Graham Speake is now firmly established as a leading authority on the history and spiritual life of Mount Athos, the famed monastic republic ensconced within northern Greece. Through a number of publications, including his highly regarded Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise (Yale University Press, 2004; 2nd revised edition Denise Harvey [Publisher], 2014), not to mention his leading role in the charitable foundation the Friends of Mount Athos, Graham Speake has become something of an apostle for the Holy Mountain in the contemporary West. But whereas the earlier book focused on the history and spirituality of the mountain itself, this book (a very worthy successor) looks rather at the legacy and impact of Athos outside its own borders—in the author's words, an “external history.” The title deliberately evokes the classic work of the Russian (but also impeccably British) historian Sir Dimitri Obolensky: The Byzantine Commonwealth (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971). In that work, Obolensky took the British Commonwealth as a kind of an analogy for his exploration of Byzantine “soft power”—of sociocultural, intellectual, diplomatic, mercantile, and religious sway exercised well beyond the territorial borders of the empire—in Georgia, Bulgaria, Rus, Serbia, Romania, and elsewhere. While the aptness of the appeal to the British Commonwealth has been questioned, the basic idea of an extraterritorial but profoundly formative Byzantine influence shaping what became the Orthodox Christian world has come to be a widely accepted paradigm within Byzantine and Eastern European studies. By extension, Speake presents in this book something of the web of connections and interactions that have spread out from the Holy Mountain in its thousand years of its existence as a monastic hub. Indeed, Athos can legitimately claim to have become in this period the leading center of Orthodox monasticism. A study of its own “commonwealth” thus has much to say about virtually every corner of global Orthodoxy, both in the heartlands and in the diaspora, from the forests of Siberia to the deserts of Arizona, and from the wilds of the Caucasus to deepest Essex.
The book begins with a potted historical survey of Byzantine monasticism focusing on the Studite pattern that underpins the Athonite coenobitic tradition established by St. Athanasios the Athonite at the Great Lavra in 963. The survey is admirably precise and concise although the opening observation that “Christian monasticism was initially a phenomenon of the desert” does rather skate over the urban or village-based proto-monasticism of the Syriac-speaking world. Speake looks first at the movements of Georgians and Latins to and from the Holy Mountain in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, taking in the foundations of the Benedictine monastery of the Amalfitans and the monastery “of the Georgians” (Iviron). Speake details the ways in which Iviron shaped and inspired monastic foundations in Georgia and gives a fine overview of St. Euthymios the Athonite's extraordinary efforts of translation, rendering into Georgian much of the ascetic literature of the Greek East. Speake goes on to present the Athonite dimension of the monastic histories of Kievan Rus, Serbia, Bulgaria, Russia, and Romania, always taking great care to integrate this dimension within the broader historical context. Along the way, Speake finds time to discuss the Hesychast Controversy and the extraordinary achievement of the sometime Athonite monk and abbot (later Archbishop of Thessalonica) St. Gregory Palamas in defending the ascetic vision and experience of the monks of Mount Athos. In assuring conciliar acceptance of the possibility of the vision of God in this life, Palamas's achievement represents something of a high-water mark of Athonite impact on the dogmatic enterprise of the Orthodox Church. While I have no quibble with the presentation of the controversy nor with the convincing characterization of Palamas as a “truly creative theologian of the first order[,]” it occurs to me that St Gregory might not have appreciated being described as one who “changed the theology of Orthodoxy for all time” given that his own theology is based very much on a paradigm and rhetoric of strict conformity and continuity with patristic and apostolic teaching.
The penultimate chapter details the huge spiritual impact of the Philokalia or Dobrotolubiye, a collection of ascetic texts bearing on the Hesychast tradition of prayer and gathered on the Holy Mountain. Speake also elaborates on the plusses and minuses that have come to Athos with the advent of speedy communication—“the motor boat age.” The closing chapter explores the Athonite Commonwealth as it has extended into the diaspora, notably the seventeen monasteries established in North America in recent decades by Elder Ephrem of Philotheou, all of which are run on strictly Athonite lines. Attention is also given to the thriving monastery dedicated to St. John the Baptist founded in 1959 by Elder Sophrony in what was then a quiet corner of the English county of Essex. The daughter houses of the monastery of Simonopetra in France are also discussed.
There is no doubt that Graham Speake has produced a polished and convincing account of the extraordinary impact that Mount Athos has had on the development of Orthodox monasticism worldwide and indeed on Orthodox spiritual life more generally. The book is elegantly and concisely written and, like its predecessor volume, sumptuously illustrated. One may of course probe the “commonwealth” label a little. While deliberately intended to denote a relatively loose form of association, I wonder if the label does not still run the risk of reifying what is at heart a highly complex and moving web of personal relations, institutional connections, more or less distant inspirations, pilgrimage patterns, literary resources, spiritual pedagogy, and much else. More to the point, is there not a risk of creating a rather Athonocentric model of Orthodox monasticism and spirituality that underplays the many other monastic and spiritual traditions of the Christian East and indeed elides the variety of opinion and practice on the Mountain itself? For all its undeniable heft and reach, Athos has no monopoly on Orthodox monasticism and spiritual practice. Such questions aside (and they are questions rather than criticisms), this is a handsome and important book that tells its story with flair and aplomb. It can certainly be heartily recommended.
