The Monk on the Holy Mountain

Sophrony’s arrival on Mount Athos in 1925 and his entry into the Russian Monastery of St. Panteleimon, the Rossikon; his early years of intense repentance, prayer, and tears; his tonsure and ordination to the diaconate; and the hesychast world of the Holy Mountain in the 1920s and 1930s into which he came. This file follows the painter-turned-monk through the years that prepared him to meet St. Silouan, pinning the inner and visionary claims to Sophrony’s own writings.

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

Leaving Paris for the Holy Mountain

The move to Mount Athos was the term of Sophrony’s conversion, not a fresh beginning. Sergei Sakharov had been a gifted painter who had exhibited in Moscow and then, after the Revolution and exile, in Paris; he had sought the Absolute first through art and then through an impersonal, Eastern-influenced mysticism, and had been brought back to the personal God of the Gospel by the words spoken to Moses, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14) — a return marked by a repentance so violent that he later described it as a kind of dying (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, opening autobiographical chapters; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1–2; see The Search for the Absolute). For a man so converted, the next step was not a return to the studio but the search for the place where the living God could be sought with the whole of one’s strength. That place, in the Orthodox imagination, was the Holy Mountain.

Sophrony left Paris for Athos in 1925, at the age of about twenty-nine (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2; on the move to Athos see the master chronology in the same work). He had passed briefly through the milieu of the Russian émigré theological renaissance then gathering in Paris — the world of the newly founded St. Sergius Institute and of the patristic revival — but he did not belong to it as a scholar; he went to Athos precisely because he wanted the experience that the academy could only describe (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Sophrony’s distance from the Paris academic theologians; see The Patristic Revival). The decision was decisive and lifelong: from 1925 he would remain on the Holy Mountain for just over two decades, until he left for France after the Second World War.

The Russian Monastery of St. Panteleimon

On Athos Sophrony entered the Russian cenobitic monastery of St. Panteleimon — the Rossikon — the great house of Russian monasticism on the Holy Mountain (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2; Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, the biographical frame in which Sophrony places his own coming to the same monastery as Silouan). The Rossikon had been, before the Revolution, one of the most populous monasteries on Athos, swollen with Russian monks and pilgrims; by the time Sophrony arrived in 1925 it was a community whose numbers were already in decline, cut off by the Revolution from the Russian Church and the stream of Russian pilgrims and novices that had sustained it (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2, on the post-Revolutionary condition of the Rossikon). It was a house under strain — and it was here, in this very monastery, that the unlettered Russian peasant-monk Silouan was already living the hidden life of prayer that Sophrony would later make known to the world.

Sophrony was received as a novice and in due course tonsured a monk. He was given over to the ordinary obediences of cenobitic life and to the long cycle of the Athonite services, the all-night vigils, and the discipline of a community whose horarium was built around prayer (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2). The exact sequence and dating of his early Athonite years — reception, tonsure, the assignment of obediences — is given only in broad outline by the sources, which are more concerned with the inner trajectory than with a documentary chronology. [Disputed: the year of Sophrony's arrival on Athos is given as 1925 by Nicholas Sakharov (*I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, ch. 2) and is the date followed throughout this collection and by the Essex monastery's own accounts; some popular and secondary notices place his entry to St. Panteleimon's a year or two later or compress the arrival and the meeting with Silouan, but no source documents a date earlier than 1925, and 1925 is the figure consistently given in the scholarly biography].

The Early Years of Repentance and Prayer

The center of Sophrony’s early monastic life, on his own testimony, was repentance. He came to Athos already broken by the grief over sin that had accompanied his return to Christ, and the monastic years deepened it rather than soothed it. He has left, in his autobiographical writing, the record of years given to weeping for his sins, to prayer prolonged into the night, and to the conviction that he stood under the judgment of God and had no ground of his own on which to stand (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the early Athonite repentance; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2). This was not a passing mood but the substance of his ascesis; the whole theology of repentance, of podvig (ascetic struggle) and of the “tears of repentance” that fills his later writing is the considered reflection of a man who lived it first as a young monk on the Holy Mountain.

These are claims of personal spiritual experience, and per the repository methodology (§3.5) they are reported here as Sophrony’s own testimony, pinned to his writings, rather than certified as adjudicated fact. Sophrony himself was careful to distinguish the gift of grace from the labor that prepares for it: the tears and the prayer were his work; the consolation, when it came, was God’s. He records that in this early period he experienced both the withdrawal of grace — the sense of God-forsakenness that he would later make so central to his theology — and, by his own account in the autobiographical work, moments of the visitation of the Uncreated Light that had first touched him at his conversion (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the alternation of grace and its withdrawal; see We Shall See Him as He Is and Godforsakenness and the Uncreated Light). The pattern of his entire spiritual doctrine — descent before ascent, the abyss of self-knowledge before the light — was laid down in these years before he ever met Silouan.

The instrument of this prayer was, as for all Athonite monks, the Jesus Prayer: the unceasing invocation of the name of Jesus, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me,” carried in the heart through the labor and the offices of the day (Sophrony, On Prayer, 1996, on the Jesus Prayer as the heart of the monastic life; see The Jesus Prayer). Sophrony came to Athos already drawn to interior prayer, and the Holy Mountain gave him the tradition, the discipline, and the living teachers of it. What he would later teach about the Jesus Prayer at Essex — its grades, its dangers, its relation to the descent of the mind into the heart — he learned first as a young monk of the Rossikon (Sophrony, On Prayer, 1996; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, on the continuity of Sophrony’s prayer-teaching with his Athonite formation; see The Community and the Jesus Prayer).

Ordination to the Diaconate

In the course of his monastic life on Athos, Sophrony was ordained to the diaconate (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2). The diaconate placed him in the liturgical service of the community and is the rank by which he is most often named in the early period — “Father Sophrony the deacon” of the Rossikon — before his later ordination to the priesthood, which belongs to his years in France after the war. The sources treat the diaconate as a station within his Athonite ascesis rather than as a turn toward an active or administrative role: Sophrony’s vocation, as it took shape on the Holy Mountain, was contemplative and penitential, oriented toward prayer rather than toward office. His later reluctance, recorded by his disciples, to be made much of, and his consistent self-presentation as a penitent rather than a teacher, are continuous with the deacon-monk of these years (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2; on Sophrony’s self-understanding as penitent, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988).

The Hesychast World of Athos in the 1920s and 1930s

The Mount Athos that received Sophrony in 1925 was a living hesychast republic, but one under pressure. Hesychasm — the tradition of inner stillness (hēsychia) and the Jesus Prayer systematized by St. Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century — was not for the Athos of Sophrony’s day a historical memory but the everyday practice of its monks, carried in the cenobitic houses, in the smaller sketes and kellia, and above all by the solitaries of the wild southern tip of the peninsula (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the continuity of Athonite hesychasm; see St. Gregory Palamas and Theosis). It was a world in which the unceasing prayer of the heart, the guidance of an experienced elder (geron), and the theology of the Uncreated Light were not curiosities but the assumed framework of the spiritual life.

At the same time the Holy Mountain of the 1920s and 1930s was a place of decline in numbers and of national strain. The collapse of imperial Russia had cut the Russian houses off from their homeland; the Greek houses too felt the long depopulation of Athonite monasticism that would reach its lowest point only in the middle decades of the century, before the revival of the 1970s and after (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the condition of Athos before its later renewal). Sophrony thus entered Athos at a low ebb of its outward fortunes — and it was precisely in such a setting, in a declining Russian monastery, that he found the hidden saint whose witness he would carry into the modern world. The contrast is one Sophrony himself drew: the treasure of the Holy Mountain was not in its numbers or its buildings but in the hidden men of prayer whom the world did not know (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, on the hiddenness of Silouan amid the ordinary life of the Rossikon).

It is essential to the shape of Sophrony’s life that he was already a serious monk of prayer and repentance before he met St. Silouan. The discipleship that began around 1930 did not make him a monk; it found a monk already advanced in the ascesis of repentance and gave to that ascesis its definitive form and its theological language. Sophrony came to Silouan with years of tears and prayer behind him, and with the experience — both of the Light and of its withdrawal — that made him able to recognize in the unlettered elder a teacher who had been further along the same road (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 2; see Disciple of Saint Silouan). The monk on the Holy Mountain became the disciple of Saint Silouan; the next file follows that meeting.

References

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; the early Athonite repentance, tears, and the alternation of grace and its withdrawal.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (The biographical frame: the Rossikon, the hiddenness of Silouan, and Sophrony’s own coming to the same monastery; earlier English form The Undistorted Image, 1958; Russian Starets Siluan, Paris, 1948/1952.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. On Prayer. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996. (The Jesus Prayer and the descent of the mind into the heart, in continuity with his Athonite formation.)
Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (Ch. 2: the arrival on Athos in 1925, entry to St. Panteleimon’s, the early monastic years, and the ordination to the diaconate; the chronology followed in this file.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The Athonite formation; the condition of the Holy Mountain and the continuity of its hesychast tradition in the early twentieth century.)