Read the lives of all the saints. Orthodox Saints: list by year of life

The history of the formation of Orthodoxy in Rus' is inextricably linked with a number of individuals who devoted their lives to the true worship of God and the fulfillment of all divine laws. Strictly following the requirements of their religion, these people deserved Divine Grace and the title of Orthodox saints for their selfless service to the Almighty and intercession for the entire human race before him.

The list of godly personalities who became famous for righteous deeds or who suffered for the faith of Christ is truly inexhaustible. Nowadays, it is also replenished with new names of pious Christians canonized by the church. The acquisition of holiness by ascetics of spiritual improvement can be called a great work, coupled with the burden of overcoming base feelings and vicious desires. Creating a divine image in oneself requires enormous effort and painstaking work, and the feat of Orthodox saints awakens admiration in the souls of true believers.

On icons depicting the righteous, their heads are crowned with a halo. It symbolizes the Grace of God, enlightening the face of a person who has become a saint. This is God's gift, warming the soul with the warmth of spirituality, delighting the heart with divine radiance.

Through prayers in churches and prayer chants, clergy, together with believers, glorify the image of the earthly life of the righteous according to their rank or title. Taking into account the feats accomplished during life or the reasons for leaving for another world, on the pages of the Orthodox calendar compiled by the Russian Orthodox Church, lists of pious persons by rank are presented.

• Prophets. This is the name given to the Old Testament saints, endowed with the gift of foreseeing future events. The Prophets were chosen by the Almighty; they were called upon to prepare the people for the acceptance of Christianity.
• The best followers of the Lord are called apostles. Of these, 12 saints are called close, the ranks of the disciples of the Heavenly King number 70 righteous people.
• The Forefathers include the pious men mentioned in the Old Testament, who were distantly related to our Savior.
• Righteous men or women who have accepted monastic rank (monasticism) are called venerables.
• The status of great martyrs or martyrs is given to God-pleasers who died a martyr's death for the faith of Christ. Servants of the church are classified as hieromartyrs, sufferers in monasticism - venerable martyrs.
• Among the Blessed are the pious who have become insane for Christ's sake, as well as travelers without a permanent home. For their obedience, such people were gifted with God's mercy.
• Enlighteners (equal to the apostles) are called righteous people whose actions contributed to the conversion of peoples to the Christian faith.
• Passion-bearers or confessors are the name given to pious believers who were subjected to persecution and imprisonment for their devotion to the Savior. In the world, such Christians died in great pain.

Prayers to the holy saints are associated not only with the veneration of God’s companions, but with turning to them for their own help. Showing divine honors and worshiping anyone other than the true and one God is prohibited according to the Holy Scriptures.

List of the most revered saints of the Orthodox Church by year of their life

• The First-Called Apostle is one of the 12 disciples of Christ, chosen by him to preach the Gospel. The disciple of John the Baptist received the status of the First Called for being the first to respond to the call of Jesus and also calling Christ the Savior. According to legend, he was crucified around the year 67 on a cross of a special shape, later called St. Andrew's. December 13 is the day of veneration by the Orthodox Church.
• Saint Spyridon of Trimifunt (207-348) became famous as a miracle worker. The life of Spyridon, elected bishop of the city of Trimifunt (Cyprus), was spent in humility and calls to repentance. The saint became famous for many miracles, including the revival of the dead. An adherent of strict observance of the words of the Gospel passed away while reading a prayer. Believers keep the icon of the miracle worker at home to receive God’s grace, and on December 25 they honor his memory.
• Of the female images, the most revered in Russia is the Blessed Matrona (1881-1952). The Orthodox saint was chosen by the Almighty for good deeds even before her birth. The difficult life of the righteous woman was permeated with patience and humility, with miracles of healing documented in writing. Believers venerate the relics of the passion-bearer, preserved within the walls of the Intercession Church, for healing and salvation. The day of veneration by the church is March 8.
• The most famous of the righteous saints (270-345) is listed as Nicholas of Myra in the list of great saints. As a bishop, a native of Lycia (Roman province), devoted his entire life to Christianity, pacified the warring, defended the innocently convicted, and performed miracles of salvation. Believers turn to the icon of St. Nicholas the Pleasant for mental and physical healing, and protection for travelers. The Church honors the memory of the miracle worker with prayers on December 19 according to the new (Gregorian) style.

Prayer to Nicholas the Ugodnik for help:

After the desired is realized, it is important to offer a prayer of gratitude to the saint:

Touching the myrrh-streaming relics of the Wonderworker, kept in the Catholic monastery of Bari (Italy), blesses believers with healing. You can pray to Nicholas the Pleasant anywhere.

The emphasis of Orthodox teaching is based on the spiritual principle of purposeful movement towards achieving holiness throughout a sinless life. An important advantage of holiness according to Orthodox teaching is the constant communication with God of the apostles who are in the Kingdom of Heaven.

List of Russian Orthodox saints canonized in the 19th century

The act of canonization of righteous Christians can be either church-wide or local. The basis is holiness during life, the performance of miracles (intravital or posthumous), incorruptible relics. The result of the church's recognition of the saint is expressed by a call to the flock to honor the righteous man with prayers during public services, and not by commemoration. The ancient Christian church did not carry out the canonization procedure.

List of pious righteous people who received the rank of sainthood in the 20th century

In Orthodox literature there is a special genre that describes the life and exploits of people who lived in holiness. The lives of saints are not secular chronicles, but life stories written in accordance with church canons and rules. The first records of events in the lives of holy ascetics were kept at the dawn of Christianity, then they were formed into calendar collections, lists of days of veneration of the blessed memory of saints.

According to the instructions of the Apostle Paul, preachers of the word of God should be remembered and their faith should be imitated. Despite the departure to another world of the holy righteous, whom the holy church reveres.

For high morality and holiness, throughout the history of Orthodox Rus', people with a pure heart and a radiant soul were gifted with God's grace. They received the heavenly gift of holiness for their righteous deeds, their help to people living on earth is invaluable. Therefore, even in the most hopeless situation, go to church, pray to the saints, and you will receive help if the prayer is sincere.

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Preface

In the publication offered to the reader, the lives of the saints are presented in chronological order. The first volume tells about the Old Testament righteous men and prophets, subsequent volumes will reveal the history of the New Testament Church right up to the ascetics of our time.

As a rule, collections of the lives of saints are built according to the calendar principle. In such publications, the biographies of ascetics are given in the sequence in which the memory of saints is celebrated in the Orthodox liturgical circle. This presentation has a deep meaning, for the church’s memory of a particular moment in sacred history is not a story about the long past, but a living experience of participation in the event. From year to year we honor the memory of the saints on the same days, we return to the same stories and lives, for this experience of participation is inexhaustible and eternal.

However, the temporal sequence of sacred history should not be ignored by the Christian. Christianity is a religion that recognizes the value of history, its purposefulness, professing its deep meaning and the action of God's Providence in it. In a temporal perspective, God's plan for humanity is revealed, that is, “childhood” (“pedagogy”), thanks to which the possibility of salvation is open to everyone. It is this attitude to history that determines the logic of the publication offered to the reader.

On the second Sunday before the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers, the Holy Church prayerfully remembers those who “prepared the way for the Lord” (cf. Is. 40:3) in His earthly ministry, who preserved the true faith in the darkness of human ignorance, preserved as a precious gift to Christ who came save the dead(Matthew 18, I). These are people who lived in hope, these are the souls by which the world, doomed to submission to vanity, was held together (see: Rom. 8:20) - the righteous of the Old Testament.

The word “Old Testament” has in our minds a significant echo of the concept of “old [man]” (cf. Rom. 6:6) and is associated with impermanence, closeness to destruction. This is largely due to the fact that the word “dilapidated” itself has become unambiguous in our eyes, having lost the diversity of its originally inherent meanings. Its related Latin word “vetus” speaks of antiquity and old age. These two dimensions define a space of holiness before Christ unknown to us: exemplary, “paradigmatic,” immutability, determined by antiquity and originality, and youth – beautiful, inexperienced and transitory, which became old age in the face of the New Testament. Both dimensions exist simultaneously, and it is no coincidence that we read the hymn of the Apostle Paul, dedicated to the Old Testament ascetics (see: Heb. 11:4-40), on All Saints’ Day, speaking about holiness in general. It is also no coincidence that many of the actions of the ancient righteous people have to be specially explained, and we have no right to repeat them. We cannot imitate the actions of the saints, which are entirely related to the customs of spiritually immature, young humanity - their polygamy and sometimes attitude towards children (see: Gen. 25, 6). We cannot follow their boldness, similar to the power of blooming youth, and together with Moses ask for the appearance of the face of God (see: Exodus 33:18), which St. Athanasius the Great warned about in his preface to the psalms.

In the “antiquity” and “old age” of the Old Testament - its strength and its weakness, from which all the tension of waiting for the Redeemer is formed - the strength of endless hope from the multiplication of insurmountable weakness.

The Old Testament saints provide us with an example of faithfulness to the promise. They can be called genuine Christians in the sense that their entire lives were filled with the expectation of Christ. Among the harsh laws of the Old Testament, which protected from sin human nature that was not yet perfect, not perfected by Christ, we gain insights into the coming spirituality of the New Testament. Among the brief remarks of the Old Testament we find the light of deep, intense spiritual experiences.

We know the righteous Abraham, whom the Lord, in order to show the world the fullness of his faith, commanded to sacrifice his son. Scripture says that Abraham unquestioningly decided to fulfill the commandment, but is silent about the experiences of the righteous man. However, the narrative does not miss one detail, insignificant at first glance: it was three days’ journey to Mount Moriah (see: Gen. 22: 3-4). How should a father feel as he led the most dear person in his life to the slaughter? But this did not happen right away: day succeeded day, and the morning brought the righteous not the joy of a new light, but a painful reminder that a terrible sacrifice lay ahead. And could sleep bring peace to Abraham? Rather, his condition can be described by the words of Job: When I think: my bed will comfort me, my bed will take away my sorrow, dreams scare me and visions scare me (cf. Job 7:13-14). Three days of travel, when fatigue brought closer not rest, but an inevitable outcome. Three days of painful thought - and at any moment Abraham could refuse. Three days of travel - behind a brief biblical remark lies the power of faith and the severity of the suffering of the righteous.

Aaron, brother of Moses. His name is lost among the many biblical righteous people known to us, obscured by the image of his illustrious brother, with whom not a single Old Testament prophet can be compared (see: Deut. 34:10). We are hardly able to say much about him, and this applies not only to us, but also to the people of Old Testament antiquity: Aaron himself, in the eyes of the people, always retreated before Moses, and the people themselves did not treat him with the love and respect with which they treated their teacher . To remain in the shadow of a great brother, to humbly carry out one’s service, although great, is not so noticeable to others, to serve a righteous man without envying his glory - isn’t this a Christian feat already revealed in the Old Testament?

From childhood, this righteous man learned humility. His younger brother, saved from death, was taken to the palace of the pharaoh and received a royal education, surrounded by all the honors of the Egyptian court. When Moses is called by God to serve, Aaron must retell his words to the people; Scripture itself says that Moses was like a god for Aaron and Aaron was a prophet for Moses (see: Ex. 7: 1). But we can imagine what enormous advantages an older brother must have had in biblical times. And here is a complete renunciation of all advantages, complete submission to the younger brother for the sake of the will of God.

His submission to the will of the Lord was so great that even sorrow for his beloved sons receded before her. When the fire of God burned Aaron's two sons for carelessness in worship, Aaron accepts the instruction and humbly agrees with everything; he was even forbidden to mourn his sons (Lev. 10:1-7). Scripture conveys to us only one small detail, from which the heart is filled with tenderness and sorrow: Aaron was silent(Lev. 10:3).

We have heard about Job, endowed with all the blessings of the earth. Can we appreciate the fullness of his suffering? Fortunately, we do not know from experience what leprosy is, but in the eyes of superstitious pagans it meant much more than just a disease: leprosy was considered a sign that God had abandoned man. And we see Job alone, abandoned by his people (after all, Tradition says that Job was a king): we are afraid of losing one friend - can we imagine what it’s like to lose a people?

But the worst thing is that Job did not understand why he was suffering. A person who suffers for Christ or even for his homeland gains strength in his suffering; he knows its meaning, reaching eternity. Job suffered more than any martyr, but he was not given the opportunity to understand the meaning of his own suffering. This is his greatest sorrow, this is his unbearable cry, which Scripture does not hide from us, does not soften, does not smooth out, does not bury it under the reasoning of Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, which, at first glance, are completely pious. The answer is given only at the end, and this is the answer of Job’s humility, which bows before the incomprehensibility of God’s destinies. And only Job could appreciate the sweetness of this humility. This endless sweetness is contained in one phrase, which for us has become a prerequisite for true theology: I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear; now my eyes see You; so I renounce and repent in dust and ashes(Job 42:5-6).

Thus, in every story told by Scripture, there are hidden many details that testify to the depth of suffering and the height of hope of the ancient righteous.

The Old Testament has become distant to us with its ritual instructions, which have lost force in the Church of Christ; he frightens us with the severity of punishments and the severity of prohibitions. But he is also infinitely close to us with the beauty of inspired prayer, the power of immutable hope and unwavering striving for God - despite all the falls to which even the righteous have been subjected, despite the inclination to sin of a person who has not yet been healed by Christ. The light of the Old Testament is light from the depth(Ps. 129:1).

The blessed spiritual experience of one of the most famous Old Testament saints - the king and prophet David - has become for us an enduring example of all spiritual experience. These are the psalms, the wondrous prayers of David, in every word of which the fathers of the New Testament Church found the light of Christ. Saint Athanasius of Alexandria has an amazing idea: if the Psalter reveals the most perfect human feelings, and the most perfect Man is Christ, then the Psalter is the perfect image of Christ before His incarnation. This image is revealed in the spiritual experience of the Church.

The Apostle Paul says that we are joint heirs with the Old Testament saints, and they achieved perfection not without us(Heb. I, 39-40). This is the great mystery of God’s economy, and this reveals our mysterious kinship with the ancient righteous. The Church preserves their experience as an ancient treasure, and invites us to join the sacred traditions telling about the lives of the Old Testament saints. We hope that the proposed book, compiled on the basis of the “Cell Chronicler” and “The Lives of the Saints, set out according to the guidance of the Four Menaions” by St. Demetrius of Rostov, will serve the Church in its holy work of teaching and will reveal to the reader the majestic and arduous path of the saints to Christ, saved by Christ .

Maxim Kalinin

Lives of the Saints. Old Testament forefathers

Sunday of the Holy Fathers happens within the dates from December 11 to December 17. All the ancestors of the people of God are remembered - the patriarchs who lived before the law given in Sinai, and under the law, from Adam to Joseph the Betrothed. Together with them, the prophets who preached Christ, all the Old Testament righteous people who were justified by faith in the coming Messiah, and the pious youths are remembered.

ADAM and EVE

After arranging and putting in order all the visible creation above and below and planting Paradise, God the Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, in His Divine Council of Rivers: Let us create man in our image and likeness; may he possess the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air, and the wild animals, and the livestock, and all the earth, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. And God created man(Gen. 1, 26-27).

The image of God and likeness is not created in the human body, but in the soul, for God does not have a body. God is a disembodied Spirit, and He created the human soul disembodied, similar to Himself, free, rational, immortal, participating in eternity, and united it with flesh, as Saint Damascus says to God: “You gave me a soul by Divine and life-giving inspiration, from the earth I gave you a body.” having created" (Funeral chants). The Holy Fathers make a distinction between the image and likeness of God in the human soul. Saint Basil the Great in his 10th Sixth Day conversation, Chrysostom in his interpretation of the book of Genesis in his 9th conversation, and Jerome in his interpretation of the prophecy of Ezekiel, chapter 28, establish the following difference: the soul receives the image of God from God at the time of its creation, and the likeness of God is created in her in baptism.

The image is in the mind, and the likeness is in the will; the image is in freedom, autocracy, and the likeness is in virtues.

God called the name of the first man Adam(Genesis 5:2).

Adam is translated from Hebrew as an earthen or red man, since he was created from red earth. 1
This etymology is based on the consonance of the words ‘ādām – “man”, ‘adōm – “red”, ‘ădāmā – “earth” and dām – “blood”. – Ed.

This name is also interpreted as “microcosmos,” that is, a small world, for it received its name from the four ends of the great world: from the east, west, north and noon (south). In Greek, these four ends of the universe are called as follows: “anatoli” - east; “disis” – west; “Arktos” – north or midnight; “mesimvria” – noon (south). Take the first letters from these Greek names and it will be “Adam.” And just as in the name of Adam the four-pointed world was depicted, which Adam was to populate with the human race, so in the same name the four-pointed cross of Christ was depicted, through which the new Adam - Christ our God - was subsequently to save the human race, inhabited at the four ends, from death and hell universe.

The day on which God created Adam, as already mentioned, was the sixth day, which we call Friday. On the same day that God created animals and cattle, He also created man, who has common feelings with animals. Man with all creation - visible and invisible, material, I say, and spiritual - has something in common. He has commonality with insensible things in being, with beasts, livestock and every animal - in feeling, and with Angels in reason. And the Lord God took the created man and brought him into a beautiful Paradise, filled with indescribable blessings and sweets, irrigated by four rivers of the purest waters; in the midst of it was a tree of life, and whoever ate its fruit never died. There was also another tree there, called the tree of understanding or the knowledge of good and evil; it was the tree of death. God, having commanded Adam to eat the fruit of every tree, commanded him not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: On the same day, if you take it down, - he said, - you will die by death(Gen. 2:17). The tree of life is attention to yourself, for you will not destroy your salvation, you will not lose eternal life, when you are attentive to yourself. And the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is curiosity, examining the deeds of others, followed by condemnation of one's neighbor; condemnation entails the punishment of eternal death in hell: Judge for your brother the Antichrist is(James 4:11-12; 1 John 3:15; Rom. 14:10) 2
This interesting interpretation cannot be applied to the biblical narrative itself, if only because Adam and Eve were the only people on earth. But the very idea that the tree of knowledge is associated with a person’s moral choice, and not with some special property of its fruits, has become widespread in patristic interpretations. Having fulfilled God's commandment not to eat from the tree, a person would experience goodness; Having broken the commandment, Adam and Eve experienced evil and its consequences. – Ed.

Holy forefather ADAM and holy foremother EVE

God made Adam king and ruler over all of His earthly creation and subjected everything to his power - all the sheep and oxen, and the livestock, and the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, so that he would possess them all. And he brought to him all the cattle and all the birds and the meek and submissive beast, for at that time the wolf was still like a lamb, and the hawk like a hen in its disposition, one not harming the other. And Adam gave them all names such as were appropriate and characteristic of each animal, coordinating the name of each animal with its true nature and disposition that subsequently emerged. For Adam was very wise from God and had the mind of an angel. The wise and most kind Creator, having created Adam as such, wanted to give him a concubine and loving companionship, so that he would have someone with whom to enjoy such great blessings, and said: It is not good for man to be alone; let us create a helper for him(Genesis 2:18).

And God brought Adam into a deep sleep, so that in his spirit he could see what was happening and understand the upcoming sacrament of marriage, and especially the union of Christ Himself with the Church; for the mystery of the incarnation of Christ was revealed to him (I speak in agreement with theologians), since the knowledge of the Holy Trinity was given to him, and he knew about the former angelic fall and about the impending reproduction of the human race from it, and also through God's revelation then he comprehended many others sacraments, except for his fall, which by the destinies of God was hidden from him. During such a wonderful dream or, better yet, delight 3
In the Septuagint, Adam's dream is designated by the word §ta aig-"frenzy, delight." – Ed.

The Lord took one of Adam’s ribs and created him a wife to help him, whom Adam, waking up from sleep, recognized and said: Behold, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh(Genesis 2:23). Both in the creation of Adam from the earth, and in the creation of Eve from a rib, there was a prototype of Christ’s incarnation from the Most Pure Virgin, which St. Chrysostom perfectly explains, saying the following: “As Adam, in addition to his wife, produced a wife, so the Virgin without a husband gave birth to a Husband, giving for Eve husbands duty; Adam remained intact after the removal of his fleshly rib, and the Virgin remained incorrupt after the Child came from Her” (Word for the Nativity of Christ). In the same creation of Eve from Adam’s rib there was a prototype of the Church of Christ, which was to arise from the piercing of His rib on the Cross. Augustine says the following about this: “Adam sleeps so that Eve may be created; Christ dies, let there be a Church. When Adam slept, Eve was created from a rib; When Christ died, the ribs were pierced with a spear so that the sacraments by which the Church would be structured would flow out.”

Adam and Eve were both created by God in ordinary human stature, as John of Damascus testifies to this, saying: “God created man who was gentle, righteous, virtuous, carefree, sorrowless, sanctified by all virtue, adorned with all blessings, like a kind of second world, small in the great, another angel, a joint worshiper, bowing to God together with the Angels, an overseer of a visible creation, thinking about mysteries, a king existing on earth, earthly and heavenly, temporary and immortal, visible and thinking, average majesty (in height) and humility, and also spiritual and carnal" (John of Damascus. An accurate exposition of the Orthodox faith. Book 2, ch. XII).

Having thus created on the sixth day a husband and wife to stay in Paradise, entrusting them with dominion over all earthly creation, commanding them to enjoy all the sweets of Paradise, except for the fruits of the reserved tree, and blessing their marriage, which then had to be a carnal union, for he said: Grow and multiply(Gen. 1:28), the Lord God rested from all His works on the seventh day. But He did not rest as if weary, for God is Spirit, and how can He be tired? He rested in order to provide rest to people from their external affairs and worries on the seventh day, which in the Old Testament was the Sabbath (which means rest), and in the new grace the day of the week (Sunday) was sanctified for this purpose, for the sake of what was on this day Resurrection of Christ.

God rested from work in order not to produce new creatures more perfect than those created, for there was no need for more, since every creature, above and below, was created. But God Himself did not rest, and does not rest, and will not rest, supporting and governing all creation, which is why Christ said in the Gospel: My Father is working hitherto, and I am working(John 5:17). God acts, directing the heavenly currents, arranging beneficial changes of times, establishing the earth, which is not based on anything, motionless and producing from it rivers and sweet water springs for watering every living creature. God acts for the benefit of all not only verbal, but also dumb animals, providing for, preserving, feeding and multiplying them. God acts, preserving the life and existence of every person, faithful and unfaithful, righteous and sinful. About Him, - as the Apostle says, - we live and move and we are(Acts 17, 28). And if the Lord God were to withdraw His all-powerful hand from all His creation and from us, then we would immediately perish, and all creation would be destroyed. Yet the Lord does this, without troubling himself at all, as one of the theologians (Augustine) says: “When he rests he does, and when he does he rests.”

The Sabbath day, or the day of God’s rest from work, foreshadowed that coming Saturday, on which our Lord Christ rested in the Tomb after the labors of His free suffering for us and the accomplishment of our salvation on the Cross.

Adam and his wife were both naked in Paradise and were not ashamed (just as small babies are not ashamed today), for they did not yet feel within themselves carnal lust, which is the beginning of shame and about which they knew nothing then, and this is their very dispassion and innocence were like a beautiful robe for them. And what clothes could be more beautiful for them than their pure, virgin, immaculate flesh, delighting in heavenly bliss, nourished by heavenly food and overshadowed by the grace of God?

The devil was jealous of their blissful stay in Paradise and, in the form of a serpent, deceived them so that they would eat the fruit from the forbidden tree; and Eve tasted it first, and then Adam, and both sinned gravely, breaking the commandment of God. Immediately, having angered their Creator God, they lost the grace of God, recognized their nakedness and understood the enemy’s deception, for [the devil] said to them: You will be like a god(Gen. 3:5) and lied, being father of lies(cf. John 8:44). Not only did they not receive deity, but they also destroyed what they had, for they both lost the ineffable gifts of God. Is it only that the devil turned out to be telling the truth when he said: You will be the leader of good and evil(Genesis 3:5). Indeed, it was only at that time that our ancestors realized how good Paradise and staying in it were, when they became unworthy of it and were expelled from it. Truly, good is not so well known that it is good when a person has it in his possession, but at the time when he destroys it. Both of them also knew evil, which they had not known before. For they knew nakedness, hunger, winter, heat, labor, sickness, passions, weakness, death and hell; They learned all this when they transgressed the commandment of God.

When their eyes were opened to see and know their nakedness, they immediately began to be ashamed of each other. At the same hour in which they ate the forbidden fruit, carnal lust was immediately born in them from eating this food; Both of them felt passionate lust in their members, and shame and fear seized them, and they began to cover the shame of their bodies with fig tree leaves. Having heard the Lord God walking in Paradise at noon, they hid from Him under a tree, for they no longer dared to appear before the face of their Creator, whose commandments they did not keep, and hid from His face, being overwhelmed by both shame and great awe.

God, calling them with His voice and presenting them before His face, after testing them in sin, pronounced His righteous judgment on them, so that they would be expelled from Paradise and feed from the labor of their hands and the sweat of their brow: to Eve, so that she would give birth to children in illness; Adam, so that he would cultivate the land that produces thorns and thistles, and for both of them, so that after much suffering in this life they would die and turn their bodies into the ground, and with their souls go down into the prisons of hell.

Only God comforted them greatly in that he revealed to them at the same time about the upcoming Redemption of their human race through the incarnation of Christ after a certain time. For the Lord, speaking to the serpent about the woman that her Seed would erase his head, predicted to Adam and Eve that from their seed would be born the Most Pure Virgin, the bearer of their punishment, and from the Virgin would be born Christ, who with His blood would redeem them and the entire human race from slavery He will lead the enemy out of the bonds of hell and again make him worthy of Paradise and the Heavenly Villages, while he will trample the head of the devil and completely erase him.

And God expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise and settled him directly opposite Paradise, so that he could cultivate the land from which he was taken. He appointed Cherubim with weapons to guard Paradise, so that no man, beast or devil would enter it.

We begin to count the years of the world's existence from the time of Adam's expulsion from Paradise, for how long the time lasted during which Adam enjoyed the blessings of Paradise is completely unknown to us. The time at which he began to suffer after his exile became known to us, and from here the years got their beginning - when the human race saw evil. Truly, Adam knew good and evil at a time when he was deprived of goodness and fell into unexpected disasters that he had never experienced before. For, being at first in Paradise, he was like a son in his father’s house, without sorrow and labor, being satisfied with a ready and rich meal; outside Paradise, as if expelled from his fatherland, he began to eat bread in the sweat of his brow with tears and sighs. His assistant Eve, the mother of all living, also began to give birth to children in illness.

It is most likely that after being expelled from Paradise, our first parents, if not immediately, then not for a long time, knew each other carnally and began to give birth to children: this is partly because both of them were created at a perfect age, capable of marriage, and partly because that their natural lust and desire for carnal intercourse intensified after the former grace of God was taken away from them for breaking the commandment. In addition, seeing only themselves in this world and knowing, however, that they were created and destined by God in order to give birth and multiply the human race, they wanted to see fruit similar to themselves and the multiplication of humanity as soon as possible, and therefore they soon came to know themselves carnally and began to give birth.

When Adam was expelled from Paradise, at first he was not far from Paradise; constantly looking at him with his assistant, he cried incessantly, sighing heavily from the depths of his heart at the memory of the ineffable blessings of heaven, which he lost and fell into such great suffering for the sake of a small taste of the forbidden fruit.

Although our first parents Adam and Eve sinned before the Lord God and lost their former grace, they did not lose faith in God: both of them were filled with the fear of the Lord and love and had hope for their deliverance, given to them in revelation.

God was pleased with their repentance, incessant tears and fasting, with which they humbled their souls for the intemperance they committed in Paradise. And the Lord looked upon them mercifully, listening to their prayers, made out of contrition of heart, and prepared forgiveness for them from Himself, freeing them from sinful guilt, which is clearly seen from the words of the Book of Wisdom: Siya(wisdom of God) preserved the primordial father of the world, the one created, and delivered him from his sin, and gave him every kind of strength to maintain(Wis. 10, 1-2).

Our ancestors Adam and Eve, not despairing of God’s mercy, but trusting in His compassion for mankind, in their repentance began to invent ways of serving God; they began to bow to the east, where Paradise was planted, and to pray to their Creator, and also to offer sacrifices to God: either from the flocks of sheep, which, according to God, was a prototype of the sacrifice of the Son of God, who was to be slain like a lamb for deliverance human race; or they brought from the harvest of the field, which was a foreshadowing of the Sacrament in new grace, when the Son of God, under the guise of bread, was offered as an auspicious Sacrifice to God His Father for the remission of human sins.

Doing this themselves, they taught their children to honor God and make sacrifices to Him and told them with tears about the blessings of heaven, rousing them to achieve the salvation promised to them by God and instructing them to live a life pleasing to God.

After six hundred years from the creation of the world, when the forefather Adam pleased God with true and deep repentance, he received (according to the testimony of George Kedrin) by God's will from the Archangel Uriel, the prince and guardian of repentant people and intercessor for them before God, a well-known revelation about the incarnation of God from the Most Pure, Unmarried and Ever-Virgin Virgin. If the incarnation was revealed, then other mysteries of our salvation were revealed to him, that is, about the free suffering and death of Christ, about the descent into hell and the liberation of the righteous from there, about His three-day stay in the Tomb and the uprising, and about many other mysteries of God, and also about many things that were to happen later, such as the corruption of the sons of God of the Seth tribe, the flood, the future Judgment and the general resurrection of all. And Adam was filled with the great prophetic gift, and he began to predict the future, leading sinners to the path of repentance, and comforting the righteous with the hope of salvation 4
Wed: Georgy Kedrin. Synopsis. 17, 18 – 18, 7 (in references to Kedrin’s chronicle, the first digit indicates the page number of the critical edition, the second - the line number. Links are given by edition: Georgius Cedrenus / Ed. Immanuel Bekkerus. T. 1. Bonnae, 1838). This opinion of George Kedrin raises doubts from the point of view of the theological and liturgical Tradition of the Church. The liturgical poetry of the Church emphasizes the fact that the Incarnation is a sacrament “hidden from the ages” and “unknown to the Angel” (Theotokion on “God the Lord” in the 4th tone). St. John Chrysostom said that the Angels fully realized the God-manhood of Christ only during the Ascension. The statement that all the secrets of the Divine Redemption were revealed to Adam contradicts the idea of ​​​​the gradual communication of Divine revelation to humanity. The mystery of salvation could be revealed in full only by Christ. – Ed.

The holy forefather Adam, who set the first example of both fall and repentance and with tearful sobbing, who pleased God with many deeds and labors, when he reached the age of 930, by God's revelation, he knew his approaching death. Calling his assistant Eve, his sons and daughters, and also calling his grandchildren and great-grandsons, he instructed them to live virtuously, doing the will of the Lord and trying in every possible way to please Him. As the first prophet on earth, he announced the future to them. Having then taught peace and blessing to everyone, he died the death to which he was condemned by God for breaking the commandment. His death befell him on Friday (according to the testimony of Saint Irenaeus), on which he had previously transgressed the commandment of God in Paradise, and at the same sixth hour of the day in which he ate the commanded food given to him from the hands of the Evines. Leaving behind many sons and daughters, Adam did good to the entire human race all the days of his life.

How many children Adam gave birth to, historians say differently about this. Georgiy Kedrin writes that Adam left behind 33 sons and 27 daughters; Cyrus Dorotheus of Monemvasia also claims the same thing. The holy martyr Methodius, Bishop of Tire, during the reign of Diocletian in Chalcis (not in Chalcedon, but in Chalcis, for one is the city of Chalcedon, and the other is the city of Chalcis, which see in Onomasticon), a Greek city that suffered for Christ, in the Roman The Martyrology ("Martyr's Word"), under the 18th day of the month of September, the revered one (not found in our Saints), tells that Adam had one hundred sons and the same number of daughters, born along with the sons, for twins were born, male and female 5
Georgy Kedrin. Synopsis. 18, 9-10. – Ed.

The entire human tribe mourned Adam, and they buried him (according to the testimony of Egyptipus) in a marble tomb in Hebron, where the Field of Damascus is, and the Mamre oak tree later grew there. There was also that double cave, which Abraham later acquired for the burial of Sarah and himself, having bought it from Ephron during the time of the sons of the Hittites. So, Adam, created from the earth, returned to the earth again, according to the word of the Lord.

Others wrote that Adam was buried where Golgotha ​​is, near Jerusalem; but it is appropriate to know that the head of Adam was brought there after the flood. There is a probable account of James of Ephesus, who was the teacher of St. Ephraim. He says that Noah, entering the ship before the flood, took the honest relics of Adam from the tomb and carried them with him into the ship, hoping through his prayers to be saved during the flood. After the flood, he divided the relics between his three sons: to the eldest son Shem he gave the most honorable part - the forehead of Adam - and indicated that he would live in that part of the earth where Jerusalem would later be created. Hereby, according to the vision of God and according to the prophetic gift given to him from God, he gave burial to the forehead of Adam in a high place, not far from the place where Jerusalem was to arise. Having poured a great grave over his forehead, he called it the “place of the forehead” from Adam’s forehead, buried where our Lord Christ was subsequently crucified by His will.

After the death of the forefather Adam, the forefather Eve still survived; Having lived ten years after Adam, she died in 940 from the beginning of the world and was buried next to her husband, from whose rib she was created.

In the old days, reading the Lives of Saints was one of the favorite pastimes of all strata of the Russian people. At the same time, the reader was interested not only in historical facts from the life of Christian ascetics, but also in the deep edifying and moral meaning. Today the Lives of the saints have faded into the background. Christians prefer to spend time on Internet forums and social networks. However, can this be considered normal? The journalist is thinking about this Marina Voloskova, teacher Anna Kuznetsova and Old Believer writer Dmitry Urushev.

How was created hagiography literature

The study of Russian holiness in its history and its religious phenomenology has always been relevant. Today, the study of hagiographic literature is managed by a separate direction in philology, called hagiography . It should be noted that hagiographic literature for medieval Russian people was not just a relevant type of reading, but a cultural and religious component of his life.

The lives of saints are essentially biographies of clergy and secular persons glorified for veneration by the Christian Church or its individual communities. From the first days of its existence, the Christian Church carefully collected information about the life and activities of its ascetics and communicated it to its children as an edifying example.

The lives of saints constitute perhaps the most extensive section of Christian literature. They were the favorite reading of our ancestors. Many monks and even laymen were engaged in rewriting lives; richer people ordered hagiographic collections for themselves. Since the 16th century, in connection with the growth of Moscow national consciousness, collections of purely Russian lives have appeared.

Eg, Metropolitan Macarius under Tsar John IV, he created a whole staff of scribes and clerks, who for more than twenty years accumulated ancient Russian writing into an extensive literary collection Great Fours. In it, the Lives of the saints took pride of place. In ancient times, in general, reading hagiographic literature was treated, one might say, with the same reverence as reading the Holy Scriptures.

Over the centuries of its existence, Russian hagiography has gone through different forms and known different styles. The lives of the first Russian saints are works " The Legend of Boris and Gleb", lives Vladimir Svyatoslavich, Princess Olga, Theodosius of Pechersk, abbot of the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery, and others. Among the best writers of Ancient Rus' who devoted their pen to glorifying saints, Nestor the Chronicler, Epiphanius the Wise and Pachomius Logothete stand out. The first Lives of the Saints were tales of martyrs.

Even Saint Clement, Bishop of Rome, during the first persecution of Christianity, appointed seven notaries in various districts of Rome to daily record what happened to Christians in places of execution, as well as in prisons and courts. Despite the fact that the pagan government threatened the recorders with the death penalty, recordings continued throughout the persecution of Christianity.

In the pre-Mongol period, the Russian church had a complete set of menaia, prologues and synoxarions corresponding to the liturgical circle. Patericons—special collections of the lives of saints—were of great importance in Russian literature.

Finally, the last common source for the memory of the saints of the Church is calendars and month books. The origin of calendars dates back to the very first times of the Church. From the testimony of Asterius of Amasia it is clear that in the 4th century. they were so complete that they contained names for all the days of the year.

From the beginning of the 15th century, Epiphanius and the Serb Pachomius created a new school in northern Rus' - a school of artificially decorated, extensive life. This is how a stable literary canon is created, a magnificent “weaving of words”, which Russian scribes strive to imitate until the end of the 17th century. In the era of Metropolitan Macarius, when many ancient inexperienced hagiographic records were being redone, the works of Pachomius were included in the Chetii-Minea intact. The vast majority of these hagiographic monuments are strictly dependent on their samples.

There are lives almost entirely copied from the ancients; others use established literary etiquette, refraining from providing precise biographical information. This is what hagiographers involuntarily do, separated from the saint by a long period of time - sometimes centuries, when the popular tradition dries up. But here, too, the general law of the hagiographic style, similar to the law of icon painting, operates. It demands the subordination of the particular to the general, the dissolution of the human face in the heavenly glorified face.

Valuable That, What modern?

Currently, classical hagiographic literature is fading into the background. In its place are news feeds, social networks, and, at best, reports from printed church media. The question arises: have we chosen the right path for church information life? Is it true that we only occasionally remember the exploits of famous saints, but pay more attention to the events of our day - high-profile, but forgotten tomorrow?

Not only lives, but also other ancient literary monuments are of less and less interest to Christians. Moreover, in the Old Believers this problem is felt more acutely than even in the Russian Orthodox Church. There is a lot of hagiographic literature on the shelves of bookstores of the Moscow Patriarchate, just have time to purchase and read. Some Old Believers express the idea that everything can be bought there. Their bookstores are overflowing with a variety of church literature, biographies of Sergius of Radonezh, Stephen of Perm, Dionysius of Radonezh and many others.

But are we really so weak that we ourselves cannot (or do not want) to publish a collection of lives or publish a brief overview of the life of this or that saint in the parish newspaper? Moreover, literary monuments published in non-Orthodox church publishing houses are replete with inaccuracies in translations, and sometimes with deliberate historical or theological falsifications. For example, today it is not difficult to stumble upon the publication of Domostroy, where in the chapter on church customs all ancient customs are replaced with modern ones.

Now the periodicals of the Old Believers are filled with news materials, but there is practically no educational information there. And if there is no such thing, then people will not have sufficient knowledge. And it is not surprising that many traditions are forgotten, once most important names, symbols and images are erased from memory.

It is no coincidence that, for example, in the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church and other Old Believer accords there is not a single temple dedicated to holy noble princes Boris and Gleb. Although these princes were the most revered Russian saints before the church schism, today, except for an entry in the calendar and a rare service (and then if the day of remembrance falls on a Sunday), they are not venerated in any way. What then can we say about other, less famous saints? They are completely forgotten.

Therefore, we must do everything possible for spiritual enlightenment. Hagiographic literature is a faithful assistant in this matter. Even a five-minute reading of the Life sets a person up for a good time and strengthens him in faith.

By publishing, even if abbreviated, the Lives of saints, teachings, sermons, possibly collections of church rules, apologetics, we will thereby help a person learn more about his faith. This can save many believers from superstitions, false rumors and dubious customs, including those borrowed from heterodox confessions, which are quickly spreading and turning into a “new church tradition.” If even older, experienced people often become hostage to ideas received from dubious sources, then young people can even faster become victims of harmful information.

There is a request for ancient literary works, including the Lives of Saints. For example, parishioners of the Rzhev Church in the name of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos have repeatedly expressed the opinion that they would like to see interesting hagiographic stories about local, Tver saints in the parish newspaper “Pokrovsky Vestnik”. Perhaps other Old Believer publications should think about this as well.

Coming back To Old Russian traditions enlightenment

Today, many Old Believer authors and journalists consider it important to publish hagiographic literature, reviving the reader’s sense of respect for the names of ancient ascetics. They raise the question of the need for more educational work within the Old Believers themselves.

Anna Kuznetsova - journalist, member JV Russia, teacher additional education V G. Rzhev

It is not only possible, but also necessary, to publish the lives of saints, only in a convenient and not very expensive format. We have saints who were canonized after the schism of the 17th century. But for the most part, people remember only Archpriest Avvakum and Boyarina Morozova, and therefore associate only them with the Old Faith.

And judging by the way our leading hagiographers are engaged in research on these issues about people who lived one and a half to two centuries ago, it turns out that we are “behind” by just two centuries. In this sense, there is no clear book church policy, because apart from the archpriest and the “victims like him” we don’t know anyone...

Dmitry Aleksandrovich Urushev - historian, member of the Union of Journalists of Russia

The Apostle Paul writes: “Remember your teachers, who spoke the word of God to you; as they look to the end of their lives, imitate their faith” (Heb. 13:7).

Christians must honor their mentors - saints of God, and imitate their faith and life. Therefore, from ancient times the Orthodox Church established the veneration of saints, devoting every day of the year to one or another righteous person - a martyr, ascetic, apostle, saint or prophet.

Just as a loving mother takes care of her children, so the Church took care of her children, for their benefit and edification by recording the lives of the saints in the book Prologue. This book consists of four volumes - one for each season. In the Prologue, short lives are arranged day by day; in addition, one or more teachings of the holy fathers are given for each day. A more extensive collection of lives and teachings is called the Four Menaions and consists of twelve menaia - monthly volumes.

Bulky Chet'i-Minei are rare and hard-to-find books. The compact Prologue, on the contrary, was very popular in Ancient Rus'. It was often rewritten and published several times. Previously, Old Believers also read the Prologue with pleasure, receiving great benefit and true instruction in a righteous life.

Reading the lives of the saints of God and soul-helping teachings, Christians of the past had before them the example of holy martyrs and ascetics, they were always ready to courageously stand for Orthodoxy and piety, they were ready to fearlessly confess their faith before the enemies of the Church, without fear of executions and torture.

But the Prologue is written in Old Church Slavonic. And during the years of Soviet power, its knowledge among Christians decreased significantly, and the circle of reading Slavic books itself narrowed exclusively to liturgical books. Now the sad fact noted by V.G. has become obvious. Belinsky back in the middle of the 19th century: “Slavic and ancient books in general can be a subject of study, but not at all of pleasure; they can only be dealt with by learned people, not by society.”

What to do? Alas, we will have to put on the shelf the Prologue, the Chetii-Minea and other soulful reading in Old Church Slavonic. Let's be realistic, now only a few experts can delve into this ancient source of wisdom and draw the water of life from it. The average parishioner is deprived of this pleasure. But we cannot allow modernity to rob and impoverish it!

It is impossible to force all Christians to study the language of ancient Russian literature. Therefore, instead of Old Church Slavonic books, books in Russian should appear. Of course, creating a complete translation of the Prologue is a difficult and time-consuming task. Yes, probably unnecessary. After all, since the middle of the 17th century, since the schism, new saints appeared in the Church, new teachings were written. But they are not reflected in the printed Prologue. We must work to create a new body of soul-helping reading for Christians.

This will no longer be the Prologue and the Cheti-Minea. These will be new essays, written simply and entertainingly, designed for the widest audience. Let’s say this will be a selection of educational literature, including publicly available books about the Holy Scriptures, church history, Christian theology, the lives of saints, textbooks on Orthodox worship and the Old Church Slavonic language.

These are the publications that should be on the bookshelf in the home of every Old Believer. For many they will be the first step on the ladder of the wisdom of God. Then, by reading more complex books, a Christian will be able to rise higher and grow spiritually. After all, to be honest, many Old Believers do not understand anything about their old faith.

I was unpleasantly surprised when I encountered this phenomenon: a person lives a Christian life, prays and fasts, regularly attends services, but knows nothing about the teachings of the Church and its history. Meanwhile, Soviet times, when to go to church it was enough that “my grandmother went there,” are a thing of the past. New times ask us new questions and require new answers about our faith.

What can we answer when we don’t know anything? Therefore, we must not forget that Christianity has always been based on books. Without them, our faith and history seem inexplicable.

A wonderful hagiography, or

hagiographies these days are often treated with disdain, both by non-believers and believers. Traditional believers, although they revere saints, for the most part treat their lives as descriptions of some kind of alien existence, the exploits of distant epic heroes, by definition inaccessible to imitation - and even those not intended for it. At one time, when I had to discuss with Orthodox Christians about various situations in the Church and how it would be correct to react to them, I tried to give relevant examples from the lives of saints, but they often answered me approximately like this: “Then we are saints, and then we are, we are sinners and cannot literally imitate them; now is not the time, the situation is different; we would rather obey such and such a priest or an elder...” - although this was not about any then great feats, which modern people are really hardly capable of, but about the attitude towards divine services or about how the saints reacted to various apostasy of the episcopate, that is, about such actions that

It is quite possible to imitate in our time. Liberal believers often find the behavior of saints strange and “inhumane,” and their lives implausible, boring or sugary; however, the latter applies most of all to their modern transcriptions. Thus, in fact, believers neglect the lives of saints just as much as non-believers - and, apparently, that’s why they are not too eager to read them: who is interested, in fact, in learning about things that are alien to you or even lead to a state of discomfort, since soon you cannot and do not want to imitate anything you read?

As for non-believers, or at least non-church people, they often consider lives to be collections of fairy tales and myths that have no relation to real life and are therefore uninteresting, and, moreover, written in a language unusual for the reader of modern novels.

True, thanks to the emergence of such a field of science as critical hagiography, scientists have been able to largely “rehabilitate” lives and show that these works often have significant value as historical sources - you just need to be able to read such texts. The scholarly Bollandist Hippolyte Daley is responsible for the now classic division of the lives of saints into “historical” and “epic.” “Historical” lives tell the story of the actual life of a real saint, although it can be significantly ennobled, embellished and supplemented, because the saint should be seen as an unconditional ideal. Thus, actions are most often hushed up or obscured

saints who may seem unseemly or simply do not fit with the appearance of an impeccable hero. But hagiographers love to talk about numerous miracles performed by saints, including quite improbable ones, although there are also lives where miracles are completely absent. Hagiographers often compose long speeches in defense of the Christian faith or some dogma, which the saint was unlikely to actually pronounce - and which the hagiographer himself could not hear in any case! - and if he did pronounce it, it was not in the form in which they were presented in the life; in all such cases, we obviously have before us a literary fantasy on the topic “how could it (or should) be said.” Nevertheless, there is a significant percentage of historical authenticity in even such lives, although their data should, if possible, be verified using other sources. 7 But the “epic” lives of the people do not have as their goal to tell the real story: it is something like a Christian epic containing elements of metric reality, but their combination is entirely subordinated to the creation of a certain legend with the necessary meaning. 8

The development of critical hagiography, however, together with the rehabilitation of lives as historical sources, entailed many revelations: it turned out that many saints, especially of the first centuries of Christianity, but not only, either did not exist in reality at all, or are derivatives of the processing of stories that did not having almost nothing in common with the lives composed by hagiographers on their basis - this can have a discouraging effect on the reader, especially the believer, as well as the scholar-historian. However, the historian reassures himself that even entirely literary lives about fictitious saints may well contain - and, as a rule, contain - many real and often very valuable details of the life of that time,

Modern man often does not realize that a thousand years ago people needed entertainment just as much as they do now, and that not only the lives of saints, but also many exegetical works then played the same role as novels or fictionalized biographies do for modern man. At one time I was struck in this sense by the interpretation of St. Nile of Sinai on the Gospel parable about the rich man: the exegete developed several lines of the parable, one might say, into a whole novel about this rich man and how he, having collected grain in the granaries, dreamed of how he would boast about it to people, driving it through the streets, but did not want to share it with the poor, and in the end this grain in the granaries was either eaten by worms, or God turned it to dust with his wave. But then, suddenly realizing, apparently, that this whole story had no basis in the text of the parable being interpreted, the exegete declared without hesitation: “It’s better to say that whether this happened or not, the rich man, who considered himself long-lived, did not know. Because, prematurely delighted with life, he anticipated the loss of what he had collected.” Anyone who remembers, for example, the two-variant ending of J. Fowles’s novel “The French Lieutenant’s Mistress,” I think, will appreciate the literary device used by Neil. Having read this interpretation, you fully realize that the works of holy exegetes, often filled with the most fantastic turns of thought that can hardly occur to a modern reader of the Bible, served the Byzantines as a kind of intellectual novels. Of course, ancient poems and novels continued to be read in Byzantium, and Homer and pagan rhetoricians were studied in schools throughout the history of the Empire, but pious readers and listeners required pious literature, and this was, first of all, the lives of saints. We should also not forget that not all Byzantines were literate enough or could afford to have their own library - books at that time were very expensive - and therefore the works created then were designed to be read aloud, with family or friends, in a congregation monks, from the church pulpit.

In addition, hagiographies often played the same role that the media play in our time. Not all believers could understand the high dogma and logical language of polemical works, and for the people, doctrinal truths were presented in a simplified version: in the form of short sayings of the holy fathers, put into the mouths of the heroes of their lives, or in the form of suitable examples from life, or in the form of memorable poetic poems. epigrams, or using hagiographic symbols. In the era of iconoclasm, for example, icon-readers loved to repeat a quote from St. Basil the Great: “the honoring of the image passes to the prototype,” although Vasily wrote this in a completely different context, not about icons at all, but about the portrait of an earthly king, from this example going back to the theology of God the Son as the “natural image” of God the Father. Sometimes hagiographers forced saints to pronounce entire speeches with a confession of faith, containing a brief summary of all Orthodox dogmas. In the lives there are often references to very specific features of heretical teachings, which were being fought at that time, and therefore the lives can be useful in studying the theological polemics of a particular era. As an example from life, they cited the attitude towards portraits of the emperor: whoever dishonored them was punished as an insult to the majesty - which means that whoever dishonored the image of Christ and the saints is all the more worthy of punishment; For the iconoclasts, for propaganda among the people, the easiest way was to equate icons with idols. Of course, such examples were much more understandable to the people than complex discussions about whether God can or cannot be depicted on an icon, which were the lot of more educated people. Both iconoclasts and icon-worshippers composed epigrams outlining their views and refuting their opponents. Finally, whole detailed legends could be invented about saints and their miracles in order to tune the mass consciousness to one wave or another, so even the most implausible legends had a very definite historical meaning for contemporaries. However, this still does not solve the problem of modern perception of such texts. As one patrolologist said on this occasion, this is why no one reads hagiography now except historians: if hagiographic works are the media, “then who, besides historians, is interested in media that report stale news with old ideology?”

But the function of the hagiographies was far from being limited to the media or to pious reading “for the benefit of the soul.” In fact, the modern reader admires, for example, A. S. Pushkin’s novel “Eugene Onegin” in the same way as the poet’s contemporaries, although this work contains a lot of allusions and references to pressing problems for the author and, perhaps, was written in the heat of struggle with well-defined literary trends, about which the modern reader has no idea, which does not prevent him from loving this work, although he may well understand and perceive it in a completely different way than was intended by the author himself. Of course, a specific life may contain one or another main message that the author would like to instill in the reader - but this is generally the property of almost any literary work, and other modern novels may turn out to be no less ideological and obsessively “educational” than medieval lives. The life may contain a deliberate apology for icon veneration, an almost apocalyptic picture of the spiritual and moral decline of the Empire, an attempt to prove that modern saints are no worse than the ancients, or the idea that there are no sins that could prevent a person from repenting and achieving holiness; Lives often served various short-term purposes, church-political and even economic. However, any life is, first of all, a biography of a specific person who lived in specific conditions, and because of this, it always contains quite important details that help restore the historical and cultural picture of the era and understand the tastes and demands of those Byzantines for whom these works were created at that time playing for many people the same role as novels for our contemporaries: lives entertained, taught, consoled, inspired, instilled certain ideas, and educated morally. At the same time, the Byzantines themselves, as can be seen from the sources, treated the too “miraculous” lives with a degree of healthy skepticism and were in no hurry to take on faith everything that was written there.

Thus, lives, perhaps, are most interesting not from the “ideological” side, that is, not as media and a weapon in the fight against this or that heresy, but as sketches of the history, culture and morals of the era, and from this point of view they are very informative and entertaining. Even in “epic” lives, not to mention “historical” ones, and even in descriptions of various miracles, which the modern reader treats with such distrust, one can find a lot of interesting details of the life and mentality of the Byzantines of that time. Moreover, if you carefully read the lives of the saints and their own writings, especially letters, you can see that the saints were not only great ascetics and unattainable examples of Christian living. They were also ordinary people, sometimes they showed weaknesses and quarreled among themselves, at times they became despondent and discouraged, they suffered and rejoiced, they worked and rested, they taught and studied, they had love for some people and dislike for others, they experienced various needs in difficult times. they sought support not only from God and the inhabitants of heaven, but also from earthly friends - in a word, despite their exploits, they were people just like us, and not at all some kind of “aliens” who had nothing in common with us. In this regard, it seems to me an excellent attempt to “revive” and bring the Byzantines closer to us, the recently published guide to Constantinople, compiled by the Russian Byzantinist S. A. Ivanov - this book reads like an exciting novel, and the tone of the stories about emperors and saints, which may seem too familiar to the pious pilgrim, is a good device for showing that the Byzantines, who often seem so distant and incomprehensible, are in fact much closer to modern people than we think.

On the other hand, from this point of view, the multi-volume Lives of the Saints as presented by Demetrius of Rostov, published by Optina Pustyn before the revolution and republished in our time, seem to be a very harmful project - the publication of adapted, similar to one another, emasculated, enthusiastically sweet texts, from which the majority was removed interesting and non-standard episodes and touches present in the original lives. It was after getting acquainted with several translations of real Byzantine lives of saints, when I was able to compare them with previously read adapted texts, that I came up with the idea of ​​​​a project to translate them with commentary, so that the reader could not only familiarize himself with the text, but also learn about the historical and theological context specific lives, including about the everyday realities of the era, as well as information about the heroes of the lives from other sources - after all, such reading can be much more interesting, nourishing for the mind and useful for the soul (including, I think, for non-church people or non-believers) than getting acquainted with the texts of the lives with little or no commentary, which for the reader, especially the unprepared and unfamiliar with the history of Byzantium, essentially remains largely closed to understanding.

Unfortunately, in Russia the study of hagiographic texts is far from being in the same state as in the West. During the Soviet period, the lives of saints were considered “religious obscurantism,” and when S. V. Polyakova prepared for publication a Russian translation of a number of Byzantine lives, she published them in a book called “Byzantine Legends,” as literary monuments and with very little commentary. In recent years, the situation has improved, but not much, mainly due to the publication of texts and annotated translations of individual monuments. While entire series devoted to the study of hagiographical literature, numerous critical editions of texts, collections of translations, studies, articles and reports are published abroad, Russian Byzantine studies in this area is still very far from such a flourishing.

However interesting the lives of saints may be from an everyday, historical or theological point of view, their modern reader, of course, inevitably asks the questions with which J. Dagron began one of his remarkable articles on hagiography:

“Did the Byzantines believe in all those saints who little by little took over the cult space, the liturgical calendar, books, images and imagination? How did they read or listen to these Lives or collections of miracles, full of fantastic stories? Ancient myths poetically explained the structure of the world and did not require agreement with them, but hagiography, which seeks to give an account of the course of history, is based on a certain system, imposes a “wooden language” and, like one or another modern ideology, obliges the reader position itself either inside it or outside it. So, this is precisely a matter of faith, or more precisely, faith in faith - after all, if hagiography develops within Christianity, it would be very daring to say that it has always formed an integral part of it.”

The genre of hagiography indeed did not immediately occupy a place of honor in Byzantine literature and win the trust of readers. The people in those days were far from being as “dark” and gullible as is often imagined now. Reading the sources shows that Byzantium always had its share of skeptics and scoffers at “excessive” piety. As J. Dagron noted, “the saint as an image (and because he is an image) acquires its final status only after the Triumph of Orthodoxy,” that is, in the 9th century. Before this, the saints had numerous competitors: pagan sages and wonderworkers like Apollonius of Tyana, whose biography in form and content is very similar to the life of the saint; scientists who tried to explain certain phenomena in life not by divine intervention or “direct control” and providence of the Almighty, but by ordinary natural laws; astrologers who predict the future or help find a lost or stolen item not with the help of divine grace, but with their own

Such ambiguity, doubt and even sometimes skepticism, of course, posed a danger to hagiography: if some astrologer, doctor or pagan philosopher can achieve “naturally” the same result that saints do with their miracles, then what is the advantage of holiness and even more broadly? - Christian faith? In the early lives there appears the image of a pagan skeptic who turns to true faith thanks to the miracles of one or another saint; then this character is transformed into a Christian skeptic, doubting the holiness of the hero of the life and becoming convinced through a miracle; attacks on astrology are increasing; secular medicine is contrasted with “religious” - the saint succeeds in healing the sick, whom doctors refuse, and so on. However, at the same time, in the collections of “Questions and Answers” ​​of the 7th century, we encounter tricky questions about miracles performed by heretics, or about why there are more seriously ill people among Christians than among pagans - and the answers to them sometimes sound very strange. modern: miracles do not prove holiness; illnesses, healings and death have natural causes and, with the exception of special cases, should not be considered as signs or direct actions of God... Moreover, even regarding the fate of the souls of the dead, saints and non-saints, the compilers of these “Questions and Answers” ​​do not yet have the certainty that appears subsequently: either they are all in suspended animation, since the soul cannot act without a body, or, even if they retain perception, they are constantly in paradise and cannot know what is happening on earth, so instead of them, believers and Only angels in their form can appear to those praying on earth.

“Such principles,” notes J. Dagron, “do not take anything away from holiness, but clip the wings of hagiography, many of the topoi of which are simply destroyed: miracles and prophecies as evidence of holiness, epidemics and disasters as divine punishments, the superiority of the saint over the doctor, the quiet death of the righteous and torment of the sinner, immediate reward for deeds, direct revelations and visions from above... Even more important is that the Questions and Answers, leaving for the saints a privileged position in the period before the Last Judgment, limit their posthumous action - and therefore the most noticeable components of their cult - some doubt. The attack is clearly directed at the excesses of the fertile imagination of the authors of Lives and Miracles, who are carried away by the flow of their narrative into various deviations from the normal.”

All these themes that arose in the VI-VII centuries. as a result of countering the too rapid flourishing of hagiography with its supernatural miracles and the constant intervention of saints in the lives of people, they received their further development during the iconoclastic crisis: the denial of the benefits of prayers to the saints, the denial of their relics and miracles from them, as a result of which churches in iconoclastic times were consecrated without placing a particle of relics into the altar - these manifestations of iconoclasm were just a development of the sentiments and theological structures of previous centuries, based, among other things, on the doctrine of the “sleep” of the souls of the dead. According to this teaching, the soul of a person, be it a righteous person or a sinner, after death remains inactive and, as it were, “sleeps”, remains in suspended animation: separated from the body as an instrument of action of the soul through the senses, it is deprived of all sensations and is in complete inactivity with the moment of death until the general resurrection, when the soul is reunited with the body and receives its well-deserved reward. Thus, before the bodily resurrection, the saints can neither appear to people on earth, nor provide assistance to those who turn to them with prayer in front of relics or icons - they simply do not hear the prayers addressed to them; Instead, angels in the guise of saints appear to those praying. Celebrations in honor of them, however, are useful, since they edify the believers and remind them of the need to imitate the virtues of the saints.

The iconoclasts adopted these views in their struggle against the cult of icons, and, as V. A. Baranov noted, “the need to respond to the doctrine of the ineffectiveness of saints as intercessors and to the underlying doctrine of the “sleep of the soul” could cause the flourishing of icon-venerable hagiography in the iconoclastic and post-iconoclastic periods. This process can and should be considered in the broader context of polemics with teachings that deny the “real” appearances of saints and their immediate assistance after prayer in front of their icons or relics.” By the end of the iconoclastic era, hagiography celebrates, in the words of J. Dagron, “a triumph, receiving a status that protects it from all suspicion”: the cult of saints, their posthumous apparitions and miracles become an integral part of Orthodox dogma and liturgical practice.

However, despite this official triumph, the skeptics, naturally, did not go away and, apparently, still remained so dangerous for traditional piety that in the 11th century. was even conciliarly adopted and included in the Synodic, read on the feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, a special anathema against those who “do not accept with pure and simple faith from the bottom of their hearts the extraordinary miracles of our Savior and God, our Lady Theotokos who gave birth to Him immaculately, and all other saints, but they try, with the help of sophistic arguments and reasoning, to reject them as impossible or to falsely interpret them according to their own ideas and adapt them to their understanding.” J. Guillard notes that this anathema is not easy to interpret, since it is not entirely clear what miracles are meant: “Miracles in general or miracles of a special order? The supernatural in the gospel stories and in the lives of saints or posthumous

miracles? It seems certain that the condemned interpretation is based on philosophical arguments.”

In any case, upon careful study of the sources, it becomes obvious that the Byzantines were far from being so totally pious and like-minded with regard to faith in God, the cult of saints and way of life, as it sometimes seems to people who are accustomed to seeing a static “Orthodox kingdom” in Byzantium “, but they could disagree very, very much on the most important issues, just like our contemporaries - and this is another reason to read and study the lives of the saints.

READING THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

Don't go into heavy reading, it's not helpful at all. The most instructive reading is the Lives of the Saints; theoretical knowledge is not given here, but living examples of imitation of Christ the Savior are presented. Let the saints be your mentors, do not have other teachers, so as not to be troubled in spirit, especially those who try to distract from the Orthodox Church, run away from such mentors.

For example, reading the Lives of Saints. When we read them, at least the life of St. vmchts. Catherine, then the Saint begins to pray for such a person before the throne of God, and the prayer of the saints, of course, is important. Perhaps some soul was on the verge of destruction, but by reading the Lives of the Saints, she attracted their prayer for herself and was saved. Buy these books: they are not so expensive, others will get more, and by reading them we gain enormous benefits.

Learning to fight your passions is very important and even necessary. The best guidance in this will be for you to read the Lives of the Saints. The world has long since abandoned him, but do not conform to the world, and this reading will give you much comfort. In the Lives of the Saints you will find instructions on how to fight the spirit of evil and remain victorious. May the Lord help you.

I have always advised and advise you to read the Lives of the Saints, and you will find great consolation in this reading. Your sorrows will seem insignificant to you in comparison with those that the saints endured. Reading the Lives of the Saints, you will have a desire, if possible, to imitate them. You will want to pray and ask the Lord for help, and the Lord will help.

In the world, reading the Lives of the Saints, and especially in the Slavic language, has been completely abandoned; Do not conform to the customs of this age, but engage in this saving reading.

Monasticism... how many times have we talked about it, and I always advise, if you don’t join a monastery yourself, then at least read descriptions of the lives of holy monks and saints. They can teach us a lot.

The world of evil spirits is now looking at us and is already forging chains, wanting to destroy the words of the sinful Barsanuphius, but do not be afraid! The Lord will save us from their evil power. Read Holy Scripture, the Gospel, the Epistles, and the Lives of the Saints. This reading is of great importance, but here’s what’s sad: The Lives of the saints are published, perhaps acquired by some, but the majority do not read them. Meanwhile, what benefits can be derived from this reading! In it we will find answers to many of our questions, they will teach us how to get out of a difficult situation, how to resist when darkness envelops the soul on all sides, so that it seems as if God has abandoned us.

What empty books are given to children to read and destroy young souls. Reading the Lives of the saints fills their pure souls with light. After all, the word “holy” comes from the word “light,” since saints shed the Light of Christ around them. By reading the Lives of the Saints, you will not gain knowledge in physics or chemistry, but you will learn to go deeper into yourself, how to know yourself. There are the most learned people who seem to be comprehensively educated, but lacking faith, they do not know their souls at all.

I remember my childhood. We lived in a village. My parents were believers. My father usually read aloud the life of some saint before dinner on holidays. I remember I was not even 7 years old, but I listened to my father with enthusiasm. I used to run my little hands through my brown curls and I was afraid to utter a word from what my father was reading.

“Daddy,” I tell him, “I want to be a saint.” But it’s painful to go into the furnace or into the tin pot.

“You can become a saint in another way.”

“I have no time to talk to you,” the father answers and continues reading.

I remember how my soul lit up from this reading. I was still little then, and my soul was pure. Reading was of great importance for my later life. Now, although I am unworthy, I am still a monk. Our family was Orthodox: we all kept fasts and went to church. It is a pity that now all the decrees of the Church are violated, which is why children become spoiled and often grow up completely unfit.

When I was already an officer, the works of Spielhagen were in fashion. Once they persuaded me to read “From Darkness to Light.” I started reading and was disappointed. Everything there is only darkness, heroes and heroines are also filled with darkness; When will the light appear, I thought, but I read and read, and didn’t even get to the light, it was all just darkness. I left this book unread. One day I entered the orderly’s room to give him some instructions: I saw that he was sleeping, and on the table, next to him, was a little book about Philaret the Merciful. I became interested in her, woke up the orderly so that he would open the doors if anyone came, and I took the book and went out into the garden. From the very first pages I could not restrain myself from tears and read with great desire (I generally read quickly) the whole story. I gave the book to the orderly. He smiles:

— Did you like the book?

“I liked it very much,” I answer, “I read it with pleasure.”

- Spielhagen? Well, did you like it?

- Where I like it, I read one page, didn’t understand anything, read another, too, and then quit.

- Yes, I don’t like it either, yours is better.

- So why are you reading?

“Yes,” my orderly concluded thoughtfully, “there is only emptiness there.”

And he was right.

I have read a lot of secular books, and, for the most part, there is really nothing but emptiness in them. True, sometimes something will flash, like a distant lightning, and disappear, and then darkness again. The current literature of all the Andreevs and Artsybashevs gives absolutely nothing useful and comforting to either the mind or the heart. It becomes scary for the younger generation, which is brought up on such literary garbage. Both poetry and art greatly influence the human soul and ennoble it. For example, a talentedly executed picture, especially if it has something lofty as its subject, even happens to regenerate a person’s soul, of course, by the grace of God.

Patristic creations

Works of the bishop. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) are necessary, they are, so to speak, the alphabet, the syllables. The works of the ep. Feofan Vyshensky - the essence is already grammar, they are deeper. Even the Successful Ones read them with some difficulty...

Today, while signing a book by one of my spiritual daughters, entitled “Invisible Warfare” and setting the date January 6, I remembered that this is precisely the day of the death of Bishop Theophan, who translated this book from Greek into Russian.

Bishop Theophan did not translate it word for word, but conveyed the spirit of this book, like Zhukovsky, who, when translating Schiller, was so imbued with the spirit of this poet that the translation was difficult to distinguish from the original.

5th volume of the bishop's works. Ignatius, contains the teaching of St. fathers in relation to modern monasticism and teaches how to read the writings of the saints. fathers. Bishop looked very deeply. Ignatius and even, perhaps, deeper in this regard, Bishop. Feofan. His word has a powerful effect on the soul, because it comes from experience...

"Fatherland" ep. Ignatius (Brianchaninova)

It's good that you started reading this book. It is composed as follows: ep. Ignatius wrote out what answered the monastic questions of concern. From this point of view, his work is irreplaceable. Many perplexities are immediately destroyed by some extract. D.N.

Creations of the Holy Spirit. Petra Damaskina

This book is deeper than Abba Dorotheus. Of course, Abba Dorotheos is the ABC of monastic life, although by reading it, you can discover more and more new things, and for everyone it is consistent with his state. It has a shore, and from the shore you can walk first up to your knees, then deeper and deeper. Another - immediately into depth.

There are strange mysterious places in this book. There you will see how the saints began to understand the meaning of visible nature. They do not care about the visible mechanism of things, but they understand their meaning. Just as we use a watch, and we have nothing to do with the structure of the mechanism and its chemical composition. Or, we taste an apple, feel a pleasant taste and do not care about its chemical composition... Saints, indeed, begin to learn the meaning of visible nature.

The description of the invisible world must be understood spiritually and not literally

All this must be understood spiritually, this is only a hint of reality itself, and some, not realizing that everything is said here in the highest spiritual sense, are tempted. For example, in heaven before the Throne of God there is a curtain that was parted when blessed Theodora approached her... Of course, this must be understood in a spiritual sense. Just as they say that the Jews had a veil over their eyes, this does not mean that there really was some kind of material veil over them. Or they also say about the seraphim that they covered their faces with wings. What kind of wings could they have? This means that they cannot see the full glory of God...

MIRACLES

Once, when I was about six years old, there was such a case: we lived in a dacha on our estate near Orenburg. Our house stood in a huge garden-park and was guarded by a guard and dogs, so it was impossible for an outsider to enter the park unnoticed.

One day my father and I were walking in the park, and suddenly, out of nowhere, an old man appeared in front of us. Approaching my father, he said: “Remember, father, that this child will one day drag souls from hell.”

A year before I entered the Skete, on the second day of the Nativity of Christ, I was returning from early mass. It was still dark and the city was just beginning to wake up. Suddenly an old man came up to me, asking for alms. I realized that I didn’t take my wallet with me, and there were only twenty kopecks in my pocket. I gave them to the old man with the words: “I’m sorry, I don’t have them with me anymore.” He thanked me and handed me the prosphora. I took it, put it in my pocket and just wanted to say something to the beggar, but he was no longer there. I looked everywhere in vain; he disappeared without a trace. The next year on this day I was already in Skete.

If you look at life carefully, it is all full of miracles, but we often do not notice and pass by them indifferently. May the Lord give us the wisdom to carefully spend the days of our lives, working out our salvation with fear and trembling.

The former abbot of the Meshchovsky Monastery, Fr. Mark, now living in retirement in Optina Pustyn: “I remember, it was, it seems, in 1867. I was very sick and did not expect to get up. At this time I lived in Optina. One day I see, as if in a subtle dream, as if I was standing in a clearing near Kozelsk, and opposite three Churches. The sun is rising. There are some creatures standing next to me on the right and left sides. I notice that the sun that I see is an icon standing in the attic of the Ascension Church. To my question to the one who stood next to me on the left side, he answered: “I am George! The icon you see is the icon of the Akhtyra Mother of God.” When he woke up, he told Fr. Ambrose. A search began in all the churches of the city of Kozelsk, but the icon of the Akhtyrskaya Mother of God was not found anywhere. They also searched in the Ascension Church. After a long and unsuccessful search, the priest of that Church, Fr. Demetrius discovered this icon in the attic of the Church, lying in dust and debris. The holy icon was then solemnly brought to Optina, and I, having venerated it after the prayer service, received relief from my illness and soon recovered completely.”

After this miracle, many came to her with faith from this icon. To this day, St. This icon is located in the Church of the Ascension in the city of Kozelsk and is revered by the residents as miraculous.

When I was returning from Manchuria by rail, I wanted to be alone at night - whether I was sad or something else, I don’t remember. I went into the hallway of the carriage, so to speak, I mean that small room, of which there are usually two in every carriage: in front and in back; they have 4 doors: one leads to the carriage, the other to the platform to the next carriage, and two to the right and left for passengers to exit. I went out and leaned on one door and thought: “Glory to You, Lord. I’m going to dear Optina again.” And I wanted to go to the opposite side door, I walked and suddenly, as if by some force, I was pushed away. I stopped in the middle and, looking closely, I saw that the door was pushed to the side (there are doors of such a device), which I did not notice in the dark, but wanted to lean my elbows on it. And what would have happened... The Lord saved...

THE FOOL-FOOLS, THE BLESSED

Skete ryasophore monk Fr. Athanasius told me about a certain servant of God for Christ’s sake who acted like a fool, the following. His name was Sergei Nikolaevich. Played the fool in the city of Livny, Oryol province. Descended from peasants. He died at the age of 70. He always wore rags and led a wandering life. Living in the world, Fr. Afanasy once started pouring bread. The deal was profitable. He somehow brings bread to Livny on Sunday morning and sells it to a merchant. We made a deal and finished the matter. At that time, Sergei Nikolaevich, who was visiting the merchant, came to them and responded to the words of Fr. Afanasy tell him something, says: “It’s a sin to take a merchant’s hands!” He did not understand these words then. Their meaning was subsequently explained by the Liveni monks, that is, that it is sinful to trade on holidays.

The same holy fool went to a Livny merchant and shit in his front corner. Soon after this, a great misfortune happened to the merchant - two men were buried in his well by a collapsed log house. The court came and the merchant had to fork out money.

We also saw Sergei Nikolaevich, how one day he crossed the river along its bottom, disappearing under the water. He also said to one girl, the daughter of a poor bourgeois widow in Livny: “You and I will die together!” And so it happened. When this girl died, the holy fool came to the widow, sat down on the right side of her coffin and died. They were buried together on the same day. They were taken out of the city Church at 8 o'clock in the morning, and brought to the cemetery in the evening. Requiem services were served all along the way. There were a lot of people, almost the entire city gathered to bury the righteous.

Fr. told me today, January 22, 1896. Demetrius the artist, a skete monk, who recently came to Shamordino, the holy fool John, who lived in the village of Khlopov, 30 versts from Shamordin. He came to the cell of nun Olga, whose daughter was sick with consumption. He showed with signs that she needed to receive unction and prepare for death. Then he demanded the key to the locked box, and when it was unlocked at his request, he took out the icon lying there - the blessing of the sick woman from Fr. Ambrose. He placed the image on the goddess and ordered an unquenchable lamp to be lit before it. Then he left.

Blessed ones. Blessed Annushka

When I entered, she began to quickly undress, even began to take off her shirt, so that even her breasts became visible: I turned away. She says: “Give me that green caftan.” I handed her a caftan that was hanging on the wall. Having put it on, she began to say: “You see how beautiful I have become, do you see?” For me this was completely incomprehensible... And this meant that I needed to renew my soul. Finally, I asked her: “How will it all end for me?” She took it and wrapped her head in a caftan and sat down like that. I left her while she was still in that state. I didn't understand anything and asked about it. I was told that this means monasticism. And then I didn’t even think about going to the monastery. At first I was afraid to go to her, thinking that maybe it was a demonic charm. But spiritual people assured me that this was truly a truly blessed soul. When I was with her, she had been lying on her bed of three pieces of wood covered with felt for 40 years: she had paralysis of her legs.

She was an orphan, and some old woman was following her. Poor to the last degree, but the entire furnishings of her room were clean.

Blessed Ivanushka

His family considered him a fool, but the people respected and loved him. One day he came running to the hayfield. They ask him: “What do you want, Ivanushka?” And he immediately ran in the direction of the Zhizdra River. In this very place there was a steep cliff and one of the deepest places in the river. They look - he's gone. Everyone thought he had drowned. What to do? And he, having passed under the water to the other shore, came out of the water, bowed to everyone and left. In the summer they let him go, and in the winter they tied him by the leg.

I was still a military man then, although not in uniform. I come in, and Ivanushka says:

- Father has come.

They tell him:

“This is not Father,” thinking that he was mistaken. And Ivanushka again:

- Father has come.

Then he told me to take a whip and whip the “kitten”.

- Do you see her running after you? Well, that's it, that's it, that's it.

I was whipping through the air, not understanding anything. He continued:

- Oh, she ran away. What? Oh, she's a kitten.

Then it was 3 o'clock in the afternoon, dawn was beginning. I began to say goodbye to him. He turned to the window directly at Optina Pustyn at dawn and began to look. I don’t know what he saw; of course, he didn’t tell me. But it was clear that he was seeing a wondrous vision. So I left him.