Holy Men on the Holy Mountain

I have over the years drawn attention to various books and videos about Mount Athos. To that growing list we will, next year, have to add another volume published by the most prestigious centre for Byzantine studies in North America. Forthcoming in April 2016 is a newly edited and translated collection: Alexander Alexakis, ed., and R.P.H. Greenfield et al. trans., Holy Men of Mount Athos (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 2016),740pp.

About this book we are told:

Often simply called the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos was the most famous center of Byzantine monasticism and remains the spiritual heart of the Orthodox Church today. This volume presents the Lives of Euthymios the Younger, Athanasios of Athos, Maximos the Hutburner, Niphon of Athos, and Philotheos. These five holy men lived on Mount Athos at different times from its early years as a monastic locale in the ninth century to the last decades of the Byzantine period in the early fifteenth century. All five were celebrated for asceticism, clairvoyance, and, in most cases, the ability to perform miracles; Euthymios and Athanasios were also famed as founders of monasteries.

Holy Men of Mount Athos illuminates both the history and the varieties of monastic practice on Athos, individually by hermits as well as communally in large monasteries. The Lives also demonstrate the diversity of hagiographic composition and provide important glimpses of Byzantine social and political history.

All the Lives in this volume are presented for the first time in English translation, together with authoritative editions of their Greek texts.

But if you can't wait until 2016, here is another study already in print, released earlier this year under the editorship of the well-known Orthodox Metropolitan and scholar Kallistos Ware with Graham Speake: Spiritual Guidance on Mount Athos (Peter Lang, 2015), 157pp.

About this book we are told:

Spiritual guidance is the serious business of Mount Athos, the principal service that the Fathers offer to each other and to the world. Athonites have been purveyors of spiritual guidance for more than a thousand years in a tradition that goes back to the fourth-century desert fathers. The recent monastic renewal on the Mountain is testimony to the Fathers’ continuing power to attract disciples and pilgrims to listen to what they have to say. The papers included in this volume examine some of the many aspects of this venerable tradition, as it has developed on Mount Athos, and as it has devolved upon monks and nuns, spiritual fathers and confessors, lay men and women, in other parts of Greece and in the world. Most of the papers were originally delivered at a conference convened by the Friends of Mount Athos at Madingley Hall, Cambridge, in 2013.