The Church and the Sacraments

The ecclesial ground of St. Porphyrios’s whole teaching: that the love of Christ he preached is lived in and through the Church — His Body — and her mysteries. For the Athonite hesychast there is no private Christianity; the soul wounded with love for Christ is united to Him in the sacramental life of the Church, above all in confession (the medicine of repentance he administered for sixty years) and the Eucharist (the food of immortality). His own life — priest, confessor, hospital chaplain, founder of a monastery — was the lived embodiment of this conviction: that to love Christ is to love His Church, and to be healed by Christ is to be healed within her.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

No Private Christianity

It would be possible, from a careless reading of his teaching of love, to imagine St. Porphyrios as a teacher of a warm, individual, churchless spirituality — “just love Christ in your heart.” Nothing could be further from the truth. St. Porphyrios was, from the age of twelve or so to his last breath, a man of the Church in the fullest institutional and sacramental sense: a monk of the Holy Mountain, an ordained priest for sixty-four years, a confessor who administered the Mystery of Repentance to thousands, a hospital chaplain who brought the sacraments to the sick and dying, and the founder of a monastery. His love of Christ was never a flight from the Church but a life lived wholly within her. For St. Porphyrios, the Church is the Body of Christ — to be united to Christ is to be a living member of His Body, and the love of Christ and the love of His Church are one and the same love (Wounded by Love, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, “The Church”). One cannot love the Head and despise the Body.

This ecclesial rootedness is the necessary corrective to any sentimentalizing of his message. The divine eros he taught is not a private mysticism but the inmost life of a churchman — fed by the liturgy, the fasts, the feasts, the icons, and above all the sacraments. He drew the whole of his interior life from the Church’s well, and he sent every soul he counseled back to that same well.

Confession: The Medicine of Repentance

The sacrament St. Porphyrios served most constantly was confession — the Mystery of Repentance — and his understanding of it is woven all through this collection (see The Young Confessor and Reading Souls in the City). He spent his life in the confessional, and he understood the sacrament not as a tribunal of judgment but as a place of healing — the medicine by which the soul’s wounds are cleansed and Christ’s grace restored. This is why his confessional manner was so merciful and so discerning: a physician adjusts the medicine to the patient, weighing (with St. Basil) the manner of repentance rather than the letter of the canons. The point of confession, for St. Porphyrios, was always the cure of the soul and its restoration to the love of Christ — never mere accusation. To bring one’s sins to confession is, in his teaching, simply to bring one’s wounds to the Physician, in the place He has appointed for their healing.

The Eucharist: The Food of Immortality

If confession is the medicine, the Eucharist is the food — the very Body and Blood of Christ, the “food of immortality,” by which the believer is most intimately united to the Christ he loves. For an Orthodox priest of St. Porphyrios’s depth, the Divine Liturgy is the center of all things, and the reception of Holy Communion the summit of the soul’s union with Christ on earth. His teaching of eros for Christ finds its supreme fulfillment here: the soul that longs for Christ receives Him, really and bodily, in the Eucharist, so that the lover and the Beloved are made one flesh and one blood. The whole interior life of love and prayer that he taught flows toward, and is fed by, this sacramental union. The Athonite hesychast did not oppose the prayer of the heart to the liturgy of the Church; the one is fed by the other, and both have their goal in communion with Christ.

His own deep reverence in celebrating the Liturgy is attested by those who knew him, and his lifelong sorrow in his later years, when illness and blindness limited his ability to serve, testifies to how central the altar was to him.

A Life That Embodied the Teaching

The strongest evidence of St. Porphyrios’s ecclesial conviction is not a set of statements but the shape of his life. Everything he was, he was within the Church and through her offices: monk, priest, confessor, chaplain, founder. He did not teach a spirituality he stood outside; he was the Church’s man through and through, and his teaching of love was simply the inner meaning of a thoroughly ecclesial and sacramental existence. The same is true of his founding of the Monastery of the Transfiguration at Milesi (see The Monastery at Milesi): the elder of love expressed his love by building up a community of the Church, a place of liturgy and sacrament and common life, to outlast him. And his deepest desire — voiced in his dying words, the prayer of Christ “that they all may be one” (see Return to Kavsokalyvia) — is an ecclesial desire: the unity of all in the one Body of Christ. The love he taught and the Church he served were, in the end, the same reality.

The Communion of Saints and the Whole Body

St. Porphyrios’s ecclesiology is not merely institutional; it is mystical in the proper sense — a vision of the Church as the living Body of Christ in which all the members are bound together in one life. This shows in two of his most characteristic teachings. The first is his teaching on the communion of saints: for St. Porphyrios the saints and the Mother of God are not distant heavenly figures but living members of the same Body to which the believer belongs, present and active, to be loved and entrusted with one’s needs — which is why he counsels parents to entrust their children to the Mother of God in prayer (see The Education of Children), and why his own life was lived in intimate companionship with the saints, beginning with the St. John the Hut-Dweller whose Life first drew him to Athos.

The second is his teaching on the mutual indwelling of the members — the great mystery, as he put it, of identifying oneself with one’s brother and carrying the other’s burden, so that the “me” in “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” comes to enclose the whole Body (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). This is pure Pauline ecclesiology — “if one member suffers, all suffer together” (1 Corinthians 12:26) — lived as a spiritual practice. For St. Porphyrios, to be in the Church is to be so joined to every other member that their pain becomes one’s own and one’s prayer becomes intercession for all. His whole hidden ministry of silent prayer in his last, blind years (see Return to Kavsokalyvia) was this ecclesiology in action: the dying elder, unable to do anything else, bearing the whole Body in his prayer. And his dying words — Christ’s prayer “that they all may be one” — are its final, perfect expression. The love of Christ, the love of the Church, and the love of every member of the Body were, for St. Porphyrios, one indivisible love.

Love of Christ, Love of the Church

It is also worth noting that St. Porphyrios’s ecclesial rootedness kept his luminous, joyful spirituality from drifting into the dangers that beset every “religion of the heart.” A Christianity of warm feeling and personal love for Christ, cut loose from the Church and her sacraments, tends over time to dissolve into subjectivism — each believer the arbiter of his own spirituality, accountable to no tradition, vulnerable to every delusion. St. Porphyrios’s love of Christ was anchored against this drift by the whole objective structure of the Church: the canon of Scripture, the dogmas of the councils, the discipline of the sacraments, the obedience of confession to a spiritual father, the calendar of fasts and feasts, the apostolic succession of the priesthood he himself bore. His eros for Christ was a fire, but a fire kept in the hearth of the Church, where it could warm and not consume. This is why he could be at once so free and so safe a guide: the freedom of his teaching of love rested on the unshakeable ground of his sacramental and ecclesial life. Take away the hearth, and the fire is dangerous; within it, the fire is light and warmth. His whole witness urges the reader to seek the love of Christ exactly where he himself found and kept it — within the Church, at the chalice, in the confessional, under obedience, in the communion of the saints.

The sum is simple and it guards against every misreading: for St. Porphyrios, to love Christ is to love His Church, and the soul wounded with divine eros lives that love sacramentally, in confession and Eucharist, within the Body of Christ. The luminous, joyful, world-affirming Christianity of love that he taught is not an alternative to the Orthodox Church’s sacramental and liturgical life but its living heart. Take away the Church and the sacraments, and his teaching of love loses the very ground it grows in; rooted in them, it is the inmost flame of the whole Orthodox tradition, burning in a hidden Athonite hesychast set down in the heart of a modern city.

References

Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. The chapters on the Church, on confession as the healing of the soul, and on the love of Christ lived within His Body.
Elder Porphyrios (Bairaktaris): A Short Biography. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/66300.html). His lifelong priestly and confessional ministry; the centrality of the Liturgy; his teaching of unity in the one Body of Christ.
Orthodoxy Guide: The Jesus Prayer and Spiritual Direction (this repository). The sacramental and ecclesial setting of the inner life within which his teaching stands.