Lev of Optina

Saint Lev of Optina, born Lev Danilovich Nagolkin in 1768 in Karachev in the Oryol Governorate of the Russian Empire, is remembered as the first of the famous nineteenth-century elders of the Optina Hermitage. Of modest family and with little formal education, he worked in his youth as a salesman for a merchant and traveled widely through the Russian provinces, an experience that later colored his understanding of ordinary people. In 1797 he entered the Beloberezhskaya Hermitage, placing himself under Elder Theodore, a transmitter of the hesychast teaching of Saint Paisius Velichkovsky. He was tonsured a monk with the name Leonid in the early years of the nineteenth century, ordained to the diaconate and priesthood, and for a time served as superior of that hermitage before laying down office in order to live a more hidden monastic life.

Together with Elder Theodore he resided at Valaam Monastery and at other northern houses, seeking to practice the Jesus Prayer and the ministry of spiritual direction in the Paisian tradition. After his elder’s death in the 1820s, Leonid accepted the invitation of Abbot Moses and settled at Optina Pustyn, near Kozelsk in the Kaluga region, in 1829. There he became the first starets of Optina, receiving large numbers of clergy and lay pilgrims for confession and counsel. In later life he was clothed in the great schema and took the name Lev, the name by which he is generally known in the calendar.

His eldership combined a blunt, sometimes startling manner with insistence on inner prayer and repentance. The practice of a simple hieromonk giving spiritual guidance to persons of every rank was still unusual in the Russian Church of that period and provoked both popular attachment and official unease; diocesan authorities at times restricted his right to receive visitors. Among those formed by him was Macarius of Optina, who continued the elder tradition at the monastery and through whom it passed to later fathers such as Ambrose of Optina. Hagiographical sources ascribe to Lev gifts of discernment and knowledge of hearts; these claims belong to the tradition of his cult and are not independently documented.

Hieroschemamonk Lev died at Optina on 11 October 1841 and was buried at the monastery. Devotion to the Optina Elders spread in the later nineteenth century, was interrupted by the Soviet closure of the house, and revived with the monastery’s restoration. He was glorified with the other Optina Fathers by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1990. The Moscow Patriarchate had glorified Ambrose of Optina in 1988 and subsequently glorified the remaining Optina Elders, including Lev, for local and then church-wide veneration in the 1990s and in 2000. His principal feast is 11 October, and he is also commemorated in the synaxis of the Optina Elders. He was a monastic priest of the Russian Orthodox Church, never a bishop, patriarch, or pope, and is not recorded as having married or had children.