Whoever Plants a Tree

Amphilochios is remembered, far beyond Orthodox circles, for a strikingly early ecological spirituality: he planted trees on the once-barren island of Patmos, taught that “whoever plants a tree plants hope, peace, and love,” and is said to have assigned the planting and tending of a tree as a work of repentance at confession. This file examines the practice and the famous saying, citing carefully and distinguishing what is securely attested from what is paraphrase.

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

The Testimony of Kallistos Ware

The best-attested source for Amphilochios’s love of trees is again Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), who witnessed it firsthand on Patmos in the 1960s. Ware records that the elder taught a “commandment” of love toward the trees, and preserves the elder’s own words in a form that has become widely quoted: “Do you know that God gave us one more commandment, which is not recorded in Scripture? It is the commandment, ‘Love the trees.’” Ware adds that Amphilochios believed “whoever does not love trees does not love Christ” (Metropolitan Kallistos [Ware], on Amphilochios and the trees, in his lecture and essay on the creation, e.g. “Through the Creation to the Creator” and the 2005 lecture on Orthodoxy and the environment; the saying is also cited in Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, SVS Press, 2000). Because Ware was a critical firsthand witness and the elder’s own spiritual son, this transmission is the anchor for the whole of Amphilochios’s ecological reputation, and it is unusually secure by the standards of a saint’s sayings.

Ware also records the practice behind the teaching. As a confessor, Amphilochios would give the planting of a tree, and its subsequent care, as an epitimion — a penance or spiritual assignment — so that repentance issued not merely in an act of contrition but in an act of life and creation (Ware, on Amphilochios’s assigning of tree-planting at confession, in his writings on the creation; the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder). The nuns of the convent, it is added, were charged with watering the young trees through the dry Aegean summers (Ware, on the watering of the trees).

“Hope, Peace, and Love”

The single saying most often quoted from Amphilochios — and the one named in the very title of this file — is the counsel that whoever plants a tree plants hope, peace, and love. It circulates in several closely related forms, of which a representative version runs: “When you plant a tree, you plant hope, you plant peace, you plant love, and you will receive God’s blessing” (a widely circulated form of the elder’s counsel, transmitted through the sisterhood’s collections and the ecological literature that has taken him up; the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography and counsels).

[Disputed: the exact wording and attribution of the tree-planting counsel. The saying circulates in multiple forms — “whoever plants a tree plants hope, peace, and love and receives the blessing of God”; “when you plant a tree, you plant hope, you plant peace, you plant love”; and others — none of which can be fixed as a single verbatim original, since the elder’s counsels reach us through his community’s compilations and through paraphrase (see METHODOLOGY §2.4). The most securely attested core is (a) Ware’s firsthand report of the “commandment” to love the trees and of “whoever does not love trees does not love Christ,” and (b) the well-documented practice of assigning tree-planting at confession. The “hope, peace, and love” formula is the authentic substance of his teaching, transmitted faithfully by his community, but is quoted here as such a transmission rather than as a fixed verbatim text. The counsel should be cited with this care, not treated as a documented ipsissima verba.]

The Greening of Patmos

The practice had a visible result. Patmos is a dry, rocky island that historically bore few trees; Amphilochios set himself to change this, planting and encouraging the planting of trees — the large pines that came to shade parts of the once-bare island are attributed to his initiative — and directing the students of the Patmias Ecclesiastical School and his penitents to do the same, so that wooded areas grew where there had been bare rock (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on the planting of trees on Patmos; the ecological literature on Amphilochios, following Ware and the sisterhood, on his bringing the pines to the island). Whether or not every particular claim of “the first trees on Patmos” can be documented, the substance — that the elder deliberately and successfully reforested parts of a barren island as a spiritual work — is well attested and remains visible on the ground. [Disputed: the claim that Patmos had “no trees” before the elder. The stronger devotional versions state that the island had no trees at all before Amphilochios; the sober version is that Patmos was largely barren and that the elder introduced and propagated trees, notably pines, on a significant scale. The reforesting initiative is secure; the absolute “no trees before him” is a devotional heightening and is flagged as such.]

Why This Matters

Two features make Amphilochios’s tree-planting more than a charming eccentricity. The first is its earliness. He was doing this from at least the mid-twentieth century — decades before ecological concern became a common Christian theme, and long before the Ecumenical Patriarchate, under Patriarchs Dimitrios and Bartholomew, made the care of creation a signature of its witness in the 1980s and after. To find, on a small Aegean island in the 1950s and 60s, a confessor assigning tree-planting as penance and teaching that love of trees is inseparable from love of Christ, is to find a genuine forerunner of a movement that the wider Church would only later articulate (Ware, on the significance of Amphilochios’s early ecological witness, in his writings on the creation; see Care for Creation).

The second is its integration. Amphilochios’s ecology was not a program bolted onto his spirituality but an organic extension of it. The same man who taught the “religion of love” and who lifted the burdens of penitents assigned the planting of a tree as the fruit of repentance — uniting the sacrament of confession, the labour of the hands, the care of creation, and the theology of hope in a single homely act (see The Confessor of Souls; The Gospel of Love and Joy). To plant a tree in penance is to turn from sin toward life, to make reparation not in the abstract but in the greening of the earth, and to sow — literally — hope. The theology that underlies this is the subject of the next file (see Care for Creation).

See Also

References

  • Ware, Metropolitan Kallistos (of Diokleia). Writings on Orthodoxy and the creation, including “Through the Creation to the Creator” and his 2005 lecture on Orthodoxy and the environment; and “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom (Collected Works, vol. 1), Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The firsthand report of Amphilochios’s “commandment” to love the trees, “whoever does not love trees does not love Christ,” and the assigning of tree-planting at confession.)
  • 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 planting of trees on Patmos; the “hope, peace, and love” counsel; the nuns’ watering of the trees.)
  • Methodology reference: METHODOLOGY.md §2.4 (compiled sayings) and §3.5 (attestation).