Preserving Silouan’s Writings

After St. Silouan’s death on 24 September 1938, Sophrony withdrew from the cenobium of St. Panteleimon’s into the “desert” of Athos — first to the wilderness of Karoulia, the most austere of the hesychast settlements, and then to a cave near the New Skete in the territory of St. Paul’s Monastery — to live as a hermit and confessor to other hermits, and to guard, edit, and order the autograph notes Silouan had left behind. This file follows that withdrawal and the long editorial labor through which Silouan’s writings were preserved, and it states plainly the provenance question that follows from it: almost everything the world knows of St. Silouan reaches it through Sophrony’s hands.

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

The Death of the Elder and the Notes He Left

St. Silouan the Athonite — Simeon Ivanovich Antonov, the peasant of Tambov who had come to the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon on Athos in 1892 — died on 24 September 1938, after some forty-six years on the Holy Mountain and after the eight years in which Sophrony had been his disciple and confidant (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Edmonds, 1991, the biographical part; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1–2; see Disciple of Saint Silouan). He left behind no treatise and had sought no audience. What he left was a body of plain notebooks and loose papers — autograph notes set down over years in the unschooled hand and orthography of a man of little formal education — in which he had recorded, without system and without title, the things he had been given to understand in prayer (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, editor’s introduction to the Writings; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1).

These notes are the textual core of everything that would later be called Silouan’s “Writings.” Sophrony, who had been close to the elder and was trusted by him, became their keeper. The transmission of St. Silouan to the Church and to the world thus passes through a single channel: a small archive of barely ordered manuscripts, and one disciple who knew their author, understood what they were reaching toward, and undertook to make them legible (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, editor’s introduction; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Sophrony as Silouan’s editor and interpreter).

The Withdrawal into the Desert

Sophrony did not remain in the great cenobium after his elder’s death. The loss of Silouan removed the immediate reason for his presence in the community, and his own spiritual inclination, sharpened by years under the elder, drew him toward the stricter solitude of the hesychast life. Within a short time of Silouan’s death he obtained release from St. Panteleimon’s and withdrew into the “desert” of Athos — the term the Holy Mountain uses for its remote, semi-eremitic margins, where monks live alone or in twos and threes in huts and caves under a light common rule (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the desert years; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

His first refuge was Karoulia, on the wild southern tip of the peninsula below the Great Lavra’s dependencies — a settlement of cells and caves clinging to a near-vertical cliff above the sea, reached in places by chains fixed to the rock, and reckoned the most austere and physically severe of all the Athonite hesychast habitations. To live at Karoulia was to embrace a poverty and exposure that few even among Athonite monks would undertake (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the Karoulia years). Later he moved to a cave in the territory of St. Paul’s Monastery, near the New Skete, where he continued the eremitic life and where, in time, his health and his vocation as a confessor would draw other monks to him.

The precise topography and chronology of these years are reported with the imprecision proper to a life lived deliberately out of sight. [Disputed: the location of Sophrony's Athonite hermitage. Sophrony's own accounts and the principal scholarship place him first at Karoulia and subsequently in a cave near the New Skete in the territory of St. Paul's Monastery (Sophrony, *We Shall See Him as He Is*, 1988; Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, ch. 1); popular and some secondary accounts compress or reorder these stages, and the exact dates of each move and the duration of the Karoulia period are not fixed precisely in the sources (Louth, *Modern Orthodox Thinkers*, 2015, who treats the desert years in general terms). What the sources agree on is the shape: a withdrawal, after 1938, from the cenobium into the most austere solitude Athos affords, followed by a settled eremitic and confessorial life until illness compelled his departure from the Mountain about 1947].

Hermit and Confessor of Hermits

The desert years were not, for Sophrony, a flight from responsibility into private contemplation. As his reputation for discernment grew, he was ordained and came to serve as spiritual father and confessor to the hesychasts scattered through that severe country — the very men whose vocation was solitude, and who therefore most needed a confessor able to reach them in it. He is reported to have walked long and dangerous distances over the Athonite cliffs to hear the confessions of monks who could not easily come to him, exercising in the desert the office of spiritual fatherhood that he had learned, as a disciple, under Silouan (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on his service as confessor; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; on the office itself, see Spiritual Direction).

This is a point of some importance for understanding the man who would edit Silouan’s notes. Sophrony came to the editorial labor not as a literary executor handling a stranger’s papers but as a hesychast and confessor formed in the same prayer the notes record — a man whose own life of solitude, the Jesus Prayer, and the cure of souls gave him, on his own account and that of his interpreters, an interior key to what Silouan had written (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, editor’s introduction; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1–2; on the prayer, see Jesus Prayer). It is exactly this nearness that makes his editorship both uniquely qualified and impossible to disentangle from his own theology — the double-edged fact at the center of this section.

The desert years closed for reasons of health. By the mid-1940s Sophrony’s body had been worn down by the austerities and by illness, and around 1947 he left Mount Athos for France, settling near Paris, where the next stage of the work — the publication of the book — would be carried out. The withdrawal into the desert had been, among other things, the seedbed of the editorial task: it was in those years of solitude that the notes were read, brooded over, and brought toward order (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

Guarding and Ordering the Writings

The autograph notes Silouan left were not a finished book and did not present themselves as one. They were occasional, repetitive, undated, and without internal divisions — the record of a praying man, not the composition of an author. To make of them something the Church could read, Sophrony had to do genuine editorial work: to gather and preserve the manuscripts; to read them against his memory of the elder’s spoken teaching and his knowledge of the man; to select, group, and order the material under thematic headings; and to render the peasant’s rough orthography and elliptical phrasing into readable Russian prose (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, editor’s introduction to the Writings; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; on the resulting corpus, see The Writings).

The Writings as the world received them — the second, documentary part of Sophrony’s eventual book — are therefore an edited corpus. They are arranged by Sophrony under headings of his choosing (“Adam’s Lament,” “Concerning the Love of God,” “Concerning Humility,” and the like); the chapter sequence, the thematic grouping, and the very decision as to what constitutes a complete unit of thought are editorial acts (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, the Writings; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1). Sophrony presents this honestly as an editor’s arrangement of his elder’s words, not as a transcription of a book Silouan wrote; but the consequence is unavoidable: the order, emphasis, and even the legibility of Silouan’s text are owed to Sophrony.

It is worth naming what the editing did not claim to do. Sophrony did not present himself as the author of the spiritual content; he understood his task as the preservation and presentation of words given to Silouan, and he subordinated his editing to fidelity to the elder as he had known him (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, editor’s introduction; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1). The question is not whether Sophrony invented Silouan — no serious scholar holds that — but how much of the form, selection, and theological accent of the Silouan the world knows is Sophrony’s, and that question cannot be answered from outside the editorial channel, because the channel is nearly the whole of the surviving evidence.

The Sophrony Question

This brings the file to the methodological heart of the matter, which the repository names rather than hides. Nearly everything known of St. Silouan — his biography, his sayings, the famous word given him by Christ, and the body of his Writings — reaches the Church through Sophrony: as compiler of the notes, as biographer, as the man who selected and ordered the texts, and as the theologian who supplied the interpretive frame in which they are read (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1–2; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Sophrony as the mediator of Silouan). There is no large independent archive of Silouan, no rival biography from a contemporary who knew him as well, against which Sophrony’s portrait can be triangulated. The disciple is the lens.

Scholarship has registered this without scandal, as a feature of the transmission to be reckoned with rather than a charge to be answered. [Disputed: the extent of Sophrony's editorial and theological shaping of Silouan — "the Sophrony question." One position holds that Sophrony's editing was conservative and faithful, preserving Silouan's voice and selecting from genuine autograph notes, so that the published Writings give the Church a substantially reliable Silouan (Sophrony's own account, *Saint Silouan the Athonite*, 1991, editor's introduction). A second position, developed in the scholarship, observes that the categories through which Silouan is presented — the prominence of "keeping the mind in hell," the language of love for enemies as the criterion of grace, the framing of the whole within a theology of the person — are also Sophrony's own theological preoccupations, so that the Silouan the world reads is to a real degree a Silouan interpreted by Sophrony, and the two cannot be cleanly separated (Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, ch. 1–2, who treats the Sophrony–Silouan relation as one of deep mutual interpenetration; Louth, *Modern Orthodox Thinkers*, 2015). No source alleges fabrication; the dispute concerns the degree of editorial and interpretive mediation, not the authenticity of the underlying notes].

The honest conclusion is the one the methodology requires (METHODOLOGY §2.4, §3.5): where a figure is known mainly through one mediating witness, the mediation is part of the subject, to be stated and not concealed. St. Silouan is genuinely a saint of the Church, glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1987 on the strength of the witness Sophrony preserved; and Sophrony is genuinely his disciple, not his inventor. But the Silouan available to study is the edited Silouan, and the reader who wishes to weigh a particular saying or emphasis must remember that he is reading it as Sophrony selected, ordered, and translated it (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1–2). The book through which this edited Silouan reached the world, and the word at its center, are the subject of the companion file.

References

Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (Biographical part on Silouan’s death in 1938; editor’s introduction to the Writings; the edited corpus of Silouan’s autograph notes.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Tolleshunt Knights / Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988. (The desert years; Karoulia and the cave near the New Skete; his life as hermit and confessor.)
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 Sophrony–Silouan relation, the editing of the notes, and the question of mediation.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Sophrony as the editor, biographer, and interpreter through whom Silouan is known.)