The Twentieth-Century Revival

By the early 1970s Mount Athos seemed to be dying: the monastic population had fallen to around a thousand, mostly elderly men in decaying and half-empty houses. Within a generation the Mountain was transformed — its numbers rising, its houses repopulated by young and educated monks, its idiorrhythmic monasteries returned to the coenobitic life, its hesychast tradition visibly renewed. This renewal, one of the most remarkable in modern Orthodox history, sprang above all from the hesychast desert and the spiritual lineages of a few great elders. This file traces the decline and the revival, deferring the modern hesychast saints to their own collections.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite)

The Mid-Century Decline

For most of the twentieth century Athos was in decline, and by mid-century the decline looked terminal. Several forces converged. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had cut off the funding and the great flow of novices that had swelled the Slavic houses in the nineteenth century, so that the huge Russian, and to a lesser extent the Bulgarian and Serbian, communities emptied and aged (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, ch. 5–6, on the collapse of the Slavic houses; see The Pan-Orthodox Mountain). The general secularisation of the twentieth century, two world wars, the Greek Civil War, and the pull of modern life away from the monastery all reduced the flow of new monks. The idiorrhythmic form, dominant in many houses, was itself a symptom and a cause of spiritual relaxation (see Coenobitic and Idiorrhythmic).

The numbers tell the story starkly. From tens of thousands of monks in earlier centuries and some seven thousand around 1900, the population fell steadily through the twentieth century to a nadir of roughly one thousand to twelve hundred monks by the early 1970s — and these were disproportionately old, so that the communities faced not merely decline but extinction as the aged monks died without successors (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6, on the mid-century figures and the sense of impending death; on the low point around 1971). Observers of the 1960s and early 1970s wrote of Athos as a museum, a relic, a dying institution whose end was in sight (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6). It was precisely at this point that the recovery began.

The Sources of the Renewal

The revival did not come from administrative reform or outside funding; it came from within, from the spiritual depths of the Mountain, and above all from the hesychast desert. Its human sources were a handful of great spiritual fathers whose disciples, gathered into brotherhoods, went out to repopulate the failing monasteries.

The pivotal figure was St. Joseph the Hesychast (died 1959), who with a small brotherhood had lived the strictest eremitic and hesychast life in the caves of the desert of Athos — at Katounakia, the Little St. Anne’s, and the New Skete — reviving the rigorous practice of the Jesus Prayer and inner watchfulness in conditions of extreme austerity (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6, on St. Joseph the Hesychast and his brotherhood; see St. Joseph the Hesychast, and, for the desert, Sketes, Kellia, and the Desert of Athos). Though he died before the revival became visible, his disciples and their disciples became the abbots and elders who refounded the great houses: the spiritual lineage of St. Joseph the Hesychast repopulated a whole series of monasteries — among them Vatopedi, Philotheou, Karakalou, and others — carrying the hesychast tradition of the desert into the coenobitic heart of the Mountain (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6, on the Josephite lineage and the repopulation of the houses).

Other elders played the same generative role. Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, elder Paisios, and elder Porphyrios — the last two now glorified — drew disciples and pilgrims and became, through their eldership and their example, magnets and models for a new monastic generation (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6; on the elders see The Athonite Spiritual Fathers; and, for the saints themselves, St. Paisios and St. Porphyrios). The renewal thus followed the ancient Athonite pattern: the eremitic and hesychast life of the desert, renewed by a few holy men, overflowed into the great monasteries and raised them from the dead — the same movement, from the desert to the coenobium, that had shaped the Mountain since St. Athanasius (see The Early Hermits and Saint Athanasius).

Alongside these Greek lineages stood the witness of St. Silouan the Athonite (died 1938), the Russian monk of St. Panteleimon’s whose profound hesychast experience — made known to the world after his death through his disciple Sophrony’s book — became one of the most influential spiritual testimonies of the century, carrying the prayer of the Holy Mountain into the modern West (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6; see St. Silouan the Athonite and St. Sophrony of Essex). Silouan lived and died in the very depth of the Mountain’s decline, in an emptying Russian house — a reminder that the Mountain’s holiness was never extinguished even at its lowest ebb, and that the revival to come had hidden roots in those dark decades.

The Transformation

From the later 1960s and especially the 1970s the recovery became unmistakable. New and often young, educated monks — many of them university graduates who had turned from the modern world to the monastic life — arrived in numbers; whole brotherhoods, gathered around the elders of the Josephite and other lineages, entered and refounded the failing houses; and the monastic population, which had bottomed out around a thousand, began a sustained rise that continued into the following decades (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6, on the arrival of the new monks and the rising numbers; on the later figures see Pilgrimage Numbers and Challenges). The character of the new monasticism was notable: not a nostalgic survival but a serious, often rigorous, and spiritually confident revival, drawing precisely the young and capable whom the age was thought to have lost to secularism (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6).

The revival had structural as well as demographic effects. As new brotherhoods took over the houses, the idiorrhythmic monasteries were converted one by one to the coenobitic life, the process completing in 1992 when the last of them, Pantokratoros, became coenobitic, so that all twenty ruling houses are now coenobitic (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 7; see Coenobitic and Idiorrhythmic). The reversion to the stricter common life both expressed and consolidated the deeper renewal.

The Meaning of the Revival

The renewal of Athos is the fact that shapes the whole modern discussion of the Mountain. It confounded the confident mid-century prediction of extinction and demonstrated, in a secular age, the continuing power of the monastic and hesychast vocation to draw and to form serious lives (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6 and conclusion — the “renewal in paradise” of his title). Its sources are instructive: it came not from modernisation but from a deeper fidelity to the oldest thing on the Mountain, the hesychast prayer of the desert, transmitted through the personal bond of elder and disciple (see The Athonite Spiritual Fathers). At the same time the revival has brought its own challenges — the pressures of numbers, of pilgrimage and tourism, of wealth and publicity and the modern world — which are treated in Section 09 (see Pilgrimage Numbers and Challenges). But the central fact remains: a Mountain that seemed to be dying in 1971 was, a generation later, alive and growing, and it had been raised by the very tradition of prayer for which it exists.

See Also

References

  • Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. (Chs. 5–7 and conclusion on the mid-century decline and the figures, St. Joseph the Hesychast and his lineage, the elders of the revival, St. Silouan, the arrival of the new monks, the rising numbers, and the return to the coenobitic life.)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Bishop of Diokleia). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (The twentieth-century monastic and hesychast revival in its wider Orthodox context.)