The treasures shipped from Mount Athos
Like the blood sent out and returning to the beating heart, so, according to the mid-20th century historian Fernand Braudel, people and ideas circulated to Earth’s ends from the Mediterranean.
This metaphor was taken up by Dimitri Obolensky (1918-2001) for the way that Mount Athos in Greece drew in men from all over eastern Europe and sent them out again carrying the culture and spirituality of the Holy Mountain.
This theme is now taken up by the independent English historian Graham Speake, an enthusiast for Mount Athos received into the Orthodox Church in 1999, aged 53. His new book is called A History of the Athonite Commonwealth.
The title is, to be sure, obscure. I wrote here last week about a book called The Salmantine Lanterns, but I think Athonite Commonwealth beats that. It became clearer once I realised that Athonite referred to Mount Athos.
Orthodox monasticism (of the highest importance, since the Desert Fathers of the fourth century, in maintaining doctrine and spirituality) saw a key moment in 963 with the founding of the Great Lavra next to 6,600ft Mount Athos at the southern tip of the peninsula that extends 30 miles into the Aegean. The word lavra means a narrow street in a city, hence a string of hermits’ cells around a church and refectory where monks shared in the liturgy and ate together each week.
The Great Lavra was the first large-scale monastery in the European provinces of the Byzantine empire outside Constantinople. As the Great Lavra flourished it drew new monastic foundations to Athos. There was, from the late 10th century, even a Benedictine monastery using the Latin rite. Its recruits came from Amalfi, a prosperous maritime city-state. This monastery survived the rift of 1054 often taken as the moment of schism between Orthodox and Catholic.
Individual travel was of the first importance in the spread of Christianity. Along the Mediterranean coasts monks voyaged to the Holy Land, or further to Sinai, or Trebizond on the Pontic shore of the Black Sea, or up the Dnieper to Kiev.
From Athos in this way was spread the movement called hesychasm. In the 14th century this method of living a life of prayer proved a battleground.
Its essential element is use of the words: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.” This was accompanied by what seems to be a technique of meditation, as Nicephorus the Hesychast explains: “Put pressure on your intellect and compel it to descend with your inhaled breath into your heart.” There the intellect could recite the Jesus prayer while the prayer of the heart was done silently.
An enemy of hesychasm, Barlaam of Calabria (1290-1348), denounced claims that God could be seen by the uncreated light of the Transfiguration. Perhaps he was too insistent on literal statements. In any case he lost the argument.
The second great influence was the diffusion of the Philokalia, published in Venice in 1782. It was a kind of ressourcement
– collected writings of the Greek Fathers. The edited collection embodied the spirit of hesychasm.
A monk-centred model for spreading Christianity is unfamiliar today in the West. Every monk, of course, had a mother (even if she could not set foot on Athos), so implicitly the transmission of monasticism relied on the anonymous piety of lay people.
Its very unfamiliarity makes Graham Speake’s survey of the spiritual diaspora of Mount Athos a surprising window on the faith that East and West are meant to share.