Joseph of Optina

Joseph of Optina, known in the world as Ivan Efimovich Litovkin, was a Russian Orthodox monk and elder of Optina Pustyn, numbered among the Optina Elders. He was born in 1837 in the village of Gorodishche in Tambov Governorate, in the Russian Empire, into a poor peasant family. His father died while Ivan was still a small child, and his mother raised several children in hardship and piety. The youngest of the siblings, he was of a quiet and meek disposition. In youth and early manhood he worked at various labors, including service in commercial establishments, while inwardly drawn to the monastic life.

In 1861 he entered Optina Pustyn, the Kaluga-region monastery that in the nineteenth century became the principal center of Russian eldership (starchestvo). He was received by Elder Ambrose of Optina, who became his spiritual father. Over the following decades Joseph served as Ambrose’s cell-attendant, sharing in the elder’s labors of counseling the many pilgrims who came to Optina and of conducting an extensive spiritual correspondence. He was tonsured to the mantle with the name Joseph, later ordained hierodeacon and then hieromonk, and lived a life of obedience, unceasing prayer, and concealed austerity.

After Ambrose’s death in 1891, Joseph was made superior of the Skete of St. John the Baptist attached to Optina and was recognized as an elder in his own right. He received monks and lay visitors for confession and counsel, yet persistently attributed any spiritual benefit to the prayers of his reposed teacher rather than to himself. Those who knew him described unusual humility and meekness and, according to monastic tradition, gifts of discernment and healing. He thus carried the Optina school of spiritual direction into the last years of imperial Russia. In his final years he suffered from illness but continued to receive those who sought him.

Joseph died at the monastery in 1911 and was buried at Optina Pustyn. After the Soviet closure of the monastery his grave, like those of the other elders, became a focus of unofficial veneration. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified the Optina Elders in 1990; the Moscow Patriarchate did so at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in 2000. Saint Joseph is commemorated on 9 May according to the Julian calendar and together with the Synaxis of the Optina Elders. His relics rest at the restored Optina Monastery near Kozelsk.