St. Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938)

Simeon Antonov, a strong young peasant from Tambov province who came to the Russian monastery of St Panteleimon on Athos in 1892 and stayed forty-six years, most of them as steward of the mill and the workshops. After months of struggle so dark he thought himself abandoned, he saw Christ in the church, and later heard the word that became his whole teaching: keep thy mind in hell, and despair not. What he wrote in the notebooks found after his death is simple and very hard: the love of enemies is the test of whether anyone knows God at all, and a monk’s work is to pray for the whole world, for all Adam, as for himself. His disciple St Sophrony published them. He died in 1938 and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1987. Feast: September 24.