The Search for a Living Elder

The young monk’s quest, in a period of Athonite decline, for a genuine teacher of noetic prayer: the thin state of hesychast practice on the Holy Mountain in the early twentieth century, the counsel he sought from Elder Daniel of Katounakia and other spiritual fathers, and his joining of the simple ascetic Elder Ephraim, with his lifelong companion Arsenios, to begin the desert life.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

A Mountain in Decline

The Mount Athos that Frangiskos reached around 1921 was in a long recession that would not reverse until after mid-century. Historians of the twentieth-century revival describe a Holy Mountain whose population had been falling for decades and would continue to fall — from tens of thousands in the nineteenth century to a low point of roughly a thousand or twelve hundred monks by the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of them aged (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on the demographic decline and its nadir). Much of the settled life was idiorrhythmic — monks living semi-independently, keeping their own property and rule — rather than strictly coenobitic, a form that critics of the period regarded as a spiritual slackening (ibid., on idiorrhythmy and its reform).

More to the point for a young man seeking prayer: the living, transmitted practice of noetic prayer — the disciplined inner work of the hesychast fathers — had, by the testimony of Joseph’s own circle, become rare on the Mountain (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Vatopaidi, 1999, on the difficulty of finding a teacher of the prayer of the heart). This is the report of the tradition around Joseph, and it should be read as such — the perception of a reforming movement that saw itself as recovering something largely lost — but it is corroborated in its broad outline by the independent scholarship on the Mountain’s condition (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002). The desert of unceasing prayer that Frangiskos had read about existed still in scattered hermits, but it was neither easy to find nor easy to enter.

The Quest for a Teacher

Frangiskos’s response was to search. The biography presents his first Athonite years as a deliberate quest across the Mountain for a living elder who actually practiced and could teach the noetic prayer — a going from cell to cell and skete to skete, questioning ascetics, testing what he found against what he had read (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the search for a genuine guide of prayer; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013, recalling the elder’s account of the search). The search itself is significant: it shows a man who would not settle for the ordinary observance he found around him, and who from the outset made inner prayer, not merely external monastic discipline, the criterion of the life he wanted.

Among the elders he is said to have consulted was Daniel of Katounakia (Elder Daniel the Katounakiotis, d. 1929), the learned and respected head of a small brotherhood at Katounakia, one of the more esteemed spiritual figures of the Mountain in that generation (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the counsel of Elder Daniel; on Daniel’s stature, Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002). The tradition presents Daniel as a source of counsel and encouragement rather than as the abiding elder Frangiskos was seeking; the man he was looking for — one who lived the strict, prayerful desert life of unceasing invocation — he did not find in the settled brotherhoods, and he was drawn instead toward the harshest and most solitary quarters of the Mountain (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999).

Early in this period Frangiskos was joined by the man who would be his companion for the rest of his life: Arsenios (later Elder Arsenios the Cave-dweller, the Spelaiotis), a monk older than himself in years but who placed himself under Frangiskos’s spiritual leadership and shared every hardship of the desert life with him for nearly four decades (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on Arsenios becoming his lifelong synergos, or fellow-struggler). The pairing is one of the distinctive features of Joseph’s story: the two men formed the nucleus of the small ascetic band that would move together through the caves of the Athonite desert (see Elder Arsenios the Companion).

Joining Elder Ephraim and the Beginning of Obedience

Frangiskos did not attempt the ascetic life on his own authority. In keeping with the tradition’s insistence that no one may safely undertake the inner warfare without obedience to an elder, he and Arsenios placed themselves under an elder named Ephraim — a simple, unlettered but virtuous ascetic living in the desert region — under whom Frangiskos was tonsured a monk and received the name Joseph (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on his tonsure and his obedience to Elder Ephraim). [Disputed: the biographical tradition names Frangiskos's first elder as a simple ascetic called Ephraim, under whom he was tonsured; the sparse early record gives little more than the name and character of this first elder, and details of the arrangement rest on the later biography rather than on any contemporary document (Joseph of Vatopaidi, *Elder Joseph the Hesychast*, 1999).] The tradition is candid that this first elder, though holy, was not himself a master of the noetic prayer Joseph craved; Joseph gave him full obedience while continuing, with his blessing, to press further into the inner work than his elder could guide him (ibid.).

This is the paradox at the root of Joseph’s spiritual formation, and his disciples make much of it: the great teacher of noetic prayer in the twentieth century had, in effect, no full human teacher of that prayer. What he could not receive from a living master he sought directly — through relentless ascetic effort, through the Philokalia and the ascetic fathers in the texts, and, his disciples testify, through the grace given to his persistence (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on his self-taught yet grace-assisted acquisition of the prayer; see Experiences of Grace and the Uncreated Light, where these claims are treated under §3.5). Whether one reads this as providence or simply as the record of a strong-willed man who forced his own way, it set the pattern of his life: an extreme, exploratory asceticism, undertaken in the desert, in search of a prayer he was determined to reach.

The search, then, ended not in the discovery of a great living hesychast but in the decision to become one — to withdraw with Arsenios into the caves of the Athonite desert and there to wage the inner struggle himself. That desert, and that struggle, are the subject of Section 02.

See Also

References

  • Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. (The search for a teacher of prayer; the counsel of Elder Daniel of Katounakia; the companionship of Arsenios; the tonsure under Elder Ephraim.)
  • Ephraim of Philotheou (of Arizona), Elder. My Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 2013. (The elder’s recollections of his early search on the Mountain.)
  • Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (The demographic and spiritual decline of Athos in the early twentieth century; idiorrhythmy; Elder Daniel of Katounakia.)