"This Holy Man": Impressions of Metropolitan Anthony (review)

When I came to London as a graduate student in 1979, my chief concerns were learning to navigate the labyrinthine catalogue of the British Library and finding a sandwich shop I could afford. But I had another agenda as well. Having recently decided to join the Orthodox Church, I was seeking instruction, which I could not find in the ethnic enclaves of parish life. Thus it happened that, after plunking down three pounds for an adult education class on Russian Orthodoxy, I found myself scrunched into a third-grader's desk at a school in West Kensington, listening to a wizard with a mellifluous bass voice and incandescent eyes tell us why St. Seraphim of Sarov had fled his monastery to live as a hermit in the forest. During break, as I sipped my tea and tried to look inconspicuous, I too wanted to flee when, to my horror, I saw the wizard heading straight toward me. He had noticed an unfamiliar face so, naturally enough, he came to introduce himself and ask, "Now who are you?" I fumbled for a moment and replied, "Ummm—could you ask me an easier question?"

That inauspicious meeting was my first encounter with "this holy man," the Russian archbishop of London—known to his fellow hierarchs as Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, to readers around the world as Anthony Bloom, and to his disciples simply as "Father Anthony." During the eight months I spent at his cathedral of All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, I realized that I had stumbled into a living laboratory of hagiography. Waiting at the bus stop in Knightsbridge, I could hear miracle stories as readily as complaints about the weather. The faithful shared anecdotes with love and wonder, tinged with a possessive edge. Women competed jealously for the privilege of cleaning the church on Mondays because the bishop might pass through, en route to his monastic cell behind the altar, and scatter words of life. When he heard confessions, the line snaked all the way from the icon screen to the back of the church, and when he preached, all chatter and squirming ceased.

Despite her title with its careful quotation marks, Gillian Crow claims that Bishop Anthony was "not a saint but, like everyone, a human being with his sins and weaknesses" (xi). Fair enough—but if we are waiting for a human being without sins and weaknesses, saints by definition do not exist. (Wasn't even Jesus unreasonable when he cursed the fig tree, although "it was not the season for fruit"?) What Crow really means, I suspect, is that her subject was not a saint in the style of medieval hagiography—one of those insufferable prigs who, even in infancy, refused the breast on Fridays. By that standard, though, not even medieval saints were "saints." It was literary convention that required biographers to smooth away all flaws, to write as if every clash of personalities were a titanic struggle between God and Satan, every chance event a divine intervention. These days, we prefer our saints in their full humanity, complete with infuriating sins and embarrassing weaknesses. For what matters is not perfection but love. "No one can renounce the world," Bishop Anthony liked to say, "until she has seen the light of eternity shining in a human face." In this admiring but honest biography, Gillian Crow gives us as true a reflection of one such face as we are likely to find.

Born André Blum in Lausanne, Switzerland, only months before World War I, Metropolitan Anthony would become one of the most extraordinary churchmen of the twentieth century. Through his charismatic preaching, lectures, and radio broadcasts, he was responsible for the conversion of thousands, bringing hope to the persecuted Soviet church even as he transformed the Orthodox diaspora in Britain...