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The earth is behind us. Prostrate in the guest-room at Iviron, we lie upon another plane of existence, back in that mysterious, immaterial regnum from which the mind cast loose with the Renaissance. It is a world peopled in physical truth with the bodies ascribed to El Greco's astigmatism; where the ghosts of the departed flit wireless-like among the woods and the marble troughs—sun-spotted, happy ghosts perching on cruciform signposts nailed to trees, shooting out of caves, sentinels on gaunt crags, contained even, in the very aged, within human bounds. How comes it that this fragment of a life which once held sway over all the Greek seaboard endures unaltered since its foundation, the most remarkable testimony to Europe's evolution on the face of a Europeanised globe? Who will say but that this talk of a theocracy at our very door is not some antiquarian figment, sprung from a technicality of word rather than fact? Its continuity must be demonstrable, together with a proof of independent administration in the present. Nor will the sceptic, whose thesis is the exaltation of living, be content with either, till accompanied by a showing of those mystic emotions which call flesh and sense to a profession of their own denial. At the hazard of tedium, let the eye inspect this interim. The rest is the stucco of a day. Here is the concrete.[*]

[* There is no up-to-date bibliography of Athos. The most accessible is that of F. W. Hasluck's Athos and Its Monasteries, compiled in 1912.]

In the earliest Christian times, the Mountain was already, for appearance and security, the chosen of hermits. Legends survive of this period, beginning with that of the visit of the Virgin herself. History opens in the ninth century with the arrival of Peter the Athonite, a substantial person who after fifty years' battling with wild beasts, both of mind and forest, was discovered by a hunter. He was followed by St. Euthymius of Salonica, who, having forsworn the world at the age of eighteen (leaving a daughter, Euphrosyne, to carry on his family), at first moved on all fours and ate grass. He then retired to a cell, whence his companion was driven out by the vermin, but which he only exchanged after three years for a position on a pillar. Soon after, a friend of his named John Colobos founded a monastery at the northern and mainland end of the peninsula, receiving a chrysobul from the Emperor Basil I the Macedonian, which appointed him and his foundation protectors of the Mountain and its hermits, as against the inhabitants of the neighbouring town of Erissos. This document is known to have been dated prior to the year 881. A portion of it was formerly in the library of the monastery of Philotheou, whence it is thought to have been transported to Leningrad. Its importance lies in its constituting the first official recognition of the holy men's title to the proprietorship of land.

But dispute ensued on this very ground: Which holy men? The hermits or the monks? And in so doing symbolised the basic issue of the ecclesiastical problems of the time. Hitherto the profession of monasticism had demanded simply individual retirement and the practice of such ascetics as the spirit moved. The common rule of life initiated by St. Basil in the fourth century, while strengthened in western Europe by the ordinances of St. Benedict, had fallen into desuetude in the East before the Hellenic instinct for private self-assertion. But in the eighth century Theodore of Studium had attempted the reintroduction of a coherent form of communal living among the numerous bodies of hermits within the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Patriarchates. Between the new monastery of Colobou and the solitaries of the southern end and actual peak a controversy now arose that symbolised this deeper issue in the question of the actual proprietorship of the land. It was settled in favour of the hermits in a second chrysobul granted by the Emperor Leo VI the Philosopher, who reigned between 886 and 911. That they were already possessed of a central organisation at this time is proved by the title of First Quietist, attached to the representative whom they sent to Constantinople to conduct their appeal. Henceforth this head of the community was known as the Protos, or First. From him, by bureaucratic descent, springs the Protepistates of to-day. Thus, though there were yet on the Mountain proper no actual monasteries, the middle of the tenth century found it under the legal proprietorship of holy men, and administered by a central authority resident in Caryes. There, in the Synod's archives, the documents of the Byzantine emperors which were to give meaning to Article 62 of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, are still preserved.

But the system of ordered monasticism, as visualised by Theodore, was to triumph in the end. The piety of the brothers Leo and Nicephorus Phocas, prominent functionaries at the Byzantine Court, had been attracted to the Mountain, and the project conceived that their boyhood's friend, Athanasius, should found a community at their expense. In 961, Leo visited Caryes, and financially assisted the enlargement of the Protaton, which was then, as now, the central church of the Athonite community. Two years later Nicephorus became Emperor. Athanasius, having calculated to receive him as a brother, was indignant. But he was persuaded to undertake the foundation which the Emperor not only endowed, but rendered independent of all but imperial control. Thus the seed of autonomous administration was legalised. Following the analogy of the previous century, a rivalry immediately arose between the Lavra—as Athanasius' foundation was called—and the scattered inhabitants of the rest of the Mountain. This was carried in 972 to Constantinople, where the Emperor John I Tzimisces, murderer and successor of Nicephorus, handed it to the judgment of a Studite monk. In accordance with the Studite ideals laid down by Theodore, the position of the monastery was confirmed, its emoluments being increased by the new Emperor. Simultaneously, the powers of the Protos, and the assembly of hermit-leaders that was already holding regular sessions in Caryes, were defined. But with this reinforcement of the Lavra the predominance of loosely scattered groups of cells was doomed. Before Athanasius' death, at the close of the first millennium after Christ—due to the collapse of a dome which he was helping to build—three more monasteries proper were in being. Of the twenty that survive to-day, eight followed in the eleventh century; two in the twelfth; one in the thirteenth; four in the fourteenth; and one in the sixteenth. By the typicon of the Emperor Constantine IX Monomach, issued in 1046, the cells of the hermits were finally subordinated to their present state of dependence on the larger foundations. Hence the term "Ruling Monasteries."

From now till the sack of Constantinople by the Latin Crusaders in 1204, the history of the Mountain is illumined by a single incident. Towards the end of the eleventh century, Vlach shepherds, who had obtained leave to supply the monks with milk and wool, were discovered to be purveying their wives and daughters in addition. Uproar followed; the Patriarch's signature was forged to restore discipline; and half the monks deserted their monasteries in company with the shepherds. The stricter fathers then demanded the suppression of the beardless, as well as the female element. And, to preserve the Mountain from total desertion, the Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, asking if he were Herod that he should murder children, stifled the enthusiasm of the reformers by threatening to cut off their noses. Then came the sudden tragedy that wrecked the complicated and magnificent civilisation of the mediaeval Greeks. In the division of their empire that followed the Latin conquest, Athos fell, with the "Kingdom of Thessalonica," to Boniface of Montferrat. It was placed by Benedict, papal legate to that transient conceit, within the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Sebaste, who built himself a castle on the promontory as a base for systematic plunder. But, in deference to the representations of the Latin Emperor, Henry of Flanders, Pope Innocent III restored the ancient status of dependence on none but the head of the state, accompanying his edict by sententious comments on the Mountain's arid soil but spiritual fecundity. Such the position remained till the recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks in 1261.

The following century witnessed the partial subversion of the old rule of Athanasius enjoining upon the monks a community of property, in favour of one under which private wealth was permitted. The difference has since become known as that between the cenobitic and the idiorhythmic way of life. The chief implication of the latter is that the occupants of a monastery, being some rich and others poor, necessarily lose their footing of equality. But that wealth must necessarily offer more scope for useful activity to the intelligent is in this context often forgotten. To contemporaries, in whose eyes monachism was not designed for useful activity, the idiorhythmic system gave offence. In 1394 a strong protest was despatched from the Patriarch Nicias against the possession of property, the maintenance of private kitchens, and protracted absences in the outer world. At this time also were regulated the contributions due from each monastery to the upkeep of the machinery of government in Caryes and the central church of the Protaton. Ten years later, however, the new mode of life was finally and categorically condoned in a chrysobul of the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, that enterprising monarch who travelled in the West and spent Christmas at Eltham with Henry IV. In return for this concession, the Emperor rewarded himself with the revenues of the monastic estates. In 1430 the Turks took Salonica; and the monks, by hurried submission, were able to retain their autonomy intact. Eight years later, representatives of the Mountain were found at the Council of Florence in active opposition to the proposed union of the Greek and Latin Churches. Constantinople fell in 1453. And, with the extinction of the Byzantine autocrats, Athos was placed, like the rest of their unhappy world, within the temporal jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch, who was, in his turn, responsible to the Sultan for the government of all the Greeks within the Ottoman dominions. Thus the community remained, its administrative independence unimpaired, till November 2nd, 1912.

From the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century there is little to record. In 1574 the Patriarch Jeremiah sought to remedy the financial plight of the monasteries by calling upon the Constantinople Trade Union of Furriers to audit their accounts. It was now that the number of ruling houses was fixed at twenty. In the seventeenth century a Turkish governor, corresponding to a French sous-préfet, made appearance as adviser to the monastic authorities. In the eighteenth came the great revival of wealth and letters throughout the Greek world that led to the Revolution. This was preceded in 1783 by the typicon of the Patriarch Gabriel, defining the powers of the Epistasia, the executive committee of four, as opposed to those of the whole deliberative assembly. But the nineteenth century had not entered its second quarter before the Mountain was subjected to ruinous penalties by the abortive rising of 2,000 monks in sympathy with their compatriots on the mainland. Legend has it that a cross of light appeared on the summit, bearing, as to Constantine 1,500 years before, the words: "by this conquer." A crushing indemnity was extracted by the Turks; a garrison of 3,000 soldiers quartered in the monasteries; and the community reduced to such straits that, of the seven thousands of monks formerly in residence, only one remained. Gradually, however, the financial position improved. Though it received a blow in 1861, when the Rumanian Government, at their wits' end to infuse life into a still-born state, confiscated lands of the Athonite monasteries worth £120,000 a year. This action, though legally indefensible, did not lack the precedent of the Greek Government itself, which had pursued a similar policy under Count Capo d'Istria in 1834. But on that occasion so much of Greece was still Turkey that the Athonite monasteries suffered comparatively little, their estates being mainly in the north. Then, in 1878, the Holy Mountain entered on a new stage of its history, when, for the first time, its autonomy was recognised by international treaty at Berlin.

The latter vicissitudes of Athos, and their ultimate and satisfactory conclusion, have been so interwoven with the Mediterranean policy of Tsarist Russia that their tale is reserved for Chapter XI. After the Great War, which closed for Greece in catastrophe, the Hellenic Government, faced with the problem of supporting a million and a half destitute refugees, confiscated all the landed property in the kingdom. With the rest of the proprietors, among them British subjects, the Athonite monasteries suffered. But the extent of the measure hangs in the balance, reasonable compensation having been promised by the Greek Government in 1926—though not yet paid. At length in 1927, the constitution of the Mountain, based on nine centuries of precedent, obtained the ratification of the Hellenic sovereignty. It is possible, therefore, to give an account of the Mountain's administrative machinery which bears the stamp of finality.

The rule, or, more exactly, precept, of life enjoined by Athanasius in 969, and adopted by subsequent foundations on the Mountain, was not original, sixteen of the clauses being identical with those laid down by Theodore, Abbot of St. John of Studium in Constantinople in the first years of the ninth century. Theodore's ideal was tinged with the Latin concept of usefulness. Under his aegis, it is thought, was systematised the cursive handwriting which supplanted uncial, and which had, proportionately as far-reaching an effect on the distribution of books as the invention of printing. Hence it was that the practice of calligraphy and painting was early pressed upon the Athonite monks. The prohibition of slaves, of private property, of grand clothes and elaborate food, of cafés and houses of ill-fame, was common to both. The two latter indicate the enormous size to which, even within the crowded precincts of the capital, the monastic foundations of the time were apt to swell. In the paragraphs dealing with slavery, there is nothing of humanitarianism. A superfluity of domestics was deprecated solely as a luxury.

It is interesting, also, to note that as early as Theodore there was prescribed that absolute exclusion of the female sex which, surviving in the twentieth century, has afforded the Mountain its greatest publicity. "Have no animal," Theodore wrote, and Athanasius echoed in less explanatory terms, "of the female sex in domestic use, seeing that you have renounced the female sex altogether, whether in house or field, since none of the holy fathers had such, nor does nature require them. Be not driven by horses or mules without necessity, but go on foot, in imitation of Christ. But, if there is need, let your beasts be the foal of an ass." Hard words—to deliver the fathers and their friends to the mule for ever. But Theodore scarcely foresaw, nor Athanasius after him, that they would be applied with the preposterous inconsequence of later Byzantine Christianity, to a fertile 120 square miles. By the middle of the eleventh century complaint was already launched against the herds of cows on the Mountain; on the ground, mainly, that Caryes threatened to develop into a commercial centre. Regulations were therefore established for a weekly market only.

Tradition assigns the female rule to another source. The Empress Pulcheria, it is said, having founded the monastery of Vatopedi, was summarily bidden remove herself by the Virgin, jealous, after the fleshly manner of Greek deities, of this encroachment on her preserve. It is on record that Stephen Dushan, King of Serbia, brought his Queen on a pilgrimage to Athos. But the rule was scrupulously observed by the Turkish governor of later days, whose harem remained forlornly in Constantinople till the two years' tenure of his office were over. It remained for an Englishwoman, Lady Stratford de Redcliffe, to achieve the first historical infringement. As an official of the Constantinople embassy wrote later, she ought to have known better.

With the coming of the idiorhythmic system and private property, the path to God of unadulterated mysticism was complicated by works and ethics. And it was the idiorhythmic monasteries that contributed to the intellectual revival—the founding of a school and printing-press—which marked the eighteenth century. To-day, from the point of view of cleanliness and order they are often the better managed, and have been, when their resources allowed, the most active in works of assistance. Iviron, beneath whose roof we lay, maintained until the end of the nineteenth century, when it ceased to be necessary, a hospital for lepers. And it was this monastery which, in 1880, presented the Patriarchate with the large and valuable site of the enormous red-brick Greek school which dominates the more crowded quarter of Stamboul. To the building itself another Athonite monastery, Vatopedi, contributed £3,636.

In the fourteenth century the change was marked by the abolition of the office of abbot in favour of two trustees, known as epitropoi, aided by a council of elders. Even in those monasteries that retained the older cenobitic rule, the power of the abbot was now subject to limitation at the hands of a similar body; although, in matters spiritual, it was emphasised. These conditions prevail to-day. The tenure of the abbot is for life. His advisory council is chosen in some monasteries by himself, in others by the fathers in corporate session. In the idiorhythmic houses, the monks are divided into two grades, and it is only from the higher that the elders are elected. These frequently maintain in their cells pupils whom they train to step into their shoes when they die. But in each monastery the system varies.

The outstanding distinction, however, between the cenobitic and the idiorhythmic lies in their methods of finance. In the former, before the confiscations, it was the custom to send monks as overseers, who might ensure the arrival of the revenues from the various farms and plantations owned by the monastery on the mainland. These then found their way into the common purse. In the latter the estates were put up to yearly auction among the elders; and the highest bidders, having paid a lump sum into the treasury, could often, with the aid of cheap Albanian labour, make for themselves 100 per cent profit on their outlay. The younger monks of these foundations and those of the lower grade, receive a small payment for their services toward the upkeep of the monastery, and are given wine, two pounds of bread weekly, and occasional vegetables. Clothes, books, and extra food they must buy themselves. It is plain that the system, though pleasant in prosperity, is not adapted to communal economy. And in times of stress it has always happened that many of the idiorhythmic monasteries have been obliged to reconstitute themselves cenobitic. The position is exemplified at present by the monastery of Stavronikita, which, although it formally announced in 1926 that it intended to close down, contains instead of one kitchen, fifteen, and as many comparatively wealthy elders.

The generosity of the Greek Government, however, allows the Athonite community privileges which to some extent ameliorate a financial condition by no means desperate, though unsatisfactory in comparison with the prosperity of the years before the war. The monasteries are exempt from death-duties. And all exports and imports are free of duty. The latter alone are calculated at seventy million drachmas annually—approximately £194,500—the customary taxes on which must necessarily deprive the budget of a country containing scarcely seven million inhabitants of an important sum. On the exports from their estates on the Mountain, together with the income from previous investments, the monasteries are now dependent. To quote two random figures: In 1925, 268 tons of nuts were exported, in addition to wine, oil, wood, and charcoal. And it is calculated that the Lavra alone derives an annual revenue of £2,750 from its forests. Scientific planting is considered superfluous. In light of which, it may be noted that an Austrian expert, on a recent tour of inspection, expressed the opinion that the afforestation was as good as any in Europe. The total yearly expenditure of any single monastery is hard to gauge. That of Iviron was assessed, before the war, at between £6,000 and £7,000. But it is now, as the epitropos was at pains to inform us next morning, considerably less. The Russian Monastery computes to-day that containing as it does, 600 monks, £13,700 is the minimum to which annual expenditure can be reduced.

Leaving aside the somewhat complicated regulations which bind the smaller communities of cells known as skitai and kellia to the Ruling Monasteries, there remains to give some account of the central administration at Caryes, the origins of which, as has been shown, date back to pre-Athanasian times. On May 10th, 1924, the Holy Synod of the Mountain, following an extraordinary session, submitted to the Greek Foreign Office—the department is significant—a final draft of the Athonite constitution, as it has come down to them. This has now received the ratification of the Hellenic state, and is incorporated in the letter of the Hellenic constitution. The following most important sections may serve to illustrate the fundamentals of the cratic government in our time:

None but the twenty Ruling Monasteries may possess property on the Mountain. No increase in the number nor change in the status of the monasteries is permitted. All who embrace the monastic profession on the Mountain are deemed Greek subjects.

These clauses have relation to the three foreign monasteries, Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian. But their full import will only be understood after reading Chapter XI.

Justice is dispensed by the authorities of the monasteries, save in penal cases, which are referred to the civil courts in Salonica. The representative of the Greek state on Athos must uphold the orders of the Holy Synod, provided these accord with the present constitution. Every decision of the Synod that does not run counter to the constitution is obligatory on the monasteries. The administration of the properties of the monasteries is consigned to the fraternity of each individual one.

The actual government of the Mountain, which has functioned uninterrupted over a longer course of years than any in existence, is divided, like others, into the legislature, or Holy Synod, and the executive, or Holy Epistasia. With the latter we were already acquainted.

The Holy Synod numbers twenty members, each monastery sending a representative on the 1st of January to sit for twelve months. These reside in the different konakia maintained by the monasteries in Caryes, one of which, it will be recalled, had been the scene of our visit to Evlogios. It is responsible for the security of the monasteries and the maintenance of order; has the right to investigate all who disembark on the Mountain; and to expel those whom it considers undesirable. In the event of a criminal act, the civil authority cannot intervene without its consent. It must sanction the election of, and invest with office, all abbots and epitropoi. Finally, its interference in the domestic affairs of a monastery, though irresistible when invoked, is permitted only in the most exceptional cases.

The decisions of the Synod are enforced by the Epistasia, the origin of which is to be found in the chrysobul of Constantine IX Monomach, dating from 1046. Its full organisation was completed in 1779, during the term of Patriarch Paisios. The twenty Ruling Monasteries are divided into five groups of four. These groups are chosen in annual rotation, each of the monasteries which they contain sending a deputy chosen for his "experience, education, and powers of oratory." Save in the case of the Protepistates, he may, if it is desired, represent his monastery on the Synod in addition. These four possess the four quarters of the composite seal of the community, with which they must impress all the correspondence of the Synod. Their chairman is the Protepistates, who is the chief monk of the community, but can only be a member of the leading monastery of each group. They enjoy also a kind of mayoral dignity, being responsible for the cleanliness and lighting of the Caryes streets. They possess a general medical authority, regulate food prices, forbid the opening of shops during vespers, or on Sundays and official holidays, and cast a stern eye upon the preparation of non-ascetic foods on Wednesdays, Fridays, and other fast days. They must maintain a proper decorum, suppressing all songs, plays, barrel-organs, smoking, improprieties, and drunkenness. Nor, as we were later to discover, are these duties a sinecure. In case of need, the Epistasia acts through the Synod Guard, employing in the last resort, the state police, of whom there is a small resident force commanded by one bored officer. These latter possess a tiny prison in Caryes, tenanted from time to time by holy smugglers.

There exist on the promontory some 5,000 monks. This figure may be compared with those available at previous dates. By 1489, the monasteries alone, exclusive of dependent cells, contained 2,246. This, at the end of the seventeenth century, had increased to approximately 4,000. Following the Revolution, there remained but 1,450. In 1849 there were 3,000; in 1903, 3,260; though the whole monastic population of the Mountain, including those outside the monasteries, by then numbered 7,432. In 1913 the total within the monasteries rose to 3,742; while, including those without, it fell to 6,345. To-day, at 5,000 all told, the depletion is due mainly to the Russians, who have decreased since the war by over 1,000. The variations of the figures of the Lavra will testify to the vicissitudes of an individual monastery. Starting under Athanasius with eighty, it was immediately increased, upon the fresh endowment of the Emperor John I Tzimisces, to 120. In 1046 it held 700; in 1489, 300; while in 1677 and 1678 there appears a discrepancy between 600 and 450. With the Revolution the inmates sunk to 60. In 1903 they rose to 165. And they have now returned to their original quota, in the neighbourhood of 100. Novices are recruited by the Mountain as a whole at the rate of from 100 to 150 a year, exclusive of 40 or 50 Russians.

It will be seen from these statistics that the Mountain is no mere coccyx on the body politic of Europe, but an organism in which the germs of life are as vigorous as when first implanted. And it may be enquired, Of what nature is the attraction offered by the cloister to the man of the twentieth century? The cynic, the materialist, and he who boasts his common sense, will reply: Indolence and shelter. Nor will they be wholly at fault. But their perception is not acute. Institutions are not borne flourishing through a thousand years on such ideals alone.

In the composition of man there is body, there is reason; so with the animals. And there is something further, which the animals do not share. This, the essence of all true satisfaction, takes the form of a quest. In some its impulse is negligible. In others it dictates the whole course of existence. Of the latter there are, in the main, two sorts. There are the humanists, who hold to the fullness of living, whose faith rests implicit in the virtue of the earth to set the seal to their desires. For them their Absolute is inseparable from that alliance of the physical and transcendental which the language terms Beauty. And, secondly, there are those for whom no physical interpretation, no channel other than the direct, can suffice. These are the religious whose goal takes form in God. The borderline between the two is ill-defined. But they constitute, none the less, cardinal classifications of human temperament.

It is clear that for the first, the humanists, religion will frequently mean nothing; and that in no circumstance will it conjure in them the fundament of emotion that it does in the second. But it is the tragedy of contemporary transition that for the second, the instinctively religious aimed towards an Absolute external to the earth, there exists, in many cases, no religion adequate to the direction of their imaginings. Thus it happens that in both—in the inspired of earth and likewise of heaven—there has arisen no mere negative distaste for Christianity, but an active detestation. This is born, for the humanist, of the belief that religion of any kind degrades man by directing himself from himself; for the religious, of the canting phrase and withered fable, beneath which, as memory tells him, the emotions of childhood were stifled and unpicked.

To approach those humorous and kindly men, the monks of Mount Athos, in a temper of psychological understanding, it is necessary to forswear, if only temporarily, the sting of these prejudices. Let the humanist realise, atheist though he be, that the religious seeks, after all, only the same as himself by other roads. And let the religious who is agnostic visualise to himself another Christianity, far different from that which has been extended and distorted through four centuries of uncongenial logic; a Christianity not yet moulded by Latin materialism to the convenience of an institution; not wrung by civil wars, combed with the burrowings of sectarians, and balanced between the parties of the state like a boulder on a needle; but a single path of exploration, unclouded by doubtful ethics and hieratic blackmail, toward the eternal El Dorado. Such was the Christianity that conquered, and such, on the Holy Mountain, it has remained.

This inflexibility of approach, passion "to be one with the nature of God," takes, in its most intense manifestations, the form of mysticism. And on Athos it is the mystic that has left his imprint, has invested the very air with his outgivings. For him, to pure contemplation is added a coadjutor, such as the humanists find in beauty: "Refusing to be deluded by the pleasures of the sense world, he accepts instead of avoiding pain, and becomes an ascetic; a puzzling type for the convinced naturalist, who, falling back upon contempt—that favourite resource of frustrated reason—can only regard him as diseased."[*] To some the virtue of pain, the divinity of human suffering, is apparent, to others not. But analogy may be pointed in the opposite sphere; for few will deny that the world's greatest artists have been those that have experienced it.

[* Evelyn Underhill: Mysticism.]

In the mystic, all the senses are fused in the impetus of one inconceivable voyage. "I heard flowers that sounded, and saw notes that shone"—a literal testimony of the past (eighteenth century), and an epitome, for all the reader knew, of the trend of modern science. It is the forces of the mystics with which the visitor to Athos, unwittingly perhaps, finds himself in contact. Only once has the Mountain, in this respect, attracted the attention of contemporaries. In the fourteenth century, the Hezychasts, as they were called, claimed to envision, through perpetual contemplation, the light of the Transfiguration. This appeared owing to the accident of their sitting with heads bowed, in their navels, a fact which has brought them the contempt of posterity. In the controversy that followed they were championed by Nicolas Cabasilas, Archbishop of Salonica, a sincere literary exponent of the maligned phenomena which reason was already discrediting. And it so happens that there survives in the church of the Protaton in Caryes a contemporary portrait of this—almost the only mystic of the later Byzantine Church whose name has descended to history. In this face, painted as though by a French impressionist, the mute history of the Mountain may be read through a thousand years.