THE SPIRITUAL WAY OF SAINT SERAPHIM
THE SPIRITUAL ICON OF SAINT SERAPHIM
When we analyze the spiritual icon of Saint Seraphim, we discover there at the same time some
traditional traits of Russian monastic saintliness and some new traits. Saint Seraphim belongs to
the same lineage as Saint Theodosius of Petchersk, Saint Sergius of Radonezh and Saint Nilius
Sorsky, a lineage that is itself connected to the ancient monastic tradition, particularly that of
Palestine, continuing in the mystical movement of Sinai and of Mount Athos. Saint Seraphim
appropriated this tradition very consciously: from his novitiate, his favorite reading, beyond the
Gospels, are the Philokalia and the great Menologion (lives of the saints) of Dimitri of Rostov.
When he spends a thousand nights standing upright in prayer on a rock, he recalls that
he is only the student of the the stylites of the 5th and 6th centuries. Right in the 19th
century, he puts into practice the ascetical precepts of the Syrian and Egyptian Desert
Fathers. A baker during his novitiate, he must have remembered Saint Theodosius of
Petchersk and Saint Cyril of Byelozersk, who had pursued the same vocation. A hermit
in the forest, he follows in the footsteps of the poustiniki of the 14th century, and, like
Saint Sergius, he tames the wild animals. His “rule of prayer” is the ancient rule of
Saint Pachomius the Egyptian. But above all he is the student of Nilius Sorsky in the
practice of “the spiritual act,” of the prayer of the heart addressed to Jesus.
We rediscover with him all the classical traits of the Russian staretz: his gentleness, the
pardon accorded to enemies and above all the infinite charity for every human
suffering. His visions are also of a piece with those of the old Russian saints: visions of
the Mother of God, visions connected with the mystery of the Eucharist, the vision of
the heavenly Light. In his person is fulfilled the synthesis of the northern mysticality of
Saint Sergius and the oriental mysticality represented in Russia above all by Saint Nilius
Sorsky.
Nevertheless despite these numerous ties with the old Russian and Greek tradition,
there emerges from the person of Saint Seraphim a very strong impression of freshness
and newness. He relived the ancient themes of oriental monasticism with the intensity
of a man who has heard a personal call from God. This call was the vocation “to
acquire the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Such, according to him, is “the aim of the Christian
life” (Interview with Motovilov, p. 156), of “all” Christian life.
This intimate and mystical link of Saint Seraphim with the Third Divine Hypostasis, the
Holy Spirit, confers upon him a character that is new and prophetic, an annunciator of
the joy of the age to come. In spite of his long years of asceticism and repentance, the
life of Saint Seraphim is not somber in the least. Above it hovers not at all the image of
an angry God who requires mortifications and tears in order to be appeased, but that of
“the Beloved,” whose divine love demands of man, for his part, a divine and perfect
love. As for this perfect love, Seraphim knows that God alone can give it by the grace of
the Holy Spirit. The unshakable conviction that he could, by invoking with faith the
Lord Jesus, receive in this life even the gift of the Holy Spirit, constituted the unity of
the saint’s spiritual existence.
He devoted body and soul to the labor of this invocation: “Like iron in the hands of the
smith, thus have I placed my will between the hands of God.” In order to accomplish
this work “of invocation of the Name of the Beloved” and of purifying his soul in
expectation of the grace of the Holy Spirit, he became the silent faster who, after the
example of the widow of the Gospel (Luke 18:1-8), importuned God, night and day, by
his yearning cry: “Lord Jesus Christ, have pity on me.” In his flight far from the world,
he had no hatred of people, “who bear upon themselves the Name of Christ,” but only
the desire to purify his heart of all earthly and human preoccupations, so as to prepare
within himself the place of the Holy Spirit.
The life “in the Spirit” is the life of the age to come, “of which silence is the sacrament.”
In order to take part in this life, one must suffer with Christ, and silence is precisely “the
cross upon which a man must nail himself.” It is suffering “suffered in the communion
of the cross of Jesus Christ” (Spiritual Instructions, 38). At the same time it affords the
possibility of concentrating all the forces of thought, of the heart, and of the will in the
cry, in communion with the church, invoking the Holy Spirit: “Our God, grant us
peace.” And every peaceful soul, that is to say every soul that has learned how to
acquire peace, “is vivified by the Holy Spirit and grows in purity, illumined by the
Trinitarian unity of the holy mystery.” For Saint Seraphim, suffering was only the
condition that a person who wishes to arrive at a greater supernatural joy must fulfill.
This is what he expressed clearly in the sayings addressed to his disciple John
Tikhonovich: “If you would know the sweet peace of soul of the righteous ones in
heaven, you would suffer gladly and with acceptance in this world of sorrows,
persecutions and calumnies. If this cell were full of black worms, and if these worms
were gnawing our bodies during our whole lives, it would be necessary to accept it so
as not to lose heavenly joy " (Semeur, March-April 1927, pp. 285-286). In this same spirit
of expectation of the heavenly Kingdom, comparable to the eschatological hope of the
first Christians, Saint Seraphim taught “joyous dying.” “For us, to die will be a joy,” he
said to a nun, in exhorting her to sacrifice her life for her brother.
The joyous and confident expectation of the age to come is fortified in Saint Seraphim
by the conviction that already here and now, the life of the Christian can be a life in the
Holy Spirit. Still more than by his sayings, Saint Seraphim manifested by his very life
the presence of the Holy Spirit in this world. He had become a living flame, a burning
luminary, a bearer of the Spirit of God upon the earth, it is said of him in the Annals of
Diveveyo. And he himself expressed the secret of his spiritual radiance when he said:
“God is a fire who warms and enflames our heart and our inward parts with perfect
love, not only for our own sake, but also for the neighbor” (Spiritual Instructions, p. 193).
The signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit in Saint Seraphim were, according to his
biographers, the supernatural joy and peace that emanated from him. “Joyful and
luminous as one of the angels,” it is thus that one depicts the visage of the startez. And
he himself said that the sign of the action of grace is “a life ordered in peace” (Spiritual
Instructions, 24) and a “joyous intelligence, an angelic joy” (ibid.), for “God creates joy in
everything he touches” (c.f. Interview with Motovilov, p. 178). He used to call each
person who came to him “my joy” and he greeted them with the joyous salutation of
Easter: “Christ is risen!”
He was not content to proclaim this joy; he poured it into the hearts of his interlocutors:
“The staretz’s state of soul seemed to flow into the souls of the afflicted, and they would
return revived by his joy. Each of those who would come to him was touched by the
divine fire that was within him, and the person began to be set aglow” (Annals of
Diveyevo). The deep wellspring of this spiritual action was a boundless love for people,
a love that, with peace and joy, was made evident for him as the essential gift of the
Holy Spirit. He expressed the nature of his own tenderness for his spiritual children by
the exhortation, addressed to a hegoumen, that this spiritual teacher be for his own
spiritual children “not only a father, but also a mother.” Other, more mysterious, signs
of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the life of Saint Seraphim are his visions, his
familiar relationship with the Mother of God and the saints, his gift of healing, his
supernatural knowledge of human souls. All this is reduced by him expressly to the
gift of the Holy Spirit. The knowledge that the saint has of the past and the future, of
the secret thoughts of his interlocutors, is not the fruit of an effort of the reason, of a
laborious reflection. It is an intuitive knowledge, the “cheerful knowledge” in the Holy
Spirit. Saint Seraphim himself explained it thusly: “The first thought which arises in my
soul, I consider it as a message from God, and I express it without knowing what has
happened in the soul of the one who comes to me.”
Of all the graces accorded the saint, the most astonishing, for our spirits made opaque
by sin, is without doubt his bodily transfiguration by the Light of the Holy Spirit, in
which it was granted to Nicolai Motovilov to participate (see the Interview with
Motovilov, pp. 176-181). Causing us to glimpse hic et nunc the transfiguration of man
and of the whole of nature by the gift of the Holy Spirit, the holiness of Saint Seraphim
communicates to us the sensation of the nearness of the Kingdom of God: it announces
the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.
Excerpt from the book by Élisabeth Behr-Sigel,
Prayer and Holiness in the Russian Church,
Éditions Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1982.
[translation Anthony N. Whitley, 2002]