The Repopulation of Athos

How St. Joseph’s spiritual line revived the great coenobia of the Holy Mountain: Joseph of Vatopaidi (1921–2009), who led a brotherhood that ultimately repopulated the vast monastery of Vatopaidi; Charalambos of Dionysiou (1910–2001), who became abbot of Dionysiou; and the wider phenomenon by which Joseph’s disciples and their disciples reversed, within a generation, the demographic and spiritual decline of Athos and founded monasteries abroad.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

From the Desert to the Coenobia

Joseph the Hesychast lived and died in the eremitic desert, but the most visible fruit of his life was the revival of the coenobitic monasteries — the great communal houses of the Holy Mountain that, in the mid-twentieth century, stood half-empty and aging. The mechanism of this revival was the movement of Joseph’s spiritual descendants from the desert into the coenobia as abbots and brotherhoods, carrying with them the recovered hesychast discipline and drawing in the young monks whose arrival reversed the decline (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on the repopulation of the coenobia by the desert brotherhoods, prominently Joseph’s line). Historians of the Athonite revival identify Joseph’s brotherhood as one of the principal wellsprings of this transformation: a strikingly large share of the abbots who led the renewal of the great monasteries from the 1970s onward trace their spiritual descent to Joseph the Hesychast (ibid.).

Joseph of Vatopaidi and the Revival of Vatopaidi

Chief among these was Elder Joseph of Vatopaidi (1921–2009) — often called Joseph the Younger, or Joseph of Vatopaidi, to distinguish him from his elder — the disciple who wrote the principal biography on which this collection largely rests (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Vatopaidi, 1999). Formed under Joseph the Hesychast in the desert, he led, after his elder’s death, a brotherhood that lived successively at New Skete and at the Skete of Koutloumousiou, growing and attracting young monks; and in 1989–1990 this brotherhood was invited to take over the ancient, immense, and depleted coenobium of Vatopaidi, one of the greatest monasteries of the Mountain, which under his leadership was restored to full coenobitic life and became one of the most populous and vigorous communities on Athos (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, on Elder Joseph and the repopulation of Vatopaidi). [Disputed: the year Elder Joseph's brotherhood took over Vatopaidi is generally given as 1989 or 1990; accounts differ on whether to date it from the first monks' arrival or the formal reconstitution of the coenobium. The substance — that Elder Joseph of Vatopaidi led the brotherhood that revived Vatopaidi at the end of the 1980s — is well attested (Speake, *Renewal in Paradise*, 2002).] It was from Vatopaidi, and under his authority, that the biography of his elder was published in 1999 — so that the revival of the monastery and the transmission of Joseph the Hesychast’s memory are, in his person, a single work.

Charalambos of Dionysiou

Another of Joseph’s desert disciples, Elder Charalambos (1910–2001), likewise moved from the eremitic life into the leadership of a coenobium, becoming abbot of the Monastery of Dionysiou, which he governed and renewed on the hesychast lines learned from Joseph (Middleton, Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit, Protecting Veil, 2004, on Elder Charalambos of Dionysiou; Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, on Dionysiou’s renewal). Charalambos is remembered, like the others, for transplanting into the communal life of a great monastery the intensity of prayer and the strict discipline of the desert brotherhood — evidence again of the pattern by which Joseph’s eremitic hesychasm became the seed of coenobitic revival (Middleton, Precious Vessels, 2004).

The Pattern of the Revival

The cases of Vatopaidi, Dionysiou, and Philotheou (the last under Ephraim of Arizona; see The Two Ephraims) exemplify a pattern that ran through the Mountain in the last third of the twentieth century. Declining or idiorrhythmic monasteries were reconstituted as strict coenobia under abbots drawn from the hesychast desert brotherhoods; the reformed communities, offering a serious and prayerful monastic life, attracted a wave of educated young men whose entry reversed the demographic collapse; and the recovered hesychast discipline — the noetic prayer, the vigil, frequent confession and communion, the demanding obedience — became the common ethos of the renewed houses (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, on the pattern and the demographic reversal). Joseph the Hesychast’s brotherhood was not the only source of this revival — other lineages, notably that of Elder Paisios and the tradition around Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra, contributed as well — but it was among the most important, and the concentration of major abbots descended from Joseph is one of the striking facts of the period (ibid.; on the wider revival, see The Athonite Renaissance).

The Founding of Monasteries Abroad

The revival did not stop at the Mountain’s borders. The same brotherhoods that repopulated Athos went on to plant monasteries beyond it — most conspicuously in North America, through Ephraim of Arizona’s network of some seventeen to twenty foundations, but also in the establishment or renewal of dependent houses and convents in Greece and elsewhere (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, on the American and other foundations; see Hesychasm in the Modern World). Through these foundations the hesychast tradition that Joseph had recovered in the caves of Little St. Anne’s was carried to continents where Athonite monasticism had never before existed, and made available to Orthodox Christians — and inquirers — who would never see the Holy Mountain. That a hidden desert hermit, who had struggled even to find a teacher of the prayer he sought, should stand at the head of so vast an expansion is the central paradox and the central claim of his legacy, taken up in Section 08.

The scale of this progeny is also, in the tradition’s understanding, part of the warrant for his glorification: the Church, in recognizing Joseph as a saint in 2020, recognized among other things the manifest fruitfulness of his life in the revival of monasticism that flowed from it (see Glorification 2020 and Assessment).

References

Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. (The biography’s authorship and its publication from Vatopaidi.)
Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (The repopulation of the coenobia by the desert brotherhoods; Elder Joseph and Vatopaidi; Dionysiou; the demographic reversal; the foundations abroad.)
Middleton, Herman A. Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit: The Lives and Counsels of Contemporary Elders of Greece. Thessalonica: Protecting Veil, 2004. (Elder Charalambos of Dionysiou and the renewal of Dionysiou.)