). In this Optina paralleled, and complemented, the great patristic labors of the same era by St. Ignatius Brianchaninov and St. Theophan the Recluse, who were producing their own ascetic anthologies and the Russian Dobrotolyubie (see St. Ignatius Brianchaninov and St. Theophan the Recluse).

The Letters and Lives of the Elders

Optina also published its own. The letters of the elders — the vast correspondence of spiritual direction written by Macarius, Ambrose, Anatoly Zertsalov, Joseph, and the others — were gathered and printed, both in the elders’ lifetimes and after, and they remain a principal source for the Optina teaching (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the published letters; the letters circulate in several collections and are cited by recipient-class per METHODOLOGY §2.4 — see St. Ambrose of Optina: The Letters). And the monastery produced the great Optina Lives of its own elders — above all the biographies by Archimandrite Agapit (Belovidov) of Leonid, Macarius, and Ambrose — which are the foundational hagiographical sources for the whole synaxis (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the Optina Lives; the Agapit biographies are the standard sources, as noted in St. Ambrose of Optina).

The Inheritance in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

The published inheritance is the chief reason Optina’s influence survived the destruction of the monastery. When Optina itself was closed and its elders killed or scattered, the books remained; the Optina editions of the fathers and the letters of the elders continued to circulate, in Russia clandestinely and in the emigration openly, keeping the Optina teaching alive through the Soviet decades (Kontzevitch — himself an émigré scholar whose Optina Pustyn and Its Era is part of this continuation — Jordanville, 1970). In the twentieth century the inheritance passed into English: the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood produced its “Optina Elders Series,” translating the Lives of the elders and much of their teaching, and so carried the Optina inheritance to the English-speaking Orthodox world (the “Optina Elders Series,” Platina, CA, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood; on the diaspora channel see St. Ambrose of Optina: Cultural Memory). Thus the publishing work begun by Macarius and the Kireevskys in a forest skete in the 1840s became one of the enduring gifts of Optina to the whole Orthodox Church — the fathers on prayer, restored and handed on.

References

Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (The purpose and method of the Optina editions; the Life of Paisius 1847; the edition of Isaac the Syrian 1854; the catalogue of ascetic fathers printed; the letters and Lives of the elders.)
Paert, Irina. Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. (Ch. 4: the Optina publishing program and its diffusion.)
Stanton, Leonard J. The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. (Isaac the Syrian and the Optina editions in the Russian literary imagination.)
The “Optina Elders Series.” Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (The twentieth-century English translations of the Lives and teaching of the elders.)
The Optina Lives by Archimandrite Agapit (Belovidov) and the published letters of the elders — the foundational primary sources, cited per METHODOLOGY §2.4.