St. Silouan the Athonite

He was born Simeon Antonov in 1866, a peasant of the Tambov province in Russia, of a family of farmers. He was a strong and capable young man, and not without the sins of youth, when the call of God turned his heart, and he set out for the Holy Mountain of Athos, entering the Russian Monastery of St. Panteleimon in 1892.

There he gave himself to the common labors of the monastery and to prayer. But he was assailed by the demons and by a darkness of soul almost beyond bearing, until he was on the edge of despair. In that extremity the Lord appeared to his heart and gave him the word that became the rule of his whole life: Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not. By it he learned to hold himself worthy of condemnation and yet to trust wholly in the mercy of Christ, and the warfare was stilled.

From that grace grew the great mark of his holiness, a love that wept and prayed for all men. He came to understand that to pray for the world, and even to pray with tears for the enemies of God that they too might be saved, is the very sign of the Spirit of Christ, and that he who does not love his enemies has not yet known God as he ought. He lived hidden in the work assigned him, keeper of the monastery storehouse, unremarkable to the eye.

He was nearly without learning, but the words that came from his prayer were written down, and after his repose his disciple, the Archimandrite Sophrony, gathered his life and his writings into a book that has carried his teaching across the world. In it the unlettered monk speaks of humility, of the love of enemies, and of the grace and the loss of grace, with a depth that has fed bishops and scholars.

He reposed on the Holy Mountain on the twenty-fourth of September, 1938. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints in 1987, and the Church keeps his memory on the twenty-fourth of September, honoring Silouan the Athonite as a teacher of humility and of prayer for the whole world.