Counsels and Sayings

Amphilochios’s teaching reaches us chiefly through his recorded counsels and sayings — preserved by his sisterhood and his spiritual children — and through the memory of his method as a director of souls: gentle, encouraging, patient, and refusing to crush. This file treats that method and the provenance of the sayings, following METHODOLOGY §2.4 on compiled counsels.

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

How the Counsels Reach Us

Amphilochios, like most of the modern Greek elders, left no systematic theological work. What survives of his teaching comes in three forms: his letters, preserved by his convent; the counsels and sayings gathered by his sisterhood and by his spiritual children after his death; and the recollections of those who knew him, of whom the most eminent in print is Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) (the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography and counsels of the elder; Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, SVS Press, 2000).

Per METHODOLOGY §2.4, the provenance of such compiled counsels is treated here as a topic, not an embarrassment. The sayings of an oral teacher, gathered by devoted disciples, are shaped in transmission: the same counsel appears in slightly different wordings, and the setting of a saying is often lost or reconstructed. This does not make them worthless — the substance of Amphilochios’s teaching is remarkably consistent across the versions, and the earliest and best transmission runs through his own convent, which had every reason to preserve his words faithfully — but it does mean that any single quoted saying should be received as the substance of his counsel rather than as a stenographic record. [Disputed: the exact wording of individual sayings. Amphilochios’s counsels circulate in several versions through the sisterhood’s compilations, the recollections of his spiritual children, and secondary collections; the wording varies while the substance holds. Per §2.4 the sayings are cited for their sense, with the transmission acknowledged.]

The Method of Gentleness

The dominant note of Amphilochios’s direction was gentleness. His spiritual children remembered a confessor who did not browbeat, who lifted burdens rather than piling them on, and who sent penitents away with hope and encouragement (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his gentle manner in confession; see The Confessor of Souls). Ware’s firsthand portrait — gentleness, humour, warmth, joy — is precisely a portrait of a method as much as a temperament: Amphilochios directed souls by kindness and encouragement, drawing people toward the good by love rather than driving them by fear (Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” 2000; see Gentleness and Discernment).

This gentleness was not laxity. The tradition of the Orthodox elder holds together two things that can seem opposed: a rigorous truthfulness about sin and the passions, and a boundless compassion toward the sinner. Amphilochios, formed in a severe asceticism (see The Making of a Monk), knew the demands of the spiritual life exactly; but he applied them to others with a patience and encouragement that reflected his conviction that souls grow toward God as plants grow toward the light — by warmth and nurture, not by force. It is no accident that his most famous single counsel was to plant and tend a tree (see Whoever Plants a Tree): the image of patient cultivation is the image of his whole pastoral method.

Counsels of Love

Many of his preserved counsels turn on love. He taught, in sayings his community preserved, that one must have love even toward those who do the greatest harm; that the measure of one’s love for God is one’s love for other people (“the more a person loves God, the more he loves other people”); and that one should consider every other person greater than oneself (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography and counsels, on these sayings; retold in Sanidopoulos, “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010, following the sisterhood). These are not original in content — they are the common patrimony of the Gospel and the Fathers — but they are the authentic center of his teaching, and their force lay in the person who spoke them: a man in whom the love he counselled was visibly present (see The Gospel of Love and Joy).

Among the most quoted is his counsel toward an ardent, affective love of Christ: to cultivate love for the person of Christ to such a degree that at the pronouncing of His name tears come and the heart truly burns (a counsel widely circulated through the sisterhood’s collections; the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography and counsels). And to the Orthodox of the diaspora he gave the wise and often-cited counsel: “do not be either defensive or aggressive; simply be yourself” — a rule for witnessing to the faith among the heterodox without either fear or aggression (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his counsel to the diaspora; Sanidopoulos, 2010; see The Nuns and the Mission).

Counsels for the Common Life

His counsels also touched the ordinary conduct of the communities he founded. To his nuns and to the brothers who served them he gave the plain rule of mutual care: “Have love between yourselves, and the brothers should take care of the nuns” — a homely, practical charity, love made concrete in the mutual service of a community (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his counsel to his communities; Sanidopoulos, 2010). Here the “religion of love” descends from principle to the texture of daily monastic life: the great commandment lived out in the small kindnesses of a household of prayer.

The Consistency of the Witness

What is striking about the counsels, taken together, is their consistency with everything else known of the man. The teaching (love as the whole of the Gospel), the method (gentleness and encouragement), the character (warmth, humour, joy), the institutions (a serving, charitable sisterhood), and the ecological practice (the planting of trees as a work of repentance) all say the same thing in different registers. This coherence is itself a kind of evidence: the sayings ring true because they are of a piece with the documented shape of his life. Per METHODOLOGY §2.4 the individual wordings are held lightly; but the portrait they compose — an elder who taught, and lived, a religion of love — is as well attested as anything about a twentieth-century saint can be (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography; Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” 2000; see The Sources for His Life).

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. (The counsels on love, the burning love of Christ, the diaspora, and the common life; the primary transmission of his sayings.)
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 gentleness, humour, warmth, and joy of his method.)
Sanidopoulos, John (Mystagogy Resource Center). “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010. (Aggregator translation following the sisterhood; used to locate, not as terminal citation.)
Methodology reference: METHODOLOGY.md §2.4 (compiled sayings and oral tradition).