Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [13]
Slavic invasions of the Balkans and Lombard conquests in Italy drove a wedge between the remaining two. Rome, deprived of imperial support, linked its fortunes to the rising Germanic West. Constantinople’s contracting empire became increasingly Greek.
The break came in 1054, when Rome and Constantinople exchanged excommunications. The Latins had added Filioque to the Nicene Creed, making it read that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son; they also used unleavened rather than leavened bread in the Eucharist. Absurd that East and West should sunder over a phrase and a pinch of yeast? Not when eternal salvation seemed at stake.
This was the lesson of Byzantine monasticism: I saw men bend their necks to the yoke of obedience and, through self-denial and punctilious repetitions of ritual, follow unquestioningly an ordained path of salvation. For as Orthodoxy was central to Byzantium, monasticism, ever the conserver of traditions, is the living heart of Orthodoxy.
The face of that boy still haunts me. I saw him on the boat to Mount Athos—father and son come from Germany to see the Holy Mountain. He was about thirteen, the same age as my son. We boarded at a Greek port at the base of the steep-walled peninsula that juts thirty-five miles into the northern Aegean. The motors revved up, and with a flurry of monks crossing themselves and murmuring “Kyrie eleison—Lord, have mercy,” we were off for a United Nations of monastic communities—Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian—where no female has been allowed to set foot for a thousand years.
I saw the boy again when we debarked at Daphni. We crowded in, wall-to-wall black robes and black cylindrical hats, for the jolting bus ride up the mountainside to Kariai, headquarters village for the monastic republic, the world’s oldest. Then as I trudged off to join the rounds of worship and work and share Spartan meals in half a dozen monasteries, the boy slipped from mind.
Stavroniketa, thrusting massive walls and crenellated keep above the sea, was a hive of purposeful piety. There the rhythmic beats of the semantron wakened me in the night. Noah had summoned the animals into the ark with such a resonant wooden plank and mallet, I had been told. Now it called the faithful into the spiritual ark, the church, to save them from the deluge of sin.
In Stavroniketa’s church, under the brazen eagles of Byzantium agleam in chandelier coronas, I stood absorbed by the symphony of motion—monks bowing, prostrating themselves, making rounds to kiss the icons, lighting and snuffing candles, swinging the smoking censer, reading and singing antiphonally, raising voices in fervent prayer. The frescoed church itself mirrored the cosmos, martyrs and saints and angelic hosts rising in a scale of sanctity toward the symbolic vault of heaven where a stern Pantocrator, the almighty Christ, looks down disturbingly into the depth of one’s soul.
To relax my limbs, I shifted position.
“Hisssssssssssss!”
I had clasped my hands improperly. As the hours wore on, if anyone made a false move or kissed an icon in the wrong order, a hiss signaled instant correction.
Back in our guest cell near dawn, my cellmate, an American anthropologist, whispered, “Reminds me of the military. The Benedictines in France are the infantry; the Franciscans in Italy, the air force, free and easy. These Orthodox monks are the marines—a crack outfit of shock troops under a tough master sergeant. No sloppiness here.”
As I topped a shoulder of the 6,670-foot Holy Mountain, wincing at each sharp penitential stone in the steep path, I found monks building a wall. A decade earlier dilapidated Philotheou Monastery had seven graybeards. I counted ten times that many monks, beards as black as their robes.
Father Nikon, the young