Letter to the abbess of the Arzamas Alekseevskaya community

To the Most Reverend Lady Mary 1 with her God-gathered sisters - rejoice in the Lord! Christ, our true God, says: “Fire has come to burn on the earth, and what do I want if it is already on fire?” (Luke 12:49). Having received from Him this Divine fire, cast onto the earth of their hearts, the holy apostles and disciples of the Lord immediately kindled with the flame of love for Him, left the world and everything in the world, and, coming to Him as to their Lord and Teacher and true Mentor on the path of salvation, they surrendered themselves soul and body into true obedience and cutting off their will and understanding until their last breath and with great and inscrutable joy they said to Him: “Behold, we have left everything and died after You” (Matthew 19:27). always having this Divine fire in their hearts and in everything following the Divine will of their Lord and Teacher, they purely and immaculately, like the apple of their eye, preserved obedience until the end of their lives, confirming it through the patience of countless temptations and varied deaths and the shedding of their blood, which they shed to the last drop for their faith and love for Christ God, in order to preserve their obedience to Him as a pure and immaculate sacrifice until death. Having accepted this Divine fire of God’s love, the holy martyrs with indescribable joy endured many and varied torments and most violent deaths for Christ God and received from Him the crown of His Divine glory in the Kingdom of Heaven. Having accepted this Divine fire, all our reverend and God-bearing fathers fled from the world and everything in the world, and some of them, remaining in the community in perfect obedience and cutting off their will until their last breath, accepted the martyr’s crown from the right hand of the Lord; others, laboring “in the deserts and in the mountains and in dens and in the pits of the earth” (see Heb. 11:38), walked the narrow and narrow path, always bearing the death of the Lord Jesus in their body (see 2 Cor. 4:10), crucifying Christ, being in hunger, and thirst, and all suffering, in unceasing prayer and supplications, and tears; They spent their lives in extreme poverty, imitating Christ and the holy apostles, and kept the Gospel commandments like the apple of their eye, pure and immaculate, and were honored with the Kingdom of Heaven. And why say too much? Having accepted this Divine fire of God's grace, all the saints, true servants of Christ, of every rank and title and in every place of His dominion (see Ps. 102:22), received salvation, for they diligently kept the soul-saving Gospel commandments, without the fulfillment of which it is impossible to be saved by the Orthodox faith alone. Having received from his goodness this fire of the divine love of Christ, by the action of his grace cast into the earth of your heart, thanks to the diligent and attentive reading of a certain soul-helping book, you immediately hated the world and everything in it, and had the intention, leaving the world, to silently serve God day and night in a single life. Your parent, having learned about your intention, although he tried in every possible way to turn you away from it and instigated various persecutions against you, wanting to quench the fire of God’s jealousy in your soul, but you, with the assistance of God’s grace, overcame all this with your patience. So your parent himself, no longer having hope of keeping you in the world and seeing your firm intention to serve God, leaving the world, sent you to the monastery located in Kostroma. Having stayed here for four years, you were honored, prompted by the grace of God, to read many fatherly books, from reading which you received such spiritual benefit that you desired a common residence and asked Christ the Savior to give you a true mentor. And she made such a promise that if you find a perfect mentor, then, according to the teachings of Basil the Great, Saint John of the Climacus and Saint Simeon the New Theologian, you will surrender yourself to him in perfect, soul and body, obedience, hating and rejecting all your desires and will, and you will be trampled upon by everyone in your common life (see 1 Cor. 4:13). Fulfilling your desire and request for it, as good and pleasing in everything, Christ, the knower of the heart, gave you a true mentor for salvation, the late Father Theodore of blessed memory, having heard about whom you went to see him on Solovetsky Island and whom the Lord returned to his common monastery. And since he also had another cenobitic monastery, a female one, a hundred miles away from his male one, you moved from Kostroma to Arzamas, from the previous staff monastery to the cenobitic one. And there she remained with the holy sisters of the above-mentioned holy man in perfect obedience, according to the Divine Scripture and Tradition and the teaching of our holy fathers, and in cutting off her will and understanding in everything, accepting teaching from him as if from the mouth of God, and obeying him in everything not as a man, but as Christ God himself, with all the sisters confessing to him, as to God himself, the secrets of his heart, when he came from his monastery to visit you, and receiving spiritual instruction from him in everything, down to the smallest thing. During the three years of your stay in the monastery in such obedience, your father and mentor loved you according to God, and all your sisters also loved you. And your spiritual father wanted, for your holy obedience, to entrust you with the holy sisters to your care for them. You did not seek this at all and did not want it, but knowing the power of holy and divine obedience and the fact that obedience is life, and disobedience is death, you reluctantly bowed your neck under the good yoke of Christ’s obedience and took upon yourself the light burden of Christ - care for the salvation of the souls of the holy sisters who gathered in the name of Christ and voluntarily surrendered themselves to you in holy obedience. Having accepted this burden, you had the sure hope that it was not you, but your spiritual father who governed you and all the sisters, and it was on him, and not on you, that the whole burden of governing the souls of the holy council lay. And therefore you underwent holy obedience with inscrutable joy, obeying the holy father in everything as God Himself. And when you lived for two years after receiving the leadership, by God’s permission various spiritual temptations and various spiritual infirmities came upon you, and a diminishment of faith and love for your spiritual father, and so on, all the details of which you are explaining to me. After you had lived in such varied spiritual devastation for two years, your spiritual father and teacher passed away from temporary life to eternal life. And then the eyes of your soul were opened and you began to recognize the futility of your soul and what kind of mentor you had lost according to God. Remembering the destruction of your soul that followed temptation, you cry and sob, and almost come to despair from the intense grief and sadness of your heart, and you write to me, and ask, and pray with many tears, that I write to you something for spiritual consolation. without despising your prayer about this - although I am not at all trained in the art of writing to anyone and am inexperienced in it - I write to your honesty and pray and advise about the past temptation and weakness of your soul not to grieve beyond measure and not to despair, but with undoubted hope in God's mercy to place before God the true beginning of true repentance for past infirmities and with all your heart and with all your soul to repent and ask for forgiveness from His goodness. He, as a good and humane God, rejoicing over your true repentance, just as He forgave all sinners who repented, will forgive you all your sins, without any doubt. It also comes to me, honest lady, that Christ the Savior, our true God, when He intended to entrust the universe to the saints of His supreme disciples and apostles Peter and Paul, so that they would preach His gospel in it and instruct those who believed in Him from their preaching to the true knowledge of God and keep His commandments, allowed them to follow His Divine and incomprehensible destinies Peter should deny Him three times, and Paul should persecute and destroy the Church of God, so that they would become merciful to those who sin and more easily forgive the sins of those who repent. After the true repentance of Peter and the miraculous conversion to faith in Christ of Paul, both of these holy apostles, since they themselves knew the weakness of human nature, were, like Christ the Lord, most merciful to those who sin and those who truly repent. And just as they themselves bore everyone’s burdens, so they encourage everyone to do the same, saying: “Bear one another’s burdens, and thus fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). Is it not in this way, through unknown destinies, that Christ the Savior allowed the above-mentioned spiritual temptations and infirmities to come upon you, so that after a long time, having fully seen, as in a mirror, the weakness of your soul and the weakness of human nature, you would learn to bear the infirmities of the weak and be willing to show mercy to those who sin through weakness and those who repent and correct such “with the spirit of meekness” (see Gal. 6, 1). Therefore, repenting before God, glorify His incomprehensible Providence, which wonderfully arranges the salvation of those who fear Him and repent. And since, most honorable lady, from reading the books of the fathers, you longed to find a true mentor who would guide you on the path of salvation, and since, with God’s help, having found one, you remained with him in true obedience and you keep the saints’ sisters in the same obedience, and by deed and experience you learned the fruits of both blessed obedience and cursed disobedience, then it behooves me to write a little about holy obedience to your honesty. Divine obedience is a thing so necessary for true pleasing God that without it it is completely impossible to please God. Therefore, most holy obedience was planted by God in three places: in heaven, in paradise and on earth. In heaven - among the powers of heaven, in paradise - among the pristine people, on earth - among the holy disciples and apostles of the Lord. And in these three places the fruit of blessed obedience and the fruit of damned disobedience appeared. In heaven, all the powers of heaven, having, by their good will, preserved obedience to God, were made worthy, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, to dwell eternally in Him. The devil, belonging to the angelic order, by his own autocratic will fell from obedience and, becoming proud, was cast out of heaven with all the retreating forces of the same angelic order, who voluntarily obeyed his wicked advice and, deprived of the Divine light, by their own will forever became darkness, the enemies of God and the salvation of faithful Christians. So the fruit of both obedience and disobedience appeared in heaven. In paradise, pristine people, while they remained in true obedience to God, enjoyed the vision of God and the manifold gifts of the Holy Spirit; when they voluntarily obeyed the advice of the devil and, falling from obedience and becoming proud, wanted to be equal to God, then, hearing from Him condemnation to death, they were expelled from paradise and became guilty of the death of the entire human race. And if the Son of God, by His obedience to God and the Father until death, had not destroyed Adam’s disobedience, then there would have been no other hope left for the human race for salvation from death and eternal destruction. So in paradise, among the primordial, the fruit of obedience and disobedience appeared. On earth, Christ, the Son of God, who came down from heaven to do not his own will, but the will of the Father who sent Him (see John 6:38), to whom he was obedient to death, and death on the cross (see Phil. 2:8), implanted His Divine obedience in His holy disciples and apostles. Those who remained in it even until death were honored with their preaching to lead the entire universe to the knowledge of God and now reign in heaven with Christ, their Lord and Teacher. And the damned Judas, who fell away from obedience and, instead of obeying the Lord, obeyed the devil in everything, fell into despair, hanged himself and died forever in soul and body. So the fruit of obedience and disobedience appeared on earth. This divine obedience, planted by Christ the Lord Himself in His holy disciples, passed on to the holy, angelic monastic order, in which many in holy obedience shone like the sun and completely pleased God. And the entire monastic order is based on holy obedience. And in ancient times, the fathers either stayed in hostels, or followed the royal path, that is, they lived together or in threes, and if they stayed in the deserts, then for the most part they began their lives in obedience and thereby, by the grace of God, avoided the delusion of demons. And those who spontaneously began the monastic life many times happened to fall into various demonic delusions, from which may the Lord deliver us with His grace. Divine obedience also has great praise because, according to the teachings of St. John Climacus and other holy fathers, it is the mother of the foundation of all the commandments of the Gospel, that is, love, which is achieved by obedience, as the Lord said: “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15), and also: “If you have My commandments and keep them, that is you who love Me” ( John 14:21), and also: “He who does not love Me does not keep My words” (John 14:24). Keeping the commandments of Christ and His words is nothing other than perfect obedience to Christ the Lord. Divine obedience is such a great virtue before God that, according to the consistent teaching of many saints, true novices who remain in true obedience until the end of their lives receive a martyr’s crown from Christ God, since the cutting off before the superior of all their will and understanding will be imputed to them on the day of righteous reward for our deeds in the mental and spontaneous shedding of blood for the name of Christ. In such divine, holy and blessed obedience, honorable lady, maintaining a council of holy sisters, gathered in the name of Christ, instruct them on the path of salvation no other way than according to the true reason of Divine Scripture, as our reverend and God-bearing fathers conveyed and teach. strengthened by God's help, present yourself to them as an example of every good deed by diligently fulfilling the commandments of the Gospel, love for God and neighbor, meekness and humility, always the deepest and towards the whole world of Christ, maternal mercy towards them, patience and long-suffering, prayer with tears, consolation and motivation for every good deed, bearing with the love of God all their burdens and weaknesses, burning with God's love for them, as for the sisters and disciples of Christ, diligently instructing them in true obedience to God in everything and in cutting off, or rather, killing their opposing will, in renouncing their opinions and reasoning. In the secret of your heart and soul, consider yourself before God to be dust and ashes, worse and more sinful than all people. Try to present an image to the holy sisters: both by observing the commandments of the holy fathers, and by physical labor according to your strength, if you can, by standing on the rule of the church, by bowing big and small. Also, carry out the cell rule established by the holy fathers with the fear of God in prayers, psalmody and reading. Also diligently and with great attention and study, read in the books of the fathers about prayer, performed with one mind in the heart; it is the truest monastic feat, most pleasing to God. And if, with God’s help, you acquire true understanding about it from the teachings of the holy fathers, then force yourself to do it, calling on God for help, and you will gain great benefit from it for your soul. Force yourself not to condemn anyone, for there is only one righteous Judge - Christ the Lord, Who will reward everyone according to their deeds, but only condemn yourself, and you will not be condemned during His terrible second coming. Forgive everyone who sins against you from your heart, so that the Heavenly Father may also forgive you your sins (see Matt. 6:14). And what more can I say? Always force yourself to all the commandments of the Gospel with all your soul, and place all your hope for the salvation of your soul without any doubt in God’s mercy alone. For your former weaknesses and spiritual sins, which God allowed, may God forgive you according to His grace and love for mankind, and may He bless you both in this century and in the future. Write to me - write with all boldness, and for the Lord’s sake I beg you to write in detail to me, unworthy, about your community life and church order and refectory, about your food and the whole structure of your life. Our Lord Jesus Christ, our true God, said: “Where there are two or three gathered in My name, I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20), through the prayers of His Most Holy Mother, our Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary and all the saints, may He be among you, gathered in His Most Holy Name, forever. Amen. I earnestly wish your honor with all the saints, the sisters gathered in the name of Christ in the commandments of the Gospel, to achieve perfect success. Unworthy pilgrim of the Holy Ascension Nyametsky and Predtechev Sekulsky Moldovlakhian monasteries, Archimandrite Paisius. The letter is addressed to Maria Petrovna Protasyeva, abbess of the Arzamas Alekseevskaya community.