Joseph of Optina

Origins and early life

He was born Ivan Efimovich Litovkin on November 2, 1837, in the village of Gorodishche in the Starobelsk district of Kharkov province, the youngest of a large family of pious peasants — a household, the accounts say, in which the children were brought up "in piety, in obedience and in the fear of God," and in which spiritual things counted for more than the family's modest property. Two of his sisters became nuns.

The account of his childhood preserves an episode that the Optina tradition has always treated as the seed of his whole life. At about six years old, playing outside with other children, he suddenly cried out and pointed to the sky, and when the others asked what he saw he said that he beheld the Queen of Heaven in the air. The vision was gone in a moment; the boy spoke of it very rarely thereafter, and he was reticent about it to the end of his life, but the tradition sets it beside the second vision of his old age, and it belongs to the record.

His father died when he was four and his mother when he was eleven, and the orphan was passed among relatives and employers. He worked as a shop-boy and household servant in several towns, was cheated of his wages, went hungry, was thrown out of one place after another and was even, on one journey, robbed of everything he had. Later, as an elder, he would use these years to speak with authority to the poor and the ill-used who came to him, and the biographers note that the hardness of them left in him no bitterness at all.

The road to Optina

He had wanted the monastic life from boyhood, and had thought to reach the great monasteries of Kiev. His sister — a nun of the Borisov convent — urged him on the way to look in at the Optina hermitage and its famous elder. He came, and asked Ambrose whether he should go on to Kiev; and Ambrose, in the manner in which the Optina elders settled such matters, told him simply to stay. He entered the skete of St John the Forerunner at Optina on March 1, 1861, at twenty-three, and he remained in that skete for the remaining fifty years of his life.

He was given at once to Ambrose as cell-attendant, and the assignment lasted thirty years, until the elder's death. It is the whole of his outward biography for those decades: to keep the door, to bring in and send out the endless stream of visitors, to serve the sick elder day and night, to be interrupted at every moment, and to be silent. Ambrose tried and tested him hard, in the way of the Optina tradition, sometimes rebuking him sharply and publicly for nothing; the disciple's answer was always the same silence. He was present, unnoticed in his corner, at the conversations in which Ambrose directed the consciences of half of educated Russia, and he learned the eldership by watching it done.

Tonsured a monk in 1872 — receiving the name Joseph after Joseph the Hymnographer — he was ordained deacon in 1877 and priest in 1884, and was afterwards raised to the great schema. Ambrose gradually began to send visitors on to him, and in the last years would say of him, "Go to Father Joseph — he knows everything as I do."

The illness of 1888, and the eldership

In 1888 Joseph fell gravely ill and was thought to be dying; he was given the Holy Mysteries and anointed, and the brotherhood expected the end. In the course of that illness, the tradition relates, the Mother of God appeared to him a second time, and he recovered. From then on his reputation stood on its own, and the flow of visitors to his cell increased against his will.

Ambrose died on October 10, 1891, at Shamordino, and Joseph — by then the obvious successor in everything but self-estimation — took up the eldership. He became confessor and spiritual director of the Shamordino convent which Ambrose had founded, whose several hundred sisters had lost their father, and in 1894 was appointed superior (dean) of the Optina skete, an office he held for a further eleven years before ill health obliged him to lay it down while continuing the eldership itself.

His manner was quite unlike Ambrose's. Where Ambrose was quick, warm and voluble, Joseph was grave and spare; those who came expecting a torrent of counsel received two or three sentences, and again and again the memoirists record that the few words went precisely to the thing they had not said aloud. Visitors describe a peculiar stillness in his cell and a peace that they could not account for, and they attribute it, as he himself did when pressed, to the unceasing prayer of the heart — the Jesus Prayer, which he had carried since his years at the door of Ambrose's cell, and which he taught in the sober Optina manner, as obedience and repentance before it is anything else. He had the gift of discernment, and instances of foreknowledge are recorded of him, as are healings; but he was severe about such things and would not have them talked of.

Repose and glorification

The last years were years of weakness. He continued to receive people and to write letters of direction to the sisters of Shamordino to the end. He reposed on May 9, 1911 (Old Style; May 22 by the civil New Calendar reckoning), in his seventy-fourth year, having received the Holy Mysteries, and was buried at Optina beside his teacher.

The Optina eldership continued after him in Barsanuphius, Anatolius the Younger and Nectarius, the last of the line, until the monastery was closed by the Soviet power in 1923. Optina was returned to the Church in 1987 and the elders' relics were recovered; the Jubilee Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in the year 2000 glorified the whole company of the Optina elders for universal veneration, Joseph among them, and his relics rest in the monastery he never left.