We Shall See Him as He Is

Sophrony’s autobiographical-theological masterwork (Essex, 1988), whose title is taken from 1 John 3:2 — “we shall see him as he is.” The book is the most sustained first-person account of the vision of the Uncreated Light — the Taboric, Palamite light — left by any modern Orthodox saint, and it is also the most controversial of his writings, precisely because of that intimacy: to set down one’s own mystical states in print struck some of his contemporaries as a breach of the ascetic reticence proper to the hesychast tradition. This file follows the book, its central theme, its reception, and the debate over its boldness, pinning every visionary claim to Sophrony’s own words per the repository methodology (§3.5).

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

The Book and Its Title

We Shall See Him as He Is (Russian: Videt’ Boga kak On est’) appeared in English in 1988, translated by Rosemary Edmonds and published by Sophrony’s own community, the Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, trans. Edmonds, Essex, 1988). Sophrony was by then in his early nineties — he died in 1993 — and the book has the character of a final testament: a long, meditative, and explicitly autobiographical work in which the elder, looking back across a life that ran from the impersonal mysticism of his youth, through the eight years of discipleship under St. Silouan, to the founding of the Essex monastery, sets down what he had come to know of God (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony, SVS Press, 2002, ch. 1, on the autobiographical form; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, on the place of the book in Sophrony’s corpus).

The title is a direct citation of Scripture. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Sophrony makes the verse programmatic: the whole book is an extended meditation on what it means that the destiny of the human person is not merely to know about God but to see Him as He is, and to be made like Him in that seeing. The eschatological vision of the Johannine epistle is read by Sophrony as already breaking, in anticipation and by grace, into the present life of the person who prays — supremely in the vision of the Uncreated Light (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the title-text and the seeing of God; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 7, on the Light). The title thus binds together the two great themes of the book: the vision of the Light, and the deification (theosis) of the person who is changed by what he sees (see Theosis).

The Vision of the Uncreated Light

At the center of the book stands the Uncreated Light — the light that the three disciples saw on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–8; cf. 2 Peter 1:16–18), which Orthodox theology, following St. Gregory Palamas, confesses to be not a created radiance nor a symbol but the very uncreated energy and glory of God, truly seen by purified human eyes (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the Taboric Light; see St. Gregory Palamas). Sophrony stands deliberately within the Palamite tradition: the Light he describes is the light of Tabor, the light of the hesychast fathers, the uncreated glory whose reality the fourteenth-century councils of Constantinople defended against Barlaam of Calabria (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 7, situating Sophrony’s account in the Palamite inheritance; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Sophrony and Palamas).

What is distinctive in Sophrony is not the doctrine of the Light — which he received from Palamas and from the living tradition of Athos — but that he writes of having seen it, and writes of it in the first person. He recounts, as moments of his own life, experiences of being enveloped in or drawn into a light that he insists was not psychological, not imaginative, not a created phenomenon of the mind, but the Light of the Godhead itself; a light in which he knew the presence of God, and which left him changed (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on his own experiences of the Light). He locates the first such experience early, in the period of his return to Christ from the impersonal mysticism of his youth — a vision he describes as the gift that confirmed his return and that he would spend the rest of his life trying to understand and to recover (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the early vision; see The Search for the Absolute). Later experiences he connects with the deep repentance and the God-forsakenness he learned to bear under the influence of St. Silouan’s word, “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not” (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Edmonds, SVS Press, 1991, on the word to Silouan; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the descent and the Light; see Godforsakenness and the Uncreated Light).

Per the repository methodology (§3.5), these are claims of personal religious experience and are reported here as Sophrony’s own testimony, pinned to the work in which he sets them down, not certified as adjudicated historical or theological fact. This is the same discipline the collection applies throughout: the deepest things in Sophrony reach us in his own words, and the honest course is to name the source and let the reader weigh it (cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, throughout).

The Light and the Person

Sophrony does not treat the vision of the Light as an end in itself, a spiritual phenomenon to be sought for its own sweetness. He binds it tightly to his theology of the person and to repentance. The Light, on his account, is given not to the curious or the ambitious but to the broken and the repentant; it follows the descent into the recognition of one’s own nothingness and sin, and it comes as the act of a personal God to a person, drawing the human “I” into communion with the divine “Thou” (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on repentance and the Light; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 7, on the connection of the Light to the hypostatic principle; see The Hypostatic Principle). The seeing of God “as He is” is thus inseparable, for Sophrony, from becoming a person in the full sense — from the fulfilment of the human hypostasis in the image of the personal, Triune God. The vision of the Light and the theology of the person are two faces of one teaching (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 4 and 7).

This linkage is also what guards Sophrony’s account, in his own intention, against the charge of a merely “experiential” or quietist mysticism. The Light does not dissolve the person into an impersonal divine ocean — the very error he had fled in his youth — but constitutes and confirms the person before God, so that the deified human being is more, not less, himself (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 4). The book is therefore not only a record of visions but an argument: that the deepest experience of God known to the Orthodox tradition is at the same time the deepest fulfilment of personhood, and that the two cannot be separated.

The Boldness of the Book

It is the first-person form that makes We Shall See Him as He Is the most debated of Sophrony’s writings. The ascetic tradition that formed him is marked by a deep reticence about one’s own spiritual states. The fathers of the Philokalia warn repeatedly that to speak of one’s own graces, visions, or attainments is spiritually perilous — an occasion of vainglory, a courting of delusion (plani / prelest), and a violation of the hiddenness in which grace is best kept (a commonplace of the hesychast literature; see, in Sophrony’s own milieu, On Prayer, trans. Edmonds, SVS Press, 1996, on guarding the inner life). For a monk of Athos to publish a sustained account of his own experiences of the Uncreated Light was, against that background, a striking departure — and it did not pass without comment.

[Disputed: whether Sophrony's first-person publication of his own mystical experiences was spiritually prudent and consonant with the hesychast tradition. (a) The critical view — that the ascetic tradition counsels reticence about one's own states, and that some Athonite and traditionally-minded readers regarded so open a written account of personal visions of the Light as imprudent, even a temptation to or for the writer — is reported as a real strand of the reception (Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, discussing the autobiographical method and its reception; Louth, *Modern Orthodox Thinkers*, 2015, noting the unusual openness of Sophrony's self-disclosure). (b) The defending view — that Sophrony wrote not to display himself but, like St. Silouan whose writings he had preserved and like the deliberately confessional theology of repentance, as a testimony for the spiritual benefit of others, in obedience and at the end of a long life, and with constant insistence that the Light is given only to the repentant who count themselves as nothing — is Sophrony's own stated rationale and that of his interpreters (Sophrony, *We Shall See Him as He Is*, 1988, on his purpose; Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, on the apologia for the autobiographical form). The collection does not adjudicate which judgement is correct; it records that the book's openness was, and remains, a point of discussion.]

Sophrony himself was not unaware of the difficulty. His interpreters note that he framed the disclosure as an act done for others — a handing-on of what he had received, in the conviction that the experience of grace is given to the Church and not merely to the individual, and that to bury it in silence would be to withhold a needed witness in an age starved of the knowledge of God (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on writing for the benefit of others; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1, on the rationale of the autobiographical theology). He also took care to surround the accounts of the Light with insistent reminders of his own unworthiness, of the priority of repentance, and of the danger of spiritual delusion — the very safeguards the tradition prescribes — so that the book reads less as a boast than as a confession framed by self-accusation (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, throughout). Whether these safeguards suffice, or whether the publication of such material is itself the imprudence, is exactly the question the tradition’s reticence raises and the question on which judgements differ.

There is, moreover, a precedent within Sophrony’s own work. He had spent years preserving, editing, and publishing the writings of St. Silouan — writings in which the elder, too, recorded his own experiences of grace, his vision of Christ, and his being taught by the Lord (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991; see The Book That Revealed Silouan). In giving Silouan’s first-person testimony to the world, Sophrony had already made a judgement that such witness could rightly be published for the Church’s good; We Shall See Him as He Is extends that judgement to his own experience. His defenders see consistency in this; his critics may see in it the same risk doubled (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, on the continuity between the Silouan book and the autobiography).

Reception and Stature

For all the controversy over its form, We Shall See Him as He Is is widely regarded as Sophrony’s theological masterwork and as one of the significant spiritual texts of twentieth-century Orthodoxy (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Sophrony’s stature; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, treating the book as the fullest statement of Sophrony’s theology). It has been translated into numerous languages and has had a wide influence well beyond Athonite and monastic circles, shaping the spiritual reading of clergy and laity across the Orthodox diaspora and beyond it (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; see Sophrony in Contemporary Orthodoxy). Its themes — the Uncreated Light, the prayer “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not,” the hypostatic principle, God-forsakenness, the prayer for the whole Adam — became, through this book and Sophrony’s eldership, part of the common idiom of a renewed Orthodox spirituality (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002; see Bearing the Whole Adam).

The book’s stature does not erase the question of its boldness; rather, the two are bound together. It is precisely because Sophrony wrote so openly of the highest things — the seeing of God “as He is” — that the book has the immediacy and authority it does, and that some have judged the writing of it imprudent. The collection’s settled position, following its methodology, is to honour the book as Sophrony’s testimony, to pin its visionary claims to his own pen, to present the question of its prudence as a genuine and unresolved one within the tradition, and to leave the final weighing to the reader and to the Church’s continuing reception of a saint glorified only in 2019 (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002; see Legacy and Assessment; on the glorification, Glorification 2019).

References

Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988. (The autobiographical theology; the title from 1 John 3:2; the first-person accounts of the vision of the Uncreated Light; repentance and the Light; the rationale for writing.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (St. Silouan’s own first-person testimony of grace; “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”; the precedent for publishing such witness.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. On Prayer. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996. (Guarding the inner life; the Jesus Prayer and the experience of grace.)
Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (The autobiographical method and its rationale and reception; ch. 4 on the hypostatic principle; ch. 7 on the vision of the Light.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Sophrony within twentieth-century Orthodox theology; the openness of his self-disclosure; his relation to Palamas.)
Scripture: 1 John 3:2 (the title-text); Matthew 17:1–8 and 2 Peter 1:16–18 (the Taboric Light of the Transfiguration).