The Gospel of Love and Joy

At the center of Amphilochios’s teaching stood a single conviction: that Christianity is, above all, a religion of love — that God is love, that every person bears the image of God and is to be loved without exception, and that the fruit of this love is joy and hope, not fear. This file sets out that teaching and its roots in the Johannine and patristic tradition of the island of the Apocalypse.

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

“A Religion of Love”

The whole of Amphilochios’s spiritual teaching can be gathered under one heading: love. His spiritual children remembered him as a man for whom the Gospel was, before anything else, the revelation and the demand of love — the love of God for humanity, and the love the Christian owes to God and to every neighbour without exception. The saying his community treasured as the key to his heart states it plainly: “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 Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder; OrthodoxWiki, Amphilochios [Makris] of Patmos, following the sisterhood, on this saying).

To call his teaching a “religion of love” is not to reduce Christianity to sentiment. In Amphilochios’s mouth the phrase carries the full weight of the First Epistle of John, the letter of the Apostle whose island he lived on: “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16); “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear” (1 John 4:18). It is the theology of the Beloved Disciple, native to Patmos, that Amphilochios preached: that the God who is love has loved us first, and that our whole vocation is to receive that love and to return it — to God and to every person made in His image (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on love as the substance of his teaching; on the Johannine setting of Patmos, see Athanasios Makris of Patmos).

The Image of God in Every Person

The distinctive edge of Amphilochios’s teaching on love was its universality. He grounded it in the doctrine of the image of God: because every human being, without exception, bears the image of God, every human being is to be loved and reverenced. The saying that names “the Turk, the black, the white” is not a throwaway line but a compressed theology — a refusal, on the ground of the imago Dei, of every division by nation, race, or religion that would license the withholding of love (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography; OrthodoxWiki, following the sisterhood).

The cost of this teaching, in his time and place, should not be missed. Amphilochios was a Greek monk of the Dodecanese, formed in the memory of the Ottoman centuries and living through the Italian occupation and the wars of the twentieth century — a setting in which enmity toward “the Turk” and suspicion of the foreigner were the natural passions of the age. To name the Turk first among those he was born to love was to strike directly at the enmity nearest to hand, and to insist that the Gospel’s love admits no exception on grounds of nation or faith. This is the same universality that bore fruit in the missionary reach of his spiritual children to the peoples of East Africa (see The Nuns and the Mission) and in his irenic counsel to the diaspora to be neither defensive nor aggressive but simply themselves (see The Confessor of Souls).

Joy and Hope Against Fear

If love was the substance of his teaching, joy and hope were its atmosphere. Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), who knew him, named among the traits that most distinguished him “his sense of tranquil yet triumphant joy” (Metropolitan Kallistos [Ware], “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, SVS Press, 2000; see Gentleness and Discernment). This joy was not incidental to his message but part of it. Amphilochios set joy and hope deliberately against fear — the “perfect love” of 1 John that “casteth out fear.” He is remembered as an elder who sent people away from confession lightened rather than crushed, hopeful rather than despairing, and who regarded the cultivation of joy and hope as itself a spiritual work (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his joy and his setting of hope against fear; see Counsels and Sayings).

This is a note that unites him with the other elders of his generation — Porphyrios’s insistence that Christ comes not through fear and pressure but through love and joy; Paisios’s humour and consolation — and it distinguishes their pastoral manner from a more fearful and penitential style. For Amphilochios the fear that the tradition rightly commends is the “fear of God” that is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10), reverence and awe; but the servile fear that paralyzes the soul is the enemy of love and is to be cast out by love (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography; compare St. Porphyrios and St. Paisios).

The Burning Heart

The love Amphilochios preached was not cool benevolence but an ardent thing. Among his counsels preserved and circulated is the exhortation to cultivate such a love for the person of Christ that at the mere pronouncing of His name tears come to the eyes and the heart genuinely burns — a call to an affective, personal love of Jesus, not merely a dutiful observance (a widely circulated counsel of the elder, transmitted through the sisterhood’s collections of his sayings; the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography and counsels). [Disputed: the exact wording and setting of individual sayings. The counsels of Amphilochios reach us mainly through his community’s compilations and through the recollections of his spiritual children; the substance is consistent, but the precise wording of any given saying varies between the versions in circulation, and per METHODOLOGY §2.4 the provenance of such compiled sayings is treated as a topic in its own right (see Counsels and Sayings).] The point of the counsel is characteristic: the “religion of love” is not an idea about love but a fire to be kindled — a real, warm, personal attachment to Christ that overflows into love of neighbour and of all creation.

Love Extended to Creation

Finally, Amphilochios’s religion of love did not stop at the human. It extended, famously, to the whole of God’s creation — to the trees he asked penitents to plant, to the natural world he taught his children to reverence as God’s handiwork. This extension of love beyond the human to the created order is the subject of Section 06, and it is one of the most distinctive things about him (see Whoever Plants a Tree and Care for Creation). It is best understood not as a separate doctrine but as the outermost reach of the one “religion of love”: if God is love and has made all things, then love of God overflows into love of all that God has made — the neighbour of every nation, and the very trees and the earth. In Amphilochios the Johannine gospel of the island of the Apocalypse became a gospel of love embracing God, humanity, and creation together.

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. (Love as the substance of his teaching; joy and hope against fear; the counsel to love Christ ardently.)
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Amphilochios (Makris) of Patmos.” (The saying on loving every person — the Turk, the black, the white — as the image of God.)
  • 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. (His tranquil yet triumphant joy.)
  • Scripture: 1 John 4:16, 4:18 (God is love; perfect love casts out fear); Luke 1:38; Proverbs 9:10 (the fear of God).