Sophrony (Sakharov)

Sergei Symeonovich Sakharov was born on September 23, 1896, in Moscow. As a young man he showed genuine artistic talent, and after fleeing post-revolutionary Russia he pursued a serious career as a painter in Paris. Those years in exile were also years of interior struggle: the faith of his childhood slowly reasserted itself, and by the mid-1920s he had resolved to leave the art world for monastic life. In 1925 Sophrony arrived at Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula in northern Greece that has functioned as the spiritual heart of Eastern Orthodoxy for more than a millennium. There he came under the guidance of Elder Silouan the Athonite — a Russian peasant monk of extraordinary depth whose central teaching, 'keep your mind in hell and despair not,' Sophrony would spend the rest of his life transmitting. Sophrony lived on the Holy Mountain for more than twenty years, and the long formation he received there shaped everything he later wrote and taught. After Silouan's death in 1938, Sophrony gathered his master's notebooks and sayings into the book now known as 'Saint Silouan the Athonite' — a biography and anthology of teaching that became one of the most widely read Orthodox spiritual texts of the twentieth century. The book introduced a barely literate Russian peasant to readers across the Christian world and established Sophrony as a theologian and spiritual writer of the first rank. Declining health brought him eventually to England. In 1959 he founded the Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights, Maldon, Essex, which became a place of pilgrimage for Orthodox Christians — and for many non-Orthodox seekers — from around the world. Sophrony's teaching centered on the Jesus Prayer ('Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner'), on the Orthodox understanding of deification (theosis), and on the pastoral conviction that the spiritual father must bear a mother's heart for those in his care. He continued to receive pilgrims, hear confessions, and write until very near the end of his life. Sophrony died on July 11, 1993, at the age of 96. On November 27, 2019, the Ecumenical Patriarchate formally proclaimed his glorification and canonization, and his feast day is observed on July 11, the anniversary of his repose. He is venerated throughout the Orthodox world as a teacher of prayer and a faithful witness to the apophatic tradition of Christian mysticism.