ELDER SOPHRONY OF ESSEX, ENGLAND, THE ELDER’S UNDERSTAIND OF THE CHURCH AND THE CONVERSON OF NON-ORTHODOX TO IT

THE ELDER’S UNDERSTAIND OF THE CHURCH AND THE CONVERSON OF NON-ORTHODOX TO IT

The following information is taken from a book entitled “I Know a Man in Christ” written by Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos, Greece.  It is about the life and works of Elder Sophrony of Essex, England.  The Elder was born September 3, 1896 to Orthodox parents in Russia.  His name was Sergei Symneonovich Sakharov.  As a child, Sergei experienced the Uncreated Light of Jesus Christ.  He read widely, including such Russian greats as Gogo, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Pushkin.  Due to his great artistic talent, he studied at the Academy of Arts between 1915 and 1917 and then at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture between 1920 and 1921.   Sergei used art as a quasi-mystical tool to discover eternal beauty, breaking through present reality into new horizons of being.  Later, this would help him differentiate between human intellectual light and God’s Uncreated Light.

In 1921, Sergei left Russia, partly to continue his artistic career in Western Europe, and partly because he was not a Marxist.  After going first to Italy, he went to Berlin, and then settled in Paris.  Sergei’s 1922 arrival in Paris lent itself to artistic exhibitions of Sergei’s works, which attracted the attention of the French media.  However, he was growing increasingly frustrated by the inability of art to express purity, and however much he tried he couldn’t escape this reality.  He also grew to see that rational knowledge was entirely unable to provide an answer to the problem of death.  

In 1924, Sergei came to the realization that Christ’s precept to love God with all of one’s being was not merely a psychological thing, but ontological; that this total love was the only way to relate to God; and that love had to be a personal thing by definition necessary.  On Holy and Great Saturday of that year, he returned to Christianity. Prior to this, Sergei followed Eastern Mysticism for he had not yet found Jesus Christ. It was on Holy and Great Saturday that He experienced the Uncreated Light in strength unmatched to the end of his life and, as a result, distanced himself from his artwork and from his former spiritual delusion.

Sergei then became among the first students of the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris.  He heard the lectures of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and Nicholas Berdyaev, but while both influenced Sergei, problems with each (Bulgakov’s sophiology and Berdyaev’s anti-asceticism) limited the influence they had on the future Elder.  In 1925, finding formal theological study to be inherently unfulfilling, Sergei left the Institute and Paris to become a monk on Mount Athos.

By 1958, Elder Sophrony moved to Essex, England from Mt. Athos and he attracted a number of people living near him seeking the monastic life.  A piece of property in Essex, England became available and the Community of St. John the Baptist was founded at this site, under the jurisdiction of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh.  The Monastery had monks and nuns, something that has continued to the present and originally had six members.  In 1965, the Monastery would come under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, adding the title Patriarchal to its name.  Later, the Ecumenical Patriarchate elevated the Monastery to the status of Stavropegic.  Elder Sophrony died July 11, 1987.

In the writings of Elder Sophrony, in the book “I Know a Man in Christ” he makes it very clear that it is not easy for non-Orthodox to convert to the Orthodox Church, as these people have to struggle with their own nature which is imbued with the way of life that they have followed since birth.  Heresy has changed the theology and all the powers of the soul—the entire way people think and live.  Dogma is closely connected with spiritual life, so when dogma is altered this has consequences for man’s spiritual life as well.   
This means when someone who is not Orthodox comes to the Orthodox Church he must go through a furnace of repentance, of change and regeneration of his entire way of thinking and living.  This will take a long time.  In order for someone’s positive attitude towards Orthodoxy to become an experience of his heart, he must lead a life of asceticism and crucifixion for many years under the guidance of an experienced spiritual father.  Otherwise the old self will remain, with the result that unbelief and the inclination to go back to the old way of life will often occur.  

The spiritual director, however, must also be crucified in the course of this spiritual guidance.  This is a rebirth that comes about through the Grace of God.  As is well-known, on this way of the Cross the spiritual guide is subject to attacks from the one he is guiding, who holds him responsible for his troubles.  St. Silouan says the following about this: “Some people ask for advice.  You tell them.  They do not want to obey, it is difficult for them.  So they even start being hostile to you.”  If this happens with all those receiving guidance who are Orthodox Christians from birth, who were born in Orthodox surroundings, it is much more the case with those who come from other Churches, who were born and brought up in Western surroundings with other theological traditions.  Superhuman efforts are needed to deliver them from the world of delusion and heresy that has become natural for them and determines how they think and live.

For this reason, Elder Sophrony would say of someone who had returned to Orthodoxy, that usually more than twenty years are required from the time when he/she was baptized as an Orthodox Christian, under the guidance of an experienced spiritual father, before we are certain that he/she has learned to live an Orthodox way of life.

Elder Sophrony says about the Orthodox Church:  “The Orthodox Church is distinguished from all the other Churches in the world on three levels, because: a) only it is completely true in its theology, b) only it knows the mystery of Grace, of holy fire, and preserves the fullness of Divine Grace, and c) it is the most ancient, most fundamental and basic Church from which other larger or smaller fragments have broken away from time to time.  He writes: “Christ, Whom the Church gave me! I do not despise any means that helps me to bring about my union with Christ.  But is it, I wonder, possible for us to find somewhere outside the Church with a greater abundance of such measure?
In the Church I have the incarnate God in such a way that we eat and drink God, we breathe His Word.  Through His Name, His Word and His power we celebrate the Mysteries (Sacraments).  And these Mysteries are not just simple symbols, but true reality.  All experience bears witness to this in such an obvious way.”  He cannot conceive of his life far from the true God Whom he came to know in the Church, which is the Body of Christ.   

He tells us here how he lived the Divine Liturgy.  Elder Sophrony had a living relationship with God in the Divine Liturgy.  He tells us:  “I should consider it a great joy and mercy from God to serve you during the celebration of the Liturgy, especially at that moment when the deacon proclaims: ‘Bless, Master, the Holy Bread,’ and the priest says, ‘And make this Bread the Precious Body of Thy Christ,’ ‘And that which is in this cup the precious Blood of Your Christ.’ At this moment fiery Grace descends and touches the heart, and sometimes it embraces the whole man with great power.” (Elder Sophrony is speaking here what is happing to him in the Divine Liturgy.) He also tells us: “There are three things that I cannot understand:  1) faith without dogma, 2) Christianity outside the Church, 3) Christianity without asceticism. 

Elder Sophrony points out the mistakes of the Roman Catholic Church in his writings.  He analyses various phenomena, such as the stigmata of the Crucifixion; the dogmatic differences; its organization, which has been secularized from the institutional point of view; the alteration of the dogma and the spiritual life, of repentance and confession.  He says: “In Roman Catholicism, however, (in comparison to the Orthodox Church) there are many basic errors, as much from the dogmatic point of view as from the point of view of the spiritual life.”  He regards it as very significant that visionary activity and the prayer of Orthodox ascetics is spurned and despised by Roman Catholics; in particular, the error of Roman Catholicism is that some Holy Fathers who were most eminent in this visionary activity of the Orthodox Church are regarded by it as especially malicious heretics, such as, for example, St. Gregory Palamas.  All the same, he does not think it is good to undertake an anti-heretical activity, and he writes that it is more perfect to pray to God with a pure mind.  This shows how a hesychast (a person who has developed the prayer of the heart) works.

As an empirical Orthodox theologian he cannot accept the limitation of the Orthodox Church and the theory of ecumenism, which he regards as one of the most dangerous heresies.  The attempt by some people to create a worldwide apostolic Church is a deluded effort.  In the same way, those who try to live some sort of exalted mysticism, which transcends the limits of the ecclesiastical perception of the Christian religion, are also deluded.  He continues to say to us: “I pray to God that you may not be deluded by all these things, but that you may believe unshakably with your hearts and minds that there exists on earth the One, Unique and True Church that the Lord founded.  The Church (and not its individual members) preserves intact the complete teaching of Christ; it possesses the fullness of knowledge and Grace and is unerring.”     

ΤΕΛΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΤΩ ΘΕΩ ΔΟΞΑ
THE END AND GLORY TO GOD


METEORA GREECE
Edited by: +Fr. Constantine (Charles) J. Simones, Waterford, CT, USA, Oct. 20, 2015, 860-460-9089, cjsimones300@gmail.com