by Scott Cairns
The footpath led onto the midpoint of the broad road of crushed granite that connects the monastery to its arsanás; I hiked up that road and to the bridge over the river. The monastery itself is well protected, its ancient walls built into the granite of the slope. There are, actually, two protective walls here—one outer ring protecting scattered kellía, workshops, and storage sheds, and an older, more daunting ring protecting the traditional, inner sanctum around the central katholikón. Between these two, just above the gardens and vineyards, a relatively modern guest quarters occupies a broad terrace with a commanding view of the canyon, its extensive monastery gardens, and the sea poised between two steep and rugged points. Just outside the inner gate, a large square gazebo overlooks the scene, as well. As I approached it, I met an old monk also approaching, but coming from the monastery gate; he, too, was apparently a visitor. Like a good many of the very old monks, he was very small, even childlike in stature. He nodded to me as he caught my eye, and I approached him saying, “Evlogíte.”
“O Kýrios,” he said, smiling, giving me his hand.
As I kissed the hand, he blessed me and asked my name.
“Isaák,” I said. “Ime Isaák.”
He smiled broadly and asked, “Isaák o’ Sýros?”
“Ne, páter, Isaák o’ Sýros?”
“Kalá! Kalá!” he said, beaming.
Although Saint Isaac of Syria, my name saint, is relatively unknown among American Christians in general, and only slightly better known among American Orthodox, he is famous on the Holy Mountain and in monastic communities around the world. His Ascetical Homilies, written for the most part to offer practical help and spiritual guidance to monks, is widely read and revered. He has helped countless monks in their struggle toward lives of prayer, and he has helped a good many other, slower travelers along the way, as well.
The old monk and I climbed the few steps to the gazebo platform and settled in, dropping our packs to await the guest master.
It turned out to be a long wait.
One disadvantage of hiking from monastery to monastery—as opposed to using the boats and microbuses—is that guest masters tend not to notice your arrival. These days, most pilgrims prefer the buses and boats, so most guest masters tend to plan their activities around the schedules of these transports.
Fortunately, the gazebo was comfortable, shady, and cool, and the view was stunning. I took the opportunity to settle into prayer. The old monk was way ahead of me, his prayer rope already being drawn, knot by knot, between his fingers.
A couple of hours later, I was roused from that stillness by the sight of the boat—the Agía Ánnis—gliding into view. Half an hour after that, the microbus pulled up to the gate with its load of pilgrims; that’s when the guest master hurried out from the gate to herd us all inside and upstairs to the archondaríki to sign in.
Here again, at Saint Paul’s, I realized that my status as not-exactly-Greek translated into my being not-exactly-Orthodox. The guest master put the others—about twenty, all told—into small rooms in groups of threes or fours and assigned me, by myself, to a huge room with roughly twenty bunk beds. At this point in my journey, I was beginning to puzzle over the wide disparities between communities like Simonópetra, Grigoríou, and Saint Anne’s where the stranger is warmly embraced and communities like Great Lavra and Saint Paul’s where the stranger seemed more likely to be kept at arm’s length. I went out on the terrace to think it over.
That’s when Yórgos—one of the pilgrims I’d met as we’d all signed the guest book—strolled out of the guest house and came over to visit.
Yórgos was there with a group of friends—Stamátis, Evángelos, and Nicholas—accountants from Thessaloníki, all of them in their late twenties or early thirties. This was an annual trip for most of them. The others came out soon, and after Yórgos had introduced us, they offered me cigarettes and cold coffee. I was happy to get the coffee. After about five minutes, I was no longer Isaák to them; they called me Sácco.
Their English was, for the most part, pretty good, and we were able to cobble together a friendly conversation, swapping photos of wives and children, generally enjoying the afternoon together.
At one point, we walked down the slope to a domed shrine midway between the arsanás and the monastery. This shrine marked the spot where, in 1457, the gifts of the magi were presented to the fathers here. Tradition has it that Maro, the stepmother of Mohammed the Conqueror, had come to “return” these relics to the Christians, and though she had been one of the very few women—at the time—to have set foot on the Holy Mountain, this spot, maybe a quarter mile from the sea, was as far as she’d dared to go.
We entered the open-air shrine, opened the glass-paned doors of the icon shelf, and relit the oil lamp inside. One by one, we venerated the icons. Our prayers were brief and silent, but the very fact of our praying together simply, unself-consciously was a refreshing contrast to the more familiar spectacle of public prayer back home.
The tálanton called us to vespers soon after we returned to the guest house terrace, and we hurried into the gate to the church. The central katholikón at Saint Paul’s is very like the kathólika elsewhere on the mountain except that a wide, glassed-in exo-narthex, itself lined with beautiful icons, serves as entry from the stone courtyard.
The day ended much the way it had ended for me throughout much of this first pilgrimage: vespers, trápeza, an evening walk. When night fell, filling the sky with stars and one very round moon, I left my fellow travelers on the terrace and hiked back down the cobbled path to the shrine. I was feeling a little melancholy. I would, after all, be leaving the Holy Mountain in three days, and my plan to find a spiritual father there now appeared pretty foolish, and very unlikely.
At the shrine I lit a taper, knelt before the icon of the Theotókos, and asked if she would please help me know why I had come there. To the Christ in her arms I said, “Lead me to someone who will help me find the prayer of the heart.”
I made my way back up the path, slipped into the solitude of my vault of a barracks to say my evening rule—leaning against one wall and facing, roughly, the east. Then I lay down and closed my eyes, continuing the Jesus Prayer in the dark, working harder than usual to attend to the words, to dwell on them. Certain faces were playing back in my memory—the priest at Philothéou, his eyes glowing with candlelight as he brought the golden spoon to my mouth, the bright and loving eyes of Father Iákovos, the deadpan jests of Father Damaskinós, the hand-clapping laughter of Father Damianós, and the easy warmth of Fathers Cheruvím and Theóphilos. My melancholy and second-guessing persisted pretty much until, quite suddenly, something in me calmed and, presumably, I fell asleep.
I was again one of the first pilgrims into the services. I had come to prefer arriving well before the others—even before many of the monks, as it often happened—so that I could venerate the icons, light my three candles, and breathe the prayer in the quiet of the nave unhurried. I also liked being able to find my habitual corner stall, or one near it, so I could settle into prayer as the readings from the psalms began.
This day, the service flew by—which is maybe a curious thing to say about anything that happens over the course of four hours. Still, the rhythm of worship, the rhythm of prayer, and, to some extent, even the rhythm of life on Athos was becoming—had become—familiar and satisfying. The long services had begun to feel less like an endurance test and more like the one continuous prayer they are intended to be.
As is often the case, liturgy was followed by trápeza, which was followed by our packing up and preparing to leave. As I did, I startled to realize that I hadn’t so much as spoken to a single monk who lived here. I’d spoken to the yéronda—the old monk—in the gazebo as he too awaited the guest master; I’d also spoken for a few minutes with another friendly visitor, a monk from Australia; but none of the resident monks had made themselves available to the pilgrims, even after vespers and trápeza, when a few generally will make such an ef
fort.
The immediate friendship offered by Yórgos, Stamátis, and the others had distracted me from so much as noticing this until now. I went out with my backpack and found my friends smoking on the terrace; they offered me coffee, cold and sweet. The weather had darkened a little, with a thick curtain of rain clouds being drawn across the horizon; from what I gathered of their conversation, Stamátis and some others would be joining me to walk to Dionysíou—just over an hour’s hike up the coast—while Yórgos and Evángelos would take the boat some hours later.
We said our good-byes, and Yórgos especially wished me well, saying he hoped we’d meet again at Dionysíou or sometime in Thessaloníki. We embraced, exchanged the traditional two-cheek kiss of the Greeks, and headed down to the trailhead near the beach. He shook my hand firmly, met my eyes, and he said, “Kálo taxídi, Sácco. Good the journey.”
Good the journey. Exactly.
The hike from Saint Paul’s to Dionysíou—which is nearly identical to the hike from Dionysíou to Grigoríou—is a series of steep ascents seaward, rising to briefly level stretches atop and around sun-drenched headlands overlooking the Aegean, followed by steep descents away from the sea and into narrow canyons—green, shaded, smelling of fresh water, damp earth. The trail transects four or more such headlands before descending into the significantly wider canyon holding the monastery.
Our little group huffed and puffed during the ascents, we caught our breaths through the level stretches, and we joked and laughed during the brisk descents. The accountants from Thessaloníki proved to be very good company, and it was with real regret that I left them at Dionysíou. I could have stayed the night, but I was eager to get back to Grigoríou, where I could bend the ear of Father Damianós. I stopped just long enough to enjoy my last guest tray with my crew, then headed out for the next ascent. Halfway up that first stretch of trail, I heard a distant, echoing “Sácco-o-o-o-o,” shouted from the direction of the monastery. Squinting, I could make out a bunch of what looked to be accountants from Thessaloníki, waving their arms from a high porch near the top of the monastery’s sheer wall.
As the trail took me up the first ridge and down the other side, I focused on the prayer. I’d be spending my last two Athos nights at Grigoríou, and with only a few days left, I was anxious to firmly establish the prayer before returning home—something of a grim irony, really, being anxious to attain stillness.
Fair to say, this last hike of my first journey became one long and earnest prayer. A prayer for prayer. I had all but given up on finding a father.
The sight of Moní Grigoríou from the final ridge gave me a surprising sense of homecoming. Its stone walls and slate domes, perched atop a sheer cliff rising from the sea, were softened by a late-morning haze. The trail descended in a series of switchbacks through olive groves and brought me to the cemetery plot and its lovely chapel. As I passed the chapel, striding toward the monastery’s back gate, I walked by a large tin bucket resting on the chapel steps. It held two dark brown femurs, an amber skull, and several broken bits of bone.
Not knowing exactly how to respond to my strange discovery, I crossed myself and nodded in respect, then hurried to the gate.
Father Damianós was serving coffee to new arrivals when I showed up at the archondaríki. Carrying a large silver tray laden with a good twenty cups of muddy residue, he flashed his famous smile and nodded for me to slip directly into the kitchen—or rather, into the small dining room off the kitchen where he and I had visited earlier in the week.
When I did, I found that Father Damianós had another guest as well. Robin Amis, a writer-scholar from England, was sitting at the table working on a laptop computer identical to my own; several open books and manuscripts were spread out across the table before him. He looked up over the top of his glasses and said, “Ah, an American.”
I confessed and introduced myself.
Robin, a regular visitor to Grigoríou, was here this time to assist Father Damianós with a new translation of The Deification as the Purpose of Man’s Life, a book on theosis by Archimandrite George, the abbot of Grigoríou. Abbot George is a prolific and much respected theological writer. His books include studies of experiential grace, the Lord’s Prayer, theosis, and other matters of spiritual growth. I believe I have mentioned already that everything about life on Mount Athos is best understood as a means to an end.
Theosis, it so happens, is that very end. It is—one should take care to notice—an end that turns out to be endless.
Discipline, obedience, fasting, even putting up with pilgrims—every aspect of ascetic struggle on Athos—are understood to assist in humility, which is understood to assist in prayer; and prayer—a life that has become prayer—is understood as the central, indispensable path to theosis. It is, in short, the experiential translation of humanity from death into life.
Or it might be said to be the gradual realization of the existential translation from death to life that Christ has brought about. Already.
That is, even the long and difficult path to a life of prayer is understood to be a means of glimpsing, taking part in, living into a reality that—thank God—is already so.
Saint Athanásios writes, famously and provocatively, that “God became man, so that man might become god.” For those Western Christians who might find this equation bordering upon heresy (which, for Eastern Christians, poses a very tasty irony), you might bear in mind that God is forever unknowable, never to be equaled, much less eclipsed. Every incremental development toward deification that a man or woman apprehends will concurrently avail, for that man or woman, a fuller and truer vision of God’s inexhaustibility. That is, the more we become like God, the more powerfully we appreciate how far beyond our prior understanding He—endlessly—is.
I think I already mentioned Enormity as a likely figure.
Let’s go with inexhaustible Enormity.
That said, the human person who, through theosis, becomes like God, does so via the death-defying agency of Christ, in whose Divine Life that man or woman participates. By His death, we say, “Christ has undone Death.”
The Deification as the Purpose of Man’s Life is a very savory book, but Father Damianós, Robin Amis—and, most significantly, the Abbot himself—have been somewhat dissatisfied with the earlier translation into English. Their new translation seeks to make available to English readers some of the subtleties and powerful implications that readers of Greek already enjoy.
Nous, as I’ve noted already, is a word that has often suffered from translation, being reduced simply to mind, or reason, or, slightly better, heart. The new translation will not translate nous into any of these but will endeavor to teach the complexities of the word itself, and will endeavor to introduce the noetic faculty to a broader array of English-speaking Christians.
To quote the glossary notes Father Damianós shared with me:
The nous is our highest faculty. It has been called the “eye of the soul,” the “eye of the heart,” and also the “energy of the soul” by various church fathers. Since the fall, and the [consequent] fragmentation of the soul, the nous may identify itself with mind, imagination, or the senses, losing sight of its pure state. When cleansed, the nous is able to perceive itself, perceive God, and rightly perceive creation; it is cognitive, visionary, and intuitive. Metropolitan of Nafpaktos Hierotheos has said, “The nous is in the image of God. And as much as God is light, the nous too has light mirrored in it by the Grace of God.”
Bishop Kállistos Ware has called it “the intellective aptitude of the heart.”
In most English translations of his Gospel, Saint Luke says of the resurrected Christ along the road to Emmaus, “Then he opened their minds that they might understand the scriptures.” In the Greek of his original text, the word Saint Luke employs here is nous.
Nearly every time we come across a discourse by Saint Paul on mind, his word of choice is nous; most notably, when Saint Paul writes about the sinful capacities of humankind and observes that
“since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done,” the word for that depraved faculty is also nous.
The nous, then, can be either whole or fractured, cleansed or soiled, availing either insight or delusion, depending.
Therefore, as the monks on Mount Athos struggle to see, feel, think, and imagine clearly and truly, they seek to do so by means of a grace-illumined, grace-restored nous.
So we talked a good bit—Robin, Father Damianós, and I—during these last days of my pilgrimage. My roommates for these two nights were two Italian Catholics, Paolo and Osvaldo. This was Paolo’s first visit to the Holy Mountain, but it was Osvaldo’s fourth. Curious about Osvaldo’s interest in Athos, I asked him—with the help of Paolo, whose English was pretty good—what brought him here so many times. He said, according to Paolo, “God love.”
Nice answer.
We hung out together, comparing journeys as we could. They took to calling me Zacco.
As Catholics, Paolo and Osvaldo were not, according to convention, allowed to worship in the nave itself but were expected to worship in the narthex. I knew this, and, ostensibly, so did they. So it was with a tremor of surprise that, at the culmination of my last Divine Liturgy at Grigoríou, I looked up from prayer to see Osvaldo in line to receive the Holy Mysteries.
I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I followed behind to join the line.
What happened was this: Osvaldo approached the chalice, leaned forward, and opened his mouth. The priest lifted the spoon bearing the Mysteries, and said—roughly translated—“The servant of God…” And he paused, waiting for this servant of God to say his name, whereupon the priest expected to continue, repeating that name and announcing, “…receives the Holy Mysteries.”
Osvaldo’s silence extended the pause. And the priest asked quietly (as he had one time asked me), “Íste Orthódoxos?”