Balfour Talk Amended

In October 2017 I delivered a paper at the Benedictine Monastery, Alton Abbey, on David Balfour. About a year later Mr Balfour’s daughter, Charlotte, wrote to me and set me right on a number of points. I am most grateful to her; below is the amended text. AN ENGLISHMAN IN THE EASTERN ORTHODOX MELTING POT My story begins and ends in Oxford. The Pan-Orthodox English, Greek and Russian Church of the Annunciation and the Holy Trinity, 1 Canterbury Rd, has been over the past half-century a meeting place of East and West. Leading churchmen have worshiped in this modest North Oxford location. It is the local church of the eminent theologian and writer, Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia. Its distinguished visitors have been Metropolitan Anthony of Surozh, to whose diocese it once belonged; Pimen, Aleksy and Kirill, all future patriarchs of Moscow, and the future Metropolitan of Leningrad, Nikodim (Rotov), who advocated rapprochement between Moscow and Rome. At one time the former Athonite monk and theologian, Vasily (Krivoshein), Archbishop of Brussels, served there, as did the French theologian, Archimandrite Lev (Gillet). Another monk of Mount Athos, St Sophrony (Sakharov), the disciple of St Silouan the Athonite and founder of the Stavropeigic Monastery of St John the Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights, Essex, also visited. He was canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 27 November 2019. To the north of the church, on the Oxford ring road, is the Wolvercote cemetery, where Tolkien is buried. Here also lie most of the deceased 1 Canterbury Rd Greek, Serbian and Russian parishioners; and just to the northern side of them is an intriguing tombstone. Its inscription reads: David Balfour 1903–1989 Monk Diplomat Scholar and his wife Louise née von Zedlitz 1906–1994. Who was this Elizabethan man of many parts, this monk whose wife survived him? Metropolitan Kallistos, his DPhil supervisor, knew Balfour well and is the source of the biography I am about to give. David Balfour became a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church by a circuitous route. He was baptized an Anglican in 1903. Later in the same year, he and his family became Roman Catholic. Having attended Roman Catholic schools, he entered the novitiate in 1922 at the French Benedictine Abbey in Farnborogh, Hampshire. There he met Dom Louis Gillet, the future Archimandrite Lev. Gillet inspired in Balfour an interest in the Christian East. As a result, in 1925, Balfour left England for the Benedictine priory of Amay-sur-Meuse in Belgium where he felt better able to pursue his interest in Eastern Orthodoxy. In 1926, he was sent to the German University in Prague and then to Salzburg University to study theology. In August 1927 he made his Solemn Life Profession at Amay-sur-Meuse and was ordained deacon. From 1928–1932 he taught at the Greek College of St Athanasius in Rome. While at the College, he studied at the Pontifical Scots College, where he was awarded two degrees including his licentiate in 1931. During his four-year stay in Rome, he became interested in the Russian Orthodox Church and wrote articles on it for the Amay periodical Irénikon. He made lengthy and detailed contributions to the periodical’s ‘Chronicle of Russian Orthodoxy’, discussing with sympathy and sensitivity the plight of the martyred church in the USSR. He also published the first ever translations into English of essays by the Russian philosopher Berdyayev. In 1932, he travelled to Mount Athos to the Russian Monastery of St Panteleimon. There his meeting with St Silouan and his disciple, St Sophrony (Sakharov), so profoundly affected Balfour that he abandoned Catholicism, to which he ‘felt a strong aversion’, Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia, ‘Obituary of David Balfour’, Striving for Knowledge of God: Correspondence with David Balfour (Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist: Essex 2106), p. 13. and became Orthodox. In 1932, he was received into the church in Paris by Metropolitan Elevfery, Exarch of the Moscow Patriarchate in Western Europe. Balfour decided to join the Moscow Patriarchate, rather than the Russian Orthodox Church abroad. His old friend, Fr Lev Gillet, had become a member of the latter, but St Panteleimon Monastery had continued to be in contact with the motherland and Balfour wanted to be part of a church which preserved its links with Russia. Nonetheless, he was for a time involved in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. He was sent to New York, possibly to interpret, in a lawsuit between Metropolitans Evlogy (Gerogievsky) and Antony (Khrapovitsky). Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky), having been been put in charge of all the Orthodox Churches of Western Europe, moved to Paris; Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitskhy) stayed in Sremsky Carlovćy at the head of the Arkhiereysky sobor / Council of Hierarchs. In 1926 Evlogy split from Antony and the Council of Hierarchs, but caused discord by staying under the jurisdiction of Moscow: after the death of Patriarch Tikhon a year earlier, Antony had disassociated himself from Moscow. In 1932, Balfour was enrolled as a priest in the Moscow Patriarchate parish of the Three Hierarchs Church, rue Pétel, Paris. On 8 May next year, he was tonsured to the small schema by Archbishop Veniamin of Sebastopol with the name of Dimitry. In 1934, Metropolitan Elevfery sent Fr Dimitry to London for six months to liaise with a group of English Orthodox in the hope of setting up a parish there. At some time in this period, according to Charlotte Balfour, Fr Dimitry was sent to Nice. The venture failed from lack of support and money, so he went back to rue Pétel. In September 1935, Fr Dimitry returned to Mount Athos, where he stayed for six months in a remote Russian kellion. The Greek authorities forced him to leave the Holy Mountain: they were becoming increasingly intolerant of visitors to the Russian Athonite community and disapproved of one who had been baptized and ordained in the Roman Catholic Church. Charlotte Balfour comments: My understanding (from my father’s account to me) was that this happened before he converted. The ‘Church police’ came along and asked what he was doing in orthodox robes when he was a catholic. He asked for a few more days to ‘complete the work I came here to do’ and during that time decided to convert. St Silouan told him to go back to Paris. The young priest-monk, however, ignored his spiritual mentor’s advice and spent 1936–41 in Athens. While still under the jurisdiction of Metropolitan Elevfery, who granted him yearly leave of absence, he enrolled as a monk in Penteli Monastery outside Athens and was made archimandrite by the head of the Church of Greece, Archbishop Chrysostomos. Seriya: Russky Afon XIX–XX vekov, vol. 5, ‘Istoriya Russkogo svyato-Panteleimonova monastyrya na Afone s 1735 po 1912 god’ (Athos: Izdanie RSPMA, 2015), pp. 402, 409. The archbishop appointed him as the pneumatikos (father-confessor and spiritual counsellor) at Evangelismos Hospital, a royal institution, thanks to which Fr Dimitry was in close contact with the monarchy. He also took a degree in theology at Athens university and was awarded him arista (a first). On 18 April 1941, on the eve of the German army’s entrance into Athens, he left by ship for Alexandria, having received a ‘letter of canonical release’ from Archbishop Chrysanthos, the successor of Chrysostomos. On board he celebrated the Easter Liturgy. Upon his arrival, he went straight to the Orthodox authorities in Alexandria, requesting that they take him in or assign him to a job. They refused. After that he went to Cairo and within five or six months had lost his faith. As he wrote in his memoirs: I had ceased to believe in the exclusive claims of the Orthodox Church and was disgusted with the moral corruption of some members of the unmarried clergy. Kallistos, op. cit., pp. 17–18. After five months in Cairo ‘doing nothing’, as he put it, he shaved off his beard, took off his monastic habit and broke from the Orthodox Church. In September that year he entered the British intelligence service and was soon promoted to the rank of major. In 1943, he was seconded to the Foreign Service and joined the British Embassy in Cairo to liaise with the Greek government in exile. Next year, he was back in Athens, where he played a key role as an interpreter and intermediary. All communications between the British, and the Greek regent and government were conducted through him. He interpreted for Churchill, who was in Athens in December 1944 and at the Varkiza Conference in February 1945. His time in Athens was blighted by the left-wing Greek press, which pilloried him for having swapped the black for the scarlet, and accused him of espionage. His friends urged him to clear his name, but, to the embarrassment especially of the Greek church and monarchy, he said nothing, deeming it unseemly for a British intelligence officer to engage in a public dispute. Many saw his silence as an admission of guilt. Wild rumours about him have persisted about him. See the following URLs (the latter in Greek): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/soc.culture.greek/gKaL0kdL9jY and http://www.markoseugenikos.gr/index.php?name=biography.of.david.balfour. In 1948, Balfour married in a London registry office a New Zealander, Louise (née von Zedlitz) Fitzherbert, According to Charlotte Balfour, My mother was born von Zedlitz but changed her name to Fitzherbert (her mother’s maiden name) by deed poll during World War 2. Her father, whose father was German and mother English, had suffered in New Zealand for being German in the First World War, losing his job at the University of Victoria. She wanted it to be clear where her loyalties lay. with whom he had a daughter, Charlotte, born in 1949. From the end of the war until 1966 David Balfour worked as a diplomat. He was Oriental Secretary in Tel Aviv, then Consul-General in Smyrna (1951–5), Genoa (1955–60) and Geneva (1960–3). He was awarded a CBE in 1960. He retired from the FCO in 1968, after eight years in Whitehall. He continued working as a linguist, becoming Fellow of the Institute of Linguists, in 1963, and Senior Tutor at Wilton Park (Surrey) International Conference Centre. From 1968–78 he worked as a conference interpreter. His ability at languages was phenomenal. He had an expert knowledge of Ecclesiastical Greek and Church Slavonic. He spoke and wrote fluently French, Italian, German, Modern Greek and Russian, and had a reading knowledge of Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew, Turkish, Romanian, Serbian and Bulgarian. Kallistos, op. cit., p. 21. In 1978, when he had reached the age of 75, he was awarded his DPhil at Oxford. In the words of Metropolitan Kallistos, his supervisor: During the 1970s David resumed the research on St Symeon of Thessalonica that he had begun in Greece forty years before. … [He was] at least twice as old as any of my other pupils… In an enlarged form [his thesis] was published in two volumes… It is not often that a doctoral dissertation sees the light of day in the form of two large published works, together amounting to almost 600 pages… His work on Symeon completed, David turned to the publication of other anecdota that he had unearthed in the 1930s. His edition of St Gregory the Sinaite’s unpublished Discourse on the Transfiguration, with an English translation and a lengthy study (also in English) of the author’s life and writings, appeared as a series of articles in the Athens periodical Theologia during 1981–3… He also contributed articles on Symeon of Thessalonica and Gregory the Sinaite to The Greek Orthodox Theological Review and St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly. The last project on which he was engaged was a critical edition of the unpublished Second Century by St John of Karpathos. Ibid., pp. 22–4. In 1962, during his spell in Geneva, his life took a final momentous turn. He woke his family in the middle of the night and announced he was ‘once more a believer’. As reported in SRA XV, p. 405, he said to them: ‘Ya vnov´veruyu.’ As a result he sought out his old friend, the disciple of St Silouan, St Sophrony, now abbot of the Monastery of St John the Baptist. After hearing Balfour’s lengthy confession and absolving him, St Sophrony instructed him to go to Paris, as St Silouan had done in 1935. This time Balfour obeyed. There Metropolitan Nikolay of Korsun of the Moscow Patriarchate readmitted him as a communicating member of the church and allowed him to read and sing in services. Balfour was told, however, that he could not be reinstated as a priest until either his wife died before him or he found himself on his own deathbed. Such, in brief, is his biography. I have been fascinated by David Balfour because of his achievements. As a linguist myself, I appreciate his expertise, the level of which I could never hope to attain. His written Russian is fluent, idiomatic and very competent, yet he had no formal instruction in the language, which he seems to have picked up through conversing with its speakers and reading. He had a Russian nanny and had gone to Usovka in south-western Russia (now Ukraine) with his mother in 1911. His parents had ‘large mining interests in Russia’ (presumably before 1917), according to Metropolitan Kallistos, op. cit., p. 10. More impressive is his knowledge of Greek, one of the most intricate and varied of the Indo-European languages. There is an enormous difference between Byzantine and Modern Demotic Greek, both of which he was a master. Thanks to languages, he was accepted as one of their own by Belgians, the French, Russians and Greeks. He also had considerable charm and could form lasting friendships with people from widely differing social and national circles. Like Patrick Leigh-Fermour, who travelled throughout central and eastern Europe before the Second World War, he found most doors open to him. His most remarkable social success was with the Russians on Mount Athos and the Athenians. In the 1930s the Russian Athonite community was beleaguered. From 1928, the Greek authorities had set about enforcing a ban on Slav visitors from outside Athos to the Russians there. The brotherhood of St Panteleimon’s seemed thus condemned to die of old age: pilgrims ceased to visit it, and no more novices or monks could to join. At the beginning of the twentieth Century, however, St Panteleimon Monastery was one of the largest and wealthiest in the Orthodox world, with some two thousand monks, and up to three thousand visitors and lay workmen. Most of the monasteries on the Holy Mountain were Greek, and Greek Athonites had long resented their Russian brothers, of whom they were jealous and suspicious. After the liberation of Athos from Turkish rule in 1912 by Greece and the Bolshevik Revolution five years later, when most ties with the motherland were brutally severed, St Panteleimon’s was cut off from the outside world. That an Englishman had access to the monastery for several months, at a time when Slavs were banned and visitors from the west were virtually unheard of, is extraordinary. Balfour’s move to Athens in 1936 was no less surprising. Not only did he ‘disobey’ St Silouan’s instructions, but he went to live among the very people who had forced him to leave Athos. Of course, the Greek Athonites and authorities on the Holy Mountain were very different from the people in Pendeli Monastery, and those in the circles of Archbishop Chrysostomos and the king. Nevertheless, nearly all Greeks had long mistrusted and disliked their Orthodox rivals from the far north. After a short while, Balfour had so much influence in Athens that he was again able to visit St Panteleimon’s without hindrance. The Russian chronicler of St Panteleimon Monastery was so impressed by Blafour’s ability to go everywhere without difficulty that he writes: ‘By the beginning of 1939 [Balfour] had, without impediment, settled [sic] in [the] monastery.’ Seriya: Russky Afon XIX–XX vekov, vol. 6, “Istoriya Russkogo svyato-Panteleimonova monastyrya na Afone s 1912 po 2015 god” (Athos: Izdanie RSPMA, 2015), p. 276. Something about Balfour captivated the monks of St Panteleimon. One of the monastery’s senior fathers, Dukhovnik / Spritual Father Pinufry (Erofeev), asked St Sophrony about him: Fr Sophrony simply asked him to pray, just as Balfour, as he was leaving, had asked all the monks to pray for him. Fr Pinuphry at first said with some hopelessness, ‘Why should we be praying for the Catholics? They are foreign to us. But may God grant everyone salvation.’ Nonetheless, he began to pray, and after some days, on meeting Fr Sophrony he said: ‘Balfour is an extraordinary man. Imagine, at night during my Rule of prayer I started praying for him as you requested, and suddenly the prayer became somehow special, and seized my heart so much that all these days, at home and in church, I am praying only for him.’ Sister Magdalen, Foreword to Striving for Knowledge of God: Correspondence with David Balfour, p. 31. Balfour was confident in his own ability to persuade and influence people. While in Athens, he wrote to (the future Archbishop) Vasily (Krivoshein), who was at the time a monk at St Panteleimon’s with St Sophrony: Please give my warm greetings to Ioann Shakhovskoy. If he travels through Athens, ask him to get in touch with me. Should he need help at the Ministry with his visa, I’ll be glad to help. I’ve got pretty strong connections here. Seriya: Russky Afon XIX–XX vekov, vol. 15, “Afonsky period zhizni arkhiepiskopa Vasiliya (Krivosheina) v dokumentakh” (Athos: Izdanie RSPMA, 2016), p. 400. The future archbishop kept up his friendship with Balfour. The latter, already unfrocked and living in Cairo, continued corresponding with Fr Vasili, seemingly in the secure knowledge of the strength of their friendship. In 1945, Balfour wrote in a far more familiar and relaxed way, addressing the monk as ты (tu), rather than Вы (vous); he signed his correspondence ‘Your brother in Christ David Balfour’, as opposed to the ‘The sinful Priest-Monk Dimitry’. Ibid., pp. 410, 409. Note, however, that in a letter to Balfour in 1945, St Sophrony ‘[continued] to address DB as a priest, and to add the greeting “Christ is in our midst” … He was not aware that DB had left the priesthood and the monastic life.’ Striving for Knowledge of God, fn. 270, p. 261. By this time, St Sophrony was no longer in contact with Fr Vasily, having moved away from St Panteleimon’s, and was living in a kellion belonging to the Greek Athonite Monastery of Aghiou Pavlou. In his letter to St Sophrony, dated 21 July 1945, Balfour signs himself ‘Your brother in Christ, whose name is David once again, but for you, still Dimitr[y]’. Ibid., p. 361. Assessing Balfour’s character, Metropolitan Kallistos observes: Always spiritually an explorer, David was marked by a restless, questing spirit, which made it difficult to him ever to settle down completely. A man of brilliant intellect but also of strong emotions, he could prove impulsive and excitable. His formidable energy, his frankness and the candour of his criticisms, made him seem at times overbearing, and he did not always appreciate the effect that he had on others. But in reality he was far less self-confident, far more sensitive and humble, than he appeared at first sight. The many variations in his career led others to suspect his sincerity, but this was almost certainly unjust. Kallistos, op. cit., pp. 9–10. Metropolitan Kallistos movingly describes the death of this restless genius: During the last three years of his life his health had begun to deteriorate. In his illnesses he was at times a far from easy patient, but his wife looked after him with devoted and unselfish care. He died in his sleep at their home in Kingsclere, outside Newbury. During the final three weeks much of his old restlessness disappeared: he seemed happy and at peace. Ibid., p. 24. 1