08 — Veneration

The recognition of St. Sophrony of Essex as a saint and the reach of his witness in the contemporary Church: the synodal act of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of 27 November 2019 that entered his name in the calendar and set his feast on 11 July, the day of his repose in 1993 (with a joint commemoration with St. Silouan on 24 September); and his immense influence on modern Orthodox spirituality — the renewal of the Jesus Prayer in the West, the spread of his theology of the person through his disciples and translations, and the monastery at Essex as a center of pilgrimage. These two files treat, respectively, the act of glorification and the living reception that surrounds it.

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

Sophrony is among the most recently glorified of modern Orthodox saints, recognized barely a quarter-century after his death, and among the most widely read — a saint who left a substantial autobiographical and theological corpus through which his teaching reached the whole Orthodox world in his own lifetime and immediately after. This section takes the two faces of his veneration together: the formal, in the synodal decision of 27 November 2019 and the feast it established; and the lived, in the spread of the hesychast prayer he carried from Athos to Essex, the work of his disciples and translators, and his place in the conversation of twentieth-century Orthodox theology alongside Lossky, Florovsky, and Zizioulas. Per the repository methodology (§3.5, §4), the spiritual claims are pinned to Sophrony’s own writings as his testimony, the assessment of so recent a legacy is offered provisionally, and the genuinely contested points — the festal arrangements and the relation of his personalism to Zizioulas’s — carry structured [Disputed: ...] notes.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Glorification of 2019 The synodal decision of the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of 27 November 2019; the inscription of his name in the calendar; the feast of 11 July (the day of his repose, 11 July 1993) and the joint commemoration with St. Silouan on 24 September; the petition from the stavropegial Essex monastery; the swiftness of the recognition (twenty-six years) and what the glorification does and does not settle.
Sophrony in Contemporary Orthodoxy His influence on modern Orthodox spirituality: the renewal of the Jesus Prayer in the West; the diaspora (Britain, Western Europe, North America, Greece, Russia, Romania); his theology read alongside Lossky, Florovsky, and Zizioulas on personhood; the spread through disciples (Zacharias) and translations; the Essex monastery as a center of pilgrimage.

See Also

References

  • Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Synodal decision on the glorification of Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), 27 November 2019. Announced by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and republished by the Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, Essex.
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988; On Prayer. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996; Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991.
  • Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002.
  • Zacharou (Zacharias), Archimandrite. Christ, Our Way and Our Life: A Presentation of the Theology of Archimandrite Sophrony. Trans. Sister Magdalen. South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2003.
  • Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.