From a human perspective, it was highly improbable that, among the more than a thousand monks living at the Athonite Monastery of Saint Panteleimon, Silouan (1866-1938), a Russian monk with hardly any instruction who worked at the monastery cellar and mill, were the one to go down in history.
Sophrony took upon himself the task of piecing together Silouan’s texts, often written in scrap paper. However, these pages constitute a veritable corpus of ascetic doctrine and mystical theology, written in a simple and direct language, far from wordiness, abstruse concepts, or systematic coherence. How the highest and deepest sense becomes clear to us is what makes these pages a truly remarkable book.
