Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Spiritual conversation

Conversation with Motovilov (On the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit)

St Seraphim of Sarov

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: Беседа преподобного Серафима с Н. А. Мотовиловым. О цели христианской жизни

Cover: Winter (1890) by Ivan Shishkin (Russian, 1832–1898), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:beseda-prepodobnogo-serafima-s-n-a-motovilovym:en:1

Introduction

The Author

Few figures in the modern history of Christianity are loved as widely, or across as many boundaries, as Seraphim of Sarov. He was born Prokhor Moshnin at Kursk in 1754—some accounts give 1759—into a family of merchants and builders; his father was engaged in raising churches in the city. As a small boy Prokhor fell so gravely ill that his life was despaired of, and, by the account preserved in his Life, he was healed when his mother carried him out to a passing procession and held him up to a wonderworking icon of the Mother of God. It was the first of the Marian graces that would mark his whole path. Devotion to the Theotokos runs through everything told of him, and he would die on his knees before her image.

At about nineteen he left the world for the forest hermitage of Sarov, entering as a novice in the late 1770s. In 1786 he was tonsured a monk and given the name Seraphim—“the burning one,” after the fiery ranks that stand before God’s throne—and was ordained hierodeacon; in 1793 he was ordained hieromonk. Soon afterward he withdrew from the common life of the monastery to a solitary cabin some miles off in the woods, and there he pursued an ascetic severity that has become legendary: long fasts, ceaseless prayer, wild animals coming to his hand—the bear he fed is among the best-loved images in Orthodox iconography—and, most famously, a thousand nights spent kneeling on a great rock with his arms raised to heaven in prayer. When robbers broke in and beat him nearly to death, expecting to find money, he refused to defend himself and afterward pleaded for their pardon; the blows left him stooped for the rest of his life. Years of strict enclosure and silence followed. Then, after a further appearance of the Mother of God around 1815, he opened his door: for the last stretch of his life he received a stream of pilgrims from every rank of society, greeting each—even in the depths of winter—with “My joy! Christ is risen!” He became the spiritual father and guardian of the women’s community at nearby Diveyevo, which grew into one of the great convents of Russia. He reposed on the second of January, 1833.

Seventy years later, in 1903, the Russian Church solemnly glorified him among the saints, an event attended by Tsar Nicholas II and the imperial family and by immense crowds. The commemoration of a hidden forest hermit had become a national and ecclesial occasion. What made Seraphim so beloved was not only the wonders reported of him but the substance of his counsel. He belonged, by inheritance, to the long line of the hesychast fathers—the tradition of inner, unceasing prayer that reaches back through the monasteries of Athos and the Egyptian desert—yet he did not keep that inheritance for the cloister. He took the innermost tradition of monastic prayer and made it a gift for ordinary people in the world, teaching noblewomen and peasants, officials and pilgrims, that the life of grace was open to them exactly where they stood. This conversation is the fullest surviving statement of that gift.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

Seraphim left almost nothing in his own hand. What we have of his teaching comes through those who wrote down what he said, and the most celebrated of all such records is the conversation set out here. Its recorder was Nikolai Alexandrovich Motovilov (1809–1879), a landowner of noble family from Simbirsk and a graduate of Kazan University, who had been healed of a severe affliction through the elder’s prayers and became one of his devoted disciples and a benefactor of Diveyevo. In Russian tradition he is remembered by the title he embraced for himself: “the servant of the Mother of God and of Seraphim.”

From boyhood, Motovilov tells us at the outset, one question had given him no peace: what does the aim of the Christian life actually consist in? He had put it to many spiritual persons and come away unsatisfied, told only to go to church, pray, keep the commandments, and do good—but never told what all of that is finally for. Some had even rebuked his asking as improper curiosity. The conversation opens with Seraphim answering that unspoken hunger directly, and claiming to know of it by revelation. It took place in the winter—the record is dated by tradition to November 1831—in a snow-covered clearing beside the elder’s “near hermitage,” on the bank of the Sarovka river, with sleet sifting down as the two men sat facing one another on a felled tree. The scene matters, because this is not only a discourse but an event: the elder does not merely define the aim of the Christian life, he shows it, and the record moves toward the moment when his own face shines with the light of the Spirit he has been describing.

The transmission of the text is itself part of its story, and it should be told plainly. Motovilov wrote his account but never published it, and after his death the manuscript lay for some seventy years among a great disordered mass of his papers. Through his widow, Elena Ivanovna, the papers came in 1902 into the hands of the writer Sergei Nilus, who—as the closing pages of this edition themselves describe—recovered the barely legible manuscript from that chaos and first brought the conversation to print in 1903, on the very eve of Seraphim’s glorification. The brief epilogue here, beginning “Here the Motovilov manuscript ends,” is Nilus’s own narrative of that discovery, and it has traveled with the conversation ever since.

Argument and Structure

The work is a single sustained dialogue, and it advances in one long movement from a thesis to a demonstration of that thesis. It can be read in a sitting, but its argument is tightly built.

Seraphim begins by clearing away a common confusion. Prayer, fasting, vigil, almsgiving, and every good work, however excellent, are not themselves the aim of the Christian life; they are the means. “The true aim of our Christian life,” he says, “consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God.” The Russian word rendered “acquisition” — styazhanie — is frankly commercial, the language of gaining and amassing, and Seraphim, the former merchant’s son from Kursk, presses the metaphor without embarrassment: grace is the only capital worth accumulating; the virtues are goods to be traded for it; one should invest wherever the return in the Spirit is greatest, “at a hundred to the spiritual ruble.” A crucial qualification runs through the whole: only the good done “for Christ’s sake” gathers this profit. A good deed done otherwise remains good, and God honors it, but it does not of itself bring the grace of the Spirit.

From this thesis the conversation develops by way of Scripture, of which the text is a dense mosaic. Seraphim rereads the parable of the wise and foolish virgins: the oil that the foolish lacked, he argues, was not good works—for they were virgins, and kept a high virtue—but the grace of the Holy Spirit, which their works had never sought. Virtue that never asks whether it is actually acquiring the Spirit is exactly the foolish virgins’ mistake. He then opens a long meditation on grace across the whole span of salvation history. The “breath of life” breathed into Adam was the grace of the Spirit, which raised him above every other creature; this was lost at the Fall; yet the Spirit continued to work “from outside” through the prophets and the righteous of Israel, and even, Seraphim insists, among righteous pagans and truth-seeking philosophers who, without knowing the true God, were beloved for their seeking. In Christ, at Pentecost, and now in the mysteries of Baptism and Chrismation—“the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit”—that lost breath of life is restored to the faithful.

Then comes the turn on which the whole work pivots. Motovilov, unsatisfied by teaching alone, presses the elder: how can a person actually know that he is in the grace of the Holy Spirit? Seraphim answers first in words, then abandons words. He grips his disciple firmly by the shoulders and says, “We are both now in the Spirit of God together. Why do you not look at me?” Motovilov finds he cannot: the elder’s face has become brighter than the sun, lightning seems to flash from his eyes, and a great blinding radiance spreads over the snow around them. What follows is the heart of the text—an unhurried exchange in which Seraphim asks his disciple, one by one, what he feels, and expounds each sensation as a genuine mark of the Spirit’s presence: an extraordinary stillness and peace, a sweetness beyond any earthly sweetness, an overflowing joy, a warmth that does not melt the falling snow, and a fragrance unlike anything on earth. The demonstration completes the doctrine: the grace that is the aim of the Christian life is not an abstraction but something that can be seen, tasted, and known. The elder closes by charging Motovilov to remember and to tell what he has witnessed—“this was given you to understand not for yourself alone, but through you for the whole world”—words that account, providentially, for the very existence of the record. Nilus’s epilogue on the manuscript’s recovery then follows.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The conversation’s enduring power lies in the clarity with which it reorders the whole Christian life around a single end. Religious observance and moral effort, it insists, are not ends in themselves; they are instruments, and their purpose is communion with God through the indwelling Holy Spirit. This is a bracing correction in any age tempted to measure the spiritual life by the sheer quantity of good works or devotions performed. Seraphim’s question to every believer—are you, at this moment, in the Spirit of God, or not?—cuts beneath activity to its aim.

Just as striking is the text’s insistence that grace is not only believed but experienced. The Spirit’s presence, in Seraphim’s teaching, is perceptible: it can be felt as peace and joy and warmth, and, in the extremity of the moment recorded here, seen as light. This is the ancient conviction that the goal of the Christian life is deification—that a human being can be so filled with grace as to become, by God’s gift, a partaker of the divine nature and even to radiate the divine light. In the Christian East this theme of the uncreated light is bound up with the memory of the Lord’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor and with the theology of Saint Gregory Palamas and the hesychast tradition; the shining of Seraphim’s face is often read as a living witness to that same reality. The teaching is at once profoundly traditional and, in the plain forest setting of a nineteenth-century Russian winter, startlingly immediate.

Finally, the conversation is significant for the door it opens to everyone. Seraphim is emphatic that the aim he describes, and the means to it—prayer above all, because prayer is always at hand for anyone, rich or poor, strong or weak, righteous or sinner—belong no less to the layman than to the monk. “The Lord listens equally to a monk and to a layman,” he tells Motovilov, himself a married man of the world. Much of the affection this text has drawn to itself over more than a century comes from precisely that generosity: it takes the highest reaches of the contemplative tradition and places them within reach of ordinary Christian lives.

Reception and Influence

From its first appearance in 1903 the conversation quickly became one of the most widely circulated and cherished spiritual texts of modern Orthodoxy, and its central phrase—the acquisition of the Holy Spirit as the aim of the Christian life—passed into common devotional speech. The luminous encounter in the snow has been depicted repeatedly in the iconography of the saint, and the text is regularly drawn upon in modern reflection on prayer, on grace, and on the reality of deification and the divine light. Its appearance coincided with a broad revival of interest in the elders and in the hesychast tradition of prayer, and it has often served as an accessible entry into that world for readers who would never open a technical treatise. Read far beyond the Russian Church that produced it, and translated into many languages, it now stands among the acknowledged classics of Christian spiritual literature.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, modern English translation of the conversation, made from the public-domain Russian text as transmitted in the standard Russian editions (the source used here follows the version published at azbyka.ru). It is an English-only reading edition; the Russian is not printed alongside. The aim throughout has been a clear, dignified, contemporary English that carries the warmth and the density of the elder’s speech without archaism, while preserving the abundant Scripture that saturates his teaching—rendered in his own voice rather than conformed to any single received English Bible—and retaining the emphases of the original. Scripture references are given in the modern Arabic style (for example, Matt. 12:30; 1 Cor. 2:9). The closing epilogue by the text’s first publisher, Sergei Nilus, is retained as part of the received whole, since it has accompanied the conversation from the beginning and tells the story of its survival.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is attributed as the Church receives it. Its author is Saint Seraphim of Sarov, whose words these are and who was glorified among the saints in 1903. Nikolai Motovilov is credited as the disciple who recorded the conversation, not as its author, and Sergei Nilus as the one who first recovered and published it. The reader holds, in the end, a document of unusual character: a piece of instruction that becomes an eyewitness account, in which the teaching about the light of the Holy Spirit and the seeing of that light are bound together in a single afternoon by a river in the snow.

Suggestions for Reading

Read the conversation straight through, at least the first time, and let it build. It is a single unbroken movement, and its full weight lands only when the long doctrinal exposition gives way to the demonstration in the snow—so that a reader who has followed Seraphim’s argument about the acquisition of the Spirit then watches that Spirit made visible. Two habits of the text are worth noticing along the way. First, the commercial imagery—acquisition, capital, trade, profit, interest—is deliberate and warm, not crude: the elder is speaking to a layman in the plainest terms he can find, turning the language of ordinary getting and gaining toward the one gain that lasts. Second, the sheer density of Scripture is part of the meaning; Seraphim thinks entirely within the Bible, and his teaching is less a system than a reading of the whole story of salvation as the giving, losing, and restoring of the Holy Spirit. Newcomers need not track down every reference to feel the argument. The one phrase to carry away is the elder’s own thesis, repeated until it cannot be missed: the true aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God.

The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life

It was on a Thursday. The day was overcast. There was a quarter-inch of snow on the ground, and a fairly thick snow-sleet was sifting down from above when Father Seraphim, our dear elder, began his conversation with me in the near meadow beside his “near hermitage,” facing the Sarovka River, at the hill that approaches closely to its banks.

He seated me on the stump of a tree he had just felled, and himself squatted down on his haunches opposite me.

— “The Lord has revealed to me,” said the great elder, “that in your childhood you earnestly desired to know what the aim of our Christian life consists in, and that you asked about it repeatedly of many great spiritual persons…”

I must note here that from the age of twelve this thought had given me no peace, and I had indeed turned to many persons of a spiritual life with this question, but their answers left me unsatisfied. The elder had no way of knowing this.

— “But no one,” Father Seraphim continued, “told you about it definitively. You were told: go to church, pray to God, keep the commandments of God, do good—and that is the aim of the Christian life. Some even took offense at you for being preoccupied with what they called an improper curiosity, and told you: do not seek things higher than yourself. But they did not speak as they should have. I, poor Seraphim, will now explain to you what this aim truly consists in.”

Prayer, fasting, vigil, and all other Christian practices, however good they may be in themselves, still constitute only the means—not the whole aim—of our Christian life, though they do serve as the necessary means of attaining it. The true aim of our Christian life consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God. Fasting, vigil, prayer, almsgiving, and every good deed done for Christ’s sake are means for the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God. Note, my dear one, that only the good deed done for Christ’s sake bears for us the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Everything done not for Christ’s sake, even if it is good, brings us no reward in the life of the age to come, and in this present life likewise gives us no grace of God. That is why the Lord Jesus Christ said: He who does not gather with Me scatters (Matt. 12:30). A good deed can only be called a form of gathering, for even though it is not done for Christ’s sake, it is still good. The Scripture says: In every nation anyone who fears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him (Acts 10:35).

And as we see from the sequence of the sacred narrative, this one who “does what is right” is so acceptable to God that the Angel of the Lord appeared to Cornelius the centurion—who feared God and did what was right—during his prayer, and said: So send men to Joppa and summon Simon who is called Peter. He is staying with a certain Simon, a tanner, whose house is by the sea; he will tell you words by which you will be saved, you and all your household (Acts 10:5–6). And so the Lord employs all His divine means to ensure that such a person does not, on account of his good deeds, forfeit his reward in the life of the renewal of all things. But for this, one must begin here with right faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came into the world to save sinners, and with acquiring for oneself the grace of the Holy Spirit, who brings the Kingdom of God into our hearts and opens for us the path to obtaining the blessedness of the life of the age to come. Yet the Lord’s acceptance of deeds done not for Christ’s sake goes no further than this: our Creator provides the means for their performance. Whether a person makes use of them or not remains with him. That is why the Lord said to the Jews: If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now that you say, “We see,” your sin remains (John 9:41). Let a person, like Cornelius, make use of God’s acceptance of his deed done not for Christ’s sake, and believe in His Son—then such a deed will be reckoned to him as if it had been done for Christ’s sake, by faith in Him alone. In the contrary case, a person has no right to complain that his good deed came to nothing. This never happens only in the doing of some good deed for Christ’s sake, for a good deed done for His sake not only obtains a crown of righteousness in the life of the age to come, but even in this present life fills a person with the grace of the Holy Spirit, and moreover, as it is said: …for God does not give the Spirit by measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand (John 3:34–35).

So it is, my God-loving friend! It is in the acquisition of this Spirit of God that the true aim of our Christian life consists, and prayer, vigil, fasting, almsgiving, and the other virtues done for Christ’s sake are only means for the acquisition of the Spirit of God.

— “But what is acquisition?” I asked Father Seraphim. “I somehow do not understand this.”

— “Acquisition is the same as obtaining,” he replied to me. “Surely you understand what the acquisition of money means? So it is exactly the same with the acquisition of the Spirit of God. You understand, my God-loving friend, what acquisition means in the worldly sense? The aim of the worldly life of ordinary people is the acquisition, or amassing, of money, and for the nobility, beyond that, the obtaining of honors, distinctions, and other rewards for service to the state. The acquisition of the Spirit of God is also a kind of capital, but one that is grace-given and eternal, and it, like monetary, rank-based, and temporal capital, is acquired by the same means, which are very similar to one another. God the Word, our Lord the God-man Jesus Christ, compares our life to a market, and calls the business of our life on earth a trading, saying to us all: Trade until I come… making the most of the time, because the days are evil (Luke 19:13; Eph. 5:16), that is, seek profit from time for the gaining of heavenly goods through earthly commodities. Earthly commodities are virtues done for Christ’s sake, which bring us the grace of the All-Holy Spirit.”

In the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, when the foolish lacked oil, it is said: Go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves (Matt. 25:9). But when they had bought, the doors of the bridal chamber were already shut, and they could not enter. Some say that the lack of oil in the foolish virgins signifies a lack of good deeds during their lifetime. That understanding is not entirely correct. What lack of good deeds did they have, seeing that though they were foolish, they are still called virgins? For virginity is the highest virtue, as a state equal to the angels, and could by itself serve as a substitute for all the other virtues.

I, poor as I am, think that it was precisely the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God that they lacked. In doing virtuous deeds, these virgins, through spiritual ignorance, believed that the whole spiritual matter consisted only in doing virtuous deeds. We have done virtues, they thought, and thereby have done God’s work—but whether they had received the grace of the Spirit of God, whether they had attained it, they gave no thought to. Such ways of life, which rest only upon the doing of virtuous deeds without carefully examining whether they bring the grace of the Spirit of God, are spoken of in the patristic books: “There is a way that seems good in its beginning, but its end is at the bottom of hell.”

Anthony the Great, in his letters to monks, speaks of such virgins thus: “Many monks and virgins have no conception whatsoever of the distinctions among the wills acting in a person, and do not know that three wills act in us: the first—God’s will, all-perfect and all-saving; the second—our own human will, which if not destructive is at least not saving; the third—the demonic will, entirely destructive. And it is this third, hostile will that teaches a person either to do no virtues at all, or to do them out of vainglory, or for the sake of good alone and not for Christ’s sake. The second—our own will—teaches us to do everything to gratify our desires, and even, as the enemy teaches, to do good for the sake of good, without attending to the grace thereby acquired. The first, however—God’s will, all-saving—consists in this alone: to do good solely for the acquisition of the Holy Spirit as an eternal, unfailing treasure that nothing can fully and worthily appraise. It is this—this acquisition of the Holy Spirit—that is properly called the oil that the foolish virgins lacked. They are called foolish for this reason: they forgot about the necessary fruit of virtue, the grace of the Holy Spirit, without which no one has or can have salvation, for: ‘By the Holy Spirit every soul is enlivened and exalted in purity, and is illumined in the sacred mystery of the Trinity.’”

The Holy Spirit himself takes up dwelling in our souls, and this very indwelling in our souls of Him, the Almighty, and the co-abiding of His Trinitarian Unity with our spirit, is granted to us only through our most earnest acquisition of the Holy Spirit on our part—which prepares in our soul and flesh a throne for the divine and all-creative co-abiding with our spirit, according to the unfailing word of God: I will dwell in them and walk among them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people (2 Cor. 6:16). This is the oil in the lamps of the wise virgins, which could burn brightly and long, so that those virgins with their burning lamps could await the Bridegroom who came at midnight, and enter with Him into the bridal chamber of joy. The foolish virgins, seeing that their lamps were going out, did go to the market and buy oil, but could not return in time, for the doors were already shut. The market is our life; the doors of the bridal chamber, shut and barring entrance to the Bridegroom, are human death; the wise and foolish virgins are Christian souls; the oil is not deeds, but the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God received through them into the interior of our nature, transforming it from this to that—that is, from corruption to incorruption, from soul-death to spiritual life, from darkness to light, from the cave of our being, where the passions are tethered like cattle and wild beasts, to the temple of the Divinity, to the most radiant bridal chamber of eternal rejoicing in Christ Jesus, our Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and eternal Bridegroom of our souls.

How great is God’s compassion for our wretchedness—our inattentiveness to His care for us—when God says: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Rev. 3:20), meaning by “the door” the course of our life, not yet shut by death! O how I would wish, my God-loving friend, that in this present life you might always abide in the Spirit of God! For the Lord will judge a person in whatever state He finds him. Woe, great woe, if He finds us weighed down with worldly cares and sorrows, for who can endure His wrath and who can stand before His face? That is why it is said: “Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation” (Matt. 26:41; Mark 14:38)—that is, so that you may not be deprived of the Spirit of God, for vigil and prayer bring us His grace. Of course, every virtue done for Christ’s sake gives the grace of the Holy Spirit, but prayer above all, because it is always in our hands as an instrument for the acquisition of the grace of the Spirit.

You might wish, for example, to go to church, but either there is no church nearby, or the service has ended; you might wish to give to a poor person, but there is no poor person to be found, or there is nothing to give; you might wish to preserve your virginity, but you lack the strength to fulfill it due to your constitution or the efforts of the enemy’s snares, which you cannot resist in human weakness; you might wish to perform some other virtuous deed for Christ’s sake, but again you lack either the strength or the opportunity. But as for prayer—none of this applies: for it there is always the possibility for everyone and at all times—for the rich and the poor, for the distinguished and the simple, for the strong and the weak, for the healthy and the sick, for the righteous and the sinner.

How great is the power of prayer even of a sinful person when it is offered from the whole soul—judge by the following example from Holy Tradition: when, at the desperate request of a mother who had lost her only son, taken by death, a harlot who had happened to meet her on the road—one who had not yet even cleansed herself from a sin just committed—moved by the mother’s desperate grief, cried out to the Lord: “Not for my sake, a wretched sinner, but for the tears of a mother grieving for her son and firmly believing in Your mercy and almighty power, O Christ our God—raise, O Lord, her son to life…”—and the Lord raised him.

So it is, my God-loving friend, great is the power of prayer, and it brings the Spirit of God more than anything else, and it is the most convenient for everyone to perform. Blessed shall we be when the Lord God finds us watchful, in the fullness of the gifts of His Holy Spirit! Then we may with holy boldness hope to be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, as He comes with great glory and power to judge the living and the dead and to render to each according to his deeds.

You see, my God-loving friend, you are pleased to count it a great happiness to converse with poor Seraphim, being assured that even he is not deprived of the Lord’s grace. But what shall we say of the Lord Himself, the ever-inexhaustible Source of every heavenly and earthly good? For through prayer we are found worthy to converse with Him Himself—the all-good and life-giving God and our Savior. But even here one must pray only until God the Holy Spirit descends upon us in the measures of His heavenly grace known to Him. And when He is pleased to visit us, one must then cease praying. For why pray to Him—“Come and abide in us, and cleanse us from all filth, and save, O Gracious One, our souls”—when He has already come to us to save us who hope in Him and call upon His holy name in truth, that is, with the intention of humbly and lovingly receiving Him, the Comforter, within the chambers of our souls, which hunger and thirst for His coming? I will explain this to you, my God-loving friend, with an example: suppose you invited me to your home as a guest, and I came at your invitation and wished to converse with you. But you kept on inviting me still: “Please do come in, come in, I beg you!” Then I would inevitably have to say: what is this? Has he lost his mind? I have come to him, and he is still inviting me!—So it is with the Lord God the Holy Spirit. That is why it is said: “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth” — that is, I will appear and will go on appearing to every believer in Me and caller upon Me, and will converse with him, as I once conversed with Adam in Paradise, with Abraham and Jacob, and with other servants of Mine—with Moses, Job, and those like them.

Many interpret this “stillness” as referring only to worldly affairs—that is, that during prayerful conversation with God one must be still from worldly concerns. But I will tell you in a godly manner that although one must indeed be still from worldly concerns during prayer, when—through the almighty power of faith and prayer—the Lord God the Holy Spirit is pleased to visit us and comes to us in the fullness of His ineffable goodness, then one must be still even from prayer. The soul is busy and occupied with busyness when it makes prayer; but at the coming of the Holy Spirit, one must be in complete stillness, hearing clearly and intelligibly all the words of eternal life which He is then pleased to declare. One must at that time be in complete sobriety of soul and spirit, and in the chaste purity of the flesh. So it was at Mount Horeb, when the Israelites were told not to come near their wives for three days before the appearance of God on Sinai, for our God is “a consuming fire that devours everything impure,” and no one tainted with filth of flesh or spirit can enter into communion with Him.

— “But then, Father, what is to be done with the other virtues done for Christ’s sake for the acquisition of the grace of the Holy Spirit? You have been speaking to me only about prayer.”

— “Acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit through all the other Christ-given virtues as well; trade in them spiritually, trade in those that yield you the greatest profit. Gather the capital of gracious surpluses of God’s grace; deposit it in God’s eternal bank at immaterial interest—not at four or six percent, but at one hundred to the spiritual ruble, and even immeasurably more than that. For example: if prayer and vigil give you more of God’s grace, keep vigil and pray; if fasting gives much of the Spirit of God, fast; if almsgiving gives more, give alms—and in this manner, reason about every virtue done for Christ’s sake.”

Let me tell you about myself, poor Seraphim. I am by birth from the merchants of Kursk. So, when I was not yet in the monastery, we used to trade in goods that gave us the most profit. Do the same, my dear one, and, as in commerce the point is not to trade more but to get more profit, so also in the business of the Christian life: the point is not merely to pray, or to do any other good deed. Though the apostle says: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), yet remember that he also adds: “…but in church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue” (1 Cor. 14:19). And the Lord says: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but the one who does the will of My heavenly Father” (Matt. 7:21), that is, the one who does God’s work, and does it with reverence, for “cursed is the one who does the work of the Lord with slackness” (Jer. 48:10). And the work of God is: “Believe in God and in Jesus Christ whom He has sent” (John 17:3). If we reason correctly about the commandments of Christ and the apostles, then our Christian business consists not in multiplying the count of good deeds—which serve as only the means toward the aim of our Christian life—but in extracting the greatest benefit from them, that is, in acquiring the most abundant gifts of the Holy Spirit.

I would so wish, my God-loving friend, that you yourself would acquire this ever-unfailing source of God’s grace and always reason: are you in the Spirit of God or not? And if you are in the Spirit, then blessed be God!—there is nothing more to say: you could stand before the dread judgment of Christ this very moment. For He will judge a person in whatever state He finds him. But if not—then you must examine why and for what reason the Lord God the Holy Spirit was pleased to leave us, and seek and search for Him again and not relent until the Lord God the Holy Spirit whom we seek is found and is again with us in His grace. As for the enemies who drive us away from Him, we must press upon them until even their dust is scattered: …and I destroy them and strike them down, and they do not rise; they fall under my feet (2 Sam. 22:39).

So it is, my dear one. So do trade spiritually in virtue. Distribute the gifts of the grace of the Holy Spirit to those who need them, after the example of a lighted candle, which itself gives light and burns with earthly fire, and kindles other candles—not diminishing its own fire—to give light to all in other places. If this is so with earthly fire, what shall we say of the fire of the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God? For, for example, earthly wealth diminishes as it is distributed, whereas the heavenly wealth of God’s grace, the more it is distributed, the more it multiplies in the one who distributes it. So the Lord Himself was pleased to say to the Samaritan woman: Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again; but the water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life (John 4:13–14).

— “Father,” I said, “you keep speaking of the acquisition of the grace of the Holy Spirit as the aim of the Christian life; but how and where can I see it? Good deeds are visible—but can the Holy Spirit be seen? How will I know whether He is with me or not?”

— “We in the present day,” the elder replied, “have arrived—through our almost universal coldness toward holy faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and through our inattentiveness to the workings of His divine Providence over us and of the communion of man with God—at a point where, one may say, we have almost entirely withdrawn from the true Christian life. The words of Holy Scripture now seem strange to us when the Spirit of God speaks through the mouth of Moses about Adam seeing the Lord walking in Paradise, or when we read in the Apostle Paul: Now after these events Paul resolved in the Spirit to pass through Macedonia and Achaia and go to Jerusalem, saying, ”After I have been there, I must also see Rome“ (Acts 19:21). And repeatedly in other places in Holy Scripture there are accounts of God’s appearing to people.”

“In exactly the same way it is said of Abraham and of Jacob that they saw the Lord and conversed with Him, and Jacob even wrestled with Him. Moses saw God, and all the people with him, when he was found worthy to receive from God the tablets of the law on Mount Sinai. The pillar of cloud and of fire—or, what is the same—the manifest grace of the Holy Spirit—served as the guide for God’s people in the wilderness. People saw God and the grace of His Holy Spirit not in dreams or visions or in the fantasies of a disordered imagination, but truly and in open reality. We have become extremely inattentive to the matter of our salvation, which is why we and many others take many words of Holy Scripture in a meaning other than what they should convey. And all this is because we do not seek God’s grace, do not allow it—through the pride of our mind—to dwell in our souls, and therefore do not possess the true enlightenment from the Lord, which is sent into the hearts of people who hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness with their whole heart.”

“Many interpret the verse — And the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul (Gen. 2:7)—as if this meant that before this moment Adam had no human soul or spirit, but only flesh, created from the dust of the earth. This interpretation is incorrect, for the Lord God created Adam from the dust of the earth in the threefold composition which the holy Apostle Paul affirms: Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thess. 5:23). All three of these parts of our nature were created from the dust of the earth, and Adam was not created dead, but as a living animated being, like the other animate creatures of God living on earth. But here is the crucial point: if the Lord God had not then breathed into his face this breath of life—that is, the grace of the Lord God the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son and is sent into the world for the Son’s sake—then Adam, however perfectly and excellently he had been created above all other creations of God as the crown of creation upon the earth, would still have remained without the Holy Spirit within himself, the Spirit who elevates him to a Godlike dignity, and would have been like all other creatures, which though possessing flesh, soul, and spirit, and what belongs to each according to their kind, do not have the Holy Spirit within themselves. But when the Lord God breathed into Adam’s face the breath of life, then—in Moses’s expression — the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul (Gen. 2:7), that is, perfectly in all things like God, and, like Him, immortal forever and ever. Adam was created so that none of the elements created by God could act upon him: water did not drown him, fire did not burn him, the earth could not swallow him in its depths, nor could the air harm him by any of its effects. All was subject to him, as to God’s beloved, as the king and master of creation. And all admired him as the all-perfect crown of God’s creations. From this breath of life breathed into Adam’s face from the all-creative Mouth of the all-creative and Almighty God, Adam was endowed with such wisdom that there has never been, is not, and will hardly ever be on earth a person wiser and more knowledgeable than he. When the Lord commanded him to give names to all creatures, he gave to each creature such names in his language as fully express all the qualities, all the power, and all the properties which that creature possesses by God’s gift given to it at its creation.”

“It was on account of this gift of the supernatural grace of God, sent down to him through the breath of life, that Adam was able to see and understand the Lord walking in Paradise, and to comprehend His words, and the conversation of the holy Angels, and the language of all beasts and birds and reptiles living on the earth, and all that is now hidden from us as fallen and sinful persons, and that for Adam before his fall was as clear as light. The Lord God bestowed the same wisdom and power and omnipotence and all other good and holy qualities upon Eve as well, having created her not from the dust of the earth but from Adam’s rib in Eden of delight, in the Paradise planted by Him in the midst of the earth.”

“In order that the immortal, God-given, and all-perfect properties of this breath of life might be conveniently and continually maintained in them, God planted in the midst of Paradise the tree of life, in whose fruits He enclosed all the essence and fullness of the gifts of this His divine breath. If Adam and Eve had not sinned, they and all their descendants could have always, by partaking of the fruit of the tree of life, sustained within themselves the eternally life-giving power of God’s grace and the immortal, eternally youthful fullness of the powers of flesh, soul, and spirit, and the unceasing agelessness of their infinitely immortal all-blessed state—a state which even our imagination at the present time can scarcely conceive.”

“But when, through eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—prematurely and contrary to God’s commandment—they came to know the difference between good and evil and subjected themselves to all the calamities that followed from the transgression of God’s commandment, they were deprived of this priceless gift of the grace of the Spirit of God, so that even until the very coming into the world of the God-man Jesus Christ the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7:39).”

“Yet this does not mean that the Spirit of God was altogether absent from the world, but His presence was not of the same full measure as in Adam or in us Orthodox Christians; it appeared only from outside, and the signs of His presence in the world were known to the human race. For example: to Adam after the fall, and likewise to Eve together with him, many mysteries relating to the future salvation of the human race were revealed. And to Cain, despite his impiety and his crime, the voice of gracious divine—though reproving—conversation with him was readily comprehensible. Noah conversed with God. Abraham saw God and His day and rejoiced. The grace of the Holy Spirit, working from outside, was reflected also in all the Old Testament prophets and saints of Israel. Among the Jews there were afterward established special schools of prophecy where they taught how to recognize the signs of God’s appearing or of angels, and to distinguish the workings of the Holy Spirit from the ordinary phenomena occurring in the nature of ungrace-filled earthly life. To Simeon the God-receiver, to the ancestors of God Joachim and Anna, and to many countless servants of God there were constant and varied divine manifestations, voices, revelations confirmed by evident miraculous events. Not with the same force as among God’s people, but the manifestation of the Spirit of God worked also among the pagans who did not know the True God, for God found among them as well people chosen for Himself. Such were, for example, the virgin prophetesses, the sibyls, who consecrated themselves to virginity—though for the Unknown God, yet still for God, the Creator of the universe, the Almighty and Ruler of the world, whom even pagans recognized as such. Also the pagan philosophers, who though wandering in the darkness of ignorance of the Divine, yet by seeking the truth beloved of God, could through this very God-beloved seeking be partakers of the Spirit of God, for it is said: For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law (Rom. 2:14). And truth the Lord so blesses that He declares through the Holy Spirit: Truth will spring up from the earth, and righteousness will look down from heaven (Ps. 84:12).”

“So then, my God-loving friend, both in the Jewish holy people, a people beloved of God, and among the pagans who did not know God, there was nonetheless preserved a knowledge of God—that is, a clear and rational understanding of how the Lord God the Holy Spirit acts in a person, and precisely how and by what outward and inward sensations one can verify that it is the Lord God the Holy Spirit acting and not the delusion of the enemy. In this manner all of this was from the fall of Adam until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in the flesh into the world.”

“Without this perceptible understanding of the workings of the Holy Spirit that was always preserved in the human race, it would have been impossible for people to know with certainty whether the fruit of the woman’s seed, promised to Adam and Eve, who was to crush the head of the serpent, had come into the world.”

“But behold, Simeon the God-receiver, preserved by the Holy Spirit after the announcement to him at the age of sixty-five of the mystery of the ever-virgin conception and birth of Him from the All-Pure Ever-Virgin Mary—having lived by the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God for three hundred years—then, in the three hundred and sixty-fifth year of his life, declared clearly in the temple of the Lord that he had perceived by the gift of the Holy Spirit that this was indeed He, the very Christ, the Savior of the world, of whose supernatural conception and birth from the Holy Spirit he had been foretold by the Angel.”

“And behold, the holy prophetess Anna, daughter of Phanuel, who had served the Lord God in the temple of God for eighty years after her widowhood and was known for her special gifts of God’s grace as a righteous widow, a pure servant of God—she proclaimed that this indeed was He, the Messiah promised to the world, the true Christ, God and man, King of Israel, who had come to save Adam and the human race.”

“And when He, our Lord Jesus Christ, was pleased to accomplish the whole work of salvation, He breathed upon the apostles after His Resurrection, renewing the breath of life that had been lost by Adam, and gave them the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God. But this was not all—for He had told them: It is better for you that I go (to the Father—Ed.); for if I do not go, the Comforter will not come to you (John 16:7). When He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all truth (John 16:13). When the Comforter comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness about Me (John 15:26). This was already the promise of grace upon grace (grace for grace) (John 1:16).”

“And so, on the day of Pentecost, He solemnly sent down upon them the Holy Spirit in a rushing wind, in the form of fiery tongues that sat upon each of them and entered into them, and filled them with the power of fire-like Divine grace—a grace that breathes refreshingly like dew and acts with joy-creating power in the souls of those who partake of its power and workings. And this very fire-breathed grace of the Holy Spirit, when it is given to us—all the faithful of Christ—in the Mystery of Holy Baptism, is sacredly sealed by Chrismation upon the principal places of our flesh indicated by the Holy Church, as the eternal guardian of this grace. It is said: ”The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.“”

But what do we, in our poverty, seal—if not the vessels holding some precious treasure we hold dear? And what can be higher than anything in the world, or more precious than the gifts of the Holy Spirit poured down upon us from above in the Sacrament of Baptism? For that baptismal grace is so great, so necessary, so life-giving to man, that even from a heretic it is not taken away until the very moment of his death—that is, until the term appointed from above by the Providence of God for the lifelong testing of man on earth: what he will be good for, and what he will accomplish during the God-given span of his life through the power of grace bestowed upon him from above. And had we never sinned after our baptism, we would have remained forever holy, blameless, and withdrawn from all defilement of flesh and spirit, as God’s saints. But here is the trouble: growing in years, we do not grow in grace and in the knowledge of God, as our Lord Christ Jesus grew; instead, corrupting ourselves little by little, we are deprived of the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God and become sinners to varying degrees. But when someone, stirred by the wisdom of God—which seeks our salvation and encompasses all things—resolves for its sake to rise early to God and keep watch in pursuit of his eternal salvation, then that person, obedient to wisdom’s voice, must resort to true repentance for all his sins and to the practice of virtues opposed to those sins; and through virtues practiced for Christ’s sake—to the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, who works within us and establishes the Kingdom of God within us. It is not without reason that the Word of God says: “The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by force, and those who use force seize it” (Matt. 11:12). That is, those people who, despite the bonds of sin that have bound them and who, by their violence and incitement to new sins, prevent them from coming to Him, our Savior, in perfect repentance for their accounting with Him—those who despise all the strength of those sinful chains and strive to break their bonds—such people afterward truly appear before the face of God, whitened beyond snow by His grace. “Come,” says the Lord. “If your sins are like crimson—I will make them white as snow” (Isa. 1:18).

So it was that the holy mystic John the Theologian once saw such people clothed in white garments—that is, garments of justification—and “palms in their hands” as a sign of victory, and they sang to God a wondrous song of “Alleluia.” No one could imitate the beauty of their singing. Concerning them the Angel of God said: “These are the ones who came out of the great tribulation; they washed their robes and made their robes white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 7:14)—purified through sufferings and whitened in the reception of the Most Pure and Life-Giving Mysteries of the Body and Blood of the spotless and blameless Lamb of Christ, who before all ages was slain by His own will for the salvation of the world, and who is continually slain and broken even now, yet never consumed, granting us as provision for eternal life into our eternal and inexhaustible salvation, as a favorable answer at His dread Judgment, and as the most precious exchange—surpassing all understanding—of that fruit of the tree of life of which the enemy of mankind, the Morning Star fallen from heaven, had sought to deprive our human race.

Although the enemy, the devil, deceived Eve, and through her Adam fell as well, yet the Lord not only granted them a Redeemer in the fruit of the seed of the Woman—He who trampled down death by death—but also gave to all of us in the Woman, the Ever-Virgin Theotokos Mary, who crushed in herself and continues to crush in all the human race the head of the serpent, an unfailing Intercessor to her Son and our God, an unashamed and unconquerable Advocate even for the most desperate sinners. For this reason the Mother of God herself is called “the Affliction of demons,” for there is no way for a demon to destroy a person, so long as that person does not himself turn away from seeking the help of the Mother of God.

Moreover, your God-loving soul, I, the poor Seraphim, must explain in what the difference consists between the actions of the Holy Spirit—who mystically and sacramentally dwells in the hearts of those who believe in the Lord God and our Savior Jesus Christ—and the actions of the sinful darkness, which at the instigation and inflaming of the demons works within us like a thief. The Spirit of God recalls to us the words of our Lord Jesus Christ and works in unity with Him, always in a spirit of joy, gladdening our hearts and guiding our steps on the path of peace; while the deceitful, demonic spirit reasons contrary to Christ, and its workings within us are turbulent, perverse, and filled with the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. And everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die (John 11:26)—he who possesses the grace of the Holy Spirit through true faith in Christ, even if through human weakness he should die spiritually from some sin, yet he will not die forever; he will be raised by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who takes away the sins of the world and freely grants grace upon grace. It is of this grace, revealed to all the world and to our human race in the God-Man, that the Gospel says: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men,” and further: “and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4–5). This means that the grace of the Holy Spirit, granted at baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, despite human falls, despite the darkness surrounding our soul, nevertheless shines in the heart with the primordial Divine light of the priceless merits of Christ. This light of Christ, when the sinner remains unrepentant, speaks to the Father: Abba, Father! Do not be angry to the end at this impenitence! But then, when the sinner turns to the path of repentance, it completely blots out even the traces of the transgressions committed, clothing the former transgressor once again in the garment of incorruption woven from the grace of the Holy Spirit—the acquisition of which, as the aim of the Christian life, is what I have been speaking about at such length to your God-loving soul.

I will say more, so that you may understand still more clearly what to mean by the grace of God, how to recognize it, and in what ways its action is manifested in people who are enlightened by it. The grace of the Holy Spirit is a light that enlightens man. All of Holy Scripture speaks of this. Thus David, the ancestor of God, said: Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path; and: If Your law had not been my comfort, I would have perished in my affliction (Ps 118:105,92). That is: the grace of the Holy Spirit, expressed in the Law by the words of the Lord’s commandments, is my lamp and my light; and had it not been for this grace of the Holy Spirit—which I seek so diligently and earnestly that seven times a day I meditate on the judgments of Your righteousness—illuminating me in the darkness of cares bound up with the great calling of my royal rank, where would I have found even a spark of light to illuminate my path along the road of life, made dark by the ill will of my enemies?

And indeed, the Lord repeatedly manifested for many witnesses the action of the grace of the Holy Spirit upon those people whom He sanctified and enlightened by His great visitations. Remember Moses after his conversation with God on Mount Sinai. The people could not look at him—so brightly did he shine with the extraordinary light surrounding his face. He was even compelled to appear before the people only under a veil. Remember the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mount Tabor. A great light enveloped Him, and his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow (Matt. 28:3). When Moses and Elijah appeared to Him in that same light, then, in order to conceal the radiance of the light of Divine grace that was blinding the eyes of the disciples, a bright cloud, it is said, overshadowed them (Matt. 17:5). And in just this way does the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God appear in ineffable light to all those to whom God manifests its action.

— “In what way, then,” I asked Father Seraphim, “can I know that I am in the grace of the Holy Spirit?”

— “That, your God-loving soul, is very simple,” he answered me, “which is why the Lord says: ’All things are simple to one who understands…’ The trouble for all of us is that we ourselves do not seek this Divine understanding—which does not puff up, for it is not of this world. This understanding, filled with love for God and neighbor, builds up every person toward salvation. Of this understanding the apostle said that God wants all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4). And about the lack of this understanding, the Lord said to His apostles: He says to them: ‘Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?’ (Mark 4:13). And again concerning this understanding, the Gospel says of the apostles that ’the Lord opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.’ Living in this understanding, the apostles always saw whether the Spirit of God dwelt in them or not, and, permeated by it and perceiving the co-presence of the Spirit of God with them, they said with certainty that their work was holy and entirely pleasing to the Lord God. This is also why in their epistles they wrote: It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us (Acts 15:28), and only on these grounds did they offer their epistles as an unchangeable truth for the benefit of all the faithful—thus did the holy apostles tangibly sense within themselves the presence of the Spirit of God… So then, your God-loving soul, do you see how simple it is?”

I answered:

— “Still, I do not understand how I can be firmly certain that I am in the Spirit of God. How can I, within myself, discern the true manifestation of it?”

Father Seraphim answered:

— “I have already told you in detail, your God-loving soul, how people come to be in the Spirit of God and how one must understand His manifestation in us… What more do you need, my dear friend?”

— “I need,” I said, “to understand this thoroughly.”

Then Father Seraphim took me very firmly by the shoulders and said to me:

— “We are both now, my friend, in the Spirit of God together. Why do you not look at me?”

I answered:

— “I cannot look at you, Father, because lightning flashes from your eyes. Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes ache from the pain.”

Father Seraphim said:

— “Do not be afraid, your God-loving soul! You yourself have now become just as radiant as I am. You yourself are now in the fullness of the Spirit of God; otherwise you would not have been able to see me as I am.”

And bowing his head toward me, he said to me softly in my ear:

— “Thank the Lord God for His ineffable mercy toward you. You saw that I did not even make the sign of the cross—I only said inwardly to the Lord God in my heart: ‘Lord, grant him to see clearly with his bodily eyes that descent of Your Spirit, which You grant to Your servants when You are pleased to appear in the light of Your magnificent glory!’ And so, my dear friend, the Lord instantly fulfilled the humble request of poor Seraphim… How then can we not thank Him for this ineffable gift to us both? Not even to great hermits does the Lord always show such mercy, my friend. It is the grace of God that was pleased to comfort your contrite heart, as a loving mother, through the intercession of the Mother of God herself… Well, my dear friend, why do you not look me in the eyes? Look freely, do not be afraid—the Lord is with us!”

After these words I glanced at his face, and still greater reverent awe came upon me. Imagine: in the midst of the sun, in the most brilliant brightness of its midday rays, the face of a person who is speaking with you. You see the movement of his lips, the changing expression of his eyes, you hear his voice, you feel that someone is holding you by the shoulders with his hands—but you see not those hands, not yourself, not his form—only one blinding light, spreading far in every direction, many fathoms around, and illuminating with its vivid brilliance both the snow-white expanse covering the meadow, and the fine snow falling from above upon both me and the great elder. Can one even imagine the condition in which I found myself at that moment?

— “What do you feel now?” Father Seraphim asked me.

— “Extraordinarily good!” I said.

— “But in what way good? What exactly?”

I answered:

— “I feel such stillness and peace in my soul that no words can express it!”

— “This, your God-loving soul,” said Father Seraphim, “is that peace of which the Lord said to His disciples: ’My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you… If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you’ (John 15:19; John 14:27). It is to these people—hated by this world, yet chosen by the Lord—that the Lord gives that peace which you now feel within yourself; ’peace,’ in the apostle’s words, ’which surpasses all understanding.’ The apostle calls it thus because no word can express the well-being of the soul that it produces in those people into whose hearts the Lord God implants it. Christ the Savior calls it the peace from His own bounty—not the peace of this world—for no temporal earthly well-being can give it to the human heart; it is bestowed from above by the Lord God himself, and therefore it is called the peace of God…”

— “What else do you feel?” Father Seraphim asked me.

— “An extraordinary sweetness!” I said.

And he continued:

— “That is the sweetness of which Holy Scripture says: ’They will be abundantly satisfied with the richness of Your house, and You will give them drink from the river of Your pleasures’ (Ps. 35:9). This sweetness now fills our hearts and spreads through all our veins with an ineffable delight. From this sweetness our hearts seem to melt, and we are both filled with such blessedness as cannot be expressed by any tongue… What else do you feel?”

— “An extraordinary joy throughout my entire heart!”

And Father Seraphim continued:

— “When the Spirit of God descends to a person and overshadows him with the fullness of His coming, then the human soul is filled with ineffable joy, for the Spirit of God brings joy to everything He touches. This is that very joy of which the Lord speaks in His Gospel: ’A woman, when she is in labor, has pain because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So you also now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you (Jn 16:21-22,33). But however consoling this joy may be which you now feel in your heart, it is still nothing compared to that of which the Lord Himself said through the mouth of His apostle, ’that no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love Him’ (1 Cor. 2:9). The foretastes of this joy are given to us now, and if from these foretastes it is already so sweet, so good and glad in our souls, what shall we say of that joy which is prepared there, in the heavens, for those who weep here on earth? So you, my dear friend, have wept a good deal in your life on earth—and see what joy the Lord comforts you with even in this present life! Now it is up to us, my dear friend, adding labors to labors, to go from strength to strength and attain the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ—that the Lord’s words may be fulfilled in us: ’But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint, they shall go from strength to strength, and the God of gods shall appear to them in Zion of understanding and of heavenly visions…’ Then our present joy, which appears to us only in part and briefly, will manifest itself in all its fullness, and no one shall take it from us, as we are filled to overflowing with inexpressible supernal delights… What else do you feel, your God-loving soul?”

I answered:

— “Extraordinary warmth!”

— “How is that, my dear friend—warmth? But we are sitting in the forest. It is winter outdoors, and there is snow underfoot, and more than an inch of snow is on us, and fine snow is falling from above… What kind of warmth can there be here?”

I answered:

— “Such as there is in a bathhouse, when they pour water on the heated stones and the steam rises in a column…”

“And the fragrance,” he asked me, “is it like the steam of a bathhouse?”

“No,” I replied, “there is nothing on earth like this fragrance… When my mother was still alive, I loved to dance and go to balls and evening dances, and my mother would sometimes sprinkle me with perfume she bought at the finest shops in Kazan—but even that perfume gave off nothing like this fragrance…”

And Father Seraphim, smiling warmly, said:

“I myself, dear friend, know this just as well as you do, but I asked you on purpose—to find out whether you feel it the same way. This is the absolute truth, your God-lovingness! No pleasant earthly fragrance can be compared to the fragrance we are now experiencing, for we are now surrounded by the fragrance of the Holy Spirit of God. What earthly thing could be like it!.. Notice, your God-lovingness, you told me that all around us it is warm, as in a bathhouse—yet look: the snow is not melting on you or on me, nor is it melting beneath us. It follows that this warmth is not in the air, but within us ourselves. This is precisely that warmth about which the Holy Spirit moves us through the words of prayer to cry out to the Lord: ”Warm me with the warmth of the Holy Spirit.“ It is warmed by this warmth that the hermits and hermitesses of the desert did not fear the winter frost, being clothed as in warm furs in the gracious garment woven by the Holy Spirit. And so it should be in very truth, for the grace of God must dwell within us, in our heart—since the Lord said: ”The Kingdom of God is within you“ (Luke 17:21). By the Kingdom of God the Lord meant the grace of the Holy Spirit. And so, the Kingdom of God is now within us, and the grace of the Holy Spirit both shines upon us from without and warms us within, and, filling the air around us with manifold fragrance, delights our senses with a heavenly delight and floods our hearts with an unutterable joy. Our present state is that very state of which the Apostle spoke: ”The Kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit“ (Rom. 14:17). Our faith consists not in persuasive words of human wisdom, but in a demonstration of the Spirit and of power (1 Cor. 2:4). It is precisely in this state that the Lord said: Truly I say to you: there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Kingdom of God come with power (Mark 9:1). You see, dear friend, your God-lovingness, with what unutterable joy the Lord God has now made us worthy! This is what it means to be filled with the fullness of the Holy Spirit, of which St. Macarius of Egypt writes: ”I myself was in the fullness of the Holy Spirit…“ With this fullness of His Holy Spirit the Lord has now filled even us poor ones… Well, now it seems there is nothing more to ask, your God-lovingness, about how people come to be in the grace of the Holy Spirit! Will you remember this present manifestation of God’s ineffable mercy, which has visited us?”

“I do not know, Father,” I said, “whether the Lord will grant me always to remember as vividly and clearly as I now feel it this mercy of God.”

“But I believe,” Father Seraphim replied to me, “that the Lord will help you to retain this in your memory forever—for otherwise His grace would not have inclined so instantly to my humble prayer, nor would it have hastened so quickly to heed poor Seraphim, all the more because this was given you to understand not for yourself alone, but through you for the whole world, so that you yourself, having been established in the work of God, might also be of benefit to others. As for the fact that I am a monk and you are a man of the world—there is no need to think about that. With God what is sought is right faith in Him and in His Only-begotten Son. For this, the grace of the Holy Spirit is poured out abundantly from above. The Lord seeks a heart filled to the brim with love for God and neighbor—that is the throne upon which He loves to sit, and upon which He appears in the fullness of His heavenly glory. ’My son, give Me your heart!’ He says. ’And all the rest I will add to you Myself,’ for within the human heart the Kingdom of God can be contained. The Lord commands His disciples: ’Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and … it will be added to you. … For your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things’ (Matt. 6:32–33; Luke 12:30–31). The Lord God does not reproach us for making use of earthly goods, for He Himself says that according to our position in earthly life we have need of all these things—that is, of everything that brings our human life on earth some comfort and makes our path to the heavenly homeland more accessible and easier. Resting on this, the holy Apostle Paul said that in his view there is nothing better in the world than godliness combined with contentment. And the Holy Church prays that this might be granted to us by the Lord God; and although afflictions, misfortunes, and varied needs are inseparable from our life on earth, still the Lord God did not will and does not will that we should be only in sorrows and tribulations, which is why He commands us through the Apostles to bear one another’s burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ personally gives us the commandment to love one another and, consoling one another in this mutual love, to make easier for ourselves the sorrowful and narrow path of our journey to the heavenly homeland. For what purpose did He descend to us from heaven, if not to take our poverty upon Himself and to enrich us with the riches of His goodness and His unspeakable mercies? For He came not to be served, but to serve others Himself and to give His life as a ransom for many. So do you also, your God-lovingness—do likewise, and having clearly seen the mercy of God shown to you, tell all who desire salvation about it. ’The harvest is plentiful,’ says the Lord, ’but the laborers are few’ (Luke 10:2). And so the Lord God has sent us out to labor and has given us gifts of His grace, so that, reaping the ears of our neighbors’ salvation by bringing the greatest number of them into the Kingdom of God, we might bring Him fruit—some thirtyfold, some sixtyfold, some a hundredfold. Let us watch ourselves, dear friend, lest we be condemned along with that wicked and lazy servant who buried his talent in the ground, but let us strive to imitate those good and faithful servants of the Lord who brought their Master: one—four instead of two, and another—ten instead of five. As for doubting the mercy of the Lord God, there is no need. You yourself, your God-lovingness, see how the words of the Lord spoken through the prophet have been fulfilled in us: Am I a God near at hand, says the Lord, and not a God far away? (Jer. 23:23). I had not yet, poor one that I am, made the sign of the cross—I had only desired in my heart that the Lord would grant you to see His goodness in all its fullness—when He immediately and in deed hastened to fulfill my desire. I say this not to boast, and not to show you my importance, nor to make you envious, and not so that you should think that since I am a monk and you are a layman—no, your God-lovingness, no! ’The Lord is near to all who call upon Him in truth, and there is no partiality with Him, for the Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hands.’ If only we ourselves will love Him, our Heavenly Father, truly, as children. The Lord listens equally to a monk and to a layman, to an ordinary Christian, provided both are Orthodox and both love God from the depths of their souls, and both have faith in Him, even ’as a grain of mustard seed’ — both will move mountains. ’One will put a thousand to flight, and two will put ten thousand.’ The Lord Himself says: ’All things are possible to the one who believes’ (Mark 9:23), and the holy Father Paul exclaims: ’I can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens me’ (Phil. 4:13). Even more wonderful than this our Lord Jesus Christ says of those who believe in Him: ’Whoever believes in Me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to my Father. … And I will ask the Father… and your joy will be complete. Until now you have asked nothing in My name; ask, and you will receive…’ (Jn 14:12,16; John 15:11; John 16:24).”

“And so, your God-lovingness, whatever you ask of the Lord God, you will receive—provided only that it be for the glory of God or for the benefit of your neighbor, because the benefit of your neighbor He also counts as His own glory; which is why He says: ’As you did it to one of the least of these My brothers, you did it to Me’ (Matt. 25:40). So have no doubt whatsoever that the Lord God will not fulfill your requests, as long as they relate either to the glory of God or to the benefit and edification of your neighbors. But even if something were needed for your own need, or benefit, or advantage—even this the Lord God will be pleased to send you just as quickly and graciously, so long as a pressing need and necessity has arisen for it, for the Lord loves those who love Him; the Lord is good to all, He is generous and gives even to those who do not call upon His name, and His mercies are over all His works; He will fulfill the desire of those who fear Him and will hear their prayer and carry out all their counsel; the Lord will fulfill all your petitions. Guard against only one thing, your God-lovingness: do not ask the Lord for what you do not have pressing need of. The Lord will not refuse you even that, on account of your Orthodox faith in Christ the Savior—for the Lord will not forsake the scepter of the righteous and will fulfil the will of His servant David without delay—yet He will call him to account for why he troubled Him without particular need, asking for what he could very easily have done without.”

“And so, your God-lovingness, I have now told you everything and shown you in deed all that the Lord and the Mother of God through me, poor Seraphim, have been pleased to say and show you. Go now in peace. May the Lord and the Mother of God be with you always, now and forever and to the ages of ages. Amen. Go in peace!…”

And throughout this entire conversation, from the very moment that Father Seraphim’s face shone with light, this vision did not cease, and everything said from the beginning of the narrative up to this point he spoke to me while remaining in one and the same condition. The ineffable radiance of light that streamed from him I saw with my own eyes, and I am prepared to confirm this on oath.

* * *

Here the Motovilov manuscript ends. It is not for my pen to clarify and underscore the depth of significance of this act of the triumph of Orthodoxy—nor does it require any testimony about itself, for it bears witness to itself with such unshakeable force that the empty words of this world cannot diminish its significance.

But if only one could see in what condition the papers of Motovilov came to me—those papers which had been keeping in their hiding places this precious testimony to the God-pleasing life of the holy Elder! Dust, jackdaw and pigeon feathers, bird droppings, scraps of entirely uninteresting bills, bookkeeping and agricultural notes, copies of petitions, letters from various individuals—all in one heap, jumbled together with one another, and the whole lot weighing 4 poods and 25 pounds. All the papers were aged and covered in a hasty script so utterly illegible that I was simply horrified: how was one ever to make sense of it?!

Sorting through this chaos and stumbling upon every possible obstacle—the handwriting above all was a stumbling block for me—I remember nearly giving way to despair. And then, amid all that wastepaper, every now and then a phrase would flash like a spark in the darkness, laboriously deciphered: “Dear Father Seraphim told me…” Told him what? What was concealed within those undeciphered hieroglyphics? I fell into despair.

I remember that toward the evening of a whole day of stubborn and fruitless labor, I could bear it no longer and cried out in prayer: “Father Seraphim! Can it be that you gave me the means to obtain the manuscripts of your ‘servant’ from so far away as Diveevo, only to return them unread to oblivion?”

My cry must have come from the heart. The next morning, taking up the sorting of the papers, I immediately found this manuscript, and at the same moment received the ability to decipher Motovilov’s handwriting. It is not hard to imagine my joy, and how significant seemed to me the words of this manuscript: “But I believe,” Father Seraphim replied to me, “that the Lord will help you to retain this in your memory forever—for otherwise His goodness would not have inclined so instantly to my humble prayer, nor would it have hastened so quickly to heed poor Seraphim, all the more because ’this was given you to understand not for yourself alone, but through you—for the whole world…’”

For seventy long years this treasure lay buried and hidden away in attics, amid various forgotten odds and ends. It had to come into print—and at what moment: on the very eve of the glorification of the holy relics of him whom the Orthodox Church is beginning to beseech: “Holy Father Seraphim, pray to God for us!”

May 19, 1903

Scripture Index

Every Scripture reference identified in this book, sorted in canonical Bible order. Tap a reference to jump to the verse where it appears.

Genesis

Genesis 2:71. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.29)

2 Samuel

2 Samuel 22:391. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.24)

Psalms

Psalms 35:91. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.71)

Psalms 84:121. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.33)

Isaiah

Isaiah 1:181. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.40)

Jeremiah

Jeremiah 23:231. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.85)

Jeremiah 48:101. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.23)

Matthew

Matthew 6:32–331. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.85)

Matthew 7:211. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.23)

Matthew 11:121. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.40)

Matthew 12:301. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.6)

Matthew 17:51. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.45)

Matthew 25:91. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.11)

Matthew 25:401. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.86)

Matthew 26:411. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.15)

Matthew 28:31. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.45)

Mark

Mark 4:131. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.47)

Mark 9:11. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.83)

Mark 9:231. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.85)

Mark 14:381. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.15)

Luke

Luke 10:21. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.85)

Luke 12:30–311. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.85)

Luke 17:211. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.83)

Luke 19:131. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.10)

John

John 1:4–51. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.43)

John 1:161. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.38)

John 3:34–351. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.7)

John 4:13–141. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.25)

John 7:391. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.32)

John 9:411. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.7)

John 11:261. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.43)

John 14:271. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.67)

John 15:111. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.85)

John 15:191. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.67)

John 15:261. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.38)

John 16:71. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.38)

John 16:131. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.38)

John 16:241. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.85)

John 17:31. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.23)

Acts

Acts 10:5–61. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.7)

Acts 10:351. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.6)

Acts 15:281. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.47)

Acts 19:211. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.27)

Romans

Romans 2:141. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.33)

Romans 14:171. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.83)

1 Corinthians

1 Corinthians 2:41. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.83)

1 Corinthians 2:91. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.74)

1 Corinthians 14:191. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.23)

2 Corinthians

2 Corinthians 6:161. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.14)

Ephesians

Ephesians 5:161. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.10)

Philippians

Philippians 4:131. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.85)

1 Thessalonians

1 Thessalonians 5:171. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.23)

1 Thessalonians 5:231. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.29)

1 Timothy

1 Timothy 2:41. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.47)

Revelation

Revelation 3:201. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.15)

Revelation 7:141. The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life (1.41)

Colophon

Conversation with Motovilov (On the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit)
by St Seraphim of Sarov.

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
Winter (1890)
by Ivan Shishkin (Russian, 1832–1898), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 16, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction

- The Conversation of the Venerable Seraphim With N. A. Motovilov. On the Aim of the Christian Life

- Scripture Index

- Colophon