Starets

A starets is an elder, and the word describes a relationship rather than a rank. Someone seeks out a monk of long experience, opens his thoughts to him without reserve, and follows his direction; that is the whole of the institution. Nobody ordains an elder, no synod appoints one, and there is no vestment, jurisdiction or title that comes with it. Timothy Ware's description of Orthodox practice is precise on the point: eldership is a charismatic ministry, recognised by those who receive it and by nobody else, and it can be exercised by a monk of no rank at all while a bishop possesses none of it.

That is what makes the starets a genuinely different institution from the saint of Latin Christianity rather than a translation of the same thing, and it is worth stating plainly because the two are routinely equated. Canonisation is posthumous, juridical and universal in its effect. Eldership is exercised by the living, is conferred by nobody, and reaches only the people who actually come. The two can meet, since an elder may be glorified as a saint after death, and several have been. Most are not.

The Orthodox churches do recognise saints, by a synodal act usually called glorification, and the word carries the sense that the church is acknowledging a status God has already given rather than conferring one. There is no equivalent of the Roman congregation, no fixed number of miracles, and no single authority competent for the whole communion, so recognition happens church by church.

The Russian eldership of the nineteenth century was a revival, not a survival, and it can be traced to a specific chain of transmission. Paisius Velichkovsky, who died in 1794, was a Ukrainian monk who went to Mount Athos and then to Moldavia, gathered a community, and set it to translating the Greek ascetic fathers into Church Slavonic. The collection he worked from was the Philokalia, assembled by Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth and printed in Venice in 1782; his Slavonic version, the Dobrotolubiye, appeared in Moscow in 1793 and carried the texts and the practice of continuous prayer into the Russian monasteries.

The practice took root most visibly at the hermitage of Optina, south of Moscow, where a succession of elders received visitors through the nineteenth century. Irina Paert's study describes what that meant socially: the monastery became a destination not only for peasants but for the educated, and Gogol, Dostoevsky, Solovyov and Tolstoy all went there. The figure of the elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov is drawn from that world, and the novel did as much as anything to fix the image of the starets in the imagination of readers who would never meet one.

The most widely known Russian elder, Seraphim of Sarov, who died in 1833, stands slightly outside the Optina line. He spent long periods as a hermit before receiving visitors, and was glorified in 1903 in a canonisation the imperial family pressed for, which is itself part of the history: eldership and state interest met, and the meeting was not comfortable.