Preface to the Fourth Edition

Seven years have passed since the first edition of Father Arseny's book. During this time, it has been repeatedly reprinted in Russian, three times in Greek, in English, and publications in other languages are being prepared. Its beneficial influence on the souls of our contemporaries is enormous, many have gained the Christian faith thanks to this book.

But there were also skeptics who even stated in print that the book Father Arseny is a novel, the main character of which is a collective image, and the stories that make up it are fiction. These doubts, allowed by God's Providence, prompted a man who personally knew Father Arseny, Vladimir Vladimirovich Bykov, to write his memoirs, which are placed in this edition as an Afterword.

In the last years of his life, Father Arseny constantly blessed his spiritual children to write down the stories of those who came to him and his own memoirs, telling how God helped them find faith and go through life. The Elder expressed confidence that in time these notes would help other people find God, and expressed the desire that the future collection be called The Path to Faith. The fourth part was published with this title in the third edition of the book, published in 1998. But Vladimir Vladimirovich said that there are still memoirs that the authors or their descendants have not yet given for publication. In response to our intensified requests, Vladimir Vladimirovich again began to persistently persuade the owners of precious manuscripts to transfer them for a new edition. This is how the fifth part of the book appeared, which we called Love Thy Neighbor. It contains sixteen previously unpublished stories of Father Arseny's spiritual children, his fellow prisoners and his own. They contain a lot of new information about the life of Fr. Arseny, and the real names of people close to him appear (A. F. Baturina, A. F. Berg, Yuri and Kira Bakhmat, and others). The texts published for the first time tell us about Fr Arseny's trips to Bishop Athanasius (Sakharov), about his connection with Archpriest Sergei Orlov (Hieromonk Seraphim in secret tonsure), with Archpriest Alexander Tolgsky, and with Archpriest Vsevolod Shpiller. It turns out that a number of people well known to us, now deceased, knew Father Arseny closely and secretly communicated with him (D. I. Melikhov, T. N. Kameneva, L. A. Diligenskaya, and others). We should not be surprised by such skillful and strict secrecy: new memoirs tell how Father Arseny's spiritual community lived during the years of persecution and in the last period of his life in Rostov the Great, how they learned to guard their secrets. This mystery has not yet been fully revealed: we do not know the true secular name of Father Arseny, we have not found the name of the church where he served in Moscow. But we thank God for the grace-filled gift of sharing in the great pastoral feat of a remarkable elder and wondrous wonderworker, so close to us in time.

Preface to the First Edition

The few biographies of ascetics and martyrs of the twentieth century, although they show the triumph of love over evil and death, so characteristic of the ancient lives of the holy martyrs, are rarely to such an extent as the book Father Arseny, which belongs to an unknown compiler.

Father Arseny is a collection of literary eyewitness testimonies about the life of the modern saint, the confessor of their spiritual father, as well as their stories about their own life.

The authenticity of the events described (partly hidden by nominal names and titles) is beyond doubt. In addition to the confirmations of Father Arseny's still living students, there is also an internal guarantee of this authenticity: the heart of the reader joyfully believes in everything described, since it is impossible not to believe, before us the truth in its genuine beauty.

Even in samizdat typing, the wonderful book was widely distributed and made a strong impact on a large circle of readers. It revealed the image of a saint of our time, intrinsically identical with the Orthodox holiness of all times, but having the unique features of an ascetic of modern times. What is the peculiarity of this recent feat? First of all, in the spirit of the times. The first Christian martyrs expected the end of the world soon, but they were spiritually born into a young church, living a pure, spiritual life, which had not yet known the notorious sins of history. If then one out of twelve disciples became a traitor, then the persecutions of the twentieth century, figuratively speaking, often left only one out of twelve faithful. The terrible atmosphere of general renunciation, betrayal, betrayal, the unimaginable scale of the spiritual and historical catastrophe, the millions of people captivated by lies and drawn into the satanic reprisal against the Church of Christ, over their people and their country, all this plunged into despondency and despair, produced a feeling of doom, hopelessness, abandonment. Having lost faith in God, the formerly great, Orthodox Russia became a defenseless object for the implementation of Satan's plan of genocide unprecedented in history. The Civil War and the Patriotic War, tens of millions of victims of artificially created famine, tens of millions of innocents who were painfully exterminated in countless camps and prisons. Formerly, the Orthodox people become drunk, accustomed to deception, theft and lies as a way of life, to violence and robbery, to fornication and debauchery, to the systematic destruction of their own children. In the diabolical darkness, seeing each other as enemies and becoming enemies, people gave their strength and lives to an age-old senseless war, cruelly, mercilessly torturing each other. They became unable to organize their national life, forgot how to work, forgot how to love, live a family life, give birth to and raise children.

Evil in its essence cannot be defeated by evil, just as fire cannot be extinguished by fire. Only Christ's love on the cross, in its self-denial with faith and humility enduring any torment and even death, is capable of defeating evil and tearing away from it the already perishing, blinded and embittered human soul. There is no doubt that Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church live and pray, repent and are spiritually renewed only because the great host of holy martyrs, moved by love for Christ, for the Church, for the lost Russian people, resisted evil, giving themselves to the cross for the faith in Christ. If it were not for them, we would not have left one stone unturned long ago. But today the very life of the Russian Orthodox Church clearly reveals to us the miraculous fruits of the podvig of her new holy martyrs. Nevertheless, the spirit of this martyrdom very often remains misunderstood by both writers and readers. Probably because they had never met this spirit in their lives. Often those who now claim to be the successors and venerators of the holy martyrs are in fact shepherded by completely different pastors. Only a few witnesses left memories, when the ascetics themselves had long since moved to eternal homes.

In contrast to most of the camp literature, which makes a strong but heavy impression, Father Arseny introduces us to the victorious, bright spirit of Christ's love, which is not darkened by the surrounding hell, but shines even brighter, even more inextinguishable.

Anyone who was vouchsafed by the Lord to personally communicate with the confessors of that time will immediately recognize in Father Arsenius the image of a holy elder, full of love, humility, meekness, Christian sobriety and reasoning, abiding in prayer, having long ago entrusted himself entirely to the will of God, endowed with the grace-filled gifts of clairvoyance and wonderworking. A small and secret, but nevertheless a whole host of such elders-confessors until recently manifested the fulfillment of ancient prophecies about the saints of the end times. It is through them that the spiritual succession was realized, uniting us today with the fullness of the Russian Orthodox Church, with her saints.

The manuscript is published essentially without editorial corrections in order to preserve its authenticity. We ask everyone who knows something about the heroes of this book or about other ascetics of the 20th century to share their information with us.