Godforsakenness and the Uncreated Light

The apophatic, kenotic side of St. Sophrony’s spiritual theology: his teaching that the experience of God-forsakenness — modeled on Christ’s cry from the Cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) — is a necessary purifying descent before the fullness of theosis, and that this descent stands in a single dialectic with the vision of the Uncreated Light. Sophrony reads this in the key St. Silouan gave him: “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” This file follows that dialectic as Sophrony narrates it, pinning the visionary and confessional claims to his own writings as his testimony rather than asserting them as adjudicated fact (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

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

The Cry from the Cross

At the center of Sophrony’s account of the spiritual life stands the cry of the crucified Christ: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46, citing Psalm 22:1 [LXX 21:2]). Sophrony does not treat this as a merely rhetorical citation of the Psalm, nor as a momentary darkening soon dispelled, but as the revelation of the uttermost depth of Christ’s kenosis — the self-emptying of the incarnate Word (Philippians 2:5–8) carried to the point where He, who is one with the Father, takes into His human experience the whole weight of humanity’s separation from God (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the Gethsemane–Golgotha descent; His Life Is Mine, 1977). In the abandonment of the Cross, Christ bears the God-forsakenness of fallen Adam — the very state of the human race cut off from God by sin — and in bearing it, heals it.

This reading is inseparable from the prayer of Gethsemane treated in the companion file: the agony in the Garden (Luke 22:39–46), where Christ sweats as it were great drops of blood, and the cry from the Cross are for Sophrony two moments of one descent, in which the Lord takes the whole Adam into Himself precisely by entering the place of God’s absence on Adam’s behalf (Sophrony, His Life Is Mine, 1977; see Bearing the Whole Adam). The God-forsakenness is thus not the failure of redemption but its instrument: Christ saves the abandoned by being abandoned.

God-Forsakenness as Purifying Descent

From this Christological center Sophrony draws a teaching about the path of every soul that seeks God in earnest. He held, on the testimony of his own experience and his reading of Silouan, that those whom God draws toward the fullness of communion are led through an experience of God-abandonment — a withdrawal of the felt presence of grace, a darkness and desolation in which the soul tastes something of the dereliction of the Cross (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, the chapters on the loss and return of grace; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 4, on God-forsakenness). This experience is, for Sophrony, not punitive but purifying: it burns away the subtle self-love and self-reliance that cling even to advanced prayer, it teaches the soul that grace is gift and not possession, and it widens the heart by acquainting it, from within, with the suffering of all who live without the consciousness of God (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; On Prayer, 1996).

Sophrony narrates this above all from his own life. In We Shall See Him as He Is he records that after the early gift of the vision of the Uncreated Light (see The Search for the Absolute) there came a withdrawal of that light, a prolonged and bitter sense of God’s absence, which he interpreted only later as a necessary stage — the descent that had to precede a more stable and purified participation in the Light (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988). Per the repository methodology, these are claims of personal religious experience and are reported here as Sophrony’s own testimony, pinned to his writings, not certified as adjudicated fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The structure Sophrony describes — gift, withdrawal, purified return — is recognizably the pattern that the ascetic tradition names the alternation of the visitation and the withdrawal of grace, and Sophrony reads his elder Silouan’s life in the same terms: the early visitation of Christ, the long years of struggle and the felt loss of grace, and the word given to Silouan in the midst of that struggle that became the key to the whole (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, the Life of Silouan; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 4).

“Keep Your Mind in Hell, and Despair Not”

That word is the saying Sophrony received as the heart of Silouan’s teaching, given (in the account Sophrony published) by Christ Himself to Silouan when the monk was tormented by the assaults of despair: “Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not” (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, the Life and “Writings” of Silouan; see The Book That Revealed Silouan). The saying holds together the two movements that Sophrony’s whole theology of God-forsakenness tries to articulate. “Keep thy mind in hell” is the descent: the soul is to remain in the consciousness of its own unworthiness of God, condemning itself, refusing every self-justification, accepting the full darkness of its separation from God as its due. “And despair not” is the refusal to let that descent close into hopelessness: the soul holds, in the very depth of its self-condemnation, to the hope of God’s mercy, and so the descent into hell becomes the place where grace is found rather than the place where it is lost (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 4).

For Sophrony, this is the practical form of co-crucifixion with Christ. To “keep the mind in hell” is to enter, in measure, into Christ’s own descent into the God-forsakenness of fallen Adam; “and despair not” is to hold, with Christ, to the Father in the very place of His apparent absence. The saying thus translates the cry of the Cross into a rule of life: the soul that would share Christ’s resurrection and the vision of His Light must first consent to share, in some degree, His abandonment, yet without the despair that would make the descent destructive rather than redemptive (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; On Prayer, 1996).

The Dialectic of Darkness and Light

The decisive point in Sophrony is that the God-forsakenness and the vision of the Uncreated Light are not two unrelated experiences but two poles of a single movement. The Light of which Sophrony speaks is the Uncreated Light of Tabor and of the hesychast tradition — the same divine energy, the glory of God Himself, in which the saints behold God and are deified, as articulated in the theology of St. Gregory Palamas on which Sophrony draws (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the Uncreated Light; see Theosis and St. Gregory Palamas). Sophrony’s distinctive emphasis is that the fullness of this Light is given not despite the descent into God-forsakenness but through it: the soul is hollowed out and purified by the abandonment so that it can receive a Light it could not otherwise bear, and the depth of the descent corresponds to the height of the ascent (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 4–5).

This is why, for Sophrony, the experience of God-forsakenness is not a sign of being far from God but, paradoxically, may be a sign of being drawn near: the closer the soul approaches the Light, the more searchingly it is purified, and the more keenly it feels every residue of separation as darkness. The dialectic is apophatic in form — God is known in the cloud of His apparent absence as truly as in the radiance of His presence — and Sophrony unites it with the personalist and kenotic core of his thought: the person comes to its fullness, and to the vision of the personal God who is Light, by way of a kenosis that mirrors Christ’s (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; On Prayer, 1996; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 4–6).

Theosis Through Kenosis

Read in this way, Sophrony’s teaching is a particular inflection of the Orthodox doctrine of theosis — deification, the participation of the human person in the divine life and glory by grace (see Theosis). His contribution is to insist on the kenotic shape of the path to it: there is no theosis, on his account, that does not pass through a real co-suffering with the crucified Christ, a real entry into the God-forsakenness of Adam, because deification is participation in the whole Christ — the Christ of Gethsemane and Golgotha as well as of Tabor and the empty tomb (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; His Life Is Mine, 1977). The vision of the Uncreated Light is the goal; the descent into God-forsakenness, kept from despair by hope in God’s mercy, is the road (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 4).

[Disputed: how to read the relation between Christ's God-forsakenness on the Cross (Mark 15:34) and the impassibility of the divine nature, and what status to give Sophrony's transposition of that cry into the normative pattern of the spiritual life. Sophrony presents the abandonment as the deepest point of Christ's kenosis and as the model and source of a purifying God-forsakenness in the believer (Sophrony, *We Shall See Him as He Is*, 1988; *His Life Is Mine*, 1977); patristic interpreters of Mark 15:34 — read along the lines of Cyril of Alexandria and the conciliar Christology — generally locate the dereliction in Christ's appropriation of fallen humanity's condition in His human nature and economy, not in any real rupture within the Trinity, and the repository follows that dogmatic frame (cf. METHODOLOGY §4, dogma vs. theologoumenon). Nicholas Sakharov treats Sophrony's account of God-forsakenness as a genuine theological development, grounded in experience and in Silouan, rather than a settled patristic commonplace (Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, ch. 4); the universality and necessity of such an experience for every soul is best taken as Sophrony's spiritual counsel pinned to his own testimony, not as a dogmatic requirement.]

Why It Matters

Sophrony’s teaching on God-forsakenness guards his whole spirituality against two distortions. Against a triumphalist mysticism of the Light that would seek the vision of God while bypassing the Cross, it insists that the Light is reached only through co-crucifixion. Against a despairing asceticism that would sink into the consciousness of sin without hope, it holds up the “and despair not” that keeps the descent redemptive. The result is a spiritual theology in which the deepest darkness and the highest Light are bound together in the single person of the crucified and risen Christ, and in which the soul that would behold the Uncreated Light is taught first to keep its mind in hell, and not to despair (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; On Prayer, 1996; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 4–5).

See Also

References

  • 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 loss and return of grace; God-forsakenness; the Uncreated Light; theosis through kenosis.)
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. His Life Is Mine. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. London: Mowbray; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977. (Gethsemane and Golgotha; the kenosis of Christ.)
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (The Life of Silouan; “Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.”)
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. On Prayer. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996. (Prayer in the time of the withdrawal of grace.)
  • Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (Ch. 4 on God-forsakenness; ch. 4–6 on the dialectic of descent and the Light.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Sophrony on the Uncreated Light within twentieth-century Orthodox theology.)