ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Holy elders and saints of the Eastern Christian Church because they bear witness to the Spirit and actions of God in the world. It explores how elders who were not trained as professional theologians interacted with science and how it affected them in daily life. It is remarkable that the twentieth century, for all its materialism and anti-Christian and anti-theistic sentiment, produced a number of wonderful grace-bearing people. Elder Sophrony is an interface between the Orthodox world and the Western one, the desert-dweller and the world of the Parisian artist, academic theology and monastic theology. In Andre's biography there is a brief mention of something that touches upon a very profound and, for some, difficult topic. The wonder of human creativity, borne of the image of the Creator God, is a topic that surfaces over and again in Orthodoxy and in the writings of Metropolitan Bloom.
