9783039113378 Intro 002.Pdf

René Gothóni and Graham Speake Introduction Introduction René Gothóni and Graham Speake This book is about what Dimitri Obolensky called ‘the alternating current of men and ideas flowing to and from the Mediterranean’ which found, and continues to find, ‘illustration in the role of Mount Athos, drawing to itself men from all over Eastern Europe who sought training in the monastic life, and then sending back […] the results of their labours and learning to their native lands’.1 This current has been flowing since the first monasteries were founded there in the tenth century. Its strength increased in the late Byzantine period, when the Holy Mountain of Athos became the undisputed centre of spirituality for the Orthodox world, and it persisted throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule, when Athos continued to flourish thanks to the monks’ remarkable diplomatic skills, missionary outreach, and fund-raising activities. As a result monks and pilgrims were attracted to the Mountain from all over Eastern Europe and hence its spirituality has remained not only international but pan-Orthodox. Nowadays, as we shall see, the catchment area has been widened to include Western Europe, North America, and indeed most of the world; but the durability and power of the Holy Mountain’s magnetism have remained remarkably consistent from Byzantine times to the present day. Athos has always transcended national and cultural boundaries and, as Rosemary Morris shows in her paper ‘Where did the early Athonite monks come from?’, it has done so from the very earliest times. In the ninth and tenth centuries many Athonites had made their monastic profession elsewhere – both St Peter the Athonite and St Blasios of Amorion for example in Rome – and came to the Holy Mountain as monks rather than novices or pilgrims. What attracted them to go there? 1 Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (London, 1971), p. 383. 12 René Gothóni and Graham Speake It may have been any of a number of factors: the spiritual reputation of individual elders already there was one, the fame of the Mountain as a haven of seclusion and tranquillity another, the relative weakness of the authority of the patriarch over it a third. Whatever the reason, they came from far and wide – Georgians to people the Georgian foundation of Iviron, Amalfitans (probably via Constantinople) to settle at the Benedictine monastery of St Mary, and Sicilians and Calabrians too, though whether they ever had their own houses remains doubtful. And it was a two-way process: many monasteries had established their own dependencies (metochia) in Constantinople by the mid-eleventh century; and books were being translated from Greek into Georgian on the Mountain and shipped back to Georgia for consumption. As Dr Morris shows, the early history of Athos provides clear evidence of the flexibility and fluidity of Byzantine monasticism. It has never looked back. In a paper entitled ‘Holy Men of Athos’ Alice-Mary Talbot concentrates on the variety of ways of monastic life that have been available on Athos since the tenth century. St Peter the Athonite and St Euthymios the Younger had no alternative but to be hermits, since there were as yet no monasteries on the Mountain, though Euthymios had previously belonged to a cenobitic community in Bithynia. St Athanasios the Athonite, a native of Trebizond, first became a monk on Mount Kyminas in Bithynia in a lavra that offered a combination of communal and eremitic monasticism. On moving to Athos, where at first he lived as a hermit, he was persuaded by his friend and benefactor, the future emperor Nikephoros Phokas, to found a lavra there. As the foundation grew, Athanasios decided to make it a full-blown cenobitic monastery. Still known as the Great Lavra, this monastery attracted recruits from far and wide and within fifteen years it housed500 monks. After his death the founder’s tomb became a shrine and a focus of pilgrimage. Four centuries later, when the empire was on its last legs but the Mountain was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, St Maximos Kafsokalyvitis entered the Great Lavra as a novice, but having seen a vision of the Mother of God he chose to spend his remaining seventy years as a wandering ascetic on the slopes of the Mountain itself. He specifically asked to be buried next to his hut so that his tomb should not attract crowds of visitors. Introduction 13 This was the time when Athos was acquiring fame as the source of a new, or rather revived, monastic movement known as Hesychasm, which was in turn the focus of a major controversy. As the champion of the Hesychasts, St Gregory Palamas, later archbishop of Thessaloniki, acknowledged his debt not only to earlier generations of scholars but also to contemporary ascetics and holy men at whose feet he had sat. St Maximos may have been one of these. By the time of Gregory’s death in 1359 Hesychasm had become firmly established on Athos and, as it spread, the monks gained enormous influence over the development of spirituality throughout the Orthodox world. As Dimitri Obolensky has written, In the late Middle Ages the international role of Mount Athos became more important still: it was from there that the movement known today – not altogether appropriately – as hesychasm, of which the revival of contemplative monasticism in the fourteenth century was the original and most characteristic feature, spread to the Balkans, Rumania, and Russia. Led by a series of outstanding patriarchs of Constantinople, fostered locally by a confraternity of devoted Slav and Rumanian monks, and overflowing into literature and art, this movement linked together, more closely perhaps than ever before, the different parts of the Byzantine cultural commonwealth.2 In his paper on ‘Monasteries as Bridges between Athos, Russia, and Karelia’ Ismo Pellikka is much concerned with this movement, though he traces the earliest contacts between Athos and Kievan Rus’ to the start of the eleventh century. ‘Monasteries are not only havens of spiritual life, but also centres of interaction between monastics and their surrounding societies’, he acutely observes, and he singles out the Cave Monastery in Kiev and the Konevitsky in northern Russia as ‘well- known stepping-stones’ between Mount Athos and Russia. After the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century Russian monasticism had to begin again from scratch, but in the century after 1330 no fewer than 150 monasteries were founded, including three ‘core’ houses in southern Karelia with close Athonite connections. The arrival of Hesychasm in Russia, particularly at the hands of Nil Sorskij (1470–1556), heralded a period of even closer direct contact with the Holy Mountain and this 2 Id., Six Byzantine Portraits (Oxford, 1988), p. 6. 14 René Gothóni and Graham Speake continued into the sixteenth century when Athonite ideas and teaching were brought to Moscow by St Maxim the Greek. A most significant manifestation of the impact of Hesychasm on Russian art is to be observed in the icons of Andrei Rublev and his school. A further wave of Athonite influence reached Russia in the late eighteenth century with the compilation of the anthology of ascetic and mystical texts known as the Philokalia, of which a Slavonic translation was published in Moscow in 1793. Subsequently translated into Russian by St Theophan the Recluse, this was the book carried on his travels by the anonymous subject of the influential classic of Orthodox spirituality known as The Way of a Pilgrim. Since the fall of Communism, Mount Athos, and more specifically the monastery of St Panteleimon, has once again been playing an important role in Russia. To keep pace with the revival of monasticism there, the Rossikon has been operating as a training ground for inexperienced monastics. Its numbers have risen accordingly and many monks come for short periods of time to experience at first hand the spiritual tradition of the Holy Mountain. At the same time the spiritual influence of Athos has been felt in many areas beyond the Orthodox heartlands. In France, for example, three monasteries have been founded by Archimandrite Placide as metochia of the Athonite monastery of Simonopetra with the blessing of Abbot Aimilianos. In England the monastery of St John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights was founded by Archimandrite Sophrony, not as a dependency of the Holy Mountain, but very much in the Hesychast tradition as transmitted by St Silouan of Athos. And in the United States Archimandrite Ephraim, former abbot of the Athonite monastery of Philotheou, has founded no fewer than sixteen monasteries and convents, the most significant being that of St Anthony in the desert of Arizona. Let no one accuse Athonite monks of being introspective misanthropes! A major dimension of the renewal currently taking place on the Mountain is the will to export the Athonite message to the furthest corners of the earth. At the same time pilgrims are flocking to Athos in greater numbers than ever before, at a rate nearing 100,000 each year according to Fr Symeon of the monastery of Dionysiou. Most of the papers in Part Two were delivered at a conference convened in the University of Helsinki in August 2006 to mark the opening there of an exhibition of ‘Treasures Introduction 15 of Mount Athos’.3 The theme of the conference was ‘Pilgrimage as Dialogue’, and as Fr Symeon explains, monasteries are ‘places of repentance, infirmaries for souls, […] workshops of spiritual life’. The vast majority of Athonite monks today first came to the Mountain as pilgrims themselves, and there is a sense in which the monk is also a pilgrim. Pilgrims are therefore made welcome and, if they are Orthodox, encouraged to participate in the sacraments which enable them to experience the presence of God’s grace and the blessing of the Mother of God.

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