O Holy Mountain!
Cochrane, Eric
Realization of a timeless present 0 HOLY MOUNTAIN JOURNAL OF A RETREAT ON MOUNT ATHOS M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S. O. Doubleday, $13.95, 291 pp. Eric Cechrane N OTHING is more gratifying than...
...And he has written down what he learned in the form of a diary, one in which the sense of immediacy charac18 January 1980: 27 teristic of the form is heightened by the inclusion of a number of charming drawings...
...and he stayed not just for the ten days usually accorded to pilgrims, but for some three months...
...And he was no more worried than were his hosts about the problems of how forms of religious life created in the fourteenth century can survive even in Greece, the country with which they have so long been identified, at a time when most Greeks are frantically trying to turn it into a Western European industrial democracy...
...I further suggested that they acquaint themselves with Orthodox religious traditions...
...JAMES GIPS is Chairman of the Computer Science Department of Boston College and co-author of Algorithmic Aesthetics: Computer Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts...
...Upon my return from a brief visit to Mt...
...And instead of being able to meditate in solitude during some four to five hours each day on the trail, he was constantly drawn info interminable theological debates, most of which he found to be not very fruitful...
...BERNARD BERGONZI is a professor of English at the University of Warwick...
...But a retreatant has many advantages that are denied a pilgrim, particularly if he is a monk...
...Thus Fr...
...Pennington begin to wander about a bit...
...Athos several years ago I suggested ("Thoughts from the Holy Mountain," Commonweal, June 30, 1976) that the only legitimate motives for going there were religious...
...Indeed, one turned out to be really a continuation of the other...
...But he learned much that can serve to enrich the religious life of all Western Christians, lay as well as clerical...
...While he was there, Fr...
...and even then what he saw remained wholly marginal to what he heard and thought...
...His mdst recent book is Reading the Thirties...
...Eric Cechrane N OTHING is more gratifying than to have someone follow your advice, particularly if he is unaware of doing so...
...REVIEWERS MARTIN GREEEN teaches in the English Department of Tufts University in Massachusetts...
...Pennington may not have been granted the kind of intense religious experience he was somewhat hoping for, and he may not have been able to do much to further the cause of ecumenism among those for whom even the former patriarch of Constantinople was a Latinizing apostate...
...Hence, instead of turning secretarial spread into sunburned muscle, as do most pilgrims whose vocation for hiking is encouraged by being thrown out of each successive monastery the morning after their arrival, he actually gained weight...
...To be sure, a retreatant has one disadvantage with respect to a pilgrim: he is usually confined to a single monastery...
...And having already eliminated the past from his consciousness, he had only to guard himself occasionally against the temptation to plan for the future in order fully to profit from the Mountain's greatest achievement, the realization of a timeless present...
...And he was already so well acquainted with the particular forms of Athenian religiosity that he could understand the spiritual potentialities even of the "Jesus prayer," which to the uninitiate usually sounds like a meaningless repetition of a few not very meaningful words...
...What his hosts did was usually very similar to what his own brothers do...
...His books include The Challenge of the Mahatmas...
...Pennington read all the ancient and Byzantine Church Fathers that he had not read before—at least to judge from his many quotations from them...
...He quietly endured the claims of his disputants to be the only true Christians in a world full of wayward sheep—perhaps remembering that until recently Catholics often made similar claims...
...I also suggested that prospective visitors acquire at least the rudiments of the Greek language...
...He patiently accepted the humiliation of occasionally being' 'excluded like a heretic'' from the liturgy and of frequently being bombarded with anti-Catholic imprecations...
...So completely did he dedicate himself to the purposes of his retreat that he paid almost no attention to what secular visitors hold to be the Mountain's chief attractions: frescoes, manuscripts, architectural monuments, and even— except when a particularly brilliant sunset or an especially violent storm struck his balcony at Simonos Petras—the spectacle of nature...
...Pennington went not just on a pilgrimage, as I did, but on a retreat, one, indeed, which he had carefully prepared in advance...
...Pennington was far more understanding of all that inevitably strikes Latins as rather anachronistic features in Greek religious life...
...Commonweal: 28...
...Moreover, as an active although temporary , member of an Athonian religious community, Fr...
...eric cochrane teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago...
...Pennington had learned modern Greek (dimotiki) well enough to carry on the most intimate conservations, and he had learned enough Byzantine Greek to participate fully in the liturgies...
...He reverently listened to what was told him about the virtues of certain local relics, including a hand of Mary Magdalen that maintains body temperature and emits a sweet odor...
...Pennington had much less difficulty bridging the gap beCommonweal: 26 tween life on the Mountain and life back home—which for him goes on chiefly in a Trappist monastery in Massachusetts...
...What was given him to read complemented what he had already read...
...Not until the end of his retreat did Fr...
Vol. 107 • January 1980 • No. 1
