Ascent of Mount Athos:

...Despite the participation of young and old, men and women, in the rich two-and-a-half-hour liturgy in Sofia's St...

...For if we in the West are more and more emphasizing the incarnate Christ and the immanence of God, the Orthodox refuse to dilute their strong stress on the absolute transcendence of God...

...Orthodox monasticism has no rule but is governed by canons of one of the early ecumenical church councils, which one monk explained as a type of framework for their life...

...At Rila monastery, the center of Bulgaria's national self-awakening in the last century, the deputy abbot, Archimandrite Gavriil, told me that there are now only thirteen monks in a monastery built for three hundred and that the majority of these are old...

...Their spiritual and theological reading concentrates on the Bible and the Fathers and even though the young Father Theologos of Stavronikita monastery discussed with me James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which he had just read, he seemed unable to comprehend my very Western questions about developments in religious life or new forms of experimental ministry in de-Christianized areas...

...Though church officials constantly affirm that relations with the Communist state are good and that the state allows the church to function freely, this freedom is very much given on the state's terms...

...This renewal of monastic life, however, also appears to be characterized by many of the conservative attitudes which dominate the Orthodox church in Greece...

...EVEN MORE SO than in Greece this subservience to the state strikes the visitor to Bulgaria...

...This has left a legacy of having a rather subservient attitude to the state, and though the church in Greece protested to the government over proposals to introduce obligatory civil marriage so that the government modified its view, Orthodox theology still appears to provide no basis for the sort of critical attitude to the state which is increasingly taken for granted by theology in the West...

...The monasteries themselves look more like walled medieval cities built as defensive fortresses against attack not only from the Turks or pirates but also from Western Christians at the time of the Crusades...

...He, however, had worked for a time in West Germany...

...by the Orthodox to express most fully the apostolic faith, which dominates the monks' lives...

...But if the Vatican is dedicated to administration, Mount Athos is dedicated to prayer and asceticism, a point unashamedly upheld in the strict and total ban on women gaining entry to the peninsula...

...With the end of this patronage a period of decline set in so that when the 1 ,000th anniversary of monasticism on Mount Athos was being celebrated in 1963, it was seen by many as "more of a funeral than a festival," as one monk told me...

...BUT EVEN Mount Athos has not been able to escape from the political changes taking place in the world around it...

...They proudly point to the church's role in the resurgence of national identity and culture in the last century after five hundred years of Turkish rule, a role admitted by the founder of the Communist state in 1944, Georgi Dimitrov...

...In 1971 for the first time the number of monks dropped below 1,000, but already a reform had begun which has now attracted large numbers of young people to become monks...

...The area's autonomy is underlined by the absence of roads from Greece itself onto Mount Athos, so that the thousands of pilgrims who visit the various monasteries every year must reach the peninsula by boat...

...For the foreigner special permission from the Ministry of Northern Greece and the police in Thessalonika is necessary, and all pilgrims must go to the administrative center of Karyes on arrival to get an elaborately stamped "visa" from the Holy Community, the government of Mount Athos with one member elected from each of the monasteries for a year...

...But such a self-identity based on the past has its dangers...

...ORTHODOXY IN GREECE & BULGARIA Ascent of Mount Athos PEADAR KIRBY MOUNT ATHOS, the spiritual heart of Eastern Orthodoxy, is a hilly and heavily-wooded peninsula jutting some forty miles into the Aegean Sea in the northeast of Greece...

...The many dualisms of soul and body, of spirit and matter, of the person and God which underlie so much of Western thought are completely foreign to the Orthodox mind...

...But such a strict adherence to tradition allows, paradoxically, a flexibility and lack of legalism which would be the envy of many Western religious orders...

...This flexibility is easily noticed in the almost constant coming and going of monks during the liturgy...

...Questioning Orthodox church leaders about the role of the church in a Communist society, I found that they constantly returned to the theme of its being a national church...

...Panteleimon's Russian Orthodox monastery, built by the czars to house 1,500 monks and 1,000 pilgrims, now houses only a community of thirty and many of the buildings lie dilapidated and unused...

...Nonetheless, if the Western Christian brings a constant critical eye to bear on this rich alternative Christian tradition, one could not fail to be struck again and again by the deep devotion even of young Orthodox to their church...

...Equally the center of the monks' lives, the elaborate four-hour-long liturgy from 1:00 to 5:00 every morning, is like an eternal drama which has changed little in form or content since monasticism first began on the peninsula before the ninth century...

...Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, this lack of vocations to monastic life seems to indicate a growing secularization which may threaten the future of the Orthodox church in Bulgaria more decisively than did the Turks...

...This dates back to a law of 885 and is reinforced by a penalty of two-years imprisonment...

...The same attitude was expressed by the fullness with which young people participated in the liturgy, including young pilgrims rising at 1:00 A.M...

...in the monasteries to take part in the liturgy...

...Even the simple but wholesome vegetarian meals eaten in refectories, some of them decorated with frescos hundreds of years old, underline the link with tradition...

...The visitor to Mount Athos therefore goes back to a world which in many ways seems to pre-date the scientific, philosophical, psychological, and political revolutions since the Renaissance...

...We have much to learn from each other.o learn from each other...

...Dominated by the 6,000-foot-high Holy Mountain of Athos itself, the peninsula as a whole is the home of 1,500 monks living in twenty different monasteries and numerous other settlements, cells, and hermitages attached to these...

...For the Orthodox stress on maintaining the tradition which has been handed down appears to the Western Christian as both a rich inheritance and also a strait-jacket...

...Underlying much of the conservatism is a strong link with political power deriving from the alliance with the Byzantine empire in the middle ages...

...Its positive element is in its holistic worldview, which relates the person and the world to the saving, unifying work of the triune God...

...Perhaps the most challenging expression of this difference is the view that in the liturgy time touches eternity, a view which becomes a rich experience for participants in the monks' liturgy...

...a previous contributor, is an Irish journalist living in Dublin...

...It is a stress which, in Mount Athos at least, appears to be answering a thirst for God felt by many young Greeks...

...This new wave of vocations, I was told, is characterized by a large number of entrants coming from Western Europe and Latin America, and by such people as former left-wing activists, drug addicts, and practitioners of yoga joining the monasteries...

...The visitor is struck by the friendly welcome of the monks and their willingness to spend long hours in discussion even into the evening hours when the rest of the monks have gone to their rooms for the customary silence...

...The first half of this century saw the end of the Orthodox monarchies not only in Russia but also in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rumania, and with them the end of a source of lavish patronage for the monasteries...

...Therefore though the church is able to own farms in a country where 98.5 percent of productive land is owned by the state, and though the church has a monopoly to produce all the goods it needs for use in church, it appears to accept a total prohibition by the state on work with young people...

...It was a young monk in Gregoriou monastery who brought up the fllioque controversy with me and began to blame the Western Church for the schism in the eleventh century...

...Within this protective framework exists a rich monastic life virtually unchanged for centuries...

...It is as if the objective rhythms of the liturgy and the monastic life can allow room for the subjective needs of each of the individual participants not to be stifled...

...A bishop, who preferred not to have his name used, admitted that the Greek church is very unecumenical and rather out of touch with theological developments outside the country...

...For it is a strict view of adhering to the tradition of the church fathers, believed PEADAR KIRBY...

...As a semi-autonomous state linked to Greece it is rivaled only by Vatican City as a political entity established to express and maintain a religious organization...