MARK JENKINS on MOUNT ATHOS AND THE LOST KNOWLEDGE OF THE IMAGINATION. CHAIRED BY JASON ELLIOT.

Mount Athos is a remote and rugged peninsula off the North Eastern coast of Greece. For more than a millennium an autonomous monastic republic has existed on the ‘Holy Mountain’ with little contact with the outside world. Today nearly two thousand Eastern Orthodox monks dedicate themselves there to a quest for the Light of Meaning – to behold reality as it is beyond the veil of appearances.

The monks who live on Mount Athos reside in a variety of monastic settlements, ranging from grand monasteries to small hermitages and caves. There is a tradition that twelve of them are invisible. Their outer lives are simple and unextravagant, but their inner struggle is active and profound. They are occupied with seeing, rather than thinking, and with the cultivation of interior vision.

Expressed most simply, these monks want to be like Adam before the Fall – able to perceive the world in the Light of Meaning.  But this can only happen to those who have the courage to die. They know that there cannot be life without death and are they are dedicated to the attainment of a transcendent form of imagination virtually unknown to outsiders. The know those who die will not die when they die.

Mark Jenkins studied the breakdown in relations between the Greek East and the Latin West in the late Medieval Era under the late Professor Donald Nicoll, Koraes Professor of Byzantine History at Kings College London. After university, Mark was commissioned from Sandhurst into the Welsh Guards and served on operations in Northern Ireland, Central America and finally Afghanistan. After leaving the Army Mark delivered solutions for clients across Africa and the Middle East, including Somalia, Libya and Yemen. He also spent a year on the staff of HRH Prince Ghazi, where he also studied Islam at the University of Jordan, and served as Director, Inter Faith Affairs at the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre.

The talk will be introduced by Jason Elliot, former war correspondent and author of several bestselling titles on travel and exploration of Eastern cultures and a forthcoming work on the symbolism of Sufi poetry.  After the Talk there will be a dialogue between Mark and Jason about the lost knowledge of the imagination in the Christian and Islamic traditions and an opportunity for questions from the audience.