04 — The Essex Monastery

The passage by which Sophrony carried the hesychast life of the Holy Mountain into the West: leaving Mount Athos around 1947 for reasons of health, settling near Paris at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois and publishing the book on St. Silouan, and then in 1959 founding the Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex — an old rectory that became a stavropegial monastery under the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1965. These two files describe the founding of that house and the liturgical and communal life Sophrony built within it, centred on the corporately prayed Jesus Prayer.

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

Sophrony’s foundation in England is the hinge between his Athonite formation and his influence on the modern Orthodox West. Having spent more than two decades on the Holy Mountain — arriving in 1925, becoming St. Silouan’s disciple in 1930, and withdrawing into the Athonite desert after the elder’s death in 1938 — he left Athos in failing health, returned to the émigré world of France from which he had come as a young painter, and there discharged his debt to his elder by bringing the witness of St. Silouan into print (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). Only then did he found, in an obscure Essex village, the community in which the prayer of the Holy Mountain could be lived by people of every nation. This section follows that double movement — Athos to France, France to England — and the life of prayer Sophrony established at Tolleshunt Knights, where he wrote the works of his maturity and died on 11 July 1993.

Files in This Section

File Description
Founding the Monastery of St. John the Baptist The departure from Mount Athos around 1947 for reasons of health; the French years at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois and the publication of the Silouan book; the move to England and the founding, in 1959, of the Monastery of St. John the Baptist in an old rectory at Tolleshunt Knights, Maldon, Essex; its reception as a stavropegial monastery under the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1965; the dedication to the Forerunner; and Sophrony’s death there in 1993.
The Community and the Jesus Prayer The liturgical and spiritual life Sophrony built: the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me/us”) prayed corporately for long periods in place of much of the fixed cycle of services; the international, multi-ethnic, “double” community of men and women under one elder; and the rhythm of prayer, Liturgy, and obedience.

See Also

References

  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (Publication history through the French years: Starets Siluan, Paris, 1948/1952; The Undistorted Image, Faith Press, 1958.)
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Tolleshunt Knights, Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988.
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. On Prayer. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996.
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. His Life Is Mine. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. London: Mowbray; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977.
  • Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (Ch. 1 on the departure from Athos, the French years, the founding at Tolleshunt Knights in 1959, the stavropegial status of 1965, the community’s prayer, and Sophrony’s death in 1993.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The chapter on Sophrony: the trajectory from Athos through France to the Essex foundation and its life of prayer.)