by Scott Cairns
Great Lavra is, well, quite frankly, great; it is immense. In Orthodox tradition, there are three modes of monastic life. Hermits, of course, live for the most part in solitude; small groups of monks might make up a skete; and larger groups form monasteries. The largest monasteries are sometimes called lavras. That said, you might gather from its very name that Megísti Lávra is one big, big monastery. You would be correct.
Besides being the oldest among the current twenty monasteries—the “ruling monasteries”—it is also first in the hierarchy of those communities. It is genuinely huge, spreading out across an area roughly the size of, I’d guess, about a dozen football fields, resembling a medieval village more than a single monastery. Much of it has been restored, much of it is in the midst of restoration, and great stretches of it remain in dire need of repair.
We were dropped off in the parking lot and followed the signs (finally, signs!) to the archondaríki, where we signed in and enjoyed the usual welcome of cold water, loukoúmi, rakí, and Greek coffee (pretty much received in that order) while we awaited our room assignments. Of the fifty or so pilgrims arriving, nearly all were Greek, the exceptions being me, a man from the Ukraine, and two Japanese, one of whom was, quite surprisingly, a Zen monk.
Receive this however you will. It took about an hour for the majority of the rooms to be doled out, during which time we all waited in the archondaríki and in the guest patio. Two by two, the Greek men were installed in rooms with two or three beds. Once they’d all been assigned rooms, we four—two non-Greek Orthodox and two Japanese disciples of Zen—sat in the courtyard awkwardly awaiting our assignments; we tried conversation, without much luck; then we waited for another hour or so. Finally, the guest master happened by, seemed surprised to see us still there, and waved for us to follow him.
He led us to something resembling a barracks, a room holding about thirty beds, and motioned for us to settle in. One thing I hadn’t fully gathered until this point was how some monasteries—not all, mind you, but some—take pains to keep non-Orthodox “visitors” from mixing with the Orthodox “pilgrims.”
Most monasteries restrict non-Orthodox to the narthex during services. Some set separate tables for them during meals or, in extreme cases, feed them afterward or in adjacent rooms. Some, it turns out, also assign them to separate sleeping quarters. In this case, the monks at Lavra were careful to do pretty much all of the above. One unique twist, however, was that the Ukrainian and the American were also considered non-Orthodox—or, perhaps, not quite Orthodox enough. Or something. The Ukrainian was steamed. I was perversely entertained. The two Japanese men took it in stride and offered me some dried apricots and cashews.
I spent the afternoon poking around the expanse of Great Lavra alone, picking my way through one dusty courtyard after another, discovering chapel after chapel, workman after workman, monk after monk. Most of the day was punctuated by the sounds of drilling, sawing, and hammering; I wondered how the monks managed to pray amid such wall-to-wall cacophony. Even after three hours of traipsing the grounds, I never did manage to get my mind around their rolling expanse. Those grounds include—by rough count—something like half a dozen churches and thirty-five chapels; the central katholikón dates from A.D. 963. From what I could gather, more than three hundred monks live there, having relatively recently returned to a coenobític rule. The trápeza—whose ceiling is supported these days by an imposing network of steel scaffolding—is immense, its tables and benches carved out of marble and granite, with room for, I’d guess, more than a thousand men.
Up the slope and away from the sea, two miles or so above Megísti Lávra—roughly a third of the way to the summit of Athos itself—lies a very notable cave. These days, it is part of a monastic enclave of several kellía. It is the place where a fourteenth-century monk acquired a life of prayer that would lead to a very important turn of events later in his life when he would serve as Bishop of Thessaloníki and defend “the prayer of the heart” from its scholastic critics.
Hesychasm, in general, dates back well before the twelfth century, but its most articulate defender was Saint Gregory Palamás, the monk of that Mount Athos cave. Hesychía (eh-see-KEE-ya), the condition toward which the hésychast strives, is often translated as silence, but I think we do better with stillness, so long as that stillness suggests a condition of the whole physiology and psychology, not just the vocal cords.
It is a stillness that occasions, as well, an actual healing—a re-pairing—of mind and body, what some would call a noetic regeneration. Nous—that noun from which the adjective noetic springs—is a word found throughout the Greek New Testament and throughout the writings of the fathers and mothers of the church. In translation, its import is almost invariably lost.
Nous is most often rendered as mind or reason or intellect, and these poor translations are complicit in our unfortunate dichotomy of the human person into a two-part invention: a relatively deplorable vehicle (the body) and its somewhat more laudable passenger (the spirit). Along with an insidious doctrine of secret, saving knowledge given to those whose spirits have transcended bodily bondage, this very dichotomy is, frankly, such a dire misunderstanding as to constitute its own species of heresy, namely Gnosticism. You might recognize its legacy as an ongoing, body-bashing error among a good bit of the Western Church, both high and low.
A clearer understanding of the nous, therefore, would be a very good thing—and it is one good thing to which I hope, somewhere along the journey, to attend.
But where was I? Wandering in the woods beneath Saint Gregory’s cave, recalling his story.
As most of us one day discover, the greatest hindrances to spiritual maturity, spiritual equilibrium, and wholeness are the countless distractions that keep the head turning to and fro, keep the mind flitting from one fragmentary blip to another and the body more or less twitching in response—not to mention the heart racing along as if pursued. This composite “white noise” keeps our brains buzzing, and our persons dissipated. Abba Nicephoros the Solitary puts it like this: “Let us return to ourselves…, for it is impossible for us to become reconciled and united with God, if we do not first return to ourselves, tearing ourselves—what a wonder it is!—from the whirl of the world with its multitudinous vain cares, and striving constantly to keep our attention on the kingdom of God, which is within us.”
Saint Isaac of Syria says, “Descend into your heart, and there you will find the ladder by which you may ascend.”
The hésychasts are canny about the chaos, and they seek control over that whirl of circumstance by developing a habit of stillness, of watchfulness, which avails a consequent habit of apprehending God’s Presence, and—as I like to say—leaning wholly into It.
En route to this sweet apprehension, they observe their own, scattered faculties being restored, reunited, being knit back into a seamless self. Thereupon, they apprehend a reunion of that self with the Holy One as well.
Or so they say.
Or so I’ve read, and so I’m pleased to believe.
Theology, as you already may have noticed, comes in two broadly popular flavors: the more familiar kataphatic (the theology of attributes, the via positiva) and the somewhat less familiar apophatic (the theology of negation, the via negativa). At its intermittent best, the West has understood the two approaches as equal, largely complementary, each approach balancing the other. In the Western model, for example, one might say—kataphatically—that God is King, which would reveal something of God’s relation to us; but one would hasten to—apophatically—balance that assertion by insisting that God is not King the way a man would be king. This hedging of the term would eventually yield to an understanding that God is, finally, in no way comparable to a king, or to anything else—being God and all.
In Eastern Christendom, the apophatic is understood as the higher approach outright, a fuller, more appropriate perception that grows out of what is often an initiating, kataphatic glimpse. In the midst of apophatic apprehension, one wo
uld watch each of the familiar, kataphatic metaphors—king, father, judge, for example—fail and fall away, revealing a glimpse of appalling immensity far beyond any of the gestures by which we attempt to define God.
I like how Saint Gregory of Nyssa puts it after he puzzles and pores over the Exodus passage regarding how Moses enters the darkness and finds God within it: “The true knowledge and true vision of what we seek consists precisely in this—in not seeing, for what we seek transcends knowledge, and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility.”
Simone Weil offers a very likely account of this apophatic vision when she writes: “A case of contradictories, both of them true. There is a God. There is no God. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am sure my love is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God, in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say that word.”
To be fair, all theology, all “God talk,” bears at least a trace of both flavors. I’m pretty sure that most actual theologians, pressed on the point, would concede that all of their assertions about God come down to being words about what has been revealed by Him rather than words defining Him.
And the reason that all these folks, confronted by the impossibility of defining God, don’t just shut up about it—and possibly the reason that even Simone Weil, for all her genuine, hard-won humility, didn’t just keep her disturbing thoughts to herself—is that we are none of us in this for ourselves alone.
Ourselves, alone is finally a very undesirable circumstance, perhaps even a quintessentially satanic circumstance.
For Saint Gregory Palamás, the issue came down to how we might acknowledge, on the one hand, God’s absolute beyond-us-ness and, on the other hand, God’s condescending love for us and union with us, as revealed by His apparent desire that we partake of His Holy Being.
Saint Gregory spoke, therefore, of a difference between presuming to know God in His essence and coming to know God in His energies. We cannot—not ever, according both to Saint Gregory and to long-standing Orthodox conversation—hope to know God in His essence, but we can know of Him in His energies. We can witness His works, His acts, His effects; moreover, we can experience them, experientially know them. Such knowledge enables—one might say that such knowledge animates—our faltering faith, just as participating in, partaking of those divine energies, animates our faltering life.
Saint Gregory and the other holy hésychasts of Mount Athos lived by these energies, which, by habits of contemplative prayer, they came more fully to apprehend and to appreciate. By these habits of prayer, they understood that humankind was created in order to (again, my favorite figure for this) lean into those energies, dwelling, as it were, on them and in them.
My guess is that—inveterate choosers that we are—we are forever leaning one way or another. Choosing to lean into the Holy Presence is to taste, here and now, of the kingdom of God; choosing to lean away is to taste, here and now, hell.
The monks of Mount Athos lived deliberately by these energies in the twelfth century and long before; they live by them today, as do we, if not so consciously or deliberately. Not all the monks on Mount Athos—nor all the monasteries there—pursue an absolutely hésychast tradition, but all do cultivate elements of that tradition, in particular the constant awareness of God’s Presence, and the desire that our lives become prayer.
This, then, is the significance of lives of prayer, a significance I’m beginning to understand better as I go along. Such lives are lives comprised of prayer. As the Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov puts it: “It is not enough to say prayers; one must become, be prayer, prayer incarnate. It is not enough to have moments of praise; all of life, each act, every gesture, even the smile of the human face, must become a hymn of adoration, an offering, a prayer. One should offer not what one has, but what one is.”
In my long afternoon of meandering around the grounds, inside and outside the great wall of the Great Lavra, I never heard the tálanton, but at about 4:00 p.m. I barely made out the bell calling us to vespers; I followed the sound to the central katholikón. The vesper service was, not surprisingly, lovely—a sweet conclusion to a busy day. The antiquity of Great Lavra is palpable; as I prayed I apprehended an uncommon weight here, as if this oldest of the twenty monasteries bore, even in its air, a corresponding, accumulated heft. At the conclusion of vespers, I walked to the courtyard in what felt like a numbing, ethereal fog; I languished there for a half hour or so, until the bilo called us in to eat our potatoes and beans.
As I’ve mentioned, the Holy Mountain has a curious effect on pilgrims, seeming to bring out the best in some and what looks to be the worst in others. It is fair to say that it brought out both in me, in reliable sequence. At trápeza, one pilgrim—a guy about my age, if slightly grayer, certainly more dour—seemed to take it upon himself to be captain of the piety police.
During meals, the general convention is silence. Men file in, take their places as directed by the monks, stand until the prayers of blessing are completed, then sit on the benches and dig in. No one is supposed to speak; all are expected to listen carefully to the words of the appointed reader—who, for the most part, is reading excerpts from the lives of the saints in Greek. Still, on occasion, a pilgrim or two will ask for bread to be passed, or will reach to pour water and offer to fill the cups of those around him; in other words, quietly and reverently a few words and gestures are sometimes exchanged without much fuss.
For the self-appointed sheriff at our table, however, this casual behavior was not to be condoned; it was to be corrected, and without delay. If a man reached for the water pitcher too soon (one convention is to wait for water until a few minutes into the reading, when a small bell jingles, signaling “drink up”), or if someone made a comment to a neighbor, our sheriff manically gestured for silence. The young man next to me—twentyish and pleasant—asked me to pass the bread. The sheriff, sitting opposite us, hissed. The young man gave me a quick look and smiled, raising an eyebrow. The sheriff glowered at us both. The young man took a bite of his potato and said, “Hmmm.” The sheriff put his finger to his lips and shushed him.
A moment later, the young man reached to the end of the table for the bowl of olives, and the sheriff slapped his hand.
These perplexities pretty much dominated my thoughts as I settled in to sleep that night in our huge barracks. The isolation of the Japanese men, the nearly identical isolation of the Ukrainian and myself, the pious schmuck at dinner (along with the not-exactly-unique disposition he came to represent for me) had me feeling a little lost, had me wondering what I was doing here.
When the tálanton woke us at 3:00, I dressed in the dark and hurried to the katholikón, where I found Sohsen, the Zen monk, already sitting—by which I do mean sitting, Zen style—in the narthex. This is as far as he would be allowed to enter, but he sat calmly, eyes closed, breathing his silent meditation.
The service was, as expected, beautiful. Still, although it wasn’t a fasting day, the Eucharist was presented and returned to the altar before anyone, monk or pilgrim, had an opportunity to partake—yet another perplexity of life at Great Lavra. We filed from the katholikón directly into trápeza, where, once again, I was seated directly across from the sheriff. I smiled when our eyes met, and he turned away, scowling. The young man from the night before sat at an adjacent table and, when he’d caught my eye, smiled and gave me a thumbs-up, nodding to the sheriff.
The meal went passably. There was no wine. I managed to break my fast without incident and without—so far as I know—giving further offense to my tablemate.
After trápeza, I packed my gear, studied the map, and set my sights on Saint Anne’s Skete, a six-hour hike to the west. This day’s trek would take me through some of the most isolated territory on the Holy Mountain, a region in which the most strenuous áscesis was pursued by the most rugged of spiritual athletes.
First, however, I would need to find
the trail out of Great Lavra’s expanse, ideally heading in the right direction. Most of the other pilgrims rushed to the microbus immediately following trápeza, but in the courtyard I found a thirty-something man talking on the card phone.
When he had hung up, I asked, in pretty poor Greek, if he knew where the trail to Saint Anne’s Skete started. He said, in English that was only slightly better than my Greek, that he was going that way as far as Skíti Timíou Prodrómou.
Along the way, I learned that he was on liberty (either that or his name was Liberty, Lefthéris) from the Greek army, and that he was here to spend time with his spiritual father, a hermit named Father Pávlou, who lived near the Romanian skete. Lefthéris, I learned, visited this spiritual father at least four times a year; he had been to Athos fourteen times in the previous three years.
We walked together quietly, savoring the coolness of the morning and attending to a forest alive with birdsong and powerfully fragrant pine. In about an hour, we turned off the road and onto a trail leading toward the shore and to the gates of the skete, which we entered crossing ourselves. Although it is a skete, Timíou Prodrómou is slightly larger than some of the smaller monasteries, and similarly structured—a fortified wall of stone buildings circling a central katholikón. The fathers there are mostly Romanian, and their welcome was quite warm. Lefthéris and I enjoyed our rakí, loukoúmi, and cold water (in that order), and once we were refreshed, were invited to venerate the icons in the katholikón.