Introduction

The Author

This book belongs to a distinct kind of writing. It is not a treatise composed by the man whose name stands at its head, but a Life — a hagiography—written about him by the community that kept his memory. Saint Seraphim of Sarov left the Church a handful of his own words: the counsels gathered as the Spiritual Instructions, and the celebrated Conversation with Nikolai Motovilov on the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. The present work is something else. It is the narrative of his whole earthly course, from his birth in Kursk to his repose at Sarov and the wonders reported at his grave, assembled from monastery archives, the recollections of those who had known him, and the earlier printed accounts that had already begun to circulate. In the manner of the Church’s oldest hagiography, its true author is a tradition rather than a single pen.

The saint it describes was born Prokhor Moshnin, the son of Isidor and Agafya Moshnin, a devout merchant family of Kursk. The received tradition, followed in the Church’s commemoration of him, places his birth on the nineteenth of July, 1754; this Life, reflecting the fluidity of the monastery’s own early records, gives the year as 1759. He lost his father as a small child and was formed by his mother’s piety and charity. After a boyhood marked by two deliverances that his household read as signs of divine protection—a fall from the bell tower of the church his family was building, and a grave illness healed, the Life says, after the wonderworking Kursk icon of the Mother of God was carried through their courtyard—the young Prokhor set his heart on the monastic life. Having journeyed to Kiev to venerate the relics of the Caves and to seek a blessing, he was directed to Sarov, and entered that hermitage as a novice in 1778. He was tonsured a monk in 1786 with the name Seraphim, was ordained hierodeacon and, in 1793, hieromonk. There followed the long years of withdrawal for which he is most remembered: the forest solitude, the extreme fasting, the thousand nights of prayer said to have been kept upon a rock, and, in 1804, the beating by robbers that left him bent for the rest of his days and which he met with complete forgiveness. Emerging at last from his reclusion, he became one of the most sought elders of his age, receiving a stream of visitors with the greeting “my joy,” exercising gifts of insight and healing that the Life reports in abundance, and taking under his fatherly care the women’s community at Diveyevo. He reposed on the second of January, 1833.

The compiler who gave this material its fullest and most durable shape was Nikolai Vasilyevich Elagin (1817–1891), a religious writer and censor of the imperial period who had made a study of the Sarov monastery’s history. In 1861 the monastery asked him to prepare, from its own archives and the existing publications, a complete account of the elder’s life; Motovilov, the saint’s devoted disciple and first collector of testimony, passed further materials to him that same year. Elagin’s redaction was published at St. Petersburg in 1863. He did not write on a blank page: short accounts of the elder’s life and deeds had already appeared in the two decades after his repose, and part of Elagin’s task was to weigh, correct, and enlarge them against the monastery’s documents. His labor produced the fullest and best-attested Life yet made, and it is this redaction—reprinted, expanded, and adjusted across successive editions through the end of the century—that stands behind the text translated here. Tellingly, the 1863 book appeared without his name, as a work of the monastery itself, and his authorship was acknowledged in print only in the fifth edition of 1905. That anonymity is not incidental: it reflects the book’s own understanding of itself as the corporate testimony of Sarov rather than the composition of an individual, and it is why the work is rightly received as the Sarov tradition’s Life of its elder, given order by Elagin’s hand.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

The Life was written to preserve and to edify, and behind both purposes lay the growing conviction that a saint had lived and died in Sarov’s forest. Within a few years of Seraphim’s repose the first short accounts of his life and deeds had appeared, drawn from those who remembered him; the demand for them, and the multiplying reports of help received at his grave, made a fuller and more carefully documented Life both possible and necessary. The monastery’s commission to Elagin in 1861 was an effort to gather this scattered witness—archival records, the depositions of eyewitnesses, the earlier printed sketches, and the papers Motovilov had assembled—into one authoritative narrative before the living memory of the elder should fade.

Its aim, then, is twofold and openly so. First, it means to instruct. The book everywhere pauses over Seraphim’s conduct to draw out the lesson: how the young novice conquered despondency by obedience, how the ascetic ordered his sleep and food, why stillness must be guarded and idle talk shunned. Long stretches of it are effectively a manual of the spiritual life, taught by example and interlaced with the sayings of the elder himself and of the Fathers he loved—Isaac the Syrian, Barsanuphius, Macarius, John of the Ladder. Second, it means to testify. The later chapters, recording the cures and consolations reported after his death, function as a dossier of the saint’s continuing intercession, the very kind of evidence the Church weighs when it comes to number someone among the saints. Composed a generation after the elder’s repose and four decades before his formal glorification, the Life is both the ripened fruit of Sarov’s devotion and, in retrospect, a principal foundation of the case for his canonization.

Argument & Structure

The book follows the shape that Christian hagiography has kept for centuries: birth and formation, ascent through the monastic degrees, the summit of holiness, repose, and the wonders that follow. In its complete form it moves through twelve chapters and a short appendix. The opening chapters carry Prokhor from his Kursk childhood and his mother’s blessing to the gates of Sarov, and then through his years as a novice—the round of obediences in the bakehouse and the woodworking shop, the illness of 1780 and the vision that healed it, and the disciplined pattern of prayer, reading, and labor by which he prepared for tonsure. The central chapters trace the classic Sarovian progression: from tonsure and priesthood into the “distant wilderness” of forest solitude, into the practice of stillness and a period of strict reclusion, and then into the “near hermitage” from which, in old age, he opened his door to the world.

From there the narrative turns outward to the elder’s public work—his fatherhood of the Diveyevo community, his influence on the convents at Ardatov and Zelenaya Gora, and the crowded final years of his eldership—before closing with his preparation for death, his passing and burial, and two chapters cataloguing the “gracious help” reported at his intercession afterward. The appended cell prayer-rule, the short daily office he kept and taught, fittingly ends the volume where the elder’s own life began, in prayer.

Two threads run through the whole. One is ascetic and interior: the Life is unusually attentive to the psychology of the spiritual struggle, and Seraphim’s own analyses—of tedium, despondency, and faintheartedness, and of the humility that alone breaks their power—give the book much of its enduring weight. The other is the theme of divine protection and presence, announced in the childhood deliverances and gathered up in the Mother of God’s words over the sick novice, “This one is of our kind,” a refrain the reader is meant to hear again in every later wonder.

Readers should know that the present edition does not contain the entire book; the reason is set out below. The great set-pieces of the received tradition that fall in the missing chapters—the thousand nights upon the rock, the robber attack of 1804, the fullest telling of the posthumous miracles—belong to the Life’s design even where the text before the reader does not narrate them, and are supplied by the wider tradition and by the saint’s other Lives.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

At the center of everything this Life records stands the teaching for which Seraphim is most loved, and which his own Conversation with Motovilov states outright: that the true aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God. The Life dramatizes that conviction. Its long apprenticeship in obedience, its forest stillness, its fasting and unceasing Jesus Prayer, are not presented as ends in themselves but as the means—the “spiritual commerce,” in the elder’s own merchant’s image—by which a soul trades the perishable for the grace of the Spirit. The saying most often carried out from Sarov, that a man who acquires a peaceful spirit will draw thousands around him toward salvation, is the practical form of the same doctrine, and the Life’s portrait of the elder besieged by pilgrims is its living illustration.

The book is also a document of the Russian recovery of ancient monastic prayer. Seraphim belongs to the same eighteenth- and nineteenth-century renewal that produced the Philokalia in Slavonic and the eldership of Optina; his reading, named page by page in these chapters, is the hesychast inheritance of Isaac the Syrian, Barsanuphius, and John of the Ladder, and his life is that inheritance embodied in the Russian forest. In him the tradition of stillness and the invocation of the Name is shown not as a museum piece but as a living path, walked to its end within living memory.

This attention to the inner life gives the book a value beyond biography. Its most quoted passages are the elder’s own diagnoses of the soul’s maladies and their cures, and they read as a compact ascetical teaching drawn from experience rather than from books alone. The Life is careful to show that Seraphim’s authority rested on what he had suffered and overcome: he prescribes the ordering of sleep, food, and speech because he had first tried these remedies on himself, and he speaks of despondency and its healing as one who had been driven to the edge of it and returned. In this the book joins the long line of monastic writing in which doctrine is inseparable from a life, and the reader is invited to receive the teaching only in the company of the man who lived it.

Not least, the Life exhibits the particular vocation of the starets, the spiritual elder. What the desert once was, the elder’s cell becomes: a place where the ordinary Christian—the merchant, the soldier, the peasant woman, the landowner Motovilov—may receive from a man filled with the Spirit the discernment, healing, and consolation that the monk had gone into solitude to find. Seraphim’s care for Diveyevo makes the point concrete, extending his eldership to a whole community of women and binding the fruits of his hidden years to the visible life of the Church. The miracles the book reports—the healings, the readings of hearts, the appearances after death—are set down as such vocations have always been set down in the Church’s memory: as received testimony to the nearness of God in his saints, offered for the reader’s faith rather than for his analysis.

Reception & Influence

The Life did its work. The book Elagin shaped, reissued through edition after edition, became the standard nineteenth-century account of the elder and carried his memory far beyond Sarov, feeding a devotion that grew steadily through the century. That devotion reached its climax in 1903, when the Russian Church solemnly glorified Seraphim among the saints. The celebration at Sarov that July—with the uncovering of his relics, immense crowds of pilgrims, and the presence of the imperial family—was among the great religious events of the age, and it set the seal of the whole Church upon the holiness that this Life had labored to document. His principal shrine came to rest at the Diveyevo convent he had fathered, where it remains a place of pilgrimage. The relics themselves would pass through a long exile in the century that followed and were rediscovered and returned to Diveyevo only in the early 1990s—a later chapter of the same veneration that this book first helped to kindle.

Since then Seraphim has become one of the most widely venerated of all Russian saints, and one whose appeal has crossed confessional lines: his figure is honored well beyond the Orthodox world, and his teaching on the acquisition of the Spirit and on joy has found readers across the Christian traditions. The narrative preserved here—with its greeting of “my joy,” its Paschal warmth, and its insistence that holiness is offered to everyone—is a principal reason why.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, modern English translation of the Life of Elder Seraphim of the Sarov Hermitage, made from the public-domain Russian text of Elagin’s redaction as preserved in the digital library of azbyka.ru, itself a re-typesetting of the pre-revolutionary printed editions. Following the conventions of this series, the saint is named as the Church receives him, and the writer who assembled the Life is credited in his proper place as its compiler—a contributor to a book about the saint, never as its author. Citations of Scripture and of chapters are given in the modern Arabic style, and the English has been rendered in a readable contemporary register while keeping the reverent cadence of the original.

Two matters of the text should be stated plainly. First, this edition should not be mistaken for Seraphim’s own writings. His teaching survives in separate works—the Spiritual Instructions and the Conversation with Motovilov — which are edited and read on their own terms; the present book is the tradition’s Life of him, and quotes his sayings within its narrative rather than presenting them as a corpus. Second, the edition is not quite complete. The digital source from which it was made carries a defect inherited from its pagination: three of the book’s twelve chapters—the fourth and sixth, on the solitude and labors of the distant and near wilderness, and the eleventh, on the manifestations of grace after the elder’s repose—were served only as duplicates of neighboring chapters and could not be recovered from the available copy. What is offered here is therefore the remainder of the Life: chapters one, two, three, five, seven, eight, nine, ten, and twelve, together with the cell prayer-rule. The break is noted so that the reader who misses the famous episodes of the rock and the robbers will know they belong to chapters not present in this source, and may seek them in the fuller tradition. Restoring them awaits a fresh transcription of the printed edition. Within its bounds, the text is the whole and continuous witness of those chapters, faithfully carried into English, and the doctrinally weighty passages have been checked against the Russian by hand.

What remains is more than enough to do what the compilers of Sarov intended: to set before the reader a man wholly given to God, and through him the ancient promise that the Holy Spirit may still be acquired, and joy still found, in the following of Christ.