A Remnant Book Review…

From the Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

v There is a feeling of fin de race amongst Christians all over the Middle East..." Then this: "Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place, and that is a very bad thing for the Arab world. It is the Christian Arabs who kept the Arab world "Arab," rather than "Muslim."

Reviewed by Vincent Chiarello

Remnant Columnist

The English writer Graham Greene, a convert, was once asked the importance of his Catholic faith to his writing. He responded that he, "was a writer who happened to be Catholic." In his autobiography, Graham admitted that his conversion came about so that he could marry a devout Catholic.

Greene's later life showed just how very little that conversion meant to him. By way of contrast, Greene's contemporary, Evelyn Waugh, another convert, described himself as "a Catholic writer." One could also add the names of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton to Waugh's. Is there, then, a separate classification for these men, or is it a distinction without a difference?

Perhaps the best way to distinguish them is to use Paul Fussell’s distinction between a tourist, such as your scribe, and a traveler such as William Dalrymple. There are tourists who write, and writers who travel, a distinction with a significant difference. In my trips to various parts of the world, I've written commentaries about the places I’ve seen, but I am not a travel writer. When touring, I am generally satisfied with the explanations provided by the Michelin Guides, or even those of Frommer’s, as earlier tourists used Karl Baedeker’s Guides , first published in Germany in 1827, in German, of course. To these tourists, "Baedekers", as these guides came to be known, were the gold standard and their maps indispensable to both tourist and traveler alike. By 1907, Baedeker published their first English language edition, and a copy of that vade-mecum accompanied many members of the English upper class, the first group of travelers who wrote as they made their "grand tour" of the continent of Europe.

Good travel writers are endowed with a tutored eye that allows them to describe in detail their experiences, later found in books about travel, but not in guides. William Dalrymple's, From the Holy Mountain, is a marvelous example of a book written by a talented writer whose travel in this particular instance has a specific purpose: to retrace the steps of John Moschos, an itinerant Byzantine monk, whose peripatetic journey took him through large swaths of the Byzantine Empire in the 6 th century. His observations about early signs of collapse on its fringes caused by a surging tide of Islamic military might in that part of the world were a harbinger of things to come. Moschos's journey and his observations were later published in a diary of his travels, The Spiritual Meadow, which served as Dalrymple's Baedeker.

Besides being a writer who travels, William Dalrymple is also a Scottish architect whose previous publications include, In Xanadu, and The City of Djinn , for which he was won several writing prizes. His degree (from Cambridge) in architecture provides him with an ability to describe the places and sites he visits, including Byzantine (Orthodox) monasteries that have existed for nearly 1500 years, in a way both informative and fascinating.

This particular expertise also allows the reader a rare glimpse of what the Byzantine world looked like just before Islamic expansion turned that Christian world upside down, for it must always be remembered that Byzantium was the seedbed of Christianity.

If a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, then both Dalrymple and Moschos, along with his acolyte, Sophronius, began their respective journeys, although separated by 1400 years, at the same place: the fabled Greek Orthodox monastery atop Mt.

Athos. But Dalrymple, unlike Moschos, had a problem: he was Roman Catholic, and a friend who had earlier visited the monastery advised him never to admit it to the monks. This friend had made that mistake and, "...had he admitted to suffering from leprosy or tertiary syphilis he could not have been more resolutely shunned..." An exaggeration? Hardly, as seen in the following conversation: Apparently, these monks never received the memo about ecumenism.

But Dalrymple’s luck held out and he is able to touch and view what he had traveled from Scotland to see: the original text, printed in purple ink on pure vellum of The Spiritual Meadow.

There is an air of hopelessness that surrounds many of the people described in this book, as if they were totally drained by their experiences of any likelihood of an improvement in their lives. It need be remembered that Dalrymple was traveling in these regions twenty years ago, and one must wonder if he were to retrace his steps today would that melancholia be even more noticeable?

In visiting Beirut, formerly known as the "Paris of the East," but now a city still in ruins after its civil war, Dalrymple meets with Kemal Salibi, a Maronite Christian, historian at the American University of Beirut, and author of A House of Many Mansions, a history of Lebanon’s civil war. Salibi and his family were unhurt and survived their apartment’s constant bombardment during the war, but were forced to flee after he received death threats from the terrorist organization, Hezbollah.

When asked about the exodus of Lebanese Christians en masse, he replied: "...the reason they are leaving is no longer because they are threatened, or because their country is going to disappear. It is because – how to put it? – they are weary. There is a feeling of fin de race amongst Christians all over the Middle East..." Then this: "Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place, and that is a very bad thing for the Arab world. It is the Christian Arabs who kept the Arab world "Arab," rather than "Muslim." Allow me a personal note on Beirut. In 1974, I was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala, which was then headed by Ambassador Francis E. Meloy, who two years later was tapped to represent the U.S. in Lebanon during its civil war. On the day before he left Guatemala in June, 1976, he took my wife and me aside to show photos of the Beirut sky at night, bursting with artillery shells that could have been mistaken as fireworks during a July 4th celebration. I believe that he knew it was a very dangerous assignment, but he accepted that risk and left the day after. Several weeks later, Ambassador Meloy and his driver were murdered, probably by Hezbollah, as they crossed over "the Green Line" into Moslem-controlled West Beirut. Dalrymple's visit eighteen years later showed that little had changed.

If Lebanon evoked an air of unending sadness to Dalrymple, the situation in Syria today is one of tragic proportions, for the future of the Syrian Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches is very grim.

When in 1994 Dalrymple spoke to the Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Aleppo, the prelate claimed, "Christians are better off in Syria than anywhere else in the Middle East.

Other than Lebanon, this is the only country where a Christian can feel equal to a Muslim – and Lebanon, of course, has many other problems." Twenty years later, those words do not hold up, for the conditions in Syria today are as bad as those of Lebanon during its civil war.

What neither Dalrymple nor the Metropolitan could have foreseen was the process by which the elimination, directly or indirectly, of Syria's Christians would become the result of Western strategy, despite the urgent warnings by both Catholic and Orthodox clergy. One of the most outspoken voices in this regard was that of the Mother Superior of the Carmelite Convent in Qara, Sister Agnes Miriam de la Croix, a Palestinian by birth. In a press conference at the Vatican in July, 2012 covered by Fides, the Vatican's news agency, Mother Superior insisted that what was being reported in the West was "a lie, manipulated by the media." "We are living in a big lie," she insisted. Her observations were confirmed by Open Doors USA, a Christian Human Rights group.

If the West has seemed indifferent to the plight of Syria’s Christians, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and Russia's Patriarch, Kirill, have not. In addition to Patriarch Kirill's providing financial assistance, he also sent a letter to President Obama urging him to listen to Syria’s religious leaders who "unanimously" opposed military intervention against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. Putin's government began the process by which fifty thousand Russian visas will be issued to Syrian Christians in the embattled Province of Homs and the city of Aleppo. While the West and the Catholic Church have remained removed from the scene, President Putin is reviving the historical role of the czars as "the Protectors of the Middle Eastern Orthodox Christians." In September, 1994 Dalrymple visited one of Syria’s oldest and most revered Orthodox holy sites: the convent of Notre Dame de Seidnaya. To his amazement, upon entering the chapel the congregation that evening appeared to consist not of Christians, but of heavily bearded Muslim men who, kneeling on their rugs, prayed as the priest circled the altar with his thurible, while Muslim women in black chador went and lit candles to the Virgin. Then this: "Eastern Christians and the Muslims have lived side by side for nearly one and one-half millennia, and have only been able to do so due to a degree of mutual tolerance and shared customs unimaginable in the solidly Christian West." One can only wonder if he would, or could, say the same today.

(Continued Next Issue)

T M A A S

Fr. Christophoros, the librarian at Mt. Athos: Forgive me, but are you Orthodox or heretic?

Wm. Dalrymple: I am Catholic.

Fr. Christophoros: My God! I’m so sorry.