Q: You are one of the few people who knew well both Metr Antony (Bloom) and Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov). What do you think of them and their disputes?

A: I am not sure that I am one of the few, but I did know them both well.

The future Metr Antony was born on the same day as my grandfather, though twenty years after him. He was a typical Franco-Russian intellectual. He was very gifted, very open, to the point of liberalism, and very sincere. His father, Boris, was an Imperial diplomat who was interested in the occult and had the gift of hypnotism. His mother was the sister of the ‘mystical’, but very unOrthodox Russian composer Scriabin.

Andrei Bloom (as he then was) came to the faith in his teens and lived it in his own way. He did not study at seminary. He was completely unmercenary and lived very modestly. His interests were intellectual and in people and was very popular, especially among women. He was widely read in Western literature, but not so much in the Church Fathers or the literature of piety and the Lives of the Saints. He was really quite emotional and you can hear this in his sermons. His approach to the Faith was emotional, even sentimental, and cultural. That approach is very important to some.

Fr Sophrony was eighteen years older than Metr Antony and came from a well-off Russian family in Moscow, emigrated to France after the Revolution and was a huge intellectual, philosopher and artist who had belonged in his youth to the Art Nouveau Movement. He came to England in 1959, when a large property was given him by the Church of England in an ecumenical spirit. At that time he was still living in France, where for some 14 years he had been under the Patriarchate of Moscow after he had been expelled from Mt Athos. He had lived there for twenty years and was expelled by the Greek authorities for political reasons, together with two other Russian monks.

In 1965 he left the jurisdiction of Metr Antony of Moscow after twenty years and returned to the jurisdiction of Greek Constantinople. This happened after he had fallen out with Metr Antony, who wanted to close his monastery and ordain his priests, so he could expand his tiny diocese. Fr Sophrony (as we always called him – never starets) is now a local saint, canonised by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and venerated in the monastery, or convent, which he founded just outside a village in the east of Essex.

So we can see that Metr Antony had an emotional approach to the Faith and is very attractive to the emotional and even sentimental, especially to women, and brought tens of thousands of Russians and others to Orthodoxy. On the other hand, Fr Sophrony had an intellectual and philosophical approach to the Faith and he is attractive to highly educated people of many nationalities, many of whom have doctorates, like his monks.

Thus, they were very different people. But both played a positive role. The point is that everyone is different and there is no reason to reject or condemn either of them, as some do. Having said that, neither was my ‘cup of tea’ personally. But so what? There is room in the Church for many different sorts of people and many sorts of people are needed. Let us not be narrow! Tastes vary.

We can see this in the views of other Orthodox. For example, the then Fr Vitaly (Ustinov), later Metropolitan of ROCOR, called, I think in 1948, the then Fr Antony (Bloom) ‘a priest of Satan’, simply because he belonged to the Patriarchate of Moscow, which had been revived by Stalin. However, we know that Metr Vitaly ended his life outside the Church in a sect. Metr Antony (Bloom) did not.

Another critic, and of both the ‘Western’ Metr Antony and of the ‘delusional’ Fr Sophrony (according to Professor Osipov), is the Russian academic, Professor A. I. Osipov. His lectures are interesting for beginners in Orthodox life and he was very popular, especially in the 1990s when 100 million Russians were baptised, virtually without instruction. Once more, he is just another personality, with his own approach, a third approach, that of the academic.

All three approaches are interesting, but I don’t see why they should be mutually exclusive. However, once more he is not my personal cup of tea. But he is the cup of tea of many others. People are different! Accept that everyone is different and stop falling into that trap of sectarian narrowness and condemnation that some Russians can be inclined to, with their cries of ‘That’s uncanonical’, ‘you’re a schismatic’, ‘that’s heretical’ etc. None of that is Christian. Moreover, it is this Russian intolerance that has caused the schism between Russians and Greeks today, all the purely political divisions in the Russian emigration (meaning that today ROCOR is out of communion with the Western European Archdiocese of the Russian Church), and all the divisions inside Russia from the seventeenth century until today, Sad.