Saturday, August 21, 2021

Heavens and modern man.
Saint Sophrony the Athonite.


Saint Sophrony the Athonite.
 Dear Shura,

Peace be with you!

How are you? Do you have enough strength to follow events, or rather, to keep up with them? I remember, so very long ago, when I was still a schoolboy, and I was at home reading Turgenev's novel 'Rudin'. I was straight away ab­sorbed by its content. Papa was sitting in the same room read­ing the newspaper. I asked him naively, 'Papa, how can you find it interesting to read newspapers? There are so many wonderful books.'

His answer: 'And what are you reading just now?'

'Turgenev. '

'Do you like to read books about history too?'

Remembering that such books were for me at that time text-books, which I had to know so as to pass exams, I replied: 'Not much.'

'But I personally do like history' , answered Papa.

So then I said to him, 'But look, you are reading a news­paper, not history. It is different, after all.'

'No, I don't see any difference. Newspapers are real his­tory, only not of the past, but of the present, of the very same day.'

So when I remember you now, I was thinking that you too like to follow the history of humanity, and when you haven't any strength in your eyes for reading the papers, or books, you listen to the radio.

For my part I have lived the whole of my life outside the world. In the years of my youth my fascination with art cut me off from everything around me. I was overmastered by one aspiration: to penetrate the mystery of the beauty in every­thing I saw, every manifestation of nature. The more I was ab­sorbed in my quest, the more mysterious became every sight, and I used to swoon with rapture at this mystery. We see the world in quite a different way than the intellectuals. Take the sky - what is it for an 'intellectual'? A fiction, a diffusion of solar light, reflected in the earth's atmosphere, and beyond this sky - the dark and endless space of the cosmos. I always considered that the wonderfully deep heavens that we could see were not a 'wall' around the earth; that beyond the limits of the visible lay reality that is boundless, cosmic, and inac­cessible like the visible sky Lying on the roof of my studio, I used to gaze attentively at the sky, and in a strange way it seemed to Come nearer to me, so close that it seemed to en­compass me too. But it did not communicate its Myster» to me. Oh, how I looked at every Object, at every sight, with pas­sion; and each phenomenon, each object, became mysterious. How is it possible that a ray of light, in itself something sim­ple, divides into an infinite variety of hues, but acting as a whole it creates a picture which is forever alive, which changes unceasingly, and yet preserves something of oneness?

To take the place of these youthful pursuits came a new awareness, another quest for a different Absolute, hidden be­hind all these visible manifestations.

Even now it seems to me, or rather, it is manifestly clear to me, that until man resolves this last question, until he finds the first and last meaning, he is naively and chaotically cre­ating, and afterwards destroying, what was created with arduous labour.

It is obvious to me that if people were aware of, understood, what man is, every problem - family problems, politi­cal, social, demographic, economic problems, and so on - would be solved automatically and all humanity would be­come brothers, one great superb family. The division into slaves and masters, into superiors and these the least I" would be unthinkable. There would be no more of wars - that ulti­mate fall of humanity. And what we see is that, if you forgive the expression, all the history I learnt at school was for the most part filled up with chronicles of fratricidal wars. As soon as any state becomes stronger than its neighbour, it quickly begins to enslave 'by fire and by sword' those weaker than it­self. And so it goes on until our day ... the same 'law of the jungle' .

Living 'to one side' of this wild and brutal life, with a dreadful pain in my heart I appeal to the Heavens, with their sublime mysteriousness, to descend to the level of the earth, to embrace all who are by nature suffering people, to reveal to them another sphere of Being, so that every labour of man may become an attractive process of creativity, so that the fruits of this creative upsurge remain without menace from destructive weapons. I pray that the Light, invisible to us un­less there are objects to receive it, become visible to all people in the domain of their minds and their loving hearts.

To many of our contemporaries such an idea seems like an unrealistic dream, just naively keeping one's head in the blue-tinted clouds ... not to say rose-tinted clouds. But I know with all my being that they are not correct; the ones who are right are those who see the blue heavens and love their mystery.

 

 

Your loving

Sophrony.

 

 

Reference:

Letters to his family.  Archimandrite Sophrony (Sacharov). (2015)