Athonite Monasticism

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Athonite monasticism is the form of Orthodox Christian monastic life that grew up on Mount Athos, the long mountainous peninsula in northern Greece given over almost entirely to monks. Hermits had settled the ridge by the ninth century; the first of the great communal houses, the Great Lavra, was founded in 963 by Athanasius the Athonite under imperial patronage. From there the peninsula filled with monasteries, sketes, and isolated cells until it became what it still is: a self-governing monastic district, twenty ruling monasteries and their dependencies, populated only by men. By long-standing rule, no women — and by custom most female animals — are permitted to cross onto the Holy Mountain, a restriction Athonites trace to the Virgin, whom they hold to be the peninsula’s sole mistress and protector.

What gives Athos its weight beyond Orthodoxy is the practice cultivated there. Hesychasm — from hēsychia, stillness or silence — names a tradition of inner prayer in which the monk seeks, through unceasing repetition of the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”) and a disciplined quieting of thought, to draw the mind down into the heart and there hold it open to God. Its roots run back through the desert fathers and the apophatic theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, but it took its mature Athonite form in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Practitioners reported that the prayer, sustained, could end in the perception of a divine radiance they identified with the light the apostles saw at the Transfiguration on Tabor.

That claim provoked the defining controversy of Athonite history. In the fourteenth century the monk Gregory Palamas, himself trained on Athos, defended the hesychasts against the Calabrian scholar Barlaam, who held the vision to be either delusion or a created sensible glow. Palamas answered with a distinction that Orthodoxy went on to canonize at councils in Constantinople: between God’s unknowable essence and his energies, the latter being God himself as truly given and truly seen, so that the light was uncreated and the experience real deification rather than metaphor. Western theology never adopted the essence–energies distinction, and it remains one of the deeper divergences between the Latin and Greek traditions.

The mountain’s later history is one of decline and revival. The eighteenth-century Kollyvades movement, centered on Athos, gathered the patristic and ascetic writings into the Philokalia and renewed the prayer of the heart across the Orthodox world; the practice carried into Russia and surfaces, half-anonymously, in the nineteenth-century Way of a Pilgrim. After a long twentieth-century ebb the monasteries refilled. The resemblance between the hesychast’s repeated invocation and the mantric and dhikr practices of other traditions has often been remarked, and it is real as far as it goes; but the Athonite would insist that the light is a Person met, not a state attained — and that the difference is the whole of the matter.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899) · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism