| The Theology and Memory of Elder Sophrony (Sakharov) Dr. Christopher Veniamin Archimandrite Sophrony was born Sergei Symeonovich Sakharov in Moscow on September 23, 1896. He emigrated to Western Europe in 1921. A year later he would settle in Paris, pursuing his career as an artist. In Paris, the future monk returned to the faith of his fathers, holy Orthodoxy. In 1926, Sergei entered the St. Panteleimon Monastery on Mt. Athos, where he would become a disciple of the great elder, St. Silouan of Mt. Athos. He was given the name Sophrony in monastic tonsure. In 1947, circumstances forced Fr. Sophrony to move to Paris, where he wrote about his elder, St. Silouan. In 1958, he moved to England and founded the Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights. On July 11, 1993, Elder Sophrony reposed in the Lord. Today marks the twenty-second anniversary of his repose. In honor of his repose, we offer below two sources coming from his spiritual children who are transmitters of his theology and memory. The first is an aduio recording of Archimandrite Zacharias of Elder Sophrony " s monastery in Tolleshunt Knights and Dr. Christopher Veniamin, professor of Patristics at St. Tikhon " s Seminary in South Canaan, PA, sharing remembrances and teachings of Elder Sophrony, and the second is an article authored by Dr. Veniamin on the concept of " theosis " in the teachings of Elder Sophrony and his own great elder, St. Silouan the Athonite. " Theosis " in Saint Silouan the Athonite and Staretz Sophrony of Essex As a young boy, I had the blessing of serving each Sunday in the altar of the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist, Essex, England. One day when I was still a lad of only fifteen or sixteen years of age, following the Divine Liturgy, and whilst standing in the Prothesis of All Saints Church, Father Sophrony asked me why I was looking so thoughtful. Embarrassed that I was preoccupied with such mundane matters, I had to confess that school examinations were on the horizon, and that I wanted to do well in them. To my surprise, however, Father Sophrony did not belittle my worldly anxiety, but gently nodded his head, and agreed that it was indeed important to do well in examinations, and that to do so required much toil and sacrifice. But then he also added, as though to a friend, that " in this world there is nothing more difficult than to be saved. " |
| – Archimandrite Sophrony, St. Silouan the Athonite, Tolleshunt Knights, 1991. Prayer for enemies The Lord bade us to love our enemies, and the man who loves his enemies is like to the Lord. But we can only love our enemies by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and so as soon as anyone affronts you, pray to God for him, and then you will preserve peace in your soul, and the grace of God. (…) Peace in our souls is impossible unless we beg the Lord with all our hearts to give us love for all men. The Lord knew that if we did not love our enemies, we should have no peace of soul, and so He gave us the commandment, “Love your enemies.” Unless we love our enemies, we shall only now and then be easy, as it were, in our souls; but if we love our enemies, peace will dwell in us day and night. (…) Though a man pray much, and fast, but has no love for his enemies, he can know no peace of soul. And I should not even be able to speak of this, had not the Holy Spirit taught me love. – St. Silouan the Athonite, Archimandrite Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, Tolleshunt Knights, 1991. Killing and Bloodshed The rivers of blood of our brothers, shed mercilessly at your orders, cry out to heaven and press us to speak to you a bitter word of truth. (…) Celebrate your anniversary in power by liberating the prisoners, by stopping bloodshed, violence, destruction, the restriction of faith; turn not to destruction, but to the establishment of order and lawfulness, grant the people the desired and well-deserved rest from civil war. Or else all just blood that you have shed shall be required from you (Luke 11:51), and from the sword you shall perish, who have taken up the sword (Matt. 26:52). – St. Tikhon of Moscow, “Letter to the Council of People’s Commissars, October 13/26, 1918,” L. Regelson, The Tragedy of the Russian Church (1917–1945), Paris, 1976 (in Russian). Bloodshed always calls for new blood. And vengeance – for new revenge. Building on enmity means building on a volcano. There will be an explosion, and once more there will be an empire of destruction and death … |
| The love of Christ is a bliss that transcends every good on earth, but at the same time it is a passion, a torment unto death.” Focusing as he does his mind on his heart by means of pure prayer, and plunging deeply into the heart’s domain, Silouan sees that the being of humankind is not something foreign or alien to his own existence; he thus accepts all people as an intrinsic part of his own being. More importantly, he now begins to grasp Christ’s commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself” in terms other than those of a mere moral rule. Because the preposition “as” does not concern the volume of love but refers rather to the ontological unity of all people. By the same token, on Judgment Day Christ will identify Himself with the “least” of society’s members. For in His very being, Christ encapsulates humankind in its entirety, and so suffers for the “entire” Adam. As Silouan says, “the monk implores God for the sake of all humanity … The Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, grants the monk the love of the Holy Spirit and it is on account of this love that the monk’s heart is always sad for the people, as not everyone is saved. The Lord Himself was so sorrowful for the people that He gave up His life on the Cross. But the Theotokos, too, was equally as distressed in her heart for the salvation of the people … Now, it is the selfsame Holy Spirit that the Lord gave to the Apostles and the saintly Fathers of our Church and to its ministers. This is really what our ministry to the world consists of. It is also why neither Church ministers nor monks should become entangled in secular problems and concerns but must imitate instead the Mother of God, who stayed in the sanctuary, in the “holy of holies,” studying the Lord’s commandments day and night and prayerfully interceded for the people. The prayerful people par excellence are the Saints. Silouan believed that it was thanks to their prayers and intercessions that God preserves the world. So pleasing are the Saints to God that He listens to their prayers with approval, thereby keeping us from harm’s way in the process. |
| Yet there is a tension, even a paradox, in St Silouan’s attitude towards the created order. He urges us to ‘love every created thing; and emphasizes the beauty of nature: From my childhood days I loved the world and its beauty. I loved the woods and green gardens, I loved the fields and all the beauty of God’s creation. I liked to watch the shining clouds scurrying across the blue sky (286). If we lose our sense of wonder before the beauty of nature, so he believed, this suggests that we have at the same time lost our sense of God’s grace (96). On the other hand, the Starets maintains that the true monk ‘forgets the world’ (501). So he writes: After I came to know my Lord, and He made my soul His prisoner, everything changed, and now I no longer want to contemplate the world (286).... My soul... has no wish to look upon this world, though I do love it (381).... My soul is filled with love of Thee and knows no desire to look upon this world, beautiful though it be (284). Such is St Silouan’s order of priorities. However much we value the beauty of the creation, we should feel an incomparably greater love for God the Creator. For St Silouan, then, there is a single and undivided mystery of salvation, at once personal, pan-human and cosmic: everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else. There can be no disagreement between our personal salvation and the salvation of the world. The two form a unity. Our own salvation is necessarily linked to the salvation of every other human being, for ‘our brother is our life’. At the same time, the transfiguration of us humans inaugurates the transfiguration of the cosmos. Not without reason, on the last page of Fr Sophrony’s book on the Starets, do we find a prayer that is all-embracing in its scope: O Lord, give unto us this love throughout Thine whole universe (504). All quotations from St Silouan or from Fr Sophrony, unless otherwise indicated, are from Archimandite Sophrony (Sakharov), Saint Silouan the Athonite (Monastery of St John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, By Maldon, Essex 1991). References to the relevant page are included in the text. |
| St Silouan’s compassion for the suffering of animals did not make him lose sight of the truth that God has given this world to us humans for our use. Man, as he puts it, is the ‘supreme creation’ (376). In Fr Sophrony’s words, ‘The world itself was created for man.’ Of course this does not in any way justify a cruel and selfish exploitation of our natural environment. On the contrary, in our enjoyment of the world, we are to show the utmost humbleness and sensitivity. God has indeed given us ‘dominion’ over the animals (Genesis 1:28), but dominion does not signify tyranny. (3) The compassionate love of St Silouan extends beyond animals to plants: ‘Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees’ (Revelation 7:3). On one occasion when the two of them were walking together, Fr Sophrony struck out with his stick at a clump of tall wild grass. The Starets said nothing, but he shook his head doubtfully; and at once Fr Sophrony was ashamed (94). In his own writings St Silouan says: That green leaf on the tree which you needlessly plucked – it was not wrong, only rather a pity for the little leaf. The heart that has learned to love feels sorry for every created thing (376). The Spirit of God teaches the soul to love every living thing so that she would have no harm come to even a green leaf on a tree, or trample underfoot a flower of the field. Thus the Spirit of God teaches love towards all, and the soul feels compassion for every being (469). Thus cosmic compassion, this sense of our human responsibility towards the whole of creation, makes the Starets very much a saint of our own time, living as we do in an era of global pollution. His words, written over half a century ago, are marked by prophetic insight. With good reason the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, in the timely statement on Orthodoxy and the Ecological Crisis published in 1990, includes St Silouan the Athonite among the witnesses that it cites, along with the Prophet Isaiah, St Isaac the Syrian and Dostoevsky. |
| Despite the striking parallels between the Russian novelist and the Athonite monk, it is highly unlikely that Saint Silouan had ever read Dostoevsky. More probably, the similarities arise because both are shaped by the same living tradition and both are drawing on the same sources. Saint Isaac the Syrian, who writes in a famous passage of the Ascetical Homilies: “What is a merciful heart? It is a heart for the whole of creation for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, and for every created thing. At the recollection and at the sight of them such a person’s eyes overflow with tears owing to the vehemence of the compassion which grips his heart: as a result of his deep mercy his heart shrinks and cannot bear to hear or look on any injury or the slightest suffering of anything in creation. This is why he constantly offers up prayer full of tears, even for the irrational animals and enemies of truth, even for those who harm him, so that they may be protected and find mercy” . What exactly does Staretz Silouan mean when faithful to the teaching of Saint Isaac, he affirms that the Saints “embrace the whole world, with their love?” Let us note the all-embracing love and prayer that constitute our true vocation as human persons. There is first his firm conviction that God calls every human being to salvation. Secondly, there is his conception of the “total Adam” and, linked with this, his insistence that my neighbor is myself. Thirdly, there is his firm assurance that in God’s total plan it is not only human beings but the entire cosmos that is to be redeemed and transfigured. “It was particularly characteristic of Staretz Silouan to pray for the dead suffering in the Hell of separation from God” , writes Father Sophrony and he goes to recall an exchange that he overheard between the Staretz and a hermit: I remember a conversation between him and a certain hermit, who declared with evident satisfaction, “God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire”. Obviously upset, the Staretz said: ‘Tell me, supposing you went to Paradise and then looked down and saw somebody burning in Hellfire – would you feel happy?’ ‘It can’t be helped. It would be their own fault,’ replied the hermit. The Staretz answered him with a sorrowful countenance: ‘Love could not bear that,’ he said. ‘We must pray for all!’ |
| Such is Dostoevsky’s vision of cosmic unity. The created world constitutes an individual whole, and so the salvation of each individual person is inextricably bound up with the salvation of all humankind and, yet more widely, with the salvation of the entire universe. ‘We are members of one another’ (Ephesians 4:25) needs to be given the broadest possible application. It is not only we humans who depend on each other as the limbs of a single body; but we have bonds of kinship with the animals as well, and also with trees and plants, rocks and earth, air and water. We live in them, and they in us. Precisely the same sense of cosmic unity is expressed by St Silouan the Athonite: He who has the Holy Spirit in him, to however slight a degree, sorrows day and night for all mankind. His heart is filled with pity for all God’s creatures, more especially for those who do not know God, or who resist Him and therefore are bound for torment. For them, more than for himself, he prays day and night, that all may repent and know the Lord (352). The Lord bestows such rich grace on His chosen that they embrace the whole earth, the whole world, with that love (367). Archimandrite Sophrony, in his book on Starets Silouan, sums up the teaching of the Starets on cosmic coinherence in these words: The life of the spiritual world, the Staretz recognized as one life and because of this unity every spiritual phenomenon inevitably reacts on the state of the whole spiritual world (101). We shall not be distorting the meaning of the Starets – or that of Fr Sophrony – if we give to these words an all-inclusive scope: instead of saying ‘the spiritual world’ and ‘every spiritual phenomenon’, we can correctly say ‘the created world’ and ‘ every phenomenon’. As Fr Sophrony states elsewhere, St Silouan believed that each person who truly prays to God ‘integrates everyone into his own eternal life whatever the geographical distance or the historical time between them’ (233). Indeed, he integrates not only every person but every thing. Nothing is alien to him. In Dostoevsky’s words, ‘Everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else.’ |
| In the midst of the information revolution, the world wide web and the boom of technology, man still yearns for the same fundamental things: purpose and direction. The secular society can’t give him either. The purpose is temporary, ceasing to exist when life expires, and the directions one gets are so contradictory that they end up canceling themselves. So man is confused, lost and at the brink of despair. He is thirsty, but there is no well of life, he is hungry but there is no food for his eternal soul, he is lonely and he has no man. So what to do? In an interview I recently read (you can find it here, it is very edifying), the Archimandrite Sophrony Sacharov, of blessed memory, at that time a younger monk, was asked by a visiting priest: “Fr. Sophrony, how will we be saved?” Fr. Sophrony prepared him a cup of tea, gave it to him, and told him, “Stand on the edge of the abyss of despair and when you feel that it is beyond your strength, break off and have a cup of tea.” Obviously this was a very odd answer, and the young priest was definitely confused. So off he went to St. Silouan the Athonite, who lived not far from there, and told him everything, asking for advice. Long story short, next day, St. Silouan came to the cell of Fr. Sophrony and the two started a conversation about salvation. The beautiful fruit of their conversation was an unforgettable phrase that I would like to also offer as the answer to our conversation today about depression: “Keep your mind in hell and despair not.” At first glance, St. Silouan’s take on salvation is not less strange that Fr. Sophrony’s initial answer, but it actually makes great sense. In traditional Christianity, the difficulties of life, the hardships are assumed as part of our fallen existence. Our bodies and our minds suffer the torments, but this is nothing but a temporary stage. The ascetic Fathers considered them as tests on par with the athletic exercises, very useful in practicing and improving the powers of the soul like patience, kindness, hope, faith and so forth. We keep our mind in hell when we consciously assume the pain of living in a fallen world, when we learn from this passing agony to avoid the even greater torture of an eternity without Christ. But there is hope in this suffering because Christ himself has suffered them first and has opened for us a way out of despair, a way out of pain, a way out of death. Christ is the well of life, the bread of eternity, and the only Man we need. |
| E.S.: So…if it’s in a good language already, what’s happening with it? A.E.: It is in a good language, and we want it in this language. But unfortunately, our young people today are not able to understand it. E.S.: And this translation can be made now. A.E.: Yes, it can be done. E.S.: I understand, holy abbot. I wonder, though, if many people understand this book? A.E.: They don’t understand it in its full depth, but they may not understand it for another reason, because of its language. In our monastery, we have quite a few young monks. The young monks don’t know Greek, even though they are Greek, because unfortunately in Greece various factors have managed to adulterate the Greek language. E.S.: What I’m trying to say is that this book, by its very nature, because the providence of God lead me to Silouan, is about spiritual practices of the very highest kind. A deeper, more extreme form of asceticism does not exist. And from this, one can discern that it is from God. “Keep your mind in hell and despair not….” A.E.: Your book, St. Silouan the Athonite , was the reason that many people came to the Holy Mountain to become monks. And throughout Europe, the book led many heterodox to Orthodoxy. St. Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938). E.S.: It can also help people in Russia, because they have completely lost the ascetic culture. Seventy years of captivity… A.E.: A number of Russian bishops came to Vatopedi and told us that the Russians are pious, but because of their persecutions they don’t have an inner life. E.S.: They lost asceticism and this can help. The Roman Catholics, as I have heard for many years, from the time I began to do philological studies and have had contact with them, have said that the Orthodox Church cannot say that it is, “the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.” It isn’t catholic, it’s a part of them, how can we express it, they [the Orthodox] are ethnic bodies who live with hatred among themselves. A.E.: Unfortunately, that’s what they say. |
| I remember a conversation between him and a certain hermit, who declared with evident satisfaction, ‘God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.’ Obviously upset, The Staretz said: ‘Tell me, supposing you went to paradise and there looked down and saw somebody burning in hell-fire - would you feel happy?’ ‘It can’t be helped. It would be their own fault,’ said the hermit. The Staretz answered him with a sorrowful countenance: ‘Love could not bear that,’ he said. ‘We must pray for all’ (48). This universal intercession commended by St Silouan, so far from being sentimental or Utopian, has on the contrary a clear Scriptural foundation: ‘God desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’ (1 Timothy 2:4). This is the key text that the seventeenth-century Arminians invoked when opposing the strict Calvinist doctrine of double predestination; this is the text that inspired the dynamic missionary preaching of John Wesley in the eighteenth century; and this is equally a saying that the twentieth-century Athonite keeps steadfastly in view: My soul longs for the whole world to be saved (291).... Divine love desires the salvation of all (328).... The Lord’s is such that He would have all men to be saved (368).... Our one thought must be that all should be saved (379).... The merciful Lord sometimes gives the soul peace in God but sometimes makes the heart ache for the whole universe, that all men might repent and enter paradise (426). According to St Silouan, this burning desire for the salvation of all humankind is to be found to a supreme degree in the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary: She, like her beloved Son, desired with her whole heart the salvation of all (406).... She loved mankind and prayed ardently... for the whole world that all might be saved (365). The fact that God desires the salvation of all does not of course mean that our salvation is automatic and inevitable. As the Letter to Diognetus states, ‘God persuades, He does not compel, for violence is foreign to Him.’ God’s call to salvation comes in the form of an invitation, which we on the human side are free to accept or to reject. But, although the response varies, the call is universal. |
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