I spent some of last week staying at Optina Pusting, the monastery near Kaluga, to the south of Moscow. The monastery had been closed by the Bolsheviks the year after the revolution, and turned into an agricultural institute. In 1987, it was given back to the Orthodox Church, in a terribly dilapidated state. Father Benedict, a monk from Sergiev Posad, was sent there in 1992 by Patriach Alexei to restore it. The number of monks there has been steadily growing ever since, and now stands at around 100. The monastery also attracts more and more pilgrims each year, who can stay, eat and pray in the monastery for as long as they like for free.

I felt very welcomed by the monks, many of whom were around my own age. They were impressive people, who had taken a conscious decision to turn away from the cheap thrills of the modern world and devote themselves to seeking God.

One monk, Father Gleb, was a taxi driver in Moscow in the 1990s. He says: “I used to be so tired all the time, I wondered if I was ill. Then I came here, and realized it was just stress. Modern life is so stressful. Now, I feel peace inside. And I’m hardly tired all day”. He now drives Archimandrite Benedict on his daily tour of the monastery, and helps organize the logistics of the monastery.

Another monk, Father Mefodi, 38, used to be a sound engineer in Moscow. He came to Optina to record a speech by Patriach Alexei. His recording equipment, however, had mysteriously refused to work. Mefodi told a monk, and the monk said ‘Are you baptized?’‘No’. ‘That’s the problem. Come with me’. He whisked him off to be baptized, and lo, the recording equipment worked. Ten years later, Mefodi is still at Optina, and is the conductor of the choir.

What he likes about the place, he says, is the sense of brotherhood. “In Moscow, everyone walks around like they are wearing a suit of armour, and if they take that armour off for a second, someone will stab them. Here, we are brothers, even closer than blood brothers, because they argue all the time. We look out for each other, share the same ideals”. It’s like communism without the gulags.

I see exactly what Mefodi means. That’s the calmness of the place – no one is struggling to show what a brilliant and successful personality they are. You can actually relax and stop showing off. And yet you do meet wonderful personalities there, people from whom kindness and humour radiate. There was a young monk who lived on my floor, called Father Barlaam. He had a slightly dark, Caucasian face and a thick black beard, and he swayed around like he was stoned, with a smile playing at the side of his lips. There was something so cool, so unconventional, about Barlaam. He had dropped out of civilization, but without losing all discipline. Instead, he had decided to dedicate his life to a spiritual ideal.

Another monk, called Father Alexei, was particularly kind to me. He was only 33, but he seemed to be an important figure at the monastery, in a position of some authority, serving the archimandrite. In the services, the locals would crowd up to certain monks and ask their blessing, as if particular monks had more ability to heal than other monks, and they seemed to think Father Alexei had particular blessing-power. Anyway, he was extremely unaffected, unsophisticated, but full of humour and kindness. He had a very beautiful face, easily breaking into a wide, unguarded smile. He was constantly amused by the English words for things – carrots for example. He was one of these people who are blessed with a relatively small ego, through which something brighter seems to shine.

I understood what attracted Mefodi to such a brotherhood. I felt I too could live, if not permanently, certainly for months or even years, among such people, joined by an ideal to try to serve God and live in touch with the deeper parts of our personality. The monks have sought there a shelter from the confusion of modern Russia, from the isolation, aggression and stress of urban life, the humiliations and confusion of globalization, and the false promises of consumerism.

They are not the first to turn to Optina for an alternative to the modern world. In the nineteenth century, much of the Russian intelligentsia looked to the fathers of Optina for an alternative, non-Western, non-rational way of living. Dostoevsky came here after the death of his three-year old son, and partly based the character of Father Zosima, in his Brothers Karamazov, on Father Ambrose, a famous father of Optina.

It was Zosima who put forth Dostoevsky’s critique of liberalism and globalization: “You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires”. That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants. They maintain that the world is getting more and more united, more and more bound together in brotherly community, as it overcomes distance and sets thoughts flying through the air.

Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation.

Other Slavophiles turned away from the West, and towards Optina – Gogol, Kireyevsky, Khomyakov. Optina, for these thinkers, was the link which would reconnect the intellectual to the peasants. It was to Optina that Tolstoy turned when, in the middle of his life, despite having written unequalled literary masterpieces and devoted himself to the cause of ‘Progress’, he felt seized with a desire to kill himself.

And yet Tolstoy’s case is rather more complicated than that of other Slavophile writers of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, he saw in Optina, and in the Orthodox church in general, something deeper than the rational liberalism of the West, which his skeptical intellect had found to be lacking in answers as to why one should live. He saw something stronger than rationalism in the simple, irrational faith of Russian peasants.

I felt that too. The services at Optina are really something.  The first happens at 5.30, when the sun hasn’t risen, and you walk to the church in silence through the snow, with figures in black cowls walking silently beside you. It really feels like what Christianity originally was – a mystery cult.  Inside the church, lit only by a few candles, the monks, pilgrims and locals bow in the darkness to the altar and icons, and the beautiful monastic chanting seems to pull you into a trance, seems to speak to the centre of your being.

And then in the evening service, the sun sets through the church, filled with locals from nearby, the women wearing shawls, the men all bearing huge, proud beards, and looking quite Old Testament, some of the figures look wild, with burning eyes and unkempt hair, as if they have just staggered from a three-day gambling frenzy at which they have lost everything, but found God. And as the night draws in, the faces of the faithful seem to merge with the icons of the fathers lining the walls. And afterwards, you leave the church, your head heavy with incense, and the stars gleam in the black night, as if answering the stars on the church’s domes.

And what do we, the West, have to offer? I mean, sure, we have IKEA, and better hospitals, and less corrupt police – ease of living, in a word. But what ritual or ceremony of the same irrational, otherworldly power? Maybe the Beatles. Maybe only rock or dance music in the West today offers a ritual of anything like that irrational power.

On the other hand, there were aspects of Orthodox dogma which Tolstoy could not accept. Particularly, he couldn’t accept Orthodox teaching that all other faiths, even Catholic and Protestant Christianity, were the work of the devil. He wrote, in his book A Confession: “At that time, in consequence of my interest in religion, I came into touch with believers of various faiths: Catholics, Protestants, Old-Believers, Molokans, and others. And I met among them many men of lofty morals who were truly religious”. Tolstoy was likewise rather ahead of his time in admiring the religions of India – Buddhism and Hinduism. And he couldn’t accept that such figures as Gandhi or the Buddha were led by the devil. And so he turned away from Orthodoxy.

And yet. Years later, as an old man nearing death, he again went to Optina, looking for some reconciliation with the Church before he died. Mefodi tells me: “Three times he walked round the skete [the building where the holy fathers lived], but he couldn’t bring himself to go in and repent. He was too proud. So he left, but on the train-ride home, he fell ill, and had to get off at a nearby station. And there he died, without the last rites. It was God saying ‘that’s the last straw’”.

On my visit, I likewise felt the power of the place. As Father Barsanaphius said at the beginning of the twentieth century: “one often hears the opinion that whoever visits Optina even once will gravitate towards it with his whole soul…there’s something special about it”.

And yet, it is still guarded by the sentinels of dogma. The head of the monastery, Archimandrite Benedict, a small man with a big beard, and eyes that switch from merriness to a rather theatrical wrath, was kind enough to give me long talks, in which I wasn’t interviewing him so much as he interviewed me.

He spoke to me for hours, and almost always on the subject of the dangers of other churches – the pitfalls of Calvinism, the heresies of Rome, the laughable liberalism of the Church of England (“They are allowing lesbian vicars now, I hear. Good God!”) Sitting in his study, he leans forward: “Do you believe in the afterlife?”“Er…actually I believe in reincarnation, like the Buddhists”. “What? Reincarnation?! You think you could come back as a horse?”“Yes.”“Good God. Well, fine, follow the Gods of India, or Africa, or Japan, or Australia…sure, everything is one, and lovely and beautiful…[his face darkens over, his brow looms forward, his eyes flash, his finger jabs at me]…but on the Day of Judgment, you will face God, and he will say ‘what have you done with your soul?’ and then there is no running away, no hiding. What will you say to him? Eh?” I blink. I am beginning to hallucinate through lack of sleep and food.  “I…er…did my best?” I suggest. “Oh you did your best? Fine, follow the gods of Japan, or the gods of Africa”, he says with sarcasm. And I feel like telling him, has he ever read Japanese Zen Buddhism, has he ever been to Japan, does he realize Africa is probably more devotedly Christian than any other continent on the planet? But I am a guest in his monastery, so I don’t.

But it goes on. That evening, after the evening service, I am led to the monastery stables, where the archimandrite is feeding the horses. And there, with these enormous horses stamping impatiently for another sugar-lump, Father Benedict gives me another talk on the dangers of ‘Papa Rimsky’ (ie the Pope), and of Protestantism, and Jewry. He pauses. “You’re not a Mason are you?” Masons figure strongly in Optina monks’ conception of world evil.  So do bar-codes, which are apparently a sign of the coming anti-Christ.

And the next night, the same thing – more hours of talks, in the stables at night. And it sort of freaks me out. I begin to realize he is angling for my soul. No doubt, it is partly because he genuinely believes my soul to be in mortal peril. But also, what a scalp it would be – a Western journalist, converting to the Orthodox faith. The West saved by the Star of the East, just as Dostoevsky predicted! Because he can see how moved I am by the place. And he gives me an Orthodox cross to wear, and Orthodox books to read, and asks me what Church I will stand with, on the Day of Judgment, and I say “I don’t know”.

And the next morning, I decide to leave, because I can’t face another of those night-time examinations, and am feeling the pressure to convert, and don’t want to.  There are aspects of Orthodox dogma I can’t sign up to.

The Orthodox monastic life is, as Mefodi said, a war against the devil, and I don’t believe in the devil. Nor do I believe that the Gods of Japan, Africa or anywhere else in the world are without merit. Anyone who has studied comparative religion knows what Christianity owes to mystery religions of the Mediterranean and Egypt, and knows that at the heart of the great religions – Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Gnosticism and some of the Greek philosophers – is an esoteric core of mystical beliefs which are very similar, what Aldous Huxley called the “perennial philosophy”.

And yet a part of me would love to live at Optina, taking part in the beautiful rituals of Orthodoxy, side by side with men of spirit like Father Alexei or Father Barlaam. A part of me felt really at home there.  I told Father Barlaam I was leaving, and he said: “Already? You gotta stay longer than that to get the benefit of the place. Stay for a little year! Come back in May, it’s beautiful then.” Father Alexei walked me to the bus. He was surprised I was leaving a day early. “It’s a pity…we could have talked more. Why are you rushing off?” I couldn’t really explain. As I was getting on the bus, he asked, “How old are you?”“28.”“I would like to baptize you as Orthodox.”“OK, maybe next time”, I said, then thought, man, you can’t lie to a monk.

The bus drove away and I felt a bit sad, but also calm and enriched. There is something there, and it seems to me we need that sort of place – a place of retreat and spiritual restoration from the hectic, stressful, liberal world. Anyone of feeling knows that that world is not enough. But unfortunately, these holy places are still guarded by the big Churches, which remind me of multinationals, the spiritual equivalent of Gazprom, guarding their natural resources, competing for a monopoly over the global market of souls.

But modern people, particularly my generation and the equivalent generation in Russia, are globalized souls. We travel a lot, we read widely, we recognize the truth in other religions, and that religious experiences can happen even outside of any Church. I can’t even accept Christ is the only path to God, let alone that the Orthodox Church is the only path. So what can we do about it? Can we do away with these faiths’ claim to uniqueness, without doing away with traditional faith and rituals altogether? Without the exoskeleton of organized religion, are we destined to collapse in spiritual decadence? And – the question that dominates my thoughts more than all others – can we combine the scientific and political advances of liberal societies with the profound, irrational rituals of religion, or are they – as Dostoevsky thought – mutually incompatible?

I pondered these thoughts as the bus drove back through the bleak landscape and ugly towns of the Kaluga region. A part of me wondered if maybe God would lose patience with me, and strike me down on the road back from Optina. And in fact, the bus did break down. But it was OK, another one came.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

March 17, 2006