Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy by Irina Paert (review)

Traditional histories of the Russian Orthodox Church focus on the patriarchs and bishops, the Holy Synod, or the theological opposition between the mainstream Church and “deviant” sects. In this book, Irina Paert presents an alternative history of the Church with a consistent focus on eldership – starchestvo – as a prism through which she seeks to explain and underpin larger developments in Russian cultural, societal, and ecclesiastical history. The starting point for Paert’s study is the observation that everybody knows what an elder – starets – is, but there is a paucity of academic studies on eldership in the Russian context. The elder, “a person of exceptional spiritual insight who often (but not necessarily) provided religious directorship to neophytes” (P. 4), seldom held any Church office and thus received his or her authority “from below.” The elders mostly possessed personal charisma of the type Max Weber had outlined, and with time, in spite of their relatively limited number, they “became central to Russians’ understanding of their own religion and culture” (P. 11).

Paert sees it as her task to review the changing role and position of the Russian elders through time, in order to correctly assess the claims to their importance for the Russian nation. This she does in six chapters, each roughly devoted to a specific period of time. In the introduction (Pp. 3–17), she sets out the parameters of the study, including a brief look into concepts such as “popular religion” and “heterodoxy” as well as elaborating the source problem, which every researcher on religiously venerated personalities has to grapple with. Historically sound sources are scarce, since most accounts are hagiographical or polemical. Chapter 1 (Pp. 18–40) then covers “eldership” in the Early Church as well as its long and winding road to a revival movement associated with the Russian/Romanian monk Paisii Velichkovskii in the eighteenth century.

Chapter 2 (Pp. 41–70) treats the eighteenth century, whereas chapters 3 (Pp. 71–102) and 4 (Pp. 103–139) cover the nineteenth century, with a break in the 1860s, when large-scale social reforms changed Russian society dramatically. While the time until 1860 was a time when monastic eldership was continuously becoming more popular, though only to a limited section of Russian society, the agrarian reforms of the 1860s made it accessible also to peasants.

According to Paert, “the popular appeal of elders was not singularly centered upon religious divination. … It was, rather, part of a more complex combination of social, religious, and psychological factors that arose after the emancipation … ‘the crisis of freedom’” (P. 126). The institution of eldership often acted as a stabilizing factor in times of change, whereby it “left the orbit of the ‘local’ and entered the orbit of the ‘national’” (P. 129).

Chapter 5 (Pp. 140–178) encompasses the times of crisis in the early twentieth century, whereas the last chapter (Pp. 179–213) covers the Soviet and post-Soviet periods as well as developments in the Russian emigration. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Church institution attempted to capitalize on the popular appeal of eldership by institutionalizing it. This project was controversial and fraught with difficulties, and the Russian Revolution put an end to all official institutionalization attempts. Nevertheless, eldership continued to play an important role for the Russian population, although it often became more informal and secret in Soviet times, being treated as a type of opposition to the regime. In the emigration, eldership was, with a few exceptions, not revived. The traditional emphasis on asceticism and withdrawal from society was downplayed, and seldom seen as a way to come to terms with the situation of the Orthodox believers in exile. The revival of religious life in Soviet and post-Soviet society from the 1980s saw a flourishing of self-appointed spiritual “elders,” who more often than not had a rather crude notion of what eldership should embody.

This last point is...