Between 1975 and 1983 I must have attended at least 100 liturgies, presided over by Fr Sophrony. On summer weekdays in the mid-seventies I would sit in the old refectory after meals and listen to him. I did not ask him any questions. I listened, because I wanted to learn. Young men do not interrupt elderly and wise monks with foolish questions.
Fr Sophrony came from an upper middle-class Moscow family, interested in astrology and oriental religion, as was the bourgeois fashion then. As a young man he briefly became a Hindu and was marked by the mantra and the ashram. Emigrating with the Saint Petersburg aristocracy, much infiltrated by freemasonry, to Paris, he was a young artist taken with the art nouveau movement. Elena Grigorievna Evdokimova related to me in the 1980s how in the early twenties she found ‘Seryozha’ (the young Fr Sophrony) quite unworldly, harmless, in the clouds, intellectual, even slightly eccentric. So when he left worldly Paris for Mt Athos, there was no surprise at all. He was simply not made for this world.
On Athos, of course, the young Sophrony met monk Siluan (Silouan is the French transliteration; Silvanus is the Western form), the repentant peasant hesychast. His example of deep repentance, after a stormy youth, which led to his experience of the Holy Spirit, was a revelation and brought monk Sophrony to salvation. Fr Sophrony recorded St Siluan’s words, which we would otherwise never have known, and presented them with his usual poetic eloquence to a world which had little idea of the Orthodox Tradition, as one of the great spiritual revelations of the twentieth century.
It was the Prayer of the Heart which had led to St Siluan, who was to lead to St Sophrony. We recall that the Russian St Panteleimon’s Monastery on Athos was still imbued in St Siluan’s time with name-glorifying (imiaslavie) through the Prayer of the Heart. That living Spirit had been ruthlessly and unjustly suppressed by the stale, bureaucratic hierarchy in Russia. That had led to a Russian Navy ship being sent to Athos, the killing of four monks, injuries to many more and some 1,600 monks being transported by force to Russia, where they were mistreated by the hierarchy much as later monks were mistreated by the Communists.
A 1914 letter of one of the main proponents of the Prayer of the Heart, Elder Hilarion (Domrachov), had said that Russian military reverses in the First World War might be attributable to the persecution of name glorifying: ‘What further disasters this will lead Russia to, only God knows’, he had said. In 1915 he added that the persecution coming from ‘the highest members of the Russian hierarchy, is a sure omen of the proximity of times in which the last enemy of truth, the all-pernicious Antichrist, has to come’.
Thirty years later, in 1948 the xenophobic Greek government expelled three highly educated Russian monks from Athos, accusing them of collaborating with the Nazis. Fr Sophrony was one of them, my beloved Fr Siluan of Paris another, and the future Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) the third. Fr Sophrony returned to Paris. Although it was here that he published his notes on St Siluan, other efforts did not bear fruit in Paris in the tiny Moscow jurisdiction with such intellectuals as Lossky and Uspensky. An attempt to found a convent came to naught. However, in 1959, the Church of England very generously offered a church, a building and some land free for an Orthodox monastery.
So it was that Fr Sophrony and three monks moved to England. In 1965 the anti-monastic Metropolitan Antony (Bloom), also a Parisian, led Fr Sophrony and his small community to move from the Moscow jurisdiction to the Constantinople jurisdiction. Despite the reconciliation between the two in 1981, at which I was present, Fr Sophrony’s passage to Constantinople is something that Moscow has never quite forgiven, but that is another story.
Still in the 1970s the small monastery, by then essentially a convent, lived very modestly, dependent on pious Greek Cypriots from London. I remember Fr Sophrony’s stories about Athonite life in the 1930s, how monks queued to live in caves (suitable caves were in short supply), and the young monk Sophrony’s shock at seeing naked monk-ascetics. I also remember his reserve at Solzhenitsyn, whose books appeared in the West in the 70s. Fr Sophrony remained outside Western anti-Soviet politics, into which the naïve Solzhenitsyn fell, and only much later repented for.
Fr Sophrony’s unusual iconographical and architectural style, monks and nuns living in a double monastery, the highly intellectual monks and nuns with doctorates, whom he attracted, his books which are very difficult to understand, but which explain the philosophy of holiness, attract some, others less. But everybody is different. The main thing is that Fr Sophrony lived to see the 1992 canonisation of St Siluan, his lifetime’s mission fulfilled.
In 1993 he passed away. Fr Sophrony and his monastery, becoming more and more Greek in ethos after he reposed, was a one off and did and does much good. In 2019 he was canonised as a local saint, St Sophrony the Athonite. His life was the witness of one who had reflected in his way the wisdom and holiness of St Siluan. St Sophrony made known St Siluan and that was his great achievement.
In the 70s, I had spoken to elderly monks at St Panteleimon’s on Athos, who had known ‘Sophrony’, who confirmed that he was always in the library, indeed he was the librarian. (They offered me his post, since none had replaced him since 1948!). The monks also confirmed that ‘Siluan is a saint’, adding that ‘there were lots of saints in those days’. I remember venerating his fragrant relics at St Panteleimon’s, thirteen years before his canonisation.
Holy Fathers Siluan and Sophrony, pray to God for us!