Athanasios Makris of Patmos

St. Amphilochios was born Athanasios Makris in 1889 on the island of Patmos, the small Aegean island where the Apostle John received the Revelation. This file sets out his origins and youth on the “island of the Apocalypse,” distinguishing the well-attested facts from the devotional traditions of a saint’s childhood, which are pinned to their source per the repository methodology.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (20th-c. elder; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Island of the Apocalypse

Patmos is a small, rocky island of the Dodecanese in the southeastern Aegean, of no great size or natural wealth, but of an importance in Christian memory out of all proportion to its geography. It is the island to which, according to the tradition received from the second century, the Apostle and Evangelist John was exiled under the emperor Domitian and on which he received the visions recorded in the Book of Revelation — “I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation… was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ” (Revelation 1:9). The Cave of the Apocalypse, midway up the hill between the harbour and the hilltop town, is venerated as the place of the vision; the great fortified Monastery of St. John the Theologian, founded in 1088, crowns the height above it (Ecumenical Patriarchate, Synodal Act of canonization of St. Amphilochios, 29 August 2018, on the setting of his life; see The Monastery of St. John the Theologian). To be born on Patmos in the late nineteenth century was to be born within sight of the two holiest sites of the Johannine tradition, in a community whose life had been shaped for eight centuries by the monastery on the hill.

The whole of Amphilochios’s life would be lived within this small compass. He was born on the island, he became a monk of its monastery, he founded a convent on it, he was exiled from it and returned to it, and he died and was buried on it. Unlike the other great modern Greek elders — Paisios, who wandered from Mount Athos to Sinai and back; Porphyrios, who lived and served for decades in Athens — Amphilochios is emphatically the elder of Patmos, and the island’s identity as the place of the Apocalypse and the see of the Johannine “religion of love” is inseparable from his own witness (Metropolitan Kallistos [Ware], “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, SVS Press, 2000, on Amphilochios as elder of Patmos; see St. Paisios and St. Porphyrios for the contrast).

Birth and Family

He was born on 13 December 1889 on Patmos, the son of Emmanuel and Irene Makris, a large and devout island family, and was baptized Athanasios (the biography compiled by the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, on his birth and parents; OrthodoxWiki, Amphilochios [Makris] of Patmos, following the sisterhood’s account, on the names of his parents and the birthdate). [Disputed: the precise birthdate. The sisterhood’s biography and the OrthodoxWiki article give 13 December 1889; several secondary accounts and the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s own summary give simply “1889.” The year 1889 is not in serious question; the exact day rests on the sisterhood’s record and is reported as such.]

Of his family and the ordinary circumstances of his childhood the sources say relatively little that can be independently checked; what they preserve is largely the recollection, gathered by his convent after his death, of a child marked from the first by piety. The sisterhood’s biography relates that he showed an extraordinary religious seriousness from infancy — that he kept the fasts even as a nursing child, and that at the age of five he persuaded his godmother to embrace a life of virginity (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography of the elder, on his childhood piety; retold in the biographical summary at Mystagogy Resource Center [J. Sanidopoulos], “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010, following the sisterhood).

Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, these childhood traditions are reported here as what the elder’s own community remembered and set down, not as independently documented events. They belong to the recognizable devotional pattern of the Life of a saint — the holy child who fasts at the breast, whose sanctity is legible from the cradle — a pattern found from the earliest Byzantine hagiography onward, and they should be read as the community’s confession of who he became rather than as a chronicle verifiable at the time. That his family was genuinely pious, and that he was drawn to the monastic life very young, is not in doubt: he entered the monastery on the hill above his home while still a youth (see The Monastery of St. John the Theologian).

A Patmian Vocation

What can be said with confidence is that Amphilochios’s vocation was formed by Patmos itself. The island had no other industry to compare with its monastery; its horizon was the sea and the fortress-monastery of St. John, and its patron the Evangelist of love. A boy of unusual religious temperament, growing up under that hill, would have known the monastery’s feasts, its chanting, and its monks as the most vivid realities of his world. When, at about seventeen, he asked his parents’ blessing to enter it, he was not leaving his home for a distant and unknown life but climbing the hill to the center of the only world he had known (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his entry to the monastery; see The Monastery of St. John the Theologian).

This rootedness is worth dwelling on, because it explains something of the character that his spiritual children would later describe: a serenity, a lack of restlessness, an at-homeness in his place that struck even a visiting Oxford academic as remarkable. Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), who knew him on Patmos in the 1960s, remembered above all his “sense of tranquil yet triumphant joy” — the joy, one might say, of a man entirely where he belonged (Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000; see Gentleness and Discernment). The island of the Apocalypse, the island of the Beloved Disciple, produced in Amphilochios a witness whose whole message could be summed up in the Johannine word love — and it is fitting that the elder of the “religion of love” should have been the son of the island where the Apostle of love had written (see The Gospel of Love and Joy).

See Also

References

  • The Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation (Evangelismos), Patmos. Biography and counsels of the Elder Amphilochios Makris (Greek: Ὁ Γέρων Ἀμφιλόχιος Μακρῆς). Patmos: Holy Monastery of the Annunciation. (The primary hagiographical source: his birth, family, and childhood piety.)
  • Ware, Metropolitan Kallistos (of Diokleia). “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity.” In The Inner Kingdom (Collected Works, vol. 1). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (Firsthand testimony to Amphilochios’s character and joy.)
  • Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Synodal Act for the canonization of St. Amphilochios of Patmos, 29 August 2018. (The official summary of his life and the appointment of the feast.)
  • Sanidopoulos, John (Mystagogy Resource Center). “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010, and “Saint Amphilochios Makris Resource Page,” 2019. (Aggregator translations following the sisterhood’s biography; used to locate, not as terminal citation.)
  • Scripture: Revelation 1:9 (John on Patmos).