Even amid the sharpened borders and rigidly defined tracks of modernity, it’s sometimes still possible to uncover historical routes and cultural byways half hidden to the everyday eye. Not long ago, I followed one such route into the world of Eastern Orthodox monasticism, spending several days at the Monastery of Simonos Petras—or “Simonopetra”—on Mount Athos, Greece.
Two friends and I met in Thessaloniki, where, from the late Byzantine walls in the evening, one can look out over a port full of cargo ships at rest before they set out across the Mediterranean. At this gateway to southeastern Europe, the wide bay opens to long sea lanes reaching to the Cyclades, Lebanon, the Black Sea, and Suez. Taking the southeastern coastal road away from the harbor along the sunbaked rim of the Thermaic Gulf, we traveled to the small town of Ouranoupoli, the “City of the Heavens,” the portal to the Holy Mountain. From the small visa office at Ouranoupoli, run by the Holy Executive of Mount Athos, we obtained the diamonitirion, or entrance permit, stamped with the double-headed-eagle insignia of John VIII Palaiologos, the penultimate emperor of Byzantium. Stowing these distinguished documents, we walked out toward a quiet seafront and a glassy sea.
It was a still morning when, under the battlements of a lone tower built by another medieval Byzantine emperor, Andronikos II, we boarded a boat alongside a small group of pilgrims, all of them men. In accordance with an official proclamation of the Emperor Constantine Monomachos in 1046, women have been barred from visiting Mount Athos for centuries, although a daring few have made the attempt. Other groups have been prohibited as well—most idiosyncratically those of Catalan descent, who until the 1990s were expelled from the peninsula in retaliation for the conduct of a fourteenth-century company of Catalan mercenaries who pillaged Byzantine territories. Regulated by the monks’ long memory and their deep devotion to Athonite tradition, daily entry to the peninsula is limited to one hundred Eastern Orthodox men and ten non–Eastern Orthodox male pilgrims. As our boat pulled away from the small harbor at Ouranoupoli, I took a quick glance around the deck. Some of that day’s contingent stood alone, others in groups, equipped for what looked like travels in the wilderness—friends, fathers and sons, or black-robed Orthodox priests loaded with heavy backpacks, carrying staves in their hands.
The Agion Oros, the Holy Mountain, stands at the tip of a peninsula that juts out into the northern Aegean Sea. Its slopes are covered in black pine, chestnut, cypress, and wild olive trees, interspersed around outcrops of rock that take on the tones of the sea and sky. Its heights are crisscrossed by narrow footpaths that have been traversed since the earliest Christian monastic houses were established on the peninsula at the beginning of the ninth century. As we sailed down its western coastline, the seagulls kept pace, flying low alongside the upper deck or gliding across the prow. The religious houses of the Agion Oros rose up along the spine of the peninsula, their outlines like the engravings of sixteenth-century cities as beheld by travelers, breaking the horizon with towers and steeples. As I watched them pass in profile, it seemed as though a map of ancient routes was surfacing, and each isolated landing place was throwing out lines of contact to Novgorod, Jerusalem, Damascus, Alexandria, and the Sinai. The terrain, rugged and sun-starched, began to evoke that other landscape, of deserts and calm seas, which has become synonymous with the contemplative life of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Conversations dimmed as passengers watched the coastal inlets with growing attentiveness. Slowly, the gray mountain rose up ahead.
Simonopetra began with a dream. It was founded in the thirteenth century by the hermit Simon the Athonite, who, while living in a cave on Mount Athos, had a vision of the Theotokos (Mother of God) calling on him to build a monastic house perched on an almost sheer pillar of rock. Simonos Petras—the “rock of Simon”—rose up through the centuries under the eye of various Byzantine emperors, Ottoman governors, despots, and princely potentates and through multiple catastrophic fires, contractions, and expansions.
Today it rises high above the Aegean, silhouetted against laurel-clad slopes and the grey rock of Mount Athos. The vast outer walls are ringed by level upon level of balconies, like the tiered decks of a galleon. At the center of the monastery stands the chapel, its foundations resting on the tip of the rock itself. Around it, the network of cells, the library, and the grand refectory clothe the rockface, the smoothly layered stones reaching sheetlike down the escarpment, blending seamlessly into the ravine.
We made the journey up from the small coastal landing to the heights above the sea, where the monks met us warmly with the customary offering of raki and sweets before escorting us to the cells of the guest quarters. After we were sorted into small rooms with windows looking down the rockface to a mountain stream, we caught sight of our fellow guests—Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Greeks—some of whom nodded to us quietly before returning to a book or sitting in silence. After explaining the house rules, our hosts returned to other duties and a new stillness drew in around us, marked by the occasional shuffle of feet on the flagstones and the last peals of the evening bell. Hours passed until, with Simonopetra silhouetted against the dusk, jackals began to cry outside the walls.
During my childhood in Australia, we would swim in the Southern Ocean on a rugged stretch of coastline where the waves seemed to hurl themselves in all the way from Antarctica. We would dive under before each wave broke, so that for a moment the water darkened and I could feel the tides tense and release like sinews. The first evening on Mount Athos, I remembered that feeling—an elemental rhythm sounding slowly and the lower currents taking hold.
I awoke at 3:45 a.m. As my awareness grew, I heard the faint sound of a monk clapping the semantron—a percussive instrument made of chestnut wood—from the balcony to rouse the others in their cells. It was time for the Orthros prayers, the last office of the night. Dressing quickly, I ambled outside and splashed my face with water from the bronze faucet that draws from the ravine. Now more alert, I walked up the covered stone stairs, through a narrow passageway, and then out onto a balcony suspended high over the sea, past a large bell framed by the remaining night.
Turning in toward the rock, I entered the chapel and took up a shadowed alcove. One or two monks stood lodged in their own niches nearby, dressed head to toe in the customary black robes. Through a low door, I could make out the gold of the iconostasis, muted except where oil lamps cast small pools of light upon its surface, dancing over the faces of the icons. Across the surfaces of the walls and pillars, and above each low archway leading toward the sanctuary, frescoed scenes from the gospels ascended story upon story.
While we sat there, the chanting voices of the monks searched through the darkness. Minutes, maybe an hour, passed. Then another. The lamps tremored as an Aegean breeze, tentative and quiet, washed up over the rim of the balcony, in through the doors and around our ankles, pouring the night into the chapel’s contained space. The close air was sharpened with sea salt. The faces of the saints in the icons were made mobile by the play of shadows and flickering flames, their eyes balanced between inquiry and withdrawal, their hands and feet full of impending movement.
We participate in the divine life, wrote the Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky, “at a higher level than intelligence...for the simple reason that we do not know him at all. We have here the entry into darkness.” Turning into the chapel that morning, and the mornings that followed, that line lived with me, so that I almost muttered it under my breath at the threshold: “We have here the entry into darkness.”
Throughout those early hours in the chapel, my mind wandered in and out of focus. I had been reading from the great compendium of Orthodox spiritual guidance, the Philokalia, which enjoins the monk at prayer to ward against tiredness and to remain watchful. But my attention seemed to flow in and out, one moment dulled by exhaustion, the next fixed upon the details before me: voices, the shield of a frescoed soldier-saint, the slim red slippers of an apostle peeking from under the hem of a Byzantine courtier’s robe.
The Philokalia urges “watchfulness” as the quality that guards the gates of the intellect against motley passions and fantasies. The passions besiege the mind, cautions St. Hesychios the Priest. “One can see them plotting to destroy the city of Troy like Agamemnon and Menelaus.” So, I imagined my mind as the walled city and the passions as the Greeks, camped on the beach, waiting for weakness.
Initially, I thought I had found in the Philokalia a kind of contemplative iconoclasm, or at least a stringent dualism whereby “a heart that has been completely emptied of mental images gives birth to divine, mysterious intellections that sport within it like fish and dolphins in a calm sea.” My attention, though, felt hopelessly besieged. It seemed that each morning I would get up in the dark and make my way to the inevitable fall of Troy.
Hour after hour I began to recollect things I’d seen years ago, images arriving at random, or at least without any strong sense of intentionality. A prostrate man in a car park in Calais at 2 a.m., near the migrant camp called The Jungle, about to try crossing to the United Kingdom through the Eurotunnel, clutching a bag of white bread. A sepia photograph I once saw of my great-grandfather mowing a field on the Iveragh Peninsula in southwestern Ireland with a scythe, bent over with exertion. A group of people, women with young children, boarding a smoke-belching bus in Cairo, about to make an overnight journey south to Sudan. My sister on her first day of university, walking out the door with a colored scarf. People in movement, caught glancingly, faces half turned toward me and half withdrawn.
This was the iconostasis in my mind, which returned to me in the chapel each morning—a world, a life, shimmering with traces of its original passage. It felt close to what Jon Fosse writes of in his Septology, of the mind turning up “often at the strangest times and places, a picture, a motionless picture that still has something like a kind of motion in it.”
Where does that sense of the picture’s motion, its living stillness, come from? In a famous tract addressed to the monks of Tegernsee Abbey in Bavaria, the fifteenth-century cardinal, diplomat, and mathematician Nicholas Cusanus wrote of the peculiar vision of icons. Writing in 1453, the year that Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, at a time of fractured hopes and many wars, his letter The Vision of God invited the brothers of Tegernsee to practice contemplation with the aid of an icon, encouraging them to notice the play of eyes that are at once steady and glancing, sending out a gaze that seems to search the room, taking in the mosaic of each life. Cusanus’s Neoplatonic, mystical theology paid particular attention to seeing and being seen. Sight, he wrote, “is conditioned by the affections of the organ and of the mind. Hence, a given individual looks now lovingly and gladly, later sadly and angrily, now as does a child, later as does an adult, and, still later, gravely and as does someone elderly.”
Standing in my stall for hours each morning, waiting for the lamplight to cede to sunrise, I began to sense that the icon sees in all these ways at once, viewing the assembled monks with love and sadness, childlike delight and the poise of experience. This way of seeing gathers disparate scenes and folds them gently into each other, intimating that they hold together somehow, beyond any imposed and brittle scheme of unity. The dark spaciousness became checkered with singular details—personalities and stories half played out. This incompleteness, in which each face ranged obliquely into view, brought to that first morning at Simonopetra an alternating sense of vastness and intimacy.
We emerged from the chapel onto the balcony where the day had broken into a bright quietude. As the heat settled, we took strong silted coffee and the first meal of the day—simple food eaten wordlessly under a great fresco of the ladder of divine ascent. While we ate, a monk read stories from the lives of the saints. On the wall above us, demons hauled pious men from the heavenly ladder with boat hooks, their finely bearded faces overcome with surprise.
After eating we rested, looking out on the terraced vineyards that clung to the seaward side of the rock. Starlings traced each other’s paths through the sky and down the battlements. As I watched them plummet and wheel, I began to think more about the “entry into darkness” and the apprehension of reality at a “level higher than intelligence.” Did this require the complete evacuation of mental images, or could the images somehow aid contemplative growth like the icon at Tegernsee?
Fifteen years before he wrote to the Benedictine brothers, on a 1438 journey by ship back from Constantinople to Venice, Cusanus envisioned a route to knowledge of God—the absolute maximum, “the end that is the world’s end.” In a dedicatory letter written to Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, he tells of how the vision of “learned ignorance” came to him “while returning by sea from Greece,” when he received “a celestial gift” from the “Father of Lights” and was “led to embrace incomprehensibles incomprehensibly.” On Learned Ignorance, the work that arose from his vision, contemplates the kind of reflective contact one can make with the ineffable divine—that which eludes conceptualization. In place of affirmative ascriptions or characterizations, we are to move along the via negativa toward a state of “learned ignorance” in which “darkness,” the element that obscures ordinary vision, becomes the metaphor for a kind of liberated sight: a form of seeing released from rational knowledge and conception.
This could be read the way I first interpreted the Philokalia, calling for an emptying of the mind that leaves aside all the details of our material lives, including our memories. In that case, the recollection of a face, a gesture, or a person would block the openness one needs for contemplative perception. But Cusanus’s route to learned ignorance, or illuminated “darkness,” is full of looking, seeing, and recalling. The cardinal’s metaphysical speculations always come out of a perspective—a place in the world from which he watches and questions. Though developed with all of Cusanus’s formal mathematical and scholastic brilliance, On Learned Ignorance still bears the sensory imprint of that voyage from Greece.
At the time, the journey between the eastern Mediterranean and Venice could take up to ninety days, as the galleys or round ships passed through the Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic Seas, retracing the merchant or pilgrim route from Europe. Venetian ships kept on sailing at night, even out of sight of land. And although by the fifteenth century the compass had replaced celestial navigation, the night sky clearly loomed large over Cusanus on the long way home.
A certain cadence enters the text, transporting us to the galley deck where the papal envoy watches and thinks with a visual intelligence. “Or who can know,” he asks again and again. “Or who can know” whether, upon the dissolution of each animal life, “only the form returns to its own star from which the species received actual being on mother earth and matter returns to possibility, while the spirit that unites them remains in the motion of the stars?” His curiosity becomes metronomic and wavelike by repetition: “Or who can know…or who can know…or who can know?”
Soon a metaphor emerges, which Cusanus uses to make the voyage, in all its tedium, into a portal for contemplative insight. The world, he writes, is to other stars as a ship is to shore. Without “comparison to a fixed point,” like the water rushing by a ship’s prow or the outline of land, “how would a passenger know that one’s ship was being moved?” The ship, the traveler’s frail world, would instead appear in illusory guise as the stationary center of the firmament. Fixed points are essential to perception. When attentively assembled and understood in relation to one another, they offer the means of locating ourselves in a cosmos of perplexing contingencies.
Looking out that morning from the high balcony at Simonopetra, it felt as though the monastery was in motion, ploughing silently through the sky with an unseen wake stretching out behind it. It seemed to me then that iconographic memories might work like fixed points. Earlier, during the daybreak prayers, they had welled up out of different times and places, inviting comparison. Like Cusanus’s seaborne traveler noticing the interplay of elements, contemplating such memories drew disparate encounters together, breaching the boundaries between them. Figures from different moments of life appeared alongside each other. And across the gulfs that separate human conditions—those of the displaced, the serene, the hopeful, the tormented—the concurrence of those faces became piercing. The forlorn figure of the migrant on the hot asphalt in northern France, the laboring body of my great-grandfather, and the mothers and children on the road out of Cairo all appeared to belong to each other.
Here, I began to think, was the seed of an answer to my early sense of foundering in Philokalic discipline. “We have here the entry into darkness,” but this contemplative darkness isn’t blank anonymity, just as the broad darkness of the chapel before dawn wasn’t void of personality. The “darkness” of the mind—the “emptiness” urged by the Philokalia—is the element in which a different kind of awareness grows, one that allows images a life of their own, beyond any self-referential fantasies of the viewer. As with the icons that adorned the walls, my scattered memories had an iconographic life—a presence that moved beyond representation or clear realism.
The coincidence of these disparate and unfinished scenes posed a lasting question, which, I suspect, many carry off the mountain with them. This is the question of how each human image is bound up across time and space, across the world of settled peace and the world of war and banishment—of how, as Cusanus wondered, “in all faces the Face of Faces is seen, veiled and enigmatically.”
