Founding the Monastery of St. John the Baptist

The trajectory by which Sophrony, having left Mount Athos around 1947 for reasons of health, settled near Paris at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, completed and published his book on St. Silouan, and then in 1959 founded the Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights, Maldon, in Essex, England — an old rectory that became, in 1965, a stavropegial monastery under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. This file follows that double movement, from the Holy Mountain to France and from France to England, and the dedication of the new house to the Forerunner.

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

Leaving the Holy Mountain

Sophrony’s departure from Mount Athos brought to an end more than two decades of monastic life there: he had arrived in 1925, met St. Silouan in 1930, lived as his disciple until the elder’s death in 1938, and then withdrawn into the more remote, eremitic life of the Athonite desert at Karoulia and in the wilderness near St. Paul’s (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. on Sophrony). The years of the Second World War and after were hard on the Holy Mountain, and the severe asceticism of the desert told upon a body that had never been robust. His leaving was, by the consistent account of his biographers, forced upon him chiefly by ill health — the deterioration of his stomach and general strength under the privations of the desert — rather than chosen as a change of vocation (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

The exact year of his departure is given slightly differently across the sources, and the surrounding circumstances — convalescence, the difficulty of obtaining papers in the post-war years, and his need to bring out the writings of St. Silouan — mean that “leaving Athos” was less a single dated event than a passage of a year or two. [Disputed: the standard accounts place Sophrony's departure from Mount Athos and arrival in France around 1947 (Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, *Modern Orthodox Thinkers*, 2015); some treatments give 1946 or 1948 for the move, and the date he reached Paris is sometimes distinguished from the date he left the Holy Mountain, the two being separated by illness and travel.] What is not in dispute is the cause and the destination: he left for reasons of health, and he went to France, where a large Russian émigré world already existed and where medical care and a settled community of his own people were available.

He did not leave the Holy Mountain lightly, and he never repudiated it. Athos remained for him the school in which everything he later taught had been learned — the place of his discipleship under Silouan, of the prayer for the whole Adam, and of the experience of the Uncreated Light and of God-forsakenness (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1). The foundation he would make in the West was, in his own understanding, an attempt to carry the hesychast life of the Holy Mountain into a new soil, not to leave it behind.

France: Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois

In France Sophrony settled, after a period in and around Paris, at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, the town south of the capital that had become a center of Russian émigré life and the site of the great Russian cemetery where so many of the exiles of his generation are buried (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). There, for a time, he served as a priest and chaplain to a community connected with a Russian house — a setting that placed him once more, after the solitude of the Athonite desert, in the midst of the diaspora world from which he had come as a young painter in the 1920s (see Russia, Art, and Exile). The return to France thus closed a circle: the man who had left Paris in 1925 to seek the living God on the Holy Mountain came back to the same émigré world a generation later, a hieromonk and the bearer of his elder’s witness.

The French years were decisive for one reason above all: it was in France that Sophrony brought to completion and into print the work that would make his elder known. The manuscript of St. Silouan’s life and writings, which he had guarded and prepared in the Athonite desert, was published in Russian — Starets Siluan — at Paris in 1948 (with a second edition in 1952), and from this the English forms would follow, first as The Undistorted Image (Faith Press, 1958) and later as Saint Silouan the Athonite (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Edmonds, 1991, publication history; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; see Preserving Silouan’s Writings and The Book That Revealed Silouan). The discharge of this debt to Silouan — the making-public of the witness entrusted to him — belongs to the French period and, in a sense, had to precede the new foundation: only when the elder’s word was given to the world could the disciple turn to building a house in which that word might be lived.

Around Sophrony in France there gathered the first nucleus of those who would follow him to England — a small group of disciples, Russian and Western, drawn by his direction and by the spiritual world he opened to them (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The community that would be formally founded in Essex did not spring up from nothing in 1959; it grew out of the circle that formed around Sophrony in the French years, and the move across the Channel was, for several of them, a continuation rather than a beginning.

The French period was not, however, a place where Sophrony could establish what he sought. The difficulties were partly canonical and jurisdictional — the Russian émigré Church in Western Europe was itself divided in those years among Moscow, the Russian Church Abroad, and the Exarchate under Constantinople — and partly practical: he did not find in France the conditions for the kind of monastic community, men and women living the prayer of the Holy Mountain together, that he had come to envisage (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The decisive opening came not in France but in England.

The Move to England

The move to England came at the end of the 1950s. Invited and assisted by friends and disciples in England — among them figures connected with the small but growing Orthodox presence in Britain — Sophrony and a handful of companions crossed from France to look for a place where the community could be established (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). England in the late 1950s had only a slender Orthodox infrastructure, but it offered what France had not: the practical possibility of acquiring a property and founding, under a stable canonical authority, a monastery of the kind Sophrony intended.

The place they found was an old rectory at Tolleshunt Knights, a village near Maldon in the county of Essex, in the flat country of the English east coast (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; the monastery’s own published accounts). A former Anglican rectory with its grounds, it was unremarkable as architecture and remote from any center of Orthodox life — which suited Sophrony, who was not founding a showpiece but a place of prayer. The community took possession and began, in 1959, the life of the Monastery of St. John the Baptist. From that year the foundation is dated, and Tolleshunt Knights — an obscure Essex village — became the unlikely seat of one of the most influential monastic communities of the twentieth-century Orthodox West (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

The Dedication to St. John the Baptist

Sophrony dedicated the new monastery to St. John the Baptist, the Forerunner of Christ (Prodromos) — the desert ascetic, the preacher of repentance, and the one of whom the Lord said that among those born of women none was greater (Matthew 11:11; Luke 7:28). The choice was not incidental. The Forerunner is, in the Orthodox tradition, the pattern of the monastic and ascetic life itself: the man of the wilderness whose whole existence was the proclamation “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2) and the self-effacing confession “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). For a community whose center Sophrony intended to be repentance and unceasing prayer, the patronage of St. John the Baptist named the program (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1 and on the community’s ethos; the monastery’s own accounts; on repentance as the foundation of Sophrony’s teaching, see The Search for the Absolute).

There was also a kenotic fitness in the dedication. The Forerunner’s “I must decrease” is the Gospel’s own statement of the self-emptying that Sophrony placed at the heart of the Christian and monastic life — the descent into humility, even into a kind of self-condemnation, which he had learned from St. Silouan’s word “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not” (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Edmonds, 1991; Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; see Disciple of Saint Silouan). A house dedicated to the one who decreased that Christ might increase was a fitting home for a spirituality built on repentance and the prayer for the whole Adam.

Becoming a Stavropegial Monastery

The most significant institutional act in the monastery’s early life was its reception, in 1965, as a stavropegial monastery directly under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Stavropegial (from the Greek stauros, “cross,” and pēgnumi, “to fix” — the planting of the patriarchal cross at the foundation) means that the house is subject not to the local diocesan bishop but directly to the patriarch himself, an unusual and protective status that gave Sophrony’s international community a stable canonical home above the jurisdictional divisions of the émigré Churches (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; the monastery’s own published history). For a community gathered from many nations and ecclesiastical backgrounds — Russian, Greek, English, and others — direct dependence on Constantinople resolved at a stroke the problem that had dogged Sophrony in France, where to belong to one émigré jurisdiction was to be estranged from another.

[Disputed: the standard accounts give 1965 as the year the Monastery of St. John the Baptist received stavropegial status under the Ecumenical Patriarchate (Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, *Modern Orthodox Thinkers*, 2015); the monastery's foundation is firmly dated to 1959, but popular accounts occasionally conflate the foundation date with the grant of stavropegial status or give the latter loosely as "the mid-1960s," and the precise day and month of the patriarchal act are not consistently reported.] The reception under Constantinople was, in the long view, of a piece with Sophrony’s whole later trajectory: it placed his community, and his elder’s witness, within the canonical structure of the Church that would, in 2019, glorify him as a saint.

The stavropegial status had a further consequence that bore directly on the monastery’s character. Freed from dependence on any single national jurisdiction, the community could be frankly international and could include both men and women living the monastic life under one elder — the “double” community that became one of the foundation’s distinctive features and that is treated in the companion file on the community and its prayer (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; see The Community and the Jesus Prayer).

The Last Decades and Sophrony’s Death

From 1959 until his death Sophrony lived at Tolleshunt Knights as the founder and spiritual father of the community. It was at Essex, in these decades, that he wrote the works of his maturity — His Life Is Mine (1977), We Shall See Him as He Is (1988), On Prayer (1996), and Words of Life (1996) — and that he received the stream of visitors, disciples, and inquirers from across the Orthodox and non-Orthodox world who came to him for direction (Sophrony, His Life Is Mine, 1977; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; On Prayer, 1996; Words of Life, 1996; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1). The monastery he had founded as a frail man “for reasons of health” outlived his frailty by more than three decades.

Sophrony died at the monastery on 11 July 1993, in his ninety-seventh year, and was buried there; 11 July is now kept as his feast (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; the monastery’s own accounts; on his glorification by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 27 November 2019 and his feast, see the collection README). The old Essex rectory that had become the Monastery of St. John the Baptist was the place of his death as it had been the work of his last and most fruitful years.

References

Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (Publication history of the Silouan book 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. (Written at Essex; the Athonite formation carried into the foundation; repentance and the kenotic life.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. His Life Is Mine. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. London: Mowbray; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977.
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. On Prayer. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996.
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Words of Life. Tolleshunt Knights, Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1996.
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 for reasons of health, the French years at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, the move to England, the founding at Tolleshunt Knights in 1959, the stavropegial status of 1965, 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.)
Scripture: Matthew 3:2; 11:11; Luke 7:28; John 3:30.