01 — Foundations
The Russian and Parisian ground from which St. Sophrony of Essex (1896–1993) rose: the Moscow childhood in a devout merchant family, the gifted painter who exhibited in Russia and then in the Paris of the Russian emigration, the upheaval of the Revolution that drove him into exile, and — beneath the biography — the spiritual crisis of his youth, when he turned from the Christianity of his childhood to a non-Christian, quasi-Buddhist mysticism of the impersonal Absolute, and then, in anguish over the personal God of the “I AM,” returned to Christ. These two files establish who Sergei Sakharov was before Mount Athos and what question drove him there.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (20th-c. elder; disciple of St Silouan)
Sophrony’s later theology — his insistence that the Absolute is not an impersonal essence but a personal God who names Himself “I AM,” and that the human person is fulfilled only in the image of that personal God — cannot be read apart from the crisis of his youth, which he himself recounted as the formative wound and gift of his life. This section sets that context: the artist’s formation and the world of the Russian emigration in Paris (the milieu of the patristic revival), and the religious search that carried him out of the Church into Eastern meditation and back, on his account, by the grace of the personal God.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Russia, Art, and Exile | Sergei Semyonovich Sakharov, born Moscow 1896 in a merchant family; the gifted painter trained at the Moscow school; the Revolution of 1917 and its aftermath; emigration to Berlin and then Paris (1922); the artist exhibiting in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in the émigré capital. |
| The Search for the Absolute | The youthful abandonment of the Christianity of his childhood for an impersonal, Eastern-influenced mysticism; the crisis precipitated by the biblical “I AM THAT I AM”; the return to Christ and the personal God, as Sophrony himself narrates it in We Shall See Him as He Is. |
See Also
- The Monk on the Holy Mountain — where the search led: Mount Athos from 1925
- We Shall See Him as He Is — the autobiographical work in which Sophrony recounts the crisis of his youth
- The Patristic Revival — the Russian émigré theological world of Paris
References
- Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988.
- Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002.
- Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.