7.

 What is an elder and what does he do?

            The Apostle Paul enumerates three ministries in the Church that are independent of the Church hierarchy: Apostles, prophets and teachers. (These ministries may be connected to the rank of bishop or priest, but not necessarily so). An elder was one who had received the second of these gifts of the Holy Spirit — that of the prophetic ministry (cf. Eph 4:11, 1 Cor 12:28). This gift was bestowed as a special gift of grace, and it was given to those carriers of God's grace and otherworldly wisdom whose rare and God-given spiritual discernment and insight enabled them to serve as guides to others.

            So high a calling as the prophetic ministry required a great personal sanctity, purity of heart, and uninterrupted abiding in God. Sanctity of life was definitely a requirement of the prophets in the time of the first Christians. As is written in one of the oldest works of Christian literature:

He must have the manner of the Lord. From his manner may be distinguished the false prophet from the [true] prophet [The Didache (The Teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles by the Twelve Apostles)].

Many saints were given the grace of prophecy, including Fools-for-Christ's-Sake (Yurodivi) and holy eldresses, and even the mentally unstable. However, as Professor Smirnov notes in his doctrinal dissertation The Spiritual Fathers in the Ancient Eastern Church, “The charismatic phenomena of the first centuries of Christianity repeated themselves in ancient monasticism: that the elders were bearers of these charisms — the special gifts of the Holy Spirit, given to man directly by God, according to one's personal worthiness.”

            Eldership, being a direct continuation of the prophetic ministry, appeared under this name and in this form only in the fourth century, when monasticism arose as a guiding principle. From that time on, the gift most commonly manifested itself as monastic eldership.

            The father of monasticism himself, St. Anthony the Great, was the earliest and most famous of the elders. In a pattern common to later elders, he withdrew from the world and spent the first part of his life (from eighteen to thirty-five) living as a desert anchorite in strict solitude and ascetic endeavors. In time, a group of disciples gathered about him, and later still, he had a circle of people who came from far and wide to seek his advice. So great did his fame for helping others become that he was described by his biographer St. Athanasius as a physician to all Egypt. St. Anthony had many successors through the centuries, most of whom followed his pattern of withdrawing from the world to return to it with gifts of discernment for the benefit of their fellow men.

            Angels are a light for monks, it was noted, and the monastic life is a light for all humanity. However, the heights of Christianity, the best expression of monasticism, is eldership. This ministry consisted in edification, exhortation and comfort (1 Cor. 14:3). As St. Barsanuphius, an elder from the famous Optina Hermitage, explained, the Lord spontaneously reveals to elders the past, present and future of people. Thus, in addition to physical eyes, elders have spiritual eyes before which the human soul is revealed, and nothing is hidden from them. This gift, the ability to see the human soul, gives an elder the opportunity to raise the fallen, direct people from a false path to a true one, heal diseases of soul and body, drive out demons, and act as direct transmitters of God's will for all who came to them. In the lofty spiritual gaze of elders, the boundaries of space and time were set aside, and they saw the spiritual meaning of present and future events, the latter of which they were able to foretell.

            Archpriest Sergei Lebedev speaks of the ability of elders and eldresses to foretell the future in the following way:

It is not clear to many Christians how these pious people, elders and eldresses, prophecy the future just as it will happen. Many confuse [their gift] with a kind of fortune-telling because of their simplicity, spiritual immaturity, heedlessness and lack of faith. Such people sometimes speak thus about these strugglers for God: “Here he guessed and it came out as he said it would.” Herein is revealed great thoughtlessness and even sinful-ness. Fortune-telling is forbidden in the Old Testament. Fortune-tellers have the devil and his angels for their accomplices. They are totally sinful and Christians should not turn to them under any circumstances. If a Christian turns to a fortune-teller, he shows himself a traitor to Christ and accepts the devil's help. [The gift of prophecy] has the great blessing of God as its foundation, and it is a great gift given only to people of the highest spiritual labors who have a pure heart. They acquire inner light as a gift from the Lord [Consoler of Suffering Hearts: Eldress Rachel, Visionary of Russia, p. 10].

Hieromonk Seraphim Rose explains that elders had their exceptional abilities as they are an image of Adam in his unfallen state. When Adam named the animals that came before him in Paradise, he instantly gave whatever name God placed in his mind. In the same way, when an elder sees someone for the first time, he tells the person's name, tells the person's sin, and tells him what he must do to save his soul. The elder's mind gives this startling information because he is in direct contact with God, Who gives him this ability. As Iulia De Beausobre goes on to note, because elders had this ability, they were sought out in the solitudes of many lands by people eager to find a teacher capable of bringing order to their confusion, and capable of kindling the light of hope in the darkness of their despair.

            Hieroconfessor Barnabas (Belyaev), Bishop of Pechersky, himself an elder, left the following description of the institution of eldership and how it manifested itself in Russia:

Elders in Russian ecclesiastical consciousness are ascetics who have passed through a long probation and have come to know spiritual warfare from experience, and who by many exploits have acquired the gift of discernment, and who, finally, are capable by prayer of attaining to the will of God for man. That is, to a greater or lesser extent they have received the gift of... giving spiritual direction to those who come to them.

The influence of eldership spread far beyond monasteries. In Russia, elders were spiritual guides for thousands of people who flocked to be guided by these holy men — Tsars, princes, philosophers, writers such as Gogol and Dostoyevsky, and ordinary people from all walks of life. Those who rendered themselves to the guidance of an elder experienced a special feeling of joy and freedom in God, for contact with God is always combined with a feeling of indescribable peace in the soul.

            Well-known holy men from among the Russian elders were Saints Seraphim of Sarov and John of Kronstadt. Eldership flowered especially at the Optina Hermitage, which produced no less than twelve elders: Ambrosi, Leo, Moses, Anthony, Isaaki, Makari, Ioasaph, Anatoli, Ilarion, Barsanuphius, Nektary and Nikon, all of whom have been glorified by saints by the Russian Church in Exile. With the Optina elders, as with others, the Lord bestowed on them the gift of understanding the state of soul of people who came to them, plus miracle-working, the ability to drive out demons, and the ability to heal sicknesses.

            The prophetic ministry flourished when the spiritual life in the Church was high, and it declined in decadent periods. In these pre-apocalyptic times, when the love of many has grown cold and spiritual impoverishment prevails, the grace of eldership has grown exceedingly scarce. It is not known to the writer if any elders are still alive today. However, if any still do exist, they choose to conceal themselves from the gaze of others rather than seek the vainglory that comes from the human praise they would receive from putting on display the treasure they have obtained. Regarding the present scarcity of elders, Archpriest Alexey Young writes:

In this country, at least, there are no true elders today whose voice can be the voice of Heaven for a disciple or spiritual child. To think otherwise is very dangerous: whole groups have been led into schism and heresy because they believed their leader to be an unerring “elder.” [“Cults Within and Without,” Orthodox America, vol. 15, no. 7, 1996, p. 11].

Also regarding the disappearance of elders in these times, a new martyr of the Communist yoke, Hieromartyr Damascene, Bishop of Glokov, stated:

Perhaps the time has come when the Lord does not wish that the Church should stand as an intermediary between Himself and believers, but that everyone is called to stand directly before the Lord and himself answer, as it was with the forefathers [Episkopi-Ispovedniki, San Francisco, 1971, p. 92].