An alluring presence in the religious landscape of modern Russia, the spiritual elder (starets) captured the imagination of such well known Russian writers and artists as Fedor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Nesterov, and more fatefully, that of the last Empress of Russia, Alexandra. Western readers might be most familiar with the figure of the elder from the classic story, “A Sincere Tale Told by A Wanderer to his Spiritual Father,” better known as The Way of a Pilgrim. Defining elders as “persons of exceptional spiritual insight who often (but not necessarily) provided religious directorship to neophytes” (4), Irina Paert's exceptionally well-researched and highly accessible study brings this often idealized figure into much needed critical historical relief. Grounded in extensive archival work, Spiritual Elders is the first comprehensive study available in English that examines the rise and evolution of the practice of eldership (starchestvo) in modern Russian Orthodoxy.

Proceeding from the premise that the role and reception of eldership in Russia was determined in large part by historical and cultural circumstances, the book is organized chronologically. Chapter 1 provides a sweeping overview of the practice and understanding of eldership from early Christian times, through Byzantium and medieval and pre-modern Russia—an overview demanded by the fact that, according to Paert, Russia's modern elders often “forged an imaginary link” (18) between their activities and those of their early Christian and Byzantine predecessors. Despite the hesychast revival of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the work of such luminaries of indigenous Russian monasticism as Sergius of Radonezh (d. 1392) and Nil Sorskii (1433–1508), Paert maintains that sources offer little evidence that eldership in the form of spiritual guidance was widely practiced within Russian monasticism before the eighteenth century (26–27). “Traditional” eldership in modern Russia was a “re-invented tradition” (15) that in large part was born out of the eighteenth-century Philokalic movement initiated by the Greek monastics on the one hand and the Ukrainian born monastic Paisii Velichkovskii (1722–1794) on the other. Focusing on the two-hundred year period from the reign of Peter the Great to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, chapters 2 through 5 constitute the core of the study. Ironically, eldership developed in a context unfavorable to Russian monasticism. On the one hand, the political and secularizing reforms of Peter the Great and Catherine II resulted in a drastic decrease in monastic wealth and a significant decline in the numbers of monastics and monastic communities; on the other hand, these same reforms drove monastics to pursue and master their vocations in alternative settings—in unofficial communities, in forest hermitages, and abroad, on Mount Athos and in Velichkovskii's community in Moldavia. The reign of Alexander I in the early nineteenth century ushered in a new climate for eldership in Russia that provided impetus for a gradual growth and development of monastic culture that peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Elders who had emigrated abroad or who had entered into an internal emigration returned and revived interest in the culture of eldership. If in the eighteenth century state officials might have looked askance at monasticism and questioned the pragmatic “worth” of eldership, by the mid-nineteenth century eldership became “a widely accepted superior form of monastic profession” (143). Ruling elites latched onto elders as potential “spiritual policemen” who might be useful to efforts associated with nation building; the institutional church, in turn, valued them for their role in maintaining order and discipline within monastic communities. Lay people sought them out as holy men and women who could offer practical advice and even potential healing. Collaboration between Slavophiles such as Ivan Kireevskii and the well-known center of Orthodox eldership, Optina Pustyn, in the translation of patristic texts into Russian set the stage for what eventually would become a neo-patristic revival in Orthodox theology. Notably, the second half of the nineteenth century saw a demographic shift among elders whose ranks now were filled with men and women primarily from the peasantry (in contrast to the nobility and the merchant class). This social shift reinforced the image of elders as men and women “of the people.” The final chapter traces the changing nature of eldership in Russia during Soviet times, the impact that decades of the militantly atheistic regime had on Russia's culture of spiritual eldership, as well as the public reemergence of that culture in post-Soviet times.

Among the book's significant contributions to the study of Orthodox Christianity in modern Russia are its attention to the complex nature of Russia's culture of eldership and the difficulty in defining the status and role of elders vis-à-vis other authoritative figures in Orthodox ecclesial life—the bishop, the abbot, and the parish priest. Russia's elders included a notoriously wide array of practitioners—men as well as women, tonsured monks, ordained clergy, and laity; the highly educated and the barely literate; nobility, merchants and peasants—who often drew inspiration from different ancient models. With their authority stemming from the perceived holiness and charismatic gifts, they were a continual source of tension within the ecclesial community. For instance, the practice of “disclosure of thoughts” associated with elders competed to a certain extent with sacramental confession (which elders never discouraged), resulting in tensions between priests and elders. Similarly, while often mediators between abbots and rank and file monks, elders also sometimes served as alternative authority figures to the abbot within a monastic community. At the same time, as Paert points out, since Orthodox understandings of tradition embraced charismatic authority, such tensions fell within normative institutional boundaries. Moreover, they often countered the dominant centralizing tendencies of a strong hierarchically structured institution, allowing for an alternative to the parish and the bishop as a focal point of Orthodox identity.

Spiritual Elders covers an enormous amount of ground in less than three-hundred pages. Readers interested in the phenomenon of eldership from various disciplines and perspectives—historical, political, spiritual, and cultural—will find much material of interest. I would highly recommend the book to scholars and students of monasticism, Christian spirituality, and lived religion, in addition to those interested more specifically in modern Russian Orthodoxy and Russian culture.