In
an Orthodox country, where Church life is the normal experience for most each
day, the monastery is at the center of that life. The life of the monks - their renunciation of
the world, humility, love, and ceaseless prayer - is the pattern for the rest
of the Christians in the country to follow.
People from every class of society, from peasants to soldiers to
philosophers to kings, seek their counsel, blessing, and prayers, and many
times end up becoming monks themselves.
And from the monasteries come the leaders of the Church - the bishops,
and also deacons and priests.
Of
its place in a country’s life, Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna wrote,
Monasticism is not something unto itself—a peculiar
and exclusive institution. In the true
monastic every Christian sees what he can be.
He beholds a model to be emulated.
He embraces the higher faculties of the soul and beholds what it is that
embodies all that to which Christians aspire.
As an old adage has it: “Christ,
the light of Angels; Angels, the light of monastics; monastics, the light of
all men.” Monasticism reaches up to
Christ, derives from Christ, and brings the Christian Faithful into a direct
encounter with the light that flows forth from Christ and His Angels.
Just as the body has need of various victuals and
craves the things that sustain it, so the soul needs an image of purity. It is this image which the monk and nun have
always presented (‘Introduction’, in Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili, The Monastic Life, trans. Archbishop
Chrysostomos of Etna and Bishop Auxentios of Photiki, Etna, Cal.: Center for
Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2001, p. 16).
Now
that Communism has fallen in Eastern Europe and Russia, monasticism is once again taking
its place of central importance there.
In Russia, for ensample, there were about 1,025 monasteries in 1914
before the Soviet takeover, 18 in 1987, but 713 in 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Russian_Orthodox_Church,
accessed 21 Aug. 2016).
Like
the Southern plantation, a monastery is a self-sufficient, hierarchical
society, focused also on the production of two kinds of goods, one kind material
and one kind non-material: the material
(like the plantation) being agricultural products and kindred handcrafts of
various sorts and the non-material (unlike the plantation) being mainly an
inner life of prayer.
At
the head of the monastery is the abbot or abbess, and under his or her rule are
the brothers and sisters, each of whom has his or her particular place in the
order of the monastery’s life: planter,
harvester, cook, chanter, cell attendant, bee keeper, candle maker, and so on.
In its life of work and prayer, every monastery has
to support itself financially. Contrary to what some may think, the diocese or
central Church administration does not financially supports the monasteries.
Each monastic establishment strives to have their financial support come from
within its specific confines and through the labors of the monks/nuns. Yes,
donations from individuals, parishes, and Church organizations form a large
portion of the necessary financial running of the monasteries, but the
monastics still labor to maintain the physical structures and properties, as
well as doing things that produce an income. Projects vary from one monastery
to another, but often include painting icons, sewing vestments, running an
Orthodox bookstore on the premises of the monastery, hosting retreats and
visitors, and sometimes going out to speak at a conference or retreat, writing
and publishing books, baking prosphora for parishes, etc. (‘What Role Does
Monasticism Play in the Life of the Church?’, http://www.pravmir.com/what-role-does-monasticism-play-in-the-life-of-the-church/,
accessed 18 Aug. 2016)
So
far things look fairly alike between the plantation and the monastery, but in
his focus on the inner life, the monk begins to part ways from the gentleman,
who is more focused on outward action, be it running the plantation or service
in the government or military (‘It was natural that a people whose talent lay
almost wholly in the direction of statecraft should consider eminence in war
and eloquence in council the marks of illustrious manhood.’ -- Richard Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay, p. 56).
In
the tway-speech (dialogue) he has created between a modernish theologian (whose
mindset is probably not far different from most Southerners, past or present,
when it comes to monastic life) and a traditional Orthodox monk, Metropolitan
Cyprian draws out this difference betwixt inward as over against outward virtue:
THEOLOGIAN:
But this I cannot understand—the young theologian interrupted. If a monk cares only for himself and for his
“little cell,” separated from the world, uncommunicative, how does he put into
practice the love which is an essential trait of the Christian? Is this not, therefore, just egotism?
MONK:
Listen, my child. The greatest
joy and delight of God is to dwell in the pure hearts of those who love
Him. Since, therefore, the goal of the
monastic, as with every Christian, is to be united to God by Grace, to be
“divinized,” all of his fervor is directed toward cleansing his heart of the
passions and making it a bright throne and chamber where the Holy Trinity might
dwell. For this reason, Saint Gregory
Palamas says, “Indeed, only this is impossible to God, to enter into union with
man before he has been cleansed.” Consequently,
it is not egotism for a monk to attempt in solitude to deliver himself from the
dung of the passions. For more moved is
God when you overcome the passions, then when you return thousands of souls to
goodness, as the Fathers say (Monastic
Life, p. 22).
The
monk says elsewhere,
MONK: Listen,
my child, the contemporary Christian in the world, entangled as he is in
temporal concerns, has lost the essence of Christianity and, more specifically,
of Orthodoxy—namely, mysticism, Divine love.
He believes that he has been appointed to the service of his neighbor
and that, consequently, he does not have time for himself. He thinks that giving of himself entirely to
his neighbor is enough to show that he is not selfish or egotistical. However, the truly unselfish man is one who
subjects himself to hardship through the ways of asceticism set forth and left
to us by the Holy Fathers, not those hardships which contemporary zealots for
“social action” desire, i.e., trips
to hospitals, social agencies, etc. The truly unselfish man is likewise one who
humbles himself, fleeing vainglory.
Internally, he is humbled through self-denial and self-reproach, the
beginning or alpha of mystical spiritual work.
External humility lies in humble eyes cast downwards, in silence, in the
avoidance of quarrels, in submission, in not contradicting one’s superiors, in
the avoidance of provocation of others, in suffering insult, and in such
things. Since, then, the “active
Christian” betrays these mystical works of humility, he believes that he is
able to cure others and has forgotten the words, “Physician, heal thyself” and
the admonition, “My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall
receive the greater condemnation.” The
unfortunate “active Christian” has not reflected well: “How, indeed, will I give, when I do not
have?” How will an empty cistern water
the gardens? He has not reflected on
what it is that a Christian should have and what he, himself, has. He has forgotten the words of Saint Paul: “Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me,” which words were the moving force of his apostolic activity
(pgs. 32-3).
. . . The
centrality of prayer, which I have spent so much time discussing, is not such
that it compromises the importance of philanthropic works. I simply want to assure you that the endeavor
to cleanse the heart and its works by prayer, along with asceticism founded in
humility, is greater. Social action,
properly speaking, should spring forth from a loving soul, not from some
pietistic or sentimental love that is satisfied with external effusions and
material gifts alone. Good works lie in
holiness that has been externalized, and they have a purely instructive
character, benefiting and accruing principally to the doer and not to the receiver. They are done, as it were, for the perfecting
of the benevolent soul. As we have said,
good works must, of course, be undertaken by the layman, even before
sanctification has been achieved, but without a lopsided emphasis on their
significance (p. 45).
. . . Monasticism
constitutes the aristocracy of the Church, and just as aristocrats spend the
time in the courts of the rulers and take part in the “Lucullan feasts” and
delights, so also monks always reside in monasteries, which are the antechambers
of the Heavenly Blessedness, and there they drink the nectar of Divine
love. Intoxicated by its sweetness, they
cry out: “We are wounded by love” (p.
39).
Metropolitan
Cyprian, in these sayings of the monk, shows the South how she may overfare (transition)
from the old nobility of the gentleman to the new nobility of the monk. There would be some changes, but many
familiar traits would remain.
He
is still a heroic warrior, but he battles with the demons and his own fallen,
disordered passions instead of men.
He
is still one who has the power of ‘command’, but through the Grace of the God
that overflows from a pure, meek, and loving heart instead of through force of
arms or skill in rhetoric.
He
still does good works for his neighbor, but they are mostly the hidden work of
the heart, his unceasing prayer for all the world.
There
is still a web of virtues growing out of his way of life, but it is based on lowliness
rather than pride.
No
one should misunderstand, however: There
will always be a need in the South and in every country for a ‘gentleman
class’, a Christian æþeldom (aristocracy) whose work is done primarily in the
world. The South, to her praise, has
always cherished hierarchy, but by banishing monasticism in large part from her
life, the right ordering of things has been disrupted; an essential channel
within the Church that carries God’s Grace to the faithful has been blocked (but
we do no wish to be too harsh about this, since the South, Old and New, has known
little of the Orthodox Faith). So the
fulness of the Christian life is unknown in Dixie,
and instead of the humble monk, imitating the Most Humble Christ, as her model,
there is the proud gentleman, with his quick temper, sensitivity to insults,
duels, and so on, whose lineage unfortunately is tied up with that of the high-minded,
warsome French Normans.
But
as we have noted, there is so much in common between plantation life and
Orthodox monastic life that the journey back to the historic Christian norm of
having monks as the ‘aristocracy’ of the land would probably not be as
difficult in the South as in other predominantly evangelical Protestant
countries. Already the Southerner is
inclined toward ‘idleness’ (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and eds. Mansfield and Winthrop,
Chicago, Ill.: U of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 360), which, echoing one of the
Metropolitan’s statements above, with but a few changes can become the
threshold of the inner life of prayer the monk and nun are called to cultivate.
As
the work of salvaging, guarding, and strengthening the good things of Southern
culture goes on, encouraging monastic life must become an essential part. It is a bulwark of the Truth, upbraiding -
sometimes with words, sometimes merely by the life the monks and nuns live, and
sometimes by their martyrdom - those who try to introduce innovations and
errors of any kind, great or small, into the Christian life. So we ask our Southern brothers and sisters
to honor the monks and nuns as once they honored the gentlemen and ladies
aforetime, and all the more so, as the excellence of the fruits of the formers’
labors is seen to rise above that of the latters’.
Since
we have dealt somewhat abstractly with this subject, next time we will try to
show through the lives of some monastics who have deeply impacted the West what
this monastic life looks like when actually practiced in the world.
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