Athos and the Third Rome

I had never heard of the Theocratic Republic of Athos until recently. If you have never heard of it either it’s to be found on the easternmost prong of the trident-like peninsula that projects from northern Greece into the Aegean Sea.

Oh, I knew that Athos was the host to a community of Orthodox monasteries, Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian as well as Greek. I also knew that is a place closed to women. What I was unaware of was its unique political status as a self-governing though not independent entity. But what makes it of particular and topical interest is that it now stands at the centre of a religious struggle, one that largely seems to have escaped attention in the non-Orthodox World, a struggle that opens the door to the ghosts of vanished empires.

In an article in the April edition of the BBC History Magazine, David Keys says that Athos, the Holy Mountain, as the Greeks refer to it, might be considered as the last surviving remnant of the Roman Empire. It was given its status by the Byzantine emperor Basil I in 885, as a monastic territory within the Empire. This unique identity was preserved through the long centuries of Ottoman occupation.

Although the monks finally accepted the sovereignty of the emerging Greek state, Athos was formally recognised in the national constitution of 1926 as a self-governing theocratic republic, officially known as the Autonomous Monastic State of the Holy Mountain. On spiritual matters the territory comes under the supervision of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, long resident in Turkish Istanbul.

If you think that things can’t get any more complicated they do! Just as Greece is struggling for its political soul with Germany, there is a struggle for the Orthodox soul with Russia. Remember Athos is an international community representing the whole of the Orthodox world. There were points during the last century when the majority of monks were Russian, though the Greek government has since restricted a non-Greek presence.

So far so nothing, and Athos might have continued to slumber in spiritual isolation, but for one thing…some of the monks are getting a bit bolshie! Recently two of the peninsula’s twenty monasteries have been in trouble with the police. Why? Because they are refusing to pray for the Patriarch. The implication here is that he has no spiritual authority over them, a violation not only of church hierarchy but also a violation of the 1926 constitution.

Things have been taken to the point where the police have been trying to expel the monks of the tenth century Esphigmenou monastery. In another case Abbot Ephraim of the tenth century Vatopedi monastery has been arrested as part of a corruption scandal. But the dissidents have a champion. Turn now and look to the Third Rome. Abbot Ephraim has become an icon in Moscow!

It was after the fall of Constantinople, the second Rome, to the Turks in 1453 that the title began to settle on Muscovy, with the clear implication that Russia was now the centre of the Orthodox world. “Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. There will be no forth.”

The Third Rome did fall, or rather was eclipsed for decades by the communists. But the demise of the Soviet Union has seen a remarkable revival of the Orthodox Church. In the years since Gorbachev’s Christmas Day farewell 25000 new churches have been built. Today some seventy per cent of the world’s Orthodox community live in Russia and the Ukraine. A new vibrancy has brought with it a new assertiveness, with Moscow seeking primacy over Constantinople.

Ephraim is particularly prized. Last year he allowed a textile belt said to have been worn by the Virgin Mary, one of Athos’ most sacred relics, to leave Greece for the first time ever. It went with him on a tour of Russia, where it was seen by an estimated three million people, some of whom queued for twenty hours. By sheer coincidence (of course it was) Ephraim was arrested soon after his return with the belt, something that could not have happened, as Keys writes, without the tacit neutrality or agreement of the Constantinople Patriarch.

Actually the ramifications here are even wider. The whole question has been caught up in a new cold war between Russia and America. Unbeknown to me, Washington regards support for the Patriarch as an important part of its foreign policy. Over the past few years he has been visited in Istanbul by Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, just to bolster the old chap over his Moscow rival. The Greeks, increasingly worried about their own identity, are no less anxious to secure this ancient link and their pre-eminence in the Orthodox universe.

The trouble is, given his position in a Muslim country, the Constantinople Patriarch, once as powerful as the Pope in Rome, is an isolated figure. Successive patriarchs were really only able to preserve a primacy paradoxically thanks to the persecution the Russian Orthodox suffered at the hands of the communists. Now the Russian Church wants to give proper meaning to the concept of the Third Rome, many seeing Moscow as the rightful successor to the Byzantine patriarchy.

How did the Autonomous Republic get caught up in this, you may wonder? Simply this: it’s a traditionally conservative community and many of the monks, not just in the foundations I’ve mentioned, are openly critical of the Constantinople patriarchate, which they see as too ecumenical and too liberal. Alienation from Constantinople has entailed admiration of Moscow and the renaissance of Russian Orthodoxy.

To complicate things one stage further (yes, I know, I know!) the Republic is also in conflict with the European Parliament, which is calling for the thousand-year-old ban on the entry of women into the celibate community to be ended. Just how much ‘autonomy’ the Autonomous Republic truly has is clearly open to question. Come to that, just how much autonomy any of us have, religious or not, is also open to question. Turkey swallows the Patriarch; Greece swallows Athos; Europe swallows Greece. Perhaps the only independence left is to be found in the Third Rome. What a depressing thought to conclude with.

Gorgeous Glass

I read in one of my history journals that five hand-painted stained glass masterpieces from sixteenth century Germany have been discovered in South Wales. The pieces in question were removed from Steinfeld Abbey near Cologne in 1803 during the French occupation of the district

The glass, which had previously been put into storage by the monks, was sold to a local dealer when the Abbey was secularised. From there it was sold to an expatriate German business man by the name of John Christopher Hamp, who was based in Norwich. Hamp sold them on to various wealthy clients, who either installed them in their own houses or donated them to local churches.

During the last century scholars discovered various panels in houses, chapels and churches in Hertfordshire, Cheshire, Norfolk and Bristol. In 1928 the Hertfordshire panels were bought by Ernest Cook, the grandson of the travel agent, who donated them to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they remain to the present day.

The Welsh panels are the first fresh discoveries in twenty years. Although gratifying it still represents only a tiny fraction of the collection that is still missing, possibly broken up, or possibly close to where you live, somewhere in the manor houses and churches of England and Wales. Who knows what you are looking through? :-)

Sin

Sin is all about guilt, at least that’s what I thought until I dipped into Gary Anderson’s Sin: A History. I now know that it’s not about guilt at all: it’s about debt and indebtedness. It’s a singular feature of this book that Anderson has managed to make sin exciting, along with Old Testament exegesis!

Here the key to understanding is metaphor: that sin is a burden to be carried, a debt to be paid, a stain to be cleansed away. Anderson maintains that the way in which sin is understood and perceived determines the manner in which one deals with the consequences. There is in this, he continues, a revolutionary process at work.

In early Judaism sin as a burden to be carried was the dominant theme, expressed in the ritual of the scapegoat, sent into the wilderness carrying all of the transgressions of the community. The change here came in the period of Persian domination between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. The Aramaic languages now became part of religious discourse, opening up new metaphorical visions. Sin was no longer a burden to be expelled but a debt to be settled, rather in the fashion of an economic transaction. For the Israelites the Babylonian Exile became a way of paying off the accumulated debts of the past. Later the Christians were to perceive the sacrifice of Christ in similar terms, the price for centuries of human misdemeanor.

This change had major theological consequences. Human action was now central to the whole equation. It was no longer sufficient to expel sin as a collective into the wilderness and thus out of the sight of God, no, there now had to be acts of personal expiation. Imagine, if you will, divine debit and credit, where one is constantly obliged to pay close personal attention to the balance for fear of that ultimate letter from the celestial bank!

So, good works became an important way of staying in credit. But, perceived in these terms, a problem begins to emerge in the later Christian church; for if sin was a debt that could be paid alms could be given not just to the poor, rather an obsession in the later Middle Ages, but by a less direct route into the bank of the Church itself, which in return guaranteed remission. Thus came the paper indulgences, thus came a kind of spiritual inflation or debasement of the currency of salvation.

The Reformation began as a reaction against this kind of accountancy, swinging the pendulum away to the opposite extreme. Not only were paper indulgences worthless the notion of ‘good works’ went with them. God’s Grace, Luther and others argued, was inscrutable. One’s earthly actions, in other words, had no bearing at all on the divine calculus; one was saved or one was damned, and that was that! Let’s just imagine a world without sin, a world without fear, a world without debt, a world without regret, a world without sin. Yes, let’s imagine a Pagan world!

Was Hobbes an Atheist?

Well, many of his contemporaries certainly thought so. In October 1666 a committee of the House of Commons was empowered to examine the views expressed in Leviathan as part of the preparations for a bill intended to make hereesy a crime. Some even went so far as to suggest that Hobbes' doctrines were responsible for the Great Fire of London!

His books were either banned or burnt, and the Catholic church placed De Cive on its Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1654. He was regularly attacked in the press of the day, which delighted in detailing the torments he would suffer in the after-life for his apparent lack of belief. It was his rationalism and materialism that tended to disturb people most; even God is reduced to a material level. Archbishop Tenison was to say of him "Yet for the very handsomeness in dressing his Opinions, as the matter stands, he is to be reproved; because by that means, the poyson which he hath intermixed with them is with the more readiness and danger swallowed."

His views were certainly unsettling in an age not noted for latitude in matters of faith and belief: that there was no personal Satan; that the Pentateuch and many other books of the Bible were revisions or compilations from earlier sources; that few miracles could be credited after the Testament period; that witchcraft was a myth; and that religion was often confused with superstition. He was, as one writer has noted, 'anti-ecclesiastical, anti-clerical, anti-enthusiastic, anti-theology, anti-creeds and anti-inspiration.'

So, was he an atheist? All I can really say here is that the evidence suggests not; and in his personal life he adhered to the Anglican Church, which, in any case, was for him a necessary instrument of Leviathan. He believed in God as First Cause, but denied most of the manifestations and attributes accorded to Him by organised religion; even holiness, goodness and blessedness, which in the Hobbesian view are all unknowable facts. His God, such as He is, is distant, cold, intellectual amd essentially unknowable. What did he really believe? That is a question that can only be answered by God…and by Hobbes!

Not News: the Pilgrim Fathers Practiced Witchcraft!

Well, no, not exactly, but I caught your attention, did I not?

It is true, though, that evidence has been uncovered suggesting that some of the colonial communities may have openly practiced witchcraft, swapping spells with African slaves. This comes from a small feature in the February issue of the BBC History Magazine, entitled The Colonists who Practiced Magic with African Slaves (p.12). It reports some conclusions reached by archaeologists and anthropologists who have uncovered a ‘spirit bundle’ below the streets of Annapolis, Maryland.

They were working on a log-road four feet below the present street level when the diggers found a clay and sand bundle, containing a stone axe, three hundred pieces of led shot, 25 common pins and a dozen nails. Discovery of such bundles is not new, but the remarkable thing about this one is that it was placed in plain view. Dr Mark Leone, director of the Archaeology in the Annapolis project, says that this find is quite different from anything else hitherto seen in North America, providing the earliest evidence so far that African religion was being practiced.

The bundle dates to 1700. Dr Leone continues: “We’re particularly intrigued by the placement of this bundle in so visible a spot, because it suggests an unexpected level of public tolerance. All the previous caches of African spirit practices we’ve found in Annapolis were at least 50 years younger. These had been used in secret. But in the earlier generation, the Annapolis newspapers was filled with references to English magic and witchcraft, so both European and African spirit practices may have been more acceptable then.”

Dr Frederick Lamp, curator of African Art at Yale, thinks that the bundle may represent the image of Eshu Elegba, the god of chance and confusion.

Commenting also on the frequent reports on pagan and non-Christian beliefs in The Maryland Gazette published before 1750 Dr Leone says, “English witchcraft in this period existed openly in public and was tolerated. It’s intriguing to speculate how English and African spirit beliefs may have interacted and borrowed from each other.”