The Making of a Monk

The years that formed Amphilochios: a strict ascetic discipline on Patmos, a period on Mount Athos to which his abbot sent him in 1911, the tonsure to the Great Schema there in March 1913, and his return to Patmos, his reluctant acceptance of ordination in 1919, and the beginning of the priestly and confessional ministry that would define him.

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

The Ascetic Discipline

The gentleness for which Amphilochios became famous grew out of a severe ascetic beginning. The biography compiled by his sisterhood records that as a young monk he kept an extreme discipline of fasting — the community’s account preserves the memory of a fixed and very small number of mouthfuls at each meal on ordinary days, and only seven or eight olives on days of fast — together with long hours of prayer and vigil (the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder, on his ascetic rule; retold in Sanidopoulos, “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010, following the sisterhood). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, such details are the recollection of his community, offered as the pattern of his early life rather than as a documented daily record; but the substance — that he was, in his formative years, a rigorous ascetic in the Athonite mold — is consistent across the sources and coheres with everything else known of him.

This is a point worth underlining, because the popular image of the modern Greek elders as figures of warmth and joy can obscure the ascetic labour beneath. Amphilochios, like Paisios and Porphyrios and Iakovos, was formed by fasting, vigil, obedience, and unceasing prayer before he became a dispenser of consolation; the “religion of love” he preached was the fruit of a life first emptied by ascesis (see The Gospel of Love and Joy; compare St. Paisios and St. Iakovos Tsalikis). The Orthodox tradition names this movement precisely: apatheia, the stilling of the passions, opens into agape, love — the ascetic labour is not an end but the ground of love (see Orthodoxy: Monasticism).

Mount Athos and the Great Schema

In 1911 his abbot sent the young monk to Mount Athos — the center and source of Greek monasticism — to be trained in the craft of wood-carving, one of the traditional arts of the Holy Mountain (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his being sent to Athos for wood-carving in 1911; Sanidopoulos, 2010). The stay was formative in more than the manual craft. It was on Athos, in March 1913, that he was tonsured to the Great Schema — the fullest and highest grade of the monastic state — at the hands of an Elder Antoniadis (OrthodoxWiki, Amphilochios [Makris] of Patmos, following the sisterhood’s biography, on the Great Schema tonsure on Athos in March 1913 under Elder Antoniadis; see The Monastery of St. John the Theologian for the earlier rassophore tonsure of 1906).

[Disputed: the dating of the Great Schema. The detailed sisterhood-based record places it on Mount Athos in March 1913; shorter secondary accounts that mention only one tonsure sometimes give “1913” for his monastic profession generally, and a few, compressing the record, place the name Amphilochios here rather than at the 1906 rassophore tonsure. The two-stage account — name at 1906, Great Schema in 1913 — is the fuller and is followed here. The spec’s summary “tonsure as Amphilochios 1913” reflects the compressed tradition; the distinction is noted in The Monastery of St. John the Theologian.]

That the elder of Patmos received the Great Schema on Athos ties him to the same Athonite root as the whole twentieth-century Greek monastic renewal. The Holy Mountain was the reservoir from which the renewal of Greek spiritual life flowed in the twentieth century, and Amphilochios drew from it directly (see St. Sophrony of Essex, an Athonite of the same generation who carried the tradition west; and the Athonite formation shared with St. Paisios).

Reluctance and Return

The sisterhood’s biography records a striking reluctance in the young schema-monk to accept ordination and office. When, after the Athonite period, his abbot arranged for his ordination, Amphilochios declined and asked instead to be assigned elsewhere; he sought for a time to serve at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem before the monastery required his return to Patmos, where he was given to the hermitage of Apollo alongside an Elder Makarios — an assignment that, the biography says, “made Amphilochios very happy, as he was better able to pray” (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his reluctance to be ordained and his desire for the life of prayer; Sanidopoulos, 2010, following the sisterhood). This reluctance is a recognizable mark of authentic monastic humility in the tradition — the flight from office and honour that the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and the whole ascetic literature praise — and it is consistent with the man his spiritual children later knew, who bore his gifts lightly and without display (see Gentleness and Discernment).

He was ordained deacon in 1919 and priest soon afterward, and — the desire for hidden prayer notwithstanding — obedience placed him in the very ministry from which he had shrunk: the ministry of confession (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his ordination in 1919; OrthodoxWiki, on the diaconate in 1919 followed shortly by the priesthood). Assigned to the monastery’s dependency (metochion) on the nearby island of Kos, and later based at the Cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos from 1926, he began to hear confessions and to guide souls across the Dodecanese (see The Confessor of Souls). The man who had wished only to pray in a hermitage became, by obedience, the confessor of a whole region — and it is one of the quiet ironies of his life, and a testimony to the tradition’s wisdom, that the ministry he had fled became the vessel of his sanctity.

From Ascetic to Elder

The making of the monk, then, was the making of an elder in the classical Orthodox pattern: ascetic labour first, then the Great Schema, then — against his own desire for hiddenness — the pastoral office in which the fruit of the labour was given to others. The reticence about office, the love of prayer, the Athonite formation, the severe fasting: these are the raw materials from which the gentle confessor of the 1950s and 60s was formed. When the future Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) met him on Patmos in the 1960s and was struck by his “tranquil yet triumphant joy,” he was meeting the ripened end of a discipline that had begun sixty years before with a boy climbing the hill to the monastery (Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, SVS Press, 2000; see Gentleness and Discernment). The next step in that public life was the abbacy (see Abbot of Patmos).

See Also

References

  • The Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation (Evangelismos), Patmos. Biography and counsels of the Elder Amphilochios Makris. Patmos: Holy Monastery of the Annunciation. (Ascetic discipline; sent to Athos for wood-carving in 1911; reluctance to be ordained; the hermitage of Apollo; ordination in 1919.)
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Amphilochios (Makris) of Patmos.” (The Great Schema on Athos in March 1913 under Elder Antoniadis; the diaconate in 1919 followed shortly by the priesthood.)
  • 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. (The mature character formed by this discipline.)
  • Sanidopoulos, John (Mystagogy Resource Center). “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010. (Aggregator translation following the sisterhood; used to locate, not as terminal citation.)