‘THE EARTHLY HEAVEN’
THE MOTHER OF GOD AND THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
a conference organized by the Friends of Mount Athos to be held at
Madingley Hall, Cambridge: 25–27 February 2011
The venue
This will be our fifth weekend conference at Madingley. We continue to return there because it is the perfect venue for a meeting such as ours. The house, which dates from the sixteenth century, stands in its own grounds amid beautiful country just 3 miles to the west of Cambridge. The surrounding park was landscaped by Lancelot (‘Capability’) Brown in 1756. In the 1860s Queen Victoria rented the house as a residence for the Prince of Wales when he was an undergraduate. It was bought by the University of Cambridge in 1948 and operates as a centre for continuing and adult education. The house has been extensively refurbished to provide en-suite facilities to all study bedrooms, well-equipped meeting rooms, and a new bar. All meals are taken in the great hall where the cuisine achieves a high standard. We are fortunate to have the use of the nearby parish church for our services during the weekend.
The theme of the conference
Athos is dedicated to the glory of the Mother of God. The entire peninsula is regarded as her garden and she is everywhere present in it. She is the archetype of monasticism, the paradigm of Christian holiness, the abbess of the whole Mountain, every monk’s guide to the Kingdom of Heaven. Not only is every monk deeply conscious of her presence and her protection; she has inspired some of the most sublime examples of art, music, poetry, and other writings. No theme could be more appropriate for a conference of the Friends of Mount Athos.
The programme
There will be a total of six presentations, each lasting about 40 minutes with time at the end for discussion. The speakers are all experts on their chosen themes, but all will be concerned to make their subject accessible to everyone in their audience.
On the first evening Metropolitan Nikolaos, himself an Athonite and a long-standing friend of the society, will speak about ‘The Place of the Mother of God in the Life of the Athonite Monk’.
On the Saturday morning, after a memorial service, the lectures will be devoted to iconography. First Aidan Hart, a celebrated iconographer, teacher, and former Athonite, will speak on the subject ‘Festal Icons of the Mother of God: Theology in Colour and Form’. Then Fr Lukas, a monk of the Xenophontos monastery on Athos and a practising iconographer (he painted last year’s FoMA Christmas card), will address the topic ‘Painting the Mother of God’.
After lunch there is free time for a rest or a walk or just catching up with friends.
Then Saturday evening will be devoted to music. Before vespers Dimitri Conomos, a distinguished musicologist and member of our Executive Committee, will speak (and maybe sing) on the topic ‘Mary in Athonite Poetry and Song’. After dinner Dimitrios Skrekas (whom you may remember singing in Cappadocian cave churches) will speak about ‘The Mother of God in Athonite Hymbody’.
On the Sunday morning, after a celebration of the Divine Liturgy, Metropolitan Kallistos, our President, will speak about ‘Athonite Writings on the Mother of God’.
The speakers
Metropolitan Nikolaos is a graduate of Harvard and MIT in science and engineering and of Holy Cross in theology with a doctorate in biomedical engineering and in Orthodox bioethics. Having finally established himself in the spiritual ‘university and hospital’ of Mount Athos, he experienced the cenobitic life and the hermit’s life and offered witness of the Athonite ethos in the heart of Athos, where he served at the Metochion of the Ascension of the Lord, a dependency of the monastery of Simonopetra. Since 2004 he has served as the Metropolitan of Mesogaia.
Aidan Hart, a Reader of the Orthodox Church, has been a full-time iconographer for over twenty-five years. He founded and is tutor for the Diploma in Icon and Wall Painting, run by The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts. A comprehensive book by him on the techniques of icon and wall painting is due to be published later this year.
Fr Lukas is from Larissa where he took his first steps as an icon painter. He was tonsured a monk of the monastery of Xenophontos in 1985 where he continued his training in iconography at the feet of older monk icon painters.
Dimitri Conomos is a Byzantine musicologist living in Oxford. He is a visiting professor at London University and is the author of many books and articles on early Christian, Byzantine, and Slavonic chant. He has also published two books on mythology and edited a volume on Orthodoxy and ecology.
Dimitrios Skrekas wrote a doctoral thesis at Oxford on Byzantine hymnographical texts of the eighth century and is a professional cantor. Since 2008 he has worked at the British Library as a cataloguer on the Greek Manuscript Digitization Project.
Metropolitan Kallistos holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Oxford where from 1966 to 2001 he was a Fellow of Pembroke College and Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies. He is a monk of the monastery of St John the Theologian, Patmos, and an assistant bishop in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain. In 2007 he was raised to the rank of metropolitan. His publications include The Orthodox Church (2nd edn, 1993) and The Orthodox Way (2nd edn, 1995) and he is co-translator of the five-volume Philokalia.
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Please send this slip with a £50 (€65 / $75) per person non-refundable deposit, payable to the Friends of Mount Athos, to Simon Jennings, Rawlinson & Hunter, Eighth Floor, 6 New Street Square, London EC4A 3AQ. He may be contacted by e-mail at