Bearing the Whole Adam

The center of St. Sophrony’s spiritual theology: the conviction, received from St. Silouan and developed in his own writings, that the measure of Christlike love is to “pray for the whole world” — for the “whole Adam,” all human nature as a single man — and that the model of such prayer is Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:39–46; John 17), where the one Person of the incarnate Word bore the whole of fallen humanity. This file follows that theme as Sophrony narrates and develops it, pinning the spiritual claims to his own writings and naming where the scholarship locates the boundary between what he received from Silouan and what he himself developed.

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

“Pray for the Whole World”

The phrase that governs everything in this section is Silouan’s, and Sophrony preserved it as the very signature of his elder’s holiness: the man in whom grace dwells does not pray for himself alone, nor even for his friends and his own people, but “prays for the whole world,” weeping for all men as for himself (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, the “Writings” of Silouan, esp. the chapters on love for enemies and “Adam’s Lament”). For Silouan this was no abstraction but the burning content of his own prayer: he records that the Lord taught him “love for enemies,” so that the soul “is sorry for all men” and “prays for all” — for those who do not know God, for the suffering, for the dead, even for those in hell (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, “On Love”; “Concerning Love of Enemies”). Sophrony took this to be the surest mark by which the presence of the Holy Spirit may be known: “to pray for the whole world” is the criterion of authentic Christian love, because it is the love of Christ Himself, who died “for all” (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991; His Life Is Mine, 1977).

This love is rooted, in Silouan’s “Writings,” in the commandment of the Sermon on the Mount — “Love your enemies … pray for them which despitefully use you” (Matthew 5:44) — which Silouan treats not as a high counsel for the few but as the test of whether one truly knows God by the Holy Spirit: “If you pray for your enemies, peace will come to you,” and the soul that cannot love its enemies has not yet known God as it ought (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, “Concerning Love of Enemies”). Love for enemies and prayer for the whole world are, for both Silouan and Sophrony, a single reality: one cannot bear the whole Adam in prayer while excluding any part of Adam from one’s love.

“Adam” as the Total Man

To understand what Sophrony means by praying for “the whole Adam,” one must grasp the way both he and Silouan use the name “Adam.” Adam is not, in this usage, merely the first man of Genesis, the individual progenitor. Adam is the total man — humanity as one nature, one being extended through all persons, so that the sin of the one and the fall of the one is the wound of all, and the salvation of all is the healing of the one Adam (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, “Adam’s Lament”; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 5). Silouan’s great prose-poem “Adam’s Lament” gives this its most famous expression: Adam, exiled from paradise, weeps not only for his own loss but for the whole race that came from him and shares his exile; his lament is the lament of all humanity for the lost vision of God, and his longing is the longing of the whole human race for return (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, “Adam’s Lament”).

On this account, to “pray for the whole Adam” is to pray for the entire human nature as a single living whole — past, present, and to come — gathering all men into one’s prayer because all men are, in the deepest sense, one man. Sophrony reads this against the background of the Pauline contrast between the first Adam and the last Adam, Christ (1 Corinthians 15:45–49): as in Adam the whole of humanity fell, so in Christ, the second Adam, the whole of humanity is recapitulated and raised. The one who prays for the whole Adam prays, therefore, in the image of Christ, who took on not an individual fragment of human nature but the whole nature of Adam in order to heal it (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; His Life Is Mine, 1977; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 5).

This is also why, for Sophrony, the prayer for the whole Adam is inseparable from the consciousness of one’s own sin. Because Adam is one, the person who has truly repented sees in himself the sin of all and weeps for all as for himself; the deeper the repentance, the wider the prayer, until the boundary between “my sin” and “the sin of the world” is, in the experience of such prayer, effaced (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991; On Prayer, 1996; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988). The movement of self-condemnation and the movement of universal compassion are, in this theology, the same movement.

The Garden of Gethsemane as the Model

Sophrony’s distinctive contribution is to find in the Garden of Gethsemane the supreme and defining instance of this all-human prayer. In His Life Is Mine he devotes his central reflection to what he calls the prayer of Gethsemane: Christ’s agony in the Garden (Luke 22:39–46) and His high-priestly prayer (John 17) are, for Sophrony, not merely the prelude to the Passion but the very summit of redemptive love — the moment in which the incarnate Word, in His human nature, takes the whole of fallen Adam into Himself and prays for all, sweating as it were great drops of blood (Luke 22:44) under the weight of the sin of the world (Sophrony, His Life Is Mine, 1977, the chapter on the Gethsemane prayer). In the high-priestly prayer Christ prays “that they all may be one” (John 17:21), gathering His own and, through them, the world into the unity of the Father and the Son; in the agony He bears the whole separation of humanity from God in His own person.

For Sophrony, this is the archetype of hypostatic prayer — prayer in which a person, precisely as person (hypostasis), contains and bears the whole. Christ is one Person who carries the entire nature of Adam; and the Christian, drawn into Christ’s love, is called to a participation in this very prayer, to a love that, on its small human scale, embraces all men as Christ embraced them in the Garden (Sophrony, His Life Is Mine, 1977; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 5–6). The prayer of Gethsemane is thus the meeting-point of Sophrony’s theology of the person — the hypostatic principle — and his theology of love: the person attains its fullness not by withdrawing into its own individuality but by opening, in the likeness of Christ, to contain all Adam (see The Search for the Absolute for the personalist root of this thought).

Sophrony is careful to insist that this participation is gift, not achievement. The capacity to pray for the whole world is not generated by human effort but is the indwelling of the love of Christ in the praying person by the Holy Spirit; it is, in his language, a prayer that the Spirit prays in us, a being-drawn into the prayer of Christ rather than an imitation mounted from below (Sophrony, On Prayer, 1996; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988). This is the connective tissue between the prayer for the whole Adam and the Jesus Prayer of his monastery: in the continual invocation of the Name, the heart is enlarged until it can hold all (see The Jesus Prayer, and the practice at Essex, The Community and the Jesus Prayer).

Silouan’s Gift and Sophrony’s Development

It is important, and faithful to the scholarship, to mark the relation between what Sophrony received and what he developed. The substance — love for enemies, prayer for the whole world, the figure of Adam weeping for all humanity — is unmistakably Silouan’s, recorded by Sophrony in the “Writings” he preserved and published (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991; see Preserving Silouan’s Writings). But the systematic articulation — the language of “hypostatic prayer,” the explicit enthronement of the Gethsemane prayer as the theological model, the linkage to the personalist account of the human being as image of the Trinity — is Sophrony’s own theological construction, built upon Silouan’s experience but going beyond his elder’s deliberately simple idiom.

[Disputed: whether "praying for the whole Adam" / prayer for the whole world is best attributed to St. Silouan or to Sophrony's theological development of it. Sophrony presents the teaching as received from Silouan and grounds it in Silouan's own "Writings," above all "Adam's Lament" and the chapters on love for enemies (Sophrony, *Saint Silouan the Athonite*, 1991); Nicholas Sakharov treats the "universal" or all-human prayer as a genuine Silouanic core that Sophrony substantially *develops*, recasting it in the technical language of hypostasis and the Gethsemane prayer that is not Silouan's own (Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, ch. 5–6); Andrew Louth likewise reads Sophrony as the interpreter who gave Silouan's spiritual experience its theological form (Louth, *Modern Orthodox Thinkers*, 2015). The positions are complementary rather than strictly opposed: the experience is Silouan's, the systematic theology of it is Sophrony's.]

Does It Imply Universalism?

A natural question presses on any theology of prayer “for the whole world,” including those in hell: does it tend toward apokatastasis — the doctrine of universal final salvation? Sophrony was aware of the question and resisted the conclusion. He held that the love which prays for all, even the damned, is the very love of Christ and is therefore not optional but commanded; yet he did not infer from the universality of the prayer the certainty of universal salvation, and he preserved the reality of human freedom and the possibility of its definitive refusal of God (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; His Life Is Mine, 1977; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 6). The same balance is found in Silouan’s celebrated exchange, recorded by Sophrony, in which a hermit rejoiced that God would punish the godless and Silouan answered that love could not bear such a thought, that “love could not bear it” and would pray even for the lost — a saying about the form of love, not a dogmatic assertion about the outcome (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991).

[Disputed: whether the universality of Sophrony's (and Silouan's) prayer for "the whole Adam," including those in hell, tends toward universalism (apokatastasis). Sophrony explicitly resists drawing the universalist conclusion, treating the all-embracing prayer as the commanded form of Christ's love while upholding human freedom and the real possibility of perdition (Sophrony, *We Shall See Him as He Is*, 1988; *His Life Is Mine*, 1977); Nicholas Sakharov reads Sophrony as deliberately holding the tension — a "hope" that all might be saved expressed in prayer, without the dogmatic affirmation that all *will* be (Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, ch. 6). Some readers nonetheless detect a structural affinity with the universalist hope of figures such as Origen and, in modern Orthodoxy, the more speculative apokatastatic currents; the repository notes the tension without resolving it, and follows Sophrony's own stated refusal of the universalist dogma.]

Why It Stands at the Center

The prayer for the whole Adam is not, for Sophrony, a peripheral devotion but the place where his whole theology converges. The personal God of the “I AM,” whom he found at the end of his early search (see The Search for the Absolute); the hypostatic principle, the human person as image of the personal, Trinitarian God; the Uncreated Light of theosis; the Jesus Prayer of his community — all of these are gathered into the single act of a person who, having been drawn into the love of Christ, bears the whole Adam in prayer as Christ bore him in Gethsemane. It is the most concentrated statement of what Sophrony believed a human being is for: to become, by grace, a person whose love is as wide as Christ’s, and so to participate in the saving prayer of the second Adam for the first (Sophrony, His Life Is Mine, 1977; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 5–6).

See Also

References

  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (“Adam’s Lament”; “Concerning Love of Enemies”; the prayer for the whole world. Earlier English form: The Undistorted Image, Faith Press, 1958; Russian original Starets Siluan, Paris, 1948/1952.)
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. His Life Is Mine. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. London: Mowbray; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977. (The Gethsemane prayer; the prayer for the whole Adam.)
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Tolleshunt Knights / Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988. (Hypostatic prayer; the love that embraces all Adam.)
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. On Prayer. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996. (Prayer as the Spirit’s prayer in us; the enlargement of the heart.)
  • Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (Ch. 5–6 on the universal/hypostatic prayer, “Adam,” and the question of universalism.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Sophrony as the theological interpreter of Silouan’s experience.)