A recent screed directed against Fr Seraphim Rose (which I will not link here, as I do not wish to feed the trolls — I’m sure you can find it if you really want to) calls for an honest response, so I’ll attempt to give one here that does justice to the complexity of the specific history involved, and responds, in addition, to the underlying problems — of course, from my own perspective.
Please forgive this introduction to address some of the facts about Fr Seraphim, before I get to some broader reflections. The screed in question contains a mixture of verifiable information and unsupported, hyperbolic innuendo, some of which reveals the author’s personal biases, complete ignorance of Orthodoxy in general and of the specific histories and individuals he discusses, and his own “philosophical” presuppositions; these don’t call for a response (at least, not here).
Addressing Fr Seraphim’s Potential Connection to Crimes at Platina
Here are the things the author gets more or less right.
Fr Seraphim’s pre-monastic homosexuality. Fr Seraphim identified as gay before converting and becoming a monk. No one contests this. Of course, this is merely biographical background, not an abuse allegation.
His cause of death. He died in 1982 from an acute intestinal ischemia after a blood clot blocked intestinal blood flow. That’s a vascular emergency; medical references describe mesenteric/intestinal ischemia as typically due to arterial or venous thrombi — not sexual activity (whether recent or distant), as the article claims. “Acute mesenteric ischemia is most commonly caused by a blood clot in the main mesenteric artery. The blood clot often starts in the heart. The chronic form is most commonly caused by a buildup of fatty deposits, called plaque, that narrows the arteries… The most common risk factors for chronic mesenteric ischemia include: type 2 diabetes; high cholesterol levels; high blood pressure; artery disease; smoking; obesity; older age.” That according to the Mayo Clinic. Having visited Platina, I can say without irony that the monks’ diet is nutritionally inadequate. I would not be at all surprised to learn that Fr Seraphim suffered from diabetes, for example. This gets into deeper problems with traditional ascetic practices, which I’ll discuss below.
Moreover, it’s likely that Fr Seraphim did not seek prompt treatment for his symptoms; this is particularly imaginable for a pious traditionalist Orthodox monk living in a remote location. Multiple accounts say he had severe abdominal pain for several days and was reluctant to go to the hospital; the monks finally brought him to Mercy Medical Center (in Redding, which is an hour and a half from Platina). A letter from his treating physician (Oct 1, 1982) states they believed the venous blockage began “several days prior to his admission,” by which time bowel tissue had already died and toxins had triggered multi-organ failure.
Acute mesenteric/intestinal ischemia is a surgical emergency; outcomes worsen rapidly with time, and early diagnosis and intervention are critical. Delays are common and mortality remains high, but prompt treatment would have improved Fr Seraphim’s odds. The sources support the supposition that he had symptoms for days and reached care late, which in this condition is extremely dangerous. Tl;dr — Fr Seraphim died because of a reluctance to seek care for an acute and extremely dangerous medical condition, not because of homosexual activity.Gleb (Fr Herman) Podmoshensky was suspended and defrocked. A spiritual court decision by ROCOR’s Western Diocese was made on June 16, 1988, later confirmed by the ROCOR Synod that July. The suspension (in 1984) was for accusations of sexual misconduct; the defrocking was for disobedience in his refusal to face that tribunal. His subsequent departure to a noncanonical jurisdiction is, sadly, a common practice for Orthodox clergy and monastics accused of sexual misconduct — cf Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Brookline, MA.
The Platina monastery left ROCOR for a noncanonical jurisdiction run by a convicted abuser, “Metropolitan” Pangratios, and returned to canonical Orthodoxy under the Serbian Church in 2000 — with Gleb’s defrocking sustained and new abbot installed. That institutional history is well documented; again, none of this implicates Fr Seraphim personally.
Here are the claims where the author’s BS enters.
That Fr Seraphim “was part of a pedophile predation ring” or abused anyone, whether before tonsure and ordination or after. The post supplies no documents, victims, dates, police files, or Church findings naming Fr Seraphim. I haven’t found a single credible source showing Fr Seraphim was ever accused, investigated, or disciplined for sexual abuse. I’ve been Orthodox since 1993 and I have never heard of such. Further, given his liminal position in the Orthodox world — mainstream Orthodoxy in the United States in the 70s, 80s, and 90s considered him an extremist who was spiritually dangerous to read, as I know because I was there, being cautioned by many priests about reading him too enthusiastically (or at all) — there was plenty of motivation for people to uncover and publicize any evidence of this. That no such evidence has come to light speaks volumes.
That his death resulted from homosexual activity. Acute intestinal/mesenteric ischemia, as noted above, is caused by blood clots, atherosclerosis, low-flow states, etc. — not sexual behavior. The condition is fundamentally unrelated to the health of the intestinal tract, but is related rather to cardiovascular health.
What Fr Seraphim Did Wrong
The worst that can be said of Fr Seraphim — and this is bad — is that he knew or suspected Gleb to be an abuser, and didn’t do anything about it, deciding to “cover his brother’s sin.” There is some evidence of this, viz. the following comment by a Church reader who was at Platina both before and after Fr Seraphim’s death. This was written in 2014:
They both were monastic brothers, but Fr. Seraphim put himself under the obedience of Herman, for his humility sake. Yet, both confessed their sins to each other. Fr. Seraphim was the sincere ascetic struggler… he saw people and life, from a spiritual view, not a worldly or political one. Fr. Seraphim saw himself as a sinful pilgrim, struggling with the passions of his flesh, JUDGING NO ONE BUT HIMSELF, and he always wanted to end up in the Heavenly New Jerusalem, with Our Lord and His saints. He did not belong in this world.
Herman was a man of this world, a self proclaimed, “missionary.” Fr. Seraphim did not seek or want, the praises of people, but Herman did. Poor Herman, became envious of the real virtues of his monastic brother, and that people respected him.
Fr. Seraphim suffered because he knew of at least some of the secret sins of his brother, but... he refused to condemn or judge Herman, and he kept silence, publically.
However, there is evidence that Fr. Seraphim planned on leaving Platina monastery and his brother Herman, had he lived into another year, as he had had enough of Herman’s unrepentant life, and of Herman constantly making excuses for his sinful ways, etc.
When Fr. Seraphim died, and I was at his all-night vigil over his coffin, and funeral on the following day, Herman was totally out of his mind with remorse and guilt and weeping and self-accusation, kneeling down many times at night, in front of the coffin and trying to tell Fr. Seraphim, that he was sorry, etc.
Fr. Seraphim had been the stronger one, the true monastic, and when he departed, Herman was like a ship with no rudder or captain at the wheel.
I can still see Fr. Seraphim’s smiling peaceful face in his coffin. MEMORY ETERNAL to a truly ascetic monastic struggler, Fr. Seraphim, and may he indeed be with the Saints in Heaven. I firmly believe, that he is there…
Fr. Seraphim never spoke evil against ANYONE! He carefully followed the old monastic rule to: “Be hard on yourself, but easy on others.” Herman’s unrepentant life, that is what hurt and sickened him.
I was a witness to all of this, so I speak the truth.
Furthermore, I have hard evidence, gathered from different sources, that Fr. Seraphim was not guilty of the sins of his brother, as some foolish people who did not know him, have wrongly imagined.
Fr. Seraphim was, an angel in the flesh.
Rd. Daniel
If he knew about it, Fr Seraphim shouldn’t have covered his brother’s sin, when that sin involved catastrophic wrongs done to others — if not minors, then likely confused and vulnerable young men not far off from being minors, who were desperately seeking compassion and counsel. This problem needs to be brought out and thoroughly vetted in any discussion of Fr Seraphim’s future glorification.
Current Norms and Past Crimes
In the wake of the Catholic abuse crisis, the baseline in responsible churches is: no “covering a brother’s sin” when harm is alleged — “report externally, protect the vulnerable, and investigate independently.” Concretely, norms now include: immediate reporting to civil authorities for any allegation that could be criminal; independent review (not just internal clergy circles) with survivor-first protocols; safe-environment safeguards like background checks, training, and the two-adult rule; and transparent discipline and removal from ministry pending outcomes. These are codified in places like the U.S. Catholic bishops’ “Dallas Charter,” which specifically addresses efforts to conceal misconduct and crimes, and holds leaders accountable, at least in theory.
The Orthodox Church in America (to which I belong) has written procedures for reporting, background checks, and misconduct response. Evangelical groups often bring in third-party investigators precisely to avoid the old reflex toward internal handling. The widely taught “two-adult rule” (no one-on-one with minors) is now standard across many ecclesial communities.
Of course, St Herman’s was founded in a different era. It was a deeply countercultural institution, on the fringes of “world Orthodoxy” even when it was part of ROCOR (since it was in ROCOR when ROCOR was out of communion with everyone but the patriarchates of Serbia and Jerusalem, was in communion with various Greek Old Calendar communities, and was publishing things like Metropolitan Philaret’s condemnation of the “heresy of ecumenism,” really written by Bishop Gregory Grabbe, but that’s another story). The “grasshoppers in the faith” coming into Orthodoxy now don’t understand what it meant to be in ROCOR in the 70s and 80s.
However, even if, in another era, Fr Seraphim believed silence was “charitable” (and here he was ever the completely old-school traditionalist), we’ve learned at a terrible cost that silence enables harm. Any consideration of glorification (“canonization”) today should include a transparent review of how he responded to known or suspected abuse.
To be sure, we should avoid “presentism,” that is, judging people in the past by standards that didn’t yet exist, but we also shouldn’t pretend those earlier eras had no moral compass. Even before today’s safeguarding protocols, people knew that sexual exploitation and coercion were grave crimes; the question is what a conscientious priest then could have recognized and done — raise concerns, remove access, seek counsel outside the abuser’s circle, or contact civil authorities where feasible.
Because glorification is about modeling virtue for the Church, it properly has a higher bar than ordinary historical sympathy: we can extend personal mercy to the man while insisting on institutional truth-telling, survivor-centered transparency, and concrete repentance where others were harmed. In short, mercy toward persons, zero tolerance toward systems of silence, and no veneration without clear evidence that a candidate chose the good of the vulnerable over the comfort of the in-group, even by the lights available in his own time.
If Fr Seraphim really knew of the harms done by Gleb Podmoshensky, and not merely about Gleb’s sinful proclivities, that should weigh heavily in any decision about his glorification. But in no way does any of this information counter the broader image of Fr Seraphim that emerges from all the testimonies of his spiritual children: as Reader Daniel says, “he was an angel in the flesh.” He was a man of fathomless patience, lovingkindness, tenderness, bone-crushing humility, intense asceticism, and fervent desire to pursue the path of salvation as he received it from the great figures of ROCOR — who themselves were living beacons of the timeless, ancient faith of Holy Russia. There is no evidence that Fr Seraphim after his tonsure did anything with his own sexuality but lay it at the foot of the Cross and pray his whole life for transformation in Christ.
The Roots of the Problem
With all of this said, I want to get to the deeper problem, which is that, however successful Fr Seraphim was in choosing a life of celibacy as a gay man, there is a long shadow cast by Christianity’s fraught relationship with eros. Some of this, I know directly, for example, the demise of St Isaac of Syria Skete in Boscobel, WI, itself a community related to Christ of the Hills monastery in Blanco, TX. Readers can do their own research there. It’s dark. Orthodox who think they’re immune to the epochal woes of the Roman Catholic Church in this regard are deeply deluded. Abuse and perversion follow in the wake of Christian sexual asceticism like a miasma. It’s been true since the days of St Peter Damian and it’s true today. Why?
To me, the answer is straightforward, and I will just say it. Sexual renunciation is unnatural. Its valorization in the Church has its roots in the asceticism of the ancient pagan world, specifically, in the asceticism of Greek and Roman elites, Stoicism and Platonism and most of the Gnostic sects (of which, in a sense, the proto-Orthodox Church was one). As I have said before, the notion that Christianity brought restraint to an ancient world marked completely by promiscuity and sexual excess is utter nonsense. Asceticism and sexual renunciation — the idea that abstinence from sexual activity was a prerequisite for spiritual realization and higher spiritual states, despite the tension of this valorization of abstinence with Roman mores that supported the family as a bulwark of the state — were part and parcel of the entire spiritual universe of late antiquity, of which, in the beginning, Christianity was one small, dissident sect. When it learned to speak Hellenism, it adopted a great deal in its effort to translate the Gospel into that philosophical and cultural language. I cannot avoid the conclusion that much of what it adopted ended up fundamentally distorting it.
I can’t lay the blame entirely at the doorstep of Greek philosophy, since the presence of the Essenes shows a distinctly Jewish form of asceticism, including lifelong continence for a spiritual and religious elite. Of course, the ancient world is far richer and more complex than we habitually suppose, and those Essene doctrines might have their roots elsewhere, even as, for example, the Book of Enoch is obviously deeply influenced by Iranian religious traditions. Here we fade into an examination of the psychological origins of the valorization of sexual continence, and I am thoroughly out of my depth. I will say only that I can easily imagine that, in a world without obstetrics or analgesics, with high infant mortality, a profound burden of acute illness, and human lives truncated by disease, disaster, and endemic warfare, I understand existentially the view of the world which would lead someone to say, Get me the f*ck out of here!
In any event, despite modern parsings of the faith, when you return to the post-apostolic (Patristic) wellsprings of Christianity, sex and sexual pleasure are treated with overwhelming negativity. Yes, you can cherry-pick quotations from the Fathers to build up a positive image of sexuality… sort of. But when you stand back and look at the whole picture, when you read the many encomia to virginity and let the global atmosphere of their arguments sink in, the inescapable realization, at least for me, is that the Fathers rejected sexual pleasure, even when they allowed for procreative sex. In some cases they even asked innocently, “How could we populate the monasteries unless married people have children?” (If you don’t believe this is true about the Fathers, go ahead and find and cite something from any Father valorizing sexual pleasure as a good in itself, and not merely as a subsidiary component of procreation. I would love to be proved wrong.)
By the way, here’s a story about one of Geronda Ephraim’s monks (for readers who do not know, he was a contemporary traditionalist Greek elder responsible for many monastic foundations in North America). When I came to him, as a priest, for confession, he evinced a great interest in the details of my sex life, and quizzed me in depth. When I told him that yes, my wife and I engage in oral sex, he told me that he was incapable of absolving me, and that I would have to go to my bishop to confess and receive absolution. Obviously this was because his practice was to apply a canon that would excommunicate me for some prolonged period of time, which would have been problematic given my priestly ministry.
That was really the end of my dalliance with that kind of traditionalism. It played a role in my eventual departure from the priesthood.
This is the tradition as it really is. It’s sick. There isn’t any other way to describe it. Even if we mitigate some of the worst excesses, the basic anthropology underneath it is still sick. Yes — the sickness exists elsewhere. Yes, the culture as a whole is full of sexual brutality and perversion. But Christianity, if it represents the healing irruption of God’s power in creation in a new way, should describe and demonstrate a way of healing those wounds. It should not perpetuate and exacerbate them.
Fr Seraphim, by all accounts, dealt “successfully” with his homosexual orientation by total renunciation, and transmuted it into a profoundly beautiful sensitivity of soul that allowed him to serve as a beacon of faith for the world around him. He took the deep grief that it doubtless occasioned for him and turned it into a hymn of love (as he said, “All the crosses of my life have only been joy to me”). This was the choice he made, given the tradition he encountered and entered and loved so deeply. I am sure that countless other Orthodox and Catholic ascetics have done the same over the centuries. I know the radiant beauty of their souls because I have “met” them. I am Orthodox because of the light I have seen in them. Their suffering worked a spiritual alchemy. I don’t believe it was God’s intention that they suffer in a body-denying, eros-denying culture, but I do think God rejoiced at the use they were able to make of their experience in creatively bringing forth spiritual transformation for the healing of the world.
Gleb made a different choice — but his “choice,” too, was conditioned profoundly by the tradition he inherited and accepted. His response was not one of integrity, but it is still one that shows clearly not simply his own darkness, but the inhumanity of the tradition within which he was operating, and the tragedy of his inability to square that tradition with his own affective life that he did not have the psychological power to suppress.
So what happens if we reconstruct a Christian anthropology (perhaps I should say simply, construct a Christian anthropology, because I am not sure it has really been done yet) on the basis of a valorization of sex, sexual pleasure, and indeed, pleasure in general — indeed, the whole affective life? The valorization of an unarmored approach to and experience of life, rather than an armored approach? What would a fully sex-positive, body-positive, earth-positive Christianity look like? I perpetually end my notes with these kinds of questions, and if it irritates you, you should know that it irritates me as well. I want the answer and I don’t know what it is.
Certainly, the answer must be in some way to “make sexuality human,” in the words of process theologian Norman Pittenger. That is, here, as everywhere, I think, the human vocation is to illuminate nature from within, with God’s help, rather than to suppress it or transcend it. I do not believe that the valorization of continence as the height of a humane appropriation of sexuality is “making it human.” On balance, the civilizational consequence of this approach seems rather to have made it inhuman. I believe that the brutality of a civilization is directly tied to the degree to which it is at war with eros. Crushing (or attempting to crush) the eros of sexual desire leads inexorably to the crushing of tender-heartedness, because at the roots of the soul, these two things are one. This is why sexually repressive societies tend to be haunted by all manner of cruelty and disregard for children, domestic animals, and wild nature.
Who does not know that intercourse, even marital intercourse, is never committed without the itching of the flesh, without the fervor of lust, without the stench of lust? Whence the conceived seeds are fouled, stained, and vitiated, from which the infused soul finally contracts the stain of sin, the stain of guilt, the filth of iniquity, just as liquid infused from a corrupted vessel is corrupted, and, coming into contact with something polluted, is polluted by the very contact.
That was Pope Innocent III — the man who executed the Albigensian Crusade. Sadism is the obverse of sexual renunciation.
The ascetic tradition as we have received it shows the great beauty that human beings can create from adversity — but it also represents a fundamental corruption of Christianity, and we are already well-advanced into a world that has rightly rejected it.
A view that commends itself to me is this. The bodies with which we are endowed are the product of aeons of evolution. They are unfathomably rich and complex in capacities and drives. Some of those are light, some are dark. We cannot choose whether or not to receive that whole transmission — but we can decide precisely how we receive it. This, in my view, is the spiritual life. Not a rejection of incarnate existence with everything it contains, but an acceptance of it and a cosmic effort to transmit God’s light to it, so that the whole creation is kindled from within.
Isn’t that, in the end, the entire model of spiritual life proposed to us by the doctrine and myth of the Incarnation?
> Sexual renunciation is unnatural.
Christianity is supposed to be unnatural in many regards. Christ's death is natural; His resurrection and Ascension are unnatural. Sacraments all have unnatural components; it's what separates Baptism from merely washing one's brow. The whole of Christianity rests on the realness of the unnatural parts of human existence. If humans were meant to be only natural in all things, then what purpose would the Divine serve?
Even atheists, like Richard Dawkins in 'The Selfish Gene,' can recognize forces that motivate humans away from purely natural, genetic coding. Whatever that something is, it isn't clear that it's natural, nor is it clear being unnatural would make it maladaptive.
Regardless of one's view of celibacy and/or asceticism, calling something "unnatural" isn't a sound argument against the thing, especially when it comes to Christianity.
This is really two essays from my perspective. Good job on the first regarding Fr. Rose, but the second which seems to imply there is no Divine Eros is problematic. There are deeply embodied and fully intimate modes of experiencing divinity and sacredness which are based on renunciation. There is no reason a christian ascetic should't also be able experience a kinda of preview of the unity with God. The ramifications of glorification involving the full body are not as developed in christian asceticism as they should be. Yet, the eros that allowed St. Symeon to say that "Christ is my penis" (I'm not kidding), is not to be brushed off as mere repression but rather a completion of the meaning of eros:
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For while we become many members He remains one and indivisible, and each part is the whole Christ himself. 160 And so thus you well know that both my finger and my penis are Christ. Do you tremble or feel ashamed? But God was not ashamed to become like you, yet you are ashamed to become like Him? “I am not ashamed to become like Him. 165 But in saying He is like a shameful member I suspect that you speak blasphemy.” So then, you suspected badly, for there are no shameful members! They are hidden members of Christ, for they are covered, and on account of this they are more revered than the rest, (1 Cor 12.23) 170 as hidden members of Him Who is hidden, they are unseen by all, from Whom seed is given in divine communion, (1 Jn 3.9) awesomely deified in the divine form, from the whole divinity itself, for He is God entire, He Who is united with us, oh spine-chilling mystery! 175 And thus it truly becomes a marriage, unutterable and divine: He unites with each one, and again I shall say these things for pleasure, and each is made one with the Master. And so if you will put the whole Christ on your entire flesh, (Rom 13.14) then you shall understand everything that I say and have no cause for shame.
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If only monasticism was understood as aimed at this kind of deep eros with Christ! More than that, this kind of 'body positivity' certainly would be good to apply when thinking of sexuality in general. Also I want to point out the renunciation can indeed also be done in a body-positive way. You seem to paint it as inherently negative towards the body.
So while I agree that orthodoxy needs to emphasize spiritual eros more and understand that physical eros (eros expressed sexually) is a REAL mode of participation in divine eros, I also think you are flat out wrong to state that it is a form of non-christian repression to be ascetical. This is very harmful to spread. When a person is filled with this kind of joy, there is no sense of lack, the body is indeed involved in an embodied pervasion of the Spirit which mimics perichoresis. This is TOTAL eros of mind, spirit, and body, not a mere suppression or repression of the body. It is a fulfillment of what sex participates in (and note as I write below that sex also has a 'high ceiling' of potential). This exists, I know of it, I know of other people who know of it, and it is not 'sexual' in the normal sense of the word. It is supra-sexual.
To reiterate, this is not a denigration of marriage either. Sexuality can also participate fully in this kind of experience as well, but this means it must be elevated beyond the merely physical again to include the full perichoresis participating in the union of Christ and his Church (i.e. ALL reality).
So the way forwards as I see it is NOT to decide renunciation is for self-loathing and world-loathing gnostics, but to bring renunciation fully into its true meaning which is embarrassing for the many, but true nonetheless: marriage with Christ in all its implications. Marriage of ALL of one's being including the body (nonsexual, non-lustful eros). Then renunciates are simply those who focus on this only, whereas those who get married focus on union with each and union with Christ. Those in marriage are participating in 'theosis with world and Christ' which is critical as well since the World Song includes all of creation united in a beautiful whole. Those renunciates are focusing on 'theosis with Christ' and letting their 'theosis with the world' develop as the result of it rather than so to speak 'developing concurrently'. So, I agree we don't denigrate marriage either. Can you agree to stop denigrating renunciates?