Mount Athos the Sacred Bridge
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Mount Athos the Sacred Bridge The Spirituality of the Holy Mountain von Graham Speake, Dimitri Conomos 1. Auflage Mount Athos the Sacred Bridge – Speake / Conomos schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG Peter Lang Bern 2005 Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 064 4 Inhaltsverzeichnis: Mount Athos the Sacred Bridge – Speake / Conomos DIMITRI CONOMOS AND GRAHAM SPEAKE Introduction By means of a crowd I built a great mountain – a tower reaching up to heaven. Ephrem the Syrian The knowledge of God is a mountain steep indeed, and difficult to climb. Gregory of Nyssa Between 28 February and 2 March 2003 the Friends of Mount Athos in association with the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies at Cam- bridge University held an international conference on the subject, ‘Mount Athos, The Sacred Bridge: The Spirituality of the Holy Moun- tain’. The venue was Madingley Hall near Cambridge. Around a hun- dred delegates listened to six highly stimulating papers presented by speakers from the Holy Mountain, from Greece, from the USA, and from Great Britain. The objectives of the conference were to draw the attention of the wider world to the Holy Mountain’s historic import- ance, spirituality, and religious legacy, to communicate scholarly views, and to shed light on the contribution made by Athonite monas- ticism not only to worldwide Orthodoxy but also to Christianity at large. The present volume, which bears the same title as the confer- ence, comprises eight essays: the aforementioned six presentations of the invited speakers (Archimandrite Ephraim of Vatopedi, Fr Alex- ander Golitzin, Bishop Nikolaos [Hatzinikolaou] of Mesogaia and Lavrion, Professor Andrew Louth, Fr Nicholas Sakharov, Bishop Kal- listos [Ware] of Diokleia) together with two other papers bearing directly on the theme, originally given by guest speakers at Annual General Meetings of the Friends in Oxford in 2001 and 2002 (Sister Magdalen and Archimandrite Elisaios of Simonopetra, respectively). 12 Dimitri Conomos and Graham Speake Each of the authors places full responsibility for the Mountain’s unique spirituality squarely on the shoulders of the Athonite elders. Indeed, most of the titles indicate a specific name. These are men who constitute the embodiment of an extraordinary tradition that bridges one thousand years of charismatic leadership and whose origins look back a further six centuries. In the pages that follow we shall read how the elders have guided, judged, inspired, healed, and interceded for generations of God-seekers. They are the steely girders of the sacred bridge which, for the monks, spans many lifetimes and many strug- gles. In turn, the elders also pass on a precious patrimony, the fruit of years of experience and encounter, to their disciples, to those who themselves will progress from sonship to fatherhood. But what of Athos itself? While traditions of spirituality may be noted in other monastic centres, both Western and Eastern, the most extensive development is clearly manifested on the Holy Mountain. And if a particular mode of ascetic living is more comprehensively cultivated in one environment than in another, we ought surely to ask ourselves why this is so. What is it about this forcing ground of human expectation that makes it so peculiarly congenial? What is it about this environment (both the natural and the sociological) that makes it so particularly receptive? A further question: to what extent, in the process of being received and assimilated, is the tradition altered or transformed? Is there in the end something specifically Hagioritic about the way in which it has come to be applied on the Athonite peninsula? Undeniably, the spiritual legacy of Athos has been shaped by and continues to depend on the unique character of that remote peninsula’s physical and human landscapes. In this context we may shift from our bridge metaphor to personification: ‘Here every stone breathes prayers’ (said Fr Nikon of Karoulia, referring to the Athonite terrain);1 and to allegory: ‘The monasteries of Athos are gathering places [… where] the abbot is an image of God; he represents Christ, and the rest 1 Quoted by Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia, ‘Wolves and Monks: Life on the Holy Mountain Today’, Sobornost, 5:2 (1983), 68. Introduction 13 of the monks form the communion of saints, both the living and the dead’ (wrote Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra).2 At the same time, the association of mountains with the sacred has a long history and is not peculiar to the Judaeo-Christian religious experience. Virtually every religious and spiritual tradition has identi- fied holy mountains where a transmission of spiritual knowledge or a divine revelation took place.3 These holy mountains were perceived to be more than mere geographical locations of spiritual grace, but also metaphors of the spiritual path. To be sure, the legacy of Athos stems directly from the theophanies on the hallowed heights of Sinai, Car- mel, Tabor, and Olivet. Where it differs, however, is in its enduring relevance. Other sacred peaks that shone with divine manifestation did so for a specific purpose and for a restricted period, while Mount Athos has for over a millennium preserved praying communities – laboratories of selfless love in which the kingdom of God reveals itself on earth. They clamber to its laps and integrate fully with the physical topography. From this perspective we go some way towards answering our questions about the uniquely Hagioritic qualities of Athonite spiritu- ality. Bishop Kallistos explains how the message of the Philokalia, with its three master-themes, nepsis, hesychasm, and the Jesus Prayer, encourages the monks to practise continual inner prayer as an avenue to personal holiness (‘St Nikodimos and the Philokalia’). For Bishop Nikolaos (‘Distinctive Features of Athonite Spirituality’) the physical landscape ‘has something different about it. Everything and everyone is adorned with an extraordinary otherness of exceeding beauty.’4 In other words, the monks and the monasteries are inextricably held within an all-encompassing environment of sacred space. There, in the stillness (hesychia), their prayer forms the ‘indispensable basis for genuine theology’ (Andrew Louth, ‘St Gregory Palamas and the Holy Mountain’). We learn, moreover, that Elder Joseph the Hesychast 2 ‘A Thousand Years are but a Day’, Le Messager Orthodoxe, 95 (1984), 20. 3 To the Chinese, for example, all mountains are sacred. They are never just pieces of rock, but always a source of spirituality, worshipped as the embodi- ment of mysterious power. 4 Editors’ italics. Cf. Pentecost Matins, Second Canon, Ode VII, Troparion 3. 14 Dimitri Conomos and Graham Speake (Archimandrite Ephraim, ‘Elder Joseph the Hesychast: A Universal Image of Holiness’) had great respect for the inanimate creation: After spring it’s beautiful here – from Holy Pascha until Our Lady’s Day in August. The beautiful rocks theologize like voiceless theologians, as does all of nature – each creature with its own voice or its silence […] everything has its own voice, so that when the wind blows, their movement creates a harmonious musical doxology to God. The world as sacrament is also a leitmotif in the spiritual teaching of Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra. Sacramental, too, is his per- ception of himself as spiritual father where the task is not to impose a standard recipe for Christian living but to create communities that are morally and spiritually inspired and where personalities can be moulded (Fr Alexander Golitzin, ‘Topos Theou: The Monastic Elder as Theologian, and as Theology’). The monks and nuns in his care do not merely coexist biologic- ally; they are a communion of persons that take as their model the supreme reality, the Holy Trinity, whose name the Church ceaselessly extols. Here, the term ‘spirituality’ refers to the lived experience of such a life in both its outward social and inward personal dimensions. The community’s repeated gathering around the elder and its continu- ous prayer for the world constitute the essential effort whereby a determined spirituality is given shape and sustenance (Archimandrite Elisaios, ‘The Spiritual Tradition of Simonopetra’). Personal sanctity and community-building are, therefore, the two touchstones of Athonite spirituality. The landscape of Athos, like the human state, can be fierce or gentle; yet it has lured men of humility and faith to a deeper understanding of who they are. St Silouan of the Rossikon was such a man. He encouraged the cultivation of love for all persons and all creation and his advice is uncompromising (Sis- ter Magdalen, ‘St Silouan, a Modern Athonite Saint’; Fr Nicholas Sakharov, ‘St Silouan the Athonite and Archimandrite Sophrony’): ‘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.’ What of the future? The French have a proverb: ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ – ‘The more it changes, the more it is the Introduction 15 same.’ In short, nothing really alters. Least of all, the human con- dition. With regard to the bridging power of Athos’s spirituality, the essays in this volume testify to that: In spite of the historical and social changes it has undergone, the Holy Mountain is today, as it always has been, truly the ‘Garden of the Mother of God’. For you it is an open window, a window through which you too can witness what an angel, a type of Christ, once showed to the Apostle John the Theologian: the heavenly Jerusalem, the eschatological dwelling of God with men.5 * * * * The Friends of Mount Athos, who convened the conference, are a di- verse group of individuals and communities sharing a common inter- est in the well-being of the monasteries of Mount Athos.