‘I’ve been a novice for one and a half months now. I am from Pafos. I studied Law at the University of Komotini (north Greece) for three years, but I dropped the degree to become a monk. If you are from the outside you cannot and will never understand this internal calling (esoteriko kalesma). I first came here the previous Easter, before my university exams of June. I stayed for a couple of weeks. I had decided to leave for Komotini on a Saturday. But then my spiritual Father told me to stay for one more day for the Sunday celebration. I did, and that Sunday I heard the calling inside me, and realized that I did not want to leave Vatopaidi. I decided to imprison myself in this stable, and somehow I am sure that this is the right decision. You see, before I couldn't understand the meaning of going to the Church, the meaning of Christmas and Easter, the importance of the Sunday liturgy. Do you understand what it means to hear the inner calling (esoteriko kalesma) of God and choose to leave behind you all the freedoms, in order to imprison yourself in this stable at your own will? It cannot be explained, simply because it is an order from the Holy Spirit. I came for a week, and I stayed for life. And that’s that; you can never understand why someone comes here for a week and stays for life’
[Discussion with a novice, 31/7/2003]
The Vatopaidian monks describe their personal decision to join this particular monastery as an ‘internal calling’ (esoteriko kalesma). The novice I talked to above distinguished himself from me, the secular visitor, by telling me that I ‘cannot and will never be able understand the calling’ because it has nothing to do with social sciences. Numbers and statistics can not fully explain62 this esoteric force. The monks say that the decision to join Vatopaidi was ‘the will (charis)63 of the Holy Spirit’, not theirs. Thus, it cannot be explained with secular logic, but only with the rationality of God. Many monks put this sentiment into words by referring to the calling as a kind of liberation from an ‘aimless’ secular past: ‘I was and I wasn’t there, my (secular) life did not have a meaning, an aim. I realized that without the charis of Jesus I would never
62
In an Athonian parable, narrated to me by an old monk of Vatopaidi [26/4/03], a secular visitor was trying to open the door of the cell of an elder monk, but despite his hard effort he could not open it. The elder then asked him to try to open the door the other way, which he did, and the door swiftly opened. The parable reveals the gap between ‘worldly’ rationality and the rationality of monastic life, as the latter is an-other way of life. At the field one day I was lost in the forest, until I found the deserted Vatopaidian
Skete of St Dimitrios. I sat down there thirsty, when I saw an old monk walking by. I asked him for some
water, and he pointed to me that I was sitting on the top of a fountain that was covered with a wooden plate: ‘You have been sitting on it all this time, but you could not see it’ he told me [10/10/02]. The metaphor the old monk made was that one must open himself to the rationality of God, in order to access the ‘system of secret knowledge’ (as in Newman and Boyd 1982: 282) of monastic life.
63
Charis, which is the root to the word ‘charismatic’ means in Greek ‘grace’, ‘elegance’, and ‘happiness’: See glossary
have an aim in my life. That is what monastic life gives: it gives you an aim to come closer to God. And that is why I decided to become a monk’ [Cypriot priest-monk 8/10/02]. Many monks I talked to said that they were ‘saved’ after joining Vatopaidi from a secular past of sin. This sentiments are expressed in a number of stories of would-be saint individuals, who lost their way and miraculously found themselves at the shores of the peninsula, as in the legend of Mary and John’s shipwreck on the way to meet Lazarus, when they took shelter at the site where today the Georgian monastery of Iviron stands. One afternoon, a Vatopaidian monk kicked a visitor out of the
guestroom because his eyes were red and he suspected him of smoking hashish. He then told me:
Disillusion with secular life is a common motive among monks of different backgrounds, which can be summed up by a Greek monk: ‘I vividly remember a Saturday night, ten years ago, when some friends of mine took me to a nightclub. I got bored and dizzy. “What is this rubbish, what a waste of time” I thought to myself and the next morning I came here to find peace’. Many monks told me that they were ‘saved’ from a secular past of sin. The Greek monk told me of an accident with his motorbike that left him in a coma, an incident that changed his life: ‘It was a miracle that I came out of it (the coma) a few months later. My mother told me I was crazy. But she could not understand the will of the Mother of God that made me come here’ [20/4/2003]64. Such sentiments are expressed in a number of traditional stories of charismatic monks and saints who lost their way and miraculously found themselves at the shores of the peninsula, following the legend of Mary, who was also rescued from a shipwreck at the coast of the Georgian monastery of Iviron (see Introduction). The decision to abandon an ‘aimless life’ however is often seen by the biological family and friends of the monks, particularly their mothers, as ‘crazy’. But for the monks, it is the ‘world’ outside Athos that is irrational and ‘confusing’, not their decision to abandon it:
64 ‘They think that I don’t know, they think that I’ve never been there, because I am a monk. But the
reason that I am here in the first place is because of these things, drugs, alcohol, and prostitutes. Do you think that when I was a child I was a good kid, like the Cypriots (monks are)? This mark (on his face) is from a motorbike. The accident wasn’t my fault, but I fell into a coma, because I hit my head. It was a miracle that I came out of it a few months later. It was the will of the Mother of God, in order to make me come here. She taught me that you have to respect yourself, and the others next to you, at all times. If you ride a motorbike, or a woman, it is always the same thing: you must respect yourself, your body, heart and soul, at all times no matter what you are doing. When you sin you only hurt yourself. I vividly remember a Saturday night, ten years ago, when some friends of mine took me to a nightclub. I got bored and dizzy: ‘What is this rubbish, what a waste of time’ I thought to myself. The next morning I came here to find peace’ [Greek monk 20/4/2003]
‘monastic life gives an aim to life’, in opposition to the monks’ ‘aimless’ secular past [priest-monk 22/9/02].
The calling usually happens at a young age, but sometimes it can also happen at an older age, such as in the exceptional case of an 82-year old Cypriot novice that I met in Vatopaidi, who six months prior to our conversation had joined his first cousin, an older monk at the Huts of Katounakia, before moving to Vatopaidi to ‘die peacefully’, in his words. Normally, the Vatopaidians do not accept novices over 35 years-old, but an exception was made for him because of his large fortune, which he donated to the monastery. But his decision angered his secular family, as they felt that he had abandoned them: ‘My family got really angry, they don’t even want to talk to me’ [10/5/03]. Their anger was partially because he excluded the members of his biological family from his will. The Vatopaidian elders used the traditional rule of poverty, which states that no monk is allowed to have any private property, according to articles 33
and 39 of the Internal Regulations of the monastery, in order to claim the wealth of the
old novice in exchange for allowing him to spend his final years there.
In my discussions with younger monks and novices, they particularly referred to their mothers when they talked about their secular past. In their accounts, it was clear that the ‘calling’ had a shocking effect to them. The biological father of one of the younger monks told me regarding the emotional impact of the decision of his son to become a monk: ‘His mother is still upset. Sometimes in the summer she takes the boat, and the Abbot allows him in one of Vatopaidi’s boats, so that she can see him for a bit. They spend a few hours together (on the boat) and that’s it’ [1/5/03]. His mother made the effort to visit him on the boat (so that she does not walk on the ‘virgin’ land on which women are not allowed), to see him just for a few hours every now and then, under the constant supervision of an elder. Another priest-monk told me that sometimes the Devil took the form of their mothers in their dreams to tempt them and make them feel guilty for abandoning ‘cosmopolitan’ life65.
65 In the words of a Vatopaidian monk: ‘sometimes in the evenings we remember our mothers and feel
sorry for them. But it is the devil that sends such memories to torture and confuse us. The memory of our parents is a source of negative energy. We must be indifferent towards such sentiments, for the devil is cunning and deceiving. He can take the form of our (biological) mother to confuse us, and the only way to keep the door of our Heart shut is by praying at all times, even in our sleep’ [6/11/02]
The priest-monk warned of the danger of the ‘passionate love’, describing it as a kind of self-obsession, a ‘sick love’ in his words. The earthly mother-love is therefore seen as deceiving, based on passionate ties that bring feelings of guilt, particularly to
untrained novices, which is an excessive emotion thought to be carried from the ‘world’ into the monastery. Because the biological mothers of the monks are not virgin – as Mary, their spiritual mother, is – the passionate love for them is associated with sexual reproduction and to emotional attachment to the material world from which the monks strive to escape. Particularly the bond to the biological mother is thought to be a
weakness that the Devil uses to ‘darken’ a monk’s ‘heart’ [discussion with priest-monk 8/5/03]. For this reason, the novices are placed under a strict regime of prayer, work, and confession, and supervised by an elder at all times, in helping them to ‘keep their mind concentrated on God’ and to avoid such negative ‘thoughts’ (logismoi) [see chapter 6]. Through this cathartic process ‘the longing for your family lasts for three years. Then you just forget about it; I haven’t talked to my mother for 20 years’ [middle-aged monk 22/4/03].
The above examples reveal the emotional impact of separation from the biological family. Monastic life demands self-sacrifice, both from the would-be monk and from his biological family. In this moral context, the monks say that they imitate Christ, who is thought to be the ‘first monk’66. Following his example (Matthew 12:47-9), they have to denounce their secular family and friends; they must struggle against their feelings for, and of, their secular family. In this context, the path to salvation is not an easy one; it is a path of ‘war’, beginning with the denunciation and emotional detachment from the biological family, which is the first step in the process of separation of each would- be monk from his secular past. The aim is to achieve a monastic persona in the ideal image and imitation of the archetype of Christ, the ‘first monk’ as they call him, whose
66 In the words of a Vatopaidian priest-monk: ‘Christ came to bring War, in order to make Peace. When a
young man asked Him what did he have to do to find peace, Christ told him to abandon everything he kept, and follow Him. And when His Mother and sister came to visit Him, He said: ‘I have no mother and siblings; I only have one father, God’. Christ was in everything a virgin; he did not have a family or a country. Our greatest enemy is our family, and by this I mean the exaggerated love we feel for them that do not allow us to be free. The first step of liberation has to be a violent struggle, to put the knife deep to cut through the bone. It is painful, but with the help of the prayer it is a struggle that you can win. When I told my mother that I am going to Athos she cried, and she told me that my father had three cardiac arrests because of me. But as my beloved Elder used to say, it takes three years until you can completely take your mind off your parents. And that’s how long it took. Today my mother tells me on the phone ‘I wish all my sons had become monks like you’, because through me she also found Jesus. And Jesus never abandons a monk, but gives His blessing to his family for ten generations’ [10/4/03]
life and image (eikona, ‘image’ in Greek/ imago Dei in Latin) the monks imitate both in their choice to become monks (calling as self-sacrifice). Just like Christ sacrificed his personal life for the common good, including the love for the physical side of his mother, monks sacrifice their emotional attachment to their secular families by entering into the ‘spiritual family’ (pneumatiki oikogeneia) of the Athonian families (Iossifides 1990 and 1991). In this context, as a number of ethnographies discussed in the past (Stewart 1991: 80, see also Campbell 1964: 35, du Boulay 1974: 57), the Athonian families are reconstructed on the archetypal image of family-structure in which god as the father, Mary the mother, and the abbot of the monastery the representative father- figure of God on earth.