Holy Mountains, Holy Men

All of the papers collected in this volume were first delivered at a conference held by the Friends of Mount Athos at Madingley Hall, Cambridge, in October 2024. The society wishes to acknowledge with thanks the generous sponsorship received from the Gerald Palmer Eling Trust and the A. G. Leventis Foundation. The editor wishes to thank the Friends of Mount Athos for contributing generously towards the production costs of the volume. Once again, we are pleased to record our gratitude to our publishers for their patience, courtesy, and efficiency at every stage.

Graham Speake

What is it that makes a mountain holy? Is it simply its height, which makes it physically or spiritually closer to God, and therefore what some have called ‘a thin place’? Or is it its history, which may be associated with certain events in Holy Scripture? Or is it that the people who dwell or have dwelt there are themselves holy, or have pretensions to holiness? These are some of the questions that the authors of papers in this book have tackled without necessarily coming to any conclusions but leaving the reader to ponder them for him or herself. Perhaps we can agree that when you stand on the top of such a mountain, be it Athos or Sinai or Tabor, you feel that you are in an exceptionally special place where many have stood before and many will stand in future and, to borrow T. S. Eliot’s words, ‘where prayer has been valid’. You feel as if you are in every sense, both literally and metaphorically, on top of the world. You want that feeling to stay with you for ever – it is one of the most spectacular and memorable moments in your life – and it is with reluctance that you then turn to descend to the mundane world below.

But if you are descending from the peak of Athos, then the world below is far from mundane. For you are descending step by step into the otherworldly desert of Mount Athos. This desert has been the preserve of holy men since monks first set foot on the Mountain. And so it remains to this day. And so may it remain for generations yet to come. Most of the men who are the subjects of the chapters of this book spent at least some of their lives in the desert. There is something about this amazing place, like the peak towering over it, that is conducive to holiness, that breeds holiness in its inhabitants, that breeds saints. You tread lightly and quietly as you pass through it lest you disturb the men who dwell there. You hesitate to call at their door, though the chances are that, if there is anyone at home, he will give you the warmest of welcomes, even if the treat that he offers you is no more than a glass of (precious) water and one or two desiccated olives. You are the honoured guest, treated as if you were Christ Himself. And if you ask him for ‘a word’, you may be sure that the reply is as profound and as humbling as the sayings of the desert fathers of Egypt.

Such encounters are rare, as are the men who feature in the chapters that follow. These chapters focus largely on the high points or turning points in the history of Athos. These are the moments about which our sources have the most to say, which are therefore easier to write about because we know more about them. In between are the long, long periods in which nothing in particular seems to happen and nothing much gets written about. To the outsider, they may seem like longueurs, but to the insider, to the humble men who simply go on going about their everyday concerns, dedicating themselves to prayer and worship every moment of their lives, this is the life that they first came to Athos to experience and that has kept them there ever since. As young men they may have first come as pilgrims and then met an elder who inspired them with his wisdom and invited them to join his flock. In time, they too may grow into elders and acquire disciples of their own. And so the tradition is passed on from one spiritual generation to the next.

And what does that tradition comprise? What is it that attracts these young men in the first place? What is it that keeps them in total obedience to their elder? What is the secret of Athonite spirituality?

That essence of Athonite spirituality is surely defined, or redefined, by the ‘high points’ in the history of Athos. It is at these high points that the tradition is refined or restated, be it through the Typikon of St Athanasios, the Tomos of St Gregory Palamas, or the Philokalia of Sts Makarios and Nikodemos. The intervening centuries are often a time of consolidation, when the teaching of the saints is put into practice and put to the test. Those centuries also would merit complementary chapters of their own, but they would be thin gruel, for the sources are silent.

The intervening centuries have sometimes seen a decline in the population of the Mountain. Sometimes, this could be attributed to political events in the outside world, such as the Greek revolution in the 1820s when many monks left to fight for the liberation of Greece. Sometimes, it could be ascribed to religious movements, such as the Glorifiers of the Name dispute before World War I, when more than 800 Russian monks were deported by force and sent back to Russia on board warships. At other times, the growth of secularization in the outside world has threatened to lure would-be novices away from a life of austerity and prayer, as happened in the third quarter of the twentieth century. On this, I would like to quote some words spoken at a previous conference by Archimandrite Elisaios, Abbot of Simonopetra monastery: