07 — Sources and the Corpus

The written and living sources through which St. Sophrony of Essex (1896–1993) reaches us: a small but weighty literary corpus, almost all of it autobiographical, theological, or epistolary, beginning with the book on his elder (Saint Silouan the Athonite) and culminating in his own first-person masterwork (We Shall See Him as He Is); and the second, unwritten “text” of his eldership — the spiritual fatherhood through which he formed the Essex community and transmitted what he had received from St. Silouan. These two files survey the corpus work by work, with dates, translators, and the relation of the Russian originals to the English translations, and then treat Sophrony as geron and the disciples who carry his teaching.

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

Sophrony is, in a precise sense, doubly accessible: through a published corpus and through a living tradition of disciples. The corpus is unusual among the saints for its autobiographical density — Sophrony is one of the very few canonized figures to have left a sustained first-person account of his inner life — and the published works cannot be read apart from the eldership that produced them, since the books grew out of the same spiritual fatherhood that formed the monastery at Tolleshunt Knights. This section maps both. The Writings surveys the books and letters one by one, fixing each work’s date, translator, and content, and attending to the problem that runs through the whole corpus: the relation of Sophrony’s Russian originals to the English translations by which most readers know him. The Spiritual Father treats the eldership itself — confession and direction, the formation of the community, and the disciples (Archimandrite Zacharias, Sister Magdalen, and the community he left behind) — as the continuation of the elder–disciple bond Sophrony had himself received from St. Silouan (see Disciple of Saint Silouan).

Files in This Section

File Description
The Writings A survey of Sophrony’s literary corpus, work by work, with dates, translators, and content: Saint Silouan the Athonite (Russian Starets Siluan, Paris 1948/1952; English first as The Undistorted Image, 1958; definitive trans. Edmonds, SVS 1991), We Shall See Him as He Is (1988), His Life Is Mine (1977), On Prayer (1996), Words of Life (1996), and the correspondence (Letters to His Family / Striving for Knowledge of God; the letters to David Balfour); and the relation of the Russian originals to the English translations.
The Spiritual Father Sophrony as elder (geron / starets) and spiritual father: the formation of the Essex community through spiritual fatherhood, confession and direction, his understanding of obedience and the elder–disciple bond as the continuation of what he received from St. Silouan, and his disciples — above all Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou), expositor of his theology, and Sister Magdalen.

See Also

References

  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991.
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988.
  • Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002.
  • Zacharias (Zacharou), Archimandrite. Christ, Our Way and Our Life: A Presentation of the Theology of Archimandrite Sophrony. South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2003.
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.