Introduction

The Author

Few figures in the Christian East are loved as widely, or across as many boundaries, as Saint Seraphim of Sarov. He was born Prokhor Moshnin in the city of Kursk in 1754, the son of a merchant family; his father Isidore died while Prokhor was still a boy, and the child was raised chiefly by his mother, Agathia. Pious stories cluster about his early years—a fall from the scaffolding of a church his family was building, from which he walked away unhurt, and a recovery from grave childhood illness after the passing of a wonderworking icon of the Mother of God. Whatever a cautious historian makes of such accounts, they tell us how the Church has always read this life: as one marked from its beginning for the presence of God and for the special protection of the Theotokos, whose icon would stand before him at his death.

Drawn to the monastic life while still young, Prokhor made a pilgrimage to Kiev and then entered the Sarov hermitage, deep in the forests of the Tambov region, in 1778. He was tonsured a monk in 1786 and given the name Seraphim—“the burning one,” after the fiery order of angels—and was ordained hierodeacon soon after and hieromonk in 1793. His was not, however, primarily a life of liturgical service. Not long after his ordination he received a blessing to withdraw to a small wooden cell in the forest some miles from the monastery, and there he gave himself to the older and harder work of the desert: manual labor, fasting, the unceasing prayer of the heart, and long vigils. To this period belongs the most famous of his ascetic feats—a thousand nights of prayer kneeling upon a great rock, his arms raised to heaven, imitating the ancient pillar-saints in an idiom of his own.

His solitude was not undisturbed. In 1804 he was attacked in the forest by robbers who supposed the elder must be hiding money; they beat him nearly to death with the handle of his own axe. He survived, but remained bent and stooped for the rest of his life, and when his assailants were later found he refused to let them be punished. After a further season of extreme silence he returned to the monastery, and there entered a still stricter reclusion—the Russian zatvor — passing years walled into his cell in prayer and the reading of Scripture, seeing almost no one. Only in his last years, and by his own account at the direction of the Mother of God, did he open his door to the world. From roughly the mid-1820s until his death he received a ceaseless stream of visitors—monks, peasants, nobles, the troubled and the sick—greeting each of them, in every season, with the Paschal cry: “My joy! Christ is risen!” He became the very type of the Russian starets, the spirit-bearing elder whose counsel and discernment drew a nation to his forest cell.

Seraphim died on the second of January, 1833, and was found kneeling before his icon of the Mother of God, as if caught up in prayer at the last. Seventy years later, in 1903, he was solemnly numbered among the saints; the glorification at Sarov drew immense crowds and the presence of Emperor Nicholas II himself, and was carried forward in no small part through the labors of Archimandrite Seraphim Chichagov, who gathered the records of the elder’s life. He is commemorated on January 2 and on July 19, the day his relics were uncovered. His veneration long ago spilled beyond the bounds of the Russian Church: he is honored across the Orthodox world, remembered warmly in the Christian West, and named as a saint even by a Roman pontiff. Something in his gentleness and his radiant joy speaks to Christians of every communion.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The Spiritual Instructions gather, under thematic headings, the counsel that Saint Seraphim gave to those who came to him—monks setting out on the ascetic path, and laypeople seeking a rule of prayer and a way through the ordinary trials of the soul. They are not a treatise that he sat down to compose. They are, rather, the distilled wisdom of a lifetime of spiritual fatherhood, drawn from his conversations and from the papers preserved at the Sarov monastery, arranged after his death by the hands that also compiled and printed the early Lives of the elder in the nineteenth century.

It is important to be candid about what kind of book this is. The Instructions are, in large part, a florilegium—an anthology of the Fathers. On page after page Seraphim speaks by way of Isaac the Syrian, Barsanuphius the Great, Macarius of Egypt, John Climacus, Gregory of Sinai, Symeon the New Theologian, Antiochus the Monk, Isidore of Pelusium, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Ambrose of Milan, threading their sayings together with Scripture and with the hymns of the Church. He himself claimed to teach nothing new. That was precisely his intention. He understood his task as the faithful handing-on of the one ancient tradition of Christian prayer and watchfulness—the tradition of the desert and of the Philokalia, which had been freshly published in his own lifetime and which he almost certainly knew—so that a monk in the Russian forests, or a merchant in a Russian town, might live it. The purpose of the collection, then, is thoroughly practical: to place in the reader’s hands a tested map of the inner life, from the first fear of God to the heights of contemplation, in the words of the saints who had walked it.

Readers should not confuse this collection with the other, shorter text by which Seraphim is most widely known in the West—the record of his winter Conversation with the layman Nicholas Motovilov “On the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit,” a separate work, preserved and published independently, in which the elder’s face is described as shining like the sun. The Instructions are the broader, quieter companion to that luminous scene: the daily discipline that prepares a soul for such grace.

Argument and Structure

The book is built of some forty short chapters, most only a page or two, each gathered around a single theme and titled plainly—“On God,” “On Faith,” “On Hope,” “On Love for God,” “On Prayer,” “On Peace of Soul.” Read straight through, they trace a deliberate ascent, and it is worth noticing the shape of it.

The collection opens with God Himself and the great objects of faith—the mystery of the Holy Trinity, the reasons for the coming of Christ—before turning to the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, and to the fear of God that Scripture calls the beginning of wisdom. From these foundations it moves inward and downward into the practical warfare of the soul: the guarding of the tongue and of the heart’s secrets, the dangers of idle talk, and then a remarkable clinical survey of the passions that afflict anyone who tries to pray—tears and their counterfeits, sorrow, the noonday listlessness the Fathers called tedium or despondency, and despair, each diagnosed and each met with a concrete remedy.

At the center of the book stand its chapters on prayer and peace. Seraphim sets out the practice of the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—as the unceasing remembrance of God, to be carried into church, into work, into the whole of a life. Around it he ranges the counsels most characteristic of him: on the peace of soul that is “acquired through afflictions” and that makes the heart a dwelling place for God; on the guarding of the heart and the discernment of its movements, the good spirit being known by the quiet joy it brings and the evil one by its trouble and confusion; and on the “light of Christ,” the inner illumination that dawns when the mind, purified and stilled, descends into the heart and calls upon the Name.

From there the book turns to the ascetic scaffolding that supports this inner work—renunciation of the world, bodily labors, repentance, fasting, vigilance against temptation—and to the disciplines of solitude, silence, and stillness in which the prayer of the heart matures. It closes with the most seasoned of its teaching: a careful account of the active and contemplative lives and how one must precede the other, followed by a handful of direct, personal instructions—to a novice, to a brother drawn toward the hermit’s life, and to abbots, whom Seraphim charges to govern their monks not as masters but as a tender mother cares for her children. A final section of explanatory notes, supplied by later editors, clarifies the older Slavonic wording of the many scriptural and liturgical texts the elder quotes.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The abiding contribution of the Instructions is not a new doctrine but a demonstration—proof, in the nineteenth century, that the ancient way of the heart was still alive and still open to anyone who would take it up. In an age of rapid change, when much of educated Christendom had grown skeptical of the mystical tradition, Seraphim is a living witness that the promises of the Fathers are not archaic hyperbole. His whole teaching bends toward a single end, which he names again and again: union with God, the warming of the cold heart by the fire of divine love, the shining of the light of Christ within. The famous formulation that the aim of the Christian life is “the acquisition of the Holy Spirit” belongs to his Conversation with Motovilov, but the same vision animates every page of the Instructions; here we are simply shown the long, ordinary labor by which that acquisition is prepared.

Two features give the collection its particular value. The first is its psychological precision. Seraphim, following his beloved Isaac the Syrian, is an unmatched physician of the inner life. His chapters on despondency and despair distinguish states that a careless reader would run together—natural weariness from demonic assault, the despair born of too many sins from the subtler despair born of wounded pride—and prescribe for each a different medicine. He knows how sorrow “gnaws at the mother that gives it birth,” how the noonday demon suggests that a monk’s cell is unbearable, how tears of compunction can be counterfeited by a laughter that betrays the enemy’s hand. This is not theory but the fruit of watching his own soul, and thousands of others, for half a century.

The second is its insistence that the interior path is governed and sober. Seraphim is emphatic that contemplation must be built upon the active life, that the prayer of the heart is entered “with fear and trembling” and, wherever possible, under the guidance of an experienced elder or, failing that, of Scripture and the Fathers—never through presumption, which delivers a soul straight into delusion. Against every caricature of mysticism as private enthusiasm, he sets a discipline hedged about with humility, obedience, and the discernment of spirits. That balance—of longing for grace and distrust of one’s own judgment—is the book’s most bracing gift to a modern reader.

Beneath both features runs the note that colored the whole of Seraphim’s own life: joy. The severity of the counsels never hardens into gloom, because their end is not renunciation for its own sake but the “peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,” and the warmth of a heart set alight. The elder who could greet every stranger as “my joy” and speak of the martyrs’ sufferings in the same breath as the martyrs’ gladness leaves that same imprint on his book. Nor is the reader ever left alone with an abstract God: the Mother of God, who watched over Seraphim from childhood and stood before him at his death, and the whole company of the saints he quotes, hold the Instructions within the living communion of the Church, so that the solitary work of prayer is never a solitude of the soul.

Reception and Influence

Seraphim’s Instructions passed quickly into the bloodstream of Russian spiritual life. Circulated with the Lives of the elder that appeared through the nineteenth century, they helped make Sarov a place of national pilgrimage and shaped the great revival of eldership that runs from Optina to the Russian diaspora of the twentieth century. When Orthodox Christians began, in the last century, to render their tradition into English, the Instructions were among the first texts chosen: they have been translated and set beside the elder’s Life and his Conversation with Motovilov in collections that consciously present Seraphim as a “Russian Philokalia,” a late flowering of the same tradition the Greek anthology had gathered. His words on the Jesus Prayer and on the peace of the soul are quoted wherever the prayer of the heart is taught, and his figure—bent, white-bearded, radiant—has become one of the most recognizable in all of Christian iconography. That his cult crossed so easily into the wider Christian world, drawing the admiration of Western writers and churchmen, is itself a mark of how universally his counsel has been received.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, modern English translation of the Spiritual Instructions, made from the public-domain Russian text of the collection as it has come down through the Sarov tradition and as published in standard Russian editions. It renders the Instructions into clear contemporary English while preserving the cadence and the reverence of the original, and it reproduces the full sweep of the work—all its thematic chapters together with the personal instructions to novices and abbots that close it, and the explanatory notes with which later Russian editors glossed the elder’s many Slavonic citations of Scripture and the services.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is attributed to Saint Seraphim of Sarov, the author as the Church receives him; the anonymous compilers who first arranged his counsel, and the editors whose notes clarify the text, are credited for their work but never displace him, and translators are named as translators, never as authors. Scriptural and internal references are given in a normalized Arabic style—book, chapter, and verse—for ease of use, in place of the older Roman and Slavonic forms. Because so much of the book is woven from the Fathers, Seraphim’s quotations of Isaac the Syrian, Barsanuphius, Macarius, and the rest are kept as he gives them, with their sources named where he or his editors named them, so that the reader can see the tradition speaking through him. This is an English edition intended to be read on its own; it is not a parallel or bilingual text, and it does not set the translation against the Russian.

Suggestions for Reading

The Instructions reward slow and repeated reading far more than a single passage from cover to cover. Each chapter is a self-contained counsel, and the book can be opened at any of them; a reader new to this literature might begin with the chapters “On Peace of Soul,” “On Prayer,” and “On Attentiveness to Oneself,” which carry the heart of Seraphim’s teaching in a few pages. It helps to remember that the elder wrote first for monks, and that some of his counsels assume the discipline of the cloister; but their substance—watchfulness over the heart, the unceasing remembrance of God, patience under affliction, refusal to judge one’s neighbor—is addressed to every Christian, as Seraphim himself intended when he offered these words “to monks and laymen” alike. Read a chapter, sit with a sentence, and return; that is how this book was meant to be used, and how the elder in his forest cell would have given it.