Review: Heinz Nussbaumer, Der Mönch in mir: Erfahrungen eines Athos-Pilgers für unser Leben

The Friends of Mount Athos Book Reviews

Der Mönch in mir: Erfahrungen eines Athos-Pilgers für unser Leben. [‘The Monk within Me: Experiences of an Athonite Pilgrim for our Life.’] By Heinz Nußbaumer.Vienna: Styria Verlag, 2006. 139 pages. €15.90 hardback. Numerous illustrations. ISBN 978-3-222-13204-9.

The author is a Roman Catholic pilgrim from Austria who, for the past twenty-five years, has travelled extensively over the Athonite peninsula. In his peregrinations he has befriended a number of abbots and monks, but latterly he has gravitated to, and formed a particularly close relationship with, the community at Xenophontos Monastery. His book is not a history of monastic life on Mount Athos (although there is a brief appendix with an overview of the growth of monasticism over the past 1000 years), nor is it a ‘visitor’s guide’, but rather a collection of spiritual reflections on the encounter between two landscapes, the human and the natural, that together define the phenomenon that is the Holy Mountain.

Since its first publication in German in 2006, this monograph has been translated into Russian, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, Polish, and Slovenian. For nearly forty weeks it held a place in Austria’s bestseller list and in 2007 it was declared Vienna’s Golden Book of the Year. Moreover, it has received accolades from Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk (Chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations), it was awarded the Bulgarian Cultural Prize in 2008, and it has even been read during meals in the refectories not only of some Athonite monasteries but also of Catholic communities in Germany and Austria. With good reason Nußbaumer feels that, by virtue of the broad acceptance of his book, he has created a small spiritual bridge between monastic houses in east and west.

The work is composed, not of numbered chapters, but of brief, often rhapsodic, narrative cameos that depict what the author considers to be the utterly unique qualities of the Holy Mountain. Among these are creative silence, inner tranquillity, and brotherly love, each of which is set in an environment where one is ‘alone but never lonely’. The very setting of Athos enhances these and other qualities, such as the striking contrasts of mountain and sea, thick forests and barren rocks. Indeed, the physical terrain serves as an inspiration for the monks to practise ascetic austerity and to experience the peace of God. It is not only the inhabitants, the fathers, who are unique and different from us. It is also the place itself that has something altogether mysterious about it. Everything and everyone is adorned with an ‘extra-ordinary’ otherness of great beauty.

According to the author, one of the most striking features of the Athonite lifestyle is that it constitutes one large spiritual family whose progeny recognize the obligation that they have towards their ancestors, the elders of the past. This is most obvious in the special care and honour paid to the resting places of the departed fathers: the simple graves surrounded by cypresses and adorned with flowering shrubs. Near to the burial grounds are the chapels for memorial services and in a special area are kept the human remains – bones and skulls tenderly arranged on shelves or in baskets. This sense of spiritual legacy is of paramount importance. If for over 1000 years the mystical tradition of the Holy Mountain has been preserved unimpaired, it is because the principal concern of the monks has been to maintain, to assimilate, and to cultivate such a legacy. Far from interpreting this as a cult of personality, as some have suggested, this zeal is life itself, the continuity of life, indeed the passing on of authentic life. In the monastic tradition, authentic spirituality is lived out personally and is assimilated freely by each member in the community.

Elder Elisaios, when speaking about the ten or so elderly fathers (‘our grandfathers’) whom the community from the Meteora ‘inherited’ when it re-established itself at Simonopetra in 1973, emphasized that the old monks offered the best that they had, namely, the priceless Athonite oral tradition. This was for the newcomers a hidden treasure.

In those simple and uneducated monks, our eyes were opened to four qualities that were to be important for all of us: a simple faith in God and in the saints; a pragmatic consciousness of one’s own sinfulness; patience in all things and to all people; and faithfulness in worship.[1]

Many other themes are touched upon in Nußbaumer’s book: unceasing prayer, the problem of evil, self-negation, the remembrance of death, and so forth. Each is developed in a personal and thoughtful manner where, intentionally, more questions are provoked than answers given. There are a great number of very beautiful photographs, including an arresting scene of the cemetery at Xenophontos (pp. 90−1).

DIMITRI CONOMOS

Oxford