Millennium

The millennium of the first monastery on Mount Athos, the Great Lavra, founded in 963, allowed Patriarch Athenagoras to grow the fruits of a renewed Orthodox brotherhood on this fateful land.

After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Mount Athos took upon itself the spiritual service of unity and the witness to the universality of the Church. Monks constantly flowed here from all over the Orthodox world, where in turn Athonite missionaries, bearers of the Spirit and civilization, went. Only the revolutions of the 20th century, in 1917 in Russia, after the end of World War II in South-Eastern Europe, were able to interrupt this double flow.

The East, as we have said, expressed the institutional features of monasticism to a lesser extent than the West. In the East, various facets of the single spiritual path were revealed with greater freedom, beginning with community life, which is made up of psalmody, "apostolic love," and social service, up to the podvig of the unknown hermit, whose prayer embraces the whole world, and the Lord sometimes sends him to people in order to carry out the obedience of spiritual fatherhood and discernment of spirits.

Most importantly, Mount Athos has become a place of prophetic service for monks, a place where the Spirit knows no national boundaries: a hearth of Orthodox unity. Up until the fourteenth century, the Protos (first), lifelong chairman of the executive committee elected by the monks, was appointed by the emperor: a symbol of a culture that did not withdraw into itself and was not affirmed in anything human. From the fourteenth century onwards, Protos was appointed by the Ecumenical Patriarch, with whom Mount Athos bears witness to ecumenism. But in an unforeseen way it also becomes the leaven of culture (for history is sometimes fertilized by those who deny it for the sake of eternity) and the ark of Tradition.

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Today, monastic life in Orthodoxy is experiencing a crisis. In Greece and the Middle East, the decline of monastic vocations is caused primarily by a difficult historical mutation. Traditional forms of monasticism have always been associated with rural civilization, which is now on the verge of extinction. In the era of foreign domination, monasteries were the last refuges for threatened society. They could hardly meet the challenge of the modern world, which in the eastern Mediterranean is regarded as imported from outside, and not as the result of the normal evolution of structures and minds, as in the West. In Eastern Europe, the situation is even more complicated due to official atheism and aggressive secularism of the authorities. However, the challenge of technical civilization, which had degenerated into a totalitarian system, made people face the need to comprehend the most essential. In Russia, as in Romania, in the years after World War II, there was a renewal of monastic life, which often captured strata of intelligent youth. The alarmed authorities reacted in the most severe way: in Romania, the reaction manifested itself in 1958, in Russia a year later. Only a less noticeable rise in female monasticism in Serbia was able to take place painlessly. Today we see signs of a certain revival of monasticism. Contemplation "in the heart of the masses" is gaining strength in Russia, where there are still a few monastic communities. Much has been preserved in Romania, where the monastic reform carried out by Patriarch Justinian in 1953 is beginning to bear fruit. Numerous young communities are intertwined with new structures, and the monks, according to the statute drawn up by the patriarch, must participate in economic construction "with a view to transfiguration," with prayers for those "who do not know how and do not want to pray and have never done so."

In Greece, difficult relations exist between the "monastic" zealots of traditional forms of monastic life and the haters of everything modern and the "laity" brotherhoods, which are sometimes seduced by purely external work. Somewhat apart from this rivalry are young Christian intellectuals who strive to find the spirit of Tradition in order to work out an answer to the aspirations and anxieties of the modern world. Some of them choose the "path of Alyosha Karamazov" – prayerful, full of love and presence among people, others go to Athos with the same thirst for inner renewal. In the Middle East, such problems are close to being resolved. In the Youth Movement of the Patriarchate of Antioch, a call to the contemplative life has been awakened, a women's community has recently arisen near Tripoli under the spiritual guidance of Fr. George Khodra; a male community of followers of the hesychasm tradition, brought here by Fr. Andrei Skryma, settled in the mountains, above Beirut. In the Diaspora, there is a significant gap between individual monastic convents, mostly convents, whose nuns came for the most part from nostalgic for the past and least enlightened circles of the Russian emigration—and an intellectual rather than spiritual understanding of Orthodoxy. Attempts to renew monastic life in monasteries, such as the Tolleshunt Knights under the guidance of the disciple of Elder Silouan, remain a rather isolated phenomenon.

Athos seems to concentrate this crisis in itself. A significant decrease in the number of its inhabitants is explained primarily by the cessation of replenishment from Russia: in 1900, the Russian St. Pantelemon Monastery numbered 2500 monks, and today there are only three dozen of them left. The situation, however, is not hopeless, there are still a thousand and a half monks on Mount Athos, and in some Greek communities there is a surge of new strength. The hermits in the southern "pus-tynki" still keep alive and ardent the flame of the highest monastic tradition. But there is another side to the crisis: it is expressed in the categories of fear of the modern world, unwillingness to know it, suspiciousness and curses...

At the same time, the renewal of Mount Athos requires openness to Orthodox or simply Christian ecumenicality. Athenagoras I, organizing the festivities of the millennium of Athonite monasticism, despite the discontent of some monks who feared disturbance and public uproar, sought to promote a double process of renewal and openness. To gather on Mount Athos all the Orthodox Churches, in the person of their primates, meant not only to remind them of their unity, but also of the duty arising from this unity, in order to bring about an influx of new forces to the Holy Mountain, and to return to the spiritual life of the "silent" its creative dimension.

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On June 11, 980, the young monk prayed in the skete of the Dormition at the Mother of God. He was supposed to sing the Ninth Canto of the Canon, invariably dedicated to the Mother of God, originally including only "Magnificat" (My soul magnifies the Lord), when the "stranger", the Angel of the legend, actually a vision, appeared. And the "stranger" prefaced the hymn with the words: "It is worthy to truly bless Thee, the Mother of God, ever-blessed and immaculate, and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim, without the incorruptibility of God the Word, we magnify Thee, the Mother of God." This prayer, which is included today in many services, has become one of the favorite prayers of the Orthodox world. The anxious monk could not remember the words, but the "stranger" wrote them down on the stone with his finger. At the same time, the icons of the Mother of God and the Savior in the iconostasis changed places, so that the Mother of God appeared to the right of the Holy Doors. A symbol of deification and "mysterious primacy" at the end of time, "the meaning of divine motherhood," writes Fr. Andrei Skryma.

The icon still exists in the Protaton church in Karyes. A solemn procession carried her across Greece in the month that preceded the millennium festivities.