The Search for the Absolute

The inner drama of Sophrony’s youth, which he himself made the opening of his autobiographical theology: the abandonment of the Christianity of his childhood for an impersonal, Eastern-influenced mysticism that sought union with a supra-personal Absolute; the crisis precipitated when he confronted the biblical name of God, “I AM THAT I AM,” and could no longer rest in an impersonal deity; and the return to Christ and the personal God. This file follows that search as Sophrony narrates it, pinning the visionary and confessional claims to his own writings.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (20th-c. elder; disciple of St Silouan)

The Turning Away

Sometime in his youth — by his own account in the years of his early manhood, overlapping with his life as an artist — Sergei Sakharov set aside the simple faith of his childhood. He came to regard the personal God of his upbringing as too small a conception, a projection that could not be the true Absolute; the genuinely ultimate, he reasoned, must lie beyond all personal limitation, beyond the distinction of “I” and “Thou,” in a supra-personal unity (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, opening autobiographical chapters; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1). This was not a drift into indifference but a deliberate, even ascetical, religious quest: Sakharov turned to forms of meditation he himself associated with the mysticism of the East — a discipline aimed at the dissolution of the personal self into the impersonal Absolute, a “transpersonal” deity beyond being and beyond name (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the “non-Christian mysticism” of Sophrony’s youth).

The seriousness of this period is essential to the theologian he became. Sophrony did not later dismiss his Eastern phase as mere error of the intellect; he treated it as a genuine and powerful spiritual experience that nonetheless led him astray — an ascent that, precisely because it sought the impersonal, abandoned the living God. The whole of his mature theology of the person can be read as the considered answer of a man who had once, with his whole strength, sought to transcend personhood and found at the end of that road not God but a kind of self-divinization and, finally, a confrontation with non-being (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1–2; see The Hypostatic Principle).

The precise content of Sophrony’s youthful meditation is described by him in spiritual rather than doctrinal terms, and the scholarship is correspondingly careful. [Disputed: Sophrony and his interpreters describe his youthful path as an "Eastern," quasi-Buddhist or Hindu-influenced mysticism of the impersonal Absolute (Sophrony, *We Shall See Him as He Is*, 1988); Nicholas Sakharov (*I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, ch. 1) treats it as a syncretic, broadly Indian-inspired meditation rather than adherence to a specific school, and cautions that Sophrony's own retrospective account is theologically shaped; no source documents a formal affiliation with any named Eastern tradition]. What is not in dispute is the structure of the experience as Sophrony reports it: a turning from the personal God toward an impersonal Absolute, pursued through meditation, and reaching a crisis.

The Crisis of the “I AM”

The hinge of the whole search, in Sophrony’s telling, was the divine self-naming of Exodus. Brought up short in his impersonal mysticism, he was struck by the words spoken to Moses from the burning bush: “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14) — the revelation that the Absolute is not an impersonal “It” beyond all personhood but a personal “I,” One who says I AM (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the “I AM”; His Life Is Mine, 1977, on the personal God; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2). The discovery that to be in the fullest sense is to be personal — that the ground of all being names Himself in the first person — overturned the premise of his Eastern quest, in which the personal was precisely what had to be transcended. The God who is I AM could not be reached by the dissolution of the “I”; He could be met only by a person standing before Him as “thou.”

Sophrony made this confrontation the cornerstone of his theology of personhood: the conviction that being is not impersonal but hypostatic, and that the human person, made in the image of the personal God, is fulfilled not by dissolving into an impersonal Absolute but by entering into personal communion with the One who is I AM (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; On Prayer, 1996; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 4, “The Hypostatic Principle”; see The Hypostatic Principle). The crisis of the “I AM” was thus not merely a step in his biography but the seed of his distinctive contribution to modern Orthodox thought.

The Return to Christ

The return was not, on Sophrony’s account, a simple intellectual correction but a movement of repentance accompanied by spiritual experience. He came back to Christ and to the Orthodox Church, and the early period of his recovered faith was marked by an intense and even violent grief over sin — a repentance that he later understood as the necessary descent before any ascent, and that prepared him for what he would learn from St. Silouan about keeping the mind in hell (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the early repentance; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2). He has also left, in the same autobiographical work, the testimony that in this period he was granted an experience of the Uncreated Light — a vision of God as light that he records as the gift that confirmed his return, and that he would spend his life trying to understand and to recover (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the early vision of the Light; see We Shall See Him as He Is).

These are claims of personal religious experience, and they are reported here as such. Per the repository methodology (§3.5), the vision of the Light and the inner movements of repentance and grace are pinned to Sophrony’s own writings as his testimony, not certified as adjudicated fact; their fuller theological treatment, and the questions raised about them, are reserved for Section 05. What the present file establishes is the shape of the search: a turning from the personal God to the impersonal Absolute, a crisis over the biblical “I AM,” and a return to Christ marked by repentance and, on his testimony, by an experience of the Uncreated Light.

Repentance as the Door

What distinguishes Sophrony’s account of his return from a merely intellectual conversion is the centrality of repentance. He describes the period of his recovery of faith as marked by a grief over sin so intense that it could be called a kind of spiritual death — a weeping that, in his telling, opened the soul to God more surely than any reasoning could (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the gift of tears and the depth of repentance; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2). This was not a passing mood but the beginning of a lifelong understanding: that the way up to the vision of God passes through the way down into self-knowledge and contrition, and that the deeper the descent in repentance, the higher the soul may be raised in grace. The seed of what he would later receive from St. Silouan — the word “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not” — is already present in the repentance of these early years, before he had ever set foot on the Holy Mountain (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; on the Silouan word, see The Book That Revealed Silouan).

The repentance also reframed his whole past, including the Eastern phase, as something to be wept over rather than merely corrected. Sophrony did not present his years of impersonal mysticism as an honest mistake honestly amended; he presented them as a turning away from the living God that required not just a change of mind but a change of heart, a return of the prodigal (Luke 15:11–24) who must first come to himself in the far country and then arise and go to his father (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2). The personal God of the “I AM” is not reached by argument but met in repentance — and this conviction, that the knowledge of God is inseparable from the purification of the heart, became one of the steady themes of his mature theology (see We Shall See Him as He Is).

Why the Search Mattered

It would be possible to read the Eastern phase of Sophrony’s youth as a regrettable detour, quickly corrected. Sophrony himself did not read it so. He treated it as the indispensable negative against which the positive of the Christian revelation stood out: only because he had sought the impersonal Absolute with his whole strength, and tasted where that road ended, did the personal God of the “I AM” strike him with the force of a revelation rather than a mere inherited belief (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1–2). His later insistence on the person as the central category of theology — over against every philosophy and mysticism that subordinates the personal to an impersonal ground — is the considered fruit of a man who had been to the far country of the impersonal and come back.

The search also set the trajectory that carried him to Mount Athos. Having found that art could not be his absolute and that the impersonal Absolute was not God, Sakharov left Paris in 1925 for the Holy Mountain, seeking not a theory of the personal God but the living experience of Him in the most concentrated school of prayer the Orthodox world possessed (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002; on the move to Athos, see The Monk on the Holy Mountain). The crisis of the “I AM” did not end in Paris; it sent him to Athos, and on Athos it would be deepened and tested by the eight years of his discipleship under St. Silouan.

References

Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988. (The youthful turn to impersonal mysticism; the crisis of the “I AM” / Exodus 3:14; the return and the early vision of the Uncreated Light.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. His Life Is Mine. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. London: Mowbray; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977. (The personal God and the “I AM.”)
Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (Ch. 1–2 on the Eastern mysticism of his youth and the return; ch. 4 on the hypostatic principle.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Sophrony’s “non-Christian mysticism” and the return to the personal God.)