The Monthly Salon: April

Happy St George's Day

A very happy St George’s Day to all of my English readers - and, indeed, to any readers in Georgia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Malta, Ethiopia, Moscow or Genoa, all of which claim the dragon-slayer as their patron. He’s a well-travelled saint, is George. I don’t think he ever visited any of these countries - he certainly never set foot in England - but perhaps that’s a measure of success. Globalisation isn’t a new phenomenon.

Last year, I wrote a piece here about the ‘English soul’ to mark our saint’s day. You can read that here. The year before that, I wrote an essay arguing that the English should revert to their older patron saint, Edmund the Martyr, who I have long thought would be a better fit for the nation. No offence meant to old George, but then he’s quite busy anyway.

Speaking of souls, English or otherwise: in January I spent a week on Mount Athos, the Orthodox monastic republic in Greece. It was my second visit - I wrote about the first one, in 2022, here, and about this more recent one, and the silence it brought me, here. This time around, I visited Lakkoskiti, a remote Romanian skete (a skete is a kind of mini-monastery) nestled beneath the peaks of the peninsula’s Holy Mountain, high up in the winter forest:

I thought I’d have a remote and silent retreat, but as I wrote back in 2022, Athos is (alas) all wired up now, and one of the monks there, Father Theologos, turned out to know who I was. The Athonite monks these days are an intriguing bunch. Back in the days of St Porphyrios, my favourite modern saint, monks on Athos were more commonly drawn from peasant communities in pre-war Europe. Porphyrios himself only spent one year at school when he arrived on Athos, aged twelve, and had to teach himself to read the Gospels.

These days, Athos is in a different place, as is the world. The monastic community declined so fast during the 1980s that it was assumed by many that the Holy Mountain itself would just fade from history. Monasteries began to empty and crumble, and the world seemed to be moving on. Then, one of those things happened that seems so common in Christian history: just as everything seems lost, there is a renewal. It reminds me of something Hilaire Belloc once wrote: ‘the Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerors.’

After the fall of communism, Athos began filling up with young men, and many of them were highly educated. This continues today. An Athonite monk in the 2020s is less likely to be from peasant stock and more likely to have a PhD in something. These people know what ‘the world’ is, and in many cases have lived in it before leaving for another life entirely. I say this to explain how I ended up being interviewed on film by Father Theologos, below the slopes of the Holy Mountain, about the Machine, the state of the West and the modern world, and the mystery and challenge of the Orthodox faith. Fr Theologos worked in Silicon Valley before deciding to change his life, so he knows what the score is.

I didn’t expect to be talking about this on film in between liturgies, vigils and silent walks in the forest, but life is full of surprises, and some of us don’t seem to be able to escape our destiny at the moment, however far we run. You can watch the interview above, or on my YouTube channel.

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I seem to have got distracted. This is the Monthly Salon, and you’re supposed to be talking, not me. So please fire away, my dear reader: talk about anything you like here, and let’s see what’s on the collective mind of the Abbey’s denizens this spring.

Christ is risen!