Gentleness and Discernment

What his spiritual children remembered above all was Amphilochios’s gentleness, his humour, the warmth of his affection, and his sense of tranquil yet triumphant joy — the description left by his spiritual son Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware). This file treats his character and the accounts of his charismatic gifts of discernment and healing, pinning each such claim to its named source per METHODOLOGY §3.5 rather than asserting it as adjudicated fact.

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

The Testimony of Kallistos Ware

The single most valuable witness to Amphilochios’s character is Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia, the English theologian who knew the elder personally on Patmos in the 1960s and became his spiritual son. In his widely read essay “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” Ware introduces Amphilochios as a contemporary example of the traditional Orthodox elder and gives this description: “What most distinguished his character was his gentleness, his humour, the warmth of his affection, and his sense of tranquil yet triumphant joy” (Metropolitan Kallistos [Ware], “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, SVS Press, 2000).

The value of this testimony is that it is firsthand, from a sober and critical observer — an Oxford academic, not a devotee prone to exaggeration — who had known many spiritual figures and who chose Amphilochios, out of all of them, as his illustration of the living elder. The four traits Ware names — gentleness, humour, warmth, joy — recur in every account of the elder and form the settled portrait: a man whose sanctity expressed itself not in austerity of manner or fearsome authority but in kindness, laughter, affection, and an unshakeable joy (Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” 2000; the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder, to the same effect).

This joy was not shallow good cheer but, in Ware’s careful phrase, “tranquil yet triumphant” — the paschal joy of a man who had passed through the ascetic labour and the sufferings of the occupation and come out the far side into a settled gladness. It is the same quality noted in the other elders of his generation and marks the whole tenor of his teaching (see The Gospel of Love and Joy; compare St. Porphyrios and St. Paisios).

Universal Love

Bound up with this gentleness was a striking universality of love. The biography preserves a saying that his community treasured as the key to his character: “I was born to love people. It does not concern me whether he is a Turk, black, or white. I see in the face of each person the image of God, and for this image of God I am willing to sacrifice everything” (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his love for every person; OrthodoxWiki, Amphilochios [Makris] of Patmos, following the sisterhood, giving this saying). For a Greek monk of the Dodecanese, formed under the shadow of the Ottoman past and the Italian occupation, to name “the Turk” first among those he was born to love is not a bland cosmopolitanism but a costly act of the Gospel — the refusal of enmity in the very terms in which enmity would have been most natural. This universal love is the root of his “religion of love” (see The Gospel of Love and Joy).

The Gifts: Attestation-Pinned

Like the other elders of his generation, Amphilochios was credited by his spiritual children with charismatic gifts — discernment (diakrisis) of the state of souls, foreknowledge, and healing. Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, these accounts are reported here as what named witnesses attest, pinned to their sources, and not asserted as adjudicated fact.

Discernment and foreknowledge. His spiritual children attributed to him a gift of reading the soul — of knowing what a visitor needed before it was spoken, of discerning thoughts, and at times of foreseeing what was to come. The sisterhood’s biography, which gathers the recollections of those who knew him, is the principal repository of these accounts (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his gift of discernment). Ware, a critical witness, does not catalogue miracles but conveys the impression of a man of genuine spiritual perception, and it is his restraint that lends weight to the more effusive accounts of the community (Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” 2000).

Foreknowledge of his own death. The most concrete instance of foreknowledge in the sources is his own: the biography relates that at Easter 1968 he foresaw his approaching death and was granted, as it were, a period of preparation, and that when he asked for more time in order “to develop his spiritual children,” the Mother of God and St. John the Theologian appeared to him and told him the request was denied (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on the Easter 1968 foreknowledge and the vision; Sanidopoulos, “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010, following the sisterhood; see Repose 1970). This is reported strictly as the community’s account of what the elder told them and of what they believed; it is pinned to the sisterhood’s biography per §3.5 and treated further in the file on his repose.

A child granted. The biography also preserves an account of a childless woman: that the elder arranged the adoption of a girl, Helen Angelides Torkos, by a barren woman who then herself conceived and bore a son in March 1970 — days before the elder’s own death — and that when the news was brought to him, “he simply looked up to heaven and smiled” (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on the childless woman and the birth of March 1970; Sanidopoulos, 2010, following the sisterhood). Again this is reported as the community’s testimony, pinned to its source; the smile toward heaven is the biography’s own image of an elder receiving a last confirmation of grace as his life closed.

The Meaning of the Gifts

Two things should be said about these accounts. First, they are exactly the kind of material that METHODOLOGY §3.5 exists to handle: reports of charismatic gifts, gathered by a devoted community after the saint’s death, which the honest course neither dismisses nor certifies but reports with its source named and its status as testimony made plain. That Amphilochios is a very recent and well-documented figure — with living witnesses, photographs, and his own letters — makes the sources unusually good by hagiographical standards, but it does not turn a report of discernment or foreknowledge into an adjudicated fact, and the collection does not pretend otherwise.

Second, and more important for understanding the man, the gifts were never the point. In every account the discernment serves love: it is used to console, to heal, to lift burdens, to send people away with hope. The elder himself, on the biography’s own showing, cared not for the display of gifts but for the souls in his charge — his last recorded desire being simply for more time to help them (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography; see Repose 1970). The gentleness, in other words, was not a garnish on the gifts; it was the substance, and the gifts were its instruments. This is the unity of his witness, and it is what his “religion of love” names (see The Gospel of Love and Joy).

References

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 firsthand description of Amphilochios’s gentleness, humour, warmth, and tranquil yet triumphant joy.)
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. (His universal love; the accounts of his discernment, the foreknowledge of his death and the vision of 1968, and the childless woman.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Amphilochios (Makris) of Patmos.” (The saying on loving every person as the image of God.)
Sanidopoulos, John (Mystagogy Resource Center). “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010. (Aggregator translation following the sisterhood; used to locate, not as terminal citation.)