Metropolitan Anthony's Sneaky Side...

One of the cool things about Gillian Crow's new book This Holy Man, about Metropolitan ANTHONY (Bloom) +2003, are the anecdotes of his life as a mercurial young man in Paris in the late 20's and 30's. This took place a few years before his monastic tonsure. Just so you know, the Metropolitan's baptismal name was Andrei.


From page 84-85:

Andrei had by this time developed an interest in homeopathy and he tried to set up as a homeopathic doctor, without success. The time was not ripe for alternative medicine. He retained his enthusiasm, however, and would often treat himself with homeopathic remedies.
As well as his work as a physician he continued his youth activities, including leading Bible study sessions in his house. These were a source of inspiration to the young people, one of whom was Nicholas, the son of Vladimir Lossky.

* * * * * * * *

Vladimir Lossky had chosen to remain a layman, despite being a renowned theologian. He was, in Metropolitan Anthony's words, one of the people in Paris who did most to promote Orthodoxy, not only among his fellow theologians but also in the world around him. He had refused to become a priest, saying that he accepted instead to be a lay theologian and, in the freedom that gave him, to convey Orthodoxy to whomever wished to hear about it. He was married, with a family of four children. How he and his wife treated them was something Andrei was never to forget.
'I called for them one Sunday - I was living across the street from them at the time on the Isle St Louis - on the way to the Liturgy. When I went into the house I found the parents kneeling in front of their children asking their forgiveness for any wrong that they had done them during the week. I have no doubt that action had more impact on their faith than any theological teaching Lossky might have given them.
However, the young Andrei was not above disagreeing with his friend when he thought fit. At one time, Lossky's opinion was that the Eastern religions had no proper knowledge or experience of God. Andrei did not dare to argue openly with such a distinguished person, about a somewhat controversial topic. 'But what courage couldn't achieve, cunning could,' he later said, and he decided to make his point in a way that his friend could not fail to respond to. Andrei slipped home and wrote out eight quotations from the Upanishads. He took them back to Lossky with an apparently innocent query.

'Could you help me? I have some sayings of the Fathers here and I can't remember who said what. Can you identify them for me, please?' Lossky went through the list and without hesitation wrote beside each quotation the relevant name: St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil the Great and so on. When the theologian had attributed them all, Andrei dropped his bombshell.
'It's the Upanishads.'
From then on, he said, Lossky began to look much more sympathetically at other faiths and came to find in them truths he had never before been able to acknowledge.

Tisk, tisk, tisk.