Monasticism
9 topics
EssentialMonasticismMount Athos (Holy Mountain)The peninsula in northern Greece that has been given over to monks for more than a thousand years, and the heart of Orthodox monasticism. Hermits lived there before the tenth century, but its history as the Holy Mountain begins with St Athanasius the Athonite, who founded the Great Lavra in 963. Twenty ruling monasteries share it, seventeen Greek, one Russian, one Serbian and one Bulgarian, with sketes, cells and hermitages among them. They govern themselves through the Holy Community at Karyes, under the spiritual authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the sovereignty of the Greek state; they keep the Julian calendar and Byzantine time, and admit no women, for the mountain is held to be the Garden of the Theotokos, who by tradition landed there on her way to Cyprus. St Gregory Palamas prayed there and St Nikodemos edited the Philokalia there, and after a long decline the late twentieth century brought it young monks again, many of them spiritual children of St Joseph the Hesychast. Men come as pilgrims with a permit, the diamonitirion, and stay as guests of the monks.ImportantMonasticismMonasticismThe monastic life: withdrawal from the world for unceasing prayer and repentance. It began in the Egyptian desert in the late third century with St. Anthony the Great, and received communal form from St. Pachomius and St. Basil the Great. Orthodoxy has no separate religious orders - there is a single monastic state in three forms: the hermit’s solitude, the coenobitic community, and the skete between them. Entry is by tonsure, and the vows are for life.ImportantMonasticismThe Desert Fathers and MothersThe men and women who went out into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine and Syria from the late third century to live for God alone, and made, as St Athanasius wrote, the desert a city. St Antony went furthest and stayed longest, and the Life of him that Athanasius wrote around 360 carried the ideal across the whole Christian world. Around them grew the three ways of life that the Church still keeps: the hermit alone, as Antony; the small group around an elder, as at Scetis under St Macarius; and the community under a rule, as St Pachomius founded it in the Thebaid. There were Mothers as well as Fathers, Syncletica, Sarah and Theodora among them. What they taught was handed down as sayings, short and blunt, gathered in the fifth century into the Apophthegmata; Palladius wrote down what he saw among them, and St John Cassian carried their teaching to the West. Almost every later word of Orthodox spirituality, on the passions, on watchfulness, on humility, starts from theirs.ImportantMonasticismOptina PustynFamous Russian monastery in the Kaluga region, renowned for its tradition of spiritual eldership (startchestvo) in the 19th century. Elders like Leonid, Macarius, Ambrose, and Nektary attracted pilgrims from all walks of life: Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy all visited. Fr. Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov is based on Elder Ambrose. Reopened at the end of the Soviet era.ImportantMonasticismSt. Catherine's Monastery (Sinai)The oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world, built at the foot of Mount Sinai by Emperor Justinian (6th century). Contains the world's second-largest collection of ancient manuscripts (after the Vatican), including leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus. Houses irreplaceable icons surviving Iconoclasm because the monastery was in Muslim-held territory. A UNESCO World Heritage site.ImportantMonasticismTrinity-Sergius LavraThe spiritual heart of Russian Orthodoxy, founded by St. Sergius of Radonezh in 1337 near Moscow. The holiest monastery in Russia. St. Sergius blessed Dmitry Donskoi before the Battle of Kulikovo (1380). Rublev painted his Trinity icon here. Houses the Moscow Theological Academy. The Lavra, closed in 1920 and reopened in 1946, remains the center of Russian spirituality.ImportantMonasticismTypes of MonasticismThe ways the monastic life is lived, all of them older than any rule that describes them. The coenobium is a community with everything in common, meals, work and prayer, under an abbot, as St Pachomius founded it in Egypt, St Basil gave it its rules and St Theodore the Studite its Byzantine form. The lavra, as St Sabbas built his in the Judaean desert, scatters its monks in cells around a church and gathers them at the weekend. The skete is a village of small houses around a central church; the kellion is a single house with its elder and one or two disciples; and the hermit lives alone, as some still do in the cliffs at the southern tip of Athos. The idiorrhythmic way, where each monk kept his own purse and table, spread on Athos in the late Middle Ages and ended there in 1992, when the last such house returned to the common life.MonasticismMeteora MonasteriesThe monasteries built on the sandstone pillars of Thessaly, where hermits lived in the caves from the eleventh century and St Athanasios the Meteorite, come from Mount Athos, founded the Great Meteoron in the fourteenth. There were once more than twenty; six still live. Until the 1920s the only way up to several of them was a rope ladder or a net hauled up by a windlass, and the monks, asked when the rope was replaced, are said to have answered: when the Lord lets it break. UNESCO listed them in 1988. They draw great numbers of visitors now, and still keep the round of services, the fasts and the silence for which they were built so far from the ground.MonasticismMonastic TonsureThe rite by which a monk or nun is made, with a cutting of the hair in the form of a cross as a first offering of the whole self. It comes in stages. A novice becomes a rassophore, receiving the black robe and usually a new name, without vows. The small schema brings the vows of obedience, chastity and poverty, the mantle and a prayer rope, called in the rite a sword of the Spirit. The great schema, which some receive only near death, is the full angelic habit. The service is spoken of as a second baptism, because the one tonsured is washed of what went before and begins again, and the Church sings over him the parable of the prodigal son, and the Father who ran to meet him.