Marcin Podbielski

This essay grows from a sense of bewilderment: A Catholic who encounters Orthodoxy starts wondering why there seems to be almost no room in contemporary Catholic spirituality for silence and isolation. Reliving two experiences, those of Mount Athos and Mount Jamna—the latter apparently a failed attempt by a Dominican monk to create a Catholic mount of solitude—I try to understand them from the perspective of an ordinary believer who happens to be familiar with philosophical language. Comparing the experience of silence at Athos, described in terms of an absence of Heideggerian dwelling, and Pascal’s divertissement, with the much more ordinary life going on at Jamna, I seek to present them both using a theoretical scheme drawn from Plato that opposes participation, icons, and idols. Viewed through the incomplete metaphor that this scheme provides, Athos and Jamna emerge as two different realizations of an icon given to us by Christ himself, as human instruments, which we create to point to true participation in the Divine presence of the New Jerusalem. Though imperfect, they are still true icons because they lead to true sacramental participation while anticipating the transformative , the view from the Mount which alters the one who has attained it. While similar in this respect, the two icons also differ deeply: whereas the Catholic experience tries to bring everyone into participation in the life of the New Jerusalem, the Orthodox Athos, in its silent uniqueness, testifies to a unique and ineffable transcendence.

Introduction

The image of the mountain is deeply embedded within our Christian way of speaking about human destiny. We would not be able to remove it from our language or our imagination, given its prominence in the New Testament. Christ chose to lead Peter, James, and John ‘by themselves’ to go to a ‘high mountain’, ‘ὄρος ὑψηλὸν κατ ἰδίαν’ (Mt 17:1, cf. NJB), in order to show them who He is. Then He died on a prominent rock—as tradition says, very close to the walls of the Jerusalem of his era. Pilgrims will forever see this place rising as a hill within the Mount of the Holy City, lower possibly only than the Temple Mount. Jerusalem herself, the Holy City topped with the Temple, raises her gaze above, in anticipation of the New Jerusalem, one which is to descend from Heaven, ‘καταβαίνουσα ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ’ (cf. Rev 21:2). In the religious imagery that we allow and use in our churches, we will always represent