ANTHONY OF SOUROZH

ABOUT THE MEETING

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From publishers

     Metropolitan Anthony was born in 1914 and spent his early childhood in Persia, where his father was a Russian consul. After the revolution, the family wandered around Europe for several years and in 1922 settled in Paris. The future metropolitan graduated from high school here, then from the biological and medical faculties of the university. In 1939, before leaving for the front as a surgeon in the French army, he secretly took monastic vows, was tonsured into the mantle with the name of Anthony in 1943. After the war, he continued to practice medicine until 1948, when he was called to the priesthood, ordained and sent to pastoral service in Great Britain. Bishop (1957), Metropolitan and Patriarchal Exarch in Western Europe (1966), relieved of this post at his own request in 1974, since then he has devoted himself entirely to the pastoral care of the ever-increasing flock of his diocese and all who turn to him for advice and help.

     Metropolitan Anthony is an honorary doctor of theology from the University of Aberdeen "for preaching the word of God and the renewal of spiritual life in the country", from the Moscow Theological Academy - for a set of scientific, theological, pastoral and preaching works, and from the University of Cambridge. His first books on prayer and spiritual life were published in English in the 1960s and were translated into many languages of the world. A Russian translation of one of them, Prayer and Life, was published in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1968.

     Vladyka never writes, does not prepare his talks and speeches in advance. Everything published was originally born as a word addressed directly to the listener - not to a faceless crowd, but to each individual person, that "modern man" who experiences (often without realizing it) spiritual hunger and the need for communion with God. The publishers strove to preserve as much as possible this sound of the living word of Vladyka in the printed text.

NO NOTES[1]

     Please tell us about your childhood...

     I have very few childhood memories; For some reason, my memories do not linger. Partly because a lot of things are layered on top of one another, as on icons: behind the fifth layer it is not always possible to make out the first one; and partly because I learned very early – or was taught – that, in general, your life is of no interest; What is interesting is what you live for. And so I never tried to remember either the events or their sequence – since this has nothing to do with anything! Whether I'm right or wrong is another matter, but I was taught this way very early. And that's why I have a lot of gaps.

     I was born by chance in Lausanne, in Switzerland[2]; my maternal grandfather, Scriabin, was the Russian consul in the East, in the then Ottoman Empire, first in Turkey, in Anatolia, and then in what is now Greece. My father met this family because he was also a diplomat, he was my grandfather's secretary in Erzurum, he met my mother there, and at one time they got married. My grandfather had already retired and spent his time – 1912-1913 – in Lausanne; my father at that time was artificially appointed consul in Colombo: it was an appointment, but no one went there, because nothing happened there, and the man was used for something useful, but he was listed. And so, in order to take a break from his Colombes labors, he and my mother went to Switzerland to visit her father and my grandmother.

     My grandmother, my mother's mother, was born in Italy, in Trieste; but Trieste at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; about her father I only knew that his name was Ilya, because my grandmother was Ilyinichna; they were Italians... My grandmother's mother later became Orthodox with the name Xenia; when my grandmother got married, her mother was already a widow and went with them to Russia.