Forced Back from Athos (c. 1925–1927)

The wound that turned the course of St. Porphyrios’s life: the severe pleurisy that broke the health of the young monk Nikitas after a few years of extreme asceticism at Kavsokalyvia, leading his elders to send him from the Holy Mountain for the sake of his life; his return toward his native Evia and his lodging at the Monastery of St. Charalampos at Lefkon; the providential presence there of Archbishop Porphyrios III of Sinai, who, recognizing the young monk’s virtue, ordained him deacon and then priest in 1927 and gave him the name Porphyrios; and the grief of a man who would spend the rest of his life longing for the Mountain he had been forced to leave.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

The Pleurisy

The asceticism of Kavsokalyvia — barefoot vigils, near-fasting, sleep on the floor, hard labor on the rocks — was more than the body of a half-grown boy could indefinitely bear. After some years on the Mountain, the young monk Nikitas fell gravely ill with pleurisy (a severe inflammation of the lining of the lungs), and his condition became dangerous (Wounded by Love, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, “I leave the Holy Mountain”; Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). His elders, fearing for his life and judging that he could not survive the rigors of the skete in his state, took the decision that broke his heart: they sent him off the Holy Mountain, back toward the world and his native island, where he could be cared for and might recover (Porphyrios (Bairaktaris) the Kapsokalivite, OrthodoxWiki).

The early accounts agree that he was still very young when this happened — in his late teens or so; one widely repeated account puts his departure from Athos at around age nineteen (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). It is worth pausing on what this meant to him. He had run away to Athos as a child to be a hidden hermit for the rest of his life; the Life he loved had promised him exactly that; and now, just as the life had begun to take root and the gift of grace had been given to him there, his own body tore it away from him. He never stopped grieving it. Decades later, the longing to return to Athos to die would shape the close of his life (see Return to Kavsokalyvia). The illness was, in the most literal sense, the wound on which his whole subsequent vocation in the world was built.

Lefkon and the Archbishop of Sinai

Back in the region of his birth, the young monk lodged at the Monastery of St. Charalampos at Lefkon (Lefka), near Avlonari in Evia, where he could be nursed and could continue, as far as his strength allowed, his monastic life (Wounded by Love, “Ordination”; Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). It was there that the second great providence of his early life met him.

Present at the monastery — by the accounts, having come to the region — was Porphyrios (Pavlinos) III, the Archbishop of Sinai (the abbot-archbishop of the Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai). The aged hierarch came to know the young monk and was deeply struck by him: by his virtue, his prayer, and — as the accounts have it — the gifts of grace that were already evident in him (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com; Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wikipedia). Recognizing what he was looking at, the Archbishop resolved to ordain him.

Ordination (1927) and the Name Porphyrios

The ordination took place at the Monastery of St. Charalampos. By the well-attested account, Archbishop Porphyrios III ordained the young monk deacon on July 26, 1927, and priest the following day, July 27, 1927 (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com; Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wikipedia). At his ordination he received the name Porphyrios — the name of the ordaining archbishop himself — by which he would be known for the rest of his life and as a saint. He was about twenty-one years old (Wounded by Love, “Ordination”).

[Disputed: most accounts, including the OrthoChristian Short Biography and Wikipedia, give the ordination as July 26–27, 1927, at age twenty-one; some popular accounts instead place it in 1926 at age twenty, naming the ordaining hierarch as Porphyrios III, Archbishop of Sinai (so, e.g., the OrthodoxWiki summary and several parish Lives). The 1927/age-twenty-one chronology, with deacon and priest on consecutive days, is the more detailed and is followed here.]

The name proved fitting. Porphyrios — from porphyra, the imperial purple — would become, in his hiddenness, a kind of purple-clad king of the inner life; but the immediate point of the name was simpler and more human: the dying Athonite vocation of the boy Nikitas was reborn, under a new name, as the priestly vocation of the man Porphyrios. The hermit who could not stay on the Mountain became a priest who would carry the Mountain into the world.

The Theology of a Thwarted Vocation

There is a pattern in Orthodox hagiography, and indeed in St. Porphyrios’s own teaching, that gives the illness its deeper meaning. The saints’ lives are full of vocations that seem, at the human level, to be broken or thwarted — and that turn out, in God’s providence, to be the very means by which a greater good is accomplished. The reader of this repository will recognize the type in St. Ambrose of Optina, whose health was destroyed before his eldership began, so that the invalid who could not serve the Liturgy became the most sought-after elder in Russia (see, in the sibling collection, the model file on St. Ambrose’s formation). St. Porphyrios belongs to the same pattern. His Athonite vocation was, humanly speaking, ruined by the pleurisy — the hidden hermit’s life he had longed for since boyhood was taken from him almost as soon as it began. And precisely that ruin became the door to a ministry of incomparably wider reach.

St. Porphyrios’s own teaching on illness — that sickness, embraced with love and offered to Christ, becomes a means of grace rather than a mere misfortune (see Reading Souls in the City) — was not abstract doctrine but the distilled wisdom of a life that began with exactly such a providential illness and would be punctuated by grave sickness to its very end. He knew, from the inside, what it was to have one’s deepest desire thwarted by a failing body, and to discover that God was working through the thwarting. The pleurisy of his youth was the first lesson in a curriculum of redemptive suffering that lasted the rest of his life — and it is no accident that the elder who had learned this lesson so early became so powerful a consoler of the sick and dying in the wards of the Athens Polyclinic.

A Priest in the World, an Athonite at Heart

The transformation was real but it was never complete, and St. Porphyrios would not have wanted it to be. He was now a priest in the world — and would soon be a confessor and then a city chaplain — but he remained, in his own self-understanding and in everything the sources record, an Athonite hesychast. He carried the inner life of Kavsokalyvia — the Jesus Prayer, the asceticism, the grace — into parishes, villages, and finally a great hospital. The later description of him as “a hesychast from the Holy Mountain in the heart of a city” (the title of A. N. Papathanasiou’s study, Denise Harvey, 2014) is precise: the illness moved his body to the world, but it could not move his heart from the Mountain.

What the illness did, providentially, was widen the field of his ministry beyond anything a hidden Athonite hermit could have reached. Had he stayed at Kavsokalyvia, he would have been a holy monk known to a few. Driven into the world and ordained, he became a priest accessible to thousands — and the charism of insight given to him as a boy on the Mountain was now set to work in the confessional, where it first became visible to the world (see The Young Confessor).

A Note on the Chronology

The reconstruction of these early years is necessarily approximate, because St. Porphyrios was an obscure young monk whom no one was yet documenting, and the principal source for the period is his own much later reminiscence in Wounded by Love, supplemented by the early Greek biographers who gathered the testimony after his repose. The fixed points are reasonably firm: his birth in 1906; his ordination by Archbishop Porphyrios III of Sinai at Lefkon; his elevation to Archimandrite in 1938; his Athens chaplaincy from 1940. The softer points — the exact age of his flight to Athos, the precise years of his Athonite life, the exact age at which the pleurisy struck and he left the Mountain, the precise year of ordination — vary somewhat across the accounts, and where they do, this collection has flagged the variation rather than choosing silently among them (see the disputes noted here and in Evia and the Boy Who Fled to Athos). The variation is of the ordinary kind that attends the early life of any figure who became famous only decades later; it touches the chronology, not the substance. What is not in doubt is the shape of the thing: a child fled to Athos, received grace there, was driven back to the world by illness while still young, and was ordained a priest in his native Evia — the providential sequence on which his whole life in the world was built.

References

Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. Chapters on leaving the Holy Mountain, the illness, the lodging at Lefkon, and the ordination.
Elder Porphyrios (Bairaktaris): A Short Biography. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/66300.html). The pleurisy and departure from Athos (c. age nineteen); the Monastery of St. Charalampos at Lefkon; Archbishop Porphyrios III of Sinai; ordination as deacon (July 26, 1927) and priest (July 27, 1927); the name Porphyrios.
Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia. Wikipedia. Ordination at age twenty-one under the name Porphyrios by Porphyrios III of Sinai; chronology of the early life.
Porphyrios (Bairaktaris) the Kapsokalivite. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). The elders’ decision to send him from Athos; the alternative dating (1926, age twenty) noted in the dispute.
Papathanasiou, Athanasios N. A Hesychast from the Holy Mountain in the Heart of a City. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2014. On the Athonite hesychast who lived his hiddenness in the modern city.