Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh

The shape of his early life is the thing worth noticing. He was tonsured under the German occupation, in a country at war, with no monastery available and no prospect of one; the instruction he was given was to live the monastic day inside a surgeon's. He kept it. When he was finally free to be a priest full-time he was already thirty-four and had spent a decade praying in the intervals of a hospital timetable.

That is why his writing on prayer sounds the way it does. It is addressed to people with jobs and interruptions and no natural gift for stillness, because it was worked out by one — and it never suggests that the reader's ordinary life is the obstacle.

He arrived in London in 1948 as chaplain to the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, and over the following decades built the Russian Orthodox presence in Britain from a small émigré chaplaincy into a diocese with a substantial English-speaking membership. He was consecrated bishop in 1957 and became metropolitan and exarch of the Moscow Patriarchate in Western Europe in 1966, resigning the exarchate in 1974 while remaining diocesan bishop.

His position was never simple. He served under a Patriarchate operating within the Soviet state, in a country full of émigrés who had fled it, and he was outspoken enough to be a difficulty for Moscow more than once. The tensions of that arrangement, and the disputes that broke over the diocese after his death, are part of the record and are not tidied away here.

He was a broadcaster before he was an author. His talks on the BBC reached an audience with no Orthodox connection at all, and the books were largely made from them — Living Prayer, School for Prayer, and the one that has outlasted the rest, Beginning to Pray.

Its opening move is characteristic and still startling: he begins with the absence of God, with what to do when prayer produces nothing, and refuses the pretence that a beginner should feel anything in particular. Because it starts there, the book has been usable by people at the very edge of belief, and it has stayed in print for more than fifty years in a market that discards most things in five.

Metropolitan Anthony is the reason a great many English speakers have any idea what Orthodox prayer is. He wrote for beginners, from the position of a beginner, and he never pretended that a life of work and interruption disqualifies anyone — a conviction earned in the years when his own monastic rule had to be kept between operations.

He is not glorified, and this page implies no veneration, though many in Britain and Russia speak of him as a saint. What is recorded is a surgeon who prayed eight hours a day because there was no monastery to be had, and then spent fifty years telling other people it could be done.