The Confessor of Souls

From his ordination in 1919 until his death in 1970, Amphilochios exercised a ministry of confession and spiritual fatherhood that made him one of the most sought-after elders of the Greek world — the confessor of the Dodecanese, of clergy and monastics and laity, of Greeks and foreigners, and, through his spiritual children, of Orthodox as far away as East Africa and the Western diaspora. This file sets that ministry within the Orthodox understanding of the geron, the spiritual father.

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

The Making of a Confessor

Amphilochios’s ministry of confession began by obedience rather than by choice. Ordained deacon in 1919 and priest soon after, the young schema-monk who had wished only to pray in a hermitage was set instead to hear confessions (see The Making of a Monk). Assigned first to the monastery’s dependency on the island of Kos, he served as confessor throughout the Italian-occupied Dodecanese, travelling among the islands; from 1926 he was based at the Cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos, where he guided the students of the Patmias Ecclesiastical School (the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder, on his assignment to Kos and to the Cave of the Apocalypse; OrthodoxWiki, Amphilochios [Makris] of Patmos, following the sisterhood, on his service as confessor across the Dodecanese).

Over the following decades this ministry grew until Amphilochios was, in effect, the spiritual father of a whole region. The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s summary at his canonization names his “fatherly concern for his spiritual children” as a defining mark of his life (Ecumenical Patriarchate, Synodal Act, 29 August 2018). Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), who knew him on Patmos in the 1960s and became his spiritual son, describes him precisely as a contemporary example of the traditional Orthodox elder — a living instance, in the modern Aegean, of the geron of the ancient tradition (Metropolitan Kallistos [Ware], “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, SVS Press, 2000).

The Orthodox Elder

To understand Amphilochios’s ministry it is necessary to understand the office he filled. In the Orthodox tradition the geron (Greek) or starets (Slavonic) — the spiritual father or elder — is not primarily an administrator or even a confessor in the narrow juridical sense, but a bearer of the Holy Spirit’s discernment who takes on the burden of another soul and guides it toward God. The office descends from the Desert Fathers, whose disciples “disclosed their thoughts” (logismoi) to an elder and lived in radical obedience; it was renewed in the hesychast tradition, in the Philokalia, and, in the modern period, in the Athonite and Optina revivals (on the tradition of the spiritual father, see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction). Ware’s own classic essay on the subject — the very essay in which he cites Amphilochios — sets the elder within this long lineage (Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” 2000).

Amphilochios stands in the same twentieth-century flowering of the eldership as Paisios, Porphyrios, Iakovos of Evia, and Sophrony of Essex — the “religion of love” wing, so to speak, of the modern Orthodox renewal, in which the elder’s authority was exercised overwhelmingly through gentleness, encouragement, and joy rather than through severity (see St. Paisios, St. Porphyrios, St. Iakovos Tsalikis, St. Sophrony of Essex). What distinguished Amphilochios within that company, in Ware’s firsthand judgement, was the particular warmth and tranquil joy of his manner (Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” 2000; see Gentleness and Discernment).

The Reach of His Fatherhood

The reach of Amphilochios’s spiritual fatherhood was remarkable for a man who spent almost his whole life on one small island. Because Patmos was a place of pilgrimage and its monastery a center of the Greek world, and because Amphilochios’s reputation as a confessor drew people across the Aegean, his spiritual children came to include not only the people of Patmos and the Dodecanese but clergy, monastics, and laity from far afield — and among them foreigners who found their way to the island of the Apocalypse.

The most consequential of these relationships bore fruit in the Orthodox mission to Africa. Fr. Chrysostomos Papasarantopoulos, the pioneer of the modern Greek Orthodox mission in East Africa, was among Amphilochios’s spiritual children, and it was under the elder’s encouragement that he undertook the mission that took him to Kampala, Uganda in 1960 and thence to Kenya, Tanzania, and the Congo, founding churches and schools (Orthodox Missionary Fraternity [Porefthentes] and related mission literature, on Papasarantopoulos’s connection to Elder Amphilochios; see The Nuns and the Mission). Through such children the confessor of Patmos became, at one remove, a father of the African mission — a reach treated more fully in the section on the convent and its outreach (see The Nuns and the Mission).

His fatherhood extended also to the Western diaspora. The biography preserves his counsel to Orthodox living in the West — “do not be either defensive or aggressive; simply be yourself” — a saying that presupposes spiritual children in Europe and America seeking his guidance on how to live the faith among the heterodox (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his counsel to those in the diaspora; Sanidopoulos, “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010, following the sisterhood). Among his non-Greek spiritual children the most eminent was the future Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia, the English convert and Oxford theologian, whose personal debt to Amphilochios he acknowledged in print and whose essay carried the elder’s sayings to a worldwide readership (Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” 2000; see Gentleness and Discernment).

The Manner of His Confession

What his spiritual children remembered of his confession was not severity but consolation. He received the penitent with warmth, lifted the burden of guilt rather than adding to it, and sent people away with hope and joy rather than fear — the pastoral method treated in detail in the section on his counsels (see Counsels and Sayings). His most famous single practice as a confessor belongs to his ecological witness: he is said to have assigned the planting and tending of a tree as a work of repentance, so that penitence issued in an act of life and creation (Ware, “Through the Creation to the Creator,” and the 2005 lecture, on Amphilochios’s tree-planting counsel; the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography; see Whoever Plants a Tree). This union of the sacrament of confession with the care of creation is one of the most distinctive things about him, and it is treated at length in Section 06.

The ministry of the confessor was thus the trunk from which everything else in his life branched: the convent he founded to give his spiritual daughters a home (Section 04), the teaching of love he communicated through direction (Section 05), the ecological counsel he gave at confession (Section 06). He remained a confessor to the end; even the account of his death is an account of an elder concerned above all for the souls in his charge, asking for more time “to develop his spiritual children” (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his final years; see Repose 1970).

See Also

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. (Amphilochios as a contemporary example of the traditional Orthodox elder; Ware’s personal debt to him.)
  • 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 confessional ministry across the Dodecanese; his counsel to those in the diaspora.)
  • Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Synodal Act for the canonization of St. Amphilochios of Patmos, 29 August 2018. (His fatherly concern for his spiritual children.)
  • Orthodox Missionary Fraternity (Porefthentes) and related mission literature. On Fr. Chrysostomos Papasarantopoulos and the East African mission’s connection to Elder Amphilochios.
  • Sanidopoulos, John (Mystagogy Resource Center). “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010. (Aggregator translation following the sisterhood; used to locate, not as terminal citation.)