The Salvation of the World According to St Silouan

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We Must Pray for All: The Salvation of the World According toSt SilouanDecember, 19

Kallistos (Ware), Metropolitan

Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia analyses the soteriological theology of St Silouan the Athonite. Identifying thesimilar sense of cosmic unity found both in Dostoevsky and St Silouan, the Metropolitan discusses the influence ofSt Isaac the Syrian on both men, moving on to examine St Silouan's burning desire and constant prayer for thesalvation of the whole world and its theological implications.

Members of one another

Love all creation, says Starets Zosima in Fyodor Dostoevskys novel The Brothers Karamazov:

Love all creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand within it. Love every leaf, every ray of Gods light.

Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery

in things.

This divine mystery of which Starets Zosima speaks is precisely the interdependence, the reciprocal

coinherence, of all created things in God.

Everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you

set up a movement at the other end of the world.[1]

Such is Dostoevskys vision of cosmic unity. The created world constitutes an individual whole, and so the

salvation of each individual person is inextricably bound up with the salvation of all humankind and, yet more

widely, with the salvation of the entire universe. We are members of one another (Ephesians 4:25) needs to be

given the broadest possible application. It is not only we humans who depend on each other as the limbs of a

single body; but we have bonds of kinship with the animals as well, and also with trees and plants, rocks and earth,

air and water. We live in them, and they in us.

Precisely the same sense of cosmic unity is expressed by St Silouan the Athonite:

He who has the Holy Spirit in him, to however slight a degree, sorrows day and night for all mankind. His

heart is filled with pity for all Gods creatures, more especially for those who do not know God, or who resist

Him and therefore are bound for torment. For them, more than for himself, he prays day and night, that all may

repent and know the Lord (352).[2]

The Lord bestows such rich grace on His chosen that they embrace the whole earth, the whole world,

with that love (367).

Archimandrite Sophrony, in his book on Starets Silouan, sums up the teaching of the Starets on cosmic

coinherence in these words:

The life of the spiritual world, the Staretz recognized as one life and because of this unity every spiritual

phenomenon inevitably reacts on the state of the whole spiritual world (101).

We shall not be distorting the meaning of the Starets or that of Fr Sophrony if we give to these words an

all-inclusive scope: instead of saying the spiritual world and every spiritual phenomenon, we can correctly say

the created world and every phenomenon. As Fr Sophrony states elsewhere, St Silouan believed that eachperson who truly prays to God integrates everyone into his own eternal life whatever the geographical distance or

the historical time between them (233). Indeed, he integrates not only every person but every thing. Nothing isalien to him. In Dostoevskys words, Everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else.

Despite the striking parallels between the Russian novelist and the Athonite monk, it is highly unlikely that St

Silouan had ever read Dostoevsky. More probably, the similarities arise because both are shaped by the same

living tradition, and both are drawing on the same sources. St Silouan (almost certainly) and Dostoevsky (possibly)



have been influenced by a Mesopotamian hermit of the seventh century, St Isaac the Syrian, who writes in afamous passage of his Ascetical Homilies:

What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for theanimals, for demons, and for every created thing. At the recollection and at the sight of them such a personseyes overflow with tears owing to the vehemence of the compassion which grips his heart; as a result of hisdeep mercy his heart shrinks and cannot bear to hear or look on any injury or the slightest suffering ofanything in creation. This is why he constantly offers up prayer full of tears, even for the irrational animals andfor enemies of truth, even for those who harm him, so that they may be protected and find mercy.[3]

What exactly does Starets Silouan mean when, faithful to the teaching of St Isaac, he affirms that the saintsembrace the whole earth, the whole world, with their love? Let us note the all-embracing love and prayer thatconstitute our true vocation as human persons. There is first his firm conviction that God calls every human beingto salvation. Secondly, there is his conception of the total Adam and, linked with this, his insistence that myneighbour is myself. Thirdly, there is his firm assurance that in Gods total plan it is not only human beings but theentire cosmos that is to be redeemed and transfigured.

Divine love desires salvation for all

It was particularly characteristic of Staretz Silouan to pray for the dead suffering in the hell of separation fromGod, writes Fr Sophrony, and he goes on to recall an exchange that he overheard between the Starets and asomewhat dour hermit:

I remember a conversation between him and a certain hermit, who declared with evident satisfaction,God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.

Obviously upset, The Staretz said:

Tell me, supposing you went to paradise and there looked down and saw somebody burning in hell-fire -would you feel happy?

It cant be helped. It would be their own fault, said the hermit.

The Staretz answered him with a sorrowful countenance:

Love could not bear that, he said. We must pray for all (48).

This universal intercession commended by St Silouan, so far from being sentimental or Utopian, has on thecontrary a clear Scriptural foundation: God desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of thetruth (1 Timothy 2:4). This is the key text that the seventeenth-century Arminians invoked when opposing the strictCalvinist doctrine of double predestination; this is the text that inspired the dynamic missionary preaching of JohnWesley in the eighteenth century; and this is equally a saying that the twentieth-century Athonite keeps steadfastlyin view:

My soul longs for the whole world to be saved (291).... Divine love desires the salvation of all (328).... TheLords is such that He would have all men to be saved (368).... Our one thought must be that all should besaved (379).... The merciful Lord sometimes gives the soul peace in God but sometimes makes the heartache for the whole universe, that all men might repent and enter paradise (426).

According to St Silouan, this burning desire for the salvation of all humankind is to be found to a supremedegree in the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary:

She, like her beloved Son, desired with her whole heart the salvation of all (406).... She loved mankindand prayed ardently... for the whole world that all might be saved (365).

The fact that God desires the salvation of all does not of course mean that our salvation is automatic andinevitable. As the Letter to Diognetus states, God persuades, He does not compel, for violence is foreign to



Him.[4] Gods call to salvation comes in the form of an invitation, which we on the human side are free to accept orto reject. But, although the response varies, the call is universal.

St Silouans belief that God does indeed desire the universal salvation of the human race can be summed upin four short injunctions: love all; pray for all; weep for all; repent for all.

(1) Love all. When as a young monk, attending a service in the Church of the Holy Prophet Elijah, St Silouanreceived a vision of Christ (26), the effect of this vision was to flood his soul with a rare feeling of love for God andfor man, for every man (34). This all-embracing love remained with him throughout his life: Love cannot suffer asingle soul to perish, he wrote many years later (272). Comprehensive love of this kind he saw as par excellencethe characteristic of the saints (not that he would have made any claim to be himself numbered among them):

The holy saints have attained the Kingdom of Heaven, and there they look upon the glory of our LordJesus Christ; but by the Holy Spirit they see, too, the sufferings of men on earth. The Lord gave them suchgreat grace that they embrace the whole world with their love (396).

This ardent love, as the Starets envisages it, extends beyond the living to the dead and to those not yet born.In Fr Sophronys words:

In seeking salvation for all men love feels impelled to embrace not only the world of the living but also theworld of the dead, the underworld and the world of the as yet unborn that is, the whole race of Adam (108).

For St Silouan, as we have seen from his conversation with the dour hermit, this love for our fellow-humansincludes even hell within its scope. Expounding the teaching of the Starets, Fr Sophrony writes:

Dwelling in heaven, the Saints behold hell and embrace it too in their love (116).

This is possible for them, because the love that is at work in their hearts is nothing else than the love of GodHimself; and Gods love is present everywhere - even in hell:

God is present in hell, too, as love (115).... Even in hell Divine love will embrace all men, but, while thislove is joy and life for them that love God, it is torment for those who hate Him (148).

In the words of Vladimir Lossky, The love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have notacquired it within themselves.[5]

In thus teaching that the power of love extends even to hell, the Starets is once more following St Isaac theSyrian:

Even those who are punished in Gehenna are tormented with the scourging of love. The scourges thatresult from love that is, the scourges of those who realize that they have sinned against love are harderand more bitter than the torments which result from fear.... The power of love works in two ways: it tormentsthose who have sinned, just as happens here on earth; but those who have observed its duties, love givesdelight. So it is in Gehenna: the contrition that comes from love is the harsh torment; but in the case of thesons of heaven, delight in this love inebriates their souls.[6]

The power of love works in two ways: what the saints in heaven feel as joy, those under condemnation in hellexperience as intense pain. But it is the same divine love that is present in them both.

If those in hell are not deprived of Gods love, if they are embraced also by the love of the saints, may it not stillbe possible for them to respond to this love that surrounds them on every side? Is there not still a hope that theymay ultimately be saved? St Isaac certainly seems to have believed in universal salvation:[7] as a member of theChurch of the East, dwelling safely beyond the confines of the Byzantine Empire, he had no reason to fear the anti-Origenist anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553).

What of St Silouan? Fr Sophrony maintains that the Starets was no Origenist (109),[8] and I agree with him. StSilouan insists that our loving intercession should extend even to those in hell, we are to sorrow over those who



are not saved (377) and to weep for those who do not know God (386). Further than this, however, he does notgo. With characteristic reticence, he avoids all speculation about a final apocatastasis. He does not attempt tospecify who can be saved and who cannot; that is a mystery known at present only to God. For his part he answersonly with the words, I do not know:

Father Cassian used to say that all heretics would perish. I do not know about this my trust is only in theOrthodox Church (483).

When reflecting on the possibility that in the Age to Come there may be some who remain for everunreconciled, burning in hell-fire, the Starets says simply, Love could not bear that. Further than this he does notgo.

What of the demons? Might they also be saved, and in that case should we not pray also for them? St Isaacthe Syrian, as already noted, affirms that the merciful heart is on fire with compassion for the demons, but he doesnot actually say that we should pray for them. St Silouan speaks in similar terms. We are to pity the demons, butnothing is stated about intercession on their behalf:

The Spirit of God teaches love towards all, and the soul feels compassion for every being, loves herenemies and pities even devils because they have fallen away from God (469).

The Starets was emphatically a man of the Church; and so, if asked whether we may legitimately pray for thedemons Fr Sophrony does not in fact record any occasion when he was so asked surely his answer would havebeen that the Church has no such practice; and in all such matters we must follow the Churchs rule of prayer. Butat the same time it is not for us to set limits to the divine mercy.

(2) Pray for all. Love and prayer go together; if, then, we are to love all human persons, this signifies that weare also to pray for them. So the Starets writes:

I pray Thee, O Merciful Lord, let all mankind, from Adam to the end of time, come to know Thee (319).... Iwill pray for the whole human race, that all people may turn to the Lord and find rest in Him (328).... I beseechThee, O Lord, let all peoples come to know Thee (332).

The Starets quotes with approval the words of an ascetic monk with whom he once talked:

Were it possible I would pray everyone out of hell, and only then would my soul be easy and rejoice(468).

Were it possible: the Starets does not say that it actually is possible. The Starets sees this all-inclusiveintercession as the proper and characteristic vocation of the monk.

The constant prayer for others constitutes the monks way of serving society as a whole:

Thanks to monks, prayer continues unceasing on earth, for through prayer the world continues to exist....When there are no men of prayer on the earth, the world will come to an end.... The world is supported by theprayers of the saints (407-8).

In this connection Fr Sophrony refers appropriately to the sixth-century elder St Barsanuphius of Gaza, whoasserts that in his day there were three men who through their prayers were preserving the whole human race fromcatastrophe (223).[9] Barsanuphius mentions the names of the first two, who significantly are otherwise unknown tothe annals of history. He does not say who the third was, presumably because God had revealed to him that it wasBarsanuphius himself.[10]

By thus praying for the world, the monk not only helps the Church and human society at large, but he alsohelps himself. Here the Starets describes his own experience as a monastery steward. Most monks consider thatthis particular obedience renders it impossible to preserve continual prayer and inner peace, for it involves contactwith large numbers of people throughout the day. Starets Silouan disagrees. If the steward will only intercedeconstantly for those under his charge, saying The Lord loves His creation, all will be well: he will find that he is



freed from distractions and can maintain an uninterrupted remembrance of God (418).

In the monks relationship with the world, St Silouan distinguishes a double movement. First, through prayer

the monk withdraws into himself, shutting out the world, gradually liberating himself from visual imagery and

discursive thinking, and so entering into the image-free stillness of the heart. But then, within the depths of his own

heart, he rediscovers his solidarity with all humankind and with the whole creation. So the monks flight from the

world turns out to be not world-denying but world-affirming. In the words of Fr Sophrony:

In his longing for God he hates the world and retires totally into the depths of his own heart. And when

he does so totally, in order there to do battle against Satan, in order to cleanse his heart from every single

passion, in the depths of this heart of his he meets with God, and in God begins to see himself indissolubly

linked with the whole of cosmic existence; and then there is nothing alien, nothing that is extraneous to them.

As St Silouan observes, True, Arsenius the Great was bidden to shun people but in the desert, too, the Spirit

of God teaches us to pray for people and for all the world (296).

(3) Weep for all. True prayer cannot but be costly; loving intercession involves an inner martyrdom, awillingness on our part to accept suffering. As St Silouan says, Praying for people means shedding blood (236);

The greater the love, the greater the suffering (338). It is not enough simply to read lists of names; we are required

to intercede with tears of sorrow. Pray for all means Weep for all:

My heart aches for the whole world, and I pray and shed tears fro the whole world, that all may repent

(341).... My soul weeps for the whole world (371).... O Lord, grant me tears to shed for myself, and for the

whole universe (385).

(4) Repent for all. St Silouan would have us go yet further on the path of mutual coinherence. Not only are werequired to weep for all, but we should also repent for all. In his view this is part of what St Paul meant when he

said, Bear one anothers burdens, and in this way fulfil the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). As Fr Sophrony points

out, if viewed in purely juridical terms the notion of vicarious repentance of laying one persons guilt upon another

makes no sense; it is simply not fair. But the love of Christ is not limited to juridical norms:

The spirit of Christian love speaks otherwise, seeing nothing strange but something rather natural in

sharing the guilt of those we love even in assuming full responsibility for their wrong-doing. Indeed, it is only

in this bearing of anothers guilt that the authenticity of love is made manifest and develops into full awareness

of self (120).

Adams fall consisted precisely in his refusal to accept that he too was involved in the guilt of Eves sin. Adam

denied responsibility, laying all the blame on Eve and on God who had given him this wife, and so he shattered the

unity of the human race. If only, instead of justifying himself, he had taken upon his shoulders the responsibility for

their joint sin, the destinies of the world might have been different (121). We in our turn, when we refuse to repent

for others, are repeating Adams sin, thus making his fall our own.

Strange though this concept of vicarious repentance may seem to most modern readers, it has in fact an

excellent Patristic pedigree. One author who expresses this idea in strong terms is St Mark the Monk (?early fifth

century):

The saints are required to offer repentance not only on their own behalf but also on behalf of their

neighbour, for without active love they cannot be made perfect.... In this way the whole universe is held

together in unity, and through Gods providence we are each of us assisted by one another.[11]

Adam, our father

St Silouans consuming desire for the salvation of all stands out in yet sharper relief when we take into account

his teaching about what may be termed the total Adam. This is not, I think, a phrase that he himself employs, but it

accurately sums up his point of view.

For St Silouan, Adam is our father (451), the father of all mankind (448). Following St Paul (1 Corinthians



15:22, 45), the Starets sees Adam the first-formed man as the collective head of the human race, containing andrecapitulating within himself the whole of humankind. There are obvious parallels here between St Silouan and StIrenaeus of Lyon, even though the Starets was probably unfamiliar with the Irenaean writings. This solidarity andrecapitulation in Adam renders all human persons consubstantial and ontologically one, as Fr Sophrony puts it(123, 51, 217). This ontological unity is not merely abstract and theoretical but specific and actual, for the wholeAdam is not an abstraction but the most concrete fullness of the human being, to quote Fr Sophrony once more(222). It was the denial of this consubstantiality that constituted, as we saw earlier, the essence of Adams fall.

This unity in the total Adam is movingly expressed in the best-known of all St Silouans writings, AdamsLament (448-56). Here the Starets takes up and develops in his own way the liturgical texts for the Sunday beforeLent, the Sunday of Forgiveness, on which the Orthodox Church commemorates the expulsion of Adam fromparadise. In particular he has used the ikos appointed for that day:

Banished from the joys of paradise, Adam sat outside and wept, and beating his hands upon his face, hesaid: I am fallen, in Thy compassion have mercy on me....

O paradise, share in the sorrow of thy master who is brought to poverty, and with the sound of thy leavespray to the Creator that he may not keep thy gate closed for ever. I am fallen, in Thy compassion have mercyon me.[12]

As we read St Silouans prose-poem Adams Lament, it becomes clear that this is the lament not just of Adambut of Silouan himself, and not of him alone but of the whole human race. Adams sorrowful repentance is ourrepentance also:

The soul that has lost grace yearns after the Lord, and weeps as Adam wept when he was driven fromparadise (326).... O Lord, grant unto us the repentance of Adam (271).

Nor is this all. It is the lament not of humankind alone but of the entire creation, for all created things areinvolved in Adams fall:

Thus did Adam lament,

And the tears streamed down his face onto his beard,

onto the ground beneath his feet,

And the whole desert heard the sound of his mourning.

The beasts and the birds were hushed in grief (449).

Lo, the whole earth is in travail (452).

The sin of Adam is cosmic in its effects, destroying as it does the primal harmony that prevailed betweenhumans and the rest of creation. So Adam exclaims in his Lament:

In paradise was I joyful and glad:

the Spirit of God rejoiced me,

and suffering was a stranger to me.

But when I was driven forth from paradise

cold and hunger began to torment me.

The beasts and the birds that were gentle



and had loved me turned into wild things,

and were afraid and ran from me (455).

Because of our solidarity in the total Adam, writes Fr Sophrony, all of us share in Adams guilt (120). Thisdoes not mean that either he or St Silouan would endorse an Augustinian doctrine of original sin, in a fullydeveloped form. But it does mean that, united as we are as members of a single human family, we are each of usresponsible for everyone and everything, to use the phrase of Starets Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. Yet, ifwe are subject to a solidarity in guilt, we enjoy egually a solidarity in salvation: in the words of Khomiakov, No oneis saved alone.[13] My personal salvation is bound up with the salvation of the entire human race, and indeed ofthe whole creation. Fr Sophrony neatly illustrates this interdependence in both sinfulness and salvation byrecounting a conversation that he once heard between two Athonite monks:

The first said,

I cannot understand why the Lord does not grant peace to the world even if only a single personimplored him to do so.

To which the other replied,

And how could there be complete peace in the world if but a single malicious man remained? (200)

This understanding of the total Adam means that, on each occasion when we say the Lords Prayer, we offerit not only on our own behalf but on behalf of everyone. As Fr Sophrony says, When we pray Our Father we thinkof all mankind, and solicit the fullness of grace for all as for ourselves.[14] St Gregory of Nyssa emphasizes thissame point when he states that, since we share in Adams nature and therefore share also in his fall, inconsequence the petition in the Lords Prayer, Forgive us our trespasses, is something that we offer for Adamssake as well as for our own.[15] This fits exactly with St Silouans line of thought.

On the basis of this theology of the total Adam, the Starets is able to give a particularly powerful interpretationto Christs command, You shall love your neighbour as yourself (Matthew 19:19). I am able to love my neighbouras myself, because by virtue of the unity of all humankind in Adam our father, my neighbour is myself. I amlikewise to pray for others as I pray for myself: All my desire, says St Silouan, is to learn humility and the love ofChrist, that I may offend no man but pray for all as I pray for myself (350: italics in the original). In the same way thesuffering of the other is my suffering, and my neighbours healing is healing for me as well; my brothers glory willbe my glory also.[16] If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoicetogether with it (l Corinthians 12:26).

This leads St Silouan to affirm in a strong and literal sense that my neighbours life is my own: Blessed is thesouls that loves her brother, for our brother is our life (371: italics in the original). For the one who prays, says FrSophrony,

The existence of mankind is not alien and extraneous to him but is inextricably bound up with his ownbeing.... Through Christs love all men become an inseparable part of our own individual, eternal existence(47).

Christ has taken up the total Adam into Himself and has suffered for him; we therefore should take up intoourselves the life of all mankind, looking upon every other person as our eternal brother:

Each of us must, therefore, take heed not only for himself but for this single whole (47-48).

So it is that, according to the Starets, in his deep heart the Christian after a certain fashion lives the wholehistory of the world as his own history; for no man is alien to him (234).

Exactly because my neighbour is myself, because my brothers life is my own, I am required to love myenemies.



Only in the light of St Silouans teaching on the total Adam can we truly appreciate the crucial importance thathe attached to love for enemies. I am to love my enemy, because my enemy is myself; I am the other whom Iregard as my enemy. His life is mine, and mine is his. Love for enemies is a direct corollary of our mutualcoinherence in Adam, our father.

Weep with me, forest and desert

Sin and salvation, however, are not merely human in scope, but they also involve the entire created order.When Adam fell, the whole creation fell with him; and by the same token our human salvation will inaugurate thesalvation of the total cosmos. As Fr Sophrony puts it, Every saint is a phenomenon of cosmic character (223). Weare not saved from but with the world.

This cosmic understanding of sin and salvation has a firm basis in Scripture. St John the Baptist, for example,greets Jesus with the words, Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). TheForerunner does not say the sins, but he says the sin (in the singular) of the world. Beyond the personal sins ofindividual humans, there is a deeper sinfulness that involves the world as a whole. St Paul in his turn states that theentire created universe is at present in bondage to decay and groans as if in pangs of childbirth, waiting witheager expectation for the revealing of the children of God. When we humans enter into our glorious liberty inChrist, then the whole creation will also be set free (Romans 8:19-22). Our fall, that is to say, entails the fall of allcreation, and our redemption will likewise bring liberation to creation as a whole. The New Testament concludeswith a comprehensive vision not only of a new heaven but of a new earth as well (Revelation 23:1).

The same understanding of the cosmic dimensions of Christs saving work finds expression in the servicebooks of the Church. Let us take as an example a text with which St Silouan was certainly familiar: the Praises orEncomia recited at Matins on Great Saturday in front of the Epitaphion depicting the dead Christ laid out for burial.[17] In the first place the Praises emphasize that Christs death and resurrection bring forgiveness and new life toall the human race:

Uplifted on the Cross, Thou hast uplifted with Thyself all living people; and then, descending beneath theearth, Thou raisest all that lie buried there.

Stretched out upon the Wood, Thou hast drawn us mortals to unity; pierced in Thy life-giving side, OJesus, Thou art become a fountain of forgiveness unto all.

We notice how the atonement is not selective but universal in its scope. But the Praises go further than this,proclaiming that Christs death upon the Cross has transformed the entire created order:

The whole creation was altered by thy Passion: for all things suffered with Thee, knowing, O Word, thatThou holdest all in unity.

This is a remarkable statement, but it does not stand alone. The Praises return frequently to the themeof this all-inclusive co-suffering:

Though Thou wast shut within the narrowest of sepulchres, O Jesus, all creation knew Thee as true Kingof heaven and earth.

The whole earth quaked with fear, O Word, and the daystar hid its rays, when thy great Light was hiddenin the earth.

Of old the lamb was sacrificed in secret; but Thou, longsuffering Saviour, wast sacrificed beneath theopen sky and hast cleansed the whole creation.

O hills and valleys, the multitude of humankind, and all creation, weep and lament with me.

The sun and moon grew dark together, O Saviour, like faithful servants, clothed in black robes ofmourning.



Come, and with the whole creation let us offer a funeral hymn to the Creator.

The whole earth mourns with us humans for the dead Christ laid in the tomb; and to an equal degree the wholeearth is raised to new life, along with us humans, through the Saviours resurrection from the dead. Paschalsalvation extends beyond the human realm to the world of nature, involving animals, trees, hills and valleys, sunand moon, and the totality of the material creation.

Faithful to this all-inclusive understanding of Christs redemptive work, the Starets believes that our personalsalvation is integrally connected with the salvation of the whole world. The precept Love all means that we are tolove the entire creation: humans first, but also animals, plants, and each and every part of nature. Ours is to be alove without limits, to borrow the title of one of Fr Lev Gillets books.[18] We are to feel compassion for the wholeuniverse and every living creature... a love for every one of Gods creatures, says St Silouan. Weep for all meansthat you will shed abundant tears for your fellow-man and for every thing that hath breath, and all creation (427).When the soul learns love of the Lord, she is filled with compassion for the whole universe (443); and when shemourns for the withdrawal of Gods grace she calls on all creation to lament with her:

Weep with me, forest and desert. Weep with me, every creature created by God, and comfort me in mygrief and sorrow (365).

In St Silouans teaching concerning the bonds that unite us humans to the rest of creation, there are threepoints that I find particularly interesting:

(1) The Starets underlines the spiritual value of the human body. While he adopts a negative attitude towardsthe passions, he is fundamentally positive in his estimate of our human physicality. We are to hate, not our bodiesas such, but the sinfulness that corrupts them. In its present fallen state the body may appear to us as ouradversary, but in its true and natural condition, as originally created by God, it is our helper and our friend. Godcalls us to a total sanctification:

The Light of the Lord will be in the souls and minds and bodies of the Saints (290).... The Holy Spiritpervades the entire man - soul, mind and body (353) (italics in the original).

Advancing on the spiritual way, a person becomes sensible, consciously aware, of the grace of the HolySpirit in body as well as soul (283); the ninth of the ten rewards that the monk receives from God even hereon earth is that he feels the grace of God in his body, too (501)/ The man with grace in soul and body knowsperfect love (368).

Perfect love, then, leads to the transfiguration of the body:

The fourth and perfect kind of love for God exists when a man possesses the grace of the Holy Spirit inboth soul and body. His body is then hallowed, and after death his earthly remains become relics (343).

The Starets mentions from his own experience an instance of bodily glorification:

At Vespers during one Lent at the Monastery of Old Russikon-on-the-Hill the Lord allowed a certain monkto see Father Abraham, a priest-monk of the strict rule, in the image of Christ. The old confessor, wearing hispriestly stole, was standing hearing confessions. When the monk entered the confessional he saw that thegrey haired confessors face looked young like the face of a boy, and his entire being shone radiant and wasin the likeness of Christ (403-4).

In this way St Silouans theology of the human person is firmly holistic. Divine grace embraces the total person,soul and body together; the body is deified along with the soul. This has an immediate relevance for his attitude tothe material creation. It is through our bodies that we relate to our physical environment, which passes within usand becomes part of us through the exercise of the five senses. If, then, sanctification involves not only our soul butour physical nature, it follows that through our body we can experience the material world as holy, and through ourbody we can in turn transmit holiness to the material world around us. Our body is the essential intermediarybetween our inward being and the world of nature; and, because our body can be filled with grace, it is clear that



our own sanctification forms a single mystery with the redemption of the material creation.

As a monk of the strict Athonite tradition, St Silouan had been formed by an austere physical discipline. Butnever did he interpret this ascetic self-denial in a dualistic sense. The monks aim, in the words of St JohnClimacus, is precisely a body made holy.[19] He seeks the sanctification of the body, not its destruction.

(2) St Silouan gave careful thought to our relationship as humans with the animals. This is only to be expected.He had grown up in an agricultural community. The Holy Mountain which then became his monastic home aboundsin living creatures, in birds, butterflies, snakes and jackals, and also (at any rate in the days of the Starets) inwolves and wild boar, not to mention the domestic animals, the horses and mules, that the monasteries used tokeep in great numbers before the advent of the tractor and the jeep. Animals were his constant companions.

His attitude towards them is marked by two characteristics: by loving compassion and by realism. He displaysboth gentleness and detachment. Loving compassion inspires him to write:

Once I needlessly killed a fly. the poor thing crawled on the ground, hurt and mangled, and for threewhole days I wept over my cruelty to a living creature, and to this day the incident remains in my memory....

One day, going from the Monastery to Old Russikon-on-the- Hill, I saw a dead snake on my path whichhad been chopped in pieces, and each piece writhed convulsively, and I was filled with pity for every livingcreature, every suffering thing in creation, and I wept bitterly before God (469).

At the same time the Starets urges us not to grow unduly attached to animals, and not to bestow on them thelove that we ought rather to give to God and to our fellow-humans:

Feed animals and cattle, and do not beat them - in this consists mans duty of kindness towards them; butto become attached, to love, caress and talk to them - that is folly for the soul (470).

I left that passage out from the first English edition, Fr Sophrony once said to me. I knew the English wouldnever be able to understand that.

Incidentally, St Silouan nowhere suggests that there is anything intrinsically sinful in eating animal flesh. As anAthonite monk he would not have eaten meat, but there are many days in the year when the monastic rule permitsfish. There was even a time, so he tells us, when he had to struggle against an almost obsessive desire toconsume fish (470-1). If the monk abstains from meat, this is for ascetic and disciplinary reasons, not becausemeat-eating is in itself wrong. Indeed, the Orthodox Church had never advocated vegetarianism as a generalprinciple.

St Silouans compassion for the suffering of animals did not make him lose sight of the truth that God hasgiven this world to us humans for our use. Man, as he puts it, is the supreme creation (376). In Fr Sophronyswords, The world itself was created for man.[20] Of course this does not in any way justify a cruel and selfishexploitation of our natural environment. On the contrary, in our enjoyment of the world, we are to show the utmosthumbleness and sensitivity. God has indeed given us dominion over the animals (Genesis 1:28), but dominiondoes not signify tyranny.

(3) The compassionate love of St Silouan extends beyond animals to plants: Hurt not the earth, neither thesea, nor the trees (Revelation 7:3). On one occasion when the two of them were walking together, Fr Sophronystruck out with his stick at a clump of tall wild grass. The Starets said nothing, but he shook his head doubtfully; andat once Fr Sophrony was ashamed (94). In his own writings St Silouan says:

That green leaf on the tree which you needlessly plucked it was not wrong, only rather a pity for the littleleaf. The heart that has learned to love feels sorry for every created thing (376).

The Spirit of God teaches the soul to love every living thing so that she would have no harm come to even agreen leaf on a tree, or trample underfoot a flower of the field. Thus the Spirit of God teaches love towards all, andthe soul feels compassion for every being (469).



Thus cosmic compassion, this sense of our human responsibility towards the whole of creation, makes theStarets very much a saint of our own time, living as we do in an era of global pollution. His words, written over halfa century ago, are marked by prophetic insight. With good reason the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople,in the timely statement on Orthodoxy and the Ecological Crisis published in 1990,[21] includes St Silouan theAthonite among the witnesses that it cites, along with the Prophet Isaiah, St Isaac the Syrian and Dostoevsky.

Yet there is a tension, even a paradox, in St Silouans attitude towards the created order. He urges us to loveevery created thing; and emphasizes the beauty of nature:

From my childhood days I loved the world and its beauty. I loved the woods and green gardens, I lovedthe fields and all the beauty of Gods creation. I liked to watch the shining clouds scurrying across the blue sky(286).

If we lose our sense of wonder before the beauty of nature, so he believed, this suggests that we have at thesame time lost our sense of Gods grace (96).

On the other hand, the Starets maintains that the true monk forgets the world (501). So he writes:

After I came to know my Lord, and He made my soul His prisoner, everything changed, and now I nolonger want to contemplate the world (286).... My soul... has no wish to look upon this world, though I do loveit (381).... My soul is filled with love of Thee and knows no desire to look upon this world, beautiful though it be(284).

Such is St Silouans order of priorities. However much we value the beauty of the creation, we should feel anincomparably greater love for God the Creator.

* * * *

For St Silouan, then, there is a single and undivided mystery of salvation, at once personal, pan-human andcosmic: everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else. There can be nodisagreement between our personal salvation and the salvation of the world. The two form a unity. Our ownsalvation is necessarily linked to the salvation of every other human being, for our brother is our life. At the sametime, the transfiguration of us humans inaugurates the transfiguration of the cosmos. Not without reason, on thelast page of Fr Sophronys book on the Starets, do we find a prayer that is all-embracing in its scope:

O Lord, give unto us this love throughout Thine whole universe (504).

[1] F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, book 6, chapter 3.

[2] All quotations from St Silouan or from Fr Sophrony, unless otherwise indicated, are from ArchimanditeSophrony (Sakharov), Saint Silouan the Athonite (Monastery of St John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, By Maldon,Essex 1991). References to the relevant page are included in the text.

[3] The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, tr. Dana Miller (Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston,Mass. 1984), pp. 344-5; A.M. Allchin (ed.) and Sebastian Brock (tr.), The Heart of Compassion: Daily Readings withSt Isaac the Syrian (Enfolded in Love series: London 1989), p.9. My own rendering is eclectic, drawing on bothtranslations, but mainly following Dr Brock.

[4] Epistle to Diognetus vii, 4.

[5] The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London 1957), p. 234.

[6] Ascetical Homilies, tr. Miller, p. 141; tr. Brock, p. 53.



[7] Ascetical Homilies, tr. Miller, p. 141; tr. Brock, p. 52.

[8] Indeed, was Origen himself an Origenist, in the sense envisaged by the Council of 553?

[9] See Barsanuphius and John of Gaza, Correspondence, 569.

[10] This is the opinion of the first editor of Barsanuphius, St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, VivlosVarsanouphiou kai Ioannou (2nd edn, Sotirios Schoinas: Volas 1960), p. 267, n. 1.

[11] On Repentance 11 (PG 65:981AB).

[12] The Lenten Triodion, tr. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware (London/Boston 1978), p. 175.

[13] The Church is One, 9.

[14] Archimandrite Sophrony, His Life is Mine (London/Oxford 1977), p. 68.

[15] On the Lords Prayer 5. We should not read into this statement an Augustinian doctrine of original guilt.

[16] Archimandrite Sophrony, His Life is Mine, p. 61.

[17] This service is usually held on the evening of Good Friday. For the full text of the Praises, see TheLenten Triodion, tr. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, pp. 623-44.

[18] Un Moine de lEglise dOrient, Amour sans limites (Chevetogne 1971).

[19] The Ladder of Divine Ascent 1 (PG 88:633C).

[20] His Life is Mine, p. 70.

[21] Issued in collaboration with the World Wide Fund for Nature International (WWF), and obtainable fromWWF, World Conservation Centre, Avenue du Mont-Blanc, CH 1196, Gland, Switzerland.

Theology, Monasteries and MonasticismKeywords:, Salvation, World, Prayer, Athos, See also:Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) makes pilgrimage to Mount Athos Metropolitan Jonah of OCA attends meeting of Friends of Mount Athos in UK .. A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton

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The Salvation of the World According to St Silouan