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| Leaving Aghiou Pavlou |
Hugging the shore the entire way, the boat skirted below immense stone outcroppings. Those that were detached from shore towered overhead, seeming to balance precariously in the sea. Elsewhere, huge shale formations swirled up and down like immense slabs of cake frosting.
We reached Dafni in an hour with all the usual commotion at each intervening stop. There, I had to wait until 12:30 for the larger caïque to depart northward.
* * *
While waiting, I fell into discussion with Manolis, a law student at the University of Komotini in northern Greece. He seemed about my age and was on his way south to the Holy Mountain. He had read widely, and our discussion turned to the meaning of Orthodoxy, which he defended as the correct interpretation of the patristic writings. One cannot correctly understand these writings, he urged, unless one reads them in the Orthodox spirit. Unlike the religions and philosophies of the West, Orthodoxy, he contended, is not dependent solely on the activity of the brain and logic. Rather, it is a matter of both reason and spirit. One does not merely think in Orthodox terms; one lives an Orthodox life. It is a matter of total experience, and no amount of reading, absent a proper spiritual understanding, will give greater understanding of it.
I told him I had no problem with this interpretation. But what bothered me was when the adherent of any one religion claimed to have the absolute truth. He agreed that this could be a problem because it often leads to un-Christian behavior. We are all humans and thus we are at present, anyway, capable of only imperfect understanding of divine ways. Who are we to proclaim the truth of our mere thoughts and suppositions?
Manolis urged me to leave the U.S. if possible. He couldn't imagine how anyone could live there willingly. He kept emphasizing the differences between East and West and how Orthodoxy reflects them. One example, he said, is the notion of beauty. Greek churches, for example, are built humbly low to the ground and, in his opinion, harmoniously with nature. Similarly, the white-washed houses of the Greek countryside. These reflect our humility before the power of nature and acknowledge our status within the larger scheme of things.
By contrast, the West builds its churches with tall steeples, as if to proclaim man's ability to challenge and overpower nature, a measurement of existence according to man's standard, not God's. He viewed this as a sort of hubris that the Greeks had wisely avoided. For Manolis, Protagoras's proclamation of man as the measure of all things had no place in Orthodoxy.
I reminded him that not all churches in the West are vast Gothic cathedrals like Chartres, and that most of them are in fact quite small. The matter of the beautiful houses gave me an opportunity to compare my abhorrence of having to accept someone else's notion of beauty with having to accept someone else's version of Orthodoxy. Skyscrapers, I maintained, can be beautiful too, and who is to say which is the "truly" beautiful, the humble white-washed Greek house or the "hubristic" skyscraper of the West?
* * *
From Dafni, the larger caïque deposited me at Ouranoupolis in an hour. From there, the bus returned me to Thessaloniki in three and a half hours.
* * *
Thinking back on my visit after all these years, I have come to see that Viscount Norwich was exactly right in his assessment of Mount Athos. Those who visit, he said, "find themselves by turns entranced and revolted, bewildered and
enlightened, depressed and exhilarated, terrified and consoled." That is precisely how Mount Athos struck me.
And what has been Mount Athos's effect on my Orthodoxy?
In one sense, Mount Athos solidified my Orthodox faith. That September, even for just a few days, Mount Athos unplugged me from the everyday world and permitted me to see and experience Byzantine Christianity up close. I felt Orthodoxy's deep pull and profound strength. Its long history was palpable. Its truths seemed transcendent and eternal, reaching far beyond the ethno-centric immigrant faith the Greeks had brought to America, which till then was the only version of Orthodoxy I had known. These sensations unavoidably gave my faith a distinct frame of reference, a tangibility in time and space, and a bit of newly discovered profundity that helped me understand, or at least tolerate, much of what had previously been obscure or repulsive. It gave me the incentive to give Orthodoxy another try.
But my visit did not remove all skepticism, not skepticism about faith, but about how Orthodoxy presents the faith. The gullibility of the monks for preposterous legends. The ridiculous rules, such as no crossing of legs or arms. These continued to offend me. It struck me that much of the place's appeal was mostly to simple uneducated monks for whom Mount Athos was a refuge from the pressures and hazards of life in the world. On Mount Athos, some of them may have had more to eat and may have enjoyed better living conditions than they would have had at home. But they struck me as essentially 0blivious to the real mysteries of Orthodoxy.
Over the centuries, Mount Athos has had its ups and downs. Even in the past century there have been major fluctuations in the numbers of monks populating the various monasteries, as these figures show:
Iviron
- 1903 - 456
- 1959 - 101
- 1968 - 68
- 1971 - 57
- 1980 - 52
- 2000 - 78
Stavronikita
- 1903 - 219
- 1959 - 35
- 1968 - 26
- 1971 - 31
- 1980 - 40
- 2000 - 45
Aghiou Pavlou
- 1903 - 250
- 1959 - 115
- 1968 - 111
- 1971 - 96
- 1980 - 81
- 2000 - 104
Panteleimonos (Roussikon)
- 1903 - 1,928
- 1959 - 61
- 1968 - 27
- 1971 - 24
- 1980 - 30
- 2000 - 53
[source: Graham Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise (Yale Univ. Press: 2002), pp. 169-174]
I didn't realize it at the time, but what I saw in 1980 -- the tumbledown monasteries populated with a few aged monks -- was Mount Athos at its most recent nadir. The Holy Mountain was suffering from the 20th century's advanced secularism and the triumph of democracies over the empires and kingdoms and principalities that had previously kept the place supplied with means and men.
Especially harsh had been the fall of imperial Russia and the corresponding suppression of Orthodoxy behind the Iron Curtain. In 1980, who could foresee that all would change beginning nine years later with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the disappearance of the Iron Curtain?
As we now know, Viscount Norwich proved to be terribly wrong in describing Mount Athos as "an anachronism, and one which modern Greece is no longer able to indulge." His dire prediction that it would become a tourist destination for both sexes or simply a museum lacking any vestige of the Holy Mountain's original life was also entirely off the mark:
Droves of tourists, while they embarrass the resources of the remaining monks and disturb the quiet of centuries, may in the end provide the means to preserve the skeletons of at least the most famous, most historical and perhaps the most beautiful of these ancient institutions, but by then the danger is that all the original life will have gone, and the peninsula will contain a series of hotels catering for the young of all ages and sexes, perhaps one large museum housed centrally in the Protaton and all the wealth of timber and wild life given over to insecticide and fertiliser.
[J. Norwich & R. Sitwell, Mount Athos (Harper & Row, New York: 1966), 98, 147; Speake 169-70]
In recent years, money and new monks have poured in through the revival of Russia and the former Iron Curtain countries, a general rekindling of interest in Eastern Orthodoxy, and the establishment of support groups like the Friends of Mount Athos (formed in Great Britain in 1990). They have sparked the Holy Mountain's remarkable revival.
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| Stavronikita has added a third floor |
Entire monasteries have been re-built or repaired. They look well-ordered and prosperous. Most seem to have embraced electric power. Monasteries swarm with monks of all ages and from all over the world, many of whom are well educated. They use cell phones and laptops. They have internet access. Visitors -- 320,000 of them in 2015 -- throng the Holy Mountain and move between monasteries by taxi and bus. They now arrive at Dafni on large ferries that disgorge cars, trucks, and buses.
Some monasteries, like Iviron, have returned to cenobiticism. When I visited Iviron in 1980, it was idiorrhythmic and had some fifty monks. [In saying fifty monks, I am deferring to Speake's statistics (recorded above), not what I was told the population was when I visited in 1980: twenty-five monks.] Now it is cenobitic and has close to eighty. The hideous gazebo in which I sat to write has been replaced by an attractive structure that harmonizes with the landscape and with the architecture of Iviron's other structures.
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| The new gazebo at Iviron |
Even Covid has come to Mount Athos. Eight cases were reported at Aghiou Pavlou as of late Sept/early Oct. 2020, and the monastery was placed in quarantine. One infected person was hospitalized in serious condition. Kathimerini reported a ninth case at Chilandariou and a tenth at the monastic village of Lakkoskete. Greece's National Public Health Organization sent a team to the area. It was unknown whether those living on the mountain were observing health protocols required for the rest of Greece, such as wearing masks.
* * *
My dream has been to return, to see the changes for myself, and to experience once again the strange effect of the place. Regrettably, my health won't allow it. But I will forever cherish the memories of my two visits to the Holy Mountain and how they helped me wrestle with and shape my answer to "Are You Orthodox?"
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