Moses of Optina

Moses of Optina, in the world Timofey Ivanovich Putilov, was born in 1782 in Borisoglebsk in the Yaroslavl Governorate of the Russian Empire, into a pious merchant family. His father, Ivan Grigorievich Putilov, raised his children in the Orthodox faith and intended that Timofey continue the family trade. From youth Timofey was drawn to prayer, fasting, and spiritual reading rather than commerce. In the first decade of the nineteenth century he left home to seek the monastic life, going first to Sarov Hermitage, a center of inner prayer in the Russian Church and the home of Saint Seraphim of Sarov and other Sarov elders.

After a period at Sarov he lived at the Svensky Monastery near Bryansk, where he came under the influence of Elder Athanasius, a disciple of Saint Paisius Velichkovsky. He then settled among hermits in the forests near Roslavl in Smolensk province. There he was tonsured a monk with the name Moses and spent about a decade in the eremitical life, practicing the Jesus Prayer and studying the writings of the Holy Fathers in the Paisian hesychastic tradition. In the early 1820s Bishop Philaret of Kaluga, later Metropolitan of Kiev, invited Moses and several companions from the Roslavl forests to Optina Pustyn, near Kozelsk, in order to found a skete on the model of the ancient desert monasteries and of Mount Athos. Moses became the principal organizer of the new Skete of Saint John the Baptist beside the main monastery.

In 1826 Moses was appointed superior of Optina Pustyn, an office he held for the remaining thirty-six years of his life. He was later raised to the rank of archimandrite and received the great schema. As abbot he combined administrative energy with monastic humility. He rebuilt and enlarged the monastery, constructed churches and other buildings, laid out gardens and workshops, and assembled one of the most important monastic libraries in Russia. Under his direction Optina began a publishing work that issued Slavonic and Russian editions of patristic and ascetic texts, including writings associated with Saint Paisius Velichkovsky, Saint Isaac the Syrian, and other fathers. These books circulated widely and helped revive hesychastic spirituality in the Russian Church.

Moses understood that a monastery needed not only good order and books but living spiritual guides. He invited Elder Leonid (Leo) to Optina and later supported Elder Macarius, thereby establishing the institution of eldership (starchestvo) that made Optina a center of pilgrimage for clergy, laity, and writers of nineteenth-century Russia. His own younger brother, Alexander Putilov, became the monk Anthony and served as superior of the skete. Moses himself was known more as a wise administrator and man of prayer than as a public elder, yet he offered counsel to monks and visitors and was remembered for gentleness, discernment, and unceasing intercession. He died at Optina on 16 June 1862.

After his death he was venerated locally at the monastery. In the late twentieth century the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him together with the other Optina Elders, first for diocesan veneration in the 1990s and then for church-wide veneration at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council in 2000. His relics rest at Optina Pustyn near Kozelsk. He is commemorated on 16 June and with the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of Optina on 11 October.