There is a moment early in Imprints where Archimandrite Vasileios describes what writing actually is for him. Neither a craft nor, in truth, a choice. "Writing is a by-product," he says, "like the imprint left by the slug as it crawls along the earth." A few lines later: "The struggle is for a man to say, as far as he can, much with little, and in the end to say everything with nothing." It is as good an introduction as any to a book that has, by its own foreword's admission, no chapters and makes no arguments.

Elder Vasileios spent more than half a century on Mount Athos, first as abbot of Stavronikita Monastery and then, from 1990, of Iveron, becoming one of the most significant figures in the modern revival of Athonite monastic life. Imprints is not a memoir of that life and it is certainly not a manual for living it. It is, instead, a succession of brief passages, some of them a single sentence, gathered without connective tissue, the way a monk might gather what has actually stayed with him after fifty years of prayer and burial services and long nights in the church.

What stays with the reader, in turn, is not primarily doctrine, though the doctrine is there, carried lightly on the shoulders of Abba Isaac the Syrian, who appears on nearly every page as something between a source and a companion. What stays is a handful of faces. An unlettered monk dying of cancer in a cell belonging to Iveron. A schoolgirl of sixteen with epilepsy who became, in the author's words, "the mother of her class." A boy named Rade, in a wheelchair in a Serbian community in America, in whose "clear face shine two eyes, pantocratic and pained, full of questioning and expectation." Bishop Maxim Vasiljević, who contributes the foreword, is right to insist that whatever else this book teaches, it teaches that people like these "hold the world invisibly in existence."

The book's most demanding passage has nothing directly to do with Orthodoxy at all. Elder Vasileios quotes at length from Viktor Frankl's account of a young woman dying in Auschwitz, who told him she had found a companion in a chestnut tree visible through her barracks window. "It says to me: I am here — I am here — I am life, eternal life," she told him. Elder Vasileios does not soften this or explain it away. He simply lets it stand as what he elsewhere calls "the old language of the ascetics, who learned in their own bodies that the blow meant to end them became the occasion of their life." It is consolation offered from within affliction, not from outside it. The foreword is careful to note that this is the only kind Elder Vasileios ever asks his reader to accept.

Threaded through all of this are extended meditations on the Resurrection narratives: two disciples who do not recognize their own risen Teacher until the breaking of the bread; a woman who touches the hem of a garment in a crowd and is healed before anyone notices; Thomas, who is answered not with a rebuke but with a wound to touch. Each becomes, in Vasileios's hands, an icon of the same pattern that structures the whole book: presence known most fully at the point of apparent absence, life found precisely through loss.

None of this makes Imprints an easy book to summarize, and that is rather the point. It resists being reduced to an argument because, as its author insists more than once, "the true man expresses himself, in the end, in one sentence that recapitulates his work and defines who he is." Readers looking for a systematic treatise on Orthodox spirituality should look elsewhere. Readers willing to sit with a single line for a while, and let it do its slow work, will find here one of the more quietly demanding spiritual books Sebastian Press has published, translated with evident care by Fr. Gregory Edwards, and worth returning to long after the first reading ends.