Holy wisdom suspends optimism and overcomes pessimism as glorification of God transcends desire and despair, enlightening hearts by renewing minds in the heart. Uncreated light is not an impersonal force but a personal energy, dynamically communicating wisdom with dynamic glory, glorifying God with saints in God, communicating liberating freedom. Saint Sophrony the Hesychast handed on a dynamic legacy of freedom that cannot be assimilated by conventional conformity but transcends it, resurrecting sacred tradition with dynamic glorification. Revelation of glory is unconditioned grace, the free gift of the Spirit, not a condescending reward for ‘good’ behaviour. Saint Sophrony truly assimilated Saint Silouan the Athonite’s prophetic revelation of love and his loving prayer for all as for himself, embracing the whole world.
Saint Sophrony’s hesychast legacy was remembered in different ways by different disciples and interpreted in different ways by those who communicated it to different worlds. The Russian world had different priorities and was at war with itself as well as the Greek world, whilst the Athonite world construed his legacy in various different ways. Western Orthodoxy received Hesychasm as cure for its many malformities, seen through the radical eye of Saint Sophrony. Holy wisdom discerns and disentangles a tangle of warring agendas, uncovering the dynamic freedom of love and prayer for all, uniting the legacies of Saint Sophrony and Saint Silouan. This united legacy centres in love with freedom, communion with dynamic union, divine oneness with holy difference.
Holy wisdom purifies the heart and hallows the mind in the heart, curing the ethno- phyletistic heresies of Russian imperialism and Greek nationalism, together with western nihilism, uncovering the legacies of Saint Sophrony and Saint Silouan in catalytic, liberating ways. Freedom unites with communion in the union of wisdom and glory, avoiding the extremes of totalitarian uniformity and militaristic division. Holy anarchism uncovers hallowed co-inherence at its heart, curing phyletistic, ethic heresies with wisdom, restoring Holy Orthodoxy. Love was the quintessential legacy of both Russian saints, both of whom expose the vanity of vainglorious Russia and Greece, as well as the scholastic pretensions of Rome. Dynamic wisdom co-inheres with dynamic glory when God is soundly glorified, which is why both Russian saints were glorified, free of ethnic vainglory, Russian or Greek.