4.

 What do you think is the significance of monasticism?

            Today in the “television generation,” very little is known about the institution of monasticism and its contribution to civilization. When monks or nuns are portrayed on TV, this portrayal is generally done with utter lack of seriousness, if not downright mockery. For this reason, monasticism is not understood in the secular West.

            There are other reasons as well for that lack of understanding. Many people no longer read, and also, the technological change during the last century has been so striking and fast that it is easy to attribute almost everything to the present and nothing to the past. We no longer look to the past as people used to do, but live in an exaggerated appreciation for the present. This answer will therefore examine the monastic past, something that has washed up even to the shores of our modern world.

St. Athanasius the Great writes that:

“There are two forms and states of life. One is the usual life for mankind, married life; the other is the angelic and Apostolic life of which there is no higher, virginity or the monastic state.”

Monasticism is not something alien to the Church, but is life according to the Gospel. Thus, it is not without reason that the spiritual writers have set forth an extremely exalted point of view of this way of life. As one of them noted, among the Orthodox Church's monks and nuns throughout the ages, the gifts of casting out demons, healing sicknesses, resurrecting the dead, and gifts of prophecy, are not exceptional. Moreover, the greatest Fathers and theologians of Orthodoxy have come from the ranks of monastics. For these reasons, the best way to penetrate Orthodox spirituality is to enter it through monasticism.

            Monasticism had its origins in the Old Testament period of the Church, when God revealed to Moses the vow of the Nazarite — a vow of celibacy and the consecration of one's life to God (Numbers 6:2). Subsequently the prophets, from Elijah to John the Baptist, set examples of this vow.

            The monastic way was later perfected in the life of Christ. According to the teachings of all the Holy Fathers and teachers of the Church, the first monastic community was that which Christ formed with His Apostles. St. Basil the Great gives this teaching when he states that “the image of the common monastic life is truly an imitation of the way of life of the Lord Jesus Christ with His disciples.”

            Likewise, the Church historian Filon notes that “already in the beginning of the Apostles' preaching, there were among Christians those who were distinguished by a special love of wisdom, that is, a yearning toward higher ascetic struggles and contemplation, which are the very constituents of the purely monastic life, and which a merely Christian life lived amidst the tumults and vanities of the world — although not in itself forbidden — is not adequate to satisfy.” In the same regard, St. John Chrysostom writes:

In the beginning of Christianity, in the land of Egypt there appeared a wonderful army of Christ, leading a form of life natural only to the celestial powers; and it was made up not only of men, but also of women, who no less than the men led the contemplative life. As great ascetics they entered into spiritual warfare with the devil and the powers of darkness.

Having seen Christ's example, the holy disciple and Evangelist Mark, who established the Church in Egypt, founded the first ascetic communities that continued this way of life. These communities had the Old Testament prophets as models, and they adhered to the principles set forth in Acts 4:32. These communities came to be known as monasteries, and their inhabitants came to be called monks, from the Greek word monos (single or alone), in reference to their choice to be alone with God. From these monastic communities arose the great monastic saints, the Desert Fathers, of the fourth-century Egyptian Thebaid.

            During the three hundred years of persecution of Christians, endless numbers of men, women and children underwent the cruelest forms of torture imaginable, being lacerated, burned, crucified, beheaded, drowned, thrown to lions in arenas, and having molten lead poured down their throats, for their Christian faith and love of God. Martyrdom had a central place in the spiritual outlook of early Christians, being considered the ultimate act of renunciation of the world and the highest confession of one's faith. All Christians believed and lived in truth, and lived in readiness to be killed.

            Once freedom was granted to the Church by Constantine, however, the suffering of persecution and martyrdom as a means of Christian perfection was gone. Under the new conditions where many started coming to Christianity out of expediency, many Christians in their freedom and wealth became worldly, forgetting that the Christian life is undertaken to save one's soul, and forgetting that this path entails suffering in this life in order to obtain peace in the next. This development resulted in secularism, something that proved an even greater danger for Christianity than the persecution of the Church, for with it, the ascetic way of living disappeared from the cities.

            In reaction to this secularization, the idea of martyrdom took other forms, such as a life of monasticism. At that time, there began to appear anchorites or hermits, people who fled society to enter into a voluntary or bloodless martyrdom in the desert — that is, to preserve the essence of the spiritual life and live a genuine life according to the Gospel. At first they left the world singly, and then in loosely-knit groups. In this way, monasticism emerged as a definite institution in the fourth century. As Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos goes on to explain, the Holy Fathers emphasize that the monastic life is the continuity of the Apostolic age and the life of the early Church. The Fathers, he states, taught that monastics are those who live the life of the Gospel, who experience repentance to its ultimate degree, and who try to observe the commandments of Christ unyieldingly.

            One of the earliest records of a monk is that of St. Anthony the Great (+356). When he was a young man, his parents died and left their substantial wealth to him. Sorrowing over their death, he went into church, and there he heard the priest read from Scripture: “If thou will be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give it to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven: and come and follow Me” (Mt 19:21). Upon hearing these words, Anthony's heart began to burn for Christ. He then went to distribute his inheritance among the poor, after which he departed to the Egyptian desert to be alone with God. There he lived a life of prayer, fasting and reading Holy Scripture, living to over a hundred years of age.

            The ultimate aim and significance of St. Anthony's life was not to withdraw complacently unto himself, but to cleanse his heart of the passions and vices that thrive in the world. After this cleansing, he was able to help his fellow men by his counsel or through his miraculous prayer. St. Anthony is the typical hermit — one who saved his own soul, and also saved the souls of many of his fellow men at the same time.

            After St. Anthony's repose, St. Athanasius the Great, the bishop of Alexandria (the same Athanasius who was responsible for the New Testament canon of Scriptures), recorded Anthony's life for the inspiration of others, eloquently presenting him as a model of ascetic perfection. As St. Athanasius writes:

How did this recluse in the wilderness become famous in Spain and Gaul, in Rome and Africa, were it not for God, Who knows His own people everywhere?... And although such people wish to live in seclusion, God reveals them and they cannot “hide their light under a bushel” (Mt 5: 15).

In bringing this story throughout the world, St. Athanasius changed the face of history with the life of St. Anthony, the illiterate cave-dwelling monk and the founder of anchoritic monasticism. St. Anthony's fame spread not because he desired it (for he had purposely withdrawn into the wilderness), but because God wanted him to serve as a lamp to illumine all.

            Following St. Anthony's example, thousands of people — men and women alike — fearing that the lure of comfort and security would divert them from their search for unity with God, withdrew from the world which entangles the soul, in order to devote attention to the “one thing needful” (Lk 10:42). Abandoning all things that tied them to the world — riches, homes, relatives, friends and all earthly consolations, they took up the eremitical way of life in the wilderness areas. Like the walls of the catacombs before, the wilderness isolated them from the world and gave them the opportunity for a more God-centered life. There, far from the temptations of the world and far from the eyes of men, these ascetic recluses concealed themselves in solitude in the wide expanse of desolate areas, in mountains and forests, in caves, cells and tombs, where they lead a life of self-renunciation and deprivation, one spent in prayer, fasting, chastity and vigilance. In such a state, they became lifelong martyrs in spiritual warfare against the passions and against the demons. “Lo, I have fled afar off and have dwelt in the wilderness. I waited for God that saveth me” (Ps 54:8-9). Some of the hermits lived in such complete isolation that, in the case of St. Mark of Thrace, he lived for more than ninety years without ever seeing another human face.

            Eremetical monasticism was established by St. Anthony the Great. According to this discipline, each monastic lived separately from the others in a hut or cave, where he prayed, fasted and labored under the guidance of a leader or elder called an abba, or father. During Anthony's lifetime, another form of monastic life began to develop — cenobitic monasticism, where the ascetics gathered into one community and were subject to one rule, under the leadership of an abbot or archimandrite. The founder of communal monasticism is St. Pachomius the Great.

            Receiving and preserving the same outpouring of spiritual gifts which distinguished the first era of Christianity, monasticism spread quickly through Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Greece, Ethiopia and India, and to Italy, Gaul, Ireland, Bulgaria and Russia, and to the ends of the world. First a monk would settle in some uninhabited area, after which people would settle nearby. In time a village would grown, and cities and entire societies has their beginnings in the simple poverty of monks.

            In Russia, just as in Byzantium before it, every aspect of life was centered around Christianity. However, there was still a need for the much deeper, God-centered life that only the desert can offer. As a result, the thick Russian forests became the desert where God-seekers could find the solitude they needed for the austere monastic life. Monasticism quickly spread and greatly thrived in Russia, but it met its Passion Friday on February 18, 1932, when all of Russian monasticism disappeared into the concentration camps. This act took place in the dead of one single night, and it was ignored by all and was almost unknown to the whole world. Soon after this so-called “holy night,” the United States recognized the Soviet tyranny as the lawful government of crucified Russia.

            Comparing the life of hermits to those living in the world, St. John of Kronstadt writes that the former are worthy of a thousand crowns. He continues:

They, out of love for God, forsook the world and all that is in the world; they went away into the desert, uninhabited places, and there, shut up in their cells, they spent all their life in thinking of God, in prayer, in renouncing their own will, in fasting, watching, laboring, and in doing great deeds for the love of God, enduring during their whole life the assaults of the opposing forces [the demons, who were] endeavoring by every means to shake their faith and trust in God, and especially their love for Him. To fight, for the love of God, against our own flesh and the devil — that crafty, mighty and evil enemy — not for some hours, days and months, but for many years, sometimes sixty or seventy — is not this worthy of crowns? And what, in comparison with these ascetics, or Holy Fathers, are men living in the world, falling so often into sin even without being assaulted, and defeated by their own flesh without even being attacked? What in comparison to holy ascetics are worldly men, living in accordance with their own will, in luxury, in pleasures of every kind, gorgeously appareled and living delicately (Lk 7:25), given over to pride, ambition, envy, hatred, avarice, irritability, wrath, revenge, amusements, fornication, drunkenness — to all possible vices, although not all in the same person? They are caught alive, without any resistance, in the power of the devil, and therefore he does not attack them, but leaves them long entangled in the nets in the peace of self-forgetfulness that precede death [My Life in Christ].

Orthodox monasticism is called the angelic life. As an old adage from St. John of the Ladder has it: “Christ, the light of angels; angels, the light of monastics; monastics, the light of the laity.” Likewise, Scripture teaches that “they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain... the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage... for they are equal unto the angels” (Lk 20:35-36, cf. Mt 22:30, Mk 12:25). When the disciples said to the Master, “if the case of a man be so with his wife, it is good not to marry,” Christ in reply instructed:

All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For... there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake; he that is able to receive it, let him receive it (Mt 19:12).

            A monk explains that Christ refers to monastics as eunuchs for the Kingdom not only because of their celibacy, but more importantly to emphasize that like the eunuchs of His day, who were influential royal officials, monastics have a special closeness to God. They are “before the throne of God and serve Him day and night in His temple” (Rev 7:15).

            A Russian priest additionally explains that the arduous process of monastic self-denial and renunciation in and of itself is not the goal, but that it is the most effective means of attaining the highest spiritual life. The aim of monasticism is human transformation (the attainment of moral and spiritual strength) for the salvation of one's soul. This human transformation is the process of theosis (divinization), or a participation of man in the divine energies of God. This union with God is possible through the conquest of the passions, for Christ states that those who see Him are the pure of heart. As St. Gregory Palamas instructs, “Indeed, only this is impossible to God, to enter into union with a man before he has been cleansed.”

            As an American nun notes of this transformation, many monastic saints regained the likeness of Adam in Paradise, who was rightful lord over the animals and earthly elements. Wild animals, including fierce lions and bears, and timid birds, were gentle and unafraid in the presence of these men and women, and the cruel cold of the Siberian winters could not harm them. Dwelling in the antechambers of Heaven as they did, these saints barely touched the prosaic aspects of pragmatic human affairs.

            Regarding monasticism’s ultimate goal, the salvation of one's soul, the voices of all the Holy Fathers are summed up by Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky), former First Hierarch of the Russian Church in Exile, himself a monastic of high spiritual caliber and one whose remains did not decompose after his repose. The metropolitan wrote that “according to the definition of the Fathers, the monastic life is per se the direct road to the Kingdom of Heaven.”

            Orthodox monasticism continues today, particularly in the countries of Eastern Europe, where monasteries dot the countryside with noticeable frequency. Orthodox monasticism will continue to exist until the consummation of the ages.