The Friends of Mount Athos Book Reviews

© 2008

Mount Athos: The Highest Place on Earth. By Metropolitan Nikolaos of Mesogaia, translated by Caroline Makropoulos. Athens: En Plo Editions, 2007. 153 pages. £10.99 paperback. ISBN 978-9606719-17-2.

Many Friends of Mount Athos will remember the visit a few years ago of Archimandrite Nikolaos (as he then was), a monk of Simonopetra, to the Annual General Meeting at St Anne’s, Oxford. The talk he gave was at once moving and entertaining: he captured image after image of life on the Holy Mountain, gleaned from his early memories of Athos. In this book he describes writing his talk: ‘I plunged into my memory, bringing back to mind my first experiences, and reviving my love and respect for and faith in Athos.’ That talk is the basis of the book. It reflects on every page his deep love for the Holy Mountain, for its life, the beauty of the environment, the ‘daringness of the buildings, the daily pattern of life in the monasteries and the sense of another world full of hope, depth and substance’; but far more even than these things, the ascetical tradition going back fourteen centuries and the contemporary monks who live that tradition with such heroic, super-natural, super-human commitment.

In August 1971 as a young man he visits Athos for the first time. With ‘secret joy and indescribable awe’, he encounters some of the great ascetics of the twentieth century. He boards the bus in Thessaloniki bound for the Athos boat and sits besides the great Elder Gerasimos, who composed sacred hymns and liturgical texts. ‘What an entrancing combination of solemnity and simplicity!’ He meets another monk who talks ‘about the gifts and grace of God as if he were talking about his garden’. He goes to Stavronikita and feels ‘the monumental silence’. He visits the deserts of Katounakia and Karoulia: ‘The hermitages clinging precariously to the precipitous rock-face spoke of those bold and heroic ascetics who themselves cleave to the rock of the grace of God. I was seized by a feeling of indescribable awe.’ ‘I was drawn by the thought of people who experience heaven and who live in an angelic state; it seemed to me the only truth.’ He encounters one Fr Seraphim who ‘looked at us with the innocent eyes of a wild beast – eyes that were rarely used: these people begin to see when they have their eyes closed.’ He finds that ‘during the thirty years or so he had spent in the monastery’, one Fr Mitrophan ‘might have uttered no more than thirty words of worldly conversation’. Later on, as a priest, Fr Nikolai felt privileged to give communion to the great Hieromonk Ephraim of Katounakia, one of the earliest disciples of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. ‘His repentance welled up from the spring of the grace of God and as his tears flowed they mixed with the blood of Christ.’

A very personal theme runs through the book: an account of the young man’s early monastic vocation. Two contradictory attitudes to the life on Mount Athos are in his mind. Here was a highly intelligent and successful student of physics, with no particular intention of marrying, at the first bloom of his adult years, ready to make the major choices of his life. On the one hand, to choose a possibly brilliant career in the world must have been extremely attractive; on the other hand, he is profoundly touched in his soul by the ascetical tradition, and he seems to others ready to choose the monastic way. It might seem that this would set up in his mind a great struggle. Yet this is exactly what does not happen. Deeply moved as he is by asceticism, at no time does he consciously say to himself, ‘Maybe this is for me. Should I become a monk like these?’ ‘I felt so much that my heart nearly gave way. I was deeply moved. Yet – and how strange it was – my will was not touched or affected.’

He does not tell us the rest of the story. I wanted to know what happened in his mind between this visit and the 1980s, when he is back on the Mountain as a novice and then a young hieromonk. How did he change his mind? Vocation, of course, is always a personal and intimate mystery in anyone’s heart, but we may be forgiven for longing to know. Perhaps one day Metropolitan Nikolai will write about that.

This is a truly beautiful book, beautifully and movingly written, and indeed beautifully translated, about that beauty which is rarer and profounder than any other: the beauty of holiness, the desire of those who have died to this world in order to be deified.

Fr ATHANASIUS

Harkstead, Ipswich