The Elders and the Gift

The Athonite formation of the boy who became St. Porphyrios: his two elders at the Hut of St. George in Kavsokalyvia — the hieromonk Panteleimon, his spiritual father, and Ioannikios — and the severe, total obedience he gave them; his tonsure as the monk Nikitas; and the foundational account, told in his own remembered words in Wounded by Love, of how, watching the old monk Dimas make his prostrations one night, he received the charism of grace and of “clear sight.” Throughout, the Elder’s own insistence is reported as the sources report it: that this was grace, given by God, and never a skill that is learnt or a gift to be sought.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

Two Elders, One Obedience

When the boy Evangelos arrived at Kavsokalyvia, he was placed under two elders who shared the Hut (Kalyva) of St. George: the hieromonk Panteleimon, who became his spiritual father (Gerontas), and Ioannikios, his fellow-elder — by some accounts Panteleimon’s brother according to the flesh — who was a priest (Wounded by Love, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, “My elders”; Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). The early accounts agree that the two elders had a reputation for being unusually austere (Porphyrios (Bairaktaris) the Kapsokalivite, OrthodoxWiki). They were demanding men, and the discipline of the Hut of St. George was hard.

Into that discipline the boy poured himself without reserve. The single most emphasized feature of his early monastic life, in every account, is the totality of his obedience. As he later described it, and as Wounded by Love records, he cut off his own will so completely that, in the phrase the biographies use, “his will disappeared into his elder’s will” (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com, paraphrasing the reminiscences in Wounded by Love). He kept nothing back for himself. He asked a blessing for the smallest action; he embraced the harshest tasks; he slept little, on the floor, under a single blanket; he walked barefoot over the rocks; he kept long vigils of prostrations through the night (Wounded by Love, “My ascetic struggles”). The asceticism was extreme even by Athonite measure — and it was undertaken not as a grim feat but, by his own telling, out of love: the same love that had spelled out a saint’s Life on a hillside now drove the labor and the vigils.

He was tonsured a monk and given the name Nikitas — the name by which he was known on the Mountain through these years; the name Porphyrios came only later, at his ordination in the world (Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wikipedia, which dates the tonsure as Nikitas to about age fourteen; see Forced Back from Athos).

The Night of Old Dimas: The Account of the Gift

The foundational episode of St. Porphyrios’s life — the moment the whole tradition points to as the reception of his charism — is an account he himself gave, late in life, and which is preserved in Wounded by Love. Per the methodology of this collection, it is reported here as what the Elder himself attested and what the text records, not as adjudicated fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

By his account, there was at the skete an old, hidden ascetic named Dimas (or Demas), a Russian monk of great prayer who concealed his holiness. One night the young Nikitas, returning to the church, came upon old Dimas — who believed himself unobserved — making his prostrations before the locked doors of the church, weeping and praying with such intensity, such manifest grace, that the boy was overwhelmed. Hidden and watching, he was, as he put it, set on fire by what he saw. And in that moment, he said, the old man’s prayer passed to him — the grace of God came upon him, and with it the gift of prayer and of clear sight. As St. Porphyrios reportedly summarized it: “Old Dimas transmitted to me the charisma of prayer and of clear sight” (St. Porphyrios, quoted in Wounded by Love, “Divine grace”; cited in the Theophaneia review of the book, theophaneia.org).

What followed, by the same account, was a transformation. At the Divine Liturgy soon after, his whole being overflowed; the words that came to him, again and again, were simply “Glory to You, O God! Glory to You, O God! Glory to You, O God!” (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com, drawing on Wounded by Love). From this experience, the accounts say, he began to perceive things hidden from ordinary sight — the states of souls, things at a distance, things to come. One image he gave of those early days has become famous: “I would sit on a stone and see my elders praying far away, though they were invisible to the eye” (St. Porphyrios, reported in the popular Lives, e.g., Saint Porphyrios the Prophet, and in Wounded by Love).

“It Is Grace”: The Theological Framing

It would be a serious distortion of the sources to report this account as a tale of a wonder-working power acquired. The Elder himself never let it be told that way, and his framing is part of the record — indeed, it is the most important part of it.

St. Porphyrios insisted, all his life, that the gift was grace — charis, the uncreated grace of God — and not anything of his own. His best-known statement on the matter is blunt: “It’s not something that’s learnt. It’s not a skill. It is GRACE” (St. Porphyrios, quoted in Wounded by Love, “Divine grace”; Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). He tied the gift inseparably to humility: “With humility you attract the grace of God,” and “even if you do all in the world, you achieve nothing if you haven’t acquired humility” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “Humility and love”). The charism, in his account, was not a reward for his asceticism but a free gift of God that came through the prayer of a hidden old man and through the door of his own self-emptying obedience.

And — crucially for everything that follows — he taught that such gifts are never to be sought. To seek signs, to want clairvoyance, to desire to work wonders, is for St. Porphyrios a dangerous spiritual error, a door to delusion (plani). The grace is given to the humble who do not want it; it is poison to those who do (see The Warnings, which treats this teaching in full). This is why the present collection treats the charism with such care: the Elder who possessed it more visibly than almost any modern saint was also its most insistent critic when it was made the object of desire.

Obedience as the Door to Grace

It is worth dwelling on the place of obedience in this account, because in St. Porphyrios’s own understanding it was not incidental to the gift but the very door through which the gift came. The Athonite and broader Orthodox monastic tradition holds obedience to be the foundational virtue — the cutting-off of one’s own will being the most direct assault on the root passion of pride, and therefore the surest path to the humility that draws grace (on the tradition, see Spiritual Direction). St. Porphyrios embodied this to an extreme degree, and he understood his own experience in its terms: the boy who had emptied himself of his own will into his elder’s will had made himself, precisely, the humble and self-forgetful vessel into which grace could be poured.

This is the inner logic that binds the two halves of his foundational story together. The gift of clear sight did not come to a self-asserting, ambitious, gifted young monk who sought spiritual experiences; it came to a boy who had annihilated his own will in obedience and who wanted nothing for himself. The grace and the humility are not two separate facts but one: the self-emptying made the room, and grace filled it. And this is exactly why St. Porphyrios could later teach, with such conviction, that gifts are never to be sought and that humility is the one thing necessary (see The Warnings). He was generalizing from his own experience: the surest way to forfeit the conditions for grace is to want its gifts; the surest way to receive them is to want only Christ, in humility and obedience. His later doctrine and his early experience are a single, consistent whole.

What the Gift Was For

In the years that followed, the charism did not make Nikitas a celebrity of the Mountain — he was a hidden boy in a remote skete. What it did was make him, even very young, a reader of souls and a vessel of consolation. The accounts have his elders themselves recognizing the gift; the OrthoChristian biography notes that the grace given to him became known to those near him even as he tried to conceal it (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). It was a charism oriented entirely toward love — toward seeing into a person in order to help, console, and heal, never toward display. That orientation would define the thirty-three years he later spent hearing confessions in Athens (see Reading Souls in the City) and the whole shape of his teaching, in which the point of seeing into a soul is to love it toward Christ.

But the Athonite idyll was brief. The body that had sustained the barefoot vigils of Kavsokalyvia broke down; a severe pleurisy struck the young monk, and his elders, fearing for his life, sent him off the Mountain — a wound from which, humanly speaking, his Athonite vocation never recovered, and which turned the hidden hermit into the hidden priest of a great city (see Forced Back from Athos).

See Also

• Evia and the Boy Who Fled to Athos — the origins and the flight that brought him to these elders
• Accounts of Clairvoyance — the documented later accounts of the charism described here, pinned to named witnesses
• The Warnings — his insistence that such gifts come only by grace and are never to be sought
• Wounded by Love — how this charism of love issued in his whole teaching of turning to Christ
• Orthodoxy Guide: Spiritual Direction — the obedience-and-eldership tradition into which the boy was formed

References

• Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. The Elder’s own account of his elders Panteleimon and Ioannikios, his ascetic struggles, the night of old Dimas, the reception of grace, and the insistence “It is GRACE.”
• Elder Porphyrios (Bairaktaris): A Short Biography. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/66300.html). The elders at the Hut of St. George; the total obedience; the Dimas episode and the “Glory to You, O God”; the gift as grace, not skill.
• Porphyrios (Bairaktaris) the Kapsokalivite. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). The two elders’ austere reputation; the formation at Kavsokalyvia.
• Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia. Wikipedia. Tonsure as the monk Nikitas (the name borne on Athos before his ordination as Porphyrios).
• “Book Review: Spiritual Eldership, Confession and Charisms in Wounded by Love.” Theophaneia.org. On the Dimas account and the framing of the charism as transmitted grace, drawn from the book.