Elder Amphilochios and the Trees

Fr Amphilochios Makris (1889–1970) was the elder of Patmos when Ware first stayed on the island in the 1960s, and became his spiritual father. Ware’s firsthand portrait of him — gentle, humorous, warm, joyful — is the single most valuable modern witness to a now-glorified saint, and Ware’s report of the elder’s teaching about trees is the anchor of Amphilochios’s whole ecological reputation. This file treats the relationship, the testimony, and what Ware took from it.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

Who Amphilochios Was

Athanasios Makris (1889–1970), in monastic life Amphilochios, entered the Monastery of St John the Theologian on Patmos in 1906, received the Great Schema in 1913, was ordained in 1919, served as abbot of the monastery from 1935, founded the Convent of the Annunciation (Evangelismos) on Patmos in 1937, and was exiled by the Italian occupying authorities from 1937 to 1939. He died in 1970 and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 29 August 2018 (Ecumenical Patriarchate, Synodal Act, 29 August 2018; the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder; see the full treatment in St. Amphilochios of Patmos).

Ware met him in the 1960s, in the last decade of the elder’s life, and became his spiritual son.

The Testimony

Ware’s portrait of Amphilochios appears in “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” his standard essay on the geron/starets, collected in The Inner Kingdom (SVS Press, 2000). He introduces the elder there not as a curiosity but as evidence — as a contemporary instance of an office usually described from the Desert Fathers and from nineteenth-century Optina. The best-known sentence is a character summary:

“What most distinguished his character was his gentleness, his humour, the warmth of his affection, and his sense of tranquil yet triumphant joy.” (Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000)

Four things make this testimony unusually weighty, and they are worth naming because the sister collection on Amphilochios rests a great deal on them.

It is firsthand. Ware knew the man; he is not transmitting a compilation.

The witness is critical rather than devotional. Ware was an Oxford academic who had met a great many spiritual figures and who was, as his conversion essay shows, entirely capable of naming Orthodoxy’s failings. He does not catalogue miracles; he describes a temperament. The restraint is what gives the account its evidential value, and it is why the more effusive material from the convent’s own biography can be read with more confidence than it otherwise could.

It is discriminating. Among the twentieth-century Greek elders — Paisios, Porphyrios, Iakovos of Evia — Ware picked out in Amphilochios a specific note: not severity, not fearsome authority, but “tranquil yet triumphant joy,” the paschal gladness of a man who had passed through ascetic labor and through the occupation and come out the far side.

It carried. Because the essay circulated worldwide in English, Ware’s paragraph is the reason a Dodecanese confessor is known outside Greece at all. Whatever else Ware did for the Church, he is the proximate reason that an English-speaking reader has ever heard of Amphilochios Makris.

“Love the Trees”

Ware’s other great contribution to the memory of his elder is the tree-planting, which he recorded in his lecture “Through Creation to the Creator” — the Third Marco Pallis Memorial Lecture, delivered in London in 1996 and published by the Friends of the Centre in 1997. The passage is short, and because it is the source for almost everything subsequently written about Amphilochios and ecology, it is worth quoting at length:

“Fr. Amphilochios, the geronta or ‘elder’ on the island of Patmos when I first stayed there, would have been in full agreement. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that God gave us one more commandment, which is not recorded in Scripture? It is the commandment “love the trees.”’ Whoever does not love trees, so he believed, does not love God. ‘When you plant a tree,’ he insisted, ‘you plant hope, you plant peace, you plant love, and you will receive God’s blessing.’ An ecologist long before ecology had become fashionable, when hearing confessions of the local farmers he used to assign to them a penance, the task of planting a tree. During the long summer drought, he himself went round the island watering the young trees. His example and influence have transformed Patmos: photographs of the hillside near the Cave of the Apocalypse, taken at the start of the twentieth century, show bare and barren slopes, where today there is a thick and flourishing wood.” (Ware, “Through Creation to the Creator,” 1996)

Ware sets the elder in a lineage rather than presenting him as a novelty. Immediately after the passage above he notes that Amphilochios “was by no means the first spiritual teacher in the modern Greek tradition to recognize the importance of trees,” and cites St Kosmas the Aetolian, martyred in 1779, who planted trees on his missionary journeys and prophesied that “People will remain poor, because they have no love for trees” (ibid.). The point matters: Ware is not claiming to have discovered a proto-environmentalist but identifying a strand of Greek monastic practice that ran from the eighteenth century to the man he happened to know.

Ware’s own framing of the theological question follows in the same lecture: “‘Love the trees.’ Why should we do so? Is there indeed a connection between love of trees and love of God? How far is it true that a failure to reverence and honor our natural environment — animals, trees, earth, fire, air, and water — is also, in an immediate and soul-destroying way, a failure to reverence and honor the living God?” (ibid.).

A note on citation. The “hope, peace and love” formula is here quoted in the form Ware gives it, which is the earliest and best-attested form in English. The saying circulates in other wordings, and the sister collection flags the variation with a [Disputed: ...] note on the exact verbatim text (see Whoever Plants a Tree). This collection follows the same discipline: the secure elements are Ware’s firsthand report of the “commandment,” of “whoever does not love trees does not love God,” of the tree-planting penance at confession, and of the elder’s own watering of the saplings.

A bibliographical caution. “Through the Creation to the Creator” is not a chapter of The Inner Kingdom and should not be cited as one; it is a separate lecture, published as a pamphlet by the Friends of the Centre (London, 1997, ISBN 0-9531698-0-4) and reproduced online by the Orthodox Peace Fellowship under the slightly shortened title “Through Creation to the Creator.”

What Ware Took From Him

The influence runs in both directions, and it is not hard to trace on Ware’s side.

A theology of the spiritual father grounded in a person. Ware’s essay on spiritual guidance is the standard English account of the geron, and it is written by someone who had one. That is why the essay does not read like a survey of Optina; it reads like a description.

A pastoral temper. The manner for which Ware became known — the warmth, the humor, the refusal of severity, the tendency to send people away encouraged rather than crushed — is precisely the manner he ascribes to Amphilochios. Whether the manner was learned from the elder or merely recognized in him cannot be determined, but the correspondence is exact (see The Great Explainer).

A creation theology with a concrete root. Ware became one of the most-quoted Orthodox voices on the environment, and his ecological writing always begins from Patmos rather than from a policy statement. When the Ecumenical Patriarchate made the care of creation a signature of its witness under Patriarchs Dimitrios and Bartholomew from the late 1980s, Ware could point to a confessor who had been assigning tree-planting as penance thirty years earlier (see Environmental Ethics).

“Living saints.” In the closing paragraphs of his conversion essay, Ware answers Fr Lazarus Moore’s warning that he would find in Orthodoxy “little generosity or heroism or real sanctity” by saying that he had in fact “enjoyed the privilege of meeting living saints” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000). Amphilochios, glorified in 2018, is the clearest single referent that sentence has.

Consistency With the Amphilochios Collection

This file is written to agree with St. Amphilochios of Patmos, which is anchored on exactly this testimony. Two points of discipline are shared between the collections and are restated here:

Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, the accounts of Amphilochios’s discernment and healing are reported as what named witnesses attest, not certified as adjudicated fact. Ware himself “does not catalogue miracles” (as the sister collection puts it), and his restraint is treated there as strengthening rather than undermining the community’s fuller accounts.
Per METHODOLOGY §2.4, the elder’s counsels reach us largely through his community’s compilations. Ware’s report is the exception — it is direct — and is therefore the anchor.

References

Ware, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia. “Through Creation to the Creator.” Third Marco Pallis Memorial Lecture, London, 1996; published as Through the Creation to the Creator, London: Friends of the Centre, 1997, ISBN 0-9531698-0-4; reproduced by the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, In Communion. (All quotations about Amphilochios and the trees, and the reference to St Kosmas the Aetolian, are from this lecture. Not a chapter of The Inner Kingdom.)
Ware, Metropolitan Kallistos. “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity.” In The Inner Kingdom. Collected Works, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The character portrait: gentleness, humour, warmth, “tranquil yet triumphant joy”; Amphilochios as a contemporary example of the traditional Orthodox elder.)
Ware, Kallistos. “Strange Yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church.” In The Inner Kingdom. Collected Works, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, 1–24. (“Living saints”; Fr Lazarus Moore’s warning.)
Ecumenical Patriarchate. Synodal Act glorifying Amphilochios Makris, 29 August 2018.
The Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation (Evangelismos), Patmos. Biography and counsels of the Elder Amphilochios Makris.
Kosmas the Aetolian, St. Prophecies, as quoted by Ware in “Through Creation to the Creator.”