He escorts me into the dining hall and plants me at what appears to be the pilgrim’s table of honor, right next to the table filled with the top monks. Father Ephraim heads that table, with Arsenios in shouting distance.
Most of what the monks eat they grow themselves within a short walk of the dining hall. Crude silver bowls contain raw, uncut onions, green beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and beets. Another bowl holds bread baked by the monks, from their own wheat. There’s a pitcher of water and, for dessert, a soupy orange sherbet-like substance and dark honeycomb recently plundered from some beehive. And that’s pretty much it. If it were a restaurant in Berkeley, people would revel in the glorious self-righteousness of eating the locally grown; here the food just seems plain. The monks eat like fashion models before a shoot. Twice a day four days a week, and once a day for three: eleven meals, all of them more or less like this. Which raises an obvious question: Why are some of them fat? Most of them—maybe 100 out of the 110 now in residence—resemble their diet. Beyond thin: narrow. But a handful, including the two bosses, have an ampleness to them that cannot be explained by eleven helpings of raw onion and cucumber, no matter how much honeycomb they chew through.
After dinner the monks return to church, where they will remain chanting and singing and crossing and spraying incense until one in the morning. Arsenios grabs me and takes me for a walk. We pass Byzantine chapels and climb Byzantine stairs until we arrive at a door in a long Byzantine hall freshly painted but otherwise antique: his office. On the desk are two computers; behind it a brand-new fax machine-cum-printer; on top of it a cell phone and a Costco-size tub of vitamin C pills. The walls and floor gleam like new. The cabinets exhibit row upon row of three-ring binders. The only sign that this isn’t a business office circa 2010 is a single icon over the desk. Apart from that, if you put this office side by side with the office of Greece’s minister of finance and asked which one housed the monk, this wouldn’t be it.
“There is more of a spiritual thirst today,” he says, when I ask him why his monastery has attracted so many important business and political people. “Twenty or thirty years ago they taught that science will solve all problems. There are so many material things and they are not satisfying. People have gotten tired of material pleasures. Of material things. And they realize they cannot really find success in these things.” And with that he picks up the phone and orders drinks and dessert. Moments later a silver tray arrives, bearing pastries and glasses of what appears to be crème de menthe.
Thus began what became a three-hour encounter. I’d ask simple questions—Why on earth would anyone become a monk? How do you handle life without women? How do people who spend ten hours a day in church find time to create real estate empires? Where did you get the crème de menthe?—and he would answer in twenty-minute-long parables in which there would be, somewhere, a simple answer. (For example: “I believe there are many more beautiful things than sex.”) As he told his stories he waved and jumped around and smiled and laughed: if Father Arsenios feels guilty about anything, he has a rare talent for hiding it. Like a lot of people who come to Vatopaidi, I suppose, I was less than perfectly sure what I was after. I wanted to see if it felt like a front for a commercial empire (it doesn’t) and if the monks seemed insincere (hardly). But I also wondered how a bunch of odd-looking guys who had walked away from the material world had such a knack for getting their way in it: How on earth do monks, of all people, wind up as Greece’s best shot at a Harvard Business School case study?
After about two hours I work up the nerve to ask him. To my surprise he takes me seriously. He points to a sign he has tacked up on one of his cabinets, and translates it from the Greek: The smart person accepts. The idiot insists.
He got it, he says, on one of his business trips to the Ministry of Tourism. “This is the secret of success for anywhere in the world, not just the monastery,” he says, and then goes on to describe pretty much word for word the first rule of improvisational comedy, or for that matter any successful collaborative enterprise. Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. “Yes . . . and” rather than “No . . . but.” “The idiot is bound by his pride,” he says. “It always has to be his way. This is also true of the person who is deceptive or doing things wrong: he always tries to justify himself. A person who is bright in regard to his spiritual life is humble. He accepts what others tell him—criticism, ideas—and he works with them.”
I notice now that his windows open upon a balcony overlooking the Aegean Sea. The monks are not permitted to swim in it; why, I never asked. Just like them, though, to build a beach house and then ban the beach. I notice, also, that I am the only one who has eaten the pastries and drunk the crème de menthe. It occurs to me that I may have just failed some sort of test of my ability to handle temptation.
“The whole government says they are angry at us,” he says, “but we have nothing. We work for others. The Greek newspapers, they call us a corporation. But I ask you, Michael, what company has lasted for a thousand years?”
At that moment, out of nowhere, Father Ephraim walks in. Round, with rosy cheeks and a white beard, he is more or less the spitting image of Santa Claus. He even has a twinkle in his eye. A few months before, he’d been hauled before the Greek parliament to testify. One of his interrogators said that the Greek government had acted with unusual efficiency when it swapped Vatopaidi’s lake for the Ministry of Agriculture’s commercial properties. He asked Ephraim how he had done it.
“Don’t you believe in miracles?” Ephraim had said.
“I’m beginning to,” said the Greek MP.
When we are introduced, Ephraim clasps my hand and holds it for a very long time. It crosses my mind that he is about to ask me what I want for Christmas. Instead he says, “What is your faith?” “Episcopalian,” I cough out. He nods; he calibrates: it could be worse; it probably is worse. “You are married?” he asks. “Yes.” “You have children?” I nod; he calibrates: I can work with this. He asks for their names . . .
THE SECOND PARLIAMENTARY inquiry into the Vatopaidi affair is still gathering steam, and you never know what it may turn up. But the main facts of the case are not in dispute; the main question left to answer is the motives of the monks and the public servants who helped them. In the late 1980s, Vatopaidi was a complete ruin—a rubble of stones overrun with rats. The frescoes were black. The icons went uncared for. The place had a dozen monks roaming around its ancient stones, but they were autonomous and disorganized. In church jargon they worshipped idiorrhythmically—which is another way of saying that in their quest for spiritual satisfaction it was every man for himself. No one was in charge; they had no collective purpose. Their relationship to their monastery, in other words, was a lot like the relationship of the Greek citizen to his state.
That changed in the early 1990s, when a group of energetic young Greek Cypriot monks from another part of Athos, led by Father Ephraim, saw a rebuilding opportunity: a fantastic natural asset that had been terribly mismanaged. Ephraim set about raising the money to restore Vatopaidi to its former glory. He dunned the European Union for cultural funds. He mingled with rich Greek businessmen in need of forgiveness. He cultivated friendships with important Greek politicians. In all of this he exhibited incredible chutzpah. For instance, after a famous Spanish singer visited and took an interest in Vatopaidi, he parlayed the interest into an audience with government officials from Spain. They were told a horrible injustice had occurred: in the fourteenth century a band of Catalan mercenaries, upset with the Byzantine emperor, had sacked Vatopaidi and caused much damage. The monastery received $240,000 from the government officials.