Monastic life is completed in union with God after the physical death of the monk. Because of their healthy life style, the monks do not indulge in excesses, and often die very old (most monks die when over ninety years old). Sleep deprivation and
abstinence from food, as well as constant work, guarantee a long life, unless an accident befalls them. According to the secretary of Vatopaidi [5/5/03]: when the brotherhood discovers the corpse of a monk, they do not wash it but use a sponge of warm water to clean the forehead, the chest, the hands, the knees, and the feet in a crosswise direction. Then the deacons of the dead monk dress the corpse with clean white socks, long pants, a vest, the Angelic Schema, and the polystavri, and place a rosary in his hands. Then they tie the body with a white bandage, using his cap and old hood to cover his face in the shape of a cross. Finally, they put him a new belt and shoes. They then place the corpse on a bed made of straw, symbolizing the poverty of monastic life. On the bed, the monks cover the corpse with his cassock from head to toes, on which they sew three crosses using a red thread over the head, chest, and feet. The monk is ready to ‘depart’. Only the faces of deceased Abbots remain uncovered, as they represent the monastery in public life. By contrast, the covered face of ordinary monks reveals their
homogeneous belonging, their anonymity.
The funeral of an ordinary monk takes place in the lite (the area with the candles in between the nave and the exonarthex, see below map of catholicon, figure 5d). Priest- monks are buried with their stoles on (‘petrachilli’). If the monk has died in a profane space, such as a hospital outside Athos, the priest-monk recites the ‘Thrice Holy’ three times and silently continues while accompanying the corpse back to Athos. After the
preparation of the corpse the monks place on the chest of the dead man the icon of the Saint related to him by name and ‘virtue’ (according to his given name in his
ordination). Then the service starts and the whole brotherhood gathers together carrying lighted candles. The monks specifically sit separately from the visitors, as the latter are not allowed near the corpse.
Then the body is carried to the cemetery in a sober mood80. Two acolytes led the parade carrying lighted lanterns (moveable candles) and censers, as light symbolizes the victory of Jesus over the darkness of death through his resurrection. Conversely, the monks hope to be resurrected in Christ’s second coming. The deacons carried the corpse, followed by the choir, priest-monks, and the rest of the brotherhood. At the very back are the visitors. Seculars are not allowed to approach the corpse, or attend the funeral. Their access is also restricted outside the cemetery, because they are thought to carry all their sins from the ‘world’ that could pollute the final cathartic act in the life of a monk, his spiritual exit to paradise.
On the way to the cemetery, the monks make frequent stops for the priest-monk to make a prayer; a deacon using the censers (thymiato) clears the way for the corpse to exit the monastery’s gate, which faces the north west. In the cemetery, the monks gently place the body in the ground, which is blessed by the priest who throws oil from the ‘Lamp of Jesus’. The monks recite ten rosaries and sing the ‘Thrice Holy’ for a final time. The abbot then delivers a speech on the virtues of the departed monk during his life in the monastery. After the monk’s burial the brotherhood commemorates him for forty days (to symbolize the days of Jesus in the Desert) at the ‘great entrance’, during the preparation of the Holy Communion at the Divine Liturgy. If he were an Abbot the commemoration can last up to a year.
The dead monk remains buried for three years, which is the same ‘testing’ period that a novice needed to go through first in the ‘desert’, and then in the monastery, in order to be ordained into a monk. After this period, the Vatopaidians exhume the bones and throw them in the bone storage, a hut situated next to the cemetery. The Vatopaidians believe that after three years the colour of the skull reveals the ‘charis’ of each monk: if the skull has a yellow colour, they believe that it shows the high spirituality of the
monk; if it is white, the monk had less ‘charisma’ during his life [priest-monk 12/8/03]. The yellow colour is associated with the long hours of praying with a candle.
Furthermore, while the brotherhood remains anonymous, the names of the previous members of the Vatopaidian ‘council of elders’ (gerontia) are carved on the front of the skull. Even in the afterlife, the spiritual hierarchy between anonymous deacons serving eponymous elders continues for an eternity...
4.12 Conclusion
This chapter looked into monastic life as a life-long rite of passage into an earthly existence to life after death, marked by three rites of passages: the ordination of tonsure, the ‘Angelic Patent’, and the funeral of a monk that signifies his grand exit to Heaven. Accordingly, the rites place each monk within an informal and spiritual hierarchy, which is marked by a dress code that distinguishes between inexperienced and experienced monks, as well as sets of duties and particular rules of conduct
emphasizing diaconema (‘service’, where the word ‘deacon’ is rooted) with the general obligation for the younger monks to be obedient and helpful to older ones (see next chapter). This journey to Vatopaidi is physical, geographical, historical, as well as spiritual; a path of purification that first begins with the ‘calling’, goes through the cleansing period of the ‘desert’ to the monastery, and then continues from the
ordination of the novice to a monk until his exit to heaven. This path was first opened by the charisma of Joseph the Hesychast who, on the one hand, revived the
‘spirituality’ of monastic life by returning the emphasis on Jesus prayer and re- introducing communal life, and on the other, through his frequent travels inside and outside Athos not only revived the population of monastic settlements, but also re- opened the trail of communication between the ‘world’ and Athos on which the economy of monasteries depends. His disciples followed the same path in imitation of the example and charisma of Joseph. One of them, Joseph the Vatopaidian opened the path that led to Vatopaidi.
In this context, I spoke of a double Vatopaidian ‘history’: on the one hand, the
ephemeral story of the revival of the family of Josephaeoi, and on the other, the eternal tradition of the monastery itself which is conceived separately from human activity. In the monastery, the history of the brotherhood based on movement and migration, on the
way to a monastery, is fused with the static history of the monastery itself based on its
tradition. In this context of historicity, although the ‘spiritual’ return to coenobitic life, on the basis of a Greek form of the ‘pure’ prayer revived by the charisma of Joseph the Hesychast and his disciples, portrays a ‘return’ to the golden Byzantine days of the Palaeologus Dynasty, underneath it lays a history of expulsions of non-Greek monks accused of being ‘communists’ (see also Introduction, pages 16-18) and their
replacement with Greek ones who repopulated abandoned monastic settlements, forming a new Greek emergent tradition. In this sense, the claim for ‘spirituality’ became a strategy of domination of the Greek over non-Greek monks. In looking at constructions of the past in Cyprus, Bryant highlighted the importance of the purity of the Hellenic ‘spirit’ (2002: 521) in creating a ‘historical’ linearity with the nostalgia of a lost past. On Athos this nostalgia is materialized as a return to a golden and ‘Greek’ Byzantium, to which the family of Josephaeoi ‘returned’.
On a personal level, the passage to Heaven is also a personal striving and self- sacrifice of the secular past of each novice in order to return to the pure state before the Fall of Adam and Eve. Accordingly, the rites of passages reverse natural time with ‘sacred time’ which when ‘played in reverse, death is converted into birth’ (Leach2004: 124- 136). Leach argued that the circular repetition of ‘sacred time’ plays on the theme of dying now to live in the afterlife. In this context, the monastery is a liminal space based on a life of practices in-between life and death, which manipulate the sense of ‘sacred time’. Ritual time is time in reverse: the journeys of Joseph the Hesychast inside and outside the monastic self, in his turn inwards to seek for the lost Greek ‘spirituality’ of Gregorius Palamas, based by his interpretation on the ‘pure prayer’ and communal life, ‘as it was a thousand years ago’.
In this context, the monasteries are conceptualized as being both sacred and liminal spaces, based on a life understood in a liminal state of existence that illustrates Turner’s concept of ‘liminality’ (1967: 93-98) as the marginal state of being, in between life and death, Paradise and Hell, outside the social constrains of the world. Further, this throws a different light on Durkheim’s concept of the ‘sacred’, highlighting the functional interdependence of the two ‘worlds’ to each other: ‘To be sure, this prohibition cannot go so far as to make all communication between the two worlds impossible, for if the profane could in no way enter into relations with the sacred, the sacred would be of no
use’ (Durkheim 1995: 38). On Athos, the movement of would-be monks to a monastery is both esoteric and geographic, illustrating Turner’s concept of ‘communitas’: ‘anti- structured’ groups formed spontaneously on the way to a shrine (1974: 45-46). On Athos, similar groups of young men are then structured within each monastery’s hierarchy, social organization, and particular tradition through the institution’s rites of passage. In this sense, the ‘Monastery’, imagined in-between the ideal and the real world, is an evolving and heterogeneous arena, in which each individual strives toward and against collective ideals of the monastic self. The next chapter will show how through repeated practices of faith, such as confessions and Holy Communion, this journey is materialized on a daily basis, until the monk reaches Christ in heaven.
Figure 4o:
Picture of skulls of former monks with their names curved on, kept in the Vatopaidi’s bone store (Melinos 2002)