REFLECTIONS FROM TRE HOLY MOUNTAIN

...The only legitimate motive for a trip to Athos is the one recognized by the founders and present custodians of the monas-eries: the quest for God...

...But when combined with or balanced by the other two, it can produce profound renovations in the life of the Church-as it did most notably at the time of Erasmus, Sadoleto, Paleotti and the Christian humanists...

...The second has often been vitiated by the assumption that the latest theological formations are qualitatively the best: Thomas Aquinas superseded Augustine, Suarez superseded Thomas, Charles Curran obliterates Alfonso de' Liguori, and Hans Kiing erases Vatican I. It has also been subject to manipulation, as Karl Morrison demonstrated in his Tradition and Authority in the Western Church (Princeton, 1969...

...Century-old local rites have been wiped out in a day, even over the opposition of such powerful advocates as Charles Borromeo of Milan...

...of Chicago Press...

...Thus liberated from the bonds of time, modernity and the flesh, the visitor can at last begin climbing up the thirty-two-step ladder toward heaven that is depicted on the walls of the refectory at Dionisiou...

...Even at the relatively populous Ayios Pavlou the frescoes are rapidly disappearing behind ever thicker layers of candle smoke...

...Having missed the 2 P.M...

...The second, just the opposite, is the one once associated with John Henry Newman's concept of doctrinal development and currently associated with the Johannine concept of aggiorn-amento...

...Seagulls alone elude the rigorous exclusion of all female animals- although they are probably not envisaged in the Deuteronomy prohibitions against possible alternatives to normal sexual relations...

...He must spend a whole morning tramping from his consulate to the Ministry of Northern Greece and then to the Foreign Office of the Police Department in Thessaloniki-and he must add another half hour if he mistakes the "old" no...

...It can encourage atrophy, apathy and a total divorce between the sacred and the secular...

...The Greeks, on the other hand, have preferred the latter...

...While recognizing the basically unchanging nature of doctrine in general, this form of tradition provides for the gradual "discovery" of previously unformulated doctrines and for the rectification or explication of previous formulations in the light of new historical circumstances...

...Wild figs and blackberries, the only available supplement to the sparse and vitamin-free monastic table, will simply not keep the body going for five hours under the hot sun-particularly when five hours suddenly stretches into seven as a result of straying from badly-marked and overgrown trails...

...London, 1960...

...and they insist that even the forests on the mountains are a sign of God's presence ("o dasos einai thafma Theou," warn the no-smoking signs...

...If you are stuck at my own Wo-ist-der-Bahnhof level, you will be forced to depend, as I was, upon one Greek monk who spoke some French, one Greek-American monk who spoke Mid-Western English (that's Father Gregorios at Dionisiou), an Italian school teacher who spoke good Greek, a Colombian Benedictine Eastern-Rites specialist who spoke Italian, and whatever Athenian students were patient enough to hear me through to the end of my tortured sentences...

...Much more effectively than the occasional pronouncements of ecclesiastical authority, it can provide a universally acceptable standard for judging the orthodoxy of novelties, and it can direct all efforts at restoration toward the same epoch in the past...

...And permanent companions can be a bar to fruitful contacts with occasional companions, particularly with the many young Greeks and Italians, who are generally serious and well informed...

...And beds consist of thin straw mattresses on wooden bunks...

...Guided by these rules, the visitor will be able to take Ml advantage of those conditions of life on Athos that most distinguish it from the rest of the world...

...ERIC cochrane teaches in the history department at The University of Chicago and is the author of Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (U...

...The first is the one associated with the various groups of so-called "traditional Catholics," and it usually consists in a demand for a return to practices and doctrinal emphases current at one time or another in the past...

...He will certainly be taken aback by the violent anti-Catholicism of the monks, even if he remembers that they denounced their own patriarch in 1963 for his ecumenical inclinations...

...Fourth: Be sure you know enough modern Greek, the sole and universal language of the residents, to be able to carry on, and not just listen to, conversations...

...Not till mid-afternoon will he be able to start forth, signed and sealed permit in hand, with the hope of reaching a monastery before dark...

...Years are still counted according to the Julian, not the Gregorian calendar, and hours are counted according to standard time, not the daylight-saving time observed in the rest of Greece...

...Or, more precisely, it has been reduced, as it was on Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, to an ever-repeating cycle of daily meals and annual feasts-without beginning, without end, without direction and without the one element that might justify its inclusion among Kant's categories: change...

...By themselves, unfortunately, both these forms of tradition have proven to have certain disadvantages...

...and since the king is an essential part of the church hierarchy, they always will have one...

...There is nothing but the sound of monks chattering on their verandas in the evening, of mules shuffling up and down steep paths, of waves splashing onto bright white beaches upon which no Sardinian resort builder has ever set foot...

...Indeed, in the light of one complete disaster (the English schism) and of several near-disasters (the Concordat of Bologna and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy), this preference may well have been justified...

...True, this form too has its dangers...

...And Catholics today, if they wish to heal the nine-century-old schism, will have to begin by reconsidering their previous distinctions between what is binding doctrine and what is pious belief...

...The visitor may also have learned something about the relative value of uniformity and diversity...

...Third: Respect the established dietary regulations and abstain from such standard hikers' items as canned meat, cheese and sausages...

...And now that nationalism is rapidly vanishing in the more advanced states of the West, it {Continued on page 499) may be possible at last to carry out the Tridentine project for provincial and national synods and to permit other variations in the liturgy than just that of language...

...But whoever arrives alone after having made a visible physical effort will be rewarded with ouzo, coffee, candied fruit and friendly conversation...

...But that is a pleasure even the most obdurate Platonist would probably find irresistible...

...Second: Go on foot...

...Sentences from the Fathers and the Councils have been torn out of context and rescrambled to give them completely new meanings...

...He may, for instance, have learned something about ecumenism...

...Similarly, learn more about Athos itself than I did by reading the standard travelogs, like Carlo Hemmer's Wanderer auf Athos (Luxemburg, 1964) and Philip Sherrard's Athos, The Mountain of Silence (Eng...

...Fifth: Learn as much as possible about the history, the theology and the liturgy of the Eastern Church, and do not rely solely, as I did, on the well-known Western authorities, like Timothy Ware and Jaroslav Pelikan...

...Tradition in this form consists in preserving and transmitting pure, untouched and unaltered the entire doctrinal and religious heritage, not just of the Apostolic age, but also of the age of the Fathers and the first ecumenical councils-those councils, that is, which are represented symbolically in the frescoes of Lavras...

...The Greeks have always had a king, explained one monk (Pericles, Demosthenes and certain sultans notwithstanding...

...Olives provide the only substantial ingredient in a menu limited almost wholly to bread, tomatoes and bean soup -as the emaciated frames of the monks clearly demonstrate...

...The Greeks' preference may also be justified...

...The Greeks appropriately call the mountain not Athos, which is the name only of the highest peak, but To Ayion Oros, "the Holy Mountain...

...But to insist that the Orthodox begin by accepting doctrines promulgated without their advice and consent in relatively recent times will probably succeed no better today than it did at the abortive Council of Ferrara-Florence in the fifteenth century...

...He will probably interpret the distribution of blessed bread after the liturgy (the celebrant alone ever seems to communicate) as an abuse of the Eucharist...

...25 for the "new" number on the Tsimiski...

...But the ordinary visitor has almost as hard a time just getting onto Mt...

...And it has produced such aberrations as the pontificate of Paul IV, the Venetian Interdict and the Syllabus of Errors...

...Icon painters still reproduce only slightly Dis-neyfied versions of the same images their predecessors have been reproducing for centuries-with the happy result that they are easily distinguishable from pin-ups on bus drivers' dashboards...

...Yet disappointment with the defects can give way to an appreciation of the merits of Athos if the visitor abides by a certain number of unwritten, but nonetheless universally observable, rules...

...Portraits of ex-king Con-stantines still hang beside fifteen-year-old photographs of the restored prime minister Karamanlis...

...He must push his way through the clutter of bags, crates, parked buses and impatient travelers that surround what passes for the KTEL ticket office on the Olibou...

...But bring along a good supply of dextrose tablets, chocolate bars and, above all, a shaker for preparing the latest of Greek delicacies, nes-cafe frappe...

...But if the wounds of a fractured Christendom are ever healed, it may also one day serve as a guide for those who labor daily to push this world onward toward its destined goal...

...A sleepless night on the beach and a breakfastless three-hour ride on the 7 A.M...

...But there is still another form of tradition: the one that is acclaimed today on Athos and that was accepted throughout the Church before the time of Gregory VII...

...All the monasteries have at least one empty wing...

...And the characteristic wooden balconies of Simonas Petras have almost wholly rotted away...

...Only one of them (that I noticed) shows any sign of repair or reconstruction work in progress...

...Toilet facilities consist of a hole projected out over a cliff-which is something of a shock for one used to the $1,200 private bathrooms that adorn the "cells" of most American monasteries...

...He will note that the monastic reception rooms, unlike those of the West, are totally free of theological and ecclesiastical journals, and that the dusty codices in the tightly-locked libraries are meant only to be admired, never to be studied...

...Bathing facilities consist of a single tap in a drafty hall (which the monks scrupulously avoid, to judge by the grey color of their skin...

...Most important of all, the visitor will discover that time has been turned off...

...He will probably find the chanting "monotone, artless, turned in on itself" (as did Gerhard Pohl in Wanderungen auf Athos, Berlin 1960), even when it is occasionally well performed...

...And the Tridentine Latin mass, upon which Catholics were nourished for four hundred years, has been abolished even in the legally a-national basilicas of Rome...

...and a two-and-a-half hour hike (which is better than two hours of being tossed about in a rickety bus) will get him into the "capital" at Kane" just as either the state police officer or the monastic officials have gone to lunch...

...Solitude is a prerequisite for meditation and reflection, without which a religious pilgrimage inevitably degenerates into a Chaucerian pilgrimage...

...To define the reunification of the churches in terms solely of an act of contrition on the part of wayward brothers will undoubtedly seem to him as an oversimplification of a complicated problem, particularly in the light of the failure of such definitions in the West to attract converts from Protestantism...

...After all, even in its accentuated Counter-Reformation form, uniformity has not saved the Western Church from a constant round of doctrinal squabbles over the past four centuries, from Molin-ism to Modernism...

...He will soon find that Athos is no longer what it once was, either in the seventeenth century, when czars and sultans subsidized a building boom, or in the late nineteenth century, when ample continental landholdings supported a lively school of theology...

...Two forms of tradition have long been recognized in the West...

...Several entire monasteries (and almost all the isolated hermitages) have been completely abandoned...

...First: Go alone...

...Notwithstanding the purely accidental Hellenization of recent decades, the Athos monastic federation, like the loose confederation of auto-cephalic churches that make up Orthodoxy in general, manages to tolerate a broad diversity of organization and rite without ever compromising the adherence of all to the same fundamental doctrines...

...The Western Church has generally preferred the former-in the thirteenth century, when Innocent III claimed feudal jurisdiction over distant kingdoms, in the sixteenth century, when Pius V proclaimed papal supremacy in temporal as well as in spiritual matters, and in the nineteenth century, when Pius IX asserted the right of papal appointment to all episcopal sees...

...eseis eiste protestandi...

...For one thing, he will discover that modern civilization has been effectively excluded-all of it, that is, except the truck on the new dirt road to Simonas Petras, the telephone line to Lavras, and the small generator that ignites the 3-watt bulbs after 8 P.M...

...For another thing, the visitor will discover that both the comforts and the distractions of the flesh have been effectively eliminated...

...That reduces the bodily pleasures to one alone: the sensation of a sweaty body as it hurls itself, once out of sight of a monastery, into the cool, blue sea...

...and to judge from the evident paucity of recruits (most of the younger residents are really visiting theology students preparing for the secular priesthood), the number will probably approach zero within a generation...

...Above all, do not pretend to get much out of the romantic prose of the only guidebook available for purchase (Athos, published in three languages by the Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies in Thessaloniki), no matter how much you may be charmed personally by the jovial, friendly author, Thomas Prova-takis, who is usually around...

...Sixth, and most important: Remember that all other motives are secondary-delighting in the spectacle of unspoiled nature, admiring Byzantine art (most of it dates from the eighteenth century anyway), looking for old manuscripts (all of which have been catalogued), or transcribing inscriptions (most of which are printed in Gabriel Millet's Recueil des inscriptions...

...He will probably judge the liturgies to be little more than an endless (average: 3 hours) round of strolling about, lighting and blowing out candles, rattling censers, twirling candelabras, and kissing images-just the sort of external ritual that post-Vatican II Catholicism has tried so hard to shed...

...Athos today...

...For the Catholic visitor, initial doubts may rapidly grow into severe disappointment...

...The first has often been a-historical...

...and no one is sure which of them is the current incarnation of the eternal Constantine the Great as king of the Hellenes, or, more accurately, as Emperor of the Romans (Aftokrator ton Romdn...

...bus, he will have to wait till 5; and after almost four hours of winding up and down the crest of the Cholomon, he will probably discover that the sun-worshiping former hosts of the ex-Gastarbeiter who owns the only hotel in Our-anopolis have taken the last room...

...And when faced with the sole alternative of unconditionally surrendering to the infallible "guardians of the true faith" (Bertold Spuler in Gegenwartslage der Ostkirchen, Frankfurt, 1968), he will probably' rush gratefully back into the tolerant arms of his errant, troubled, poliform Reformata Reformanda...

...But since he cannot hope to accomplish in the 10- to 14-day limit of his permit what the fifth-century mystic who inspired the fresco prescribed as the work of a lifetime, he would do well at the same time to reflect upon what of his experiences might be of immediate value to his fellow Catholics back home...

...It can also save the other two from their former aberrations...

...Should he ask why the monks persist in reading the Bible in koine Greek, which almost none of them understands, he will be labeled as one of the "Pseudo-Witnesses of Jehoval," whose spoken (dimotiki) Greek bibles are denounced on huge posters in front of all the churches of Thessa-loniki...

...It is thus not surprising that some Catholics have tried to escape from tradition altogether-some behind a barrage of metaphysical abstractions borrowed from Aristotle or Seneca, others behind a Catholicized version of the Lutheran doctrine of Sola Scriptura...

...The number of resident monks has dropped in this century from almost 8,000 to roughly 1,500...

...As it summons and disperses the vapors that swirl around it, and as it turns the calm Aegean suddenly into a forest of whitecaps, so for centuries the white peak of Athos has served as the mighty guardian of those who have fled this world...

...That is, it has established as eternally binding what in fact was merely the result of historically contingent conditions-those, say, of the late thirteenth century or the late nineteenth century...

...Try instead looking up some of the published writings of the monks themselves, most of which are cited in the authorities' footnotes...

...at Vadopediou...

...Whoever arrives by the Dafni-Iviron bus or by the Esfigmenou-Lavras boat will be treated as an anonymous member of one more troublesome group (especially by the cook...

...After all this effort, the visitor may wonder why he bothered coming at all...

...There are no cars, no bars, no television, no newspapers, no beer cans, and, most surprising of all, no noise ("please lower your voice," ordered one monk when I had raised it just enough to be heard by three people at once...

...Most important of all, modern Catholics might learn from Athos a better appreciation of the profundity of what Trent itself declared to be one of the two sources of religious doctrine: tradition...

...Should he try to defend himself by suggesting that modern Catholics consider the filioque a dead question and papal infallibility an open one, he will probably be checked by some version of the "you're-all-Protestants" argument ("eimaste emeis katholiki...

...boat will prepare him for another round of bureaucratic chaos at Dafni, the sole port of entry to the monastic republic...