587
Why are any of these obscure details relevant? Because the holy Mount Athos
is a most fitting context for sensing the salient contours, disturbing at best, which
separate the art and valiant spirituality of the last Byzantine bastion, from modernity; confronting prayer, science and art with the realities of the modern world,
atop one of the most inaccessible locations on the planet. At the crux of geographical and historic bifurcations along the Halkidiki Peninsula—where the
6670-foot snow- clad peak rests above the 20-monastery complex of Eastern
Orthodoxy, with its scores of cells and cliff-hanging hermitages overlooking the
Homeric wine-dark waters—humanity reveals a window on its contradictory face.
This eremitic complex of precipices over which human nature confronts its daily
prayers, duties, and demons is an ecological wonderland. As the late poet and
scholar Philip Sherrard, with photographer Takis Zervoulakos, portrayed, the
monastic paradise teems in the Spring with “olives and vines, ilex and arbutus,
wild smilax and osmunda fern …,” St. John’s wort, “bright purple flowers of the
Judas tree and the white plumes of the Manna ash …” while “wild boar and deer
still roam the woods.”
3
The mountain’s hagiography commences in AD 49, when Athos lore has the
Holy Virgin, Mother of God arriving; and by the ninth century, a monk by the name
of Peter the Athonite taking up residency, “fifty years in the cave” there on the
venerated abyss. That cavernous wild, and numerous others like it, would subsequently host a larra, or “colony of hermits” in the form of the Great Lavra, a cenobitic monastery founded by Saint Athanasios in 961. Dozens of hesychasteria—cells
on cliff walls wherein solitaires lived out their devotional stays on earth—remain
today. Quoting St. Gregory Palamas, writes Sherrard, “Man, being himself light,
sees the light with the light; if he regards himself, he sees the light, and if he
regards the object of his vision, he finds the light there again, and the means that
he employs for seeing is the light; and it is in this that union consists, for all this is
but one.”
4
And, concluding his narrative with words from St. Symeon, “… For
immense richness I exist penniless/and having as I think nothing, possess much/
and I say I thirst, in the midst of waters.”
5
Such poetic raptures, symptomatic of the
living miracle on Mount Athos, population just over 1800 souls (all males), contrast poignantly with the rest of us in ways that one must ask: Where to begin? This
is the essence of existentialism, with its origins and future in nothing less than
natural history herself.
That light of St. Palamas (1296–1359), with his enormous bird, brilliant halo,
and penetrating, El Greo eyes, has worked miracles across the icons and murals at
Mount Athos, in much the manner that it erupted, for example, in the body of
resplendent and overpowering mountain illuminations by Joseph Mallard William
Turner (1775–1851), particularly in his canvas, “Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished
3 Sherrard and Zervoulakos, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, New York 1982, p. 7.
4 Citing Triade II, 3, 36, in Gregoire Palamas, Défense des saints hésychastes, edited by Jean
Meyendorff, Vol. 2, Louvain, France 1959, from p. 171 of Sherrard and Zervoulakos.
5 Sherrard and Zervoulakos, citing Hymn III in Symeon le Nouveau Theologien, Hymnes I. p. 171.
61.1 The Search for Henbane upon Mount Athos
Why are any of these obscure details relevant? Because the holy Mount Athos
is a most fitting context for sensing the salient contours, disturbing at best, which
separate the art and valiant spirituality of the last Byzantine bastion, from modernity; confronting prayer, science and art with the realities of the modern world,
atop one of the most inaccessible locations on the planet. At the crux of geographical and historic bifurcations along the Halkidiki Peninsula—where the
6670-foot snow- clad peak rests above the 20-monastery complex of Eastern
Orthodoxy, with its scores of cells and cliff-hanging hermitages overlooking the
Homeric wine-dark waters—humanity reveals a window on its contradictory face.
This eremitic complex of precipices over which human nature confronts its daily
prayers, duties, and demons is an ecological wonderland. As the late poet and
scholar Philip Sherrard, with photographer Takis Zervoulakos, portrayed, the
monastic paradise teems in the Spring with “olives and vines, ilex and arbutus,
wild smilax and osmunda fern …,” St. John’s wort, “bright purple flowers of the
Judas tree and the white plumes of the Manna ash …” while “wild boar and deer
still roam the woods.”
3
The mountain’s hagiography commences in AD 49, when Athos lore has the
Holy Virgin, Mother of God arriving; and by the ninth century, a monk by the name
of Peter the Athonite taking up residency, “fifty years in the cave” there on the
venerated abyss. That cavernous wild, and numerous others like it, would subsequently host a larra, or “colony of hermits” in the form of the Great Lavra, a cenobitic monastery founded by Saint Athanasios in 961. Dozens of hesychasteria—cells
on cliff walls wherein solitaires lived out their devotional stays on earth—remain
today. Quoting St. Gregory Palamas, writes Sherrard, “Man, being himself light,
sees the light with the light; if he regards himself, he sees the light, and if he
regards the object of his vision, he finds the light there again, and the means that
he employs for seeing is the light; and it is in this that union consists, for all this is
but one.”
4
And, concluding his narrative with words from St. Symeon, “… For
immense richness I exist penniless/and having as I think nothing, possess much/
and I say I thirst, in the midst of waters.”
5
Such poetic raptures, symptomatic of the
living miracle on Mount Athos, population just over 1800 souls (all males), contrast poignantly with the rest of us in ways that one must ask: Where to begin? This
is the essence of existentialism, with its origins and future in nothing less than
natural history herself.
That light of St. Palamas (1296–1359), with his enormous bird, brilliant halo,
and penetrating, El Greo eyes, has worked miracles across the icons and murals at
Mount Athos, in much the manner that it erupted, for example, in the body of
resplendent and overpowering mountain illuminations by Joseph Mallard William
Turner (1775–1851), particularly in his canvas, “Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished
3 Sherrard and Zervoulakos, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, New York 1982, p. 7.
4 Citing Triade II, 3, 36, in Gregoire Palamas, Défense des saints hésychastes, edited by Jean
Meyendorff, Vol. 2, Louvain, France 1959, from p. 171 of Sherrard and Zervoulakos.
5 Sherrard and Zervoulakos, citing Hymn III in Symeon le Nouveau Theologien, Hymnes I. p. 171.
61.1 The Search for Henbane upon Mount Athos