Friends of Mount Athos. Annual Report 2001

Transcription

1 Friends of Mount Athos Annual Report 2001

2 FRIENDS OF MOUNT ATHOS PRESIDENT The Rt Revd Dr Kallistos Ware, Bishop of Diokleia PATRONS Mr Costa Carras The Very Revd Professor Sir Henry Chadwick, K.B.E., F.B.A. Mr Patrick Leigh Fermor, D.S.O., O.B.E. Archbishop Gregorios of Thyateira and Great Britain Professor Elizabeth Jeffreys, F.A.H.A. Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith, K.C.V.O., C.M.G. Professor Donald M. Nicol, F.B.A. EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Professor David Cadman, F.R.I.C.S. Dr Dimitri Conomos Mr Anthony Hazledine (Events Secretary) Mr Simon Jennings, F.C.A. (Hon. Treasurer) The Rt Revd Basil Osborne, Bishop of Sergievo Dr Graham Speake, F.S.A. (Hon. Secretary) The Rt Revd Dr Kallistos Ware, Bishop of Diokleia (Chairman) NORTH AMERICAN MEMBERSHIP SECRETARY Professor Robert W. Allison HONORARY MEMBERS HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh HRH The Prince ofwales All correspondence should be addressed to the Hon. Secretary, Dr Graham Speake, Ironstone Farmhouse, Milton, Banbury OXlS 4HH (fax ; from whom details of membership may be obtained. This report is private and not for publication. The contributions remain the copyright of the authors and may not be reproduced '"';thout their permission. They represent the opinions of their authors which are not necessarily shared by the society. CONTENTS The Society's Year By Graham Speake 5 A Project to Clear the Footpaths of Mount Athas By john Arnell 16 Report from the Mountain By john Leatham 23 Orthodox Relations By Richard Chartres 34 St Silouan, a Modem Athonite Saint By Sister Magdalen 46 The Ecology of the Virtues By Bishop Basil 62 A Sojourn on the Holy Mountain in the Year 1949: Part Two By Donald M. Nicol 76 SYNDESMOS and Mount Athas: The Eighth Spiritual Ecology Camp By Dimitri Conomos 95 A Yorkshire View of Athas By Graham Binns 103 BOOK REVIEWS Gabriel Nicholas Pentzikis: St Simon the Athonite: His Life. By Aidan Hart 106 Nicholas Fennell: The Russians on Athos. By Nikolai Lipatov 107 Archimandrite Vasileios: The Fayyum Portraits, Institution and Charism in the Orthodox Church, 'The Light of Christ Shines upon All' through all the Saints, What is Unique about Orthodox Culture, and Priestmonk Agathangelos: My Recollections of Papa Tykhon. By Marcus Plested 112 Printed in Great Britain by Windrush Design and Print. Witney OXB 6XW

3 THE SOCIETY'S YEAR My dear friends, The first year of the third millennium of the Christian era has given us all pause for reflection. We do not need to live in Manhattan or Cumbria, in Kabul or New South Wales, to be touched by what has happened. None of us can now step aside with Wernher von Braun and say 'that's not my department.' We are all of us both victims and perpetrators. At the same time we are all beneficiaries. The world, we are told, has never before been so united, and that may be so. Another of the consequences of the past year's events is that we can no longer take people and things for granted in the way that perhaps we did before. Not just globally but as individuals, we are drawn to embrace each other. Friends and family, urban structures and rural surroundings, all are vulnerable and merit our cherishing. As the celebrant exhorts us at the invitation to the Creed, 'Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess.' One of the consequences of the devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that struck the United Kingdom in 2001 was that we were deprived of the freedom to use public footpaths. For those of us accustomed to doing so, this was no trivial matter. Suddenly we found ourselves without an amenity that we had always taken for granted. Not only did we (and our dogs) miss this simple means of daily exercise, but the farmers also admitted that they missed us. It was a great relief to all concerned when the restrictions were finally lifted. The problems that beset the footpaths on Mount Athos are less acute but in the long term much more serious. For centuries they had provided the only means of communication by land on the Mountain. They were therefore in constant use, by monks as well as pilgrims, and their existence was taken for granted. In recent decades, however, this has ceased to be true. In order to facilitate access to the millennium celebrations in 1963, a road was built from Daphne to Karyes, much to the dismay of some of the more prescient monks. As they foresaw, this was the thin end of the wedge, and since then a network of roads has gradually spread to most parts of the peninsula, originally intended to service the expansion of the timber industry, now shamelessly providing motorized transportation between the monasteries and the capital. With the advent of vehicular transport, evidently welcomed and gradually adopted by monks and 4 5

4 pilgrims alike, the footpaths fell into disuse and disrepair. An amenity that had once been taken for granted was suddenly no longer available. But not all pilgrims (nor, to be fair, all monks) rejoiced in the convenience of the roads. Bishop Kallistos in a recent article has written of the joys and hardships of pedestrian pilgrimage on Athos: I count it a singular blessing that I was able to visit the Holy Mountain of Athos first of all in autumn 1961, and again in autumn 1962, at a time when there were no roads for vehicles, no buses, no jeeps or tractors. Today the Garden of the Panagia is desecrated with petrol fumes; then it was altogether different. As a pilgrim, either one travelled from monastery to monastery by the little motorboats that plied along the coast (but in the equinoctial gales most of these had been cancelled); or else one hired a mule (but that was far too expensive for a student like myself); or else one walked. I walked. At times it was hard work, for the ancient mule tracks of Athos are steep and stony. I lost my way, slipped into ravines, fell backwards into a thorn bush and twisted my ankle. But by walking alone - meeting only the occasional monk, not to mention an alarming number of snakes, and at one point a family of wild boar - I was able to experience Mount Athos as a centre in sacred space, in a way that otherwise I could not possibly have done. I was able to feel, in the words of the Russian Athonite hermit Fr Nikon, 'Here every stone breathes prayers.'' And readers of our Annual Report may recall the 'Open Letter to the Principals of all the Athonite Monasteries' written by Brother Guillaume, a monk oftaize who has a great love and respect for the Holy Mountain: Many, many monks on Mount Athos expressed to me their sadness - which I fully share - about the destruction of so many extremely beautiful, historic paved roads (monopatis). Is there not a possibility for the monasteries to save the last existing monopatis?... Many monks told me that they are afraid that too many new roads stimulate a superficial kind of tourism, where visitors rush from monastery to monastery by car, instead of walking slowly as real pilgrims from place to place, admiring the incredible beauty of Mount Athos.l It is therefore with great joy that we announce the first results of a new project to clear and conserve what remains of the footpaths, mule tracks, and wayside shrines and fountains of the Holy Mountain. Our member John Amell led the team which went out in May 2001 to assess the size of 1 Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, 'The Orthodox Understanding of Pilgrimage', Forerunner, 38 (Winter ), 1-10 (p. 8). 1 Annual Report of the Frimds of Mount Atbos ( 1998 ), pp the task and undertake some sample clearing and his report is printed below (pp ). As he points out, the project was undertaken at the instigation of HRH the Prince of Wales; and it seems to me worth recording here how the idea came about. In May 2000 a Greek wrote from an address in Germany to the Prince of Wales, drawing His Royal Highness's attention to the nature of the problem. Here is part of what he wrote: The problem of the historic footpaths on Mount Athos has been recognized by a friend of Greece, my Austrian friend Reinhold Zwerger. He has mapped the footpaths and issued a description of them in a little book which was published also in English. For many years he has been fighting with the passion of the Castilian knight Don Quixote for the preservation of the footpaths, but without the official help and co-ordination of a Greek authority it is impossible for a private person to get anything going on a fairly long-term basis... I know that you are a great supporter of traditional architecture and their preservation. But would an old bow bridge built in accordance with Byzantine architecture not be worth preserving?! The paved old path leading over it is necessary for us pilgrims and friends of the Holy Mountain for whom the way is the destination. Because only when walking on such ways the body and the soul have the chance to become one and to spiritualise the experience gained in the last visited monastery. My friends and I would much appreciate Your Royal Highness becoming an advocate for this higher purpose. This letter caught the imagination of the Prince of Wales. We were consulted by his office; and we responded positively, pointing out that it was a cause that would perhaps appeal more to pilgrims than to the Athonites themselves, but one that would be most warmly supported by all members of the Friends. The next thing we knew was the challenge issued to us at Highgrove to get on and do something about it. It is typical of His Royal Highness's concern for Athos that he should take up an issue such as this and not only ensure that action is taken but also participate personally in the project. The day that he spent with the team, labouring as hard and sweating as profusely as any of them, was surely an inspiration to all of us, not just those who were there working with him on the spot, but to the monks, to the members of the Friends, and to everyone who cares about the future of pilgrimage on the Holy Mountain. Happily the press knew nothing of it, so it cannot have been done to polish up his image as a hard-working ordinary bloke. It was simply done out of love. The other person to whom this project owes a large debt is John Amell. The Prince had scarcely finished speaking before John buttonholed me at 7

5 Highgrove and asked if he might be permitted to help. The next day he wrote to me about it; within days he had established links with the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers; and by the end of August he had a plan of action. John's enthusiasm for and dedication to the project are manifest in the report that he has compiled. It is pleasure to announce that he will be leading the second expedition, scheduled to go to Athos in May2002. Conserving the paths of Athos is not a one-off, finite operation; it is more like painting the Forth Bridge: it is a task that can never be completed. But we are extremely serious in our undertaking of it and we are not blind to the apparent impossibility of finishing the job. We see it as a long-term project, one in which we shall be involved for many years to come; and we see it as an aid to pilgrimage, not as a means to simply enhancing the environmental amenities of the Holy Mountain (which would in any case be beyond our remit as a charity). The work can of course only proceed with the full co-operation of the monks, and we have taken care to ensure that those monasteries on whose land we operate do in fact welcome us and wish to participate in the project. We like to think that in due course others may follow our example and take up the cause. But we do not delude ourselves by thinking that we are embarking on something that has not been done before. Reinhold Zwerger has been doing it for years; and the fruit of his labours is the map that we all use. It is a pleasure to record that our team has had the benefit of his advice, gained from many years' experience, and that the work proceeds not only with his blessing but his enthusiastic support. One of the aims of our project is of course eventually to produce a new map. Because it is such a major undertaking for us, and because it was instigated by the Prince ofwales, we decided to ask His Royal Highness ifhe would like to speak to us about it at a meeting of the society in It is again typical of his generosity and his deep concern that he not only accepted but he very kindly invited us to hold the meeting at Highgrove. It is therefore a great honour for me to announce that the nexi: meeting of the society will take place at Highgrove House in Gloucestershire on Friday 28 June The size of the Orchard Room dictates that numbers will have to be limited; and for that reason we have decided that it shall be open only to members, and that the AGM (which would otherwise have taken place on this day) shall be held over until the autumn. Full details are being circulated to members together with this Annual Report. 8 ' j i I 1 t.!! ~ -! Looking further ahead, I am pleased to take this opportunity to announce that the AGM of the society in 2002 will be held at St Anne's College, Oxford, on Saturday 28 September. We have deliberately chosen a Saturday this year in response to many requests from members, though we realize that this will inconvenience others, to whom all we can say is that we cannot please all of the people all of the time. It will, as usual, take the form of an all-clay conference and we shall be honoured to have as our guest Archimandrite Elissaios, Abbot of the monastery of Simonopetra. Details of this meeting will be circulated to members nearer the time. There will not then be an autumn meeting in London this year. * * * * * I must return to my theme which is to chronicle the past year, not to anticipate the next. As usual, we celebrated the new year with a Vasilopitta party at the Andipa Gallery in Knightsbridge on 16 January; and as always we are grateful to Maria and Acoris for their hospitality and to Mr Lalaounis for donating the prizes. This was the first Vasilopitta since the death of our late President, Sir Steven Runciman, and his presence was greatly missed. There were opportunities to remember him publicly at memorial services held at St Columba's Church of Scotland, Pont Street, on 25 January and at the Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity and the Annunciation, Oxford, on 1 November, the latter date being the anniversary of his death; and an international conference was held in his memory at Mistra at the end of May. The society's tenth AGM was held at St Anne's College, Oxford, on Tuesday 22 May and was attended by about seventy members and guests. For the first time Bishop Kallistos took the chair as both President and Chairman. After a kontakion for Sir Steven and Derek Hill sung by Dimitri Conomos, Sister Magdalen of the Community of St John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, gave a talk entitled 'St Silouan, Monk of Mount Athos', the text of which is printed below. In the afternoon Mr Petros Koufopoulos of Athens, architect of the restoration of the Protaton Tower in Karyes, gave an illustrated presentation entitled 'The Architectural History of the Protaton Tower, its Conservation and Rehabilitation'. This was of particular interest to members of the society because this was the project to which Sir Steven had donated the proceeds of his Onassis Prize for Culture and whose completion he had the satisfaction of witnessing on his last 9

6 pilgrimage to Athos in July This absorbing talk was accompanied by a large number of carefully selected slides. We regret that the sheer number of illustrations prevents our reproducing the talk in this Report; and we can only urge readers to go to Karyes and see for themselves the magnificent museum that has been created inside the Protaton Tower and the associated reading rooms and depository for archives. Reports have reached us that access to this museum is sometimes difficult to negotiate and we would encourage pilgrims to give the fathers of the Holy Community a few days' notice of their intention to visit. It is of course entirely contrary to the terms of our donation - which amounted to some 160,000 and supported the entire cost of the internal refurbishment of the tower - that access should not be open to all who have a serious interest in its contents. After a buffet lunch the formal business of the AGM was transacted. As Secretary, I reported that the membership remained static at 580, the same total as in I read out the names of those who had joined since the printing of the last Directory and I reported the deaths of Sir Steven Runciman, Constance Babington Smith, Nigel Clive, Derek Hill, Christopher Hookway, Richard Johnson, Peter Lang, Robert Runde, Edward Ryan, and Peter Talbot-Willcox. Since the 2000 AGM the society had met twice: on 23 November for a service of Great Vespers in St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, followed by an address by the Bishop of London entitled 'Orthodox Relations'; and on 16 January for a Vasilopitta party at the Andipa Gallery. On 2 August we had been received by HRH the Prince of Wales at Highgrove. In his closing address the Prince had drawn attention to the parlous and deteriorating state of the paths on the Holy Mountain. At his instigation a committee had been formed and in May a team of twelve volunteers had spent ten days surveying and/or clearing paths from Vatopedi to Chilandar and down to Karyes. I remarked that the Prince had become a good friend to both the society and the monks and that we were delighted to welcome David Cadman to represent his interests on our Executive Committee. I also welcomed Bishop Basil as a member of the committee, I spoke at some length about Sir Steven's memorable journey to Karyes in July, and I thanked all those who had contributed to the smooth operation of the society during the past year. As Treasurer, Simon Jennings presented the accounts for the year 2000 and stressed the importance of subscriptions to the society's financial 10 health. Outgoings had related primarily to work on the Protaton Tower in Karyes, and the final instalment of this would be paid as soon as the details were known. He said that the fmances were 'in a proper state for a charity with neither too much nor too little'. He had recently written to all members asking them to sign a Giftaid form: about one third had so far done so, and he urged others to sign it if they were UK tax payers. Bishop Kallistos moved that the accounts be adopted, a motion that was passsed unanimously, and turned to elections. Both the Secretary and the Events Secretary had reached the end of their term of office. They were therefore standing down and offering themselves for re-election; there being no other candidates, they were duly re-elected. Bishop Kallistos further announced that Bishop Basil of Sergievo and Professor David Cadman, who had already been co-opted to the Executive Committee, were now offering themselves for election; and their election also was approved by a unanimous vote. There being no other business, the Chairman closed the meeting at 2.30 pm. On 29 September a group of about fifteen members, led by Bishop Basil, paid a visit to the Monastery of StJohn the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex. We were warmly received by members of the community, taken on a tour of the monastery, and provided with refreshments both spiritual and temporal. The Prince ofwales, who had been hoping to join us for the visit, in the event was unable to come but sent a message to the Abbot which was read to the whole community on his behalf by David Cadman. That message is printed here with His Royal Highness's kind permission: I very much regret that I shall not be able to be with the Friends of Mount Athos when they visit you on 29th September. My visits to Vatopaidi in the last few years have been of such great interest and delight and I have been much heartened by the wisdom of the fathers, including wonderful conversations with the Elder Joseph. Through the Friends of Mount Athos and my Foundation we have begun a project to restore the pilgrim paths on the Holy Mountain and I hope that this work will continue next year. This letter comes with my heartfelt best wishes to you and your monastery. Friends of the monastery will be interested to know that Fr Silouan, who was formerly a member of that community, has now moved to become Abbot of the Monastery of Sts Antony and Cuthbert at Gatten in Shropshire. Fr Silouan will be one of the speakers at our meeting at Highgrove on 28 June

7 . In. October our member George Politis exhibited a selection of his pamtmgs of ~he Holy Mountain ('Images from Mount Athos') at Gallery F~rty Se;en m Bloomsbury. Members of the Friends were invited to the pnvate VIew on 15 October, and Mr Politis has very generously donated a percentage of the proceeds to the society. The autumn me~ting of the Friends took place on Thursday 29 November. After a service of Orthodox Vespers in the Romanian Church of St Dunstan in the West, Fleet Street, celebrated by Bishop Kallistos we removed to the St Bride's Institute in Bride Lane where, after some s'uitab1e r.efreshment, Bishop Basil gave an address entitled 'The Ecology of the :'Irtues: The Ecological Crisis in the Light of the Ascetic Theory of Maximu~ the Confessor', the text of which is printed below (pp ). Some thirty-five members and guests attended. * * * * * At the end of the year we were saddened by the death of Sir Dimitri Ob?Ien~ky, Emeritus Professor of Russian and Balkan History in the Umversity of Oxford and since its foundation a Patron of the Friends of ~ount Ath~s. Dimitri was a scholar of great distinction, his most influential book ~emg The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, ( 1971) which revolutionized our understanding of the medieval history of Eastern Europe. Born in Petrograd in 1918, the son of Prince Dimitri Aie:candrovich Obolensky, the young Dimitri was educated in Eastbourne, Pans, a~d Cambridge. Elected a Fellow of Trinity in 1942, he moved to Oxford m 1949 as Reader in Russian and Balkan History and became a Studen~ of Christ Church. In 1961 he was elevated to a personal chair ~the. pai~ters n~atly altered 'Prince' to 'Prof.' on his door, as Bryer recalled m?~s obituary m the Independent), and in 1974 he became a Fell ow of the B.ntlsh Academy. As Bishop Kallistos said at his funeral, we remember him ~ot only f?r his work as a scholar but also for his love of poetry, especially Russian poetry (he edited the Penguin Book of Russian Verse in 19~2), and for his love of the Orthodox Church, in which he was ordamed a subdeacon. To this we must add his love of the Holy Mountain. H~ was ~ keen supporter of the Friends, though he rarely attended meetm~s.his book Six Byzantine Portraits ( 1988) contained a chapter on St M~ximos the Greek, Enlightener of the Russians, and Sir Dimitri had been mstrumental in bringing about his canonization by the Russian Or- 12 thodox Church in that same millenary year. In 1997 a portion of the saint's relics was presented by Patriarch Alexis II to the monastery of Vatopedi, where St Maximos had been a monk from 1505 to 'This auspicious event', as Sir Dimitri described it in an article in the Annual Report of the Friends for that year, signalled 'a revival of the traditional tions between Mount Athos and Russia' and was seen as 'a further the increasingly close relationship between Vatopedi and the rest Orthodox world'. The translation of the relics was no less warmly welcomed by the fathers of Vatopedi, some of whom with Abbot Ephraim travelled in person to Moscow to receive them amid elaborate ceremony. Dimitri died in Burford on 23 December, aged 83. Eternal memory! * * * * * It is a pleasure to announce the publication by Ormylia of volume 3 of the ongoing translation of The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church. Volume 1, covering the saints who are commemorated in the months of September and October, was reviewed in the Annual Report for Volume 2, covering November and December, was reviewed last vear. Volume 3, containing the saints for January and February, arrived too iate for inclusion this year but will, we hope, be reviewed next year. Like most of the books reviewed here, this important series is available from Orthodox Christian Books Ltd., Studio 7, Townhouse Farm, Alsager Road, Audley, Staffordshire ST7 8JQ (orthbook@aol.com). The translation is being funded partly by the Friends of Mount Athos and partly by the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. Completion of the work, in a total of six volumes, is eagerly awaited. Those who have joined the society recently may be interested in the possibility of acquiring back numbers of the Annual Report. Many issues are now out of print; but copies of 1993, 1997, and 2000 are still available and may be obtained from the Secretary (price 2.50 each including post and packing). Copies of the Pilgrim's Guide to MountAthos, last revised in 2000 ( 3.50), and the map by Reinhold Zwerger, last revised in ), may still be obtained in the same way. ~o changes have been reported in the procedure for obtaining entry to the Holy Mountain since the Guide was last printed. First-time pilgrims must still visit the Pilgrims' Bureau in Thessaloniki before travelling to Ouranopolis; regular pilgrims may arrange to collect their documents at 13

8 the office in Ouranopolis. But all pilgrims should note that all telephone numbers in Greece have recently changed and that a 0 should be added to all area codes. Thus the code for Athens (formerly 1) is now 10, that for Thessaloniki (formerly 31) is now 310, and that for Athos (formerly 377) is now If dialling from outside Greece, the telephone number of the Pilgrims' Bureau in Thessaloniki is now ; fax For ease of reference I give below a complete list of both telephone and fax numbers for all the monasteries. I am advised that the monasteries of Iviron, Dochiariou, Simonopetra, and Esphigmenou are not currently accepting guests overnight, though these monasteries may be visited during the day. I should not close this report without mentioning the retirement of our President (and Chairman), Bishop Kallistos. In September 2001 he retired from his university teaching post as Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford; and at the end of the year he ceased to be Rector of the Greek Orthodox Parish of the Holy Trinity in Oxford, having held both positions for thirty-five years. Happily for us, he continues to live in Oxford, and to exercise his episcopacy as Bishop of Diokleia, and most importantly he remains President of the Friends of Mount Athos. It was fitting therefore that he should mark this turning-point in his life by making a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain in order to celebrate the Feast of the Nativity of Christ with the brotherhood of Simonopetra. I should like to take this opportunity to wish His Grace a long and fruitful retirement and many years in his capacity as our President. GRAHAM SPEAKE Hon. Secretary ATHOS TELEPHONE AND FAX NUMBERS If calling from outside Greece, these numbers should be preceded by Monastery Telephone Fax Great Lavra Vatopedi Iviron Chilandar Dionysiou Koutloumousi Pantokrator Xeropotamou Zographou Dochiariou Karakalou Philotheou Simonopetra St Paul's Stavronikita Xenophontos Grigoriou Esphigmenou St Panteleimonos Konstamonitou

9 A PROJECT TO CLEAR THE FOOTPATHS OF MOUNT ATHOS 30 April-10 May 2001 Many pilgrims to the Holy Mountain in recent years have been concerned about the deterioration in the condition of the footpaths and, in many cases, their virtual extinction as the roads and forest trails have been developed. Notwithstanding the wonderful maps and the working parties led by Herr Reinhold Zwerger, the condition of the footpaths has continued to deteriorate. At the reception for the Friends of Mount Athos held on 2 August 2000 at Highgrove His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales expressed similar concern and suggested that the Friends should put their minds to this problem to see what could be done. Having had some responsibility for our local footpaths, I contacted the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV), from whom I have received excellent training in footpath clearance in the past. They were enthusiastic to help with the project and introduced me to one of their senior international project leaders, Andy Rockall. Together we worked out an outline plan of action, a system to document the state of the paths and the work completed, and a shopping list for tools and equipment. Volunteers included members of the Friends, BTCV members to act as team leaders, representatives of the Prince's Foundation, and my local Footpaths Officer from Essex County Council. They proved to be a longsuffering and very good-humoured group, despite disparate backgrounds, experience, and ages. The team of twelve met for the first time at Heathrow Airport to travel to Thessaloniki via Vienna. Most of the party were visiting the Holy Mountain for the first time, so I had taken great care to ensure they were well briefed on what to expect in terms of accommodation, food, and facilities. I was really pleased to see that everyone arrived at Heathrow with minimal luggage, especially as we had two substantial packages of cutters, loppers, saws, choppers, etc. to take with us. We arrived in Thessaloniki in the late afternoon and had made arrangements to stay overnight. This provided the opportunity for some 'teambuilding' in the evening, but we were all on parade at the crack of dawn for our coach to Ouranoupolis. The coach didn't arrive! We did eventually 16 wake the driver and get the trip underway, but we had to have some rapid processing of our documents at the office in O~ranoupolis to get to the boat in time. Then the magic of the Holy Mountam started to take charge. I suspect that all pilgrims find that boat journey something rather special, an opportunity for reflection and to shed some of the thoughts that trouble our daily lives. It was with considerable relief that I found two monks from the monastery of Vatopedi waiting to greet us at Daphni and transport us across the mountains to the monastery that was to be our base for the next two weeks. We were accommodated in two dormitories adjacent to one another; and, having settled in, we were introduced to Fr ~athew who was to be our main point of contact with the monastery dunng our stay. We were greeted by Fr Arsenios, the Deputy Abbot, and Fr Isidore and spent some time that evening discussing the footpaths that we should work on. We also took a look at the condition of some of the nearer paths and then got the team together for a talk on the safe use of the equipment we had brought. The next morning we were breakfasted and on the road by 7.00 and put in our first efforts at clearing on the path leading from the monaste~ to the monument on the ridgeway known as Chera, the Hand. We spht into teams of three or four, depending on the conditions, and each team would take a 25-metre stretch of path. We found that much of the pathway had been reduced down to no more than half a metre, which we cut back to generally about 2 metres. The constrictions varied from bracken to substantial trees up to 10 centimetres thick which had to be sawn down and then cut into pieces for disposal. The work was slow and demanding, and drinking water quickly became a vital commodity. We had a brief stop at around to review progress, refuel with water and perhaps an apple if that was on the menu for the day. We then worked until about 1.00 when we took a more substantial break for food and to rest. We were supplied with lunch provisions by the monastery. These included olives, bread, apples, c~eese.on a non-fasting day, and occasionally halva and raisins. We settled m quickly to the relatively frugal diet that had been a cause of concern to many people before the trip, and as time progressed, secret stashes of Mars bars and other chocolate delights started to appear. We finished between 3.00 and 4.00, depending on conditions and the distance we had to walk back to the monastery. Then started an orderly 17

10 8. Vatopa\~,.; Below: The 2001 team and (above) the record of its achievements. Paths coloured green were cleared, those coloured yellow were surveyed

11 queue for the shower, washing and airing of clothes, writing up of notes, and perhaps a short rest before joining the monastic community in the church for the evening service. Supper was taken as part of the service, and after supper we met with the Holy Fathers to discuss progress, outline a plan for the following day, and, as the days progressed, to discuss various other issues, many well removed from footpaths. We came to learn much about the organization and planning that are necessary to keep the monastery functioning. Their plans for the future are ambitious and include the complete renovation of the olive groves as well as considerable building and renovation work around the monastery and at the derelict school building. Major work is already in hand to underpin the structure of the church and to continue the renovation of the monks' quarters. We were privileged to stay in completely renovated accommodation, this work having been done to the highest standards throughout. Mter the first few days the quality and speed of our work on the footpaths had improved and the monks were taking an increasing interest in our work. Attendance in church was increasing as the members of our team began to understand more of the significance of aspects of the services. It was also noticeable that the levels of chatter both inside the dormitory and around the monastery significantly diminished. We had one really testing day of heavy rain. A decision was taken first thing in the morning that we should press on with the work planned for the day. This decision was far from unanimous. We set off in heavy rain; but after just a couple of hours of cold wet conditions things brightened up; and by the time we had completed our day, clothes had dried out and spirits improved. One evening we were very honoured to be offered a tour of the new museum and the old library. The library contains some amazing treasures, including very ancient illuminated manuscripts, and we were able to view the thirteenth-century copy of Ptolemy's Geography with its wonderfully coloured maps. The continuing work on the library will enable these priceless manuscripts to be preserved in good condition for future generations. His Royal Highness had indicated his intention to visit the monastery during the period of our stay. As the time of his visit approached, one could sense increased urgency around the monastery. For our part, we had earmarked a particularly interesting stretch of path that we thought 20 included a wall and a fountain but was all very heavily overgrown. This was in case His Royal Highness should wish to join us in our task. On the evening of his arrival Andy and I spent an hour or so with the Prince of Wales to brief him on the work we had done and what we felt remained to be done in the future. He seemed pleased with what we had achieved, concerned at the amount that remained to be done across the whole territory of the Holy Mountain, but also concerned that our team appeared to be short on luxuries. We had tactfully referred to the impact of the smell of bacon early in the morning emanating from the royal party's accommodation which was situated below our dormitories. Immediately after this discussion two bottles of a suitable luxury were delivered to our dormitories. The smell of bacon was quickly forgotten. The Prince of Wales and two of his party joined us to help clear the fountain area. This turned out to be a very substantial task, but was interrupted by the appearance of a lone pilgrim who we found was from Khabarovsk, in the very far east of Russia. He was a little taken aback to be introduced to the Prince of Wales who greeted him with enthusiasm; but he decided to join in our efforts and stayed on to share our lunch. It was a wonderful day and we were all impressed with the energy and enthusiasm shown by the Prince ofwales. We had cleared an area bounded by a stone wall in quite good condition with steps to the olive grove above and the remains of an old fountain: a real reward for our efforts. On several days we sent out survey parties, usually consisting of two people, to evaluate the condition and the work necessary to recover various paths, should it be possible to organize further visits in the future. Several we found to be all but impassable. Most of our work was in the area around the monastery and we estimated we cleared some 5 kilometres of path to a good standard. A further 26 kilometres were surveyed. This certainly represents no more than 5 per cent of the total task, but it is an important beginning. The monastery has also started renewing the waymarking of their paths. We took care to sharpen, oil, and grease all of the tools we took with us and these have been locked away together with some notes for the guidance of others who might have time available to continue our work. The end of our last day's work was a very thoughtful time and the walk back offered a period of inward reflection. For those visiting the Holy Mountain for the first time it had been a profound experience. Losing some weight was just one of the good things that happened to most of us; 21

12 but the return journey to our everyday lives was nevertheless a profound shock. We decided, perhaps unwisely, to take the boat from Vatopedi to Nea Roda to where we had redirected our bus. The boat then stopped for 1 hours at Esphigmenou, putting our timetable at some risk. In the event we made our flight in good time but had to change planes in Vienna. For some reason I cannot fathom, half of our party avoided the Transit signs and took themselves out through Austrian Customs. By the time they made their way back, the rest of the party had found a small restaurant area where we could slowly wean ourselves back to our normal diet. We all ~oticed t?e noise, the colour, and the speed of things around us as we sat tn the atrport, especially when invaded by a party of football fans celebrating some victory no doubt. '. Since returning, we have produced a short factual report both for the Fnends an~ forst James's Palace to distribute to our various sponsors. We have latd plans for future visits, and I anticipate we shall be able to mount a similar effort in This project came about at the instigation of the Prince of Wales and ~e are ~s~cially gr~t~~ul to His Royal Highness for his help and generosity tn making 1t a posstbthty. A number of organizations have contributed in variou~ w~ys including the funding of travel and equipment: the Latsis Orgamzatlon, the Alliance of Religions and Conservation and of course t~e Friends of Mount Athos. The help of the British Trus; for Conservation Volunteers was invaluable in providing the experience and guidance that ensur~d good and safe progress was achieved. We are most grateful for all of th1s help and most especially for the assistance and hospitality of the monastery of Vatopedi. JOHN ARNELL Bishop's Stortford REPORT FROM THE MOUNTAIN For a reason that will soon become evident, I open this Report from the Mountain, which concerns the year 2001, rather perversely by noticing a publication that marked the 150th anniversary in 1999 of the Skete of St Andrew at Karyes, administrative capital of the Holy Mountain. The book was titled Holy Skete of Saint Andrew- Seraglio, and is bilingual. The then archimandrite of the skete, monk Pavlos, was co-editor of the book. A noted conservator of icons and wall-paintings, monk Pavlos has been at the skete since 1992, but now spends much of his time in Constantinople where a few years ago he set up a conservation studio in Galatas. Monk Pavlos and his brother Fr Maximos, an expert in technical aspects of the conservation of paintings, were followed by their elderly father, monk Andreas, into the skeletal brotherhood his sons had formed in the vast and (apart from the presence of the Athonite Academy in one wing) empty buildings of the skete, a dependency ofvatopedi Monastery. Monk Andreas remains there, a member now of the rather larger community comprising a group of monks from Philotheou Monastery under Dikaios (Prior) Ephraim, formerly Abbot of Philotheou, which was installed in Several members of the new brotherhood are Greek-Americans by birth. One of the short chapters in the anniversary publication is 'On Keimilia', its author monk Pavlos. In it he notes that the word keimilion is usually translated as 'precious object or artefact', adding that the true meaning of the word cannot be fully expressed in any European language: '... the holy keimilia', he writes, 'are the fortune and glory of our church... the bridges through which Grace is granted to us.' He continues, 'If the holy keimilia are conceived as monuments, moveable or unmoveable, then we are led inevitably to a spiritual bankruptcy.' This is a claim that carries conviction and merits consideration. Of course, many publications do concern exclusively the spiritual essence of Athos- its saints and holy men, their teachings and example; the liturgies and services, the psalmody and superb chanting (cassettes and CDs); 1 the religious writings of monks and theologians, of scholars and profound 22 1 A traveller to Romania has told me that at Jassy he heard a choir chanting Athonite psalmody and wondered if this had come about through the influence of COs recorded on the Holy Mountain. 23

13 thinkers. But most of these are in Greek only, some in other Balkan languages. What impression is left by other 'Athonite' publications that aim at a wider public- a public which includes, of course, the whole of that half of the human race which must observe the avaton? Increasingly, such publications -books, video films, CD-roms, and so on -are appearing in bilingual editions, sometimes in more than two languages. But like many, if not most, museum exhibitions or permanent displays (and their catalogues too), they tend to focus on the worldly, the material and aesthetic aspects of a wide variety of subjects, not least keimilia, that are features of the Holy Mountain's history and life. 2 Some of these publications are indeed needful and invaluable academic studies; others, books with superb illustrations and illuminating texts, testify to the importance attached through the ages by the humble layman and powerful benefactor to this unique centre of Orthodox monasticism and learning - books that conjure up what constitute the superficial elements of Athos, its natural and man-made features, its thousand-year-old existence, and its keimilia, only hinting at its purpose and practice. For the significance of all these to the essentially spiritual and liturgical disciplines of Athos is not always made apparent. Mutatis mutandis, Hamlet is presented without the Prince. And so we come back to monk Pavlos's trenchant remarks. I quote him more extensively: 2 Today, as the holy keimilia become increasingly a matter of research on account of their historical, artistic, aesthetic, even commercial value, their sanctifying communion with the faithful is gradually eroded, as if it were a second iconoclasm. What is happening is a spiritual corrosion that each one of us is able to trace frrst in his own self. If we happen to talk with people of our father's generation, they would be able to narrate countless miracles and incidents related with a certain keimilion. On the contrary, we usually seek to learn whether this keimilion is of Byzantine origin or not and what is its value. Keimilia are sources of sanctifying energy, divine Grace for the whole world. By placing them in a museum in fact we mortify these depositories which are invaluable for the life of the universal world, our whole planet. By mortifying, therefore, this sanctifying energy in them, we move towards a spiritual devastation. Yet I remember seeing visitors to the 'Treasures of Mount Athos' Exhibition held in Thessaloniki in women in awe as they confronted the inaccessible - venerating icons on display, the museum display for once not suppressing an instinctive awareness of the sanctity of their proper place and function keimilia should be living things and indeed are alive only in their natural environment: the church, the monastery, the proskynitarion (where they are placed for worship), beside the kandilion (oil-lamp). Where they.are venerated, there they should be studied and restored. We oug~t to~~ trymg hard to preserve not only their material existence, but also the1r spmtual one. ~d while the former can be achieved through a proper and thorough restonng process the latter is accomplished by preserving their use in the Liturgy and worshi~... Undoubtedly, today a place where keimilia are stored and preserved should be accessible to the people as well. Such a place, however, ought to be something much more than a 'historic~!' museum. It ought t~ be a spiritual school, a catecheterion,... a psychagog10n,... a place of sanct1ty. It is not publication and exhibition in themselves of keimilia, but the limited scope or reach of them that monk Pavlos is questioning. Should not we be questioning that too?.. Academician Pavlos Mylonas, a distinguished architect, mdicates what may be our answer. The Academy of Athens was the setting in Febr~ary 2001 of the presentation of the professor's Atlas of Athos, the copious fruit of nearly fifty years of exhaustive study of the architecture especially, but also of the estates and resources, the history and ~ay of lif~ of all twenty ruling monasteries and many of their dependen~ie~. Repl~ng to previous speakers who had praised his patient work and It~ Impre~~Ive conclusion, Mylonas delivered a sometimes emotional, sometimes cntical address. At one point he remarked, 'If we wish to approach, however superficially, the heart of the Holy Mountain, we.h~ve to stress ~o characteristics.' Of the one, he said, 'The frrst charactensbc of the Monastic State is its spiritual hypostasis [substance or existence] and its spiritual life. In that context, though, the sum of its monuments is nothing but a material shell which the monk could, if required, slough off without affecting the fabric of his life, which is above all spiritual.'.. The summaries that follow of books and other products published m 2001 by Athonite sources or on Athonite themes are a more numer~us typical selection than usual, but this is intention~l. They ~ay help ~onsideration of the validity of monk Pavlos's observations and m pondenng the question evoked by them. * * * * * 25

14 Mount Athos - The Sacristy of Protaton. The title is a literal translation from the Greek, whereas more accurately it should read 'Mount Athos - The Treasury of the Protaton', for it illustrates with superb photographs and illuminating texts the pick of the accumulated treasures of the Protaton. Opening with an introductory greeting from the Patriarch, the book is the first publishing venture of the Hagioritiki Hestia (Athonite Centre), accomplished in association with the Holy Community of Mount Athos. It takes the form of a 'calendar', or rather diary, for The Hestia, based in Thessaloniki, is an outcome of the unique exhibition 'Treasures of Mount Athos' held in 1997, the year in which the city was the Cultural Capital of Europe. I doubt that many will be filling the blank spaces on the diary pages with notes of ephemeral engagements and transitory events, for long after 2002 has been superseded by 2003, and subsequent years, possessors of the publication will wish to refer to the informative texts and striking photographs of portable icons, manuscripts, wood-carved screens and altar crosses, liturgical vessels, and other precious metalware, objects with long histories of perennial interest. The texts describe briefly not only the arts and craftsmanship that created the objects, but also the archive and library of the Treasury, and include a valuable, more extensive contribution on 'The Protaton and Athonite Monasticism', a largely administrative history, by Kriton Chryssochoi'dis. A carping note: the frontispiece, a coloured aerial photograph spread across two pages, shows the Protaton and adjacent buildings, which include the premises of the Holy Community and, beside it, of course, the late Byzantine Protaton Tower. But the photograph is an old one: the tower is scaffolded and shrouded with safety netting. This must seem disrespectful of the restorers of the tower whose work is done and of the inimitable Byzantinist Sir Steven Runciman whose benefactions in his latter years (he died in November 2000 aged 97) achieved the conversion of the third floor of the tower into a jewel of a miniature modem museum, the present Treasury. Characteristic scenes of Athonite life during a thousand years of existence, 'spiritual, institutional and administrative', adorn in traditional style the walls and domed ceiling of the Treasury, once the calefactory or kitchen - perhaps both - of the medieval building. Some of the scenes are illustrated in the 'Calendar', including one of Panselinos decorating the Protaton in the late thirteenth century. 26 The Towers of Mount Athos (in Greek only), published by the Centre for the Preservation of Athonite Heritage, Thessaloniki, The Protaton, each of the twenty ruling monasteries, and many of their dependencies possess towers, sometimes more than one; the earliest date to the eleventh century. This book is an extensive architectural and historical study illustrated with reproductions of black and white and coloured photographs; old engravings (of which those made by the Ukrainian monk Vassily Barsky, who visited the Holy Mountain in 17 44, are unrivalled examples); recent detailed topographical and architectural drawings; material taken from Markos Kambanis's The Towers of the Holy Mountain ( 1998), a collection of his own prints and drawings accompanied by excerpts from literature, and Rallis Kopsidis's engravings published in Actes de Vatopedi, vol. 1: Des origines a 1329, texte et album, Paris, This first volume, in two parts, of documents preserved at Vatopedi Monastery is the 21st in the series Archives de l'athos founded by Gabriel Millet and Paul Lemerle and published by Jacques Lefort. It is dedicated to the memory of Nicholas Oikonomidis, the Byzantine historian whose great contribution to the publication of Athonite archives is noted in this work, an invaluable reference for scholars researching this period of the history of Byzantium. The Katholikon ofvatopedi Monastery- Its History and Architecture, Athens, 2001, by Stavros Mamaloukos. This work was the subject of a doctoral thesis and is now published, in Greek with a summary in English, by the School of Architecture at the National Metsovion University. There are two compendious volumes: the first of texts, the second of plans and black and white illustrations. The author duly acknowledges the pioneer work and assistance of the architect Academician Pavlos Mylonas, who has dedicated the greater part of his professional life and retirement to the detailed study of the architecture and history of Athonite monasteries and their possessions. (Mylonas's Pictorial Dictionary of the Holy Mount Athos and Atlas of the Twenty Sovereign Monasteries, already mentioned, was published in four languages by the German Archaeological Institute, Berlin, in 2000.) Dr Mamaloukos's work adds to the spate of publications of all kinds by or on Vatopedi since a small group of monks from Cyprus under Elder 27

15 Ephraim, a community now much enlarged, took over the monastery in The Restoration of Mount Atbos Icons by the Iera Skiti of Agbios Andreas - Serai, written by Archimandrite Pavlos Politis. First founded in 1614 and rebuilt on a far greater scale by Russian monks in 1851, the skete has for several years past been a reputed centre of conservation and restoration by monk Pavlos working in collaboration with his brother Fr Maximos. The book was published by the Lykion ton Hellenidon, London, Photography on Mount Atbos, the slender catalogue of the exhibition that drew upon the Mount Athos Photographic Archive for its material. The exhibition was held in summer 2001 in Ouranoupolis, whence pilgrims commence their short journey by ferry-boat to Daphni, chief port of entry to the Holy Mountain. [Very recently I was handed the back page of the property supplement of a national newspaper. Twenty-three colour photographs with descriptive captions advise the reader of the construction of a housing settlement comprising 260 dwellings and many touristic facilities on the low hills fringeing the sandy beaches of Nea Roda, barely 4 miles from the border of Athos. Ouranoupolis has developed, less methodically, since I first knew it as a small refugee hamlet almost half a century ago. Sydney Loch had just died, but his widow Joice offered my companion and me the hospitality of her home in Andronikos' s tower. A millennium of quietude and isolation and the rare environment of the Holy Mountain are under a threat that grows year by year.] Secular Music in Mount Atbos - Codices of Byzantine Music, 2 vols., Thessaloniki, Proceedings of the congresses held on the occasion of the 'Treasures of MountAthos' Exhibition, Thessaloniki, 1997, published in the series 'Holy Mountain: Nature -Worship- Art', with synoptic texts in English of Greek, French, Serbian, etc. contributions to the congresses. Romanian Documents on Mount Atbos - Protaton Archive, by Florin Marinescu, financed by the Holy Community of the Holy Mountain and published by the Greek National Research Centre (No. 36}. 28 Holy Great Monastery ofvatopedi, 2 CO-roms... In 1990 Vatopedi was converted from the idiorrhythmic order to a patnsbc traditional way of monastic life. Today the community consists of 85 monks. This is the latest edition of the COs which describe a thousand years of existence and some of the monastery's possessions, 'an unrepeatable treasure for civilization'. Paper Icons- Greek Orthodox Religious Engravings, , first published as CO-roms (both Greek and English) in 1997, a new issue. The work illustrates 633 engravings, with 200 pages of text; narration, Byzantine music, and indexes. The Medieval Aristocracy on Mount Atbos - Byzantine, Georgian and Slav Aristocrats and Eminent Churchmen, tenth to fifteenth centuries, University Press, Sofia, By Cyril Pavlikianov, who dedicates his study to the memory of his teacher, the late Nicholas Oikonomidis. New Synaxarion of the Orthodox Church, by Hieromonk Makarios of Simonopetra, in Greek, adapted from the original French edition, with index, 362 pages and maps, vol. 1 (September), Ormylia Press, The prologue to this Greek edition is by Abbess Nikodimi of the Holy Koinovion of Ormylia; the introduction is by the author. The first three volumes (September to February) of the English edition, translated from the French by the late Christopher Hookway, were published, also by Ormylia Press, in 1998, 1999, and 2001 respectively. Catebeze si cuvantari 2, Viata in Dub, a Romanian translation, published by Deisis, Sibiu, 2001, of Catechisms and Orations 2, Life in the Spirit, by Archimandrite Aimilianos, formerly Abbot of Simonos Petras Monastery on the Holy Mountain. Archimandrite Aimilianos, beloved by his community, was the author of many spiritual works before he was struck down a few years ago by a debilitating illness and retired to Ormylia, a convent and dependency of Simonos Petras. Atbonite Memory (Athonite History in Words, Sound and Pictures), the Historical Collections in the Athonite Digital Library, is a series to date of seven archives: Sound, Photographic, Art Gallery, Film and Video, 29

16 Map and Philately, and Monumental Painting (eleventh to twentieth centuries). In the spring of 2001 the National Map Library began cooperation with the Mount Athos Photographic Archive with a view to helping with the establishment of the Mount Athos Map Library. Mother of God, a CD issued by Koutloumousi Monastery, which 'presents more material from the Greek Orthodox tradition concerning the person of the Theotokos, who is greatly honoured on the Holy Mountain'. Parousia (Presentation) of Docheiariou Monastery, published by the monastery, in Greek only, in This is a comprehensive work compiled by several hands, of whom some are members of the community. The book describes the history of the monastery and its buildings; its relations with Moldavia and Wallachia; its saints and martyrs; its revered possession, the icon of the Virgin Gorgoipikoos (Swift to hear and succour); its library, archives and treasures; its murals and sculpted marbles; and finally its liturgical and musical tradition. The publication's general editor, Dr Stylianos Papadopoulos, is well known throughout the Holy Mountain as a Byzantine scholar and museologist. Monasticism in America, published in Athens and written by a Greek professor at Scranton University in the States, is about Orthodox monasteries founded in America and Canada along Athonite lines during the past fifteen years by Archimandrite Ephraim, former Abbot of Philotheou. * * * * * A newspaper article published in Makedonia drew attention to the links established by Athonite monasteries with a number of countries on several continents: 'Simonopetra with France, Philotheou with Canada and America, Stavronikita with India and Korea, Zographou with Bulgaria, Panteleimonos with Russia and the Ukraine, St Paul's with Arabia, Vatopedi with Cyprus, Koutloumousi with Constantinople and, we may add, Chilandariou with Serbia, Grigoriou with Mrica, the Skete of Prodromou with Romania... ' This widespread and zealous tendency, a recent phenomenon among Athonite communities, confounds those who hold that the Holy Mountain is too isolated from the world and its realities. 30 It was in July that the Holy Community enthroned the new abbot of Philotheou Monastery, Archimandrite Nikodimos. According to a study made by Professor V. Atsalos, President of the Greek Palaeography Society and honorary professor at the Aristoteleion University of Thessaloniki, there are throughout the world 64,000 Greek manuscripts dating from the fourth to the nineteenth century. Of these, 26,000 are preserved in Greece, 20,000 of them in Athonite collections. In late January 2001 the Greek Society for Christian Letters presented an award to Archimandrite Nikolaos Hatzinikolaou, Prior of the Analipseos Church, metochi (dependency) of Simonopetra in Vyronas, Athens, for his book The Holy Mountain, the Highest Point on Earth, a personal spiritual testimony (in Greek). The Prince of Wales again visited the Holy Mountain in May He stayed as customarily at Vatopedi Monastery and remained three days. President Vladimir Putin was not so fortunate. In December bad weather prevented him from visiting the monastic peninsula. Consideration is being given to the construction of a new harbour at Ouranoupolis. The present one, serving both the monastic communities and pilgrims to the Holy Mountain, is inadequate for the modern ferryboats that provide frequent communication with Daphni and lesser landing-places on the peninsula. The then impending visit of the Pope in May 2001 to the Holy Mountain provoked some virulent protests from the Holy Community-indeed from many quarters of the Church of Greece. The visit was to follow the Pope's meeting with Archbishop Christodoulos in Athens, which the Archbishop later said had had a positive result. A typical expression of the uncompromising opposition felt by many on the Holy Mountain came from a monk of Esphigmenou, the monastery with the forbidding slogan displayed at its entrance, 'Orthodoxy or Death!' My companion and I spoke with him on the jetty at Jovantsa in July, a while after the proposed visit had been cancelled because of the Pope's frail health. In one short rabid outburst, the monk declared, 'If the Pope had visited the Holy Mountain, the Virgin would have left.' 31

17 As always, the quarterly Protaton, a bulletin published in Karyes (in Greek only), is a valued source of information and comment for this report. The writer gratefully acknowledges the bulletin's otherwise unsung contribution to the compilation of items in the report. One issue of Protaton reported the deaths of twelve monks. Of these, five were octogenerians, two nonagenerians, and one a centenarian. The quietistic rhythm of Athonite life manifests itself in many ways. In March 2001 the Bioethical Centre of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece was inaugurated in the grounds of the Church of the Analipseos; on the same occasion the book Church and Transplants, published by the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece, was presented to the crowded auditorium. The Archbishop was present and among those who spoke. The Centre, administered by Archimandrite Nikolaos, performs a unique service for those in Greece and elsewhere who are in government or the medical profession and for all concerned authorities, academics, and theologians and for those specialists who attend its frequent seminars and read its profound and stimulating publications. The census of 1991 showed the monastic community of Athos to number Today it amounts to about 1800, among whom an increasing number of monks come from outside Greece proper. From time to time relics long treasured on the Holy Mountain are taken to be venerated in places beyond the confines of Athos. On Palm Sunday 2001, for instance, a part of the True Cross, preserved at Xeropotamou Monastery, was taken to Petrokerasa in the Halkidiki to be venerated by the faithful on the 250th anniversary of the miraculous deliverance of the region from a fatal pestilence. On the feast of StGeorge the Great Martyr the monks of Koutloumousi took a holy relic of the saint to the church dedicated to him at Arachova on Mount Parnassus. The following month the Holy Girdle of the Theotokos was carried by the Abbot ofvatopedi to the monastery's metochi at Agios Nikolaos- Porto Lagos on the occasion of the visit of His Beatitude Patriarch Bartholomew. was greatly respected by the monastic communities and appreciated especially for his effective interventions on their behalf with the authorities in Athens and elsewhere, obtaining their assent to requests from individual monasteries and obtaining approval of plans affecting the whole community, particularly those requiring special funding. For the time being Mr Kasmiroglou, who arrived on the Holy Mountain as Deputy Civil Governor at the same time as Mr Psycharis took up his appointment, is acting as Governor. He too enjoys the friendship and respect of the monastic communities. Esphigmenou Monastery was at the centre of an unusual and distasteful incident in late July. An Old Calendarist monastery, Esphigmenou does not commemorate the Patriarch and has not been in communion with the other Athonite monasteries or the Holy Community at Karyes since Each monastery, including Esphigmenou, has its allowance of permits ( diamonitiria) issued by Karyes which enables it to invite visitors of its choice to the monastery who are additional to the daily quota of permits controlled by the Pilgrims' Office. Esphigmenou has been in the habit of flaunting this privilege and has invited its adherents in numbers far in excess of its allowance. One day in late July dozens of zealots (Old Calendarists) without permits but with an aggressive determination to reach Esphigmenou were denied entry to the Mountain by civil forces charged exceptionally to prevent their landing at the monastery. They came to blows, while on the other side of the peninsula other zealots seized the ferry-boat Axion Estin at Ouranoupolis. Calm was eventually restored, but the riotous action only worsened for a while relations between Esphigmenou and the rest of the monastic community. JOHN LEATI-IAM Athens After five years in office the Civil Governor of the Holy Mountain, Mr Stavros Psycharis, resigned his post in October The Holy Community pleaded with the government not to accept the resignation. Psycharis 32 33

18 ORTHODOX RELATIONS 1 It would be wrong to begin this talk without contributing my mite to the tributes already paid to Sir Steven Runciman, our President and pioneer. He was a Life Fellow of the college of which I was a mere undergraduate. I remember him first in 1966, holding us entranced after an Audit Feast with his reminiscences. 'I was visiting a sabbat in Northern Ireland with Dame Margaret Murray', he said with his eyes half-closed. 'When she came out, she said "Steven, goats aren't what they were in my young day."' Some of the colour in life has departed with Steven, but we Friends of Mount Athos are especially in his debt. He taught a whole generation to see Byzantium with new eyes and was revered in Greece and on Athos itself as a friend and champion. Give rest, 0 Christ, to thy servant with thy saints where sorrow and sighing are no more but life everlasting. To my theme: the seventh century was one of disaster and trauma for the Christian world. Irish bog oak studies suggest that the political disasters may have been preceded by extreme climatic turbulence and certainly the eruption of the plague played a part in lowering the resistance of the empire of East Rome to an ecologically highly destructive Persian invasion. Then came the Arabs and the advance of Islam. The cities of the civilized eastern Mediterranean disintegrated and a host of monks and scholars were forced to disperse over the globe. It was our good fortune that one of them, Theodore, a Greek of Tarsus, was consecrated by the Pope as Archbishop of Canterbury in 668 when he was already past pensionable age. For the next twenty-two years he was head of the English Church, extending the episcopate and bringing about greater doctrinal unity. According to Henry Chadwick, he also played a significant role internationally in holding the line against Monothelitism which was finally condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 681. It is good that we should begin with the undivided Church, a state to which we intend to advance in obedience to the motto of the Diocese of London- 'back to the future'. The story of the medieval estrangement between East and West is well known and England was of course involved in the suspicion and barbarous treatment of Eastern Christians. Steven Runciman helped to clear our sight on this point and there can be little 1 A version of a talk given to the Friends of Mount Athos on 23 November 2000 at St Bride's Institute, London EC4. 34 doubt today that the Fourth Crusade was a crime. As Kallistos has written, What shocked the Greeks more than anything else was the wanton and systematic sacrilege of the Crusaders. As the Byzantines watched the Crusaders tear to pieces the altar and icon screen in the Church of Holy Wisdom and set prostitutes on the Patriarch's throne, they must have felt that those that did such things were not Christians in the same sense as themselves. We cannot change the past, but we are responsible for remembering it aright with penitence for the events of 1204 but also fortifying ourselves with more hopeful memories which suggest that there is another way. I hope that you have been able to see the small but interesting exhibition at the Courtauld of icons from St Catherine's in the Sinai. The evident Western influence in the double-sided icon in the centre of the exhibition [usually kept in the store-room so that even Fr Justin had never seen it] reminds us that Latin monks were resident in Sinai long after the symbolic date of In this and in so many other ways I believe that the Monastery of the Burning Bush is a potent sign of hope in our own time. In England, however, the sixteenth century saw are-engagement with the churches and spiritual tradition of the East. Reformation debates led to an anxious re-examination of the patristic corpus. In the preface to the first Book of Common Prayer Cranmer appeals to the authority of the 'auncient fathers' to establish the mind of the early church on liturgical matters. This appeal to patristic authority has continued to be characteristic of Anglicanism. The title-page of Bishop Jewel's 'Challenge Sermon' [a classic statement of Anglican doctrine, preached at Paul's Cross just ten years after the publication of the First Prayer Book] bears a clause from the Sixth Canon of the Council of Nicaea: 'let the ancient customs prevail or be maintained.' It is possible to draw a rather facile contrast between openness to tradition and the need for the Church to be relevant, and to proclaim the truth 'afresh' in each generation. In truth, there is no necessary opposition between memory and mission. If we are simply preoccupied with the conditions of the passing moment and resort directly to the New Testament moment without keeping company with those who have read the scriptures before us, then it is very doubtful whether our analysis of the contemporary situation will be very profound or our understanding of the witness of the New Testament really adequate. There will be too much 35

19 temptation to read the scriptures in the light of a somewhat superficial grasp of contemporary issues. I am not pleading for an abundance ofleamed lumber from the patristic muniment room, but I do believe that the Church always needs to be in touch with the patristic mind and a lively sense of tradition. The Fathers were faithful to scripture and showed a marked reluctance to go beyond the language of scripture and to define in areas where there was little scriptural guidance. Their approach to scripture was exegetical, historical, and mystical rather than systematic. But they were not simply content to repeat old formulations in the very different cultural circumstances in which they found themselves. To have developed a patristic approach is to have acquired a capacity to discern the signs of the times and to use or discard the categories of contemporary discourse in the service of the gospel. The Cappadocians, for example, struggled with Arianism as the most profound threat to New Testament understandings of Christ and they exploited the potential of the highly developed philosophical categories of Neoplatonism. But patristic theology was generated within the believing and worshipping community and while not afraid to reason was not ashamed to adore. The appeal to the Fathers and a preference for their theological approach is characteristic of the English Reformation. The year after the publication of the First Prayer Book, Cranmer issued formal articles of inquiry into his cathedral to elicit whether there was at Canterbury 'a library within this church and in the same St Augustine's works, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Hierome, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Cyprian, Theophylact'. The full range of patristic sources only came to be published and disseminated in the first half of the sixteenth century and Cranmer's use of the sources that were available to him does not understandably approach the scholarly sophistication which was possible for those who came after, but his method, which gives to the patristic sources such a privileged role in the interpretation of scripture, is of continuing significance. It is also clearly a method which makes judgements which are inherently revisable in the light of further research. Most important of all, Cranmer quotes Nazianzen to affirm that progress in theology is not made on the basis of mere erudition and intellect but in proportion to the spiritual development of the theologian. 'Therefore the fear of God must be the first beginning and, as it were, an ABC of an introduction to all them that shall enter to the very sure and most fruitful knowledge of holy scriptures.' 36 Rather later in the century the expansion of overseas trade re-established direct personal contact between Eastern and Western Christians. Trading relations with Russia were opened up and Tsar Ivan the Terrible sent an offer of marriage to Queen Elizabeth I. There was some theological dialogue and Boris Godunov sent theological students to study at St John's College, Cambridge. The time of troubles which followed the tsar's death prevented the return of these young Russians. One of them, Michail Alphery, was ordained in the Church of England and held a living in Huntingdonshire until dispossessed with the loyal clergy under the Commonwealth. The reign of Elizabeth I also saw the development of the Levant Company and contact between the Company's chaplains and the Greek Church. In Constantinople itself the embassies of the trading powers began to invest in the politicking surrounding patriarchal elections. The Latin ambassadors attempted to tilt affairs in a Romeward direction, while the English and Dutch favoured condidates like Cyril Lukaris who inclined towards reformed theology. Mitrophanes Kritopoulos was a protege of Patriarch Cyril and was sent by him to study first here in the City, at Gresham College, and then at Balliol under the patronage of Archbishop Abbott. The story is told in Colin Davey's excellent book, Pioneer for Unity. The 'Friendship Book' of Mitrophanes Kritopoulos survives in the university library in Thessaloniki. All his Oxford friends made elegant entries in this early example of East-West academic exchange. Kritopoulos eventually became Patriarch of Alexandria. The most enduring fruit of the contacts between Patriarch Lukaris and the English Church was the gift of the Codex Alexandrinus which was to be an important source for modem biblical textual scholarship. Later in the seventeenth century there was a noble project to establish a Greek College in Oxford at a time when Orthodox scholarship in the East was inhibited by the restrictions imposed by the Ottoman regime. In 1676 the Archbishop of Samos arrived in London and my predecessor Henry Compton assisted him to build a Greek church in Soho. It is pleasant to record that Greek Street and Old Compton Street still lie cheek by jowl. In 1692 a scheme initially devised by the Archbishop of Samos was revived by Dr Woodruffe, a Canon of Christ Church and also a City incumbent. That year Woodruffe became Principal of the somewhat dilapidated Gloucester Hall. With the assistance of the Levant Company and its chaplains he sought to open a college for twenty Greek students, 37

20 five from each of the four patriarchates, who would receive a general education in Oxford. In 1698 the first cohort arrived. Alas the venture did not thrive. It was an excellent idea, taken up in more recent times by the St Andrew's Trust and others, but the difficulties at the tum of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proved insuperable. There were suspicions. A Greek Jesuit commenting on the scheme feared that it would administer noxious drafts of heresy to the students, but it was in fact proselytizing Roman Catholics who were a more serious threat. Three students who had left Oxford in search of a better life on the Rive Gauche in Paris were kidnapped and forced to study Catholic doctrine in Louvain with a view to converting them. This illustrates a continuing theme of relations between Anglicans and Orthodox. The Church of England identifies itself in its official formularies as 'part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church'. It has always seemed absurd to claim a monopoly of Christian insight, and a sense of that sbsurdity has grown with the world-wide experience of the Church. Most of the time, therefore, Anglicans had few ambitions to convert members of different branches of the Church, and this has engendered the confidence that is essential for friendship and mutual assistance. The Gloucester Hall class of 1703, however, was the last to be sponsored by the Levant Company. The scheme collapsed and Dr Woodruffe spent some years nearby in the Fleet Prison for debtors, owing With the exception of the celebrated correspondence between the English non-jurors and the Greek patriarchs, the eighteenth century saw very little meeting of minds. The situation changed as the Romantic revival encouraged a fresh appreciation of Orthodoxy. The story is summarized in a very pithy way by Randall Davidson, writing in 1923: We have centuries of intercourse. Where did the Codex Alexandrinus come from? It was a gift from the Patriarch Cyril Lucar to England so long ago as the days of Charles I. Every student of the subject knows the important correspondence which passed in the 18th century between the English non jurors and the Greek Patriarchs. Pass on a hundred years and we have to note the interest taken in the matter by the early Tractarians. The story of William Palmer's visit to Russia and his study of Eastern Church questions was republished by Mr Newman himself. Then in about 1840 or a few years later came the great book of Robert Curzon entitled The Monasteries of the Levant, followed by very many other books and monographs down to our own day, all bringing the Eastern Church in touch with ourselves. Then came the visit of Archbishop Lycurgus of Syra in 1870 and the great part which Bishop Christopher Wordsworth took in welcoming him with an address, or rather 38 essay of historic importance. For myself personally I began to handle the subject at Lambeth long ago, 46 years ago though in a very subordinate capacity. So that I am able to estimate the steady growth of intercourse between then and now, and the new flood of communication between the churches of the east and ourselves. I gave a paper on William Palmer in St Petersburg in It was for me a vivid example of the continuing possibility of suspicion and misunderstanding with a consequent need for patience when in dialogue with another thought world. Palmer at the time was merely in deacon's orders but he had his share of the confidence proper to an Oxford scholar of the Victorian period. Reading the account of his travels in Russia edited by his friend John Henry Newman, I was naively surprised that such a comparatively lowly representative of the Anglican Church was afforded such extraordinary opportunities to expound his ecclesiological doctrines, notably his version of the branch theory of the Church, to Orthodox leaders including hierarchs of the highest degree like Metropolitan Philaret [Drozdov). Fresh light was shone on the mystery by another participant in the conference who revealed that the police reports on Palmer had survived the October Revolution and were to be found in the archives of the Holy Synod. Every facility had been given to Palmer on the assumption that he was a spy in the pay of the Foreign Office, bent on discerning the differences between Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, so that the British could make mischief in the Balkans. Despite these sub-plots relations continued to develop in the nineteenth century. After the celebrations in 1888 of the 900th anniversary of the baptism of Prince St Vladimir, the Metropolitan of Kiev commented that the fraternal greeting from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Benson, was the only such communication he had received from the head of a non-orthodox Church. When Nicholas II was crowned in 1896, my predecessor Mandell Creighton was dispatched as Queen Victoria's special envoy at the Tsar's coronation. He had to get the permission of the Lord Chancellor to wear his cope abroad. He got trapped in it after the service and was forced to eat his lunch still vested; but his table companion was John, now StJohn, of Kronstadt the thaumaturge and they had a fascinating conversation. A full account of the visit, written in the bishop's own hand for the Queen herself, is preserved in the library at Windsor. It is good to compose litanies rehearsing the story of the ties between Anglicans and Orthodox. If we do not, then a Cloud of Forgetting super- 39

21 venes, as to some extent I fear that it is in danger of doing in our own time. At the end of last year, after I had been to visit the Serbian Orthodox monasteries in Kosovo, I met a young Serb scholar who gave me a copy of a letter in Latin, sent by my predecessor Archibaldus [Tait] Episcopus Londiniensis to the Metropolitan of Belgrade in Tait thanks the Metropolitan for his kindness to a priest from the Diocese of London who had visited Serbia and adds a prayer for unity 'ut Christi Ecclesiae partes diu sejunctas charitatis et verae fidei vinculo constringat'. The young Serb scholar then rehearsed the story of relations between the Church of England and the Serbian Church up to the Second World War. There had been numerous academic exchanges and even a journal published in Serbia by those who had studied in England entitled Britannia. The inter-war years drew Anglicans and Orthodox closer together than at any period before or since. The Serbian story can be paralleled in the story of relations with the ancient patriarchates as well as the newer churches like Romania. The Orthodox diaspora after the Bolshevik Revolution greatly enriched Western theology. Close friendships developed. I am thinking of Georges Florovsky's contacts with Lord Hugh Cecil and so many others. The Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius remains as a precious legacy from this period. Both Anglican and Orthodox Churches were prominent in the establishment of the World Council after the Second World War and in various other ecumenical ventures; but with the Cold War division of Europe, the diminution of Britain's role as a world power, and a great investment of energy on the part of the leadership of the Church of England in building up the institutions of the Anglican Communion, relations with the Orthodox did not perhaps enjoy the same priority as they had in the inter-war period. This is not to say that there have been no notable initiatives, such as the Anglican Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Commission, established after Michael Ramsey's visit to Athenagoras I in Ramsey did of course look the patriarchal part and indeed became at one point an exhibit in the Museum of Atheism in St Petersburg which used to be housed in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan. I watched the evolution of this fascinating institution over thirty years. In the 1970s it was rather crude. Ramsey appeared in a gallery somewhat sneeringly entitled 'Some Foreign Friends of the Russian Orthodox Church'. There was a photograph of the Arch- 40 bishop with his Canterbury cap set at a villainous angle. Having seized a small primatial cross from some chaplain, he appeared to be advancing menacingly into a crowd scything to left and right. Not long after, it became clear that the atheists were becoming more tentative about their lack of faith. The primitive vigour of the displays depicting monkish excesses was toned down and replaced by a rather pallid evolutionary line with much ado about Voltaire couched in a style which would not be such a shock to the susceptibilities of Western tourists. Finally the museum lost its municipal grant and closed at about the same time as the restoration of the name St Petersburg to the city. The Moscow Agreed Statement was published in It includes a survey of the topics which have historically been at issue between our churches. This historic agenda was ventilated with the clarity and candour typical of the age when the English Ambassador Sir John Finch met the Patriarch of Constantinople in February 1679 to discuss the affairs of the Greek Church in London. They talked about icons, invocation of the saints, the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist, the 'filioque', and the possibility that the church in London might be placed under the general jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Patriarch and the five archbishops who supported him were also asked by Sir John on the instructions of the Bishop of London to repudiate the Council of Bethlehem. Viewed on our wide canvas it is encouraging to see how much progress has been made. On the question of the Council of Bethlehem, the Patriarch and his colleagues were able to say that 'they did not know what the import of the Council of Bethlehem was, so they could say nothing about it.' Face-to-face meetings continue to be invaluable, even in these days of more efficient communication, because the scope for misunderstanding still exists. I remember as Secretary to Archbishop Runcie, who certainly felt to the full the special Anglican affinity with Orthodoxy, paying an official visit to Patriarch Demetrius of blessed memory. The usual topics were raised with the notable addition of the ordination of women to the priesthood and the theology of the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Maurice Wiles. We were, however, rather surprised to be taxed with the existence of some destructive report on the diaconate which had been prepared by a working party of a board in Church House and had been shelved almost as soon as it had appeared. We were able to reply truthfully that there was less in it than met the eye. But the need to take care to 41

22 explain ourselves to one another continues, especially in a communications culture which uses hype to sell newspapers. A recent unfortunate example was the Archbishop of Canterbury's Message for the Millennium, an impeccably orthodox piece of work which sensibly acknowledged the difficulty experienced by many people with a modern mind-set in accepting the bodily resurrection. Sensational reports reached Greece that the Archbishop himself had raised doubts about the resurrection; and a Greek friend told me that he had seen a university professor on television comprehensively refuting a heresy which of course the Archbishop had never for one moment entertained. Beyond the misunderstandings, however, substantial progress has been made. The Creed has been recited at the enthronement of the last two Archbishops of Canterbury sans 'filioque'; and the newly published Book of Common Worship provides for its omission on suitable occasions. From being a matter of contention, icons and Orthodox traditions of prayer have come to enrich Anglican worship both in private and public. An obvious example can be seen in Westminster Abbey where I had the privilege of blessing two icons, one of the Pantocrator and the other of the Mother of God, written by Sergei Federov, both of which occupy a prominent place in the church. At the same time, returning to the agenda of disputable issues tackled by Sir John Finch and the Patriarch, there is now no question about the significant role and the welcome presence of the Archbishop of Thyateira, representing the Ecumenical Patriarch in Great Britain, and other Orthodox leaders who are accepted as powerful witnesses for Christian faith, not as strangers, but as voices from within our culture. It would be unwise, however, to be too self-congratulatory. Hard on the heels of the work done in the first phase of the Joint Doctrinal Commission came the first ordinations of women in the Anglican Communion. It may have been possible to believe that Anglicans were some primitive survival of Celtic Christianity beyond the Roman pale, but the move to ordain women to the presbyterate was clear evidence that the truth was rather more complex. At this point Bishop Runde's personal role in keeping the channels of communication open was vital. He became so identified with the Orthodox that Archbishop Coggan was in the habit of referring to him as 'Albanski'. He made no attempt of course to perpetuate any fantasies about the nature of Anglicanism, and Orthodox friends came to appreciate just what scope there was in the Church of 42 England for honest disagreement. The Bishop was accompanied by Mrs Runde on one notable visit to Bishop Josif of Rimnicul Vilcea in Romania. They had a typically lively debate at the dinner table and Bishop Josif, observing them with wonder, said 'Dominus dixit et domina contradixit.' Now, however, strictly theological disagreement has been greatly complicated by what has happened in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Iron Curtain may have been breached, but a new hard currency curtain has taken its place following, in some parts of the continent, the ancient dividing line between Eastern and Western Christians. Some Western Christians have seized the opportunity for proselytizing in Orthodox lands, supported by the kind of financial and technical resources which it is hard for the indigenous churches to match. Unsurprisingly this has exposed the ecumenical movement to fresh strain and at times acute tension. At the same time, Christian churches of all kinds have found themselves caught up in struggles to redefme communal identity in a postcolonial and post-communist world. This has been an element in the worldwide increase in the salience of religious institutions and convictions which characterizes the start of this new millennium. There is much that is admirable in the recovery of the Christian roots of historic nations, but scripture, tradition, and reason resist any too easy identification of Christ and the culture of any particular place and time. One of the topics which Anglicans and Orthodox can profitably survey together with a proper sense of humility for past mistakes is the correct relation between church and society, church and nation, church and state. One of the most heartening aspects of relations at present is the theological partnership that already exists as Anglicans and Orthodox together confront a postmodern sensibility which is prepared to admit the appeal of ancient liturgy and art but which combines such aesthetic appreciation with a relativistic despair about the possiblity of any truth claims not sanctioned by individual taste. Works like Being as Communion by Metropolitan John of Pergamum are studied by Anglicans not so much to gain insight into Orthodox doctrine but to assist them as fellow Christians 'to uphold the truth of the gospel against error'. A similar sentiment was expressed by a learned young monk I met on a deeply moving visit to the beleaguered monasteries of Kosovo. Mter a night spent in the monastery of Pee, listening to the anguished cries of a mother whose daughter had just been raped and murdered by the militia of the rival ethnic group, I 43

23 fell into conversation with Fr Jovan who almost as an afterthought asked whether I was acquainted with the work of Catherine Pickstock, a remarkable young Anglican theologian whose very important book, After Writing- On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, was in process of being translated into Serbian. All churches are being called to reinterpret their story in a world where there are no longer any emperors, where hierarchy is a suspect concept, and where there are attempts to reduce the mystery of the Church to the level of institutions which cater for spiritual consumers. We are partners in the gospel at a time which conforms to the pagan state which Gibbon described in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Paganism, according to Gibbon, is the state in which the philosophers regard all religions as equally true and the government regards all religions as equally useful. As partners in the gospel, Orthodox and Anglicans have not only the potential to make a modest contribution to building the unity of our continent and its peace by reinvigorating the synapses between the two hemispheres of the mind and memory of Europe but also I believe we have the resources and the responsibility to encourage one another in faithfulness in this beguiling pagan environment. One of the most significant ecumenical questions of our day is how the Orthodox Church in particular are going to be able to present the inspiring story of the Christian martyrs of the twentieth century as a gift to all Christians. Russian efforts to tell and interpret the story of the Solovki martyrs, for example, is work that the Orthodox are doing for the whole Christian world. It may also be that the experience and struggles of Christians in the consumerist West could likewise come to have a value for those Christians who are confronting the challenges of consumerism rather than those of persecution. Now is the moment to renew and rebuild friendships and to follow the example of Benjamin Woodruffe and his collaborators into new initiatives. The recent emergence of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at Cambridge is one very hopeful development. Another example is the work done by the present Ecumenical Patriarch supported by the EU Commission in establishing the Symposium for Religion, Science and the Environment. This symposium not only spans Christian confessional boundaries in the face of the ecological challenges which confront us all but also introduces working scientists in the field to representatives of all the major world faiths. It was as a participant in the Ecumenical Patriarch's symposium focusing on the plight of the Danube region after the Kosovo 44 campaign that I was able to renew contact with a Bulgarian hierarch whom I had first met when he was a young monk and I a failing theological student at Cuddesdon in the dark days of the 1960s. I had tried to teach him English and we had listened to my gramophone recordings of the 1953 Coronation. When it was time for him to go home, he said that he had learnt some very important things from me and from his time at Cuddesdon. 'What sort of things?', I said artlessly, expecting perhaps a bouquet for tolerance and scholarship. 'It was here and from you', he said with genuine emotion, 'that I discovered that Silvikrin Hair Shampoo is better than carbolic soap for cleaning my beard.' We must build on every opportunity no matter how unexpected. Great disappointment follows if we fail to keep our friendships in good repair. It was also on that visit to the Danube that I fully appreciated the disappointment felt by many Orthodox in Serbia at what they perceived as the uncritical support given by Anglicans to the NATO bombing of their country and their abandonment by Anglican friends. Now thanks to the very tangible support of the Archbishop of Canterbury we have been able to appoint a young priest, Fr Philip Warner, as Chaplain in Belgrade. I am looking forward to visiting Serbia next year in company with Bishop Kallistos and a party of pilgrims to assess what more we can do prayerfully and practically to rebuild the partnership between the churches about which Bishop Tait wrote in his Latin letter to the Metropolitan of Belgrade, 'ut Christi Ecclesiae partes diu sejunctas charitatis et verae fidei vinculo constringat'. Amen. 45 RICHARD CHARTRES Bishop of London

24 STSILOUAN, A MODERN ATHONITE SAINT 1 Friends are those who love the reality as it is. Friends ofmountathos are therefore well advised to get to know its reality from its saints. When we read about Mount Athos, it seems to me that we find two approaches, very different in character. One I would characterize as 'journalistic'. As soon as you see in the first line of the article or the blurb on the book's back cover a reference to the banishment of women and hens, you know that you are in the 'journalistic' category. If there are photographs, there has to be one of a huge ancient refectory where a few monks are having a meal and listening to a reading, and the caption informs you that they are drinking wine while hearing sermons against gluttony. The second approach is in my view both more faithful to the reality and more edifying: it tries to show Athos as a spiritual phenomenon. Thankfully such works are abundant, and even in the last decade a score of biographies of Athonite holy men has appeared in English. There are, too, books which start out as travelogues, whose authors became touched by a spark of the often hidden frre burning in the hearts of men of prayer, and in the places and sacred objects sanctified by this prayer over the centuries. St Silouan lived recently and was 'given' to the Church by canonization in 1987, so he is a man of our times in two senses. The Patriarchal act of Canonization gave him the title St Silouan the Athonite, bearing witness to the fact that he is a fruit of the Athonite tradition. In him we can glimpse what makes of Athos a spiritual power station for the world, and see its relevance for all of us, wherever we live. If we take the best examples of Athonite life, we are not being naive about any human weaknesses one could find there, or about any of the so-called 'anachronisms' that puzzle the journalistic authors. We do, though, put these phenomena in their rightful place in the scheme of things. Archimandrite Sophrony's biography of St Silouan 2 has the advantage ofbeingwritten with the psychological insight that characterizes twentiethcentury writing. Furthermore, he avoids stressing the charisms of healing and prophecy that St Silouan was endowed with at the expense of pre- 1 A talk given to the Friends of Mount Athos in Oxford on 22 May l Saint Silouan the Athonite (Tolleshunt Knights: Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 1988). 46 senting him as an authentic struggler for the truth. Once, a child who heard that I would be telling about St Silouan that day asked me, 'Isn't he the one that used to drink two bottles of vodka and not get drunk? Didn't he have a fight in the street?' 'Yes.' 'Oh good, I like the naughty saints best.' Do not misunderstand me: you do not have to be wicked in your youth to become a saint. Nor is it wickedness that proves you are a real human. But if you have seen the same person amusing himself as a village lad, and then spending nights weeping for the world, a bridge is built between 'everyday' life and holy life. Athos ceases to be quaint. In 1866 Simeon Antonov was born in the village of Shovsk in the Tambov Province of Russia. There he lived as one of seven children in a rural family, working from a young age in the fields, and receiving little formal schooling - two winter terms at the village primary school. Archimandrite Sophrony often referred to him as 'illiterate' or 'semiliterate'. He was, though, very intelligent and quick to grasp ideas and information. Then, during his forty-six years on Mount Athos he would receive a rich formation from listening to and reading the Scriptures, the Church's service books, and the writings of the Fathers. The notebooks he filled with writings at moments of inspiration in his later years are unique as a literary phenomenon because of all these ingredients. From his childhood we notice an aspect of his character: his honesty to himself. At four years of age the word of a pedlar - 'Where is this God of yours, then?' (p. 10)- had troubled his previously undoubting faith in God. Though his father reassured him that the pedlar was just speaking as a fool, it took ftfteen years before he again felt wholeheartedly that God exists and is alive. When he was nineteen and a carpenter, a pilgrim was telling the estate workers about StJohn Sezenov, whose tomb she had venerated. Hearing about the saint as a real person made Simeon reflect: 'If he was a holy man, then it means that God is here with us, so there is no point in me going off to search for Him' (p. 11 ). Simeon must have spent those years wondering how to find God. This reassurance was needed; and it ignited prayer in his soul, and he felt drawn towards monasticism. When this touch of grace waned, after about three months, Simeon drifted back to the life of a young village lad, who was popular with his contemporaries, and admired by many of the village girls. He fell into fornication, and into near-murder during a brawl. But a miraculous event occurred. He heard, during a dream, a voice reproaching him that his ways were ugly to look upon. He knew beyond doubt that the gentle 47

25 voice belonged to the Mother of God, and he remained ever grateful to her for 'appearing from the heavens to show a young man like me his sins' (p. 15). The Queen of Athos drew him by the route that all monks take: repentance. At his first 'call' he had spoken to his father about monasticism, but his father had asked him to do his military service first. The time for this came, but his second monastic call was so decisive that he did not drift into the life typical of recruits. His thoughts and intentions were already, as his comrades once teased him, 'on Mount Athos and at the Last Judgement' (p. 18). The eagerness of Simeon's heart, and his straightforward character, together with the absence in him of any of the self-opinion typical of the well educated or the well off, made up soil ready for the seed of grace in a measure that exceeds the average. We see this grace at work in him as a result of Fr John of Kronstadt's prayers, for he had gone to take this great man's blessing, and not managing to see him, had written a note asking for his prayers before he left for Athos (p. 19). Simeon thereafter felt palpably the flames of hell roaring about him. To experience the touch of God in this 'negative' form requires a courageous soul. There are times when the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, visits us to convict us. Such painful states educate our depths, and also act as a safeguard, as in Simeon's case. Nothing on his route to the monastery could have tempted him to rethink - he was desperate to go where he knew relief and explanation were to be found. Athos is a place where God meets men's real souls. Simeon entered the Russian monastery of St Panteleimon in autumn He came as he was. While he fitted in with all the details of Athonite life, he never played the role of an ideal monk. There is nothing artificial or constrained about his piety. As Fr Sophrony puts it (p. 63), he 'always remained true to himself'. He had a simplicity which most of us need to acquire. It was not naivete; he had a lot of experience of life, and he already had a mature and wise moral judgement, as we can see from advice he gave his fellows in the battalion. His simplicity was partly due to his lack of training in critical analysis. It is also a matter of keeping one's attention on concrete reality rather than weighing up the whole world in our minds theoretically or imaginatively. Simeon's simplicity was also bound up with his acceptance of authority. This is not in a merely juridical sense. He was sometimes confused by advice he was given by elders. But he was able to obey because he did not 48 feel superior to anyone, let alone his administrative and spiritual superiors in the monastery. Furthermore, though his experiences of receiving mistaken counsel were of a serious character, he never stopped advocating and practising obedience to the clergy. 'The Holy Spirit gives good counsel to the soul when we hearken to the advice of our pastors'(p. 406). St Silouan remained submissive and obedient all his life. Obedience is what keeps Athonite life flowing as a living tradition rather than simply a museum of Byzantine monasticism. It was not long after his arrival before a violent inner storm, lasting about six months, assailed him. Mter one dreadful experience when demons became visible to him as he tried to pray in his cell, and he felt as if God were cruel- and told Him so- he went, according the programme, to Vespers at the mill chapel. There, in front of the Lord's icon, he pronounced the Jesus prayer: 'Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.' And how did the Lord 'have mercy' on him? By appearing alive before him and filling all his being with grace that he could know as divine. Simeon's vision did not last long: it was a matter of seconds rather than minutes. 'From his words and from his writings we know that a great Divine light shone about him, that he was lifted out of this world and in spirit transported to heaven, where he heard ineffable words' (p. 26). Indeed, earthly 'words cannot encompass such things' (p. 27). The divine light that shone then had still to be assimilated in order to become St Silouan's eternal possession. Such a measure of grace is usually only bestowed at the end of an ascetic's life, or he must wait for it to be given in the next life. It cannot be maintained if the body is to survive. St Paul was blinded, the Apostles on Tabor fell to the ground. And Brother Simeon carried on with his life... For a certain time Simeon lived in Paschal joy. Then the action of grace began to diminish, and a long period of bewilderment ensued. He not only suffered from the fading away of the intensity of the grace, he again passed through torments caused by the activity of demons. Astaretz who expressed his admiration of Simeon activated a struggle with pride. Or let us say, he could have been wiser and cultivated Simeon's natural self-abasement. As it was, fifteen years went by until Simeon - who in the meantime (in 1896) had been professed and given the name of the Apostle Silouan- even clearly understood why, after he had been granted such grace, God would seemingly forsake him and leave him to perish in hellish torment. 49

26 He was not simply looking for relief from suffering. He was seeking the Lord as a lost child seeks its mother, only more intensely. He was grieving over his loss like a widower, only more intensely. He was not looking for explanations, he was looking for Christ. And he felt demons keeping him away. He avoided sin and he prayed unceasingly-what more could he do? Ask God, and ask God, and ask God. And finally, this time in words rather than a vision, God answered him. 'Lord, Thou seest that I desire to pray to Thee with a pure mind but devils will not let me. Instruct me, what must I do to stop them hindering me?' And in his soul he heard, 'The proud always suffer from devils.' 'Lord,' said Silouan, 'teach me what I must do that my soul may become humble.' Once more, his heart heard God's answer, 'Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not' (p. 42). Christ's answer gave him a principle on which all the rest of his life would be founded. And gave to the world a saving spiritual formula in an epoch where both pride and despair reign supreme. We must remember that St Silouan received this word with gratitude. He was in a state of condemnation; and he was reassured that God not only had not left him forgotten in hell, but was recommending him to hold fast to this position; therefore there was no need to lose hope - only to keep self-abasement. Fr Sophrony considered that this exhortation of Christ can be compared to Einstein's formulae= mc"in its importance for the world. It can assist even those who have not had Fr Silouan's depth of experience. On one level, it can help us when we are in any difficult and unavoidable situation, to trust in God's providence, and to be steadfast in prayer. On another level, it can teach us how to remain humble in our self-awareness. But we must note that St Silouan was commanded to keep his mind in hell. That is, the consciousness that he was experiencing hell was already a reality, not something on the level of imagination. Even parallel texts in the Church's tradition, which speak of self-condemnation and the remembrance of hell, do not all evince such a depth of experience. So we must not ape him artificially. If we did so our mental energy would be focused in the unreal world of the imagination, and there would not be enough room for faith and hope to be at work in our soul's reality. We learn from St Silouan to face our own reality: our created state first of all; to have an attitude towards God of a dependent being. If we take it a stage further: we must not allow anything, from within or without, to smother gratitude 50 towards God's providence. And then: we must not be puffed up with selfadmiration. As well as this, sometimes during the Church year- not least through the Gospel itself - we are reminded of the fact that we shall be judged, of the fact that eternity can be lived out either in dark torment or in unwaning light. Our conscience too can awaken us to these realities. And then we will know the power of the second half of God's word to St Silouan: whatever happens, do not despair. Everything is possible to God, who is 'with us always', even in hell. Athos plumbs the depths. After this experience, St Silouan, over the years, learned to keep grace by burning up any thoughts of pride, or indeed any state of diminished grace, in the fire of humility. Grace, and loss of grace, and regaining of grace: this is the pattern of Christian asceticism through all the centuries and in every situation. This is what Athonite monks are busy at 24 hours out of 24. And St Silouan is witness to the fact that there is no higher charism than humble love for all humanity. Mter writing about the wonderworking power given to the saints he adds: 'But all my desire is to learn humility and the love of Christ, that I may offend no man but pray for all as I pray for myself (p. 350). 'Were I to be asked what I would have from God-what gifts- I should answer: "The spirit of humility"' (p. 432). St Silouan's monastic life progressed in an organic way. His ups and downs were real, and he did not pretend them away. He prayed through them. We have seen how the routine of Athonite life was a stabilizing factor running in the background of his spiritual 'adventures'; it never caused him to lapse into deadness of spirit, repeating prayers simply verbally, doing prostrations mechanically, confessing without repenting. In spite of nights of spiritual torment, he did not excuse himself from the long monastic services or his duties of obedience, which were demanding. He worked hard at the mill and later as steward at the monastery depot. He remained cordial in all his contacts with his fellow monks and with lay people. His distress was given expression, outlet, in confession and above all in prayer, and thus he kept from self-pity; he was not trying to gain sympathy by a display of psychological sorrow. Exterior discretion is a marked feature of Athonite monasticism. As far as daily life of St Silouan is concerned, several incidents are recorded by Fr Sophrony and by Fr Silouan himself, especially in the chapters called 'Portrait of the Staretz' in Part 1, and 'Reminiscences and Conversations' in Part 2. I want here to mention an incident not recorded in the book. Fr Sophrony used to cite St Silouan as an example of some- 51

27 one who was 'never difficult', that is, he never rebutted an approach by coldness, he listened to those who spoke, he was not touchy or sulky, he co-operated readily with the requests of others. He was calm and gentle, with a warmth of expression that photographs have not preserved. But this does not mean that he was a 'man-pleaser'. He never compromised his integrity before God. There was only one occasion when Fr Sophrony contradicted him. During a procession which was part of a vigil service, Fr Sophrony, who was of a sickly constitution, remarked to the Elder, 'It takes physical strength to be a monk.' St Silouan replied, 'It takes spiritual strength to be a monk.' A little later Fr Sophrony repeated his comment and likewise, though a little more emphatically, St Silouan repeated the same reply. When Fr Sophrony went so far as to sigh a third time and say 'Even so, you need physical strength to be a monk', Fr Silouan quietly moved away to a different position in the procession. As he matured spiritually, we see two elements emerging in his life: his ability to teach others, and his prayer for all Adam. This latter is the heart of what Athonite life gives to the world. A robust peasant could end up spending entire nights for decades, seated upon a stool, and often weeping copious tears. It was the vision of Christ's love, the taste of divine compassion, that stirred up in him the compassion he felt for his fellow man. And he expressed his love above all in prayer. He lived like that because he loved; you pray fervently for those you love, and you care for their salvation as much as your own. If, when you retire to your room at night, your prayer rule is perfunctory, you will not notice whether you are far from God. In other words, his extraordinary feat of prayer grew organically out of his experience, his sincerity, and his longing for God's love to reign in his own heart and that of every human being. This is a theological reality. When God reveals Himself, He is not simply imparting information; He is making known that life which those who would be in His likeness can live. 'The Holy Spirit teaches us to love God, and love keeps the commandments' (p. 498). In most cases this process of education is gradual, but in Silouan the final state possible to man on earth was given to him at the beginning of his ascetic struggle. All his life was a struggle to conform to Christ. This conformity was given in the form of love for all mankind from Adam to those in the future. 'When the soul learns love of the Lord she is filled with compassion for the whole universe' (p. 443). The love in the Holy Trinity is hypostatic: each person embraces all the fulness of divinity. Communicated to a man, this love 52 embraces all a man's fellow humans, and their lives and destinies become inseparable from his own. St Silouan's desire was 'to pray for all as for himself. St Silouan had known all the dimensions of human experience: heaven, hell, and earth, and his compassion resulted from experience rather than imagination. 'I know from experience what it means to be in the Holy Spirit and what it means to be without Him' (p. 435 ). Elsewhere he is even more explicit: 'We know of this [the darkness of those in hell], because the Holy Spirit in the Church reveals to the saints what is in heaven and what is in hell' (p. 289). 'The Lord gives the monk the love of the Holy Spirit, and by virtue of this love the monk's heart sorrows over people because not all men are working out their salvation' (p. 407). Adam's Lament (Chapter XVIII) is Silouan's lament and humanity's cri de coeur. God communicates His love via hearts ready to bear it. They are not mere channels, because the heart cannot be constrained to love; divine love has become their own, and is brought to earth in them. We reach 24 September 1938, when, fully conscious to the end, Fr Silouan fell asleep peacefully in the Lord. Even when ill, he was more concerned for his prayer than for any medical succour he could get in the infirmary: he only agreed to go when Fr Sophrony arranged for him to be in a semi-private compartment, away from the noisily ticking dock. Facing death, his concern was that he 'had not attained humility'. His peaceful departure, according to Fr Sophrony's interpretation, is a sign that on his deathbed he regained the humility of Christ as his own state ( p. 243). Fr Silouan himself said that any other contribution than prayer for the world is secondary to the essence of monastic life. Serving pilgrims (and perhaps also giving talks... ) is 'pleasing to God. But rest assured that it is not monastic life by a long way'(p. 408). Perhaps because they have renounced other vocations and do not set out to be teachers, monks who live as true monks often serve also by their example and their teaching. In Fr Silouan we have a supreme example of what effect love - the key to human fulfilment - can do. He also left a legacy of teaching on the theological and practical levels, which, as he showed, are inseparable. In the Patriarchal act of Canonization, St Silouan is described as 'an apostolic and prophetic teacher of the Church'. In one of the hymns in his honour he is called 'most comforting among theologians'. A real theologian is someone who knows the truth of God by meeting the living God. His teaching and writing are a consequence, not simply of his own reading, but of his experience of God. When a theologian is 53

28 uneducated, the language he uses can deceive us by its simplicity. Orthodox theologians in Paris who first read St Silouan's notes thought that there was nothing particularly significant about them. That is the only reason why Fr Sophrony set out to write a more erudite introduction. St Silouan is not a public defender of the faith against heresy, a polemicist. He theologizes for another motive: 'How shall I be silent concerning God when my spirit is consumed day and night with love for Him?[... ] What shall I tell my soul? Hide within thyself what the Lord said? But all heaven knows about this. And I should be asked, "Wherefore did you conceal the Lord's mercies, and not declare them to men, that all might love God and find rest in Him?'" (p. 482) We cannot dismiss what he says because it is simply, sometimes even childishly, expressed. First of all this is not the entire truth. We notice that he uses concepts that great philosophers grope to comprehend. Nor let us dismiss what he says because he is a son of the Church and follows the stream of its theological tradition - because 'there isn't anything original'. For how does Tradition work? 'Even the souls of the heathen sensed that God is, though they were ignorant how to worship the true God. But the Holy Spirit instructed the prophets of old, and after them the Apostles and then our holy Fathers and Bishops, and in this wise the true faith came down to us' (p. 358). And what does 'in this wise' mean? Not 'if we read what they say', for he goes on to add: 'And we knew the Lord by the Holy Spirit, and when we knew Him our souls were confirmed in Him' (ibid.). Even if it were true that he wrote nothing original -and it is not-this 'confirmation' in itself is infinitely precious. It prevents Tradition from becoming dead letter. If Apostolic and Patristic theology is confirmed by the experience of a contemporary in an age where even to remain Christian is a constant struggle against the flood of apostasy and despair, we have already been given a great gift in St Silouan. We have another John reassuring us that indeed God is Love, in a world which makes us ask, as Fr Sophrony's foreword brings to light, 'Where is this Providence that is attentive to the last detail? We are all of us crushed by the spectacle of evil walking unrestrained up and down the world' (p. vii). St Silouan was brought up in the Christian faith, and when he came to the monastery he was familiar with the Church and its teachings and services. Yet when he saw the living Lord, he ever afterwards described this event as the moment when 'the Holy Spirit gave me to know the Lord'. It is quite astonishing that someone who all his conscious life had 54 heard and repeated the phrase 'Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit' should write that until then 'I did not know about the Holy Spirit' (p.320). The knowledge of God which he claimed to have received, and which he shared in his spoken counsel and in his writings, came as a direct fruit of his vision at the mill when he was a novice. He says that it is 'incomprehensible' how the Holy Spirit shows Himself. His theology was first of all a state of being that he was given to share with the Lord. It was many years later that he became a teacher, and only in his old age did he write his message 'for the people of the earth'. We can feel the authority of experience behind his words. St Silouan writes with assurance because 'my thoughts are the fruit of long years of living' (p. 491). When he answered Fr Sophrony's theological enquiries or wrote notes about God, he was describing what he had seen and tasted and handled of the Word of God. 'The saints speak of that which they have actually seen, of that which they know. They do not speak of something they have not seen. They do not tell us, for instance, that they have seen a horse a mile long, or a steamer ten miles long, which do not exist' (p. 358). As a philosophical concept, a gnoseology, this sentence is worth at least one PhD's research. St Silouan's visitation gave him the immediate direct knowledge of truth without him needing preparation by an intellectual, conceptual, study of truth or how man becomes cognizant of it. From him we learn that truth is known by revelation to the bumble-minded. 'Pride is at the root of unbelief. The proud man would acquire knowledge through his mind and his studying, but it is not given to him to learn to know God, in that the Lord reveals Himself only to the lowly in heart.' The educated, and especially those with theological education, will not know God until they believe in their own ignorance. 'Both in heaven and on earth the Lord is made known only by the Holy Spirit, and not through ordinary learning' (p. 357). Athos is a theological academy par excellence. St Silouan was utterly without speculative theological curiosity. He could not discuss dogmas abstractly. He could use theological language articulately, but he never spoke about God as an abstract subject, remote and theoretical. Every time he makes a theological statement he soon adds something about the spiritual effort or state needed to understand or keep the reality he refers to. 'Many philosophers and scholars have arrived at a belief in the existence of God but they have not come to know God. And we monks apply ourselves day and night to the study of the Lord's command but not all of us by a long way have come to know the 55

29 Lord, although we believe in Him. To believe that God exists is one thing, to know God another' (pp ). Here is a paragraph that covers the contents of a year's lectures in the philosophy of religion. Many theological themes are touched upon with a rare freshness and depth in his notes: Triadology, Divine Love, Prayer, Creation, the Church, the Bible, etc. As far as love for man is concerned, in St Silouan we reach the summits of love and of teaching about love. This monk with no theological or philosophical background answered Fr Sophrony's question about universal love like this: 'To be one with all, as the Lord said, "that all may be one", there is no need for us to cudgel our brains: we all have one and the same nature, and so it should be natural for us to love all men; but it is the Holy Spirit Who gives us the strength to love' (p. 108). In this sentence, down to the word 'but', is contained Orthodox anthropology in its fulness. Fr Silouan wrote that pure, undistracted prayer is the fulfilment of the commandment to love God with all our mind (p. 143). This is just one example of a powerful new expression in the ascetic Tradition of the Church. There are three features of St Silouan's theology that Fr Sophrony considered original. Originality does not mean a diversion from Tradition, but a new form of expression and/or one that goes deeper into the heart of the matter. In my opinion St Silouan is original in both these senses. [ 1] St Silouan describes the humility of Christ as of another kind than 'ascetic' humility, that is, keeping a lowly estimation of oneself. 'There are many kinds of humility. One man is obedient, and has nothing but blame for himself; and this is humility. Another repents him of his sins and considers himself loathsome in the sight of God -and that is humility. But there is still another humility in the man who bas known the Lord in the Holy Spirit' (p. 310). Christ-like humility cannot be the same as self-condemnation for sin, because Christ is sinless. But St Silouan was not basing his comparison on dogmas learned 'from outside'. For one thing, he kept selfblame to a rare degree, so he knew 'by the taste' that it was not the same. Second, he knew that he had lost the Christ-like humility given to him as a sight and as a state in his vision. [2] That love of our brethren is the test of how real and how deep is our love for God is taught directly by Christ 3 and the apostles. 4 St Silouan shows us that the test of our knowledge of Truth is our attitude towards those 56 who offend us or persecute us, or are cruel to the Church. 'There are people who desire the destruction, the torment in hellfire of their enemies, or the enemies of the Church. They think like this because they have not learned divine love' (p. 275). [3] St Silouan read the Holy Fathers, especially ascetic writers such as John Climacus, Isaac, Macarius, the Desert Fathers, and others, and quoted from them in conversation and in writing. He recommended reading: '0 brethren, read more of the Holy Gospels, and the works of the Holy Fathers! Through such reading does the soul come to know God, and the mind becomes occupied with the Lord' (p. 416). He could compare his experience with what the Fathers said. He made the observation that when he read the Holy Fathers, he could tell what degree of inspiration lay behind the words. He measured the words uncritically, preferring to read Orthodox sources just for that reason. But at the same time he shows that words are measured by criteria other than authorship. Even the saints did not always write with the same inspiration. And the higher the degree of inspiration in the reader, the more discerning he will be of variations. No wonder Fr Triphon said that Fr Silouan had reached the measure of the Holy Fathers (p. 251). St Silouan's writings touch upon life in all its aspects, because everything can be done either in accordance with the Holy Spirit or not. Man's life is conditioned by his theology. Striving for virtue is a natural effect of the Holy Spirit's touch. 'We must urge ourselves all our lives to do good.' 'Think that God sees you, though you do not see him' (p. 490). St Silouan's advice goes from prayer-the spiritual level-to the psychological level, to the physical level, and all the time these levels overlap, as they do in real life. 'If you are irritable, or, as they say, "nervy", that is a real calamity. Paroxysms or fits of mental anguish are diseases to be physicked with lowliness of spirit and repentance, and by loving one's brother and one's enemies' (p. 447). [There, by the way, we have material for a few doctorates in psychology and manuals of psychotherapy... ] Life cannot be separated from 'spiritual life'. 'How clear it is to me that the Lord guides us! Without Him we cannot even think a good thing. Therefore we must surrender ourselves humbly to the Divine will, so that the Lord may direct us' (p. 341). If we put anything before the kingdom of God, the kingdom of 3 e.g. John 13:35. ~e.g. 1 John 4:8, Eph.4:15, Jas. 1:27. 57

30 God loses its place in our life. That is one of the key messages Athos gives the world. We have time only to glance at a few of the areas of life covered by St Silouan's notes. In the world, seeking our path is often tied up with ambition. Once again, St Silouan shows us how to see reality. 'Everyone in this world has his task to perform, be he king or patriarch, cook, blacksmith or teacher, but the Lord Whose love extends to everyone of us will give greater reward to the man whose love for God is greater' (p. 296). 'In love towards God and our fellow-men[... ] lie both freedom and equality. With society as it is graded on this earth there can be no equality, though that is of no importance for the soul. Not everyone can be an emperor or a prince; not everyone can be a patriarch or an abbot, or a leader; but in every walk of life we can love God and be pleasing to Him, and only this is important' (p. 343). (This time there is material for doctorates in sociology!) His love and prayer for those who offended him was sown in him by the Lord, and cultivated in his life among the brethren. 'Many of [the monks] disliked him. Some inveighed against him face to face, saying that he was "bewitched". Others would say, "Ugh, damned saint!"' Others misunderstood his praying for the persecutors of the Russian Church - and remember he had relatives in Russia. Athos reminds us of the adage that it is 'not so much the geographical location as the way of life' that sanctifies. As a geographical reality, Athos is uniquely valuable precisely because its space is reserved for Orthodox monastic life, but this is not conferred automatically on its inhabitants. I will quote another counsel which is both deeply theological and eminently practicable by everyone: 'With all your might and main ask the Lord for humility and brotherly love, for to him who loves his brother the Lord giveth freely of His grace. Try yourself: one day ask God for brotherly love, and the next day live without love, and you will see the difference' (p. 426). Love may be expressed in simple ways. 'Often a single sympathetic greeting will work a happy change in the soul; while contrariwise, one unfriendly look- and grace and the love of God depart. When that happens, make haste to repent' (p. 427). 'I was walking along [... ] when I saw a little four-year-old boy running towards me. [... ] I had an egg on me, which I gave to the child. He was delighted, and ran off to show the present to his father. And for a little thing like that I received great joy from God, and took a love for every one of God's creatures, and 58 my soul sensed the Divine Spirit. Reaching home, seized with pity for the world, I prayed long to God, weeping many tears' (p ). Every encounter is a training ground for universal love. By the way, the sacrifice was not so 'little'; he was living in a monastery where the diet, as Fr Sophrony used to say, varied between rice with cabbage and cabbage with rice. The monks usually got only an egg at Easter. St Silouan lived without forgetting the dimension of heaven. But in his advice to people in the world, and advice to monks about their everyday life, he writes about everyday matters with wisdom. Fr Sophrony said it was always as easy to talk to him about private and difficult matters 'as if you were discussing a recipe for soup'. As a monk he was asked about varied matters: what to study, how to pray for a missing daughter, whether a hieromonk living in the city should listen to music, and so on. His answers were not condescending- indeed, they did not always make comfortable listening, for he encouraged the keeping of the commandments. He spoke about freedom to a student in a manner that Fr Sophrony considered 'too profound for the youth to grasp', but the student grasped enough to be 'deeply impressed' and had 'food for thought' for the future (p. 65). To take another example: on the question of food, St Silouan is his own original self, combining a childlike honesty about his shortcomings with a depth of ascetic experience and understanding. A practical matter is dealt with in the light of the soul. 'After meals we should feel like praying-that is the measure of moderation' (p. 326). St Silouan was taught compassion for all the creation. 'The Spirit of God teaches the soul to love every living thing so that she would have no harm come to even a green leaf on a tree, or trample underfoot a flower of the field.' 'Once I needlessly killed a fly. The poor thing crawled on the ground, hurt and mangled, and for three whole days I wept over my cruelty to a living creature, and to this day the incident remains in my memory.' St Silouan spoke and acted with deep sensitivity to the beauty of creation, but he was not sentimentally attached to God's handiwork. He scythed grass, ate fish, 'used' creation. Also, he was aware that heavenly beauty is so great that earthly beauty fades in comparison. 'The sweetness of the Holy Spirit surpasses all the delights [music, love, nature... these are just some of the "delights" he mentions he had known] of the world' (p. 466). In many other places he speaks of rapture in God to the point that the world is quite forgotten. 59

31 Between December 1904 and October 1905 St Silouan returned to his homeland, called up as a reservist at the time of Russia's war with Japan. He visited some monasteries; and on one train journey a fellow passenger offered him a cigarette. Fr Silouan thanked him but did not take a cigarette. The man said, 'Probably, Father, you consider smoking a sin? But smoking helps in real life; it helps you to relax.' He continued trying to persuade Fr Silouan of the benefits of smoking, and finally St Silouan said, 'Before you light up a cigarette, pray, repeat an "Our Father".' The man answered: 'It somehow doesn't go, to pray before you smoke.' And St Silouan said: 'Well, if you feel embarrassed to pray before you do something, it is better not to do it' (p. 70). In an age where we are swamped with information it is salutary to hear what St Silouan has to say about knowledge and about infonnation. 'Some there are who spend their whole lives trying to find out what there is on the sun or the moon, or in seeking like knowledge, yet this is of no profit to the soul. But if we take pains to explore the human heart [...]' (p. 355). 'With our minds we cannot come to know even how the sun is made; and if we beg God to tell us how He made the sun, the answer rings in our soul, "Humble thyself, and thou shalt know not only the sun but the Creator of the sun"' (p. 103). As far as 'news' is concerned, St Silouan said that he did not care for newspapers. 'Reading newspapers clouds the mind and hinders pure prayer' (p. 73). One of the monks said that hearing the news encouraged his prayer for others - certainly an admirable reaction. But St Silouan said: 'When the soul prays for the world she knows better without newspapers how the whole earth is afflicted.' When asked to explain, he said, 'Newspapers don't write about people but about events, and then not the truth.[...] You won't get at the truth by reading them; whereas prayer cleanses the mind and gives it a better vision of all things' (p. 73). Knowledge direct from God brings with it the strength for compassion. Information tires the brain and the spirit to no purpose. Words are allowed to float in and out of our mind without provoking effective compassion, edifying us, or even exercising our brains. We know that the news we hear at 7 o'clock will be updated at 8 o'clock. Athos absorbs all the pain of the world, but Athos and our culture are diametrically opposed means of picking up the world's vibes. Extraordinary gifts of grace do not mean that God's chosen ones are preselected and everyone else is second class. The saints who received grace beg God to dispense it to all without exception. Grace, even 60 etymologically, means a gift; and it is always a personal gift. Even had we the ability to discern measures of grace correctly, there is no sense in envying another person a greater measure of grace. What we can do is treat our one talent as another has treated his five. We have seen today what a true monk did with his talents. 'The monk prays constantly. Thanks to monks, prayer continues unceasing on earth, and the world profits, for through prayer the world continues to exist' (pp ). Most of the prayer on Athos remains 'in secret'. When it is revealed, as in the case of St Silouan, together with a portrait of one who practised it to its ultimate degree, then we really do visit Mount Athos. '...::~-~..._-.. _ -.,;::'",;--.. ;- 61 SISTER MAGDALEN Tolleshunt Knights

32 THE ECOLOGY OF THE VIRTUES The Ecological Crisis in the Light of the Ascetic Theory of Maximus the Confessor 1 At the beginning of November 2001 I attended a conference in Moscow on 'Christian Anthropology'. It was sponsored by the Theological Commission of the Holy Synod of the Russian Church and supported by Church and secular organizations, including the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the proper Russian fashion we heard and discussed something like thirtyeight papers in three days. Some were memorable, some not so memorable. But one thing has stuck in my mind. In a paper that addressed what the author called the 'anthropological crisis' of the present age, he said these words: 'If we humans are going to survive on earth, we are going have to rethink the universe.' I couldn't agree more. But the question such a statement raises is: why do we have to rethink the universe? It is this issue that I would like to consider first this evening. What we are facing now on a worldwide scale is not a technological crisis; it is not a political crisis; it is not an economic crisis. It is not the result of getting a few things wrong. We are in crisis because we have created an imaginal world as the background of our decisions in which the inner world of man has no place. And so we should not be surprised if the world our actions then produce turns out to be in some sense inhuman, if it turns out to be inimical to the very survival of man. If our decisions are taken against the background of a view of the universe from which the inner sworld of man has been removed, we can hardly be surprised when the result of our decisions does not serve us well. What starts from inhuman premises will end with inhuman results. I have been saying 'we', but of course I don't mean everybody. I have in mind those who have accepted the 'scientific', 'positivistic' world-view which began to dominate the minds of those who govern our countries for the first time towards the end of the eighteenth century: the various forms of 'godlessness' that rose to the surface in the French Revolution, in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia. 1 A version of a talk given to the Friends of Mount Athos on 29 November As we look back over the past few hundred years it becomes harder and harder to think of these phenomena as aberrations. A certain type of 'godlessness' rose to the surface in society on a massive scale and e~a~le~ leaders to take decisions in the name of man that were profoundly tntmtcal to man. From the point of view of the objective historian, not all these phenomena are the same. They differ considerably in the way they developed over time. But there is nonetheless an inner coherence that we now can look back and see in a way that wasn't possible - for most people - at the time. If our sight is clearer now, what corresponds to these phenomena in the present world? What should we really think about the drive for 'efficiency' that we see everywhere today? We are constantly being told to seek the most efficient way to do things, whether in business, in the government, in the health service- or in the army. To be efficient can only be a good thing. It means to increase profits, to reduce taxation, to improve services - and to kill without suffering casualties of one's own. Surely these are all good things. But we need to ask ourselves: what lies behind this drive for efficiency? How should it be assessed from a theological point of view, from the point of view of the Gospel? Is it inspired by anything more than greed, lust for power, a desire for physical comfort - and the fear of death? One of the most obvious manifestations of what has happened to the thought world of society as a whole is the way in which politicians now fall back on 'the best scientific advice' whenever they can. 'Scientific advice' is somehow thought to bring discussion to an end. It is the 'last word', the deciding piece of information that every politician wishes to be able to utter and either silence his opponents or get himself off the hook. And yet this scientific advice is of such a nature that it cannot do more than produce 'facts'. It does not tell anyone what to do-or why. It reflects a world unsullied by notions of'good', or 'beauty', or 'wisdom'. Recently a friend drew my attention to a passage in a book by B. Carr in which he describes how human beings are 'downgraded to the level of passive observers, so that the problem of human consciousness is excluded from the subject matter of physics'. Carr points out that one feature which is noticeably absent from this model [of the universe] is the creator [i.e. of the model], man himself. That physi~~ has little to say a~out the place of man in the universe is perhaps not surpnsmg when one cons1ders the fact that most physicists probably regard man, and more generally con- 63

33 sciousness, as being entirely irrelevant to the functioning of the universe. [Man] is seen as no more than a passive observer, with the laws of Nature, which he assiduously attempts to unravel, operating everywhere and for all time, independent of whether or not man witnesses them. This scientific view of the world does concern itself with 'truth', but this truth is essentially of a mathematical nature. Already in the thirteenth century Roger Bacon declared that 'Mathematics is the gate and key of the sciences.' By which he meant the gateway and key to the understanding of nature, which is God's creation, but the creation of a divine God. Two things have happened in the course of the gradual development of the contemporary scientific world-view. The first is the objectification of our relationship to the world. The observer is removed from the picture of the natural order that we carry around with us. Nature exists 'out there', independently of ourselves. It is a non-personal 'other' on which we can carry out mental and physical operations, which we can mentally and physically dissect. Paradoxically, this is true even though developments over the past century in the field of physics make it quite clear that at the atomic and sub-atomic level the observer, through the instruments that he uses to investigate the behaviour of the physical world, modifies that world and influences his observations. In other words, the observer himself is part of the picture and must be understood as such. In fact, it is not clear that a world, a 'cosmos', can exist as we understand it without an observer- though the potential for existence is always there. Note that at this point we unite the word 'exist' with its Latin root, exsistere, meaning 'to come forth, to emerge, to appear'. Only in the presence of the observer does the world 'exist' in this etymological sense; only in the presence of an observer does it 'come into being', 'emerge (into existence)', 'come forth'. What is marvellous about the human being, of course, is that he can look at himself from outside and put himself into the picture. To be able to look at oneself, to have a certain 'distance' from oneself is of course the miracle of self-consciousness, the extraordinary ability of the human being to put distance between himself and the contents of his own mind. This is something that is at the very heart of the spiritual life - and therefore of struggles that go on in the hearts of the monks of Mount Athos. But it is also what will enable us to put ourselves back into the picture we have of nature, and thereby cease editing ourselves out of creation. 64 This form of 'self-erasure' has been helped by a second development that has taken place over the last few centuries, though its origins go far back into the ancient world. When we think about the real world as rational, scientific beings, we think of it as being made up of a kind of 'substance' that has no qualities. We should ask ourselves where this notion came from, since it is 'counter-intuitive' in terms of the world of nai've realism in which we normally live. The world in which we move is filled with colours, sounds, smells, and things to taste. Just watch a nine-month-old child put everything it sees into its mouth. Less noticeably - perhaps because it is so ordinary- our everyday world is filled with things we can feel through our skin: pressure in the first instance, but also heat and cold, and, in extreme cases, pain. All of this is edited out of the world that our physics textbooks describe for us. What remains is substance without attributes, the Cartesian world of mathematically conceived 'extension' in which 'real qualities' do not exist, while the 'qualified' world ends up as a feature only of our inner world, the non-spatial, incorporeal mind, which, for Descartes, was located in the pineal gland behind the brain. Not only is beauty 'in the eye of the beholder', but all colour, taste, smell, sound, and tactile sensation is also 'in the eye of the beholder'. The 'real' world of physics is somehow without all these. It has its own striking beauty, of course, but it is the beauty of mathematics, just as the game of chess has its own beauty and fascination - and for some can become a whole world. This desire to reduce the real to the mathematical goes back to the ancient Greeks, and its origin can be traced to their earliest attempts to understand nature. This attempt at what one might call 'the rationalization of nature' is the driving force behind the thought of the Ionian philosophers such as Thales, Anaxagoras, and Heraclitus, each of whom identified one substance that maintained its identity behind the changes of the perceptible world. With the Pythagoreans a further step was taken, when number was declared to be at the heart of all that exists: 'All things are numbers', according to one of their sayings. In the words of Philolaus, a famous fifth-century member of the school, 'Were it not for number and its nature, nothing that exists would be clear to anybody either in itself or in its relation to other things... ' This belief was underpinned by their investigation of music and the movement of the heavenly bodies and by the rapid progress made by the Greeks in geometry and arithmetic. Already in his dialogue Pbilebus, Plato had expressed the 65

34 thought that each science is only truly a science to the extent that it contains mathematics. The Greeks, in a brilliant fashion, were able to show clearly and convincingly that the world we live in is structured along mathematical lines. At the same time Plato also gave expression to another fundamental idea of the classical world-view: the eternal nature of matter. In the Timaeus Plato develops his notion of a 'demiurge' who fashions the world we see on the basis an ideal world which is also eternal. This 'workman' god does not therefore create the universe out of nothing, ex nibilo, but works on pre-existing 'stuff'. As a result, of course, the world is not entirely dependent upon a Creator for its existence, as in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, but a free-standing reality. This belief in a world formed from an unqualified substance and defined mathematically underpinned the classical understanding of the material world. As time went on, many different theories were developed to explain the world that we see, some of which backed off from the thoroughgoing rationalization of nature found among the Pythagoreans Among these, of course, was Aristotle, for whom mathematical constructs were incapable of embracing qualitative differences such as colour and smell. As abstractions from experience, they are not independent of or prior to experience. They exist in our minds as ideas mediating between the sensible objects and the essence of the object. Strange as it may seem, the gradual rejection during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Aristotelian physics that had come to dominate Western thinking in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries actually marked a return to the mathematically based model of classical Greek physics. This in turn made possible the discoveries of Galileo and Newton. It is interesting to see how a view of the world that was the province of the educated few in the ancient world has become the possession of the many in our age. We are taught in our schools (as least I was, and I don't believe there has been any change) a 'scientific' view of the material world in which the most penetrating form of scientific exploration- physics - is also the field least connected with the world as experienced in ordinary life. I can remember very well the attraction that physics had for me as a teenager, when I eagerly read-as best I could-the American government's Smith Report on atomic energy and the bomb. This field was intellectually respectable and stimulating as was no other. Its purity and rigour were deeply attractive. And of course they still are. 66 In a way, we seem to have fallen in love with the notion of 'unqualified' substance, substance without colour or taste or smell. The 'accidents' of matter exist only in our minds. They don't belong to the real world, the three-dimensional world of spatial extension. They don't really 'exist' in that etymological sense of 'emerging from' the world that the physical sciences describe for us. The comments of Lars Thunberg concerning the views of Maximus the Confessor on this point are instructive: When Maximus affirms that God created not only qualities but qualified substance, he does so not only in rejection of pagan philosophers, who had assumed the eternal existence of substances and thus also their lack of contrariety (and therefore of qualities], but also in order to underline that the ~~alifying element in creation is not of a secondary value. Substances and quahbes were created together, while at the same time both are merely created, separated by nature from God's ever-being and by his act of creation from non-being, and thus entirely dependent on condescending divine grace for their subsistence (Microcosm and Mediator, p. 90). Maxim us thus actually stresses the God-givenness of the qualified world, the world as perceived by the senses. In this three-dimensional world outside ourselves, God's providential care is at work and it is there that the Logos of God is busy, preserving both qualitative difference and interrelation through the 'mode of being', the tropos byparxeos of individual entities. Here we can see that the world as understood by Maximus embraces more of reality than the world as understood by our contemporary physical sciences, from which much that we experience has been edited out. In the world of Maximus the world of experience is given real weight and ultimately divine significance. It is also a world in which, at the same time, man should feel at home, since the qualified entities among which we live have not only a God-given a place in it, but because of the involvement in them of the eternal Logos of God are somehow singled out for our close and attentive examination. At the same time it is also a world in which the way in which we live - or should live - is the focus of attention. It is this aspect of Maximus's thought that I wish to turn to now, the way in which he integrates human behaviour into his cosmology. Many of you will be familiar with the way Maxim us distinguishes between the 'principle' or logos of a created nature, the logos pbyseos, which pre-exists in the Logos of God, and its 'mode of being' or tropos byparxeos. The logos pbyseos embraces all that that particular nature or created entity 67

35 can be in the eyes of God: its coming-into-being, its movement and development, and its final status or ultimate goal (its genesis-kinesis-stasis). The tropos hyparxeos, on the other hand, or 'mode of being', is its actual state or performance in this world. Throughout almost all of creation these two coincide, and the 'principle of nature' and 'mode of being' of each entity are the same, though perhaps it would be better to say that each entity's 'mode of being' expresses the 'principle' of its nature. In creatures endowed with freedom, however (those which are autokinetoi, such as man), they need not coincide. A discrepancy can arise, and the actual movement and development of such a creature can differ from the plan originally envisaged by God. The general picture, however, is clear: all that we see or perceive in any manner is an expression of the will of God, because even 'qualified substances' express the logos of their nature. The colours of a sunset, the shape of a tree's leaves, all the varieties of fishes that one can find in the sea-all smells and all tastes- each and every one of them is an expression of God's will for creation. The beauty of the world in all its diversity can be thought of as a gift to man - and therefore through the world man is enabled to relate to God the Creator of all that is. But what form should that relationship take? If we look back at the development of the current paradigm, we find it structured by the attitudes of two very important thinkers, Francis Bacon ( ) and Rene Descartes ( ). Bacon proposed the mastery of nature as the goal of scientific investigation, rather than an understanding of the purposes God had built into the natural world. He wished to 'command nature for the service and welfare of man, not to please and delight scholars'. As he saw it, science could 'provide man with "infinite commodities", "endow human life with inventions and riches, and minister to the conveniences and comforts of man"'. Such are 'the true and lawful goals of science' (cited in M. Klein, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, vol. 1, p. 226). These same attitudes found expression a few years later in the work of Rene Descartes. In his Discourse on Method Descartes says: It is possible to attain knowledge which is very useful in life, and instead of that Speculative Philosophy which is taught in the Schools, we may find a practical philosophy by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all other bodies that environ us, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of our artisans, we can in the same 68 way employ them in all those uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature (cited in Klein, op. cit., PP 226f.) Descartes was a brilliant mathematician. His work on co-ordinate geometry and its relationship to algebra laid the foundations for the development of the calculus and all subsequent mathematics. It is perhaps worth noting that Descartes departed from the position of the ancient world in that algebra to him seemed superior to geometry through its universality and the way in which it managed to 'mechanize' the reasoning process and thereby minimize the work involved in solving problems. It was more 'efficient' than geometry, which is so tied to figures that, as he said, 'it can exercise the understanding only on condition of greatly fatiguing the imagination' (cited in Klein, op. cit., p. 308). What is striking is that Descartes seems to have cared little for the beauty and harmony of mathematics. He was impressed with the power it gave one over nature. Mathematics is not for him a contemplative discipline, but a constructive and useful science. Mathematical method applied only to mathematics is without value because it is not a study of nature, and those who cultivate mathematics for its own sake are idle searchers given to the vain play of the spirit (ibid., pp. 307f.). Both Bacon and Descartes, of course, were believers. Nevertheless, the elimination of 'final causes' and the rationalization and mathematicization of nature opened the way for the thinkers of the following century who were often openly hostile to Christianity and to all 'supernatural' religion. Reason now reigned supreme and the happiness of man in this life was felt to be the appropriate goal of all human endeavour. A side effect of this tendency was an easy optimism and a general insensitivity to the fact of sin. 'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' became the goal of the political process - and of human activity in general. 'Life' in this context means this life, of course; liberty means the right to do what one wants so long as it does not interfere with the rights of others; 'the pursuit of happiness' means largely the pursuit of those 'commodities', 'conveniences', 'comforts', and 'riches' of which Francis Bacon speaks, using the power over nature that Descartes thought was the proper goal of human intellectual activity. All of this, I know, sounds very familiar. And so it should. These ideas are very near to being the 'civic religion' of the most powerful nation the world has ever known and sometimes seem close to becoming the civic 69

36 religion of this country as well. But whether they form an adequate foundation for human life - to say nothing of the Christian life - is something that can be discussed. The picture of the world offered by Maximus, however, is very different. Not only is the world of nature created by God a world of 'qualified substances', so that it will never be possible to understand it in purely mathematical terms, but it also has an end, a goal, built into its deep structure from the beginning. This is the object of 'natural contemplation' -or, perhaps better, 'the contemplation of nature' (pbysike tbeoria)- of which the ascetic tradition speaks. To understand the world in depth, it is necessary to understand what God intends it to be. Any other understanding touches only the surface of reality. Here we must say quite boldly that from the point of view of Maxim us, as for the whole of the early Christian tradition, the ultimate goal of man -and therefore of the universe- is deification, tbeosis. The crisis we are facing today, however, takes place at a much lower level. We need to fmd out how we can live in relation to the earth in such a way as to prevent the gradual deterioration of our surroundings to a point where life - at least human life - is no longer possible. When we address the ecological situation, we are addressing our own survival. The present line of development of the world economy cannot be projected indefinitely into the future. Already, in order to equalize the standard of living of the world's population at the level of the West, we would require, I am told, the resources of three earths. And we have only one available. It is impossible to go into the detail of the historical cultural processes that have led us to our present situation. Nor is there any need, for we know them- from within. We are all implicated in our present situation, whether we are aware of it or not. And here perhaps we need to allow for the notion of 'unwitting' sin. In the panikbida we ask God to forgive the person who has departed this life 'all his sins, both voluntary and involuntary'. Why? Because even involuntary sin separates us from God, and it is that separation that we hope will be overcome by God in his mercy - if necessary, after death. It is the gift of freedom, itself bound up with the image of God in man, that made sin possible, since it made possible a discrepancy within the created world between what God wills and that which is. In Maximus's understanding of the spiritual life this discrepancy is the result of selflove (pbilautia), which encapsulates all other forms of sin. Pbilautia is the 70 opposite of pbilantbropia, 'love for mankind', the overriding characteristic of God, which is mentioned again and again in the prayers of the Eastern Church. The 'tear' or 'rent' which sin has introduced into the fabric of creation can be repaired only by imitation of God, more specifically by imitation of Christ, who is himself the revelation of God's love for mankind and tells us that he does only what he sees the Father do. It is through pbilantbropia that we restore our relationship with our neighbour, and in doing so restore our relationship with God, fulfilling the double commandment on which 'hang all the law and the prophets' (Mt. 22:40). Gratitude, thankfulness (eukbaristia) for God's pbilantbropia can be shown to him in two ways: first, by turning to God in love ourselves; and second, by passing on God's love for us by turning it outwards towards others, to our neighbours, in the form of our own love for man. In this way we both imitate God, becoming 'God-like', and fulfil the double commandment given by Christ. Self-love, pbilautia, is an expression of man's refusal to accept the double commandment to love both God and one's neighbour. It leads first to the disintegration of the individual, in that the soul of the person who has given himself over to self-love is no longer related properly to his body. In such a person the soul obeys the body rather than controlling and commanding the body, while at the same time it does not relate properly to the nous, the spiritual intelligence in man, since it is in revolt against the higher understanding of life that the nous is capable of providing. This disintegration of man as an individual leads inevitably to the disintegration of man as a whole, the 'one man' that has existed since the creation of Adam. Like Eve, we were all taken from Adam and are 'bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh'. For Maximus it is sin that sets one man against another, thereby introducing division into humanity. The vices that arise through the various sinful distortions of to tbumikon, the irascible or incensive aspect of man's created being, are especially prominent in this respect: hatred, slander, envy, and resentfulness. But it is not only these that divide. Gluttony, covetousness, pride, and vainglory are also well able to divide one individual from another -just as they are able to divide nations. In all of this human ignorance plays a huge part. Maximus uses the Platonic term gnome, 'opinion', to designate the state of human understanding after the Fall and links it directly with man's capacity for self- 71

37 determination. It is possible for men to holds a variety of opinions on the same subject, each differing from the other in this respect. This is what we would expect in free creatures. In Maximus, however, the term takes on a more substantial meaning than it ever had in Plato or in the Greek philosophical tradition in general. He uses it more in the sense of 'disposition', a steady inclination to act in a certain way. A person's gnome, therefore, is something that can change, though only slowly and with effort. True knowledge, knowledge of the world as Christ knows it, the 'mind of Christ', is only available through the conformity of our human gnomeand the intentionality, the directedness that accompanies it- with the deep structure, the logos, of our nature as given by God. This is the case because our logos physeos is always held in harmony with the whole of creation through the divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity, 'by whom all things were made'. Our fallen gnome, however, with its strong admixture of ignorance, leads us into revolt against God and against others, destroying our inner harmony and thereby separating us from our own true nature that we share with all mankind. Conversely, when the human will is in harmony with its own logos - and therefore with the Logos of God - it is also in harmony with the deep structure of all men. Not that this automatically provides us with an easy and tranquil life. The gnome of the saint is highly unlikely to be in harmony with the gnome of the generality of mankind and his behaviour will therefore not be in harmony with their behaviour, their tropos hyparxeos. To be a saint is to be out of tune with the tenor of this fallen world, to 'walk to the sound of a different drum'. What we see, then, is that in the theological synthesis of St Maximus the pursuit of the virtues leads quite naturally not only to a life in harmony with others, but also to a life in harmony with the whole of creation, simply because it is also life in harmony with the logos, the deep structure, of one's one being, which is in turn an integral part of the God-given structure, the Logos, of the whole of creation. Where does that leave us in relation to human activity - the whole of human culture in its extraordinary diversity- and especially, in the present context, in relation to human economic activity, which is the area that impinges most directly upon the current ecological crisis? Man has been created free, a hypostatic reality, just as the persons of the Trinity are hypostatic realities. The implication of this is that man has been invited - has been called - to continue the work of God in creation. 72 Not in the sense of a slavish imitation of God's creation, not by doing only what God has already done. Man is invited to be creative himself, but in harmony with what has been freely given him in creation. It is as if God took creation to a certain point, and then handed it over to man. 'The rest of the task is yours', he says. 'But don't forget your creator.' 'To the extent that you remember me and return to me my love while at the same time sharing my love with your fellow human beings, what you do will be good. It will fit in and develop - in ways that I have provided for but have never carried out - that original creation that I gave into your hands in the beginning.' Maximus has built his thought on the foundations laid by the Church Fathers who preceded him, modifying them in the light of the insights given him by his own experience and reflection. These foundations were laid down in the course of an extended dialogue between the Christian community and the society and culture into which its was born. In fact, the dialogue actually began even before the establishment of the Church. Already in the Jewish diaspora throughout the Mediterranean world the conflict of world-views that set a Semitic, desert-based monotheism over against the agrarian polytheism of the Mediterranean world had produced a literature that managed to embrace both worlds. Some of the texts that arose at the interface between Judaism and Hellenism eventually made their way into the Christian Bible. I am thinking of such texts as Ecclesiasticus, or Ben Sirach, the Books of the Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Psalms of Solomon, and such works ofjewish Hellenism as Tobit and Judith. Even the Old Testament has a Hellenistic element in it. In the end the interaction of Judaism and Hellenism produced that extraordinary figure, Philo of Alexandria. Philo seems to have not known Hebrew, yet he is deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, was a leader of the large Jewish community in Alexandria, and in AD 39 took part in an embassy to Rome to plead with the Emperor Caligula for the religious rights of the Jews of his native city. And yet at the same time he is thoroughly familiar with the pagan culture of the Hellenized Roman empire. It is probably no coincidence that his works were preserved by Christians as an important part of the larger Christian tradition, and not by the Jewish community. As a contemporary of Christ he shows us the kind of Judaism within which it was possible for Christianity to grow and develop intellectually and theologically into the later synthesis of the Fathers. 73

38 This dialogue between the Church and the surrounding culture continued throughout the first centuries of the Christian era. It didn't really come to an end until the ancient world itself came to end in Byzantium and in the West. The Fathers of the Church were well aware of the intellectual and spiritual currents of their day. Many of them were at the forefront of contemporary intellectual life. And as a result they incorporated into their thought - to the extent that this was consistent with the Tradition of the Church and the Apostolic faith - the fruits of almost a thousand years of philosophical and spiritual reflection. Some of the better educated of them thought of classical culture as a kind of preparation for the Gospel, as a human cultural effort, guided by the Logos, which could in the end only find its fulfilment in Christ. Their deepest intuition was perhaps the realization that for the Incarnation to take place, the created world had to be 'God-friendly'. It had to be of such a nature as to welcome the presence of the Son. And if, by nature, the created world welcomes the Son, then by nature it will also welcome those who liken themselves to the Son through the virtues. Those who lead a Christ-like life will inevitably find themselves making decisions that are related to the deepest purposes of God for the world, no matter in what field they happen to be working. The reason for this can be seen in the way that Maxim us has related virtuous behaviour to ontology. The virtuous life is actually more 'real' than its antithesis, a life led in revolt against God and in opposition to one's own true nature. One must actually work in order to sin, for the natural state of all creatures is conformity with the deep will of their Creator. Perhaps this is why sin is so repetitive, while the life of the spirit is always new. God is simply more inventive than we are. What, then, have I been trying to do? I have tried to identify and locate in history what I consider to be the world-view prevalent in our universities and in the minds of those who guide the activities of our country and the West in general. In this mental world what we can perceive is what is real, and the most penetrating analysis of what we perceive is provided by the mathematical insights into its functioning offered by the physical sciences. The result of this objectifying view of nature is to eliminate the beholder, that is, ourselves, mankind, from the picture of the world we carry in us. At the same time I am suggesting that the understanding of the Fathers enables us to integrate human activity into our view of what is real, and 74 thereby secure an ontological foundation for a life in accordance with the will of the Creator, a style oflife, therefore, which will not lead inexorably to the destruction of creation. An ecologically sound life-style becomes a life-style in accordance with God. At the same time the whole of man's spiritual life becomes not just a psychological or even 'spiritual' return to the Father. It becomes a return to life in harmony with the deep structure of creation. We see here the ecological aspect of the virtues, the 'ecology of the virtues', whereby a life lived according to God, in imitation of God in Christ, is also a life that will preserve the integrity of the created world. The detail we shall have to work out ourselves, probably with tears. It can only be worked out properly, however, in relation to the spiritual life of man. Thus a framework is provided for all of life, and all aspects of human life are brought into a single integrated whole. In all probability we don't really need the 'neopatristic synthesis' advocated by Fr Georges Florovsky in order to face the crisis of our time. We need simply to make our own the synthesis of the Fathers. 75 BISHOP BASIL OF SERGIEVO Oxford

39 A SOJOURN ON THE HOLY MOUNTAIN IN THE YEAR 1949 Part Two Easter Sunday 9 April Got up feeling very tired at about 8 am and sat in the spacious reception room with its bay windows overlooking the court and its walls covered with rows of prints of Serbian nobility. I think Chilandari must be one of the last places in the world which provides portraits of King Peter II of Yugoslavia and gives him a prominent position. I talked for a while to a rather sleepy Philaretos, who told me that he came from Crete, had been in a concentration camp in Germany, returned to Greece to find his father and two brothers dead, and was persuaded by his mother to become a monk. (I later discovered that he is the only Greek here, and that he is still a novice, going from monastery to monastery.) Pavlos then appeared with the usual refreshments; and after I had written some of my diary, he invited me to his room to drink a glass of banana. There I met two other Serbian monks, the one very quiet and sombre, the other very loquacious in rather bad Greek. We played at breaking red eggs, a game in which the monks took a delightfully childish pleasure. The conversation was rather one-sided. It turned on the evils committed by the Pope in seeking worldly power as well as spiritual authority. (It seemed tactful not to draw parallels from Byzantine history.) Later on I lunched with Pavlos in his own room, and at last had a real meal of cheese, and soup, and roast lamb, with lots of red wine. The Serbs eat their cheese before their meal. So much rich food after so long an abstinence soon gave me a stomach ache, and I reacted like everyone else, by having to have a siesta. I was awakened at 3 pm from a very deep sleep, and more or less bullied into going to church by Pavlos. I had a bad headache and felt not very religious; but mercifully the church service lasted for only about an hour. Afterwards I went with more of the monks to what can be best described as their 'common room', where I sat between the Abbot and his deputy. Coffee, cognac, jam, and red eggs were served. Here I got talking to Moses, a young and large monk, whom I had heard chanting in the church. He took me to his room to help him identify some stamps in his quite large collection; and we soon got on quite friendly terms. His Greek 76 was better than most, for he had started in Salonica. Having done his philatelic business, we went for a walk together, first of all to the beehives where there were other monks sitting and taking the sun. I have never heard such a hum as the bees were making. I took a photograph of three monks sitting there, but I fear that they noticed and posed themselves accordingly. From there we went up the hill at the back of the monastery, and I took a picture of this lovely view before the sun went down. We sat there and talked for some time. Moses was very interested about my life in England, and especially our universities; and I did my best to cope with his flood of questions. In tum I asked him about Chilandari, and I told him how very like Cambridge it was. On his reckoning there are twentysix Serbian monks and only five Russians here, apart from the one Greek. On the way back we stopped at a little cottage with a church attached; and there we met a wild old Russian monk with long white hair and beard, who had obviously been over-celebrating his Easter. When he was told that my name was Don, nothing could stop him bringing out a bottle of raki, some glasses, and some red eggs-because his home was on the River Don. He chattered on in a mixture of Slav and Russian and Greek, and showed us a musical instrument that he had made out of a pumpkin and waxed string, and before we knew where we were, there were four glasses of strong raki aboard us and we were both quite merry. But we went back before the gates of the monastery closed and up to Moses's room, and found the Representative (another aged monk) and had more raki. About 7.30 Pavlos came back to look for us; and the four of us adjourned to his room for supper, taking the bottle with us. We all got merry-and mercifully (since my hand is tired from writing) I vowed not to record on paper what happened subsequently... To bed at about Having successfully talked my way out of going to an early morning service, I lay in bed until8 am. I spent the rest of the morning visiting the monastery with Moses, who knew far more about it than most monks do. He is, I feel, a very remarkable person and his intelligence combined with his gentle and kindly nature helps to increase my ever-mounting respect for the monks of Athos and my general veneration for them. The church at Chilandari, dedicated to the Panagia, is I think the best preserved of all from the outside, for there have been no later additions of plaster or colouring, and the fourteenth-century brickwork and architectural details remain unsullied. Inside I made notes of several objects of interest. Most of the inscriptions are in Serbian, but none very early. Historically the 77

40 most important item is the tomb of St Symeon-otherwise King Stephen Nemanya-the founder of the Serbian dynasty, who made the Serbian church independent of Constantinople. His son, who became a monk under the name of Sabbas, is also held in high esteem. The frescos in the church (originally of the fourteenth century) have been repainted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but with respect for the originals. The iconostasis is of the usual magnificence, and beneath it can be seen parts of the earlier marble screen of considerable proportions. The coloured mosaic marble flooring which extends into the hieron, though covered by planks, is very fine. Of dilettante and antiquarian interest is the painting in the exonarthex of the three-headed angel, representing the Holy Trinity. I was shown into the museum, where there is a good collection of icons (Greek and Serbian), including those earlier in the iconostasis of the church; and at least two very important tapestries of the fourteenth century. I tried to get a photograph of the south side of the church, which is very hard because of its cramped position. I eventually succeeded from the window of the room of a funny little monk, where of course we had to drink some raki. From there Moses took me to the Tower of St Sabbas, and we went up to the top of it. Out of the top window, at great personal risk, I took a photograph looking down on the church. Then we sat up there talking about England until Pavlos shouted across that I was expected for lunch. I found that I was to have the honour of eating with the Abbot. Conversation was limited at first, apart from formalities; but after some wine he betrayed all the humanity which sparkled in his eyes. He was most interested in the state of affairs in England; but he seemed to base most of his ideas on the subject on Ivanhoe and The Mill on the Floss which he had read in Serbian translations. He was convinced that another war was inevitable and that it would be destructive beyond all calculation. On the whole I found him to be a wonderfully contented and pleasant old man, with a shrewd and not very worldly intelligence. He pressed wine on me lavishly, and taught me the Russian proverb that one should never stop at two glasses, but always have a third for the Holy Trinity, a fourth for the four Gospels, a fifth one for the Pentateuch, and so on up to the Twelve Apostles. The result was that I slept like a pig from 1.15 to 3.15 pm. On the Holy Mountain the monks really do sleep at midday and not in the early afternoon. Having dined at am, they retire automatically at about or 1 pm for about an hour. Vespers happens about 3 pm 78 (at least at Chilandari). When I finally awoke from my stupor, I first of all took a very posed picture of Pavlos and the other monks (at their request); and then I went to visit the refectory which is now only used three times a year. It is covered with wall paintings. At the back of the refectory is where the monks collect their wine rations once a week, and of course we had to have a glass of sweet wine (very like thick cider). Later on Moses took me to the library. The funny little monk from whose room I had earlier in the day taken a photograph turned out to be the librarian, but Moses knew a great deal more about it all. It is quite a small collection of books built into the south side of a little chapel. Most of the books (manuscripts for the most part) are Serbian, but I saw some good parchment Gospels of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Also of interest to me were some chrysobulls of Michael and Andronikos Palaiologos and Stephen Dushan, all with their gold seals attached, and signed in cinnabar ink (No. 105 in the catalogue of Lampros), and a MS of StJohn Chrysostom, which is the most important work. From the library I went for a walk in the sunset with Moses, into the enchanting world of pear and olive trees to the left of the entrance. He is such a quiet and gentle person that it was a pleasure to be in his company even without saying much. When we got back he took me to see how the bells work. They have quite a system of chimes at Chilandari, which several times woke me in the night, but it did not cause me any annoyance. This is quite contrary to Greek practice. Greeks have little idea of how to make a musical sound with bells. The general idea of the system here at Chilandari is a continuous treble worked by one hand on two small bells, six or seven notes, worked by rope and pulley with the other hand, and a wooden foot pedal connected to a large 'bass' to mark the intervals. Just below the bell tower is the room traditionally associated with St Sabbas, and the oldest part of the monastery. On the way down from the belfry we met the bell-ringera nice dirty old Russian monk-and we were taken to his room for some lovely honey (from the comb), walnuts, and the inevitable raki; and from there we headed for Moses's room to have another little raki before supper, and I wrote down for him at his request in Greek the English monetary system. I had already decided to go back to Vatopedi the next day to collect my forgotten letter, and to go from there to Konstamonitou, leaving out Zographou, which seemed to be mostly nineteenth century and rather dull. So supper was to be a sort of farewell trio of Moses, Pavlos, and 79

41 myself. I went to join Pavlos; but Moses did not appear for some time. So I had the occasion to have an intimate talk with Pavlos. I asked him (after some more raki) why men became monks. Naturally, I was trying to elicit his own 'tragic story' out of him. But it took some time. First he told me that there were three categories of monks: those who came because the life seemed easy; those who came because of some great crisis in their life; and those prompted by real religious fervour. Finally, after much hedging, and much laughter because I told him that I thought that he looked tragic and came under category two, he embarked on his own story. Briefly-although I promised not to write it down-it revolved round a girl, and the faithlessness of his best friend, as a result of which he had lost faith in himself, in all worldly friendships, and retired within himself. One thing, he said, was essential to be able to withstand the rigours of the monastic life, and that was the power of being contented within oneself and with oneself, requiring nothing more than the company of one's own mind. And all his past was now a closed book over which he could laugh because he had found that contentment. When Moses fmally arrived, Pavlos and I knew more about each other than most people discover in months. From there on the evening proceeded on more normal and sociable lines, and after a fair amount of food and wine I made a sketch of Moses, as I had already done of Pavlos, to the great amusement of both. And so to bed at 10 o'clock. Tuesday 11 April This was a simple day to record. I spent all the morning working on a sketch of the back of the monastery, and had some lunch, feeling rather sad, with Pavlos. He impressed upon me the impossibility of getting a general idea of Mount Athos because each monk is, after all, an individual and a human being and most of them have a story to tell behind their career which they struggle hard not to divulge. About 1 pm I left Chilandari with very genuine regret. I felt that by leaving I was somehow betraying myself, somehow failing-although I know that I could never really live there and partake of all the dying traditions of forgotten empires that the Orthodox religion entails. It was just something that I had found in two people, apart from the ritual aspect of their religion, that reminded me of aspirations that I once cherished, and of friendships so sincere that they needed no explanation. Pavlos put on a straw hat and came some of the way with me. At the entrance we met the mad old Russian monk. He 80 seemed to be quite drunk. But I had to take a picture of him. Then we walked very slowly down the path and over some vineyards, sat down to smoke a cigarette under a cypress tree, and as I said goodbye, Pavlos pressed some cigarettes into my hand. He had no desire to come with me back to the world. And he left me suddenly, with a light-heartedness that showed clearly which way along my way his interests and his life lay. The road from Chilandari to Esphigmenou was one of the easiest on Athos, provided that one does not get lost. At Esphigmenou I stopped to see my horse-racing friend, and he took me into the church, where I was shown round by a rather dirty old monk with bad breath who told me a lot of tales about miracles. The church is a nineteenth-century building and its only recommendation is the iconostasis-a gilded structure with lovely little scenes from the Bible carved out and painted in bright colours. I was encouraged to stay for the night but decided to press on. The two and a half hours' walk to Vatopedi, which had been such misery the Saturday before, seemed comparatively simple when the sun was shining and the sea a deep blue down below. When I reached the point in sight ofvatopedi where the road joins the sea, I had a paddle and lay down on the pebbles for half an hour. Finally I reached the monastery about 6 pm. At Vatopedi I was received by the same two monks, who were taking tea with a couple of old Russian monks from the Russian skete at Karyes. So I had a very welcome cup of tea instead of the usual coffee and raki. The two monks knew quite well what I had come back for, and it was a mercy that I had done so because they were planning to send my letter on to Zographou the next day. A Greek cruiser had just anchored offshore and some officers and men were visiting the monastery. The sound of music wafting inland from the ship's wireless was causing some excitement among the monks. After a very good supper of roast lamb and potatoes, cheese, red eggs, and good wine, I wrote my diary and retired to bed. Wednesday 12 April I left Vatopedi for Konstamonitou at 8 am. The path is very hard to find and of course I lost it, and this time seriously, because I went more than an hour out of my way and all up hill. The paths on Athos are really most complicated, and one can never cut across in what one knows from the map to be the right direction because of the height and density of the bushes. In the end I found a house with a small church and went to inquire. This turned out to be a Romanian offshoot of Vatopedi; and the 81

42 usual hospitality was offered to me in the form of coffee, raki, and jam. One of the four monks there spoke good Greek, and showed me their church (quite modern) and talked to me for a while about the situation in Europe and particularly in Romania, where he had relatives. When I left, he sent one of the monks to show me the way, which was very helpful. He was a kind old man and came a long way with me. The path went steeply up to the top of the ridge which divides the mountain of Athos; and the sun was shining brightly. It took me about an hour to get up, at the end of which I was awash with sweat. Just over the other side of the hill I found a good spring, and I took off all my clothes and had a good bath. Then I washed some underclothes and sat in the sun and changed into dry clothes and ate an egg and some bread which the Romanian had given me. From there I went on to Konstamonitou, which was an easy walk of about half an hour. From above, the monastery looked like another version of Esphigmenou-another monastery which had given up any pretensions to greatness. Closer inspection rather confirmed this view. I arrived there at about 1.15 pm when all the monks had gone for their rest. And at the same time there arrived by mule from Zographou monastery a very old man with a white beard. Together we were shown upstairs to the guest room; and there we waited for some twenty minutes before anyone appeared. Looking down on the court, the monastery had a grey seminary appearance. It is a small, poor house with about 25 monks at present. When the master of ceremonies turned up (a pallid and aged monk of the uncultured, superstitious variety), coffee etc. were served. He was called Modestos. A modest lunch was being prepared the while-an interval of one hour; and the old man talked to me about his travels which were wide but not very interesting. He was touring all the monasteries by mule as a pilgrim and talked much of the proof of God's miracles wrought by icons. He told me of the miracle of the icon done by St George at Zographou. It seems that there was a dispute about the identity of the saint to be depicted in the church, the monks being for St George, others for St Demetrios. In the end it was decided to leave a blank icon overnight in the church, with guards on the door. The next morning the Archbishop broke the seal on the door, and pointed in amazement at a newly finished icon of St George. His finger stuck fast to the icon, and it had to be sawn off. Such is the tale of the icon which was truly 'unmade by human hands'. After lunch Modestos showed me the church-a nineteenth-century construction with little to commend it except an icon of St Stephen and one 82 of the Virgin and Child which must both be twelfth century. I then inspected their ingenious water supply which works by rope and pulley from a balcony down to a river some distance away. Then I set off for the monastery of Docheiariou, about an hour and a half down hill and then up and down along the coast. Mercifully I remembered when I was still at the gate that I had again forgotten my letter; so I did not have to go back so far this time. On my way I visited what I thought was the arsenal of Konstamonitou. Actually it turned out to be the arsenal of Zographou. A ragged and dirty old monk there showed me the church, and then gave me a huge glass of ouzo. Then, when he saw me looking for a pencil to write something down, he made me a present of one of his own-a very typical gesture of Athos. From there, after a very hot walk in a baking evening sun, I reached Docheiariou at 6 pm. The monasteries on this side of the Mountain of course have the benefit of sunset and I was at once struck by the colourful appearance of this monastery, sloping down to the water's edge and topped by a fine grey tower. Fr Benjamin, the guest-master, a rather plump and cheerful monk, took to me at once, as I to him. He gave me the best room, and then we sat on the balcony looking at the sunset and talking as if we were old friends, until he went to make me some supper. (His theories about the moral behaviour of the English with regard to women were very strange, and I hastened to correct them.) Supper in the kitchen was very good, with salad, cheese, lamb, and three poached eggs, as well as lots of good red wine. My heart warmed to Benjamin as a good, honest, pious monk, with not much learning and no pretensions, but a heart of gold. I was interested to hear that the good names of Moses and Pavlos at Chilandari were more or less common knowledge in the nearby monasteries. Thursday 13 April Docheiariou, with 25 monks, is an enchanting little monastery. Its little court, quite swamped by its tall church, runs up the hillside from the sea, and is surrounded by a variety of gaily coloured buildings. It clearly had to be painted. So after two cups of tea, I went some distance away and started on a bit of the entrance. After about an hour, Benjamin came to tell me that the church was now open. I had already been round the outside and noted two marble relief slabs on either side, which probably date from the original eleventh-century structure. Only the south side preserves "ts original brickwork, the rest having been plastered over. Internally the 83

43 church is very impressive. There is an exonarthex with open arcades; and then an inner narthex divided into sections, the inner part of which, a large rectangular building with four columns, is bigger than the church itself. The whole building is covered with frescos, perfectly preserved. The exonarthex has the usual scenes of martyrs, the naos the complete cycle of feasts and so on of the Cretan school-fine examples of stylized severity. From there I visited the library, which is housed on the second floor of the tower. I had the company of the librarian, a dear and gentle old monk with a mellifluous voice. The only books of any special note were a Menologion of the eleventh century (Lampros no. 5) and a thirteenth-centurytetraevangelion with four small-page miniatures (Lampros no. 39). I took some pictures from the window. But then it was 11.30, the monastery's lunch time. I took my lunch again alone with Benjamin who, among other things, told me I was the nicest of the foreign visitors that he had had to cope with. After lunch I finished my painting; and since all the monks were now having their rest, I began another one. After that was done, I managed to find one monk to show me the side chapel where is the miraculous icon of the Virgin Gorgoepekoos (almost invisible owing to the attentions of the devout), and then the refectory nearby, which is completely decorated with eighteenth-century paintings of saints and their miracles. Then I said my farewells to Benjamin whom I found sorting out the monks' rations, and at about 5.30 I set out for Xenophontos monastery. I went partly along the beach and then steeply up and down again to the rather grey little monastery of Xenophontos. The dirty old monk at the gate had been in England and the USA (he left in 1901), and directed me to the guest-rooms. Here I was shown into the kitchen; and while coffee and the rest were being prepared for me by a boy, a taciturn old monk came to talk to me. He was from Asia Minor. The difference between a cenobitic monastery and an idiorrhythmic one is noticeable. Before long I was installed in a rather large room facing the sea; and my meal was brought to me by the epitropos, who insisted that I eat it before sunset (at 6.20). The meal consisted of potatoes, very salty fish, cheese, and wine, with rather mouldy bread. Left then to my own devices, I retired to bed at Friday 14 April Up at 7 am. Then after a short breakfast, including an egg from the Romanians of yesterday, followed by a long period of waiting until the monks came out from their morning service, I wandered down to the gate 84 to see my friend from America, and there I listened to a long tirade against the sinfulness of man, most of which was addressed to a peasant who had just looked in, and who put pretty cogent arguments for the blindness of God to man's sufferings. The gate porter fmally had recourse to the benefits accruing to Christians in the next world, with which the peasant, as an Orthodox, had reluctantly to agree. The porter then spoke about the prosperity of England and the USA as being due to their honesty and integrity. At about 9.15 I went back to the kitchen; and suddenly a meal of soup and two large fish and wine was put before me. I had forgotten that in a coenobium the monks eat after the morning service. There was nothing to do but eat it, as I was not sure where I would be getting my next meal. But my stomach was so unused to eating in the morning that I suffered for the rest of the day. A monk in the end appeared to show me the two churches. He had a manuscript history of the monastery written by some monk who was more interested in it than I was. Another monk joined us; and the two were very good examples of the most uncultivated and superstitious monks on Athos, though ready to be very friendly. The small church of StGeorge at Xenophontos-the original katholikon-has various points of interest, notably the sixteenth-century frescos of the Cretan variety and the floor mosaics. The new katholikon of the nineteenth century has little to commend it, except the two very fine mosaics of Sts George and Demetrios of the fourteenth century. I also noted two interesting panel icons. Generally the monastery is a little depressing. The court is dominated by the walls on the north and east rather like a prison, and its life now would seem to be a reflection of this fact. Perhaps I did not take enough count of the spiritual life of the monastery as shown in its hospitality towards its guests. It is often hard for a visitor to guess the true life of these places-and often, as at Docheiariou and elsewhere, one finds such goodness (perhaps the best) among the humblest of the servants of the monastery. Anyway, I had barely returned to the guest-room (having looked at the refectory on my way), when I heard the (welcome) sound of the caique approaching which was going to take me to Daphni. So I quickly packed my bags and rushed down to get it. This cost me 5000 drachmas, but it got me to Daphni at about There I bought some necessities and had a cup of coffee. But there seemed to be no boat going to the Lavra that day. So about 1.45 I set out to walk to the monastery of Simonopetra. The road went very steeply up for about half an hour and then mostly along the side 85

44 of the hill through quite a lot of mist above the sea. On the way I met a little monk corning down, who carne from a skete of Iviron. He typically enough launched into his own account of the cosmic situation when he heard that I carne from England. About 3 prn I reached the fantasy of Sirnonopetra, perched on the top of a rock rising some 1000 feet above the sea. I went straight to the guest-room, where I found the cook, now no longer a monk, but formerly a deacon. He had been pressed into the army in 1941 on the order of Metaxas that all monks at that time not actually on Athos should be conscripted. With him I met a young man who had come to Athos as a novice and has been touring the monasteries looking for a spiritual horne. He had been here for about fifteen days, but says he does not like it. After I had been sitting for some time on the incredible balcony which looks down on the sea in the bay with the mountain towering above, the Abbot in person carne to find me and conducted me all round the church and monastery, most of which owing to serious fires in past years in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been damaged. Then together with another very pleasant and intelligent monk we went to the library-all printed works but with handsome bindings and all scrupulously kept. Supper I ate in my room at 6 prn. And after that the young novice carne to see me. I told him about Pavlos's three categories of monks, and asked him why he wanted to be a monk. He answered that from his youth he had always attended church and had been a religious person. During the war his mother had died; and after the war his three brothers were killed by the Andartes. So he had no ties in the world, and had come to Athos almost as a refugee. This led us on to much deep conversation and to a deeper affection for the young man on my part. [Parts of this discussion here follow.] On the whole my impressions of Sirnonopetra were favourable. The place is clean and well kept, the site is astounding, and the people (from the Abbot down) charming. There are only thirty monks, and most of them seem to be from Asia Minor. One most intriguing feature of the place is its 'comfort stations', to look down the hole of which may prove to be an effective remedy for constipation. Sirnonopetra is a splendid establishment, despite its dearth of Byzantine interest. It also has the most confortable bed that I have yet found on the Holy Mountain. 86 Saturday 15 April Up at about 7arn, having written my diary for some two hours before going to Gregoriou monastery, which I reached in about three-quarters of an hour, on a very steep, up and down path. Gregoriou is a quaint place, mainly modern, built on the edge of the sea in a rather crowded fashion, so that there is no proper courtyard. The monks seemed very pleasant and insisted on giving me a meal about 10.15, which was very welcome. I found that the young novice had followed me from Sirnonopetra (despite all the efforts of the Abbot to make him stay), and we had our meal together, together with a visiting priest who was very voluble. It was impossible to see either the church or the library because all the monks with the keys were asleep preparing for the vigil before the feast of St Thomas. So, after a wander around the place, I left about 12.30, along with the young novice. It was by now very hot indeed with a bright summer sun; and the road to Dionysiou was more up than down. There is one very beautiful spot where the path crosses a torrent and there is a view up the gorge to a huge waterfall, which comes directly over the precipice on the north-west flank of the mountain. After almost an hour of hard sweating we reached the little cove just below Dionysiou.... The monastery was built high on a rock above the sea, and owing to its cramped position is a very compact little place. Here again there is no real court, and everything is dominated by the church and the cloisters of the refectory running along the south side, which bear some remarkable frescos of the Revelation. There is a curious white bell-tower and a fine sixteenthcentury defence tower, in which the library is housed. At the monastery we were received by an aged monk who put us in an ante-room while he went to wake the archontaris, which took nearly half an hour, during which I fell asleep. Our host, however, appeared in the end; and after giving us coffee etc., ushered us into a single room-not very clean and with a bumpy bed. There he sat down; and for about an hour talked to me about the differences between Orthodoxy and Protestantism. We argued long about the efficacy of icons and of praying to the saints; but of course I was banging my head against a brick wall. I thought I had scored a point by observing that icons were made by human hands and not by God; but of course in this monastery they have an icon painted by St Paul; and this did not get me very far. Finally we gave it up; and he went to find the librarian. He turned out to be a most remarkable and educated old man whose name was Euthyrnios, who has done a great deal 87

45 with his library and really knows about it. Among its MSS there is some very interesting material-particularly an eleventh-century Tetraevangelion with the finest full-page illustrations that I have yet seen; there is a twelfthor thirteenth-century Eklogion equally well illustrated. Among the printed works I saw the earliest edition of the Suda Lexicon, and of several editions of Aldus and Stephanus. From the library Euthymios took me to the refectory and the church, which is in two parts (old and new), both finely painted in the Cretan style... The church has paintings of the Cretan school as well, with predominant blues and reds, and a fine assortment of icons. Before sunset I had time to go down to the sea and take a photograph looking up to the monastery. Supper happened about 6.30 together with the archontaris and the young novice. I was then taken to see the Abbot, a man of whom I had heard much that was good. I sat in a room that was lit only by the dying rays of the sun and talked to him until the semandron and the bells for the start of the evening service rang out. The Abbot is indeed a remarkable man, young as abbots go (about sixty years of age) and with a wonderfully gentle and slow voice and manner. His head seems to be always full of thoughts which came out without any effort, and his eyes were the eyes of one who has reached far into his own soul and into the souls of others. He showed a good knowledge of all the subjects which he discussed, which was the more surprising in that it seemed to go with a kind of British Israelite faith in the authenticity of the Book of Revelation and a form of superstition which did not at all suit him. Soon after leaving him, I went to part of the all-night vigil of St Thomas in the church. I was put in the stall next to the Abbot; and I was intrigued to find that, deeply religious though he is, he makes his responses and chants in the same casual way as the other monks. I stayed for about two hours, most of which was taken up with chanting. There was only one monk with anything like a good voice, and he was very moving. I got very sleepy about 11 pm. Sunday 16 April Up at 6.30, but I had to wait around until the monks came out of their morning service. They surely do work hard, especially after an all-night vigil. For the first time the archontaris invited me to eat in the refectory with the monks. The morning meal occurs about 9 am, the evening at about 5 pm. The food of cold gruel, hard bread, smelly fish and wine made me nearly sick. There is no talking with the meal and a monk reads 88 from the Gospels from a pulpit above the tables and the Abbot sat at the end of the room. Some of the monks ate heartily, but others seemed too tired to be able to cope with any food. As it was a feast day, the meal ended not with the usual prayers but with a sort of ceremony. Two large candles were lit and the Abbot and another monk exchanged prayers with a good deal of incense. Then half a loaf of bread was handed round to all the company as each picked a morsel from it. The Abbot then processed into the cloister and stood there while the monks flled past him, genuflecting as they went. Back in the guest quarters a few monks gathered round and glasses of wine and coffee were produced. One of these, a tall saintly-looking old man, had worked with the English in building railways in the Sudan. Conversation soon developed into the usual topics. Among the ordinary monks these are three: the iniquity of the Jews (and the current desecration of Jerusalem); the misunderstanding of the Catholics; and the prophetic recapture of Constantinople, which will put everything right again. These three topics are a quiet nostalgia for the Byzantine tradition, but after a while on Athos one does get a little weary of them. I left Dionysiou at 10 am under a burden of bad food and wine, and made my way up a tenuous track which goes high above the sea and certainly has its exciting moments. I was heading for the monastery of St Paul. Stupidly enough, the path goes right down to the sea and then up again to the monastery, which I found to be very perverse on a hot morning. St Paul's is perhaps the only one of the monasteries really built on the slopes of Athos, in a very commanding position, but its construction is modem and rather depressing. A simpleton of a monk showed me the church, which has not a lot to commend it, and then gave me some coffee and a lot of twaddle about Jerusalem; and in about half an hour I was on my way, leaving the monasteries behind me on the long and difficult trek over to the west side of the mountain where there are no monasteries but only sketes and kellia. In about half an hour I reached New Skete, a collection of little houses and churches on the hillside near the sea. Everything was quite still and dead, it being hot and midday. I waited a while at the main church; and then pressed on to the skete of Agia Anna. This is a larger (and older) foundation but a version of the same thing. It stands high on the mountainside with a wonderful view down to the sea. Getting to it needed a very steep climb of more than half an hour which reduced me to near ruin and a pool of sweat. I got to the main church and guest-house at about 2.30 pm, 89

46 where a large and friendly monk gave me coffee, raki and a good meal of soup, fish and potatoes, after which I climbed out on to a concrete balcony and passed out for an hour. Later on I met Fr Anthirnos, a tiny monk with a lot of talk, who insisted on taking me into his house. All the monks of St Anne's earn their keep by handicrafts, mostly by the making of priestly headgear. Anthimos like many other monks in various places on the Mountain had sheltered three British soldiers here at his house when the Germans invaded Greece, and many were shipped out by caique dressed as monks or by submarine to Egypt. Anthirnos's love for the English manifested itself in an affection for me which was quite embarrassing. He showed me the addresses of the three persons, and also of Brig. John Hunt and two sergeants who stayed in his house in 1945 and made the ascent of Mount Athos. Then he showed me his workshop and the icons that he was painting (for sale in Athens and Salonica), and very nasty too, over-coloured and in the sentimentalized quasi-italianate style favoured by the tasteless populace of Greece. After a deal more of affection I managed to get out of his house on the plea of visiting a little church, the cemetery church built by the Bishop of Naupaktos in And after that I sat on the balcony listening to the frogs, until called for a very simple supper in the kitchen of the guest-house with the archontaris and an older monk. Prayers were said before and after the meal, and it was home in on me how much stricter was the life of the sketes than that of the big monasteries. I then found that I had forgotten my pencil so was unable to write my diary. Instead I read most of the Book of Revelation and went to bed frightened if not much wiser. I also read chapters 38 and 39 of Ezekiel on the advice of Anthirnos, but could not see much relative to the Communist menace. Monday 17 April Possibly my worst day. I left St Anne's after some coffee about 7.30 am. They say that it is about 2" hours' walk to Kafsokalyvia but in fact it is more like 3 to 4 hours. I would say that it is one of the hardest roads on Athos-when one finds it. Anthirnos carne with me for about 15 minutes to show me the way. The road continues on and up the gorge, and the summit of Athos high above is very steep. There comes a point after 30 minutes' climbing where the right path leads off to the right and climbs up and beyond a great spur of rock. I, not knowing the way, went straight on, on what appeared to be a path and had been used as such. This led up 90 to the bed of a torrent, which I was fool enough to think was a path, because it looked like one. It went straight up the mountainside through small stones which gave no foothold. Somewhere my bag which I was carrying on the end of my stick slipped and my camera and everything else fell out and went rolling down. My camera got a severe bumping on the stones, but seems to have survived. In the end this wall of a path petered out altogether at the bottom of a vast scree; and I did not know which way to tum. On looking back, I cannot think how I managed to get up that scree, stumbling and slipping at every step and several times falling on my side. There was much swearing on the Holy Mountain that day. Once at the top where the shrubs began again, I could see that the only place I was heading for was the summit of Mount Athos, over to the left, and this I tried to make for; but after battling with trees and shrubs, and remembering something about wolves at St Anne's, I went back to my scree and sat down. The only hope seemed to be to go right the way back that I had come with such effort. I went back to the scree and if necessary I resolved to go back to St Anne's for the night. So I tumbled and fell all the way down the scree and down that perpendicular torrent-very hungry, angry and tired-and when I reached the place where the track divided I tossed between my courage and my common sense, and I decided that I would not go on down for some food and rest. So I turned off to the left, and climbed steeply up for about half an hour, but this time on a proper track, and reached the ridge. It was raining a bit to add to my depression. But now I knew that I was at last on the right road, which was a great comfort in this wild terrain. So, four hours after leaving StAnne's, I reached a collection of houses and churches. This turned out to be Kerasia, a kellion of the Lavra; and here I was treated to genuine if simple hospitality in the form of water, beans and wine, which were more welcome that I can say. From there a boy, I suppose a novice, with splendidly Raphaelite hair showed me the way on to Kafsokalyvia. The road was again very steep but downhill. But about 2 prn I tottered into a collection of houses which I knew must be Kafsokalyvia. This is known as the artists' colony of Athos, and is an idiorrhythrnic skete of artisan monks, who earn a living by wood-carving, icon-painting and other crafts. Numbers have fallen since the war, but there are still about 75 monks living in this sheltered spot, thickly wooded and climbing steeply out of the sea. The place was dead when I arrived; and after drinking some water from a spring, I made for a pretty little house to ask where 91

47 the guest-house might be. There I was shown into a room where an old monk was sitting in a comer carving little wooden boxes for sale. Mter coffee and raki he showed me his little church and then to the house of the archontaris which was just below. He pointed out to me the guesthouse at the top of the village and told me to ring the bell in the belfry if the keeper was not at home. This turned out to be the case, so I made my way up to the guest-house, changed my clothes which were very wet, and climbed up the belfry and gave the bell a good ring. This gave the whole sleepy colony a start. It made me feel rather like the hunchback of Notre Dame. Soon a very old monk appeared from a house down below to ask who I was. Then I saw him toiling up the hill, and soon he arrived and opened up the guest-house for me, and gave me two large tots of raki. So after the old man's kindly offices, I lay down on the hard wooden couch provided and fell fast asleep. When I woke up at 5 pm, the guest-master had arrived-a fat and gentle monk called Athanasios; and coffee was soon put before me. Athanasios is a kind soul, quiet and devout. He first came to Athos from Asia Minor when he was sixteen, to be a pupil at the then flourishing college of icon-painting of the Josephite brothers in the colony. We talked for a while about England; and then (at my request) went down to his house to see some of his work. Although technically better than that of Anthimos, it was still of the over-sentimental style. But it was interesting to see the work in progress.... From there he took me to see the Josephite college, a big house which still shows evidence of past prosperity, though now inhabited only by two very old monks. It still has quite a substantial library (including MSS). Raki was now served to me on the balcony; and sitting there it was easy to imagine how easily artists can have worked in these surroundings. Then we went to call on Fr Arsenios, of whom I had heard about his wood-carvings-one of his larger works has recently been shipped to America. He lives alone in a little house at the top of the village, and though over ninety, is still working. Unfortunately he had only one piece to show me; but that was enough to show me his skill. It was a large icon of StGeorge and the Dragon, most wonderfully carved from its background with a delicacy that defied analysis. I shall always have happy memories of this devout and aged man, his blue and sunken eyes, content to spend his declining years in this remote spot, though gifted with a talent that could have earned him a fortune in the world. 92 From there we went to the house of a comparatively young monk-a big and jovial man. Sitting by lamplight, he was making paperknives with 'Agion Oros' written on them for the tourist trade in Athens and Salonica. They earned him a living. But they were rather nasty. He insisted on giving us ouzo, after which, it being now dark, we made our way back to the guest-house. Here I had a simple and quiet meal with Athanasios, who discussed with me about the affairs of the world. The meal was again preceded and concluded by long prayers. At about 9.30 I retired to bedto the same wooden couch on which I had fallen asleep this afternoon. It served me very well. Tuesday 18 April After an early meal of potatoes and eggs pressed upon me by Athanasios I took my leave of Kafsokalyvia and set out for the Lavra. The path winds along close above the sea and then dives into a valley and steeply up the other side. At the top of the hill I found a skete and stopped to ask if I was on the right route. For the first time on Athos I was attacked by a dog, but my hurt feelings were repaired by the kindness of two monks who gave me some ouzo and water. From there the path cuts across a fearsome scree which runs straight down to the sea and must be the result of a terrible landslide in ages past. Then it climbs up for half an hour to the ridge of a spur of hill, from which the luxurious and gentle slopes which support the monastery of the Great Lavra suddenly became visible. Just below me was the large skete of Prodromos, but it is all of the nineteenth century and did not appear very attractive. I pressed on to the Lavra. From here on the path is paved in the familiar Athos manner and runs gently down for about an hour, through thick scrub. It was a hot morning and I could hear the lizards and snakes darting into the grass at the side of the path as I stumbled along on the hard stones. Soon the vast walls of the Lavra came into sight; and by 1 pm I was being shown into the guest apartment. As I half-expected, the Lavra was a little blaze about guests and the fat and jovial archontaris could produce nothing but bread and cheese for lunch. After that and my siesta I was taken on a very planned and formal tour of the library and the katholikon. The Lavra for all its reputation does not breathe the air of magnificence and prosperity which surrounds Vatopedi. Later I called on my old friend Plato, the Deputy Abbot, who was entertaining the Bishop. Athos seems to sport a bishop of its own, who, however, lives in the world and only visits the Holy Moun- 93

48 tain on occasions. On my way back to the guest-room I ran into a very old man who it seems makes a point of entertaining all foreigners in his own room. I was to be no exception, and over two glasses of raki he showed me his book signed by many nationalities. Back at the guest-house I found that I had been moved into a room with a Greek timber merchant, because a visiting priest from Iviron had to have a whole room to himself. This annoyed me, partly because the timber merchant concerned was rather a dirty person who snored all night. Wednesday 19 April Spent most of the day painting. Today I met Fr Nikon from Karoulia; and today arrived two American officers in a commandeered Greek navy sloop. The contrast between these two events was an interesting conclusion to my stay on Mount Athos. The American officers were the worst and most loud-mouthed variety, and only justified their existence by giving me a passage to Salonica on their boat on the next day, which might otherwise have taken me about a week. Fr Nikon was a hermit who lived in the almost inaccessible colony called Karoulia, on the western slopes of the mountain. He was a Russian prince, a former officer in the Tsar's cavalry, who had taken the monastic habit thirty years ago-at least ten of which he has spent in rigorous eremitic retirement. He spoke perfect English (though hardly any Greek) and showed a remarkable understanding of various subjects, among them English literature. He was very well acquainted with the works of George Eliot. Under his robe he wore the purple vestment with embroidered gold cross and monograms indicative of the highest order of sanctity. And the saintliness of his bearing and the softness of his voice effectively drowned for me at least the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals of the two noisy Americans, and reduced to their correct proportions all that we pompously call Progress. DONALD M. NICOL Cambridge SYNDESMOS AND MOUNT ATHOS The Eighth Spiritual Ecology Camp The Holy and Imperial Monastery of Hilandar: 24 July- 6 August 2001 Introduction SYNDESMOS, the World Fellowship of Orthodox Youth, is the largest and oldest Christian youth organization in the world. Founded in 1953, largely by students and scholars of diverse ethnic origins at ~e Sain~ Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, the Fellowshtp contmues to develop co-operation and communication among Orthodox youth ~ov~ments and theological schools around the globe and to promote wtthm these organizations a deeper understanding of and commitment to their common faith. Today there are 126 member movements spread over 42 countries. Among its many and diverse activities, SYNDESMOS has organized theoretical and practical endeavours connected with environmental protection as understood in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition. One of the latter, the annual Athonite Spiritual Ecology Camp, has enjoyed enduring success. Indeed for the fifteen places available this year, there were over forty applica~ts. This event has, over the years, served to introduce the participants to the holiness and beauty of the Garden of the Mother of God. Surrounded by an abundance of natural splendour, the monks of Athos maintain a respect for the material world that is unique in all Christianity. The team members have been in a position to experience and appreciate this living symbiosis of respect for Creator and Creation in their work, conversations, and observations, and it was clear that they have been profoundly impressed. This summer was no exception. For the first time in eight years, the camp was held at a non-greek monastery. 1 The members o~ the group were from nine countries: Romania (5), Lithuania (2), Bulgana (2), Denmark (1), Albania (1), Syria (1), Greece (1), the United Kingdom (1), For notices on the previous seven camps and for more information about the SYND~SMOS Fellowship ( see my articles in the Annual Report of the Fnends o(.\founc A thas (1994), pp ; (1995), pp. 42-4; (1996), pp. 54-5; (1997), pp. 74-6, (1998). pp. 43-8; (1999), pp ; (2000), pp

49 and the Congo ( 1). The last, aside from the team leader (myself), was the only person who knew Greek. As in the past, this mixture of nationalities added the element of cultural variety to the programme: many firm friendships were made not only during the hours of work but also in leisure times and through the monastery's prayer life. Moreover, we all benefited from learning about each other's religious traditions and customs. Although our venue was the Imperial Serbian Coenobium of Hilandar, we did not have representation from Serbian SYNDESMOS members in our group. Participants at past camps in Greek monasteries have regularly enjoyed the company of young men from Yugoslavia and its former republics, but this year's lack was compensated for by the numerous pilgrims from Serbia, Bosnia and the Republic of Macedonia whom we befriended and who joined us in our ecological tasks. Hilandar The monastery of Hilandar lies on the north-east coast of the Athos peninsula about 2 kilometres inland, in the valley of a short river, encircled by low steep hills. Ranking fourth in the Athonite monastic hierarchy after the Great Lavra, Vatopedi, and Iviron, Hilandar was established as a Serbian monastic house in 1198 by the Grand Zhupan of Serbia, Stefan Nemanja (later the monk St Simeon), and his son Prince Rastko (later St Sava, first archbishop of Serbia). The rich archives of the monastery with 172 Greek, 154 Serbian, and 2 Bulgarian charters, some of which are elegantly displayed in a modem library and museum, have made it possible to reconstruct in considerable detail Hilandar's history in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and its growth in spiritual, economic, and political importance. Without exaggeration, Hilandar may be described as the centre of medieval Serbia's spiritual life and an important intermediary and representative in Serbia's relationship with Byzantium. The monastery also played a major role in the proliferation of writing, music, and literature in the Serbian lands during the Middle Ages. Altogether the library holds nearly 1,000 Slavonic manuscripts from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries and about 180 Greek codices and booklets from the same period. Since the tragic wartime fire in Belgrade's National Library (1941). Hilandar's is now the richest treasury of old Serbian literature and manuscripts. The entire corpus of Slavonic manuscripts and printed books has been copied on microfilm and can be consulted by scholars at the Hilandar Room of the Ohio State University in Columbus, USA. 96 Among Hilandar's works of art, the most notable is the highly venerated, miraculous icon of the Mother of God with Three Hands (the Tricberoussa or Troierucbitsa). This image is said to have been brought to Europe from Jerusalem by St Sava himself. Previous to this, it had shown its miraculous powers at the time of the iconoclast conflict by healing the hand of StJohn of Damascus (eighth century), the greatest Orthodox opponent of iconoclasm. In gratitude he added an extra hand to the icon. The main place of its veneration was Skopje, then capital of the Serbian empire, but after the Turkish conquest it was miraculously transferred to Hilandar. Because of its uniqueness, the Tricheroussa is revered as the abbess of the monastery and the icon is given an honourable position on the throne in the katholikon. Second to her is the parigoumenos, or 'supporting abbot' (currently Fr Moses). On 13 February 1199 St Simeon Nemanja died in the newly built katholikon and was buried in the south-western part of its nave. From his tomb, a vine sprouted in a miraculous way, breaking through the wall of the church. Many infertile women have been known to bear children after consuming the leaves of this vine. Today Hilandar is home to approximately thirty (mostly) Serbian monks, many of them young, educated, and multi-lingual. In recent years the monastery adopted the fully fledged cenobitic life and the buildings have been renovated and modernized. The SYNDESMOS Project On Tuesday 24 July the participants arrived by bus, train, or plane at Thessaloniki, where they were accommodated and given hospitality in a residence provided by the Metropolis of Neapolis and Stavroupolis and at the home of Dimitri Conomos. This day and the following were devoted to sight seeing: the city's Byzantine churches, its walls, and the sea front. On Wednesday evening the group attended Great Vespers for the feast of St Paraskeve (25 July) at a large parish church dedicated to the saint in the suburb of Menemeni. Metropolitan Dionysios introduced the visitors to the large congregation and provided them with a generous supper afterwards in the church hall. At the following morning, we departed for Ouranoupolis, taking the first bus from Thessaloniki's Halkidiki Bus Station. After receiving our Diamonitiria, we embarked on the Gorgoipikoos, which sailed at for Daphne. Upon arrival, we headed for the monasteryofvatopedi, where 97

50 we were received with enthusiasm and heart-felt hospitality. Our Romanians were delighted to meet a large group of their own countrymen who have made Vatopedi their monastic home. The same could be said for our Russian, English, and French speakers. The monastery ofvatopedi has proved itself to be a veritable syndesmos ('bond of unity') of many nationalities and peoples. Within a few hours we were given an informal lunch, attended Vespers, ate at the refectory, venerated the Holy Girdle and other relics after Compline, and visited the monastery's splendid museum. It was also a delightful surprise to meet Fr Raphael- formerly of the monastery of St John the Baptist in Essex, but now living in Romania- who had been visiting the Holy Mountain for several weeks. We spent the night in comfortable quarters at Vatopedi's new arcbondariki and rose early on Friday to attend the morning services and the Divine Liturgy. After the morning meal, Abbot Ephraim met with the group, spoke some words of encouragement, and presented each of us with a beautifully illustrated Vatopedi desk calendar. We set off by boat for Hilandar just as a helicopter landed on the beach near the monastery's main entrance. We were informed that Greece's former Prime Minister, Mr Constantine Mitsotakis, was paying a day visit to Vatopedi. This holy and venerable monastery was the venue of the first SYNDESMOS Spiritual Ecology Camp, held in the summer of 1994, and on many subsequent occasions the Fellowship's pilgrims have been made very welcome here. We wish to thank Abbot Ephraim and the community for their readiness to receive the SYNDESMOS representatives with so much eagerness and warmth. Because Hilandar's wharf was under repair, we were obliged to disembark at Esphigmenou, about an hour's walk from our destination. The burning midday sun sent temperatures soaring and on arrival at Hilandar we were completely exhausted, having covered the distance carrying heavy bags and rucksacks. To our delight and relief we were each offered some strong..jlivovica, loukoumi, iced water, and coffee in the monastery's spacious and elegant arcbondariki. There we were met by Hieromonk Metodije, who was to be our immediate contact for the duration of our stay. Before Vespers, the team went on an inspection tour of the immediate surroundings and some took the 30-minute walk to a sandy beach, where they were dismayed to see piles of garbage: glass, paper, plastic, and metallic objects that had been washed up or negligently discarded. We 98 were later informed that this was an almost insoluble problem since much refuse and waste drifts over from the holiday island of Thasos, or from passing vessels, or even from the Anatolian coast. Apparently on one occasion a number of dead sheep had floated over, the victims of a rogue forest fire on Thasos. Vespers was served in Church Slavonic at It was sung well and vigorously in the contemporary Serbian style by the young Yugoslav pilgrims, some of whom were students of theology in Belgrade and active members of church choirs at home. The meal that followed, taken in the old refectory, was simple and appetizing. After Compline, we met the other guests, as well as some of the monks, and engaged in discussions on various matters. Saturday 28 July was the commemoration of the Holy Prince Vladimir, equal-to-the-apostles: services began at and finished by The Divine Liturgy was followed by a festive meal in the refectory, after which the SYNDESMOS contingent was invited to assist in the clearing up. This turned out to be a twice-daily task ( diakonima) but not the principal preoccupation of the group over the following week. The real duty set by Hilandar Monastery for the working day ( ) was of two kinds: (a) clearing an enormous olive orchard of large rocks and rubble that had inundated the area as a result of a torrential overflow of water from the adjacent river. This watercourse had burst its banks during last October's cataclysmic rainfalls and the consequent flooding had brought with it a volley of stones, rocks, and pebbles that devastated the olive grove. The commission to clear the land of this mosaic of injury and to prepare the ground for new seeding was given to six of the young workers (the Dane, the Greek, and four of the Romanians); (b) clearing the hilly slopes around the fourteenth-century tower of King Milutin (located approximately half-way between the monastery proper and the sea) of heavy overgrowth-bushes, shrubs, branches, weeds, thorns, thistles, stones, and refuse. The remaining nine workers wielded picks, hoes, axes, shovels, cutters, scythes, forks, and rakes provided by the work supervisor, Fr Sava. Both jobs were extremely strenuous and tiring. We laboured under a blazing sun with temperatures averaging around 38 degrees. Fortunately the second team was protected for a part of the day by the shadow cast by the massive stone tower. Between the first meal of the day in the early morning and that following Vespers (around eleven hours later) little was provided by way of refresh- 99

51 ment or a snack. Upon our return to the monastery, we were occasionally offered some coffee, 'l'livovica, and loukoumi - so long as we returned before when the arcbondariki closed. However, there was a plentiful supply of clean, fresh, cold water from the ancient well of St Simeon and St Sava just beside the katholikon: it was a popular meeting place. Naturally, there was no work on Sunday, except for table clearing after the morning and evening meals. The SYNDESMOS party relaxed with the monks and guests at the monastery. After the services, the book and souvenir shop was opened for purchases of publications, wooden and metallic religious items, cassettes and CDs of church music, prayer ropes, incense, etc. At midday we decided to visit the only other monastic establishment in the immediate area, the monastery of Esphigmenou; about 50 minutes' walk from Hilandar. Unlike most of the other monasteries and sketes on the Athonite peninsula, which are within reach of other settlements and of Karyes, Hilandar and Esphigmenou are quite isolated. The nearest communities are Vatopedi and Zographou- both of them over two hours' walk away. For this reason our excursions were very limited in comparison with other years. Esphigmenou is the most populated of the Athonite monasteries, accommodating over 100 monks. We were greeted very warmly by the fathers, who spent a great deal of time showing us the grounds and the katholikon; they also presented us with souvenirs and offered refreshments. One of the monks, a Bulgarian, spoke at length with our two Bulgarian participants. On the way back to Hilandar we stopped at the hut and cave of St Antony of the Kievan Caves ( c.1 051), who had spent some years on Athos before leaving for Kiev where he established the Caves Monastery and organized it along Athonite principles. After the evening meal at Hilandar, most of the SYNDESMOS members went to confession with Fr Kyril who, in addition to Serbian, could communicate in Greek, English, and Russian. The day ended with a concert of religious songs and hymns in Arabic, Romanian, Greek, Albanian, Russian, and Bulgarian. Each of the following days followed the standard pattern of services, meals, hard work, and discussion- with a few exceptions. On Monday 30 July a forest fire broke out at the extreme north end of the peninsula, near the mainland village of Nea Roda; some of the team were called by the fire fighters to assist in preventing its spread. The SYNDESMOS contri- 100 bution was valuable and all danger was eliminated after 90 minutes of fire fighting. On Tuesday 31 July there was a one-day visit to Hilandar by 120 Serbs and the monastery's relics were set out for veneration. Among them were a fragment of the Precious Cross and the remains of St Artemios, St Ieremias, Patriarch of Constantinople, and St Haralampos, the great martyr and healer. On the following day, five from the group went on a fishing convoy with some of the monks to find food for the morrow's feast of the Prophet Elias (Elijah). The vigil that Wednesday evening lasted from to A day of rest was declared on Thursday 2 August for the festal Liturgy and the associated celebrations. Finally, but reluctantly, the SYNDESMOS pilgrims took their leave of Hilandar after the morning meal on Friday 3 August. We split into a number of small parties that dispersed in various directions over the peninsula. There was an agreement that we would meet at Simonopetra the next day for that monastery's matronal feast of StMary Magdalene. The Bulgarians with some others visited the Bulgarian monastery of Zographou, the Lithuanians went to the Russian monastery of St Panteleimon, the Romanians made for the Romanian sketes of Colc;u and Prodromou, while the remainder decided to go a day early to Simonopetra for the vigil, which lasted from to A major reconstruction programme is currently underway at Simonopetra which made it impossible for the monastery to hold a traditional 'open-house' panegyri. The katholikon has been reduced to a shell, the archondariki with its panoramic views has all but disappeared, and there are no more than five exterior rooms in which to put up guests. For these reasons, this year's celebration was one of the quietest and least-populated (fewer than twelve guests) in living memory. On Saturday 4 August the SYNDESMOS convoy assembled at the monastery. We were shown around the buildings, and inspected the new constructions, the gardens, the library (where we were shown some rare first editions of the Greek Pbilokalia and of its Russian version, the Dobrotolubie), and the museum. There was also a long and inspiring discussion with the new abbot, Fr Elisaios, who offered us gifts and refreshments and spoke about the importance of our endeavours on the Holy Mountain. We were pleased to observe in the kitchen that Simonopetra's refuse is now being separated into glass, perishables, and metals - clearly a sign of ecological sensitivity. That evening we attended Vespers in the Chapel of St George, which was followed by a sumptuous and festive meal. 101

52 The next day we were treated to an exciting speedboat ride to the monastery ofxenophontos for our last night's stay. The fathers welcomed us warmly and provided us with excellent accommodation. On Monday 5 August all of the participants returned to Thessaloniki and from there made their way to their respective homes. Next year's SYNDESMOS Spiritual Ecology Camp will be held at the Holy Monastery of Stavronikita. i 102 DIMITRI CONOMOS Oxford A YORKSHIRE VIEW OF ATHOS John Bacon Sawrey Morritt ( ) was a Yorkshire squire who lived at Rokeby Hall, a Palladian mansion in the North Riding. He is remembered only tangentially as the first English owner of The Toilet of Venus, a painting by Velasquez more commonly known as 'The Rokeby Venus'. He was a friend of Walter Scott, who dedicated to him a very long ballad, Rokeby, and he was nicknamed 'Troy' Morritt. That arose from his having written A Vindication of Homer as a riposte to one Jacob Bryant, who had set out to prove that Troy never existed. Morritt's interest in Troy had been sparked during the course of a Grand Tour that he had undertaken at the age of twenty-two with Robert Stockdale and other friends. The tour lasted from 1794 until Morritt wrote home regularly and at length, clearly intending these letters addressed to his mother and sister to stand as a record of his journeys. The excerpts quoted here are from letters to his sister in December In that first year of the tour Morritt and Stockdale set out to visit Mount Athos. They sailed from Tenedos to Lemnos, keeping a sharp lookout for a hostile French frigate that they had seen at Tenedos- 'not having the least desire to finish our tour by a trip to France at present'. They stayed some days at Lemnos, taking care to observe the courtesies and call upon the Turkish Aga who was in charge. Consequently he decreed that they should not pay for anything, 'so we travelled ala Turque, at other folks' expense'. They got away from Lemnos. 'Mount Athos, which you see from it [Lemnos], is one of the grandest single objects I ever saw. It rises in a high conical form directly from the sea, and as you here don't see the continuity of the land, the end of the promontory [... ] is very striking.' As soon as it was light our eyes were amused with one of the finest countries I had ever seen. All the mountain is covered with Greek convents, of which there are not less than twenty scattered over its sides in the most picturesque points of view you can conceive. One of these, embosomed in the wood, was above us at a little distance from the shore. Its turrets and high battlemented walls, mixed with tall, thick cypresses and surrounded with wood, had an air completely monastic; farther up the hill was another, equally venerable. The bank on which they stood is uneven in the extreme, covered with wood, and now with all the beauty of autumn colouring. As, besides the greatest profusion of oaks, chestnuts, and oriental planes the mountain is covered with shrubs and evergreens, you can hardly conceive anything so rich and varied. We stayed one day at this monastery, and saw with wonder the comfort in which they live here. In the courtyard of the 103

53 monastery is a thick orchard of oranges and lemons, now full of the finest fruit I ever ate. They gave us some very good wine, and I can really say these were the first convents I ever thought did any good in the world, but in this inhospitable place an institution that receives strangers, and where every passenger that calls of every sort has a right to a loaf of bread, is really a very useful establishment. We rode from hence about twelve miles towards the point of Mount Athos. Mter gaining the top of the hill above the convent, the road lays westward along the side of a slope, terminated to the left by the sea, and in front by the summit of the mountain; on this slope, which waves in every direction, the road winds at one instant through thick and beautiful woods, at another along lawns or open fields, commanding, besides this lovely foreground, views of the sea and the different islands of Thasos, Samothrace, Imbros, and Lemnos, or the coast of Macedonia, with a high range of distant mountains. Athos itself, before us, is a still more magnificent object; its sides, which are covered with wood, terminate in a high, pointed crag, of an amazing height, which catches the light of the sun, and reflects it in the softest and most brilliant colouring, both in the morning and evening. I have no hesitation in saying that, accustomed as I have been to beautiful scenery, this surpasses any I had ever seen, for the details of it were everywhere as lovely as the ensemble. At every step clear springs, rising out of beds of verdure, dash across the road; at every step you pass trees covered with ivy, every one of which would make a picture; several villages, monasteries, and other decent houses, surrounded each by tufts of trees, or rising out of banks of wood, are seen in the most picturesque points of view; the sea below forms a thousand bays, over which the trees hang on the water edge; the mountain itself, more uneven than I ever saw, gives you a fresh view at every turn. By this means the scene unites every beauty of the wildest and grandest sort to those of the finest and most fertile countries. The retired scenes of rock and wood are as perfect as the effect of the grand prospects of the country and the islands, and the forest is at the same time full of the finest trees, now in their greatest beauty, and a thick bed of shrubs and flowers. The grass, which had just sprung from the late rains, had the verdure of spring, and the weather was as warm as it is with us in the beginning of September. Delighted with the scene, we arrived at Cares, and lodged in another small monastery. From it we returned eastward again: the road ascends the ridge of the promontory; the southern side of it terminates also in the sea, and is covered, if possible, with still thicker foliage. The change of the leaf gave these banks a richness I had no notion of, and the evergreen oak mixed with them, here an immense forest tree, is so light a green as not to have the wintry effect of our firs and spruce. The road winds, as if on purpose, first on one side of the ridge and then on the other, as if to give us the full view of both seas; sometimes it continues along the top with a valley on each side, open to the two seas. We stared and talked till we had exhausted every bit of our admiration, and were obliged to stare in silence. The southern view, including also some small islands, is bounded by the high ridge of the opposite promontory of Cape Falso. Its woods are still richer than the other, and the view in general is more confined. It has not such variety of objects, but some old, 104 large monasteries placed among its woods, of which you see the turrets and battlements among the trees, seem the very temples of solitude and retirement. If I talk romantically you must lay it to the account of the place, for I can't describe it in any other terms. We descended a steep zigzag for a little way, to a large monastery below. When we were at it, we looked around on a amphitheatre covered with wood; through the middle of it runs a clear torrent, in most part hid by the shrubs and trees that hang over it. On one side of the slope the monastery stands, a plain, large, venerable pile, made more so by the cypresses and large trees that rise amongst its walls. We were admitted into a large, clean, and comfortable room, and for the first half-hour were flxed at the window, and agreed very cordially in pitying all you poor people that stay at home; I have no hesitation in preferring it to everything I ever saw, even in Switzerland, and will never again suppose I have seen the finest thing in the world, for there is no limit to beauties of this sort. The view of a double sea, adorned to such a degree with islands and shores, was what I had no notion of. Thasos, a very mountainous island, wooded and cultivated. Samothrace, a high, craggy, barren mountain, with the boldest outline rising from the water. Imbros and Lemnos low and broken lines. The monastery where the travellers stayed in a 'large, clean, and comfortable room' was perhaps Xenophontos as Morritt observes, shortly after, that 'the last great monastery I have mentioned was that of St. George [... ] where they pretend to show the tomb of their patron.' Was he really referring to the great mosaic icon of St George at Xenophontos? Or to the portable icons of the saint displayed in the katholikon at Zographou? Was Zographou, rather than Xenophontos, the monastery at which they stayed? At any event 'we paid, of course, high reverence [... ] as Englishmen.' Morritt's enthusiasm did not, regrettably, extend to his hosts, and his remarks about the monks are uncharitable. He and Stockdale left Athos by the land route. 'The country eastward, after a short and romantic ride through a wood of oak, with fine rocks and torrents, grows less beautiful.' They took a dim view of Xerxes' canal, and Morritt remarked 'the Duke of Bridgewater is certainly a much greater workman.' The two proceeded to Salonica where they settled comfortably in the English consul's house. From this haven Morritt complained to his sister in English xenophobic style about Greeks, Jews, and the brutish French, reserving a modicum of admiration for the Turks, a 'so much more honourable race that I believe, if ever this country was in the hands of the Greeks and Russians, it would be hardly livable [sic]'. 105 GRAHAM BINNS Cleve ley

54 BOOK REVIEWS St Simon the Athonite: His Life. Text (in Greek) by Gabriel Nicholas Pentzikis. Illustrations by Marcos Cambanis. Mount Athos: Holy MonasteryofSimonos Petra, pages. ISBN No price. What first struck me about this little book was the quality of its production. The text is printed on high-quality, cream-coloured, thick paper, while the printing of Marcos's playful illustrations retains much of the delight of the original rose-tinted handmade paper. Each chapter begins with a linocut initial. The illustrations are a delightful cross between iconography, lay art, children's book illustration, and the artist's own imagination. Though loosely executed- with no straight lines!- they are carefully planned out. Marcos's background in iconography, book illustration, and print-making serves him well for this sort of work (he has recently been commissioned to fresco the katholikon of the Iviron metochion of Kornopholia in northeastern Greece and to do a series of linocuts of lviron). It is refreshing to see such freedom, responsibly used, in Orthodox art. In this context it is relevant to note that scholarly research suggests that changes in the style of Byzantine icons were often initiated, and disseminated, by book illustrations. When it happened, such innovation was probably encouraged by the cultured patron of the book, and sometimes by the subject-matter which had little or no precedent in illustration. This reviewer is certainly finding this to be the case as he works on illustrating the StJohn's Bible on vellum. The text describes the life of Simonopetra's founder, and is based on a fourteenth-century Life by Isaiah the Hesychast of Athos and later renditions. It is clearly written in a simple demotic Greek suitable for both adults and older children. What we know of the saint's life begins with his arrival on Athos. He seeks out a spiritual father with whom he lives in strict obedience and deep reverence. However, St Simon becomes so respected by other monks and his Geronda that the latter begins to regard him less as a disciple and more as a fellow brother in ascetic struggles and so becomes less strict. This and the adulation of others does not please the young ascetic, so he pleads for a blessing to go and live by himself. 106 He finds a quiet cave, above the monastery he is later to found, and there continues his ascetic struggles. In time his virtue is again discovered, and visitors return. Repeated visions of the Mother of God and divine light convince him that God wishes him to build a monastery on the rocky outcrop below his cave. Soon three wealthy brothers arrive, asking to be accepted by Simon as his disciples. After the customary period of testing he tonsures them, and then gives them the obedience of finding master builders to create the monastery. These are brought, but when they see the proposed site they flatly refuse; it is ridiculously dangerous. But a miracle quickly changes their minds: while serving them drinks, a monk falls headlong down the rock face, only to walk back up half an hour later without having spilt a drop from the carafe and goblet he was holding. The Life recounts other miracles worked by the saint, up until his repose on 28 December Although we do not now know where his tomb or relics are, his first biographer, St Maximos of Kavsokalyvia, states that his relics were then fragrant with myrrh, hence the name, St Simon the Myrrh-gusher. AIDAN HART Shropshire The Russians on Athos. By Nicholas Fennell. Oxford etc.: Peter Lang, pages. ISBN , US-ISBN Price p/b Mount Athos with its multi-ethnic monastic community attracts profound interest in many parts of the increasingly interconnected world. The last two centuries have witnessed numerous academic and popular publications about Athos, not to mention a stream of travellers' accounts which continues a much older tradition. 'The garden of the Mother of God' represents a unique domain of spiritual life conducted in accordance with Orthodox ascetic tradition and set in the environment of treasures of Byzantine art and breath-taking natural beauty. One of the features that ~ake Athos so special is the pan-orthodox character of the Holy Mountain where Greek, Georgian, Slavonic, and Romanian strands of spirituality coexist and enrich each other. This new book represents a pioneering study in English of the role of the Russians in the life of Athos. 107

55 The author, Nicholas Fennell, is remarkably well equipped to deal with the subject of investigation. He was deeply influenced by the work of his father, Professor John Fennell, 1 whose interest in Russian history, research methods, and style he absorbed. In a sense one can say that the book belongs to the academic school of John Fennell. Equally strong family and academic ties connect the author to Greece where he has developed fruitful contacts in ecclesiastical and scholarly circles of the adherents of both the old and the new calendar. A thorough understanding of the different backgrounds of Greek and Russian Athonites and their national psychology is combined with a degree of detachment which allows freedom from passions and objective analysis of controversial issues. The book opens with an Introduction which describes Mount Athos, its monasteries and sketes, and gives a review of the sources. The study itself consists of two major parts: (I) an account of the Russian presence on Athos (chapters 1-5) and (II) a detailed investigation of the history of the Prophet Elijah Skete (chapters 6-9). Chapter 1 offers an analysis of Greek-Russian relations from the late eighteenth to the end of the twentieth century which serves to explain the background to relations between the Greek and Russian Athonites. The following chapters (2-5) consider the sequence of events from the first appearance of Russians on the Holy Mountain to the time of St Paisy Velichkovsky and then chronicle the increase in numbers of Russian monks at St Panteleimon and the ensuing frictions with the Greek brethren, the impact of the establishment of national Churches in the Balkans and the nationalist wars, the controversy of the Glorifiers of the Name of God, and, finally, the loss of all links with Russia as a result of the communist revolution. From various Russian establishments on Athos Fennell selected for close study the Prophet Elijah Skete because he believes that 'the skete is a microcosm of Athonite society, and as such it goes some way to explaining the history of Mount Athos and its ethnic tensions' (p. 22). 1 John Fennell was a prolific scholar. Titles of his books witness to the scope of his expertise which extended from Russian language and literature to medieval Russian history and then to the history of the Church: The Correspondence between Prince A.M. Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan N (Cambridge: CUP, 1955, 1963); Ivan the Great of Moscow (London: Macmillan, 1961); The Penguin Russian Course (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961); Pushkin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964); Prince A.M. Kurbsky's History of Ivan N (Cambridge: CUP, 1965); The Emergence of Moscow (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1968); Early Russian Literature (with A. Stokes) (London: Faber and Faber, 1974); The Crisis of Medieval Russia, (London: Longman, 1983); A History of the Russian Church to 1448 (London and New York: Longman, 1995). 108 Part I is predominantly based on secondary Greek and Russian sources which the author meticulously and dispassionately examines. The material is subjected to a forensic-style analysis in order to present an objective picture of events and to identify limitations of the often one-sided accounts of both contemporary and later observers. Such an approach provides solid foundations for the author's conclusions and testifies to his skill as a historian. Part II is of even greater value, based as it is on primary sources from the archive of the Prophet Elijah Skete which Fennell microfilmed during his study trips and has introduced into academic discussion for the first time. Moreover, scholars and friends of Mount Athos owe Fennell a great debt because his microfilms have preserved for posterity the history of a skete whose documents have at best been rendered inaccessible and at worst been destroyed since the expulsion of its Russian brotherhood in In dealing with his subject, the author has consciously selected a historical approach, warning his readers of the limits he has set for himself: '... as a historian I have to focus on the exceptional - on clashes and disunity; I pass over the majority of Athonites who have spent most of their time getting on with the business of being monks in prayer, toil and self-denial' (p. 70). 'It should not be forgotten that we have been concentrating on political, worldly and therefore sensational events' (p. 234). Within the scope of historical analysis Fennell has succeeded admirably. Indeed, one cannot ask more of any single piece of research. One would wish, however, one day to see a study which would complete the picture and examine the spiritual dimension of the life of the Russian communities and individual monks and their contribution to the inner life of the spirit on Athos. Such a study would need to consider in greater detail the impact made by the lives and writings of such Russian Athonites as St Paisy Velichkovsky, Staretz Silouan, Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov, and hieromonk (later Archbishop) Basil Krivocheine. The teaching of the Glorifiers of the Name of God also deserves more detailed research, evaluating its theological significance, for, together with the disputes about Sophia (the Wisdom of God) and ecumenism, it represents one of the major doctrinal issues raised in Orthodox theology in the twentieth century. The monastery of St Simon of Cana at New Athos also presents a major opportunity for research into the relationship between Athos and Russia. 109

56 Valuable as it is, the historical outline of a life like that of Gavriil, prior of the Prophet Elijah Skete (pp ), provides only one side of the story. One might apply to it these words of Archimandrite Sophrony about Staretz Silouan: From 'born' to 'died' - how meagre the picture! Of his external life there is nothing to tell, while to touch upon a man's inner life in the sight of God may well be prying and indelicate, and to make public the depth of a Christian heart- almost sacrilege. Yet, in the belief that nothing can now dismay the Staretz, who left this world victorious over it... I shall try to relate something of his spiritual biography, so rich and so sublime. 2 A passing reference to an article in Orthodox America about the discovery of the relics of Prior Gavriil (p. 255) can be supplemented by the following information which illustrates the lasting legacy of the skete. 3 On 22 July 1994 clergy from the St Elijah Cathedral in Odessa in the presence of a special committee from the diocese conducted a search for the grave of Prior Gavriil who had been buried in the basement of the cathedral (originally built as a metochion of the Prophet Elijah Skete on Athos). The coffin was discovered and opened. It contained incorrupt relics which were transferred to the cathedral itself. A number of miraculous healings were reported to the Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church which studied the findings of the committee and later reports and canonized Archimandrite Gavriil of Athos as a locally venerated saint, approving his icon, troparion, kontakion, and akathistos and establishing the day of his memory (9 July OS/22 July NS). The relics are preserved in the St Elijah Cathedral in Odessa. Finally, some corrections and additions can be made to the bibliography: Prepodobnyj GavriilAfonsky. Proslavlenie, zhitie, akafist [St Gavriil of Athas. Canonisation, life and akathistos] (Ukraine, between 1994 and 1998). Boris Zaitsev, Afon [Athos] (Paris, YMCA Press, 1928; many reprints in Russia in the 1990s). Bishop Nikon Rozhdestvensky, 'Na Novom Afone' [On New Athos], Troitsky Tsvetok, 78 (Svyato-Troitskaya Sergieva Lavra, 1911). Reprinted in Kraskovsky (Moskva, 1998), pp Dusan Korac, Sveta Cora pod Srpskom Vlascu ( ) [The Holy Mountain under Serbian Rule ( )], Zbornik Radova Vizantoloskog Instituta, 31 (Beograd, 1992). Ieromonah Vasily (Krivocheine), 'Afon v dukhovnoj zhizni Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi' [Athos in the Spiritual Life of the Orthodox Church], Vestnik Russkogo Zapadno-Evropejskogo Patriarshego Ekzarkhata, 12 (1952), Konstantinos K. Papoulides, Oi Rosoi Onomatolatrai tou Agiou Orous [Russian Glorifiers of the Name on Mount Athas] (Idryma Meleton Hersonesou tou Aimou, 173) (Thessaloniki, 1977) (numerous other publications by him on ecclesiastical and scholarly connections between Russia and Greece are listed in K.K. Papoulides, To Rosiko Arhaiologiko lnstitouto Konstantinoupoleos ( ) [Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople ( )] (Idryma Meleton Hersonesou tou Aimou, 209) (Thessaloniki, 1987), pp ). Fr Sergii Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii. His Life, Teachings and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism, translated from Russian by V. Lickwar and A.l. Lisenko (Belmont, MA: Nordland Publishing Company, 1980) (only the Russian original is listed). I.F. Kraskovsky, Makary Sushkin, Igumen i Svyaschenno-Arkhimandrit Afonskogo sv. Panteleimonovskogo Monastyrya [Makary Sushkin, Abbot and Hieroarchimandrite of the Monastery of St Panteleimon on Athas] (Moskva: Universitetskaya tipografiya, 1889; reprinted Moskva: Izdatel'stvo imeni svyatitelya Ignatiya Stavropol'skogo, 1998) (the author is given as Krasnovsky and the title slightly changed). A. Soloviev, 'Histoire du monastere russe au Mont Athos', Byzantion, 8 (1933), (a rarer edition is listed). NIKOLAI LIPATOV Birmingham/St Petersburg 2 Archimandrite Sophrony, The Monk of Mount Athos: Staretz Silouan, (London: Mowbray, 1973), p The information is derived from a booklet, St Gavriil of Athos. Canonisation, Life and Akathistos, obtained by the present reviewer in September 1997 from the St Elijah Cathedral in Odessa where the relics are preserved

57 Archimandrite Vasileios: The Fayyum Portraits (32pp., ISBN , 5.95), Institution and Charism in the Orthodox Church (27pp., ISBN , 4.95), 'The Light of Christ Shines upon All' through All the Saints (24pp., ISBN , 4.95), What is Unique about Orthodox Culture (86pp., ISBN , 8.95), all translated from the Greek by Elizabeth Theokritoff. Priestmonk Agathangelos: My Recollections of Papa Tykhon (58pp., ISBN , 7.95), translated from the Greek by Evthymios Katsikas. Montreal: Alexander Press, Nos in the series 'MountAthos'. These slim volumes continue the 'Mount Athos' series with four further works by Archimandrite Vasileios, the highly regarded Abbot of Iviron, and one by Hieromonk Agathangelos, also of lviron. The series aims to convey something of the quality of contemporary spiritual and theological endeavour on the Holy Mountain through the prism of Iviron. In The Fayyum Portaits Fr Vasileios provides an engaging treatment of these remarkable examples oflate antique portraiture. He evokes the spirit of the portraits very vividly, pointing to the sense they convey of the 'tragedy and beauty of life', and the atmosphere of a 'sacred calm of mourning' they create. The faces wait in expectation for the coming of Christ, for the revelation of the incarnate, and therefore depictable, Word. This, as one might expect, leads Fr Vasileios on to a discussion of the Fayyum portraits as precursors of the icon. Like the icon, they are products of the Hellenic spirit, characterized by its respect for and willingness to depict the human face. This approach is contrasted with the aniconic spirit of the Orient, the spirit Fr Vasileios sees as lying behind Byzantine iconoclasm. He also argues that the West has never been able to grasp the sensitivity towards the human of the Hellenic tradition, something which explains why the non-christian Fayyum portraits are actually closer to the liturgical icon than any artistic product of the West from the Renaissance onwards. Some may find this approach overly schematic. The essay concludes with a discussion of the Greek vocation, an obligation to keep alive and ever present the joyful sadness in which the Hellenic tradition contemplates the human condition - the poignant sense of the coincidence of sorrow and joy expressed so clearly in the upbeat tones of the Lamentations on Good Friday and the dirge-like tune of the Paschal hymn with which we greet the risen Christ. Institution and Charism in the Orthodox Church tackles the perennial question of the relationship between charismatic and institutional leadership within the Church. This is a question that remains very much alive on the Holy Mountain where monks and monasteries have never been loath to resist ecclesiastical authority when they have deemed it necessary. Fr Vasileios lays down the basic principle that the Church is a divinehuman foundation, a manifestation of the presence of God in the world. No human institution can, therefore, claim to contain or control this presence. It is this inherent freedom of the Church that allows for the guidance of the saints. Here Fr Vasileios cites the claim of St Symeon the New Theologian that the very institution of the Church is charismatic. (Symeon was of course a great mystic who, like virtually all great mystics, had a distinctly uneasy relationship with the ecclesiastical authorities of his day.) The final part of the essay speaks of the nature of the charismatic fathers of Athos: their humilty, grace, radiance, fragrance, and ability to speak even by their silence. While this short essay leaves many questions unanswered or answered only by implication - for example the question of the precise extent of the Church or of the way in which we may discern good from bad charismatic guidance - it is nonetheless a valuable affirmation of the continuing presence of living examples of sanctity among us. This affirmation is underlined in 'The Light of Christ Shines upon All' through All the Saints. Here Fr Vasileios gives us a number of examples of sanctity, named and unnamed, and also goes into some detail as to the distinction between true saints and false teachers, concluding that, 'In the end there are no ancient or modem people. There are only true or false people.' This he illustrates with two examples: Isaac the Syrian, about whom he has written previously, and Papadiamantis. What he says about the latter is particularly striking, showing him as one in whom 'everything becomes a divine liturgy', a liturgy in which Papadiamantis 'clothed in the grace of some sort of priesthood celebrates the mystery of the word as an extension of the mystery of God the Word incarnate'. A further example of sanctity is furnished by Hieromonk Agathangelos in My Recollections of Papa Tykhon. Fr Tykhon (d. 1968) was one of the great elders of the Holy Mountain in the last century and the spiritual guide of another great elder, Fr Pai'ssios (d. 1994). In addition to the reminiscences of Fr Agathangelos, the volume also contains some ex

58 tracts from FrTykhon's letters and prayers in which his devotion to Christ and the mystery of the Cross is made plain. The last of these volumes, also the most substantial, represents an important contribution to the debate over the nature and identity of the modem Greek nation. The essay has been sanctioned by the Holy Community and can therefore be taken as an authoritative statement of the Athonite approach to the issues involved. In What is Unique about Orthodox Culture, Fr Vasileios shows how acutely aware the monks of Athos are of the problems of modem Greek society, the 'malignant hydrocephaly' of Athens that is undermining the particularity of Greek identity, the failings of the educational and political systems, and the damage wrought by tourism. Fr Vasileios gives an account of the witness of the Holy Mountain in this rapidly changing world, a way of life that remains profoundly human and profoundly liturgical. A way of life in which one can answer the question, 'What do you do?' with the deceptively simple reply, 'I live here.' This witness to a truly liturgical existence gives the Orthodox Church an eternal relevance to each and every nation. It has a calling to proclaim the joy and certainty of the Resurrection in this age of anxiety and uncertainty. Fr Vasileios goes on to speak of some of the saints of modem times who have responded to this calling in the land of Greece. Amongst these saints he includes not only figures such as St Kosmas the Aetolian but also, interestingly and worryingly, Makryiannis. Fr Vasileios argues that we need to follow the example and inspiration of figures such as these in righting the wrongs of modem Greek society. The Orthodox Church, he writes, has always preserved the culture of Greece and is itself the only guarantee that that culture will survive. Without it, Greece will lose its identity. There is much to be commended in this passionate essay, but I must confess that I find very little in it of the universality of Orthodoxy. The particular characters and genii of the various nations surely have their place within Orthodoxy, but in this account the eternal significance of the nation, and of one nation in particular, appears to me to be much exaggerated. In sum, these volumes contain a great deal of fascinating and enlightening material. They provide a very valuable insight into the life and thought of contemporary Athos. On a more mundane note it must be said that the volumes are frankly overpriced and that the translation is not always elegant (although this may well be a reflection of the original Greek, which I have not seen). The emphasis on the peculiar importance of Greece may also 114 grate on even the most devoted Philhellene. That said, there is much to recommend in these essays, perhaps most notably their fine poetic evocation of an authentically liturgical existence in which our humanity is perfected and consummated in its encounter with God. 115 MARCUS PLESTED Cambridge