"In fact, it seems to me the art of the arts and the science of the sciences to guide men, these different and varied beings."

These words of St. Gregory of Nazianzus briefly depict a phenomenon that occurs quite often in the life of the Eastern Church and is known under the name of eldership. Eldership arose and developed in connection with the ascetic education of young monks, in order to teach them active Christianity.

In the concept of "renouncing all earthly things" there is no negation of the world. This is the fundamental question, the most difficult in all Christian asceticism. All the means that are given to the disciple should have as their goal not the complete mortification of the flesh, but its overcoming and transfiguration. In ascetic-mystical teaching, this is clearly called: "union with God" and "deification." It is in this state that the ascetic, wholly bound up with earthly sufferings and who has already attained the glory of a saint, must return to the world again to serve his neighbor, seeing in him a man like himself. This is the ultimate goal of all forms of active asceticism.

The proper training of a monk, which educates the future ascetic, cannot consist in a complete renunciation of himself, he must preserve all the ties inherent in social life in the monastery, and especially his personal attitude towards the elder. Of course, those who have reached the highest stages of asceticism can educate a hermit in themselves. But only a select few are given the path of complete self-denial, and if they serve as a model for others, they set an example not of hermitage, but of their own solitary virtues.

The monastery arose from the idea of saving oneself, from the desire to love God and for people, and not from independent motives to achieve salvation. Both goals are interconnected. The seventh-century ascetic Abba Dorotheus presented these problems in the following comparison. Our life, he said, is nothing but the path to perfection, to the attainment of love, which comes from our relationship to God and to our neighbors. If we take God as the center of the circle, then our path to God follows a radius, and to the extent that we approach the center, that is, God, the same degree we approach each other. Love for God is conditioned by our love for our neighbor and vice versa. The lives of the elders, who went through all the stages of Christian asceticism, are, perhaps, the best confirmation of this comparison of Abba Dorotheus, for the elders lived and acted in the spirit of love for God and neighbor. In them, and especially in St. Seraphim of Sarov, Christianity

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CHAPTER I. BASIS

"Rejoice, Thebaid of Russia, show off, the wilderness and wilds of Olonets, Belo-Yezersk and Vologda, who have grown up a holy and glorious multitude, instructing the world not to cling to each other by a wondrous life, take up your cross on your shoulders and walk in the footsteps of Christ... Rejoice, O thou wilderness, formerly barren and uninhabited, and afterwards, like a crene, flourishing and growing a multitude of monks!" (from the canon to All Saints Who Shone Forth in the Russian Land).

The Russian desert is evergreen spruce and pine forests, silvery smoothly flowing rivers, various lakes, the blue surface of which is quiet or agitated by the summer wind or frozen in winter.

The ancient ascetic could only see the endless desert full of mysterious power, feel the abrupt change of fiery hot days into cool nights, watch the sudden onset of darkness of the African night with all its magic of the star-studded sky.

How different is the world in which the ancient Russian hermit lived! Before his eyes stood the dark wall of scaffolding that surrounded him, leaving only a piece of bright sky above. White birch trunks at the edges of the forest or in the clearings and along the banks of the rivers slightly softened the gloomy tone of this northern landscape. Countless swamps stretched everywhere, swamps and lakes hindered the passage.

The hermit did not know the silence of the eastern desert. During the long hours of solitary prayer, which he spent standing or prostrating, his ear caught various rustles coming from the depths of the forests, the creaking of trunks during the frosty winter, the ringing of streams in the springtime, the cry of night birds at dusk or on bright summer nights, and the cracking of branches under the foot of a walking animal. And — the eternal noise of the peaks, like a low organ sound...

In contrast to the impressive beauty of the eastern deserts or the Syrian mountains, Russian nature is full of sadness and sorrow. It does not promise the hermit mystical pleasure. The uniform change of seasons, slow dying and the invariable rebirth of nature call him to calm and even work and endure all difficulties. His work – prayer, humility, fasting and renunciation of the world – is the main means of Russian asceticism. The ascetic understands the rebirth of nature from winter shackles as a semblance of his own liberation from sins, as a second birth for eternal life in God.

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