SPIRITUAL FATHER/MOTHER

SPIRITUAL FATHER/MOTHER. The notion of “spiritual fatherhood” has a long history in Christianity, going back at least to Paul. In the 3rd c. Gregory the Wonderworker’s panegyric on Origen (q.v.) provided a kind of preview of later portraits of the spiritual father. This portrait, however, emerges clearly in the stories and sayings around the 4th c. Desert Fathers (q.v.).

The “old men” (gerontes, startsy) act as exemplars and counselors for monks, often in a relationship of deep and abiding psychological and spiritual intimacy, not unrelated to the relationship obtaining between master and disciple elsewhere in the ancient world. Greater emphasis, though, is placed in the monastic context on the obedience owed the elder by his spiritual child than, for example, would be the case between one of the ancient philosophers and his pupils, e.g., Plotinus (q.v.) or Iamblichus. The bonds, moreover, between the monastic elder and his children were both lifelong and seen extending even beyond death.

One finds the theme of spiritual fatherhood fully worked out in Joh n Climacus’s works, The Ladder and The Pastor, and in the writings especially of Symeon the New Theologian (q.v.). The term is sometimes used loosely to apply to a person’s “father confessor,” but in a proper usage the two should be distinguished. Very few priests who hear confessions are spiritual fathers and the opposite is also often the case: a spiritual father or mother is not necessarily ordained clergy.