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By Root 203 0

ème de menthe?—and he would answer in twenty-minute-long parables in which there would be, somewhere, a simple answer. (For example: “I believe there are many more beautiful things than sex.”) As he told his stories he waved and jumped around and smiled and laughed: if Father Arsenios feels guilty about anything, he has a rare talent for hiding it. Like a lot of people who come to Vatopaidi, I suppose, I was less than perfectly sure what I was after. I wanted to see if it felt like a front for a commercial empire (it doesn’t) and if the monks seemed insincere (hardly). But I also wondered how a bunch of odd-looking guys who had walked away from the material world had such a knack for getting their way in it: How on earth do monks, of all people, wind up as Greece’s best shot at a Harvard Business School case study?

After about two hours I work up the nerve to ask him. To my surprise he takes me seriously. He points to a sign he has tacked up on one of his cabinets, and translates it from the Greek: The smart person accepts. The idiot insists.

He got it, he says, on one of his business trips to the Ministry of Tourism. “This is the secret of success for anywhere in the world, not just the monastery,” he says, and then goes on to describe pretty much word for word the first rule of improvisational comedy, or for that matter any successful collaborative enterprise. Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. “Yes . . . and” rather than “No . . . but.” “The idiot is bound by his pride,” he says. “It always has to be his way. This is also true of the person who is deceptive or doing things wrong: he always tries to justify himself. A person who is bright in regard to his spiritual life is humble. He accepts what others tell him—criticism, ideas—and he works with them.”

I notice now that his windows open upon a balcony overlooking the Aegean Sea. The monks are not permitted to swim in it; why, I never asked. Just like them, though, to build a beach house and then ban the beach. I notice, also, that I am the only one who has eaten the pastries and drunk the crème de menthe. It occurs to me that I may have just failed some sort of test of my ability to handle temptation.

“The whole government says they are angry at us,” he says, “but we have nothing. We work for others. The Greek newspapers, they call us a corporation. But I ask you, Michael, what company has lasted for a thousand years?”

At that moment, out of nowhere, Father Ephraim walks in. Round, with rosy cheeks and a white beard, he is more or less the spitting image of Santa Claus. He even has a twinkle in his eye. A few months before, he’d been hauled before the Greek parliament to testify. One of his interrogators said that the Greek government had acted with unusual efficiency when it swapped Vatopaidi’s lake for the Ministry of Agriculture’s commercial properties. He asked Ephraim how he had done it.

“Don’t you believe in miracles?” Ephraim had said.

“I’m beginning to,” said the Greek MP.

When we are introduced, Ephraim clasps my hand and holds it for a very long time. It crosses my mind that he is about to ask me what I want for Christmas. Instead he says, “What is your faith?” “Episcopalian,” I cough out. He nods; he calibrates: it could be worse; it probably is worse. “You are married?” he asks. “Yes.” “You have children?” I nod; he calibrates: I can work with this. He asks for their names . . .

THE SECOND PARLIAMENTARY inquiry into the Vatopaidi affair is still gathering steam, and you never know what it may turn up. But the main facts of the case are not in dispute; the main question left to answer is the motives of the monks and the public servants who helped them. In the late 1980s, Vatopaidi was a complete ruin—a rubble of stones overrun with rats. The frescoes were black. The icons went uncared for. The place had a dozen monks roaming around its ancient stones, but they were autonomous and disorganized. In church jargon they worshipped idiorrhythmically—which is another way of saying that in their quest for spiritual satisfaction it was every man