Unpublished texts by Father Sophrony: From repentance to filial adoption

This article publishes the transcription of two oral talks by Father Sophrony (1993 and 1991), given to the monastic community of his monastery as a spiritual testament. These are previously unpublished texts, presented in the form of transcribed and adapted oral meditations. The first talk develops a fundamental distinction between two modes of repentance: an ethical repentance, which remains within the moral order, and an ontological repentance, which effects a passage toward divine eternity and opens onto deification. The second addresses the question of receiving the gift of true being in human weakness. The theological contribution of these texts lies in the articulation between spiritual anthropology and soteriology: filial adoption is not a human achievement but a divine act, and deification presupposes a repentance that transcends ethics to reach the order of being.