Augustine Sokolovski
On June 25 (12), the Orthodox Church honors the memory of St. Peter of Athos. Due to the similarity of ascetic deeds, the celebration in honor of St. Peter is held on the same day as St. Onuphrius the Great. In liturgical books, both saints have a joint common service.
In Christian history, Anthony the Great (251-356) is considered the founder of monasticism, and Paul of Thebes (227-341) is the first hermit. Anthony was about twenty years younger than Paul. Both lived in Egypt in the fourth century.
In the monastic history of Athos, there were also two founders. These are Athanasius of Athos (920-1003) and Peter of Athos (650-734). Peter was a solitary hermit, and Athanasius created the most famous and leading monastery of Athos - the Great Lavra. The difference in chronology between the two ascetics is approximately three centuries. Athanasius lived at the turn of the first and second millennia, and Peter in the era of the initial spread of Islam in the seventh-eighth century.
Saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) dedicated a special laudatory sermon to Saint Peter. This was Gregory's first literary work. By that time, in the thirties of the fourteenth century, the veneration of Saint Peter on Athos was in decline. It was the word of Gregory Palamas that began its revival.
"It seems to me that it is unfair that we zealously glorify those who have accomplished something worthy of memory in other parts of the world. But we neglect the example of every good that we have at home, I mean the life of Peter," began his Sermon Saint Gregory Palamas. An ascetic and teacher, whom the Orthodox Church considers equal to the ancient Fathers of the Church, Gregory acted as a defender of the Athonite ascetics, whose prayer experience was questioned by the Orthodox rationalists of that time. Saint Peter, a hermit and a contemplative ascetic, that is, literally from the Greek "hesychast", became for him a prototype of what the monks of Athos, contemporary to Gregory, lived and were saved by, and whom he defended from attacks. Thus, thanks to Gregory, from a locally venerated holy man, Peter became a became a saint of the entire Christian world.
The most ancient source of information about Peter is the liturgical canon written by Saint Joseph the Hymnographer (816-886). The text says that Peter remained in silence for a long time on the Holy Mountain, his relics were initially hidden from the world, and after their discovery they produced healings.
The life of the saint and Athonite traditions say that Peter was once a soldier in the Byzantine armies and was captured by Muslim Arabs. The only way to be freed from captivity was to pay a ransom, but there was no one to pay for Peter. In despair, he asked himself why he had suffered such misfortune, and suddenly remembered that he had once, in a pious impulse, made a vow to God to devote himself to monastic life, but had not fulfilled it. Having received a miraculous release through the prayers of St. Nicholas and Simeon the God-Receiver, who appeared to him in a vision, Peter thus made a new promise to God.
The Byzantine Empire of that time was plunging into the heresy of iconoclasm. The monks sought refuge on the Holy Mountains, of which there were three at that time. All of them were in Asia Minor and Anatolia. These monasteries served as a refuge from the iconoclasts, but were subject to raids by the same Muslim conquerors from whose captivity Peter had barely escaped. To avoid them, he went not to Asia, but to Europe, and prophetically chose Athos. He lived in complete solitude for more than fifty years, in the rarest and most difficult feat of a "grazer saint", that is, like John the Baptist and Mary of Egypt, he ate only what grew in nature. Even his clothes rotted.
The choice of Athos turned out to be prophetic. After all, it was soon destined to become the fourth Holy Mountain of Byzantine monasticism, the only one to survive, while the others ceased to exist due to the cataclysms of history.
The Russian monastic tradition has preserved the practice of two tonsures, the small and great schema, when the vows and tonsure into monasticism are repeated, that is, brought anew, to become stricter. Like the biblical prophets, who, at the command of God, performed certain actions to indicate future events, the life of St. Peter of Athos gives an instructive figurative explanation of such a sacred practice of two tonsures. Thanks to another great ascetic and teacher, St. Theodore the Studite (759-826), who lived a century after the events described, who insisted that there can only be one and only tonsure, in the Greek tradition the practice of two tonsures was taken out of use. However, it was preserved in Russian Orthodoxy.
For us humble lay people, the life of St. Peter reminds us that God always accepts the repentance of a Christian, and when we sin again, even if this is repeated, we must literally run to confess and return to God, in the words of the Psalms, “as a deer runs to the water springs” (Psalm 41:2), over and over again.