ON A boat gliding its way down an undulating peninsula where the dense virgin woods are crowned by a numinous marble peak, the atmosphere is carefree. The autumn rays make glorious patterns in the sea, and what appear to be medieval towns, with winding cobblestoned streets, tall houses and multi-coloured domes, dot the coastline.

The boat’s passengers include parish groups and choirs from all over Greece, and farther afield, especially eastern Christian lands such as Russia, Romania and Serbia. Homely announcements (“The group from Corfu may open their sandwiches whenever they choose”) and dollops of local history (tales of miracle-working icons, saintly monastic founders and ascetic labourers) are served up over a loudspeaker in various east European tongues, vying with the seagulls.

This is the nearest most of the voyagers will get to the semi- independent monastic polity of Mount Athos, the most easterly of three fingers of land that jut out into the north Aegean sea. For the past millennium, Athos has been barred to female visitors—there are some large convents nearby to which devout ladies are redirected—and is accessible to males only after burdensome procedures. Regulations forbid most passenger-boats from coming any nearer than 500 metres from the Athonite coast.

But even at a distance, Athos exerts a powerful fascination. Its 20 monasteries, whose fortunes have fluctuated wildly over the centuries, have seen a revival over the past couple of decades. The monks’ numbers have risen (to a current total of 2,300) and their average age has dropped. But it is Athos’s history, as well as its spiritual importance, that attracts visitors: these calm waters have seen some strange disturbances.

A century ago next year, one of the most extraordinary events in the modern history of Christianity took place there. In the summer of 1913 the Aegean was penetrated not by pleasure-craft, but by the navy of the Russian tsar. A gunboat and later two transporters, complete with a party of marines, sailed up to a giant monastic house. A Russian archbishop tried negotiating with a bitterly divided community. When that failed, the troops opened up with a water-cannon, directed at the cells of monks on the losing side in a theological argument. Eventually, hundreds of bedraggled monks, defeated but defiant, were bundled onto ships. Opinion differs on whether anybody was killed, but the monks were certainly treated brutally: over the next two weeks, more than 800 of them were dragged away and transported to Odessa, where about 40 were jailed and most of them were stripped of their robes and sent on their way.

Hardly seismic, some might say, at a time when war was brewing in Europe and about to explode across the world. At that very moment the second of two short, sharp local conflicts was crackling. The previous October a pan-Christian alliance of Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia had all but driven the Ottomans out of Europe; Athos and the surrounding land had passed into Hellenic hands after five centuries of Ottoman overlordship. In summer 1913 there was a fresh round of fighting, with Greeks, Serbs and Turks clipping the wings of Bulgaria. The great European powers looked on anxiously. Russia wanted to hold the ring in a Slavic partnership of Serbs and Bulgarians. Britain, torn between old ties with the Ottomans and a newer relationship with the rising naval power of Greece, was wary of that.

With geopolitics in the background, the tsar’s move can be seen as a power play. But the trigger for the Russian navy’s storming intervention was spiritual, not military.

For six years the Russian monks of Athos—who had appeared in large numbers in the late 19th century and now exceeded the Greeks—had been at the epicentre of a controversy that also raged among the Russian elite, drawing in the court, the Duma, scientists and mathematicians. The argument concerned the holiness of the name, or names, of God.

The row began in 1907, when a book entitled “In the mountains of the Caucasus” was published. It was written by an elderly monk called Ilarion. Before moving to a remoter, Caucasian spot, he had spent many years at St Panteleimon’s (see picture above), the biggest Russian house on Athos: a giant establishment, home at that time to about 2,000 monks. St Panteleimon’s was the only one of the peninsula’s 20 monasteries that was formally under Russian control. (There were a couple of other vast Russian houses on Athos, dedicated to Saint Andrew and the Prophet Elijah, but they were notionally subordinate to nearby Greek monasteries; this helped ensure that the ruling council of Athos remained overwhelmingly Greek.)

What the Russians lacked in political power, they made up for in numbers and spiritual passion, exemplified by Ilarion’s book. It extols the benefits of reciting the “Jesus prayer”, a simple supplication whose repetition had been part of eastern Christian practice for centuries: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.” In a tender, cautious tone, the book argues that just as “in God’s name, God himself is present”, the name of Jesus Christ, when recited prayerfully, radiates sanctity; it is more, infinitely more, than a set of letters.

In a tender, cautious tone, Ilarion’s book argues that the name of Jesus Christ, when recited prayerfully, radiates sanctity; it is more, infinitely more, than a set of letters

Ilarion had touched upon one of monotheism’s most sensitive spots. In any philosophical system in which the starting-point is the radical, primordial distinction between the Creator and the created, a hard question arises. To which side of the line should words, images or phenomena be assigned that belong to earthly reality but also pertain to God? And is it ever possible for something or someone to be on both sides of the line at once?

A thousand years ago, Islam was bitterly divided over whether the Koran was created or divine; the latter view won out. In the religion of ancient Israel the barrier between Heaven and Earth seemed to melt, but only for a moment, when God revealed his holy name to Moses with the words Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, I am what I am. Once revealed, this name—or rather its third person form, YHWH, which literally means “He is”—was deemed to be so pregnant with sanctity that it could be uttered only once a year, by the priest when he entered the holiest part of the temple and, in a sense, merged with God. To let the name of God—He who is—pass human lips at any other time would imply a muddling of earthly and heavenly realms. So awesome was the name that as soon as it was revealed, it had to be veiled again.

In the eighth century Christians argued over the status of icons which, like sacred words and titles, were felt to be a kind of meeting place between the earthly and divine. There was nothing intrinsically holy about wood or paint, but these images were more than decorations: as “windows on to heaven” they guided people into a holy, uncreated realm and some of that holiness adhered to the images themselves.

In the 14th century, as Byzantium dissolved into civil and theological war and the Ottoman conquest loomed, yet another dispute over the boundaries between Earth and Heaven raged, both on Athos and in the imperial court. The terms of the argument sound obscure to most modern ears. When Jesus Christ appeared on a mountain bathed in light, were the rays that emanated from his body created or divine? But behind the question was that recurring dilemma in monotheism. How, if at all, can the all-powerful, transcendent Creator and the created world come into contact with one another, and what does that imply for human destiny? The view that prevailed was a subtle one. God was both an inaccessible “essence” and an infinite variety of “energies” that could be experienced on earth. Humans could both perceive the light emanating from their Lord and become re-transmitters of that light themselves—and all this could happen during their earthly lives. Ilarion’s treatise sparked yet another version of this debate.

The book did well. The tsar’s sister-in-law paid for its publication, and the censors of the Church made no objection. But some people did not like it. Another Russian Athonite monk, a certain Khrisanf, wrote a blistering review, saying the book absurdly exaggerated the status of words, which were simply part of earthly, human language. Soon the Russian community on Athos was split down the middle. Those who loved the book felt they were being victimised for venerating the names of God and Jesus and for the spiritual experiences they enjoyed when they invoked the name of Jesus. It seemed to them that they were being punished for their faith.

As the book’s popularity in Russia grew, so did the tension. In 1912 a powerful archbishop, Anthony Khrapovitsky, ordered the publication of the damning review in an important journal, and refused to publish any contrary views. He called supporters of the book “name-deifiers”—a label implying they were idolators—while they called themselves "name-glorifiers" and dubbed their foes "name-fighters".

Although most of the “glorifiers” were simple souls, among them was one of the most remarkable figures in late tsarist Russia. Born Alexander Bulatovich, he was a blueblooded officer in an elite regiment who went to Ethiopia in the 1890s, to bring succour to an emperor whom Russia backed against Italy. He learned Amharic, and his writings about local life were studied by Soviet officials when Ethiopia fell under their influence in the 1970s.

In 1902, haunted by the memory of killing a Chinese soldier in Manchuria, the swashbuckling hussar took monastic vows, taking the name Anthony. Seven years later, as an Athonite monk, he sat down to write a somewhat critical assessment of Ilarion’s booklet, and had another spiritual experience: an “emptiness, coldness and darkness” possessed him, and he realised that Ilarion was right and his critics wrong. The blackness, he felt, must have descended because he had been on the brink of “denying the divinity of the name of the Lord”. Thus chastised, he penned a treatise in defence of the sanctity of God’s name.

Bulatovich could still use his fists as well as his pen. At the end of 1912, as theological passions boiled over and war crackled through the Balkans, he returned from a six-month absence to find that sentiment in St Andrew’s, his monastic house, was overwhelmingly on the side of the name-glorifiers and his abbot, a name-fighter, had been voted out but would not quit his cell. He led a party which, after punches flew and beards were pulled, ousted the old abbot. Along with his counterpart at nearby St Panteleimon’s, who was struggling to keep order, the abbot appealed to a higher authority.

By the spring of 1913, dissent on Athos was surging out of control; a blockade, a rebuke from the Patriarch of Constantinople—Orthodoxy’s main bishop—and massive pressure from some hierarchs in Russia had failed to bring the name-glorifiers to heel. Meanwhile, at the London conference which settled the first Balkan war, Russians pressed for more influence in the running of the monastic statelet. They feared that the Greeks might use the name dispute as an excuse for expelling all the Russians from Athos. That is the best strategic explanation for the timing of the Russian navy’s move.

Whatever the merits of theology by water-cannon, the literature of the glorifiers often reads better than the propaganda of their foes, who caricature the glorifiers’ views to make them sound like crude pagans. And, in the end, the glorifiers were not entirely defeated. Bulatovich won a hearing from the tsar, who persuaded the Church to treat the glorifiers leniently. During the first world war Bulatovich served as a military priest and fought bravely. In December 1919, having retired to his estate in Ukraine, he was murdered in mysterious circumstances. Bulatovich’s earthly remains are marked by a chapel where he is quietly venerated as a saint. In modern-day St Petersburg Mother Kassia, a learned nun attached to a dissident wing of the Orthodox Church, still lobbies for his rehabilitation—triggering some rich theological debates in the Russian blogosphere. Metropolitan Hilarion, the Oxford-trained prelate who heads the Russian church’s external arm, has studied the name-glorifying dispute and concluded that it is still an open question who was right. That is a controversial thing to say in a church where the official line is that the glorifiers were pushy rioters who deserved a good dousing.

For the glorifiers’ views, though apparently abstruse and unworldly, are subversive. Mysticism—any movement in which people believe they are having a direct experience of the divine—undermines the authority of religious leaders. In the history of virtually all faiths there has been a tension between visionaries and prophets on one hand and hierarchs and administrators on the other. In the Russian case, to say the name-glorifiers were right would imply that the masters—religious and political—of tsarist Russia were wrong.