‘Being’

Father Sophrony, Sergei Sakharov (1896 – 1993) was one of the founding members of a society of painters called ‘Bytie’ or ‘Being’ in Moscow just after the Russian Revolution. Although he was sympathetic with the quest of his fellow artists to captivate a representation of true ‘Being’ that would endure, he gradually realised that he could not find anything in the art of his era except the image of the chaos that surrounded it. An intense period of spiritual search led him to faith in Christ, and he abandoned painting in order to devote himself to prayer. He became an Orthodox monk and then a priest on Mount Athos. After many years of ascetic striving, he left the Holy Mountain and upon establishing an Orthodox monastery in Essex, England, returned to painting in order to attempt to portray true ‘Being’ in icons of Christ and the saints. This book presents the dual inspirations of Father Sophrony’s iconography, focusing on the years of his artistic formation and relating this to his later reflections on the relationship of prayer, freedom and creativity.

— From: ‘Being’

Sergei [St. Sophrony] gave himself over to prayer, striving to come closer to the Being, his whole aim now was to learn to know and enter into a personal contact with Him. “I was filled with reverent worship for the First Craftsman, the Creator of all things, and a longing to meet Him, learn from Him, know how He created.”

At the same time Sergei was filled with an ardent prayer of repentance for having turned his back on Christ in the search of what he thought was a more absolute union with eternity but which in fact lead him to that very eternal oblivion he was trying to escape. The prayer engulfed his entire being and came into conflict with his painting, which also demanded the whole of him. The struggle between these two forms of art — prayer being an even higher form of art than painting — tore him apart and he realized he would have to choose between them. For a while he tried to combine the two, but ultimately he realized that prayer was the more important for him and he gave up painting.

“This battle between art and prayer, that is, between two forms of life which require the whole of man, continued within me in a very intense manner for a year and a half or two years. In the end I was convinced that the means at my disposal in art would not give me what I was looking for. That is, even if I could intuitively sense eternity through art, this awareness is not as deep as in prayer. And I decided to give up art — which for me was a terribly high price to pay.”

“Inside myself I was torn between art and prayer. After a stubborn, long-drawn-out contest prayer won.”

— Excerpt from: ‘Being’ : The Art and Life of Father Sophrony • Chapter 3 (p. 84-85)