Monasticism tends to have a bad reputation here at the South. Marriage of man and woman, children, and ancestors have always been the focus and ideal of the Southern people. A peak into Dixie’s literature confirms this. In her novel The Great Meadow, Elizabeth Madox Roberts has the youthful brothers and one of their sisters exchange these lines:
‘Where will my land be, for my house?’ Diony asked. It came to her now, as a sudden disaster, that Five Oaks would not be her place. Other land higher up toward the Ledge would belong to Sam. ‘Where mought be my place?’
‘You’d have to marry to get a place,’ Reuben answered her.
‘But suppose I mought not,’ she said.
‘Then God help you! Iffen a woman isn’t married she has a poor make-out of a life,’ Sam said. He was bending over the rope, his hands making a knot, his face earnest in what he said.
‘But God’s sake! I never knew a woman that wasn’t married,’ Reuben said, as if his saying were final, half muttering, as if it were no matter. ‘Come to think, I never knew one.’
‘Crazy Abbie, over at the court-house,’ Sam spoke after a moment of careful search. ‘She carries out slops in the ordinary, the tavern place. I never heard it said she ever had anybody marry with her’ (Hesperus Press Ltd., London, England, 2012, p. 11).
The typical Southern view of the abnormality of the single, unmarried state is flawlessly expressed. Another Southern novelist, Margaret Junkin Preston, wrote in a similar vein. In Silverwood: A Book of Memories, young Edith expresses a desire for retirement from the world and wooded solitude:
“Doesn’t the taste of wood-life we are enjoying to-day, suggest how delightful it would be to have a rustic cottage—a permanent home, somewhere hereabouts, away from the world and all its vexations, where we could do as we please, unrestrained by the trammels of society,–happy in God, and nature, and one another?”
A very monastic sort of vision, which is summarily rejected by Edith’s mother precisely because of that feature:
“But to be serious,” said Mrs. Irvine—“you have need to be put into the heart of society, Edith, to eradicate your anchorite notions. Silverwood, I’m afraid, is not the place for you. God made us social beings, and we must not try to unmake ourselves. The old convent life you profess sometimes to have a hankering after, apart, of course, I understand you,” as Edith was about to interrupt her with an explanation, “apart from its superstitious religion—this convent life tended to uproot all human affections from the heart of woman. And it’s the idlest fancy, too, to suppose that those sisterhoods didn’t have constant jarrings and blickerings. I dare say even at the period of their greatest purity, they were the hot-beds of such strifes as private households know nothing of. So get rid of all these ideas, my daughter: I don’t like to hear you advocate them even in sport” (Forgotten Books, London, England, 2015, pgs. 77-78, 80).
Hrmpf! Case closed, right? The single, unmarried state shall forever be reserved for the eccentrics and the unfortunates here in Dixie.
Well, perhaps not. For the Orthodox Church has a few things to say in defense of monasticism, which, as we shall see, is actually another form of marriage and not a lonesome single state (though it may appear to be the latter to some). But more on that anon.
The recently reposed Metropolitan Bishop Isaiah of Denver provides a much-needed counterpoint to the rigidly anti-monastic view of the largely Protestant South in his essay ‘Orthodox Monasticism: A Brief Study for the Layman’. He begins by noting the dismal view towards monasticism that exists today in many places (like Dixie):
We are living at a time in which the monastic life is not only considered abnormal, but is even ridiculed and condemned. Even they who profess to teach the word of God, especially within Protestant Christianity, cynically condemn the monastic life as useless, isolationist, abnormal, and not in conformity with the teachings of Christ. They teach that they who enter monasteries and convents certainly are not the ideal Christians.
He then begins to trace the origins of monasticism, beginning with St. John the Baptist:
Yet, history witnesses to us that the ascetic life, the life of monasticism has existed within the Church from the very beginning. Even before the Church had been established on earth, a voice came crying out of the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord. That voice belonged to Saint John the Forerunner and Baptist. It is not incorrect to see him also as the forerunner of monasticism within the life of the Church. For Saint John prepared the way for a King whose Kingdom is not of this world. Monasteries and convents more than anything else are vivid witnesses of that coming Kingdom.
Saint John had left his home and his people early in life and went to live in the wilderness (Isaiah 40:3, Malachi 4:5). He went to live the life of an ascetic. He had been there for several years, living the life of a hermit (heremitis). During that period he prayed incessantly, having dedicated his whole being to God. When the time came for him to fulfill his greatest mission, he returned to society to prepare the way for the King. He began by calling people to repentance and proclaiming that the Kingdom was close at hand. After he baptized Jesus in the Jordan, his mission was completed and from that point Jesus took up the message: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”
And the Lord Jesus Christ Himself overturns the idea expressed by Mrs. Preston in Silverwood that monasticism is contrary to human nature:
. . .
The rest is at https://southernorthodox.org/monasticism-mystical-marriage-with-christ/.
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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