St.Seraphim of Sarov Prophecy

Blair Laird

I am having a hard time finding this reference to read the prophecy of St. Seraphim in my resources. Does anyone have what these references in their library? What book can I purchase to read about this in greater detail?

"What do you mean by “a New Rome”?

This term has been used twice in the history of the church. First, it was used by those who moved to Byzantium with the Roman emperor when he established his new capital there (AD 324). Thus, Byzantium (renamed Constantinople) became the “New Rome” because it was the capital of the eastern part of the Roman Empire.
Still later the term would be used by the Russians who, shortly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, called Moscow the “New Rome.” As an aside, Patriarch Bartholomew (the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, sometimes called the “Ecumenical Patriarch”) has recently condemned the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome. Still, the Russian Orthodox Church has held that this position must be maintained because it was prophesized by Saint Seraphim of Sarov. The scope of this book precludes us digging deeper into this issue, so we’ll let it go at that."

Faulk, Edward. 101 Questions and Answers on Eastern Catholic Churches. New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2007. Print.

MJ. Smith

https://thesobornost.org/2014/01/prophecies-about-russia/ will show you the context

Blair Laird

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1076807#Comment_1076807

Is it this one that is being referenced?

”“Constantinople and Jerusalem will be inhabited by the combined powers of Russia and the others. At the division of Turkey almost all will go to Russia, and Russia with the united forces of many other States will take Vienna, and about 7 million native Viennese will remain under the house of the Hapsburgs, and there the territory of the Austrian empire will be constructed”

also were you able to pull anything in your library on this?

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1076812#Comment_1076812

Blair Laird said:

also were you able to pull anything in your library on this?

This is not an aspect of Russian Orthodoxy that I am apt to have in my library. Some related literature:

[quote]

Chronologically, the de facto “autocephaly” established in 1448 with the election of Jonas coincided with the end of Tatar control over Muscovy and the growth of the Muscovite empire, within which the Church, whose head had no canonical recourse to Constantinople any more, would be tightly controlled by the authority of the grand-prince, and later of the tsars. The doctrine of Moscow the “third Rome” was developed in some circles, primarily in an apocalyptic context: the “third Rome” had no “future” and was the last refuge of Orthodoxy before the end of history, which was expected to occur soon. The official circles of Church and state were not, normally, very enthusiastic about this approach, since they were building the future of a nation-state. Normal communion was eventually reestablished with Constantinople and with the other Eastern patriarchs, and it is from captive Constantinople that the Muscovites would receive approval for the coronation of their first tsar, or emperor, in 1547, and for the establishment of a patriarchate (1589). The new primate would receive the fifth, and not the first place (as the theory of the “third Rome” would demand) within the “pentarchy” of the Orthodox patriarchs.

Aristeides Papadakis and John Meyendorff, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church AD 1071–1453, ed. Andrew Louth, vol. IV, The Church in History (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994), 356.

[quote]

Ivánka then shows the persistence and the variations of this concept in Byzantine theology and its continuation after the fall of Constantinople in the idea of the Third Rome. The decisive turning point, which was an immediate preparation for modern ethnic ideologies, was reached paradoxically with the Russian raskol [division, schism]—in the alienation of the Old Believers from a hierarchy whose justifiable reforms were perceived by the simple people as a break with the past and as the destruction of their traditional faith. The process is so significant for the modern development of the concept of Church that it may well be legitimate to cite at greater length Ivánka’s description of it:

It is quite tragic that in the Old Believers’ movement the old Byzantine attitude of making one’s own established custom and one’s own rite the criterion for orthodox belief—which in its day had led to the schism of 1054—was now being turned against the Greek and the official Russian Church itself and that the Old Believers, on the basis of that same Byzantine tradition, now equated their ethnic identity with the right-believing Church as such and now themselves broke with the official Russian Church and with Greek Orthodoxy, in the name of the right-believing people, and not of the orthodox Church.5

In this connection, Ivánka speaks about a “popularization of the Church”: against the Church (and against the hierarchy) “the ‘right-believing people’ as people makes the claim that it alone is responsible for orthodoxy.”6

Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 30–31.

[quote]

The millenarian hope transported what was eschatological into history and imbued what was historical with a messianic passion. Divided though the Christian churches and nations were in the nineteenth century, political millenarianism possessed them all. What mobilized millions in the USA as the American dream of ‘the New World’2 became in Tsarist Russia the Russian dream of the world’s End-time redemption. Moscow was ‘the third Rome’ and there was to be no fourth.3 The messianism of the Byzantine empire became the matrix for Orthodox eschatology.4 This forged the Russian idea that, after the fall of Constantinople, Moscow had taken over leadership of the one Christian-Orthodox empire, and with it had inherited the Byzantine claim to world hegemony too. In the British empire, the claim to sovereignty was in many ways religiously transfigured, and motivated by missionary zeal. In the Spanish empire, subjugation and baptism were one and the same, in the spread of cristiandad. In Prussia’s Germany, ‘culture-Protestantism’ drew eschatology into history. Kant’s ethics and Hegel’s philosophy of history provided its framework and justification. In a secular way, France saw herself as the pioneer and guardian of civilization for the peoples of her African colonies.

Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), 4.

and many other similar references to the Russian Orthodox apocalyptic "Third Rome" but none specific to St. Seraphim of Sarov. But I tend to avoid apocalyptic literature outside of its descriptions of liturgy.