The Appearance of the Theotokos at Dafni in Antioch
This feast goes back to an ancient Syrian tradition in which the Theotokos appeared to Saints Peter and John at a spring of water in the area of Dafni, which is one of the suburbs of Antioch. This happened after the Spirit of the Lord carried the two apostles from Sion, Mother of the Churches, and placed them in the region of the City of God, Antioch.
The Restoration of the Temple of the Three Saints Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael.
We have no details about this feast.
For these two commemorations, Fr. Touma relies on three Syriac manuscripts of Orthodox provenance. According to his view, the Temple of the Three Holy Youths was likely in the region of Antioch, as it is only mentioned immediately following the celebration of the Appearance of the Theotokos in Dafni and seems to have been connected to it in some way.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Forgotten Saints in the Antiochian Heritage
One of the most important recent works on Arabic-speaking Orthodoxy is the book Forgotten Saints in the Antiochian Heritage by Archimandrite Touma (Bitar), abbot of the Monastery of Saint Silouan at Douma (al-Qiddisun al-Mansiyun fi al-Turath al-Antaki, Beirut: Manshurat al-Nur, 1995).
Correction: thanks to some research by 'Flavius Josephus', it turns out that Fr. Michel Najim (who still has a pretty nice website) hasn't translated this book. So, somebody needs to!
The recovery of ‘forgotten saints’ is especially important in the life of the Churches of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria because of their unique histories under Islamic rule and the later domination of their hierarchies by ethnic Greeks. In the case of the Patriarchate of Antioch, many people wrongly assume that Greeks held exclusive control of the patriarchate until the 20th century. However, from relatively shortly after the time of the Muslim conquest of Antioch until the Melkite Schism of 1724, most patriarchs were Arabic speakers or biculturally Greek and Arab. (In future posts I hope to elaborate much more on the medieval history of Arab Orthodoxy…).
However, two historical events led to the tragic loss of much of Antioch’s Arab heritage-- the Crusades and the subsequent rise of the Mamluks in the 12th and 13th centuries and the Greek takeover of the patriarchate in the 18th century. While the Byzantine re-conquest of Antioch and the Syrian coastline as far south as Lattakia in the 10th and 11th centuries led to a revival in Christian learning in both Greek and Arabic, the subsequent conquest of the entire Levant by the Crusaders led to the exile of much of the native Orthodox clergy to Constantinople, increasing the pace of the Constaninopolization of native Antiochian liturgical practice. With the final defeat of the Crusaders at the hands of the Muslim Mamluks, Antioch was sacked and its monasteries (including the Monastery of Saint Simeon, which at one point had the world’s largest church) destroyed. During the period from the 13th century until the 16th century, there is a dramatic drop both in the number of original works written by Orthodox Christians under the Muslim yoke and in the number of manuscripts copied.
Under the Ottomans, things generally improved. While the Patriarch of Constantinople was legally the head (millet bashi) of all Orthodox Christians in the empire, the patriarchs of Antioch maintained a fair degree of autonomy and were able to bolster this with newly-established ties to secular and religious authorities in Wallachia, Moldova, Russia, and even Georgia. The patriarch Macarios ibn al-Za’im (d. 1648), who traveled to all of the aforementioned countries as patriarch, is perhaps the greatest figure of Arabic Orthodox revival in this period. Of his many activities, one that he gave special attention was the copying of old manuscripts, often by his own hand or the hand of his son and archdeacon Paul, and the general revival of the Patriarchate’s heritage, both Arabic and Greek. Of his many works (almost all of which remain only in manuscript!!!), is Saints of our Country (Qiddisun min Biladina), which records the lives of saints of the Patriarchate of Antioch from the earliest martyrs through his own time, and includes a number of saints from the Islamic period whose memory had fallen out of regular celebration. Sadly, less than a century later the events surrounding the schism of the Church of Antioch into Orthodox and Uniate parties led to the installation of an almost entirely Greek hierarchy, a situation mirroring that of the contemporary Patriarchate of Jerusalem. These hierarchs, ignorant of local customs, simply followed the customs and celebrations of the Church of Constantinople. And so, even after the return of the patriarchate to Arab leadership after over 150 years, much had been lost.
The work of Fr. Touma to recover the lives of many of these saints is a very involved undertaking, requiring the use of over a dozen Arabic manuscripts as well as a host of other primary sources and western scholarly works. It provides as much material as he could find about each liturgical commemoration (since the Church of Antioch commemorated a number of miraculous events and relics in addition to her saints) as it appears in his manuscripts and provides a detailed account of his sources and other available historical information. The book itself is of a scholarly quality on par with the best western work (unfortunately not always the case with modern Arabic-language scholarship) but is also written with a deep sense of reverence toward the saints and love for the Church of Antioch.
Correction: thanks to some research by 'Flavius Josephus', it turns out that Fr. Michel Najim (who still has a pretty nice website) hasn't translated this book. So, somebody needs to!
The recovery of ‘forgotten saints’ is especially important in the life of the Churches of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria because of their unique histories under Islamic rule and the later domination of their hierarchies by ethnic Greeks. In the case of the Patriarchate of Antioch, many people wrongly assume that Greeks held exclusive control of the patriarchate until the 20th century. However, from relatively shortly after the time of the Muslim conquest of Antioch until the Melkite Schism of 1724, most patriarchs were Arabic speakers or biculturally Greek and Arab. (In future posts I hope to elaborate much more on the medieval history of Arab Orthodoxy…).
However, two historical events led to the tragic loss of much of Antioch’s Arab heritage-- the Crusades and the subsequent rise of the Mamluks in the 12th and 13th centuries and the Greek takeover of the patriarchate in the 18th century. While the Byzantine re-conquest of Antioch and the Syrian coastline as far south as Lattakia in the 10th and 11th centuries led to a revival in Christian learning in both Greek and Arabic, the subsequent conquest of the entire Levant by the Crusaders led to the exile of much of the native Orthodox clergy to Constantinople, increasing the pace of the Constaninopolization of native Antiochian liturgical practice. With the final defeat of the Crusaders at the hands of the Muslim Mamluks, Antioch was sacked and its monasteries (including the Monastery of Saint Simeon, which at one point had the world’s largest church) destroyed. During the period from the 13th century until the 16th century, there is a dramatic drop both in the number of original works written by Orthodox Christians under the Muslim yoke and in the number of manuscripts copied.
Under the Ottomans, things generally improved. While the Patriarch of Constantinople was legally the head (millet bashi) of all Orthodox Christians in the empire, the patriarchs of Antioch maintained a fair degree of autonomy and were able to bolster this with newly-established ties to secular and religious authorities in Wallachia, Moldova, Russia, and even Georgia. The patriarch Macarios ibn al-Za’im (d. 1648), who traveled to all of the aforementioned countries as patriarch, is perhaps the greatest figure of Arabic Orthodox revival in this period. Of his many activities, one that he gave special attention was the copying of old manuscripts, often by his own hand or the hand of his son and archdeacon Paul, and the general revival of the Patriarchate’s heritage, both Arabic and Greek. Of his many works (almost all of which remain only in manuscript!!!), is Saints of our Country (Qiddisun min Biladina), which records the lives of saints of the Patriarchate of Antioch from the earliest martyrs through his own time, and includes a number of saints from the Islamic period whose memory had fallen out of regular celebration. Sadly, less than a century later the events surrounding the schism of the Church of Antioch into Orthodox and Uniate parties led to the installation of an almost entirely Greek hierarchy, a situation mirroring that of the contemporary Patriarchate of Jerusalem. These hierarchs, ignorant of local customs, simply followed the customs and celebrations of the Church of Constantinople. And so, even after the return of the patriarchate to Arab leadership after over 150 years, much had been lost.
The work of Fr. Touma to recover the lives of many of these saints is a very involved undertaking, requiring the use of over a dozen Arabic manuscripts as well as a host of other primary sources and western scholarly works. It provides as much material as he could find about each liturgical commemoration (since the Church of Antioch commemorated a number of miraculous events and relics in addition to her saints) as it appears in his manuscripts and provides a detailed account of his sources and other available historical information. The book itself is of a scholarly quality on par with the best western work (unfortunately not always the case with modern Arabic-language scholarship) but is also written with a deep sense of reverence toward the saints and love for the Church of Antioch.
Monday, July 6, 2009
How to Translate the Psalms
The following is from the forward to Isaac the Athonite’s translation of the Psalms, written by Archimandrite Cassianus of Dayr al-Shafi’a al-Harra (Monastery of Our Lady of Fervent Intercession), Bdebba el-Horsh, North Lebanon. This translation of the Psalms was published in 2000 by the same monastery.
This is how the Elder, Father Isaac the Athonite appeared to me time after time. He would leap about the ground of the Holy Mount Athos, gliding like a hart around the channels of water that he had dug with his own hands on the grounds of his hermitage, seeking the underground water from God’s heart, shining with the stars in the Virgin’s Garden and clinging to the full moon which shined from behind the wall in that small cell. After roaming the night in prayer, he would come to us, looking through the window and pouring into our sleep-wearied eyes what he had gathered from the lights of the night. He would call out to us, “Come to praise! Come to the church! Let us praise the Lord with the ten-stringed Psalms!”
When I banished the weight of sleep from my eyes, I would see him carrying in his hand a small notebook with a blue cover as he walked to the church. He would enter the temple and begin preparation for the Divine Sacrifice after he placed that notebook on his desk among his books and his prayer-ropes and his papers.
Time and again curiosity pressed me to want to know what that ascetic elder was reading at night under the light of the stars. I tried to ask him many times, but I held back, imagining that he recorded in it the names of some afflicted people in order to pray for them at night.
The years went by and the days and nights passed, and the thought remained, asking me, “On which page of the notebook did he record my name?” until the day came when the truth was made clear. Our last encounter on the ground of the Holy Mount Athos was in the cell of the Resurrection on September 27, the feast of Saint Isaac the Syrian.. At noon, after the elder rested from the morning prayers, he sat next to me on a wooden seat. In his hands was the priests’ service-book, recently printed, which we had worked on together. He kissed it, placed it on his forehead, and said to me, “I will give you a book for you to print in the same way and for you to publish with the same binding, so that the Arabic-speaking sons of our Church will benefit from it.
He went into his cell and came back with that blue notebook and handed it to me. I grabbed it like a hungry man grabs a crust of bread. I opened it and I found that it was a book of the Psalms that Father Isaac had written with his own hands and translated from the Greek Septuagint which our Orthodox Church relies upon. I leafed through the book and found its words to flow forth brilliantly, like sweet water.
On the morning of the next day, after we finished the Divine Liturgy, he started to recount to me the story of this book. He said, “When I would read the Psalms in Arabic I would come upon many unclear meanings and I became alarmed when I compared some verses as they appear in the Arabic to the reliable Greek text because I found them to be very far from the intended meaning. There were unclear words or phrases or more in almost every Psalm, to the point that it leads to a lack of clarity in the text and the total discarding of the intended theological meaning as it was put forth by the Holy Fathers like Basil the Great, Dionysios, and Nicodemos of Mount Athos, whose many volumes I would read in order to understand just one sentence. So, I am able to show them in Arabic as close as possible to the intended theological meaning.
[…]
I would often stop at certain verses, pondering on them and praying, asking the Prophet David, ‘How should they be composed according to their true meaning?’ In that way I passed the nights and the hours of the day, searching and refining until I arrived, finally, at a faithful Arabic translation.
This does not mean that I deny the blessed efforts of those who worked before me, and for this reason you see that I preserved the words and phrases that my predecessors translated clearly, and which I found to correspond to the original Greek text, because the ears of the faithful have become accustomed to hearing them and have become familiar with them. I only updated what appeared to me to not fit with the original text in a simple, comprehensible way. While clarifying the meanings, it was necessary to rely on the Fathers of the Orthodox Church who explained the verses of the Psalms with the light of their divine inspiration and the profundity of their prayer and giving praise. “
I took the book as a blessed, precious gift and left the Holy Mountain for Lebanon, carrying a letter to His Eminence Metropolitan Elias (metropolitan of Tripoli) from Father Isaac asking his blessing to print the book.
I spent nearly two years refining the words of the book, numbering the verses according to the order followed in the Greek translation and writing out the vowels for important words so that they can be read in the Arabic language without hesitation.
I wrote to Father Isaac asking him to explain certain points and his explanation was the last written words that his hand wrote with ink before he left and was transported to the Land of the Living and the Living Word.
After I finished ordering and arranging everything that was necessary, I gave it to be printed at Pascha, so that it would be a holy, inspiring Pascha to those who accept it with faith and reverence, and a humble offering to our Lord Jesus Christ, the first and most glorious Pascha, so that He may forgive the sins of the Elder, Father Isaac the Athonite and make his memory to be eternal among the righteous and the saints, the Orthodox who have shone forth in piety and asceticism during the two thousand years since Christ walked the earth.
This is how the Elder, Father Isaac the Athonite appeared to me time after time. He would leap about the ground of the Holy Mount Athos, gliding like a hart around the channels of water that he had dug with his own hands on the grounds of his hermitage, seeking the underground water from God’s heart, shining with the stars in the Virgin’s Garden and clinging to the full moon which shined from behind the wall in that small cell. After roaming the night in prayer, he would come to us, looking through the window and pouring into our sleep-wearied eyes what he had gathered from the lights of the night. He would call out to us, “Come to praise! Come to the church! Let us praise the Lord with the ten-stringed Psalms!”
When I banished the weight of sleep from my eyes, I would see him carrying in his hand a small notebook with a blue cover as he walked to the church. He would enter the temple and begin preparation for the Divine Sacrifice after he placed that notebook on his desk among his books and his prayer-ropes and his papers.
Time and again curiosity pressed me to want to know what that ascetic elder was reading at night under the light of the stars. I tried to ask him many times, but I held back, imagining that he recorded in it the names of some afflicted people in order to pray for them at night.
The years went by and the days and nights passed, and the thought remained, asking me, “On which page of the notebook did he record my name?” until the day came when the truth was made clear. Our last encounter on the ground of the Holy Mount Athos was in the cell of the Resurrection on September 27, the feast of Saint Isaac the Syrian.. At noon, after the elder rested from the morning prayers, he sat next to me on a wooden seat. In his hands was the priests’ service-book, recently printed, which we had worked on together. He kissed it, placed it on his forehead, and said to me, “I will give you a book for you to print in the same way and for you to publish with the same binding, so that the Arabic-speaking sons of our Church will benefit from it.
He went into his cell and came back with that blue notebook and handed it to me. I grabbed it like a hungry man grabs a crust of bread. I opened it and I found that it was a book of the Psalms that Father Isaac had written with his own hands and translated from the Greek Septuagint which our Orthodox Church relies upon. I leafed through the book and found its words to flow forth brilliantly, like sweet water.
On the morning of the next day, after we finished the Divine Liturgy, he started to recount to me the story of this book. He said, “When I would read the Psalms in Arabic I would come upon many unclear meanings and I became alarmed when I compared some verses as they appear in the Arabic to the reliable Greek text because I found them to be very far from the intended meaning. There were unclear words or phrases or more in almost every Psalm, to the point that it leads to a lack of clarity in the text and the total discarding of the intended theological meaning as it was put forth by the Holy Fathers like Basil the Great, Dionysios, and Nicodemos of Mount Athos, whose many volumes I would read in order to understand just one sentence. So, I am able to show them in Arabic as close as possible to the intended theological meaning.
[…]
I would often stop at certain verses, pondering on them and praying, asking the Prophet David, ‘How should they be composed according to their true meaning?’ In that way I passed the nights and the hours of the day, searching and refining until I arrived, finally, at a faithful Arabic translation.
This does not mean that I deny the blessed efforts of those who worked before me, and for this reason you see that I preserved the words and phrases that my predecessors translated clearly, and which I found to correspond to the original Greek text, because the ears of the faithful have become accustomed to hearing them and have become familiar with them. I only updated what appeared to me to not fit with the original text in a simple, comprehensible way. While clarifying the meanings, it was necessary to rely on the Fathers of the Orthodox Church who explained the verses of the Psalms with the light of their divine inspiration and the profundity of their prayer and giving praise. “
I took the book as a blessed, precious gift and left the Holy Mountain for Lebanon, carrying a letter to His Eminence Metropolitan Elias (metropolitan of Tripoli) from Father Isaac asking his blessing to print the book.
I spent nearly two years refining the words of the book, numbering the verses according to the order followed in the Greek translation and writing out the vowels for important words so that they can be read in the Arabic language without hesitation.
I wrote to Father Isaac asking him to explain certain points and his explanation was the last written words that his hand wrote with ink before he left and was transported to the Land of the Living and the Living Word.
After I finished ordering and arranging everything that was necessary, I gave it to be printed at Pascha, so that it would be a holy, inspiring Pascha to those who accept it with faith and reverence, and a humble offering to our Lord Jesus Christ, the first and most glorious Pascha, so that He may forgive the sins of the Elder, Father Isaac the Athonite and make his memory to be eternal among the righteous and the saints, the Orthodox who have shone forth in piety and asceticism during the two thousand years since Christ walked the earth.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Isaac the Athonite, part III
The completion of parts I and II.
On his return to Lebanon, he was ordained as a priest at the Patriarchal Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God at Balamand by the laying on of hands of the patriarch Elias IV (Mouawad), with the name Philippos. He then lived in the period between 1973 and 1975 in the little monastery dedicated to the memory of the Holy Greatmartyr George the Victory-bearer, a dependency of the Monastery of the Mother of God at Hamatoura, in the region of Zgharta in North Lebanon, a metochion of the Archdiocese of Mount Lebanon on the territory of the Archdiocese of Tripoli and Koura.
Father Philippos took to his assignment at the monastery of Saint George with much enthusiasm. He immediately put himself to work restoring the monastery's church and the monks' cells which circled it. He also cared for the neglected fields, re-planting olive trees and grapevines. Father's personality and the work that he did began to bear fruit and the monastery little by little became a well-known place of spiritual renewal that attracted more and more souls to the Lord. It is worth noting that Father Phillipos served during his stay in that monastery the parish dedicated to the Holy Archangel Michael in the village near Ras Kifa.
But the Grace of God had forseen a different destiny for him. Thus, under pressure from the war in Lebanon, he had to leave his monastery, located as tradition demands on a mountaintop, which had become a valuable military position, and to seek refuge once more in Thessolonica where he was raised to the rank of Archimandrite in 1976. He exercised his priesthood in the city itself, at the church of Saint Barbara and he had charge of the theology students from the Patriarchal Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God at Balamand for the faculty at Thessalonica.
In 1978, he obtained permission from +George (Khodr) of Mount Lebanon, upon whom he still depended, to join the monastic life on Mount Athos. He moved to the Monastery of Stavronikita and received the name of his patron saint, Isaac the Syrian. He could thus follow more closely the teachings of his spiritual father, the elder Paissios, who lived in the hermitage dedicated to the Venerable Cross not far from the monastery.
Father Isaac would speak of his encounter with Saint Isaac in the introduction to his Nuskiyyat, his translation from Greek into Arabic of the Ascetic Discourses and Letters of Saint Isaac the Syrian. He reccounted to us that a venerable monk of Mount Athos said to him, when he still knew very little of the saint, "Have you come here from a land that has produced so many saints like the virtuous Isaac the Syrian in order to learn the fundamentals of the monastic life?" Father responded, "Yes, holy father, for the experience of our fathers has been transmitted here and I have come to recover it in this place."
One year after arriving at the monastery of Stavronikita, he retired to what would become his refuge, the hermitage of the Ressurection which he himself restored in the region of Kebssala, not far from Karyes, the capital of the Holy Mountain. He lived there alone for four years, a life of hard asceticism and struggle. He was confronted with many temptations and trials that sought to make him leave his solitude, until one day when, overwhelmed from the tourment of his thoughts, his fatigue, and his sufferings, he discovered a small grave while he was walking nowhere in particular. He stopped in front of it and prayed fervently, calling up within himself the memory of death. Then he said with a resolute voice, "Here I may die." From that moment, the thoughts which were tormenting him completely disappeared. This memory of death never left him again, since according to the monastic tradition, he dug a grave of his own size with his own hands in the garden of his hermitage. He censed this grave every day until his body was laid to rest there after his falling asleep in the Lord Thursday, July 16, 1998.
He remained on Mount Athos from 1978 until 1998, the year of his repose, and was known for his asceticism and spiritual combat. He became, by the grace of God, a renowned spiritual father on Mount Athos and in Greece, demanding of himself and a fervent promoter of the assiduous practice of the sacrament of confession.
In his lifetime, he also became a living bridge between the Church of Antioch and the Holy Mountain. He often said, "I represent Antioch on Mount Athos," and he was proud of it. Lebanese, but also arabic-speaking Christians of the patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, as well as others who came from the New World came to receive his blessing and to ask his advice. He also made a number of short trips to his country of origin, Lebanon, as well as Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
May his prayers accompany us, amen.
On his return to Lebanon, he was ordained as a priest at the Patriarchal Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God at Balamand by the laying on of hands of the patriarch Elias IV (Mouawad), with the name Philippos. He then lived in the period between 1973 and 1975 in the little monastery dedicated to the memory of the Holy Greatmartyr George the Victory-bearer, a dependency of the Monastery of the Mother of God at Hamatoura, in the region of Zgharta in North Lebanon, a metochion of the Archdiocese of Mount Lebanon on the territory of the Archdiocese of Tripoli and Koura.
Father Philippos took to his assignment at the monastery of Saint George with much enthusiasm. He immediately put himself to work restoring the monastery's church and the monks' cells which circled it. He also cared for the neglected fields, re-planting olive trees and grapevines. Father's personality and the work that he did began to bear fruit and the monastery little by little became a well-known place of spiritual renewal that attracted more and more souls to the Lord. It is worth noting that Father Phillipos served during his stay in that monastery the parish dedicated to the Holy Archangel Michael in the village near Ras Kifa.
But the Grace of God had forseen a different destiny for him. Thus, under pressure from the war in Lebanon, he had to leave his monastery, located as tradition demands on a mountaintop, which had become a valuable military position, and to seek refuge once more in Thessolonica where he was raised to the rank of Archimandrite in 1976. He exercised his priesthood in the city itself, at the church of Saint Barbara and he had charge of the theology students from the Patriarchal Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God at Balamand for the faculty at Thessalonica.
In 1978, he obtained permission from +George (Khodr) of Mount Lebanon, upon whom he still depended, to join the monastic life on Mount Athos. He moved to the Monastery of Stavronikita and received the name of his patron saint, Isaac the Syrian. He could thus follow more closely the teachings of his spiritual father, the elder Paissios, who lived in the hermitage dedicated to the Venerable Cross not far from the monastery.
Father Isaac would speak of his encounter with Saint Isaac in the introduction to his Nuskiyyat, his translation from Greek into Arabic of the Ascetic Discourses and Letters of Saint Isaac the Syrian. He reccounted to us that a venerable monk of Mount Athos said to him, when he still knew very little of the saint, "Have you come here from a land that has produced so many saints like the virtuous Isaac the Syrian in order to learn the fundamentals of the monastic life?" Father responded, "Yes, holy father, for the experience of our fathers has been transmitted here and I have come to recover it in this place."
One year after arriving at the monastery of Stavronikita, he retired to what would become his refuge, the hermitage of the Ressurection which he himself restored in the region of Kebssala, not far from Karyes, the capital of the Holy Mountain. He lived there alone for four years, a life of hard asceticism and struggle. He was confronted with many temptations and trials that sought to make him leave his solitude, until one day when, overwhelmed from the tourment of his thoughts, his fatigue, and his sufferings, he discovered a small grave while he was walking nowhere in particular. He stopped in front of it and prayed fervently, calling up within himself the memory of death. Then he said with a resolute voice, "Here I may die." From that moment, the thoughts which were tormenting him completely disappeared. This memory of death never left him again, since according to the monastic tradition, he dug a grave of his own size with his own hands in the garden of his hermitage. He censed this grave every day until his body was laid to rest there after his falling asleep in the Lord Thursday, July 16, 1998.
He remained on Mount Athos from 1978 until 1998, the year of his repose, and was known for his asceticism and spiritual combat. He became, by the grace of God, a renowned spiritual father on Mount Athos and in Greece, demanding of himself and a fervent promoter of the assiduous practice of the sacrament of confession.
In his lifetime, he also became a living bridge between the Church of Antioch and the Holy Mountain. He often said, "I represent Antioch on Mount Athos," and he was proud of it. Lebanese, but also arabic-speaking Christians of the patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, as well as others who came from the New World came to receive his blessing and to ask his advice. He also made a number of short trips to his country of origin, Lebanon, as well as Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
May his prayers accompany us, amen.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Isaac the Athonite, part II
Continued from part I.
The liveliness of his spirit and the zeal that Fares showed in his studies certainly encouraged the hegumen Yuhanna to authorize him to expand his studies, which he did by enrolling at the school attached to the Patriarchal Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God at Balamand in the region of Koura, North Lebanon. He thus found himself under the authority of +Ignatius (Hazim, the current Patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Antioch and all the Orient) who was at that time bishop and superior of the monastery.
He was ordained deacon with the name Phillip at the monastery dedicated to the Holy Greatmartyr Jacob the Persian at Deddeh in Koura in 1963, by the laying on of the hands of +Elias (Kourban), metropolitan of the diocese of Tripoli and Koura, under whom was the monastery of Bkeftin to which he was attached. He was noticed throughout that period for his attentiveness at prayer, his carrying out what he was entrusted to do in peace and with much zeal, and his obedience to his superiors.
Providence, as usual, used local circumstances and caused him to leave the school of Balamand to head to Patmos in Greece in 1968, where he received the diploma sanctioning the end of his secondary studies.
He then persued his desire to deepen his knowledge of scripture by becoming a student at the faculty of theology at Thessolonica, where he served as a deacon at the Cathedral of Saint Dimitrios, patron of the city. It should be noted that he was known for having a very beautiful voice, which attracted many of the faithful to hear the Antiochian deacon chant and say the litanies in Arabic and Greek.
But the most important event for him during this time was that he became acquainted with the Holy Mountain of Athos and with the monastic life that was cultivated in that garden of the Mother of God. There in particular he met the one who would become his spiritual father, the Elder Paissios (+ June 12, 1994).
The liveliness of his spirit and the zeal that Fares showed in his studies certainly encouraged the hegumen Yuhanna to authorize him to expand his studies, which he did by enrolling at the school attached to the Patriarchal Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God at Balamand in the region of Koura, North Lebanon. He thus found himself under the authority of +Ignatius (Hazim, the current Patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Antioch and all the Orient) who was at that time bishop and superior of the monastery.
He was ordained deacon with the name Phillip at the monastery dedicated to the Holy Greatmartyr Jacob the Persian at Deddeh in Koura in 1963, by the laying on of the hands of +Elias (Kourban), metropolitan of the diocese of Tripoli and Koura, under whom was the monastery of Bkeftin to which he was attached. He was noticed throughout that period for his attentiveness at prayer, his carrying out what he was entrusted to do in peace and with much zeal, and his obedience to his superiors.
Providence, as usual, used local circumstances and caused him to leave the school of Balamand to head to Patmos in Greece in 1968, where he received the diploma sanctioning the end of his secondary studies.
He then persued his desire to deepen his knowledge of scripture by becoming a student at the faculty of theology at Thessolonica, where he served as a deacon at the Cathedral of Saint Dimitrios, patron of the city. It should be noted that he was known for having a very beautiful voice, which attracted many of the faithful to hear the Antiochian deacon chant and say the litanies in Arabic and Greek.
But the most important event for him during this time was that he became acquainted with the Holy Mountain of Athos and with the monastic life that was cultivated in that garden of the Mother of God. There in particular he met the one who would become his spiritual father, the Elder Paissios (+ June 12, 1994).
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
عذراء يا أم الإله
From the wonderful French-language blog of the parish of St. Ignatius in Nice: O Virgin Pure sung by Archimandrite Pandeleimon (Farah), higumen of the monastery of Hamatoura.
Archimandrite Isaac (Atallah) the Athonite (1937-1998) Part I
While there has never been a specifically Arabic-speaking monastery or skete on Mount Athos, there have been many Arabic-speaking monks who have gone to the Holy Mountain to seek their salvation. This is evidenced by, for example, the Arabic signature on the 14th-century "Declaration of the Holy Mountain in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts". In our own time, Isaac the Athonite travelled from his native Lebanon to the Holy Mountain, where he became a disciple of the Elder Paissios. The following article, which I will translate in installments, was written in Arabic by Archimandrite Isaac's brother Anthony and annotated by Fr. Ephrem (Kyriakos), abbot of the monastery of Saint Michael in Baskinta.. The translation here, however, is from the French translation of that document by "La Rédaction", published in Le Bon Pasteur, the bulletin of l'Association des Chretiens Orthodoxes d'Antioche et de leurs Amis, no. 4, March-June 2006.
Father Isaac was born to Martha and Nemr Atallah on April 12, 1937 in a Lebanese village called Nabay in the region of North Metn, dependant on the Orthodox Archdiocese of Mount Lebanon. He was given the name Fares. He grew up in a pious Orthodox family and learned from his father, the parish cantor, love for Christ and faithfulness to the tradition of the Church. From his youth he was attracted to solitude and prayer. It would often happen that his parents would lose track of him until they would eventually find him praying in the fields surrounding his village, not far from the house of his birth. He was already finding all his happiness in nearness to God and His Church.
One day when he was still fairly young he left the family home to join the monastery of the Prophet Elias in Shwayya, in the region of North Metn, but his father set out to go find him. At that time they said, perhaps to console him, that it was not the tradition of monasteries to accept the eldest son of a family as a monk since he is the family's support. Fares agreed and returned home.
He did his primary studies at the school of his village, Nabay, then he left school to work as an apprentice carpenter. At the end of his apprenticeship, he went to practice his trade in the "carpenters' souk" in Beirut. It is there that every evening, at the end of the work day, he took courses in Byzantine chant in the Ashrafiyya district of Beirut at the school of Mitri el-Murr, Protopsaltes of the Church of Antioch.
In the summer of 1962, at the age of twenty-five, he made his life's decision. In his small bag, he carefully packed his clothes and left his work at the grand Phonecia Hotel, which was the standard for Beiruti luxury at the time, and returned to his home after having turned in his resignation. When he arrived before his father, for whom he had enormous respect and unfailing obedience, he handed him his savings passbook, saying "This savings account has been opened in your name. When it matures, I would like for you to withdraw this money and distribute it equally among all the members of the family. As for me, I don't need anything because I am going to the monastery." His saddened father asked him, "What can I offer you in this world so that you don't become a monk?" Fares answered him, "Even if you give me this world as an inheretence, my eyes will not covet it! My life is not here, but in the monastery." Nemr, his father, tried hard to dissuade him from following the path of monasticism by putting preassure on the other members of the family, but it was in vain.
The same day, Fares took his bag and headed with his brother Anthony towards the monatery of the Dormition of the Mother of God in Bkeftin, in the region of Koura, a place he had never seen. He only had its adress and the name of its higumen, Archimandrite Yuhanna (Mansour), the future Metropolitan of Lattakieh in Syria, who had had his formation in the bosom of the Orthodox Youth Movement in the city whose bishop he would later be.
Arriving at the place, Fares got out of the taxi and got down on his knees, facing the monastery and, lifting up his arms, he recited a prayer then crossed himself. While getting up, he said audibly, "I give thanks to the Lord for having now granted me my desire."
Archimandrite Yuhanna was there at the enterance to the monastery to welcome them. The monastery was largely in ruins, most of its rooms were in a state of delapidation and almost uninhabitable. A single monk lived there besides the higumen. The sun was setting when Anthony went back, leaving his older brother at the monastery. At the family home, everyone was eagerly waiting for him. His father spoke first, saying "So where exactly did he go?" "To the monastery of Bkeftin in Koura," he responded, "but I assure you right away that, given the monastery's state of ruin, and given that Fares last worked at the Phonecia Hotel in Beirut, he won't last two or three days before you see him coming back to the house." His father looked squarely at him and said, "No matter what difficulties he will encounter, your brother will not come back again."
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