The Monastic Magnet. Roads to and from Mount Athos. Bearbeitet von Graham Speake, René Gothóni

Transcription

1 The Monastic Magnet Roads to and from Mount Athos Bearbeitet von Graham Speake, René Gothóni 1. Auflage Taschenbuch. 197 S. Paperback ISBN Format (B x L): 22 x 18 cm Gewicht: 300 g schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei Die Online-Fachbuchhandlung beck-shop.de ist spezialisiert auf Fachbücher, insbesondere Recht, Steuern und Wirtschaft. Im Sortiment finden Sie alle Medien (Bücher, Zeitschriften, CDs, ebooks, etc.) aller Verlage. Ergänzt wird das Programm durch Services wie Neuerscheinungsdienst oder Zusammenstellungen von Büchern zu Sonderpreisen. Der Shop führt mehr als 8 Millionen Produkte.

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3 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, (London, 1971), p. 383.

4 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 housed 500 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.

5 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 wellknown 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 ( ), heralded a period of even closer direct contact with the Holy Mountain and this 2 Id., Six Byzantine Portraits (Oxford, 1988), p. 6.

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 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

7 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. In this way the spiritual legacy of Athos is transmitted in abundance to monks and pilgrims alike. In his keynote address to the conference René Gothóni elaborated on the idea of pilgrimage as an ellipse, a journey from home to the pilgrimage centre and back again. He begins his journey, as most pilgrims do, in the harbour of Ouranoupolis from where the voyage to the harbour of Daphne symbolizes the binary opposition between the mundane world and the Athonite world. The whole Mountain is a pilgrimage centre, and on arrival the pilgrim entrusts himself to the care of the Mother of God, the Theotokos, whose Garden he is entering. When we encounter the world of the other be that other a work of art, a film, or a play we suspend our judgement. Professor Gothóni argues that the pilgrim to Mount Athos experiences something similar in his encounter with God. Standing in front of the holy icons, he learns to shed his preconceptions and his prejudices, and pilgrimage becomes indeed a dialogue with God. Marco Toti writes about The Inner Dimension of Pilgrimage to Mount Athos, the aim of which, he suggests, is to find one s longabandoned home. The whole Christian life is a pilgrimage to the lost homeland of the kingdom that is within. The homesickness that every man feels for the loss brought about by original sin can be assuaged by the light radiating from Mount Athos. The Exodus into the desert was the first pilgrimage, illustrating the journey of the Church in the world. 3 The exceptions are the papers by Graham Speake on The Way of a Pilgrim on Mount Athos and Metropolitan Nikolaos on Mount Athos: The Highest Place on Earth which were both given as addresses to meetings of the Friends of Mount Athos in Oxford.

8 16 René Gothóni and Graham Speake Pilgrimage is a quest for the spiritual centre without which life has no meaning. The prime example of this is the anonymous Russian pilgrim who embarks on a continuous journey of endless inner progression. Athos is such a spiritual centre where, despite the threat posed by the intrusion of modern conveniences, the saints still bear witness to God through their actions and through their faces. The same Russian pilgrim provides the frame for Graham Speake s paper on The Way of a Pilgrim on Mount Athos, in which he considers the extent to which the modern visitor to Athos can see himself following in the Russian pilgrim s footsteps by shedding his worldly cares and departing to another world. He goes on to reflect on the motives that drive pilgrims to go there year after year, and on the benefits that they will be privileged to enjoy when they get there. These include a powerful and ancient liturgical tradition, an ecumenical cultural tradition of belonging to the whole world of Orthodoxy, a natural environment of great beauty enhanced by silence, and the presence of holy men and charismatic elders who have been a feature of the Mountain since the ninth century. It is a combination of these benefits, Dr Speake suggests, that draws most visitors to Athos, no doubt because for most of us they are so obviously lacking in our own lives in the world. In his paper on Parfeny Aggeev and Russian Pilgrimage to Mount Athos Nicholas Fennell focuses on just one individual pilgrim, namely Parfeny Aggeev, who first visited the Mountain in 1839 in search of a spiritual father. He was tonsured to the great schema in 1840 but was then told to leave Athos and gather alms for his monastery in Russia. He returned in , but then left for good and after various travels joined a monastic community near Moscow where he died in Frustrated in his heart-felt desire to return to Athos, Parfeny turned to writing. His Tale of Monk Parfeny s Journeying, published in 1855, brought Athos to the attention of Russian readers and greatly influenced the numbers of pilgrims going to Athos. The book had a major impact on the work of many contemporary writers, including Dostoevsky, and also provides a valuable historical record, compiled as it was by an unbiased witness of momentous events. Most nineteenth-century Russian pilgrims were impoverished peasants who came to Athos with no money and Parfeny is a typical example, arriving on foot in the tradition of the wandering beggar and the anonymous Russian pilgrim.

9 Introduction 17 Describing Athos as an example of a very thin place, where the dividing line between the visible and the invisible, between the present age and the age to come, grows ever more transparent, Metropolitan Kallistos considers how this thinness of Mount Athos was interpreted by two British pilgrims in the second half of the twentieth century, namely Gerald Palmer and Philip Sherrard. Intrigued by his reading of the Philokalia and perhaps also by the anonymous Way of a Pilgrim, Palmer was searching for a new meaning in life when he first visited Athos in On his very first day at the monastery of St Panteleimon he encountered the celebrated hermit, Fr Nikon, who was to be for him the ideal spiritual guide. Palmer had come to Athos as a seeker. He received far more than he had ever expected, and he returned home a new man. What he valued most of all was the quality of the Mountain s silence, its hesychia. It is through the silence, he believed, that the pilgrim is enabled to experience the object of his journey as a very thin place. Sherrard first visited Athos in 1951 and continued to do so for many years, but by the mid-1970s, despite evidence of a monastic renewal, he felt dismay at the loss of silence and simplicity in the way of life of the old Athos. He believed that visitors were losing the true spirit of pilgrimage by abandoning the practice of walking, and Metropolitan Kallistos thinks he was largely correct. Walking enables the physical beauty of Athos to enter deeply within us, so that we realize that we are indeed present in a very thin place. In another paper devoted to the experiences of two contrasting twentieth-century pilgrims, Graham Speake explores further the reasons why people go to Athos. Though coming from very different backgrounds, both of his subjects were seeking new meaning and a fresh direction to their lives. The Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis went to Athos in November 1914 with his friend, the poet Angelos Sikelianos, and spent forty days there. Kazantzakis describes some of his experiences and encounters in the autobiographical novel Report to Greco. Despite finding some relief to the questions about the meaning of life that tormented him, he says his visit was ultimately a failure in that he failed to find the person he later realized he was looking for. The American theologian Alexander Golitzin first visited Athos as a student in November He too was looking for someone to solve his problems and, despite first impressions and early disappointment,

10 18 René Gothóni and Graham Speake he was sufficiently intrigued to make further visits. In the end he was convinced by three manifestations of Athonite monasticism: the cenobitic daytime life of the monastery, the nocturnal struggle of the monks at prayer in their cells, and above all the towering central figure of the abbot. Unlike Kazantzakis, Golitzin found (eventually) what he was looking for on Athos, a spiritual father by whom he was in due course tonsured a monk. Most pilgrims approach the Mountain as seekers after some sort of spiritual guidance: if they have the patience and the strength to persevere, the chances are that they will find it. The final paper, by Metropolitan Nikolaos, is a hymn of praise, an intimate and deeply personal expression of his love for Mount Athos. He concentrates not on his experiences of the Mountain as a monk, but as a student, a young man searching for a true meaning in life. He describes his various meetings with the celebrated elder Fr Paisios: next to an Athonite monk you forgive, you believe, you are comforted, you hope. He writes about an early visit to Karoulia, the most inaccessible part of the Mountain, where monks cells are suspended vertiginously over the sea far below. He recounts his visits to the cells of saintly ascetics and fools for Christ. Most evocatively of all, he offers a description of the desert of Athos, the southermost tip of the peninsula, where you can meet more easily an angel than a man, where the return to paradise is realized. His Eminence is at pains to assure us that his Athos is a holy mountain that is accessible to all, described by spiritual rather than geographical boundaries, closer to heaven than to earth. Metropolitan Nikolaos is a living witness to the continuing strength of the alternating current of men and ideas that for more than a thousand years has flowed between Mount Athos and the world. Drawn to it first as a questioning pilgrim, like Alexander Golitzin he found solutions to his problems in the monastic tonsure. Sent back into the world as a bishop, he operates as an articulate ambassador for the Holy Mountain and its unique gifts. For, despite the irreparable damage done to the environment and the monastic way of life by the inexorable spread of roads and vehicular traffic over all but the southernmost tip of the peninsula, Athos is fundamentally unchanged and remains a spiritual powerhouse offering refreshment to all who turn to it.