The Mountain of Silence

After training as a sociologist and arriving in the US, Kyriacos held a standard academic agnostic view, looking down on traditionally religious people from this superficially sophisticated perspective. His turning point came when a colleague introduced him to many mystical writings, both East and West, along with the practice of transcendental meditation. He subsequently came to see his prior materialist position as a superstition, and subsequently met a remarkable healer and mystic called Daskalos on a field trip to his native Cyprus. This encounter enabled him to realise that there are trans-rational states of consciousness, and he wrote three books about Daskalos, which I read in the 1990s. Interestingly, like myself, he was also influenced by the writings of Pitirim Sorokin, the first professor of sociology at Harvard. This book continues his journey as a return to his roots through a different, experiential Christianity featuring the charismatic Father Maximos..

The Holy Elders he encountered through Father Maximos led to the realisation that these saints on Mount Athos were living witnesses of the reality of God and other spiritual presences. Through systematic spiritual practices, monks can open up to the grace of the Holy Spirit and perform miracles, many of which are reported here. Such occurrences were also common in the lives of Daskalos and Peter Deunov. The existence of deeper realms of reality is a critical ontological and epistemological point, the basis of which is acceptance and belief in the reality of God (p. 158). Then one can see that the Elders and Saints are scientists of spiritual reality, which is in fact at the centre of human existence. Our alienation and disconnection from the Centre, the inner Christ, is the real source of our contemporary malaise, also characterised as a series of illnesses of the heart: ignorance, forgetfulness, hardness, blindness, improvidence and contamination – all of which leads to a fragmentation of attention.

In January, I revisited the work of the great Russian mystical philosopher, Nikola Berdyaev, who drew an important distinction between the philosophical mysticism of Eastern Orthodoxy and the rational theology developed in the West. The former is experiential, and the latter mental. I am also reading the classic anthology, The Art of Prayer, with many citations from Theophan the Recluse stressing the importance of remembrance of God and especially the practice of the Jesus Prayer (Efche), an absolutely essential feature of the Orthodox approach that brings the mind into the heart in constant remembrance of the Divine. The Ecclesia is understood as a vehicle of progressive Divinisation, Christification and Theosis, representing a path trodden by generations of monks 'baptised into the fire of holiness.' Their wills become completely aligned with the Divine Will and the Holy Spirit in total humility, hence their capacity to experience the Uncreated Light that they emanate as love. Fr Maximos insists on the experienced existent reality of deceased Saints, angels and demons, and on the power of the cross.

All humans are subject to what Fr Maximos calls logismoi as thought forms and elementals that come into our inner space. He characterises the various stages of assault, interaction, consent, captivity, and obsession. He also gives strategies on how to deal with these in terms of indifference, shifting focus, prayer, reading the lives of the Saints, and confession. There are some extraordinary stories of devotion and transformation: an alcoholic priest was defrocked by his bishop, who then had a vision of hundreds of deceased people clamouring for his return. Upon inquiry with the priest, he told the bishop that in order to make up for his failings with respect to alcohol, he used to go and say prayers in the cemetery for the deceased… another elder was insulted by his spiritual guide for 40 years, and when the latter died and found himself in hell, Fr Ephraim prayed devotedly for his release – a superhuman achievement of selfless love. In an extraordinary formulation with respect to the nature of hell (p. 159), Fr Maximos explains that it is a state of being cut off from God: 'hell is the experience of God, not as light and eternal grace but as eternal fire instead. God, however, is not eternal fire. It is human beings who create the distortions, not God. It is therefore the souls of human beings that need to be healed so that they may be able to have the vision of God as light and not as fire that torments.'

The book is replete with spiritual wisdom and insights, illustrated with many stories and experiences from Fr Maximos himself. He explains that the Beatitudes are beyond human morality, how the trials of life can be regarded as opportunities for growth, how humiliation can lead to humility and emptiness (kenosis), how the elders through love take on the suffering of others, and how through energy and force of ceaseless prayer it is possible to recover our primordial state and achieve union with God. The final chapters clarify the differences of approach between Eastern and Western Christianity: the way of the monks of Mount Athos is the way of quietude, hesychasm, where the goal is direct experience of the Uncreated Light and Theosis. Kyriacos explains the 14th century debate between Barlaam and Gregory Palamas, where the former regarded the experience of the Uncreated Light as the product of distorted imaginations – the secular position today. However, the key point is that Theosis has been and is attainable, and in our era 'we need to re-integrate the rational with the intuitive, the scientific with the mystical' – neatly defining the role of the Network. This deeply inspiring book will open you up to the mystical path of Mount Athos and the further reaches of human potential and capacities.