Starets Silouan the Athonite

Revelation speaks of God: “God is love,” and “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1John 4:8; 1:5).

Yet how difficult it is for us, human beings, to assent to this. Difficult – because both our personal lives and the life of the world around us seem to bear witness rather to the contrary.

Where then is this Light of the Father’s Love, if at the end of life’s path every one of us, with Job in the bitterness of heart, must confess: “My days are past; my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart. They change the night into day; the light is short because of darkness. If I wait, the grave is my house... and where is now my hope? And as for my hope, who shall see it?” (Job 17:11–15).

From the lips of Christ Himself we hear that God watches over all His creation with the most attentive providence: that not a single little bird is forgotten before Him, that He even clothes the grass of the field, and that His care for human beings is infinitely greater – that “even the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:30).

But where is this providence, so attentive down to the smallest detail? We are all overwhelmed by the spectacle of evil, unchecked in its wild and merciless reign throughout the world.

Millions of lives – often scarcely begun, before they have reached even the faintest awareness of existence – are torn away with inconceivable cruelty. Why, then, has this absurd life been given at all? And so the soul, in its anguish, thirsts for an encounter with God, to speak to Him face to face:

“Why did You give me life? … I am weary of suffering: darkness surrounds me; why do You hide Yourself from me? … I know that You are good, but why are You so indifferent to my pain?

Why are You so... cruel, so pitiless toward me?

I cannot understand You!”

***

There lived upon the earth a man, a man of giant strength of spirit, whose name was Silouan. Long did he pray with unceasing tears: “Have mercy upon me!” – yet God did not hearken unto him.

Months passed in such prayer, until the strength of his soul was utterly spent. He sank into despair and cried out: “Thou art unyielding!” And when, with these words, something within his soul, already broken with hopelessness, was torn asunder yet again – suddenly, for a fleeting instant, he beheld the living Christ: fire filled his heart and his whole body with such force that had the vision endured even a moment longer, he would have died.

Never after was he able to forget the ineffably meek, infinitely loving, joyous, and peace-filled gaze of Christ; and through the long years that remained to him he bore tireless witness that God is love – love boundless, incomprehensible.

It is of him, this witness to Divine Love, that we must now speak.

Since the days of John the Theologian, through these nineteen centuries that have passed, there have arisen whole hosts of such witnesses. Yet this last is especially dear to us, for he was our contemporary. Among Christians there often appears a yearning – wholly natural – for visible signs of our faith, lest they faint in their hope; for the tales of miracles wrought in ages long past too easily fade in their minds into myth. This is why such new testimonies are so important; this is why this new witness is so precious to us, in whom we beheld the most precious manifestations of our faith. We know that only a few will believe him, even as few believed the testimony of the Fathers of old: not because the testimony is false, but because faith demands struggle.

We say that in these nineteen centuries of Christian history whole multitudes of witnesses to Christ’s love have passed; yet in the boundless ocean of mankind they are so few, so rare.

Rare are such witnesses, because no struggle is harder, no trial more bitter, than the struggle and the warfare for love; because no testimony is more fearsome than the testimony of love; and no preaching more exalted than the preaching of love.

Look upon the life of Christ. He came into the world to bring unto men the glad tidings of eternal Divine life, which He expressed to us in simple human words, in His two commandments: to love God and to love one’s neighbor. And from the Gospel we see what temptations He endured at the hands of the devil, who did all that was in his power to compel Christ to transgress, if but in some small thing, these commandments – thus depriving Him of the “right” to give them unto man.

Consider what took place in the wilderness (Matt. 4; Luke 4). From the replies of Christ we discern that there the battle was for the first commandment – that of love for God. Christ, the Victor in that struggle, as He went forth to preach, was surrounded by the devil with an atmosphere of implacable, murderous enmity, pursued at every step. Yet even then the adversary achieved not his aim. The final blows fell upon Christ: the betrayal of a disciple and apostle, the universal abandonment, the frenzied cries of the very multitude whom He had blessed – “Crucify Him, crucify Him!” But even here the love of Christ triumphed, as He Himself bore witness with absolute finality: “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33), and again: “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me” (John 14:30).

Thus the devil could not wrest from Him the right to give unto the world the new commandment. The Lord triumphed, and His victory abideth forever; never again shall anyone or anything diminish that victory.

Jesus Christ loved the world with boundless love; and this love was granted to Starets Silouan to experience with living power. In return he too loved Christ, and for long years endured extraordinary struggle, that none and nothing might rob him of this gift. At the end of his life he could well have said, with the great Apostle Paul:

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35–39).

Dwelling upon these words of the Apostle, we understand that he could speak thus only because he had himself endured all these trials. And everyone who follows after Christ, as the experience of centuries has shown, must pass through many such trials.

So too did Starets Silouan.

Blessed Starets Silouan, schema-monk, strove for forty-six years upon the Holy Mountain Athos, in the Russian Monastery of the Holy Great Martyr Panteleimon. In this monastery we ourselves were granted to live for some fourteen years. In the last years of the Starets’ life, from 1931 until the day of his repose – September 11/24, 1938 – we were urged by entreaty to write his “Life.” For one who possesses neither gift nor habit of writing, the task is by no means easy; yet we dared to undertake it, being deeply and sincerely convinced that upon us lay the duty to tell men of this truly great man.

The present book, by its very content, is intended for a narrow circle of those whose concerns are centered upon Christian asceticism; and so our chief aim is not literary artistry, but rather the most faithful “spiritual portrait” possible of the Starets.

In our intercourse with him our attention was wholly absorbed by his spiritual image, with the sole intent of personal profit. Never had we the thought of writing his biography; therefore much that might naturally interest a biographer remains unknown to us. Of much we are bound to keep silence, since it touches upon persons yet living. Here we recount only a small number of facts from the Starets’ life – tales he himself told at various times in the course of our frequent conversations, or else heard by us from other ascetics of the Holy Mountain, friends of the Starets. We deem that the lack of a continuous, orderly narrative of his outward life will not be a serious defect of our work. We should count ourselves well satisfied, if only we may in part accomplish the more important task – namely, to depict the spiritual image of the Starets for those who lacked the blessing of direct acquaintance with him.

So far as we are able to judge, and as far as our own experience extends, he was the one man wholly free from passion whom it was granted us to encounter upon our earthly way.

Now that he is no longer with us, he appears to us as a veritable giant of spirit.

When the Lord dwelt upon earth, His humble appearance in the flesh veiled from men’s eyes His true Divine majesty; only after the Ascension of the Lord and the Descent of the Holy Ghost was the Godhead of Christ revealed to the spiritual vision of His disciples and apostles.

Something akin befell us in relation to Starets Silouan. In life he was so simple, so accessible, that though we revered him deeply, though we knew full well the high sanctity of this man, yet we could not in full measure apprehend his greatness. Only now, after years have passed without our meeting aught comparable, do we begin – too late – to understand the true greatness of him whom, by the unfathomable Providence of God, we were permitted so closely to know.

Hieromonk Sophrony

***

Starets Silouan was a man of remarkable physical strength. The following episodes from his life bear witness to this.

When still a youth, before his military service, one Pascha after a plentiful meal of meat, his brothers went off to visit friends, while he remained at home. His mother asked him if he would like some “eggs.” He did not refuse. She cooked for him an entire cast-iron pot, nearly fifty eggs, and he ate them all.

In those years he worked together with his brothers on the estate of Prince Trubetskoy. On feast-days they would sometimes go to a tavern. There were occasions when he drank in a single evening a quarter – three liters – of vodka, yet never became drunk.

Once, after a thaw, when the frost struck suddenly and sharply, he was at an inn. A peasant lodging there prepared to return home, but, going to harness his horse, soon came back in distress:

“Trouble! I must go, but I cannot: the horse’s hooves are bound with a thick casing of ice, and from pain she will not let me strike it off.”

Simeon said:

“Come, I will help you.”

In the stable he clasped the horse’s neck near the head under his arm and said to the peasant: “Strike it off.” The horse stood utterly still; the man cleared the ice from her hooves, harnessed her, and drove away.

With bare hands Simeon could lift a cast-iron pot of hot cabbage soup from the stove and carry it to the table where the artel dined. With a single blow of his fist he could break a thick board. He raised great weights and had rare endurance both in heat and in cold. He could eat prodigiously and work tirelessly.

Yet this strength, which later would serve him in performing many extraordinary feats, at that time became the cause of his greatest sin, for which he underwent profound repentance.

It happened on the patronal feast of the village. By day, while nearly all the villagers sat cheerfully before their cottages, Simeon and a companion strolled along the street playing the harmonica. Two brothers, the village cobblers, came toward them. The elder, a man of great stature and strength, notorious for brawling, was already tipsy. As they met, he mockingly tried to seize the harmonica from Simeon. But Simeon passed it quickly to his companion. Standing before the cobbler, Simeon urged him to “go on his way.” But the man, wishing, it seems, to display his superiority over all the lads of the village on such a day – when all the girls stood watching, laughing at the scene – lunged at Simeon.

The Starets himself recounted:

“At first I thought to yield, but suddenly I felt ashamed – ashamed lest the girls should laugh at me. And so I struck him hard in the chest. He flew far from me and fell heavily on his back in the middle of the road. From his mouth came foam and blood. All were terrified; I too was seized with fear, thinking I had killed him. I stood still. Then his younger brother snatched up a great stone and hurled it at me. I turned aside, and it struck my back. I said to him, ‘What, would you have the same?’ and moved toward him. But he fled.

Long the cobbler lay stretched upon the road. People gathered, washing him with cold water. It was not less than half an hour before he could rise, and with difficulty they led him home. He was ill for two months, but by God’s mercy he lived. For a long time afterwards I had to be on guard: his brothers and their companions lurked for me in the lanes with clubs and knives. But God preserved me.”

Thus, amid the noise of youthful life, the first call of God toward the monastic path began already to be stifled. Yet the God Who had chosen him again called to him – this time by a vision.

One day, after a night of unchaste behavior, he dozed and, in a light sleep, saw a serpent enter into him through his mouth. He felt an extreme loathing and awoke. At that moment he heard words:

“You swallowed a serpent in your sleep, and you are repelled: so it is grievous for Me to behold what you are doing.”

He saw no one, but he heard the voice – a voice of such sweetness and beauty as to be wholly unlike anything earthly. And the effect it wrought, though gentle and tender, was overwhelming. By the Starets’ deep and unwavering conviction, it was the voice of the Mother of God Herself. To the end of his days he gave thanks to the Theotokos, who did not disdain him, but in her mercy deigned to visit him and raise him from his fall. He would say:

“Now I see how the Lord and His Mother pity mankind. Think of it: the Mother of God came down from heaven to admonish me – a youth sunk in sins.”

That he was not granted to behold her in vision he ascribed to the impurity in which he then lived.

This second call, which came shortly before his military service, proved decisive for the direction of his life. Its first fruit was a radical change in the course he had taken. Simeon felt deep shame for his past and began fervently to repent before God. His resolve, once his military duty was finished, to go to a monastery, returned with redoubled force. A sharp awareness of sin awoke within him, and by it his view of all life was altered. This change revealed itself not only in his own conduct, but also in the extraordinary conversations he had with others – of which, alas, only a few, the clearest in memory, may here be recounted.

Once, on a feast-day, as round dances were being led in the village, Simeon watched a middle-aged peasant, one of his fellow villagers, playing the harmonica and dancing. Drawing him a little aside, Simeon asked:

“How can you play and dance, Stepan, when you have killed a man?”

The man had slain someone in a drunken fight. He led Simeon farther aside and said:

“You know, when I was in prison, I prayed much to God to forgive me, and God forgave me. Therefore I can now play with a quiet heart.”

Simeon, who himself not long before had nearly killed a man, understood: with God one may obtain forgiveness of sins. He also understood the peace of his fellow villager – the peace of a forgiven murderer. This incident vividly portrays the clear sense of sin, the strong spirit of repentance, and the deep religious intuition of the Russian peasant soul.

Another villager of Simeon’s had relations with a girl from a neighboring village, and she conceived from him. Seeing the man’s careless indifference to this, Simeon urged him to marry her, saying: “Otherwise it will be sin.” Long the fellow refused to admit it a sin and would not wed her. Yet Simeon persuaded him, and at last he obeyed.

Hearing this story from the Starets himself, we asked him why he had not married the girl whom he once knew. To this the Starets replied:

“When I wished to become a monk, I prayed much that God would so arrange it that I might do so in peace. And God arranged all most wonderfully. I went away into military service; meanwhile, a merchant, a dealer in grain, came to our village to buy wheat. Seeing that girl in the round dance – so beautiful, tall, singing well and merry – he loved her and took her to wife. They were happy and had many children.”

The Starets fervently thanked God for hearing his prayer. Yet he never forgot his sin.

Simeon fulfilled his military service in Petersburg, in the Life-Guards, in the Sapper Battalion. Entering the service with a living faith and a deep spirit of repentance, he ceased not to remember God.

In the army he was much beloved: by his officers as a soldier ever obedient, calm, and of good behavior; by his comrades as a faithful and kindly friend. And this, indeed, was no rare thing in Russia, where the soldiers dwelt together in true brotherhood.

Once, before a feast-day, he went into the city with three guardsmen of the same battalion. They entered a great tavern of the capital, wherein were many lights, and loud music was played. They ordered supper with vodka, and made merry in conversation. Simeon spake little. One of them asked him:

“Simeon, thou art silent; what art thou thinking?”

And he answered:

“I think thus: we sit now in a tavern, eating, drinking vodka, hearkening unto music, and making merry; but on Athos they are holding vigil, and all the night shall they pray. And now consider, which of us at the Dread Judgment shall give the better answer – they, or we?”

Then another said:

“What a man is Simeon! We hearken unto music and make merry, but he is in mind upon Athos and at the Dread Judgment.”

These words of the guardsman concerning Simeon – “he is in mind upon Athos and at the Dread Judgment” – may rightly be applied not only to that hour in the tavern, but unto the whole season of his military service. For his thought was much upon Athos; and this he shewed also in that he sent thither money more than once.

Once, from the camp at Ust-Izhora, where their battalion was stationed in summer, he went to the post in the village of Kolpino, to send a remittance to Athos. On his return, not far from Kolpino, there ran straight toward him along the road a great mad dog; and when she was near to spring upon him, in fear he uttered: “Lord, have mercy!” And straightway, as soon as he had spoken this short prayer, some power thrust the dog aside, as though she had struck against an unseen wall. Turning about him, she fled toward the village, where she wrought much harm both to men and to cattle.

This event made a deep impression upon Simeon. He felt vividly the nearness of God Who keepeth us, and clave yet more firmly unto the remembrance of the Lord.

***

In the time of his military service there appeared again the power of his counsel and the goodness of his influence.

He beheld once, in the quarters of the company, a soldier who had finished his term of service, sitting sorrowful upon his cot, with his head bowed down. Simeon drew near unto him and said:

“Why sittest thou so sad, and rejoicest not, as do the others, that thy service is ended, and thou shalt now go home?”

And the soldier answered:

“I received a letter from mine own. They write that my wife hath borne a child in my absence.”

After a little silence, shaking his head, with a voice low and heavy, wherein were mingled grief, and bitterness, and wrath, he spake:

“I know not what I shall do unto her… O, I fear!… And so I have no desire to return home.”

Then Simeon quietly asked him:

“And thou, in this time, how often hast thou gone into the houses of shame?”

And the soldier replied, as though recalling something:

“Yea, there were such occasions.”

Simeon said unto him:

“Thou couldst not refrain; and thinkest thou it was easy for her? It is well with thee, for thou art a man; but she from one time may conceive and bring forth. Consider whither thou thyself hast gone! Thou art more guilty before her, than she before thee. Forgive her. When thou returnest home, receive the child as thine own, and thou shalt see, all shall be well.”

After some months, Simeon received a grateful letter from that soldier. He wrote that when he came near his home, his father and mother came forth to meet him with downcast countenance, and his wife stood by the house, timid and ashamed, holding the child. But in his heart, from the time of Simeon’s word in the barracks, there had been peace. Cheerfully he greeted his parents, cheerfully he went up to his wife, kissed her, took the child in his arms, and kissed it also. Then were all comforted; they entered the house together, and afterwards went about the village to visit kin and neighbors; and everywhere he bore the child in his arms, and all hearts were glad. Thereafter they dwelt in peace.

The soldier in his letter rendered much thanksgiving unto his friend Simeon for his good counsel. And indeed, the counsel was not only good, but also wise. For even in his youth the Elder Silouan well understood, that a necessary condition of peace betwixt men is that each should acknowledge his own guilt.

When his time of service in the Guards was ended, Simeon, shortly before the discharge of his comrades of the same age, journeyed with the company scribe unto Father John of Kronstadt, to seek his prayers and blessing. Father John they found not in Kronstadt, and resolved to leave letters. The scribe began to compose with a fair hand some elaborate petition, but Simeon wrote only these few words:

“Father, I desire to become a monk. Pray that the world detain me not.”

They returned to Petersburg, unto the barracks; and, as the Elder afterwards declared, already on the next day he felt round about him “the roaring of the fire of hell.”

Departing from Petersburg, Simeon came home and abode there but one week. Quickly they gathered for him linen and other gifts for the monastery. He bade farewell unto all, and set out for Athos. But from the day that Father John of Kronstadt prayed for him, the “roaring of hell’s fire” ceased not round about him, wheresoever he was: in the train, in Odessa, on the steamer, yea, even on Athos itself, in the monastery, in the temple, everywhere.

The Coming unto the Holy Mountain

Simeon came unto the Holy Mountain in the autumn of the year 1892, and entered the Russian Monastery of Saint Panteleimon the Great Martyr. And there began a new life of ascetic striving.

According to the customs of Athos, the novice, “Brother Simeon,” was to spend certain days in perfect stillness, that, calling to mind the sins of all his life and setting them forth in writing, he might confess them unto his spiritual father. The torment he endured was as of hell itself, and it begat within him a burning and irresistible repentance. In the mystery of confession he desired to set his soul free from all that did burden her; therefore with readiness and with great fear, justifying himself in nothing, he confessed every deed of his life. Then the spiritual father said unto him:

“Thou hast confessed thy sins before God; know thou that they are all forgiven thee. From henceforth let us lay the foundation of a new life. Go in peace, and rejoice, for the Lord hath brought thee into this haven of salvation.”

The simple and faithful soul of Brother Simeon, hearing from the elder that all his sins were forgiven, at the word, Go in peace, and rejoice, gave itself over unto joy. But he, untried and guileless, knew not yet that the ascetic must be sober even in gladness. Straightway he lost that inward tension of soul wherein he had abode since his pilgrimage to Kronstadt. In the slackness that followed, he fell under the assault of lustful desire and lingered upon the enticing images painted by passion. And a thought spake unto him: “Go forth into the world, and take thee a wife.”

What the young novice endured, being left alone, we know not. But when he went to confession, the spiritual father said unto him:

“Never receive a thought; but the moment it cometh, drive it away.”

From this sudden fall that befell him, the soul of Brother Simeon was shaken with great trembling. Having tasted the dreadful power of sin, he felt again as though cast into the flames of hell, and resolved to cease not from prayer until God should have mercy upon him.

After the hellish torment he had endured, and after the joy he had received when his sins were loosed in the sacrament of confession, this stumbling at a thought, and the awareness that once more he had grieved the Mother of God, became unto him a thing that shook his very soul. He had thought to have come unto the haven of salvation, and behold – even there he discerned the peril of perdition.

This “fall” in a thought sobered Brother Simeon for all the days of his life. Of the depth of this sobriety one may judge by this: from the day when the spiritual father said unto him, Never receive a thought, through the forty and six years of his monastic life, he received not a single lustful imagination. That which many are unable to learn in the space of years, he acquired at the first lesson, thereby showing his true culture and wisdom, according to the word of the ancient Greeks: “It is not the part of a wise man to stumble twice in the same.”

The sharp bitterness of repentance gave rise unto a new warfare. The thought urged him, saying: “Go into the desert, clothe thyself in sackcloth, and there shalt thou be saved.” Simeon answered: “Well, I will go unto the abbot, to ask his blessing thereon.”

“Nay, go not,” said the thought; “the abbot will not bless thee.”

But Simeon answered: “But now thou didst drive me forth from the monastery into the world, and now thou drivest me into the wilderness. If the abbot bless not, then surely thou urgest me not unto good.” And with steadfastness deep within his soul he said: “Here will I die for my sins.”

Thus was Brother Simeon brought into the spiritual labor by the age-old order of Athonite monastic life, a life suffused with unceasing remembrance of God: prayer in his cell alone; long services in the temple; fastings and vigils; frequent confession and communion; reading, labor, obedience. Simple, untroubled by a multitude of questions, as is often seen in modern men of learning, he, like the other monks, took in the new life rather by an organic union with the world about him than by spoken instruction. For the words of the abbot, the spiritual fathers, and the elders are for the most part brief, and commonly they take the form of positive injunctions – what and how it behoveth to do.

One such lesson for the novice was this: that cell-prayer must chiefly be wrought by the prayer-rope, with the Jesus Prayer. The oft-repeated invocation of the most holy Name of Jesus was sweet unto the soul of Brother Simeon. He rejoiced to learn that by this prayer it is easy to pray always and everywhere, in whatsoever labor or circumstance; that even during the divine services it is well to “hold” it; and that when there is no possibility to go unto the church, this prayer may supply the place of the offices. He prayed fervently and much, for his soul abode in grievous distress and therefore longed greatly toward Him that is mighty to save.

Thus there passed but a little while, about three weeks; and one evening, as he prayed before the icon of the Mother of God, the prayer entered into his heart, and began there of itself to be made day and night. Yet at that time he understood not the greatness and the rarity of the gift that had been given him of the Theotokos.

***

Brother Simeon was patient, guileless, and obedient. In the Monastery he was loved and praised for his faithful labor and his good disposition; and this was pleasant unto him. Then began to come unto him thoughts, saying: “Thou livest holily; thou hast repented; thy sins are forgiven thee; thou prayest without ceasing; thy obedience thou fulfillest well.”

By much and fervent prayer his soul would at times find a measure of rest; and then the thoughts spake unto him: “Thou prayest, and perchance shalt be saved. But if in Paradise thou findest neither father, nor mother, nor those whom thou lovest, then even there shalt thou have no joy.”

The mind of the novice wavered under such thoughts, and anxiety entered his heart; but in his inexperience he knew not what was befalling him.

And it came to pass one night, that his cell was filled with a strange light, which pierced even his body, so that he beheld his inward parts. A thought said unto him: “Receive it; this is grace.” Yet the soul of the novice was troubled thereat, and he abode in great perplexity. The prayer continued to act within him, but the spirit of contrition departed so far that even laughter seized him during prayer. He struck himself hard upon the brow with his fist, and the laughter ceased; yet the spirit of repentance returned not, and his prayer went on without contrition. Then he understood that something unseemly had befallen him.

After the vision of that strange light, there began to appear unto him demons; and he, simple and unwary, conversed with them “as with men.” By little and little their assaults increased. At times they said unto him: “Thou art now a saint.” At other times: “Thou shalt not be saved.” Once Brother Simeon asked a demon: “Why say ye contrary things unto me – now that I am holy, and again that I shall not be saved?” The demon mocked, and answered: “We never speak the truth.”

The change of demonic suggestions, now lifting him up unto “heaven” in pride, now casting him down into everlasting perdition, weighed heavily upon the soul of the young novice, driving him even unto despair. And he prayed with exceeding intensity. He slept but little, and that by snatches. Being strong of body, a veritable giant, he laid him not down upon a bed, but passed the nights in prayer, either standing or sitting upon a stool without a back. When overcome, he would sleep sitting, for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then rise again unto prayer, and so several times. In all, he slept each day not more than an hour and a half, or two.

His first obedience was to labor at the mill. It was the time of the flourishing of Russian monasticism on Athos. The Monastery had grown and was as a city in the wilderness. The number of brethren was nigh two thousand; and visitors and pilgrims came in their hundreds from Russia, and oft abode long in the great guest-houses of the Monastery. Thus the labor at the mill was no small task. Yet Brother Simeon, though so short of sleep, though holding himself to utmost restraint in food, though given to unceasing fervent prayer, though oft in bitter, even despairing weeping, nevertheless performed faithfully his heavy obedience, wherein he was compelled each day to lift and carry many great sacks of meal.

***

Month after month passed, and the torment of demonic assaults increased yet more. The inward strength of the young novice began to fail, and his courage was spent; the fear of perdition and of despair waxed great within him; and the horror of hopelessness seized more and more upon all his being. Whosoever hath endured the like, knoweth that no human courage, no human strength, is able to stand in this spiritual battle.

Brother Simeon too was broken. He came unto the uttermost despair, and sitting in his cell toward the evening, he thought within himself: “It is not possible to entreat God.” With this thought he felt himself wholly forsaken, and his soul was plunged into the darkness of hellish torment and desolation. In this state he abode for the space of about an hour.

And lo, that same day, at the time of Vespers, in the church of the holy Prophet Elias, which was at the mill, on the right hand of the royal doors, where standeth the local icon of the Saviour, he beheld the living Christ.

“The Lord incomprehensibly appeared” unto the young novice, and all his being, yea even his very body, was filled with the fire of the grace of the Holy Spirit – that fire which the Lord cast upon the earth at His coming (Luke 12:49).

From the vision Simeon was left in exhaustion, and the Lord withdrew.

***

It is impossible to describe the state wherein he found himself in that hour. From the lips and writings of the Blessed Elder we know, that he was then encompassed by the great Divine Light; that he was taken out of this world and in spirit was caught up unto heaven, where he heard unspeakable words; that in that moment he received, as it were, a new birth from above (John 1:13; 3:3). The meek gaze of the all-forgiving Christ, boundless in love and joy, drew unto Himself the whole man; and then, having withdrawn, by the sweetness of divine love He ravished his spirit into the contemplation of the Godhead beyond all images of the world.

Most wondrous in this manifestation of the Lord unto the novice Simeon – a man simple and deeply guileless – is this also: that he “at once knew” both Christ Who appeared unto him, and the Holy Spirit Who wrought within him. In his writings he repeats without end, that he came to know the Lord by the Holy Spirit, that he beheld God in the Holy Spirit. He bore witness too, that when the Lord Himself is made manifest unto the soul, she cannot but recognize in Him her Creator and her God.

It may be said with certainty, that both the flame of hell and the torments of hell which preceded the appearing of Christ unto the novice Simeon, and likewise the Divine Light which shone upon him – are things unknown and incomprehensible to most. That which the spiritual man seeth, his experiences and all his inward life, may oft appear unto the unspiritual as madness, as the fruit of a diseased mind. Lacking any share in the realities of the spiritual world, such a one denieth that which he himself hath not known. Yet potentially every man is called unto the fullness of the spiritual life; but the continual turning of the will toward the material world, toward carnal and merely psychic experiences, bringeth many to grossness of heart, even unto a state incapable of spiritual perception. In our everyday life this may be likened to one who hath a radio, and receiveth the waves that fill the air, while he who hath no receiver perceiveth nothing of their presence.

Strange and incomprehensible is the spiritual life of the Christian ascetic: therein we behold the weaving together of astounding contraries – demonic assaults, abandonment by God, the darkness of death and the torments of hell on the one side, and on the other, the manifestation of God and the light of the beginningless Being. And this no word can truly express.

***

Every man is a unique and unrepeatable manifestation; and the path of each ascetic likewise is unique and unrepeatable. Yet men, in their desire to classify phenomena by one sign or another, have sought also to make a classification here.

Through the centuries of Christian life, the experience of the Fathers hath noted three kinds, or types, in the order of the Christian spiritual life.

The first kind embraceth the vast multitude of men. They are drawn unto faith by a small measure of grace, and they pass their life in moderate striving to keep the commandments; and only at the end of their life, by reason of sufferings endured, they come to know grace in somewhat greater measure. Some few of them, indeed, labor more earnestly; and such, before their departure, receive a larger grace¹. Thus it befalleth many monks.

The second kind is when a man, drawn at first by a comparatively lesser grace, yet laboureth zealously in prayer and in the struggle with the passions; and in this toilsome warfare, in the midst of his path, he cometh to taste a greater grace. Thenceforth living in yet greater striving, they attain unto a high measure of perfection.

The third kind, the rarest of all, is when a man, at the very beginning of his ascetic path, for his fervency – or rather, being foreknown of God – receiveth a great grace, even the grace of the perfect.

This last kind is not only the rarest, but also the most grievous; for no one, so far as may be judged from the Lives and writings of the Holy Fathers, from the oral tradition of ascetics of later centuries, and from the testimony of contemporaries, is able to hold without loss the gift of divine love bestowed in its fullness. Thereafter, for a long season, he experienceth the withdrawal of grace and the sense of being forsaken of God. Objectively, this is not a complete deprivation of grace, yet subjectively the soul feeleth even the least diminution of grace’s working as abandonment by God.

This last kind of ascetics suffereth more than all others, for after the knowledge of grace, after the vision of the Divine Light, the darkness of abandonment and the assaults of the passions are felt – by reason of the contrast – incomparably deeper and more bitter: for they know WHAT they have lost. Moreover, the grace once experienced changeth the whole man by its power, and maketh him far more sensitive to every spiritual motion.

This last kind suffereth most of all, because the love of Christ in this world is subject to most grievous “fiery trials” (1 Peter 4:12), because the love of Christ in this world is by its very nature a suffering love.

The Blessed Elder Silouan belonged unto this last kind; and herein is explained his saying: “Ye cannot understand my sorrow,” or again: “He that hath not known the Lord cannot with tears seek after Him.”

When he describeth the unquenchable sorrow and the weeping of Adam after his banishment from Paradise, he is, in very truth, describing his own weeping and the sorrow of his own soul after the loss of grace.

***

The exceptionally deep sense of repentance in Simeon raises the question: “Why do some people repent of their sins so deeply and intensely, others less deeply, and still others very weakly or not at all?” What explains the difference in the intensity of the consciousness of sin among people?²

We are unable to answer this question: it seems impossible for us to penetrate the mystery of a person’s spiritual life. What is available to us is only observation of certain phenomena in the inner life of a religiously living person, when they take the form of psychological experience; some characteristic features of these experiences are accessible to our observation, but it is impossible, however, to determine anything in essence, since the foundation of Christian religious-psychical facts is the absolutely free action of the Spirit of God, which is not subject to any definition³.

“The Spirit breathes where He wills, and you hear His voice, but you do not know where He comes from or where He goes; so it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).

The second factor, also not subject to definition, is human freedom. From these two factors – human freedom and the action of God’s grace – Christian spiritual life is composed.

Both our faith and repentance, to some indeterminate degree, depend on our freedom, and at the same time, they are a gift of God’s grace. Out of His love, God seeks the person, to give not only life, but more – a superabundance of life, as Christ says (John 10:10), but this life is given to a free person not without the consent of the person themselves. Considering this circumstance, we can say that the measure of God’s gift depends on human freedom⁴.

God’s gifts are connected with a certain struggle, and when God foreknows that a person will respond to His gift as they should, this gift is poured out “without envy”. One can say that the reason for a greater or lesser gift is God’s foreknowledge of the person’s response to the action of grace. The Apostle Paul says: “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29). And again: “When God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me... I did not consult with flesh and blood” (Galatians 1:15–16).

God foreknew that Simeon, later the Schema-monk Silouan, would not consult with flesh and blood but would live his life in a struggle worthy of the great gift, and therefore called him to that extraordinary life which we see in him.

We do not attempt here to explain the mystery of the combination of the absolutely free creativity of the Great Builder of the world – God – with the created freedom of man; but our communion with the Elder, whose life was spent in an exceptionally intense struggle of love in which freedom is primarily manifested, focused our thought on God’s foreknowledge of the free response of man to the call of His love.

We believe that being chosen as a witness to love is extremely rare because such witness inevitably involves the total self-giving in sacrifice.

It occurs to us that in the person of Elder Silouan, God’s providence gives the world a new example and a new testimony of the immeasurable love of God, so that through him, Silouan, people paralyzed by despair might rise again, as the Apostle Paul says: “But I was shown mercy so that in me, first, Jesus Christ might display all His patience as an example to those who would believe in Him for eternal life” (1 Timothy 1:16).

For Elder Silouan, Christ’s command was not an ethical norm. He did not reduce Christianity to the level of moralistic teaching, as do those devoid of true religious experience, representatives of humanistic culture, who in the end see religion as unnecessary and only as a “restraining principle” for the ignorant. No, he received Christ’s word, like the Apostle Peter, as “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68), as Spirit and life, according to the Lord Himself: “The words that I speak to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63).

For Elder Silouan, the word of Christ was the Life-giving Spirit, eternal life itself, God in His action.

His faith, after his renewal following the events described above, immediately acquired the character of depth. He believed that God would judge people, that those who committed sin and did not repent would go into eternal punishment, and that those who did good according to Christ’s command would inherit the eternal Heavenly Kingdom. In agreement with the entirely correct observation of St. Maximus the Confessor: “Faith produces fear” (not fear faith) – (On Love, 1st century, 2), Simeon’s fervent faith generated in his soul a great fear of judgment for the many and significant sins he recognized in himself.

And yet we cannot but marvel at the exceptional depth of Simeon’s sense of sin. Undoubtedly, it was a gift of grace.

***

Sin, above all, is a spiritual, metaphysical phenomenon. The roots of sin lie in the mystical depth of the human spirit. The essence of sin is not in the violation of an ethical norm, but in the turning away from the eternal Divine life, for which man was created and to which he is naturally – by his very nature – called.

Sin is committed, first and foremost, in the mysterious depths of the human spirit, but its consequences affect the whole person. A committed sin is reflected in a person’s soul and physical state; it affects his outward appearance; it affects the destiny of the one committing the sin; it inevitably extends beyond the boundaries of the individual life and burdens the life of all humanity with evil, and therefore affects the destiny of the whole world.

Not only did the sin of the Forefather Adam have consequences of cosmic significance, but every sin, whether manifest or hidden, committed by any of us, is reflected in the destinies of the entire world.

The carnal person, when committing sin, does not feel its consequences within himself as the spiritual person does. The carnal person does not notice a change in his state after committing sin because he always dwells in spiritual death, because he has not known the eternal life of the spirit. The spiritual person, on the contrary, with every inclination of his will toward sin, perceives a change in his state due to the diminution of grace⁵.

***

In Elder Silouan, we are struck by his extraordinary sensitivity and remarkable spiritual intuition. Both before the manifestation of the Lord to him, and even more so afterward, throughout his entire subsequent life, he experienced sin with extraordinary depth and intensity: his heart ached unbearably because of sin, and therefore his repentance was irresistibly intense, with weeping, unyielding, until the soul felt that God had forgiven. To many, this may seem strange, and to some, perhaps exaggerated, but the example of the Elder is not for everyone.

In repenting of sin, he sought not merely an excuse, which God may grant easily, perhaps in a single breath of remorse; he sought complete forgiveness, so that the soul would tangibly feel the grace within itself. He sought from God the strength never to commit the sin again, if possible; he prayed to God for deliverance from the “law of sin” active within us (Rom. 7:23). The consequence of sin – the loss of grace – he experienced so intensely and painfully that he feared ever repeating anything similar. To turn away from the soul’s love of God and the peace of Christ was the most terrible thing for him. The awareness that he offended God – that God, gentle and humble – was unbearable. He suffered the deepest anguish of conscience for having sinned against the holy love of Christ. Whoever, in human terms, having love, commits a sin against love – for example, toward parents – knows what unbearable torment of conscience this is; but everything that occurs in the realm of human relations is only a faint shadow of spiritual relations with God.

Thus, from eternity, God foreknew Simeon-Silouan and, in a manner unknown to us, granted him the knowledge of the essence of sin with such depth and intensity that he truly experienced the torments of hell, and prayed from that “nethermost hell,” until the Lord inclined toward him and revealed Himself, granting him to know the resurrection of the soul and to see the Son of Man in His kingdom, before he experienced bodily death (Matt. 16:28).

II. Monastic Asceticism

The appearance of Christ to Brother Simeon was undoubtedly the most important event of his life. It could not fail to affect in the most essential way the further course of his life, nor could it fail to bring about the deepest changes in his soul and consciousness. Outwardly, however, the flow of life changed little: he remained at the same “obedience” – at the mill – and the distribution of time continued to follow the same routine as before, which was the general order of the Monastery: the cell rule, long hours of services in the church, a working day with ordinary human needs – meals, rest, sleep. This order was common to all, but life for each monk was different, “his own.” And if each had his own personal life, this was especially true of Simeon.

At the moment God appeared to him, his entire being was “informed” that his sins were forgiven. The hellish fire that had roared around him vanished, and the hellish torment he had endured for half a year ceased. Now he was granted to experience a special joy and the great peace of reconciliation with God; his soul was filled with a new, sweet feeling of love for God and for people, for every human being.

The prayer of repentance ceased⁶, and the uncontrollable, fervent seeking of forgiveness that had kept him from closing his eyes in sleep was gone. But did this mean that he could now rest peacefully in sleep?

Certainly not.

Having experienced his resurrection and beheld the light of true and eternal being, Simeon’s soul, in the early days after the Appearance, celebrated a kind of Paschal triumph. Everything was good: the world was magnificent, people were pleasant, nature indescribably beautiful, his body felt transformed, light, as if strengthened, and the word of God delighted his soul. Night vigils in the church, and especially prayers alone in the cell, became sweet. Overflowing with joy, his soul pitied people and prayed for the whole world.

After some time, on a festive day, following an all-night vigil in the church, in the morning while Brother Simeon served at the common refectory, grace visited him a second time – similar in nature to the first, but somewhat less intense – and then gradually its perceptible effect began to diminish. The memory of what he had experienced remained, but the sense of peace and joy in his feeling and heart diminished, replaced by perplexity and fear of loss.

What was to be done to prevent this loss?

The ascetic struggle of vigil, fasting, and prayer remained as intense as ever, yet the light and love were diminishing, and the soul longed and ached for the departing Lord.

Thus began the careful search for an answer to his growing perplexity, in the guidance of his spiritual father and in the writings of the Holy Fathers and ascetics.

The young monk came to understand that he had been granted a rare and exceptional gift, yet he did not understand why his mind, filled with the light of knowledge of God, despite all his efforts to keep the commandments, was again darkened by visions of demons, which had disappeared during the initial period after the Lord’s Appearance.

Simeon, full of perplexity, went to Old Rusik for advice from the elder Father Anatoly.

Upon hearing about everything that was happening to the young monk, the elder said to him:

“Do you pray much?”

“I pray constantly,” replied Simeon.

“I think you pray incorrectly, and that is why you so often see demons.”

“I do not understand what it means to pray correctly or incorrectly, but I know that one must always pray, and so I pray constantly.”

“During prayer, keep your mind pure from every imagination and thought, and enclose it in the words of the prayer,” said Elder Anatoly, explaining what it meant for the mind to be “pure” and how to “enclose” it in the words of prayer.

Simeon spent a considerable amount of time with Elder Anatoly. The elder concluded his instructive conversation with words of undisguised amazement:

“If you are like this now, what will you be in old age?”

Father Anatoly was a patient and enduring ascetic. He had spent his long life, as Elder Silouan said, in the ascetic struggle of fasting and repentance, but only in old age, in the forty-fifth year of his monastic life, did he experience great mercy from God and come to know how grace works. Naturally, he was surprised by the life of the young monk, but he should not have revealed his amazement. In this, he erred, for he gave the young ascetic a strong occasion for vanity, with which Simeon had not yet learned to contend.

Elder Anatoly’s mistake was not only pedagogical but also against grace. God’s grace does not allow a true ascetic to speak praise to his fellow monk – praise which even the perfected often cannot bear without harm. Praise is given only when someone is overwhelmed by despair, and revealing to the “inexperienced” what the hand of God is doing is either entirely improper or must be done with the greatest skill and caution.

One way or another, the young and inexperienced monk Simeon began the most difficult, complex, and subtle struggle with vanity. Pride and vanity bring with them all misfortunes and falls: grace departs, the heart grows cold, prayer weakens, the mind becomes scattered, and the assaults of passionate thoughts begin. The soul, which had beheld another life, the heart, which had experienced the sweetness of the Holy Spirit, the mind, which had known purity, did not want to submit to the onslaught of harmful thoughts – but how could this be achieved?

Before the Appearance, Simeon’s soul did not know how to fight against thoughts and fell into despair, despite prayer that continually acted. After the Appearance, his soul had experienced the peace of the grace of the Holy Spirit, and life was continuous prayer and praise. Yet all this began to recede again, and the battle with thoughts recommenced. The soul anguished.

He prayed, wept, and struggled to hold onto the Uncontainable, but the light, if it returned at all, came only briefly and not as before, and then left again.

Thus began long years of alternation between grace and abandonment.

***

Neither the hellish torments he endured, nor the gift of ceaseless inner prayer, nor even the Appearance of the Lord, granted the young monk full freedom from demonic attacks and the battle of thoughts. Despite the intensity of his prayer, his mind at times was darkened by visions of demons and the loss of inner peace. His extraordinary experience did not give him the knowledge of how to remain in the state that his soul had known during the vision, and to accept the withdrawal of the light calmly was already impossible.

Elder Anatoly’s advice – to enclose the mind in the words of prayer – helped Simeon somewhat to purify his mind, but it was insufficient, and then before him arose in full force the task of the ascetic “battle with thought.”

For one who has embarked on the path of spiritual life, the struggle with thoughts is not simply an inner reflection on this or that matter. The external form in which a thought appears often gives no indication of whence it comes.

Frequently, a thought arrives quietly and subtly, and its first verbal form may seem not only natural but wise, even holy; yet sometimes even the slightest touch of such a thought can produce profound changes in the soul.

Judgment of the nature of a thought should never, one might say, be based on its external form, and only experience leads to understanding the strength and subtlety that demonic suggestions can attain. There are many varieties of these suggestions. Even when a thought is good by nature, something foreign can be introduced into it, thereby significantly altering its spiritual content and effect.

A thought is the primary stage of sin. Its appearance in the consciousness of a person is not yet counted as sin: it is merely the suggestion of sin.

By rejecting a thought, one prevents the further development of sin.

An Orthodox monk considers his principal task to be inner intellectual “attentiveness” with prayer in the heart, which enables him to “see the thought” before it enters the heart. The mind, standing in silence within the heart, perceives the thought as it approaches “from outside,” trying to penetrate the heart, and drives it away with prayer. This practice, called “intellectual vigilance” or “intellectual silence,” Simeon began to learn. From the day when, by the gift of the Mother of God, the Jesus Prayer began to act in his heart, until the end of his life, his prayer “never” ceased. Yet it was not yet perfect and could not have been at that time, because the passions remained unconquered. The gift Simeon received was great and became a firm foundation of his spiritual life, but it did not lead directly to perfection. Something greater happened with him, yet it was similar to what occurs with many others: through fervent striving, they attain unceasing prayer, but not purified from passions by long ascetic effort, and despite the action of prayer, they fall into sins of passion. An ascetic cannot be satisfied with such a state⁷.

Brother Simeon had not yet learned to “guard the mind”: in prayer, he did not restrain imagination, through which the demons acted. Imagination, inevitable for anyone beginning the spiritual life, introduces distortion into this life. Since it is unavoidable in the initial period, it is not yet considered “delusion,” but gradually the beginner is led away from this form of prayer to another, which consists in “enclosing the mind in the words of prayer.” This is a more difficult and dry form of prayer, but it is more correct and less dangerous.

For the fervently God-seeking yet utterly simple and naive Brother Simeon, prayer accompanied by imagination quickly assumed a dangerous form and gave the demons an opportunity to tempt the young ascetic. That strange light which once filled his cell at night and even illuminated his innermost being, and those grotesque figures that filled his cell by night and even appeared to him by day and spoke with him – all of this posed great dangers.

Indeed, nearly all holy ascetics passed through the struggle with demons⁸, and in this sense, encounters with them are a normal phenomenon on the path to spiritual perfection. Yet how many suffered from them: how many remained mentally disturbed to the end of life, lost their minds; how many fell into terrible despair and ruin; how many suicides and crimes are committed in the world due to demonic influence?⁹

Those who have fought them know how clever they can be, often flattering those who accept them, and how furious when they are rejected.

Whenever something occurs with an ascetic as it did with Brother Simeon, the spiritual father must focus his attention. The struggle with demons should not produce fear: fear is half defeat; its appearance weakens the soul and makes it more susceptible to demonic assault.

Brother Simeon was naive but courageous; yet it was impossible to remain calm in such circumstances.

***

From the Lives of the Saints, the writings of the Holy Fathers-ascetics, from conversations with spiritual fathers and other ascetics of the Holy Mountain, the young monk Silouan gradually learned more perfect ascetic practices, remaining unceasingly in a struggle that would seem altogether impossible to most. His sleep remained interrupted – several times a day for 15–20 minutes, totaling one and a half to two hours daily. He still did not lie down in bed, but slept sitting on a stool; he labored during the day like a worker; carried the ascetic discipline of internal obedience – cutting off his own will; learned to surrender himself fully to the will of God; practiced restraint in food, conversation, and movement; and prayed for long periods with the intellectual Jesus Prayer – a most difficult practice, utterly exhausting all human strength. Yet despite his entire effort, the light of grace often left him, and at night the demons would gather around him in a crowd.

The alternation of states – sometimes of grace, sometimes of abandonment and demonic attacks – was not fruitless.

Through this alternation, Silouan’s soul remained in constant inner vigilance, alertness, and diligent seeking of an outcome. Continuous prayer and intellectual vigilance, which he learned with his characteristic patience and courage, opened for him new horizons of spiritual insight and enriched him with new means of struggle against the passions. His mind more and more frequently found that place of attention in the heart which allowed him to observe what was taking place in the inner world of the soul.

Comparing his states and experiences led to a clearer understanding of what was happening within him. Genuine spiritual knowledge and discernment began to emerge. He acquired understanding of how thoughts of various passions creep in, as well as how grace acts. Silouan entered the life of rational ascetic struggle, realizing that the primary purpose of such a struggle is the acquisition of grace. Thus the question of how grace is obtained, how it is preserved, why and for what reason it leaves the soul, became one of the central and most important questions of his entire life¹⁰.

In his struggle to preserve grace, the monk Silouan reached levels that to people of another type would seem unreasonably severe and might even give the impression that such mercilessness toward oneself is a perversion of Christianity. But this is certainly not so. A soul that has known God, elevated into the contemplation of the world of eternal light and then having lost that grace, is in a state of which one who has not known this in the same measure can have no conception.

The suffering and sorrow of this soul are inexpressible; it experiences a particular metaphysical pain. For a person who has seen the light of uncreated being, experienced its fullness, joy, and inexpressible sweetness of God’s love, there remains in this world nothing capable of enticing him. In a certain sense, earthly life becomes a burden, joyless, and he with tears seeks again the life to which he was granted a glimpse. A man losing his wife, a deeply beloved being, or a mother losing her only beloved son – can only partially comprehend the grief of one who has lost grace, because God’s love, in its power, dignity, sweetness, and incomparable beauty and authority, surpasses all other human love. Therefore St. John Climacus says of those who have lost grace that their sufferings exceed the sufferings of those condemned to death or the mourning over the dead.

The exceptional nature of this loss and the suffering connected with it drives one to exceptional feats; imagine the torment of a soul reaching exhaustion in its struggle and yet not attaining what it seeks. Grace only occasionally, for brief minutes, testifies to its nearness, then hides again. The soul suffers greatly from the darkness of divine abandonment; the mind, despite the difficult struggle of ceaseless inner prayer, is darkened and sees demons; at night they frequently come and disturb the monk, attempting to divert him from prayer or at least to prevent pure prayer. Much remains unclear to the soul in this struggle, and it wonders why and for what reason this occurs. From many painful afflictions of the heart, the monk weeps, the soul longs and seeks God, while all around are dark demons – shameless, base, evil, repulsive. “Where are You, O Lord… have You utterly forsaken me?” (Ps. 21:2).

***

The great and incomparable experience of our Fathers, passed down from generation to generation, has shown that a relatively large number have been granted visits of grace at the beginning of their turning to God, but only very few have persevered in the struggle that is absolutely necessary afterward in order, once abandoned, to rationally acquire the grace they had known. Among these few must be counted the monk Silouan.

The brief words we allowed ourselves to say above about the sufferings of the divinely forsaken soul do not correspond in significance to even a single night of struggle in which he remained for many years. We remember how the Elder, who generally did not like to speak much about this, said: “If the Lord had not given me at the beginning to know how much He loves man, I could not have endured even one such night – and I had many of them.”

Fifteen years had passed since the day the Lord had appeared to him. And then, on one of those agonizing nights of struggle with demons, when, despite all efforts, pure prayer was impossible, Silouan rose from his stool to make prostrations, but saw before him a huge figure of a demon standing in front of the icons, expecting a bow for itself: the cell was full of demons. Father Silouan sat back on the stool and, bowing his head, with a heart weighed down, prayed:

“Lord, You see that I wish to pray to You with a pure mind, but the demons do not allow me. Teach me what I must do so that they do not hinder me.”

And he received an answer in his soul:

“The proud always suffer thus from demons.”¹¹

“Lord,” said Silouan, “teach me what I must do so that my soul may humble itself.”

And again the answer came to his heart from God:

“Keep your mind in hell, and do not despair.”

***

This brief conversation with God in prayer was a new and very important event in the life of Father Silouan.

The means was unusual, incomprehensible; a means that seemed harsh, yet he accepted it with joy and gratitude. His heart felt that the Lord was merciful to him and Himself guiding him. To keep himself in hell was not new for him – before the Lord’s appearance, he had already dwelt in it¹².

What was new in God’s guidance was: “and do not despair.”¹³

Previously, he had reached despair; now, after many years of severe struggle and frequent experiences of divine abandonment, he endured hours that, if not despair, were nevertheless akin to it. The memory of seeing the Lord prevented him from falling into complete despair, but the suffering from the loss of grace was no less severe. More precisely, what he experienced was also despair, but of a different kind than the first. For so many years, despite all his efforts, as far as his strength allowed, he had not attained what he desired, and thus lost hope of ever reaching it.

When, after a difficult struggle for prayer, he rose from his stool to make prostrations to God but saw before him a demon awaiting worship, his soul was deeply pained. And then, the Lord Himself showed him the way to pure prayer¹⁴.

***

We recognize that any attempt to express in words a profound spiritual act is an effort with insufficient means, but having no better, we will use what is available to us.

What is the essence of God’s instruction to Father Silouan?

It is that from now on his soul was revealed not in an abstract-intellectual way, but existentially, that the root of all sins, the seed of death, is pride, and that God is Humility; therefore, anyone who desires to attain God must attain humility. He realized that that ineffably sweet and great humility of Christ, which he was granted to experience during the Revelation, is an inseparable property of Divine love, of Divine Being. From now on, he truly understood that his entire ascetic endeavor must be directed toward the acquisition of humility.

Now the soul of Monk Silouan rejoices, rejoices in a special way unknown to the world. He was granted to know the great mystery of “Being,” to know it existentially. O, how merciful is the Lord: to a humble servant He reveals His mysteries and teaches him the ways of eternal life. From now on, Silouan will, with all the strength of his soul, adhere to the path indicated by God Himself.

***

A new stage began in the spiritual life of Monk Silouan.

The first revelation of the Lord to him was full of ineffable light; it brought a richness of experiences, abundant love, the joy of resurrection, and a genuine and true sense of passing from death into life. Yet an involuntary bewilderment arose: why did this light withdraw? Why did this gift not have the character of inalienability, according to the Lord’s words: “and your joy no one will take from you” (Jn. 16:22)? Was the gift imperfect, or was the soul that received it unable to bear it?

Now the reason for the loss was revealed and understood: the soul had neither the understanding nor the strength to bear the gift. But now Silouan was granted the “light of understanding”; from this point on he began to “understand the Scriptures”; the path to salvation became clear to his discerning mind; many mysteries in the Lives of the Saints and in the writings of the Fathers were opened to him.

He spiritually penetrated the mystery of the struggle of St. Seraphim of Sarov, who, after the revelation of the Lord in the church during the Liturgy, experiencing the loss of grace and abandonment by God, stood in the desert on a stone for a thousand days and nights, crying: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

He understood the true meaning and force of St. Pimen the Great’s response to his disciples: “Believe, children! Where Satan is, there I shall be also.”

He realized that St. Anthony the Great was sent by God to the Alexandrian shoemaker to learn the same way of thinking: from the shoemaker he learned to contemplate: “All will be saved, but I alone will perish.”

It became clear to him that St. Sisoy the Great had in mind precisely this thought, i.e., “All will be saved, but I alone will perish,” when he said to his disciples: “Who can bear the thought of Anthony? Yet I know a man who can bear this thought” (the man being Sisoy himself).

He saw and now knew what St. Macarius of Egypt meant when he said: “Go down into the heart, and there wage war with Satan.” He comprehended the task assigned to the fool-for-Christ, and in general the path followed by the great ascetic Fathers: Vissarion, Gerasimus of Jordan, Arsenius the Great, and others.

O, how merciful is the Lord! To His humble servant Silouan He grants the knowledge of His mysteries, revealing to him the ways of Life, not in an abstract, intellectual manner, but “in the very thing itself,” i.e., existentially.

He realized from the experience of his own life that the field of spiritual battle with evil, cosmic evil, is the human heart itself. He spiritually discerned that the deepest root of sin is pride – the scourge of humanity, which has torn people away from God and plunged the world into countless miseries and sufferings; it is the true seed of death, enveloping humanity in the darkness of despair. From this point on, Silouan, a remarkable giant of spirit, would focus all his strength on the struggle for the humility of Christ, which he had been granted to know in the first Revelation but had not preserved.

Transported in spirit into the life of the Fathers, he saw that the knowledge of the path to eternal divine life has always existed in the Church and that, through the action of the Holy Spirit, it is transmitted across the centuries from generation to generation.

***

Many, encountering monks in general and Elder Silouan in particular, see nothing extraordinary in them and therefore remain dissatisfied or even disappointed. This happens because they approach the monk with the wrong measure, with improper expectations and demands.

A monk dwells in ceaseless struggle, often extremely intense, but an Orthodox monk is not a fakir. He is not at all carried away by achieving, through special exercises, some peculiar development of psychic powers, which so appeals to many ignorant seekers of mystical life. A monk wages a strong, steadfast, persistent battle; some, like Father Silouan, wage a titanic struggle, unknown to the world, to kill the proud beast within themselves, to become a true human being, in the image of the perfect Man, Christ – that is, meek and humble.

The Christian life is strange and incomprehensible to the world; everything in it is paradoxical, everything seems contrary to the world’s order, and it cannot be explained in words.

The only way to understand it is to do God’s will, that is, to observe the commandments of Christ – the path indicated by Him Himself.

After the revelation given to him by the Lord, Monk Silouan firmly set out on the spiritual path. From that day, his “favorite song,” as he himself expressed it, became:

«Soon I shall die, and my wretched soul will descend into the narrow black hell, and there I alone shall languish in gloomy flame and weep for the Lord:

Where are You, light of my soul? Why have You left me? I cannot live without You.»

This practice soon led to peace of soul and pure prayer. Yet even this fiery path¹⁵ proved long.

Grace no longer abandons him as it once did; he tangibly carries it in his heart; he feels the living presence of God; he is filled with wonder at God’s mercy; the deep peace of Christ visits him; the Holy Spirit again grants him the strength of love. And although he is no longer the foolish one he once was; although he has emerged wise from a long and arduous struggle; although a great spiritual warrior has been formed in him – he still suffers from the fluctuations and instability of human nature and continues to weep with the inexpressible tears of the heart when grace diminishes within him.

And so it continued for a full fifteen years, until he received the power, in a single movement of the mind, in a way that could not be outwardly expressed, to repel that which had previously so severely afflicted him.

***

As the grace-filled visitations increased in intensity and duration, Silouan’s soul grew ever more grateful to God:

«O Lord, how can I thank You for this new, unfathomable mercy: to a fool and a sinner You reveal Your mysteries. The world perishes in the chains of despair, yet to me, the last and worst of all, You reveal eternal life. Lord, I cannot do this alone; let the whole world know You.»

Gradually, his prayer came to be dominated by sorrow for the world, which does not know God. «To pray for people is to shed blood,» said the Elder, taught by the Holy Spirit in the love of Christ.

The love of Christ is a bliss incomparable with anything in this world, and yet this love is also suffering, greater than all sufferings.

To love with the love of Christ means to drink His cup, that cup which the Man-Christ Himself asked the Father «to remove» (to bear).

Through pure, intelligent prayer, the ascetic learns the great mysteries of the spirit. Descending with the mind into his own heart – at first the fleshly heart – he begins to penetrate its depths, which are no longer merely flesh. He discovers his deep, spiritual, metaphysical heart, and there he sees that the being of all humanity is not something alien or external to him, but inseparably connected with his own personal being.

«Our brother is our life,» said the Elder. Through the love of Christ, all people are perceived as an inseparable part of our personal, eternal being. The commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself is no longer understood as an ethical norm; in the word “as” he sees a reference not to the measure of love, but to the ontological unity of being.

«The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son... because He is the Son of Man» (John 5:22–27). This Son of Man, the Great Judge of the world, at the Last Judgment will declare that «the least of these» is Himself; in other words, He unites the being of each human with His own personal being. The Son of Man encompasses all humanity, «all of Adam,» and suffered for all of Adam. The Apostle Paul teaches that we must have the same mindset and feelings, the same life order as in Christ (Phil. 2:5).

The Holy Spirit, teaching Silouan the love of Christ, enabled him to truly live this love, to take into himself the life of all humanity. Prayer of the deepest intensity, with profound weeping for the whole world, bound and united him with «all Adam» in strong ties. For him, who had experienced the resurrection of his soul, it became natural to perceive every human being as his eternal brother. On earth, there is a sequential order¹⁶, but in eternity, all are one; therefore, each of us must care not only for ourselves, but for this universal unity.

After experiencing hellish suffering, and following God’s guidance – «keep your mind in hell» – it was characteristic of Elder Silouan to pray for the departed suffering in hell, but he also prayed for the living and those to come. In his prayer, which transcended time, thoughts of transient earthly phenomena or enemies disappeared. He came to divide people in his sorrow for the world into those who know God and those who do not. It was unbearable for him to realize that people would languish in «utter darkness.»

We remember his conversation with a hermit monk, who said:

– God will punish all the godless. They will burn in eternal fire.

Apparently, he found satisfaction in the idea that they would be punished by eternal fire. To this, Elder Silouan, visibly moved, replied:

– Tell me, please, if you were placed in paradise and could see someone burning in hellfire, would you be at peace?

– What can you do? They are guilty themselves, – the monk replied. Then the Elder, with a sorrowful face, said:

– Love cannot bear that… One must pray for everyone.

And he indeed prayed for all; praying only for himself was foreign to him. All people are subject to sin, all deprived of the glory of God (Romans 3:22). For him, who had already seen, to the measure given him, the glory of God and had experienced its loss, the very thought of such deprivation was painful. His soul ached knowing that people lived unaware of God and His love, and he prayed with a great prayer, that the Lord, in His unfathomable love, would make Himself known to them.

Until the end of his life, despite weakening strength and illness, he maintained the habit of sleeping in fragments. He still had ample time for solitary prayer; he prayed continuously, adapting the form of prayer to circumstances, but especially intensified his prayer at night, until morning.

Then he prayed for the living and the departed, for friends and enemies, for all.

***

What did he think, what did he experience, what did he say to God during the long nights of prayer for the world?

An example of such prayers can be found in some of the Elder’s notes; they allow a very close approach to the mystery of the soul of this holy man who has departed from us.

The words of these prayers are spoken very slowly, one after another. Each word carries a force that deeply seizes the whole being of the person.

The entire person gathers into unity; even physically, the whole being is gathered together.

The breath changes, becoming constrained – or, better, held back – so as not to disrupt the striving and attention of the spirit by its own “boldness.”

The whole mind, all the heart, all the body down to the bones – all gathers into one. The mind invisibly contemplates the world; the heart invisibly lives through the suffering of the world, and within it the suffering reaches its utmost limit. The heart – or rather, the entire being – is encompassed by weeping, deeply immersed in grief.

The Elder’s prayers are not verbose, but they lasted for a very long time.

Often, the prayer proceeds without words. The mind, in a special act of synthesis, conceives all things at once. The soul stands on the edge where every moment it could lose all sense of its world and body, where the mind ceases to think in separate concepts; where the human spirit invisibly perceives only God; then it forgets the world, prayer ceases, and it remains in silent amazement within God.

«When the mind is wholly in God, the world is completely forgotten,» said the Elder.

When this abiding in God ends, for reasons unknown to man, there is no longer prayer, but in the soul there is peace, love, and deep tranquility, along with a subtle sorrow that the Lord has departed, because the soul would wish to dwell with Him forever.

The soul then lives on the remainder of this contemplation.

III. Appearance and Conversations of the Elder

We met Elder Silouan during this period of his life. Many years of titanic struggle with passions had passed¹⁷.

At that time, in spirit, he was truly great.

Taught in the mysteries of God, divinely guided in spiritual battle, he was already steadily ascending toward dispassion.

Outwardly, the Elder carried himself very simply. He was taller than average; large, but not a giant.

His body was not lean, but neither was it heavy. A strong torso, sturdy neck, strong, proportionate legs with large feet. Work-hardened hands, strong, with large palms and thick fingers. Face and head of very harmonious proportions. A beautiful, rounded, moderate forehead, slightly longer than the nose. The lower jaw was strong, determined, yet without sensuality or harshness. Dark, small eyes; a calm, gentle gaze, at times penetratingly attentive; often tired from much vigil and tears.

A large, thick beard, somewhat streaked with gray. Thick eyebrows, unjoined, low, straight, like those of thoughtful people.

His hair dark, moderately thick until old age. He was photographed several times, but always unsuccessfully. The strong, manly features of his face appeared harsh and stiff in photos, whereas in life he made an impression of pleasantness, with a peaceful and kindly face, often pale and soft from little sleep, much fasting, and inward devotion, never harsh.

This was the usual appearance, but at times he would transform beyond recognition. His pale, clear face bore a certain illuminated expression so striking that it was almost unbearable to look at him; one’s gaze would involuntarily lower. One would recall the Scripture where it speaks of the glory of Moses’ face, which the people could not look upon.

His life was moderately austere, with complete disregard for appearance and great neglect of the body. Like most Athonite ascetics, he did not wash his body. He dressed roughly, like laboring monks; wore many layers of clothing because years of complete bodily neglect left him prone to colds and rheumatism. During his stay at Old Rusik, he caught a severe cold in the head, and painful headaches forced him to lie down. At night, he stayed outside the monastery walls in a large room of the provision warehouse he managed, seeking greater solitude.

This was the simple and modest outward appearance of this man. But if one attempts to describe his character and inner visage, a very difficult task arises.

In those years when we observed him, he displayed an exceptional harmony of soul and bodily strength.

He was barely literate, having attended a rural school only “two winters,”¹⁹ but through constant reading and hearing in church¹⁸ of the Scriptures and the great works of the Holy Fathers, he became very learned and gave the impression of a well-read man in monastic matters. By nature, he had a lively, perceptive mind, and long experience in spiritual struggle, inner intelligent prayer, exceptional suffering, and extraordinary divine visitations had made him supernaturally wise and insightful.

Elder Silouan was a man of astonishingly tender heart, gentle love, extraordinary sensitivity, and responsiveness to any sorrow or suffering, without any trace of sentimental femininity. His constant, profound spiritual weeping never sank into tearful sentimentality.

His tireless inner vigilance bore no shadow of nervousness.

Of considerable amazement was the great chastity of this man, given his powerful and strong body. He kept himself firmly even from every thought displeasing to God, and despite this, he interacted freely, evenly, and gently with all people, regardless of their status or way of life. There was not a hint of contempt for even those living impure lives, but in the depth of his soul he grieved for their fall, as a loving father or mother grieves for the stumblings of their dearly beloved children.

He met temptations with great courage.

He was entirely fearless and free, yet without any hint of audacity. Fearless, he lived before God in reverence: he truly feared offending Him even by a bad thought.

While possessing great courage, he was also exceptionally meek. Courage and meekness – a rare and wonderfully beautiful combination.

The Elder was a man of deep, genuine humility, both before God and before men. He loved to give preference to others, loved to be lesser, to greet first, to receive blessing from those holding sacred orders, especially bishops and abbots, yet he did this without any servility or sycophancy. He sincerely honored people of rank, position, or education, but never harbored envy or humiliation – perhaps because he deeply understood the transience of any worldly status, power, wealth, or even scholarly knowledge.

He knew “how greatly the Lord loves His people,” and out of love for God and men, he truly valued and respected every person.

His outward behavior was very simple, yet he undoubtedly possessed an inner nobility – if you like, aristocracy in the highest sense of the word. In interacting with him under various circumstances, even the most subtle intuition could not detect any rough movement of the heart; no repulsion, disrespect, inattention, or affectation. He was truly a noble man, as only a Christian can be.

The Elder never laughed aloud; he never spoke ambiguously, mocked, or joked at the expense of others. On his usually serene and calm face, one might sometimes detect a barely perceptible smile, which did not part the lips unless he spoke words.

There was no anger in him as a passion; yet with astonishing gentleness, rare compliance, and obedience, he possessed great firmness against all falsehood, deceit, and baseness. Judgment, vulgarity, pettiness, and similar things did not adhere to him; this was his steadfast resistance, exercised so as not to offend the one presenting such things, not merely externally but also in the movement of his heart, for a sensitive person would perceive it. He achieved this by praying inwardly, remaining calm, impervious to all evil.

His will was of rare strength – without stubbornness; simplicity, freedom, fearlessness, and courage combined with meekness and gentleness; humility and obedience – without humiliation or sycophancy – he was truly a human being, made in the image and likeness of God.

The world is beautiful – the creation of the great God – but nothing is more beautiful than a human being, a true human being – the child of God.

***

We never had any interest in the events of the Blessed Elder’s external life. Perhaps this was a mistake on our part, but it is now beyond remedy. When meeting the Elder, all our attention was completely absorbed by the desire not to miss his spiritual guidance: to understand it with the mind, grasp it with the heart, retain and assimilate it with the soul – more precisely, to apprehend his word, or rather, his arrangement and spirit.

At times, it seemed to us that the Elder was given the power, through prayer, to influence those who spoke with him.

This was all the more necessary because his words, in their outward form, were very simple, seemingly containing nothing “special,” whereas in essence they pertained to a supernatural state. One had to transmit to the interlocutor, through prayer, the spiritual state from which his words arose; otherwise, all would be in vain – the words would remain misunderstood, unperceived, hidden.

Interaction with the Elder had a special, exceptional character: perfect simplicity and ease, complete freedom from any embarrassment or fear of making a mistake; a profound confidence that nothing – no action, awkward word, or even absurdity – would cause rupture, disturb the peace, or meet with reproach or harsh reaction. In his presence, the heart felt no fear, and at the same time, some innermost string of the soul was drawn taut with the utmost prayerful tension, striving to be worthy of breathing in the spirit with which he was filled.

It is like entering a place filled with fragrance: your chest instinctively opens to draw it in with deep breaths, taking it fully into your being. The same movement of the soul was observed when communicating with the Elder. A calm, peaceful, yet simultaneously very strong and profound desire would seize the soul – to perceive the fragrance of that sphere of Christ’s spirit in which the Elder was allowed to live.

What a rare, exceptional, and entirely unique delight it is to commune with such a person.

***

The Elder could speak simply, without the slightest trace of vanity, about matters that went beyond ordinary human norms. If the listener had faith in him, through this outwardly simple conversation he could apprehend, to the extent accessible to him, the supernatural state in which the Elder himself resided.

We remember his account of one remarkable Russian ascetic – Father Stratonik, who came from the Caucasus to visit Mount Athos.

Father Stratonik possessed a rare gift of speech and prayer with tears; he had inspired many hermits and monks in the Caucasus, lifting them from laxity and despondency to new ascetic effort, revealing to them the paths of spiritual struggle. On Athos, Father Stratonik was warmly received among the ascetics, and his inspired words made a profound impression on many. His rich reasoning, beautiful and strong intellect, extensive experience, and gift of true prayer made him a central figure among the ascetics. He spent about two months on the Holy Mountain and began to feel saddened that his long journey had been in vain, for he had gained nothing new from his encounters with the Athonite monks.

He went to the spiritual father of the Russian Monastery of Saint Panteleimon – Elder Agafodor – and, sharing his sadness, asked to be directed to a father with whom he could speak about obedience and other monastic practices. Father Agafodor sent him to stay at the “Old Russian [Skete],” where at that time (before the war of 1914) several remarkable ascetics from the monastery brotherhood had gathered.

The Old Russian Skete is located in the mountains, at an altitude of approximately 250 meters above sea level, to the east of the Monastery, about an hour and ten minutes’ walk away. There, a stricter ascetic regimen was maintained than in the Monastery. The place was desolate and silent, attracting monks who sought greater solitude for practicing the intellective prayer. At that time, Father Silouan also lived there. Father Stratonik was warmly received at the Old Russian Skete. He conversed extensively with the fathers there, both individually and in groups.

One festive day, the schemamonk Father Dosifey invited him to his cell, along with several other monks, among whom were Fathers Benjamin of Kalyagra, Onesiphorus, and Silouan. The conversation was very rich and engaging. All were captivated by what Father Stratonik said; he was not only a guest with authority, but also superior in the gift of speech. Father Silouan, being younger, naturally sat quietly in a corner of the cell, attentively listening to every word of the Caucasian ascetic.

After the conversation, Father Stratonik, who had not yet visited Silouan alone, expressed a desire to see him at his “kalibka” (a small secluded dwelling he had built 5–6 minutes southeast of the brotherhood building for solitude). They agreed to meet the next day at 3 o’clock. That night, Father Silouan prayed earnestly for the Lord to bless their meeting and conversation.

Father Stratonik arrived at the appointed hour. The conversation between the two ascetics began easily and immediately took on the desired character. Both were constantly focused in spirit on a single goal, and their minds were entirely absorbed by the questions that were of paramount importance to them.

Having listened carefully to Father Stratonik the previous day, Silouan noticed that the latter spoke “from his own mind” and that his words about the meeting of human will with God’s will, and about obedience, were “unclear.”

He began the conversation with three questions, asking for answers:

• “What do the perfected say?”

• “What does it mean to surrender oneself to God’s will?”

• “What is the essence of obedience?”

Apparently, the extraordinary spiritual atmosphere in which he found himself immediately affected Father Stratonik; he sensed the importance and depth of the questions and became thoughtful. After a moment of silence, he said:

– “I do not know this… You tell me.”

Silouan answered:

– “They do not speak from themselves… They speak only what the Spirit gives them.”

At that moment, Father Stratonik apparently experienced the very state that Silouan was speaking of.

A new mystery of spiritual life, previously unknown to him, was revealed. He became aware of his shortcomings in the past and understood how far he still was from the perfection he had imagined after meeting so many monks, when his own superiority seemed obvious; and yet he had met many remarkable ascetics. He looked upon Father Silouan with gratitude.

Once the first question was resolved deep within his soul through the very experience of the state granted to him by Silouan’s prayer, the other two questions were easily understood.

The conversation then turned to prayer. Father Stratonik said that if prayer occurs without tears, it means it has not reached its intended place and remains fruitless. To this, Silouan replied that tears in prayer, like any other force in the body, can be exhausted; yet then the mind, refined by weeping, moves to a subtle sense of God and silently contemplates Him free of any distracting thoughts. And this can be even more valuable than weeping.

Father Stratonik left feeling grateful. He visited Silouan several more times, and until the end of his stay on the Holy Mountain, a deep bond of affection remained between them. On one of his subsequent visits, he confirmed Silouan’s words about prayer.

Apparently, this state, too, was granted to him by God to know.

***

Soon after this conversation, Father Stratonik left the Old Russian Skete and went to the hermit Father Benjamin.

This was a man of rare nobility, intelligent, well-read, with profound reasoning; in his entire appearance – his face and his slender, high, austere silhouette – there reflected some unspoken inner tragedy. He had spent decades in silence at Kalyagra, and we would like to tell much about this remarkable ascetic, but we do not consider it appropriate to allow such digressions here, so as not to prolong the narrative about the main subject. Father Stratonik had visited Father Benjamin often before, and they had many conversations, but this time he was unusually quiet and pensive. Father Benjamin would ask him about one thing – silence in response; ask about another – again the same.

Finally, with surprise, spreading his hands with a somewhat theatrical grace characteristic of him, he asked:

– “Father Stratonik, what is with you? I do not recognize you. You have always been so lively, and now you sit so sorrowful, and your inspired lips are closed… What has happened to you?”

– “What shall I tell you in response to your questions?” replied Father Stratonik.

– “It is not for me to speak of this; you have Father Silouan – ask him.”

Father Benjamin was astonished.

He had known Silouan for a long time, loved and respected him, but had never considered him so great as to seek his counsel.

It is possible that at that time Father Stratonik was experiencing something very complex in his soul. On the one hand, he had come to Athos seeking some personal “benefit”; on the other hand, from many previous encounters, he was accustomed to feeling a sense of superiority. His exceptional endurance in ascetic struggle and his rare gift of prayerful weeping could have given him reason to think he had already attained a degree of perfection – and yet, so vividly and strongly, he became aware of his own insufficiency in meeting a monk who was simple and seemingly lacking the brilliant gifts he himself possessed.

Perhaps he was silent and sorrowful because he could not retain the state he had known during the conversation with Father Silouan.

***

One day, Father Benjamin of Kalyagra, walking through the monastery forest on a feast day with Father Silouan, suggested that they visit the remarkable and then well-known Elder, Father Ambrose, spiritual father of the Bulgarian Monastery of Zograf. Silouan immediately agreed… They went… Father Benjamin was curious about what Silouan would ask Elder Ambrose.

– “I am not thinking of asking the Elder anything,” Silouan replied.

– “You have no doubts now?”

– “No, I have no doubts at this moment.”

– “Then why are you going?”

– “I go because you wish it.”

– “But people visit elders for guidance, for benefit.”

– “I surrender my will before you, and in this lies my benefit, greater than any advice the Elder could give.”

Father Benjamin was astonished by this conversation, but even then he did not understand Silouan.

Not long before his death, Father Benjamin came from the desert to the Monastery of Saint Panteleimon. He had fallen ill with dropsy and was admitted to the hospital maintained by the Monastery for hermits and, more generally, for homeless travelers. This hospital was called “Pokoy” (Rest). It was housed in a large multi-story stone building situated right on the seashore, outside the gates of the main Monastery. Next to it was a smaller building containing the food stores, which at that time were managed by Father Silouan. The proximity of the store to Pokoy allowed Silouan to visit Father Benjamin frequently and assist him. Even Father Benjamin, though with difficulty, was able to walk for the first time and often visited his friend.

Shortly after his arrival, Father Benjamin visited Father Silouan, and they had a long and important conversation. We ourselves visited Father Benjamin in the hospital the next day. He was entirely under the impression of that conversation with Silouan and repeatedly, with evident surprise and gratitude, exclaimed:

– “What a friend the Lord has given me!… You know how he revealed everything within me… Then he gave me three instructions, repeating them several times so that I would not forget, and in conclusion, he added sternly, as if driving in a large nail: ‘If you do not do as I say, you will not be saved.’”

It was clear that this encounter with Silouan was a great revelation for Father Benjamin. It happened on Monday, the first day of the Apostles’ Fast. Although according to the Monastery rule nothing was to be eaten until evening on that day, Father Silouan “served him tea,” and drank himself. This small detail was noted by Father Benjamin as a sign of Silouan’s freedom from formalities – freedom not out of contempt, but out of mastery, for he knew Silouan’s great self-restraint.

We spent about an hour with Father Benjamin; during that entire time he was deeply focused and could think or speak of nothing else, repeatedly saying:

– “What a friend the Lord has given me!”

It was only near the end of his life that he truly realized who Silouan was. Before this, he had treated him with friendliness but somewhat condescendingly, as a good monk, though a junior one. In a similar way, some other fathers on Mount Athos came to appreciate Silouan only after his death.

***

The Monastery of St. Panteleimon is very large, and its management is complex.

Certain branches of this management have their own supervisors, called economi (stewards). Due to the nature of their responsibilities, the economi sometimes cannot follow the general order of the Monastery, and therefore there is a special table in the large fraternal refectory – the “economi’s table” – where they eat individually, as their duties allow. For many years, Father Silouan served as an economus and ate at this table on weekdays.

Among the economi was one monk – Father P. – a man who stood out sharply among the brethren for his abilities, but somehow seemed “unlucky.” Father P.’s ambitious initiatives often met with little sympathy from the fathers, and his undertakings frequently ended in failure. Once, following the latest failure of one of his projects, his actions were sharply criticized at the economi’s table during the meal. Father Silouan was present with the others but took no part in the “judgment.” Then one of the economi, Father M., addressing him, said:

– “You are silent, Father Silouan, so you are siding with Father P.… You have no concern for the interests of the Monastery… What a loss he has caused the Monastery.”

Father Silouan remained silent, quickly finished his meal, and then, approaching Father M., who had already moved away from the table, said:

– “Father M., how many years have you been in the Monastery?”

– “Thirty-five.”

– “Have you ever heard me condemn anyone?”

– “No, never.”

– “Then why do you want me to now reproach Father P.?”

Father M. was embarrassed and, with shame, replied:

– “Forgive me.”

– “God will forgive.”

***

When Father Silouan was first appointed as economus, upon returning to his cell from the Abbot, he fervently prayed that the Lord would help him fulfill this responsible obedience. After a long prayer, he received an answer in his soul: “Preserve the grace given to you.” He then understood that preserving grace was more important and precious than all other duties. Thus, upon taking up his new obedience, he vigilantly ensured that his prayer would not be interrupted.

He had under his supervision up to 200 workers. In the morning, while inspecting the workshops, he would give general instructions to the senior craftsmen and then retire to his cell to weep for the “people of God.” His heart ached with sorrow for the workers; he mourned each one.

“Here is Mikhail, who left his wife and children in the village and works here for a pittance. How hard it must be for him to be so far from home, not to see his wife or his dear children… Here is Nikita, newly married, who left his young pregnant wife and elderly mother… how painful it must have been to let go of this young man, a beloved son and husband… Here is Grigory, who left his elderly parents, young wife, and two little infants, to come work here for a piece of bread… and what will he be able to earn here? What poverty they must endure to leave their whole families… and what sorrow must be in all their hearts… And in general, what terrible poverty the whole people live in… Here is little Nikolka, still a boy… with what pain his parents let him go so far, among strangers, for meager wages; how must his parents’ hearts grieve… Oh, in what poverty and suffering the people live… And all of them, like abandoned sheep, no one cares for them, for their upbringing or education… they learn every vice, grow wild, grow hard…”

Thus spoke the blessed Elder, and his soul suffered for all the poor, undoubtedly more than they themselves did, for he saw in their lives what they themselves, in their unawareness, did not notice.

“There’s a saying, ‘Heart tells heart.’” The Elder secretly prayed for the “people of God,” but the workers felt it and loved him. He never hovered over them while they worked, never rushed them, yet they, touched by his care, worked more cheerfully and energetically than elsewhere. Other economi “watched the monastery’s interests,” but everyone knows that when concern for “interests” comes, one ceases to see the person.

The Elder’s true concern for the Monastery was that the commandment of Christ be observed.

“The Lord has mercy on all,” he said – and not only said, but himself, filled with the Spirit of Christ, felt compassion for all. From observing life around him, from memories of the past, from the deepest personal experience, he lived with the suffering of the people, of the whole world, and his prayer had no end. He prayed a great prayer for the whole world.

He forgot himself; he wished to suffer for the people out of compassion; for their peace and salvation, he was drawn to shed his own blood, and he did so in prayer.

“To pray for people is to shed blood,” the Elder said.

Need one speak of what level of prayerful intensity and weeping these words indicate?

Once we asked the Elder, “Did the demanding obedience as economus, requiring interaction with so many people, not harm monastic silence?” He answered:

– “What is silence? Silence is unceasing prayer and the mind’s abiding in God. Father John of Kronstadt was always among the people, yet he was more in God than many desert monks. I became an economus out of obedience, and by the Abbot’s blessing, it was better for me to pray in this obedience than at Old Rusik, where I had requested to be for silence… If the soul loves the people and feels compassion for them, the prayer cannot cease.”

***

It is impossible not to note one remarkable feature of the Elder’s character, namely his attitude toward anyone who disagreed with him or held different views. His most sincere and profound desire was always to understand such a person in the best possible sense and never to offend what was sacred in them. He always remained himself; he was fully convinced that “salvation is in Christ like humility,” and because of this humility, he wanted with all his soul to understand every person in the kindest way. In each person, he sensitively perceived their soul, their capacity to love Christ.

We know of a conversation the Elder had with an Archimandrite engaged in missionary work among non-Orthodox Christians. This Archimandrite greatly respected the Elder and repeatedly visited him during his stays on Mount Athos. The Elder asked him how he preached. The Archimandrite, still young and inexperienced, gesturing with his hands and moving his whole body, responded excitedly:

– “I tell them: your faith is fornication, everything is distorted, everything is wrong, and you will not be saved unless you repent.”

The Elder listened and then asked:

– “Tell me, Father Archimandrite, do they believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that He is true God?”

– “Yes, they believe that.”

– “Do they honor the Mother of God?”

– “They do, but they teach about her incorrectly.”

– “And do they venerate the saints?”

– “Yes, they do, but since they have separated from the Church, what saints could they possibly have?”

– “Do they perform services in churches, do they read the Word of God?”

– “Yes, they have churches and services, but you should see what these services are compared to ours – how cold and soulless they are.”

The Elder then said:

– “So, Father Archimandrite, their souls know that they do well in what they do: they believe in Jesus Christ, they honor the Mother of God and the Saints, they call upon them in prayer. So when you tell them that their faith is fornication, they will not listen to you… But if you tell the people that they are doing well, that they believe in God, that they honor the Mother of God and the Saints properly, that they go to church for services, that they pray at home, that they read the Word of God, etc., and then show them where their error lies and how it must be corrected, everything will be well. The Lord will rejoice over them; and in this way, we all will be saved by the mercy of God… God is love, and therefore preaching must always come from love; then there will be benefit both to the one who preaches and to the one who listens. But if you censure them, the souls of the people will not heed you, and no good will come of it.”

***

One day the Elder was conversing with a student who had visited Athos and spoke much about freedom. As always, the Elder attentively followed the thoughts and feelings of his lively, likable, but naive interlocutor. Naturally, the student’s understanding of freedom was, on the one hand, the pursuit of political liberties, and on the other, the ability to act according to one’s own impulses and desires.

In response, the Elder explained his own views and aspirations. He said:

“Who does not desire freedom? Everyone desires it, but one must know what freedom truly is and how to find it… To become free, one must first ‘bind oneself.’ The more you bind yourself, the greater freedom your spirit will have… One must bind one’s passions so that they do not master you; one must bind oneself so as not to harm one’s neighbor… People usually seek freedom in order to ‘do whatever they want.’

– But this is not freedom; it is the power of sin over you. Freedom to commit fornication, to eat and drink without restraint, to hold grudges, to rape or kill, or to do anything of that sort, is not freedom at all. As the Lord said: ‘Everyone who sins is a slave of sin.’ One must pray diligently to be freed from this slavery.

We believe that true freedom is not to sin, and to love God and one’s neighbor with all one’s heart and strength. True freedom is ‘constant abiding in God.’”

Although what the Elder said went far beyond the young student’s capacity to fully understand, and though the Elder’s words appeared outwardly very simple, the student left deeply impressed.

***

We have preserved a written note of a conversation of the Elder with a monk who visited him; this conversation took place in our presence on March 18/31, 1932.

The Elder said that in the experience of the Holy Fathers, one can discern several different methods of combating an intrusive thought (pomysl), but the best method is not to engage in conversation with it at all.

The mind, once it engages with a thought, meets its continuous development, and, carried away by this “conversation,” is torn away from the remembrance of God – which is precisely the goal of the demons, who, in one way or another, entangle the mind detached from God, and from this engagement with the thought the mind will not emerge pure…

The hermit Stephen, who fed a leopard with his own hands (“Ladder,” Ch. 7, 50), at the time of his death, by habit “contradicting” thoughts, engaged in a dispute with them, and therefore found himself in a state of struggle with demons.

The venerable Mark of Ephesus, because, before his death, he comforted his soul by calculating his own labors, was suspended in the air for one hour; and “for one hour” means that there existed the danger of remaining so…

Other Fathers were more experienced in spiritual combat.

Venerable Macarius the Great, passing through the aerial realms, continually humbled himself, and when demons shouted to him from afar that he had escaped them, he replied that he had not yet escaped. He answered thus because he was accustomed to holding his mind “in hell,” and in this way truly escaped the demons.

Venerable Pimen the Great, taught by long experience in fighting demons, knowing that the most dangerous and strongest enemy is pride, labored all his life to acquire humility, and therefore said to his disciples: “Believe me, children, wherever Satan is, there will I be,” yet in the depths of his soul, trusting in the goodness and mercy of the Lord, he firmly relied on God’s salvation.

Thus humbling oneself is the best way to keep the mind free from any passionate thought. However, many ascetics do not understand this, cannot think in this way, and despair, unable to keep their mind in hell while also relying on God’s mercy…

Without engaging at all with the thought, one must attach oneself with all thought and all strength to God and say:

“Lord, I am sinful and unworthy of Your mercy, but by Your singular mercy save me…”

The soul often loses much over a single thought of doubt in God’s mercy – “perhaps the Lord will not forgive” – and despair is the worst of all, for it is blasphemy against God, as if He were incapable of saving, or the measure of our sins could surpass the measure of God’s mercy…

He took upon Himself the sins of the whole world… If a mother forgives her child completely because it is ignorant, how much more will the Lord forgive us if we humble ourselves and repent…

Spiritual combat is in many ways similar to ordinary war, and in this battle of ours one must also be courageous. Spiritual courage consists in firm trust in God’s mercy. A courageous ascetic, if he falls into sin, is deceived and strays from the right path, or even offers worship to a demon, is not lost, but immediately turns to God in repentance with full reliance, thereby overcoming the enemies; whereas the cowardly soul becomes confused, despairs, and perishes…

When one strays from the right path and falls into delusion, first of all it is necessary to repent before a spiritual father, telling him everything. After such a confession, the power of the delusion is weakened, and then, though not immediately, full correction comes.

Many stray, but unfortunately few are corrected. Many initially receive grace, but very few regain it after losing it.

The monk asked:

– Why did Venerable John Kolov pray for his passions to return?

The Elder answered:

– Venerable John Kolov, by his fervent repentance, soon overcame the passions, but did not receive love for the world and prayer for the world; and when he felt peace from the passions, then his prayer weakened, and therefore he began to ask for the passions to return to him, for, struggling with the passions, he remained in unceasing fervent prayer. And if, after overcoming the passions, he had also achieved prayer for the world, it would not have been necessary for the temptations to return, for when a person struggles with passions, he cannot purely contemplate God or fervently pray for the world… I think so.

The monk asked:

– Why did the Elder tell Venerable Pimen the Great to allow a thought into his heart and then struggle with it, while to another, less experienced brother, he said the opposite, to cut off the thought immediately?

Elder Silouan answered:

– From this advice it is clear that some Fathers followed this method of spiritual struggle, that is, they allowed the thought into the heart first and then fought with it; but here two situations are possible: one, when a person does not know how to guard his mind, then thoughts penetrate the heart, and only after that does the struggle with them begin. This is a kind of game in which one can lose. The other is when a monk, not from weakness, but consciously allows a thought to pass into the heart in order to examine all its workings; but even this method still does not allow one to remain in contemplation, and therefore it is better to allow no thoughts at all, but to pray with a pure mind. And the inexperienced brother, to whom the Elder advised cutting off the thought immediately and not engaging with it at all, received this advice because he was weak and could not resist the passionate thought, but despite the Elder’s advice, he still could not hold them properly, and by the Elder’s command was only beginning to learn the difficult art of fighting a thought. So Venerable Pimen was stronger and more experienced in spiritual combat than the other brother, yet it is always better to keep the mind pure from every thought, and with all the strength of the soul to pray, for the mind that prays purely is enlightened by the Lord.

– How is it possible to keep one’s mind pure? – asked the monk.

– The Holy Fathers have left us the teaching of intellectual–heartfelt prayer; by it the mind is kept, and I see no other way that would better enable one to keep God’s commandments at all.

***

We have preserved a written account of a conversation in which the Elder was asked several times by young people what life path they should choose. He answered differently depending on the person. Some he advised to study theology in preparation for future pastoral service in the Church; others he “blessed” to study, but in a way that combined learning with prayer and monastic asceticism; and some he advised not to pursue formal education at all, but to devote all their energy to prayer and spiritual ascetic effort.

The last piece of advice was the rarest, because Elder Silouan believed that the time foretold by Father Stratonik had come, when many “learned” people would be monks in the world. He observed that in general, conditions for monasticism in the form it had existed in antiquity were becoming unfavorable, yet the calling and aspiration toward monastic life would always remain.

In the Elder, we noticed a very firm conviction that the spiritual life – that is, a prayerful and ascetic life rooted in deep faith – was higher than any other, and therefore one to whom it is given must, for its sake, like a precious pearl, withdraw from everything else, even from “learning.”

He believed that if a spiritually gifted person turned to science while leaving behind the ascetic life, he would display greater abilities in that field than someone less spiritually endowed. In other words, a person endowed with mystical gifts, living spiritually, exists on a higher plane and of greater dignity than one immersed in academic pursuits. And descending into the lower plane of secular or intellectual activity, the spiritually gifted person will still demonstrate superior ability compared to an unspiritual person, though not immediately. He said that “the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light” (Luke 16:8), not because they are truly wiser, but because “the spiritual person is occupied with God and little with worldly affairs.”

In his conversations with us, the Elder often moved to abstract forms of expression, but in discussions with monks he presented his views concretely and very simply, so they could be understood.

“What is surprising in the fact that an unspiritual person handles worldly affairs better than a spiritual one? One thinks about these matters, while the other strives with his mind to remain in God. This happens often even among laypeople: a clever merchant laughs at a learned man for not understanding merchandise, but this does not mean that the merchant is wiser…”

Here is a characteristic conversation of the Elder. Soon after the First World War (1914–18), the Monastery began to organize the exploitation of the monastic forest and purchased a steam engine for the sawmill. The steward, Father F., a capable and naturally gifted Russian man, after installing and running the machine, was pleased with its work and began praising German genius (the machine was of German manufacture); in exalting the Germans, he disparaged Russian ignorance and inability.

Father Silouan, who in his free time from his work in the monastery store went to the sawmill to “help,” listened quietly to Father F. Until evening, when the working monks sat down to dinner, he asked Father F.:

– What do you think, Father F., why are Germans so much better than Russians at building machines and other things?

In reply, Father F. again praised the Germans as a more capable, intelligent, and talented people, while saying that “we Russians are good for nothing.”

Father Silouan responded:

– I think the reason is entirely different, and it is not that Russians are incapable. I think it is because the Russian people devote their first thought, their first strength, to God and think little about earthly matters. If the Russian people, like other nations, focused entirely on the world and devoted themselves solely to that, they would soon surpass them, because this is less difficult.

Some of the monks present, knowing that there is nothing in the world harder than prayer, agreed with Father Silouan.

***

The Monastery of Saint Panteleimon is one of the largest and best-organized on Mount Athos. It has an excellent library of up to 20,000 volumes, including many ancient Greek and Slavic manuscripts, numerous rare old books of bibliographic value, and rich collections in theology, history, and other fields. The large, well-furnished guest rooms often host visitors, mainly foreigners, and interaction with them was entrusted to the monk Father V., a theologically educated man fluent in many foreign languages.

In 1932, a Catholic doctor, Father Chr. B., visited the monastery and had many conversations with Father V. about life on Mount Athos. Among other questions, he asked:

– What books do your monks read?

– John Climacus, Abba Dorotheus, Theodore the Studite, John Cassian, Ephrem the Syrian, Barsanuphius and John, Macarius the Great, Isaac the Syrian, Symeon the New Theologian, Niketas Stethatos, Gregory of Sinai, Gregory Palamas, Maximus the Confessor, Hesychios, Diadochos, Nilus, and other Fathers included in the Philokalia, – answered Father V.

– Your monks read these books! We have them read only by professors, – the doctor exclaimed, clearly surprised.

– These are the staple books of every monk in our monastery, – replied Father V. – They also read other works by the Holy Fathers and later ascetic writers, such as Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, Bishop Theophan the Recluse, Nilus of Sora, John of Kronstadt, and others.

Father V. told Elder Silouan about this conversation, whom he deeply revered. The Elder remarked:

– You could have told the doctor that our monks not only read these books, but could themselves write similar ones. Monks do not write because there are already many excellent books, and they are content with them; but if these books were lost for some reason, the monks would write new ones.

Throughout his long life on Athos, the Elder met many great ascetics, some of whom had experienced the states described by such great ascetics as Isaac the Syrian, Macarius the Great, and others. Thus, the Elder’s words seem entirely natural.

For many years, the monastery’s large scriptorium was managed by Father Diadochus, a monk exemplary in all things, meticulous almost to pedantry, devoted to liturgical service, well-read, quiet in nature, and noble in social interaction, earning general respect.

One day, on his Name Day, I visited him and found him in the company of his spiritual friends: a spiritual elder, Father Trophimus, and Elder Silouan. I do not know what had occurred before my arrival, but I overheard the following:

The spiritual elder mentioned something he had read in a newspaper and, addressing Elder Silouan, asked:

– And what would you say about this, Father Silouan?

– Father, I do not like newspapers or news, – he replied.

– Why not?

– Because reading newspapers clouds the mind and hinders pure prayer.

– Strange, – said the elder. – On the contrary, newspapers help me pray. We live here in a desert, see nothing, and so the soul gradually forgets the world, and prayer weakens… When I read newspapers, I see how the world lives and how people suffer, and that inspires me to pray. Whether I serve the Liturgy or pray alone in my cell, I ask God earnestly for people and the world.

– When the soul prays for the world, without newspapers, it knows better how the whole earth grieves, it knows the needs of people, and pities them.

– How can the soul know by itself what happens in the world? – asked the elder.

– Newspapers write not about people but about events, often incorrectly; they confuse the mind, and the truth cannot be obtained from them, whereas prayer purifies the mind, and it sees everything better.

– I do not quite understand what you mean, – the elder asked again.

Everyone awaited Elder Silouan’s response, but he sat silently, head bowed, and did not allow himself, in the presence of the elder and older monks, to explain how the soul, praying for the entire world from afar, could perceive the life of the world and the needs and sufferings of people.

Endowed with understanding that only a few in a generation attain, he seemed almost ashamed in conversation to go further, and because of this, his great wisdom and exceptional experience often remained hidden from his interlocutor.

Typically, when he saw that his initial words were not understood, he no longer hoped to clarify by explanation; and revealing the last insight, he refrained from doing so out of spiritual modesty.

Thus, during his life, he remained “unmanifested.”

Certainly, this was not only God’s will for him but also his own desire, which God accepted and fulfilled, hiding him even from the fathers of Mount Athos.

Nevertheless, he was not completely unknown. Some monks and laypeople who visited Athos or corresponded with him appreciated and deeply loved him. Among them were bishops, priests with higher theological education, and devout laypeople.

I recall one case: a foreign Orthodox visitor stayed at the monastery for some time and was deeply impressed by Elder Silouan. He grew to love the Elder and visited him often, which the monks noticed. One of the most influential senior monks, Hieromonk N., a learned and lively-minded man, encountering the visitor in the monastery corridors, said:

– I do not understand why you, scholarly academics, go to Father Silouan, an illiterate man. Is there no one smarter than him?

– To understand Father Silouan, one must be an “academic,” – replied the visitor, not without emotion.

The same Hieromonk N., still failing to grasp why Elder Silouan was venerated and visited by learned people, conversing with Father Methodius, a monk who had managed the monastery bookstore for many years, remarked:

– I am amazed. Why do they go to him? He probably reads nothing.

– He reads nothing, but he does everything; others read much, but do nothing, – replied Father Methodius.

Beyond what has already been recounted, the reader may, from the Elder’s own writings, encounter candid accounts of certain episodes from his life. We now allow ourselves to turn to an exposition of the Elder’s teaching.

Strictly speaking, he had no “teaching” in the conventional sense of the word. What we offer here is an attempt to summarize what we learned during years of personal communion with him. It is impossible to explain fully how or why faith in the Elder arose in us, but it may be helpful to say a few words about our approach to him.

The topics of our conversations with the Elder were very often prompted by our own needs, by our turning to him in questions or concerns. Much of what was discussed in these conversations does not appear in the Elder’s writings. When we addressed him with questions, or simply listened to him, we recognized that his words arose from a divinely given experience, and we regarded them in a manner akin to how the Christian world regards Holy Scripture: as communicating truths recognized as facts – certain and undeniable. What the Elder spoke was not the product of personal reasoning. His inner process was entirely different: actual experience and direct knowledge preceded his words, which thereby carried the weight of positive testimony to spiritual realities. The search for logical reasoning “from below” was foreign to him, just as it is foreign to Scripture itself. Like John the Theologian, he could say, “We know” (1John 3:14, et al.).

Consider this example from the Elder’s writings:

“We know that the greater the love, the greater the suffering of the soul; the fuller the love, the fuller the knowledge; the more fervent the love, the more ardent the prayer; the more perfect the love, the holier the life.”¹⁹

Each of these four statements could serve as the crowning achievement of the deepest and most complex philosophical, psychological, or theological study – yet the Elder himself had no need for such studies, nor did he descend to them.

We have already noted that interaction with the Elder was of an entirely exceptional character.

It seems that, through his conversations, simple in form yet charged with the power of his prayers, he could transport his interlocutor into a unique spiritual world. Most importantly, the person entered that world not abstractly, but through a direct, lived experience conveyed to them. Few, if any, managed to retain the state received, or to live afterward in accordance with what they had perceived in his presence. Undoubtedly, this became an inexhaustible source of sorrow for many throughout their lives, for the soul cannot help but grieve having glimpsed the light and then lost it. Yet perhaps it is even more tragic to know nothing of this light at all, and, as often happens, not even suspect its existence.

From all we heard about Father Stratonikos from the ascetics of Mount Athos who knew him, we have reason to believe that he was both grateful to the Elder for the revelation he received and saddened by his own inability to preserve that state. We know with certainty that many initially approached the Elder with love seeking guidance, but later fell away, unable to live according to his word²⁰.

His word was simple, calm, quiet, and kind – but to follow it required the same relentless rigor toward oneself that the Elder himself practiced. It demanded the resolve that the Lord calls for in His followers – that is, to the point of self-denial (Luke 14:26).

On Knowing the Will of God

Elder Silouan taught: “It is always good, in everything, to seek from God understanding of what should be done or said.” In other words, in every situation, we must seek to know God’s will and the ways to fulfill it.

Seeking God’s will is the most important task of life, for by following it, we participate in eternal divine life.

We can come to know God’s will in different ways. One way is through God’s Word and Christ’s commandments. Yet the commandments, though perfect, express God’s will only in a general sense. In daily life, we face countless situations, and it is often unclear how to act so that our deeds truly align with God’s will.

To act rightly, it is not enough to know the general commandment – to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. We also need God’s guidance on how to live these commandments and the strength from above to carry them out.

A person who has received God’s love in their heart acts according to motives approaching God’s will – but never perfectly. The impossibility of complete perfection requires all of us to pray continually for guidance and help.

Even the best-intentioned action may lead to unintended or harmful consequences if the means or method are unsuitable. Life is full of such errors. That is why a person who loves God always seeks divine enlightenment, listening within for God’s voice.

Practically, this means: when a Christian – especially a bishop or priest – faces a decision, they set aside all personal knowledge, prejudices, desires, and plans. Free from self, they pray attentively to God, and the first thought that arises after such prayer is accepted as guidance from above²¹.

Directly seeking God’s will in prayer, especially in need or suffering, allows a person, as Elder Silouan said, “to hear God’s answer in their soul and learn to understand His guidance… We all must learn to know God’s will; if we do not, we will never know this path.”

This path becomes clearer through constant prayer, keeping attention in the heart. To hear God’s voice more fully, one must surrender their will and be ready for any sacrifice, like Abraham, and even like Christ, who was obedient to the Father “even to death” (Phil. 2:8).

One who follows this path will succeed if they have experienced how the grace of the Holy Spirit works in a person and if they have cultivated determined self-denial – renouncing their personal will to achieve God’s holy will. Then the Elder’s question to Father Stratonik, “How do the perfect speak?” becomes understandable, and the words of the Holy Fathers, “It pleases the Holy Spirit and us,” take on deep meaning. One comes to understand the Scriptures’ passages about the soul’s direct conversation with God and the way Apostles and Prophets spoke²².

The Holy Fathers: “It has pleased the Holy Spirit and us”; he will more clearly understand those passages in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments that speak of such direct communion of the soul with God; he will approach a true comprehension of how the Apostles and Prophets spoke.

Man is created in the image and likeness of God and is called to the fullness of direct communion with Him, and therefore all people without exception should follow this path. Yet in the experience of life, it turns out to be accessible far “not for everyone.” This is because most people do not hear the voice of God in their hearts, do not understand it, and follow the voice of passion dwelling in the soul, which drowns out the gentle voice of God with its clamor.

In the Church, the way out of such a lamentable state is another path, namely, consulting a spiritual father and obeying him²³. The Elder himself loved this path, followed it, pointed it out, and wrote about it. The humble path of obedience he considered generally the most reliable. He firmly believed that, for the sake of the faith of the one asking, the answer of the spiritual father would always be good, useful, and pleasing to God. His faith in the efficacy of the Church’s sacraments and the grace of the priesthood was especially confirmed after he saw, during Great Lent at Vespers on the Old Russian rite, the spiritual father Elder Avraamiy transformed, “in the image of Christ,” “indescribably radiant.”

Full of grace-filled faith, he lived in the reality of the Church’s sacraments, but, as we remember, he found that even “from a human point of view,” that is, psychologically²⁴, it is not difficult to see the advantage of obedience to a spiritual father. He said that the spiritual father, in performing his ministry, gives an answer to a question while being free at that moment from the action of passion under which the one asking is influenced, and therefore sees things more clearly and is more receptive to the action of God’s grace.

The answer of the spiritual father will, in most cases, bear the mark of imperfection; but this is not because the father is devoid of the grace of knowledge, but because perfect action surpasses the capacities of the one asking and is inaccessible to him.

Despite the imperfection of the spiritual guidance, if it is received with faith and faithfully carried out, it will always lead to growth in goodness. This path is usually distorted when the seeker, seeing a “human” before him, wavers in his faith and therefore does not accept the spiritual father’s “first word” and objects to him, setting his own opinions and doubts against it.

On this important subject, Elder Silouan conversed with the Abbot, Archimandrite Misail († January 22, 1940), a spiritual man whom he favored and whom God clearly protected.

Father Silouan asked the Abbot:

– How can a monk come to know the will of God?

– He must accept my first word as the will of God, – said the Abbot. – Whoever does so will receive the grace of God, but if anyone resists me, then I, as a human, will step back.

The meaning of Abbot Misail’s words is as follows:

A spiritual father, when asked, seeks understanding from God through prayer, but as a human, he responds according to the measure of his faith, following the words of the Apostle Paul: “Since we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, ‘I believed, and therefore I spoke’” (2Cor. 4:13), and also, “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part” (1Cor. 13:9). In his desire not to sin, the spiritual father, giving advice or issuing guidance, stands before God’s judgment; and therefore, as soon as he meets with objection, or even internal resistance from the one asking, he does not insist on his word and does not dare to assert it as an expression of God’s will, but “as a human, he steps back.”

This awareness was very clearly expressed in the life of Abbot Misail. Once he called a newly tonsured monk, O.S., and entrusted him with a difficult and complex obedience. The monk accepted it willingly and, having made the proper bow, was heading to the door. Suddenly, the Abbot called him back. The monk stopped. Bowing his head to his chest, the Abbot calmly but significantly said:

– Father S., remember: God judges not twice. Therefore, when you do something in obedience to me, I will be accountable to God, but you are free from responsibility.

Whenever anyone objected, even slightly, to a task or instruction from Abbot Misail, this courageous ascetic, despite his administrative position, would usually reply: “Very well, do as you wish,” and would not repeat his word. Elder Silouan, likewise, when faced with resistance, would immediately fall silent.

Why is this so? Because, on one hand, the Spirit of God does not tolerate violence or dispute, and on the other, the matter at hand – God’s will – is too great. In the word of the spiritual father, which always bears the mark of relativity, God’s will cannot fully reside nor be perfectly expressed; only the one who receives the word as pleasing to God, without subjecting it to personal judgment, or, as is often said, “without reasoning,” has found the true path, for he truly believes that “with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26).

Such is the path of faith, recognized and confirmed by the Church’s millennial experience.

***

Speaking about these matters, which constitute the revealed mystery of the Christian life yet go beyond the bounds of lazy everydayness and the usually limited spiritual experience, is never entirely safe, because many may misunderstand the words and apply them incorrectly in practice. In such cases, instead of benefit, harm may result – especially if a person approaches the spiritual struggle with proud self-confidence.

When someone sought the Elder’s counsel, he did not like to give answers “from his own mind.” He remembered the words of St. Seraphim of Sarov: “When I spoke from my own mind, there were errors,” adding that such errors could be small, but could also be great.

The state of which he spoke to Father Stratonik – that “the perfect speak nothing from themselves… They speak only what the Spirit gives them” – is not always granted even to those who have approached perfection, just as the Apostles and other Saints did not always perform miracles, and the prophetic Spirit did not always act in the Prophets with equal force, sometimes working powerfully, sometimes withdrawing.

The Elder clearly distinguished between a “word from experience” and a direct inspiration from above, that is, a word “given by the Spirit.” The first is valuable, but the second is higher and more certain (1Cor. 7:25). Sometimes, with faith and clarity, he would tell the seeker that it was God’s will for him to act in a certain way; other times, he would answer that he did not know God’s will regarding the person. He said that the Lord sometimes does not reveal His will even to the Saints, because the one seeking guidance approached them with an unfaithful or deceitful heart.

According to the Elder, one who prays diligently experiences many changes in prayer: struggle with the enemy, struggle with oneself, with passions, with people, with imagination; in such states, the mind is not pure and clarity is lacking. But when pure prayer comes – when the mind, united with the heart, silently stands before God, when the soul tangibly possesses grace and has surrendered to God’s will, free from the darkening effects of passions and imagination – then the praying person hears the inspiration of grace.

When someone without sufficient experience embarks on this practice – unable to “discern by taste” the operation of grace from the manifestations of passions, especially pride – it becomes absolutely necessary to turn to a spiritual father. In encountering any spiritual phenomenon or inspiration, until the guidance of the mentor is given, the novice must strictly adhere to the ascetic rule: “neither accept nor reject.”

By “not accepting,” the Christian protects themselves from the danger of mistaking demonic activity or suggestion for Divine guidance, thereby learning not to “heed deceitful spirits or demonic teachings” and not to offer divine worship to demons.

By “not rejecting,” the person avoids the opposite danger: attributing a divine action to demons, which can lead to the sin of “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit,” as the Pharisees attributed Christ’s casting out of demons to “Beelzebul, prince of demons.”

The second danger is more severe, for the soul can become accustomed to rejecting grace, even hating it, and internalize a state of opposition to God so deeply that it persists into eternity, making this sin “unforgivable, neither in this age nor in the age to come” (Matt. 12:22–32).

In contrast, the first error allows the soul to recognize its mistake and, through repentance, attain salvation, because there is no sin that cannot be forgiven, except an unrepented sin.

Much could be said about this critically important ascetic rule – “neither accept nor reject” – and its application in the life of the ascetic. But since this work aims to present only the main principles, not the details, we will return to the previous topic.

In its more perfect form, knowing God’s will through prayer is a rare phenomenon, possible only through long labor, extensive experience in struggling with passions, after many and severe temptations from demons, on one hand, and great interventions from God, on the other.

Yet diligent prayer for guidance is a good and necessary practice for all: superiors and subordinates, elders and juniors, teachers and students, fathers and children. The Elder insisted that everyone, without exception – regardless of position, status, or age – should always and in everything, each according to their ability, ask God for enlightenment, thereby gradually aligning their path with the paths of holy God’s will until perfection is reached.

The question of knowing the will of God and surrendering oneself to His will is closely tied to the matter of obedience, to which Elder Silouan attached extraordinary importance – not only in the personal life of each monk or Christian, but also in the life of the entire “body of the Church,” of its whole “plenitude” (pleroma).

Elder Silouan did not have disciples in the usual sense of the word, nor did he occupy a teaching position; he himself was not a disciple of any particular elder, but was raised, like most Athonite monks, in the flow of general transmission: constant presence in the church during services, listening to and reading the Word of God and the works of the Holy Fathers, conversing with other ascetics of the Holy Mountain, strict observance of the prescribed fasts, obedience to the abbot, spiritual father, and senior in his work.

He gave entirely exceptional attention to inner spiritual obedience to the abbot and the spiritual father, considering it a “Sacrament of the Church” and a gift of grace. In turning to the spiritual father, he prayed that the Lord, through His servant, would have mercy on him, reveal His will, and show the path to salvation. Knowing that the first thought arising in the soul after prayer is a divine indication, he would grasp the spiritual father’s “first word”, his “first hint,” and then not continue his own conversation. This is the wisdom and mystery of true obedience, whose goal is the recognition and fulfillment of God’s will, not human will. Such spiritual obedience – without objections or resistance, whether expressed or unexpressed – is essentially the only condition for receiving living tradition.

The living tradition of the Church, flowing through the centuries from generation to generation, is one of the most essential yet subtle aspects of its life. Where the disciple offers no resistance to the teacher, the teacher’s soul, in response to faith and humility, opens easily and perhaps fully. But the moment even a small resistance to the spiritual father arises, the thread of pure transmission is inevitably interrupted, and the teacher’s soul closes.

Many mistakenly think that the spiritual father is “just as imperfect as anyone else,” that “everything must be explained in detail, otherwise he won’t understand,” or that he “can easily make mistakes” and therefore must be “corrected.”

One who objects to or corrects the spiritual father sets themselves above him and ceases to be a disciple. Indeed, no one is perfect, and no human has dared to teach as Christ, the “one in authority,” taught; for the subject of teaching is “not from man” and “not according to man” (Gal. 1:11–12). Yet in “earthen vessels” is kept the priceless treasure of the gifts of the Holy Spirit; not only priceless, but by its very nature “unrevealable,” and only the one who walks the path of true and complete obedience penetrates into this hidden storehouse.

A prudent disciple or penitent behaves thus with a spiritual father: in few words, he conveys his thought or the essential aspect of his state and then leaves the spiritual father free.

The spiritual father, praying from the very beginning of the conversation, awaits enlightenment from God, and if he senses in his soul a “divine notification,” he gives his answer, upon which one must stop. If the spiritual father’s first word is overlooked, the efficacy of the sacrament is weakened, and the confession can turn into a mere human discussion.

If the novice (confessor) and the spiritual father maintain the proper reverence for the sacrament, the divine inspiration from God is granted quickly; if, for some reason, no inspiration is given, the spiritual father may ask for further clarifications, and only then is this appropriate. However, if the penitent, failing to give proper attention to the spiritual father’s first word, burdens him with their own explanations, they thereby reveal a lack of faith and understanding, and follow a hidden desire to sway the spiritual father to their own opinion. In such a case, a psychological struggle begins, which the Apostle Paul called “unprofitable” (Heb. 13:17).

Faith in the power of the sacrament, faith that the Lord loves the person and will never abandon one who has renounced their own will and reasoning for His Name and His holy will, makes the obedient novice steadfast and fearless. Receiving a command or simple guidance from their spiritual father, the novice, in striving to fulfill it, despises even death itself; and we think this is because they have “passed from death into life.”

From the very beginning of his monastic life, Elder Silouan was such a perfect disciple, and therefore every spiritual father was a good guide for him. He said that if monks and all believing Christians obey their spiritual fathers and pastors without judgment, criticism, or internal resistance, they themselves will not lose salvation, and the entire Church will live in full life.

The Elder’s path was such that one walking it receives the gift of God’s great mercy quickly and easily; whereas the willful and self-opinionated, no matter how learned or clever, may destroy themselves through the harshest ascetic or scholarly endeavors and barely subsist on the crumbs falling from the Throne of Mercy, while mostly living in the illusion of possessing riches they do not actually have.

The Elder said:

«It is one thing to believe in God, and another to know God.»

In the vast sea of Church life, the true and pure tradition of the Spirit flows like a thin stream, and anyone who wishes to partake of this delicate current must renounce their “own” reasoning. Wherever “one’s own” reasoning appears, purity inevitably vanishes, because human wisdom and truth are set against the wisdom and truth of God. To self-willed people, this seems unbearably difficult, even madness, but the one who is not afraid to become “foolish” (1Cor. 3:18–19) has known true life and genuine wisdom.

The Elder’s attitude toward obedience, as a necessary condition for learning the spiritual life, was closely connected with his attitude toward Sacred Tradition and the Word of God.

He understood the life of the Church as life in the Holy Spirit, and Sacred Tradition as the uninterrupted activity of the Holy Spirit within the Church. Tradition, as the eternal and unchanging presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, is the deepest foundation of its being; therefore, Tradition encompasses the entire life of the Church to such an extent that even Sacred Scripture is only one of its forms. From this follows the principle:

If the Church were deprived of its Tradition, it would cease to be what it is, for the ministry of the New Covenant is a ministry of the Spirit, “not written with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2Cor. 3:3–6).

Even if, for some reason, the Church were to lose all its books – i.e., the Old and New Testaments, the writings of the Holy Fathers, and liturgical books – Tradition would restore Scripture, perhaps not word for word, perhaps in a different language, but in its essence; and this new Scripture would be an expression of the same “faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3), a revelation of the same One Spirit, unceasingly active in the Church, which is its foundation and essence.

Sacred Scripture is neither deeper nor more important than Sacred Tradition, but, as noted above, is one of its forms. This form is most valuable for the convenience of preservation and use; yet, removed from the stream of Sacred Tradition, Scripture cannot be properly understood by any scholarly investigation.

If the Apostle Paul possessed the “mind of Christ,” then all the more so does the Holy Church possess the mind of Christ, since it includes Paul within itself. And if the writings of Paul and the other Apostles are Sacred Scripture, then a new Scripture of the Church – arising, for example, from the loss of the old books – would likewise be sacred, because, by the Lord’s promise, God – the Holy Trinity – remains unchangingly in the Church.

Those who, starting from the Church’s Tradition, claim to go “back to its origins,” i.e., to Sacred Scripture, act incorrectly. The origins of the Church are not in Scripture but in Sacred Tradition. During the first several decades of its history, the Church did not have the New Testament writings and lived entirely by Tradition, which the faithful are called to preserve according to the letters of the Apostle Paul (2 Thess. 2:15).

It is well known that all heresiarchs originated from Sacred Scripture, with the sole difference being that they understood it “according to their own interpretation.” Concerning such distortion of the meaning of Sacred Scripture when interpreting it according to one’s own reasoning, the Apostle Peter spoke long ago (2Pet. 3:16).

Individual members of the Church – even its best sons and teachers – do not achieve the full integration of all the gifts of the Holy Spirit within themselves; therefore, their teachings and writings contain certain imperfections and sometimes even errors. Yet, as a whole, the teaching of the Church, which possesses the fullness of gifts and knowledge, remains true throughout the ages.

Unshakable faith in the truth of the teaching of the Conciliar (or Universal) Church as a whole, and deep trust in all that She has accepted and confirmed through Her experience, form the foundation of the life of the Athonite monk and save him from traditionless dilettantism and timid inquiries. Such entry by faith into the life of the Ecumenical Church makes the monk a co-holder of Her immeasurable riches and immediately gives his personal experience a categorical character of certainty.

In studying Sacred Scripture, the writings of the Holy Fathers, and the inexhaustible treasures of liturgical books – rich beyond expression in both dogmatic and prayerful content – the monk encounters an unimaginably great wealth. Therefore, he is not inclined to write himself on the same matters without adding something essentially new. Yet when a real need arises in the life of the Church, new books will then be written.

Every new book claiming to enter into or express the teaching of the Church is subjected to the judgment of the Church, which, slowly but surely, examines and tests it from all sides, first and foremost regarding its influence on life. This criterion – the impact of a teaching on life – is of exceptional importance because of the intimate connection between dogmatic consciousness and lived experience, and everything found to contradict or be inconsistent with the spirit of Christ’s love, by which the Church lives, is rejected.

Individual sons and members of the Church, on the path toward this love, may stumble, fall, or commit transgressions. Yet the Church, in Her depth, knows by the Holy Spirit the truth of Christ’s love, and wherever the word “love” appears, but with a different content, the Church is not deceived by any philosophy or the dazzling brilliance of doctrine.

The Church is not deceived.

We believe that the faithful son of the Church, Blessed Elder Silouan, in his writings points to the ultimate and most reliable criterion of truth in the Church.

This criterion is “Christ’s love for enemies and Christ’s humility.”

***

The Elder wrote:

«No one can know by themselves what God’s love is, unless the Holy Spirit teaches them; but in our Church, God’s love is known by the Holy Spirit, and therefore we speak of it.»

«The Lord is good and merciful, but we could say nothing about His love apart from Scripture, if the Holy Spirit had not taught us.»

«We can reason only to the extent that we have known the grace of the Holy Spirit...»

«The saints speak only of what they have truly seen and know. They do not speak of what they have not seen...» (Col. 2:18)

«The saints say nothing from their own mind.»

Inspired Scripture is the most reliable word (2Pet. 1:19), useful for teaching and guiding toward every good deed pleasing to God (2Tim. 3:16–17). Yet knowledge of God drawn from Scripture cannot achieve the sought perfection unless the Lord Himself teaches through the Holy Spirit.

Despite his genuine humility and meekness, the Elder spoke with a kind of unwavering certainty and inner self-assurance that a person cannot grasp the Divine “by their own mind,” for it is known “only through the Holy Spirit.” Therefore, even Scripture, “written by the Holy Spirit,” cannot be understood merely through scholarly research, which can apprehend only some external aspects and details, never the essence.

Until a person is given from above the ability to «understand the Scriptures» and «know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God,» and until through long struggle with passions they humble themselves and come to experience the resurrection of their soul and all that lies on this great and mysterious path, it is necessary for them to hold strictly to the Church’s tradition and teaching and not dare to teach from themselves, no matter how learned they are “by human standards,” because even the most brilliant human ideas are far from the true life of the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, in some measure lives in every person, and even more so in a Christian, but this small experience of grace should not be exaggerated or used presumptuously.

The Holy Spirit, always truly dwelling in the Church, patiently and gently seeks and waits for every soul, but the person does not give Him freedom to act within, and thus remains outside the Light and knowledge of the mysteries of spiritual life.

It is a common phenomenon that a person, after some experience of grace, does not grow in it but loses it; and their religious life becomes centered in the intellect, as an abstract understanding. In this state, they often imagine themselves possessors of spiritual knowledge, not realizing that such abstract understanding, even if preceded by the experience of some grace, is a distortion of God’s Word. In essence, Scripture remains for them “a book sealed with seven seals” (Rev. 5:1).

Sacred Scripture is the word “spoken by holy men of God, being moved by the Holy Spirit” (2Pet. 1:21). Yet the utterances of the Saints are not entirely independent of the intellectual level and spiritual state of those to whom they spoke. They were living words addressed to living, concrete people; therefore, any purely scientific (historical, archaeological, philological, or similar) interpretation of Scripture is inevitably flawed.

Throughout all of Scripture, there is a certain ultimate purpose, but this single, unchanging purpose was communicated by the Holy Prophets, Apostles, and other Teachers of the Church to the living people around them, adapting to their level and understanding.

A particularly striking example in this regard is the Apostle Paul, who never deviated from his singular divine knowledge and vision, yet “became all things to all people, that he might save some” (1Cor. 9:19–22). In other words, Paul spoke differently to different people; and if one approaches his letters solely with scholarly analysis, the essence of his “theological system” inevitably remains undisclosed.

The Elder deeply respected theological science and its representatives, but he attributed the positive role and achievements of scholarly theology exclusively to the historical conditions of the Church’s life, and in no way to the true, eternal life of the Spirit.

Human speech carries an inherent fluidity and indefiniteness. This property remains even in Sacred Scripture, which is why the expression of divine truth in human words is possible only to a limited degree. This does not reduce the Word of God to mere human relativity. Rather, the Elder’s point is that the comprehension of God’s Word lies along the paths of fulfilling Christ’s commandments, not along the paths of academic research.

The Lord Himself taught this:

«And the Jews marveled, saying, ‘How does this man know letters, having never studied?’ Jesus answered them, ‘My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me. If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know whether the teaching is from God, or whether I speak from Myself’» (John 7:15–17).

The Lord condensed all of Scripture into a brief word: love God and your neighbor (Matt. 22:40). Yet Christ’s word – love – will remain a mystery for all philologists throughout the ages. This word is the Name of God Himself, and its true meaning is revealed only by the action of God Himself²⁶.

The Elder most often referred to God by the name “Lord”. Sometimes by this name he meant the Holy Trinity, sometimes God the Father, sometimes God the Son, and very rarely the Holy Spirit. Yet he invoked the Name of the Holy Spirit very often, and even in places where a pronoun could have sufficed, he repeatedly used the full Name of the Holy Spirit. Undoubtedly, he did this because the Name of the Holy Spirit – as well as the Name “Lord” and other Names of God – consistently evoked a living response in his soul: a sense of joy and love.

This phenomenon – the joy and the sense of light and love in the heart when invoking God – was the cause of long theological disputes concerning the nature of the Name of God. These debates began on Mount Athos in connection with the book of the Caucasian hermit Schema-monk Hilarion, On the Mountains of the Caucasus, and later spread to Russia. Between 1912 and 1916, they deeply engaged Russian theological thought and the Church hierarchy, ultimately reaching quite successful doctrinal conclusions.

The debates about the Name of God coincided with a period in the Elder’s spiritual life when he was engaged in intense struggle against every manifestation of vanity and pride in himself, the primary sources of his profound suffering. Constantly carrying the sweetest Name of Christ in his heart – since the Jesus Prayer never ceased its effect in him – he nonetheless avoided any dispute about the nature of this Name. He knew that through the Jesus Prayer, the grace of the Holy Spirit comes into the heart, that invoking the Divine Name of Jesus sanctifies the whole person, purifying passions within, but he refrained from doctrinal interpretation of his experience, fearing “to err in intellectual reasoning.” Many such errors had been made on both sides before the correct doctrinal understanding was established.

The disputes assumed a rather unbecoming and heated character, which grieved the Elder’s soul, who spent his nights in what he called the “Adam’s weeping.”

The Blessed Elder was, for us, a great gift from above and an exceptional phenomenon.

He was a striking example of the perfection of a true Christian; in him we observed an astonishingly harmonious combination of extremes that might seem incompatible.

On one hand, we saw in him a compassion for all living things, every creature, extending to the point where one might think it a pathological sensitivity. Yet alongside this, we saw another side of his life, showing that this compassion was not pathological but a genuinely supernatural greatness and mercy, given by grace.

The Elder treated even plants with care; even toward them, any roughness causing harm he considered contrary to the teaching of grace. I remember once walking with him along a path leading from the Monastery to the kalyba²⁷, where I spent a year. This kalyba was about a kilometer from the Monastery. The Elder had come to see my dwelling. We both carried walking sticks, common in mountainous areas.

On both sides of the path grew rare, tall wild grasses. To prevent the path from being overgrown, I struck one of the stalks near the top with my stick, breaking it to prevent the seeds from maturing.

The Elder found this action coarse and slightly shook his head in perplexity.

I understood what he meant, and I felt ashamed.

The Elder said that the Spirit of God teaches one to have compassion for all creatures, so that “without need” one does not wish to harm even a leaf on a tree.

“A green leaf on a tree, and you plucked it without need. Though it is not a sin, somehow it pains the heart – this heart that has learned to love – all of creation.”

But this compassion for a green leaf on a tree or a field flower underfoot coexisted in him with a fully realistic attitude toward all things in the world. He understood, in a truly Christian way, that all creatures were created to serve humanity, and therefore, when “necessary,” a person may use them. He himself mowed hay, chopped wood, prepared firewood for winter, and ate fish²⁸.

In the writings of the Elder, pay attention to his thoughts and feelings regarding animals. What is truly striking is, on one hand, his compassion for all creatures, which can be understood from his account of how he long mourned his “cruelty toward a creature” when he “killed a fly needlessly,” or when he scalded a bat with boiling water that had settled on the balcony of his shop, or when he “felt pity for all creatures and every suffering being” upon seeing a snake killed and cut into pieces on the road. On the other hand, there is his detachment from all creatures in his fervent striving toward God.

Regarding animals, he thought of them as “earth,” to which the human mind should not cling, for God is to be loved with all the mind, all the heart, and all the strength – that is, with the fullness of one’s being – forgetting the earth.

The Elder considered the often-observed attachment of people to animals, sometimes even reaching the point of “friendship” with them, to be a perversion of the order established by God and contrary to the normal condition of man (Genesis 2:20). Petting a cat while saying “kitty, kitty,” or playing and talking with a dog while leaving thoughts of God aside, or caring for animals while forgetting the suffering of one’s neighbor, or even engaging in disputes with people on their account – all of this, for the Elder, was a violation of God’s commandments, the faithful observance of which perfects man.

Throughout the New Testament, we do not find a single passage indicating that the Lord focused His attention on animals, though He certainly loved all creation. Achieving this perfect humanity, in the image of the Man-Christ, is the task set before us, in accordance with our nature created in the image of God. Therefore, the Elder considered emotional attachment and favoritism toward animals to be a diminution of the human image of existence. He writes about it as follows:

“Some grow attached to animals, but by doing so they offend the Creator, for man is called to live eternally with the Lord, to reign with Him, and to love the One God. One should have no favoritism toward animals, but only a heart that shows mercy to every creature.”

He said that all things were created for the service of man, and thus, when necessary, anything in creation may be used; but man also bears the duty to care for all creation, and any harm done to an animal or even a plant without need violates the law of grace. Likewise, any attachment to animals is contrary to God’s commandment, because it diminishes love for God and neighbor. One who truly loves God, who weeps in prayer for the whole world, cannot be attached to animals.

The Elder’s soul was enraptured by the beauty of the visible world. This rapture was not expressed through bodily posture or movements; it could be perceived only in the expression of his face and the tone of his voice. In this restrained self-restraint, the authenticity of his deep experience was felt even more strongly. Always absorbed in his inner life, he seldom looked at the external world, but when his gaze turned to the visible beauty of creation, it became a new occasion to behold the glory of God and to turn his heart anew toward Him. In this respect, he was like a child: everything amazed him. He rightly notes in his writings that one who has lost grace cannot properly perceive the beauty of the world and is amazed by nothing.

All the ineffably magnificent works of God leave no impression on him. But conversely, when God’s grace is present with a person, every phenomenon in the world strikes the soul with its incomprehensible wonder, and from contemplating visible beauty, the soul enters into a state of sensing God, alive and marvelous in all things.

The Elder had a profound appreciation for beauty, whether in clouds, the sea, mountains, forests, meadows, or even a single tree. He said that the Creator’s glory is magnificent even in the visible world, but to see the glory of the Lord Himself in the Holy Spirit is a vision infinitely surpassing any human thought.

Once, observing the movement of clouds across the emerald-blue Attic sky, he said:

“I think: how majestic is our Lord.

What beauty He has created for His glory, for the good of His people, so that nations might joyfully praise their Creator… O Lady, grant that Your people may behold the glory of the Lord.”

Thus, pausing briefly to contemplate the visible beauty and the glory of God within it, he would return once more to prayer for the people.

The Elder greatly loved the long divine services in the temple, infinitely rich in spiritual content, and he highly valued the work of the singers and readers, praying much for them and asking God to aid them, especially during all-night vigils²⁹. Yet, despite his love for the splendor, beauty, and music of the services, he said that although they were established by the gift of the Holy Spirit, in their form they were an imperfect prayer, given “to the people of believers” as something manageable and beneficial for all.

“The Lord gave us church services with singing, like to weak children; we do not yet know how to pray as we ought, whereas singing is useful to everyone when done in humility. But it is better when our heart becomes the temple of the Lord, and the mind His throne,” he wrote.

He also said:

“The Lord is glorified in the holy temples, while desert monks glorify God in their hearts. The heart of a desert-dweller is a temple, and his mind serves as the throne, for the Lord loves to dwell in the heart and mind of a person.”

And he further remarked that when ceaseless prayer is established deep within the heart, then the entire world becomes the temple of God.

The Elder often said and wrote that those who keep the Lord’s commandments become like Christ. Likeness to Christ can be greater or lesser, but there is no limit to it; so incomprehensibly great is the calling of man: he truly becomes like God.

The Elder said:

“Thus the Lord loved His creation: man is like God.”

He recalled the words of St. John the Theologian:

“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we shall be has not yet been revealed; but we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1John 3:2).

The Elder infinitely loved the words of Christ:

“Father, I desire that those whom You have given Me may be with Me where I am, to behold My glory” (John 17:24).

God is love, and as infinite love, He wishes to give all of Himself to man:

“The glory which You have given Me I have given them” (John 17:22).

And if this glory is given to humanity, then although by nature man remains a creature, by grace he becomes divine – receiving the image of divine being.

Just as Christ, possessing the image of divine being, in His incarnation took on the image of human being, so man, possessing the image of servile being, in Christ receives the image of divine being (Philippians 2:6–7).

Even Scripture, in its chastely restrained manner, does not often speak of this. Why? Perhaps because those who hear it may let their imagination soar into airy heights, forgetting – or not knowing – that God is Humility.

Recognizing the Lord as the closest, dearest, most intimate Father, the Elder said that “the Holy Spirit has made us kin.” By His coming into the soul, the Holy Spirit naturally unites man with God, so that the soul, with profound and unquestionable feeling, addresses the Lord:

Father.

***

The Elder’s soul was captivated by the vision of the Lord’s greatness, suffering for the sins of humanity and of the entire world.

He was amazed by the boundlessness of God’s love and by God’s humility. In his soul he sang praises to the Lord for His redemptive sufferings, knowing that this song was taught to him by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and this song was sweeter to him than anything else.

He understood the praise of the heavenly hosts as the unceasing glorification of the Lord for His humility and sufferings, by which He redeemed humanity from eternal death. The Elder listened to these cherubic songs with a spiritual attentiveness, which, as he expressed it, “all the heavens hear,” and which are “sweet because they are sung by the Holy Spirit.”

The Elder had a peculiar thought: only one who has known God and then lost Him can truly seek Him. He believed that every seeking of God is somehow preceded by God’s own prompting.

God exerts no force over a person but patiently stands at the human heart, humbly waiting for it to open to Him.

God Himself seeks the person before the person seeks Him; and when, at a suitable moment, the Lord reveals Himself to a person, only then does that person know God to the measure given and begins to seek the God who remains hidden from the heart. The Elder said:

«How will you seek what you have not lost? How will you seek what you do not know at all? Yet the soul knows the Lord, and therefore it seeks Him.»

Every person perceives in others what they have spiritually recognized in themselves; therefore, a person’s attitude toward their neighbor is a true indicator of the degree of self-knowledge they have attained.

One who has experienced, on the one hand, the depth and intensity of human spiritual suffering when cut off from the light of true being, and, on the other, what a person is when they are in God, knows that every human being is an enduring, eternal value greater than the rest of the world; they know human dignity, know that each one is precious before God – “the least of these” (Matt. 25:40) – and therefore will never even inwardly conceive murder, allow themselves to harm a neighbor, or even offend them.

One who “only believes,” who has experienced moderate grace and only vaguely “anticipates” eternal life, keeps themselves from sin according to their love for God, but their love is far from perfect, and they may still offend a brother.

Those who, without pity, harm others “for their own benefit or interest,” who plot or commit murder, have either become like beasts and inwardly recognize themselves as brutish beings – that is, they do not believe in eternal life – or have set foot on the path of demonic spirituality.

The Elder, through the manifestation of Christ to him, was taught to experience the godlikeness of humanity. He generally perceived people as God’s children, bearers of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, as Spirit and Light of Truth, lives in each person to some extent and enlightens them; one who abides in grace sees it in others, while one who feels no grace in themselves sees none in others.

He said that one can judge the measure of grace a person carries within by how they perceive their neighbor: “If a person sees the presence of the Holy Spirit in their brother, it means they themselves possess great grace; but if someone hates their brother, it means they are possessed by an evil spirit.”

For the Elder, this was entirely certain: he clearly understood that anyone, whoever they may be, who hates a brother has made their heart a dwelling for an evil spirit and thus has been cut off from Christ.

The Elder perceived the life of the spiritual world as a unified whole, and because of this unity, every spiritual event inevitably affects the state of the entire world. If the event is good, the whole world of holy spirits – “all the heavens” – rejoices; conversely, if it is evil, they grieve.

Although every spiritual event inevitably leaves its mark on the being of the entire spiritual world, the keen sensitivity he spoke of is characteristic primarily of the Saints. Such knowledge, surpassing human limitations, he attributed to the action of the Holy Spirit. In the Holy Spirit, the soul “sees” the entire world and embraces it with its love.

The Elder was certain that the Saints hear our prayers. He said this is evident from the constant experience of communion with the Saints. Even here on earth, in the Holy Spirit, the Saints receive this gift in part, and after passing from this life, it grows in fullness.

Speaking of such truly godlike qualities of the Saints, he marveled at the immeasurable love of God for humanity:

“So the Lord loved man that He gave him the Holy Spirit, and in the Holy Spirit, man became like God.

Those who do not believe this and do not pray to the Saints have not realized how much the Lord loves man and how He has exalted him.”

The Elder repeatedly said that “when the whole mind is in God, the world is forgotten,” and at the same time he writes: “The spiritual person, like an eagle, flies in the heights, and with the soul feels God, and sees the whole world, even while praying in the darkness of night.”

This raises a question: is there a contradiction here? And another question: is this vision of the world merely imagination?

Yet he also writes: “Rare souls know You, and with few can one speak of You.”

Among those who do not know God and cannot speak of Him, first of all, we acknowledge ourselves, and therefore we ask all those who have known God, out of their mercy, to forgive our daring and foolish attempt to at least slightly unveil the meaning of the words of the Blessed Elder.

Pure prayer draws the mind into the heart and unites the entire person, even the body. The mind, sinking into the heart, departs from the images of the world, and the soul, striving with all its powers toward God in inner prayer, sees itself in a completely unique way, illuminated by the light coming from God. It does not see external phenomena or conditions of life, but sees itself entirely, naked in its own essence and revealed in its depth.

Despite the formlessness, simplicity, and “contraction” of this contemplation, directed toward the sources of life – toward God – it reveals the boundaries within which the being of the entire created spiritual world moves, and the soul, detached from all and seeing nothing, sees the whole world in God and perceives its unity with it, praying for it:

“And I want only one thing: to pray for all, as for myself,” the Elder writes.

We have all often been moved by the grandeur and beauty of nature. But now, before us is a small, colorless photograph, and instead of vast expanses beyond the eye’s reach, we see a scrap of paper, and instead of the inexpressible richness of light, movement, colors, and forms, we see a trivial row of dark and gray spots. The difference between the small, lifeless photograph and what it depicts is immense, and yet even greater is the difference between the words above and the life hidden behind them.

The Elder was gifted with a lively, beautiful, and extraordinarily bold mind. He writes:

“By the mind alone, we cannot even comprehend how the sun was made; and when we ask God: ‘You gave us the sun, tell us how You made it,’ we hear within the soul a clear answer: ‘Humble yourself, and you will know not only the sun, but also its Creator.’ When the soul, by the Holy Spirit, knows the Lord, it forgets the whole world in joy and leaves behind concern for earthly knowledge.”

Beneath this almost naive form of expression lies an indication of two distinct modes of knowledge of being. The ordinary and well-known path to knowledge is expressed in the fact that the human spirit’s cognitive power, directed outward, encounters the countless diversity of phenomena, forms, and the infinite fragmentation of all that occurs; and therefore knowledge never attains fullness or truly real unity.

In this mode of knowing, the mind, persistently seeking unity, resorts to synthesis, which is always inevitably artificial; and the unity it achieves on this path is not something truly and objectively real, but merely a form characteristic of abstract thought.

Another path to knowledge of being lies in turning the human spirit inward and then toward God. Here occurs something opposite to what we see in the first mode of knowledge: the mind departs from the endless multiplicity and fragmentation of worldly phenomena and directs all its power toward God, and, abiding in God, sees both itself and the whole world.

It was toward this mode of knowledge through prayer that the Elder’s soul aspired. And although he never lost a healthy sense of the reality of this world, he remained, until the end of his life, distant from worldly affairs, free from curiosity and attachment.

His spirit was always occupied solely with God and with humanity.

In our desire to learn from the Elder whether there is an unmistakable sign allowing one to reliably distinguish the true spiritual path from those “phantoms of truth” that lie along deviations from it, we had conversations with him on this subject, and his words were invaluable to us. He said:

“When the Holy Spirit fills the whole person with the sweetness of His love, the world is entirely forgotten, and the soul, in ineffable joy, contemplates God; but when the soul recalls the world again, then, from God’s love and compassion for humanity, it weeps and prays for the whole world.

Surrendering to weeping and prayer for the world, generated by love, the soul, from the sweetness of the Holy Spirit, can again forget the world and rest in God; yet remembering the world, it again prays tearfully in great sorrow, desiring salvation for all.

And this is the true path, taught by the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is love, peace, and sweetness. The Holy Spirit teaches to love God and neighbor. The spirit of deception is a proud spirit; it spares neither man nor other creatures, for it has created nothing; it acts like a thief and a predator, and its path is full of destruction.

The spirit of deception cannot give true sweetness; it brings only the anxious sweetness of vanity; in it there is neither humility, nor peace, nor love, but only the cold indifference of pride.

The Holy Spirit teaches the love of God, and the soul longs for God, sweetly seeking Him with tears day and night, while the enemy brings a heavy, dark sorrow that kills the soul.

By these signs, one can clearly discern God’s grace from the enemy’s deception.”

We told the Elder that some people understand dispassion not as God’s love but as a special contemplation of being, standing above distinctions of good and evil, and that they consider such contemplation greater than Christian love. To this, the Elder replied:

“This is the teaching of the enemy; the Holy Spirit does not teach in this way.”

Listening to the Elder, we could not help but recall the demonic images of those “supermen” who ascend “beyond good and evil.”

The Elder said:

“The Holy Spirit is love, and He gives the soul the power to love enemies. And whoever does not love enemies does not know God.”

This last criterion held a completely exceptional and indisputable place in the Elder’s soul. He said:

“The Lord is a merciful Creator, and He has compassion for all. The Lord pities all sinners, like a mother pities her children even when they walk a wrong path, and where there is no love for enemies and sinners, there is no Spirit of the Lord.”

Above, we cited a conversation of the Elder with a young student, which partly reveals his views on freedom; here, we wish to present additional thoughts, some heard directly from him and some expressed in writing, though often in a language incomprehensible to most.

The Elder’s life was largely lived in prayer, and a praying mind does not merely think or reason – it lives. The action of a praying mind is not manipulation of abstract concepts, but participation in being. The truly praying mind deals not with the categories of rational thought, but with categories of a qualitatively different kind, and this other kind of category is being itself in its dynamic activity, not confined to the narrow bounds of abstract notions.

The Elder was not a philosopher in the usual sense, but he was truly a sage, possessing knowledge that transcends philosophy.

Take, for example, the experience known in ascetic writings of the Fathers as “the remembrance of death.” By this, one does not mean the ordinary human consciousness of mortality, the simple memory that we shall die, but a particular spiritual awareness.

The remembrance of death begins with the experience of the brevity of our earthly existence: sometimes weakening, sometimes intensifying, it at times turns into a deep sense of all earthly things as perishable and transient, thereby altering a person’s attitude toward everything in the world; all that is not eternal loses value in consciousness, and a sense of the futility of earthly pursuits arises.

The attention of the mind turns away from the external world, focusing inward, where the soul is placed face-to-face with the incomprehensible abyss of darkness. This vision brings the soul into awe, generating intense prayer, uncontainable by day or night.

Time loses its extension – not initially because the soul has glimpsed the light of eternal life, but precisely because all is consumed by the sense of eternal death. Finally, having passed through many different stages, the soul, through the action of grace, is lifted into the realm of the beginningless Divine Light. This is not a philosophical “transcensus,” but life in its true manifestation, requiring no dialectical “proofs.”

This is indefinable, unprovable, and imperceptible knowledge, but despite its indefiniteness, it is, as genuine life, incomparably more powerful and inwardly convincing than the most flawless abstract dialectic.

The Elder prays:

“Lord, people have forgotten You, their Creator, and seek their own freedom, not understanding that You are merciful and love repentant sinners, and grant them Your grace of the Holy Spirit.”

In praying to the all-knowing God, the Elder is not verbose and does not explain his thoughts.

“People seek freedom ‘their own,’ that is, apart from God, apart from true life, where it does not exist and cannot exist, where there is utter darkness. For freedom exists only where there is no death, only in true eternal being, that is, in God.

You are merciful and give them the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

God gives the gift of the Holy Spirit, and then the person becomes free: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2Cor. 3:17). “Everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in the house forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be truly free” (John 8:34–36).

In gracious prayer, the experiential knowledge of human freedom is extraordinarily profound. The Elder fully realized that true slavery is only one – slavery to sin – and that true freedom is only one – the resurrection in God.

Until a person attains resurrection in Christ, everything in him is distorted by the fear of death, and therefore by slavery to sin. Among those who have not yet known grace and resurrection, distortions are avoided only by those of whom it is said: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

***

The Elder reflected on the spiritual life as incomprehensible and indefinable in its origins, eternal in its spiritual foundation, simple and unified in its very essence – we do not know its name. Perhaps someone might call this realm “super-consciousness,” but this term is both obscure and inadequate, defining nothing except the relation between reflective consciousness and the world that lies beyond it.

From this indefinable realm, when spiritual life enters the sphere subject to our inner observation and even partial control, it manifests in two ways: as a spiritual state or experience, and as doctrinal consciousness. These two aspects, different and in a sense even separate in their “embodiment” – that is, in their formed manifestation in our empirical life – are, in essence, a single, indivisible life. Accordingly, every ascetic action, every spiritual state, is inseparably linked with its corresponding doctrinal consciousness.

With this in mind, we have always sought to understand with what doctrinal consciousness the Elder’s great prayer and profound lamentation for the world were united.

If the Elder’s words – so difficult to grasp in their holy and profound simplicity – are rendered in a language more accessible to modern understanding, we may approach an expression of his doctrinal consciousness.

The Elder spoke and wrote that Christ’s love cannot endure the ruin of anyone, and in its care for the salvation of all, it pursues its goal through sacrifice.

“The Lord gives the monk the love of the Holy Spirit, and from this love the monk’s heart is sorrowful for the people, because not all are saved. The Lord Himself was so sorrowful for the people that He gave Himself up to death on the Cross. And the Mother of God bore the same sorrow for humanity in her heart; like her beloved Son, she wished salvation for all to the very end. The Lord gave the same Spirit of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, to our Holy Fathers, and to the pastors of the Church” (“On Monks”).

Truly, in the Christian sense, salvation can only be achieved through love, i.e., by drawing others, leaving no place for coercion.

In its pursuit of universal salvation, love proceeds to the utmost, encompassing not only the living on earth, but also the already deceased, even hell itself, and those yet to be born – that is, all of Adam. And if love rejoices at the salvation of brethren, it weeps and prays when faced with the opposite: their perdition.

We asked the Elder: how can anyone love all people? And where does one find such love, so as to become united with all? The Elder answered:

“To become one with all, as the Lord says: ‘That they all may be one’ (John 17:21), we need not invent anything. In all of us is a single nature, and therefore it is natural for us to love all, and the power to love is given by the Holy Spirit.”

The power of love is great and victorious, but not absolute. In human existence, there is a realm where even love has its limits, where it does not achieve complete mastery. What is this?

Freedom.

Human freedom is real and so vast that neither the sacrifice of Christ Himself, nor the sacrifices of all who follow Him, can necessarily guarantee victory.

The Lord said:

“When I am lifted up from the earth (that is, crucified), I will draw all to Myself” (John 12:32–33).

Thus, Christ’s love hopes to draw all to Himself, and therefore it extends even to the deepest hell. Yet even this perfect love and perfect sacrifice may encounter resistance: someone – who knows who, how many, whether few or many – is free to respond with rejection, even in eternal terms, and say: “I will not.”

This terrifying possibility of freedom, recognized in the spiritual experience of the Church, led to the rejection of the Origenist idea of universal salvation. There is no doubt that from an Origenist consciousness one cannot generate the kind of prayer we see in the Elder.

What the Elder realized in connection with the revelation of Christ was for him beyond any doubt or hesitation. He “knew” that the One revealed to him was the Lord Almighty. He knew that the humility of Christ he had perceived, and the love in which he was filled to the limit of his capacity to bear, were the work of the Holy Spirit. By the Holy Spirit, he understood that God is boundless love and infinite mercy, and yet this knowledge did not lead him to think: “All will be saved anyway.” The consciousness of the possibility of eternal perdition remained deeply in his spirit, for in the state of grace, the soul perceives the measure of human freedom.

***

The essence of absolute freedom lies in being able, without any dependence, necessity, or limitation, to determine one’s own being in everything. This is the freedom of God; a human being does not possess such freedom.

The temptation for created freedom – which is made in the image of God – is to create one’s own being, to determine it entirely by oneself, to become a god oneself, rather than to accept only what is given, since that entails a sense of dependence.

The Blessed Elder said that even this temptation is overcome by faith in God, just as every other temptation is. Faith in God, good and merciful, faith that He is above all perfection, draws grace to the soul. In this state, there is no burdensome feeling of dependence; instead, the soul loves God as the most dear Father and lives by Him.

***

The Elder was a man of little formal education; yet his striving for the knowledge of truth was by no means less than that of anyone else. However, his path to the sought-after truth was entirely unlike the methods of speculative philosophy. Knowing this, we followed with great interest how, in a completely unique atmosphere and in a singular form within his mind, the most varied theological problems passed through and emerged in his consciousness as resolved. He could not develop a question dialectically or express it in a system of rational concepts – he feared “to err in mental reasoning” – yet the positions he voiced bore the mark of exceptional depth. And one could not help but ask: whence did he gain such wisdom?

In all his being, the Elder testified that the knowledge of higher spiritual truths lies along the path of keeping the Gospel commandments, not through “external” learning. He lived in God, receiving illumination from God above, and his knowledge was not abstract understanding but lived experience.

At the beginning of this chapter, we intended to present the Elder’s teaching, but in the course of the work we inclined to the thought that perhaps we would better achieve our goal by portraying, to the extent accessible to us, his spiritual experience. For on one hand, as the action of the Great God, this experience in each of its concrete historical manifestations carries something eternally new, and on the other hand, all his thoughts concerning the deepest religious questions are the result of his life of prayer and divine, grace-filled visitations.

Christianity is not philosophy, not a “doctrine,” but a life, and all the Elder’s conversations and writings are testimony to this life.

The Lord said to Pontius Pilate: “I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth.” Pilate skeptically replied, “What is truth?” and, convinced that there is no answer to this question at all, did not wait for an answer from Christ, but went out to the Jews.

Pilate was correct in a sense: to the question “WHAT is truth?” – if one means the ultimate truth that underlies all being – there is no answer.

But if Pilate, intending the First Truth or the Self-Truth, had posed the question as it ought to be asked, namely:

he would have received the answer that, shortly before, foreseeing Pilate’s question, the Lord gave to His beloved disciples at the Last Supper, and through them to the whole world: “I am the truth” (John 14:6; 18:37–38).

Science and philosophy ask themselves the question: “WHAT is truth?” whereas authentic Christian religious consciousness is always oriented toward the truth of “WHO.”

Representatives of science and philosophy often consider Christians to be groundless dreamers, while themselves standing on firm ground, and therefore call themselves positivists.

Strangely, they fail to recognize the entire negativity of their “WHAT,” not understanding that true, absolute Truth can only be “WHO” and never “WHAT,” because Truth is not an abstract formula or idea, but “Self-Life.”

Indeed – what could be more abstract and negative than the truth of WHAT? This great paradox is evident throughout the historical path of humanity since Adam’s fall. Enchanted by its own reason, humanity lives in a kind of stupor, so that not only “positive” science and philosophy ask, like Pilate, the question: “WHAT is truth?” but even in the religious life of humanity, the same great deception is observed, and there people constantly fall into seeking the truth of “WHAT.”

Reason supposes that if it knows the truth it seeks – WHAT – it will gain magical power and become the free master of being.

In religious life, a person who descends the path of intellectual inquiry inevitably falls into a pantheistic worldview. Whenever the theological mind tries to know the truth about God by its own strength, whether it understands or not, it inevitably falls into the same error in which science, philosophy, and pantheism are immersed: the pursuit and contemplation of truth as “WHAT.”

Truth as “WHO” cannot be known by reason. God as “WHO” is known only through communion in being, that is, only by the Holy Spirit. This was constantly emphasized by Elder Silouan.

«Whoever loves Me will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our dwelling with him… But the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things» (John 14:23–26).

In the Orthodox ascetic experience, the path of abstract contemplation is rejected as incorrect. Those who, in their God-thoughts, linger on the abstract contemplation of Goodness, Beauty, Eternity, Love, and the like, have entered a false path. Likewise, those who merely withdraw from all empirical images and concepts have not yet discovered the true path.

Orthodox divine contemplation is neither abstract contemplation of Goodness, Love, and so on, nor merely the withdrawal of the mind from empirical images and concepts.

True contemplation is “given” by God through God’s coming into the soul. Then the soul contemplates God and perceives that He loves, that He is good, magnificent, eternal; it sees His transcendence and ineffability. But abstractly, “nothing” is not contemplated. Genuine spiritual life is foreign to imagination, yet in all respects completely concrete and positive.

Authentic communion with God is sought only through personal prayer to the Personal God. True Christian spiritual experience is communion with an absolutely free God and therefore does not depend solely on human effort or will, as is possible in non-Christian (pantheistic) experience.

We can never, through our clumsy words, convey to the reader what impressed us in our communion with the Elder. Conversation with him had a wholly unique character. Despite the simplicity and meekness of his speech, his words were extraordinarily powerful, as words arising from deep experience of being, as words of a true bearer of the Spirit of life.

The appearance of Christ to Silouan was a personal encounter, which gave his orientation toward God a deeply personal character. In prayer, he conversed with God face-to-Face. The sense of the Personal God purifies prayer from imagination and abstract reasoning, directing all to an unseen center of living inner communion. Concentrating inwardly, prayer ceases to be a “cry into space,” and the mind becomes entirely attentive and listening. Invoking the names of God – Father, Lord, and others – he remained in such a state that “it is not lawful to speak of it” (2Cor. 12:4); yet anyone who has experienced the presence of the living God will understand.

One remarkable ascetic of the Monastery, Father Trophim, observed this in Elder Silouan and was filled with awe and bewilderment, as he himself recounted to us after the Elder’s repose.

Just as any rationalistic worldview has its own logical sequence, its own dialectic, so too does the spiritual world have, so to speak, its own construction, its own dialectic. But the dialectic of spiritual experience is entirely peculiar and does not coincide with the course of ordinary reasoning.

To rationalists, the criterion of true faith, true communion with God, and the sign of genuine grace identified by the Blessed Elder – love for enemies – may seem strange. Here, in the interest of brevity, we offer a few explanatory remarks.

Man is given the hope of receiving in the age to come the gift of divine likeness and the fullness of bliss, yet here he perceives only the “pledge” of that future state. Within the bounds of earthly experience, a person clothed in flesh can, during prayer, unite dwelling in God with remembrance of the world. But when dwelling in God reaches greater fullness, the world is “forgotten,” just as one entirely attached to the earth forgets God.

Yet if, in a fuller state of communion with God, the world is forgotten, how can one speak of love for enemies as a criterion of true communion with God? After all, in forgetting the world, a person does not think of friends or foes.

God, in His essence, is transcendent, beyond the world, yet by His action is present in the world (immanent). The fullness and perfection of God’s transcendent state are in no way diminished by His continuous action in the world. But man on earth, clothed in flesh, does not share such perfection. Therefore, when he dwells entirely – by all the powers of his mind and heart – in God, he no longer has in his consciousness anything from the world.

From this, however, one must not conclude that fullness of dwelling in God is unrelated to love for enemies. The Elder asserted the opposite: a profound connection exists between the two.

In the manifestation of the Lord, he was granted such knowledge that it excluded doubt or hesitation. He categorically affirmed that whoever loves God by the Holy Spirit necessarily loves all God’s creation, above all, mankind. He experienced this love as a gift of the Holy Spirit, as a descending action of God; conversely, he experienced complete immersion in God as coming through grace-filled love for one’s neighbor.

When speaking of “enemies,” the Elder used the language of his milieu, in which much was said and written about the enemies of the faith. But he himself did not categorize people as enemies and friends; rather, he distinguished those who have known God and those who have not.

Had the historical circumstances been different, the Elder likely would have expressed himself differently, as he often did when speaking of love for fellow humans in general – that is, for all people, whether benevolent or malevolent. In this, he saw likeness to Christ, who “stretched out His hands on the cross” to gather all.

Why did the Lord say that those who keep His commandments would know, “from where this teaching comes” (Jn. 7:17)? How did the Elder understand this?

God is love, absolute love, abundantly encompassing all creation. God is present even in hell as love. By granting a person the ability to know this love through the Holy Spirit, according to their capacity, God opens the path to the fullness of being.

Where there are “enemies,” there is also rejection. By rejecting, a person inevitably falls out of the divine fullness and is no longer in God.

Those who have reached the Kingdom of Heaven and dwell in God, in the Holy Spirit, see all the abysses of hell, for there is no region in all of being where God is not present.

“All the heavens of the Saints live by the Holy Spirit, and nothing in the world is hidden from the Holy Spirit… God is love, and in the Saints, the Holy Spirit is love” (“On the Saints”).

Even in heaven, the Saints behold hell and embrace it with their love.

Those who hate or reject their brother are diminished in their being, and they have neither known the true God – who is all-encompassing love – nor found the path to Him.

Because fullness of dwelling in God cannot be simultaneously complete with fullness of dwelling in the world for a human being, the judgment of whether a spiritual vision is genuine or merely “dreamlike” becomes possible only upon returning to memory and awareness of the world.

The Elder asserted: if, after a spiritual state perceived as divine contemplation and communion, there is no love for enemies – and therefore no love for all creation – this is a sure sign that the contemplation was not genuine, i.e., not truly in God.

A state of “rapture” in contemplation can come upon a person before they are aware of it. In the very state of rapture, even when it is not from God, a person may not realize what has occurred. And if, upon returning, the fruit of the contemplation is pride and indifference toward the fates of the world and humanity, then it is undoubtedly false. Therefore, the truth or deception of contemplation is recognized by its fruits.

The two commandments of Christ – love of God and love of neighbor – constitute a single life. Hence, if one thinks they live in God and love God while hating their brother, they are in delusion.

Thus, the second commandment gives us a way to test how truly we live in the true God.

Just as the Elder considered the second commandment – about love for one’s neighbor – a reliable guiding principle for testing the truthfulness of our path to God, so too, for recognizing good from evil, a reliable indicator is not so much the holy and lofty goal in its external formulation, but the means chosen to achieve that goal.

Only God is absolute. Evil, not being self-existent, but merely the opposition of a free creature to the primordial Being – God – cannot be absolute; therefore, evil in its “pure” form does not exist and cannot exist. Every evil committed by free creatures necessarily parasitically lives on the body of good; it must find “justification” for itself, appear clothed in the garb of good, and often even the highest good. Evil inevitably mixes with some measure of positive form in the pursuit of its ends, and by this aspect it “entices” humans. Its positive aspect it seeks to present to man as a value so important that “all means are permitted” to achieve it.

In the empirical existence of humans, absolute good is not attained; in every human endeavor, there is some measure of imperfection. The presence of imperfections in human good, on the one hand, and the inevitable presence of some good pretext in evil, on the other, makes distinguishing good from evil very difficult.

The Elder believed that evil always acts by “deception,” hiding behind good, but good, for its fulfillment, does not require the assistance of evil. Therefore, wherever impure means appear – craftiness, lies, violence, and the like – there begins a realm foreign to the spirit of Christ. Good is not achieved through evil means, and the end does not justify the means. “Good ill-made is not good.” This is the teaching we receive from the Apostles and the Holy Fathers. If good often prevails and, by its manifestation, corrects evil, it is wrong to think that this good was brought about by evil, that good arose as a result of evil. That is impossible. Yet the power of God is such that wherever it appears, it heals all without loss, for God is the fullness of life and creates life from nothing.

“Our Church, by the Holy Spirit, is given to understand the mysteries of God, and She is strong in Her holy thought and patience”…

The mystery of God, which the Church understands by the Holy Spirit, is the love of Christ.

The holy thought of the Church is that “all should be saved.” And the path by which the Church moves toward this holy goal is patience, that is, sacrifice.

Proclaiming Christ’s love in the world, the Church calls all to the fullness of divine life, but people do not understand this call and reject it. By urging everyone to keep Christ’s commandment – “Love your enemies” – the Church places itself in the midst of all conflicting powers, and the anger with which these warring forces are filled naturally falls upon Her. But the Church, carrying out Christ’s work on earth, that is, the salvation of the whole world, consciously accepts the burden of the collective anger, just as Christ took upon Himself the sins of the world. And if Christ in this world of sin was persecuted and had to suffer, then the true Church of Christ will also inevitably be persecuted and will suffer. This is the spiritual law of life in Christ, about which both the Lord Himself and the Apostles spoke; Paul expressed it categorically in these words: “Indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution” (2Tim. 3:12).

And this is always, everywhere, throughout the world where sin lives.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Here the Lord says that those who proclaim God’s peace will be made like Him, the Only-begotten Son of God; and they will be made like Him in all things, that is, not only in His glory and resurrection, but also in His humiliation and death. This is spoken of extensively in Scripture, and therefore those who truly preach Christ’s peace must never forget Golgotha.

And all this only for the word: “love your enemies.”

“You seek to kill Me because My word finds no place in you,” says Christ to the Jews (John 8:37). And the Church’s preaching, which is that same word – “love your enemies” – finds no place in the world, and therefore the world has persecuted and will continue to persecute the true Church, killing and continuing to kill Her servants.

***

In our interactions with the Blessed Elder, we never had the slightest doubt that his words were “words of eternal life,” heard by him from above, and that he did not learn this truth through any clever or convoluted expression, but bore witness to it through his entire life.

Many speak easily of Christ’s love, yet their deeds are a snare to the world, and therefore their words lack vivifying power.

The life of the Elder, which we observed closely over many years and which we now, in our audacity, attempt to write about, was a great spiritual feat and so beautiful that we cannot find human words to express our wonder. At the same time, it was so simple, so natural, and truly humble, that any grandiose or ornate language would introduce a foreign element, making it very difficult to write about him.

There are people who, when hearing simple words, cannot perceive their true content, and there are those whose ears are offended by the foreign notes of immodest speech. The holy and pure words of the Elder, unfortunately inaccessible to many because of their simplicity, we attempt, to some degree, to accompany with our dry and clumsy language, perhaps mistakenly believing that in this way we may help someone accustomed to a different style of life and expression to understand him.

Take, for example, a brief teaching of the Elder:

Ordinarily, when people think of approaching death, the soul is seized with restless fear, often even despair, to the point that the body suffers from the soul’s torment. How then does the Elder say that constant readiness for death and love for all bring peace not only to the soul but also to the body? It is a strange and seemingly incomprehensible teaching.

By peace in the soul and body, the Elder means a state in which not only the soul but also the body tangibly receives the action of grace. However, in this case, he speaks of a lesser measure than that which he experienced during the appearance of the Lord. In that ultimate case, grace was so powerful in both soul and body that the body clearly perceived its sanctification, and the sweetness of the Holy Spirit in the body produced such intense love for Christ that even the body desired to suffer for the Lord.

People are usually accustomed to a legalistic understanding of justice. They reject as false the imposition of responsibility on one person for the fault of another. In their juridical consciousness, it simply does not fit.

But the spirit of Christ’s love teaches something different. According to this love, taking on the responsibility for the fault of someone we love – or even bearing it fully – is not alien, but completely natural. More than that, in this bearing of another’s guilt, the authenticity of love is revealed, and its self-consciousness is attained. If one uses love only for its pleasurable side, where is reason? But when one freely accepts the guilt and labor of the beloved, love reaches its full and comprehensive perfection.

Many people cannot – or will not – understand and willingly bear the consequences of Adam’s original sin. They say:

“Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, so what does that have to do with me? I am willing to answer only for my own sins, and not for the sins of others.”

Yet the person does not realize that by this movement of the heart, he repeats the sin of the First Father within himself, and that sin becomes already his personal sin and fall. Adam denied responsibility, laying blame on Eve and on God, who had given him this wife, thereby breaking the unity of Man and his union with God. In the same way, whenever we refuse to bear responsibility for the common evil, for the deeds of our neighbors, we repeat that same sin and likewise disrupt the unity of Man.

The Lord questioned Adam before Eve. One must consider that, had Adam not justified himself but taken responsibility for their shared sin, the destinies of the world might have been different. Similarly, if we take upon ourselves the burden of the guilt of our neighbors, the course of the world may change.

Every person, in any matter, can say much in self-justification, but if he looks attentively into his own heart, he will see that in justifying himself, he does not escape deceit.

A person justifies himself, first, because he does not want to admit himself – even partially – as a participant in the evil of the world; he justifies himself because he does not recognize himself as endowed with godlike freedom, but only as a mere phenomenon, a thing of this world, dependent on it. In such a consciousness, there is much of servitude, and therefore justification is a servile act, not a sonship-like one.

In the Blessed Elder, we saw no inclination to justify himself. Yet strangely, such a manner of acting – that is, taking upon oneself guilt and asking forgiveness – appears to many as something servile. The perceptions of the children of the Spirit of Christ and of non-spiritual people are indeed very different.

To the non-spiritual, it seems incredible that the entire human world can be felt as a kind of integral being, included in the personal being of each individual, without removing other persons. The totality of human existence, according to the meaning of the second commandment – “Love your neighbor as yourself” – must and can be incorporated into one’s personal being.

Then every evil occurring in the world will be perceived not as something external, but as one’s own.

If every human person – an individual hypostasis, created in the image of the absolute Divine Hypostases – is capable of containing within themselves the fullness of all human existence, just as each Divine Hypostasis is the bearer of the whole fullness of Divine being, and this is the profound meaning of the second commandment, then the struggle against evil, against cosmic evil, must begin with each person starting from within themselves.

***

The Elder always spoke only of God’s love, and never of justice, but we deliberately led him into this conversation. He spoke approximately as follows:

“One cannot say of God that He is unjust, that is, that there is untruth in Him, but one also cannot say that He is just in the way we understand justice. Saint Isaac the Syrian says: ‘Do not dare to call God just; for what kind of justice is this – We have sinned, and He has delivered His Only-Begotten Son to the cross?’ And to what Saint Isaac says, one can add: we have sinned, and God has set the Holy Angels to serve our salvation. But the Angels, filled with love, themselves desire to serve us, and in that service they take upon themselves sorrow. As for the irrational animals and other creatures, the Lord subjected them to the law of decay, because they could not remain free from this law when man, for whom they were created, through his sin became a slave to decay. Thus, some voluntarily, some involuntarily, ‘all creation groans and suffers until now,’ as the Apostle says (Rom. 8:20–22), sympathizing with humanity. And this is not a law of justice, but a law of love.”

***

Christ’s love, as a Divine power, as a gift of the Holy Spirit, the One acting in all, ontologically unites. Love assimilates the life of the beloved. One who loves God participates in the life of the Godhead; one who loves a brother incorporates the brother’s life into their own personal existence; one who loves the whole world, in spirit encompasses the entire world.

That great prayer for the world, which the blessed Elder Silouan fervently offered, leads precisely to this perception – better said, to the awareness of the ontological unity of one’s personal being with the universal human being. If it is permissible to speak, as many contemporary philosophers do, that our sensory perception of any object is not merely a subjective psychic act, separate from the objective being of the thing itself, but is the thing itself, acting in reality within our consciousness, thus establishing communion in being, then all the more must one speak of the unity of being where the one, all-pervading Divine grace of the Holy Spirit – the All-Seeing One – operates.

Before His coming, the Lord said: “The prince of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me” (John 14:30).

Anyone who has ever truly tried to keep Christ’s commandments in their life can, to some degree, comprehend the immeasurable greatness of what Christ said; immeasurable for every human being throughout the history of the world.

In the days of Christ’s earthly life, people listening to Him were often in the same bewilderment as now. What Christ spoke was not “according to man” (Galatians 1:11); everyone saw this, and being unable to grasp the manifestation of God in such a humble form, they exclaimed:

“He is possessed”; while others said: “No, His words are not from one possessed.” Many said: “He is mad and speaks nonsense; why do you listen to Him?” But others replied: “Truly He is a prophet,” and “There was dispute among the people concerning Him” (John 7:20, 7:43, 8:48–9, 9:16, 10:19–21).

Elder Silouan was human, and the words of the Church’s prayer fully apply to him: “There is no man who lives and does not sin,” yet in his conversations and writings we encounter words that surpass the measure of ordinary human beings, reaching the edge where the understanding of “normal” people cannot reach. At the same time, there is no doubt that he spoke the pure truth about himself.

He spent nearly half a century in the Monastery under the eyes of many hundreds of people, many of whom are still alive today; he lived in a communal setting, where every weakness of the soul becomes especially evident. Many did not love him; some reproached him to his face, calling him “deluded,” others said: “Oh, cursed saint,” and he never once responded improperly. Of course, this was a gift of grace, the preservation of which he maintained through a life of extraordinary ascetic struggle.

To avoid overburdening this book, we will not cite all the Elder’s words that exceed ordinary human measure, which the attentive reader can find in his writings – for example, based on his many years of experience, he says that for the saints, prayer is never interrupted. He also said:

“At the beginning, out of inexperience, I accepted a lustful thought; I went to my spiritual father and said: ‘I have accepted a lustful thought.’ The spiritual father said: ‘Never accept it.’ And since that time, forty-five years have passed, and I have never accepted a lustful thought, never once was angry at anyone, for my soul remembers the love of the Lord and the sweetness of the Holy Spirit, and I forget offenses.”

There was such an instance. Among the brethren of the Monastery was a remarkable ascetic, Schema-monk Spyridon, who had lived in the community for half a century.

By nature, he was a stocky man, strong in body and soul, and very hardworking. He was a true monk, steadfast in his ascetic struggle. From the first years of monastic life, he loved the Jesus Prayer and consistently remained in this “practice,” which demanded exceptional patience, attention, and self-restraint. Like most monks of Mount Athos, Father Spyridon was very simple, almost illiterate, yet he was a wise man; from long experience in “wise labor,” he gained clear understanding of human strength and the qualities of the soul.

He understood that intelligent prayer requires freedom of mind from all impressions, and with steadfast faith he carried out this feat, incomprehensible to most people.

Obedience for Father Spyridon was laborious: he served as steward at the monastery’s metochion (estate) called “Krumitsa,” located in the northwestern part of the Athos peninsula. The main branches of the Krumitsa estate were olive groves and vineyards. During the last three to four years of his life, he lived in the monastery infirmary, suffering greatly from rheumatism, which had deformed the joints of his hands and feet and deprived him of the ability to work.

It so happened that when Elder Silouan fell ill with the flu in winter and was temporarily confined to the infirmary, he was given a bed next to Father Spyridon, while in the neighboring room there was a patient, a hierodeacon.

One afternoon, Father Spyridon sat on his bed facing Father Silouan, who was lying dressed in his cassock and girded, as was customary for ascetics on Athos, signifying their readiness to rise for prayer day and night. Father Spyridon spoke about prayer, while Elder Silouan listened silently.

“So you hold the prayer, hold it,” said Father Spyridon, “but when you take up work that requires thought, the prayer gets interrupted…

For example, when you go to clean the olives, and as you examine the branches and think about how best to prune them, you lose the prayer.”

At these words, Elder Silouan got up from his bed, put on his boots and a warm jacket – it was cold – and quietly said, “That does not happen with us,” and left the infirmary for his cell.

Surprised, Father Spyridon sat for a while in bewilderment, then went to the bed of the hierodeacon in the neighboring room, told him about his conversation with Elder Silouan, and said:

“Father Deacon, you know Father Silouan well. Tell me, what do these words mean: ‘That does not happen with us’?”

The deacon remained silent. Father Spyridon continued:

“Either he is mistaken, or he is great.”

Knowing Father Spyridon as an experienced elder, the hierodeacon said:

“Father Spyridon, you yourself can better understand what these words mean.”

Father Spyridon sat in thought for some time, then rose, saying:

“Yes, a remarkable thing.”

The entire life of Blessed Elder Silouan was a prayer. He prayed unceasingly, varying the form of his prayer throughout the day according to the circumstances of daily life.

He also possessed the gift of the highest form of intelligent prayer, to which he devoted primarily the nighttime, when complete silence and darkness, most favorable for this prayer, were possible.

The question of the types or forms of prayer is one of the most important questions in ascetic practice in general; it was such for the Elder as well, and therefore we shall allow ourselves to dwell on it.

On the Three Forms of Prayer

Prayer is a creative act – the highest form of creativity – and precisely because of this, it is infinitely diverse. Yet, there is a certain way to distinguish its types according to the orientation or focus of the main spiritual forces of a person, as the Fathers of the Church have done.

In this respect, prayer corresponds to the stages of normal development of the human spirit. The first movement of the mind is outward; the second is its return to itself; and the third is a movement toward God through the inner man.

Accordingly, the Holy Fathers distinguish three forms of prayer: the first, arising from the mind’s inability to ascend directly to pure divine contemplation, is characterized by imagination; the second, by reflection; and the third, by immersion in contemplation.

Only the third form of prayer is considered truly proper, necessary, and fruitful by the Fathers. However, since it is impossible for a person to have such prayer at the very beginning of their path to God, the first two forms are regarded as normal and, in their time, beneficial. Yet they warn that if a person becomes satisfied with the first form and cultivates it as the main mode of their prayer life, not only will it be fruitless, but it may also lead to deep spiritual afflictions.

The second form, though superior in many respects to the first, is still largely unfruitful. It does not free a person from the constant struggle of thoughts, nor does it lead to freedom from passions or, much less, to pure contemplation.

The third, most perfect form of prayer, is the standing of the mind in the heart, where the one praying, from the depths of their being and apart from images, presents themselves to God with a pure intellect.

The first type of prayer keeps a person in constant delusion, in a world of imagination, dreams, or poetic creativity, where the divine and all spiritual reality are presented through various fantastical images. Gradually, even real human life becomes infused with elements drawn from this realm of fantasy.

In the second form of prayer, the inner gates of the heart and mind are widely open to all external influences. As a result, the person constantly experiences diverse external impressions, yet does not understand what is objectively happening within them – how all these thoughts and conflicts arise – and is therefore powerless to withstand the onslaught of passions as required. Occasionally, in this form of prayer, one may receive grace and attain some good disposition, but due to the incorrect inner orientation, they cannot remain in it.

Having reached a certain accumulation of religious knowledge and relative propriety in his behavior, and being satisfied with this state, a person gradually becomes drawn into intellectual theology. As progress in this area continues, the internal struggle of subtle passions of the soul – vanity and pride – intensifies, and the loss of grace is aggravated. In its development, this form of prayer – whose distinctive feature is the concentration of attention in the brain – leads a person into rational, philosophical contemplation. Like the first form of prayer, this also directs him toward a representational, imagined world. However, this type of abstract mental imagination is less naive, less crude, and less distant from truth than the first.

The third form of prayer – “the union of the mind with the heart” – is generally the “normal religious state” of the human spirit: desirable, sought after, and granted from above. Every believer experiences this union when praying attentively “from the heart”; it is even more fully realized when a person feels devotion and the sweet experience of God’s love. Tears of devotion during prayer are a sure sign that the mind has united with the heart and that true prayer has reached its first level, the first stage of ascent to God. This is why it is highly valued by all ascetics. Yet here, when speaking of the third form of prayer, we mean something greater: the “mind, standing in the heart with attentive prayer.”

A characteristic consequence or property of this inward movement and settling of the mind is the cessation of imagination and the liberation of the mind from any image that has entered it. The mind, in this state, becomes wholly attentive – hearing and seeing everything – perceiving every thought approaching “from outside” before it reaches the heart.

In performing prayer in this way, the mind not only prevents thoughts from entering the heart but also repels them, preserving itself from fusion with them. In this manner, the activity of every passion is stopped at its initial state, at the very moment of its emergence.

This question is exceedingly profound and complex, and here we can provide only the most basic outline.

On the Development of Thoughts

Sin manifests itself through certain stages of its internal development.

The first stage is an approaching spiritual influence from outside, which at first may be entirely unclear, unformed. The initial stage of formation is the appearance in the field of the person’s inner vision of some image. Since this does not depend on the will of the person, it is not yet counted as sin.

In some cases, images are primarily visual, in others primarily mental, and more often mixed. Because even visual images bring along a certain thought, all such images among ascetics are called “thoughts” (pomysly).

In a person free from passions, the “sovereign” mind can remain on the received thought as a force perceiving being, remaining entirely free from its power. But if there is a “place” in a person – a suitable soil, a disposition toward the spirit contained in the thought – then the energy of the thought strives to capture the psychic world, that is, the heart and soul of the person. It does so by producing a certain sense of pleasure in a soul predisposed to vice, characteristic of a particular passion. This pleasure constitutes “temptation.”

Even this moment of pleasure, although indicating human imperfection, is still not counted as sin; it is merely the “proposal” of sin.

The further development of a sinful thought can be schematically outlined as follows: the pleasure proposed by the passion attracts the attention of the mind, which is an extremely important and decisive moment, because the union of the mind with the thought creates favorable conditions for the development of the latter. If, by an act of will, the mind does not detach from the proposed pleasure but continues to dwell on it attentively, a disposition toward it arises, a pleasant dialogue with it develops, followed by “joining” that can turn into full and active “consent.” Gradually, the increasing passionate pleasure may seize the mind and will of the person, which is called “captivity.”

After this, all the forces of the mind, captivated by passion, are directed toward the more or less decisive execution of sin in deed, if there are no external obstacles, or, if obstacles exist, toward seeking the possibility of such execution.

Such captivity may remain a singular occurrence and never be repeated if it was merely the result of the inexperience of a person engaged in spiritual struggle. But if the captivities are repeated, they lead to a “habit” of the passion, and then all the natural powers of the person begin to serve it.

The struggle against sin should begin from the primary emergence of the pleasurable action of passion, which was called above the “proposal.” This struggle can take place at all stages of the development of a sinful thought, and at each stage, the thought can be overcome and thus not culminate in deed. Nevertheless, from the moment the will wavers, the element of sin is already present and must lead to repentance so that grace is not lost.

A spiritually inexperienced person usually encounters a sinful thought only after it has passed unnoticed through its earliest stages of development – when it has already gained some strength, or even more: when the danger of committing sin in deed is near.

To prevent this, it is necessary to establish the mind with prayer in the heart. This is an essential need for every ascetic who wishes, through true repentance, to strengthen himself in the spiritual life. As noted above, with such an inner disposition, sin is arrested at its very inception.

Here it is perhaps appropriate to recall the words of the Prophet: “Daughter of Babylon, the devastator!... blessed is he who seizes and dashes your infants against the stone” in the name of Jesus Christ (Psalm 136:8–9).

This wondrous practice, incomprehensible to the lazy majority, is achieved through great labor and by very few. It is by no means simple, by no means easy, and in our effort to provide a brief but clear exposition, we will often be forced to return helplessly to it from different angles, without hope, however, of fully exhausting or satisfactorily presenting it.

***

The essence of the Elder’s ascetic path can be expressed in a few words: the guarding of the heart from every foreign thought through inner, intelligent attention, so that, by removing all extraneous influence, one may stand before God in pure prayer.

This practice is called “intelligent silence” ( умное безмолвие ). It has been handed down to us through both living and written tradition from the Holy Fathers, from the first centuries of Christianity to our day. Therefore, speaking about the Elder’s ascetic path is akin to speaking, as he himself did, about the path of Orthodox monasticism in general.

The Blessed Elder said:

«If you are a theologian, you pray purely; if you pray purely, you are a theologian.»

The ascetic monk is not a theologian in the academic sense, but he is a theologian in another sense, since through pure prayer he is granted truly divine visions.

The beginning of the path to pure prayer is the struggle against passions. As the mind is purified from passions, it becomes stronger in the struggle with thoughts and more steadfast in prayer and contemplation of God; the heart, freed from the darkness of passions, begins to see all spiritual matters more clearly and perceptibly.

The monk prefers this path to the path of scholarly theology for the reason that, through abstract philosophical contemplation, one can reach an understanding of the inadequacy of our empirical concepts before God, and thereby achieve a state in which the mind begins to “be silent.”

But this “silence of the mind” of a philosopher-theologian is not always true contemplation of God, although it approaches its threshold.

Attaining genuine contemplation without the purification of the heart is impossible. Only a heart cleansed from passions is capable of a special awe in contemplating the incomprehensibility of God. In this awe, the mind joyfully becomes silent, overwhelmed by the grandeur of what it beholds.

Theologians and ascetic monks approach contemplation by different paths. The mind of the latter is not occupied with any reflection; it only, like a vigilant watchman, silently attends to ensure that nothing foreign enters the heart. The name of Christ and His commandment – this is what the heart and mind live by in this “sacred silence”; they live a single life, controlling all that occurs within not by logical investigation, but by a special spiritual perception.

The mind, having united with the heart, abides in such a state that it is able to perceive every movement occurring within the “sphere of the subconscious.” (This term from modern scientific psychology is used here only conditionally, as it does not coincide with the concepts of Orthodox ascetic anthropology.) Abiding within the heart, the mind discerns the images and thoughts arising in its surroundings, coming from the sphere of cosmic being and attempting to seize the heart and mind of the person. In the form of a thought, that is, a mental activity connected to a particular image, is the energy of a particular spirit.

The onslaught of thoughts coming from without is extremely strong, and to weaken it, the monk must, throughout the day, prevent even a single passionate glance, allow himself no attachment to anything. The monk constantly strives to reduce the number of external impressions to the absolute minimum; otherwise, at the moment of inner, intelligent prayer, everything imprinted upon him returns to the heart like an uncontrollable wall, producing great turmoil.

The goal of the monk is to achieve continuous intelligent-heart attention; and when, after many years of this ascetic struggle – “the most difficult” of all struggles – the sense of the heart becomes refined, and the mind, through “much weeping,” gains the power to repel every assault of passionate thoughts, then the state of prayer becomes unceasing, and the awareness of God’s presence and action manifests with great strength and clarity.

Such is the path of the ascetic monk, and such was the path of the Blessed Elder.

The path of the “Areopagites” is different: it is dominated by reflection rather than prayer. Those who follow this path are often deceived, for, easily attaining intellectual comprehension even of the apophatic forms of theology, they become satisfied with the intellectual pleasure they experience. By failing to give proper attention to their unconquered passions, they easily imagine themselves to have attained what is spoken of in the works of the Areopagite, whereas in the overwhelming majority of cases, understanding the logical structure of his theological system does not lead to truly attaining the Desired.

The Elder did not see silence as being in seclusion or physically withdrawing to the desert, but in continually abiding in God. Given the great importance of this matter, we will consider it in more detail.

The Elder said that both seclusion and withdrawal into the desert are in themselves merely auxiliary means and not an end. They may help to reduce external impressions and influences, to remove one from worldly noise, and thereby favor pure prayer – but only if this withdrawal is undertaken according to God’s will, and not by one’s own desire. Otherwise, seclusion, the desert, or any other ascetic effort will remain fruitless, because the essence of our life is not in voluntary asceticism, but in obedience to God’s will.

Many think that the highest form of life is silence in the desert; others consider seclusion as such; some prefer holy foolishness; others pastoral service, scholarly theological work, and similar undertakings. The Elder held that none of these forms of asceticism is by itself the highest expression of spiritual life, but each may become so for a particular person if it corresponds to God’s will for that individual; and God’s will for each person may be unique.

But whatever God’s will may be for each person regarding a particular form of asceticism, location, or mode of service, the pursuit of pure prayer remains essential in all cases.

– The Elder considered prayer pure when it is offered with reverence, so that both heart and mind live in unison with the words being spoken, and nothing interrupts it – neither distraction by external matters nor reflection on anything foreign to the prayer. This type of prayer, as noted above, is a normal religious state, highly fruitful for the soul; to some degree it is familiar to many believers, but only in rare cases does it develop into perfect prayer.

Another form of pure prayer is when the mind is enclosed in the heart and there silently, free from extraneous thoughts and images, meditates on the memory of God’s name. This prayer is associated with constant effort; it is an action that depends to some extent on the will of the person; it is labor, an ascetic undertaking. Everything said above about this remarkable form of intelligent prayer – namely, that it allows one to perceive a thought before it enters the heart, or, conditionally speaking, allows one to control the depths of the subconscious, to free oneself from the turmoil in which a person remains due to the continual incursion of possible influences from the dark realm of the subconscious, more precisely, the deep abyss of sinful cosmic life – constitutes the negative aspect of this practice, while its positive aspect surpasses any human conception.

The created human mind, the created human person, in their standing before the First Mind, the Personal God, attain truly pure and perfect prayer only when, out of love for God, they leave behind all creation – or, as the Elder liked to say, utterly forget the world and even their own body – so that in the hour of prayer a person no longer knows whether they are in the body or apart from it.

Such prayer, in its predominant sense, is pure – it is a rare gift of God. It does not depend on human effort; rather, the power of God, with ineffable care and inexplicable tenderness, transfers the person into the world of Divine Light – or, better said, the Divine Light itself lovingly enfolds the entire person so that they can no longer recall or contemplate anything.

Referring to this highest form of prayer, the Elder said: “Whoever prays purely is a theologian.”

Those who have not had this experience have not attained theology as the state of vision of God. The mind that has never known purity, that has never beheld the eternal Divine Light, however sophisticated it may be in intellectual experience, is inevitably subject to imagination. In its attempts to know the Divine, it lives in conjectures and constructs suppositions, which, unfortunately, it often takes for genuine revelation and divine contemplation, without realizing its error.

Some Holy Fathers, in their ascetic writings, distinguish between two forms of spiritual life – active and contemplative – calling the first the path of keeping the commandments.

Elder Silouan thought somewhat differently: he too distinguished between active and contemplative life, but for him both were essentially the keeping of commandments. The primary foundation of ascetic intelligent silence for him was the words of the first commandment: “Love God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul.” He writes:

*«Who has known the love of God will say: I have not kept the commandment. Even though I pray day and night and strive to perform every virtue, I have not fulfilled the commandment of love for God.

Only in rare moments do I grasp the commandment of God, yet my soul would wish to dwell in it continually. When foreign thoughts mix with the mind, then the mind thinks of both God and things; thus the commandment – to love with all the mind and all the heart – is not fulfilled. But when the mind is wholly in God, and there are no other thoughts, then the first commandment is fulfilled – but even then, not completely.»*

In the ascetic experience of pure prayer, the mind, freed from every image and concept, is, after deep repentance and much weeping, granted true vision of God.

Intelligent silence has always met many opponents, especially in the West, who, lacking the necessary experience, in their abstract approach to this form of prayer, believed it was about seeking some mechanical method to attain Divine contemplation. But this, of course, is not so.

God, absolutely free, is not subject to any mechanical influence or coercion. Intelligent silence is inseparably linked with great self-denial and is the most difficult of all ascetic struggles. A person’s deliberate effort toward this profound labor, undertaken for the sake of better keeping God’s commandments, draws down God’s grace – provided the effort is performed in the spirit of humility.

A proud person, whatever methods they employ, will not attain true communion with God. By mere human will, the mind cannot unite with the deep heart; and if it somehow penetrates the heart, it sees only itself, its created beauty, magnificent as it is because made in God’s image, but it does not encounter the true God.

This is why the blessed Elder, striving to humble himself, resorted to the fiery weapon granted to him by the Lord:

«Keep your mind in hell, and do not despair.»

This man, not intellectually sophisticated, a “simpleton” and “ignorant,” was repeatedly granted pure intelligent vision of God, and therefore truly had grounds to say:

«If you pray purely, you are a theologian.»

And also:

«There are many believers on earth, but very few who truly know God.»

By knowledge he did not mean gnostic theological constructions, but the experience of living communion, the experience of partaking in the Divine Light.

Knowledge is an event.

In this Life, in presenting the positive experience of the Elder, as far as possible for us, we do not wish to give our work a scientific or formal character, and therefore we deliberately avoid many comparisons and references to the Writings of the Holy Fathers.

This work is an attempt to portray the Elder and describe the spiritual path he traveled, which, although entirely within the stream of the ascetic tradition of the Orthodox Church, as a truly living phenomenon bears the mark of uniqueness and irrepeatability.

The dogmatic questions touched upon here do not constitute a theological treatise. We address them based on the fact that dogmatic consciousness is organically connected with the entire course of one’s inner spiritual life. Change anything in your dogmatic consciousness, and inevitably your spiritual image, and indeed the very form of your spiritual being, will change accordingly. Conversely, deviation from the truth in inner spiritual life will entail changes in dogmatic consciousness.

Speaking of intelligent silence, which the Elder so loved, we consider it worthwhile, in a few words, to present the anthropological basis of this practice, as revealed in his own experience. The Elder’s anthropology can be expressed in the words of St. Macarius the Great and St. Isaac the Syrian, whose works he knew well:

“The soul is not from God’s essence, nor from the essence of deceptive darkness, but is a rational creature (poega), filled with beauty, great and wondrous, a perfect likeness and image of God, and the deceitfulness of dark passions entered it as a result of transgression.” (Macarius the Great, Discourse 1, paragraph 7)

“God created man in His image, creating him passionless… therefore… passions are not in the nature of the soul… but are something added, and the soul itself is guilty in them.” (Isaac the Syrian, Word 3)

“When the senses are enclosed in silence, then you will see what treasures the soul has hidden within itself.” (ibid.)

When we said that the mind, standing in prayer in the heart, sees from there every thought approaching the heart before it enters, we meant the energy of external “deceptive passions” acting upon the soul, which, in St. Isaac’s expression, are “added” rather than inherent to the nature of the soul. The mind, from the heart, resists all of this added, alien, and foreign influence striving to enter the heart, and reflects it through prayer.

Yet an even deeper entry of the mind into the heart is possible, when, by the action of God, it somehow becomes so united with the heart that it entirely casts off all images and concepts, while simultaneously closing all entrances to the heart to everything external. The soul then enters a “darkness” of a completely special order and is subsequently granted inexpressible pre-standing before God with a pure mind.

“Whoever prays purely is a theologian,” said the Elder. Not a theologian in the academic sense of the word, but a theologian in the sense of one who sees God – a theognostic.

But there is something even beyond this: states in which a person existentially and with irrefutable certainty participates in eternal life and ineffable peace in God. However, a person is not left long in such a state if the Lord, according to His uniquely known plans, wills that his life on earth continue, and so he returns again to the world, and, like the Apostle Peter on Mount Tabor, speaks of his inner communion with God: “It is good for us to be here with You, Lord.”

Intelligent Silence is an astonishingly rich and magnificent life, the description of which, due to its exceptional nature, takes on a somewhat discontinuous and paradoxical character. We have no doubt that many logically-minded people may be perplexed by the statement that a person, for some period, existentially and with irrefutable certainty, is introduced into eternal life. The apparent absurdity of becoming eternal “for a time” is obvious. Yet, we will attempt to clarify this expression.

Time and eternity, in the understanding of the ascetic, are two different modes of being. The first, time, is the mode of created, ever-arising, and in its motion unfolding being, created by God from nothing in an incomprehensible manner. The second, eternity, is the mode of Divine being, to which our concepts of duration and sequence are inapplicable. Eternity is a single, non-extended act of the incomprehensible fullness of Divine being, which, being beyond the world, non-extendedly encompasses all the extensions of the created world. The eternal in essence is the One God. Eternity is not something abstract or separately existing; it is God Himself in His being.

When, by God’s grace, a person receives the gift of participation in Divine life, he becomes not only immortal in the sense of the endless continuation of life, but also “without beginning,” for the sphere of Divine being to which he is raised has neither beginning nor end. Speaking of a person as becoming “without beginning,” we do not mean the pre-existence of the soul, nor the transposition of our created nature into the unbegotten Divine nature, but participation in the unbegotten Divine life through the deification of the creature by grace.

When the mind and heart, directed toward Christ, are united – not by one’s own efforts, but by the action of God – through some mysterious union, the person truly finds himself at his deepest foundation. Then he, as a God-shaped mind, as a God-like spirit, as an immortal hypostasis (person), sees God without form; yet, as long as he is bound to the flesh, his knowledge is not perfect, and he cannot comprehend what his eternal being will be after passing the final threshold of earthly life – that is, after release from the heaviness of the flesh and entering, freed from its burden, into the realm of the unbegotten Light of the Godhead, if the Lord wills to receive him.

The question of what eternal being will be like does not arise at the moment of vision, when the soul is entirely in eternal God and does not know whether it is in the body or outside it, but only later, when it again perceives this world, when it again feels itself in the bonds of the flesh, and simultaneously finds some covering of the flesh upon itself.

Within himself, that is, within the limits of his created being, man does not possess eternal life. By partaking of the Divine life through the gift of grace, he becomes eternal. This eternity, even here, he may experience with varying intensity – sometimes greater, sometimes lesser.

All expressions here are paradoxical, yet perhaps the following will make it clearer: insofar as we are in God, so far we are eternal.

Insofar as – but here it is not a matter of quantity, but of the gift of God.

In the state of vision the soul does not question anything. This ineffable act of being introduced into the Divine world is accomplished not by her will, for she cannot desire that which she has never known before. And yet, it is not without her participation, in the sense that in certain preparatory moments she, with good will, fervently strives toward God in keeping His commandments. Vision is preceded by great sufferings, by much weeping, by the deep penitential weeping of the heart – burning tears that burn away in a man his carnal, psychic, and even spiritual pride.

Man, so long as he is in the flesh, cannot attain perfect knowledge. Yet that which God grants him is a genuine, undeniable, existential experience of the eternal Kingdom. And though it is “in part,” as the Elder said, he nonetheless knows it with certainty.

Created “in the image of God,” man was created for life “in His likeness.” He who attains “salvation” in God receives a life akin to the very life of God Himself. God is omnipresent and all-knowing, and the saints in the Holy Spirit receive a likeness of omnipresence and omniscience. God is Light, and the saints in the Holy Spirit become light. God is Love, embracing all that exists, and the saints in the Holy Spirit, by their love, embrace the whole world. God alone is Holy, and the saints in the Holy Spirit are holy. Yet holiness is not an ethical notion, but an ontological one. Holy is not the one who is exalted according to human morality, nor even by his life of asceticism or prayer (for even the Pharisees fasted and offered “long” prayers), but the one who bears within himself the Holy Spirit. The One God is Truth and Life, and those who partake of the Holy Spirit become living and true, while those who fall away from God die spiritually and depart into the “outer darkness.”

In saying above that man, called into being by the creative act of God out of “nothing,” does not possess eternal life within himself, we by no means intend to say that, upon dying, he returns again into “nothingness,” into total non-existence. No. By falling away from God, by turning from Him – as one endowed with freedom – he departs from Life and Light into the realm of eternal death and outer darkness. But this darkness and death are not that “nothingness,” that non-being from which creation was called into existence. Rather, it is a state of the rational creature, indestructible in its essence. Turning away from God, the creature nevertheless cannot pass into any realm that is inaccessible to Him: even in hell the love of God embraces all. But while it is joy and life for those who love Him, it becomes torment for those who hate Him.

***

Speaking of the experience of eternity and the resurrection of the soul, we speak of that great good will of God which, pouring itself out upon man, “catches him up” into the realm of the Eternal Light, granting him with certainty the experience of his freedom from death – his own eternity.

The “return” from this state of vision, though it places upon a man a certain “veil,” nonetheless transforms both his personal consciousness and his perception of the world in a profound way, and it cannot but be altered for many reasons. The experience of his own fall and sufferings reveals to him the same tragedy in every other man. The experience of personal immortality leads to the recognition of an immortal brother in every other human being. The living experience of eternity and of the inward vision of God, in detachment from created things, fills the soul in an inexpressible way with love for man and for every creature. It becomes clear that only by knowing the greatness of man through one’s own spiritual experience is it truly possible to value and to love one’s fellow man.

And here is yet another inexplicable phenomenon: in the moment of vision, as the Elder expressed it, “the world is completely forgotten.” The time of vision is not a time of reflection – by no means: ordinary discursive reasoning ceases altogether. The activity of the mind remains, but it is an activity of a completely different kind; and it is wondrous how that formlessness, in its descent, clothes itself in thoughts and feelings. The state of vision is the light of God’s love, and by the action of this love new feelings and new thoughts about God and the world are born in the soul.

The first “rapture” into vision is granted to man from above without his seeking, for in his ignorance of it he could not have sought it. But afterward he can never forget it, and with much sorrow of heart he seeks it again and again – not only for himself, but for all mankind.

The Beginning of Spiritual Life – The Struggle with the Passions

To the ascetical anthropology concerning noetic practice, let us add a few more words in explanation of this practice and its results.

By means of prayerful attentiveness in the heart, the struggler strives to preserve his mind pure from every thought. Thoughts may be natural to man in the conditions of earthly existence, but they may also be the result of demonic influences. When the struggler prays, he renounces for a time – according to the measure possible for each person – the needs of his own nature, while thoughts of demonic origin he utterly rejects. Thus it comes about that, in the hour of prayer, the mind pushes away every thought, both natural and demonic.

When a man yields to demonic influence, he undergoes the defeat of his God-like freedom and falls away from the Divine life. Such a state, as passive, is called in asceticism a passion. In this name is expressed, on the one hand, the idea of passivity and enslavement, and on the other, the idea of suffering in the sense of destruction and death: “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house forever, but the Son abideth ever” (John 8:34–35). Thus, in the condition of sinful passion there are two aspects of suffering – enslavement and destruction; and therefore “the servant of sin” cannot have a true consciousness of the greatness of man’s God-like freedom as a son of God.

The passions possess a power of attraction, yet the implantation or establishment of any passionate image or thought in the soul always takes place not without the consent of man himself, for in all existence there is nothing so strong that it could deprive a free man of the possibility of resistance and rejection. When, however, some passionate thought or image is established in the soul, then the man becomes possessed by it in one degree or another. The passions are a kind of “possession,” varying in their intensity and strength.

The alluring power of passion consists in its promise of delight. Suffering, in the sense of destruction, is the consequence of passionate delights. If passionate movement did not contain an element of pleasure, but began immediately with suffering, it could never incline man’s will to its side. Passion, as suffering and death, is perceived immediately only by the spiritual man, who has known the life-giving action of Divine grace, which engenders in the soul aversion – “hatred” – for sinful movements within himself.

The beginning of spiritual life is the struggle with the passions. If this struggle were joined only with the renunciation of pleasure, it would be easy. More difficult in this battle is its second stage: when the unsatisfied passion begins to torment the man with various forms of affliction. In this case, the struggler needs very great patience, and prolonged patience at that, for the salutary result of resistance to the passions comes only slowly.

It is normal for man, in his present condition, to remain in struggle throughout his life. Yet there are two extreme states which may be described as the absence of struggle. In the dispassionate, there is no struggle in the sense that the delight offered by a passion does not attract him in the least, and everything ends with the “bare” thought. He who, though still subject to the assaults of thoughts, is not accessible to their enticing power, may rightly be called dispassionate. The sign of complete enslavement is likewise the absence of struggle, but for the opposite reason: at every stage in the development of a passionate thought the man not only does not resist, but himself goes out to meet it, lives by it.

In the conditions of carnal earthly existence, man also has non-sinful passions – that is, such needs or sufferings without whose satisfaction life itself cannot be continued, such as food, sleep, and the like. For short intervals the ascetic despises these needs, and if the voice of these needs begins to threaten him with illness, then at times he goes, in his resolve not to submit to them, even to death; yet it has been observed that actual death in such cases usually does not come, but rather – what is more – man is preserved by God in even greater measure. Such manly resolve is necessary; without it one cannot obtain freedom from thoughts, even for a short time.

When the mind descends into the deep heart, in the very act of this prayerful descent it strips itself of every image – not only of the visible but also of the mental – and in this state of purity it is vouchsafed to stand before God. That which proceeds from this imageless depth, though it may later pour itself out in the form of thought or take on one image or another, is no longer passion, but true life in God.

In this state it is revealed that the soul naturally strives toward God, is like unto Him, and is dispassionate according to its very nature.

Through the alternation of states – the reception of grace and its withdrawal – man is convinced with certainty that he “hath not life in himself,” that his life is in God, and apart from Him is death. When the soul is vouchsafed the coming of Divine light, then it truly lives the eternal life – that is, it lives by God Himself; and where God is, there is a freedom inexpressible in words, for then man is beyond death and fear.

In this state man comes to know himself, and in knowing himself he comes also to know man as such, by virtue of the consubstantiality of the whole human race.

In the depths of his being – there where the true God-likeness of human nature is unveiled, where its great vocation is disclosed – the ascetic beholds that which to the heart unillumined is wholly unknown.

In the funeral stichera, St. John of Damascus says:

“I weep and I wail when I reflect upon death, and behold in the tomb the beauty fashioned in God’s image, now lying shapeless and inglorious.”

So too weeps and laments everyone who, having known in God the primal beauty of man, returns from the ineffable banquet of the Spirit in the inner chamber of the heart and then beholds the deformity and dishonor reigning in the world.

Having dared to write about “Sacred Stillness,” which the Elder Silouan so loved, we are compelled to speak of the necessity of ascetical struggle with imagination. This question of the spiritual life is exceedingly difficult and complex, and we do not hope to treat it satisfactorily. Since our principal task is to set forth a definite and concrete experience, we consider it obligatory to outline only that consciousness and those views which have existed until now among the ascetics of the Holy Mountain, and which the Elder himself maintained – leaving aside the theories of contemporary scientific psychology. We enter into neither comparison nor critique of the one or the other; let it be noted only that they diverge on many points, for the foundation of ascetical teaching rests upon cosmological and anthropological presuppositions of an entirely different order.

The Elder writes:

“O brethren, let us forget the earth and all that is upon it, for it distracts us from the contemplation of the Holy Trinity, which is incomprehensible to our mind, but which the saints behold in heaven through the Holy Spirit. And let us remain in prayer without any imagination...”

“When the soul knows the Lord through the Holy Spirit, then at every moment it unceasingly marvels at the mercy of God, at His greatness and His might; and the Lord Himself, by His grace, mercifully – like a mother her beloved child – teaches the soul with humble good thoughts and grants it to feel His presence and His nearness; and the soul, in humility, contemplates the Lord without any thoughts.”

The faculty of imagination is manifold in its manifestations. The ascetic struggles first of all against that form of imagination which is bound up with the action of coarse bodily passions. He knows that every passion has its own image, since it belongs to the sphere of created being, which must necessarily exist in one form or another, bearing one image or another. Normally in man the action of passionate desire gains strength only when the inwardly received image of passion draws the mind to itself. If the mind repels the image of passion presented to it, the latter cannot develop and will fade away. For example: when carnal desire comes, though it be physiologically natural, the ascetic keeps his mind from the image arising within him, brought to him from without, suggested to him by passion. And if the mind does not receive this image, the passion cannot develop its energy and will inevitably be extinguished.

In speaking here of the “mind,” we do not mean discursive reasoning or logical ratiocination, but rather that which is perhaps better defined by the word attention. Such guarding of the mind against the image of passion provides the real possibility – attested by millennia of ascetical experience – of preserving, throughout one’s life, the fullness of chaste continence even in a strong and healthy body, as we see exemplified in the Elder. Conversely, if the mind of a man receives with delight the image of passion, then the energy of that image will exert a titanic violence even upon a body that is enfeebled, sick, and powerless.

Let us take another passion – for example, hatred. This passion also has its own image, and if the mind guards itself from union with this image, the passion cannot develop; but if it does join itself to it, then the passion, in proportion to this union, will gain ever greater strength and may reach the point of obsession.

Another kind of imagination with which the ascetic contends is usually called daydreaming. A man departs from the real state of things in the world and lives in the realm of fantasy. The productions of fantasy – powerless to create something wholly non-existent, wholly “out of nothing” – cannot bear a character entirely alien to the world around us. In other words: they must necessarily contain elements of the real, actual world, just as they do in dreams; and thus they are not absolutely impossible. For instance, a poor man imagines himself to be a king, or a prophet, or a great scholar. History knows of cases where poor men, occupying the lowest ranks of the social order, became emperors and the like; but usually this does not happen with those who indulge in such daydreams.

We trust the reader understands what we mean by “daydreaming,” and so as not to lengthen our words, let us turn to another manifestation of the power of imagination. Man, making use of the faculty of memory and representation, may reflect upon the solution of some problem – for example, a technical one – and then his mind, by deliberation, seeks the possibility of practically realizing this or that idea. This kind of activity of the mind, accompanied by imagination, has great significance in human culture and is necessary for the building up of life. Yet the ascetic who cares for pure prayer strives, by non-acquisitiveness, to limit himself in everything, so that even this kind of imagination might not hinder him from “giving his first thought and first strength to God” – that is, from concentrating himself wholly in God.

And finally, one more kind of imagination must be mentioned: the attempts of reason to penetrate into the mystery of being and to comprehend the Divine world. Such attempts are inevitably accompanied by imagination, which many are inclined to dignify with the lofty title of theological creativity. But the ascetic of noetic stillness and pure prayer wages a decisive struggle within himself against this kind of “creativity,” for it constitutes a reversal of the order of true being: in it man fashions God after his own image and likeness.

It may be that what has been said will provoke many perplexities and objections, but we cannot linger over explanations, hoping that with goodwill we shall be understood as we ought.

The man of prayer begins from faith – that it is God who created us, and not we who create God. Therefore, in his abstraction from every kind of theological and philosophical “creativity,” he turns to God in imageless prayer. And if the divine good pleasure should condescend to the one who prays, granting him to taste the nearness of God, then even in such a case the knowledge of God beyond all images will nevertheless take shape in one form or another. Yet this form is not “fabricated” by the ascetic or the prophet, but given to him from above.

The ascetic seeks God – his Creator – by prayer; and God, in His condescension and good pleasure, imparts knowledge of Himself in images accessible to man. These images burn away the passions within him and sanctify him. But if he should receive them as the completion of revelation, he will fall into delusion; for then even images given from above may become an insurmountable obstacle to a more perfect knowledge of God.

The creative idea of God is realized and made manifest in the world; but created freedom moves in the opposite direction: it seeks God Himself, in whom lies its final goal and the ultimate meaning of its existence. The purpose of the created world is not in its own being as such, in itself and for itself, in its mode of existence, but rather that the creature should know the Creator, and that creation should be deified.

The cause of creation is the superabundant goodness of God, and in no way a necessity for the Incarnation of the Logos. In other words: the Incarnation of the Word was not necessary for the Word Himself, nor was the creation of the world merely a preliminary act for the Incarnation of God.

The condescension of the Word is not a witness to some self-sufficient value of the world in itself, but the purpose and meaning of this condescension is revealed in the very name received by the Word of God, who humbled Himself in the flesh: Jesus, the Savior – “and thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people” (Matt. 1:21).

God is not an “ideal world,” in the sense of a world of ideas; nor is the form of empirical being the realization of a divine ideal world – such that, without this realization, even the very Divine Being would appear defective or incomplete.

In human creativity, turned toward the world, the human idea seeks its embodiment, its realization; without this, it remains unfinished in its development. But in the Divine world the Incarnation of the Logos is not the completion of some theogonic process – that is, the completion of a development within the Divinity Itself, necessary for God’s own fullness of being.

Spiritual prayer is neither artistic creation, nor scientific work, nor philosophical seeking and reflection, nor abstract rational theology; the spiritual life is not the satisfaction of our emotional strivings through their realization – that is, through their fulfillment in experiences or materialized images, such as in art. All that has just been named constitutes various forms of the activity of imagination. Some of them may be ranked higher, others lower – that is, it is possible to establish a hierarchy of these forms according to their value – but nonetheless all this belongs to the sphere of imagination, which must be overcome; otherwise, one cannot attain either perfect prayer, or true theology, or a life truly pleasing to God.

Thus the path of the Orthodox ascetic is as follows: he seeks the true God the Creator; for this, through noetic prayer he wages battle against the dark hosts of all kinds of images – both visible, that is, having some external form, outline, spatial or temporal extension, color and the like, and mental, that is, concepts – so that, stripping himself of every created image, he may pray to God face to Face.

God creates the world, and this creation proceeds in the order of condescension; but man goes to God in the order of ascent, and in his ascent from creation to God, the ascetic does not deny the reality and value of creation, but he does not absolutize or deify it, nor does he see in it either ultimate purpose or ultimate value. God created the world not so that He Himself might live the life of creation, but in order to bring the rational creature into communion with His Divine being; and when the rational creature does not attain deification – which cannot be accomplished without its own participation – then the very meaning of its existence disappears. From this awareness is born a great rapture before God the Creator in the contemplation of creation and the most real perception of everything in the created world, but at the same time this very awareness leads to detachment from all creation for the sake of contemplating God. This detachment is not a rejection of real created being in the sense of stripping it away or denying it as a “phantasm”; it is not a poetic or philosophical soaring in the realm of lofty and beautiful images or “pure” ideas, however high their value may be, for even such an orientation again carries us into the imaginary world. No – it is the yearning for the living and true God by virtue of love for Him, by virtue of our calling to live in God, in Whom is the Ultimate Goal and the Ultimate Value. In God there is completeness, having no need of incarnation; in God there is perfection, excluding all struggle and tragedy. God is not “beyond good and evil,” for “He is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all.”

For the simple and humble believer, liberation from the power of imagination is achieved through a simple and whole-hearted striving to live according to the will of God. It is so simple, and yet “hidden from the wise and prudent,” and it cannot be explained in words.

In this search for the will of God is contained “renunciation” of the world. The soul desires to live with God and according to God, and not “according to its own way,” and therefore renounces its own will and imagination, which are incapable of creating real being, but are rather “outer darkness.”

The world of human will and imagination is a world of “phantoms” of truth. This world man shares with the fallen demons, and therefore imagination is the conduit of demonic energy.

Both demonic images and images created by man himself can influence people, altering or transforming them; but in this one thing is inevitable: every image created by man himself, or suggested by demons, and received by the soul, will distort the spiritual image of man, created in the image and likeness of God. Such “creativity” in its final development leads to the self-deification of the creature – that is, to the affirmation of the divine principle as if contained within man’s very nature.

For this reason, natural religion – that is, the religion of human reason – inevitably takes on a pantheistic character.

Both human and demonic images possess a certain power, sometimes very great, but not because they are real in the ultimate sense, like the divine power which creates out of nothing, but because the human will bows before them, and only in yielding itself to them does it become shaped by them. But the Lord delivers the repentant from the power of passions and imagination, and the Christian, freed from them, laughs at the power of images.

The power of cosmic evil over man is colossally great, and not one of the heirs of Adam can overcome it without Christ and outside of Christ; He is Jesus the Savior in the proper and unique sense of this word.

Such is the faith of the Orthodox ascetic, and therefore the prayer of noetic silence is performed through the unceasing invocation of the name of Jesus Christ, whence this prayer received the name of the “Jesus Prayer.”

The silent monk, in the heavy struggle with imagination which distorts the spiritual life, encounters its manifold manifestations, which can be classified in various ways.

The Elder reduced them to the four forms already mentioned, which enabled him to express the essence of the matter.

The first form is meant in the struggle against any passion whatsoever.

The second is peculiar to those who pray according to the first pattern. To this form of imagination also belongs the well-known method of theological meditation (bogomyslie) or “meditation,” when by the effort of imagination a person creates in his mind visual scenes from the life of Christ or other sacred images. Usually, beginners or inexperienced ascetics resort to this practice. The practitioner of such “imaginative” prayer does not enclose his mind in the heart for the sake of inner sobriety, but, stopping at the visual aspect of the divine images which he himself creates, as he thinks, brings himself into a state of psychic (emotional) excitation, which, with strong concentration, may reach a peculiar pathological ecstasy.

In this state he rejoices in his “achievements,” becomes attached to such experiences, cultivates them, considers them spiritual, full of grace, even lofty; he imagines himself to be a saint and a beholder of the mysteries of God, and as a result he comes to hallucinations, falls into serious mental illness, or, at best, remains “in delusion,” spending his life in a fantastic world.

Concerning the third and fourth forms of imagination, it may be said that they lie at the foundation of all rationalist culture, and therefore it is especially difficult for an educated person to renounce them, since he sees in this culture his spiritual wealth – renunciation of which is incomparably more difficult than renunciation of material goods. This circumstance leads to a strange phenomenon which we have had occasion to observe, namely: among the simple and poorly educated ascetics who have come to love noetic prayer, one more often finds attainment of great heights and purity than among the educated, who in the overwhelming majority of cases stop at the second form of prayer.

Deeply religious and ascetically minded people quickly understand the third form of imagination as a turning toward the earth; and since its disparity with prayer is obvious, the struggle with it during prayer is simplified. The matter is different with the fourth form, which can reach extraordinary subtlety and present itself as life in God.

The exceptional importance of this question in asceticism compels us to dwell on it somewhat more in detail.

***

Among those who pray according to the first pattern, fantastical imagination predominates; among those who pray according to the second pattern, the temptation prevails to comprehend everything by means of reason. In the latter, life is concentrated in the brain. Their mind is not united with the heart and constantly rushes outward in the attempt to understand and master everything.

Having some measure of genuine religious experience, though not yet sufficient, they seek to “supplement” the gaps in this experience by their own reasoning and to penetrate into the mysteries of the Divine Being – and then, inevitably, they fall into imagination. In their zeal they will not, or cannot, understand that they are overturning the true hierarchy of being, the authentic order of things; and, as if forgetting that God created us in His image and likeness, they begin themselves to “create,” introducing into the Divine Being elements of their own image and likeness.

That ideal sphere in which they then live, if accompanied by certain intellectual talents, gives them an apparent superiority over others, and this circumstance further deepens their self-reliance.

A characteristic distortion to which the second form of prayer leads is – rationalism.

***

The theologian-rationalist constructs his system much like an architect builds a palace or a temple, using empirical and metaphysical concepts as building materials, caring less for the correspondence of his ideal construction to the actual truth of being than for the splendor and harmonious integrity of his work in its logical aspect.

Strangely enough, many great people have not withstood this essentially naive temptation, whose hidden root is pride.

The creations of the intellect are dear to their author just as a mother cherishes the child of her womb. He loves his own creations as himself, for he identifies with them, closing himself within his own sphere. In such cases, no human intervention from outside can help, and if he does not renounce his imagined wealth, he will never attain pure prayer or true contemplation.

Anyone who prays according to the third pattern knows the difficulty of such renunciation, but the discussion of this will be deferred to another place.

Many theologian-philosophers, being essentially rationalists, ascend to a supra-rational, or as we might say, a super-logical mental sphere. But this super-logical sphere is not yet the Divine world; it remains enclosed within the bounds of human, created nature, and as such, it is accessible to reason in the natural order.

Their intellectual visions do not fit within the framework of ennomical thinking – that is, formal logic – and extend into the realms of metalogic and antinomic thought. Yet even then, they remain essentially the result of rational activity.

Overcoming narrow ennomical rationalism is a mark of high intellectual culture, but it is not yet “true faith” or genuine vision of God.

These individuals, often possessing outstanding abilities for rationalist thought, by virtue of this very ability consistently ascend to the recognition of the conditionality of human thought’s laws and the impossibility of enclosing all being within the iron bands of logical reasoning. Through this recognition, they rise to the supra-rational, or rather, super-logical contemplation. Yet even then, they behold only the beauty of what is created in the image of God; and because those first entering this “silence of the mind” experience a certain “mystical awe,” they mistake their contemplations for experiences of mystical communion with God, whereas in reality they remain within the limits of human, created nature.

The categories with which the rational mind operates in such states transcend temporal and spatial dimensions, giving the contemplator a sense of eternal wisdom. These are the ultimate limits reachable by the reasoning mind on the paths of its natural development and self-contemplation. This experience, regardless of how it is interpreted – that is, whatever doctrinal formulation is applied to it – is, in essence, an experience of a pantheistic order.

Reaching these “bounds of light and darkness” (Job 26:10), man contemplates his intellectual beauty, which many mistake for Divinity.

The light they behold is indeed light, but not the True Light in which there is not a single shadow; it is the natural light of the mind of a human created in the image of God.

This light of the mind, exceeding in dignity the light of any empirical knowledge, can just as rightly be called “darkness,” for it is the darkness of detachment or abstraction, and God is not present in it. Perhaps more than in any other case, one should recall the words of the Lord: “Take heed that the light which is in you be not darkness” (Luke 11:35). After all, the first cosmic, pre-historical catastrophe – the fall of the Morning Star, Lucifer, who became darkness – was the result of self-loving contemplation of one’s own beauty; a contemplation that ended in self-deification.

We speak in a cold and disconnected manner, but one who has stood in these spiritual places might say: “But this is frightening… where is the guarantee of true communion with God, and not merely dreamlike, philosophical, pantheistic experience?”

The Blessed Elder Silouan categorically affirmed that such a guarantee, in the domain subject to our logical control, is love for one’s enemies.

He said:

“The Lord is humble and meek, and He loves His creation; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there will inevitably be humble love for one’s enemies and prayer for peace. And if you do not have this love, ask, and the Lord will give it to you, for He said: ‘Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find’” (Matthew 7:7).

And let no one dare to belittle this “psychological” sign, for such a psychic state is the consequence of genuine Divine action. The saving God saves the whole person: not only mind and spirit, but also soul, emotions, thought, and even the body – all is sanctified by God.

***

We touch only lightly and almost in passing upon the most difficult, age-old questions of the spiritual existence of man. We are very far from any claim to dialectically elucidate them to the point of rational comprehension. Were our task such clarification, it would be necessary to examine a whole series of historical examples – but let that labor be undertaken by someone else. We personally consider such abstract investigation impossible and are fully convinced that the only path to the comprehension of truth lies through faith and living experience – that is, the very path of being itself. Yet we must immediately note that the experience we speak of does not depend on human arbitrariness alone, but is granted from above as a gift of Divine favor. Philosophical experience and pantheistic experience are possible within the order of human natural ability and volition, but the Christian experience of supernatural communion with God transcends our own volition.

Christian life is the accord of two wills:

the Divine and the created human.

God can reveal Himself to any person along any path, at any moment, and in any spiritual or physical place; yet, being above all compulsion, He never violates the freedom of His image. If created freedom turns self-lovefully inward or asserts itself as a non-created, divine principle, then – regardless of any height of contemplation – it remains closed to the action of Divine grace.

Communion with God is attained through the paths of prayer, and our discussion is concerned with prayer. If we enter, to some extent, into the sphere of dialectics, it is not because we hope to convince anyone through this method, but to show that even within this sphere of human existence, the paths of prayer are present. Any attempt to rationalize spiritual experience is open to a variety of objections. This is explained by the fact that each of us, within the ideal sphere of our worldview, is free to establish any hierarchy of values.

Continuing the discussion of prayer, we will attempt to schematically outline one of the most difficult struggles encountered by the Orthodox ascetic in moving from the second form of prayer to the third – namely, the struggle with “rational imagination.”

***

Upon careful self-contemplation, a person discovers a psychological characteristic of rational thought, which can be defined as the immanent certainty of our thinking, or, in other words, as the subjective obviousness of the correctness of our conclusions. There is a certain compelling force in the arguments of reason, in its proofs, and it requires great culture and deep spiritual experience to detect this strange deception – and to free oneself from its power, Divine assistance is necessary.

The recognition of this deception is, to some extent, possible even through speculative investigation of the fundamental laws of our thought – that is, the law of identity and the law of sufficient reason.

The first, the law of identity, represents the static aspect of our thinking; its immobile point of support, dead in its stillness.

The second aspect of our thinking – the dynamic one – is expressed in the law of “sufficient” reason. Centuries of historical experience have convincingly shown the conditionality of this law; a judgment about the sufficiency of a reason is always subjective: what appears sufficient to one may not be so to another. And if we look more closely, we see that, in essence, it is never entirely sufficient.

The Orthodox ascetic discovers the relativity of our thinking in another way, as indeed all problems of being are resolved by him on other paths – namely, the paths of faith and prayer. He does not trust his weak reason, but the Great God. He believes that the commandments of Christ are the infallible standard, the canon of truth; that in their very essence they are Divine power and eternal life itself, and this faith leads him to a continuous standing before the judgment of God, the only just judgment. Every action, every word, every even slightest unexpressed movement of thought or feeling – all is placed under the judgment of the Word of Christ.

When the grace of the Holy Spirit enters us and becomes an active inner force within us, the movements of our soul naturally approach the perfection of the commandments; but when come the hours of divine abandonment, divine remoteness, and the Divine light is replaced by the heavy darkness of the uprising of passions, then everything changes within us, and a great struggle unfolds in the soul.

Spiritual battles are manifold, but the deepest and heaviest of them is the struggle with pride.

Pride is the opponent of Divine law. By perverting the Divine order of being, it introduces decay and death everywhere.

It manifests even on the level of the flesh, but it is more inclined to frenzy on the mental, spiritual plane. Placing itself first, it wages a struggle for dominance over all, and in this struggle, its main instrument is the reasoning mind (Ratio).

Reason, presenting its arguments, rejects the commandments of Christ – among them, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matt. 7:1) – as madness. It claims that the capacity for judgment constitutes the distinctive dignity of man, and that in this capacity lies his superiority over all the world; by it alone he can rule.

To assert its primacy in being, it points to its achievements, to its culture; it offers numerous proofs, strong in their self-evidence, allegedly demonstrated in the experience of historical life, that only it has the right to decide, the right to establish or declare truth; it calls itself the regulating mind of being.

Impersonal in its laws of functioning, in essence only one of the manifestations of human personal life, one of the energies of personality, reason, when given the primary place in the spiritual being of man, consistently reaches the point of waging war against its very source, i.e., the personal principle.

Ascending, as it believes, to the highest heights; descending, as it thinks, to the deepest abysses, it seeks to probe the limits of being in order to give everything its own “definition,” and failing to achieve this goal, it falls into exhaustion and declares: “There is no God!”

Then, continuing its struggle for dominance, with audacity and at the same time with despair, it says: “If there is a God, then how can I accept that this God is not me?” (This expression belongs to one who went this path).

Having not reached the limits of being and attributing this infinitude to itself, it rises in proud rebellion and declares:

“I have examined everything and found nothing greater than myself; therefore – I am God.”

And indeed, the reasoning mind, when the spiritual being of man is concentrated upon it and in it, rules and dominates in its abstract sphere to such an extent that it does not discover a higher self, and therefore ends with the acknowledgment of the divine principle within itself.

This is the final limit of rational imagination and at the same time the deepest depth of fall and darkness.

***

There are people who yield to the claims of reason described above and accept them as truth, but the Orthodox ascetic engages them in struggle. In this struggle, the intervention of strange, external forces becomes apparent, and the battle with them takes on a tragic character, reaching extraordinary intensity. Victory for the ascetic is possible only through faith, which conquers the world (1John 5:4): “For everyone born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith.”

To confront these matters, the monk does not sit comfortably in an armchair in a study, but in the stillness of the night, far from the world, unseen and unheard by anyone, he falls before God with great weeping in prayer:

“God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” like the Publican, or like Peter: “Lord, save me” (Luke 18:13; Matthew 14:30). In spirit he beholds the abyss of “utter darkness” opening before him, and therefore his prayer is fervent…

Words are powerless to convey the mystery of this vision and the intensity of this struggle, which can endure for years, until the person is purified of passions, until the Divine light comes, revealing the falsehood of our judgments and leading the soul into the boundless expanses of true life.

***

We have spoken at length with the Elder on these matters; he said that the source of the struggle does not lie in reason itself, but in the pride of our spirit; from pride, the activity of imagination is intensified, and from humility, it ceases; pride strives to create “its own” world, while humility receives life from God.

Through many years of severe struggle, the blessed Elder acquired the power to stand with his mind in God, rejecting intrusive thoughts. In the battle with enemies, he endured great suffering, but when we knew him, he spoke of the past with profound inner peace and in very simple words:

“The mind struggles with mind… our mind struggles with the mind of the enemy… The enemy has fallen through pride and imagination, and he draws us there as well… In this battle great courage is needed… The Lord allows His servant to struggle, but He Himself watches over him, as He watched over the Great Anthony when he fought with demons… You surely remember how in the Life of Saint Anthony it is said that a friend carried the Venerable One to the village church; when Anthony regained consciousness at night, he asked his friend to carry him back to the cemetery. Completely ill, he could not stand on his feet and prayed lying down; through prayer he again endured a severe attack of demons, and when, suffering greatly from them, he lifted his eyes and saw light, he recognized in it the coming of the Lord and said:

‘Where were You, merciful Jesus, when the enemies were wounding me?’ And the Lord answered him:

‘I was here, Anthony, and I watched your courage.’

“So we must always remember that the Lord sees our struggle with the enemy, and therefore we should not be afraid, even if all hell were to rise against us, but be courageous.”

“The saints learned to struggle with the enemy; they knew that the enemies act by deception through thoughts, and therefore all their lives they rejected thoughts. A thought first appears to be harmless, but then it separates the mind from prayer and begins to confuse it, so it is necessary to reject all thoughts, even those appearing good, and keep the mind pure in God… And if a thought does come, do not be dismayed, but firmly trust in God and remain in prayer… Do not be dismayed, for the enemies rejoice in our confusion… Pray, and the thought will pass… ‘This is the way of the Saints.’”

About pride, the Elder said that it knows no end to its claims. In his notes, there is such a figurative parable:

“One hunter loved to go into the forest and fields in pursuit of game.

One day he climbed a high mountain for a long time, tracking a beast, and, exhausted, sat on a large rock to rest. Seeing a flock of birds flying from one height to another, he began to think: ‘Why did God not give humans wings so that we could fly?’ At that moment, a humble hermit passed by, and, understanding the hunter’s thoughts, said to him:

‘See, you imagine that God did not give you wings; but if He gave you wings, you still would not be satisfied and would say: “My wings are weak, and I cannot reach heaven to see what is there”; and if you were given wings strong enough to reach heaven, you would still not be satisfied and would say: “I do not understand what is happening here.” And if you are given reason, again you will not be satisfied and will say: “Why am I not an angel?” And if you are made an angel, you will again be dissatisfied and say: “Why am I not a cherub?” And if you become a cherub, you will say: “Why did God not let me rule heaven?” And even if you are allowed to rule heaven, you will not be satisfied, and like another, boldly demand more.

Therefore, always humble yourself and be content with what is given to you, and then you will live with God.’

The hunter saw that the hermit spoke the truth, and he thanked God for sending him a monk who instructed him and revealed to him the path of humility.”

The Elder very insistently emphasized that the way of the Saints is to humble oneself and purify the mind from all imagination.

“The saints said: I will suffer in hell. And this despite the miracles they performed. By experience, they knew that if the soul condemns itself to hell, yet simultaneously hopes in God’s mercy, the power of God comes into the soul, and the Holy Spirit clearly testifies to salvation. Through self-condemnation, the soul humbles itself, and no thoughts remain in it; with a pure mind, it stands before God. ‘This is spiritual wisdom.’”

***

Man drills the earth with iron to extract oil from its depths, and he achieves the goal he has set. Man drills the heavens with reason to seize the fire of Divinity, but he is rejected by God for pride.

Divine visions are given to a person not when he seeks them, nor precisely the visions he desires, but when the soul descends into the hell of repentance and truly feels itself worse than all creatures. Visions that are forcibly achieved by reason are not genuine, but “illusory”; and when this illusory is accepted as truth, conditions are created in the soul that hinder even the possibility of grace acting – that is, of true contemplation.

In grace-filled contemplation, things are revealed that surpass even the richest creative imagination, as the divine Paul says: “…eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man” (1Cor. 2:9). When, like the Apostles, a person is caught up by grace into the vision of the Divine Light, afterward he engages in theology, “relating” what he has seen and known. True theology is not the conjecture of the human mind or the result of critical investigation, but the account of that being into which a person has been led by the action of the Holy Spirit.

At times, a word is granted for this, while at other times there are difficulties in finding concepts, finding expressions, through which one could somehow convey that which is above all earthly image and understanding. Yet, despite these difficulties and the inevitability of various forms of expression, he who has “known” will, in whatever verbal form, recognize and distinguish the one who has truly contemplated from fanciful, rational speculation, no matter how brilliant the latter may be.

VII. On Discernment and Its Forms

By closing the entrances to the heart, placing there as guardian the mind stripped of imagination and speculation but armed with prayer and the name of Jesus Christ, the ascetic enters into battle with every external influence and every thought originating from outside. In this lies the essence of intelligent vigilance. Its goal is the struggle against the passions. In a broader and more comprehensive sense, victory over the passions is achieved by keeping the commandments of Christ; but in this context, we are speaking of a specific form of ascetic vigilance, which begins after the ascetic, having passed certain stages of spiritual development, abandons imaginative prayer according to the first image, and then also according to the second, having experienced its imperfection.

The guarding of mind and heart against all intrusive thoughts is associated with a prolonged struggle, extremely difficult and subtle. A person living amid an infinite multitude of diverse influences and impressions, due to the constant change of these influences and impressions, does not grasp their nature or strength. But the ascetic, practitioner of intelligent silence, in his withdrawal from everything external, striving day and night to reduce the number of incoming impressions to the absolute minimum – by distancing himself from curious observation of the external world, from overhearing others’ conversations, from reading books – concentrates all his power on his inner being, and there enters into a “single combat” with the thought. Only under this condition can he discern its nature and power, sometimes colossal. A person insufficiently attentive inwardly easily falls under the influence of a thought and becomes its slave. By yielding his will to a thought, a person spiritually resembles and even identifies with the spirit whose energy is contained in that thought. Accepting with the soul a passionate thought, which very often is the result of demonic influence, the person thereby becomes an instrument of demonic action.

A deeply praying mind sometimes senses the approach of some spirit from outside, but if the mind’s prayerful attention is not disturbed, the spirit departs unnoticed, so that afterward the person cannot say who, for what, or with what purpose it came.

Sometimes, in deep prayer, something difficult to describe occurs. Around the mind pass sanctified phenomena, which seek to attract the attention of the mind, and if the mind does not give them its attention, they seem to say to it: “I bring you wisdom and understanding, and if you do not accept me now, perhaps you will never see me again.” But the experienced mind pays them no heed, and they depart not only unperceived but even unrecognized.

The mind does not even know for certain whether it was an evil enemy or a good angel; but it knows from experience that, if attention stops on contemplating a brilliant thought brought before it, prayer is lost, and afterward it is with great difficulty that one seeks it again. Experience has shown that, in the hour of prayer, one must not dwell even on seemingly good thoughts, for in doing so the mind will inevitably encounter other thoughts, and, as the Elder said, it “will not emerge pure.” The loss of pure prayer is an irreparable detriment.

In striving for his freedom, the ascetic engages in such an intense struggle with thought that one who has not experienced it cannot imagine it. In this inner combat with thought, in this direct confrontation, in which the soul of a novice often suffers partial defeat or sometimes gains victory, the ascetic has the opportunity to study the nature of thought to an astonishing subtlety. Thus, although he does not commit the sin suggested to him, he understands the operation (energy) of every passion far more deeply and subtly than one possessed by it. The latter can observe the manifestation of the energy of a passion in himself and others, but to attain a deeper knowledge, one must reach the spiritual state of the one praying according to the third image, seeing every passion in its inception.

Knowledge of the passions, acquired through overcoming them, leads to discernment born of experience. It should be noted, however, that discernment, which results from long struggle with the passions, does not attain the perfection of the gift of discernment granted through a special action of grace. The former – through certain gestures, facial expressions, individual words, the manner of silence or conversation, or the psychic atmosphere created by a person – recognizes his spiritual state. However, the most reliable basis for judgment about a person is conversation with him, for in his words the measure of genuine spiritual experience and what results merely from external instruction is revealed. The latter – that is, grace-filled discernment – knows all things through prayer and does not require the presence of the person.

***

In the course of prolonged inner struggle, the ascetic encounters, in addition to what has been mentioned above, three kinds of discernment:

1. The first arises from a natural intuition present in some people, heightened by a life of fasting;

2. The second arises from demonic influence;

3. The third comes as a gift of grace.

The first type, for a piously minded and humble person, can be useful and applied for good, as it helps in more subtle observance of Christ’s commandments in relation to one’s neighbor. For the proud and passionate, however, it is harmful, as it increases occasions for the passions and opens greater possibilities for their gratification.

The second type is extremely dangerous for those who accept it, as sooner or later it leads to the painful disruption of all a person’s spiritual and psychological faculties, even distorting their very appearance.

The third type carries the greatest responsibility and is a source of many spiritual sufferings for its possessor. The proud do not receive it at all.

All three kinds of discernment bring suffering. In the first type – natural intuition – suffering arises from heightened sensitivity of the neuro-psychic apparatus. In the second type, it arises from the generally destructive and corrupting nature of demonic action, which often becomes evident only after a long period of time. With this type of discernment, even if there occasionally appears the ability to “read” another’s thoughts, the deep inner life of a person remains inaccessible. It sometimes manifests with slightly greater reliability regarding events of an external nature. Those who accept it are given occasions for the indulgence of vanity.

True spiritual discernment is a gift of grace. With this discernment, the depth of the human soul is revealed, often hidden even from the person themselves. This type of discernment has no psychopathological character whatsoever and causes suffering to its possessor only because, as a gift from God, it is full of love – and it is forced primarily to behold the “ugliness and insignificance” of humankind. This is the suffering of love. Those who possess this gift never seek to hold onto it; pride and vanity are alien to them.

***

Above, in the previous discussion, we devoted special attention to that kind of discernment which flows from experience. The Holy Fathers call it the “gift of reasoning” and consider it the highest ascetic attainment. Its essence consists, on the one hand, in the ability to recognize the causes of a given spiritual phenomenon – that is, to discern whether it arises from grace, from demonic influence, or according to the natural course of human development; and, on the other hand, in knowing the order of spiritual life, the sequence of spiritual states, and their relative value or worth.

This gift is highly esteemed by ascetics because it always arises solely as the result of long experience in the struggle against passions, experience of many gracious intercessions and visitations, and experience of numerous temptations and attacks from the enemy. It is precious in spiritual mentors because the enemy loves to cloak himself in the form of an angel of light, and those capable of perceiving him clearly are rare.

We know of instances in which the blessed Elder Silouan, through prayer, foresaw “what is far away as if near,” when he perceived the future of a person, or when the deep secrets of the human soul were revealed to him, as many who experienced it themselves – and are still living – could attest. Yet he himself never sought this, nor even attached great importance to it. His soul was wholly absorbed in compassion for the world; he was entirely focused on prayer for the world, and in his spiritual being, he valued this love above all else.

From our long acquaintance with the blessed Elder, we were able to observe that he was intimately aware of the secrets of the spirit, and therefore he was truly a “faithful guide.”

After those exceptional, rare in the history of the Church, gracious visitations he was granted; after nearly half a century of unceasing ascetic struggle in which he persevered; and after some mistakes he endured during the first half of his long ascetic life, the Elder approached that measure of insight, that degree of perfection, which made him an undeniable support for others.

He knew the hierarchy of spiritual states, that is, the sequence of spiritual growth, which is so important, and at times even necessary, to ensure uninterrupted progress. A quite common phenomenon in the spiritual life of both monks and laypeople is the violation or distortion of this hierarchy. This occurs when a certain spiritual state or ascetic accomplishment satisfies a person, and he refuses what lies further along the path, considering this next stage inferior to the former, thus setting a limit to his own progress.

The Elder possessed experiential knowledge of the spiritual path. He pointed out three essential stages of this path: first – the reception of grace; second – its loss; and third – the recovery of grace or its renewed acquisition through the ascetic struggle of humility.

Many have received grace, not only from those dwelling in the Church, but also from those outside it, for the Lord shows no partiality. Yet none preserved the first grace, and only very few regained it.

Those who do not know this secondary period, who have not experienced through effort the return of grace, essentially lack true spiritual insight.

Elder Silouan was rich not only in personal inner experience but also, theoretically, he was well versed in the ascetic writings of the Church Fathers. By the gift of God, he was not only faithful to the tradition of the Church, but in himself the experience of the great Fathers was repeated.

He read very little; he did not enjoy reading, for the act of reading interfered with his prayer. But he loved to listen, because, without ceasing the Jesus Prayer, he could simultaneously “attend” to the reading. He listened to readings in the church during night services; he read a little in his cell; and he absorbed much through living conversation with other ascetics of the Holy Mountain, among whom there were many highly gifted individuals. In the 1930s, for a long period, he often visited his friend, the schemamonk Kassian, when he lived near the monastery in the “Cypresses.” Father Kassian loved and greatly respected the Elder, cherished his visits, and gladly read aloud to him. The Elder remembered much from the Works of the Holy Fathers, which was facilitated by the shared experience they had.

To remember the spiritual is very difficult, because in spiritual being there is too little external expression or imagery upon which material memory could rely. Is it not for this reason that the all-knowing Lord taught the mysteries of the Kingdom to the people in living images of reality and in parables?… Some surrogate for spiritual insight is possible through “external learning,” which is observed in those with extensive intellectual experience. But, of course, only one who has himself endured all, to whom experiential knowledge of the mysteries of the spiritual world has been granted from above, can truly remember the teaching of the Fathers.

This “simple” man emerged from his long struggle as the possessor of profound knowledge and of the methods and means of asceticism. This knowledge, together with his spiritual strength, made him, on the one hand, internally free from the bondage of form, and, on the other hand, spared him from wandering along foreign paths in bewilderment and misunderstanding of what was happening.

Many foreign paths run parallel to the single true way. Many closed spheres, alien to Christianity, present themselves to the discerning gaze of the ascetic, and he cannot navigate them without the Divine Light. The Elder, who in the Holy Spirit was granted to behold Christ, who in the Holy Spirit was raised into the vision of uncreated light, carried this light within himself. Therefore, with astonishing insight, he could discern true reality from the masks and phantoms of truth that inevitably meet a person on his spiritual journey.

The UNCREATED Divine Light, by its very nature, is something entirely different from physical light. In contemplating it, above all, there arises the experience of the living God, which engulfs the entire person; a non-material sense of the Immaterial; an intelligent sense, but not a rational one; a sense that, with commanding power, transports the person into another realm, yet does so with such ineffable subtlety that the person does not perceive the moment when it occurs, and does not know of himself whether he is in the body or outside it.

In this state, he becomes aware of himself with a forceful intensity and depth unknown in ordinary life, while simultaneously forgetting both himself and the world, carried away by the sweetness of God’s love. In spirit, he sees the Invisible; he breathes in Him, he is entirely within Him.

To this super-intellectual, all-consuming experience of the living God is joined a vision of light – but a light entirely different in its nature from physical light. The person then dwells in the light, is assimilated to the light, is ensouled by it, and perceives neither the materiality of himself nor of the world.

This vision comes in an incomprehensible manner; at a time when it is not expected; it comes neither from outside nor from inside, but inexplicably envelops the spirit of the person, elevating him into the realm of Divine light. And he cannot say whether it is an ecstasy (extasis), that is, an exalting of the soul from the body, because he does not notice even a return to the body; thus there is nothing pathological in this phenomenon.

God acts; the person perceives; and at that moment he knows neither space nor time; neither birth nor death; neither gender nor age; neither social nor hierarchical position, nor any other conditions or relations of this world.

The Lord has come, the Beginningless Leader and Light of Life, mercifully to visit the repenting soul.

***

The Divine Light is perceived independently of surroundings – both in the darkness of night and in the light of day. Sometimes, by God’s favor, the perception of the body and of the surrounding world is preserved.

In such a state, a person may keep his eyes open and simultaneously perceive two lights – the physical light and the Divine Light. The Holy Fathers call this vision with “natural” eyes. This, however, does not mean that the act of seeing the Divine Light is analogous in all respects to the usual psychophysiological process of natural vision; that is, it does not mean that the Divine Light, like physical light, produces a certain irritation of the optic nerve which then passes into a psychological process of seeing, regardless of which scientific theory of light one adopts. The Divine Light is different by its very nature; it is the light of the mind, the light of the spirit, the light of love, the light of life.

The natural light of the physical world serves as an image of the Divine Light. Just as vision of surrounding objects is possible only by means of light – when light is dim, the eye barely discerns objects; when light is stronger, they are seen more clearly; and in full sunlight, vision reaches a certain completeness – so too in the spiritual world, any true vision is possible only in the Divine Light. But this light is not granted to humans in equal measure: faith is light, but limited; hope is light, but not perfect; and love is light, and it is already perfect.

The Uncreated Light, like the sun, illuminates the spiritual world and reveals spiritual paths, invisible by any other means. Without this light, a person cannot understand, nor contemplate, nor, even more, fulfill the commandments of Christ, for he remains in darkness.

The Uncreated Light carries within it eternal life and the power of Divine love; indeed, it is itself eternal life and Divine love.

Whoever has not contemplated the Uncreated Light with force and discernment has not attained true contemplation. Whoever, before seeing the Uncreated Light, arrogantly extends his own mind into the contemplation of the mysteries of the spirit, not only fails to see them but blocks his own path to them. He will perceive only masks and phantoms of truth, created by himself or brought to him by the opposing force of demonic delusions.

True contemplation comes from above, effortlessly and quietly. Spiritual contemplation is not the same as abstract intellectual reflection; it is qualitatively “other.” It is the light of life, granted from above by God’s favor, and the organic path to it is not reasoning, but repentance.

The Divine Light is eternal life, the Kingdom of God, the uncreated energy of the Godhead. It is not contained within the created nature of man; it is of a different essence from us, and therefore cannot be revealed in us by any ascetic means. It comes solely as a gift of God’s mercy.

We asked the Elder how a person might know this from his own experience. The Blessed Elder affirmed that when God appears in great light, no doubt is possible that this is the Lord, the Creator and Almighty. But one who is granted to behold only a small light, if he relies not on the testimony of the Fathers of the Church but solely on his own experience, cannot clearly perceive its otherness relative to the soul. For him, the path to this knowledge can come only through further experiences of repeated visitations and withdrawals, which teach him to distinguish Divine action from natural human activity.

If a person’s prayer for the first time passes into the vision of the Divine Light, the things he perceives and experiences are so new and unusual that he cannot comprehend anything. He feels that the bounds of his being have been unspeakably “expanded,” that the light which has come has carried him from death into life. Yet, due to the magnitude of what occurs, he remains in astonishment and bewilderment, and only through repeated visitations does he understand the gift received from God. In this vision and afterwards, the soul is filled with deep peace and the sweet love of God; there are no longer desires for glory, wealth, or any earthly happiness, not even for life itself. All such things seem insignificant, and the soul is “drawn desirably” toward the living boundlessness of Christ, in whom there is neither beginning nor end, neither darkness nor death.

Of the two forms of contemplating the Divine Light described above, the Elder preferred the one in which the “world is entirely forgotten,” that is, when during prayer the spirit of man, apart from the images of the world, is led into the realm of limitless light. This vision grants greater understanding of the mysteries of the “age to come.” In this state, the soul experiences with profound intensity its participation in Divine life and truly encounters God in a manner beyond the capacity of human language to describe. When this vision ends, for reasons unknown to the person and entirely independent of his will, just as it began independently, the soul gradually returns to the perception of the surrounding world. In the quiet joy of God’s love, a subtle sorrow arises that she will again behold the light of this physical sun.

***

Man is the image of God, but one may ask: what in him constitutes the image of God? Or, in other words, in what does this image consist? In the body? In the psychic or psychophysical constitution of man? In the trinity of his soul’s faculties or manifestations?

The answer to this question is extraordinarily complex. Some reflections or glimmers of the image of God may indeed be found in all that has been mentioned, but the most essential is the “image of being.” The created being, by the gift of divine favor, participates in the uncreated, primordial Being… How is this possible? It is as incomprehensible and unfathomable as the mystery of the creation of the world from “nothing”; yet such is the mercy of the Heavenly Father that the one created “in His image and likeness” is endowed with the capacity to receive deification – that is, to become a partaker of Divine life, to acquire the Divine image of being, and to become God by grace.

Man “receives” deification – that is, in the act of deification, God is the acting principle, and man is the one who receives. Yet this reception is not a state of passivity, and the act of deification cannot occur otherwise than with the consent of the person himself; otherwise, the very possibility of deification disappears.

Here lies the essential distinction between the primary act of creation and its subsequent stage: the deification of the rational creature.

If the mystery of the creation of the world in general is incomprehensibly great, then the mystery of the creation of eternal gods is infinitely more majestic. If all life surrounding us is a wonder astonishing in its greatness, then the awareness of the Divine miracle within a human being, introduced into the realm of the Uncreated Light, reaches a depth and power incomparably greater.

For each person, if he stops to consider the fact of his being, that fact alone will be a source of profound amazement. We have encountered people who, ascending to the rational sphere proper to man by nature, were struck by its radiant grandeur. But when a person, by the action of God, is brought into the world of the Uncreated Light, then his “amazement before God” reaches an utter ineffability, and he finds neither words, nor images, nor sighs adequate to express his gratitude.

The Uncreated Light, proceeding from the impassible God, by its manifestation communicates to man a godlike impassibility, which constitutes the ultimate goal of the Christian ascetic struggle.

But one may ask: what is impassibility? By its linguistic form, the term is negative; does it not also carry a negative meaning in reality? Does it mean a stripping away of being? No. Christian impassibility is not the stripping of being, but the clothing of the soul in a new life, holy and eternal, that is, in God. The Apostle Paul says: “For we would not have you to be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life” (2Cor. 5:4).

In striving for impassibility, the Orthodox ascetic seeks a living and genuine communion with God, Whom he knows as impassible.

The impassibility of God is not something dead or static; it does not imply indifference to the life of the world or of man. God’s impassibility is not the absence of movement, compassion, or love. Yet as soon as we articulate these words, our mind instinctively frames them in empirical limitations, and doubts arise: does not movement, compassion, or love introduce relativity into God’s being? Do we not risk attributing to God an unworthy anthropomorphism?

God is entirely life, entirely love. “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all” – that is, no darkness of suffering understood as destruction or dying, no darkness of ignorance, non-being, or evil; no darkness of unresolved inner imperfection, contradiction, or lapse of being. God is the living God, dynamic, yet the dynamics of Divine life constitute an infinite, primordial fullness of being, excluding any theogonic process.

God is impassible, yet not indifferent to the life of creation. He loves, pities, sympathizes, rejoices, yet none of this introduces change, relativity, or passion into His being. God governs His creation with mathematical precision; He saves as Father, as Friend; He comforts as a mother; He participates intimately in the entire history of humanity, in the life of each person, yet His involvement does not bring change, fluctuation, or sequential process into the Divine Being itself.

God experiences the entire tragedy of the world, but this does not mean that tragedy occurs within God Himself, or that struggle arises as a consequence of His own incompleteness or darkness.

God loves the world, acts in it, enters it, becomes incarnate, suffers, and even dies in the flesh, all the while remaining unchangeable in His transcendent being. All of this He accomplishes as impassibly as He encompasses all spatial and temporal dimensions of created being in His eternity. In God, the static and dynamic aspects are so unified that no separate human concept can be applied to His being.

In striving for godlike impassibility, the Orthodox ascetic understands it not as “cold indifference,” not as “stripping away of phantom being,” not as contemplation “beyond good and evil,” but as life in the Holy Spirit.

The impassible one is full of love, compassion, and participation, yet all this flows from God acting within him. Impassibility can be defined as “the acquisition of the Holy Spirit,” as Christ living in us. Impassibility is the light of new life, generating in man new holy affections, new divine thoughts, a new illumination of eternal reason.

The Holy Fathers of the Church define impassibility as “the resurrection of the soul before the general resurrection of the dead” (John Climacus), as “attaining to the boundless in boundlessness” (Abba Phalasius, 1, 56).

***

Faith, understood not as a logical conviction but as the living sense of God, gives rise to the fear of God’s judgment; from fear comes repentance; from repentance, prayer, confession, and tears. As repentance, prayer, and tears increase and deepen, they first bring partial liberation from passions, from which hope is born.

Hope multiplies ascetic labor, prayer, and tears; it refines and deepens the sense of sin, thereby intensifying fear, which leads to profound repentance. This repentance moves the mercy of God, and the soul is granted the grace of the Holy Spirit, filled with the light of divine love.

And faith is love, but a small measure; and hope is love, but imperfect. Each time the soul rises from a lesser measure of love to a greater, it inevitably passes through fear. Love, by its very presence, casts out fear, but when love is small, fear, upon the soul’s ascent to greater love, is reborn and must again be overcome by love. Only perfect love, according to the testimony of the great Apostle of love, completely casts out fear – that fear in which there is torment.

There is another fear of God, in which there is no suffering, but joy and the breathing of holy eternity. Concerning this fear, which should not confine the soul within the bounds of earthly existence, the Elder says:

“Before God, one must live in fear and love. In fear, because He is Lord; in fear, so as not to offend the Lord by evil thoughts; in love, because the Lord is love.”

***

The intelligent silence of a Orthodox monk arises organically from deep repentance and the desire to keep the commandments of Christ. It is by no means an artificial application of Areopagite theology to the spiritual life.

The theological principles of the Areopagite do not contradict the results of such silence and, in this sense, intersect and coincide with it. Yet it is important to note a crucial point: the starting point and foundation of silence is not abstract philosophy or apophatic theology, but repentance and the struggle with the “law of sin” working in us (Rom. 7:23).

It is precisely on this path, in the effort to make the commandments of Christ the sole and all-encompassing law of our eternal being, that the “incomprehensibility” of God is perceived; and it is on this path that the spirit of man is stripped of all the images of the world and rises above the world.

This occurs when the monk deeply realizes himself to be “worse than all creatures.”

God, this Light, in which there is not a single shadow, is always present as Light. Yet in the performance of the artistic, intelligent prayer, the soul of the ascetic encounters a certain darkness of a completely special order – about which words, externally, will seem as paradoxical and contradictory as most subjects of Christian spiritual experience. This paradox arises, on the one hand, from the nature of the experience itself, and, on the other, from the perspective or viewpoint from which the spiritual event is considered and defined.

Into this darkness, the ascetic’s soul is inwardly plunged when, by an act of the will and through special ascetic methods, he strips away every representation and imagination of visible things, as well as every rational thought and concept; when he “still[s]” the mind and imagination, this may be called the “darkness of stripping.” The prayer is termed “artistic” because it is performed according to a special, established method.

If one seeks to define the spiritual “location” of this darkness, it may be said to stand at the threshold of the manifestation of the Uncreated Light. Yet if the practice of intelligent prayer is performed without proper repentance and a prayerful turning to God, the soul, stripped of all representations, may dwell for some moments in this darkness of stripping without seeing God, for in itself, in this darkness, God is not yet present.

While remaining in the darkness of stripping, the mind experiences a peculiar sense of delight and rest; and if it turns inward upon itself, it may sense a certain semblance of light – which, however, is not yet the Uncreated Light of God, but a natural property of the mind, created in the image of God. As an approach to the edge of the temporal, this contemplation brings the mind closer to knowledge of the eternal, granting a new form of understanding; yet this is still an abstract, indirect knowledge. Woe to the one who takes this wisdom for knowledge of the true God, and this contemplation as participation in the Divine Being. Woe, because in such a case the darkness of stripping, standing at the threshold of true theophany, becomes an impenetrable veil of the Divine, a strong wall that separates the soul from God even more than the darkness of grossly passionate rebellion, the darkness of overt demonic delusions, or the darkness of the loss of grace and divine abandonment.

Woe, because this would be delusion – a “deception” – for God is not yet in the darkness of stripping. God appears in the Light, and as Light.

When we call our rational knowledge and reflective consciousness “light,” it is possible, in a certain sense, to speak of a “darkness of theophany,” because it is inexplicable in rational terms: for our mind, God remains incomprehensible, unreachable. But this expression – “darkness of theophany” – is entirely conditional, for God is Light, in which there is no darkness, and He always appears as Light, and by His manifestation He leads man into the Light of eternal Divine Being.

The action of the Divine Light burns the passions in the sinful person, and thus, at certain times, it can be experienced as a consuming fire. Every devout Christian ascetic, earnestly desiring to live, inevitably passes through this burning in the fire.

***

The darkness of stripping is not the only “place” where the Uncreated Light of God manifests.

God can reveal Himself to any person along any path, even to His persecutors.

Truly, by His manifestation He will lift the person out of this world, and in this sense there will also occur the stripping or removal of sensual images and rational concepts – but that will follow a different order and a different sequence. And whoever God has been pleased to reveal His Light to will no longer be deceived by the natural light of their own mind; thus, the delusion mentioned earlier is possible only in the case when, before the manifestation of the Uncreated Light, a person through ascetic exercises attains the darkness of stripping, and in doing so trusts themselves rather than following the guidance of the Fathers.

When the revealed Light leaves a person, the soul longs for it and eagerly seeks it again by every means it can find and every method prescribed by the Fathers of the Church, among them the artistic intelligent prayer. Turning to this ascetic art, as centuries of experience have shown, is entirely legitimate, but one must not exaggerate its importance; conversely, one must not reject it, as some unwise persons do. This artistic method is not necessary for salvation; it serves only as an aid in cases where the grace-filled action, effortlessly uniting the mind with the heart, is weakened, and then this union of mind and heart is sought through the effort of the person themselves.

Properly, artistic prayer should be accompanied by positive content; in other words, it should arise from a sense of repentance and a turning toward God. If this is absent, then it contains only negative ascetic activity, which, by its very nature, cannot be considered a goal but only a means within our empirically given state of fallen sin and enslavement to passions – i.e., when the sin acting within us has become almost the law of our earthly existence.

Here we repeat what was said at the end of the previous passage: Orthodox stillness is not an artificial addition to the life of “Areopagitic apophatics.” No. It flows from deep repentance; at its foundation, according to Elder Silouan, lies the command of Christ: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind” (Luke 10:27). The apophatic asceticism of stripping arises from the seeking of the living God – “Whom the soul knows”; from the seeking of freedom of the mind from all images of the world, so as to stand before God in fullness of love, face to Face, with a pure mind in pure heartfelt prayer.

This is, above all, prayer, and not a rational philosophical analysis.

***

The Elder loved artistic stillness and constantly practiced it. It came to him easily, because his heartfelt prayer had never been interrupted from the moment he received this gift from the Mother of God.

For the performance of artistic intelligent prayer, a convenient external condition is as complete a peace as possible from all sensory disturbances, and above all, darkness and silence. Like all who live in stillness, the Elder was compelled to seek these external conveniences. Here we will note some minor details of his life that are known to us.

When he was still relatively young, for the sake of stillness he “requested” from the Abbot permission to live at Old Rusik, where he built a small separate cell not far from the communal building (a five-minute walk to the southeast). There he received visits from Father Stratonik. He did not live long at Old Rusik; he was returned to the Monastery and appointed steward. Then he would close himself in his cell, placing his alarm clock deep in a cupboard so as not to hear its ticking, and sometimes he would pull his thick woolen monastic hat down so that it covered both his eyes and ears.

When he became in charge of the monastery store, which was outside the monastery walls, he set up a corner in the spacious store suitable for stillness and spent nights there, coming to the church for Matins, before which the monastery gates were opened.

In the store, he caught even more colds and suffered greatly from rheumatism. His illness forced him, during the last years of his life in winter, to remain in his well-heated cell inside the monastery.

His final cell was on the same floor as the Abbot’s cell.

At night, he often went to another small cell that served him as a wood store; it was on the same floor, in a row of similar cells, which after a reduction in the number of brothers had been converted to wood storage, in a dead-end corridor with extremely thick stone walls. In this stone chamber, he had even greater solitude, complete silence, and darkness.

To an outside observer, the Elder remained “ordinary” until the end of his days. He lived as good monks generally do: fulfilling obedience, practicing abstinence in all things, observing the monastic rules and orders; he partook of Communion twice a week, and during fasts, three times. His work in the store was not difficult, and for his strength it was easy; it took relatively little time, though it required his presence during the day.

Until the end, he remained calm and good-natured; there were no outbursts, no passionate distortions in all his internal and external demeanor. As a truly experienced ascetic, he knew how not to reveal himself outwardly, standing before the Father in secret, according to the command of the Lord. Until the end, he remained distant from worldly concerns and indifferent to the things of this world, but in his deep heart he continuously carried the fire of Christ’s love.

In the writings of the Blessed Elder, the word “grace” constantly recurs. To better understand what should be meant by this word, we may pause to consider how an Orthodox monk understands grace.

The Russian word “Blagodat’” (Благодать) expresses, in part, a theological idea about it – an understanding of its nature – namely: the good gift of God, or the gift of divine grace; the uncreated, transcendent power (energy) of God.

Man is created in the image of God the Creator. In the essence of a created human being there is nothing uncreated. This created image of God cannot partake of the Divine essence, but it is endowed with the capacity to enter into communion with the uncreated Divinity through participation in His grace.

And although man is not partaker of the Divine essence, through grace he becomes a sharer in the Divine life.

Grace, as the uncreated energy of God, according to Orthodox understanding, is – “Divinity” itself.

When Divinity wills to unite with the human being, the person sees and experiences in himself the action of the Divine power, which transforms him, making him godlike – not only potentially, “according to the image,” but actually, “according to the likeness” of being.

Grace – Divinity – sanctifies man, deifies him, i.e., makes him a god.

The commandment of Christ is not, as we have said, merely an ethical norm, but in itself is eternal Divine life.

The natural human being does not possess this life in his created existence, and therefore, to do the will of God, that is, to live according to God’s commandment, a person cannot by his own strength; yet he is capable of aspiring toward God, toward blessed eternal life.

The natural human striving would remain only a striving, without the possibility of its real fulfillment, if it were not met by the Divine power – grace – which in itself is the sought-for, eternal Divine life.

In his experience, the Christian ascetic becomes convinced that grace, in its action, can only be of Divine origin. He becomes convinced that in the very nature of man there is no such power. Further, through experience, he verifies that not only does man seek God, but God Himself seeks man, and even to an incomparably greater degree. God is constantly seeking the human being; therefore, as soon as man manifests his striving toward good and its fulfillment, grace already precedes him. However, the actions or influence of grace are in no way subject to human will.

Grace comes and goes according to the will of the uncoerced, absolutely free God. Whatever man may do, if God does not will, he remains outside of true life, outside the Divine light, in “utter darkness.”

Having recognized this in his own experience, the Orthodox monk places the entire meaning of his life in acquiring the grace of the Holy Spirit.

The question of acquiring grace was central in the life of Elder Silouan; it manifested in his constant striving toward it, in his continual conversations about how it is attained and why it is lost by us.

***

Based on the history of the Church and our communication with many ascetics, we have come to the conclusion that the experience of grace in those who have been granted great visitations and visions is only truly assimilated after many years of ascetic struggle. Over time, it is absorbed more deeply and takes the form of spiritual understanding, which we prefer to define as dogmatic consciousness – not in the academic sense of the word.

The historical experience of the Church, which includes the Holy Apostles as well as the great ancient and modern Fathers, allows us to determine this period, starting from approximately fifteen years.

Thus, the first epistle of the Apostle Paul (to the Thessalonians) was written about fifteen years after the Lord appeared to him on the road to Damascus. For many, this period lasts twenty, twenty-five, thirty years, or even longer.

The Evangelists and other Apostles wrote their testimonies and epistles only after many years following the Lord’s Ascension. The Holy Fathers recounted their visions and experiences, in most cases, at the end of their ascetic journeys. In the life of Elder Silouan, we see that more than thirty years passed before he was able to express his experience in writing, with a complete and mature dogmatic consciousness. Such is the lengthy process of assimilating grace.

The dogmatic consciousness we refer to here is born from spiritual experience, beyond the reasoning activity of the human mind. The expression of experience in words by the Saints is not scholastic construction; it is the revelation of the soul. The word about God and life in Him comes without reflection; it arises spontaneously within the soul.

Ascetic dogmatic consciousness is not a rational reflection on an inner experience, which is psychologically natural.

The ascetics withdraw from the paths of reason because rational reflection not only diminishes the intensity of the vision of the Light but also leads to the cessation of true contemplation; the soul then descends into darkness, left with nothing but abstract rational knowledge, devoid of living force.

What use is it to reason about the nature of grace if one does not feel its action within oneself? What use is it to eloquently speak of the light of Mount Tabor without abiding in it in being? Is there any point in subtle theological discussion of the Trinity if one does not have within oneself the holy power of the Father, the meek love of the Son, and the uncreated light of the Holy Spirit?

Dogmatic consciousness, understood as spiritual knowledge, is given by God, as is all true life in God, which is possible only through the coming of God. It does not always manifest in spoken or written words. When God’s grace descends upon a person, there is no urge in the soul to express the experience in rational concepts or logical interpretations.

The soul has no need for them, for it knows with undemonstrable, yet unquestionable, certainty that it lives in the true God. And if there remains strength within, it seeks a greater fullness; if the Divine action exceeds its strength, it remains silent in blissful exhaustion.

It is impossible to perfectly clothe spiritual experience in words; human language cannot equivalently express the life of the spirit.

The inexpressible and incomprehensible in logical thought is grasped in being. God is known through faith and living communion; and when human words enter with all their conditionality and fluidity, a field opens for endless perplexity and objections.

It can be said with certainty that none of the Saints would have sought verbal expression of their spiritual experience and would have remained forever in silence – this “mystery of the age to come”³⁰ – if not confronted with the task of instructing their neighbor; if love had not generated hope that at least one soul, as the Elder writes, might hear the word, accept repentance, and be saved.

The foundations of dogmatic knowledge, without diminishment, are already given in the first experience of grace. If this aspect of the unified and indivisible spiritual being is not immediately perceived clearly, it is not because the gift of God is deficient in itself, but because the assimilation of this gift by man involves a lengthy inner process.

A person who contemplates the uncreated Divine light for the first time, first introduced into the world of eternal being, is struck by bewilderment due to the novelty of the vision and its incommensurability, its incompatibility with the surrounding material world. He is in blissful astonishment. He cannot express it in words. He may be mute or say something almost absurd. If he is not called to serve as a herald, the unutterable words he has received in his heart remain hidden.

Yet, however great the first gift of Divine grace, until it is assimilated, man may again be subject not only to doubts but to falls. A perfect example of this is the Apostle Peter: on Mount Tabor, he is in blissful bewilderment; later, during the Passion of Christ, he denies Him; and many years later, in his epistle, he refers to his Taborian vision as testimony to the truth.

The duration of grace assimilation is not the same for everyone. The normal path of this assimilation, in general, is as follows. The first experience of Divine visitation profoundly affects the whole person and fully draws him into inner life, into prayer, and into struggle with the passions. This period is rich in the feeling of the heart and abounds in experiences so strong that the intellect is wholly attracted into participation.

The subsequent period – loss of grace – immerses the person in great sorrow and perplexed searching for the reasons for the loss and the paths to regain God’s gift. Only after many years of changing spiritual states, usually accompanied by reading Sacred Scripture and the writings of the Holy Fathers, conversations with spiritual mentors and other ascetics of piety, and a long struggle with the passions, does a person discover within himself the light of knowledge of the paths of the spirit, which comes mysteriously without observation (Luke 17:20). This knowledge, which we call dogmatic consciousness, is the deep life of the spirit and is by no means abstract gnosis.

***

God is not envious. God is not self-loving nor ambitious. He Himself humbly and patiently seeks every person along all their paths, and therefore everyone can, to some degree, know God not only within the Church but also outside of it. However, perfect knowledge of God apart from Christ or outside of Christ is impossible (Matt. 11:27).

Outside of Christ, no spiritual (mystical) experience can grant a person the knowledge of Divine Being as the one incomprehensible absolute Objectivity in Three incomprehensible absolute Subjects, that is, as the Trinity, consubstantial and indivisible.

In Christ, however, this revelation, this knowledge, becomes the light of eternal life, flowing into all manifestations of human existence.

In the writings of Elder Silouan, it is clear that he lived without contradiction in the One God in Three Persons. The same names – Father, Lord, Master, King, Creator, Savior, and others – he, in his prayers, attributes sometimes separately to each Person of the Holy Trinity, and sometimes to the Unity of the Three Persons.

According to the Elder’s categorical testimony:

– By the Holy Spirit, the Divinity of Jesus Christ is known. One who knows the Divinity of Christ in this way, through spiritual experience, perceives in Him the unconfused union of two natures and two wills. Also, by the Holy Spirit, in spiritual experience, the uncreated nature of the Divine Light and other dogmas of our faith are known. Yet it is necessary to note that the dogmatic consciousness which comes through the experience of grace is qualitatively different from dogmatic consciousness of similar outward appearance that results from “faith by hearing,” or from academic study, or through philosophical conviction, as abstract ideal representations.

“To believe in God is one thing, and to know God is another,” says the Elder.

Abstract ideal representations may correspond to the truth of being, but even in that case, in their separation from the positive experience of grace, they are not the knowledge of God which, in its essence, is eternal life (John 17:3). Nevertheless, they are precious, because at any moment they can serve a person even in the context of true spiritual life.

***

A theologian-intellectualist, reflecting on the Elder’s writings, might say: I find no richness of theological thought here; I see no dogmatic knowledge. He will say this because his spirituality belongs to a different plane of religious life.

The rationalist theologian is occupied with numerous problems and seeks their resolution through the paths of discursive reasoning. His genuine religious experience is slight; his principal experience belongs to the sphere of reason, not of living communion with God. He considers his scholarly erudition and rational experience as spiritual wealth and esteems it so highly that all other experiences, in his eyes, recede to a secondary plane.

For the truly religious person, seeking living communion with God, living by God, the preoccupations of the rationalist appear naïve. He marvels – indeed, he cannot understand – how an intelligent person can be satisfied with mere conjectures and abstract constructions.

Rationalists, for example, have struggled for centuries to resolve the problem of the relationship between grace and created freedom. They seem to forget that there is another path to resolve these questions: the path of existential knowledge of the interaction between Divine grace and human freedom. This is the path followed by Elder Silouan. This is, in general, the path of the Church. The Church is strong and rich not in its scholarly erudition, but primarily in the real possession of the gifts of grace. The Church lives by the Holy Spirit, breathes by Him, and from the fact of communion knows how He acts, and also knows the extent to which human freedom manifests itself.

The interaction of grace and freedom is infinitely varied. This variety is a consequence, on the one hand, of the measure, degree, or intensity of grace, and, on the other hand, of the spiritual state of each individual. According to the testimony of the Church Fathers and the Elder, when the Lord comes into the soul of a person, when the Divine Light envelops the whole person, when the whole person is in God, then the person seems to lose freedom; his freedom manifests only in that he wholly surrenders to God and no longer acts from himself, but only receives what is granted by God. In this state, the person “asks nothing” (John 16:23).

In other words, all questions, all “problematic issues,” fall away.

By this we do not intend to reject the legitimacy and naturalness of the soul’s puzzled inquiries and questions.

No. But we speak of different paths. While one is satisfied with, or demands, answers in the rational plane, another seeks them in the order of true being. The rationalist, to satisfy the demands of his mind, constructs the most complex theological-philosophical systems; he undertakes colossal work to dialectically, if not to prove, at least to develop and demonstrate the state of affairs as it appears to him. Often, all his powers, his rich talents, his entire life, are devoted to this. And strangely, he completely overlooks the groundlessness of such inquiry.

Is it possible to resolve the questions of eternal life along these paths? Even if it were possible, is abstract knowledge true life? Can the human spirit be satisfied with such naive resolutions?

The Blessed Elder, from his youth, felt the need for true being; he ardently sought that reality which in itself bears irrefutable witness to our spirit of eternal being, just as our consciousness bears irrefutable immediate witness to the fact of our earthly existence.

The history of human thought and spiritual experience knows one remarkable instance when the words were spoken: “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes). Another philosopher of our time perceived life differently: “I would say: I love, therefore I am; for I consider love a deeper foundation for the awareness of our being.” Others have said: “I eat, I walk, therefore I exist,” that is: “Every action and manifestation of my self is a sign of my being.”

All these expressions contain elements of rational reflection on the question: do I exist? Yet even apart from this reflection, in the sphere of irrational self-awareness, every person recognizes himself as existing.

Thus, there are spiritual states in which a person knows with certainty, by immediate knowledge, that he does not die, that he participates in eternal life; when the Holy Spirit, in the Elder’s expression, bears witness to the soul of salvation. Seeking such resolution of the questions before us is truly worthy of a wise man. This path is the path of being, which the Church of Christ follows.

The wealth of the Church consists in the true experience of Divine being. And the Blessed Elder is rich precisely in this experience of eternal being, granted by the Holy Spirit, and he proceeds from it.

The Elder says:

“O, Holy Soul…

You have revealed to me an incomprehensible mystery.”

And if one were to say to him: – Reveal to us this mystery which the Holy Spirit has allowed you to know, the answer would not be what we sought. He says:

“The Holy Spirit invisibly gives knowledge to the soul.”

“He has given me to know the Lord – my Creator. He has given me to know how much the Lord loves us… This cannot be explained.”

Thus, the Elder is poor dialectically. However, it would be an error to think this is due to his lack of education. Even a person exceptionally gifted intellectually and capable of rationalist thought will be rendered speechless when encountering the being of which the Elder speaks. There can be no “wealth” of thoughts or theological concepts here. Human words are incapable of expressing the being to which we are called, which God grants. Even the Lord Himself refrained from describing it in words, but said: “When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth… and in that day you will ask Me nothing” (John 16:13–23).

It is not always easy for a person with God. During the period of deprivation of grace – which is usually quite prolonged – God may at times appear to the soul as a relentless tormentor. Despite exerting the utmost effort and undertaking the most accessible spiritual labor, the person suffers so intensely that, if it were possible, he would renounce all being altogether.

What, then, is the nature of these sufferings? Answering this question is no simple task.

Having experienced God, having known life in the Light of the Divine Face, the soul finds in the world neither rest nor satisfaction, and nothing can hold it; everything, except God, surrounds it in emptiness. All that the soul once knew, seen as evil or darkness, every demonic action overwhelms it, and the torment of the passions at times reaches its utmost tension, while God seems to have turned away from the person and does not heed any of his pleas. The soul, as the most helpless of creatures, hangs over a dreadful abyss and cries out to God for help, yet all its cries remain unheard. God appears indifferent to all its sufferings.

The soul knows its departure from God’s love and is tormented by the consciousness of its own unrighteousness and betrayal, yet simultaneously it calls upon Him for mercy – and finds none.

God appears only as the Judge of lawlessness, and the soul wastes away under these judgments. It perceives the truth of God’s justice, but its suffering is not diminished thereby. Not in imagination, but truly, immersed in the shadow of death, and finding no God with it, Whom it calls day and night, the soul suffers unbearably. The question arises: why all this?

During the trial itself, the soul cannot perceive it as an expression of God’s mercy, or as God’s trust in it, or as His desire to bring the person into holiness and the fullness of being in Himself. The soul knows only that God has left it after revealing His Light, and thereby has immeasurably increased its suffering. And when it is utterly exhausted, seeing no God inclined toward it with mercy, thoughts and feelings arise which are kept in silence. The soul descends into hell – not as those descend who have not known the Spirit of God, who lack the light of true knowledge of God and are therefore blind; no, it descends there capable of perceiving the darkness it beholds.

This happens only to those who have known Divine grace and then lost it. The seed of God’s love, which the soul carries deep within itself, then generates repentance whose strength and fullness exceed the measure of ordinary religious consciousness. The person, with profound weeping, turns to God “with all his being, with all his strength,” and thus learns true prayer, which draws him out of this world into another, where he hears words ineffable in human language.

Ineffable, because as soon as they are clothed in ready-made words and concepts, each listener will perceive in them only what he has known in his own experience, and no more. When the soul has passed through the entire sequence of these heavy trials, it then clearly sees within itself that there is no place in the world, no suffering, no joy, no strength, no creature that could separate it from the love of God; and the darkness of this life can no longer absorb the light.

***

It is not always easy for a person with God. Likewise, living with a saint is not always easy. Many naively think that being with saints is always pleasant and joyful; they pity that they are surrounded by sinners, and dream of meeting a saint.

From isolated encounters – which often fill a previously sorrowful soul with bright hope and new strength – they are ready to conclude that being in the presence of saints always uplifts the soul. This is a misconception. No saint can free a person from the necessity of struggling against the sin that dwells within. A saint may assist through prayer, support with words and teaching, strengthen by example – but he cannot relieve one of the labor and effort required. And when a saint calls and draws us to live according to the commandments, his words may seem “harsh.” After all, some have said, and still say, regarding Christ Himself: “His word is harsh; who can hear it?” (John 6:60). Similarly, the words of saints, when they demand that we keep the commandments in purity, can seem overwhelming and “severe.”

Elder Silouan was always meek, gentle, and patient, yet he never truly deviated from what God had taught him. His approach was simple and clear:

«The Lord has pity on all… He so loved people that He took upon Himself the burden of the whole world… And from us He wants that we love our brother.»

When listening to the Elder, one realizes with the whole soul that he speaks the truth – but following him is exceedingly difficult. Many would drift away. His spiritual fragrance evoked in the soul deep shame for oneself, and a sense of one’s own foulness and corruption.

If one complains to him about one’s offenders, he understands the grief and shares in the sorrow, but he does not partake in anger. If one considers repaying evil with evil, he becomes saddened at the very thought of you.

If one thinks it harmful to respond to an evil person with good, he wonders how someone who calls themselves a Christian can consider that an action in accordance with Christ’s commandment could cause any harm. The commandments of Christ were, for him, the law of absolute perfection, the sole path to overcoming evil in the world and attaining eternal light. Observing them can only be beneficial – beneficial both for the one who follows them and for the one toward whom they are exercised. There is no case in which following Christ’s commandments could cause harm, if harm is measured not by temporary external loss, but by true and eternal being; for the commandment of Christ is the revelation of absolute good.

There was an occasion when a hieromonk told the Elder that if one acts as he teaches, enemies would take advantage and evil would triumph. At that moment, the Elder remained silent, for the speaker was incapable of grasping the word – but afterward he said, not to him, but to another:

«Can the Spirit of Christ devise harm for anyone? Is this what God calls us to?»

The cunning of the conscience in a passionate person is great and subtle. In religious life, a person dominated by passion often presents it as the pursuit of truth and benefit, and frequently as a struggle for the glory of God. In the name of Christ, who gave Himself to death for His enemies, people may be willing to stand even to the shedding of blood – but not their own blood, only that of the “brother-enemy.”

This has occurred in all times, but the life of the Elder coincided with a historical moment when such distortions manifested with particular intensity. “Is this the way of Christ?” he would say with sorrow.

***

To live according to it means to surrender oneself to suffering – not only in the exceptional sense of the word, but also in everyday life.

We do not recall now where it is recounted about a pious man who all his life asked the Lord to grant him a martyr’s death; and when the hour of his peaceful passing drew near, he said with sorrow: “The Lord has not heard my prayer.” But scarcely had he spoken these words when he received the revelation that his entire life had been martyrdom, and was accepted as such.

The Elder says that the grace he received in the beginning was “like that of the martyrs,” so that he even thought perhaps the Lord would assign him a martyr’s death; yet, like that pious man, he passed away peacefully. The Elder was in the highest degree sober in all things. He did not indulge in fantasies about perfection; but, having known the perfect love of Christ, he strove his whole life to acquire it. He knew better than anyone that “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” and therefore he said that sometimes people feel the desire to suffer for Christ – but if grace is lacking, and the body is weak, one may not endure the torments.

Therefore, one should not dare to undertake such a task without divine calling; but if the Lord summons, one must ask Him for help – and He will provide it.

The Elder did not seek martyrdom, although he knew “martyr-like” grace. Yet his life was true martyrdom. One may say even more: a martyr sometimes pays with his life for a brief period of courageous confession. But to labor for decades, as the Elder labored, and to pray for the world for decades, as he prayed – “to pray for people is to shed blood” – this surpasses ordinary martyrdom.

The Christian path in general is martyrdom; and one who walks it properly rarely seeks the office of preaching. His soul is full of the desire to see his brother partaking of eternal light, but he wishes to bear the suffering himself, and therefore turns first and above all to prayer for the world.

***

Within the bounds of earthly life, in this sphere granted by God for the manifestation not only of positive but also of negative possibilities of freedom, no one and nothing can completely stop the workings of evil; yet the prayer of love is powerful enough to change much in the course of events and to diminish the extent of evil.

«In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it» (John 1:4–5). The darkness of non-being cannot engulf the light of life.

All that is good, which comes from God and returns to God, is “indestructible.” Prayer is one of the highest forms of good being, indestructible and eternal.

This is the “good part that will not be taken away” (Luke 10:42).

In seeking salvation for themselves and for others, the ascetic, focused on his inner man, sees within himself the power of the “law of sin” (Romans 7:23). Seeing how sin kills, how it mortifies him (Romans 7:11) despite every effort to do good, he often comes close to despair, and in this burdensome state, he prays.

Let us recall a remarkable visitation. A hermit monk came to us. He was about seventy years old at the time. He lived in a remote place on the path from the Monastery to the Skete, in a ravine, by a stream, surrounded by forest. His exhausted, wrinkled, pale, long-unwashed, grayish face; untidy, gray hair and beard; sunken gray-blue eyes. We spoke for a long time.

He told us the following:

*"For many years my soul has been in pain from the thought that we, monks, renounced the world, abandoned our families and homeland, gave vows before God, holy angels, and men to live according to the law of Christ; renounced our own will, and live, in essence, a torturous life – and yet we do not succeed in doing good. How many of us are truly saved? I perish first. I see others, and the passions possess them. And when I meet worldly people, I see that they live in great ignorance, negligently, and without repentance. And gradually, almost without realizing it, I was drawn into prayer for the world. I wept much, thinking that if we – monks, renounced from the world – are not saved, then what is happening in the world? Gradually my sorrow grew, and I began to weep with tears of despair. And then, last year, while in this despair, exhausted from weeping, lying on the floor at night, the Lord appeared and asked me: ‘Why are you weeping so?’ … I remain silent…

‘Do you not know that I will judge the world?’ … I remain silent again… The Lord says:

‘I will have mercy on every person who has called upon God even once in their life’…

A thought ran through me: ‘Then why do we suffer so every day?’ The Lord responded to the movement of my thought: ‘Those who suffer for My commandment will be My friends in the Kingdom of Heaven, and the rest I will only have mercy on.’ And the Lord departed."*

This occurred to him in waking life. At the same time, he recounted two other visions that came to him in light sleep, following his sorrowful prayer for the world.

We do not name this monk, because he is still living, and we refrain from evaluating the visions.

We listened to him without the slightest expression of our own opinion on what he told us, following the strict rule of the Athonite Fathers – to be especially cautious when it comes to visions.

Perhaps our dry vigilance, or perhaps something else in us, offended this elder monk, for he never came to us again. Truly, we had the immodest thought to test him further. Perhaps this offended him? We do not know.

During our time among the monks of the Holy Mountain, we met nine men who loved to pray for the world and prayed with tears. Once we overheard a conversation between two monks. One said:

«I cannot understand why the Lord does not give peace to the world, if even one person beseeches Him?»

The other replied:

«And how is full peace on earth possible, if even one person remains with an evil will?»

But let us return to our main theme.

***

Life with God is not always easy for a human being.

We repeat ourselves, but the subject of our discussion is such that repetition is unavoidable. The thoughts of an ascetic are neither rich nor varied, yet they concern that existence which is extremely difficult to assimilate. Centuries pass, and through their long course, the same experience recurs almost unchanged; and yet few truly know the sequence of the Christian struggle and often become lost on this path.

The Lord said: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able” (Matthew 7:14).

Once again, we wish to speak of what was also the subject of long conversations between Elder Silouan and Father Stratonik. The path of a Christian, in general terms, is as follows: first, a person is drawn to God by the gift of grace; and once drawn, a prolonged period of testing begins.

The freedom of the person and their trust in God are tested – and at times, tested “harshly.” In the beginning of one’s turning to God, even small or modestly expressed requests are usually fulfilled quickly and miraculously by God. But when the period of trial comes, everything changes: heaven seems to close and becomes deaf to all prayers. For the fervent Christian, everything in life becomes difficult. People’s attitude toward him worsens; respect diminishes; what is forgiven to others is not forgiven to him; his labor, almost always, is rewarded below its value; his body becomes more susceptible to illness; nature, circumstances, and people – all seem to conspire against him. Despite all natural talents, no less than those of others, he finds no outlet for them. To all this, he endures many assaults of demonic powers.

And the last, heaviest, and most unbearable suffering – God seems to abandon him. Then suffering reaches its fullness, for it strikes the whole person in every dimension of his being.

God abandons a person? …Is that possible? Yet, in the soul, to replace the tested sense of God’s nearness comes another feeling – that He is infinitely, unfathomably distant, beyond the worlds of stars, and all invocations of Him perish helplessly in the vastness. The soul cries out to Him all the more intensely, but sees neither aid nor even attention. Everything then is hard. Everything is obtained only through disproportionate effort, beyond ordinary strength. Life becomes one of suffering, and the person senses that a divine curse and wrath hang over him.

Yet when these trials pass, the person will see that the incomprehensibly wondrous providence of God carefully guarded him along every path.

The experience of millennia, transmitted from generation to generation, tells us that when God sees the steadfastness of the ascetic’s soul, as He saw the steadfastness of Job, He will lead him through abysses and heights inaccessible to anyone else. The fuller and stronger a person’s fidelity and trust in God, the greater will be the measure of trials and the completeness of experience, reaching degrees where the limits of what is available to human beings become manifest.

***

As long as pride remains strong in a person, so long can they be subject to bouts of particularly tormenting, hellish despair, which perverts all understanding of God and of the ways of His providence. The proud soul, dwelling in grievous suffering and the darkness of hell, blames God for its torments and conceives of Him as immeasurably cruel. Deprived of true existence in God, it judges everything from its own painfully suffering state, and begins to hate its own life and, in general, all existence in the world.

Being outside the Divine Light, in its despair it can even come to regard the very existence of God as hopeless and meaningless, whereby its rejection of God and hatred toward all being grow ever greater.

Such despair and hatred are avoided by people of faith, for it is through faith that a person is saved; through faith in the love and mercy of God, through faith in His Word, through faith in the testimony of the Fathers of the Church. Most devout Christians, throughout their lives, may not have experienced their own resurrection directly, yet faith in it sustains them.

Elder Silouan speaks repeatedly about this faith, referring to the words of the Lord: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).

The hour will come when this faith will lead a person out of darkness and the narrowness of bondage into the expanses of true, imperishable life, the splendor of which is altogether unique, unlike ordinary human notions of grandeur and beauty.

***

The enemy – the devil – acts differently toward those who accept him, and differently toward those who fight against him. Prideful despair brings one kind of suffering, and the soul of the devout experiences another when God permits Satan to wage battle with the soul. This latter temptation is extremely severe and is allowed only rarely.

When a person, providentially abandoned by God for the first time, experiences the approach of Satan, their whole being – both soul and body – is overwhelmed with great suffering and fear, unlike any fear inspired by criminals or murderers, for it contains the darkness of eternal ruin. The soul then comes to know WHAT the devil is; it perceives the power of his cruelty; and struck by the enormity of the evil confronting it, it contracts entirely within itself.

From terror, despair, and trembling, it falls into such exhaustion that it finds no strength even to pray. It does not sense God as Protector beside it, and the enemy speaks: “You are in my power… Do not hope in God and forget Him; He is relentless.”

In these moments, the soul, unwilling to accept the devil, either silently remains still, thinking of God, or, at best, finds within itself the strength to call upon God’s Name. Only afterward does it realize that it is precisely in this struggle that God listens to it in an extraordinary way.

***

From the Elder’s writings, you will see that he twice experienced such a battle with Satan. The first time, he was saved by reciting the Jesus Prayer; he had not even completed it when the Lord appeared to him. The second time, he was stronger and braver, and found within himself the strength to sit and turn to God in prayer, and then received in response unusual and strange words: “Keep your mind in hell, and do not despair.”

In that moment, he came to understand the weapon by which the devil is overcome: at every approach of the enemy, the soul directs all the force of hatred upon itself, judging itself as its ultimate enemy to eternal torment, while adding: “But God is holy, true, and blessed forever.”

Armed with such a weapon, the soul is freed from all fear and becomes impenetrable to the enemy. Such an “experienced” soul, at each attack of the adversary, throws itself with great courage into the abyss of eternal darkness as if it were worthy of it, and the enemy retreats, unable to withstand the strength of the encountered fire. The soul, now liberated from him, can turn to God in prayer with a pure mind.

***

«The enemy fell through pride.» Pride is the beginning of sin; within it are contained all kinds of evil: vanity, love of glory, lust for power, coldness, cruelty, indifference to the suffering of one’s neighbor; fancifulness of the mind, overactive imagination, demonic expression in the eyes, a demonic character in the entire appearance; gloom, melancholy, despair, hatred; envy, humiliation, in many a lapse into carnal lust; tormenting inner restlessness, disobedience, fear of death or, conversely, a desire to end one’s life; and, not infrequently, complete madness. These are the signs of demonic spirituality. Yet until they manifest clearly, they remain unnoticed by many.

Not all of these signs necessarily characterize someone who has been deceived by demonic thoughts, visions, or “revelations.” In some, megalomania, love of glory, and lust for power predominate; in others, gloom, despair, or hidden anxiety; in others, envy, gloom, or hatred; and in many, carnal lust. But all will inevitably possess imagination and pride, which can even hide itself under the guise of apparent humility.

***

When a person is “seduced” by the enemy and follows him without understanding WHAT the enemy is, he does not perceive the power of direct struggle with him, and suffers because he is led by the enemy away from the light of true life into the darkness in which the enemy dwells. These sufferings bear the mark of spiritual blindness. In some cases, the enemy brings restless pleasure through the proud consciousness of one’s supposed greatness; in others, by generating a severe affliction in the soul, he turns it against God; and, not understanding the true cause of its sufferings, the soul directs hatred toward God.

A pious soul, having come to know the love of God, suffers from direct struggle with the enemy – from the great force of evil directed against it by the devil – and the person clearly sees that this power can strike him entirely to the end.

In the first case, the soul usually struggles for a long time without finding a way to God; in the second, God appears to the person in great light, as soon as the time of trial, whose duration and intensity are measured by God, has passed.

For some, it lasts only three minutes; for others, an hour or more; one ascetic endured it for three days.

The duration of the trial may depend, on the one hand, on the lesser intensity of the struggle, and, on the other, on the greater endurance of the person, for the strength of souls is not equal.

There is no temptation stronger than the struggle of the soul with Satan described above. It is a grief, the greatest of all miseries possible on earth. But there is one suffering whose torment surpasses even this: the suffering of a soul, pierced to its very depths by love for God, yet not attaining the Desired One.

It is incomprehensible how God communicates with the soul. Having kindled fervent love in it, He mysteriously withdraws from it; and when the soul is exhausted from this abandonment, He again quietly comes with His inexpressible consolation. In certain moments, the torment of being forsaken by God surpasses every hellish suffering, yet it is distinguished by containing the life-giving power of God, which transforms sorrow into the sweet bliss of divine love.

***

A person living in this heavy flesh cannot remain unwavering. In certain moments of pure prayer, the soul of the ascetic touches the true eternal Being, which is its ultimate and only goal; yet when that prayer ends, the soul again descends into a state of either intermediate awareness of God or even sensory perception of the world, along with which the darkness of the flesh returns, and the strength of inner perception weakens.

For many people, sensory perception of the world is so constant that they hardly know anything else, and they then become “flesh,” unreceptive to the law of God. But for the ascetic, the return from pure prayer to the heaviness of fleshly perception is experienced as a departure from the Lord.

The Apostle Paul says: “Whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord... we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (2Corinthians 5:6–7).

Only through continuous spiritual struggle does the ascetic hold himself back from the decline toward which his flesh constantly drags him by its weight. And the more frequent and prolonged his spiritual states, the more painfully he experiences the descent into fleshly perception of the world.

***

When the ascetic, moved by the Spirit of God’s love, prays with deep weeping, he reaches a certain state, beyond which he does not have the strength to ascend at that moment, and experiences a rest of the spirit from closeness to God; but when the prayer ends, this peace is retained in the soul only for a certain time – sometimes longer, sometimes shorter – and then it begins to be overwhelmed again.

The alternation of these states leads to various outcomes. Some, at a certain point on their spiritual path, reach such a degree of prayer that it brings their soul into fear and trembling, and then gradually they decline and weaken in prayer. Others, courageous souls, on the contrary, unceasingly grow, seeking ever greater fullness of prayer, and so continue until the desire – and even the need – takes root in their soul to spare themselves nothing, as if to “hate and destroy” their own soul.

But even this, as we see from the writings of the Elder, is not yet the ultimate love that the Lord grants His servants to know, a love whose sweetness enables a person to endure any suffering and even death with ease.

***

The Blessed Elder knew with the utmost clarity that the love with which the Holy Spirit taught him is “Truth,” standing in its ontological, existential authenticity above all doubt. He experienced this degree of knowledge when the Lord Himself appeared to him. He said that when the Lord Himself appears to the soul, it cannot fail to know its Creator and God.

By the action of the Holy Spirit, he was granted to contemplate the perfect holiness of God, and he strove for participation in and attainment of this holiness with all his heart and all his being.

One standing on this path cannot indulge in abstract rational reflection, even about the mysteries of faith.

His soul rejects any “mental reasoning” that introduces a kind of disintegration into the integrity and unity of a life directed toward God in prayer.

From constant dwelling in prayer, memory of all external matters weakens, and if it were not for the assistance of long-established habits, which freed him from the need to deliberate over daily actions, he could not even perform them.

“The soul that has known the Lord and the sweetness of the Holy Spirit becomes, as it were, mad; it sits in silence, unwilling to speak; and, as if mad, it gazes at the world and desires it not, seeing it not. And people do not know that it contemplates the Beloved Lord, and the world seems as if behind it and forgotten; the soul does not wish to think of it, because there is no sweetness in it.”

In spiritual contemplation, the ascetic becomes a witness of things that, for the overwhelming majority of people, remain a mystery. Yet he faces the impossibility of conveying this mystery, because when translated into human language, it appears entirely different to the listener. Human words and concepts offer a very limited ability to transmit the inner state of one to another.

A necessary condition for mutual understanding is the commonality or identity of experience. Without this commonality, understanding cannot be achieved, because behind each of our words lies our whole life; into every concept each of us pours the fullness of our own experience, which is why we inevitably speak in different languages.

Yet, by virtue of the unity of the human race, it is possible, even through words, to awaken a new experience in the soul of the listener, thereby as it were engendering new life within them.

And if this is so in our human interactions, it happens all the more in divine action.

The Word of God, received with the proper inner disposition of the soul, truly brings forth new life, the life contained in it – that is, eternal life.

Keeping in mind not only the imperfection of our means – language – but also our own ignorance and inability, we still allow ourselves to return to that strange form of prayer-conversation mentioned above, namely, the words: “Keep your mind in hell, and do not despair.”

Those who have read the Gospel cannot fail to notice the peculiarity of Christ’s conversations. Outwardly and formally, they seem to lack any sequence. Take, for example, His conversations with Nicodemus, with the Samaritan woman, or with the disciples at the Last Supper. Christ’s attention is focused not so much on what the person says, but on what is in the depth of their being and what they are capable of receiving from God.

Similarly, in this prayer-conversation of Elder Silouan, there may appear to be little meaning on the surface, and to some it may seem mere nonsense. Yet if the true content and the power of the revelation granted to Silouan were revealed to us, it could be said with certainty that our entire being would be shaken to its very depths.

Elder Silouan wept for decades “with great tears” for the world to know God. He realized that if the peoples – he thought of entire nations, carrying them in the prayerful love of his heart – came to know God’s love and humility, they would, like the Apostle Paul, consider as rubbish (Phil.3:7–8), as childish toys, all their passions and preoccupations, and would pursue this humility and love day and night with all the strength of their souls. If this were accomplished, the face of the earth, the destinies of all people, and the whole world would be transformed “in one hour,” as the Elder said. Such is the power of this.

It may seem strange to hear that Silouan was granted the revelation of the mystery of the Fall and Redemption, and of all the spiritual paths of man. To the divine Peter on Mount Tabor, and on the day of the descent of the Holy Spirit, it was revealed with utmost clarity that “there is no other name under heaven given among men, by which we must be saved.” Not only did the Jewish elders and scribes marvel at the categorical statement of Peter and John, simple and unlearned men, as Scripture recounts (Acts 4:12–13), but even today we marvel. One cannot help asking: “O Peter, simple and unlearned, how do you know what names are given under heaven? Were you familiar with the histories of the cultures and religions of China, India, Babylon, Egypt, and others?”

Likewise, to the “unlearned and simple” Silouan, mysteries hidden “from the wise and prudent” were revealed, and the night when that supernatural prayer-conversation occurred holds extraordinary significance in his life. The world is plunged into the darkness of spiritual ignorance.

The path to eternal life continues to be proclaimed in all languages, yet those who truly know this path are scarce – mere individuals across generations.

***

This expression may seem puzzling. What does it mean to “keep your mind in hell”? Does it mean to imagine something like the often crude, fanciful pictures conjured by naive human imagination? In this case – no.

Elder Silouan, like some other great Fathers – for example, Anthony the Great, Sisoes the Great, Macarius, and Pimen the Great – was given, over the course of his life, the real experience of hellish torments. Repeatedly experiencing this state left a deep impression on their hearts, so that by their own will they could return to it within their soul, invoking it through a corresponding inner movement of the Spirit. They resorted to this practice whenever some passion began to manifest in their soul, especially the deepest and subtlest of them all – pride.

The struggle with pride is the final stage in the battle against the passions. At first, the ascetic fights gross carnal passions, then irritability, and finally pride. This last struggle is undoubtedly the most difficult. Having learned through long experience that pride leads to the loss of grace, the ascetic, through a special inner movement, descends in his soul into hell, and with hellfire burns away every action of passion within himself.

The Elder noted that most people, approaching these limits, faintheartedly shrink back and cannot endure. This is why the Great Sisoes said with some astonishment: “Who can carry the thought of Anthony? Yet I know one who can carry it” – referring to himself.

Elder Silouan explained that Sisoes meant the spiritual method or “thought” that Anthony the Great had learned from the Alexandrian cobbler.

St. Anthony prayed that the Lord would reveal to him the measure to which he had attained. He was shown that he had not yet reached the measure of the Cobbler. Visiting the Cobbler, Anthony asked how he lived. The Cobbler replied that he gave a third of his earnings to the church, a third to the poor, and kept the rest for his own needs. Anthony, who had left all his possessions and lived in the desert in greater poverty than the Cobbler, was not surprised; his greatness lay elsewhere. Anthony asked, “The Lord sent me to learn from you – how do you live?” The humble Cobbler, in awe of Anthony, said: “I do nothing; I only work and observe the people passing by, thinking: all will be saved, only I will perish.”

Anthony, prepared by God through long and extraordinary ascetic struggle – astonishing all Egypt – felt the power of the Cobbler’s thought and understood that he had not yet attained the measure of the Cobbler. Returning to the desert, he began to train himself in this practice.

Anthony, the founder of Eastern monasticism, was granted both understanding and the strength to bear this spiritual thought.

He taught this practice to hermits capable of receiving solid food, not milk. Other great Desert Fathers also adopted it and passed it down as an invaluable spiritual treasure to succeeding generations. Each ascetic may express this practice in words of his own; for example, Pimen the Great told his disciples: “Believe me, children, where Satan is, there I will also be.” Yet the essence remains the same.

Blessed Elder Silouan said that many ascetics, approaching this necessary state for purification from passions, despair and cannot go further. But one who knows that “the Lord loves us greatly” avoids the destructive effect of ultimate despair, and can wisely stand on its edge – using the power of hellish fire to burn away every passion in himself, yet without becoming a victim of despair. “And do not despair.”

The Elder’s account is simple, as simple as the word of the Alexandrian Cobbler, as simple as the teachings of St. Sisoes, St. Pimen, and other Fathers; yet the power of the words and the depth of this spiritual practice remain unknowable to anyone who has not experienced both the torments of hell and the great gifts of grace.

***

The entire long ascetic life of Elder Silouan, especially after that night, was a fervent pursuit of humility. If we wish to understand the form and mystery of his struggle to attain humility, we must pause over his strange words:

«My beloved song: – soon I will die, and my wretched soul will descend into hell, and there I will suffer alone in a gloomy prison and weep bitterly: my soul longs for the Lord and seeks Him with tears. How could I not seek Him? He first sought me and revealed Himself to me, a sinner.»

When he spoke, “my wretched soul will descend into hell,” these were not mere words, but a real experience of hellish torments, deeply imprinted on his heart. By a conscious inner movement of his spirit, he could renew these torments within himself, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser intensity. And when the fire of hellish suffering accomplished its intended purpose – namely, destroying the passion-driven thought – he opposed its general destructiveness with the saving action of Christ’s love, which he also knew and bore in his heart.

He learned this practice when he received the response: “Keep your mind in hell, and do not despair.” The first part of his “beloved song” plunged him into hell; the second, by recalling the memory of God’s love, protected him from despair. “And do not despair.”

Only a few can practice as the Elder did. Through continuous engagement in this discipline, the soul acquires a special habit and endurance, so that the memory of hell is internalized to the point of becoming almost inseparable from the soul.

The necessity for such constancy arises from the fact that a person “living in the world and bearing the flesh” is constantly subjected to the influences of surrounding sin. The soul protects itself from these influences, as if with armor, by humbling itself even unto the depths of hell.

The Elder said:

«The Lord Himself taught me how to humble myself: 'Keep your mind in hell, and do not despair.' And by this, the enemies are conquered; and when I lift my mind out of the fire, the thoughts regain their strength.»

From our pale and disconnected words, one cannot obtain a true understanding of this wondrous and inexpressible life, in which the ultimate, humanly bearable suffering is combined with the ultimate, humanly bearable bliss. One accompanies the other in a strange and inseparable way.

If there were only suffering, it would be unbearable (from despair).

If there were only bliss, it would also be unbearable (from pride).

XII. On the Word of God and the Limits of the Creature

Every human thought, every human word, is energy – a force.

And if this is true of human thought and word, it is even more true of the Word of God, the Word of Christ.

When we hear the Gospel Word of Christ, fragrant, gentle, sweet: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”, or: “Behold, I give you a new commandment: love one another”, or “Learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart” – we must not forget that this gentle Word of Christ is the incomprehensible, boundless force that called into being from the darkness of nothingness all that exists, all the countless worlds, all creatures, rational and irrational, in their infinite diversity.

The Word of Christ, clothed in a humble, sensibly perceivable form of human language, which can even be written down, is, in its depth and essence, the energy of the Great Almighty Creator God. About it, we must say what Scripture says about God Himself: that it is a “consuming fire,” which earthly beings must approach with the greatest reverence and awe (Hebrews 12:28–29).

“Your word is very pure, therefore Your servant loves it” (Psalm 118:140), says the Psalmist.

The Word of Christ is the most mysterious word; it is inaccessible, incomprehensible even to the greatest minds, and at the same time it is so simple and clear that it is accessible even to little children.

The Word of Christ is so close to us, so understandable, so natural, so deeply akin to our human heart, and at the same time it infinitely surpasses the powers of the created nature: it is Divine, incomprehensible, supernatural. As the Apostle Paul says, “it is not of man, nor by man” (Galatians 1:11–12).

The Word of Christ, addressed to a free human being, is gentle and nonviolent, yet at the same time boundless, utterly sovereign, like the word of absolute authority, the word of the undisputed Lord of all being. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away,” says Christ.

The Word of Christ, received with deep faith, leads a person to eternal life along a path where he will encounter much that is unusual, unknown to those who do not follow Christ. On this high path, everything that a person can experience and know in his being will be revealed to him. The light of the Word of Christ reaches the farthest limits of the dark abyss, revealing the nature of countless phantoms of truth, which in the darkness draw the human soul toward themselves. The Word of Christ is a fire, testing all that is in a person and indeed all that exists in the world, for as the Apostle Paul testifies, “there is no creature hidden from Him” (Hebrews 4:13).

The Word of Christ is spirit and eternal life, the fullness of love and the joy of heaven. The Word of Christ is uncreated Divine light…

It addresses not the superficial logical reasoning but the deep heart of a person, and he who opens his heart to it to the fullest depth, in order to receive this Divine light worthily, to merge with it in oneness, becomes godlike.

The Word of Christ, received into life, creates the person as God. “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has revealed Him” (John 1:18). The revelation of God-Word (Logos) in the flesh and His Word is the foundation of the Christian life. This life is inexpressible to those who have not known it through experience, and therefore any attempt to convey in words the spiritual place where a person then stands is in vain.

Before him are revealed both the abyss of “utter darkness” and the eternal light of Godhead, and he himself stands between them. He prays then with a spirit suffering from the consciousness of ultimate need. He prays with the greatest intensity, with complete concentration of his entire being.

When the Venerable Seraphim of Sarov stood on a stone for a thousand days and nights, crying: “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner”, everyone, even if only vaguely, can understand that his spirit was engaged in a great titanic struggle.

Anthony the Great, Arsenius the Great, Seraphim of Sarov, and our other Fathers – these are people of truly exceptional courage, who renounced the world and despised every danger; and when they weep, they do not weep over lost property or any other temporary loss, but obviously before their eyes lies something far more terrible than any danger that a human might imagine on earth.

To these great names, and those like them, we may add the name of Elder Silouan.

When we read in his writings about the weeping of Adam, to which “the whole desert listened,” the great desert of the world, we must not forget that this weeping was his, Silouan’s.

He lived through the great tragedy of the fall of man. He wept a mighty weeping, before which all ordinary human weeping is nothing. Only one who has seen the eternal light of God can weep in this way. People who have not seen, or, as the Elder himself says, have not known God, cannot understand these sufferings; they cannot weep in this way.

***

Communion with the Elder led us to a firm realization that before a faithful Christian, a holy ascetic, the limits of human possibility are revealed. All the problems of human existence present themselves to him – and they do so with extraordinary intensity. The problem of life and death, the problems of freedom and creativity, the meaning of life and suffering; the problems of the relationship between revelation and faith; faith and knowledge; law and grace; eternity and time; God and His relation to the world and to man; the destinies of the world and the judgment of God.

The experience of the great ascetics testifies that before them passed the entire chain of these problems, the whole series of dogmatic propositions, but all this occurs under special conditions, entirely unlike academic scholarly work. The human spirit is led by the Spirit of Christ to knowledge of God – being-knowledge – so that the very word “knowledge” does not signify abstract intellectual acquisition or rational understanding, but entry into divine being, participation in being.

***

When we speak of the limits of human possibility being revealed before a Christian ascetic, when we speak of the fullness of the Christian – that is, truly human – experience, we do not mean the experience of various professions, spheres of scientific knowledge, or different family or social positions, or ages, and so forth. No. We mean the humanly possible experience of the abyss of fallenness, and the experience of repentance and resurrection in Christ.

The first – that is, the experience of professions, scientific knowledge, social positions, and so on – belongs to temporal, empirical existence; the second – that is, the experience of redemption and resurrection in Christ – is the experience of eternity. In the first, there is fragmentation and infinite diversity; in the second, the godlikeness of humanity and the essential unity of the human race are revealed. The first can add nothing to the second when it exists, and in its absence, it does not diminish it in the slightest. Yet the first provides the context and, in a certain sense, the condition for the second. Every human being, physically extremely limited, can have only a very restricted experience of the first type, but the human spirit is such that even within this limitation of empirical existence, it is not deprived of the possibility of the fullness of the second.

Experience of the second order, in its ultimate depth, does not depend on the empirical conditions of human life. In other words, there are no, and cannot be, external conditions under which living according to God’s commandments would become absolutely impossible.

Someone might say: Is it not too great a claim to say that the Christian experience exhausts the fullness of human existence? Is this experience, like others, not merely one of many varieties within the infinitely rich cosmic being, composed of many spheres of reality accessible to various kinds of experience – one to science, another to art, a third to philosophy, a fourth to pantheism, a fifth to Christianity, and so on?

When we speak of exhausting the possibilities of human existence, we proceed from the principle that the being of every rational creature moves between two limits: one – love for God to the point of hatred for oneself; the other – love for oneself to the point of hatred for God.

No intelligent creature can go beyond these limits in any single act. All that occurs in our personal existence is our spiritual self-determination precisely within this order, whether we give ourselves clear rational account of it, or whether this self-determination occurs in the rational depth of our spirit from which even rational thought itself arises.

In defining both limits, we see the same words – love and hatred – only in a different sequence, in a different relationship. Yet the difference here is not only in sequence but in the profound meaning of these words. In one case, it is holy and perfect love, and holy and perfect hatred; in the other, sinful self-love and sinful hatred. The first hatred is the consequence of the fullness of love for God, the complete concentration of all the powers of our being in God, to the forgetting of oneself, to the unwillingness to turn toward oneself. This unwillingness to turn toward oneself becomes categorical and is then defined either as “wrath” or as “hatred” toward oneself.

Any turning toward oneself diminishes and even interrupts dwelling in the light of the Divine, and therefore the one who has known the love of God and the bitterness of its loss turns with such intensity and anger from all that leads to that loss.

In a completely different way, one must speak of hatred toward God. Those who love themselves to the point of hating God are those who “loved darkness rather than light” (John 3:19).

This subject surpasses our powers, and therefore we will end our discourse on it.

***

God calls everyone. But not all respond to His call.

Those who do respond are tested severely by God, and the degree of severity of the testing is proportioned by God to the degree of their fidelity and devotion to Him. Those who love God pass through many and most grievous trials.

Here we would like to touch on one extraordinarily important matter, about which, however, we do not at all know how to speak. We cannot find words, nor a way to explain this subject. If possible, try to understand us from the following fragmentary words.

The one who loves God passes through sufferings which a person without deep faith in God could not endure and would be spiritually afflicted. From deep faith and love arises a great courage, of which the Elder speaks. That courage saves a person from being overcome when confronted with the world of evil spirits.

The one who loves God knows these sufferings, yet despite experiencing them, remains not only normal – that is, not only retaining self-control, the capacity for logical and moral self-discipline, and all that might be signs of normalcy – but attains an incomparably greater depth and subtlety of all these capacities than is observed in the average person.

***

He who has experienced the greatness and difficulty of the Christian path is torn by two feelings: one is a fervent desire for all to know the True God and the light of eternal being; the other is a fear – what if those who are called cannot bear the burdens of the trials? This is why such a person turns to God in prayer for the salvation of each and every one far more than he turns to preaching.

True Christianity is almost never preached in the world, because this preaching surpasses the strength of human beings.

True Christianity, by its very nature, is such that it is never aggressive.

***

Throughout the entire history of Christianity, one can trace the great caution of the holy ascetics, even when it seemed appropriate for them to speak openly about the experiences granted to them. This caution arises, on the one hand, from the awareness that if people – who generally fear suffering and are faint-hearted even in undertaking a small spiritual effort – heard of the labors and sorrows endured by these ascetics, they would simply recoil from Christianity. On the other hand, the Holy Fathers knew that when God calls one to this struggle by His grace, what seems unbearable to those who have not experienced God’s love appears in an entirely different light.

***

God is invisible, and the spiritual paths leading to Him are unseen; and how can one portray in words this mysterious life, full of the great struggle that Christ wages for the eternal life of the human being, created and loved by Him?

God preserves human freedom as the most precious principle within us, and therefore He draws the soul to His love through humility; yet on the way to this love, a person encounters the violent adversary, the devil.

The Lord allows this to happen. He educates the human soul not by removing it from the encounter with evil, but by granting it the strength to overcome all evil.

The path of a person toward God is full of great struggles. The spirit of an ascetic, striving for eternal divine love in order to become truly rational and capable of such love, inevitably passes through a long series of trials.

From the love of God, the ascetic is torn by the protests of reason – his own reason – which cannot comprehend or accept the law of Christ, appearing to it as madness. In moments of divine abandonment, these protests can gain extraordinary force.

The ascetic is also torn from the love of God by: sometimes the desire for life, sometimes the fear of death; sometimes impulses toward pleasure, sometimes illness, hunger, persecution, or other sufferings; sometimes the heights and light of other revelations and insights, sometimes the depth and grandeur of other experiences; sometimes the greatness of other possessions, or the breadth of other possibilities; sometimes visions of angels and other heavenly beings, sometimes the violence of dreadful dark powers.

It can be stated with great justification that on the path toward acquiring God’s love, the Christian ascetic will encounter the full range of possible temptations and trials, so that later, whoever the ascetic meets, he will recognize the whole spectrum of their experiences. Hence, the elders possess the ability to perceive the soul of any person, whoever they may be, regardless of social position, physical age, spiritual level, or experience in the struggle against passions.

We dare to assert – and our communion with the Elder convinced us of this – that all human paths are known to the Christian ascetic, even as his own paths remain hidden from the gaze of others (1Cor. 2:15–16).

The Blessed Elder writes: “A monk is a prayerful intercessor for the entire world… The Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, gives the monk the love of the Holy Spirit, and from this love the monk’s heart is always sorrowful for the people, because not all are saved. The Lord Himself was so sorrowful for the people that He delivered Himself to death on the Cross. And the Mother of God carried the same sorrow for humanity in her heart… The same Holy Spirit was given by the Lord to the Apostles, to our Holy Fathers, and to the shepherds of the Church… This is our service to the world. Therefore, neither the shepherds of the Church nor monks should concern themselves with worldly affairs, but imitate the Mother of God, who in the temple, in the ‘Holy of Holies,’ studied the law of the Lord day and night and remained in prayer for the people.”

Prayer for the entire world, for all of Adam, often leads to a withdrawal from personal service to individual people. Someone might ask: is such withdrawal from personal service a refusal of something concrete for the sake of something abstract?

Certainly not, for all of Adam is not an abstraction, but the most concrete fullness of human existence.

The nature of universal human existence is such that each individual, by overcoming evil within himself, strikes such a great blow to cosmic evil that its consequences beneficially affect the fate of the entire world. On the other hand, the nature of cosmic evil is such that when it is defeated in particular human persons (individuals), it suffers a defeat whose significance and scale are infinitely disproportionate to their number.

A single saint is an extraordinarily precious manifestation for all humanity.

By the fact of their existence, even if unknown to the world but known to God, the saints pour down upon the earth, upon all humanity, a great blessing of God. The Elder writes:

“Indeed, for these people, I think, the Lord preserves the world, for they are pleasing to God, and God always listens to His humble servants, and through their prayers, it is well with all of us.”

***

“The world stands by prayer, and when prayer weakens, then the world will perish…”

“You may say that now there are no monks who pray for the entire world; but I tell you, when there are no more intercessors on earth, the world will end, great calamities will come; they already exist even now.”

***

The saints live by the love of Christ, which is the Divine power that creates and sustains the world, and therefore their prayers hold such great significance. Saint Barsanuphius, for example, testified that in his time the prayers of three men kept the world from catastrophe. For the sake of saints unknown to the world, the course of historical and even cosmic events is altered, and therefore every saint is a phenomenon of cosmic significance, whose importance extends beyond earthly history into the eternal realm.

The saints are the salt of the earth; they are its meaning and purpose; they are the fruit for whose sake the earth is preserved. And when the earth ceases to bear saints, then the power that keeps the world from catastrophe will be withdrawn.

Each saint – like Anthony, Arsenius, Nicholas, Ephraim, Sergius, Seraphim, and others like them – constitutes the most precious and eternal heritage of the whole world, even though the world may refuse to acknowledge this and often kills its own prophets.

***

There are people who, in a strange way, fail to grasp the greatness of religious acts because of their rootedness in the beginningless Divine Being. These people perceive religious and spiritual life merely as subjective psychological experiences, which perish as soon as they cease within the soul. From long communion with the Elder, and from the words cited above, we see that he considered spiritual states to be extraordinarily great in their eternal, ontological significance.

He experienced prayer for one’s enemies and for the whole world as eternal life, as Divine action within the human soul, as uncreated grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit; and as long as the world receives this gift, it will continue to exist. But as soon as even a single bearer of this grace among the multitude of people on earth disappears, earthly history will come to an end, and no human science or culture will be able to prevent this destruction.

***

Daily experience convinces us that even those who, in their soul, accept Christ’s command to love their enemies often do not put it into practice in life. Why? First of all, because to love one’s enemies without grace is impossible; but if people, realizing that this exceeds their natural strength, sought, as the Elder says, God’s gracious help, they would undoubtedly receive this gift.

Unfortunately, the opposite is more common: not only do the unbelieving refrain, but even those who profess themselves Christians fear to act toward their enemies according to Christ’s command. They assume that this benefits only their enemies; that the enemies, seen through the dark prism of hatred and usually imagined as entirely devoid of goodness, will take advantage of their “weakness” and respond to love by crucifying, shamelessly trampling, or enslaving them – and thus evil, personified in the enemy, will triumph.

The notion of Christianity as “weakness” is profoundly mistaken.

The saints possess power sufficient to dominate people and even masses, yet they take the opposite path: they subject themselves to their brother, and through this acquire a love that, by its very nature, is incorruptible. On this path, they achieve a victory that endures forever, whereas victory by force is never secure and is, by its nature, less a glory than a shame for humanity.

The Elder perceived both the Incarnation of the Word of God and the earthly life of Christ as love for the entire world, even though the world was filled with enmity toward God. Likewise, he knew the Holy Spirit in the form of love, which, by its very presence, expels all hatred as light drives out darkness; a love that, in the innermost movements of the soul, conforms the human being to Christ. According to the Elder, this is true faith.

“Many have studied all religions, yet they have never truly known the true faith; but whoever humbly prays to God to enlighten him, to him the Lord will reveal how greatly He loves mankind.”

People fear to enter into the fire that the Lord has brought into the world. They fear being consumed by it and “losing” their soul. But those who do not fear this faith (Luke 17:33; John 12:25), as we see in the example of the Elder, know that they have attained eternal life, and they know this with clarity, needing no other witness than the Spirit testifying within them (1John 3:14; 5:10).

For many years, the Elder’s life was a prayer for the world; in a way unknown to us, God’s grace informed him that as long as such love and prayer existed in the world, it would be preserved by God; but when love for one’s enemies disappears entirely from the face of the earth, the world will perish in the fire of universal discord.

The path of the Elder is the path of the saints, as Christ Himself indicated, yet the world as a whole has not accepted it.

In confronting evil manifested physically, people resort to physical force. Even Christians take this path. In the Western Church, during the Middle Ages, physical struggle against evil received doctrinal justification, which has not been entirely renounced to this day.

At that time, it manifested as the “Holy Inquisition”; today it takes other forms, which, however, in their spiritual essence remain the same phenomenon. In the history of the Orthodox Church, both ancient and modern, up to the present day, there have also been many instances of leaning toward the idea of physically combating evil; fortunately, these were lapses of individual hierarchs or church groups. The Church itself has never sanctified or dogmatized such means, but has always followed the path of Christ crucified, who bore the burden of the world.

The Elder had a deep and clear awareness that evil is overcome only by good; that struggle by force merely replaces one form of violence with another. We spoke with him about this matter many times. He said:

“In the Gospel it is clearly said… When the Samaritans would not receive Christ, the Apostles James and John wanted to call down fire from heaven to destroy them, but the Lord forbade it and said: ‘You do not know what spirit you are of… I came not to destroy men, but to save them’ (Luke 9:52–56). And we must hold only this thought – that all should be saved.”

***

God, in His good pleasure, allowed us – though to our shame and disgrace – to come close to the Elder and, in him, to perceive in part the wondrous life that Christ brought to the earth; to see how, in a single heart, there coexist in a strange harmony deep and firm peace, and deep and great weeping; joy and repose for all, and at the same time the profound suffering of a spirit living the tragedy of humanity.

The law – if it is appropriate here to use that word – of eternal life is contained in two commandments: love of God and love of one’s fellow human. But when a ascetic withdraws from the world, at first his life is chiefly concentrated on the first commandment and on personal repentance, taking on a character that is, as it were, egoistic.

Later, when repentance reaches a certain measure of completeness and the grace of God touches the soul of the ascetic, then Christ’s love begins to act within him, pouring out upon people and all of humanity. Even while remaining in the desert and seeing the world not with bodily eyes, he sees it with the spirit and lives deeply the sufferings of the world, because he lives them with a Christian consciousness of the uniqueness and great eternal value of each person.

Wherever a person may go, into whatever desert he may withdraw, if he is on the path of true life in God, he will live the tragedy of the world – and even with incomparably greater intensity and depth than those living amidst the world, because they do not know what they lack.

People suffer many privations, yet – with rare exceptions – they do not realize their greatest deprivation. Deprived of temporal goods, they feel their lack, grieve, and weep; but how would the whole world weep if it realized its principal deprivation? And with what striving would it seek the “one thing needed”?

***

Sorrow for the world can be true, holy, and God-loving, but it can also be perverted and dark. In the soul of a person who has not known perfect love, the two commandments of Christ often come into sharp contradiction.

One who loves God withdraws from the world and immerses himself in a certain spiritual egoism³¹, and, as if indifferent to what occurs in the world, saves his soul. One who passionately loves the human world lives its sufferings. Bearing sorrow for the world within himself, he may rise against God, considering Him the cause of the sufferings that flood the whole world – and at times this rebellion can reach strong hostility.

Yet in the Blessed Elder, one could see, according to the example of Christ, both types of love in their organic unity, despite the difference in their manifestations: the love that triumphs in eternity, and the love that suffers in our world of sin.

***

“God allowed us to see, at least in part, how the Elder wept over the possibility that the world might be deprived of the grace of the Holy Spirit, which had been granted to him to know. He was tormented by deep ‘compassion’ and prayed to God for mercy for ‘all the peoples of the earth.’

Thus, true love for God flows into true love for humanity. And therefore the Elder constantly affirmed that ‘he who does not love his enemies has no love of God.’

By ‘compassion for enemies,’ he did not mean a contemptuous pity, but rather the ‘pity’ of a loving heart – which, for him, was a sign of the authenticity of God’s path.”

If we cast a mental glance over the two-thousand-year history of Christianity, we behold the immeasurable wealth of Christian culture. Colossal libraries, filled with the great works of human intellect and spirit. Countless academies, universities, and institutes, where hundreds of thousands of young people, approaching the shores of this vast ocean – sometimes with bated breath, sometimes with beating hearts, grateful for the happiness and bliss granted them, sometimes with fervent enthusiasm that banishes sleep and bodily concerns – drink eagerly from the living water of wisdom. Tens of thousands of magnificent churches, marvelous creations of human genius.

Incalculable treasures of other kinds of art: music, painting, sculpture, poetry. And yet much, much more. And the Elder, it seems, ignores all this and focuses only on one thing: humility and love for one’s enemies – for in this lies everything.

I remember, at one point in my life, carried away by the works of the Holy Fathers, I said to him with sorrow: “I regret that I have neither the strength nor the time to study theology.” He replied:

“And you consider that a great undertaking?” – After a pause, he added: “In my view, only one thing is great: to humble oneself, for pride prevents us from loving.”

There were moments in our lives when God showed us that the Elder was truly a vessel of the Holy Spirit, and thus we trusted his words without our inappropriate and miserable judgment.

And now we find within ourselves not the slightest objection to the Elder, but with our hearts we feel that his word is the “final” word.

The Lord summed up all the law and the prophets in two brief commandments (Matt. 22:40). And at the Last Supper, just before His departure to the crucifixion, He said to the Apostles: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends,” and immediately added: “You are My friends… I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I heard from My Father” (John 15:13–15). In these few words, everything was said. Without them – all laws, all prophets, all cultures – are “nothing.”

***

Ten years have passed since the repose of the Elder, and only now has it become possible to present his word to the faithful. In life, this word is spoken only to the closest and most faithful friends, and even then only in rare and exceptional moments, because a person cannot know how he will complete his path; he cannot know whether he will justify his word by his life and death.

And we, if this word were ours, would not speak it, for we do not justify it with our life and could not withstand its judgment. But in this case, our role can be likened to that of a postman delivering a letter not written by him, or a typesetter setting a work written by another. Yet we dare to think that the Elder’s word deserves the greatest attention and study – not externally, of course, but through one’s own life. We know no one who, with such decisiveness, with truly apostolic conviction – or better, knowledge – would assert that love for enemies is the “sole” reliable criterion of truth, and not only in the soteriological sense, i.e., as a mode of spiritual and moral life that saves a person, but also in the dogmatic sense, i.e., in abstract-ideal knowledge of Being. The whole world still seeks a criterion of truth even to this day.

The believer recognizes the Church as such a criterion, for it is “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1Tim. 3:15) by virtue of its ontological connection with the Head – Christ – whose mystical body it is; by virtue of the constant abiding and action of the Holy Spirit within it, according to God’s promise. Yet in historical experience, such guidance is insufficiently clear, because those who call themselves Church are not only the one true Church, but also false churches, and there is no external mark that indisputably distinguishes the true Church from the false.

The criterion indicated by the Elder can be called universal, because it gives everyone the opportunity – through the spiritual life, subject to the control of our consciousness, in its psychic manifestation – not only to determine their spiritual state, i.e., to discern the truth or falsity of their individual path before God, but also to distinguish the teaching of the true Church from anything alien or distorted introduced into it.

The dogmatic confession of the Church constitutes an organic, indivisible unity, from which no parts may be arbitrarily removed.

Error in anything inevitably reflects on a person’s spiritual life; and if certain deviations or misunderstandings regarding the divine being or commandments are possible without peril to the work of salvation, other deviations and distortions may nonetheless obstruct salvation.

The teaching of the Church is not “pure” knowledge, and its dogmas are not abstract speculation about the divine being, as would be foreign to the Church as “gnosis.”

No. The dogmas of the true Church always have two aspects: ontological and soteriological.

As the House of the Living God, the Church is first and foremost concerned with “life”; its purpose and task is the salvation of man. Therefore, the primary importance lies not in abstract “ontology” but in the question of salvation. Salvation is attained through observance of Christ’s commandments of love for God and neighbor. The second commandment includes the Lord’s injunction: “Love your enemies.”

The Elder knew Christ as He was revealed to him, and insisted that this is the sole true and reliable path to knowledge of God, which is eternal life; it is the path to knowing God through His coming and indwelling in the human soul (John 17:3; 14:21–23).

The true Church always preserves the teaching of Christ undistorted, yet not all who call themselves members of the Church – or even speak in its name – understand it. For the gates of its love are open to every person, regardless of spiritual attainment, provided they confess faith and intend to be saved. For this reason, the empirically given being of the Church always represents a mixture of truth – revealed in the holiness of life – with non-truth introduced by the sins of its weak members, including individual representatives of the sacred hierarchy.

This circumstance greatly complicates distinguishing the true Church from false churches, which may also claim historical succession from the apostolic era, and may preach dogmatic teaching derived from Scripture, but with additions alien to divine truth and God’s will. The source of these distortions is sinful will – human or demonic – which often cannot be logically demonstrated to another or even fully understood by oneself. In all these cases, the criterion indicated by Elder Silouan is invaluable, because it allows one to discern without error the presence of a will alien to God, “Who desires all men to be saved” (1Tim. 2:1–6), and who commanded us: “Love your enemies.”

This command of Christ, reflecting the all-perfect love of the Triune God in the world, is the cornerstone of all our teaching; it is the final synthesis of all our theology; it is the “power from above” and the “abundance of life” granted to us by Christ (John 10:10); it is the “baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire” of which John the Baptist speaks (Matt. 3:11). This word – “love your enemies” – is the fire that the Lord brought to earth by His coming (Luke 12:49); it is the uncreated divine Light that shone upon the Apostles at Tabor; it is the fiery tongues in which the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles in the upper room at Zion; it is the “Kingdom of God within us, coming with power” (Mark 9:1); it is the fullness of humanity and the perfection of godlikeness (Matt. 5:44–48).

No matter how wise, learned, or virtuous a person may be, if he does not love his enemies, that is, every fellow human being, he has not attained God. Conversely, however humble, poor, or “ignorant” a person may be, if he bears this love in his heart, “he abides in God, and God in him.” According to the Elder, to love one’s enemies apart from the One True God is impossible.

The bearer of such love participates in eternal life, and has indubitable witness of it in his soul. He is a dwelling of the Holy Spirit, and in the Holy Spirit knows the Father and the Son, knows them in true and life-giving knowledge, and in the Holy Spirit he is a brother and friend of Christ, a child of God, and by grace, a god.

***

Looking upon Blessed Elder Silouan, we often thought:

Wherever we take the Christian life, it will appear to us as entirely opposed to the ordinary course of human life and its standards. In everything, we see a strange paradox.

The Christian humbles himself in his heart to the utmost degree, descending in his consciousness “below all creatures,” and through this humility he is raised to God and becomes above all creatures.

The Christian withdraws from the world; in what seems an “egoistic” concern for his own salvation, he leaves everything behind as unnecessary; he “hates” his father and mother, and children, if he has any; he rejects every fleshly and worldly attachment; in his striving toward God, he “hates” the world and wholly withdraws into the depths of his heart. And when he truly enters there, to wage battle with Satan and to cleanse his heart of every sinful passion, in that same heart, in its depths, he meets God, and in God begins to see himself inseparably bound to all the being of the world, so that nothing is foreign or external to him.

By first breaking with the world, he, through Christ, regains it in himself – but now in an entirely new way – and becomes united with it in a “covenant of love” for all eternity.

Then every person, regardless of place or historical era in which he lived, is incorporated through prayer into his eternal life. Then he realizes that his heart is not merely a physical organ or an organ of psychic life, but something indefinable, capable of touching God, the source of all being. In his deep heart, the Christian somehow experiences the entire history of the world as his own, and sees not only himself but the entire human world, the whole range of possible thoughts and spiritual experiences; and no person is then foreign to him, but each one he loves, as Christ commanded.

To stand firm in God’s love, it is necessary that both anger and “hatred” reach their ultimate intensity – but they are directed toward the sin living in me, the evil acting in me, “in me,” not in my brother.

All power to resist cosmic evil is concentrated in the deep heart of the Christian, while outwardly he, by the command of the Lord, “does not resist evil” (Matt. 5:39).

The Christian’s heart fears everything, down to the slightest movement of thought or unworthy feeling; it is anxious over all, grieves for all, and yet simultaneously fears nothing, even if “the heavens were to crash to the earth,” even if mountains fell with a roar upon our heads with all their imagined weight, the deep heart of the Christian would remain in fearless peace.

The Christian is the most defenseless of beings; he is under the blows of everyone and everything; the Christian is a slave to all and trampled by all (1Cor. 4:13), and yet he alone is free and inviolable in the deepest and most perfect sense of the word.

Beginning with renunciation, rejection, and “hatred,” according to the word of Christ: “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26). And again: “Whoever does not renounce all that he has cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:33). The Christian concludes with the desire to lay down his soul for Christ, and “for friends and even for enemies.”

Thus, by rejecting everything, breaking with everything, and “hating” all, the Christian receives from God the gift of eternal spiritual love for all and everything. Leaving all, renouncing all, he becomes the possessor of incomparably greater riches, genuine and eternal. “As having nothing, yet possessing all things” (2Cor. 6:10).

Thus, in comparison with ordinary life, the Christian life appears entirely contrary, paradoxical.

In communion with the Elder, we often thought: “He walks on the earth with his feet, works with his hands, and lives among people as the simplest man, yet no one knows him except God.”

To live in a Christian manner – one cannot; one can only die in a Christian manner, as the Apostle Paul died each day (1Cor. 15:31).

In our helpless attempt to describe even in the slightest the spiritual path of the Great Elder, we are approaching the completion of his earthly journey, which in ordinary human language is called death, and in the language of believers – the passing.

In the Elder’s final years, his soul was constantly absorbed in prayer for the world. Outwardly, he remained calm and composed until the end, yet very often the expression in his eyes was deeply focused and sorrowful. In his conversations, he most often returned to two themes, saying:

«I go to My Father, and to your Father; to My God, and to your God.» Consider how merciful these words are… The Lord makes all of us one family.

He also said:

«Pray for people… Have compassion for the people of God.»

When I remarked that praying for people is difficult, he answered:

«Of course it is difficult… To pray for people is to shed blood… but one must pray… Everything that grace has ever taught must be carried out until the end of life… Sometimes the Lord leaves the soul, to test it, to see the soul’s understanding and its will; but if a person does not compel himself to act, he will lose grace; and if he exercises his will, grace will love him and will no longer leave him.»

It was obvious that grace had loved him and no longer left him. But where does grace lead?

***

In the structure of the world, a hierarchical order is discernible, a division into higher and lower – the Pyramid of Being. Yet in human consciousness, we find the idea of equality, as an inescapable demand of our deepest conscience.

Some, observing the psychophysical world on the one hand, and empirically given human spiritual existence on the other, and noting a pyramid of inequality in both, conclude that inequality in human existence is ontologically necessary, and either from passion or from dispassionate philosophical conviction, they suppress the demand of conscience within themselves. Others, guided precisely by this unceasing demand of deep conscience, of the profound awareness of the human spirit, invariably strive to realize equality in human being.

But is equality possible where freedom is the fundamental principle of existence? From the experience of millennia of human history, the answer appears to be no.

What, then, is to be done to change this order of things, unacceptable to our spirit? For we cannot renounce the deepest spiritual thirst – to see all people as equal in their fullness.

Let us turn to Christ and see how He resolves this task.

The Lord does not deny the fact of inequality, the hierarchy, the division into higher and lower, greater and lesser, but He inverts this Pyramid of Being, top-down, thereby attaining ultimate perfection.

The indisputable pinnacle of this pyramid is the Son of Man Himself, the Only, True, Eternal Lord; and He says of Himself that “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28).

Regarding the angels, we accept the teaching that they are beings higher than us in knowledge and in the manner of their existence compared with our earthly being, yet the Apostle speaks of them as “ministering spirits sent forth to serve those who shall inherit salvation” (Heb. 1:14).

To His disciples, the Lord commands them to follow His example, which He demonstrated by washing their feet (John 13:15). He says to them:

“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; but whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant, and whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave” (Matt. 20:25–27; Mark 10:42–44).

Thus is defined the purpose and meaning of the Church’s hierarchy: namely, to elevate those lower in rank to the level of spiritual perfection occupied by those above in the hierarchical order, according to the words of the Apostle:

“And He gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:11–13).

Christ, as Creator – that is, the cause, in Slavic terms, the ‘Guilt’ or reason of being – and in this sense as the Author of the world’s being, took upon Himself the burden – the sin of the whole world. He is the pinnacle of the inverted pyramid, the apex pressed upon by the weight of the entire pyramid of being.

Christ’s followers, in an inexplicable way, become like Him by taking upon themselves the burdens or weaknesses of others: “Let the strong bear the infirmities of the weak” (Rom. 15:1).

We speak here of all this to indicate a characteristic feature of the Christian path, as observed in the inner life of the Elder. We are aware of our powerlessness in words and images to reveal this life.

***

The Christian descends “downward,” into the depths of the inverted pyramid, where the terrible pressure is concentrated, where He who took upon Himself the sin of the world – Christ – abides.

When the heart is touched by the great grace of God, the power of Christ’s love begins to act within it, and the soul, drawn by this love, truly descends into the depths of the inverted pyramid, striving toward Christ and becoming like Him. Within the limits of his strength, a person takes upon himself the burdens of his brothers.

Here arises a state that cannot be conveyed in words. The depth and intensity of the sufferings experienced in one’s life fill the heart with immense compassion for every suffering being; compassionate love reaches a readiness to sacrifice oneself, one’s entire being, for the good of one’s neighbors. At the same time, love irresistibly draws the whole person to God: mind, heart, and even the body – all of human existence is drawn to God in deep, fervent prayer, with tears for people – sometimes for particular individuals, known or unknown, sometimes for all humanity “from the beginning,” and sometimes, after long sufferings of love, the soul entirely surrenders itself to God, forgetting the entire world.

«When the soul is in God, the world is completely forgotten, and the soul contemplates God.»

After the inner sacrifice is offered – that is, when everything is internally given – the person experiences peace for all. An inner, profound peace arises, the peace of Christ, surpassing all human understanding (Phil. 4:7).

At the bottom of the inverted pyramid – the deepest bottom, whose pinnacle is He who bore the sin and burden of the entire world, the crucified Christ out of love for the world – there is a completely unique life, a completely unique light, a unique fragrance. There the ascetic of Christ is drawn by love.

Christ’s love torments His chosen one, burdens him, and makes his life unbearably heavy until it achieves its ultimate desire, and the paths to this final goal are unusual.

«To pray for people is to shed blood.» We have seen and testify that the Blessed Elder Silouan, praying for people, for the world, for all humanity, for all of Adam, in this prayer gave his life.

Such prayer is repentance for the sins of humanity, and as repentance, it is the taking upon oneself of their burdens; and as prayer for the whole world, it is, in some measure, the bearing of the world’s weight. But for the boldness for such prayer to appear in a person, his own personal repentance must first reach some measure of completion; for if he continues to live in sin and passions, instead of bearing the burdens of his brothers, he places his own burden upon them.

To share in the passions of Christ for the world, to have a “participation in His sufferings” (Phil. 3:10; 1Pet. 4:13), one must “cease from sin” (1Pet. 4:1).

***

To live in a truly Christian way is impossible; in the Christian sense, one can only die. As long as a person lives in this world, in this flesh, he is always, as it were, covered by a veil, and this veil prevents him from abiding perfectly and continuously in God, toward Whom the soul strives. As long as a person exists in this flesh, this aspect of his life always places him within the conditionality of earthly existence, and therefore all his actions also bear a conditional character, attaining their perfection only through the great mystery of death, which will either imprint the seal of eternal truth upon the entire path of his life, or, conversely, reveal its falsehood. Death, as the dissolution of the organic life of the body, is similar for all people, but as a spiritual event, it acquires a unique meaning and significance for each individual.

In this book, we do not set ourselves the impossible task of fully revealing the mystery of Christian spiritual life; we do not aim to solve any problems here. Our task is only to touch upon it, even partially, and thus show – based on the experience of the Elder, as we observed him – that the Christian-ascetic, guided by the commandment of Christ, inevitably arrives at that condition without which the commandment cannot be fulfilled, namely: “If anyone does not hate his own soul, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26).

When a Christian, in ardent striving for the commanded perfection, receives this condition deeply into his soul, as indicated by the Lord Himself, then begins the experience that, with good reason, can be said to lead a person to those ultimate boundaries that are accessible to humans at all.

Christ is the perfect God and the perfect man.

The perfect man, both in the sense of ultimate perfection and in the sense of being truly, authentically human. Only He, the all-perfect man, fully exhausted the entire fullness of human experience; those who follow Him, guided by His commandment and His Spirit, approach this fullness, but do not exhaust it, at least within the bounds of earthly life.

Speaking of the fullness of human experience, we are convinced that it is accessible to humans in all conditions, so that monasticism in this regard is not an exception to the general rule. Each of us is given the same commandment; in other words, none of us is diminished before God, but each is honored equally. Each of us is given that measure, so to speak, by which the ultimate perfection accessible to a human being is acquired – the price of which is the same for all: to spare oneself not at all, to the very end.

To spare oneself not at all does not mean only “to give all one’s possessions or to give one’s body to be burned” (1Cor. 13:3), but to detach oneself from all that one possesses (Luke 14:33) within the limits of one’s created being, in its separateness from God, in egotistic isolation and opposition to one’s neighbor, to one’s fellow human.

This perfection is attained fully only in death; and therefore, in essence, to live in a Christian way is impossible; in the Christian sense, one can only die.

***

The Blessed Elder repeatedly said that the Holy Spirit taught him to love with the love of Christ.

To love with the love of Christ means to drink the cup of Christ – the very cup that the Man-Christ Himself asked the Father to “pass by” (Luke 22:42).

The love of Christ is a bliss incomparable to anything in this world, and at the same time, it is suffering – the greatest of all sufferings, suffering unto death.

This ultimate threshold, death, is also the final test of our love and freedom. Whoever follows Christ, even partially, even from afar, ascending to Jerusalem, will understand the fear that His disciples experienced as they followed Him (Mark 10:32). This is because every action according to the commandment of Christ passes through trial, and “it cannot be otherwise”; only through such trial does it acquire its eternal dignity.

The ascetic, knowing this spiritual law, often resolves upon an act of love with deep fear, but afterward, when he passes through the trial and comprehends the greatness of God’s gift to humanity – the godlike freedom and godlike life – he finds neither words nor sighs sufficient to express his grateful love for God.

In the life of the ascetic there are moments when he resolves fully upon death, but usually this fire is carried within him secretly, without manifesting all its power; yet the moderate, externally unexpressed activity of this love is nevertheless necessary even in daily life, in order to remain capable of preserving the commandment in measure within one’s strength.

***

In prayer for the world, through great love, a person reaches such a state that he spares nothing in himself; and when this inner sacrifice is offered, the soul attains deep peace for all. But at the conclusion of prayer, seeing the world once again immersed in suffering and darkness, the soul turns again to prayer, and so continues until it reaches the final limit of its life.

Returning from prayer to the heaviness of psychophysical life, the soul experiences a certain sorrow over the insufficiency of its sacrifice, and even a sense of shame over its own falsehood, as it is written: “Every man is a liar” (Ps. 115:2). Falsehood, because it does not remain constant, and if today one has said, “I love,” tomorrow that love may no longer be present within him. Thus, gradually, a need arises in the soul to overcome the falsehood of one’s life and bring prayer to its ultimate truth, which is attained only in death.

***

On Thursday morning, September 2/15, 1938, around 5 a.m. (according to the Athonite reckoning – around 11 a.m.), I went to the Elder in the shop and found him, as always, calm; he spoke in his usual husky voice. I did not notice any outward change in him; he was engaged in his usual work.

Around ten o’clock in the morning, after lunch, I went to his cell. He was sitting on a chair at his table.

Seeing that he had changed, I asked:

– Elder, what is the matter with you?

– I am not well.

– What is the matter with you?

– I do not know.

Rising from the chair, he sat deeply on the bed, leaning his back against the wall, supporting his body in a semi-reclining position with his right hand; slowly straightening his neck, he lifted his head, and a look of suffering appeared on his face.

I asked:

– Elder, do you wish to die?

– I have not yet humbled myself, – he answered.

Gradually he lifted his legs onto the bed and laid his head on the pillow; dressed as he was, he remained lying there.

After a short silence, I said:

– Elder, you should go to the hospital.

– I do not want to go to the hospital, because there are people there, and then they will put me again, as last time, under the clock, and its ticking disturbs prayer.

– But a sick person cannot stay here; who will attend to you? … and there it would be more convenient.

– If they gave me a separate room, I would go to the hospital.

Saying, “I will go speak with the doctor,” I went to Father Thomas, a monk who was in charge of the hospital and called “doctor.” Father Thomas had not received formal education in the world, but having worked all his life in the Monastery’s hospitals, he acquired solid experience and even some theoretical knowledge. He was a man gifted with rich medical intuition and was very useful for the Monastery, since on Athos there are no real hospitals or doctors.

The Panteleimon Monastery hospital occupies two floors and is therefore divided into two wards: upper and lower. The lower ward is a large hall, divided by a partition into two halves.

In the second, rear half, on the side of the windows facing the sea, the corners are separated from the main space by thin walls, forming two small rooms; the doctor kindly provided the right-hand one to the Elder.

Returning to him, I said that the doctor had provided a room in the lower ward. The Elder agreed to go, but he was already so ill that he could not go alone and needed support. With sorrow, I accompanied him to the hospital.

The Monastery hospital had no technical means to assist in diagnosis.

What exactly the Elder was suffering from no one determined; his health deteriorated rapidly. As a severely ill person, according to Monastery custom, he received communion every day. On Monday, September 6/19, the sacrament of anointing of the sick was performed.

I often visited him but did not dare disturb him with conversation, sitting instead outside his half-open door, as the room was very small. During the Elder’s life, it was often possible for me to witness aspects of his life, to hear from him much that revealed the course of his inner spiritual path; it was possible to some degree to observe his approach to the great mystery of death, but the very moment of death remained hidden from me.

In the final days of his life, from the onset of illness until his repose, the Elder remained silent. During his life he recounted how one schemamonk in the hospital, preparing for death, spent all his time with eyes closed so as not to disturb God’s remembrance by any external impression. When this schemamonk’s close friend and spiritual companion visited, he spoke with him very briefly, recognizing his friend only by voice. Remembering this, I did not disturb the Elder’s peace with any questions except on rare occasions.

After a week, the Elder’s condition became critical. On Friday evening, September 10/23, shortly before sunset, the Elder’s spiritual father, Hieroschemamonk Sergius, came to read the moving canon of the Mother of God for the departing soul, called the “farewell canon.” Approaching the sickbed, the spiritual father said:

– Bless us, Father Silouan.

The Elder opened his eyes and looked at us softly and silently.

His face was pale from illness, yet calm. Seeing him silent, the spiritual father asked:

– Father Silouan, do you recognize us?

– I do, – he replied in a quiet but clear voice.

– And how do you feel?

– Well, I feel well.

Whether this answer reflected an ascetic desire to hide his suffering and not reveal it in complaints about his illness, or whether the Elder truly felt so spiritually well that the illness no longer affected or disturbed the peace of his soul, I do not know.

– We have come to pray with you and read the canon of the Mother of God… do you wish it? – asked the spiritual father.

– Yes, I wish it… thank you… I very much wish it.

The spiritual father began reading the canon. The pale Elder lay on his back, calm and still, with eyes closed; his right hand on his chest, left alongside his body. Without moving his left hand, I carefully found his pulse; it was very weak: at times barely perceptible, at times somewhat fuller, but in both cases so irregular that it changed several times within half a minute.

The reading of the farewell canon concluded. The Elder opened his eyes again, quietly thanked us, and we took our leave “until morning.”

At midnight, the hospital attendant, Father Nicholas, entered the small room. The Elder asked him:

– Is Matins being read?

– Yes, – the attendant replied, adding: – Do you need anything?

– Thank you, I need nothing.

The Elder’s calm question, his answer to the attendant’s offer of service, and the fact that he heard the reading, which barely reached his corner, all demonstrate that he was fully conscious and in full self-possession.

When the reading of Matins concluded, i.e., about an hour and a half after this brief conversation, Father Nicholas looked in on the Elder again and was greatly surprised to find him already reposed. No one heard his passing; even those lying nearby. Thus quietly he departed to God.

***

According to Church regulations, the body of a monk should not be fully exposed; therefore, a complete washing is not performed. Instead, with a damp sponge, the sign of the cross is made on the forehead, chest, hands, feet, and knees. Clothed in all monastic garments, in a cassock and over it the schema, the deceased’s body is wrapped with the head enclosed in the outer robe, placed on special stretchers, the small memorial litany is sung, and the body is carried to the church, covered with a black cloth bearing a dark-red cross sewn on it, resembling the cross of the schema.

Matins in the hospital is read considerably faster than in the Cathedral, and thus, before the beginning of the Divine Liturgy, there was some time during which all simple preparations of the monastic body for transfer to the church were completed. The Elder’s body, on the stretcher, was placed in the hospital church for the memorial liturgy, after which the monks, taking turns, read the Psalter over him.

According to Monastery custom, the Elder, having lived long in the Monastery and having held responsible obediences, was to be served the funeral “by the assembly.” After Vespers, his body was transferred from the hospital church to the main church of the Monastery, dedicated to St. Panteleimon the Great-Martyr, where the funeral rite was performed by a gathering of hieromonks. Usually, the abbot presides over the assembly, but since the elder abbot, Archimandrite Misail, at that time no longer left his cell due to hemiplegia, his deputy, Hieromonk Justin, presided.

After the customary rite of monastic funeral, the Elder’s body, still wrapped in the robe and without a coffin, was lowered into the grave in the Monastery cemetery outside the gates, while the concluding litany and “memory eternal” were sung.

The Blessed Elder, Schemamonk Silouan, reposed in the second hour of the night on September 11/24, 1938, and was buried that same evening at 4 o’clock.

Athos monasticism, in its sober distrust of man, adheres to the rule of the Fathers: “Do not honor anyone before the end.” This sober caution, like everything in human life, can sometimes exceed proper bounds, taking the form of an exaggerated fear of human insignificance. Athos monasticism is perhaps more liable to this latter excess.

During his life, Elder Silouan occasionally expressed in conversations with monks the thoughts that the reader will find in his writings. Since these words surpass the measure of ordinary human experience, it was natural that many monks felt concern for him, and some would say: “We shall see how he will die.” Many monks loved the Elder for his calm meekness and unwavering benevolence, yet strangely, the entirely exceptional life of the Elder over almost half a century remained largely unknown to most, and only after his passing was his sanctity recognized.

The question of ascetic self-concealment is highly significant in the life of every ascetic. There are many reasons compelling one to it. On Athos, besides the reasons common to the world at large, there are additional local ones. In the monasteries and hermitages of Athos gathered people who had left the world and had therefore passed through the fire of renunciation. All these people, with rare exceptions, in moments of intense striving toward God, offered a sacrifice aptly named: “The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14). Each performed this feat to the extent of his ability, and thus almost every one believes that he has accomplished it in full.

After this feat, after this sacrifice, seeing that he has not attained what he sought, the monk is exposed to a particular temptation – that of spiritual dependence. Just as Cain, seeing that the sacrifice of his brother Abel was accepted by God while his own was rejected, in envy reached the point of fratricide, so too monks, even if they do not physically kill a brother, often create extremely difficult spiritual conditions for him. Beyond attempts to obstruct the spiritual life of someone they see as successful in prayer and other spiritual labors, the very inner suffering caused by awareness of one’s own lack of success is in itself a sufficient reason for an ascetic to comport himself before others without revealing anything.

In the secular world, many people desire to witness holiness in order to honor it, and thus the ascetic is exposed to the danger of vanity… Yet there are also people possessed by an evil spirit for whom witnessing holiness is unbearable; they cannot endure it and become even more embittered. In the world at large, however, the overwhelming majority are inexperienced and do not understand the spiritual person. It is easy and simple to conceal oneself from such people. It is more difficult to conceal oneself from monks, who, constantly engaged in ascetic struggle, learn by many subtle signs to perceive what a brother is experiencing. Therefore, on Athos there arises a special necessity to conduct oneself outwardly in such a way that nothing of one’s inner state is revealed. We believe that among the Athonite monks, this art is held in very high esteem.

One monk, Fr. Stefan, who worked in the monastery pharmacy, loved the Elder greatly. He himself recounted the following to me:

*"In the morning, on the day of Elder Silouan’s repose, I left my work and went to the church to read the Psalter over him, earnestly asking the Lord to let me understand from this reading how he had lived his monastic life and whether he had pleased God. When I entered the church, a monk was reading: 'Thou art my God, and I will exalt Thee; I will confess to Thee, for Thou hast heard me and hast been my salvation. Confess to the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endureth forever.' Seeing that he had finished the kathisma, I told him: 'Go rest, and I will continue.' He left, and I took my place at the analogion and began reading the next kathisma: 'Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are they who seek Him with all their heart...

Thy testimonies have I kept… With all my heart I have sought Thee… I have declared all the judgments of Thy mouth with my lips… In the way of Thy testimonies I have delighted as in all riches,' and so on from this marvelous psalm. And then I became certain in my heart that he had pleased God."*

After the Elder’s repose, a hierodeacon requested permission from the abbot to “go into the desert.” When called before the Council of Elders, he had to explain why he wished to leave the monastery.

The hierodeacon replied that he thought it would be helpful for his salvation. Then one of the council elders, Schema-monk Matthew, said: “Is it not possible to be saved here? The late Father Silouan spent his entire life in our monastery; will you find anyone greater in the desert?” This statement came from Father Matthew, who, during Silouan’s life, had been among those most concerned for him.

Another of the monastery’s elder monks, Schema-monk Trophim, a remarkable ascetic whose life could serve as an example for many, read part of the Elder’s writings after his passing.

The Elder’s words on God’s love, on humility, on “keeping the mind in hell, and not despairing,” and other teachings, made a profound impression on him. I remember meeting him at the “small gate” of the monastery. He stopped me and said:

– Now I see that Father Silouan has reached the measure of the Holy Fathers… His repose convinced me.

– Father Trophim, I ventured to say, – did not half a century of life together in the monastery convince you of this, and only his death?

– I always loved him and rejoiced in meeting him, but it seemed to me that he spoke too directly (too openly) with God, and to tell the truth, I was afraid for him.

– How did he speak that made you afraid for him?

– Although very simple, he spoke so boldly and confidently about prayer and about God as one Father, that I would stop him and say: ‘Stop, Father…’ I thought he had lost the fear of God.

– And when you stopped him, how did he respond?

– He was always calm. I stop him, and he falls silent.

– Did he ever become angry when you stopped him?

– Oh no! He was a gentle man, and I do not remember him ever being angry.

– Father Trophim, you know that those who are tempted are always disobedient and take offense if reproved. How did you not notice this?

– God hid it from me… He was so simple… I only now understand my mistake.

– And what would you say about his writings?

– I have already told you: he attained the measure of the Holy Fathers.

A Serbian bishop, who had visited Mount Athos several times and greatly loved the Elder, upon learning of his death, wrote an obituary in his missionary journal entitled: “A Man of Great Love”, in which he said among other things:

«About this wondrous monk, one can only say – a sweet soul. Not only did I feel this sweet soul, but every Athonite who met him did as well. Silouan was tall, large, with a thick black beard, and his appearance did not immediately invite strangers to him. But one conversation was enough to love this man… He spoke of God’s boundless love for man and led the sinner to strict self-judgment.»

The bishop continued, recounting some conversations with the Elder:

*"This wondrous ascetic was a simple monk but rich in love for God and neighbor. Many monks from all over the Holy Mountain came to him for advice, but the Serbian monks from Hilandar and St. Sava’s Postnica loved him especially. They saw in him their spiritual father, reviving them with his love. All of them felt the loss of him painfully. For a long time they will remember Father Silouan’s love and his wise counsel.

And he helped me spiritually very much. I felt how his prayer strengthened me. Whenever I was on Holy Athos, I hurried to see him…”

The obituary concludes:

«And there is still much, much more that I heard from Father Silouan and about him from others. But who could enumerate it all and write it down? The book of his life is entirely written in pearls of wisdom and gold of love. It is a vast, imperishable book. Now it is closed and presented by the hands of his guardian angel to the eternal and righteous Judge. And the eternal and righteous Judge will say to the soul that loved him so on earth: ‘Well done, My faithful servant Silouan, enter into the joy of your Lord.’ Amen» (E.N.).

Another Russian bishop, Metropolitan V., who knew the Elder only through correspondence and accounts of those who had seen him, upon receiving news of his repose, wrote to Abbot Iustin (18–11–1938):

*"Your Reverence, Venerable Father Abbot and brethren!

I received your notice of the repose of the venerable Elder Fr. Schema-monk Silouan…

May the Kingdom of Heaven be his!

It is not for us sinners to judge holy people. God Himself glorifies them, as the Gospel tells. But I will say sincerely that in recent years I have felt no one’s grace so strongly as from Fr. Silouan.

It is difficult to describe in words the nature of this force. As it was said of Jesus Christ during His life on earth, that He spoke with authority, not like the scribes… so in the letters of Fr. Silouan I clearly felt a power I had never experienced from anyone. The Heavenly Divine Spirit…

Convincing without any proof…

Like a voice from ‘there,’ from God… I cannot say it better… Therefore I keep his letters to me. And if I knew nothing of his life, feats, prayer, obedience, the spirit of his letters alone would suffice for me, a sinner, to regard him as venerable.

I will tell one more instance of his clairvoyance.

A mother, now living abroad, had long lost contact with her daughter in Russia. She wanted to know how to pray for her – as for one living or deceased.

She asked Elder Silouan, and he undoubtedly replied that her daughter was alive and well… Indeed, after a few months, a woman went to Russia, found the lost daughter, and spoke with her.

Later, the Metropolitan recounts another similar case of clairvoyance and writes:

*“May I ask if you would collect archival information about him? For it is instructive, comforting, and saving for us sinners. And the letters should be gathered (even in copies).

I also ask permission for Fr. S. to send me some of the late Elder’s belongings and to console me with a reply to my letter to him.”³²

Signed: M.V."

Having set for myself the task of remaining within the bounds necessary, yet sufficient, to present the most important moments of the blessed Elder’s life known to me, as well as the most essential aspects of his teaching, clearly outlined for the attention of pious readers, I conclude my work.

In familiarizing oneself with the Elder’s own writings in the second part of this book, the reader will see that I have left many questions of great significance – both dogmatic and ascetic – regarding the spiritual being of man, raised by the blessed Father, unexamined. For example, questions concerning the participation of the body in the knowledge of God, or the question of fasting, which the Elder defined in a most peculiar and extraordinarily profound way – one might even say, Christ-like: “One should eat just enough so that after taking food one desires to pray” (Luke 21:34). At the same time, the reader will encounter a whole series of positions presented by me primarily on the basis of many oral conversations with the Elder. The choice of material is inevitably conventional and constrained. It would be unreasonable to attempt to exhaust all the material; equally unwise would be to overwhelm the reader with an abundance of material, distracting from what was essential – the focus of my father’s attention.

Beyond the testimonies already cited regarding the reverent veneration of Elder Silouan, I am aware of other similar testimonies, as well as numerous cases of the effectiveness of his prayers for the sick and suffering, or his extraordinary intuition and clairvoyance. Yet I chose to remain silent about these, partly because they involve living individuals, and partly because I am entirely disinclined to dwell on such things, following the spirit of the Elder himself, who did not attach great importance to them. History records many instances of healings and clairvoyance even among those not canonized as saints. That aspect of his life is not the truly great one.

The Venerable John Climacus says: “Some value more the gift of miracle-working and what is visible in spiritual gifts, not knowing that there is much that is higher and hidden, and therefore inseparable” (Ladder, 26:95). But what in the “hidden” can be “higher” even than the gift of miracles?

The Elder speaks of this thus:

*«O, my weak spirit. It flickers like a small candle in a gentle wind; but the spirit of the saints burned fervently like a thornbush and feared no wind. Who will give me such a fire, that I may know no rest by day or night from the love of God?

The love of God is fervent. For its sake, the saints endured all sorrows and attained the power of miracles. They healed the sick, raised the dead, walked upon water, rose into the air during prayer; with prayer they brought rain from heaven. I would only wish to learn humility and the love of Christ, to offend no one, but to pray for all as for myself.»*

I have endeavored, to the best of my ability, to speak of this highest and hidden aspect of the Elder’s life. Pursuing this goal, I resolved to write openly about the paths to attaining spiritual freedom in God – without concealing or hiding what I had heard.

In the same Ladder, St. John presents a remarkable account “of holy condemned men and of the prison of the penitent” (Ladder, 5). The holy writer, prophetically foreseeing the many temptations this word could bring even to this day, says among other things:

«A courageous man will depart from this as though pierced by a sharp point, with a fiery arrow in his heart. The lesser man will recognize his weakness and, having gained humility through self-reproach, will follow after the first; yet I do not know if he will overtake him. The negligent man, however, should not even touch that which is described here, lest, despairing, he squander what he already possesses.» (Ladder, 5:27)

Fearing to tempt the naive and faint-hearted with candid accounts of the struggles of spiritual warfare, I stated at the outset that “this book, by its content, is intended for a very narrow circle of readers”; I now wish to repeat that warning, because, however simple Elder Silouan may appear, his life was an exceptionally lofty and great feat of love for God.

Truly, I had to overcome considerable shame before daring to write this Life, because circumstances required that I not conceal my closeness to the blessed Father. I am certain that anyone who knew him, and knows me, will exclaim indignantly: “And you dared to write about the Elder?” Those who did not know him but know me – or have at least seen me – will, with disdain, remark: “If the disciple is like this, then the teacher must have been nothing.”

I am aware that, for the name of such a great Elder, having such a biographer and witness is a humiliation.

But there was no other course… I would have preferred to remain anonymous and present this work without attribution, so as not to diminish the Elder’s greatness by my own smallness, yet I could not allow myself to do so, as I considered it necessary to take responsibility for bearing witness to him. In partial justification of my boldness, I will say that I was prompted to this task by the desire and persistent requests of many people, as well as by obedience to my spiritual father, the deep Elder Hieroschemamonk Pinuferius, still living, who gave me his direct blessing. Nevertheless, I struggled internally for a long time, for the spiritual word is an energy of a very special order. The speaker is the first to be judged by the word he utters; therefore, of course, I submit myself to fully deserved criticism, knowing that I will be judged by God and men.

Some relief for my conscience, however, lies in the fact that this book contains not a single thought of mine; all has been drawn from the teachings and conversations of the blessed Father and my other mentors. Fearing, however, that, as one lacking spiritual discernment, I may have made errors both in describing the Elder’s life and in presenting his holy teachings, I ask that responsibility for these be placed entirely upon me, so that the Elder’s experience, sealed in his holy life and holy word, may not be blemished.

I ask every pious reader, understanding the difficulty of the task I undertook, to be as lenient and moderate as possible in their judgments. I beg forgiveness for all my involuntary errors – none were intentional, for I was guided by the fear of “lying about a saint” – and to correct them.

To avoid loss or damage to what is essential, I request that attention not be distracted by the many external or internal imperfections of my work – for example, the awkward arrangement and presentation of the narrative; the lack of skill in psychological description; the repetitions and returns to the same points; the unpolished and fragmentary nature of theological definitions, which will inevitably cause misunderstanding and criticism. Finally, I ask forgiveness for my heavy and coarse style, so discordant with the holy and majestic simplicity of the blessed Elder’s entire being.

The circumstances of my life at present did not allow me to overcome more of these deficiencies, though it is possible that in future work they may be mitigated to some extent. Now, however, I hope that the Elder’s word, flowing from a heart full of love, will capture the minds and souls of readers, for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, it bears in itself a vivid testimony to its truth and reality.

The Elder’s word, extraordinarily high in spiritual perfection, is a testimony to the supernatural life it was granted him to live. For many, it remains incomprehensible and inaccessible, despite its clarity and simplicity. Experience has shown that it is partly incomprehensible precisely because of its simplicity and its style, foreign to the modern intellectual person, which led me to accompany – and even precede – it with explanations in a language more accessible to educated people of our time, hoping to provide at least some support for understanding the paths of holiness.

Yet when the reader takes into account the need for careful attention to the simple and serene words of the Elder, in which deep questions of human spiritual being are touched upon, or the inner struggle and workings of grace are described, any need for my explanations naturally disappears, leaving only the holy and pure word of the blessed Father.

***

Today, commemorating our Father, Elder Silouan, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his repose, my soul, with reverent love, turns to him in prayer:

Forgive me, holy Father, that in my folly I dared to speak of that which, by your condescension, you entrusted to me.

Grateful to God, who granted me the undeserved happiness of knowing you and having free and frequent access to you during your life here, I ask, allow me to inquire: now that you have passed beyond all the limits of this earth and behold the incomprehensible beauty of the Lord, who loved you and whom you loved, and His Most Pure Mother, have you, in the sweetness of God’s love, forgotten our sorrowful world and no longer recall it, or do you continue to pray even more fervently, because, as you said, love can neither forget nor find rest until it reaches its ultimate desire?

And although my darkened and dead soul is now unable to perceive your voice, yet your words remain with us, in which we hear your answer:

*«The soul that has known God, its Creator and Heavenly Father, cannot have rest on earth. And the soul thinks: ‘When I appear before the Lord, I will entreat His mercy for all the Christian race.’ And together it thinks:

‘When I see His beloved Face, I will not be able to speak from the joy, for from great love a person cannot speak.’ And again it thinks: ‘I will pray for all humankind, so that all people may turn to the Lord and find rest in Him, for the love of God desires the salvation of all.’»*

In deep conviction that our blessed Father has attained God and perfect love, for which he so irresistibly longed, and that now, in the Holy Spirit, he embraces the entire world with his prayer even more fully than during his earthly life – desiring to warn no one, to impose nothing upon anyone, following only the impulse of his soul – I conclude my humble word with a prayer:

France, Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, “Donjon,” 11/24 September 1948

The following brief comments on this book belong to one of the spirit-bearing elders of recent times, Igumen Nikon (1864–1963). Igumen Nikon himself lived a life path fairly typical for a seeker of God in the early part of our century: a “usually religious” (peasant) family; loss of faith at school (real school); unsuccessful search for the meaning of life in science and philosophy (self-education); despair and a striking divine revelation; turning to psychology (Psychoneurological Institute) and then to serious study of Orthodoxy (Moscow Theological Academy); many years of ascetic struggle, culminating in taking monastic vows in 1931 and then ordination to the priesthood. He suffered in the labor camps of 1933–37, after which he worked in menial tasks and as a gardener. From 1944 onward he served in the parishes of the Kaluga and Smolensk dioceses. From 1948 until the end of his life, he was the rector of the church in Gzhatsk (now Gagarin).

His spiritual life, however, was somewhat unusual. He himself called himself a “forest” monk, since he never lived permanently in any monastery and never encountered a constant, spiritually experienced guide on his path, despite diligently searching. Later he repeatedly told his close associates: in our time, there are no spiritual mentors who see the soul of a person and are thus capable of being true guides on the path of salvation.

It is a great blessing if one finds a person united with oneself, sincerely striving for spiritual life, well-read in the Holy Fathers, reasonable and unpretentious. But such people are becoming increasingly rare. Follow the writings of the Holy Fathers, especially Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, who adapted the ancient fathers to our own time, so extremely poor in spirit. These words arose from Igumen Nikon’s personal experience, which gave him detailed knowledge of the path of spiritual life, usually accessible only to those who pass its main stages independently, without external support. The bitter yet joyfully saving experience of falls and recoveries, deviations and corrections along this path, showed him that the most important thing in spiritual life for a Christian is the perception of the deep corruption of human nature and the impossibility of healing it by personal strength alone.

This inner vision, which, in the words of St. Peter of Damascus, is “the first sign of a soul beginning to be healthy,” is granted to a Christian only through wholehearted striving to fulfill all the commandments of the Gospel and sincere repentance, and it leads to humility – the sole unshakable foundation for building the house of salvation. “Why,” he would say, “do many fail in spiritual practice? Because they base their struggle on secret self-conceit, on pride. Until a person sees his own weaknesses and passions, and begins to pray as the widow in the Gospel, the Lord cannot approach him and grant help” (recorded on tape). In one of his letters he formulated the same thought concisely: “Success in the spiritual life is measured by the depth of humility.”

Igumen Nikon read the blind-typed manuscript of Elder Silouan with great interest and “eagerness.” He found much in the life and spiritual path of the Athonite elder similar and kindred to his own. In its teachings and writings he heard the well-known voice of the Sacred Tradition of the Church, as expressed by all the holy fathers. As for the first part of the book – about Elder Silouan – his judgment was somewhat different. This was reflected, in particular, in the few marginal notes he made on the text, already seriously ill and, of course, with no thought of possible publication. From his words, as well as from the remarks presented here, it follows that the author of the book, Fr. Sophrony, at that time still did not fully understand the spiritual life and therefore allowed some mistaken judgments. At the same time, Igumen Nikon welcomed the appearance of this book as a testimony to the unceasing life of the Church, manifesting itself to the world through its saints.

– A. Osipov, Prof., Moscow Theological Academy