MIRACULOUS MIRACLES™

Saint — Seraphim of Sarov

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St. Seraphim of Sarov
August 1, 1754, Kursk — January 14, 1833, Sarov Monastery
Wonderworker of Russia — Apostle of the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit
Convent of Diveyevo, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia
Feast
January 2 and August 1 (Byzantine)
Canonized
Canonized 1903 by the Russian Orthodox Church under Tsar Nicholas II
Life

Prokhor Moshnin was born to a wealthy Kursk merchant family and entered the Sarov hermitage in the deep Mordovian forests northeast of Russia at twenty in 1778. He was tonsured monk in 1786 with the religious name Seraphim ('the fiery one'), ordained priest in 1793, and from 1794 lived for sixteen years as a forest hermit in a small log cell several miles from the Sarov monastery — observing extreme asceticism (a thousand-day continuous prayer on a stone, attested by tradition), feeding the local bears and other forest animals, and seeing no human company for years at a stretch.

In 1810 he returned to the Sarov monastery as a sealed recluse (zatvornik). For another fifteen years he saw no one. Then, around 1825, he opened his cell to visitors — and for the next eight years until his death received an extraordinary daily stream of Russian Orthodox pilgrims of every social class. His public spiritual teaching to them — collected in the Conversation with Motovilov of November 1831 (the foundational document of modern Russian Orthodox spirituality) — centered on what he called the 'acquisition of the Holy Spirit' as the entire purpose of Christian life: the soul's gradual transformation into the form of the Resurrected Christ through the personal indwelling of the Spirit.

He founded and directed the new women's monastery of Diveyevo a few miles from Sarov — which became, after his death, the principal Marian shrine of Russian Orthodox Christianity. He died at the Sarov hermitage on January 14, 1833. Canonized in 1903 by the Tsar Nicholas II in person at Sarov — the canonization at which Nicholas's wife Alexandra (long childless) is said to have prayed for an heir; the future Tsarevich Alexei was born the following year, then immediately diagnosed with haemophilia. Seraphim's relics were seized by the Soviets in 1920, rediscovered in storage in Leningrad in 1991, and translated back to Diveyevo in 1991 — where they remain. He is the central modern Russian Orthodox saint and the most-influential figure in the 20th-century Orthodox spiritual revival.

Miracles & Phenomena

  • The thousand-day vigil

    Tradition records that early in his forest hermitage Seraphim spent a thousand days and nights standing in continuous prayer on a stone in the forest, broken only briefly for the absolute minimum sustenance — recovering from the resulting bodily collapse over the years that followed. The episode is the central iconographic emblem of his asceticism.

  • The transfigurative conversation with Motovilov

    In November 1831 Seraphim — at the request of his lay disciple Nikolai Motovilov, an Imperial Russian Army officer — explained the meaning of the 'acquisition of the Holy Spirit' by manifesting in his own face the visible uncreated light of Transfiguration; Motovilov recorded the experience as the foundational personal-experiential document of Russian Orthodox mystical theology.

  • Bear and the staritsa

    Seraphim's daily practice of feeding the local bears and wolves from his hand at the forest hermitage was witnessed by many Diveyevo nuns and pilgrims who saw the animals approach him without aggression; the bear is a major element of his iconography.

Relics
  • Body
    Relics of St. Seraphim of Sarov
    Holy Trinity Cathedral, Diveyevo Convent, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast

    His incorrupt relics, seized by the Soviets in 1920 and held at the Museum of Religion and Atheism in Leningrad, were rediscovered in 1991 in a storage room of the Kazan Cathedral. Patriarch Alexei II returned them to Diveyevo on August 1, 1991 — the seminal post-Soviet Russian Orthodox event — where they remain in the Holy Trinity Cathedral.

Iconography
  • Seraphim with the bear

    The thin bearded Russian elder in white-and-black monastic schema, leaning on a staff, the great brown bear of the Sarov forest seated beside him eating from his hand — the iconography of Russian Orthodox monastic gentleness.

Patronages
RussiaRussian Orthodox monasticismDiveyevoChildrenThe Sarov-Diveyevo region
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