02 — Mount Athos and Saint Silouan
The hinge of Sophrony’s life: his arrival on Mount Athos in 1925, his entry into the Russian Monastery of St. Panteleimon and his early years of repentance and prayer in the hesychast environment of the Holy Mountain; and, from 1930, the eight-year discipleship under St. Silouan the Athonite until the elder’s death on 24 September 1938 — the relationship from which Sophrony received the teaching that would govern the whole of his theology: “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.”
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (20th-c. elder; disciple of St Silouan)
When Sergei Sakharov left Paris for the Holy Mountain in 1925, he was a man who had sought the Absolute through art and through an impersonal Eastern mysticism, had broken on the rock of the biblical “I AM,” and had returned to Christ with an intense, even violent, repentance (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1–2; see The Search for the Absolute). Athos was the destination of that conversion, not a detour from it: he went 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. This section follows him there.
The two files trace the two movements of his Athonite life. The first is the monk’s own ascesis — his entry into the Rossikon, his early years of repentance, prayer, and tears, and his ordination to the diaconate, set within the hesychast world of the Holy Mountain in the 1920s and 1930s. The second is the encounter that gave his life its center: the meeting with St. Silouan the Athonite, traditionally dated to 1930, and the eight years of discipleship that followed until Silouan reposed in 1938. From Silouan, Sophrony received the words “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not,” the criterion of love of enemies as the test of grace, and the vocation of prayer for the whole world — the seed of everything he would later write and build at Essex.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Monk on the Holy Mountain | Sophrony’s arrival on Athos in 1925; entry into the Russian Monastery of St. Panteleimon (the Rossikon); his early ascetic years, repentance, and prayer; ordination to the diaconate; and the hesychast environment of the Holy Mountain in the 1920s–30s. |
| Disciple of Saint Silouan | The meeting with St. Silouan the Athonite (c. 1930); the eight years (1930–1938) as his disciple until Silouan’s repose on 24 September 1938; what Sophrony received — “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not,” love of enemies as the criterion of grace, and prayer for the whole world; and the form of the elder–disciple bond. |
See Also
- The Search for the Absolute — the conversion that sent him to Athos
- Preserving Silouan’s Writings — what Sophrony did with the elder’s words after 1938
- The Book That Revealed Silouan — the biography through which Silouan became known to the world
- St. Silouan the Athonite — the sibling collection on the elder himself
References
- Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (Sophrony’s biography of his elder and the partial account of the meeting and discipleship; earlier English form The Undistorted Image, 1958; Russian Starets Siluan, Paris, 1948/1952.)
- Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988. (Autobiographical: the conversion behind the move to Athos and the early Athonite repentance.)
- Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (The principal scholarly biography; chronology of Athos, the Rossikon, and the discipleship under Silouan.)
- Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Sophrony within twentieth-century Orthodox thought; the Athonite formation.)