The main stages of the theological formation of Archimandrite Sophrony. Hieromonk Nikolai (Sakharov). Charismatic eldership and obedience in the Christian tradition
ON THE ORIGINS OF THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS OF MODERN SOCIETY, ACCORDING TO THE PASTORAL WORKS OF ARCHIMANDrite SOPHRONY (SAKHAROV)
debt of memory, there is an opinionIllustr.: The Last Supper. Work about. Sophronia. Fresco from the church of St. Silouan of Athos,Essex, England. 1987
Ksenia Borisovna Yermishina. Art. researcher at the House of Russian Abroad named after Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Ph.D. Sciences.
Each era chooses the language of self-description, in accordance with the prevailing ideas about the development of society and the goals that it sets for itself. So, for example, for the 19th century, the word "progress" was the key word for describing sociality. Emphasis varied: some lamented the insufficiency of progressive processes, others cheerfully and enthusiastically reported on satisfactory results and bright prospects. In any case, the future was presented as an era of fulfillment of age-old aspirations, and time in the minds of enthusiasts was reduced. Many believed that the next generation would see something unprecedented and beautiful, such as the disappearance of crime, poverty, depravity, and so on. After the World Wars in Europe, cautious skepticism about the future was replaced by anxious expectations, while in the USSR self-description and expectations of the future were “stuck” in the paradigm of the 19th century. with his naive faith in the progress and evolution of the social sphere, which "always" leads to the best and, most importantly, to the benefit of the working people. It is not worth arguing for a long time that the existence of such ideas was rather artificial, since it was based on disinformation and misunderstanding, or rather, the lack of competent research in the field of futurology and a sound, sober assessment of the surrounding reality. After the wall of ignorance collapsed and the USSR turned out to be open (and defenseless) to the world, a cheerful faith in communism was replaced by despondency, discussions about the crisis of modern sociality, philosophy, education, science, spirituality - in a word, all conceivable spheres of human existence.
The word "crisis" (and its semantic derivatives: "problems", "decline", "degradation", "dead end", etc.) has become as characteristic of our time as the word "progress" for the century before last. In the 20th century, there was a continuous "struggle" - on all fronts and literally for everything in the world, ranging from the struggle in production or the struggle against nature, from which no one wanted to expect "favors" and to the struggle for world peace, as well as the struggle with the "sharks of imperialism and capitalism", or - on the other ideological pole - the fight against communist propaganda. The struggle has exhausted itself, progress in the scientific field has turned into the improvement of technology (which the moral and cultural environment clearly has not kept up with), but the crisis suddenly erupted on all fronts: political, economic, cinematographic, theatrical, philosophical ... whatever. Probably, there are many exaggerations in speculations on this subject, as well as in the 19th century. clearly overdid it with the exaltation of "progress", and the XX century. - in the absolutization of "struggle".
Now in the press, in journalism, in the media space, so many problems are voiced that, it would seem, mankind has not known for centuries. But which problems are really important, and which ones are only a consequence of the root problems, and which ones are nothing more than a phantom? So, for example, in the West they inflate the gender “problem”, they passionately fight against sexism and gender inequality. From the outside, this topic seems far-fetched, but at the epicenter of the fight against this “problem” they don’t think so. In order to assess contemporary crises and problems from the side (the view from the side, as a rule, is free from predilections), I turned to the spiritual and ascetic tradition, in particular, to the pastoral works of Archim. Sophrony (Sakharova) (1896-1993), who can be called our contemporary. Unfortunately, until now his works have not been appreciated in Russia, although in Greece, on Mount Athos, in the countries of the West, where he served as a confessor, he enjoys great prestige. The Patriarchate of Constantinople is currently considering the canonization of Fr. Sophronia.
Archim. Sophrony combines education and asceticism, breadth of views and love for Russia. He was one of the most remarkable artists of his time, a student of Ilya Mashkov and Pyotr Konchalovsky, but Vasily Kandinsky had the greatest influence on him. Probably, it was Kandinsky, who proclaimed the beginning of the era of abstract art, with his passion for oriental mysticism, who influenced Sergei Sakharov (that was the name of Father Sofroniy in the world), when he became interested in the search for the Superpersonal Absolute. For about eight years, Sergei Sakharov practiced meditation, studied the experience of Eastern spirituality and moved away from the church. He did not reject Christ, but tried to find a way, as he then thought, more perfect, free from psychologism, as then he understood the commandment "love one another." Only eight years later the truth was revealed to him: love is ontological, it is the essence of the nature of God and of man himself. Trying to get away from personality and from love, a person goes into the void, he is comprehended by the disintegration of spiritual forces.
Self-portrait of Sergei Sakharov (the future Elder Sophrony), 1918 Oil on canvas. Illustration from the book "In search of perfection in the world of art: the creative path of Father Sophrony." Nun Gabriela (Briliot). - M .: "Dar", 2016.
Sergei Sakharov, before leaving for the monastery, was not only passionate, but almost obsessed with painting, for him the whole world was - in colors, in color, in texture. In the workshop of Mashkov-Kandinsky they gave excellent training, but P. Cezanne was in the center of attention, his manner was a guide for the artists of this studio. Kandinsky, on the other hand, followed the path of modernism and abstractionism, which were only emerging in the West, while Russia became the leader of these artistic trends. Russian artists very quickly went through the stages of studying cubism, rayonism, constructivism, post-impressionism, and Sergey Sakharov did the same way. You need to understand that these were not just technical methods, but behind each direction of art there was a school, philosophy, a certain understanding of being.
Sergei Sakharov talked not only with artists whose names are now known, whose paintings are kept in the Tretyakov Gallery and the Hermitage. It was a circle of intellectuals, including poets (such as K. Balmont), philosophers, and public figures. He was a man of the Silver Age, belonged to the era of the brilliant heyday of Russian culture, he himself was from among wealthy people (in the center of Moscow, by the way, the mansion of the Sakharov family, which is located on Gilyarovsky Street, has been preserved). Sergei Sakharov was an eyewitness to the discovery of the Russian icon and its artistic imitation - "Black Square" by K. Malevich, he was friends or studied with those who founded the art associations "Genesis" and "Jack of Diamonds", was a member of the Moscow Union of Artists since 1918, participated in disputes over abstractionism and realism, productive and related labor in art.
After the revolution, he was arrested twice, he miraculously escaped execution. By the time of emigration from Soviet Russia, Sergei Sakharov was already a recognized master, his works were exhibited in Paris, along with the works of Gauguin, Victor Dupont, Seria, Dorignac, Bara-Levro, El Greco, Manet. Critics compared Sakharov's paintings to the work of Louis Ricard (1823-73), who was a forerunner of symbolism and copied the techniques of the old masters. Almost all of the early paintings of Sergei Sakharov are now lost, only later works of the period when he worked as an icon painter in the monastery of St. John the Baptist (Essex, England).
ST. APOSTLE THADDEUS. Sketch for the Last Supper. Late 70s. Drawing, tracing paper, pencil. Illustrations from the book "In search of perfection in the world of art: the creative path of Father Sophrony." Nun Gabriela (Briliot). M.: "Dar", 2016. Courtesy of the Stauropegial Monastery of St. John the Baptist, Essex /England/ and published with his permission.
In the prime of his career, on the rise of fame, he goes to the monastery. It was a vow of renunciation of the MOST VALUABLE thing in his life, because, according to the testimony of practicing artists, for a real artist not to create is like death, non-existence. Creativity itself gives the artist a huge spiritual lift, endorphins are released in the body, a state of soaring is felt, not to mention the comfort of being in one's social and intellectual environment. Through the feat of renunciation of art and decades of repentance, Sergei Sakharov, who became Fr. Sofroniy, reached a high spiritual level, became a companion of St. Silouan of Athos, one of the most famous saints of the 20th century. It's about. Sophrony opened the world to St. Silvanus, writing a book about him and publishing his writings. In Russia, Fr. Sophronius is little known as a confessor and shepherd, he is known as the author of a book about Elder Silouan and as a mystic writer. However, this is unfair to his pastoral heritage: he was the confessor of the monastery of St. Pavel on Athos (the first time in history when a Russian was invited to a Greek monastery as a confessor!), He fed the Athos hermits and skete inhabitants. After moving to Europe, he served at the Russian House of Sainte-Genevieve de Bois, published together with V.N. Lossky, the journal “Bulletin of the Russian Western European Exarchate”, nourished Russian emigrants, among whom there were many people with names - from N.M. Zernov to the family of Admiral Kolchak. People of 18 nationalities gathered in the monastery he created; simple people and creators of modern culture, such as the composer Arvo Pärt, who based on the works of Rev. Silvanus musical composition "Lament of Adam". Thus, the pastoral experience of Fr. It is difficult to overestimate Sophrony, he saw modernity very deeply, understood the very essence of the problems of modern people, since his entire pre-monastic life passed at the epicenter of the creative circle of people who forged life, philosophy and the worldview of modernism.
He considered the loss of faith to be the most important problem of our time: "... at present, in Christian countries, due to the passion for rationalism, there is either a complete falling away from faith, or the assimilation of a pantheistic worldview" . What is faith in understanding Fr. Sophronia? First of all, it is "the highest intuition". Faith is not identical with knowledge, erudition, but presupposes a personal meeting with the highest reality: "One rational faith in the existence of God is not yet saving ... does not lead to a genuine, existential knowledge of God, which requires all the fullness of our stay in the Word of God" . Thus, faith is the intuition of the spirit, outside of discursive reasoning, perceiving the reality of the spiritual world with all the fullness of spiritual forces. At the same time, the energy of God moves towards human intuition: “Christian FAITH can be defined as a force-energy emanating from God, connecting us with Him.” Thus, o. Sophrony gives a hesychast, synergistic definition of faith, which comes not only from man, but also from God. The meeting point of these energies marks the birth of faith: “faith is a phenomenon of the spiritual plane, associated with divine being. Living faith is felt as an inner inspiration, as the presence within us of the Spirit of God. That is why, for Fr. Sophronia's faith can and should be spiritual creativity. The tragedy of modern man is that he has lost the skill of transcending, the skill of sending his spiritual attention to where the meeting with God takes place. This is due to the transformation of the consciousness of modern man, which will be discussed below.
It would seem that the definition of Sophronius differs from the classical definition of St. Paul: "Faith is the conviction of invisible things" (Heb. 11:3). However, it is worth thinking about the very definition of an. Paul, how the contradiction turns out to be imaginary: "invisible things" are not given in the mind and feeling, but faith, as a kind of additional organ of internal perception, enables a person to see and feel something that goes beyond the boundaries of the visible world, is "things invisible". This is nothing but mystical intuition, super-rational comprehension of the "invisible". This is very close to what he is talking about. Sophrony, who uses the language of modern concepts and patristic, hesychast theology.
One of the consequences of this bias is the appearance of many mentally ill and neurotic people: "Shocked by the extreme difficulties of modern life, these people suffer deeply, crushed by the cruelty of our notorious civilization." People are in a hell created by their own “contradictory passions”, therefore “Often they see things in diametrically opposite lighting, like a photographic negative”, which is often faced by a confessor who tries to help such people. It is difficult to work with such people: they either do not trust any word of the priest, they see in his desire to serve their neighbor a petty interest or self-interest, or vice versa, they require attention and care that exceed the strength of the shepherd.
Both the cause and the consequence of all these processes was the shift of the inner attention of a person, the transformation of his consciousness: “In our era, humanity is striving for external knowledge with such force as never before. … The whole system of modern life, the whole order of upbringing and training of the rising generations is such that the mind of a person constantly breaks out and after many years of such action becomes almost completely unable to contemplate his inner world, the living image of the Living God. “We have all become “ignorant” with all the exceptionally multiplied growth of all kinds of knowledge acquired by each of us in our intensive work,” because there are so many books and knowledge that a person is not able to cover even his own field of knowledge in a lifetime. Knowledge has become incommensurable with a person, so that everyone can consider himself ignorant, regardless of the amount of knowledge acquired.
One of the main and real problems of our time is despondency and despair: “The biggest sin of our time is that people have plunged into despair and no longer believe in the resurrection. The death of a person for them is complete death, annihilation. “The meaninglessness of modern life” is obvious to everyone, since meaning is born only from contact with the Eternal. Meanwhile, Christianity (and many other religions and even some non-religious worldviews) claims that “Our birth and then growth on Earth is nothing but a creative process during which we assimilate being to the extent available to us, in the hope that knowledge not completed here will be completed to perfection beyond the limits of this form of our existence.
Modern life leads to depersonalization, when a person does not solve for himself the problem of the meaning of life, love, creativity, naturalness of his behavior. “In their degenerate state, depersonalized men and women, rather male and female, obey the “laws of nature” – that is, a person is transformed into an animal due to the loss of a personal principle. The personal beginning is given as the fruit of faith, in prayer to God face to face. For a Christian, the most important task is: “Until the last breath, we will spend our lives in the consciousness that God sees us, so that we have nothing impersonal, impersonal…. And this is our task - so that the life of God becomes our life.
Communicating with people in Europe, Fr. Sofroniy noted that modern people are impatient: “What the monks were given for decades of weeping, modern people think to get in a short period of time, and sometimes in a few hours of a pleasant “theological” conversation” . The spirit of impatience has become a characteristic sign of modernity: to receive here, now and in full. Meanwhile, spiritual growth is extremely slow: “The Word of Christ came from other dimensions of being, and extraordinary efforts are required for assimilation by a person”, the transformation of the mind, heart, and will. “Our path is slow: we, who inherit sinful death through our parents, are not reborn immediately ... we must be patient: five years is still not enough, ten years is still not enough, twenty years is still not enough, forty years - and this may not be enough, You still have to be patient and never give up.”
Due to spiritual and physical weakness, lack of faith, lack of roots in the spiritual and creative dimension, modern people can hardly endure sorrows and illnesses: “On the Holy Mountain, I met sick monks much easier than when I arrived in Europe with those living in the world. The first (monks) are internally turned to God, and everything was translated into a spiritual plane. In Europe, psychic tensions prevail; due to which the confessor is forced to show complicity in the same way in order to help people. That for which the monks on Athos gave thanks (for example, for the sent down illness), crushes modern people in the world.
Summing up what has been said, it can be noted that modern people for the most part have lost the ability to transcend, to go beyond their limited being. The ability to transcend lies at the heart of the creative process, modulates personal space, perhaps that is why modernity is so meager in the fruits of creativity. Similar views on the creative process and faith were held by Fr. Pavel Florensky and A.F. Losev. For Florensky, culture grows out of cult and, with the impoverishment of the latter, perishes, since its source and nutrient medium disappear. Fantasy and knowledge, the ability to combine forms that have already existed before, are left to the lot of a person. Considering that the human consciousness is sick, not involved in transcending into the realm of the beautiful and eternal, fantasy generates images of the ugly, boring and disharmonious. It can be assumed that with the loss of faith and the shift of attention outward, human consciousness undergoes some transformation. This hardly contributes to a feeling of happiness, harmony and completeness, otherwise our era would not have trumpeted with such perseverance about crises and problems.
The complexity of the situation is aggravated by the fact that the mind, freed from the shackles of tradition, rebels against the church in its earthly manifestation. With concern about Sophronius notes this phenomenon, emphasizing that in its earthly, historical existence, the church cannot fully reveal the truth: “The tragedy of modernity, and even of past centuries, is the inability to perceive Christ's Revelation in its true Spirit, in its true dimensions.” Because of this, the rebellion of the natural conscience against the perversion of Christianity by the historical church takes on the dimensions of theomachism and the denial of institutions. At the bottom of this phenomenon often lies a thirst for genuine churchness, undistorted truth. The art of faith consists in not throwing out the baby with the water, i.e. through transcending, to see the connection of times and eternity with the church in its earthly wandering, inevitably distorting the Revelation, which is not of this world.
Describing the conflicting passions and illnesses of modern man, Fr. Sophrony in his pastoral writings speaks precisely of the spiritual level, and not of the spiritual. He wrote about spiritual problems and the spiritual path that "few find" (Matt. 7, 14), for example, in the book "Elder Silouan" and "Seeing God as He is", but these books cannot currently be considered meaningful, read explored as they deserve. As ap said. Paul: “but not first the spiritual, but the natural, then the spiritual” (1 Corinthians 15:46). To ascend to the height of spiritual virtue, you must first build a spiritual home - which consists of mental and neurological health, assimilation of the basics of culture, immersion in the world of beautiful and genuine art, poetry, philosophy. This is only the beginning on the path to spiritual life for modern man. And about. Sophronius is one of the lighthouses on this beautiful route.
Associate Professor of the Faculty of History of Moscow State University, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Svyataya Gora Publishing House, Chief Editor website Agionoros.ru (“Holy Mount Athos”), Afanasy Zoitakis, in an interview with RIA Novosti, said that in the lists of persons whose canonization is being considered in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, there is the name of Archimandrite Sophronius (Sakharov).
“According to my information, documents regarding the already mentioned Elder Sophronius (Sakharov) are now being considered in Constantinople. Our Greek sources, who at one time reported on the upcoming canonization of the elders Porfiry Kavsokalivit and Paisius the Holy Mountaineer, now claim that the list under consideration includes, among other things, the elder Sophronius. But the exact dates cannot be given here, ”the website of the news agency quotes him as saying.
A. Zoitakis also added that, according to his information, there are other Russian ascetics, who, perhaps, will also be canonized as saints. Among them, he named the Athos elder Tikhon (Golenkov), a native of Russia, who was the spiritual mentor of the Monk Paisios of the Holy Mountain, as well as “some of the Ascetics of the Holy Mountain of the 19th century associated with the Russian Panteleimon Monastery.”
Athanasius Zoitakis noted that largely thanks to the labors of Archimandrite Sofroniy (Sakharov), who compiled and published the biography of his spiritual father, schemamonk Siluan of Athos, the veneration of St. Siluan spread unusually widely not only in the Holy Mountain, but throughout the world.
""Silouan the Athos" is one of the most significant hagiographic works not only in the history of the 20th century, but probably in the entire history of Orthodoxy, - emphasized the editor-in-chief of the site Agionoros.ru. - The book has already been translated into many languages, published in different countries, on different continents, and thanks to her, many people learned about St. Silouan.
The value of this book lies not only in the fact that it describes the life of the Monk Silouan, but also in the fact that Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) managed to reflect in it the richest theological heritage that the Monk Silouan left behind.
Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov). Childhood and youth
The future Archimandrite Sophrony (in the world Sergei Semenovich Sakharov) was born on September 22, 1896 in Moscow into an Orthodox merchant family. As a child, he was fond of reading Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin. He received his secondary education in Moscow.
During the First World War he served in the engineering troops. At some point, Sergei Sakharov became interested in painting and in 1915 entered the Academy of Arts, where he studied until 1917.
In 1918 in Moscow he was arrested twice by the Cheka.
In 1921 he emigrated from Russia and spent several months in Italy and Berlin. In 1922 he moved to Paris, where he worked as an artist and exhibited his paintings in Parisian salons.
In 1924, on Easter, Sergei Sakharov experienced a vision of the Uncreated Light. This revelation made a deep impression on him, and the young man decided to devote his life to God.
In 1925 he entered training courses St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, but soon left first for Yugoslavia, and from there to Athos, where on December 8, 1925 he was admitted to the monastery of the Holy Great Martyr Panteleimon.
Monasticism. Saint Silouan of Athos
Two years later, on March 18, 1927, Sergei Sakharov was tonsured a monk with the name Sofroniy.
In 1930 he met Elder Silouan of Athos, who became his spiritual leader.
On May 13, 1930, monk Sofroniy was ordained a hierodeacon by Bishop Nikolai of Zhich (Velimirovich; 1880-1956), now glorified by the Serbian Church as a saint.
In 1935, Hierodeacon Sophrony fell seriously ill, but despite the fact that he was on the verge of death, he survived and on December 1, 1935 was tonsured into the great schema.
After the death of his spiritual mentor, Elder Siluan, Hierodeacon Sophrony left the cenobitic monastery and retired to the skete, first to Karul, then to other sketes of Athos.
Before his death, the elder gave Fr. Sophronius made the notes he made, which later formed the basis of the book "Elder Silouan".
In 1941, Hierodeacon Sofroniy was ordained a hieromonk, and on February 15, 1942 he became the confessor of the monastery of St. Paul on Athos. From 1943 to 1947, Fr. Sofrony labored in the Trinity cell in Novy Skete.
After the end of World War II, for political reasons, Hieromonk Sofroniy, with a group of other Russian monks, was expelled from Athos and in 1947 came to France, where he entered the fourth year of the St. Sergius Theological Institute.
In 1947 Fr. Sophrony moved to the clergy of the Western European Exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchate. This entailed exclusion from the institute, which was under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Hieromonk Sophrony was appointed assistant rector of the St. Nicholas Church at the Russian Elder's Home in Saint Genevieve de Bois. Here he served from 1947 to 1956.
"Elder Silouan" - main work Archimandrite Sophronius. Last years life
In 1948, a roneotype (roneotype - a printing device, a manually operated printing press; - website) edition of the book "Elder Siluan" was published. The first edition of the book was 500 copies.
The first printed edition was published in Paris in 1952. In 1956, the first edition of the book "Elder Silouan" in English was published in a somewhat abridged form.
Gradually around Father Sophrony, who was elevated to the rank of archimandrite in 1954, a circle of spiritual children and disciples is gathering, striving for monastic life. In 1956, with the blessing of the church hierarchy, he creates in France, on the Kolara farm (near Saint Genevieve de Bois), a monastic community.
It was not possible to establish the life of a full-fledged Orthodox monastery in France, and on March 4, 1959, Father Sofroniy moved to Great Britain with some of his spiritual children, where he founded the monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex, under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. For 15 years, from 1959 to 1974. Archimandrite Sophrony was the first rector of the new monastery.
On September 1, 1974, the clergyman retired from the rectorship and became the confessor of the monastery.
Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) died on July 11, 1993 at the age of 97 in the monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex.
In addition to the book "Elder Silouan", there are also books by Fr. Sophronius "On Prayer" and "Seeing God as He Is."
“If Father Sophrony is not a saint, then there are no saints!”
Metropolitan Hierofei (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos and St. Blaise, hierarch of the Greek Church, a well-known theologian, in his book “I Know a Man in Christ…” cites the memoirs of Archimandrite Zacharias (Zakhar), one of the disciples of Archimandrite Sofroniy (Sakharov), about last days old man's life.
I came to visit him two weeks before his death. At that time, we were building a crypt for the burial of monks, and, of course, Father Sofroniy was supposed to be there first. The walls and roof were ready, but the ground was bare underfoot because there was no floor.
As he walked me to the door, he looked at the crypt and asked, "How long does it take to finish it?" I replied, "I guess, Father, two more weeks." He replied: “It is hard for me to wait even one hour: I have told the Lord everything! Now I have to leave." It must be wonderful to feel in your heart that you have said everything to the Lord to the end and you are ready to leave. I have the feeling that I have never spoken to the Lord.
Four days before his death, he closed his eyes and did not speak to us again. His face was bright and concentrated, it did not evoke pity: it retained the same expression as it had when Father Sophronius celebrated the Liturgy. No one visited him, except for Father Kirill, me, Father Nikolai and Father Seraphim. Two or three weeks before his death, he called everyone, all the brethren, one by one, to come and sit with him for about an hour in his kitchen for the last conversation with him. But the four of us had the key to his door, and we visited him every few hours. We went in and said, "Bless, Father." He did not open his eyes and did not say a word, but he raised his hand and blessed us silently, and I understood that he was leaving.
Personally, I didn't want to keep it. I used to pray that God would continue his old age, as they say in the liturgy of St. Basil the Great: "Support old age." But in those days I saw that he was leaving, and I began to say this: "Lord, grant to Your servant a free entrance into Your Kingdom." I prayed with the words of the apostle Peter, from his second epistle. I constantly said this: “God, grant free entry to Your servant and rest his soul with his fathers,” and I listed all those who labored with him on the Holy Mountain, whom I knew, starting with St. Silouan, and after him all the others.
On the last day I came to visit him at six o'clock in the morning. It was Sunday, and I celebrated the early liturgy, while Father Kirill and other priests had to celebrate the late one (for practical reasons, two liturgies are celebrated in the monastery on Sunday). I understood that he was to leave us that day. I went and started the service: the hours started at seven, and then the liturgy followed. In the continuation of the liturgy, I said only prayers of exaltation, since in our monastery they are usually read aloud; among other things, my constant prayer was: "Lord, grant to your servant a free entrance into your kingdom." This liturgy was truly different from all others. At the moment when I said “Holy to the saints”, Father Kirill entered the altar. We looked at each other, and I realized that Father Sophrony had left.
I asked when exactly he passed away, and found out that it was at the time when I was reading the Gospel. I came closer because Father Kirill wanted to talk to me. He told me: “Communion, commune the believers, and then inform them of the departure of Father Sophrony and celebrate the first Trisagion; I will do the same at the second Liturgy.” So I divided the Lamb and took communion, communed the believers and finished the liturgy (I don't know how I survived it). Then I left the altar and said to the people: “Beloved brothers, in Christ our God is a sign of God for all generations of our time, because in His word we find salvation and the solution of all human difficulties. But the saints of God are also a sign for their generation. He gave us such an elder in the person of Father Sophronius. In his words we found the solution of our difficulties. And now we should do what the liturgy teaches us, i.e. give thanks and ask, beg. And so let's give thanks to God, Who gave us such an old man, and let's pray for the repose of his soul. Blessed be God…” and the Trisagion began.
We put it in the church for three days, because the crypt was not yet ready and the tomb had not been built. We left him uncovered in church for four days and constantly read the Holy Gospel, the Trisagion and other prayers; held services, liturgy, and he was there, in the middle of the church, for four days. (And there was such a wonderful and fertile atmosphere in the temple, truly like on Easter!) No one showed signs of hysteria. Everyone prayed with inspiration. I had a friend, an archimandrite who came to the monastery every year and spent several weeks there in the summer, Father Ierotheos (Vlachos), who wrote One Evening in the Desert of the Holy Mountain. Now he is a metropolitan. He arrived as soon as he learned that Father Sophrony had passed away. Feeling the prevailing atmosphere, he said to me: “If Father Sophrony is not a saint, then there are no saints!”
It so happened that several monks from the Holy Mountain came to us to visit Father Sophronius, but they did not find him alive. Father Tikhon from Simonopetra Monastery is one of them. The Greeks who came to England for treatment developed a custom: they first came to the monastery so that Father Sophronius would read a prayer - because of the many cases of healings through his prayers. Everyone should be talking about these things. It was from among these people that two, in gratitude, built a church in Greece dedicated to St. Silouan of Athos.
On the second or third day after the death of Father Sofroniy, a family arrived with a thirteen-year-old boy. He had brain cancer and was due to have surgery the next day. Father Tikhon from Simonopetra came and said to me: “These people are very depressed, they arrived and did not find Father Sofroniy. Will you read a few prayers for the boy?” I said, “Let's go together. You will be my reader. We will read prayers in another chapel.” We went through and read prayers for the boy, and at the end Father Tikhon said: “You know what, why don't you invite the boy to go under the coffin of Father Sophrony? He will be healed. Reading prayers, we are only wasting time.” I told him that I could not do this, because people would say that Father Sophronius had just died, and we were already trying to canonize him. “Do it you! I told him. “You are a monk from the Holy Mountain, no one will tell you anything.” He took the boy by the hand and told him to go under the coffin.
The next day the boy was operated on and nothing was found. They closed his skull and said: “Incorrect diagnosis. It must have been phlegmon." It happened that the boy was accompanied by a doctor from Greece, who had an X-ray with him, which showed cancer, and this doctor told them: "We know very well what this 'misdiagnosis' means." The following week, the whole family of the boy, and he was from Thessaloniki, came to the monastery to offer thanks at the grave of Elder Sophronius. The boy has grown up, now he is twenty-one years old, and he is doing well with his health.
We offer readers an interview with Hieromonk Nikolai Sakharov, the nephew of Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov, a well-known Athos confessor, elder, theologian who founded St. To see God as He is”, “Elder Silouan” and others. Father Nikolay tells about life, about spiritual and prayer work, about the theology of Archimandrite Sophrony.
What are your personal impressions and memories from your communication with your uncle Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov)?
An entire book could be devoted to my reminiscences of Father Sophronia, because I talked with him every day for four years. Each of his words was a discovery for me, because that’s why the monastery was created: people heard the words of Elder Sophronius and decided “to whom we should go” (John 6:68).
I will tell you very briefly about our acquaintance. I was born in Russia during the Soviet era, when any contact with the West was very dangerous. Father Sophrony then came to Russia as a member tourist group. But in secret from the "guards" he managed to spend one or two hours talking with his family. And on one of his visits, when I was already conscious young age he visited our family. I then studied at a music school and had no idea about religion, or Christianity, or monasticism. When I saw Father Sophronius, then, of course, his appearance seemed strange to me. For the first time in my life I saw a man in a cassock, a monk with a long beard, with long hair. It seemed strange to me; I thought why all this. We talked a little about music with him. He knew the musical culture very well, knew poetry and literature very well. There was always something to talk about with him. Then he left. Later I learned that when he returned to England, he said of me: “I met young man who may join us later." I didn't even believe in God back then. After this meeting, my life flowed in a completely different direction. I served in the army, where, by the Providence of God, I served together with the current Archbishop Hilarion. Already in the army, I had a desire to become a monk. After the army, I was first in the Vilnius monastery, and then in the Pskov-Caves, where I lived for a year. After some time, I had the opportunity to visit Father Sofroniy. When I came to him, I had no intention of making a decision: to stay there or to return to Russia. But I was completely free - I had no obligations either to the family or to the state. Then Father Sofroniy decided that I should stay in his monastery. I give all these events briefly, but in each case miraculous phenomena occurred.
What struck me in Father Sophronia was the Athos mentality itself and that spiritual freedom that we lack so much and about which the Apostle Paul writes: “Stand in the freedom that Christ has given you.” (Gal. 5:1). But this freedom is fraught with dangers. And only people with such a high spiritual consciousness as the monks of Athos can live in such spiritual freedom.
- What is the essence of his teaching on eldership, which he embodied in his very life, the essence of his teaching on obedience?
I was immediately struck in Father Sophronia by his idea of obedience. In fact, Father Sofroniy used the word "obedience" extremely rarely. He never demanded obedience from people. Everything that people did, they did out of love for him. I think that this was obedience, because when you love a person, you do his will. This is not only in monasticism, but also in life, in the family. Of course, Father Sophrony, such a great old man, was very easy to love. And to do something for him, to fulfill his will was a sincere joy for each of us. Therefore, we rarely heard the word "obedience". Father Sofrony always believed that obedience is, first of all, a free act of will. And obedience that is imposed on a person from the outside, especially if it is imposed by force, threats, then such obedience does not bring spiritual fruit. It won't stay forever. Father Sophronius writes: "Everything that is achieved by violence has no eternal value, but only that which is achieved through love and free conscious obedience." It was this kind of obedience that he considered to be of spiritual value. I think that this is, first of all, a great responsibility for a confessor, for an elder, because eldership is not just an administrative post, a position of power. An elder is, first of all, a person who is capable of leading others in the Holy Spirit. And such love for the elder, as his novices had, cannot be imposed by any canons. It can only be earned. A person himself can find the key to the heart of another person only through love. And then already obedience “flows like living water”, according to John the Theologian, into eternal life. (cf. John 7:38). Of course, we are talking about ideals now. But what I saw in Father Sophronius, and what was in St. Silouan, who was the elder of Father Sophronius, is that not the slightest word of compulsion ever came from them. Everything happened by free will. Even if the novice wanted to immediately fulfill all the obedience, even then Father Sophrony did not immediately impose himself on him. If he saw a person's desire to obey him, only then did he gradually open up. And so he, rather, himself did obedience to all others.
Archimandrite |
Another thing that struck me in Father Sophronia was the exceptional humility, the exceptional accessibility of this man. I remember the memoirs of Bishop Anthony of Surozh. When his mother was sick and was in the hospital, Father Sofroniy visited her. At that time, he had just returned from France. She was absolutely delighted to meet him, the first thing she said: "He is a man of amazing humanity." This is a very accurate definition of Father Sophrony: his distinctive features are precisely accessibility, openness and the absence of any distance in communication.
Despite the fact that I am his relative, we never had "kindred" conversations, we never considered each other as relatives in the flesh. First of all, I was interested in his spiritual wealth, his appearance as an old man. We have always had an elder-novice relationship. On his part, he never considered me as a member of a family according to the flesh, but as a member of a spiritual family, a monastery, one of the people whom God entrusted to him, for whom he laid down his soul in prayer for each of us. You know, this energy of love in the monastery was constantly felt by everyone and everyone: monks, parishioners, just coming to the monastery. Especially the monks. There was no such thing that you were sent somewhere for obedience, you just mechanically fulfill it - this is considered service to God. No, Fr. Sofroniy, sending someone to do some work or work, constantly thought about this person, about his spiritual benefit, first of all, and not about, say, the practical needs of the monastery. Therefore, he could often change obediences to a person. I remember that a sister came to us, who at first took care of the garden at her own request, since Father Sophrony always respected the desire of a person, his will. Then he saw that she had a gift for theology. All this time his thoughts were with her in the garden, just as with all of us; asked how the day went, what we did. (And then he gave her a blessing to engage in theology). When I first arrived in England, I did not know English at all, and Father Sophrony first of all began to take care of my education. When he sent me to school in the nearest city of Colchester, he was interested in absolutely everything - how I ride the bus, what classes are there, what teachers are there, how my time goes there ... And he cared about everyone so that a person had the opportunity to life to realize himself as a person and that he is not infringed in anything. Because the man loved and worried, and he was constantly with us in his thoughts.
Are there any peculiarities in his teaching on prayer and in his prayer practice, in the practice of contemplating the uncreated light? How did he talk about his prayer experience, and is it possible to draw this experience not from personal communication, but from his books?
I think that no elder, no spiritually wise person will just share his prayer experience in some idle conversation over a cup of tea. Father Sophrony described this experience in books, especially in the book “Seeing God as He is”, according to the will of God, at the insistence of God. This is his deepest confession, which he dared to put down on paper a few years before his death, for which he received a lot of criticism and misunderstanding from some believers. But the undoubted benefit that his texts on prayer bring speaks for itself, as the Lord said: “By their fruits you will know them.” (Matthew 7:16). Father Sophronius expounds not only his own experience, but in general the atmosphere of prayer, prayer, above all, of Athos. This is the experience of Athos elders, Athos monks.
Just as Father Sofroniy was sincere in absolutely everything, so he was sincere in prayer to God. He spoke and trusted God absolutely everything. His whole life, and not just a rule of prayer, became prayer; his every action was saturated with prayer. He did not do anything without prayer and, I will say more, did not say anything. The Monk Silouan of Athos once asked the elder Stratonikos: “What do the perfect ones say?” He was in amazement at such a question, and Elder Siluan answered himself: “The saints, the perfect ones, do not say anything from themselves.” Naturally, having heard such a testament from the Monk Silouan, Father Sophrony became very stingy with various words, but very rich in the Word of God. And he also taught us, first of all, sincere prayer, so that prayer, especially liturgical prayer, should not be just “reading”, a detached running of the eyes over the text. He wanted us to learn to live every word of the liturgy, because prayer for us is, first of all, liturgical prayer. This is the basis of life in our monastery. Everything is around the liturgy, around the communion of the Mysteries of Christ.
People often say, “But what about the prayer rule? You have to read it." When Father Sophrony was still on Athos, he once asked Elder Silouan if it was possible to replace the reading of the canon with the Jesus Prayer. Father Silouan answered positively. This episode is described in the book The Sacrament of the Christian Life. The abbot, seeing Fr. Sophrony's gift for prayer, was afraid to speak openly about it. For the sake of other monks, he did not approve of such a replacement of the prayer rule with the Jesus Prayer. But this did not apply to such people as Elder Siluan and Father Sophronius, people who had reached a certain height of prayerful deed. Their minds could freely abide in God, without being burdened by other thoughts. For St. Silouan, the fulfillment of the commandment "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind" (Matthew 22:37) meant that if a person, even for a moment, allows some thought other than the thought of God into his mind or heart, this means that the commandment has not been fulfilled. Of course, we cannot speak of such perfection. But these were those ideals, those heights, those heights in which Father Sophrony himself lived on Athos, and which he, with great difficulty and lamentation, tried to convey to people outside the monastic circle. Father Sophronius once wrote to a parishioner who asked him: “I need to read a prayer, but I have a completely different mood in relation to God. I have questions, I want to ask Him why it is so in my life, why that way. Lord, enlighten me. I don’t want to read “Lord, I thank You,” because at this moment I even have some kind of argument with God.” And Father Sofroniy wrote to her: "Do not be afraid to ask God, be afraid to be insincere with God." This sincerity in prayer, which Fr. Sophrony taught everyone, made us understand that God is not Something out there that requires us to follow certain rules. No, God is a living Being, our Heavenly Father, with whom we have a dialogue, not a verbal dialogue, but a dialogue of life. He answers us not only in the words of Scripture, but also in our lives. Just as the entire history of Old Testament Israel was a dialogue with God, so the life of each of us is a dialogue with God. This personal dialogue with God was what Fr. Sophrony tried to develop in us.
The Theology of Dialogue: The “Principle of Persona” by Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov)
Priest Georgy Zavershinskiy
The monotony and boredom that characterizes our materialistic civilization induces many to seek forms of theology that would enable them to acquire an absolute Ground that stands above all that is relative and transient. World globalization leads to a more active manifestation of individualism as an alternative way of life, when, responding to challenges modern world, a person as an individual puts his personal dignity at the center of existence. In this case, otherness is understood as individualism, and the place of genuine dialogue is occupied by a disguised monologue. Disillusioned with conventional wisdom, a person craves in his life personal manifestations, which are usually understood as relative and, therefore, of no serious importance. Therefore, in Western society, the subject of religious searches is increasingly becoming an absolute and impersonal Foundation, and Eastern religiosity, corresponding to such searches, easily captures the thinking of a Western person.
Remaining within the framework of only psychological understanding, we can easily come to the idea of the limitedness and imperfection of the human personality and hence conclude that "personality" as a principle of being is not applicable to the Absolute. As a consequence, one can even assume that the concepts of the absolute and the individual are mutually exclusive, and turn to the search for a "super-personal principle" that "transcends everything relative." If a person or hypostasis is identified with a limited empirical individual, a person can move further and further in such a search. In fact, there is no limit to such searches, which, oddly enough, inspires many to continue them. At the same time, the reality of a person's relationship with God becomes more and more illusory and, in the end, generally falls out of the field of vision of a person, leaving him in the loneliness of godlessness.
The principle of personality also "eludes any definitions", but it implies "the potential for development, to include the fullness of the Divine and human being." Genuine dialogue is based on the hypostatic principle, which is common to both Divine and human existence. When the I enters into a hypostatic relationship with You, the "eternal You" is always present in this relationship, confirming that the dialogue really takes place on the hypostatic level. And vice versa, it is the “eternal Thou” that prompts the human I to search for a genuine or hypostatic dialogic I-Thou relationship. These existential statements will be further considered in the light of the theological principle of the person, formulated by Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov).
Mine life path Father Sophronius always considers theology in connection with close spiritual relations with Elder Siluan, as well as with his personal experience communion with God. In the context of the theology of dialogue, it is important to pay special attention to the genuine dialogue that takes place between Elder Silouan and his spiritual disciple, Father Sophronius, when they both experience the presence of the “eternal You” of a truly personal God.
Elder Silouan and his disciple lived in times of real threat to the very existence of man and felt that only a deep personal prayer for the world could save the world from chaos and complete destruction. This threat at one time prompted religious thinkers and philosophers of the last century to rethink humanism on the basis of a personal approach. Many of them, relying on their religious traditions and beliefs, tried to assure their contemporaries that there is nothing more important than a human person who is in relation to another person who is given no less importance. Philosophers and theologians have sought to draw lessons from the recent humanitarian catastrophe of World War II. However, not many of them lived their lives the way they taught in their writings. A vivid example of this correspondence is given to us by the life and theology of Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov).
Concerned about the growing influence of Eastern mysticism, Archimandrite Sophrony warned of the egocentric nature of the depersonalizing practice of cleansing the mind from everything relative and transient. Such a practice can lead "to the discretion of the Divine principle in the very nature of man", and, thus, to self-deification. In this case, a kind of “absoluteness” is attributed to the human I, and then the relation of the I to the other does not require confirmation of the “eternal You” of God. Father Sophronius writes that such “absoluteness” is “nothing else but a reflection of the Divine Absoluteness in beings created in the image of God and experiencing the state of the world that was characteristic of man before his appearance in this world.” However, being reflected in one way or another, "absoluteness" already ceases to be absolute. Therefore, in this case we are talking about the natural relative, and not absolute, spirit of a person in his "sublimating impulse to the Absolute." Father Sophronius asserts that any state of contemplation achieved in this way should be understood rather as self-contemplation, and not as contemplation of God. “Under these conditions, we discover the beauty of the created world, and not the First Being. In all this there is no salvation for man.”
By virtue of the position that man is created "in the image and likeness of God," one should look for a form or principle that would apply to both God and man. This principle, on the one hand, must come from God as the Creator in accordance with His triune being, which is a perfect communion of love, and on the other hand, remain the same for all people. However, the path following which the human spirit enters into Divine eternity is different for each of us, which indicates the plurality of created humanity and its diversity in the unity of the image. Ascetic hermit experience and the practice of community monastic life led Father Sophronius to formulate the principle of persona as a genuine trace of eternity in the created being of man. It is this principle, contained in each person as the image of God, from within, that implicitly encourages people to abide with each other in the fellowship of love.
Father Sophronius writes that the soul finds itself, first of all, when it comes before God face to face. “The person is born again, therefore it no longer obeys the laws of nature, but transcends earthly boundaries and invades other spheres. It cannot be described. She is one and only." Since Father Sophrony considered the hypostasis, or "person", supreme basis being, he never formulated any other definitions of personality. “As a principle that determines all other aspects of being, the person is not subject to any restrictions, and, consequently, to any other definition.” He presents the person as an active revelation and offers a kind of "dynamic definition" of the human personality, which reveals it in "the ability to self-knowledge and self-determination", in the "possession of creative energy" and in the "gift of knowledge not only of the created, but also of the Divine world."
The main theological achievement of Fr. Sophronius lies in his assertion that man, who is the image of the Absolute, is hypostatic, since the Absolute Being is hypostatic. His faith in God as a spirit and in hypostasis as a spiritual way of being a person led to the realization that, just as the Divine Logos took on human flesh, becoming visible and knowable, the human spirit is also not formless and abstract, but is endowed with the ability to express itself through its own body. The human hypostasis really exists, since the Incarnate Christ hypostatically revealed that God is not an illusory fruit of the human imagination, created out of fear of unknown impersonal spheres, but a true reality. The Divine Spirit encompasses all that exists and hypostatically conveys the same possibility to man.
The ability of a person to communicate is not automatically realized, by itself. The realization of its potential is possible only in love, which is the deepest content of personal existence, "the most exalted expression of its essence." Personality actualizes itself not through opposition, but through the relationship of love. In this gift of love lies the likeness of God. “Personality as such is a perfection that surpasses all other created perfections. Rejoicing in the freedom that has opened up to him, a person contemplates the Divine world. Personality is beyond the limits of scientific or philosophical definition and, therefore, is unknowable from the outside until it reveals itself. “Since God is mysterious, there are hidden depths in man. Man is neither the creator of being nor its completion. Alpha and Omega are not a person, but God. The God-likeness of man lies in the manner of his being. The likeness of being is precisely the likeness that Scripture speaks of.”
In fact, the Revelation of the Triune God consists in the disclosure of hypostatic relationships that are characteristic not only of intra-trinitarian existence, but are also called on the outside to become characteristic of man. God invites man to a personal or hypostatic participation in His Revelation. The dialogue is initiated by two interacting (di£) things (lÒgoi) - "the thinking addressee of the world mind (lÒgoj) and the causal principle of the motivating mind (lÒgoj)". The revelation of God the Word is dialogical, that is, through a hypostatic invitation, it is presented both in personal and impersonal creation. The "way of creation" itself is such that it presupposes the possibility of recognizing a personal principle as a "motivating mind" and accepting this principle with all one's heart and without any doubt that God is the One who in eternity says "I AM ". Such is the true invitation to the dialogue of those who are created capable of uttering the same words in a genuine dialogue with God. However, is such a dialogue even possible? And if so, how? Archimandrite Sophronius formulates the relevant questions somewhat differently: “Where is the true Being, and where is the mirage of our fallen imagination? Where is truly living eternity, and where is the deceptive attraction of our spirit to the ideas conscious of our own mind? Is the principle of a person-hypostasis restrictive in itself, and therefore unworthy and inapplicable to God, or is this principle truly the image of the Living Absolute: I AM THAT?
Speaking in terms of a confirmed or genuine dialogue, the questions posed by Father Sophronius can be reformulated as follows. What is the true otherness of You, and what is the illusory stereotype created by us? What exactly is the eternal motivating logos, and what is the mental illusion of our mind? Is the Self inherently limited and therefore unworthy of a genuine dialogue with God's eternal Thou? Or is the concept of a hypostatic relation applicable both to the Living Absolute and to the Self of a person? Archimandrite Sophrony gives the following answer to his questions: If we agree that the principle of persona is in itself limiting, then our ascetic efforts will be focused on transcending this principle in ourselves. And vice versa - if we realize it as the only possible image of the Absolute Being, imperiously attracting us, we will begin to pray: "Our Father, Who art in heaven ...".
In the language of the theology of dialogue, this answer can be reformulated as follows. If a person considers that his Self is in itself limited, then he or she should strive to transcend his Self and go beyond his limits. But if a person realizes his Self as the only means of entering into dialogue with the eternal Thou of Absolute Being by the power of the motivating logos, then he or she gains the ability to address God's Thou as his Heavenly Father.
Original sin destroyed the harmony of man's relationship with God, and its consequences turned out to be tragic for the entire universe, which lost its unity and became fragmented. The dialogic I-Thou relation was replaced by the objectified I-It relation, and genuine dialogue became no longer characteristic of human nature in its “fallen” state. Without confirmation by the eternal You of God, relations in the created world turned out to be difficult, and the openness of people, their involvement with each other began to be perceived as a suspicious and potentially dangerous phenomenon. Considering the fallen state of human nature, Father Sophrony asks the question: “Can the creation come into contact with the Creator?” He sees the possibility of meeting God and knowing God as a Person through repentance, which, in turn, is possible only in personal relationships. It could even be said that genuine personal relationships, or, as we have called them, genuine dialogue, are impossible without repentance. Repentance itself, in essence, is a conscious action of one person in relation to another, with whom there is an intention to reconcile.
Among the two most important thinkers who have written about dialogue, the concept of repentance is practically absent in the dialogic revelations of the Jewish thinker Martin Buber, while Emmanuel Levinas, in his ethical approach to dialogue, is somewhat closer to the Orthodox notion of repentance. Since participation in the dialogue, according to Levinas, implies moral responsibility, one can speak of repentance when the ethical side of the relationship is violated. “Without the law, sin is dead, but when the commandment came, sin revived” (Rom. 7:8-9). Sin, which has entered into human relationships and destroyed them, is revealed or "comes to life" through the moral law, without which it is, in fact, "dead", that is, it does not reveal itself in any way. Repentance can be seen as an attempt to return to keeping the law and, therefore, to the restoration of relationships. Focusing mainly on the practical aspects of the dialogue, Levinas does not succeed in clarifying such a subtle subject as repentance. However, in the relationship of dialogue, when it occurs, repentance is undoubtedly called upon to play a decisive role, since it contributes to the restoration of dialogue and leads to the relationship of dialogue becoming authentic.
Restoring dialogue through repentance is of vital importance, because in cases where the parties to the dialogue lose their reciprocity, and, consequently, their concern for confirming the dialogue, misunderstandings enter into the relationship and they can end. As a result of repentance comes forgiveness and reconciliation. The hypostatic principle, according to Archimandrite Sophrony, must be formulated in terms of personal love, and a person cannot enter into a hypostatic or genuine dialogue of love if unrepentant sin troubles his conscience. The spread of the consequences of original sin led to the fact that for a person the opportunity to love turned out to be closely connected with repentance and forgiveness, and genuine repentance became necessary condition for a genuine dialogue of love, that is, such relations of people to each other that would be similar to the relationship of God to man.
The Orthodox understanding of genuine dialogue can be expressed in the following way. Authentic, or confirmed, dialogue occurs when a person through repentance becomes able to recognize in himself the "eternal You" of God. In order to reveal itself, the "eternal Thou" prompts us to enter into a dialogical I-Thou relationship with another human personality. That the otherness of the Thou makes the I capable of repentance is not so much a condition, but a consequence of such an inducement or invocation of the “eternal Thou.” Sin is always the result of pride, or selfhood, which prevents us from knowing and accepting the other as a person of equal or greater worth. But when a person repents, sin loses the ability to act on the human ego in such a way as to deny any value of another. However, a person cannot repent of his own pride until the grace of God opens his soul to such an opportunity. Buber considers the "eternal Thou" as "grace", Levinas - ethics and morality. Either way, they both recognize the essential importance of an external force bringing a "change of mind" for the Self seeking You. The same external force makes You able to accept the Self and fully respond to it, establishing a new, never before existing relationship between two personalities. This is the beginning of such a dialogue, which approaches its authenticity through repentance, opening the way for such a confirmation of the dialogue, which was mentioned above. Without repentance, there is no confirmation, which means that there can be no genuine dialogue. Thus, the application of the principle of persona introduces the category of repentance into the theology of dialogue.
Father Sophrony reveals his dialogic approach, for example, in a conversation with his family published in Letters to Russia, where he speaks of knowing the other as a result of brotherly love: “If I love my brother and neighbor as my own life, and not selfishly separate myself from him, it is clear that I will know him more and better in all his sufferings, in all his thoughts, in all his searches. One can draw a parallel between these words and the “genuine and concrete appeal to the otherness of the other,” meaning “to clothe the naked and feed the hungry,” which Levinas preaches, although he does not refer to the concept of brotherly love. Neither does Buber, who was also preoccupied with "remembering the other and others in their present and special being" and addressing "them in order to establish living mutual relations." The otherness of the other is recognized through a joint stay in hypostatic love. A person’s ability to love, his “innate You”, from within encourages him to strive to share his life with another, or, in the words of Father Sophrony, to “live” the life of another as his own. The hypostatic principle implies love as its revelation and fulfillment. It is love that is the root cause, and otherness, in which a person personally addresses another, is already the result of love. From the point of view of the hypostatic principle, the dialogical I-Thou relation turns in its development into the relation of hypostatic love, which can be represented as a genuine dialogue.
Renunciation of the “bonds of the flesh” and “self-hatred” make a person able to recognize the other not as an “in-itself” It, which excludes the possibility of dialogue, but as You, with whom I can communicate in god-like love, confirmed by the “eternal You” of Himself. God. Father Sophrony said that “the created hypostasis-person is a god-like center”, to which the Creator relates “not as to His Act, but as to a certain fact even for Him.” Father Sophrony was convinced that “there is no external authority for the hypostasis” and, therefore, neither earthly nor heavenly forces can force the hypostasis to make any choice. However, this does not mean that a kind of anarchy is characteristic of hypostatic being. It is not even possible to attempt to make one's choice for the Self "in itself" unless there is a You to be recognized. Talking about choice in a situation where there is no alternative is generally pointless. Such an alternative for I is You. The encounter with the Thou excludes anarchy as such, while the I-It relation still allows it. In the dialogic I-Thou pair, both I and You aspire to hypostatic love, which in a genuine dialogue becomes their free choice.
Based on the biblical formula of Ex. 3, 14, Father Sophrony builds a bridge between the expression of the human Self and the expression of the divine Self: “The name of God is Az am Sy. For a person, the image of the Almighty, this word az ... reveals the principle of person in us. I do not exist apart from You, just as a father does not exist without a son. It is impossible to talk about I without You. Buber's grandiose existential insight allowed him to express this idea so clearly and vividly that it affected almost all areas of personalism, both in philosophical and religious thought of the last century. The deep spiritual experience of Archimandrite Sophrony prompted him to formulate the “personality principle” as key position Divine Revelation. According to the intuition of Father Sophrony, based on Orthodox Tradition and undoubtedly confirmed by it, the Self is a revelation of the principle of person in man, and the divine Self, which is the “eternal Thou” for us, is the Revelation of His Divinity. Thus, the existential connection of the search for a human personality, unconsciously striving for such a way of being that would go beyond the limits of the material world, is restored with the persistent call of a personal God, in Whose Self the principle of person is realized, the same one that is also found in the Self of a person created according to His image and likeness.
Bibliography
Sofroniy (Sakharov), archim. See God as He is. - Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1985, p. 207.
Zacharias (Zacharou), archim. Christ, Our Way and Our Life. A presentation of the Theology of Archimandrite Sophrony / Trans. from the Greek by Sister Magdalen. - South Canaan (Pennsylvania): Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2003. P. 37. See also in Russian translation: Zechariah (Zakhar), archim. Christ as the Way of Our Life: An Introduction to the Theology of Elder Sophrony (Sakharov). - Essex: St. John the Baptist Monastery, 2002. S. 49.
Sofroniy (Sakharov), archim. About prayer. - Essex: St. John the Baptist Monastery; M.: Russian way, 2002. S. 202.
Sophrony (Sakharov), archim. His Life is Mine / Trans. from the Russian by Rosemary Edmonds. - New York: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1977. P. 43.
Sakharov Nicholas V. I love, therefore I am. The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. - New York: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2002. P. 71.
Sophrony (Sakharov), archim. His Life is Mine. P. 44.
Yannaras Christos. Postmodern Metaphysics / Trans. by Norman Russell. - Brookline (Massachusetts): Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2004. P. 138.
Sofroniy (Sakharov), archim. About prayer. S. 205.
Ibid. P. 171-172.
Discussing what it means to be different, Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) in his recently published book writes that, following Levinas, for whom “The Other is not defined either by myself (as for Husserl and others), nor by being related to me (as for Buber), but rather such an absolute difference that cannot be derived, caused or justified by anything other than itself”, the reader approaches “the patristic understanding of otherness” (Zizioulas John D. Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church / Ed. by Paul McPartlan - Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2006. P. 48).
Sofroniy (Sakharov), archim. Letters to Russia / Entry. Art. and comp. hierodiac. Nicholas (Sakharov). - Essex: St. John the Baptist Monastery; M .: Publishing house of the brotherhood of St. Tikhon, 1997. S. 23.
Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and difference / Ed. by Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco and Maurice Friedman. - Pittsburg (Pennsylvania): Duquesne University Press, 2004. P. 7-8.
Kraemer Kenneth Paul with Mechthild Gawlick. Martin Buber's I and Thou: Practicing living dialogue. - Mahwah (New Jersey): Paulist Press, 2003. P. 33.
Sofroniy (Sakharov), archim. See God as He is. S. 203.
Monastery of St. John the Baptist in the village of Maldon (Essex, England).
Biography
Born September 22, 1896 in Moscow in an Orthodox merchant family. As a child he was fond of reading Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin. He received his secondary education in Moscow.
Member of the First World War (engineer troops, chief officer). He was engaged in painting and in 1915 he entered the Academy of Arts, where he studied until 1917. In 1918 in Moscow he was arrested twice by the authorities of the Cheka.
In 1921 he emigrated from Russia and spent several months in Italy and Berlin. In 1922 he moved to Paris, where he worked as an artist and exhibited his paintings in Parisian salons. In 1924, at Easter, he had a vision of the Uncreated Light, in connection with which he decided to devote his life to God.
In 1925, he entered preparatory courses in Paris, but soon left first for Yugoslavia, and from there to Athos, where on December 8, 1925 he was admitted to the Panteleimon Monastery and on March 18, 1927 he was tonsured a monk with the name Sophronius.
In 1930 he met Elder Silouan of Athos, who became his spiritual leader.
On May 13, 1930, monk Sofroniy was ordained a hierodeacon by Serbian Bishop Nikolai (Velimirovich) of Zhichsky.
In 1935 he fell seriously ill, but despite the fact that he was on the verge of death, he survived and on December 1, 1935 he was tonsured into the great schema.
In 1938, the spiritual mentor of Hierodeacon Sophronius, Elder Siluan, died, in connection with which Hierodeacon Sophronius went into the "desert": first to Karulsky, and then to some other sketes of Athos.
In 1941 he was ordained a hieromonk and on February 15, 1942 he became the confessor of the monastery of St. Paul on Athos. From 1943 to 1947 he was a member of the brethren of the Trinity cell in Novy Skete.
After the war, for political reasons, Hieromonk Sofroniy, along with a group of other Russian monks, was expelled from Athos and in 1947 came to France, where he entered the fourth year of the St. Sergius Theological Institute. In view of the transfer to the clergy of the Western European Exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchate, he was expelled from the institute and began to serve as an assistant to the rector of the St. Nicholas Church at the Russian Elder's House in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois (1947-1956).
In 1948, he published the first roneotype manual edition of the book Elder Silouan, and in 1952, the first typographical edition of the book of this work about Silouan the Athos was published in Paris (a few years later, the first edition of this book in English was published).
On April 25, 1954, he was elevated to the rank of archimandrite, and in 1956 in France, on the Kolar farm (near Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois), he established a monastic community, but he fails to establish a full-fledged monastery in France.
On March 4, 1959, he moved to the UK, where he founded the monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex, under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. From 1959 to 1974 he was its first rector. According to Hieromonk Peter (Prutyan):
He carried out perhaps the most radical liturgical reform of the 20th century. In his monastery in England, where monks and nuns of different nationalities labor, he replaced Matins, Vespers and the Hours with the Jesus Prayer, which is performed for about two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. Although at first this “revolution” seemed strange and even scandalous, criticism soon subsided, and after some time this practice began to be adopted in other communities.
In a letter dated April 27, 1991, he described his condition as follows: “I myself suffer from malignant cancer. I just don't know when I'll die. I have very little strength. Days and nights pass in the fight against pain. I spend most of my time in bed or in a comfortable chair. I haven't served the Liturgy for a long time. I don't own my legs. I don't go alone. Can't turn around at the Throne and things like that, natural to my age.<…>I got it all through the force. "
He died on July 11, 1993 at the monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex.
Sayings
- When we are in good horror from the vision of the holiness of God and at the same time in despair from our extreme unworthiness of such a God, then prayer becomes a mighty impulse of the spirit that breaks the tight ring of heavy matter.
- “Blessed are we, Israel, that we know what is pleasing to God. Be of good cheer, my people…” (Baruch 4:4-5). And we, Christians, are endowed by God to an infinitely greater extent than all the prophets and righteous before the coming of Jesus to Earth. When we realize this, we exclaim in gratitude: “Blessed are we, the New Israel, the sanctified race of Christians, for the Lord Himself deigns to unite with us so much that both He and we become “one” (cf. John 17:21- 23).
- We are cowardly, but Christ tells us: "Be of good cheer: I have conquered the world." If He conquered the “world” (in Greek, “cosmos”), then this means that He, as a man, became higher than the creature, above the world. And everyone who believes in Him, who overcomes the “law of sin” acting in us in the feat of repentance (cf. Rom. 7:23), becomes, like Christ, transcendental (super-cosmic).
- Pride, as a clear or hidden tendency to self-deification, has perverted the hearts of people; as soon as we see some signs of spiritual ascent in ourselves, this serpent raises its head and thereby darkens the mind, stops vision, and moves away from God.
Bibliography
Articles
- Holy Silence // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1950. No. 1. pp. 10-16.
- The unity of the Church in the image of the unity of the Holy Trinity (Orthodox triadology as the basis of Orthodox ecclesiology) // Bulletin of the Russian West European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1950. No. 2-3. pp. 8-33.
- Unite de l'Eglise, image de la Sainte Trinite (Triadologie orthodoxe, comme principe de l'ecclesiologie) [The unity of the Church in the image of the unity of the Holy Trinity (Orthodox triadology as the basis of Orthodox ecclesiology)] // Bulletin of the Russian West European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1950. No. 5. pp. 33-61.
- Archimandrite Spiridon. Mes Missions en Siberie [Archimandrite Spiridon. My missionary labors in Siberia / Per. in French lang. prof. P.Pascal] [in French. lang.] // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1951. No. 7-8. pp. 61-62.
- Archimandrite Spiridon. Mes Missions en Siberie [Archimandrite Spiridon. My missionary labors in Siberia / Per. in French lang. prof. P. Pascal] // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1952. No. 9. pp. 28-29.
- Apostolic ministry of bishops [Ordination of four new Anglican bishops in London on July 25, 1952] // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1952. No. 12. pp. 28-29.
- On the foundations of Orthodox asceticism // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1953. No. 13. pp. 41-57.
- De la priere pure // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1953. No. 14. pp. 79-88.
- On the foundations of Orthodox asceticism // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1953. No. 14. pp. 103-113.
- Des differents aspects de l'imagination et des moyens ascetiques de les combattre // Bulletin of the Russian West European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1953. No. 16. pp. 239-249.
- The death of Archimandrite Mitrofan // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1953. No. 17. pp. 26-27
- Des fondements de l'Ascèse orthodoxe // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1954. No. 17. pp. 30-42.
- Note on the new translation of the hymns of St. Simeon the New Theologian // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1954. No. 17. pp. 20-24.
- Des fondements de l'ascese orthodoxe // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1954. No. 18. pp. 66-74.
- De la lumière divine incréée // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1954. No. 19. pp. 141-144.
- Word on the Transfiguration of the Lord (about the Light of Tabor) // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1954. No. 19. pp. 127-135.
- "Tiens ton esprit en enfer et ne desespere pas" // Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. M., 1957. No. 26.
- Word on the Transfiguration of the Lord // Journal of the Moscow Patriarchy. M., 1975. No. 8. pp. 44-49.
- On the foundations of Orthodox asceticism // Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate. M., 1992. No. 6. pp. 45-53.
- Orthodoxy is a witness to the Truth. From letters to D. Balfour // Church and time. M., 2000. No. 3 (12). pp. 226-252.
- Sakharov N., Hierodeacon. The main milestones in the theological development of Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) // Church and Time. Scientific-theological and church-social journal. - 1999. - No. 3(16) - S. 229-270
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