“The 6,000 Beards of Mt. Athos” by Ralph H. Brewster

  • The 6,000 Beards of Athos
    Well, here’s a sad state of affairs for a book review. The only rea­son to write about this book at all is to let Ortho­dox read­ers know not to get it.

    I’m sorry to have to say that. “6,000 Beards” is the detailed mem­oir of an Eng­lish writer’s 1935 visit to Mount Athos — the Gre­cian penin­sula that has housed Ortho­dox monas­ter­ies for over a thou­sand years — and it might have given jewel-like glimpses of the life on the “Holy Moun­tain.” But even know­ing that the writer was one of the mod­ernist lib­eral literati called The Blooms­bury Group didn’t pre­pare me for how thor­oughly unmoved an indi­vid­ual could be by the scenery, the rit­u­als, the life or the art of the inhab­i­tants. He seems to have made the jour­ney out of a lit­tle old-fashioned post-Victorian sense of want­ing to look at the funny unen­light­ened peo­ple. In ret­ro­spect, it’s telling that he referred to the monks in the book’s title not as monks or even men but as beards. His aloof­ness bor­ders on con­tempt, and noth­ing seems to have made any impres­sion on him at all.

    Well, almost noth­ing. There is one notable excep­tion, and it’s almost worth the gray­ness of this book to get to it. And it’s inter­est­ing to me that the clamor of Russ­ian bells and fes­tal music got through Brewster’s hau­teur where sights and words and incense couldn’t penetrate:

    As I approached the cen­tral build­ing, the sound of the bells became more and more ter­rific. I joined the throng pass­ing the arch­way and crossed the inner court. … Look­ing up, I could see in the twi­light the biggest bell in the bel­fry slowly mov­ing up and down. It seemed that I had never seen a bell so immense. The sound was over­whelm­ing, like a tem­pest, and the tone of the great bell so deep, so unearthly, so dif­fer­ent to any­thing I have ever heard that I felt myself trans­ported to another world. …

    It was no longer Greece. The power of the Empire of all the Rus­sians seemed to be expressed in this tor­rent of bar­baric sound. Here the fallen Empire still lived. My feel­ings had never been stirred in such a way, except per­haps by the Coro­na­tion scene in Boris Godounov. …

    Sud­denly the storm stopped. The still­ness was almost sin­is­ter. Only the deep unearthly sound of the great bell went on rever­ber­at­ing for sev­eral min­utes in the black silence. Night had come. Hun­dreds of monks, like phan­toms in the dark­ness, kept clink­ing up the stairs. I mounted with them. …

    The choir was now vis­i­ble. … A series of old Russ­ian songs for four voices were sung. They were very beau­ti­ful and very sad. I have rarely heard such sad music. It was, how­ever, extremely impres­sive to hear such fine singing, as in all the other monas­ter­ies on Athos singing in uni­son is enforced, and even that is usu­ally very care­lessly per­formed. It is a mere monot­o­nous sound, tend­ing often to be a cacophany.

    Monot­o­nous cacoph­ony. And with that, he dis­patches the ancient music of Byzan­tine chant into a dust­bin. Just in time, too. For a sec­ond there, it sounds like he was in dan­ger of actu­ally let­ting Ortho­doxy in. Good thing he came up with a put-down to remind him that he was above it all.

    Sorry. I sup­pose now I’m the one giv­ing way to contempt.

    But the biggest rea­son not to get this book (which by the way is out of print now any­way, and hard to come by) is that Brewster’s inter­est in objec­tively and unemo­tion­ally report­ing what he encoun­tered includes a depress­ing num­ber of times that monks car­ried on lewd and flam­boy­ant flir­ta­tions (often appar­ently con­sum­mated) with the author’s guide, an accom­mo­dat­ing young man named Ior­gas. The author is nei­ther lurid nor judg­men­tal and there’s no “Broke­back Moun­tain” scenes (thank the Lord!), but nat­u­rally I was shocked and sad­dened. The book was writ­ten so long ago that I can hold out a lit­tle hope that if Ortho­dox monks had this much in com­mon with Roman Catholic priests, they may have fig­ured out how to deal with it bet­ter by now. And I tell myself that it’s no good read­ing the vol­umes of monas­tic writ­ings about the ter­ri­ble bat­tles that monks fight with temp­ta­tion if you’re never going to under­stand that they’re not just speak­ing figuratively.

    All the same, these sad lessons don’t go far toward ame­lio­rat­ing the piti­ful pic­ture of life on what one of the Greek locals calls “that God-forsaken place,” and so I’m doing my bit by telling oth­ers to give this one a miss.


    No related posts.


    February 20th, 2006 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Fr Joseph Huneycutt 02.20.2006

    Thanks, Grace. One slight cor­rec­tion: “Russ­ian songs for four voices” is not the same as Byzan­tine chant. FWIW.

  • Grace

    No, I know. Brew­ster obvi­ously loves the Russ­ian four-part singing which he hasn’t been hear­ing at the other monas­ter­ies on Mt. Athos. (This was at St. Pan­talei­mon, which was the 13th monastery he had vis­ited on the moun­tain, but appar­ently the first Russ­ian one.) But then he ends by com­par­ing the “fine singing” with what he’d been hear­ing at the other monas­ter­ies, which was uni­son and, accord­ing to him, “a mere monot­o­nous sound.” I’m assum­ing that that singing that he’s refer­ring to is Byzan­tine chant, which he doesn’t care for.

    And I know at that point I’m just being testy. Peo­ple are cer­tainly enti­tled to their opin­ion on these things, and for all I know the singing at the other 12 monas­ter­ies was very poor.

  • s-p

    sigh… yes, it is a sad real­iza­tion when we dis­cover that monas­ti­cism is not the cure for what ails the human being. It only inten­si­fies the bat­tle. As CS Lewis (?) said, we never know the full inten­sity of the wind if we lay down when it first begins to blow, nei­ther will we know temp­ta­tion to its fullest if we give in before it reaches its peak. We have no clue the inten­sity of the assaults of the evil one on priests, monks and our broth­ers and sis­ters who are ded­i­cated to the spir­i­tual life. Yes, they fall, but to what degree of temp­ta­tion… per­haps one that we will never know.

  • Grace

    I’d for­got­ten that CS Lewis quote. It does seem very appropriate.

    And I just thought of another one that gives a lit­tle per­spec­tive. I think it might have been St. John Cli­ma­cus, but I’m not sure. Any­way, he said that all the faith­ful are like peo­ple set­ting out to climb a moun­tain, but cer­tain gifted and pious souls are able to climb higher than the rest of us. It’s won­der­ful, but also dan­ger­ous for them, because if we fall, it hurts a lit­tle and we lose a lit­tle progress. But if they fall, they can lose all the ground they’ve made, and do them­selves and oth­ers ter­ri­ble harm.

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required