The Glorification of 2019

The act by which Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) was numbered among the saints: the synodal decision of the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople of 27 November 2019, which entered his name in the calendar and set his commemoration on 11 July, the day of his repose in 1993 (with a joint feast with St. Silouan observed on 24 September). This file follows the process and reception of that glorification — its relative swiftness, twenty-six years after his death; the petition that came from his own monastery at Essex, a stavropegial house directly under Constantinople; and the questions that attend so recent a canonization.

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

The Synodal Act of 27 November 2019

On 27 November 2019, the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, presided over by Patriarch Bartholomew, resolved to inscribe the name of Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) of Essex among the saints of the Orthodox Church and to enter his commemoration in the ecclesiastical calendar (synodal decision of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, 27 November 2019, as announced by the Patriarchate and by the Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, Essex). The decision was made public through the Patriarchate’s official communications and republished by the monastery Sophrony had founded; it is the act on which all subsequent veneration formally rests. Per the repository methodology, the act is cited here as the synodal decision located through the Patriarchate’s and the monastery’s announcements; no document-number is asserted for it, since the publicly circulated text is the announcement of the decision rather than a numbered archival instrument.

The form of the act follows the established pattern of Orthodox glorification (the Greek term is more often anakēryxis, “proclamation,” than the Slavic proslavlenie): the Church does not “make” a saint but recognizes and proclaims a sanctity already manifest, entering the name in the diptychs and the calendar so that the faithful may henceforth offer public liturgical veneration — hymns, an icon, a feast, the dedication of churches and altars (on the theology of glorification as recognition rather than creation, see the parallel treatment in St. John of Shanghai, and the general Orthodox understanding summarized in Spiritual Direction). With the synodal decision of 27 November 2019, Sophrony passed from a revered elder whose memory was privately honored to a saint of the Church whose veneration is liturgically sanctioned and universally commendable within the canonical communion.

The Date of Repose and the Feast of 11 July

Sophrony reposed at the Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights, Essex, on 11 July 1993, in his ninety-seventh year (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, biographical introduction; Essex monastery records). The glorification of 2019 fixed his principal feast on that day — 11 July — the day of his death, which in Christian usage from antiquity is reckoned the dies natalis, the saint’s “birthday” into eternal life. The choice is the ordinary one and carries no controversy: a saint is most often commemorated on the day of his repose, and Sophrony’s death on 11 July gave the calendar its natural date.

A complication of the civil calendar should be noted plainly for the reader who consults different sources. The Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Essex monastery follow the Revised Julian (New) Calendar, on which 11 July is observed as the festal date directly. Houses and faithful who keep the Old (Julian) Calendar will reckon the same commemoration to the corresponding Julian date. [Disputed: secondary listings of the feast give it variously as 11 July (New Calendar, the date kept at Essex and by the Ecumenical Patriarchate) and, in Old-Calendar reckonings, the equivalent Julian date; the discrepancy is one of calendar conversion rather than of the underlying day of repose, which all sources place on 11 July 1993 (Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002; Essex monastery announcements of the glorification)]. The substantive point is unanimous: the feast is anchored to the day Sophrony died, 11 July 1993.

The Joint Commemoration with St. Silouan

Beyond the principal feast of 11 July, the veneration of Sophrony is bound, fittingly, to that of his elder. St. Silouan the Athonite, glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1987, is commemorated on 24 September; the monastery and the wider tradition associate Sophrony’s memory with that of his spiritual father, so that the two are honored together — the disciple who kept, edited, and made known the writings of the elder joined liturgically to the elder he served (on this discipleship, see Disciple of Saint Silouan; on the book that revealed Silouan, see The Book That Revealed Silouan). The pairing is not a formal merging of feasts but a devotional and historical fitness: it is impossible to speak of the one without the other, for the world knows Silouan chiefly through Sophrony’s Saint Silouan the Athonite, and Sophrony’s own theology is unintelligible apart from the years he spent at Silouan’s side (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1–2).

[Disputed: the precise liturgical status of the 24 September joint commemoration is described differently across sources — some present it as a distinct joint feast of the two saints, others as the established feast of St. Silouan (24 September) at which St. Sophrony is now also honored at Essex and in the tradition, his own proper feast remaining 11 July (Essex monastery liturgical practice; Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002). What is not disputed is that Sophrony's principal feast is 11 July and that his memory is joined to Silouan's on 24 September]. The reader is advised that festal arrangements for so recently glorified a saint are still settling into general usage, and that the monastery of Essex — as the saint’s own foundation — is the authoritative witness to how the feasts are kept.

The Petition and the Role of the Essex Monastery

The cause for Sophrony’s glorification arose, as such causes characteristically do, from the community that had lived under him and preserved his memory. The Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights, which Sophrony founded in 1959 and which he had secured as a stavropegic house — that is, directly subject to the Ecumenical Patriarch rather than to a local bishop — was the natural petitioner (on the founding and the stavropegial status, see Founding the Monastery of St. John the Baptist). That status is materially relevant to the swiftness and the venue of the glorification: because the monastery answered directly to Constantinople, the petition for its founder’s canonization went to the Ecumenical Patriarchate as the proper ecclesiastical authority, and the Patriarchate acted upon a request from a house under its own omophorion.

The monastery’s role was not merely procedural. It is the custodian of Sophrony’s relics, his cell, his writings, and the living memory of his eldership; it is the place where his disciples — among them Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou), whose Christ, Our Way and Our Life (2003) systematizes Sophrony’s teaching — continued and continue the life of prayer he established (on the community and its liturgical life built around the Jesus Prayer, see The Community and the Jesus Prayer). The petition for glorification thus carried the weight of a community testifying to a sanctity it had witnessed at first hand over decades, and the reports of veneration and of the spiritual fruit of Sophrony’s life that accompany such a cause came from those who had lived with him. The same monastery, after 27 November 2019, became the principal site of his liturgical veneration: the place of his tomb, the source of the first hymnography and iconography, and the center to which pilgrims now come specifically to honor a glorified saint (treated in Sophrony in Contemporary Orthodoxy).

The Swiftness of the Recognition

Sophrony was glorified twenty-six years after his death — 1993 to 2019. By the measures of Church history this is swift. Many saints wait centuries; even in the modern period, the interval is often longer. The comparison with his own elder is instructive: St. Silouan reposed in 1938 and was glorified in 1987, an interval of forty-nine years (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 1991, on Silouan’s repose; Ecumenical Patriarchate, 1987, on the glorification). That Sophrony should be recognized in barely more than half that time reflects several converging factors.

First, the scale and immediacy of his influence. Unlike most saints, Sophrony left a substantial body of writing — above all We Shall See Him as He Is (1988), but also Saint Silouan the Athonite, His Life Is Mine (1977), and On Prayer (1996) — through which his theology and spiritual experience reached a wide international readership in his own lifetime and immediately after (on the corpus, see The Writings). A saint whose teaching is already being read, translated, and lived across the Orthodox world is recognized more readily than one known only by local memory.

Second, the existence of living witnesses and a flourishing community. The disciples Sophrony formed, and the monastery he founded, constituted a continuous, credible testimony to his holiness that did not depend on the slow accretion of posthumous legend (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002; Zacharou, Christ, Our Way and Our Life, 2003). Third, the stavropegial relationship to Constantinople gave the cause a clear and willing ecclesiastical home.

The swiftness, however, is precisely what the sober reader must weigh. A glorification within living memory rests on a reception still in progress; the Church’s long verdict on a saint — the centuries of veneration, the accumulation of attested intercession, the testing of a teaching against the whole patristic tradition — necessarily lies in the future. Per the repository methodology (§4), and as the collection’s master README states, the assessment of Sophrony’s legacy is offered provisionally, as a contemporary judgment rather than the settled and sifted verdict of the Church’s long memory. The glorification of 2019 is the act of recognition; the reception that completes it is the work of generations not yet ended.

What the Glorification Does Not Settle

It is worth marking the limits of what a glorification establishes, lest more be read into it than the act intends. The Church, in proclaiming a saint, certifies that the person is among the glorified in heaven and commends him for veneration; it does not thereby canonize every theological formulation he advanced as binding doctrine. Sophrony’s distinctive teachings — the hypostatic (personal) principle, his account of the vision of the Uncreated Light, his language of God-forsakenness and the prayer for the whole Adam — remain subjects of theological reception and, in places, of genuine scholarly discussion about their patristic grounding and their relation to modern personalism (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; treated theologically in We Shall See Him as He Is and The Hypostatic Principle). The glorification places Sophrony among the saints; it does not foreclose the careful theological work of receiving and weighing his contribution, which the present collection elsewhere attempts.

Nor does the glorification by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, taken by itself, automatically enter Sophrony into the calendars of every autocephalous Church on the same day or with the same rank; reception across the local Churches proceeds, as it always does, by their own synodal acts and by the gradual spread of veneration. What the act of 27 November 2019 secured is the proclamation of Sophrony’s sanctity by the Church under whose omophorion his monastery stood, the fixing of his feast on 11 July, and the opening of his public, liturgical veneration — the foundation on which the wider reception, traced in the companion file, now builds.

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. (The act of glorification; the inscription of the name in the calendar and the feast of 11 July.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988. (The autobiographical-theological masterwork whose circulation helped spread his veneration.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (Silouan’s repose and glorification; the discipleship underlying the joint commemoration of 24 September.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. His Life Is Mine. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. London: Mowbray / Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977; On Prayer. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996.
Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (Biographical introduction: repose on 11 July 1993; the theology received and weighed.)
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. (The systematizing of Sophrony’s teaching by a senior disciple of the Essex community.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Sophrony within twentieth-century Orthodox theology; the open questions of reception.)