It was a huge volume, as heavy as a crate of wine, and I staggered over to a reading desk with it, while Christophoros followed with the lamp.
'Forgive me,' he said, as I lowered the volume gently onto the desk, 'but are you Orthodox or heretic?'
I considered for a second before answering. A Catholic friend who had visited Athos a few years previously had warned me above all never to admit to being a Catholic; he had made this mistake, and said that had he admitted to suffering from leprosy or tertiary syphilis he could not have been more resolutely shunned than he had been after that. He told me that in my case it was particularly important not to raise the monks' suspicions, as they have learned to distrust, above all their visitors, those who ask to see their manuscripts. They have long memories on Athos, and if the monks have never forgiven the Papacy for authorising the ransacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade over eight hundred years ago, they have certainly not forgotten the nineteenth-century bibliophiles who decimated the libraries of Athos only a century ago.
The English traveller the Hon. Robert Curzon is still considered one of the worst offenders: after a quick circuit around the monastic libraries of Athos in the late
1840s
(in the company, I am ashamed to say, of my great-great-uncle), Curzon left the Holy Mountain with his trunks bulging with illuminated manuscripts and Byzantine
chrysobuls;
in his travel book
Visits to Monasteries in the Levant
he writes of buying the priceless manuscripts from the Abbot by weight, as if they were figs or pomegranates in an Ottoman market. Worse still is the memory of the German bibliophile Herman Tischendorff. Some twenty years after Curzon's trip to Athos, Tischendorff left the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St Catherine's in Sinai with the
Codex Sinaiaticus -
still the earliest existing copy of the New Testament - tucked into his camel bags. Tischendorff later claimed that he found the various leaves of the manuscript in a basket of firewood, and that he had saved it from the monks, who were intent on burning it to keep them warm in winter. The monks, however, maintain to this day that Tischendorff got the librarian drunk and discreetly swapped the priceless manuscript - which, like Curzon's plunder, duly found its way into the British Library - for a bottle of good German schnapps.
Noticing my silence, Christophoros asked again: What was I, Orthodox or heretic?
'I'm a Catholic,' I replied.
'My God,' said the monk. 'I'm so sorry.' He shook his head in solicitude. 'To be honest with you,' he said, 'the Abbot never gives permission for non-Orthodox to look at our holy books. Particularly Catholics. The Abbot thinks the present Pope is the Antichrist and that his mother is the Whore of Babylon. He says that they are now bringing about the Last Days spoken of by St John in the Book of Revelation.'
Christophoros murmured a prayer. 'Please,' he said, 'don't ever tell anyone in the monastery that you're a heretic. If the Abbot ever found out, I'd be made to perform a thousand prostrations.'
'I won't tell a soul.'
Christophoros relaxed slightly, and took off his glasses to polish them on the front of his habit. 'You know, we actually had another Catholic in the monastery earlier this year?' he said.
'Who was that?' I asked.
'He was a choirmaster from Bavaria,' said Christophorus. 'He had a beautiful voice.'
I eased the book up onto a reading stand, and began to unbutton its canvas cover.
'He said our church had wonderful acoustics,' continued Christophoros, arranging the lamps on the desk. 'So he asked Fr. Yacovos if he could sing a
Gloria
inside the
katholikon,
under the dome.'
'What did Fr. Yacovos say?'
'He said that he didn't think he could let a heretic pray
inside
the church. But just this once he said he would let him sing a little
alleluia
in the porch.'
I had now got the protective canvas off, and the beautifully worked leather binding gleamed golden in the light of the lantern.
I opened the cover. Inside, the text was written in purple ink on the finest vellum - strong, supple and waxy, but so thin as to be virtually translucent. The calligraphy was a beautifully clear and cursive form of early medieval Georgian. According to the library's detailed catalogue, the volume had bound together a number of different early Byzantine devotional texts. The first folio I opened was apparently a shrill sermon by St Jerome, denouncing what he considered the thoroughly pagan practice of taking baths: 'He who has bathed in Christ,' fumed the saint, 'does not need a second bath.'
Only towards the end, on folio
287
verso, did I come to the opening lines of the text I had come so far to see. Its author was the great Byzantine traveller-monk John Moschos, and the book had been compiled at the end of his life as he prepared for death in a monastery in Constantinople,
1,300
years ago.
'In my opinion, the meadows in Spring present a particularly delightful prospect,'
he wrote.
'One part of this meadow blushes with roses; in other places lilies predominate; in another violets blaze out, resembling the Imperial purple. Think of this present work in the same way, Sophronius, my sacred and faithful child. For from among the holy men, monks and hermits of the Empire, I have plucked the finest flowers of the unmown meadow and worked them into a crown which I now offer to you, most faithful child; and through you to the world at large
Turning up the lamp, I opened a fresh page.
In the spring of the year
578
a
.
d
., had you been sitting on a bluff of rock overlooking Bethlehem, you might have been able to see two figures setting off, staves in hand, from the gates of the great desert monastery of St Theodosius. The two - an old grey-bearded monk accompanied by an upright, perhaps slightly stern, and certainly much younger companion - would have headed off south-west through the wastes of Judaea, towards the fabulously rich port-metropolis of Alexandria.
It was the start of an extraordinary journey that would take John Moschos and his pupil, Sophronius the Sophist, in an arc across the entire Eastern Byzantine world. Their aim was to collect the wisdom of the desert fathers, the sages and mystics of the Byzantine East, before their fragile world - already clearly in advanced decay - finally shattered and disappeared. The result was the volume in front of me now. If today in the West it is a fairly obscure text, a thousand years ago it was renowned as one of the most popular books in all the great literature of Byzantium.
Byzantine caravanserais were rough places, and the provincial Greek aristocracy did not enjoy entertaining: as the Byzantine writer Cecaumenus put it, 'Houseparties are a mistake, for guests merely criticise your housekeeping and attempt to seduce your wife.' So everywhere they went, the two travellers stayed in monasteries, caves and remote hermitages, dining frugally with the monks and ascetics. In each place, Moschos seems to have jotted down accounts that he had heard of the sayings of the fathers, and other anecdotes and miracle stories.
Moschos was taking to an extreme the old Orthodox tradition of the wandering monk. In the West, at least since St Benedict introduced the vow of stability in the early sixth century, monks have tended to be static, immured in their cells: as the saying went, 'A monk out of his cell is like a fish out of water.' But in the Eastern Churches, as in Hinduism and Buddhism, there has always been a tradition of monks being able to wander from guru to guru, from spiritual father to spiritual father, garnering the wisdom and advice of each, just as the Indian
sadhus
still do. Even today, modern Greek Orthodox monks take no vow of stability. If after a period of time in a monastery they decide they want to sit at the feet of another teacher in a different monastery, possibly in a completely different part of Greece (or indeed in Sinai or the Holy Land), then they are free to do so.
The Spiritual Meadow
was a collection of the most memorable sayings, anecdotes and holy stories that Moschos gathered on his travels, and was written as part of a long tradition of such
apophthegmata,
or Sayings of the Fathers. However, Moschos's writings are infinitely more evocative, graphic and humorous than those of any of his rivals or contemporaries, and almost alone of the surviving examples of the genre, they can still be read with genuine pleasure.
For as well as carrying a still potent spiritual message, on another level the book can be enjoyed today simply as a fascinating travel book. Moschos did what the modern travel writer still does: he wandered the world in search of strange stories and remarkable travellers' tales. Indeed his book can legitimately be read as the great masterpiece of Byzantine travel writing. For not only was Moschos a vivid and amusing writer, he also had an extraordinary tale to tell.
Reading between the lines of John Moschos's memoirs, it is clear that he and his friend were travelling in dangerous times. Following the collapse of Justinian's great attempt at reviving the Empire, Byzantium was under assault: from the west by Avars, Slavs, Goths and Lombards; from the east by a crescendo of raids by desert nomads and the legions of Sassanian Persia. The great cities of the East Mediterranean were in fast decay: in Antioch, huts full of refugees were springing up in the middle of the wide Roman avenues which had once buzzed with trade and industry. The great Mediterranean ports - Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Seleucia -were becoming idle; many were reverting to little more than fishing villages.
As the physical world fell into decay, thousands left their families, intent, like Moschos and Sophronius, on becoming monks and hermits in the desert. Yet even in the great monasteries there was no safety: frequently the two travellers arrived at a destination to find that the abbey where they intended to spend the night had been torched by raiders, and the monks massacred or led off in great stumbling caravans to the slave markets of Arabia. It was not a picture of total holocaust: in those isolated areas of the Empire unaffected by the Persian wars, the monastic scriptoria and workshops were hard at work producing some of the most beautiful Byzantine manuscripts, ivories and icons ever designed. But these oases of monastic calm were exceptions. John Moschos's writings make clear the horrifying, almost apocalyptic, nature of the destruction he witnessed around him.
In
614
a.d
. the travellers' own home monastery of St Theodosius was burned to the ground by the marauding Persian army, and all their brethren - hundreds of unarmed monks were put to the sword. Shortly afterwards Jerusalem fell and those who survived the massacre - including the city's Patriarch - were led off as slaves to the Sassanian capital of Ctesiphon. From then on John and Sophronius continued on the road as much refugees as travellers. They took shelter in Alexandria, and when the Persians massed outside the city walls, the pair managed to get onto the last galley out of the beleaguered city.
The following year, the two pilgrims finally reached the shelter of the great walls of Constantinople. There, just before exhaustion brought about his death, Moschos completed his travel memoirs.
The Spiritual Meadow
received an ecstatic reception across the Empire. Within a generation or two it had been translated into Latin, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, and a variety of Slavonic languages; to this day many of its anecdotes are common currency among monks and peasants across the Orthodox world.