Recently, several publications have featured collections of prophetic statements by devout ascetics, particularly the great Sarov elder, St. Seraphim. This flood of prophecies especially inundated readers on the eve of the one-hundredth anniversary of Father Seraphim’s canonization [on July 24, 2003].
It is well-known that the Wonderworker of Sarov possessed the great gift of prophecy. These prophecies concern both the fate of the Diveyevo Monastery and the future of Russia. Many of them are collected in the work of Metropolitan Seraphim (Chichagov), The Chronicle of the Seraphim-Diveyevo Monastery (1896, 1903), and in the books by Sergei Alexandrovich Nilus, The Great in the Small (1903, 1905), On the Shores of God’s River (vol, 2, San Francisco, 1969). However, new texts are also being discovered that significantly complement the collection of the saint’s prophecies.
One of the latest discoveries consists of two documents found among the papers of Fr. Pavel Florensky. Upon examination, it turns out that they came into Fr. Pavel’s possession possibly with the help of S.A. Nilus (1862–1929), who was closely acquainted with Elena Ivanovna Motovilova (†1910), the widow of Nicholas Alexandrovich Motovilov (1808–1879), the benefactor of Diveyevo Monastery. N.A. Motovilov (a man with certain peculiarities, to put it mildly, now widely known among the Orthodox for his conversations with St. Seraphim, who entrusted him with his profound thoughts on the purpose of Christian life) left numerous notes in which he set forth the content of his conversations and statements by Elder Seraphim. Recently, this corpus of texts has been further supplemented by Motovilov’s correspondence with Emperors Nicholas I and Alexander II (published by me in the book The Servant of the Mother of God and St. Seraphim. [Moscow, 1996]). This correspondence also contains the saint’s prophecies about the future of Russia and the world.
The most diligent reader and the most authoritative publisher of Motovilov was S.A. Nilus. In 1902, Elena Ivanovna handed him a box of her reposed husband’s manuscripts for analysis. From this box, Nilus extracted and published the saint’s now-famous conversation “On the Purpose of Christian Life” (first published in the newspaper Moskovskiye Vedomosti, May 1903). “The Great Diveyevo Mystery” was among Sergei Alexandrovich’s papers; it made a long and difficult journey across the ocean and was first published in San Francisco in 1969 through the efforts of Nilus’ wife’s niece, Elena Yuryevna Kartsova [also known as Helen Konstevich]. In the summer of 1990, I prepared for publication and on September twenty-first of the same year, Moscow Writer published N.A. Motovilov’s notes, “Russia and the Antichrist” (title given by the publisher), preserved in the archives of Fr. Pavel Florensky. This highly questionable note was widely circulated in the pre-revolutionary period and read after the terrible October coup. For example, Princess N.V. Urusova recalled seeing this note in 1918 with the remarkable church art historian Count Y.A. Olsufiev, whom she met in Sergiev Posad. From this note she recalled the saint’s prediction “about the horrors and calamities that will befall Russia, and I only remember that it also mentioned the pardon and salvation of Russia” (see the periodical Russky Palomnik of the Valaam Society of America, 1990, No. 2, p. 94). Here are the saint’s original words from that very note, now known under the title “Russia and the Antichrist”.
“According to Fr. Seraphim, before the birth of the Antichrist, there will be a great and prolonged war and a terrible revolution in Russia, surpassing any human imagination, for the bloodshed will be terrible. The Razin and Pugachev uprisings, the French Revolution—are nothing compared to what will happen to Russia. Many of the faithful will perish, church property and monasteries will be plundered, churches of the Lord will be desecrated; the wealth of good people will be destroyed and plundered, rivers of Russian blood will flow. But the Lord will have mercy on Russia and lead her through suffering to great glory.” This prophecy of St. Seraphim leaves no doubt about its authenticity, as it is marked by N.A. Motovilov: “according to the exact words of Father Seraphim.” But further in the same note are Motovilov’s own reflections about the all-Russian, all-Slavic kingdom of Gog and Magog, “before which all nations will tremble,” about the redrawing of the world map and the unprecedented expansion of the Russian Empire, about the birth of the Antichrist “between Petersburg and Moscow, in that great city which will be called ‘Moscow-Petrograd,’“ about the convocation of the Eighth Ecumenical Council “for the final anathema against all freemasonry and similar parties,” whose goal is “to subject the entire world to anti-Christianity, under the rule of a single autocratic king, the God-fighting king, one over the whole world,” the Antichrist. Further, the note says that “the Jews and the Slavs are the two peoples of God’s promise, His vessels and witnesses, His unbreakable arks, while all other peoples are like the spit that the Lord spews out of His mouth.” According to Motovilov, these messianic peoples are beloved by God, but in the times of the Antichrist, only the Slavs “will be worthy of the great favor of God” because they did not accept the son of perdition. And the “all-powerful Russian language will reign on earth, and there will be no more powerful kingdom than the Russo-Slavic one.” Let us emphasize once again that these “prophecies” have no relation to St. Seraphim!
N.A. Motovilov’s reflections on eschatological themes fully correspond to his mindset in the 1860s when he composed, “The Great Diveyevo Mystery,” its supplement, and this note. There is no basis for attributing his reflections on the “all-Slavic kingdom of Gog and Magog” to St. Seraphim. Unfortunately, some church-related publications do this, attributing to St. Seraphim words he never uttered. Such misrepresentations can be observed, for example, in the pages of the magazine, The First and the Last, edited by V.G. Manyagin (the material was reprinted from the newspaper Orthodox Rus’, 2003, No. 5–6). In issue 5 (9) for 2003, on page 6, after the same reflections of Motovilov on the all-Russian, all-Slavic kingdom of Gog and Magog, we read: “With the combined forces of Russia and other peoples, Constantinople and Jerusalem will be conquered. In the division of Turkey, it will almost entirely remain with Russia...” With one stroke of the pen, they put words into the mouth of St. Seraphim that he did not utter. Pan-Slavism, as an ideological movement, dominated among the enlightened Russian people mainly in the 1860s, the years when N.A. Motovilov was recreating from memory the details of his oral communications with the great, clairvoyant Sarov saint, often straying into the statements of other devout ascetics. In the case of his note, “Antichrist and Russia,” one can unmistakably discern the eschatological reflections of another person, possibly Anthony of Voronezh, a great hierarch and a man of fine intellect. Motovilov himself hints at this, indicating that he wrote his note in 1834, during his trip to Voronezh, when he had a conversation with Bishop Anthony. Note the date: 1834, a time when Elder Seraphim had long since passed away (he reposed on January first, 1833). So, the saint did not utter what is said in the last paragraph of N.A. Motovilov’s note: “In Israel was born Jesus Christ, the true God-man, the Son of God by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and among the Slavs and Russians will be born the true Antichrist: a devil-man, the son of a harlot of the tribe of Dan, and the son of the devil through the artificial implantation of male seed into her, with which the spirit of darkness will also enter her womb. But one of the Russians, living to see the birth of the Antichrist, like Simeon the God-receiver who blessed the Infant Jesus and announced His birth to the world, will curse the born Antichrist and proclaim to the world that he is the true Antichrist.” This stylistic figure belongs entirely to Motovilov and no one else, for our spirit-bearing fathers based their conclusions on the Holy Scriptures and the teachings of the Holy Fathers—and if they added their own judgments on any matter, they did not contradict the Orthodox sacred Tradition. According to sacred Tradition, the Antichrist will not be born among the Slavic peoples but will be brought forth by the Jews, who are “kindling the mystery of iniquity.” It should be noted that the first to warn against the incorrect understanding of Motovilov’s note, “Russia and the Antichrist” was Mikhail Shumsky. Shortly after the document was published in the Moscow Writer, he immediately responded in the same newspaper with his somewhat irritated but essentially correct letter.
If we consider N.A. Motovilov’s note, “Russia and the Antichrist” as a whole, then aside from the first paragraph quoted at the beginning of this review, nothing else belongs to the great Sarov elder, including the idea of convening the Eighth Ecumenical Council “for the unification and reunification of the Holy God’s Churches.” According to Orthodox Tradition and the statements of many devout ascetics, the so-called “Eighth Ecumenical Council” will be an ecumenical and modernist council. So let us be vigilant. It should be noted that the same thought is expressed in Motovilov’s letter to Emperor Alexander II (see: The Servant of the Mother of God and Seraphim). The Sarov elder especially persistently preached against the liberal paths of arranging Russian statehood. The reflections on the unity of the Slavic peoples cast great doubt on their being attributed to St. Seraphim. Similarities with the same Motovilov note can be found in the publication of the journal Soul-Profiting Reading for 1912 (part 2, p. 493). There, a certain journalist Potapov, according to Motovilov’s wife, wrote: “Everything that is called ‘Decembrists,’ ‘reformers,’ and, in a word, belonging to the ‘life-improvement party’ is true anti-Christianity, which, developing, will lead to the destruction of Christianity on earth and partly of Orthodoxy, and will end with the enthronement of the Antichrist over all the countries of the world, except Russia, which will merge into one with other Slavic countries and form a vast people’s ocean, before which other tribes of the earth will tremble. And this is as true as two plus two equals four.” However, this publication was again based on Motovilov’s notes, and it’s impossible to attribute it to St. Seraphim, because in St. Seraphim’s lifetime, rebels were not called “Decembrists”; the term “Decembrists” entered common usage only a few decades later!
The greatest doubts arise from some narrative, or oral, sources. They are especially often used when discussing the prophecies of St. Seraphim regarding the fate of the last Tsar Nicholas II. Here, anonymous testimony is also used, extracted from the book of the liberal historian S.P. Melgunov The Last Autocrat, published between February and October 1917, during the period of rampant vilification of the Emperor and his family. The saint’s prophecy concerning Tsar Nicholas II supposedly stated: “At the beginning of the reign of this Monarch, there will be misfortunes and national troubles. There will be an unsuccessful war. A great turmoil will arise within the state, father will rise against son, and brother against brother. But the second half of the reign will be bright, and the Tsar’s life will be long.” Mention of the long second half of Nicholas II’s reign did not come true! And this is not surprising, for St. Seraphim, if we believe Motovilov, was referring to Nicholas I, during whose reign there were both the Decembrist rebellion and the disastrous plague of 1830, and the unsuccessful Crimean War. This was also mentioned in Motovilov’s letter to Alexander II. And Melgunov, lacking a document, relies on oral tradition. “The text of this prophecy,” he explains in his book, “was allegedly written down by some general and for safekeeping placed in the archive of the Gendarme Corps. They say that Alexander III searched in vain for this document—the prophecy concerned all reigns—but when they thought to look in the Department of Police, the paper was found.” He writes correctly—the paper was found! Only it was not found during the reign of Alexander III, but in 1906. And they searched for it at the request of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, who wished to read the prophecies of the saint about the House of Romanov. For this prophecy was persistently mentioned in rumors. There was even talk of a certain letter from Elder Seraphim addressed personally to Nicholas II. The Empress’s request reached the archivists, and they began to search. No personal letter from the Elder to Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich, who had “poor Seraphim,” canonized, was found, but the letters of N.A. Motovilov to Nicholas I and Alexander II, mentioned earlier, were found. These letters were deposited in the archive of the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Chancellery (according to Melgunov—in the archive of the Gendarme Corps). The letters contained underlined lines with predictions for Emperor Nicholas I, but possibly of interest for the current reign as well. If all the underlined lines were to be collected, they would form a single text, which, with the desire and boundless imagination, could be called a letter from St. Seraphim to Emperor Nicholas II. This is what it can be called if greatly desired to be, but responsible historians value precision, and predictions made for another Emperor and another reign cannot be arbitrarily transferred from epoch to epoch. The second half of the reign—a bright one—may well have been for Emperor Nicholas I. For he was truly a great ruler and a statesman of incomparable sanctity. His devotion to Orthodoxy and Russian spiritual culture is beyond doubt. Therefore, Orthodox people not without reason hope that this Emperor will be glorified among the saints. All the liberal filth smeared on the bright image of this great and pious man by enemies of the Orthodox faith and the Fatherland has already fallen away. People are learning how to walk without the Masonic leash, created by those who lost the ability to honor their great Emperor. Of course, there is much in common between the two Nicholas, between the two great Monarchs, as there is much in common between their August spouses of the same name. And what the saint attributed to one of them can, if desired, be attributed to the other. But only “if desired”—that is far from sufficient to determine the accurate meaning.
Sometimes St. Seraphim is considered to have been sympathetic to the Old Believers. But there are no grounds for this! It is known that the great ascetic assigned a very modest place to Old Believers in the contemporary world, comparing Orthodoxy to a ship and Old Believers—the self-styled “Belokrinitskaya hierarchy” and priestless Old Believers—to a mere frail boat. And the fact that he used an Old Believer prayer rope is a completely unconvincing argument in favor of the “zealots of ancient piety,” since, at the time of the saint, this prayer rope was ubiquitous in monastic life. More often, the Elder used ordinary prayer beads in his prayers, and he was very skilled at making them himself. To this day, wooden prayer beads made by St. Seraphim with his own hands are preserved (on display at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow). The saint did not express any special judgments in favor of the Old Believers, there are no written or oral, credible confirmations of this. However, there are a number of sharply negative statements by St. Seraphim regarding Old Believers, such as: “The two-fingered sign of the cross is contrary to holy rules”, and many others. The truth is indivisible, and to keep it whole within the bosom of the Russian Orthodox Church, as Fr. Seraphim constantly urged the Old Believers, is the duty of all who sincerely believe in our Savior and God.
Yes, our life is complex and sometimes very difficult, so it is not surprising at all that people reach out for an extraordinary miracle. Sometimes a mere rumor grows and becomes embellished with stories, turning into a persistent myth. And the myths are not challenged; they are not reviewed for authenticity, and people simply get used to them. There are, for instance, many historical myths, very persistent, though completely unsubstantiated and false. These include the alleged testament of Peter I, some falsified “prophecies” of the monk-”seer” Abel, the seemingly almost plausible legend of Fyodor Kuzmich—supposedly the former Emperor Alexander I,1 the attribution of the authorship of the well-known “Protocols” to the Secret Police, the so-called “prophetic dream” of St. John of Kronstadt, invented after his death, and much other pseudo-religious mythology.
Church-related literature also does not avoid distortions and myths. Recently, a two-part book, The Beginning and End of Our Earthly World. An Attempt to Unveil the Prophecies of the Apocalypse was reprinted with no indication of the publication venue. This rather extensive work was anonymously published in Russian capital four times before the revolution, but now it is groundlessly attributed to Holy Righteous John of Kronstadt. The work is attributed to him, although he never wrote it! Moreover, Fr. John confesses in one of his diary entries that when he accidentally came across the book, The Beginning and End of Our Earthly World, he liked it. And he even lamented that he had not written such a book himself. That is all. Who created this work? Its creator was Hieromonk Panteleimon of Optina Monastery, a well-known spiritual writer and equally renowned translator (he translated the third volume of the works of St. Symeon the New Theologian, his hymns). He published his attempt to unveil the Apocalypse openly, with his full monastic name as the sole author. The book was published in Odessa by publisher E.I. Fesenko in 1903.
In conclusion, let us quote the remarkable words of St. Dimitry of Rostov: “May I never lie about a saint...” And let us remember that any myth-making and manipulation of church-historical and hagiographical facts is a grievous sin, capable only of leading believing souls astray and causing disorder and schisms in the Orthodox Church.
From: Alexander Strizhev, What St. Seraphim Did Not Say. On the Topic of Pseudo-Religious Myth-Making,” Novaya Kniga of Russia, 2004, No. 8, pp. 38-40.
