An attractive divorcee makes a wager with her friends that she can seduce a solitary monk who has a reputation for piety. On the pretext of being lost, she gains entrance to his hermitage.
This is a scene in one of Leo Tolstoy’s lesser-known short stories, “Father Sergy” (“Father Sergey” or “Father Sergius” in other translations). In this test of wills, the monk proves to be more than a match for the temptress.
In response to the woman’s attempts at seduction and his own weakening will, the monk picks up an ax and – with a swift blow – chops off one of his fingers.
As the woman stares, horrified, at Father Sergy’s bleeding hand, he demands, “Dear Sister, why do you want to ruin your immortal soul?”
The distraught woman pledges to change her life. A year later, she enters a convent. This seeming triumph of piety over temptation is far from the end of the story, however.
Tolstoy was a master of portraying the ironies and paradoxes of spiritual struggle, and this story – a good reading selection for Lent – depicts the road to holiness as both difficult and costly. As with the title character of Tolstoy’s late masterpiece “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Father Sergy eventually undergoes a spiritual transformation that is profound, yet unrecognized by others.
Although “Father Sergy” is set in the author’s Russia, it is eerily reflective of contemporary America, where alternating public adulation and condemnation are commonplace.
A brilliant and talented man, Father Sergy is shown pursuing spiritual perfection with determination and discipline. But that pursuit, while it enhances his reputation, is driven by ambiguous motivations as well as belief. When the tale of the divorcee and her conversion becomes known, Father Sergy’s reputation for holiness becomes even more widespread.
That makes his subsequent fall all the more humbling.
One night, years after he reduced the number of his fingers, the priest has a sexual encounter with a different woman. Feeling remorse and, even more, fearing humiliation once his sin is exposed, he flees. Yet his failing and subsequent shame lead to a spiritual insight that he was unable to achieve through years of his own willful effort.
In a dream, an angel tells him to visit a relative: “Go to Pashenka and learn from her what you have to do, what your sin is, and wherein lies your salvation.”
Father Sergy remembers Pashenka as a child with “a submissive smile” who was tormented by other children. When he goes to her, he finds she has lived an unfortunate life. She is a poor widow who struggles to help her daughter, her alcoholic son-in-law and their children.
Although she sends the children to church, she herself goes only sporadically. She is ashamed of her tattered clothes, she says, and “besides, I am just lazy.” She prays. “But,” she goes on, “what sort of prayer is it? Only mechanical. I know it should not be like that, but I lack real religious feeling. The only thing is that I know how vile I am.”
But the cleric understands she is not vile. He also realizes that his own shortcomings are more profound than his sexual transgression. He realizes that, motivated primarily by pride, he had spent his life living “for men on the pretext of living for God, while she lives for God imagining she lives for men.”
As he grew older, Tolstoy developed a radical commitment to his own understanding of the teachings of Christ. He was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. Yet “Father Sergy” – a story he worked on for years but was not printed until after his death – is not an attack on the Church or the clergy. It is simply the story of a man who – like everyone else, and despite people’s expectations – has to contend with his own vanity, weaknesses and self-deception.
Jesus taught that some of the truest examples of holiness are easiest to overlook, like the poor widow who puts two small coins in the treasury (Mk 41:44) or the tax collector who prays, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.”’ (Lk 18:9-14) Father Sergy learns holiness from a tired old woman who struggles to care for her dysfunctional family and says, with embarrassment, that her prayers lack “real religious feeling.”
Tolstoy’s story ends with the once-esteemed cleric living an anonymous but holy life: without admirers, but doing humble work and caring for the sick.
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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