A decisive orientation

This article traces the founding, thirty years ago, of the Saint Silouan Orthodox monastery in Maine, an establishment placed under the spiritual influence of Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov. Bishop Symeon (Cossec), founder of the monastery, offers a personal account of the circumstances and orientations that presided over its creation. The central idea is that Orthodox monastic life in the West was constituted through a direct transmission of the hesychast tradition, inherited from Saint Silouan the Athonite through Father Sophrony. The contribution of this account is twofold: it documents the establishment of Orthodox monasticism in France at the turn of the twenty-first century and sheds light on the determining role of spiritual filiation in the living transmission of this tradition within a contemporary Western context.