Stages of the Spiritual Life, Part One
Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh
Translated from Antoine Bloom, Étapes de la vie spirituelle. Préface d’Olga Lossky-Laham. Genève : Éditions des Syrtes, 2022.
PREFACE
Conversion.
To today’s ears, the word evokes numerical transformations, cold mathematical realities.
Yet it can also refer to the pivotal moment in a person’s life when a radical inner change occurs, turning carefree pleasure-seekers into those who thirst for God. This reversal is something Bishop Anthony Bloom (1914–2003) was uniquely gifted at describing in all its depth, inviting us on a journey that leads us “from the depths of sin back to the Father’s house.” A discerning connoisseur of the human soul, Metropolitan Anthony carefully marks out the stages that await us on the path of conversion.
Where did he acquire such wisdom?
Born on the eve of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the future bishop experienced exile in France, the deprivation of a childhood tossed between a boarding school he later described as a “hell” and the poverty, material as well as existential, of emigration.
At the age of fourteen, the young Andrei Bloom reluctantly attended a catechism class by an Orthodox priest — a distinguished theologian — who tried to speak to the hearts of adolescents by painting a moralistic and uninspiring picture of life in Christ. For Andrei, already despairing in the fervor of youth of finding any meaning to existence, it seemed the perfect opportunity to put an end to any lingering ties with Christian doctrine. Back home, he picked up a Gospel and decided, once and for all, to settle the matter by reading the shortest one — Mark’s. As he read, he felt the intensity of a presence. Someone was sitting across from him, and he knew with certainty that this unseen Person was Christ.
From this encounter with the living God was born a burning faith that would make him an indefatigable missionary of the Risen One: first as a doctor tending the sick in wartime Paris, then as a hidden monk and priest, and finally as a bishop in Great Britain, where he served as Exarch of the Moscow Patriarchate for Western Europe.
He speaks, then, with experiential authority when he addresses the path of conversion to Christ — a path that led a brooding teenager, hardened by suffering and tempted by suicide, to become one of the major spiritual figures of the 20th century, widely known in Western Europe and shining even in his native Russia.
The pages that follow are a transcription of Metropolitan Anthony’s words, recorded in 1969 during a retreat given to an ecumenical group at Sainte-Gertrude Abbey1 (Louvain, Belgium), then home to a Benedictine women’s community. In the wake of Vatican II, Catholic circles were filled with ecumenical fervor, and many local initiatives emerged to foster dialogue between Christian denominations. In Louvain, the university ecumenical circle organized sessions with various speakers — including Bishop Anthony Bloom — from 1966 to 1973. Sister Marie-André Houdart (1928–2018), a Benedictine of Sainte-Gertrude and a key figure in promoting ecumenical initiatives among religious,2 maintained contact with the Orthodox bishop, who was already recognized as a spiritual authority far beyond his diocese. The recordings from these annual retreats were carefully transcribed by another sister from Sainte-Gertrude. Through Christine Chaillot, some of these transcriptions have reached the Editions des Syrtes. The texts from the first two retreats — on the themes “The Church and the World” (1967) and “Prayer and Holiness” (1968) — have not been recovered, but the present volume reproduces the talks and discussions from the third retreat, held November 15–16, 1969, titled “Stages of the Spiritual Life.” The four following retreats will be published in future volumes.
The texts presented in this book follow the recordings faithfully and still carry, half a century later, the freshness of spoken teaching. Expressed in French — his second language after Russian — with simple words that touch the heart, this teaching gives the reader the sense that Bishop Anthony is standing before them, speaking directly. To explore the stages of the spiritual life, the Metropolitan chooses to reflect on the pericopes read in the Sundays preceding Lent in the Orthodox tradition. The participants’ questions then allow him to clarify or deepen various points.
These pages preserve the spontaneous tone characteristic of Bishop Anthony, found also in his other books such as School for Prayer3 and Encounter with the Living God.4 Above all, there is his ability to offer an inspired paraphrase of the Gospels, through which he imaginatively evokes the psychological depth of the characters, making them relatable to our own inner lives. This commentary is all the more relevant as Bishop Anthony, a seasoned storyteller, enriches it with anecdotes drawn from his rich life experience, offering contemporary illustrations. Readers familiar with his works — mostly based on transcriptions of conversations, radio broadcasts, or sermons — will find here the images dear to his heart: Christ asleep amid the storm (Matthew 14:22–33), the blindness of Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46–52), the turning point of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32)...
Returning to these deeply meditated themes — more than mere stories or parables from the past, they are for him inner realities lived today — the speaker outlines various attitudes that we are invited to pass through as we journey to meet Christ. The awareness of our own blindness will allow us, like the blind Bartimaeus, to “pray with a sense of God’s absence.” That absence is the very place where the Lord awaits us, at the heart of the storm as well as in the quieter moments of our lives.
Such awareness cannot occur without relinquishing a predatory relationship to the world, where, like the Prodigal Son, we either consume or are consumed, without ever entering into true relationship. We must draw back the tentacles that bind us to external things if we are to hope to see ourselves as we truly are. The return into ourselves frees us from the judgment of others and sets us before the judgment of God — a God who reveals Himself not as an implacable judge, but as a Father, whose love does not hesitate to share in our exile far from Him.
Throughout his discourse, Bishop Anthony lets us glimpse his experience of invisible reality, when creation reveals itself no longer as governed by the flawed logic of men, but by the light of God. “We must,” he says, “keep watch for this inner world like a bird-watcher, who places himself in a silence vibrating with life in the heart of the woods or fields, ready to receive the impression of all that lives around him.” The awakening of such sensitivity to the divine presence — through attentiveness to love and beauty at work around us — can lead us to cultivate a gaze of hope. A gaze that sees the Kingdom at work beyond tragic situations and opens to us a deeper level of existence, where we discern God’s action even in the darkest chapters of human history. In this way, we may come to experience in our very flesh a solidarity with others, sharing in the prayer of Christ at Gethsemane.
Through the pages of this book, let us allow ourselves to be guided by this sure teacher — Bishop Anthony Bloom — who knows how to awaken, step by step, the awareness of divine Presence within us.
Olga Lossky-Laham
STAGES OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
My intention during this meeting is to examine with you a number of Gospel passages that may serve as signposts for a spiritual journey. The order in which they are arranged follows the liturgical tradition of the Orthodox Church: these are the readings for the Sundays in the period of preparation for Lent — a time of recollection, of self-examination, a time when we must give all the attention we are capable of to our inner state, so that later, during Lent and especially Holy Week, we may grow increasingly detached from ourselves, until, ultimately, only one thought remains in our hearts: the Lord Jesus Christ. These weeks of preparation for Lent are thus oriented toward ourselves, but by their end, we should be able to forget ourselves in order to enter into a vision greater than we are — a vision that at the same time brings us to that fullness of trust which alone can lead us to true conversion, a return to the Lord, and the beginning of a new relationship with Him.
I would like, however, to begin with a reading that lies outside this framework, because it seems to me that in the present situation — when we are so stretched between our inner life and our connection to the world, not through sin but through solidarity, and through a concern that we share with God — we must try to find our place and to define, to understand, or at least to attempt to understand, the situation we are meant to occupy as Christians, both in relation to God and in relation to the world around us.
I would therefore like to examine two texts that are surely familiar to you: Matthew 14:22–33 and Luke 8:22–25 — two accounts of storms on the Lake of Gennesaret.
THE STORM ON THE LAKE
(Mt 14:22–33; Lk 8:22–25)
I will begin by considering these texts separately, trying to see how they complement each other in helping us grasp something essential about our Christian condition.
The account in Matthew 14 shows us the apostles alone in a boat, crossing the Sea of Galilee, caught in a storm. They are in darkness, struggling against death that surrounds them on every side and threatens to overwhelm them. Their only protection against the raging waves is the fragile craft they occupy, and their only hope lies in fighting, in showing courage in the face of this struggle against time — a struggle that is constantly at the heart of our concerns. For them, all sense of safety is confined within their boat — a frail safety that could collapse at any moment. Around them, the darkness, the furious sea represents death, danger, insecurity — the unleashing of everything that stands opposed to the harmony and order intended by God.
Suddenly, in the heart of the storm, they see Christ walking on the waves. They are so sure that the storm itself — with its rupture of harmony, its deathly force, its threat to their lives — is contrary to the will of God, which is always harmony, peace, life, salvation, that when they see Christ in the midst of the storm, they do not recognize Him. Or rather, they see in the figure walking on the water only a ghost. And they cry out in fear: “It cannot be Christ! Christ is the Lord of peace — He cannot be at the heart of chaos and the fury of the elements.” But Christ replies to them: “Be not afraid; it is I.”
Is this not a situation in which we almost constantly find ourselves? Whether the storm is great or small — whether it is a storm in a teacup, one of the great tragedies of history, or the personal dramas of our lives — we expect from the presence of God the miracle that restores peace, reestablishes harmony, ends the storm. And we find it hard to believe, hard to accept, that it is in the heart of the storm that we may find the Lord — the Lord who is at once the Lord of harmony and of storm, of peace and of upheaval. This doubt eats away at our sense of security and shakes our inner stability to its core.
There are situations in which we believe God has His proper place; others we cannot accept as consistent with His presence. There are circumstances that seem to match our ideas of God — His role, His action, or His being —and others so alien to our preconceptions that, in the presence of God, we see only a ghost. “It cannot be Him — if it were, peace would already be restored, harmony reestablished.”
That is the first thing to which we must pay attention: is this truly so?
Now let us see what the Gospel tells us next. When they hear the voice of the Lord, the apostles seem to recognize His true presence, for Peter — impulsive as always, acting faster than he thinks, but with a deeper truth than thought — says: “If it is really you, command me to come to you on the water.” And Christ gives the command. Peter steps out of the boat, leaves behind that fragile security which, for all its uncertainty, was the only one he had. He surrenders himself to the dangers of death; he enters what is itself the very element of death — the storm — and he walks. He walks so long as he walks toward Christ; he walks as long as the impulse of his heart drives him toward Christ and causes him to forget all else.
But suddenly, he remembers the storm — and himself. He realizes that he is no longer protected as he had been by the fragile barrier of the boat — a boat from which they had expected shipwreck but also, paradoxically, salvation. He realizes now that he is in the shadow of death, walking on the raging sea, surrounded by wind, with no remaining security — and in that moment of self-awareness, he begins to sink.
Christ then takes him by the hand, and suddenly he finds himself back in the boat, which has already reached the shore.
Isn’t this something that is familiar to us as well? How many times have we begun to step out from the uncertain safety we build around us — the securities of life — and how many times have we begun to drown because we remembered the danger, because we forgot that Christ is Lord of the storm as well as of peace and harmony? And we forget this even in moments when we’ve just experienced it! Peter was already walking on the waves — he knew they could support him; he knew one could walk on water; that the waves would not swallow him! And yet he hesitated — he doubted. But doubted what? Since he already knew? He turned inward again — returned to himself — and his primary concern was no longer his movement toward God. He could no longer say, “I want to be with you, no matter the cost.” Instead, he wanted to save his life, to be sure he would not perish.
Let us now consider from a different perspective how this storm, which at first could do nothing to him, ended up endangering his life for a moment. Luke’s account is instructive in this regard. The general pattern is the same: the disciples are crossing the same Sea of Galilee in a boat. This time, however, Christ is with them. In the midst of the storm, they are fighting for their lives — and for His. Christ, tired, has fallen asleep at the bow of the boat, His head on a cushion. He sleeps; He is at peace; He is in perfect rest, at the very heart of the storm. The disciples, meanwhile, are struggling; they are exhausting themselves in their fight against death. He seems not even to be aware of the danger threatening those He claims to love. At the end of their strength, at the end of their hope, they turn to Him. But they do not turn to Him in hope; they do not approach Him knowing that He is Master of all things and that a single word from Him would calm the storm. Rather, they feel almost insulted by this divine serenity in the midst of the storm! They are on the verge of death, and not only is Christ peacefully asleep — He’s sleeping comfortably, His head on a cushion! If only He were sleeping with His head on His arm! If only they had some sign that His comfort, at least, had been disturbed by the storm that had shaken them to the core! They wake Him. But instead of saying, “Lord, we know you are Master of all things; one word from you will still the storm — or, if not, we will be safe in your almighty hand,” they wake Him saying: “Master, we are perishing!” And in a parallel passage we might read: “Carest thou not that we perish?” (Mark 4:39) — it matters so little to you that we are about to die in your indifference!
Then Christ rises, brushes them aside: “O ye of little faith, how long shall I be with you?” And turning from them, addressing the storm, He projects, one might say, His serenity, His inner peace, His deep harmony, upon the raging elements, and commands the wind to be still, the storm to fall silent.
What difference do we see between the disciples and their Lord? The difference, as it strikes me, is this: the disciples allowed the storm to enter into their hearts. The storm, which could have remained external, something they battled with body, mind, and will, was allowed to become internal. They were shaken to the core: fear entered them — the fear of death displaced the simple, peaceful certainty of faith. They became one with the storm. When they called on Christ, when He awoke, when He rose from that serenity that had seemed like absence, He was the same as in His peaceful sleep: the storm remained external to Him. He was at the heart of the storm, but it raged around Him — not within. He stood up and spoke to it. He was not part of the chaos of the unleashed elements; He was a point of harmony in the midst of disharmony, and that point of harmony expanded and conquered the space around it.
It is often hard for us — especially when it is not our storm, especially when we read Gospel stories with such clarity from the safety of our little boats on calm seas — not to react as the disciples did. A beloved family is broken: where is the Lord? A nation is struck by catastrophe, whether physical or moral: where then is the Lord? How can He remain silent? Is He asleep? Is He so radically absent that He is not even aware of the events unfolding — events that destroy human lives, shake entire populations? And when He does rise, when we see Him in the midst of the storm of history or in the life of a family or individual — do we recognize His presence? Or do we shake our heads and say: “It is a ghost! If it were really Him, things would be different!”
And what is our place in all this? The place of the Christian is always that of Christ. But we must not deceive ourselves: Christ in the storm is not at rest. It is easy for us to imagine Christ walking on the water or sleeping in the disciples’ boat as the image of God disengaged from worldly contingencies: always at rest, because nothing can touch Him. We speak readily of the impassibility of God, often misunderstanding the term. God’s impassibility is not indifference or hardness of heart; it is not inner absence from suffering or from events. God’s impassibility is His fundamental state: God is never in a passive mode, never acted upon. Yes, He participates. Yes, He is with us — but He acts from within the depths of His love for us, not because He is compelled or pushed to do so.
And if we seek the place the Lord occupies in human tragedy, whether individual, national, or that of all humanity, past, present, and future, we find it expressed so clearly, so tragically, in certain events of the Passion: in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the Mount of Olives, where He faces death, and with it, the whole human tragedy. The culmination of this is His cry to the Father: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” We do not sufficiently grasp the depth of God's solidarity with us. When we think of the Incarnation, of His presence among us, of the fullness of God dwelling in the flesh, we imagine Him as our brother in humanity: we think of His birth and the sorrowful circumstances of rejection and abandonment that surrounded it; we think of the hunger, thirst, and weariness of the Son of Man; we see Him surrounded by doubt, hesitation, scorn, anger, hatred, betrayal, infidelity, weakness. We see Him also suffer on the Mount of Olives, we see Him weep before God, sweat drops of blood, and in the end, die a human death. But do we fully grasp what it means for the incarnate Word to die a human death?
To us, death means gradually being stripped of our vital forces through attrition; we crumble into dust; we can no longer live because life has worn away in us. But Christ did not die of wear. He does not die at the end of a slow disintegration. St. Maximus the Confessor, speaking of the Incarnation, tells us we must understand that in His very humanity, the Son of Man was immortal — because how can one conceive of a human soul and human body, indissolubly united to divinity, dying, when death means, first of all, the loss of God? If that is so (and how could it be otherwise?) then do we not see that the Garden of Olives is the moment when Christ, in an ultimate act of solidarity with fallen man, takes upon Himself man’s destiny of death? Though He bears no seed of death within Himself, He consents to die a death that is impossible for Him. And whereas we cannot comprehend the depth of that disaster, no matter how afraid of death we may be, He can measure what it means to die when one is — and does not merely possess — eternal Life!
He faces the death of others, within a humanity that shares in no way in sin and therefore in no way in death. The full weight of human sin — not the multitude of human sins, but the horror of this loss of God which renders man mortal — weighs upon Him in the Garden of Olives. The death that approaches is an impossible death: the death of others, which He is about to take upon Himself and carry in His flesh to the Cross.
When we think of the Cross, do we fully grasp the depth of Christ’s cry: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” We are so often pointed to the prophetic Psalms and told that, in that moment, Christ is quoting what was said of Him by the prophet. But is it prophecy foretelling Christ, or Christ reciting prophecy? Can we imagine that, at the hour of His death, He is turning His mind to past writings, as if this moment were merely the culmination of what was predicted? No. Once again, we see here an ultimate act of solidarity with man. Free of sin, by an act of His divine will and His filial human obedience toward the Father, Christ accepts to share with us not only physical death (an impossible death) but also the condition of that death: the loss of God.
Does not this cry express not only the cry of millions upon millions of human beings who, from this side of death, have turned toward God and cried out in bottomless despair, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” — but also what one Russian theologian called an “ontological swoon” of His divine consciousness? A moment in which, truly, the Son of God, having become the Son of Man, willed to empty His consciousness of His divinity, to pour it out upon us, to share with us our a-theism, our loss of God, and to die of it, though there was in Him no cause for death, no possibility of death?
Is this not also what we profess in the Apostles’ Creed when we declare that Christ descended into hell? These hells are not Dante’s Inferno, not the folkloric place of Christian torment; they are something far more terrifying than all Christian folklore combined. The Sheol of the Old Testament was the place of the absence of God. Dying on the Cross, in perfect solidarity with man who has lost God, dying on the Cross by having Himself shared in that loss, Jesus the Man descends to where all men go: the place of final abandonment, the place where God is not, and never will be.
And there, a double miracle occurs. On the one hand, the words we sing in the Orthodox Church during Holy Week — “O Eternal Life, how is it that You die?” — are fulfilled. On the other hand, hell, which has opened wide to seize its mightiest enemy, the one who on earth had vanquished it at every turn; hell, thinking to claim the Son of Man in all His revealed greatness; seizes Him and finds itself filled with the presence of the Son of God, secretly present in all that the man Jesus was.
Then is fulfilled the prophecy of the Psalm: “Whither shall I flee from thy presence, O Lord? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there also.” In Hebrew terms, this was a prophecy that exceeded understanding, for in modern terms it would mean: You are present, Lord, even in the place of Your absence. Indeed, hell is destroyed, the power of the devil annihilated: victory is finally won.
But in telling you all this, I have passed beyond the crucial point in which we now stand — this storm, this problem of finding the place we are to occupy as Christians in the storm of history, in the tragedy of the family, in the drama of humanity. Our place is on this side of death. Certainly, we behold the Cross of the Lord, upon which His body no longer dies and is no longer present, for it lies in the tomb, for He is risen. And yet, throughout the whole world, death still weighs heavily, and the same cry rises from all the earth: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This measure of the loss of God, this atheism, which none have known as Christ did, is the breaking point, the place where all the sharpest and most violent tensions converge. The place of Christ in history is not a place of rest; it is what one calls the “eye of the storm” — that is, the point at which all tensions and all forces of destruction are perfectly balanced and still, not because the violence is diminished there, but because it is perfect, capable of tearing apart everything. That is where God is. That is where the Christian must be — not in the boat where the apostles struggle against the death that stalks them and seeks to seize them, not on the storm-tossed waves where Peter first walks with sure steps, then falters as he tries to reach Christ. All that is past. We stand beyond that moment. We stand where Christ is, and our place, our role, is to fulfill in our own bodies what is lacking in the Passion, in the sufferings of Christ, according to the words of Saint Paul. It is to be crucified throughout the whole course of history, so that the crucified Christ may be the living reality at the heart of every storm, during every storm; it is to die daily, so that others may live. It is to be not merely a witness, but a presence at the very center of the storm.
That is the first situation I wished to define, because it is within this foundational situation, this Christian condition, that we must see ourselves in the world. In this condition, we coincide in history, in space, in time, but also in eternity, with the presence of Christ, the God made flesh, He who, having become man, willed to make us partakers both of His perfect humanity and of His divinity; He who grafts us onto Himself in such a way that we are living members of His Body, His presence throughout history, visible, tangible, crucified; He who willed to give us the Holy Spirit as He Himself received Him on the banks of the Jordan, so that we might become temples of the Holy Spirit: not merely temples that contain a presence, but temples penetrated by that presence, in the words of St. Maximus the Confessor, as a blade plunged into fire contains fire in such a way that one can no longer distinguish the steel from the flame, so that one can cut with fire and burn with steel. And so we coincide with this God, this Lord, who through the humanity into which He grafts us, makes us partakers of the divine nature that is His and that fills all His humanity, from which His humanity can never be separated. And this, in a relationship which in Christ and in the Spirit is greater than any psychological or genetic tie, a relationship that consists, in the bold words of Saint Irenaeus, in this: that Head and members, Christ and we, are the Totus Christus — the total Christ, as spoken of by Saint Ignatius of Antioch or Saint Augustine — total Christ, for we are the Only-Begotten Son of the Father, or rather, we shall be, when all things are revealed and fulfilled.
But our place in history is Christ’s place, and we must, in the history in which we live, possess both the serenity, the unshakable certainty, the impassibility that is not indifference but sovereign activity, not dependent upon any external impulse but sufficient to itself because it is rooted in the sovereign activity of God, and at the same time, we must have an engagement with history, with mutual life, with all the complexities of living, with all the richness and all the anguish of death, in the manner of Christ at the heart of the storm, who is at once Lord of the storm and Lord of peace, harmony, and serenity.
This, we can only do through faith — that is, through that certainty in what is not seen, in what we call the invisible, in what we know by inner experience, which allows us to say that the one walking on the waves is not a ghost, but the Lord of victory; and that the storm itself has meaning, has weight, is part of the human becoming — and that we fear nothing, neither storm nor death, because in Christ we are placed beyond the storm, within His death; and we have been carried along, not only by the certainty of faith, but by the experience of God in the Resurrection, and we already see ourselves in Christ, at the heart of the divine mystery, through His Ascension.
This, then, is the first situation I wished to lay before you: a foundational condition. In the next talks, I will try to show you what stands between us and this condition that is ours, a condition that is at once perfect contemplation of God, face to face, and total engagement, without exemption or limit, with the human situation and with this cosmos in the process of becoming, which awaits the resurrection of the sons of God, the children of the Kingdom, in order to one day reach its own fullness, so that God may be all in all.
We will begin by considering the following situations: blindness, through the example of Bartimaeus, the blind man of Jericho; human respect and vanity, through the example of Zacchaeus; false justice and false sanctity, in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. These are three forms of unreality. Later, we will pause longer over the parable of the Prodigal Son.
On the Sainte-Gertrude community, see Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, vol. 33, Brepols, Louvain, 2020.
See Marie-André Houdart, O.S.B., “Communautés religieuses et souci de l’unité chrétienne,” Vies consacrées 1967-5, September 1967, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, pp. 288–309.
L'École de la prière, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1972. English translation Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray (New York: Paulist Press, 1970).
Rencontre avec le Dieu vivant, Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 2004.