The Cave Life at Little St. Anne’s and Katounakia

The austere desert of Mount Athos where St. Joseph lived: the near-vertical cliffs of Little St. Anne’s (Mikra Agia Anna) and Katounakia at the peninsula’s southern tip, where he and his small brotherhood dwelt in caves and rough cells in extreme material poverty, sustaining themselves by hard manual labor and severe fasting while giving the night to unceasing prayer.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

The Desert of the Holy Mountain

At the southern extremity of the Athonite peninsula, below the 2,000-metre marble cone of the Mountain itself, the land falls away in a wall of cliffs to the sea. This is the erimos, the “desert” of Athos — not sand but rock: sun-scorched, waterless, and nearly vertical, reachable in places only by chains and rough steps cut in the stone. Here, in a scatter of caves, huts, and tiny cells, the strictest ascetics of the Holy Mountain have lived since Byzantine times, in the sketes of Kavsokalyvia, Karoulia (“the pulleys,” named for the ropes by which supplies are hauled up the cliff), Katounakia, and the two sketes of St. Anne (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on the geography and eremitic settlements of the Athonite desert). It was into this quarter, the harshest on the Mountain, that Joseph and Arsenios withdrew to wage the inner struggle.

The choice of place was itself an ascetic statement. Joseph had come seeking not the mitigated life of the great coenobia but the extreme desert of the hesychast fathers, and he sought the most inaccessible cells precisely because they enforced the poverty, silence, and hardship in which he believed the prayer of the heart was won (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Vatopaidi, 1999, on his deliberate embrace of the harshest conditions). The tradition presents the severity not as gratuitous but as instrumental: the desert stripped away everything the nous could rest in but God.

Little St. Anne’s

Joseph’s brotherhood is associated above all with the Skete of Little St. Anne (Mikra Agia Anna), a cluster of hermit cells on the steep southwestern face, where he lived for much of his mature life and gathered his first disciples (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the years at Little St. Anne’s; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013). The cells there were minimal — a chapel, a few rough rooms carved into or built against the rock, a cistern for the scarce rainwater — and the community that formed around Joseph lived in them under a rule of the utmost strictness (see The Typikon of Vigil). Over the decades the brotherhood also occupied cave-dwellings and cells in the neighboring desert, moving as circumstances and the elder’s discernment required, and toward the end of Joseph’s life settling at New Skete (Nea Skiti), the somewhat less precipitous skete where he reposed in 1959 (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the later move to New Skete and his repose there).

The name Katounakia — a nearby desert region of the same southwestern face, where Elder Daniel’s brotherhood and, later, Joseph’s disciple Elder Ephraim of Katounakia lived — is bound up with Joseph’s story both because he passed through and dwelt in that quarter and because it became the seat of one of his most important disciples (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999; on Ephraim of Katounakia, see The Two Ephraims). The exact chronology of the brotherhood’s movements among these desert cells is not preserved with documentary precision in the sources, which are devotional biographies rather than chronicles; the constant across all of them is the setting — the cave, the cliff, the sea below, the peak above — and the manner of life lived in it.

A Life of Extreme Poverty

The material poverty of Joseph’s brotherhood is one of the most emphasized features of the tradition. The monks possessed almost nothing; they ate little and poorly — dry bread, wild greens, whatever their scant cultivation and the alms of pilgrims provided — and they observed the fasts of the Church with a severity that pushed the body to its limits (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the brotherhood’s poverty, diet, and fasting; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013, on daily privation under the elder). Water had to be gathered and carried; there was little or no money; illness was borne without medicine (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999). Joseph himself suffered for years from serious ailments — the sources describe chronic and painful conditions in his later life — which he bore as part of the ascetic struggle (ibid., on his illnesses).

The monks sustained themselves partly by manual labor, above all handwork that could be done in the cell without breaking the recollection of prayer: carving, making small wooden articles and prayer-ropes, painting icons — the traditional crafts of the Athonite hermit — sold or bartered to buy the little the desert could not supply (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the brotherhood’s handwork; on the eremitic economy generally, Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002). This labor was woven into the horarium (see The Typikon of Vigil): a means of survival, a discipline against idleness, and — because it left the mind free for the Jesus Prayer — a support of the inner work rather than a distraction from it.

The Rhythm of the Eremitic Life

The desert imposed its own rhythm, which Joseph’s rule sharpened to a point. The day was divided between the physical necessities — a little labor, a little food, brief rest — and the great matter of prayer, which claimed above all the hours of the night. Joseph reversed the ordinary order of waking and sleeping, keeping vigil through the night in the darkness and silence of the cave and taking his short sleep by day, so that the deepest hours of prayer coincided with the deepest stillness (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the nocturnal typikon; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013). The setting was integral to this: the isolation of the cliff-cell removed the noise and traffic of the settled monasteries, and the very difficulty of reaching the place kept visitors few, guarding the silence (hesychia) from which the elder took his name and his whole way of life.

It is important to read this severity as the tradition itself reads it — not as an end in itself but as the necessary condition of the noetic prayer that is the real subject of Joseph’s life. The cave, the fast, the vigil, the poverty: all are, in the hesychast understanding, the clearing of the ground on which the prayer of the heart is planted (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on asceticism as the servant of prayer; on the tradition, see Nepsis and the Jesus Prayer). The extremity of the setting is thus inseparable from the extremity of the aim: Joseph sought the highest reaches of prayer, and he sought them where the fathers had always sought them, in the desert.

See Also

References

  • Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. (Little St. Anne’s, Katounakia, and New Skete; the brotherhood’s poverty, diet, and fasting; handwork; the nocturnal typikon; the elder’s illnesses.)
  • Ephraim of Philotheou (of Arizona), Elder. My Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 2013. (Daily privation and the manner of life under the elder in the desert.)
  • Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (The geography and eremitic settlements of the Athonite desert; the hermit economy.)