'A Perfect House'—Elves, Monasticism, & Leisure

In this post I mentioned John Senior’s comparison of his first experience in the refectory of Fontgombault abbey to Odysseus’s words about the banquet in Book IX of The Odyssey: 

When Odysseus begins the recitation of his wanderings, addressing the lords and ladies at the palace of Alcinous in Phaecia, he says (in E.V. Rieu’s Penguin edition): 

'I myself feel that there is nothing more delightful than when the festive mood reigns in a whole people’s hearts and the banqueters listen to a minstrel from their seats in the hall, while the tables before them are laden with bread and meat, and a steward carries round the wine he has drawn from the bowl and fills their cups. This, to my way of thinking, is something very like perfection.' 

Such a banquet in the Odyssey is in the secular order the pale reflection of an evening meal in the religious order here, which is not something like, but the life of perfection itself. [1] 

Well, I was recently reminded afresh of monastic-Homeric connections when reading James Taylor’s Poetic Knowledge. Taylor quotes from a fascinating essay by John Henry Newman, ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, of which I shall give slightly more than he does: 

And therefore have I called the monastic state the most poetical of religious disciplines. It was a return to that primitive age of the world, of which poets have so often sung, the simple life of Arcadia or the reign of Saturn, when fraud and violence were unknown. It was a bringing back of those real, not fabulous, scenes of innocence and miracle, when Adam delved, or Abel kept sheep, or Noe planted the vine, and Angels visited them. [2] 

Newman’s examples are, of course, appropriately biblical. But everything he says here tends to remind me of the passage I quoted here from Dame Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Grey Falcon: 

Exactly similar movements must have been made a million million million times since the world began, yet the thrust of her arm seemed absolutely fresh. Well, it is so in the Iliad. When one reads of a man drawing a bow or raising a shield it is as if the dew of the world’s morning lay undisturbed on what he did. The primal stuff of humanity is very attractive. [3] 

I think this is part of what attracts me about monasticism. It attracts me about Homer, children, trees, beer, and music. It’s the festal, the contemplative, the wonderful, the poetic. 

But to Senior’s analogy in Homer I can add another, fuller one, which will take some time to expound. As I was rereading Tolkien with my students last year, I had a realisation. In The Hobbit, the narrator says of Rivendell—‘His [Elrond’s] house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.’ [4] But when Frodo arrives there in Book 2, Chapter 1 of The Lord of the Rings, the quotation, now attributed to Bilbo as the feigned narrator of The Hobbit, is slightly different: ‘That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, “a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all”. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness.’ [5] 

First of all, note that ‘work’, which was included in the original comment, is now missing from the list of activities. I find this significant for Tolkien’s portrayal of Rivendell in LOTR. But this is not the only reference to the kind of activities typically engaged in at Rivendell (I shall add italics for emphasis in the next several quotes). In the very next sentence after the quoted passage, we read, ‘As the evening drew on, Frodo woke up again, and he found that he no longer felt in need of rest or sleep, but had a mind for food and drink, and probably for singing and story-telling afterwards.’ So here, we find a repetition of a few of precisely the same activities as Frodo tries to choose among them. 

But there is more. Shortly after awaking, Frodo is visited by Sam, who expresses an interest in the singing, to which Frodo replies, ‘But you shall be merry tonight, and listen to your heart’s content.’ A little later, Gandalf is pointing out the Hall of Fire with the comment: ‘Here you will hear many songs and tales—if you can keep awake. But except on high days it usually stands empty and quiet, and people come here who wish for peace, and thought. There is always a fire here, all the year round, but there is little other light.’ [6] When Frodo finally discovers Bilbo in the Hall, he asks, ‘What were you doing?’, to which the old hobbit replies, ‘Why, sitting and thinking. I do a lot of that nowadays, and this is the best place to do it in, as a rule.’ [7] A little further on, Bilbo says, ‘And I listen and I think. Time doesn’t seem to pass here: it just is. A remarkable place altogether.’ [8] 

As I reread these passages, it dawned on me that with the exclusion of work from the list, all of the activities associated with Rivendell become ‘leisure’ activities, that is, they are all fundamentally contrasted with work in the sense of ‘hustle and bustle’ but also in the more particular sense of activity directed toward some utilitarian end. [9] Furthermore, while the hobbits seem to be prone to falling asleep, and everyone knows they love their food and drink, the remaining activities are precisely contemplative ones, whether listening to song or story, or thinking. In other words, like philosophy itself according to Josef Pieper, these activities are forms of ‘theorein, or speculari (to observe, behold, contemplate), consisting in a purely receptive gaze on reality...untouched by anything practical’. [10] 

Of course, ‘leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit’, [11] and there is a feast at Rivendell. But Tolkien concentrates on the qualities and appearance of the persons present rather than the elements, as in Odysseus’s praise of the feast, contenting himself with ‘The feast was merry and the food all that his hunger could desire.’ [12] On the other hand, Tolkien’s description of the music which, in this case, follows the eating, is striking indeed. It is not only an example of what my friend Michael Milburn points out is one of Tolkien’s definitions of Faery—‘Enchantment’ [13]—but also evidence that, in Pieper’s words, ‘music may be nothing but a secret philosophizing of the soul, an Exercitium Metaphysice Occultum.’ [14] Here is Tolkien’s description of this part of the feast: 

Frodo was left to himself for a while, for Sam had fallen asleep....But those near him were silent, intent upon the music of the voices and the instruments, and they gave no heed to anything else. Frodo began to listen. 

At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall become like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. Swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep. [15] 

This experience of falling asleep in a dark hall lit only by flames, while beautiful voices sing beautiful melodies fit to words that one understands little, is familiar to me, and likely to many other Orthodox, from the monastic vigils of the Holy Mountain. [16] The connection becomes clearer when Bilbo points out that the music is a sacred song, a hymn to the ‘archangel’ Elbereth, remarking, ‘They will sing that, and other songs of the Blessed Realm, many times tonight.’ [17] Compare Frodo’s experience with that of Elder Porphyrios at his first vigil on the Holy Mountain: 

One night there was a vigil service at the Kyriakon, the church of the Holy Trinity. This was very shortly after I had arrived, during the first few days. Our skete was celebrating its feast day. My elders left in the early evening for the church and left me in the hermitage to sleep. I was young and they thought I might not be able to stay awake until the morning when the vigil would end. 

After midnight Father Ionnikios came and woke me up. ‘Wake up and get dressed,’ he said, ‘and we’ll go to the church.’ 

I jumped up at once and in three minutes we had arrived at the Holy Trinity church. He ushered me into the church first. It was the first time I had been inside. I was overwhelmed! The church was filled with monks standing upright in an attitude of reverence and attentiveness. The chandeliers shed their light everywhere, lighting up the icons on the walls and on the icon stands. Everything was bright and shining. The little oil lamps were lit, the incense exuded fragrance and the singing resonated devoutly in the otherworldly beauty of the night. I was overcome with awe, but also with fear. I felt that I was no longer on earth, but that I had been transported to heaven. [18] 

Notice that the setting and experience are quite similar, down to the details, and just as Frodo is transported into a realm of ‘visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined’, so the young Elder Porphyrios was ‘transported to heaven’. There is even the concern with sleepiness. Sam is already asleep and Frodo himself falls asleep. Bilbo observes: ‘It is difficult to keep awake here, until you get used to it,...Not that hobbits would ever acquire quite the elvish appetite for music and poetry and tales. They seem to like them as much as food, or more. They will be going on for a long time yet....’ [19] 

Why do the hobbits become so sleepy? Because Rivendell is a monastery, and the elves are monks. The hobbits, like Elder Porphyrios at his first vigil, are fresh from the world. They are not able to enter fully into the contemplative experience of festal celebration. They are still fixated on the lower activities of Rivendell—food and drink and sleep—and are not able to stand through so many hymns. But in Pieper’s words, ‘the heart of leisure consists in “festival”’, and ‘if celebration and festival is the heart of leisure, then leisure would derive its innermost possibility and justification from the very source whence festival and celebration derive theirs. And this is worship.’ [20] The elves, like monks, enter fully into this experience—they can ‘run and not be weary’: 

And so since you will thirst for the words of the poetic canons, of the Psalter and of all the church service books, and since you will desire to read, hear and take them to heart, as soon as the simantron sounds, you will run at once with love and eagerness to hear the first words of the daily cycle of prayer...Our soul is gladdened and our hearing is sweetened as we hear the hymns and something happens within us. [21] 

[1] John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture (Norfolk, VA: IHS, 2008), p. 102. In the original post, I quoted the translation of Robert Fitzgerald.

[2] John Henry Newman, Rise & Progress of Universities and Benedictine Essays, Vol. 3 of The Works of Cardinal John Henry Newman, Birmingham Oratory, Millennium Edition (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame, 2001), pp. 385; qtd. in James Taylor, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1998), p. 35. 

[3] Dame Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (NY: Viking, 1943), p. 1044. 

[4] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There & Back Again (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 48. 

[5] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 219. While making extensive use of the Lord of the Rings Companion this year, I began to realise acutely that I need a copy of the new edition of LOTR, which has been carefully corrected and emended in many places. 

[6] Tolkien, LOTR, p. 224. 

[7] Tolkien, LOTR, p. 224. 

[8] Tolkien, LOTR, p. 225. 

[9] Eating and drinking of course, can be seen as serving the utilitarian end of nourishing our bodies, but we do not choose to eat primarily for such an end, but more for the enjoyment of it. 

[10] Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, tr. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s, 1998), p. 77. 

[11] Pieper, Leisure, p. 33. 

[12] Tolkien, LOTR, p. 221. 

[13] In his terrific article, ‘Coleridge’s Definition of Imagination & Tolkien’s Definition(s) of Faery’, Tolkien Studies, Vol. VII, ed. Douglas A. Anderson, Michael D.C. Drout, & Verlyn Flieger (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia U, 2010) pp. 55-66, Michael writes: 

For when Tolkien expresses regret at having used the word ‘Magic’ to define Faery (since it ‘should be reserved for the operations of the Magician’), he offers another words instead: ‘Enchantment’, a term he uses to refer to the ‘elvish craft’ of ‘“Faerian Drama”—those plays which according to abundant records’, i.e. fairy-stories, ‘the elves have often presented to men...’ (On Fairy Stories 63-64). Tolkien explains, ‘Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside...’ (64). This means that if you are present at a Faerian drama you yourself are, or think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary World. The experience may be very similar to Dreaming and has (it would seem) sometimes (by men) been confounded with it’ (63). (pp. 59-60.) 

[14] Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art & Contemplation, tr. Lothar Krauth (SF: Ignatius, 1990), p. 39. 

[15] Tolkien, LOTR, p. 227. 

[16] I have also experienced in a monastic setting—the women’s monastery of the Archangel Michael on the island of Thasos—precisely what Tolkien describes when he writes, ‘[S]uddenly it seemed to Frodo that Arwen turned towards him, and the light of her eyes fell on him from afar and pierced his heart’ (232). 

[17] Tolkien, LOTR, p. 232. 

[18] Elder Porphyrios, Wounded by Love: The Life & the Wisdom of Elder Porphyrios, ed. Sisters of the Holy Convent of Chrysopigi (Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2005), p. 11. 

[19] Tolkien, LOTR, p. 231. 

[20] Pieper, Leisure, p. 50. 

[21] Elder Porphyrios, p. 164.

Elder Porphyrios on the Nightingale's Song

In his book on Orthodox theology and aesthetics, Chrysostomos Stamoulis, one of my professors at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, has called my attention to a lovely passage in the Life & Discourses of Elder Porphyrios the Kapsokalyvite, [1] and this evening it set me to looking through the English edition of this work and just enjoying the Elder’s reflections a bit. I will first quote the passage Stamoulis refers to:

One morning I was walking alone in the virgin forest. Everything, freshened by the morning dew, was shining in the sunlight. I found myself in a gorge. I walked through it and sat on a rock. Cold water was running peacefully beside me and I was saying the prayer. Complete peace. Nothing could be heard. After a while the silence was broken by a sweet, intoxicating voice singing and praising the Creator. I looked. I couldn’t discern anything. Eventually, on a branch opposite me I saw a tiny bird. It was a nightingale. I listened as the nightingale trilled unstintingly, its throat puffed out to bursting in sustained song. The microscopic little bird was stretching back its wings in order to find power to emit those sweetest of tones, and puffing out its throat to produce that exquisite voice. If only I had a cup of water to give it to drink and quench its thirst!

Tears came to my eyes—the same tears of grace that flowed so effortlessly and that I had acquired from Old Dimas [an old Russian Athonite hermit]. It was the second time I had experienced them.

. . .

. . . ‘Why did they [nightingales] puff out their throats to bursting?’ The purpose was worship, to sing to their Creator, to worship God. That’s how I explained it.[2]

Later in the book, Elder Porphyrios refers again to this experience in a chapter called, ‘On Creation’. [3] At the end of the chapter, he writes:

All these things connected with nature help us greatly in our spiritual life when they are conjoined with the grace of God. When I sense the harmony of nature, I am brought to tears. Why should we be bored with life? Let us live life with the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Truth. The person who has the Spirit of God, who has Divine Wisdom, sees all things with love of God and notices all things. The wisdom of God makes him grasp all things and delight in all things.

Listen and I’ll recite my poem to you. It’s by Lambros Porphyras. [4] This captures my present state; I’ve got it constantly before me. It fits with my life.

If only the pine trees that cover the hillside would give
me a pileof their numberless branches,
then finding a spot in a hollow beside them,
I’d build there my dwelling, a hut low and lonely.

If only’t were summer-time, then they could give me
a couch of their dry leaves, pine needles, to lie on,
and then I would join in the song of the pine trees,
their chorus at dawn-break of whispers and rustlings.

And nothing beyond this would I wish thereafter.
And when full of joy from this life I’d be parted,
again they would lend me a few of their brances
and make me a bower, a bed everlasting. [5]

These passages in Elder Porphyrios remind me [6] of an article (here) that I had the misfortune of reading earlier today about three female ‘ministers’ who have written a book about ‘taking spirituality outdoors’. At one point, one of them (a female rabbi) is paraphrased as saying, ‘Think how many millennia it has taken, Korngold adds, for believers to return outside and remember that long before God was caged in a synagogue, church, mosque or book, God spoke to humankind from mountains, sands, seas and forests.’ To note first this woman’s apparently abysmal ignorance of the history of spirituality, I would point out that the passages from Elder Porphyrios are, in Stamoulis’s words, ‘reminiscent of similar attitudes, manifestations of a way of being, of ascetics of the ancient Church, and which reveal him as a genuine successor and follower of such a tradition.’ [7] Second, there is the powerful depth of the Elder’s experience and expression of this truth, as compared with the glib superficiality of the women in the article.

But finally, the article reminds me that the Elder sees no contradiction between this experience in nature and similar, if not more powerful encounters with God in context of the temple. In a touching passage about his first days on the Holy Mountain, Elder Porphyrios writes:

One night there was a vigil service at the Kyriakon, the church of the Holy Trinity. This was very shortly after I had arrived, during the first few days. Our skete was celebrating its feast day. My elders left in the early evening for the church and left me in the hermitage to sleep. I was young and they thought I might not be able to stay awake until the morning when the vigil would end.

After midnight Father Ioannikios came and woke me up. ‘Wake up and get dressed,’ he said, ‘and we’ll go to the church.’

I jumped up at once and in three minutes we had arrived at the Holy Trinity church. He ushered me into the church first. It was the first time I had been inside. I was overwhelmed! The church was filled with monks standing upright in an attitude of reverence and attentiveness. The chandeliers shed their light everywhere, lighting up the icons on the walls and on the icon stands. Everything was bright and shining. The little oil lamps were lit, the incense exuded fragrance and the singing resonated devoutly in the otherworldly beauty of the night. I was overcome with awe, but also with fear. I felt that I was no longer on earth, but that I had been transported to heaven. Father Ioannikios nodded to me to go forward and kiss the icons. I remained motionless. ‘Take my hand, take my hand!’ I started to shout. ‘I’m scared!’ He took me by the hand and, gripping him tightly, I went up to venerate the icons. It was my first experience. It was engraved on my innermost soul. I will never forget it. [8]

There is no contradiction of course, because what the monks were doing in and through the physical structure of the temple was the human equivalent of the nightingale’s song. As the Elder notes in the chapter ‘On Creation’, while the nightingales are indeed praising their Creator and expressing their purpose by displaying ‘the greatness of God and His providence’, ‘God’s purposefulness is expressed differently in us, in mankind. We have freedom and reason.’ [9] It is with the aid of these gifts that we produce art—our nightingale song. Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron has written:

Here [on the Holy Mountain] we find ourselves on another plane of education, culturally and spiritually. We find ourselves in a realm of high art (in architecture, iconography, music, poetry, prose) which is a fruit of spiritual maturity and a starting point for spiritual maturity.

There is a reverence for man, a deep knowledge and development of the capacities concealed within him. And the grace with which matter is filled is revealed.

The same spirit prevails and is manifested everywhere. In the whole architecture of the Mountain (in the way Monasteries, Sketes, Cells and Huts have been formed and established in different places). In the way the programme [the daily schedule] is organised. In the expression of the icons. In poetry. In the music of the chant. In the architecture of words and life. [10]

Thus, the temple, in the Orthodox view, is hardly a cage to imprison God, but rather ‘a house for the name of the Lord God of Israel’ (II Chron. 6:7), an expression of praise and beauty through human art.


[1] Chrysostomos Stamoulis, Κάλλος το Άγιον: Προλεγόμενα στη φιλόκαλη αισθητική της Ορθοδοξίας [The Holy is Beautiful: Prolegomena to the Philokalic Aesthetic of Orthodoxy], (Athens: Akritas, 2004), pp. 294-5.

[2] Elder Porphyrios the Kapsokalyvite, Wounded by Love: The Life & the Wisdom of Elder Porphyrios, ed. Sisters of the Holy Convent of Chrysopigi, tr. John Raffan (Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2005), pp. 31, 32. Stamoulis stops at the end of the second paragraph, but I thought I should add that last bit to clarify my further observations.

[3] Ibid., pp. 218-9.

[4] From this site:

Lambros Porphyras, 1879-1932, was born in Chios but spent most of his life in the port of Piraeus. A recluse, he mixed only with a few men of letters and with humble fishermen and workmen, his favoured drinking companions. His poetry, refined and musical, is pervaded by a sincere sadness. His soft, perhaps sentimental symbolism shows the influence of Verlaine and Moreas. [This note is based on ‘Greek Poetry from Homer to Seferis’ by Prof.C.Trypanis.]

[5] Elder Porphyrios, pp. 222-3.

[6] Of course, although the two differ notably, the nightingale story also reminds me of the incredible vision Elder Joseph the Hesychast experienced upon hearing what sounded like a bird-song on the mountain one time—‘That mysterious voice sang again, and at that point my senses stopped and my mind was “caught up”, going outside myself, in an infinite expanse of light without bounds or measure’ (Elder Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings (1898-1959), tr. Elizabeth Theokritoff (Mt Athos, Greece: Great & Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999), p. 76).

[7] Stamoulis, p. 295.

[8] Elder Porphyrios, pp. 10-1.

[9] Ibid., p. 219.

[10] Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron, What is Unique about Orthodox Culture, tr. Elizabeth Theokritoff (Montréal: Alexander, 2001), p. 20.

C.S. Lewis & St Silouan

On Saturday I finally finished Michael Ward’s amazing Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. At some point I hope to prepare a full review, but for now, I’d like to spoil for you what was for me a small surprise. In the book’s twelfth and final chapter, ‘Coda’, Ward sets out to describe briefly how he discovered his thesis (which in my opinion he has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt). First, he says that ‘any “Eureka” moment, however unplanned, inevitably has a history.’ In his case:

it consisted of thirty years’ exposure to the texts in question, ten years’ teaching Lewis to undergraduates, three years’ living at The Kilns, Lewis’s Oxford home, and eighteen months’ work on this doctoral research, which originated under the provisional title, ‘C.S. Lewis and the Word: Christ, Scripture and Language.’ [1]

Second, a friend gave him the soundtrack to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which immersed him ‘in an orchestral and mostly non-verbal rendering of Lewis’s work’. [2]

Third, and most interesting to me and, I presume, my readers, he had a meeting with his spiritual director, the Rt Revd Simon Barrington-Ward, the former (Anglican) Bishop of Coventry and a friend of Lewis at Magdalene College, Cambridge. At this particular meeting, Barrington-Ward was trying to explain ‘what Lewis meant by “wordless prayer”, a significant theme of Letters to Malcolm and one that had occupied much of the first year of my doctoral research.’ [3] To explain this, Barrington-Ward read aloud from Elder Sophrony’s book, The Monk of Mount Athos! Here is Ward’s account of it:

. . . [H]e opened up Archimandrite Sophrony’s biography of Father Silouan, The Monk of Mount Athos, and read aloud the passage describing Silouan’s meeting with the Russian ascetic, Father Stratonicos. Although this passage had nothing directly to do with Lewis, let alone his understanding of medieval cosmology, it illustrated well the subject of wordlessness which in turn (as it later transpired) proved to illuminate the planetary theme of the Chronicles.

Stratonicos, a wise and eloquent monk, full of his intelligence, has nothing to say when Silouan, in all simplicity, asks him how the perfect speak: he suddenly realises that he does not know the first thing about perfect speech. But his inability to speak allows him to hear, and into his humbled silence Silouan plants the message that ‘The perfect never say anything of themselves. . . . They only say what the Spirit suffers them to say.’ [4] Spiritual utterances in prayer, so Silouan suggests, are not just human words directed to a spiritual listener with spiritual intent; they are a participation in (one might say an Enjoyment of) the Holy Spirit himself. Silouan’s point, I saw, was essentially the s ame as that made by Lewis in Letters to Malcolm: ‘In prayer, God speaks to God.’

This account of Silouan’s exchange with Stratonicos made an extraordinarily deep impact on me. There was a momentous charge in the words I was hearing and the atmosphere in the room suddenly became somehow intense and palpable. It was a most unusual experience and I went back to my theological college, Ridley Hall, in a kind of daze. Exactly what had happened to me, I did not know, but I felt it to be of tremendous import. [5]

That night, as he was reading The Discarded Image, Ward suddenly decided to compare the chapter on ‘The Heavens’ with Lewis’s poem, ‘The Planets’. Reading the phrase ‘winter passed / And guilt forgiven’, about Jupiter, he was reminded of the plot of Lion. He continues:

As the whole pattern swam into my ken I revisited my conversation with Simon Barrington-Ward. Silouan had mentioned to Stratonicos the notion of irradiated utterance, the Holy Spirit speaking through human prayers; here in Lewis’s fiction was an imaginative version of a similar sort of thing, spiritual symbols irradiating stories. I immediately and instinctively knew, though it took much longer to understand with clarity, that Lewis had cryptically designed the Chronicles so that the seven heavens spoke through them like a kind of language or song. . . . I did not shout ‘Eureka!’ and run naked down the street like Archimedes, but I did jump from my bed in a state of undress and began to pull books from my shelves, chasing links from work to work. [6]

I thought this rather extraordinary. Admittedly, after first rereading the passage in Elder Sophrony’s book, I was a little skeptical at the idea that Lewis had managed to say the same thing as an experienced Elder speaking in what is clearly a moment of divine inspiration. But upon reflection this does not seem to me so unlikely after all. First, it occurred to me that what was most important in the story about St Silouan was not the content of his statement, which I myself might have said based on guesswork or book-learning, but the inspiration to say it at that moment, to that person. As Leonard Stanton has pointed out:

Even if it is accepted as a matter of faith that the apophthegm has spiritual value, it must be allowed that the value is not contained fully in the apophthegm as a verbal structure, in its words. The listener must seek beyond the word to the speaker, to the context in which the word was uttered, and to the transcendent realm that the word, like an icon, signifies only dimly. [7]

Second, I recall reading only Sunday night in Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms an explanation of ‘prophecy’ that provided a perfect analogy to explain the possibility of someone who is not a Saint nevertheless expressing an extraordinary insight into some spiritual matter:

If a man who knew only England and had observed that, the higher a mountain was, the longer it retained snow in early spring, were led on to suppose a mountain so high that it retained the snow all the year round, the similarity between his imagined mountain and the real Alps would not be merely a lucky accident. He might not know that there were any such mountains in reality; just as Plato probably did not know that the ideally perfect instance of crucified goodness which he had depicted [in Republic II, 361C-362A] would ever become actual and historical. But if that man ever saw the Alps he would not say ‘What a curious coincidence’. He would be more likely to say ‘There! What did I tell you?’ [8]

So without having read Letters to Malcolm, I think Ward could, at least, be right about the agreement of Lewis’s with St Silouan’s teaching. But either way, it is certainly interesting to know that St Silouan is responsible for inspiring the greatest study of C.S. Lewis yet produced.


[1] Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford U, 2008), p. 249.

[2] Ibid., p. 249.

[3] Ibid., p. 250.

[4] Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), The Monk of Mount Athos: Staretz Silouan 1866-1938, tr. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Mowbrays, 1973), p. 40.

[5] Ward, pp. 250-1.

[6] Ibid., p. 251.

[7] Leonard J. Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in Works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, & Others (NY: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 25.

[8] The Inspirational Writings of C.S. Lewis (NY: Inspirational, 1994), p. 185.

'Observer of the Divine & Author of Wonders'—St Romylos of Ravanitsa

Today, 16 January on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of the Holy Romylos (‘Romulus’ or ‘Romilo’) of Ravanitsa (1300-1376), disciple of St Gregory of Sinai. Anthony-Emil N. Tachiaos credits him with the introduction of the 14th-c. hesychast movement into Serbia. [1] St Romylos’s own disciple and biographer, Gregory of Constantinople, addresses him as ‘O father of fathers, adornment of ascetics, trainer of solitaries and fairest nursling of the desert, summit of quietude and ardent worker of contrition, observer of the divine and author of wonders’. [2] The account of St Romylos’s life in the Prologue is exceedingly short: ‘Born in Vidin, he was a disciple of St Gregory the Sinaite, and lived the ascetic life in several monasteries. St Romil entered into rest at Ravanica in Serbia in about 1375.’ [3] Thus, I decided to translate the Life in the Synaxaristes of Fr Makarios of Simonopetra from the Greek text online here:

St Romylos was born in 1300 in the Danubian town of Vidin to pious parents—a Greek father [‘a Roman’] and a Bulgarian mother. In holy Baptism he was named ‘Rajko’ [‘Man of Paradise’]. From his early years he displayed a lust for learning and his teachers, amazed at his wisdom and prudence, called him ‘childlike elder’. When he became a man, in order to avoid the marriage his parents had planned for him, he departed in secret to a monastery in the region of Trnovo. There, after the canonical testing, he was clothed in the small schema with the name Romanos, and served with great reverence in the church as ecclesiarch.

At the same time St Gregory of Sinai (6 Apr.) withdrew with his disciples from the Holy Mountain and came to reside at Paroria (Strandzha), [note on location] at the Byzantine-Bulgarian border. When Romanos heard about this teacher of noetic prayer and the hesychastic life, he asked for a blessing from his abbot to place himself under his guidance. He took with him another brother, Hilarion.

St Gregory received them with great joy and, since Romanos was powerful, with a strong constitution, he assigned to him the hardest and most burdensome duties, which he fulfilled with absolute obedience. He hauled wood and rocks from the mountain, water from the river which flowed in the foothills, and prepared clay for the dwellings. At the same time he served in the kitchen and the cellar of the monastery and had the care of the infirm brothers. The nursing of one aged monk was entrusted to him, sick and cranky, who because of his illnesses had to eat only fresh fish. Romanos served that difficult elder with wondrous meekness and long-suffering, and fished in the river for him. In wintertime, when the water was frozen, he would brake the ice and with bare feet in the frigid water he would fish with a net. In this way Romanos became a martyr in will, since he sacrificed his life at each moment for the love of neighbour.

With the death of the sick elder and of St Gregory, Romanos, whom everyone called ‘Kaloromanos’ [‘Good Romanos’], submitted together with Hilarion to another elder. Bandits, however, who pillaged in those parts and tyrannised the monks, obliged them to withdraw to Stara Zagora in Bulgaria, where their elder soon reposed.

From that time Romanos submitted to Hilarion, because he was greater in years. When the Bulgarian Tsar John Alexander (1331-1371) prosecuted the bandits, they returned to the desert hesychia of Paroria, in order to converse with God through noetic prayer. By the virtues, which had become to them second nature, and unceasing prayer Romanos was vouchsafed by God to receive many gifts, particularly the gift of ever-flowing tears.

Later with the blessing of Hilarion he withdrew into perfect solitude, in order to indulge without distraction in divine contemplations. Since he lived for many years in this way, he was clothed in the great schema with the name Romylos. The Turks however in their raids destroyed the monastery, and Saint Romylos with his disciple Gregory fled to the Holy Mountain, where they settled at Melana, near the Great Lavra. The Athonite monks soon recognised his virtues and visited him for the profit of their souls. They cut off however his beloved hesychia, and he was obliged to withdraw to a more secluded cell, in the foothills of Athos.

At that time, after the defeat of the Serbo-Bulgarian general John Uglesha by the Ottomans and his death at the Battle of the Hebrus ([also know as the Battle of] ‘Maritsa’ [or Chernomen], 1371), there followed the invasion of irregular Ottoman troops into Thrace and Macedonia. Then many monks, fearful of the general insecurity of the times, left the Holy Mountain. Thus spurred on, St Romylos too departed to Avlona [Valona or Vlorë], Alabania. During the time that he lived there he reformed the perverted morals of the inhabitants and taught them the true Faith, because they had departed far from Christianity. Longing however for hesychia, he departed for the Monastery of the Theotokos, at Ravanitsa in Serbia. This place was his final earthly residence, because after a little time he went to the Lord. His tomb, in which his disciples placed his much-exercised body, gives off an unspeakable fragrance, for it continually produces many miracles and healings for those who approach in faith. [4]

Of course, all of the wonderful detail of this summary of St Romylos’s Life is based on the eyewitness testimony of his disciple, Gregory of Constantinople (also known as ‘Gregory the Younger’ and ‘Gregory the Calligrapher’). The latter’s Life and Partial Story of the Miracles of Our Holy Father Romylos, the Modern is well worth reading, and is available online (here) in an English translation by Mark Bartusis, Khalifa Ben Nasser, and Angeliki E. Laiou. [5] There are a couple of passages from this Prima Vita that are worth posting. First, Gregory provides some interesting comments concerning St Romylos’s spiritual struggles in solitude after his return to Paroria from Zagora:

He spent the next five years there, separated from all association with men except when through some need he approached the monastery of the Holy Sinaite. But who is able to describe the weeping and wailing of this long period, and the struggles with demons and those terrors which he suffered from the demons, as he himself described to us? For the blessed man said that without God’s help no one, while still in the body, is able to wrestle with demons. ‘From my arrival in the interior of the mountain,’ he said, ‘the demons, suffering out of jealousy, created many visions and terrors to entice me to depart from there; sometimes displaying lights, sometimes lightning and thunder, sometimes great noises, and sometimes shouting all together. The ravines of the mountains echoed the roars so that I thought that the trees themselves were shouting. But I, he said, fought them off with the name of the Lord and regarded those terrors as if they were childish playthings.’ [6]

One cannot but be reminded here of the example of St Anthony the Great’s famous struggle with the demons in Vita Antonii 8-9, as well as of his homily in §§16-43. [7] In §28, he emphasizes that if the demons had any real power they would have ‘no need of hordes, nor of visible apparitions, nor of crashing sounds and rattling noises’, [8] and in §40, St Anthony tells us that ‘speaking the name of Christ I made an attempt to strike’ one of the demons. ‘I seemed to have hit home, and at once, with the mention of the name of Christ, this giant figure vanished, along with all his demons.’[9]

St Romylos does not seem to have been the man of letters that many of the other important 14th-c. hesychasts were. The one work that is attributed to him has not to my knowledge been translated, [10] and I know of him being directly connected with the copying of only one manuscript, which he commissioned while living on the Holy Mountain. [11] But fortunately Gregory does offer ‘a portion of his counseling . . . for the benefit of those who read’ the Life [12]:

16. ‘My brothers and fathers,’ he said, ‘let us keep a pure conscience toward our neighbor, and let us preserve a heart pure from evil thoughts which tend to corrupt the miserable soul. But we cannot obtain this unless we have the soul’s three parts according to nature. I speak of these three parts: Reason, Spirit and Appetite. For the all¬-good God has put these things into the soul of man, just as if they were a fortress or citadel, so that man, using them according to nature and as it pleases God, may live his life peacefully and without passion, as our holy fathers instructed us through their wise and holy teaching and even more so through their deeds. The Theologian said to set your spirit only against the Serpent through which you fell. Direct all your desires toward God, not toward anything treacherous or perilous. Let reason preside over all, and do not let the better be drawn down by the worse. Rather, whenever we arm the Spirit against its perceptible enemies, that is, against demons or passions, as the holy man said, but also against all those things which go contrary to the salvation of the soul, then we act according to nature. In this way we are able to love God and our neighbor with our entire soul as the Holy Gospel teaches (Mk 12:30-31). When Reason moves contrary to nature, we grow angry with our brothers, giving precedence to an earthly desire within us, hedonism perhaps, or glory or greed. Hence, there arises anger, vindictiveness, envy of one's neighbor and, in the end the product of envy, murder. And when we preserve the Appetite according to nature and as it was given to us by God, we eagerly desire the eternally good things which no eye has ever seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of impassioned and bodily man conceived, and which God has prepared for those who love Him (I Cor 2:9). And for these things we endure all bodily and spiritual suffering, undertaking with delight such virtuous acts as fasting, vigilance, poverty, purity of the body, and incessant prayer. To put it simply, day and night we practice everything which contributes to the salvation of the soul. When the Appetite moves contrary to nature and in a beastly fashion, we behave most irrationally, as the Scriptures say: “But man abideth not in honor: He is like the beasts that perish” (Ps 48:12). And from this we desire earthly and ephemeral things, luxury and glory, gold and silver, and the impurity which comes from them, and because of these we grow angry with men, as it has been said, and going astray we are always vindictive. Since Reason, which is the rational part of the soul, was set over everything to preside over them as if it was the ruler, when it guards the gift: given to it by God according to His image and likeness, man lives his life always thinking good things. He chants and prays, he studies and reads, and his delight lies in the law of the Lord (Ps 1:2), day and night, thinking good things about every pious man. But if Reason should turn aside from the better things, need one speak of what irrationality fills man? Talkativeness, slander, abuse and all kinds of sinful acts will dominate man the insensibility of his reason, even if one, in his insensibility, believes that he is living sinlessly. He who has the said three parts of the soul according to nature possesses a safe and sound conscience which indicates good and evil to him, like a natural law given to man from the beginning. And it advises man to preserve good and to throw off evil. Because of this we will be (rewarded for our good deeds and) justly punished for the evil ones as rational and free men. Therefore, every demonic assault customarily attacks these three things. We are not blamed because of the attack; rather, we receive a reward from God for being virtuous if we, from the beginning, cast away the seeds sown by the devil. But if we, from the first assault, accept these hostile seeds, we will come to an alliance with the devil, and from there to a pact. From this we are led to evil acts, and therefore we shall be justly condemned, as has been foretold.’ [13]

Fr Daniel Rogich points out that St Romylos ‘spent over twenty years as the disciple of Gregory of Sinai’, [14] and it is through him that St Gregory’s teachings spread to Serbia. Pavlikianov writes, ‘Being a follower of Gregory of Sinai and one of the founders of the well-known monastic centre at Paroria, in eastern Thrace, he was one of the most eminent and fervent supporters of the hesychast theological doctrine, as it was developed in the middle of the 14th century.’ [15] Subsequently, according to Tachiaos, St Romylos’s disciple, Gregory of Constantinople, ‘settled in Gornjak Monastery’ in Serbia, which the Tsar-Martyr Lazar had given him. ‘There Gregory built up a monastic centre of upholders of Gregory of Sinai’s Hesychast tradition, and these monks became known in Serbian history as “Sinaites”.’ [16]

In conclusion, here are the Troparion and Kontakion of the Saint:

Troparion, Tone 8

The streams of thy tears made fertile the barren wilderness, and thy deep sighing from thy struggles produced fruit a hundred-fold, as thou becamest a Star of the universe sparkling with miracles, O our Father Romilos; therefore, pray to Christ God to save our souls.

Kontakion, Tone 1

O Holy Father Romilos, Jewel of the Holy Mountain, Pillar of true Orthodoxy, divine follower of Righteous Gregory, and glory of Ravanitsa, come and heal us who in faith run to thee, for we celebrate thy memory in love. [17]

[1] Anthony-Emil N. Tachiaos, ‘Gregory Sinaites’ Legacy to the Slavs: Preliminary Remarks’, Cyrillomethodianum 7, 1983, pp. 121-2. See Tachiaos’s full remarks about St Romylos in this post on his Serbian disciples.

[2] Gregory of Constantinople, Life and Partial Story of the Miracles of Our Holy Father Romylos, the Modern, tr. Mark Bartusis, Khalifa Ben Nasser, Angeliki E. Laiou, ‘Days & Deeds of a Hesychast Saint: A Translation of the Greek Life of St Romylos’, Byzantine Studies/Etudes Byzantines, 9:1 (1982), pp. 24-47. The quote is from §25.

[3] St Nicholas (Velimirović), The Prologue from Ochrid, Vol. 1, trans. Mother Maria (Birmingham: Lazarica, 1986), p. 66.

[4] My translation from Νέος Συναξαριστής της Ορθοδόξου Εκκλησίας, Vol. 1, by Hieromonk Makarios of Simonopetra, (Ίνδικτος), pp. 198-200. (here)

[5] As grateful as I am to them for this translation, I would quibble with one of their notes. To Gregory’s statement in §14, ‘For the holy man had great faith in God and opened his compassionate heart equally to all, not only to men, but to the birds, snakes and wild beasts’, they have appended the footnote, ‘Compassion toward birds, reptiles and wild beasts is a characteristic which brings to mind St Francis of Assisi, and is not common in Byzantine hagiography’ (n. 45).

While it is true that Byzantine hagiography does not seem often to dwell on such things, I see no warrant for invoking Francis of Assisi, and much for recalling St Isaac the Syrian’s famous definition of the ‘merciful heart’: ‘It is the heart’s burning for the sake of the entire creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for every created thing; and by the recollection and sight of them the eyes of a merciful man pour forth abundant tears’ (St Isaac the Syrian, The Ascetical Homilies of St Isaac the Syrian, trans. Dana Miller [Boston, MA: HTM, 1984], p. 344-5).

[6] From Gregory, §12.

[7] St Athanasius the Great, The Life of Antony & the Letter to Marcellinus, tr. Robert C. Gregg (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1980), pp. 43-64.

[8] Ibid., p. 53.

[9] Ibid., p. 61.

[10] That is, the Rules Recommendable for Proper Monastic Behaviour, discovered in a Hilandar manuscript by K. Ivanova and P. Matejic in 1993 (Kl. Ivanova-P. Matejic, ‘An Unknown Work of St Romil of Vidin (Ravanica)’, Palaeobulgarica 17/4, 1993, pp. 3-15.). It is interesting, however, to note Cyril Pavlikianov’s observation, in a very interesting article on ‘The Athonite Period in the Life of St Romylos of Vidin’, Byzantina Symmeikta 15, pp. 247-55 (here), that in his Life of St Romylos, Gregory includes in a narrative form the main points of the Rules:

Analysing St. Romylos’ Rules and the passages of his Life referring to his Athonite period [§§12-21 in the English tr. of the Greek Life], one can easily figure out that their content is extremely similar; the two texts, despite the fact that they belong to two different literary genres, deal with the virtues required by the monastic life and how they must be cultivated. In the Rules, of course, the instruction is direct, while in the Life it is concealed behind a series of everyday events in which the saint is the moral protagonist. Being a commonplace in all the Byzantine hagiographical literature, in the case of St Romylos’ Life this type of narration does not extol his own monastic feats or miracles, but underlines his care about the proper instruction of the younger monks. In other words, what St. Romylos’ biographer, the Athonite monk Gregory the Calligraphier, emphasizes, while describing his personal experience as a disciple of the saint on Mount Athos, is in fact a modified reproduction of the basic points of the only literary work ascribed to his spiritual father. (p. 254)

[11] According to Pavlikianov, it was discovered by the Serbian scholar Lj. Stojanovic at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (Pavlikianov, p. 249), and was copied at St Romylos’s commission by a group of Bulgarian monks living near the Great Lavra in the foothills on the north side of the Athonite peak (ibid., p. 250). The tell-tale Slavonic inscription reads (in my poor translation), ‘Dionysius the sinner wrote [this] at Kakiplatsa on Athos. There I lived (?) with my Father, Kyr Theoctistus and with my brothers Simon and Thomas in obedience to our Father and Lord, Kyr Romylos, the Starets’ (ibid., p. 250).

[12] Gregory, §15.

[13] Gregory, §16. Fr Daniel Rogich includes part of this homily in Serbian Patericon: Saints of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Vol. 1 (January-April) (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994), pp. 126-7, as well as St Romylos’s words to the disciples of other elders from §19 of Gregory’s Life (Fr Rogich, pp. 127-8).

[14] Ibid., p. 124.

[15] Pavlikianov, p. 248.

[16] Tachiaos, p. 122.

[17] Fr Rogich, pp. 118, 131.

Obolensky, Michael Ward, & 2 Elders of the Holy Land

Although there are two Saints commemorated today in whom I am very interested, St Paul of Thebes and St Maurus the disciple of St Benedict, I posted on both of them last year and I don’t currently have much to add to those posts. Instead, I would like to point out four books that just arrived this week, the first two of which represent the last of my Christmas gift-money, the second two being a direct gift.

1) Sir Dimitri Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits (Oxford: Oxford U, 1999). A few attentive readers may have noticed my use of this one in yesterday’s post on St Sava. This book first came to my attention last year, when I posted on St Maximus the Greek. At that time, as is my practice, I merely made use of the resources I had at hand in my library, plus anything I could find online. But despite some nice passages of decent length about St Maximus in Fr Georges Florovsky’s Ways of Russian Theology and James Billington’s The Icon & the Axe, I still managed to miss to an astonishing degree the fascinating story of St Maximus’s early career in the West. Fortunately, a compassionate reader left the following comment:

You may also be interested in the chapter on the life and works of St. Maximos contained in Sir Dmitri Obolensky’s ‘Six Byzantine Portraits’ (see link: http://www.amazon.com/Byzantine-Portraits-University-Academic-monograph/dp/0198219512) which also contains scholarly accounts of Sts. Sava of Serbia, Theophylact and Clement of Bulgaria, Vladimir Monomach, and Constantine/Cyril the Philosopher. Coming from a Greek Church background- where he is perhaps lesser known- this is where I first encountered information about St. Maximos, and what a fabulous life! . . . It seems Obolensky’s principal source is Jack V. Haney’s ‘From Italy to Muscovy: The Life and Works of Maxim the Greek’, itself unfortunately very scarce. Anyway, Obolensky’s work is well worth the effort to track down as it presents a pretty thorough biography of the Saint, probably the most concentrated of all accounts generally accessible at present. Happy reading!- In
XC, Symeon

I immediately filed this away in my mind, and although it took me nearly a year to order it, I vowed I would not again let St Maximus’s feastday pass without a copy in my hand.

Some of the fascination of the book can perhaps be seen in the following passage from the ‘Introduction’, in which Obolensky discusses some of the glue that bound Byzantium and the Slavs, and specifically in the lives of these six figures:

To be really fruitful, the Byzantine-Slav encounter required more than imperial diplomacy and missionary zeal, or merely an East European quest for culture. It had to take place within an ambience somehow common to both worlds and capable of acting as an intermediary and a catalyst. This ambience needed a creative energy strong enough to leave its mark on religious beliefs, literature, and social and political ideas. It also needed a cosmopolitan character, capable of crossing state boundaries and linguistic frontiers and of being seen as a common East European tradition; and it would have to attract and command the loyalties of men of different nations, and link them to each other by common discipleship and the ties of friendship. [1]

From this, one might conclude that he is speaking of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, but Obolensky is far more specific than that: ‘In the period covered by this book, two such ambiences fostered the encounter between Byzantium and the Slavs: the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition, and the religious and cultural movement which originated in the monasteries of Mount Athos.’ [2] If the St Sava post wasn’t enough for you, stay tuned next week for a new St Maximus the Greek post making full use of this book!

2) Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford U, 2008). I first mentioned this book back in December in a post called ‘Jove’s Children—Lewisiana News’—where I gave a full description of it and linked to a little sample of Ward’s wares in Touchstone Magazine—and then referred to Ward again in a post on Saturn in Virgil and Lewis. I finally ordered a used copy from B Street Books in San Mateo, CA, without realizing that it was inscribed from the author! I hope I’m not getting anyone in trouble by pointing this out, but on the flyleaf it reads:

To Autumn

with Jovial regards

from Michael Ward

(Tuesday 20th May 2008)

There was also something stuck inside which looks to be a handout from a lecture or conference at which Ward perhaps spoke. At the top it reads, ‘Imagining God: C.S. Lewis & the Seven Heavens, Dr Michael Ward’, and then there are a number of excerpts from Lewis’s works—The Discarded Image, That Hideous Strength, Selected Literary Essays, Collected Poems, & Arthurian Torso—that illustrate Ward’s thesis.

Looking through the book, in the words of one of my professors, Chrysostomos Stamoulis, ‘I see good things.’ Ward begins with two lengthy epigraphs, and then begins each chapter with a short one (a practice that I wish every author followed). There are healthy endnotes, an extensive general index of names and topics, and even a Biblical index. Near the centre of the book there are some great illustrations, juxtaposing traditional depictions of the planetary gods with Pauline Baynes’s classic illustrations of the Narnia books.

Here are the general epigraphs, followed by the first paragraph of Ward’s ‘Preface’:

The spacious firmament on high,
with all the blue ethereal sky,
and spangled heavens, a shining frame,
their great Original proclaim.
The unwearied sun from day to day
does his Creator’s power display;
and publishes to every land
the work of an almighty hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail,
the moon takes up the wondrous tale,
and nightly to the listening earth
repeats the story of her birth;
whilst all the stars that round her burn,
and all the planets in their turn,
confirm the tidings, as they roll
and spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all
move round the dark terrestrial ball?
What though no real voice nor sound
amid their radiant orbs be found?
In reason’s ear they all rejoice,
and utter forth a glorious voice;
for ever singing as they shine,
‘The hand that made us is divine.’

—Joseph Addison, 1712 (after Psalm 19) [3]

There then comes to you a person, saying, ‘Here is a new bit of manuscript that I found; it is the central passage of that symphony, or the central chapter of that novel. The text is incomplete without it. I have got the missing passage which is really the centre of the whole work.’ The only thing you could do would be to put this new piece of the manuscript in that central position, and then see how it reacted on the whole of the rest of the work. If it constantly brought out new meanings for the whole of the rest of the work, if it made you notice things in the rest of the work which you had not noticed before, then I think you would decide that it was authentic.

—C.S. Lewis, ‘The Grand Miracle’ [4]

It is to be hoped that this book reaffirms the worth of implicit communication; not everything that needs to be said needs to be said outright. Some things, indeed, cannot be directly told: like happiness which ‘writes white’ they vanish when put into words.

—Michael Ward, ‘Preface’, Planet Narnia [5]

3) Ss Barsanuphius & John, Letters, 2 vols., tr. Fr John Chryssavgis, Vols. 113-4 in The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: Catholic U of A, 2006). Sometime after I wrote a post on St Dorotheus of Gaza last June, Bishop Savas of Troas—who is proving to be a tremendous benefactor—promised to send me these volumes as a reward upon completion of the first draft of my thesis. This duly accomplished thanks to such a powerful motivation (see this post), I waited a bit, too sheepish to complain about not receiving my reward. Well, I eventually overcame this reticence, and so the kind gift is now here. All 848 letters, the great bulk in English for the first time. I notice in the acknowledgements that Fr Chryssavgis expresses his gratitude ‘to the Rt. Rev. Bishop Sava of Troas for entrusting me with his draft translation of the [first 190] Letters, the treasured fruit of his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford’. The name of another friend I have never met in person appears immediately below this: ‘Ms Melissa Lynch generously offered her time and assistance in the careful compilation of the scriptural index.’ [6] The introduction promises good things. Fr Chryssavgis observes, ‘Whereas the study, and indeed the literature, of spiritual direction has traditionally focused on monastic development, the correspondence of Barsanuphius and John redresses a balance in this regard, concentrating much of its attention on the concerns of lay persons.’ [7] Concerning the Elders themselves, he writes:

In the correspondence Barsanuphius appears as kind, understanding, and warm; his language is clear, prayerful, and even prophetic on occasion. He reveals a strong and supportive personality, undeterred by issues and sure about his convictions. John is less ardent, less direct, and more guarded; his language is concise, precise, and even conventional at times. He reveals a thoughtful and careful personality, often deferring to his master, Barsanuphius. [8]

In conclusion, I shall offer the text of Letter 109, St Barsanuphius’s response to a letter of gratitude from someone who had been helped by him, in which Fr Chryssavgis’s characterisation is demonstrated:

Let us render all glory to the God of glory; and let us sing to him unto the ages. Amen. For glory does not belong to us, but is only proper to his Son and his Holy Spirit. God has led your love toward our frailty in order that we may be of assistance to one another, in his desire also to fulfill the Scripture that says: ‘A brother assisted by a brother is like a city fortified with ramparts’ (Prv 18:19). May all of us be assisted by our elder brother, and I mean Jesus; for he was well-pleased to make us his brothers (cf. Heb 2:11). And so we are his brothers and are praised by the angels for the kind of brother that we have, who is able to strengthen us, capable of dividing the spoils with us; a chief captain who can crush our enemies in war; a physician who can heal our passions; a general during time of peace in order to set our inner nature at peace with the outer nature when it has been submitted to him; a nurse who can nurture us with spiritual food, able to grant us life with his life, mercy through his mercy, and compassion through his compassion; a king endowing us with royalty; and a God who deifies us. Knowing, therefore, that everything lies in him, pray to him. ‘For he knows what you need even before you ask him’ (Mt 6:8), and he will grant every request of your soul, if you do not stand as a hindrance. Always offer glory to him; for to him is due glory to the ages. Amen. Pray for me, brother, that I may know my weakness and be humbled. [9]

[1] Obolensky, pp. 3-4.

[2] Ibid., p. 4.

[3] Ward, p. vii.

[4] Ibid., p. ix.

[5] Ibid., p. xi. The sentiment reminds one of Fr Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery!

[6] Vol. 1, p. vii.

[7] Ibid., p. 8.

[8] Ibid., p. 10.

[9] Ibid., pp. 130-1.

'On Lonely Athos'—Two Romantic Poets & the Holy Mountain

Somehow I occasionally manage to forget how much more I have yet to learn about English poetry. Today, while doing a Google search for the recently published translation, Georgian Monks on Mount Athos: Two Eleventh-Century Lives of the Hegoumenoi of Iviron, trans. Tamara Grdzelidze (London: Bennett & Bloom, 2009) [1], I came across an article by one Innes Merabishvili called ‘Mount Athos for Lord Byron & Thomas Moore’ (here). Although the connection with Thomas Moore (the Irish poet of the 18th & 19th centuries, not the philosopher & Catholic martyr of the 16th) is a bit more tenuous, it turns out Lord Byron does indeed make a very interesting explicit reference to the Holy Mountain of which I was wholly unaware. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, [2] Canto II.xxvii, the famous philhellene compares the solitude of the man in a crowd unfavourably with that of an Athonite hermit, writing:

More blest the life of godly Eremite,
Such as on lonely Athos may be seen,
Watching at eve upon the Giant Height,
Which looks o’er waves so blue, skies so serene,
That he who there at such an hour hath been
Will wistful linger on that hallowed spot;
Then slowly tear him from the ’witching scene,
Sigh forth one wish that such had been his lot,
Then turn to hate a world he had almost forgot. [3]

Of course, if one is tempted to go trying to read Childe Harold on the strength of this stanza alone, keep in mind that the poem is composed of four Cantos made up of from 93 to 185 stanzas each, featuring a hero that Lewis—or at least Screwtape—has described as ‘submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses’. [4]

Thomas Moore’s ‘Those Evening Bells’ passes itself off as a Russian air, but Merabishvili argues that it is a translation from the Greek of an 11th-c. poem by the Georgian hymnographer, Giorgi Mtatsmindeli (George of Mt Athos). He also writes, ‘Though there is no mention of Mount Athos in Thomas Moore’s lyrical piece the emotions expressed here are very close to the emotions expressed by Byron concerning the “godly eremite”.’ Here is Moore’s poem:

Those Evening Bells.

Air—The Bells of St Petersburg.

Those evening bells! those evening bells!
How many a tale their music tells,
Of youth, and home, and that sweet time,
When last I heard their soothing chime!

Those joyous hours are past away!
And many a heart that then was gay,
Within the tomb now darkly dwells,
And hears no more those evening bells!

And so ’twill be when I am gone;
That tuneful peal will still ring on,
While other bards shall walk these dells,
And sing your praise, sweet evening bells! [5]

Moore also has another ‘Russian Air’, which makes explicit reference to Russian ecclesiastical music, yet has a Latin refrain!

Hark! The Vesper Hymn is Stealing.

Russian Air.

Hark! the vesper hymn is stealing
O’er the waters, soft and clear;
Nearer yet and nearer pealing,
Soft it breaks upon the ear
Jubilate, Amen.
Farther now, now farther stealing,
Soft it fades upon the ear,
Jubilate, Amen.

Now like moonlight waves retreating
To the shore, it dies along;
Now, like angry surges meeting,
Breaks the mingled tide of song.
Jubilate, Amen.
Hush! again, like waves, retreating
To the shore, it dies along,
Jubilate, Amen. [6]

[1] HT Athos Agion Oros.

[2] The ‘childe’ of the title is used in its old chivalric sense of a ‘young knight’ (Fernand Mossé, A Handbook of Middle English, trans. James A. Walker [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1961], p. 433).

[3] Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Selected Poetry of Lord Byron, rev. ed. (NY: Modern Library, 1967), p. 49.

[4] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, with Screwtape Proposes a Toast (NY: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 64.

[5] Thomas Moore, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, Reprinted from the Early Editions with Explanatory Notes, etc., illust. Garrett, et al. (NY: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1888), pp. 522-3.

[6] Ibid., p. 525.

'His Mind Was Always United with God in Love'—St Paisius Velichkovsky

Today, 15 November on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of the Holy Paisius (Velichkovsky) of Moldavia and Mt Athos (1794). Most well known perhaps as the tireless translator of various texts of the Philokalia into Slavonic, St Paisius is famously mentioned by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, where the great novelist writes that the institution of monastic eldership ‘was revived again in our country at the end of the last century by one of the great ascetics (as he is known), Paissy Velichkovsky, and his disciples’ (The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky [NY: Vintage, 1991], p. 27). Fr Sergius Chetverikov describes his greatness thusly (qtd. in Bishop Seraphim [Joantă], Romania: Its Hesychast Culture & Tradition [Wildwood, CA: St Xenia Skete, 1992], p. 101):

In his person were united in an admirable synthesis personal sanctity, devotion to Orthodoxy, a remarkable aptitude for organizing coenobitic communities, the art of attracting to himself and spiritually forming numerous disciples, and thus creating around himself great schools of asceticism, and, finally, a true literary talent.

In his ‘Introduction’ to Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky: The Man Behind the Philokalia, by Schemamonk Metrophanes, trans. Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose) (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994), Fr Seraphim observes:

. . . [F]or Orthodox Christians of the 20th century there is no more important Holy Father of recent times than Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky. This is so not merely because of his holy life; not merely because, like another Saint Gregory Palamas, he defended the hesychast practice of the mental Prayer of Jesus; not only because he, through his many disciples, inspired the great monastic revival of the 19th century which flowered most notably in the holy Elders of Optina Monastery; but most of all because he redirected the attention of Orthodox Christians to the sources of Holy Orthodoxy, which are the only foundation of true Orthodox life and thought whether of the past or of the present, whether of monks or of laymen. (p. 13)

St Paisius’s disciple, Schemamonk Metrophanes, produced the most moving encomium of him in the following passage (The Life of Paisij Velyčkovs’kyj, trans. J.M.E. Featherstone [Cambridge, MA: Harvard U, 1989], p. 148):

In his teaching, his maintenance of a community, his spiritual struggles, his labors beyond human endurance, his wisdom and divine understanding, his counsel, his discernment, and his other gifts from God, our blessed father was in every way like the pious fathers of old and all those who have come after them. He was adorned with all virtues, external and internal, even as the holy fathers of old. His face was radiant like that of an angel of God, his appearance gentle, his speech humble and without boldness. He greeted all with love; he answered with piety; he was filled with goodness; he was always inclined to mercy; he attracted all to himself even as a magnet attracts iron. His humility and meekness were profound. He was forbearing in all things. In every way was this great man godly and full of grace. His mind was always united with God in love, to which his tears bore witness. Whenever he spoke of theology, his heart was flooded with love, his face shone with gladness, and tears poured forth from his eyes in confirmation of the truth. Whenever we stood before him our eyes never tired of the sight of him: we desired insatiably to look upon him; nor were our ears ever stopped with displeasure or tedium at his speech, for as I have already said, in the joy of our hearts we forgot ourselves. When we looked upon his face, we kept our ears always near his mouth, even as the Athenian philosophers of old did. For whenever they saw someone who excelled in wisdom, they desired to talk with him, and the eyes and ears of all were fixed upon him in their desire to hear some new bit of wisdom. How much more were our eyes fixed upon our blessed philosopher! For from his mouth we always heard new things concerning spiritual mysteries or the moral precepts of the God-bearing fathers.

Of course, not the least of his accomplishments were the many translations St Paisius and his disciples produced. As I have noted here, Dostoevsky was acquainted with the Saint through his translation of the homilies of St Isaac of Syria. Speaking of the importance of St Paisius’s work, Fr Georges Florovsky writes in Part 1 of his magnum opus, Ways of Russian Theology, trans. Robert L. Nichols (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979), p. 161:

Under Paisii’s guidance, Niamets monastery became a great literary center and a source of theological-ascetical enlightenment. This literary activity was organically link with spiritual and ‘intellectual construction’. . . . The message of spiritual concentration and wholeness possessed particular significance for that age of spiritual dualism and cleavage. Publication of the Slavonic-Russian edition of the Philokalia constituted a major event not only in the history of Russian monasticism but generally in the history of Russian culture. It was both an accomplishment and a catalyst.

Fr Florovsky also notes that St Paisius ‘did not retreat from or reject knowledge. His actions mark a return to the living sources of patristic theology and thinking about God’ (p. 160). Ultimately, while the Philokalia was published in Greek no later than Slavonic, it was the Slavophone hesychast revival under St Paisius that led to the discovery of the Fathers among Russian intellectuals and theologians, who in turn eventually influenced theologians in Greece beginning in the 1960s, leading to a boom of interest in the Fathers there and the repopulation of the Holy Mountain (Chrestos Yannaras, Orthodoxy & the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, trans. Fr Peter Chamberas & Norman Russell [Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox, 2006], pp. 126-8).

Finally, I would like to offer a few words from the great Elder himself. First, here are two passages from his autobiography:

Within a little more than two years, with God’s assistance, I learned the Primer, the Book of Hours, and the Psalter, and straightway I began, with God’s help, to read other books with great facility; and from my elder brother, mentioned above, I learned to write after a short time of study at home. Between lessons, whenever I found free time, I read assiduously the books of the holy Scripture, the Old and the New Testaments, the Lives of the saints, the writings of St Ephrem and St Dorotheus, the Pearl of St John Chrysostom, and as many other books as were to be found in the aforementioned holy church; and from the reading of such holy books, especially the Lives of our pious fathers who pleased God in the holy and angelic monastic state, there began to grow in my soul a longing for withdrawal from the world and assumption of the holy monastic habit. (Featherstone, p. 5)

At the appropriate season the venerable superior of the hermitage, Father Dometij, assigned me the obedience of tending the hermitage’s vineyard, which was on level ground above the hermitage, at a distance of nearly one verst. He commanded me in no wise to dare eat any grapes until I had eaten at least a small piece of bread; but provided I ate the bread, he gave me his permission and blessing to eat as many grapes as I wished, before or after the daily meal. He did this for two reasons, firstly because grapes were few in the country where I was born, and I had scarcely ever had the chance to taste them, and secondly, out of indulgence to my weakness, for he realized that I had a great desire to eat grapes and that I could not get my fill of them. Having received his command and blessing, then, after eating a bit of bread, I ate grapes often, both before and after the meal, choosing the ones which grew sparsely, that is, not close together, for these were sweeter than the others. My passion for eating grapes came to such a pitch that I wanted no other food. When I went to the meal in the hermitage, I ate very little of anything else, but I ate grapes in abundance and with great relish. Having partaken of almost no other food that whole season until the harvest, I suffered no small illness of body, and my face grew thin as if from some disease. But after the harvest, when I ceased eating grapes and partook of the usual food with the brethren, I began to feel stronger day and night; and in a short time I was restored to my previous state of health. (Featherstone, pp. 82-3)

Finally, here is a passage taken from the Saint’s writings on the spiritual life (here):

Have you heard, my beloved soul, how the Holy Fathers spent their lives? O my soul! Imitate them at least a little.

Did they not have tears? O woe, my soul.

Were they not sorrowful, thin and worn out in body? O woe, my soul.

Did they not have bodily illnesses, great wounds and lamentation of soul with tears? O woe, my soul.

Were they not clothed in the same infirm body that we have? O woe, my soul!

Did they not have the desire for splendid, sweet and light repose in this world and every bodily repose?

Yes, they desired these things, and their bodies in truth were afflicted, but they exchanged their desires for patience and their grief for future joy. They cut off everything once and for all. They considered themselves as dead men, and tormented themselves mercilessly in spiritual labors. Do you see, my soul, how the Holy Fathers labored, having no repose and suffering every kind of evil? They subjected the flesh to the spirit and fulfilled all the other commandments of God, and were saved.

But you, O pitiful soul, do not at all wish to force yourself, and you grow faint from small labors, grow despondent and do not at all remember the hour of death and weep over your sins but you have become accustomed, my wretched soul, to eat to the fill, to drink to the fill and to be slothful. Do you not know that you are called voluntarily to torment? And yet you endure nothing. How then do you wish to be saved?

At least from this time forth, then: Arise, my beloved soul, and do what I shall tell you.

If you cannot labor as the Holy Fathers did, then at least begin according to your strength.

Serve everyone with humility and simplicity of heart; acknowledging your infirmity and belittling yourself, say: ‘Woe to thee, my wretched soul; woe to thee, vile one; woe to thee, O all-defiled one, slothful, careless, sleepy, cruel; woe to thee, who hast perished!’ And so, little by little it will come to tender-feeling, will shed tears, will come to itself and repent.

For more on St Paisius, see this brief article by the great Metropolitan Laurus of blessed memory.

'I Live with the Angels & Archangels'—Papa-Tychon of the Holy Mountain

Yesterday I had someone with an ISP in Louisville, KY, wind up at my blog as a result of a Google search for the keywords ‘Fr. Tikhon Athos’. Unfortunately, as I do not have anything posted at Logismoi concerning a Fr Tikhon of Athos, the post that my mysterious reader landed at was the one on St Tikhon of Zadonsk. In fact, only one of the results on the first page of Google results for those words had anything to do with a Fr Tikhon of Athos (interestingly it was the Wikipedia article on Elder Paisios!). So anyway, I thought the charitable thing to do would be to post briefly on the life of the only ‘Fr Tikhon of Athos’ that I know of—Papa-Tychon of the Holy Mountain (1884-1968), the story of whose life is told by his disciple, Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain, in the latter’s book, Athonite Fathers and Athonite Matters (Thessaloniki: Holy Convent of the Evangelist John the Theologian, 1999), pp. 25-55.

Papa-Tychon—the name is a transliteration from the Greek, Τυχών, whereas English readers are probably more familiar with the Russian transliteration, Tikhon, from Тихон—was born in Novaya Mikhalovka, Russia, in 1884, to pious parents, Pavel and Elena. When he was seventeen, they gave him their blessing to go on a pilgrimage to the monasteries of Russia for three years. Completing that, he moved on to ‘the God-trodden Mountain, Mount Sinai’, for two months, and settled in the Holy Land, beyond the Jordan, to a live as an ascetic for a while. Unfortunately, the many pilgrims forced him to leave for the Holy Mountain. As Elder Paisios puts it, ‘Then, like a pure flower, he went and was planted into the Garden of Our Most Holy Lady where he flourished, fragrant in his virtues, as we shall see below’ (p. 27).

On the Holy Mountain, Papa-Tychon lived for five years at the Cell of Bourazeri (a dependency of Hilandar), and then got a blessing to move to a cave in Karoulia, ‘where he lived as an ascetic for fifteen years’ (p. 28). According to Elder Paisios:

All the time he was at Karoulia he spent in fierce struggles. His ‘handiwork’ was to make great and small prostrations, as well as to say the Jesus Prayer and study. He borrowed books from the monasteries, and also received from them dry rusks, from the broken pieces left over, as a blessing in return, for which he would pray with his komboskini. And so he struggled with philotimo [a term Elder Paisios often uses to mean 'the love shown by humble people'—W. James Lillie, ed. and trans., St Arsenios the Cappadocian, by Elder Paisios (Thessaloniki: Convent of St John, 2001), p. 71] to become an angel internally, too, not merely externally by wearing the angelic habit. (p. 28)

Eventually, Papa-Tychon left Karoulia as well and moved to Kapsala, ‘at the southernmost tip of Athos (above Kaliagra) to a Cell belonging to the Monastery of Stavroniceta’ (p. 28). There, he looked after an infirm, elderly monk for a time, and after the elder died, received his blessing to stay there. In Elder Paisios’s words, ‘Divine grace no revealed him to people and many who were suffering ran to him to consult him and be comforted through his great love’ (p. 28). It seems that although he was Russian, Papa-Tychon became a spiritual father to Orthodox of all ethnicities, his great disciple, Elder Paisios, for instance, being Greek. (Although the latter notes, ‘Father Tychon was greatly moved by the souls suffering under the atheist regime in Russia. He would say to me, his eyes brimming with tears: “You know, my child, Russia is still under penance from God. But it will pass”’ [p. 38].)

Seeing the great need of these people, Papa-Tychon yielded to their entreaties that he be ordained, so that he could hear formal confessions. He providentially received a donation from America through the head of Prophet Elias Skete, and hired some monks to build a chapel at the Cell dedicated to the Precious Cross (p. 29). There, according to Elder Paisios—

he celebrated spiritually every day with his rule of prayer which combined the mourning of the Cross and the brightness of the Resurrection, with his great ascesis and almost no human consolation in the hollow of Kaliagra where he gazed at heaven and lived the joys of Paradise with the angels and saints. When anyone asked him, ‘Do you live all alone in the desert?’ the elder would reply:

‘No, I live with the angels and archangels, with all the saints, with the Mother of God and with Christ.’ (p. 30).

The elder reached at this holy spiritual state because he loved Christ so much, as he did humility and poverty, too. (p. 31)

But in addition to humility, Elder Paisios points out that Papa-Tychon ‘also emphasized the study of God, that is, people’s minds should be constantly turning toward God’ (p. 43). Elder Paisios then goes on to write:

He also stressed the study of the Holy Scriptures and the holy fathers: Evergetinos, the Philokalia, St John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, St Maximos, Symeon the New Theologian, Abba Macarios and Abba Isaac. ‘Study,’ the elder would say, ‘warms up the soul and cleans out the mind, so that people willingly live in asceticism and acquire virtues, but when they don’t do so, they acquire passions.’ (p. 43)

The Elder emphasises Papa-Tychon’s great poverty and frugality—one of the many examples he gives being the herring the old man would get ‘for the joyous Twelve Days of Christmas’ every year (p. 33). Having used the fish for the Christmas feast, he would save the backbone, and for the other feasts he would dip it into some boiled water before tossing rice in, thus making the most frugal ‘fish soup’! As Elder Paisios writes, ‘In this way, he observed the dispensation for fish but also condemned himself for eating fish soup in the desert! Then, he would hang the backbone on the nail again for the next dispensation, until it became quite white and only then would he throw it away’ (p. 33).

Once, a man attempted to rob him, even going so far as to tie a rope around his neck in order to force him to give up his money, of which of course he had none. When the police finally caught the thief, they tried to get Papa-Tychon to testify against him, but he replied, ‘But, my child, I forgave the thief with all my heart’ (p. 34). Although the police laughed this off, ‘In the end the police chief took pity and let him go back to his Cell from Hierissos because he was crying like a little child at the thought that he would be to blame for the thief being punished’ (p. 34).

Whenever he would have a visitor, after praying with them in the chapel and visiting for a while, Papa-Tychon ‘would get up with great joy and say: “Now, I have a treat for you”’ (p. 35).

He would draw some water from the cistern to fill a cup for the visitor and put some in his own tin can (an old food tin which he also used to boil water); afterwards, he would go and look for some Turkish delight, which sometimes would be either as hard as rock or half-eaten by ants, but since it was a blessing from Father Tychon it was not at all disgusting. (p. 35)

Hieromonk Alexander (Golitzin) has written the following of Papa-Tychon—which I can’t find in Elder Paisios’s book—in his anthology, The Living Witness of the Holy Mountain: Contemporary Voices from Mount Athos, trans. Hieromonk Alexander (Golitzin) (South Canaan, PA: STS, 1999): ‘By this asceticism, together with a great humility, he acquired the gift of unceasing prayer, even during his sleep. “Whenever one prays,” he used to say, “the prayer must unite with the heart just like you join two different things together with glue”’ (p. 142).


Elder Paisios also tells the following story—a version of which Fr Alexander includes in Living Witness (p. 142) and which he uses to great effect at the end of his article, ‘“Earthly Angels and Heavenly Men”: The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Nicetas Stethatos, and the Tradition of “Interiorized Apocalyptic” in Eastern Christian Ascetical and Mystical Literature’ (here), calling it ‘a little taste of, as it were, “Christian merkavah” coming to us from the late twentieth century’—

Even for the Divine Liturgy, he would tell the monk who came to ehlp him and act as chanter to come in the morning when it was light. During the Divine Liturgy, he would tell the monk to stay in the narrow corridor outside the chapel and chant ‘Lord, have mercy’ from there, so that he, Father Tychon, could feel entirely alone and at ease in his prayer. When they got to the Cherubic Hymn, Father Tychon would be taken up in spiritual contemplation for twenty to thirty minutes and the chanter was obliged to repeat the Hymn many times, until he heard the footsteps of the elder at the Great Entrance.

When the service was over and I asked the elder what he saw, he replied:

‘The Cherubim and the Seraphim glorifying God!’

And he went on to say:

‘After half an hour, my guardian angel brings me back down and then I continue with the Divine Liturgy.’ (Elder Paisios, p. 37)

According to Elder Paisios, who lived with Papa-Tychon at the time, in 1968 the latter ‘had a presentiment of his death, because he continually referred to death’ (p. 47). After the feast of the Dormition, he became bedridden and did not want anyone with him for some time so that his prayer would not be interrupted. Then, in the last ten days of his life, he asked Elder Paisios to stay with him. Because he could no longer go to the Chapel of the Precious Cross, where he had celebrated the liturgy for so many years, he asked Elder Paisios to bring him the Cross from the Altar ‘as a consolation’:

When he saw the Cross, his eyes glistened, and after kissing it with due reverence, he held it tightly in his hand with all the strength that was left in him. I had also tied a sprig of basil to the Cross and asked him:

‘Does it smell nice, elder?’

He answered:

‘Paradise, my son, smells a lot better.’ (p. 48)

Two days after the feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God, that is, on 10 September 1968, Papa-Tychon fell asleep in the Lord (thus, taking into account the calendar difference, the anniversary of his repose was only 11 days ago). According to a promise he made to Elder Paisios, after three years he began to appear to his spiritual child once a year, bringing him great consolation. At the end of his account of his elder’s life, Elder Paisios appends the following ‘prayer of the elder, which he wrote with great pain and many tears’ and would send ‘to suffering souls in Russia as balsam from the Garden of the Most Holy Mother of God’ (p. 54):

Glory to Christ’s Golgotha

Godly Golgotha, sanctified with the blood of Christ! We beg you, tell us how many thousands of sinners, by the grace of Christ, repentance and tears, you have cleansed and brought to fill up the Bridal Cahmber of Paradise? Oh, with Your ineffable love, Christ our King, with Your grace, you have filled all the celestial palaces with repentant sinners. You have mercy on those here below, too and save them. And who could render You worthy thanks, had he even the mind of an angel? Sinners, come quickly. Holy Golgotha is open and Christ is merciful. Fall before Him and kiss His holy feet.

He alone, as the merciful one, can heal your wounds! Oh, how happy we shall be when Christ the most merciful counts us worthy, with great humbleness, fear of God, and burning tears to wash His spotless feet and kiss them in love! Then Christ, the merciful, will be pleased to wash away our sins and will open unto us the gates of Paradise where, in great joy, together with the archangels and angles, the Cherubim and the Seraphim and all the saints, we shall glorify the Saviour of the world eternally, our most sweet Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity Undivided and of One Essence.

Hieromonk Tychon, The Holy Mountain. (pp. 54-5)