The Living Dead on Mount Athos: Monastic Politics of Escape

The Monastic Republic of Mount Athos is a unique and confounding political entity - both Greek and multi-national, democratic and theocratic, autonomous and subject to the European Union - with more than a millennia of history and institutional memory. While Athos has been amply appreciated for its religious, historical and cultural significance, the political institutions which govern this community have been neglected in the modern era and merit greater attention. Similarly, while much of the recent English-language literature on the topic focuses on the near-death and miraculous resurrection of Mount Athos in the 20th century, this work also tends to focus on the remarkable charisma of Athonite ascetics and monastic traditions as explanatory factors, rather than examining the socio-political institutions which have allowed the community to defend and renew itself over time. This thesis poses a number of questions and proposes some answers in the hopes of encouraging future research on this topic. Two questions in particular frame the paper that follows: How did the political systems which governed Mount Athos contribute to its 1000-year survival, particularly in the modern era? How does one compare a polity like Mount Athos to any form of modern state, given that it has self-consciously retained its political form for a full millennia? Relying on James C. Scott's definitions of 'state evading' and 'state preventing' behavior, I will argue that the Athonite political structure is designed to maximize the utility of democratic institutions to defend against the threat of external intervention, as well as to minimize any internal state-building activities which might depart from the monastic ideal. This tension between the need to pursue a 'worldly,' external political strategy to maintain autonomy, while also cultivating an aggressively anti-secular internal governance strategy, is a fundamental component of Athonite history. Through an analysis of past and present Athonite political institutions I will show how Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox Christianity have influenced the process of state formation, creating a political entity which has retained a recognizable form for well over a thousand years.