2. From His Entry Into the Hermitage to His Tonsure as a Monk

Where did the young seventeen-year-old Prokhor go after leaving his family home, his mother, his brother, and his inheritance? Did he have a definite intention regarding where he would settle? Without any doubt he had in mind to dedicate himself to God in the monastic state. But where exactly? In which monastery? — these questions, which had long occupied him, still concerned him now. The fame of the ascetic life of the monks of the Sarov Hermitage—where many natives of Kursk were already living the monastic life, and where the prior at that time was Pakhomy, himself a native of Kursk—inclined him to go to these ascetics. But first he wanted to visit Kiev, in order to see at the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, that nursery of Russian monasticism, the labors of its monks, to receive counsel, instruction, and confirmation of his thoughts and a blessing from some ascetic firm and experienced in the spiritual life, and finally to pray and receive a blessing at the holy relics of the Venerable Anthony and Theodosius, the founders of monasticism and the other servants of God resting in Kiev. And so Prokhor set out—with his mother’s blessing around his neck and a staff in his hands—for Kiev. Along with him went five other Kursk merchants: these were the very men who, together with Prokhor, had conceived the intention of leaving the world and withdrawing to a hermitage. All of them afterward entered a monastery, except for the merchant Alexei Semyonovich Melenin, who, through unforeseen circumstances, found himself responsible after his parents’ death for five brothers and three sisters.

In Kiev Prokhor prostrated before the holy relics of the servants of God with fervent prayer and tears, imploring above all the Venerable Anthony and Theodosius to bless his intention and guide him on the path of salvation. While visiting the fathers there engaged in asceticism, he heard that not far from the holy Pechersk Lavra, in the Kitaev monastery, there lived as a recluse one named Dositheus, a man of truly godly life and endowed with the gift of spiritual discernment. Coming to him, Prokhor fell at his feet and kissed them, opened his whole soul before him, and begged for instruction and blessing. The discerning elder, perceiving his intentions and foreseeing in him a good laborer for Christ, directed him to the Sarov Hermitage for his dwelling and blessed him, saying in conclusion: “Come, child of God, and abide in the Sarov Hermitage; that place shall be your salvation. With God’s help, there you will also complete your earthly pilgrimage. The Holy Spirit, the treasure of all good things, will order your life in holiness. In Sarov the prior Pakhomy is also of godly life, a follower of our venerable fathers Anthony and Theodosius.” The conversation with the blessed elder Dositheus finally confirmed the young man in his good intentions. It seemed that now no obstacles, no temptations, would have power to deflect him from his resolve to enter the Sarov Monastery. After attending the services, confessing, and receiving holy communion, and once more bowing before the holy servants of God of Kiev-Pechersk, he directed his steps onto the road, and, guarded by God’s protection, arrived safely back in Kursk at his mother’s house. There he spent several more months, even going to the shop, but no longer engaged in trade—rather, he read spiritually beneficial books for his own edification and that of others who came to converse with him, to inquire about the holy sites, and to listen to his reading. This time was a time of farewell to his relatives and his homeland. His mother, though she knew of Prokhor’s decision to settle in the Sarov Hermitage and even gave her consent, when the final hour arrived and Prokhor came to bid her farewell, blessed him with the words: “You might have buried me first, and then gone to the monastery.” Of those who had agreed to go with him, two set out at the same time, while the others had arrived before him.

The cenobitic Sarov Hermitage was founded in 1706 by the hieroschemamonk John, a native of Arzamas from the village of Novy Usad, known for his monastic labors and his ill-fated life. Developing gradually, it was elevated under the prior Elder Ephrem (1758–1777) to a high degree of interior and exterior good order. Prokhor arrived there on November 20, 1778, on the eve of the feast of the Entry of the Most Holy Mother of God into the Temple. Standing in the church at the all-night vigil of the feast, witnessing the reverent performance of the divine services, listening to the dignified singing of the monks, and observing how all—from the prior to the humblest novice—were diligent in prayer, he was enraptured in spirit, rejoicing that the Lord had shown him this place for the salvation of his soul. The superior at that time, as mentioned, was Elder Pakhomy, a tonsured monk of the Sarov Hermitage who had dedicated himself to God’s service from his youth—a gentle, humble-minded monk, a faster and a man of prayer, a model for monks, whom the people called a holy man. He was of Kursk merchant stock and had known Prokhor’s parents since his childhood. With love Pakhomy received the young man, in whom he saw a genuine striving toward monasticism; he enrolled him among the novices and entrusted him to the elder Hieromonk Joseph—who served in the monastery as treasurer—for instruction in the paternal way. At first Prokhor served in the elder’s cell. He fulfilled all the monastery’s rules and regulations precisely at the elder’s direction, and served in the cell not merely without complaint but always with zeal. Such conduct drew the attention of all and earned him the regard of the elders Joseph and Pakhomy. He was then assigned, beyond his cell duties, the communal monastic obediences of the brotherhood in turn. At first he was placed in the bakehouse, then transferred to the prosphora-baking room, then to the woodworking shop, and after that he was made the one who roused the brothers. In the woodworking shop Prokhor carried out his obedience for quite a long time. For a considerable period he also served as wake-caller, together with another brother, and in this capacity he would make his way before the start of services to the brothers’ cells, announcing with a modest knock on the door—accompanied by the Jesus Prayer—that it was time to go to church. After these duties he also served as sacristan. Vigorous in his strength, Prokhor, as eyewitnesses testified, fulfilled all the monastery’s obediences with great zeal.

The path of fulfilling external obediences is without doubt the safest path for young monks: it saves them from many temptations, yet does not free them from the inner struggle through which alone the ascetic can be strengthened and grow in the spiritual life. Prokhor endured many temptations: the spirit of sorrow, tedium, and despondency acted on him powerfully, to the point of exhausting his soul. “The spirit of sorrow,” he said later, “is inseparably accompanied by tedium.” Here is how Father Seraphim describes this condition, speaking in his characteristic way through the words of the holy fathers: “Tedium, as the fathers observe, assaults a monk about midday and produces in him such terrible unrest that the very place where he lives and the brothers living with him become unbearable to him; and during reading a kind of aversion arises, along with frequent yawning and powerful hunger. Once the belly is satisfied, the demon of tedium suggests to the monk thoughts of leaving his cell and going to converse with someone, representing this as the only way to be rid of tedium—by talking with others continually. And the monk overcome by tedium is like desert brushwood, which pauses a little and then rushes on again in the wind. He is like a waterless cloud driven by the wind.”

“If this demon cannot draw the monk out of his cell, it begins to distract his mind during prayer and reading. ‘This thing,’ it suggests to him, ‘is not lying right, and that thing is not in the right place—everything needs to be put in order.’ And it does all this in order to render the mind idle and unfruitful.”

How did the young ascetic heal this illness of the spirit? “This illness is healed,” he says from his own experience, “by prayer, by restraint from idle talk, by such handiwork as one is able for, by reading the word of God, and by patience—for it arises from faintheartedness, idleness, and idle talk. (See Antiochus, ch. 26. Isaiah Sir 212.)”

“It is difficult,” he would say, “difficult to avoid this illness for one who is just beginning the monastic life; for it is the first to attack him. Therefore the primary remedy against it is the strict and unquestioning fulfillment of all the duties laid upon the novice. When your duties fall into proper order, tedium will find no place in your heart. Only those are bored whose affairs are not in order. And so obedience is the best medicine against this dangerous illness.”

“When tedium overcomes you, say to yourself, following the instruction of the Venerable Isaac the Syrian: ‘You are again craving impurity and a shameful life.’ And if the thought says to you, ‘It is a great sin to kill yourself,’ say to it: ‘I am killing myself because I cannot live impurely. I will die here rather than witness the true death of my soul before God. It is better for me to die here for purity than to live in the world an evil life. I have chosen this death above my sins.’”

“(I will put to death my fleshly passions, because I have sinned against the Lord and will no longer provoke His anger.) What does it profit me to live estranged from God? I will endure these afflictions so as not to lose my heavenly hope. What profit does God have from my life if I live wickedly and provoke His anger (Word 22)?”

Further he distinguishes tedium from despondency, shows that despondency itself is of two kinds—natural and from evil spirits—and teaches what a person who has fallen, through inattention, into one or the other state must do. “Tedium is one thing,” says Father Seraphim, “and the anguish of spirit called despondency is another. A person sometimes finds himself in such a state of spirit that it would seemingly be easier for him to cease to exist, or to be without any feeling or consciousness, than to remain any longer in that indefinably tormented condition. One must hasten to get out of it. Guard against the spirit of despondency, for from it all evil is born. (Barsanuphius, Ans. 13, 497.)”

“There is natural despondency,” teaches St. Barsanuphius, “arising from weakness; and there is despondency from a demon. Do you want to know which is which? Test it thus: the demonic kind comes before the time when one should give oneself rest. For when a person has set himself to accomplish something, it drives him to leave the work and get up before a third or a quarter of the task is done. In that case one must not obey it, but must say a prayer and sit at the work with patience. And the enemy, seeing that through this the person offers prayer, withdraws, because he does not want to provide an occasion for prayer.” (Barsanuphius, Ans. 559, 563, 564, 565.)

Finally he describes the last in this sequence of spiritual temptations—the condition of faintheartedness—and offers the surest remedy against it. “When it pleases God,” says Isaac the Syrian, “to plunge a person into greater sorrows, He permits him to fall into the hands of faintheartedness. It produces in him a strong force of despondency in which he experiences inward constriction of soul—and this is a foretaste of hell. In consequence of this comes a spirit of frenzy, from which arise a thousand temptations: confusion, rage, blasphemy, complaint against one’s lot, corrupt thoughts, moving from place to place, and the like. If you ask what the cause of this is, I will say: your negligence, because you did not take care to seek a cure for them. For the remedy for all this is one, through which a person quickly finds consolation in his soul. And what is this remedy? — humility of heart. By nothing else can a person break down the stronghold of these vices; on the contrary, he finds that they prevail over him. (Isaac the Syrian, Word 79, leaf 156, verso.)” Among the holy fathers, despondency is sometimes called idleness, sloth, and laziness.

We have seen above how the young novice in his life conquered these, or similar, temptations through patience and obedience. Let us now look at how he put the other means against them into practice.

His life at that time, before his monastic tonsure, was ordered day by day in the following way. At appointed hours he was in church for the divine services and the appointed rules. Following the example of Elder Pakhomy, he would arrive for the church prayers as early as possible, would stand without moving through all the services, however long they might be, and would never leave before the complete end of a service. During the hours of prayer he always stood in one fixed place. To protect himself from distraction and wandering thoughts, keeping his eyes cast downward, he listened with strained attentiveness and reverence to the singing and reading, accompanying them with prayer.

Outside of church, having fulfilled his obedience duties, Prokhor—withdrawing from vain association with others—loved to retire to his cell in solitude. There, besides prayer, his occupations were of two kinds: reading and bodily labor. He read books both of a general Christian and of an ascetic-spiritual nature. The subjects of his reading were: the Holy Bible, especially the Psalter; the Holy Gospel and the Apostolic Epistles; the works of the holy fathers—for example, the Hexaemeron of St. Basil the Great, the Homilies of St. Macarius the Great, the Ladder of St. John of Sinai, the Lives of the Saints in the Menaion of St. Dmitry of Rostov, the Philokalia, and others. The Psalms he read while seated, saying that for a weary man this was permitted; but the Holy Gospel and the Apostolic Epistles he always read standingbefore the holy icons in a posture of prayer, and this he called vigil (wakefulness). This reading was not done merely to pass the time or to satisfy an aroused intellectual curiosity. The young ascetic sought in it answers to the questions of life and applied what he had read to his own situation and to human beings in general. From this, in the light of the word of God, under the influence of asceticism, in humility and submission to the will of God, there gradually took shape in him—and later fully formed—a sound and luminous vision of the Christian life in general, and in particular of the paths of monasticism.

During the hours of rest from spiritual labors Prokhor gave himself to bodily work. At that time his occupation was woodworking: like other monks, he carved crosses from cypress wood to give as blessings to pilgrims. In woodworking—especially when he was carrying out this particular obedience—Prokhor distinguished himself by great zeal, skill, and achievement, so that in the roster of alternating shifts for the unceasing singing he was the only one designated specifically as “Prokhor the woodworker.” But while he carried out his cell obedience he also went out for the labors common to the whole brotherhood: floating timber, preparing firewood, and the like. While occupied with handiwork in his cell or at communal obediences, he continually held in memory and heart the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Work supplemented the monastery’s ascetic labors, for upon a monk, beyond spiritual occupations, physical labor is enjoined by the rules.

Regarding his conduct at table, the taking of food, and nightly rest, the following personal testimony of Father Seraphim has been preserved: “Sitting at table, do not look at or judge who eats how much, but attend to yourself, feeding your soul with prayer. At dinner eat your fill; at supper, practice restraint. On Wednesdays and Fridays, if you are able, eat only once. Every night without fail sleep four hours: the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and one hour past midnight. If you are weak, it is permissible to add a nap during the day. Observe this without doubt until the end of your life, for it is necessary for the rest of your head. I have kept this rule from my youth. We ask the Lord God always to grant us rest during the night hours. If you guard yourself in this way, you will not be despondent but healthy and cheerful.” In time, from standing too long and from insufficient nightly rest, Father Seraphim—as he himself said on more than one occasion—developed a severe headache. This illness resolved itself when he began to allow himself a few more hours of rest at night. After this, Father Seraphim, on the basis of his personal experience, advised the infirm to give six hours a day to sleep, and the physically stronger and spiritually firm to give five hours—repeating here the teaching of the desert fathers that we are taught to mortify not the body but the passions.

The labors of obedience, prayer, reading, and work were not, however, fully satisfying to the solitude-loving soul of the young ascetic. It is known that the Sarov Hermitage is surrounded for many miles in every direction by dense forest. Among certain elders the thought arose—following the example of the ancient ascetics and the founding fathers of the Sarov Hermitage—to withdraw from the monastery and there, hidden from people, before the eyes of God alone, to devote themselves more attentively to pious exercises. With the blessing of Prior Pakhomy, the well-known hermits—Abbot Nazary, Hieromonk Dorofei, and Schema-monk Mark—each settled in this way in different places not far from one another, each with his own disciple, in the depths of the monastery forest. Seeing such examples, Prokhor yearned in spirit for greater solitude and ascetic labor. His soul, like a turtledove, strained toward solitude. He received from his elder, Father Joseph, a blessing to leave the monastery in his free hours and go into the forest. There he found a secluded place, built a hidden shelter, and in it, entirely alone, gave himself to contemplation of God and prayer. “Even if it is not always possible to remain in solitude and silence when living in a monastery and carrying out the obediences laid upon you by the prior, at least some part of the time remaining from your obedience ought to be devoted to solitude and silence—and for this little the Lord God will not fail to send down upon you His rich mercy.” This is the rule—later impressed upon other monks—that Prokhor himself was now fulfilling, withdrawing to his solitary shelter. The contemplation of wondrous nature lifted him up to God, while complete solitude united him more closely with God in the feeling of divine omnipresence through prayer. According to the testimony of a man who was later close to Elder Seraphim, Prokhor performed here the rule that the Angel of the Lord gave to the great Pakhomy, the founder of monastic community life. This rule is performed in the following order: the Trisagion, and after the Our Father, twelve repetitions of “Lord, have mercy.” Glory and now: “Come, let us bow” three times. Psalm 50: “Have mercy on me, O God.” “I believe in one God…” One hundred prayers: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” and after these: “It is truly meet” and the dismissal. All of this constituted one prayer. But such prayers were to be performed, according to the number of hours in the day, twelve times during the day and twelve times at night. This rule, adopted in the monastery and composed according to the rule of the Venerable Pakhomy, Prokhor fulfilled—at the instruction of Elder Joseph—from the very time of his entry into the monastery. But in the shelter, amid nature, alone as it were with God, he devoted himself to the labor of prayer with greater concentration and compunction. He combined prayer with abstinence and fasting: on Wednesdays and Fridays he ate nothing at all, and on other days of the week he ate only once. Who would not rejoice to see such asceticism in a novice still young not only in soul but in years? It was evident that Prokhor was establishing himself firmly on the path of monastic life. Everyone felt respect and love for this unusual ascetic. Prokhor was not, however, the only zealous novice in all of Sarov at that time: there were other young people who showed high examples of zeal for piety. Such, for example, was the twenty-year-old novice Vasily, who entered the hermitage in 1787 from among the townspeople of Temnikov. At the very first step he gave signs of complete submission to the will of the prior Pakhomy, with the renunciation of his own will: whatever he had acquired in the world, upon entering the monastery he laid it all at the feet of the superior, earnestly surrendering himself as well into complete obedience to him. This amazed Elder Pakhomy, who always kept this novice in special regard. In the final years of Father Seraphim’s life this novice, under the name Nifont, was the prior of the Sarov Hermitage. There were other servants of God as well, but the monastic life—like the truly Christian life in general—is, according to the word of Scripture, hidden with Christ in God. Therefore they carefully concealed their pious deeds, struggled secretly with their passions, fearing and fleeing human glory. But Prokhor stood before the eyes of the elder brothers of the monastery, and his labors were so constant and striking that it was hard to conceal them. Therefore, presenting him as an example—above others—to those less diligent in monastic affairs, the elders Joseph and Pakhomy showed, beyond love for him as for their own son, also trust. “Our fathers of blessed memory—the superior Pakhomy and the treasurer Joseph, holy men—loved me,” Father Seraphim would later say, “as their own souls, and nothing was hidden from me by them; and what was profitable for their own souls and for me, they took care of.”

And how they took care! In 1780 the novice Prokhor fell gravely ill. He took to his hard bed; his body swelled; the sick man lay unable to move. It was not known what illness he had; there was no physician with him: there was no one to determine the nature of the illness. From external signs it was thought that Prokhor was suffering from dropsy. But it admits of no doubt that the ailment was stubborn and prolonged, lasting for three years—half of which the sufferer spent in bed. The sick man wholly committed his body and soul to God, prayed, and bathed his bed with tears; a word of complaint never passed his lips. Here it became apparent how much all—and first of all those in authority in the monastery—respected, loved, and pitied Prokhor. During his illness, Elder Father Joseph—his guide and instructor in the preparatory monastic labors—served him as a novice would. The prior Pakhomy and Elder Father Isaiah also cared greatly for him. Many years after this (May 25, 1832), in conversation with a certain person, Father Seraphim recalled with deep gratitude the care of Elder Pakhomy. “I had,” he said, “a friend here in the monastery at that time, the hieromonk Pakhomy. When I was sick, lying in bed for a year and a half, he tended to me, being almost constantly at my side.” We shall see later how Father Seraphim expressed his grateful feelings toward Elder Pakhomy in deed. For now let us not forget that Pakhomy was the prior of the monastery, while Prokhor was a novice… and yet it was to him—because of his infirmities—that the prior and the elders next in rank showed such zeal and care. This circumstance revealed in the senior brothers of the monastery a high degree of attentiveness and concern for the younger—as it ought to be in every well-ordered society, and especially in a church community. As the illness reached its final stage, fear for the patient’s life arose. Then the prior decisively proposed calling a physician, or at least opening a vein. The sick man’s ascetic reply was most remarkable: “I have committed myself, holy father, to the true Physician of souls and bodies, our Lord Jesus Christ and His Most Pure Mother. But if your love sees fit, provide for me in my poverty, for the Lord’s sake, the heavenly medicine”—that is, communion of the Holy Mysteries. Elder Joseph, at Prokhor’s request and his own zeal, celebrated a special all-night vigil and Liturgy for the sick man’s recovery. The brothers gathered for the service out of their own devotion, to pray for the one who was suffering; Prokhor was heard in confession and received the holy Body and Blood of Christ, which were brought to his cell, to his bed. Not long before his own repose, Father Seraphim—who always spoke the truth and abhorred falsehood—told many persons that on this occasion, after receiving the holy Mysteries, the Most Holy Virgin appeared to him in ineffable light, accompanied by the Apostles John the Theologian and Peter, and turning her face to the Theologian while pointing to Prokhor with her finger, said: “This one is of our kind.” Then she laid her right hand upon the head of the suffering man; and the matter that had filled the sick man’s body began to flow out through an opening that formed in his right side. In a short time the body was completely freed of the illness. The traces of the wound that had served as the outlet of the illness remained on Father Seraphim’s body for the rest of his life. Those who knew him in his own time

were amazed at the speed of the recovery that followed the communal prayer offered for him and his reception of the holy Mysteries. But they knew nothing of the miraculous visitation, which alone can explain the rapid end of so prolonged and stubborn an illness. This illness brought much spiritual benefit to Prokhor: his spirit was strengthened in faith, love, and hope in God. Among other things, the care shown him by the monastery’s members bound his heart to them with a new feeling of gratitude. Prokhor remembered very often, and always with love, the tending he had received from Father Joseph and the other elders, and—as we shall see—after their deaths he showed them special veneration.

During the period of Prokhor’s novitiate, under Prior Pakhomy, a number of urgently needed construction projects were undertaken in the Sarov Hermitage. Among them, on the site of the cell where Prokhor had been ill, a hospital was being built for the treatment of the sick and the rest of the elderly, and alongside the hospital a church on two floors—with altars on the lower level dedicated to Ss. Zosima and Savvaty, wonderworkers of Solovetsk, and on the upper level to the Transfiguration of the Savior. For the building of the church, the young novice was sent from Sarov to collect funds in various places. Out of obedience, out of gratitude for his own healing, and out of sympathy for the infirmities the building was meant to alleviate, he willingly undertook the difficult labor of a collector. Traveling through the towns nearest to Sarov, Prokhor also visited Kursk, the place of his birth. He did not find his pious mother still among the living, and visiting her grave, he prayed fervently and with bitter tears for the repose of her soul. But he had a blood brother there who, after the mother’s death, had become the full master of the family estate. This brother on his part provided Prokhor with generous assistance for the construction of the church. Having thus completed the obedience of the collector, Prokhor showed new zeal for the construction of the church attached to the hospital. His long and zealous practice of woodworking had taught him to make articles more sturdy and complex than the fashioning of crosses. He built with his own hands, for the lower hospital church dedicated to the Venerable Zosima and Savvaty, an altar table from cypress wood—which stands in its place to this day. From the time the altar was consecrated on August 17, 1786, Father Seraphim received holy communion for the remainder of his life in this church above all others—to keep ever in memory the great benefaction of God shown to him in this place, of which he himself spoke very often and to very many people.

These same words, on a similar occasion, were spoken to another recently reposed ascetic of our Church. This was Archimandrite Paisius, an elder of eighty years, known to devout people for his strictly monastic life. During his time resting at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, he fell gravely ill. The Mother of God, appearing to him with John the Forerunner of Christ, healed him from his illness and likewise said to him: “This one is of our kind.” This account was conveyed to us by the very person to whom Father Paisius secretly told it. The expression “of our kind” clearly indicates that Father Seraphim and Archimandrite Paisius were especially fervent in their prayer to the Mother of God, and therefore themselves stood under her special protection and intercession. An attentive reader may perceive this from the present biography of Father Seraphim.