The Shepherd, May 2005
Monasticism in the 21st Century:
A Viable Alternative or a Forgotten Ideal?, 1
by Mother Ephrosynia
of the Convent of Lesna, France
A BROTHER went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my prayer rule, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”
This is what monasticism is: a longing for God that knows no limits. It is the beginning of the Age to come, of the Kingdom of Heaven still here on earth. The Church calls monasticism the Angelic Life. According to Holy Tradition, in the fourth century an angel appeared to St. Pachomius, the first of the monks struggling out in the Egyptian desert to establish a monastic community, and gave him a bronze tablet, inscribed with a Rule for his monks to follow. From Apostolic times to the present day thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people have left everything they had and scorned everything that this world has to offer in order to follow Christ and to live the Gospels more fully.
At times this impulse has been stronger, at times weaker, and the Holy Fathers speak of monasticism as a barometer of spiritual life in the Church. When monastic life flourishes, the faithful are really striving spiritually, and conversely, when few people find inspiration in the monastic ideal, monasteries diminish and are ignored, spiritual life amongst the faithful is on the decline. At the end of the fourth century, when persecution of Christians ceased and the Church knew peace for the first time, but the zeal of converts hadn’t cooled, and many Christians desired to give everything to Christ, monasticism even became a mass movement. One of the travel writers of the period, St. Palladius, tells of his visit to Oxyrhynchus, one of the cities of the Thebaid (in Egypt). “It is impossible to do justice to the marvels, which we saw there. For the city is so full of monasteries that the very walls resound with the voices of monks. Other monasteries encircle it outside.... The temples and capitols of the city were bursting with monks; every quarter of the city was inhabited by them.... The monks were almost in the majority over the secular inhabitants... and there is no hour of day or night when they do not offer acts of worship to God.... What can one say of the piety of the... people, who, when they saw us strangers, approached us as if we were angels? How can one convey an adequate idea of the throngs of monks and nuns past counting? However, as far as we could ascertain from the holy bishop of that place, we would say that he had under his jurisdiction 10,000 monks and 20,000 nuns. It is beyond my power to describe their hospitality and their love for us. In fact each of us had our cloaks torn apart by people pulling us to make us go and stay with them.” Closer to our own time, in Russia in 1907, towards the end of the spiritual revival of the 19th century and before the Revolution, there were 24,000 monks and 66,000 nuns, about 90,000 monastics, living in 970 monasteries. On the bleak side, the countryside of France, where my monastery is, is peppered by empty monasteries in ruins, remnants of the Age of Faith, as historians call the Middle Ages. They are testimonies to the spiritual barrenness of France, where more people believe in astrology than in Christ, and people spit at me on the streets because they think I’m a Moslem. It would never occur to them that a woman wearing black might be a nun. The scene at the airport here in Ottawa when I arrived was nothing like the scene in Oxyrhyncus when St. Palladius walked through the gates, and you could probably travel clear across Canada or America and not see a single monastery nor meet a single monk or nun.
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