5.

 What has been the chief center of Orthodox monasticism since the tenth century?

            Mount Athos, also known as the Holy Mountain, became the major ascetic center of the Byzantine Empire. Preserving the highest ideals of Christian ascetic life as expounded by the Holy Fathers, this monastic community played a decisive role in the ecclesiastical affairs of the late Byzantine period, and especially during the hesychast controversy of the fourteenth century. A rocky, mountainous peninsula in northern Greece, it juts into the Aegean Sea and culminates at its tip in a peak 6,670 feet in elevation. The peninsula consists entirely of monastic settlements, some twenty of them, and a large number of smaller houses and hermits' cells. To this day on Mount Athos, there are ascetics who keep vigil in prayer all night, who live in caves in extreme poverty and totally unseen by men, and those who dwell in the open air with just one garment and no shoes.

            The textbook states that Mount Athos has experienced a new “springtime,” or a new lease on life, because of the large number of young and well-educated monks it has gained in recent decades. However, not all is in order there. Up until 1992, there was a group of monks of the Russian Church in Exile who would not commemorate the Ecumenical Patriarch because of his faith-compromising ecumenism. In May of that year, those monks were forcibly and illegally expelled from Mount Athos.

            Not long before their expulsion, a fire raged out of control for several days. Despite their best efforts, monks and firefighters were unable to control it, and litanies and supplications were of no avail either as they had been in the past under similar circumstances. Although there was rain everywhere on the peninsula at the time, there was none over the fire itself.

            Among the older monks were those who saw the fire as a forewarning of worse calamities in the future. Some viewed the fire as chastisement for the capitulation of certain Athonite Fathers to the ecumenical policies of Patriarch Bartholomew I, a large number of whom attended his enthronement as Ecumenical Patriarch in 1991.

            In recent times, the abbots of the major monasteries on Mount Athos have largely capitulated to the threats of Constantinople against any protests directed at that Patriarchate's betrayal of Orthodoxy through the heresy of ecumenism. Mount Athos is therefore experiencing anything but a “springtime.”