* * * The life and teachings of St. Theodore of Sanaxar Issued 2011 Translated from Russian by Adrian Tănăsescu‑Vlas Before Optina, there was Sanaxar In the 18th century Russian Church, impoverished and insulted by the despise and oppression of Enlightenment elites, monasteries had been reduced to a formalism deprived of the living breath of the Holy Spirit. However, in this darkness of decay and oblivion, the age-old tradition of starets was revived by a number of God-sent people, among them the least known and the most astonishing one is, perhaps, the venerable Theodore of Sanaxar. At the age of only 25, the proud aristocrat, a member of an elite regiment of the imperial guards, fled for the Russian forest, where he spent years as a hermit. What heavenly beings guided him in his astonishing struggles? This remains a divine mystery; we only know that his ascetic struggles, even before having been tonsured into monasticism, enabled him to attain the state of “the perfect man, the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). The present book presents, in its first Romanian edition, the life and teachings of this “wise man of God” who alongside Nazarius of Valaam, Basiliscus and the disciples of St. Paisius Velicikovski, is one of those through whom God achieved the miraculous revival of Russian monasticism, which the thriving times of Optina brought to the highest level. Format: 11x20 cm; 160 p. ISBN: 978-973-136-231-1 «« back