Monks

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I am a Greek Orthodox monk. I am here as a research assistant to the Abbot of my monastery, who is a visiting scholar at the Divinity School.

Because we are traditionalist Orthodox clergymen (belonging to that part of the Church of Greece which adheres to the Julian Calendar), we maintain the clerical dress (black cassock, uncut hair and beard) of the Orthodox clergy throughout Europe--even though our monastery, a dependency of a large Greek monastic house, is in the United States. It has been our view that geography should not compromise tradition, especially when one is in a country which champions religious freedom.

I have been surprised and less than pleased, then, at our reception here in Cambridge. We were welcomed, at the beginning of the term, by being pelted by snowballs on the street three or four times. Not a day has passed that we have not been ridiculed and mocked on the streets, while walking between various university libraries. Notwithstanding the fact that the Abbot of the monastery is recognized as one of the best-cre-dentialed traditionalist Orthodox writers in the U.S. (and was recently cited as such in a major religious publication in Greece), most of the people with whom we have interacted at the University are either too busy laughing at us or too preoccupied with our appearance to engage him in conversation.

I am sure there are those who would argue that Harvard is hardly responsible for the treatment which we have received. I would, however, rather question that. A university is responsible for educating. And if tolerance, respect, and simple good comportment are no longer parts of education, then we should perhaps rethink the entire process. We, as Greek Orthodox, represent one-fifth of the world's some billion Christians, scattered as we are throughout Eastern Europe, the Levant, Greece, Western Europe, and the Americas (with a population of about four million in the latter). Would it not behoove a university to teach its students of our ancient traditions? And would not education help to create tolerance?

In actual fact, the West has always ignored Eastern Christianity. Considering our numbers, it is astounding that the Divinity School, for example, offers so little to Orthodox. My own mentor, and a very close friend of our Abbot (then a doctoral student), Father Georges Florovsky, fought with little success at Princeton to initiate programs in Orthodox studies. Having left Harvard years ago as a professor emeritus, his efforts here apparently left with him. Moreover, when Orthodox scholars do seek to pursue scholarship in the West, they are forced to become what Abbot Chrysostomos calls "Western captives" or, as Father Florovsky said, "clandestine Orthodox thinkers, covered by the more acceptable cloak of the Russophile or Hellenophile." We either accommodate ourselves to the Western theological way of thinking or else. The best a traditionalist Orthodox scholar can hope for is a visiting appointment.

What happens to us on the streets, then, is not separate from the shortcomings of the University. The whole idea of a university is changing. We are witnesses to the fact that this change is not wholly healthy. We have no great numbers and no great influence. We cannot, therefore, demand that our traditions be given attention. Most of our theologians have accommodated themselves to Western thinking, fearing the very alienation which we traditionalists confront. As a result, one of the oldest and most venerable religious traditions is being distorted or ignored in contemporary scholarship. That the scholarly community allows this is an indictment of that community. And its failing, as always, shows up on the street! The Rev. Hieromouk Auxenties