Unlike Maxim or Vyshensky, however, Paissius was the initiator of a movement within the church rather than a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness. He founded a number of new cloisters in Moldavia and southern Russia, and provided them with a series of "Letters of Spiritual Direction" as guides for the purification of the monastic estate. The key to monastic life for Paissius was common obedience to the spiritual elder within a community of ascetic hermits dedicated to the practice of unceasing prayer. The spiritual life was thus seen in hesychastic terms as one of internal prayer and self-discipline; and the "rule" adopted was modeled on that of the early desert fathers. The term pustyn', or desert, increasingly replaced other designations for a monastery as the austere rule of Paissius became more widely accepted.
Even more influential and original was Tikhon Zadonsky, an anguished seeker for a new religious calling in a new kind of world. Born and brought up near St. Petersburg and educated in Novgorod, Tikhon was fully exposed to the new secularizing influences of the capital and also to the new wave of German pietistic thought. Influenced perhaps by the pietistic idea of inward renewal and rededication. Tikhon moved from his high post as suffragan bishop of Novgorod, by way of the bishopric of Voronezh, to a new monastery in a frontier region of the Don. The title of Arndt's influential pietistic tract On True Christianity became the title of Tikhon's own magnum opus on the holy life. In it and in his other writings and sermons Tikhon emphasizes the joys of Christ-like living. At Zadonsk, Tikhon took the role of the spiritual elder out of the narrow confines of the monastery into the world of affairs, becoming the friend and counselor of lay people as well as monastic apprentices.89
The man who carried this revival into the nineteenth century, Seraphim of Sarov, combined Paissius' ascetic and patristic emphases with Tikhon's insistence on self-renunciation and ministering to the people. Seraphim gave up all his worldly goods and even his monastic habit to don a white peasant
costume and spend fifteen years as a hermit in the woods near his new monastery at Sarov. A devoted Hesychast, he believed that "silence is the sacrament of the world to come, words are the weapons of this world."90 After returning from his forest retreat, Seraphim traveled widely in and out of cloisters, urging men to rededicate themselves to Christ. "Boredom," he taught, "is cured by prayer, by abstaining from vain speech, by working with the hands. .. ."91 Virginity he regarded as particularly desirable, and he was a frequent visitor to women's convents, the rapid growth of which was an important sign of the revived interest in religious callings.
The spiritual intensity generated by the new monastic communities which Seraphim set up began to attract a new kind of pilgrim-secularized intellectuals-back for visits if not pilgrimages. The famous Optyna Pustyn, to the south of Moscow, became a center of counseling and of spiritual retreats for many of Russia's most famous nineteenth-century thinkers: beginning with the Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky, who spent much of his later life there, and extending on through Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Vladimir Solov'ev. The figure of Father Zossima in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov presents a fairly accurate composite picture of Father Ambrose, the monastic elder at Optyna Pustyn, whom Dostoevsky frequently visited, and of Tikhon Zadonsky, whose writings Dostoevsky reverently studied.92
The problems of the new monasticism were those of any religious calling in a primarily secular society. The new monks were bothered by self-doubt, harassed by demands that they prove themselves useful to the state like everyone else. Shorn of their role as court ideologists and great landlords, they were not yet sure what the role of the monastery could be in the new society. The monastic revival tended to be strongest outside the traditional monasteries.
On the one hand, there was a tendency to withdraw to ever more remote hermitages, where the saintly ideal was removed from ordinary social life and related to individual ascetic exercises. In this strange, semi-Oriental world the attainment of physical incorruptibility after death was thought to be the ultimate fruit of ascetic self-mastery; and proof of some degree of this incorruptibility became a pre-requisite for canonization in the eighteenth-century Russian Church.93 The ascetic emphases of the new monasticism took it outside of the history and politics in which Muscovite monasticism had been continually involved. In its emphasis on repentance and reversion to the silent asceticism of the early Church, the new Russian monasticism was similar to the Trappist movement in post-Reformation Catholicism. Tikhon was typical not only in fleeing from ecclesiastical authority and civilization in general but also in his attempt to compile a "spiritual thesaurus gathered from the world." Only scattered fragments of
insight and experience were worth finding and preserving in the contemporary world.
As a merchant gathers varied wares from different countries, brings them into his house and hides them, so the Christian can gather from this world thoughts that are useful for the soul, lock them in the prison of his heart, and build up his soul with them.94
At the same time, there was a new desire within the monasteries to communicate more directly with people in all walks of life. The emphasis on ascetic piety tended to break down the older ritual and formality of the communal monasteries, just as the confiscation of monastic lands had taken away the former preoccupation with economic affairs. The influence of Protestant pietism tended to turn monastic elders like Tikhon into part-time popular evangelists. Elements of self-doubt may lie behind the almost masochistic desire of the new monks to humble themselves. Tikhon requested that he be buried under the entrance stone of a simple church so that he could be literally trampled underfoot by the humblest believer. When hit by a freethinker in the course of an argument, Tikhon replied by throwing himself at the feet of his astonished assailant to ask forgiveness for driving him to such a loss of self-control.95 It is perhaps fitting that Tikhon was canonized and his works studied anew in the 1860's, when Russian thinkers were turning again to the problem of moral purification and humbling themselves before the simple people. The principal ideological movement of that age, the famous "movement (literally 'procession' or 'pilgrimage': khozhdenie) to the people," was in many ways only an extension and secularization of the effort to take the monastic ideal out to a bonded but still believing peasantry. Indeed, the complex populist movement-the most genuinely original social movement of modern Russian history-appears in many ways as a continuation of all three post-Petrine forms of conservative protest to the Westernization and secularization of the Russian empire. Like all of them, populism was a loose tradition rather than an organized movement. Like most Old Believers, the populists believed in preserving the old communal forms of economic life and in the imminent possibility of sudden historical change. Like the peasant insurrectionaries, the populists believed in violent action against police and bureaucrats and in the ultimate benevolence of the "true tsar." Even after killing Alexander II in 1881, the populists could conceive of no other program than to address Utopian appeals to his successor.96 Like the monastic revivalists, the populists believed in ascetic self-denial and in humbling oneself before the innocently suffering Russian people.