What follows is a longer passage—but one of extraordinary depth. Here, Saint Sophrony speaks of his own life and experience:

 What follows is a longer passage—but one of extraordinary depth. Here, Saint Sophrony speaks of his own life and experience:

“I was born in an age of the most profound changes in the life of all mankind upon the earth. Being a contemporary of these events, I am not in a position to judge their ‘quality’ or to foresee the consequences of the struggle of ideas taking place throughout the world. In history, it has by no means always been the best that has prevailed. The horrors of our century have surpassed, in certain respects, everything known to us from previous ages. First of all, quantitatively: millions upon millions perished on the battlefields of wars between nations and in civil wars. To these must be added countless victims of terror within various countries.

My soul was never inclined to take a physical part in the struggle between different political ideologies. Yet, naturally, at the end of a long life, I have been able to form some understanding both of how the life of peoples is actually constituted and, on the other hand, by virtue of my priesthood and my prayer for the world, of how it ought to be constituted.

I was allotted no easy providence: I was born in Russia—in that place within the Adamic body spread throughout the whole earth where that body first fell ill while attempting to change an order that had become deeply unjust through centuries of coercion. Later, the terrible aspects of human character were revealed to me, and this cast me into despair over the human race.

Yet at the same time, I was powerfully caught up in the current of another life, brought to us by the Second Adam, Christ, the Son of the Living God. He vouchsafed that I might become a partaker of His Body; He showed me His Light and poured out upon me the abundance of His goodness. He, the Divine Sower, cast His good seed into the field of my heart, and I laboured not to prove barren. His words, like fire, were communicated to my mind and heart, and I learned to think as He thinks, for His word became my life.

Through the co-working of the Holy Spirit, I was blessed to partake of His sufferings and His joys. Though only in part, yet truly, He revealed the Father to us; and I became accustomed to loving the Father and to feeling that even I, the least of men, am not cast away from the Face of the Father.

I dare to say that neither the life of earthly Adam in his fall, nor the life of the Heavenly Man (cf. 1 Corinthians), is foreign or unknown to me. Thus it became natural for me to live, on the one hand, the tragedy of humanity, and on the other, the peace of Christ.”

Saint Sophrony the Athonite, from The Mystery of the Christian Life, final chapter: “Afterword”.