The biography of a man with real gifts and a real fall — and what it teaches us about spiritual delusion
A note to the reader. What follows is a biography, not an indictment. It traces the life of Gleb Podmoshensky from Riga to the grave, read through the patristic lens of spiritual delusion (prelest) — not to tear down a figure, but to understand a spiritual mechanism that the Holy Fathers described with precision. For clarity, I have marked in the notes what is confirmed by official sources, what comes from personal testimony, what comes from advocacy sources, and what is patristic interpretation. The reader who seeks the detailed canonical dossier of the case — the relationship with Fr. Seraphim Rose, the questions surrounding his glorification, the chronology of the accusations and of the ROCOR decisions — will find it in the article The Gleb Podmoshensky Case and the Preparation for Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Glorification. The present text comes as a complement to that one: where the first article laid out the dossier and the canonical questions, here we complete the picture with the life of the man himself — from Riga to the grave — so as to know it in greater detail and to understand, through the lens of the Holy Fathers, how such a fall became possible.
Why a life of Gleb Podmoshensky
In everything that has been written about Platina Monastery — including on this site — Gleb Podmoshensky almost always appears in someone else’s shadow. He is “the co-founder,” “the monastic partner,” “the defrocked abbot,” the figure who complicates the hagiography of Fr. Seraphim Rose. Rarely is he looked at directly, as the subject of his own life.
Gleb Podmoshensky can be understood neither through hagiography nor through demolition. He was a man with real gifts: a fervent convert, an editor, a missionary, the co-founder of a work that formed generations of American Orthodox. But he was also a man around whom grave accusations, canonical ruptures, and wounds gathered — wounds the Church has never fully clarified in public. It is precisely this double reality that makes his life important for discernment: not in order to judge a man’s soul, but to see how zeal, without obedience and humility, can turn into delusion.
Fr. Seraphim died at forty-eight, after twenty years of ascetic labor, leaving behind books that still awaken souls; his life raises questions about reception and hagiography. Gleb’s life raises a harder and more useful question: how does a man with real gifts fall? For it is not only those who are evil from the start who fall; those with gifts fall too, when the gifts are not sifted. Between the two ends of this life — the zeal of the young convert and the refused grave of the defrocked old man — there stretches a story worth telling whole.
This is not a portrait of faceless evil. It is the portrait of a man.
Riga, Vorkuta, exile (1934–1948)
Gleb Dmitrievich Podmoshensky was born on March 27, 1934, in Riga, Latvia, into a family of Baltic Russians1. His childhood coincided with the crushing of that world between the two totalitarianisms. Following the Soviet occupation of Latvia, his father was arrested and deported into the Gulag system, to Vorkuta, where he died2. For a child, the loss of a father — a man crushed by the Soviet concentration-camp system — is not merely a family tragedy; it is a wound that shapes a lifelong relationship with authority, with the institution, with the power that comes from above and can kill.
Around 1942, after the front had turned and the German army occupied Latvia, Gleb fled with his mother and sister to Germany, joining the millions of persons displaced from a Europe in ruins2. They spent the end of the war and the years immediately after in the German camps for refugees — an existence of chronic instability, fear, and uprootedness. Toward the end of the 1940s, around the age of fourteen, the family obtained passage to the United States, reuniting with his grandmother, a former ballerina who had emigrated earlier to New York2.
The young man who arrived in postwar American prosperity carried within him two things we will find throughout his life: a real thirst for the absolute, and a deep distrust of institutional authority — the inheritance of Vorkuta. Both would play a part. The thirst for the absolute would lead him to Christ and to mission. The distrust of authority, untempered, would lead him, decades later, into schism.
Jordanville and the birth of a zeal (1948–1961)
As a young adult in America, Gleb returned to the Orthodox faith of his forefathers3. He drew near to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) — the Church of the diaspora that considered itself the uncompromised remnant of pre-revolutionary Russia, opposed alike to Soviet atheism and to Western accommodations. Seeking a total dedication, he enrolled at Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville, New York, the spiritual heart of the Russian emigration in America. He graduated in 1962 and served as a reader in Orthodox churches in the United States3.
Jordanville gave him not only a theological formation; it kindled in him a whole world of models and ideals. There he fed on the tradition of the Northern Thebaid — the movement of Russian ascetics who, following the example of the Desert Fathers of Egypt, withdrew into the remote forests of the North to found hermitages. Gleb took this ideal seriously. In 1961, still young, he made a pilgrimage through the Orthodox hermitages and monastic settlements of the United States, Canada, and Alaska, photographing them; from these images he assembled a slide show and a lecture on “the holy places of America”4.
It must be said plainly, because it will matter for everything that follows: the young Gleb was a man of authentic zeal. Not a charlatan, not a cynic. A fervent convert, with real talent as a communicator and a sincere love for traditional Orthodoxy. It is precisely for this reason that his later fall is tragic, not predictable — the heaviest falls, as a rule, proceed from real gifts, not from nothing.
The meeting that changed a generation (1961)
In the audience of one of Gleb’s lectures in San Francisco, in 1961, sat a deeply troubled young American intellectual: Eugene Dennis Rose4. A brilliant scholar, who had passed through Zen Buddhism, through the traditionalism of Guénon, through an existential crisis he would later call “hell,” Eugene was searching desperately for a real absolute. The visual witness of a living, apostolic asceticism — real hermitages, people living the faith without dilution — struck him like a revelation.
The meeting was providential for both, and their complementarity was striking. Gleb brought Russian cultural authenticity, fluency in language and tradition, charisma and visionary daring. Eugene brought the deep intellect, the analytical rigor, and an intimate understanding of the modern Western soul, into which he could translate Orthodoxy for Americans. One was fire; the other, depth. Together they could do what neither could do alone.
Here it is worth pausing over what was not yet visible. The two set out from the same zeal — and, according to the testimony of those who knew them, from a common inner struggle: both wrestled with a homosexual attraction they carried from the years before their monasticisma. This detail must be neither hidden nor turned into the key that explains everything. The patristic tradition does not require that someone’s past be spotless in order to recognize him as a man of repentance; St. Mary of Egypt, Blessed Augustine, St. Moses the Black all had heavy pasts. The Orthodox criterion of holiness is not the absence of the struggle, but what a man does with it.
And it is precisely here, not in the past, that the two parted ways. Fr. Seraphim, after his conversion, made a costly repentance and lived in strict chastity until his death — the testimony of all who knew him converges on this pointa. Fr. Herman, according to the testimony of Reader Daniel Everiss, did not make the same repentance: he masked his passion rather than cleansing ita. The decisive contrast, then, is not between a “clean” past and a “dirty” one — both set out from the same trial — but between two responses to it: the sifting through repentance in the one, the masking in the other. And masking, in patristic language, is the very beginning of the road of delusion: the lie received as truth, first of all toward oneself. This is the distinction I developed at length in the article on Fr. Seraphim Rose, and it illuminates why two lives that set out from the same zeal and the same struggle ended so differently.
More than that — and here Herman’s road shows its direction — according to the same Everiss, he came not only to mask his passion but to defend it. At a gathering during a Platina pilgrimage, he is said to have publicly maintained, before a group, that an Orthodox man with such inclinations could become a monk without renouncing relations, as though the passion were a permitted “lifestyle” within the Churcha. If the testimony is accurate — and Fr. Seraphim, according to the same source, is said to have left that talk visibly disturbed — then we have here the gravest leap: from the unconfessed weakness to delusion preached. It is one thing to fall and to hide; it is altogether another to teach others the fall as a permitted path. In patristic language, this is the very working of delusion: the lie not merely received as truth, but passed on as truth, to the harm of others.
It must be said openly how thin the documentary basis actually is. Concerning Herman’s orientation we have the testimony of a single source — Reader Daniel Everiss — with no documented relationship from the past, no named partner, no archival record, such as exists in the case of Eugene Rosea. A single testimony, by itself, would not be enough for a firm assertion. And yet, what followed seems to confirm it. The public defense of homosexuality as permitted in monasticism, of which several accounts speak, is hard to explain otherwise. And the heaviest testimony comes from the very man who knew him most closely: Fr. Seraphim himself. According to converging accounts, he broke with Herman violently in his final days, even planning to leave Platina in order to distance himself from a monastic partner who was “unrepentant and unstable”b. Seraphim left no testimony about anyone’s orientation — nor could he have, bound by the Mystery of Confession — but his reaction says clearly that in Herman there was something grave and unconfessed, too grave for the closest and gentlest of brothers to remain alongside any longer. There remains, then, a single testimony reinforced by subsequent facts and by the rupture of the closest witness — more than a mere suspicion, less than a fully documented fact. The reader may receive it as such. Two things must nonetheless be kept distinct, which haste often confuses: the inclination as such (an inner passion) and abuse (a sin of deed and of power over others) — the present article does not mix them, nor does it automatically deduce the one from the other.
For zeal, the Holy Fathers teach us, does not save on its own; it can also destroy a man, if it is not sifted by obedience and humility. Their roads were to part precisely here: the one submitted to silent ascetic labor and to obedience, the other sought, more and more, the place at the front.
The common work: the book, the press, the mission (1963–1968)
In 1963, with the blessing of Archbishop John Maximovitch of San Francisco — the future St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco — Gleb and Eugene founded the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, a missionary work for the conversion of English speakers5. In March 1964 they opened an Orthodox bookstore near the Russian Cathedral on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, and from January 1965 they began to publish The Orthodox Word — one of the first serious publications of its kind in the English language5.
An incident preserved in Eugene’s notes says much about the spirit of those beginnings. On September 30, 1964, less than a day after the printing press they had bought arrived, Archbishop John came “by chance” to the workshop; seeing the press, his first thought was to bless it with holy water and prayer, which he did on the spot. The very name of the journal, The Orthodox Word, was given by St. John6.
Under his guidance, the two young men grew spiritually. When St. John reposed, in 1966, they felt an acute orphanhood — and took upon themselves the duty of gathering his testimonies and miracles. They compiled the first “life” of him, Blessed John the Wonderworker, a work that would contribute to the glorification of St. John, accomplished much later, in 19946.
It is worth saying what Herman himself actually wrote — for a man’s work says something about him. Besides the journal The Orthodox Word and the article “Holy Places of America” in its pages (the fruit of his 1961 pilgrimage), the two notable books that bear his name are both co-authored with Fr. Seraphim: The Northern Thebaid, a collection of lives of the Russian hermit-saints of the North — Sergius of Radonezh, Nilus of Sora, Paul of Obnora, Cyril of White Lake, and others, with an introduction by I. M. Kontzevitch — and the aforementioned Blessed John the Wonderworkerc. They are works of compilation and translation, not of original theology; the major authorial voice of the Brotherhood was, without doubt, that of Fr. Seraphim, whose own books — Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, The Soul After Death, Nihilism — have no equivalent in Herman’s work. Herman was rather the editorial and missionary energy behind the common labor.
There is a tension here that I cannot pass over in silence, though I leave it to the reader to weigh — and I say it as a reading of mine, not as a fact. The man who compiled and translated the lives of the desert saints — saints of obedience, of humility, of silent ascetic labor, of submission to tradition — is the same who would later refuse obedience, believe himself an elder without having been a disciple, and hold the eldership as a possession. He printed with his own hands the life of St. Nilus of Sora, and ended in schism. I do not read in this a hypocrisy from the start — his work seems sincere, and his love for those saints seems to have been real. I read precisely the drama of delusion: you can know in detail the way of the saints, you can even print and spread it, and yet miss it in your own life, if the sifting of obedience is lacking. To know the way is not the same as to walk it.
These achievements are real and remain real. They form the luminous background against which the later fall becomes truly tragic — not the exposure of an impostor, but the collapse of a man who had also done good.
Platina: asceticism in the wilderness and a tension from the foundation (1968–1982)
Increasingly disillusioned with the secularization around them, the two understood that an authentic faith cannot only be published — it must be lived. In the summer of 1967, with a down payment made by Eugene’s parents, they bought a rugged piece of land on a mountaintop near the hamlet of Platina, in northern California7. In 1969 they left San Francisco and moved there, founding the skete that would become the St. Herman of Alaska Monastery. The conditions were deliberately harsh: cells of uninsulated wood, no running water, no electricity, hard physical labor, cold in winter, heat in summer. It was in this setting that Fr. Seraphim wrote his books.
On October 27, 1970, both were tonsured into monasticism by Archbishop Anthony Medvedev of San Francisco7. Eugene received the name Seraphim, after St. Seraphim of Sarov; Gleb received the name Herman, after St. Herman of Alaska — glorified in that very year, on which occasion Herman read for the first time the newly composed service to the saint. Herman was appointed abbot of the monastery. His ordination to the priesthood came in 1976; Fr. Seraphim’s, in 19777.
Here lies the knot of the whole story, and I treated it at length in the article dedicated to the case, so I only summarize it. From the standpoint of the initial material and spiritual contribution, Eugene Rose’s role was at least equal, and in certain respects even that of a founder: the land was bought with the help of his parents, he coordinated the construction of the first buildings, and much of the spiritual and editorial form of Platina would bear his imprint7. And yet, formally, it was Herman who was appointed abbot — by criteria that belonged to the mentality of a Russian émigré jurisdiction: Russian ethnicity, formation at Jordanville, native language. Eugene was an American convert, without seminary, “insufficient” by those criteria.
A fragile division was thus created between formal authority and spiritual authority. Later apologists called it “administrative abbot” (Herman) plus “spiritual father of the brotherhood” (Seraphim). In Orthodox life, it is true, governance, spiritual fatherhood, stewardship, or the presence of a charismatic elder do not always fall upon the same person. The problem, then, is not that such a division is altogether impossible; the problem is that at Platina it created a real structural tension. In a healthy monastic tradition, the two centers are not as a rule violently torn apart: the one who bears the governance must also bear the spiritual responsibility, and where these centers separate from one another, the brotherhood becomes vulnerable8.
The balance of this fragile construction held for twelve years. It held, in large measure, because beside the administrative abbot stood a man with real spiritual authority, who tempered him. As long as Fr. Seraphim was there, the other’s tendencies were held in check. The question that hung in the air, unasked, was: what will happen when he is no longer there?
It must be said, in honesty, that not even Platina in its first form was the fruit of a tested monastic discipleship. It was the project of two first-generation converts, without years spent under an old, tried abbot, in a living tradition. Sources that have viewed this aspect critically have called it, without softening, “do-it-yourself monasticism” — an ascetic labor sprung from zeal, but lacking the counterweight of a tradition that corrects9. Fr. Seraphim himself, according to the testimony of those who have studied him, did not wish to join any existing ROCOR brotherhood and did not see himself following in the steps of St. John or of the great Russian hierarchs: he believed he was helping something new, American to be born9. The intention was noble. But the lack of a generationally verified discipleship leaves a man — and a brotherhood — without the surest defense against delusion.
What spiritual delusion (prelest) is
Before looking at the fall, let us set down the lens through which we read it. For what happened at Platina after 1982 is not, first of all, a criminal file or a scandal — it is, in patristic language, a case of spiritual delusion, in Slavonic prelest (in Greek, pláni).
The clearest exposition of this sickness of the soul we have from St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, a Father of the Church of the nineteenth century, who gathered the teaching of the Fathers of old into a work devoted to this subject. He defines delusion as being, in his very words, “a damage of human nature by falsehood” — “the assimilation by a man of a falsehood that he takes for truth”10. And he specifies where it all begins: “The source of self-deception and of demonic delusion is the false thought”10.
St. Ignatius distinguishes, broadly, two forms of delusion: one that comes from the wrong working of the mind (the seeking of visions, of feelings, of spiritual “experiences”), and one that comes from the wrong working of the heart. But the clearest sign of delusion, which we find in all the Fathers, is this: the closer a man is to God, the more he sees his own sins; the deluded man, on the contrary, believes himself worthy of God, reckons himself above others, and boasts of his virtues10. St. Maximus of Kapsokalyvia, in a conversation with St. Gregory of Sinai, says that the one held by the spirit of delusion is often enslaved to anger and vainglory, having in him neither humility nor true tears11.
Two things must be retained from the teaching of St. Ignatius, for they protect. First: in a certain broad sense, we are all subject to delusion, because we all have wrong thoughts — and the greatest delusion is to believe oneself free of it. Second, and most important for our case: the remedy for delusion is humility and the Holy Mysteries, under the guidance of the spiritual father10. In other words, obedience to another, the sifting by an authority outside oneself, is the very mechanism by which a man is guarded from deceiving himself. And where this mechanism is lacking — where there is no one with the authority to correct — delusion has an open road.
This is the framework. Let us return now to Platina, at the moment when the counterweight vanished.
The collapse of the anchor (1982)
Fr. Seraphim Rose died on September 2, 1982, at forty-eight, after a swift and agonizing illness — a mesenteric thrombosis not diagnosed in time12. Five months later, at the beginning of 1983, Bishop Nektary (Kontzevich) of Seattle also died, the direct disciple of St. Nektary of Optina, who regularly visited Platina and exercised a role of spiritual arbitration over the two. Within a few months, then, both figures who could hold the brotherhood and its abbot in balance had vanished: the friend with charismatic authority, and the hierarch with an Optina root.
Concerning the last moments between the two co-founders there exists a shattering testimony, which I record with the reserve it demands. Fr. Alexey Young (who later became Hieroschemamonk Ambrose), one of the closest disciples of Fr. Seraphim, related that the last words Seraphim addressed to Fr. Herman are said to have been a violent rupture, words of cursing wholly unusual for his gentle nature; and the official biographer, Fr. Damascene, records — in passing — that in the delirium of his final days Seraphim cursed “the people closest in the world to him”13. The testimony has never been published in a complete documentary form, and we retain it as such; but the convergence of the two accounts is hard to overlook.
Whatever the exact truth of those last words, the effect of Seraphim’s death is clear: the anchor was gone. And with it, the structural fragility it had concealed for twelve years rose to the surface.
The anatomy of the fall (1982–1988)
In the years that followed, the testimonies of those at Platina and around it describe a rapid deterioration. Deprived of the counterweight of Fr. Seraphim, Fr. Herman began to cultivate around himself a cult of personality, encouraging the young disciples to regard him as an infallible “holy elder”14. This is exactly the picture of delusion described by the Holy Fathers: the man comes to believe himself the bearer of a special grace, the spiritual guide of all.
The most precise testimony comes from someone who knew both personally and frequented Platina for years, Reader Daniel Everiss. He puts the contrast without circumlocution: Fr. Seraphim was “the true self-denying ascetic,” while Fr. Herman “played his pompous role, deluded — in prelest — of a ‘holy elder,’ often calling himself the spiritual guide of everyone, even when no one asked it of him”14. The same testimony records a bitter irony: Fr. Herman himself preached vigilance against the “false elders and false prophets of the last times” — being, according to Everiss, precisely one of them14.
It was against this background of delusion that the grave accusations arose. About this aspect I write soberly and briefly, because it is not the subject of this article and because it demands more caution than anything else. Beginning at the latest in the 1980s, grave accusations accumulated around Fr. Herman concerning conduct of sexual abuse against boys and young men. OrthodoxWiki records his suspension in 1984 pending an inquiry into “grave moral failings,” and the advocacy sources for victims, especially the Pokrov Truth archive, maintain the existence of several complaints and testimonies15. However, in the public sources consulted there appears no criminal conviction of Podmoshensky, nor any public canonical decision on the substance of the abuse accusations; his publicly documented defrocking was for disobedience16. It is precisely this difference — between the grave moral accusations and the formal basis of the defrocking — that remains one of the open wounds of the case. Nor did I find, in the public sources consulted, evidence that ROCOR reported the matter to the American civil authorities regarding these accusations; the advocacy sources maintain that there was no adequate reporting, but the internal diocesan documents are not public15.
The often-asked question of whether Fr. Seraphim knew and did nothing remains — in the present state of the sources — an open question, not a verdict. The critical camp maintains that twenty years of proximity make complete ignorance improbable; other researchers show, with equal force, that there is no document, no victim’s testimony, and no ecclesial decision naming Seraphim as complicit17. The present article does not settle this question, which belongs to another man’s life; I leave it where it belongs, in the dedicated dossier.
The rupture began, in practice, before the formal defrocking. In the years immediately following Fr. Seraphim’s death, Herman entered into open conflict with his hierarch. In 1984 he was suspended from priestly service, pending the investigation of “grave moral failings”15. Here intervenes the moment which, in patristic logic, says everything. Instead of submitting to the discipline of the Church and showing repentance, Fr. Herman refused the suspension and continued to act as abbot. In 1988, after the rupture had become complete, the ROCOR Synod defrocked him — and the publicly stated canonical basis of the defrocking was disobedience: the fact that he had refused the terms of the suspension and had refused to relinquish the abbacy16. The accusations of abuse were not invoked as the basis.
This formulation — criticized by victims as an evasion of the moral substance — has, however, read patristically, another significance: it certifies retrospectively that the very appointment as abbot in 1970 had been an error. For the authentic abbot is a servant of the brotherhood and of the hierarchy, not the possessor of a position; he relinquishes the service when it is asked of him, because he received it on the condition of this reversibility. The one who must be defrocked precisely because he refuses to relinquish a position of service shows, by that very refusal, that he had held it as his own — a clear sign of delusion, which confuses service with possession. This argument, with the patristic examples that support it (St. Sergius of Radonezh, who relinquished the abbacy though he was the founder of the Lavra; the Venerable Joseph the Hesychast, a recognized Elder who never held a formal abbacy), is developed at length in the article dedicated to the case18.
The schism: in the wilderness of the uncanonical (1988–2000)
Refusing the defrocking, Fr. Herman took the step that would mark one of the strangest chapters of American Orthodoxy. He declared the Synod’s decision invalid, took with him a part of the brotherhood, and went into schism. Needing an alternative source of ordinations to preserve the sacramental life, he aligned his community with “Metropolitan” Pangratios Vrionis and the “Archdiocese of Vasiloupolis” in Queens, New York19.
Who Vrionis was says much about the depth of the fall: a former Greek cleric who had pleaded guilty in 1970 in a case of sexual abuse against two fourteen-year-old boys, had been defrocked, and had then established on his own an uncanonical jurisdiction, proclaiming himself a bishop20. In other words, Fr. Herman — himself the target of accusations never publicly clarified — placed himself under the omophorion of a man with a documented criminal conviction for abuse of minors, a fact verifiable at the very moment of the move. Delusion, once installed, no longer makes the distinctions a sober spirit would have made.
And yet — and here the story shows all its troubling complexity — it was precisely in these years of canonical exile and grave delusion that Fr. Herman had the most spectacular missionary success of his life. In the mid-1980s he had come into contact with the Holy Order of MANS (HOOM), an organization with New Age roots, founded in San Francisco by Earl Blighton, which mixed Christian language with esoteric practices — spiritual alchemy, Tarot, astrology, energies21. After the founder’s death, the leadership of HOOM was seeking an anchoring in a historical Christianity. Recognizing the ascetic potential of the members, Fr. Herman gradually dismantled the esoteric framework and replaced it with patristic and liturgical Orthodox theology. At Pascha of 1988 — in the same period as his defrocking by ROCOR — he facilitated the mass conversion of the roughly 750 remaining members of the order. They were baptized, the men were ordained by Vrionis, and the organization was renamed the Christ the Saviour Brotherhood21.
The missionary apparatus worked intensely: a network of small bookstore-chapels, the “Valaam Society,” spread across the country, and Fr. Herman’s teaching work reached from America to Moscow22. In the same period he also revived the pre-revolutionary journal Russky Palomnik (The Russian Pilgrim), sent into perestroika-era Russia, where Orthodox literature was scarce and was received with thirst; he continued to assemble its issues, from his vast archive of émigré manuscripts, until his final days23.
Here lies one of the hardest lessons of the entire life of Gleb Podmoshensky, and it bears directly on discernment. Real missionary zeal can coexist with delusion and with uncanonicity. The fact that a work bears apparent “fruit” — converts, books, bookstores, enthusiasm — is not, by itself, proof that it is in the truth and under grace. It is precisely this that makes delusion so dangerous: it does not present itself as bare sin, but clothed in toil, in success, in spiritual language. Hundreds of people were brought to a real Orthodoxy by a man who was himself in schism and under grave accusations. How are these things to be weighed? It is not for us to weigh them. But the sober reader retains the principle: the outward fruits are not the criterion; remaining in the truth and in the obedience of the Church is.
In time, after Vrionis’s convictions became publicly known, around 1999, the parishes of the Brotherhood left him and sought entry into canonical jurisdictions21. The good fruits of that conversion — for there were also good fruits — were, in the end, received by the Church. One of the leaders of that transition, Vincent Rossi, would himself end as a monk in the canonical Church, tonsured shortly before his death by the later abbot of Platina himself24.
The return of the brotherhood and the final years (2000–2014)
By around 2000, the canonical isolation of Platina had become unbearable, and Fr. Herman’s health was collapsing. In 2000 he relinquished the abbacy — a step that was the very condition of normalization, since no legitimate bishop would have received the brotherhood as long as a defrocked monk led it25. After his departure, the brotherhood elected as abbot Hieromonk Gerasim (Eliel), and on November 28, 2000, the St. Herman of Alaska Monastery was received into the Serbian Orthodox Church, under Bishop Jovan (Mladenovich) of San Francisco, who recognized the former abbot’s defrocking as lawful25.
The reintegration required acts of public repentance. The leaders of the brotherhood went to San Francisco to ask forgiveness personally of Archbishop Anthony Medvedev, already old and near death. Fr. Damascene Christensen — who had followed Fr. Herman into schism for nearly twelve years — publicly testified, in a retraction, that they had finally understood that Fr. Herman had not been unjustly persecuted, that they themselves had unjustly attacked the good name of Archbishop Anthony, and that “no schism from the Church is justified”26. The monastery removed from later editions of its publications, including from the biography of Fr. Seraphim, the earlier anti-ROCOR rhetoric.
There is here an irony that tradition might call, perhaps, the working of providence: the brotherhood that Herman had founded and led into schism was institutionally saved precisely through his departure from leadership. What he had held as a possession he had to let go of, so that the work might be healed.
Deprived of authority, but permitted to remain in the monastic ecosystem he had created, Fr. Herman lived his final years in ever greater frailty, suffering from Parkinson’s and diabetes27. He did not, however, wholly abandon his vocation: he continued to compile Russky Palomnik until his strength failed him. He withdrew to a skete near Minneapolis, where, according to the available testimonies, he lived for a time alone. He died on the morning of June 30, 2014, at eighty27. According to the publicly available sources, he left no explicit declaration of repentance for the things of which he had been accused27.
There is here, too, a coincidence of the calendar: he died just after ROCOR had celebrated, on June 29, the twentieth anniversary of the glorification of St. John Maximovitch — the saint whose holiness he himself had helped to make known, in the luminous days of his youth28. For a reader sensitive to the symbolism of the church calendar, the coincidence carries a particular weight.
The refused grave
Fr. Herman’s expressed wish had been to be buried at Platina, beside Fr. Seraphim, in the monastery they had founded together29. It did not happen so. Bishop Maxim of the Western Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church — under whose jurisdiction the monastery now falls — decided not to permit his burial there29. The funeral service took place on July 3, 2014, at a church of the Bulgarian Church in Santa Rosa, California, officiated by Bishop Daniil; the burial itself was made in the Orthodox section of a cemetery in Sebastopol, California29. The separation from the monastery he had founded remains, however we read it, symbolic.
This image — a man separated, even in the earth, from the one beside whom he had wished to remain — has a gravity that it is not fitting to turn into spectacle. But neither is it fitting to pass over in silence. The words of rupture that, according to testimony, Fr. Seraphim is said to have spoken to him on his deathbed found, as it were, an echo in the very place of the grave.
What the life of Gleb Podmoshensky teaches us
There remains, at the end of this life, the question with which we began: what do we understand from it? A few things, said without any pretense of judging a soul that God alone judges.
First, that his life is not the story of a faceless evil, but of real gifts lost. Gleb Podmoshensky had zeal, talent, missionary courage, a sincere love for Orthodoxy. He brought people to Christ. He served at the birth of a journal and of a monastery that fed thousands of souls. It is precisely for this reason that his fall is a tragedy, not an exposure — and precisely for this reason that it is so instructive.
Second, that the sickness which brought him down has a precise patristic name: spiritual delusion. Not some weakness or other, but the confusion of oneself with the bearer of grace, above the law and above others — exactly what St. Ignatius described as “the damage of nature by falsehood.” And the remedy for this sickness, the same Saint tells us, is humility and obedience under a spiritual father. Where the sifting is lacking — where no one has the authority or the courage to correct — delusion grows unhindered. At the decisive moment, Fr. Herman no longer received anyone’s correction: the spiritual father who had tempered him had died, the arbitrating bishop had died, and the legitimate hierarch whom he was bound to obey was refused and then denounced as a persecutor.
Third, that the surest sign of false eldership is not the absence of gifts, but the relationship to service: the authentic abbot relinquishes it when it is asked of him, the one in delusion fights to keep it. The whole schism of Fr. Herman is, from this perspective, the signature of delusion.
Fourth, that the outward fruits are not the criterion of truth. Hundreds of converts, bookstores, books, a journal sent into Russia — all these coexisted with the schism and with the delusion. The sober reader is not blinded by success; he looks for the remaining in the truth and in the obedience of the Church, not for the spectacle of the fruits.
And finally, that discipleship within a living tradition, tested across generations, is not a fad but a defense. A monk raised under tried elders, in an order sifted by the centuries, is far more protected from dangerous improvisations than a project sprung from one’s own zeal, however sincere. This is not a guarantee — history shows falls even in the most ancient monasteries — but it is a real shield, which the first Platina did not have.
The life of Gleb Podmoshensky teaches us not to despise zeal, but to fear uncleansed zeal. It teaches us not to flee from gifts, but not to confuse gifts with holiness. It teaches us not to judge a man’s soul, but to recognize the mechanism by which the religious man can come to call obedience “persecution,” correction “attack,” and service “a personal right.” In the language of the Fathers, this is delusion. And precisely because it can grow beside good things — books, conversions, monasteries, beautiful words — it must be named with care, but without fear.
A few necessary delimitations
For final clarity, in the spirit of the other studies on this site:
This article does not claim to pronounce a verdict on the salvation of Gleb Podmoshensky. That is in the hand of God. The tradition asks us to pray for the departed, however troubled their path may have been.
This article does not transfer onto Fr. Seraphim Rose guilt that has not been proven against him. On the basis of the public sources, there is no proof that he was guilty of abuse; the question of what he knew remains open and is treated, with its sources, in the article dedicated to the case.
This article does not grant the same documentary weight to all testimonies about Platina. Some are well attested; others remain at the level of personal testimony or of advocacy-type investigation. Where the fact is not established, I have called it testimony or open question, not verdict.
This article is not the trial of a person, but a reading of a life through the lens of the Holy Fathers, for the benefit of the discernment of the Orthodox reader of today.
Notes
1. Date and place confirmed by convergent public Orthodox sources: OrthodoxWiki, the article Herman (Podmoshensky); the obituaries published by OrthoChristian.com and Pravoslavie.ru (July 1, 2014). One source (the obituary of the Minneapolis funeral chapel) gives March 26; we retain March 27, the form in the standard Orthodox sources.
2. Official/biographical source: the obituaries of OrthoChristian.com and Pravoslavie.ru (2014), which record the father’s death in the communist camps, the flight to Germany around 1942, and the arrival in the USA “at the age of fourteen,” the reunion with the grandmother who had emigrated to New York. The data concerning the exact year of arrival are not mutually consistent across sources.
3. Official/biographical source: the Portal-Credo.ru obituary, reproduced by Reader Daniel Everiss; OrthoChristian.com. Graduation from Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville in 1962; service as a reader in ROCOR churches in the USA.
4. Source: the North American Thebaid project (thebaid.org), which records the 1961 photographic pilgrimage of Gleb Podmoshensky through hermitages in the USA, Canada, and Alaska, and the “pivotal impact” of the slide show on Eugene Rose; Gleb’s article “Holy Places of America,” The Orthodox Word no. 106.
5. Official/biographical source: the obituaries of OrthoChristian.com and Pravoslavie.ru; OrthodoxWiki, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. The founding of the Brotherhood in 1963 with the blessing of St. John Maximovitch; the bookstore of March 1964; the journal The Orthodox Word of January 1965.
6. Testimony/documentary source: Eugene Rose’s note of September 30, 1964, cited in sources on the history of the Brotherhood (benedictseraphim.wordpress.com and others); the fact that the journal’s name was given by St. John. The compilation of the first “life” of St. John (Blessed John the Wonderworker); the glorification of St. John in 1994.
7. Convergent official/biographical source: Pokrov Truth (chronology), OrthodoxWiki, the obituaries. The purchase of the land in the summer of 1967 with a down payment from Eugene Rose’s parents; the move in 1969; the tonsure on October 27, 1970, by Archbishop Anthony Medvedev; the ordination of Herman to the priesthood and his appointment as abbot in 1976; the ordination of Fr. Seraphim in 1977. Eugene’s role in the purchase of the land and the coordination of the construction is attested even by the official biography of Fr. Damascene.
8. Patristic interpretation by the author, on the basis of the Eastern monastic tradition concerning the relationship between the governance of the brotherhood and spiritual fatherhood. See the development in the OrtodoxWay article The Gleb Podmoshensky Case and the Preparation for Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Glorification.
9. Analysis/advocacy-type source: Pokrov Truth, which characterizes Platina as “do-it-yourself monasticism,” lacking formation under an experienced abbot. The observation concerning Fr. Seraphim’s wish to found a “new, American” monasticism is recorded by Fallen Leaves (fallen-leaves.org, 2019), on the basis of Damascene’s biography.
a. Testimony (not an established documentary fact): Reader Daniel Everiss (posts on startingontheroyalpath.blogspot.com and readerdanielsharing.blogspot.com, 1999 and later), who knew both fathers personally and frequented Platina for years. Everiss records that both wrestled with the same attraction; that, unlike Fr. Seraphim — who made a costly repentance and lived in chastity, confirmed by all the sources who knew him — Fr. Herman masked his passion without cleansing it; and that, at a gathering during a Platina pilgrimage, he is said to have publicly defended homosexuality as a “legitimate alternative lifestyle,” recommending monasticism without the renunciation of relations, Fr. Seraphim leaving the talk disturbed. It is important to emphasize the provenance: for Eugene Rose, the orientation of his youth is documented through the personal correspondence published by Cathy Scott (2000), with a specific partner (Jon Gregerson) and that man’s direct testimony; for Gleb, there is no documented relationship from the past, no named partner, no archival record — the principal source remains the testimony of Everiss, corroborated by the public episode of the defense and, retrospectively, by the accusations of abuse. Everiss is a direct witness, but also a party who considered himself wronged by Herman; assertions that come only from him are retained as testimony, not as biographical fact. The contrast of repentance between the two is developed at length in the OrtodoxWay article Fr. Seraphim Rose: Between Repentance, Hagiography, and Discernment. The present article does not present the orientation as such as the cause of the fall — the fall, in the patristic reading, is delusion (prelest) and the refusal of repentance — and it keeps distinct the inclination (an inner passion) and abuse (a sin of deed and of power).
b. Testimony (not an established documentary fact): the accounts concerning Fr. Seraphim’s rupture with Herman in his final days come from Fr. Alexey Young (Hieroschemamonk Ambrose) and from Reader Daniel Everiss, reproduced in secondary sources (Pokrov Truth; Union of Orthodox Journalists). They include the alleged last words of rupture and the account that Fr. Seraphim is said to have planned to leave Platina in order to distance himself from a monastic partner “unrepentant and unstable.” Neither has been published in a complete documentary form, and the Mystery of Confession makes impossible any testimony by Fr. Seraphim concerning the content of anyone’s confessions. These accounts are treated at length, with their sources and nuances, in the OrtodoxWay article The Gleb Podmoshensky Case and the Preparation for Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Glorification. We retain here only this much: Fr. Seraphim’s documented reaction corroborates the existence of a grave and unconfessed moral problem, not a label concerning anyone’s orientation.
c. Bibliographical source: The Northern Thebaid: Monastic Saints of the Russian North, compiled and translated by Hieromonk Seraphim Rose and Herman Podmoshensky, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Platina (ISBN 0-938635-37-9), with an introduction by I. M. Kontzevitch; Blessed John the Wonderworker: A Preliminary Account of the Life and Miracles of Archbishop John Maximovitch, co-authored by Seraphim Rose and Herman Podmoshensky, St. Herman Press; the article “Holy Places of America,” The Orthodox Word no. 106. The attribution of co-authorship is recorded on the title pages of the editions and in library catalogues. The characterization of the work as predominantly one of compilation and translation, by contrast with Fr. Seraphim’s own theological work, is an observation of the author.
10. Verbatim quotations from St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, On Delusion (the text published in English in Orthodox Life, July–August 1980, compared with the Russian original in The Arena / ascetic writings, vol. I): “a damage of human nature by falsehood”; “the assimilation by a man of a falsehood that he takes for truth”; “The source of self-deception and of demonic delusion is the false thought.” Translation by the author from the established formulations.
11. Patristic source: the conversation of St. Maximus of Kapsokalyvia with St. Gregory of Sinai, cited in the literature on delusion (prelest).
12. Official/biographical source: the biography by Fr. Damascene (Christensen) and the obituaries; the cause of death — mesenteric thrombosis. The death of Bishop Nektary (Kontzevich) at the beginning of 1983.
13. Testimony (not an established documentary fact): the account of Fr. Alexey Young (Hieroschemamonk Ambrose), cited in secondary sources (Pokrov Truth and others), concerning the last words of Fr. Seraphim. The passage about the delirium of his final days is recorded by Damascene himself, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, without naming “the closest” ones. Young’s testimony has not been published in a complete documentary form.
14. Testimony of a direct witness: Reader Daniel Everiss, posts on startingontheroyalpath.blogspot.com and readerdanielsharing.blogspot.com. Everiss knew both fathers personally and frequented Platina for years; the quality of the source is that of a witness’s testimony, not of an official document.
15. Advocacy source: the Pokrov Truth archive (pokrovtruth.substack.com), a project led in part by victims and lawyers. These sources are uneven in documentary weight; the documents of the 1984 internal ROCOR investigation have never been made public. The 1984 suspension is also recorded by OrthodoxWiki.
16. Official source: OrthodoxWiki, Herman (Podmoshensky); the obituaries of OrthoChristian.com and Pravoslavie.ru. The defrocking by the ROCOR Synod in 1988, with the publicly stated canonical basis of disobedience (the refusal of the terms of the suspension and of the relinquishing of the abbacy).
17. Opposing positions: the critical camp — Pokrov Truth; the balanced position that emphasizes the absence of any proof against Fr. Seraphim — Orthodox analyses cited in the dedicated article. The question is treated at length, with its sources, in The Gleb Podmoshensky Case and the Preparation for Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Glorification.
18. Patristic interpretation by the author, on the basis of the lives of St. Sergius of Radonezh and the Venerable Joseph the Hesychast. The argument of “defrocking as retrospective certification” is developed in the article dedicated to the case.
19. Official/academic source: OrthodoxWiki, Holy Order of MANS; Encyclopedia.com; the World Religions and Spirituality Project (wrldrels.org). The entry under the “Archdiocese of Vasiloupolis” led by Pangratios Vrionis.
20. Public documentary source: court records from Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, cited in the article Awkward Christian Soldiers (SF Weekly / culteducation.com). Vrionis pleaded guilty in 1970 in a case involving two fourteen-year-old boys and was defrocked by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese.
21. Academic source: Encyclopedia.com; the World Religions and Spirituality Project; the studies of Phillip Charles Lucas. The contact with HOOM in the mid-1980s; the mass baptism of the ~750 members at Pascha 1988; the transformation into Christ the Saviour Brotherhood; the distancing of the parishes after 1999 and the entry into canonical jurisdictions.
22. Source: accounts of the “Valaam Society” network and the teaching work of Fr. Herman (cazandlittle.wordpress.com and others), corroborated by the obituaries concerning the missionary activity.
23. Official/biographical source: the obituaries of OrthoChristian.com and Pravoslavie.ru, which record the revival of the journal Russky Palomnik in the perestroika period, its dispatch into Russia, and the continuation of the assembling of issues until the final years; the series on the Optina Elders.
24. Official source: OrthoChristian.com (2022), the obituary of Vincent Rossi (Fr. Maximos), tonsured a monk by Fr. Damascene shortly before his death.
25. Official/biographical source: OrthodoxWiki; the obituaries. The relinquishing of the abbacy in 2000; the election of Hieromonk Gerasim (Eliel); the reception of the monastery into the Serbian Orthodox Church on November 28, 2000, under Bishop Jovan (Mladenovich), with the recognition of the defrocking as lawful.
26. Documentary testimony: the public retraction of Fr. Damascene (Christensen), cited in sources on Platina’s return to canonicity (including the monastery’s own later publications). It contains the acknowledgment that the schism had been unjustified and that the name of Archbishop Anthony had been unjustly attacked.
27. Official/biographical source: the obituaries of OrthoChristian.com and Pravoslavie.ru (2014). The suffering from Parkinson’s and diabetes; the withdrawal to a skete near Minneapolis; the death on June 30, 2014, at eighty. The absence of a public declaration of repentance is a finding based on the lack of such testimonies in the published sources.
28. Symbolic observation by the author, on the basis of the calendar coincidence recorded by OrthoChristian.com (the death on June 30, 2014, after the June 29 anniversary of the glorification of St. John Maximovitch).
29. Source: the published correspondence of Hieromonk Paisius, secretary of the monastery, and the account reproduced on the Voices from Russia blog (02varvara.wordpress.com, July 2014). The uncontested facts: the refusal of Bishop Maxim (Serbian Church) to permit burial at Platina; the service at Holy Dormition (Bulgarian Church), Santa Rosa, July 3, 2014, officiated by Bishop Daniil; the burial at Pleasant Hills Memorial Park, Sebastopol. (The sources differ on the number of clergy present; the article retains no figure.)
Methodological note
For the biographical data of Gleb Podmoshensky I have used convergent public Orthodox sources: OrthodoxWiki, the obituaries published by OrthoChristian.com and Pravoslavie.ru (2014), the published testimonies of Reader Daniel Everiss (who knew him personally), and the North American Thebaid materials concerning the 1961 pilgrimage. For the Holy Order of MANS / Christ the Saviour Brotherhood period I have used, in addition to these, academic sources (Encyclopedia.com, the World Religions and Spirituality Project, the studies of Phillip Charles Lucas). For the canonical status and the ROCOR decisions I have used official communiqués and pages, OrthodoxWiki, and OrthoChristian.
For the teaching on spiritual delusion (prelest) I have used the work of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov On Delusion (published in English in Orthodox Life, 1980, compared with the Russian original in his ascetic writings, vol. I), with the formulations quoted verbatim.
For the accusations of abuse, the sources are largely of the testimony and advocacy type (the Pokrov Truth archive, SNAP) and are uneven in documentary weight; many ROCOR diocesan documents have never been made public. Where the facts are not established, the article presents them as such. The dossier proper, with all its distinctions, is treated separately in the article indicated below.