The Spiritual Father

St. Sophrony as elder (geron / starets) and spiritual father: the formation of the Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights through spiritual fatherhood rather than rule, the place of confession and spiritual direction at the centre of its life, and his understanding of obedience and the elder–disciple bond as the continuation of what he had himself received from St. Silouan the Athonite. The file treats this eldership as the second, unwritten “text” of Sophrony’s corpus — the living transmission carried by his disciples, above all Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou), expositor of his theology, and Sister Magdalen — and pins Sophrony’s teaching on obedience and the elder to his own writings.

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

Eldership as a Received Gift

Sophrony’s eldership cannot be understood as an office he assumed; he understood it as a gift received and passed on. He had been, for some eight years on Mount Athos, the disciple of St. Silouan, and the whole of his own spiritual fatherhood was, in his account, the continuation of that bond — not the founding of something new but the handing-on of what had been given to him (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Edmonds, SVS, 1991, on his discipleship; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, on the elder–disciple relation as the structure of Sophrony’s spiritual life; see Disciple of Saint Silouan). This is the decisive frame: Sophrony the elder is intelligible only as Sophrony the disciple grown old. The teaching he gave his community on obedience, on confession, on the bond between spiritual father and spiritual child, is the teaching he had himself lived under Silouan, and he was insistent that he transmitted rather than invented it.

For Sophrony the elder–disciple relationship is not a matter of management or even of moral guidance but of a sharing of life — the spiritual father bears the disciple in prayer, and the disciple, through obedience, is freed from the tyranny of his own self-will into the freedom of communion (Sophrony, His Life Is Mine, 1977, on prayer and the person; Sophrony, On Prayer, SVS, 1996; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. on the hypostatic principle and on obedience). This is why his theology of the person and his practice of eldership are a single thing: the disciple becomes a person — a true hypostasis — precisely by entering, through obedience and love, into the kind of self-emptying communion that the persons of the Trinity have eternally (see The Hypostatic Principle, and on deification Theosis).

Obedience and the Elder–Disciple Bond

At the heart of Sophrony’s eldership stands his teaching on obedience, which he received from Silouan and which is among the most demanding and the most easily misunderstood parts of his thought. For Sophrony, obedience is not the suppression of the disciple’s freedom but its liberation: by voluntarily cutting off his own will and entrusting himself to the elder, the disciple is delivered from the closed circle of self and opened to the will of God; obedience is thus an ascetic instrument of love, freely chosen and freely given, not a juridical submission (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, SVS, 1991, on Silouan’s teaching on obedience and the will; Sophrony, His Life Is Mine, 1977; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. on obedience). The disciple obeys not because the elder is infallible but because the act of obedience, offered in faith, becomes the channel through which grace heals the disciple’s fractured will — a point Sophrony grounds in Silouan’s own counsel and in the monastic tradition of the Holy Mountain.

Sophrony was equally clear about the corresponding burden on the elder. The spiritual father, in receiving the disciple’s obedience, takes on responsibility for the disciple before God, bearing him in prayer and answering for the counsel he gives; the bond is reciprocal, a mutual self-giving in which both are bound (Sophrony, On Prayer, SVS, 1996; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002). [Disputed: the proper scope of monastic obedience to an elder — and how far Sophrony's strong language about cutting off one's own will applies outside a freely entered monastic relationship — is a contested point in the reception of his teaching. Sophrony and his disciple Archimandrite Zacharias present obedience as a liberating, mutually willed gift proper to the monastic elder–disciple bond (Zacharias, *Christ, Our Way and Our Life*, 2003; Sophrony, *Saint Silouan the Athonite*, 1991); critics and cautious commentators in the wider literature warn that the same language, transposed to lay direction or to relationships that are not freely entered, can be distorted into unhealthy submission, and stress that Sophrony intended it within the safeguards of a genuine, voluntary monastic obedience under a discerning father. The disagreement is over application and safeguard, not over Sophrony's own carefully bounded meaning.] This caution belongs to the topic and not against it: Sophrony himself framed obedience within the freedom of love, and his expositors are careful to keep it there (see Spiritual Direction).

Confession and Direction at the Centre of the Community

When Sophrony founded the Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in 1959, he built it not on a written rule in the Western sense but on the living relation of spiritual fatherhood and on the liturgical rhythm of the Jesus Prayer (see Founding the Monastery of St. John the Baptist, The Community and the Jesus Prayer). At the centre of the community’s life stood confession and spiritual direction. Sophrony heard the confessions of his monastics and of the many who came to him, and he understood confession not as a mere recitation of faults but as the place where the person is laid bare before God and, through the priest, receives healing — an extension of the same self-disclosure and self-emptying that obedience effects (Sophrony, On Prayer, SVS, 1996; Sophrony, Words of Life, Essex, 1996; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002). The community was double from early on, men and women under a single spiritual father, and Sophrony’s eldership held it together across that breadth (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the Essex community; see The Community and the Jesus Prayer).

Sophrony’s practice of confession was inseparable from his theology of the person. Because he held that the human being becomes a true hypostasis only by emerging from the self-enclosure of the fallen will into open communion, confession was for him not primarily a disciplinary transaction but the moment in which that emergence is enacted: the person stands uncovered before God, refuses the concealment that is the very texture of the fall, and is met by grace (Sophrony, On Prayer, SVS, 1996; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. on the hypostatic principle). The same logic governs his understanding of the spiritual father’s role in confession: the elder does not stand over the penitent as judge but beside him as one who has himself made the descent into self-knowledge that Silouan taught — “keep your mind in hell, and despair not” — and who can therefore accompany the disciple into the truth about himself without crushing him (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, SVS, 1991; see Godforsakenness and the Uncreated Light).

It is in this setting that Words of Life and the recorded counsels belong: brief, occasional sayings that are the deposit of direction given face to face, the written residue of an essentially oral eldership (Sophrony, Words of Life, Essex, 1996; on the corpus see The Writings). The monastery’s distinctive horarium — long stretches of the Jesus Prayer in common, in place of much of the usual cycle of services — was itself a pedagogical instrument of the elder: a structure designed to form the whole community in the prayer of the heart that Sophrony had brought from Athos (Sophrony, On Prayer, SVS, 1996; see Jesus Prayer).

The Disciples and the Living Transmission

Because Sophrony’s eldership was a living transmission, its continuation runs through his disciples as much as through his books. Foremost among the expositors of his theology is Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou) of the Essex monastery, whose Christ, Our Way and Our Life: A Presentation of the Theology of Archimandrite Sophrony (St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2003) is the principal disciple’s exposition of Sophrony’s thought — a systematic presentation, from within the community, of the themes Sophrony left scattered through his writings and his direction (Zacharias, Christ, Our Way and Our Life, 2003). Zacharias’ wider body of talks and books has become one of the chief means by which Sophrony’s teaching on the person, on God-forsakenness, and on the prayer for the whole Adam has reached a new generation, and he writes explicitly as a disciple transmitting an elder’s mind rather than as an independent theologian (Zacharias, Christ, Our Way and Our Life, 2003, Preface; see Bearing the Whole Adam).

Beside Zacharias stands Sister Magdalen, a monastic of the community whose writings — notably on the spiritual formation of children and on prayer — carry Sophrony’s pastoral mind into areas his own books did not treat at length, and who belongs to the circle of disciples through whom the community’s life and the elder’s teaching have been articulated (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, on the community; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). Her work is a reminder that Sophrony’s eldership reached beyond the cell and the confessional into the formation of whole families and of the young, and that the transmission of his mind has not been confined to the explicitly theological register in which his own books are written. And beyond any single name there is the community itself — the international, double monastery Sophrony left at Tolleshunt Knights, drawn from many nations and languages, which is itself the living continuation of his eldership and the most concrete of his legacies (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; see The Community and the Jesus Prayer). That a single Russian monk, formed on Athos under one elder, could establish in the English countryside a community that has drawn monastics and pilgrims from across the Orthodox world and beyond is the plainest measure of his spiritual fatherhood — a fatherhood that propagated itself, as he intended, through persons rather than through institutions or texts alone.

Nicholas Sakharov — Sophrony’s great-nephew and himself a monk of the community — occupies a distinctive place in this transmission: at once a disciple within the monastery and the author of the principal academic study of Sophrony’s theology, he stands at the meeting point of the living tradition and the scholarly literature, and his I Love, Therefore I Am (SVS, 2002) is in effect the disciple’s exposition raised to the level of critical scholarship (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002).

The Elder as Continuation of Silouan

It is fitting to end where Sophrony himself would have insisted on beginning: with Silouan. Sophrony understood his entire eldership as the prolongation of the gift he had received on the Holy Mountain. The teaching he gave — on obedience, on confession, on bearing one another in prayer, on the descent into the awareness of one’s own hell without despair — was, in his own presentation, Silouan’s teaching, received in discipleship and handed on (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, SVS, 1991; see Disciple of Saint Silouan and Godforsakenness and the Uncreated Light). The elder–disciple bond, for Sophrony, is the way the life of the Church is actually transmitted from generation to generation — not as information but as a sharing of spiritual life, a chain of fatherhood reaching back through Silouan to the desert and forward through Sophrony’s own disciples to the present. In this sense the most important “source” for Sophrony is not a book at all but a relationship: the one he received from Silouan and gave to the community at Essex (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002; Zacharias, Christ, Our Way and Our Life, 2003).

See Also

References

  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (On Silouan’s teaching on obedience and the will, received and transmitted by Sophrony.)
  • 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. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1996.
  • 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. (The principal disciple’s exposition of Sophrony’s theology.)
  • Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002.
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.