Short Trip to the Edge Read online

  Mount Athos has always been a unique phenomenon, and, for most folks, it remains a downright puzzling phenomenon; its uniqueness and puzzlement are all the more pronounced in the twenty-first century, when ancient pursuits like monasticism, asceticism, and hesychasm (EH-see-kazm; the pursuit of stillness) strike the modern psyche as anachronistic, extreme, and maybe a little perverse.

  The monks also follow the Julian, or “old,” calendar, and this involves a tweaking of dates to a point thirteen days behind where you thought you were.

  Think of it as a cosmic pressure to slow down—or, maybe better, as a metaphor for our failure to know, even, where we stand, or when.

  Then don’t think about it again. The monks are, for the most part, gracious enough to suppose where and when you think you are, and will play along.

  Oh, and one other thing: the clock. The hours of the day begin at sundown rather than at midnight. Not to worry; you’ll catch on.

  The easternmost of three peninsulas—easily the steepest and rockiest of three long fingers of steep and rocky land—reaching south into the Aegean from that region of northeastern Greece known as Halkidikí, the peninsula of Mount Athos is about thirty-four miles long and varies between five and eight miles across, covering less than 250 square miles total. The sharply rising terrain moves precipitously from sea level to 6,700 feet, which is the summit of the Mount Athos peak itself, very near the southern tip of the peninsula.

  In physical terms, then, the area of the Holy Mountain isn’t much. In spiritual terms, it is immense, impossible to chart.

  Archaeological evidence suggests that since as early as the second century, ascetics have lived here in pursuit of prayer—in pursuit of, rather, lives of prayer. I’ll get to what I mean by the italics soon enough. Or nearly soon enough. By and by.

  Since the third century—and perhaps even earlier—ascetics desiring lives of prayer have lived in community here. Over the next seventeen hundred years, the precise number of these communities has varied, witnessing intermittent increase and decline; some documents indicate that as many as 180 such communities flourished at one point. The establishment of these communities appears to have occurred in two distinct waves, an early wave during the third through the fifth centuries, and a second, more pronounced wave commencing in the tenth century and continuing into the fourteenth century. (Megísti Lávra, founded in 963, is agreed to have been the earliest in the second wave.)

  Today, twenty such communities are recognized as “ruling monasteries”; because Mount Athos operates as a virtually autonomous political state, representatives from these twenty constitute the Holy Mountain’s governing body. Although seventeen are identified as Greek, one as Bulgarian, one as Serbian, and one as Russian, the Holy Mountain comprises a full array of Orthodox nationalities, including substantial numbers of Romanian, Moldavian, Ukrainian, English, American, and Australian monks. There are also a dozen or more sketes; these are very like monasteries, but ostensibly—with a few notable exceptions—smaller. Each skete is a dependency of one of the twenty ruling monasteries, on whose lands it rests. Some, like the Romanian Skíti Timíou Prodrómou (named after “the Forerunner,” Saint John the Baptist), the Russian Skíti Agíou Andréa (Saint Andrew’s Skete), and Skíti Profíti Ilioú (Prophet Elias Skete), look very like full-fledged monasteries, with a central katholikón (church) protected within a high-walled structure; others, including Skíti Agías Annis (Saint Anne’s Skete) and Néa Skíti (New Skete), appear more like thriving residential communities spread across the steep Athonite slope, dotted with churches, chapels, and monastic kellía, or cells. There are, as well, throughout the Athonite wilderness, many scattered, communal farm dwellings, kalýves (communal huts), kathísmata (smaller huts for single monks), and hesychastéria (squat huts or simple caves etched in a cliff face for the most ascetic of hermits, an increasingly rare breed).

  The twenty ruling monasteries are now coenobític, meaning that the monks all follow a common rule. Until recently, some were idiorrythmic, in which the monks pursued more individualized ascetic practice, often allowing for a more demanding rule. The idiorrythmic approach—still observed in many of the sketes and smaller dependencies—is thought by some to be an aberration of the ideal monastic community, albeit a necessary one brought about during foreign occupation by Franks, Turks, and so on. Others understand the idiorrythmic rule of the skete to be more aptly suited to those monks who are permitted a more strenuous áscesis.

  In either case, the monastic rule has always revolved around prayer. And fasting, too—but fasting as a tool assisting prayer. It is safe to say that nothing about life on Mount Athos is understood as an end in itself, and that everything deliberate about life there is undertaken to accommodate prayer. Prayer is undertaken to accommodate union with God—what those in the business like to call theosis.

  We should probably stick to prayer for now, but theosis is the crux of our matter, and that is where—I pray—we will eventually arrive.

  Odd as Mount Athos may appear by contemporary standards, the Holy Mountain is visited by hundreds of pilgrims every month. The generally balmy weather and calm seas of spring, summer, and fall bring boatload after boatload scrambling to visit the steep and rocky slopes, the deep forests of chestnut, pine, and juniper, and the ancient enclaves; though wintertime draws relatively fewer, they continue to arrive daily and by the dozens whenever the weather-driven surf allows the ferryboats to dock.

  That is to say, year-round, pilgrims arrive at Mount Athos almost every day, looking for something. One friend (now a novice monk at Simonópetra) told me that a good many visitors come in search of healing from serious illness—their own or that of a loved one. Some arrive because their marriages are failing or have failed; some come to kick an addiction or two; and some few arrive because they are drawn to a fuller sense of prayer.

  Most of the visitors are Orthodox Christians, and most are from Greece; a good number arrive from other parts of eastern Europe, notably Romania and Russia. Concurrent with the rise of Eastern Orthodoxy in English-speaking countries, many also come from England, Australia, and North America. Many non-Orthodox arrive as well; from what I could gather, these are often from Germany and other parts of western Europe.

  As I mentioned, the daily limit for entry to the Holy Mountain is 120 Orthodox and 14 non-Orthodox men. Since a vote among resident monks in the year 1045 and a subsequent edict of Emperor Constantine in 1060, women are not allowed entry at all, ever.

  This last bit seems to many—as it has seemed to me—to be the most archaic element of the entire operation, an element that, for some of us, threatens to turn admirably quaint into regrettably anachronistic, verging right up on the cusp of damned insulting. Granted, there are many monastic communities, East and West, that choose to limit their communities to one gender; the Athonite monasteries are not unique in that respect. Many convents exclude men; many monasteries exclude women.

  Be that as it may, Mount Athos is an entire peninsula, an entire monastic republic, and—some would say—the spiritual center of the entire Eastern Church. So the exclusion of women strikes the casual observer as extreme, not just a little misogynistic. That sense is not much mitigated by the fact that this prohibition extends to female animals in general—save those among the wild animals and the countless cats who are pleased to keep both the rats and the vipers nicely in check.

  Explanations abound, of course. One tradition has it that the Virgin Mary (whom, incidentally, the Orthodox call Theotókos, or God-bearer), traveling by ship with Saint John en route to visit Saint Lazarus (then Bishop of Cyprus), was blown off course and came upon this beautiful peninsula. Moved by its beauty and isolation, the Virgin prayed to her Son that it might become hers to protect. The story goes that this was, and remains, a done deal.

  Some legends include miraculous, audible warnings to historical female visitors—one of them being the stepmother of Mohammed the Conqueror who had come to return the gifts of the magi to the Christia
ns near the site of today’s monastery of Saint Paul (where those relics are now kept). By and large, the legends share one element: women are not to come here, and if they do come here, they shouldn’t plan on sticking around.

  My own guess is that the lives of prayer these men seek to acquire are understood by them to be more possible in an environment where certain longstanding human failures—pride, greed, violence, lust, and so on—are mitigated by a lack of opportunity. The absence of women effectively takes at least one species of error off the table, and indirectly protects the monks from a good many others.

  That said, notable exceptions have been made in the past. In particular, during the Greek civil war—which occurred in the aftermath of World War II—the monasteries of Mount Athos offered sanctuary to many women and girls fleeing the brutality of mainland atrocities. The monks made places for them, saw that they were fed, and kept them safe for the duration of hostilities. When, back on the mainland, the coast was clear, the monks promptly cleared the Athonite coast of women.

  I hoped to ask, at one point or another, about this continuing prohibition of what are, generally speaking, my favorite people. I hoped to hear an explanation that didn’t sound quite so specious as the ones I’d heard so far. Mostly, I hoped at some point even to understand it, suspecting that, as with a good many things, the business might look different from the inside than it does from the outside.

  On the Áxion Estín, leaning into the headwind at the bow, I was waking to the fact that after many months of planning and anticipation, Nick and I would soon be inside, setting foot on land blessed by centuries of prayer—genuine prayer, prayer of a sort I could only suspect, and desire.

  Soon, I’d be walking through what the Orthodox call the garden of the Theotókos.

  I hoped, moreover, to come upon a holy man, an adept, a spiritual father, who could help me to pray.

  It was more than a little daunting.

  In a curious and surprising way, at that moment the bleary-eyed stonecutter who was slumped next to me, picking at the bandage on his knuckle, became something of a comfort.

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  Lord, he said, teach us to pray.

  Before this, my only experiences with the Holy Mountain had come through books—ancient and modern—and through an abundance of verbal and photographic imagery on the Internet. My expectations, therefore, were guarded. I knew that many holy men had lived here over the centuries, and I knew enough to suspect that many holy men still did. I didn’t expect to find a staretz exactly, but I did hope to find a spiritual guide—someone farther along the journey than I, someone who might help me to pray, as it were, always.

  From the boat, the first monastic structures that came into view were small, discrete hermitages.

  Actually, they were the ruins of small, discreet hermitages.

  In the days ahead, similar ruins, scattered along the shores and along the remote footpaths, would do their peculiar work on me, deepening my sense of how long men had struggled here, making palpable an ascetic isolation that has endured here for more than fifteen hundred years.

  As more current structures—white stone huts surrounded by olive groves—came into view, I took a new position, leaning over the shoreward guardrail to take it all in. The first actual monastery along the shore was Dochiaríou. It was huge, a mass of incongruent structural shapes—wooden constructions perched atop and overhanging a variety of soaring stone battlements, centuries of add-ons—from the midst of which the dome and cross of the katholikón, the central church, stood out, overshadowed by a tall stone tower commanding the upslope side.

  Nick and I stayed on the upper deck to watch as the Áxion Estín pulled in to Dochiaríou’s arsanás, its seaport. On the concrete pier a middle-aged man in street clothes was bowing to kiss the hand of a white-haired monk. Before the pilgrim turned to hop onto the ferry’s iron ramp, the two embraced warmly, kissing each other on both cheeks, embracing once again.

  This scene was a little unsettling. I was, at once, both warmed and—regrettably—a little envious. This pilgrim had a spiritual father.

  This curious mix of responses was my first taste of one of the great paradoxes of a visit to the Holy Mountain: on Athos, everyone is sure to be confronted, simultaneously and repeatedly, with the opportunity either to be his best or to be his worst.

  Our next stop was Xenophóntos, a soaring expanse of stone and wooden structures behind and perched atop a granite fortress—slightly larger-seeming, slightly less incongruent in appearance than Dochiaríou—set at the very edge of the sea. From its center rose a bright yellow construction crane, indicating renovations underway. Here, the scene at the pier was repeated, except in triplicate: three pilgrims and three monks, parting with evident respect and affection. We also left six passengers on the pier—workmen, off-loading bundles of rebar and bags of cement, dragging the load to a waiting flatbed.

  As the ferry rounded the headland to the immediate south of Xenophóntos, the immense Russian monastery of Saint Panteleímon loomed into view. In terms of scale and beauty, it is frankly astonishing. Commanding easily four times the area of Xenophóntos, the white granite battlements and rectangular buildings are capped in the center by no less than half a dozen sparkling green domes of varying size, all of them glistening as if fashioned of burnished green enamel—many of them the onion domes of the Russian tradition. Moreover, the monastery appeared once to have been far larger; four or more looming structures (each being four to six stories tall and each appearing to cover square footage exceeding that of a football field) stood without roofs or with fragments of failed roofs. Now housing about forty resident monks, the monastery was home to nearly fifteen hundred in 1903; in the decades that followed, the Russian revolution took its toll even here. Today (though in my experience they make a habit of saying they have no room available), Saint Panteleímon’s can accommodate, with apparent ease, a thousand pilgrims and scholars. The Áxion Estín left them at least twenty, fetching away eight.

  It was at this point that I sat down on a slatted bench on the sundeck and dug into my backpack for my journal. I had planned to write every afternoon, recapping the events and impressions of the previous twenty-four hours as well as I could; I’d thought to do so in the interval of quiet time before vespers at whatever monastery I happened to be staying the night. But here I was, still on the boat at 11:00 a.m. on my first day, growing suddenly anxious that I would forget too much.

  And there was something else: something about the presence of Saint Panteleímon monastery—its scale, its antiquity, its glistening beauty—that sparked a familiar hunger in me, a hunger to come to terms, if only provisional terms, with what lay before me.

  Enormity is the word that came to mind just then.

  In uncommonly fussy, latter-day parlance, the word enormity is most often reserved for the very big and very bad. It is our late habit to refer, for instance, to mind-boggling evil—genocide or nuclear peril—in terms of enormity. Still, etymologically speaking, the word is pretty much interchangeable with enormousness, if more vivid, more ear-grabbing, and a mite scarier. In any case, it’s the word that came to mind.

  Better make that two words—Enormity glimpsed.

  I have often startled to a fleeting sense—either within an expanse of landscape or, for that matter, while poring over a written page—that there dwells before me an excess, abysmal, roiling beyond what can be grasped. Such a sense is what first led me, even as a child, to savor the language of the Bible.

  It is what first led me to the language of poetry as well.

  Along the way, I’ve come to the opinion that the real—whatever that may eventually prove to be—will appear, inevitably, as abysmal.

  From what I gather, I’m not alone. The consensus of modern philosophy is that the human circumstance—duly appraised—is unquestionably abysmal. Where I might tweak the consensus view is simply here: I’m guessing that our circumstance—the abyss in which we live and move and have our being—need not be ap
prehended as an abysmal emptiness so much as an abysmal fullness.

  An Enormity, I’d say.

  Of which, incidentally, the human person is to become a part, a member. Appalling, yes? And abysmal. Cheerfully so, I think.

  Still and in the meantime—however one might choose to speak of the accompanying sensations—our glimpses of the real are pretty much guaranteed to be vertiginous; and any taste one might have for that sensation is admittedly an acquired taste.

  I have been working to acquire that taste for a long time now, going on most of thirty years.

  Poetry, when it is actually poetry, suits that taste. Sacred texts, when they are pored over and pressed for unexpected and generative meaning, also serve. An expanse of landscape—whether scored and moved by human agency or by more natural activity—can also provide a savory moment availing what cannot be held.

  So, as the Áxion Estín pushed back from the concrete pier at the foot of the immense monastery of Saint Panteleímon, I had myself another little taste.

  And I opened my journal in hopes of coming to terms—if provisional terms—with this sense of enormity.

  I wrote a while, or tried to write, glancing up every minute or so to scan the shore as we passed along its edge: the steeply rising slope, the juniper and cypress, the ubiquitous olive groves, and scattered white stone ruins.

  I scribbled a load of glib banalities off and on for the next half hour, then realized what I was doing and slammed the notebook shut.

  Nick brought me another coffee, and we sipped, sighing audibly, relishing the final leg of our ferry ride as we pushed toward the tiny port of Dáfni, where we’d be getting off the boat.

  Pilgrims are a funny bunch, a fairly mixed bag.

  In the packed space of our corner on the ferry’s upper deck, we witnessed a curious array. Besides the pockets of day laborers sipping beers, there were men—alone or in small groups—of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of facial hair, and sporting a wide range of demeanors. Throughout the two-and-a-half-hour ride, some had been playing cards or snapping the worry beads of their komvoloi back and forth, some had been fingering the knots of their prayer ropes while they prayed, and some were munching on Greek pastries or loosely packed sandwiches, yucking it up with their friends. Most were drinking coffee, albeit cold coffee, a whipped, wake-up confection made with instant Nescafé, sugar, and condensed milk that the Greeks call a frappé; it’s actually better than it sounds, as it would have to be.