The Books and the Influence

How the life and teaching of a near-illiterate former shepherd reached millions: the making of Wounded by Love by the Sisters of the Holy Convent of Chrysopigi from an archive of notes and recordings, its first Greek publication in 2003 and its translation into more than twenty languages; the further Counsels and the multi-volume testimony collections; and the place St. Porphyrios now holds among modern Orthodox elders — above all the standing comparison with his great contemporary St. Paisios of Mount Athos, the two twin lights of late-twentieth-century Athonite holiness, alike in sanctity and gift yet instructively different in temper and emphasis.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

Wounded by Love: The Making of the Book

St. Porphyrios is the rare saint of the first rank who left almost nothing in writing of his own. He wrote no treatises and few letters; his teaching survives because others remembered it and wrote it down. The principal vessel of that teaching is Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios, and the story of its making is itself part of the saint’s legacy.

Across more than three decades, two women who were among his spiritual children — who, as the book’s own preface notes, “knew him for a period of more than thirty years” — kept an archive of notes and recordings of his reminiscences, conversations, and counsels (Wounded by Love, Editor’s Preface, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005; Wounded by Love listing, Goodreads). After his repose, this archive was entrusted to the Holy Convent of the Life-Giving Spring at Chrysopigi, near Chania in western Crete, whose sisters compiled and edited it into the book (Wounded by Love, Chrysopigi; deniseharveypublisher.gr). The Greek original — Βίος καὶ Λόγοι (Life and Words) — was first published in 2003; the English translation, by John Raffan, was published in 2005 by Denise Harvey (Publisher) in Limni, Evia (the same house that has issued much of the finest English-language Greek Orthodox literature). The book is thus a compiled and edited record of remembered conversation — a fact this collection has kept in view throughout, per METHODOLOGY §2.4 — but a record of unusual closeness and care, gathered by those who knew him best and held by a monastery.

A Worldwide Diffusion

The reach of Wounded by Love has been extraordinary. The book has been translated into more than twenty languages and read by millions of people around the world, far beyond the Orthodox world (deniseharveypublisher.gr; Wounded by Love publisher’s notice). It has become one of the most widely read works of contemporary Orthodox spirituality — a publishing phenomenon that carried the luminous, joyful teaching of a hidden Greek elder to readers on every continent, many of whom had never heard of Kavsokalyvia or the Athens Polyclinic. The paradox is complete: the boy who managed two years of school and learned to read with difficulty became, through a book he did not write, one of the most-read spiritual teachers of his age.

Beyond Wounded by Love, the legacy is carried by further compilations of his counsels and by the multi-volume collections of eyewitness testimony (e.g., Saint Porphyrios the Prophet — Witnesses), as well as by studies such as A. N. Papathanasiou’s A Hesychast from the Holy Mountain in the Heart of a City (Denise Harvey, 2014). Metropolitan Meliton noted at the glorification that already more than fifty books documented the saint’s life (see Canonization 2013). This whole literature shares the character of Wounded by Love: it transmits a teaching that was spoken, not written, and gathered by those who heard it.

Why the Teaching Travels

Part of the reason for this diffusion is the content of St. Porphyrios’s teaching, which speaks with unusual directness to modern people. His emphasis on love over fear, on turning to Christ rather than fighting one’s faults, on beauty and joy and the goodness of creation, on raising children without coercion, and on prayer without strain (see Sections 05–07) meets the contemporary reader in his actual anxieties and offers a Christianity that is luminous rather than grim, joyful rather than fearful — without ceasing, for all that, to be the full ascetic and sacramental faith of the Orthodox Church. He is a saint who can be handed to a non-Orthodox friend, a struggling parent, or an anxious beginner in prayer, and met with relief and recognition. That accessibility, grounded in genuine depth, is the engine of his influence.

The Comparison with St. Paisios

St. Porphyrios is, almost inevitably, compared with St. Paisios of Mount Athos (1924–1994), his younger contemporary and fellow Athonite, glorified by the same Ecumenical Patriarchate just over two years after him (January 13, 2015; see the sibling collection St. Paisios of Mount Athos). The two are the twin great elders of late-twentieth-century Greek Orthodoxy, and they were known to each other and to many of the same spiritual children. Both were Athonites of humble origin; both bore the charism of insight; both became, through posthumous compilations of their spoken teaching, immensely influential teachers of the modern Orthodox world.

But the comparison is most useful where it draws out the differences of temper and emphasis, and the tradition has noted them:

St. Porphyrios is, above all, the elder of love, beauty, and joy — the teacher of the divine eros, of “turn to Christ, do not fight evil,” of nature as a secret Gospel and the soul as a poet. His emphasis falls on the positive: on filling the soul with Christ and light. He was a hidden city chaplain who lived his hesychasm in the heart of Athens.
St. Paisios is more the elder of ascetic struggle, discernment, and the sober reading of the times — sharper, more austere, more given to direct counsel on the spiritual combat, the passions, the family, and the trials of the age, and to the prophetic and the practical. He lived as a recognizable Athonite ascetic in his hermitage.

The two are complementary rather than competing — the gentle, eros-driven teacher of love and the bracing, ascetic counselor of struggle — and many Orthodox hold them together as two faces of the one tradition: the joyful and the sober, the eros and the ascesis, both crowned in the same holiness. Read alongside each other (and alongside the Ladder tradition that St. Porphyrios reorients; see Not by Struggle Alone), they give a remarkably full picture of what Athonite holiness looked like in the modern world.

The Discipline of Reading a Compiled Saint

The very phenomenon that made St. Porphyrios so widely known — a teaching transmitted through posthumously compiled books of remembered conversation — also imposes a discipline on anyone who would represent him faithfully, and it is the discipline this whole collection has tried to observe. Because he wrote nothing himself, every saying attributed to him reaches us at one or more removes: spoken by him in conversation, remembered by a hearer, written down (sometimes years later), edited into a published text, and translated. Wounded by Love is, as its compilers acknowledge, an edited compilation from an archive of notes and recordings — not a verbatim transcript, and not the saint’s own pen (Wounded by Love, Editor’s Preface).

This does not make the teaching unreliable — it was gathered with great care by those who knew him longest and held by a monastery — but it does mean that it should be reported with its provenance in view, per the repository’s methodology (METHODOLOGY §2.4 on compiled sayings). The right posture is neither credulity (treating every circulating quotation as the saint’s exact and certain words) nor skepticism (dismissing the whole record), but attestation: citing the teaching to the text that carries it, preferring the earliest and most authoritative compilation (Wounded by Love above the looser secondary collections), and being especially cautious with the free-floating “Porphyrios quotes” that circulate online, many of which are paraphrases, conflations, or of uncertain origin. The same discipline applies, with even more force, to the charism and miracle accounts, which this collection has pinned throughout to their named witnesses rather than asserting as bare fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see Accounts of Clairvoyance). To love a saint is not to abandon care about his record; it is, on the contrary, to take his record seriously enough to get it right.

The Standing of the Saint

In the decades since his repose and especially since his 2013 glorification, St. Porphyrios has taken his place among the most beloved saints of contemporary Orthodoxy — venerated across all the canonical Churches, his icon and his book found wherever the modern Orthodox renewal has reached, and his teaching of love absorbed into the ordinary spiritual life of countless families and individuals. He is, with St. Paisios, St. Silouan, St. Nektarios, and the elders of the recent past, one of the figures through whom the ancient tradition has spoken most freshly to the present age (see the sibling collections St. Silouan the Athonite and St. Nektarios of Aegina). That a hidden shepherd-boy from Evia, who could barely read and who spent his life as an obscure hospital chaplain, should have become so is itself the kind of thing his whole teaching would lead one to expect: that the love of Christ, hidden and humble, is the most powerful and far-reaching thing there is.

References

Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. (Greek original Βίος καὶ Λόγοι, Holy Convent of Chrysopigi, 2003.) Editor’s Preface on the archive of notes and recordings kept by two of his spiritual children over more than thirty years and entrusted to the Convent of Chrysopigi, Chania.
Denise Harvey (Publisher), deniseharveypublisher.gr. The Chrysopigi compilation; the translation into more than twenty languages and worldwide readership; Papathanasiou’s A Hesychast from the Holy Mountain in the Heart of a City (2014).
Two Metropolitans on the Canonization of Saint Porphyrios. johnsanidopoulos.com. Metropolitan Meliton’s note that more than fifty books documented the saint’s life.
Saint Porphyrios the Prophet — Witnesses, vols. 1–3. monastiriaka.gr. The eyewitness testimony collections.
St. Paisios of Mount Athos (this repository, sibling collection). For the comparison of the two elders, glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2013 and 2015 respectively.