Quietness & Emotional Life
Diakrisis Yearbook of Theology and Philosophy December 30, 2025 DOI: 10.24193/diakrisis.2026.1 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Witness Silence Phenomenology philosophy Contemplation Surprise Phenomenon Biography Consciousness Psychoanalysis Aesthetics Epistemology |
| Key points | Argues that two affective registers—a durative mood of mindfulness of death and punctual surprises—structure the experience of bringing cultivated quietness to speech, and that phenomenology can describe how such experiences appear without certifying the reality they disclose. |
Abstract
This study asks what it means to question quietness (hēsychia): to treat a state cultivated in long silence as something that can, after an unpredictable wait, be brought to speech. Its primary witness is the spiritual autobiography of Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov (1896–1993), read alongside the transcribed record of his Monday meetings with the monastic community of St John the Baptist in Essex and a corpus of recorded conversations, held in April 2025, with a member of that community. Working within the phenomenology of the emotions — chiefly Natalie Depraz’s account of surprise and of the foreground/background dynamics of affective life — the article distinguishes two registers in Sophrony’s experience: a durative “mindfulness of death,” the vision of the abyss that abides as a mood, and the punctual surprises that erupt against it, culminating in the contemplation of the Uncreated Light. Jean-Luc Marion’s saturated phenomenon is retained, but only to describe how such experiences are given, not to certify what gives them. Throughout, a single discipline is observed: phenomenology describes the manner of an appearing and leaves to the theological tradition the question of the reality disclosed.