The Writings

A survey of St. Sophrony’s literary corpus work by work — the book on his elder (Saint Silouan the Athonite), the autobiographical-theological masterwork (We Shall See Him as He Is), the shorter spiritual works (His Life Is Mine, On Prayer, Words of Life), and the correspondence (the letters to his family and to the convert-diplomat David Balfour) — with attention to dates, translators, content, and the persistent problem of the relation between Sophrony’s Russian originals and the English translations by which most of the world has read him. Sophrony wrote little, and wrote it slowly; the smallness of the corpus is itself a clue to a man for whom writing was an overflow of prayer rather than a vocation.

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

A Small Corpus and a Large Influence

Sophrony’s published corpus is small — a handful of books, a volume or two of letters, scattered occasional pieces — yet it has carried a disproportionate weight in modern Orthodox spirituality. He was not a systematic theologian producing volumes; he was a monk and elder who wrote out of a long interior life, and almost everything he published is either testimony (his own or his elder’s), prayer, or counsel. Nicholas Sakharov, in the principal scholarly study of the corpus, organizes Sophrony’s thought precisely because Sophrony himself never did so, and notes that the writings must be read as the deposit of an experience rather than as a constructed system (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, Introduction). Andrew Louth makes the same point from outside the community: Sophrony’s importance lies less in the quantity of what he wrote than in the singular character of We Shall See Him as He Is as a first-person spiritual document (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. on Sophrony).

A feature runs through the whole corpus and must be stated at the outset: Sophrony wrote in Russian, but the English-speaking world — and through English, much of the rest — has read him chiefly in the translations of Rosemary Edmonds, made and revised over decades and published largely by his own monastery and by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. The relation of the Russian originals to these English translations is not a mere technicality; it bears on the dating of editions, on the titles by which the works are known, and in places on the nuance of Sophrony’s most delicate theological language. This file fixes what is securely known and flags what is genuinely contested.

Saint Silouan the Athonite (Russian Starets Siluan; English first The Undistorted Image)

The first and, for the world at large, the most consequential of Sophrony’s books is the work on his elder. It is two books in one: Sophrony’s biography and theological interpretation of St. Silouan (Part One), and an edition of Silouan’s own “Writings” (Part Two), so that the volume is at once a hagiography, a theological treatise, and a primary-source edition (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Edmonds, SVS, 1991; on its double structure see The Book That Revealed Silouan and Preserving Silouan’s Writings). Without it, Silouan would in all likelihood have remained an unknown monk of St. Panteleimon’s; with it, Silouan was eventually canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1987, and the phrase “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not” entered the common speech of modern Orthodoxy.

The publishing history is layered and is the locus of the corpus’s clearest dating dispute. Sophrony composed and first issued the work in Russian under the title Starets Siluan (Старец Силуан), produced from the monastic poverty of his own resources in Paris in the post-war years. [Disputed: the first edition of *Starets Siluan* is dated by some sources to 1948 and by others to 1952. The 1948 date is widely given (e.g., as reported in the Essex monastery's and SVS's own publishing notices and in common reference accounts) and corresponds to Sophrony's first, limited Russian printing; the 1952 date is also frequently cited and appears to correspond to a fuller or more widely circulated Russian edition. Nicholas Sakharov (*I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, bibliography and ch. 1) treats the Russian text as belonging to this immediate post-war period without resolving the printings into a single year; the discrepancy reflects the difference between a first private printing and a subsequent fuller edition rather than a genuine contradiction.] What is not in dispute is that the Russian Starets Siluan precedes and underlies every later form.

The English history begins with The Undistorted Image: Staretz Silouan, 1866–1938, translated by Rosemary Edmonds and published by the Faith Press in 1958 — the first appearance of Silouan in English and the form in which a generation of Western readers first met him (Sophrony, The Undistorted Image, Faith Press, 1958; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). In later editions the work was reissued, sometimes split or reorganized, and ultimately settled under the title Saint Silouan the Athonite in Rosemary Edmonds’ revised translation, the definitive English edition published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press in 1991 (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Edmonds, SVS, 1991). Readers should be aware that The Undistorted Image, Wisdom from Mount Athos, and Saint Silouan the Athonite are not entirely independent works but successive and partly overlapping English presentations of the single Russian Starets Siluan — a fact that has caused real bibliographic confusion and that explains why the same material is cited under different titles in the secondary literature (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, bibliography).

We Shall See Him as He Is (1988)

If the Silouan book is the most consequential of Sophrony’s works for the world, We Shall See Him as He Is is the most personal and, for the study of Sophrony himself, the most important. Published by his own monastery at Tolleshunt Knights in Rosemary Edmonds’ translation in 1988, five years before his death, it is Sophrony’s autobiographical-theological masterwork: a first-person account of his inner life from the youthful turn to impersonal mysticism, through the crisis of the biblical “I AM” and the return to Christ, to the vision of the Uncreated Light and the experience of God-forsakenness (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, Essex, 1988; the title is from 1 John 3:2, “we shall see him as he is”). Its publication was not uncontroversial within Sophrony’s own circle: to speak so openly, in the first person, of visions of the Light and of the highest states of prayer cut against the monastic reticence about one’s own spiritual gifts, and Sophrony defended the disclosure as a debt owed to others — a testimony given for the sake of those who would come after (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1 and ch. on the Light; see We Shall See Him as He Is).

For the methodology of this collection the book is decisive: it is the primary source to which Sophrony’s deepest claims — the Light, the God-forsakenness, the prayer for the whole Adam — are pinned as his testimony rather than asserted as adjudicated fact (per METHODOLOGY §3.5; and see Godforsakenness and the Uncreated Light). The English title, drawn from 1 John 3:2, fixes the book’s whole orientation: the promise that the purified will see God as he is, which Sophrony reads through the Athonite tradition of the vision of the Uncreated Light (see Theosis).

His Life Is Mine (1977)

His Life Is Mine, translated by Rosemary Edmonds and published in 1977 (London: Mowbray; Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press), is the shorter and more accessible of Sophrony’s two principal personal-theological works, and for many readers it is the door into his thought. Its title, again drawn from the Johannine identification of the believer’s life with Christ’s, signals its theme: the personal God who names Himself “I AM,” and the human person fulfilled in communion with Him (Sophrony, His Life Is Mine, 1977; on the “I AM” see The Search for the Absolute and The Hypostatic Principle). Where We Shall See Him as He Is is sustained autobiography, His Life Is Mine is more nearly a compact statement of the theology of the person and of prayer — and it appeared eleven years before the larger autobiography, so that it functions, in the order of publication, as the announcement of themes the later book would unfold at length.

On Prayer (1996)

On Prayer, translated by Rosemary Edmonds and published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press in 1996, gathers Sophrony’s writing on prayer — above all the Jesus Prayer and the prayer of the heart that stood at the centre of his monastery’s life (Sophrony, On Prayer, SVS, 1996; on the Jesus Prayer in the community see The Community and the Jesus Prayer, and Jesus Prayer). It is the most directly practical of his books, and the most continuous with the hesychast tradition of the Holy Mountain that he carried into the West: here the theology of the person and of the Light is brought back to its source and end in the simple invocation of the Name. Published three years after his death, it is in part a posthumous gathering, and like the rest of the corpus it reaches English readers through Edmonds’ translation of Sophrony’s Russian.

Words of Life (1996)

Words of Life, published by the Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Essex in 1996, is a slim volume of Sophrony’s counsels — brief sayings and spiritual instruction of the kind that passed from the elder to his community (Sophrony, Words of Life, Essex, 1996). It belongs to the genre of recorded eldership rather than composed treatise, and stands closer to the oral tradition of his spiritual fatherhood than to his books; as such it forms a bridge between the written corpus surveyed here and the unwritten “text” of his eldership treated in the companion file (see The Spiritual Father).

The Correspondence: Letters to His Family and to David Balfour

Alongside the books stands a body of correspondence, increasingly published in recent decades, that has become an important source for Sophrony’s biography and inner development. Two bodies of letters are central.

The first is the family correspondence — letters written from Athos and afterward to his relatives in Russia and the emigration — published in English as Letters to His Family (in association with the Essex monastery and St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press). In some presentations Sophrony’s correspondence and reflections circulate under the title Striving for Knowledge of God, and care is needed not to conflate the various epistolary collections, which overlap and have been issued under more than one title in both Russian and English (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, bibliography). These letters are valued for the unguarded, occasional record they give of Sophrony’s monastic years, below the level of his formal theology.

The second, and the more remarkable, is the correspondence with David Balfour — a former Roman Catholic (and one-time Benedictine) who converted to Orthodoxy, became for a time Sophrony’s spiritual son, later left Orthodoxy and pursued a career in British diplomacy and intelligence, and corresponded with Sophrony chiefly in the 1930s. The letters, written largely from Athos, are an extended exercise in spiritual direction at a distance and a precious early witness to Sophrony’s mind in the very years of his discipleship under and just after St. Silouan; they were published in English translation as Striving for Knowledge of God: Correspondence with David Balfour (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2016) (Sophrony, Striving for Knowledge of God, trans., SVS, 2016; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, on the Balfour letters as a source for Sophrony’s early thought). [Disputed: the dating and editorial framing of the Balfour correspondence have occasioned scholarly caution. The bulk of the exchange is securely placed in the 1930s, contemporaneous with or just after Sophrony's years with St. Silouan (d. 1938); but the letters survive unevenly, some are undated or datable only by internal evidence, and Balfour's later apostasy and intelligence career have raised questions, addressed in the scholarship, about how far the published selection and its framing reflect editorial arrangement rather than the original sequence. Nicholas Sakharov (*I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002) uses the correspondence as a genuine early source while signalling these limits; the 2016 SVS edition presents the letters with editorial apparatus rather than as a simple chronological run.] Whatever the residual uncertainties, the Balfour letters are now recognized as one of the most important sources for the formation of Sophrony’s theology, precisely because they predate the books by decades and show his characteristic themes — the personal God, repentance, the knowledge of God — already in formation under Silouan’s influence.

The Russian Originals and the English Translations

A single thread ties the whole corpus together and deserves to be named in its own right: almost everything Sophrony wrote, he wrote in Russian, and almost everything the English-speaking world has read, it has read in the translations of Rosemary Edmonds. Edmonds translated The Undistorted Image (1958) and revised it toward the definitive Saint Silouan the Athonite (SVS, 1991); she translated His Life Is Mine (1977), We Shall See Him as He Is (1988), and On Prayer (1996). This means that the texture of Sophrony in English — its cadence, its theological vocabulary, its handling of words like person, hypostasis, Absolute, and Light — is in large part Edmonds’ rendering of Sophrony’s Russian, made in close association with the monastery and in several cases revised across editions (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, bibliography; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). Three consequences follow for anyone using the corpus. First, the dating of “first editions” must distinguish the Russian original from the English first appearance — most sharply in the Starets Siluan / The Undistorted Image / Saint Silouan the Athonite sequence noted above. Second, the same Russian work can appear under more than one English title, and the secondary literature cites it variously. Third, the precise theological nuance of Sophrony’s most delicate language is, for the English reader, mediated; serious study returns to the Russian, and Nicholas Sakharov’s monograph is in part valuable because it reads Sophrony in the original and notes where the English flattens or sharpens a term (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002). None of this diminishes the translations, which Sophrony himself authorized and which carried his witness to the world; it simply locates them honestly as translations.

References

Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (Russian original Starets Siluan, Paris, 1948/1952; first English form The Undistorted Image, Faith Press, 1958.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988.
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.
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Striving for Knowledge of God: Correspondence with David Balfour. Trans. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2016. (And the family correspondence, Letters to His Family, Essex / SVS.)
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.