Russians Atop Mt. Athos

The attraction that Mt. Athos poses recently to a lot of people, including American journalists, is actually nothing new. It has long roots--very long roots, according to a book that is coming out next month: Russian Monks on Mount Athos: The Thousand Year History of St Panteleimon's by Nicholas Fennell PhD (Holy Trinity Seminary Press, Sept. 2021).

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Holy Mountain of Athos is a self-governing monastic republic on a peninsula in Northern Greece. Standing on the shores of the Aegean Sea is one of the twenty ruling monasteries that comprise the republic, that of St Panteleimon, known in Greek as the Rossikon. Its building, fully restored in recent years, can accommodate up to 5,000 men, reflecting the scale of the settlement at its apogee in the nineteenth century and prior to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 the monastery has experienced a strong revival and is now among the most numerous of the twenty. But the vast buildings that can be seen today are a reflection of only the past two centuries. That the Russian presence on Athos goes back more than one thousand years is much less well known.

This book is the first comprehensive account in the English language of this millennium of history. The author has been able to draw from previously inaccessible archival materials in gathering the wealth of information he shares in this work. The history of the community is not described in geographical isolation but shown as interacting with the much wider worlds of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires and the modern nation state of Greece, together with that of the Russian homeland whose political character is constantly evolving. There are shown to be three distinct phases in this history: 

--from the tenth to the twelfth centuries when Russian Athonites inhabited the ancient Russian Lavra of the Mother of God, also known as Xylourgou;

--then the six hundred years from the mid-twelfth to the mid-eighteenth century when the ancient Monastery of St Panteleimon was the Russian house on Athos, more commonly referred to as Nagorny or Stary Rusik;

--the most recent 250 years, that are naturally covered in greater depth thanks to the wider availability of sources.

Amongst the themes explored in the book are ethnic relations, the Pan-Orthodox ideal, the role of money and political pressure, sanctity and heroism in adversity, and the importance of historical memory and precedent. The author seeks to arbitrate fairly between often strongly opposing ethnic viewpoints. 

It examines in detail the fluctuating fortunes of the monastic community of St Panteleimon during the past 250 years, when its ethnic identity was frequently questioned. St Panteleimon's is a history that has been blighted by Greek-Russian quarrels, mass deportation of dissenting brethren, troubles in the Caucasus, and even tangential implication in the present-day dispute between the Ecumenical and Moscow Patriarchates over Ukraine.

This text will be invaluable to both academic historians and the general educated reader who does not possess specialist knowledge. It is complemented by a timeline, glossary, comprehensive bibliography, index, full-color illustrations and photographs.

A History of Mt. Athos

I have over the years noted a number of books and videos, as well as TV shows, about Mt. Athos, a place that continues to enchant or at least attract a good deal of Western attention. Another study, from a major academic press, joins this collection: A History of the Athonite Commonwealth: The Spiritual and Cultural Diaspora of Mount Athos by Graham Speake (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 308pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This book examines the part played by monks of Mount Athos in the diffusion of Orthodox monasticism throughout Eastern Europe and beyond. It focuses on the lives of outstanding holy men in the history of Orthodoxy who have been drawn to the Mountain, have absorbed the spirit of its wisdom and its prayer, and have returned to the outside world, inspired to spread the results of their labours and learning. In a remarkable demonstration of what may be termed 'soft power' in action, these men have carried the image of Athos to all corners of the Balkan peninsula, to Ukraine, to the very far north of Russia, across Siberia and the Bering Strait into North America, and most recently (when traditional routes were closed to them by the curtain of communism) to the West. Their dynamic witness is the greatest gift of Athos to a world thirsting for spiritual guidance.

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.

Mount Athos

I was going through the Peeters catalogue when I came across a recent book I had not previously seen devoted to Mount Athos, which, as I've noted repeatedly before, continues to generate a good deal of interest.  A recent collection of scholarly articles, edited by Graham Speake and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, continues to expand our understanding of the holy mountain: Mount Athos: Microcosm of the Christian East (Peeters, 2011), 216pp.

The publisher provides us the table of contents here in this PDF; and here in this PDF you can read an extract.

The publisher further tells us this about the book:

Mount Athos is the spiritual heart of the Orthodox world. From its beginnings in the ninth century it attracted monks from all corners of the Byzantine empire and beyond to experience its seclusion, its sanctity, and its great natural beauty. The first monastery, founded in 963, was an international institution from the start; by the end of the twelfth century separate monasteries had been founded not only for Greeks but also for Georgians, Amalfitans, Russians, Serbs, and Bulgarians. Nationality, however, has rarely counted for much on Athos, and though the Romanians have never secured a monastery for themselves, today they form, after the Greeks, the largest ethnic group. This book tells the story of how these many traditions came to be represented on the Mountain and how their communities have fared over the centuries. Most of the papers were originally delivered at a conference convened by the Friends of Mount Athos at Madingley Hall, Cambridge, in 2009. As far as possible, the authors were chosen to write about the traditions that they themselves represent.

Christian Spirituality: A Quiz

Which is the more tiresome and fatuous phrase:
(a) I'm not really religious, but I am spiritual
(b) I'm spiritual, but I'm not into organized religion
(c) Jesus: Yes! Church: No
(d) All of the above.

The correct answer, of course, is (d), and the penalty for failing the exam is a mandatory reading of a new book by Kyriacos Markides that may help us turn back the flood of narcissistic nonsense spewed today in the name of "spirituality": Inner River: A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Christian Spirituality (Image Books, 2012), 336pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us

In Inner River, Kyriacos Markides—scholar, researcher, author, and pilgrim—takes us on a thrilling quest into the heart of Christian spirituality and mankind’s desire for a transcendent experience of God. From Maine’s rugged shores to a Cypriot monastery to Greece’s remote Mt. Athos and, ultimately, to an Egyptian desert, Markides encounters a diverse cast of characters that allows him to explore the worlds of the natural and the supernatural, of religion and spirit, and of the seen and the unseen. Inner River will appeal to a wide range of readers, from Christians seeking insights into their religion and its various expressions to scholars interested in learning more about the mystical way of life and wisdom that have been preserved in the heart of Orthodox spirituality. Perhaps most important, however, is the bridge it offers contemporary readers to a Christian life that is balanced between the worldly and the spiritual.

Markides is the author of several other similar works, including the highly regarded book The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality as well as Gifts of the Desert: The Forgotten Path of Christian Spirituality. 

An Interview with John McGuckin

To know the work of the Orthodox priest and scholar John McGuckin is at once to ask: does he ever sleep? The answer to that must surely be no! Author of an acclaimed intellectual biography of St Gregory of Nazianzus and study of St. Cyril of Alexandria, of liturgical works, books of poetry, reference books on Origen and the Fathers generally, introductory texts on Byzantine spirituality, and much else besides, he has gone from strength to strength in the past two years with several major works, all discussed previously on here. I've had a chance to catch up with him and ask him about some of his recent publications as well as current and upcoming projects. Here are his thoughts:

AD: Tell us a bit about your background, including, if you will, what it is like teaching at two institutions and your directorship of the Sophia Institute. What is the Institute trying to accomplish?

I am a Romanian Orthodox Priest, of Anglo-Irish descent, husband, father of three, grandfather of six, currently working in a small parish in Manhattan and also hold down the position of Nielsen Chair (i.e. professorship) in Early Church History at Union Theological Seminary, and the Chair in Byzantine Christian Studies in Columbia University. I write a lot; and in my spare time I….come to think of it I have no spare time. 

The joy of  being involved in two very different  institutions is sometimes muted by the necessity of having to attend two sets of faculty meetings!  But Union is an old Ivy League school of theological studies that has traditionally invested much in early Christian theology. Schaff, our early leader of History here (older than Oxford’s Church History department by the way), sponsored the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church series, for example; and was instrumental in a very important 19^th century reference set called the ‘Creeds of Christendom.’ Columbia is another old Ivy League school stressing more the phenomenology of religions (under which rubric Christianity  has a large role and voice). 

The different strands to my life, of course, are all interwoven. The theological task is  the chief coloration of my priestly service to the Church. Living in both worlds of Academy and Ekklesia is interesting--  but no more strange than most men and women will experience in the  contemporary world where multiple identities and roles often overlap, and sometimes ‘grind’ against one another. I have long held it necessary to bring critical historical scholarship to the illumination of  deep truths. I have never thought the  critical method to be its own justification, or that scholarship is self-justifying. It has inherent values (whatever one calls them – truth, qualitative difference, illumination, wisdom). One ends up as a ‘theologian’ (or at least a philosophe) in the Academy even if one is not specifically treating the  religious thought of the ancients. That or dilettantism are our choices. On the other side of the coin,  ecclesiastical  life and culture without the winnowing and aerating properties of the life of the mind, and the  currents of  broader culture, can all too easily become stifling and oppressive. They might not like each another; but they need one another.

AD: We seem to be living in a time when scholarship, at long last, is beginning to realize that "Christian" approaches to law and politics, in so far as they treat the East at all, must move beyond tiresome notions of "Caesaropapism." (I'm thinking here, e.g., of the recent three-volume collection, one volume of which was The Teachings of Modern Orthodox Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature.) Where does your own forthcoming book, Ascent of Christian Law: Patristic and Byzantine Formulations of a New Civilization take the scholarly debate? What drew you to work on that topic? Why do you think there remains a very high level of interest today in studies on all aspects of Byzantium?

I agree with you about scholarship needing to renew itself. It can start by reviewing  the many clichéd presuppositions and short-cuts it clings to in lieu of addressing the primary sources. Our recent times have seen a great revival of interest in Byzantine studies, and more generally the  culture of patristic thought, and the life and culture of the Churches of the East.  When one looks at the majority of texts dealing with, let’s say, Eastern Christian religious culture,  from an earlier academic age, however, one is too often appalled by the undigested level of prejudices, false informations, and plain silliness one finds. One of the worst examples of all, I would suggest, is Donald Attwater’s books on the Eastern Churches. But even sharper scholars like Dvornik had an awful lot of silly things to say about the analysis of Byzantine subtleties of theology and politeia. His term "caesaropapism" has had a detrimental effect. So much of western scholarly attitudes to Byzantium up to the late 20^th century were full of prejudices distilled from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. They are often blind to the real balances and subtleties that a close reading of the primary texts reveal. But you know what they say: “Why let the facts stand in the way of a good theory?"

My recent book on  Ascent of Christian Law: Patristic and Byzantine Formulations of a New Civilization was written because I wanted to study and learn about an issue

where I could find very little extant literature to guide me. I don’t mean that there aren’t a bundle of books on canon law, or on Roman civil law – but rather that I could not find much to help me with a big question: What did Christianity do in its passage through the first millennium in consciously building a civilisation with its own stamp upon it? Law was surely in the heads and minds of the Christians from the times of avoiding Nero’s secret police to the legal scholastics of Justinian’s court. Christianity has invested so much in law, both civilly and ecclesiastically; and yet has always avoided the turn into becoming a religion of the law (be it Torah or Sharia) which other religious systems have chosen. My book therefore, is not so much a review of Byzantine canon law, or the Justinianic Code, as much as it is a question about principles of culture and polity-building at the heart of historical Christianity. I hope it will have much to say to a wide body of readers and theorists who might like to take a fresh look at the way so many areas (take Europe as an example) have advanced theories of human rights as a way forward to a secular paradise; yet in the  process have divorced their understanding of human rights from the sense of divinely graced anthropology by which Christianity first advanced the notion of the special dignity of  humankind. We now postulate  elevated rights for  humanity without any sense of a workable philosophical or metaphysical grounding to the theory: and we sit and wonder why the century that saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was also the century that reinvented slavery, and brought back genocide to the body politic.

AD:  Not a lot of academics get a chance to work on the production of a movie or documentary, but you did exactly that in Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer. Tell us about the process of producing the movie, and the traveling it involved.

Having completed the film, eight years after we initiated it, I can now appreciate why so few academics want to be involved in this genre. It was so much work; travelling, writing and rewriting scripts, hauling equipment up mountains, moving  a team by plane and bus from America to Egypt, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. Of course now that the film is completed it is clear that it has a charm of its own and will have a life of its own, reaching into homes on TV screens and  computer monitors where an academic work of mine, for example, would never appear.  The film is a visual study of several famous monasteries (including Sinai, St. Antony’s, and Sergei Posad) where we went as film-makers and just made the simple request of the ancient Orthodox pilgrims: ‘Abba, give me a word.’ We asked the senior monastics of each place (including several convents)  to tell us something about their practice of the Jesus Prayer. We think the film gives a little window, often in an intriguing way, into Orthodox monastic life and the hesychastic tradition of the Jesus Prayer.

AD: The Jesus Prayer and the practice of Hesychasm both seem today to be attracting a great deal of attention if the number of recent books is anything to go by. What do you think might explain this interest, including from non-Orthodox? What have been the reactions so far to the movie and book?

The very few secular critics who have noticed the film have tended not to like it. The general gist was that it ‘Did not tell me anything new;’ which surprised yet heartened me that so many  of them were already experts in hesychastic prayer. Who would have thought it?  


The larger number of Orthodox and Catholic faithful who have seen it and have responded back to us are almost  all singing from the same hymn sheet: they found it charming, restful and reverent, a feast for the eye and the heart, and so on. So it seems to have greatly pleased those who were, perhaps, more likely to have found it pleasing. I suppose we did a good service for exposing more of the hidden world of Orthodox monasticism to a larger audience. But I think this is the kind of film that will work better for the heart than the head ( which is after all a good thing for a hesychastic piece is it not?). 

The more I go on in life the more depth I discover in this simplest of all prayer forms – known as the Jesus Prayer. I have been working recently, academically, in researching Byzantine mystical ideas of cognition change. A recent article of mine in the St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly looks at the states of soul-cognition in Elias Ekdikos, a major figure of the Great Church in Constantinople at the end of the first millennium. He shows, quite clearly, how advanced studies in cognitive changes (the theory of human consciousness) were part and parcel of what we today would call 'Byzantine spirituality.’ For many generations, of course, spirituality and  human culture, let alone the human sciences, have been artificially divided (this domain church; this domain culture; this domain critical thought, and so on). But it strikes me that in their  simplest of meditative techniques on the nature of the Holy Name, the  precise idea of rising up (from material consciousness, to intellective consciousness, to mystical awareness) is ever at the heart of what the hesychastic tradition is all about; and the literature on the Prayer speaks of this incessantly in the language of the ‘descent of the Nous into the heart.’ These are all deep things, difficult to talk about, of course. But when they are practised one sees it instinctively because (as Orthodox theology consistently says) these things are archetypal in the structure of the heart and soul of human beings (drop a cat--it will always land on its feet).  This is why many outsiders find the fire in the Orthodox spiritual traditions, while  many Orthodox remain unaware of their own treasures (because of over-familiarity?).

AD: Much of the movie saw you visiting or describing many venerable monasteries around the world, including some quite famous. But monasticism seems to struggle in North America--we have no equivalent of Athos, Sinai, the Kievan Caves, Trinity Sergius Lavra, etc. Why do you think that is?

The Kievan Caves Lavra can give an example to suggest an answer to your question. I could deduce the same thing from the monasteries of most other Orthodox countries I have visited.  Under the Soviets the Lavra was part destroyed, and more or less wholly turned over to be a museum. The monks, as you know, were thrown out. The religious memory of the place was desecrated and ridiculed. When I visited it in 1991 a tiny group of monastics had been allowed back and were inhabiting a small skete on the site, alongside many resentfully hostile government employees trying to run the site as a cash-making tourist enterprise.  

When we went back for the film, the site was more or less under the control of the Church (except for the main church). At its center was the archbishop’s administration for Ukraine, and the national seminary; but also a newly re-founded set of male and female monastic communities.  The latter were struggling to establish their typikon: a word which means not just the rule of life they should follow (how much prayer, how much study, what type of ministry etc) but also what ethos the community will manifest. It is easy to print out the typikon if it is simply the day’s schedule. It is by no means easy to “establish” the typikon in the sense of building up the spiritual ethos of a place. One needs to  have the stones and lanes of the monastery ‘prayed over’ for a long time. One needs monastics who have been themselves rebuilt by the grace of God over time. Such a  vested place is recognisable by the charisms and graces of men and women who have been rendered luminous by the Spirit: but it also an issue of having experienced and gracious pneumatikoi or startsi (spiritual elders) who can oversee the life of  these houses, nurture their members, direct and shape them over decades, and pass on the care of the houses to disciples who maintain the self-same ethos. 

America is good at building the plant for monasteries, in some cases; but it has difficulties in establishing the tradition of elders. It is still (in its head anyway) a new and ‘frontier civilization.’ The sense of quiet alignment with ancient wisdoms and old obediences does not come naturally to it. It is more Teddy Roosevelt than Paisy Velichovsky. That is why I think America still has some way to go to find itself as a monastically-graced land. It is not enough to don the klobuk and  behave as if the tsar might drop in one day. One needs to pass through the fires of God’s pitiful mercy in oneself, and emerge as someone who would like to build a shelter in the wilderness for the comfort of the poor passerby.

AD: In addition to these two major projects, you've also overseen something (to my mind) even grander, viz., the The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity published this year in 2 volumes by Wiley-Blackwell. Tell us about the Encyclopedia, and the process of producing such a massive work.

The old adage says : ‘Never work with animals or children.’ I would add a line – ‘Or  with Encylopedias of Orthodoxy.’  It was, actually, great fun to do. And I can say that now that it is all over and done with. I had a team of young and enthusiastic assistant editors to cheer things on. We had the inestimable privilege of working with so many splendid  international Orthodox intellectuals (for almost all the entries were by Orthodox people with doctoral level qualifications). It heartened me to see how greatly the Orthodox world has repaired its levels of education so devastated by oppressive forces over the previous century.  Almost all English-language reference works on Orthodoxy, if I may exaggerate only a tiny degree, have been written about the Orthodox by outsiders, who have had varying degrees of patience with us, or understanding of us.  This is the first  really large-scale work that looks at us from the inside: tells the story in our own words.  

The Moscow Patriarchate is currently bringing out a mammoth Russian language version--but they are still only up to 'A,' I believe. Even when this finally emerges in the light, nevertheless, ours will not be pushed aside; but I hope it will remain as an enduring monument because our work takes the highest levels of contemporary critical scholarship and analytical refinement, and allies it with a sense of reverence and delight in the affairs and culture of our Church. Ours also might “just fit” in a book bag. Theirs will need a truck to move it around!

AD: One of the many charms of the Encyclopedia was the inclusion of copies of beautiful icons produced by your wife, Eileen. Is she a full-time iconographer? Where did she study?

Yes, you are right. I did not realize this until I actually saw the book physically in hand, when Blackwells sent me a boxed set: but how beautiful a thing it is to hold and smell (I like smelling books!). It is charming. The production costs were mounting of course, and although the publishers wanted  illustrations they could not stretch to many colored ones. So I had to reach out to another charmer, my wife Eileen, who is a very successful professional iconographer, and I had to go playing my sad violin so she would let me use her images to  demonstrate Orthodox iconography. This was no difficult task. Even though I may be biased, of course, I find her work ‘commanding’ among the many splendid new iconographers we have in our time. She, for me, is a buoyant example of some of the best things going out there internationally. So I was  blessed to be able to include her work. 

People can see a fuller range here. She studied as a fine-arts student (landscape painter) at Newcastle University in England, and went on to  have a full career as an educationalist. When we moved to America in 1997,  and I took up my academic appointment here, she retired early from academia and took up her painting again (which had been a leisure-hours activity all those years). She opened up ‘The Icon Studio’ in New York and has never since been without a list of advance commissions. She absorbed the techniques of icon painting in many places: studios in Athens and the Islands, and some ateliers in Romania. Her color palette is radiant. Her line is very pure and refined. Enough already--you might think I had a special affection for the woman!

AD: Wiley-Blackwell also brought out your own The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture, the latest in a considerable number of introductions to, dictionaries of, surveys covering Eastern Christianity. Why do you think we are seeing such an upsurge in major publications on Eastern Christianity today by major publishers--Wiley, Oxford, Routledge, Cambridge, Columbia, and others? Has the world--or at least the academic world--finally "discovered" the East?

Well, Wiley Blackwell is graced to have at the helm of its religion publishing list a very wonderful person called Rebecca Harkin. She is consummately professional, but also has a finely discerning eye. And, though I should not put thoughts in her head or words in her mouth, I think she saw in the traditions of the Orthodox church a fountain of real-world Christian wisdom that was both grounded and mystical at one and the same moment, and which could  be of great utility to the large numbers of intelligent Christians out there today who are ‘like sheep without a shepherd.’ It was Rebecca who came to me and pushed me to compose both these very large works. I (of course) like my Orthodox Church book.  I tried to make it always faithful to the Orthodox tradition in all respects. But I also wanted, all the way through it, to talk about the “real world.”   So it speaks of war, and human grief, and sexuality, and corporate greed in the market place; as well as speaking about the Virgin-Theotokos, the angels, the liturgy and sacraments.  That is my real world, you see: the juxtaposition of the 7^th age of the unrealised hopes of humanity, with the glimmering light already breaking through of the 8^th age of the Kingdom.

AD: What projects are you at work on currently?

My immediate problem is how to get through to the end of this period of Lent without staining my teeth dark brown with un-milked coffee. This is a recurring project: something of the level of what the ancients would call an aporia: roughly translatable as: Solve that one if you can!  In terms of literature I am resting my steaming head on the table at present and glad to see the release in 2012 of Prayer Book of the Early Christians

as well as The Ascent of Christian Law (SVS Press), and later in the year also the  issuing of a set of studies I have introduced and edited from a number of young scholars, titled The Concept of Beauty in Patristic and Byzantine Theology. The publisher for this is not yet settled. Make me an offer someone out there? This last book looks at the tradition in Platonic philosophy of the ‘Ascent to Transcendent Beauty’ (see the priestess Diotima’s wonderful speech in the Symposium). The Byzantine church Fathers take and adapt this theme to make it a magnificent set of reflections on the  beauty of the divine transcendent.  I think this will itself be a beautiful book, as well as a deeply instructive one. I have composed for it the Introduction on the nature of beauty as a transcendental in patristic thought; as well as an article in the  main body of the book on the manner in which St. Maximus the Confessor deals with the  idea. Other chapters deal with Plato himself, with Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Niketas Stethatos and others. I like offering patristic books which are dealing with real theology, real philosophy – full of substance not merely dead and deadly exercises in academic exactitudes; and thus as dry as dust. The great Fathers of the Church were radiant mystagogues in many cases. Many of their works still leap with the  power of the Spirit. Many  modern theologians have habitually dismissed them as theologians dead and gone, who have nothing to say to the world. This is the mistake of those who have never really read them. For us Orthodox, they are our living treasure. The lights are still on in the house. 

When my head stops steaming, I am turning my mind for the latter part of 2012, towards two projects on my open list. The first is the contract  I have with IVP Academic publishers to offer them, some time before 2014, a large  text book on the history of the Christian Church in the first millennium. It is going (tentatively) to be entitled The Cross Ascendant.    I am also starting a project I have long desired to do: a translation of the Hymns of Divine Eros of St. Symeon the New Theologian, which will itself be hymnal (poetic) in character and will reflect in English blank verse the varying metric rhythms of the poetic originals. I have lived on and off with St. Symeon for most of my scholarly life, since the day he found me as a 23-year-old know-it-all in a library in Durham. And I want to render his  magnum opus   in a version which will show what a master he was in both doctrine and poetry. Just talking about it makes me want to go and smell the Greek originals again! 

So I’m off – and thank you for your kindness is asking about my work.

Byzantine Music on Mount Athos

Mount Athos, as I noted last year (see here and here), continues to occupy a very considerable place in what could be called the Eastern Christian imaginary. I have just received a new work from Scarecrow Press (an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield), the thirteenth volume in their Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities series.  In this new book, a Danish ethnomusicologist takes a look at the musical revival on the holy mountain: Tore Tvarn Lind, The Past is Always Present: The Revival of the Byzantine Musical Tradition at Mount Athos (Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities) (Scarecrow Press, 2012), 224pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

In The Past Is Always Present, Tore Tvarnø Lind examines the musical revival of Greek Orthodox chant at the monastery of Vatopaidi within the monastic society of Mount Athos, Greece. In particular, Lind focuses on the musical activities at the monastery and the meaning of the past in the monks' efforts at improving their musical performance practice through an emphasis on tradition.

Based on a decade of intense fieldwork and extensive interviews with members of Athos' monastic community, Lind covers a vast array of topics. From musical notation and the Greek oral tradition to CD covers and music production, the tension between tradition and modernity in the musical activity of the Athonite community raises a clear challenge to the quest to bring together Orthodox spirituality and quietude with musical production. The Past Is Always Present addresses all of these matters by focusing on the significance and meaning of the local chanting style. As Lind argues, Byzantine chant cannot be fully grasped in musicological terms alone, outside the context of prayer. Yet because chant is fundamentally a way of communicating with God, the sound generated must be exactly right, pushing issues of music notation, theory, and performance practice to the forefront.

Byzantine chant, Lind ultimately argues, is a modern phenomenon as the monastic communities of Mount Athos negotiate with the realities of modern Orthodox identity in Greece. By reporting on the musical revival activities of this remarkable community through the topics of notation, musical theory, drone-singing, and spiritual silence, Lind looks at the ways in which Athonite heritage is shaped, touching upon the Byzantine chant's contemporary relationship with practice of pilgrimage and the phenomenon of religious tourism.

Offering unique insights into the monastic culture at Mount Athos, The Past Is Always Present is for those especially interested in sacred music, past and present Greek culture, monastic life, religious tourism, and the fields of ethnomusicology and anthropology.

This book also includes a CD with fifteen pieces on it, including several plagal chants from the Divine Liturgy and all-night vigil. We are having this expertly reviewed later this year for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, to which you will want to subscribe here. 

Author Interview: Veronica della Dora

Earlier this year, as I noted, a good deal of attention focused on Mt. Athos thanks in part to a 60 Minutes documentary. This appeared alongside a new book about the mount: Veronica della Dora, Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place, from Homer to World War II (University of Virginia Press, 2011), 336pp. 

This book carries some significant endorsements from leading scholars, including:

Alice-Mary Talbot:
This is an extraordinarily original and innovative book. Although at first it might seem strange for a female scholar to write a book about a place she can never visit, Dr. della Dora turns this challenge to her advantage by focusing on the Holy Mountain as an 'object of desire,' and analyzing how various perceptions of it were transmitted over the centuries to viewers and readers, most of whom themselves never set foot on Athos. The book is not intended to be the 'inside story' of Athos, from the point of view of the monks, but Athos as seen "from the outside."

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware: Among the many books written about the Holy Mountain, this is one of the most exciting and original. It uncovers an aspect of Athos hitherto little explored and makes a genuinely significant contribution to existing scholarship. Veronica della Dora is concerned not with the external history of the monastic peninsula but rather with the part that it has played over the centuries, and continues to play, in the imagination of monks, pilgrims and travelers. Beautifully written, scrupulously researched, fully illustrated, this is a visionary work, remarkable in its insight. 

I asked the author for an interview about her book, and here are her thoughts:

AD: Please tell us about your background:

VdD: I graduated from the University of Venice, Italy and continued my studies in the Geography Department of the University of California at Los Angeles. I received my PhD in 2005 and, after two years as a postdoctoral researcher by the same institution and at the Getty Research Institute, I moved back Europe to start my current appointment as Lecturer in Geographies of Knowledge at the University of Bristol.

I was baptized Orthodox Christian in the metochion (dependency) of the Athonite monastery of Docheiariou in Sochos-Lagkada (Greece) in 2001, before moving to the States.

AD: What about your own background led you to the writing of this book?

The path that led me to this book is both academic and spiritual. As a cultural and historical geographer I have always been interested in processes of place making and in the ways people perceive place and landscape. There is a basic distinction between these two concepts. Place we tend to associate to meaning, to personal experience, to emotions; landscape to aesthetic contemplation. We always look at it from a distance.

I first encountered Mount Athos as a landscape. I was about to finish college and not quite sure what to do with my life. I had decided to learn Greek for a change and attend to a summer school in Thessalonica. One weekend the boys were taken to Athos. We girls were offered a boat tour of the peninsula. The night before, we were given a slide show. Images of magnificent buildings and black-robed monks ‘living like centuries ago’ captured my imagination.

Our boat left Sithonia early in the morning. Athos’ dark cone slowly started to loom on the horizon. When we passed the last monastery, Docheiariou, I suddenly remembered I had once talked to a monk from there through amateur radio. ‘Hold on, how can a monk be on a ham radio?!’ I couldn’t quite match images of austere clerics reading ancient manuscripts with HF transceivers and antennas. I became intrigued.

I decided to put my Greek to practice and wrote him a letter—out of pure curiosity, nothing else. Months passed by. ‘Maybe monks are misogynist and don’t write to women’, I thought. But one day I found an envelope stamped with the double-headed Byzantine eagle in my mailbox. ‘Dear Veronica, I am sorry it took me so long to reply, but I was working in the mainland over the summer and just found your letter’. It turned out that he and a small group of fellow-monks were building a nunnery outside of Athos, a place where women could live Athonite liturgical life.

The guy must have felt for my broken Greek and offered help. ‘I am glad you are trying to learn Greek not only because it is my mother tongue, but because it is the language of the Gospels. As a monk, however, it is not appropriate for me to keep a correspondence with a woman unless you have spiritual interests. Do you?’ ‘I am agnostic and know nothing about Orthodoxy. But I want to learn’.

We started to correspond, first through letters, later by phone. I would ask him about his daily routine and his faith. With patience and fatherly care, he would listen to me, correct my mistakes, teach me new words, and introduce me to his world.

One year later I met him at the nunnery. He was excavating the foundations of a new building with other fathers under midday’s burning sun. A bunch of sweating, dust-covered bearded men dressed in rugs—definitely not the image of monk I had in mind!

I spent few days there. I attended a long vigil. I couldn’t pick up a single word, but the chanting kept echoing in my mind for entire months after my return home. I revealed to him anxieties and personal problems. He provided me with sound advice which I treasured over the years. I found a safe shelter. I regained my faith.

I also found that dozens of other laypeople turned to the monastery, usually broken, suffering people: poor families, mothers of drug-addicted teenagers, couples who had lost their only child, the terminally sick. To each of them the monks would provide comfort, prayer, sometimes even financial help. They would not ‘preach’, but live people’s daily sufferings from within. For all these laypeople Athos continues to be a beacon of light and hope. For me it has ironically become the most stable landmark in a life of continuous changes and moves. From landscape, it has become a place.

AD: Tell us why you wrote this book:

This book was originally written as my PhD dissertation. Like, I believe, any PhD student, I wanted to work on a topic about which I was truly passionate.

I originally moved to the States in 2001 as an exchange student between my former institution in Italy and UCLA. That was two months after my baptism and exactly three days before 9/11. For a 23-year-old who had never lived by herself, let alone abroad, it was no easy task being catapulted to the other end of the globe under such dramatic circumstances. I think this is when my tie with Mount Athos started to grow stronger and stronger. In the midst of daily difficulties and uncertainties, I knew the fathers would light a candle for me and this gave me strength. I liked to think that every night, as Europe was still asleep, the monks would get up to go to church and would pray for the entire world. Everyday I saw a little miracle happen and felt closer and closer to the Holy Mountain, even though I was so distant.

The year I was preparing for my ABD exams, the European parliament had just passed a resolution of fundamental rights in the EU calling the Greek government to lift Athos’s avaton. All the articles I came across in the newspapers and on the web talked about the exclusion of women from Athos; none of them talked about the social and spiritual role of the Holy Mountain in the lives of those thousands of men and women, like myself, unable to visit it. As an insider-outsider, I felt disturbed by the caricaturization of Athos and its inhabitants in the press as a monolithic exotic other cut out from the rest of the world. As a scholar, I became interested by the genealogy of these perceptions and representations. More generally, I became interested in the processes through which a place circulates outside of its physical boundaries. 

I guess I ultimately wanted to show that physical distance does not necessarily mean exclusion from a place, and conversely, physical access does not always mean inclusion. The stories of many western travelers of the past and their orientalist constructions of Athos seem to confirm the latter point.

Finally, I wanted to show the cultural complexity of the place. I found that most scholarly monographs and tourist guides tended to focus only on certain aspects of Athos, which is its Byzantine legacy and sacredness. As I started to dive in the archives, I discovered a plethora of other stories: pre-Christian stories, stories of war refugees, botanists, sociologists, military strategists, and women. Some of these stories have appeared in specialized studies in various languages; many others just lay forgotten on dusty library shelves. I thought that taking these stories out of the archives and grouping them in a single volume would add another dimension to current scholarship on the Holy Mountain.

AD: For whom was the book written—did you have a particular audience in mind?

When I set to write my dissertation proposal, the audience I had in mind was predominantly academic. As I moved on and came across so many exciting stories and images, however, I felt more and more compelled to write for a general public interested in Mount Athos. I thought it would be a shame to confine these materials to a specialized scholarly audience. When I rewrote the work for publication, I set this as my main task, by expunging academic jargon, for example, and trying to make the book accessible and pleasant to read also to a non-academic audience.

AD: Were there any surprises you discovered in your writing?

Yes, definitely. There were many surprises and I believe this the beauty of research: you set off with a set of research questions and expectations and end up with something totally different. For example, I had no idea Athos had been a geopolitical observatory or a refuge for WWII allied soldiers, or that late Byzantine scholars and western Renaissance mapmakers represented it as some sort of insular utopia.

Every account or image I encountered during my research was a surprise in itself. I found some stories bizarre, populated as they were by eccentric philhellenes who would normally lecture in togas, by voracious bibliomaniacs after Athos’ precious manuscripts, or by lunatic early-twentieth-century adventurers gaining a reputation for having crossed the Alps on elephant back. Other stories I found moving. For example, I could not hold back my tears while reading the autobiography of WWII Australian heroine and philanthropist Joice Nankivell Loch, who for many years inhabited the Byzantine tower of Ouranoupoli and, with her husband, helped rescue the village from famine. Like myself and many other women, Joice felt part of the Athonite community even though she could not physically cross the border.

AD: Are there similar books out there, and if so, how is yours different?

There are several excellent monographs on Mount Athos, including Graham Speake’s beautifully illustrated Renewal in Paradise.

I guess two things make Imagining Mount Athos unique, or at least sui generis: the first is my female authorship (and thus my positionality); the second is my approach as a cultural geographer. I am not so much interested in the factual history of the place (this has been already written), as in ways of seeing it and in the multiple narrative channels through which Mount Athos travelled outside of its boundaries throughout the centuries.

Since pre-Christian times, Athos has been usually narrated as an island. Today many still tend to forget it is a peninsula. It continues to silently stretch far beyond its boundaries, as it always did. A woman named Maria Lagoude wrote in the eleventh century:

From old and from the beginning, and so to speak, from the time I was in my mother’s womb I was raised by the monks of Lavra. During our entire life my husband and I have been devoted to the Lavra and have much faith in it because of the virtue of the fathers who live there and their compassionate soul-loving disposition... At the Holy Lavra my husband and I found a harbour of salvation (A.M. Talbot, ‘Women and Mt Athos’, in Mount Athos and Byzantine Monasticism, p.78).

As Alice-Mary Talbot commented, this woman envisaged the abbot of the monastery as ‘her spiritual father, the Lavra as her mother, and herself as one of the brethren and children of the Lavra’—a place she never saw, even from the boat.

Mount Athos (2)

I'm watching the 60 Minutes special on Mount Athos and much of it is very good. It is quite something to see the Holy Mountain given such coverage, and much of it is very edifying. But there is, alas, the usual credulity on the part of Western journalists in accepting without question or quibble the usual propaganda about, e.g., how Orthodoxy is the only part of Christianity that has never changed, a theme first mentioned at the beginning of the piece, and in the concluding line: "Mt. Athos will not have changed at all." Many of the practices are indeed longstanding, and it is wonderful to see such fidelity to such age-old monastic life. But Mt. Athos and the attitudes of its diversity of monks have changed, and continue to change, not least in the various attitudes (largely negative) towards fellow Orthodox and fellow Christians. Anyone who believes otherwise might want to purchase the Brooklyn Bridge, which I'm selling on Craig's List for fifty cents. To be clear: I have the highest respect for Mt. Athos, but this kind of notion that they have never changed is the kind of fatuity that cannot be allowed to pass without comment.

Earlier I drew attention to a new book about Mt. Athos, which continues, of course, to occupy an enormous and singular place within Eastern Christian monasticism. The very first book review I published many years ago now was about Athos: M. Basil Pennington's The Monks of Mount Athos: A Western Monk's Extraordinary Spiritual Journey on Eastern Holy Ground. It is a charming book warmly, openly, humbly narrating the journey of a Roman Catholic monastic on Mt. Athos, during which he was alternately treated with "great love" by some who welcomed him hospitably and yet he also experienced "great pain" when others denounced him as a heretic, refused him entry even into the narthex of their church, and asked him such absurd questions as whether it was true that Catholics made the sign of the cross with four fingers because they believe not in the Trinity but in a quaternity! (Who would be the fourth? the pope? the Theotokos? Pennington's monastic inquisitors do not specify.)

Some monasteries on the mountain thus function as self-appointed guardians of what they imagine fatuously to be some kind of pure Orthodoxy unadulterated by contact with those contaminating Catholics and other heretics, including their fellow Orthodox (e.g., the Ecumenical Patriarch) who commit the unpardonable sin of dialoging with Catholics rather than condemning then tout court. Others are not nearly so fanatical. Mount Athos functions, then, not merely as some kind of monastic "powerhouse" but also as a "social imaginary" for many people on and off the mountain, shaping images and perceptions of what constitutes "Orthodoxy." Now a new book comes along to look at the various ways in which Mt. Athos has been perceived:

Veronica della Dora, Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place, from Homer to World War II (University of Virginia Press, 2011), 328pp. + 58 illustrations.

The author teaches in the School of Geographical Sciences at Bristol University. What makes her authorship of this text remarkable is that Mt. Athos forbids women to visit: only men may do so, after applying for permission.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

For more than one thousand years the monastic republic of Mount Athos has been one of the most chronicled and yet least accessible places in the Mediterranean. Difficult to reach until the last century and strictly restricted to male visitors only, the Holy Mountain of Orthodoxy has been known in the Eastern Christian world and in western Europe more through representation than through direct experience. 

Most writing on Athos has focused on its Byzantine history and sacred heritage. Imagining Mount Athos uncovers a set of alternative and largely unexplored perspectives, equally important in the mapping and dissemination of Athos in popular imagination. The author considers Mount Athos as the site of pre-Christian myths of Renaissance and Enlightenment scholarship, of shelter for Allied refugees during the Second World War, and of a botanical and sociological laboratory for early-twentieth-century scientists. Each chapter considers a different narrative channel through which Athos has entered Orthodox and western European imagination: the mythical, the utopian, the sacred, the scholarly, the geopolitical, and the scientific.

Della Dora has assembled a wealth of unique textual, visual, and oral materials without ever having had the opportunity to visit this holy place. In this sense, in addition to making an important contribution to existing scholarship on Mount Athos, the book adds to current theoretical debates in cultural geography and humanities generally about the circulation of knowledge.

Imagining Mount Athos’s appeal is international and spans Hellenic studies, cultural geography, environmental history, cultural history, religious studies, history of cartography, and art history. The book will be of interest to scholars as well as to a general audience interested in this unique place and its fascinating history.

I look forward to reading Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place, from Homer to World War II and seeing it reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.