The Icon and the Axe

costume and spend fifteen years as a hermit in the woods near his new monastery at Sarov. A devoted Hesychast, he believed that "silence is the sacrament of the world to come, words are the weapons of this world."90 After returning from his forest retreat, Seraphim traveled widely in and out of cloisters, urging men to rededicate themselves to Christ. "Boredom," he taught, "is cured by prayer, by abstaining from vain speech, by working with the hands. .. ."91 Virginity he regarded as particularly desirable, and he was a frequent visitor to women's convents, the rapid growth of which was an important sign of the revived interest in religious callings.

The spiritual intensity generated by the new monastic communities which Seraphim set up began to attract a new kind of pilgrim-secularized intellectuals-back for visits if not pilgrimages. The famous Optyna Pustyn, to the south of Moscow, became a center of counseling and of spiritual retreats for many of Russia's most famous nineteenth-century thinkers: beginning with the Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky, who spent much of his later life there, and extending on through Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Vladimir Solov'ev. The figure of Father Zossima in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov presents a fairly accurate composite picture of Father Ambrose, the monastic elder at Optyna Pustyn, whom Dostoevsky frequently visited, and of Tikhon Zadonsky, whose writings Dostoevsky reverently studied.92

The problems of the new monasticism were those of any religious calling in a primarily secular society. The new monks were bothered by self-doubt, harassed by demands that they prove themselves useful to the state like everyone else. Shorn of their role as court ideologists and great landlords, they were not yet sure what the role of the monastery could be in the new society. The monastic revival tended to be strongest outside the traditional monasteries.

On the one hand, there was a tendency to withdraw to ever more remote hermitages, where the saintly ideal was removed from ordinary social life and related to individual ascetic exercises. In this strange, semi-Oriental world the attainment of physical incorruptibility after death was thought to be the ultimate fruit of ascetic self-mastery; and proof of some degree of this incorruptibility became a pre-requisite for canonization in the eighteenth-century Russian Church.93 The ascetic emphases of the new monasticism took it outside of the history and politics in which Muscovite monasticism had been continually involved. In its emphasis on repentance and reversion to the silent asceticism of the early Church, the new Russian monasticism was similar to the Trappist movement in post-Reformation Catholicism. Tikhon was typical not only in fleeing from ecclesiastical authority and civilization in general but also in his attempt to compile a "spiritual thesaurus gathered from the world." Only scattered fragments of

insight and experience were worth finding and preserving in the contemporary world.

As a merchant gathers varied wares from different countries, brings them into his house and hides them, so the Christian can gather from this world thoughts that are useful for the soul, lock them in the prison of his heart, and build up his soul with them.94