Orthodox Monasticism 14 — The Charism of Discernment

A reader posted the following comment in the last post:

"This is what St John of Sinai had: a very strong charism of discernment in its highest degree, which he himself describes as the light of the Holy Spirit illuminating the dark parts of the soul of the other."

I'm having a bit of difficulty comprehending this notion of the "light of the Holy Spirit." My novice discernment constantly leads me into making a complacent judgement of excessive abstraction. How is St John of Sinai so inspirationally guided by the inner acknowledgment of the Holy Spirit?

Furthermore, I would like to complement you for posting the most intellectually stirring material on the net. Unfortunately, although born a Christian Orthodox, I have not practiced the faith properly throughout my adolescent years. Recently I have become increasingly interested in my faith and its potential role within my life. What reading should I do to not only become aware of the rudimentary concepts of Orthodoxy but to also gain further knowledge on the monastic life?

There are really two questions here:

1 What is the light of the Holy Spirit?

2 What reading should I do, a man born Orthodox, to increase my faith and learn about monasticism?

Let us take the first question. In general, until the Christian has an inner personal experience of the presence of Jesus Christ, he cannot understand anything. However, because of the danger of getting involved in Evangelical born-again movements, we recommend to all that they cultivate this inner personal experience through the mysteries (sacraments) of the Orthodox Church, beginning with baptism. This is the only sure road.

When we are baptized, even as infants, our mind or nous is cleansed and the Holy Spirit takes up its abode in our mind. In Orthodox teaching, the mind or nous is the inner spirit of man; it is not merely his power to reason to conclusions. The Fathers of the Orthodox Church insist that this reception of the Holy Spirit is the foundation of all further spiritual progress whether as a lay person, priest or monk. Moreover, in the Orthodox Church, the newly baptized infant (or even adult) is immediately chrismated for the reception of the Holy Spirit in the way that the Apostles received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

An Athonite Elder has remarked that we lose the presence of the Holy Spirit that we received in baptism only in cases of the denial of Christ. That is why an Orthodox man is re-chrismated after joining another religion—historically, this has been Islam—and why he is not re-chrismated even after committing murder: even murder does not drive the Holy Spirit away. Moreover, in the Orthodox Church, it is customary for the infant to receive communion regularly as soon as he is baptized (there is no ‘first communion’); the result is that the Orthodox, even if he does not want to practise his religion, has an intuitive understanding of what his religion teaches: he has had Christ abiding in him from his infancy; he has been a companion of Christ up to the time of his adolescent rebellion. Infant communion is practised even by parents who themselves do not otherwise practise their Orthodox religion. St Diadochos of Photiki is clear that it is the reception of the Holy Spirit in baptism which illuminates our mind, and a modern Western convert to Orthodoxy who has been baptized in middle age will speak often of his ‘illumination’. But what is the nature of this illumination?

This is a very difficult question. Fr Theophanes (Constantine), whom we mentioned in our last post, has written a work which discusses this sort of thing, but his work is very difficult. Basically, the mind of man—what the Greeks call the nous—is the spirit of man; it is the principle of his being alive as a man; it is the principle of his personhood. It is the principle of his consciousness. In a way that man does not understand with his reason, the nous of man unites with the Holy Spirit in Orthodox baptism after the nous has been cleansed of all other spirits. This union illuminates the nous. This cannot be explained; it can only be experienced. After this experience, a man through this illumination understands things about the Orthodox Faith that he could not really grasp at first. Now, to the question at hand of how St John of Sinai was able to see the inner world of others through the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

Although the Fathers emphasize that the foundation of the Christian spiritual life is the reception of the Holy Spirit in baptism that we have just described, they teach that the Holy Spirit comes in power to the Orthodox believer at a certain stage of his spiritual journey, at a time when God wants and determines. There is nothing a man can do to hasten this ‘second reception’—it is not really a second anything—but he can certainly pray to receive the Holy Spirit, just as St Luke teaches us in his Gospel. However, in general, because of the dangers of deception and arrogance, rather than praying for the reception of the Holy Spirit, the Orthodox customarily prays the Jesus Prayer, where he understands the ‘mercy’ for which he is asking Jesus Christ to include Christ’s response to all his needs, including his spiritual needs. However, St Gregory Palamas did pray continually to be illuminated. Now when the Holy Spirit descends, if it does—since it is not something we order at McDonald’s for take-out—it gives those charisms in power that it wishes. God knows better than we do what charisms to give us. People who have prayed for gifts out of season have usually repented of their folly: God knows what is to our advantage and what isn’t.

In this regard, it is worthwhile to mention Tatiana Goricheva, a Russian dissident. She was a bit of a hippy in St Petersburg during the Brezhnev era (not exactly a career with a future) who had reached the stage of praying like a mantra the ‘Our Father’. One day God said, ‘Okay,’ and the next instant Tatiana was a devout Orthodox believer (recall that all Russian children were baptized). What happened? God sent his grace and turned Tatiana’s head around. How did it happen? Who knows? She herself speaks thus: ‘…from the nothingness of a meaningless existence bordering on desperation we had come into the Father's house, into the church, which for us was paradise.’

Now before we continue with a discussion of the connection between the charism of discernment and the above, let us clarify our terminology.

There is a variety of terms that overlap in meaning. The terminology is precise, but we who lack these charisms flail about like little children learning to swim. Discernment (Greek: diakrisis) is the first term. Then there are clairvoyance (to dioratiko) and prevoyance or prophecy (to pooratiko or to prophitiko). St John Cassian speaks very highly of the charism of discretion (sorry, we don’t have the Latin word available), which appears to be related to one meaning of discernment. St John of Sinai in the Ladder uses the term discernment with a somewhat different meaning than what St John Cassian has in mind, which is a sense of ‘the proper measure given the time and place’.

Let us look at the full definition that St John of Sinai gives of discernment, to be found in Step 23, 1 of the Ladder:

23, 1 Discernment, first, is in beginners the true deep knowledge of things which pertain to themselves; in intermediates, then, the spiritual sense which faultlessly discriminates among that which is really good, that which is naturally good and the opposite (i.e. the bad); in the perfect, finally, that spiritual knowledge existing within the perfect which comes about through divine enlightenment and which is strong enough to illuminate that which exists darkly in others.

Or perhaps most generally this is known to be and in fact is discernment: the sure possession of the will of God in every time and place and thing, which exists only in those who are pure in heart and body and mouth. Discernment is an unspotted conscience and a pure sense.

First, it should be obvious that the degree of discernment that St John assigns to the perfect is rare.

Next, from what we have said it should be clear that this has nothing to do with the exercise of reason by the mind or nous, although the mind or nous certainly has the faculty of reason. However, what is involved is a higher faculty of the mind or nous, what the philosophers call ‘intuitive cognition’. That means ‘seeing directly without using the reason’. So when the Holy Spirit illuminates us, we see directly what it is that we see. This seeing is knowing. It is a spiritual seeing that becomes a spiritual knowing.

We can further see that there are stages in the evolution of the charism of discernment in the man as he proceeds on his spiritual road, and that personal purification plays a very important role.

Wounded by Love contains spiritual reminiscences by Elder Porphyrios, who had the gift of clairvoyance in power. Elder Paisios of Mount Athos is quoted as remarking about his own gift of clairvoyance in relation to Elder Porphyrios’ gift: ‘I have a black and white television set, but Elder Porphyrios has a colour television set.’

On pp. 27 – 33 of Wounded by Love, Elder Porphyrios describes his reception at the age of 16 of the Holy Spirit in power, his resulting illumination, and his simultaneous reception of the gift of clairvoyance. These things were transmitted to him through another Athonite Elder, Elder Dimas, without Elder Dimas’ having anything to do with it: the Holy Spirit ‘jumped’ from Elder Dimas to the young monk without Elder Dimas’ knowledge. Why? How? Who knows?

The translation of the Greek text of the passage has a few problems, but the essential message gets through. Note that ‘clear sight’ in the text is clairvoyance; the original Greek is to dioratiko.

Here we have an account by a modern Elder of how he received the gift of clairvoyance, and if what he says isn’t clear, we are not in a position to make it any clearer.

Moreover, as is clear from the sequel, coupled with the gift of clairvoyance in Elder Porphyrios was the gift of discernment in its highest degree: here we have a 16-year-old boy with the charism of discernment of the perfect. This was the basis of Elder Porphyrios’ long career as a confessor starting from his early twenties. To give an example of the sort of thing that he was known for, it is recorded somewhere that he once confessed a fellow he knew, beginning thus: ‘You have always wanted to make a life-long confession and the time has come. But it will be tiresome for you to try to remember all your sins, so I will tell them to you.’ The fellow remarks that Elder Porphyrios then told him sins that even he had forgotten.

Elder Porphyrios also received at the same time the gift of prevoyance, which is the gift of receiving revelations of what will happen to a person or place.

However, it should be understood that generally the terms are often used in an overlapping way, so that someone might use to dioratiko or even to prooratiko to refer to what St John thinks is the highest degree of diakrisis. This can cause some confusion if the person listening or reading is not careful to figure out just what in fact is being discussed. Moreover, the gifts usually appear together and are in fact somehow related spiritually.

To return to the thread of our post, at a certain stage of spiritual growth, the Holy Spirit comes in power. It gives such charisms as it wishes. There is no sense in the texts and lives of the Orthodox saints that when the Holy Spirit comes it will necessarily give you discernment and clairvoyance and prevoyance. For example, Motovilov received the Holy Spirit in power from St Seraphim of Sarov (see the life), but there is no evidence that he received those charisms from St Seraphim. Indeed, after his experience with St Seraphim of Sarov, Motovilov had a very bad experience with the demons, from which he was healed only at the service of canonization of St Tikhon of Zadonsk (if we remember correctly the saint's name), by St Tikhon. There is no guarantee either what you will receive when you do receive the Holy Spirit in power, or that life will be a bed of roses after. Usually life gets more difficult after, not less.

That brings us back to St John of Sinai. St John is emphatic that the higher gifts are reserved for monks (he remarks that if it were not so, no one would bother to become a monk since they could get everything spiritual they wanted as laymen). The other thing that St John of Sinai emphasizes is that the beginner needs a guide. That brings us to the reader’s second question, what he should be reading to deepen his knowledge of Orthodoxy and Orthodox monasticism.

We will continue with that answer in the next post, ‘Orthodox Monasticism 15’, before getting back to discussing passion and dispassion in St John of Sinai.

Orthodox Monasticism 13 — The Teaching of St John of Sinai

In English translation, the only work of St John of Sinai, the Ladder of Divine Ascent, is over 200 pages long. That is 200 pages of aphoristic observation on the monastic state as seen by a Saint. It is impossible to summarize such a dense work. We will begin with a detailed analysis of one chapter—one paragraph, really—so that our esteemed readers can see just how the Ladder is written, but first let us mention editions.

As we have already pointed out, there is no critical edition, and a plethora of manuscripts, of the Ladder. That means that there is no reliable text. There is a text in Patrologia Migne Volume 88. There is also a text, based on more than one manuscript, by Archimandrite Ignatios of the Monastery of Parakletou in Oropos, Attica, Greece (Ninth Edition, 2002), together with a translation into modern Greek. There is one English translation by Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, published by Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, USA. There is another English translation, not as good, published by the Paulist Fathers in the series ‘Classics of Western Spirituality’; that translation has a good introduction by the Orthodox Bishop Kallistos (Ware).

Let us look at the chapter. In Archimandrite Ignatios’ edition it is Step 3, 23. In Archimandrite Lazarus Moore’s translation it is Step 3, 17. The first thing we note is that because there is no critical edition, the numbering of the chapters varies from edition to edition. There is nothing to do. The next thing to note is that the structure of the Ladder is that of a ladder with 30 rungs: each rung is a stage on the journey of the monk from life in the world to the goal of the monk: dispassion, or, in the case of the coenobite, deep humility.

So we are in rung or step 3 of the Ladder, which is ‘Concerning being a Stranger’. The word used by St John is the word used to describe Abraham’s state when he went out from his people in Chaldea into the land of Canaan. Abraham was a ‘stranger in a strange land’. St John thinks that that is the proper condition of the monk who is journeying from impassionedness to dispassion. The issue in Step 3 is therefore not being attached to what we left behind in Chaldea. What does St John say in Chapter 17?

3, 17 Look! Look! lest everything appears to have been filled with water to you who love the attachment of your family, and you depart together with the flood of love for the world. Have no pity on the tears of parents or friends; otherwise, you will be crying eternally.

What is St John saying? The whole chapter is a play on tears, your own for your loved ones that you have left behind in Chaldea to come to a strange land, the monastery; the tears of your loved ones who try to persuade you to leave the monastery; and the tears you will shed in the next life if you listen.

To understand how subtle St John is, we have to consider what he means when he says that everything might appear to you to be filled with water. When does that happen? When does everything around us appear to be covered with water? When we are crying and we look out at the world through eyes covered in tears. St John has that kind of very precise knowledge of the human person. He starts from the deep psychological self-knowledge of what it means both perceptually and emotionally to be a stranger in Canaan crying for our loved ones in Chaldea, and he proceeds to weave his admonition to resist the tears and—primarily—the attachment into an elaborate play on tears and on the flood of love for the world that will sweep us out of the monastery. There are 200 pages of this sort of thing.

Let us look at a few key points in St John’s system. First of all, there are God, angels, men and demons. All of them objectively exist. If you don’t believe that, St John is not going to be your favourite book.

Next, among men there are both sinners and righteous. There are also both laymen and monks. St John doesn’t think that all laymen are sinners and all monks saints. That would be rather naïve. There are also priests of various ranks, but St John takes them for granted and does not discuss them. One of the key points that St John makes is that the angel is the light (model or beacon) for the monk, and the monk is the light (model or beacon) for the layman. The next point he makes is that a monk is a monk, and a layman, a layman. There is no sense in St John—who says explicitly that the monastic state is so difficult that unless God hid from laymen its difficulty no one would become a monk—that you can or should be a monk in practice even when you are married. His advice to laymen is this:

1, 38 I heard some men who were settled in a negligent state in the world asking me: ‘How can we, living together with spouses and surrounded by public cares, follow the monastic state?’ I replied to them: ‘All things good that you can do, do. Revile no one. Steal from no one. Lie to no one. Be arrogant with no one. Hate no one. Do not separate yourselves from the services of the Church. Be sympathetic towards those in need. Cause scandal to no one. Do not approach the portion of another and be satisfied with the wages that your wives can give you. If you do thus, you are not far from the Kingdom of the Heavens.’

His definition of the Christian is appropriate here:

1, 7 A Christian is the imitation of Christ, as much as is possible for man, in words and works and thought, believing in the Holy Trinity rightly and faultlessly.

There is no sense in St John that dogma doesn’t matter. Quite the contrary.

What is a monk?

1, 10 A monk is the order and condition of the bodiless powers accomplished in a material and sordid body. A monk is he who has only the commandments and words of God in every time place and thing. A monk is continual violence to nature and a faultless guard of the senses. A monk is a purified body, a cleansed mouth and an enlightened mind. A monk is a soul full of pain that is occupied in the uninterrupted memory of death both awake and asleep.

We can see why St John thinks that laymen are laymen and monks, monks: the monastic vocation is so high that most monks cannot accomplish it, much less laymen. What St John does point out is that the layman who is unmarried is able with relative ease to leave the world and become a monk, all other things being equal, but that the married layman is bound. Later Orthodox tradition allows the marriage to be dissolved so that one or both of the partners can enter the monastic state. Obviously, the number of such cases is not great.

What kind of monks are there?

1, 47 The whole monastic state is contained in three most general types of foundation: the one in athletic anchoretism and solitude; to practise Hesychia with one, at the most two, others; to remain in the coenobium with patient endurance. ‘Do not deviate,’ says the Ecclesiast, to the right or to the left: travel by the royal road.’ For the middle of the aforesaid ways has turned out to be appropriate for many. Woe to he who is alone, if he falls into accidie or sleep or negligence or despair, for there is no one among men to raise him up; ‘wherever there are gathered two or three in my name, there am I in the midst of them,’ said the Lord.

We should note St John’s use of biblical quotation: here and elsewhere he quite freely adapts biblical passages to his own use, changing their words by way of explaining their application to the case at hand.

Since St John was a Hesychast for forty years, it might be thought that he prefers the Hesychast life over the coenobitical life, but in fact he gives the honours to the coenobitical life. Moreover, it might be thought that he is merely skewing things for his coenobitical readers—the Ladder is mostly aimed to the coenobite—but in fact what he says agrees with what St Athanasios of Athos had to say about his foundation of the Great Lavra many years later: St Athanasios bore witness before the Holy Trinity that the wages of the coenobite were the same as those of the Hesychast. George tells us that he once discussed this with an Athonite Elder. The Elder remarked: ‘That’s the way it is. Don’t think that St Athanasios was merely trying to pull the leg of his coenobitical disciples.’

The next topic is to look at the concepts of passion and dispassion in St John of Sinai. This takes us into his dependence on Evagrius Ponticus, and in the next post we will draw on The Psychological Basis of Mental Prayer in the Heart, which discusses this sort of thing. The work was written by an Orthodox monk, Fr Theophanes (Constantine). The concepts of passion and dispassion are necessary to be understood in order for us to be able to enter into the essence of St John of Sinai’s teaching.

Orthodox Monasticism 12 — St John of Sinai

There are two psychologists in the Orthodox Church: Dostoevsky and St John of the Ladder. Everything else is a footnote to one of these two thinkers on the human condition.

Shakespeare holds ‘a mirror up to nature’. We are astonished at the accuracy of the image in the mirror of his blank verse.

Tolstoy is the better artist than his contemporary, Dostoevsky. What novel is more perfect than Anna Karenina?

But which of Shakespeare or Tolstoy has plumbed the depths of depravity, love and redemption?

Dostoevsky is a psychologist with a microscope analyzing the smallest chambers of depravity, the smallest inklings of love in the heart, the smallest touch of the divine love.

We know ourselves in Dostoevsky; we know others in Shakespeare. In Tolstoy we know Art.

When Tolstoy was dying an excommunicated Orthodox, he went around the walls of the Monastery of Optina without going in. He then went on to the train station and died.

One of the Startsy of Optina, we forget whether it was Ambrose or Makarios—both are now saints—after speaking with Dostoevsky said of him: ‘There is a man who repents’.

A very spiritual monk of our acquaintance said of King Lear: ‘Yes, there is much tenderness in that work, but not a trace of God.’

But who were they reading at Optina when Tolstoy was circumambulating the walls? When Dostoevsky the repentant sinner was visiting?

St Isaac the Syrian undoubtedly was being read by some of the Hesychasts. But the spiritual food of monks during Lent is St John of Sinai: the Ladder of Divine Ascent.

Everyone who reads the Ladder is astonished. Who is this man who wields a scalpel to dissect the spirit of man? Where did this man get that ‘astonishing psychological insight’ that we have seen a Benedictine Abbess remark on?

St John of Sinai is the pre-eminent member of the School of Sinai, a scholarly designation for four authors, three of whom are represented in the first volume of the Philokalia, while the fourth, St John of Sinai, was far too popular for the compilers of the various editions of the Philokalia to bother to include him. Most editions of his work, the Ladder of Divine Ascent, also contain his Life. His Life doesn’t tell us all that much about him. He spent forty years as a Hesychast and then became the Abbot of the Monastery of Sinai, the one we know as St Catherine’s. He writes in a very learned language, but in a sui generis aphoristic style: translating him would be difficult because of his many layers of meaning. He has a great sense of humour, very subtle, as befits a man of his native genius.

How do we become good psychologists? There is the first way: go to University and learn a school of psychology. Get a job and help people.

The second way is to ‘know thyself’. The best psychologists are people who understand themselves. This appears to be how Dostoevsky learned his psychology: he understood himself. No illusions. Brutal honesty with himself about who he was.

The third way is the most difficult: discernment. This is a charism of the Holy Spirit, and not for everyone. We don’t have it, although we have seen it in operation when we have ourselves approached charismatic Elders who have cut through the crust to the core and told us the truth. This is what St John of Sinai had: a very strong charism of discernment in its highest degree, which he himself describes as the light of the Holy Spirit illuminating the dark parts of the soul of the other. The truth of the matter is that in the Ladder of Divine Ascent, St John of Sinai is merely recording what he had seen in other people with whom he had conversed or whom he had confessed. In our own day, Joseph the Hesychast (†1959) manifests the same sort of discernment in his letters.

But something more is required: Many Elders even today have this gift of discernment, but few are capable of writing such a gem as St John of Sinai. St John was clearly educated, and probably before he came to the monastery. He was also gifted literarily. The Ladder is a well-crafted book.

Now let us look at what St John is teaching. It would help to know something about Evagrius before reading the Ladder. All of the School of Sinai is heavily dependent on the works of Evagrius although none of its members are ‘Origenists’ in the sense understood by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod. But the basic structure of the passion, the temptation of the man by the demon to put the passion into practice—that was defined by Evagrius. St John of Sinai adopts this schema but is more subtle even than Evagrius in his psychological analysis of the temptation and how the monk responds to it. This is what astonishes us.

Orthodox Monasticism 11 — The School of Sinai: Preliminary Remarks

In our historical survey of Orthodox monasticism, by the time we arrive at the School of Sinai we must make a transition from considering Orthodox monasticism geographically to considering it literarily. We can no longer, as we could with the influence, say, of early Syrian monasticism on early Egyptian monasticism, consider the matter as the movement of persons, and ideas by means of persons. We must begin to look at the movement of manuscripts and ideas by means of manuscripts. The methodological issues become completely different.

Let us take the example of St Diadochos of Photike (5^th Century), the author of the Gnostic Chapters found in the first volume of the Philokalia. St Diadochos was the bishop of Photike, a major town in a valley of the Pindus Mountains north of Nikopolis, itself an important town where St Paul the Apostle spent a winter. Now here we have a bishop in a town in a provincial part of Greece which nonetheless is attested as having had movements of persons to and from Hippo, the see of St Augustine. It is not completely out of the question that St Diadochos met St Augustine—although we hasten to add that there is absolutely no evidence that he ever did.

We know nothing about St Diadochos’ background, where he was educated, where he became a monk and so on. But here he is in a provincial town of Greece, writing in a very learned style a spiritual classic, the first work to contain a clear and deep discussion of the Jesus Prayer. Moreover, St Diadochos is said to be of the school of Evagrius Ponticus, himself a learned Greek whose movements from Pontus to Constantinople to Jerusalem to Egypt are well known. (This Evagrian influence is particularly evident in other works of St Diadochos not included by St Makarios of Corinth in his compilation of the Philokalia.) When we look at St Diadochos in and of himself, however, we are still able to consider the matter as the movement of persons and ideas through persons. But let us look at what happens later, when other writers start to use St Diadochos.

St Diadochos is a big influence on the School of Sinai.

Later, St Nikitas Stethatos attests in his Life of St Symeon the New Theologian (11^th Century) that the book that St Symeon was given by his Elder, also called St Symeon, to read when he was a novice contained the Gnostic Chapters of St Diadochos.

Hence, it is no longer possible to consider the matter geographically. We have no way of knowing which person brought the manuscript of the Gnostic Chapters of St Diadochos to Sinai. Indeed, since we know nothing about the backgrounds of the two major figures of the School of Sinai, St John of Sinai and St Hesychios, we have no way of knowing when and where they first came into contact with the thought of St Diadochos.

Moreover, when we reach St Symeon the New Theologian in Constantinople in the 11^th Century, asking who brought the first copy of the Gnostic Chapters of St Diadochos to the monastery of the Studion where St Symeon was a novice is like asking where Elder Sophrony (†1993) bought his first copy of Heidegger. Impossible to answer and completely irrelevant to any serious discussion of either Symeon the New Theologian’s or Elder Sophrony’s thought.

The issues that now arise in the discussion of Orthodox monasticism are literary: we need to find the original form of the literary work that interests us, and also the form of that work as it was used by an author who was influenced by it.

This is a matter of people slogging it out with digital photographs of manuscripts found in museums around the world and analyzing the handwriting in the manuscript to assess when and where the copy in the photograph must have been made. It is a matter of working out chains of manuscript transmission and placing the author we are interested in who used the work somewhere in that chain. It is a matter of variant readings and judgement what the most probable reading of the original manuscript was. Now there are people who enjoy this sort of thing and make a lifetime’s career out of it. We wish that they would find the time to do this work for both St John of Sinai and St Hesychios, since we do not have critical editions of their works. The most likely reason, especially in the case of St John of Sinai, is that there is a plethora of manuscripts: doing a critical edition of the Ladder of Divine Ascent would be a life’s work. It’s not much different with St Hesychios.

Incidentally, the fact that there is such a plethora of manuscripts of St John’s Ladder of Divine Ascent is a testimony to the central role it plays in Orthodox monasticism. We already mentioned, in the last post, that the work is appointed by the Orthodox liturgical typikon to be read in the monastery refectory throughout Great Lent.

Since we now take a more literary approach, we will see that the study of Orthodox monasticism takes on the character of studying the available Lives of saints, the available foundation documents written by saints, the available ascetical works written by saints. There are certainly great gaps: the Lives, foundation documents and ascetical works written by saints are the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, we often have very serious lacunae even in the literary transmission of the surviving literary documents that underlie our study. For example, while St Hesychios has been dated to around the middle of the 8^th Century, some authors date him to as late as the 13^th Century. That’s a big spread. Some questions are just plain unanswerable. Where was St John of Sinai born? Who knows? His biographer didn’t say. There’s no possible way to find out.

Finally, as a professor once said to us: where there’s a lack of facts, there’s a lot of room for theory.

Let us take an example from the liturgical realm. As those who have studied Orthodox liturgy must know, the monastic services begin: ‘Bless’d is our God always, now and ever and unto the Ages of Ages.’ But the Divine Liturgy begins: ‘Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the Ages of Ages.’ So does the service of baptism. Fr Alexander Schmeman in his work on baptism draws theological conclusions about the nature of baptism given this identity between the beginning words of the Mystery of Baptism and the Divine Liturgy. However, later research has indicated that the reason that the two services start the same way is that all the services in the cathedral rite of Constantinople started that way, whereas all the services in the monastic rite started the other way. The only significance to the common beginning of the Mystery of Baptism and the Divine Liturgy is that they both derived from the cathedral rite. The theology must be found otherwise.

It is the same with various literary data relevant to the study of Orthodox monasticism and relevant to the assessment of the thought of one saint or movement or another. There’s a lot of room for interpretation. For fashions in the history of ideas. For group think among scholars, reinforced by the sociological dimensions of the granting of PhD’s. For the agendas of one church denomination or movement or another. This problem even applies to the translations of the primary documents. They often show a systematic bias. Caveat lector.

Orthodox Monasticism 10 — Note on our Reply to Maggie Ross (Updated March 25, 2008)

(Update, March 25, 2008: As we discuss in this post, ‘Maggie Ross’ is the pen name of Sister Martha Reeves, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Anglican and Ecumenical Studies at the University of Tulsa.)

After we notified Miss Ross of our previous post, in her next post she included the following note:

"...his monastic life." See for example, The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, tr. Dana Miller, 1984: Boston, Holy Transfiguration Monastery. [NB update, Nov. 6, 2006. A western Orthodox monk has objected to this remark. Evidently Orthodox monks are no longer trained this way in the West; perhaps my source (an Orthodox Bishop) meant that it once obtained and perhaps still does in certain monasteries in the East. In any event, Isaac's text would suffice if it were the only one available.] [Emphasis added, but the remark in square brackets is Miss Ross' own.]

The ‘western Orthodox monk’ is evidently us: Miss Ross appears to be responding to our remark in the last post that St Isaac the Syrian’s writings play next to no role at all in the formation of the Orthodox monk.

We do not wish to argue with Miss Ross, but we were intrigued by the issue of whether St Isaac is the exclusive reading material of novices in any Orthodox monastery at all.

First of all let us clarify our terminology. Ordinary usage, as can easily be verified by searching the Web, makes ‘Eastern Orthodox’ refer to members of churches in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. These churches are often known by their national appellations: Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox and so on. Ordinary usage makes ‘western Orthodox’ refer to a person who belongs to an Eastern Orthodox church but who follows a western rite, whether Episcopalian or other. Nowadays, a phrase, ‘Oriental Orthodox,’ is sometimes used to refer to members of churches not in communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople, churches which the ‘Eastern Orthodox’ have traditionally referred to as Monophysite or Nestorian. These churches are often known by their national appellations: Armenian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Chaldean Orthodox, Assyrian Church of the East and so on.

We point this out because we are a little uncertain just how Miss Ross intends ‘western Orthodox’ and ‘Eastern’ in her remark quoted above.

For the record, ‘Orthodox Monk,’ the author of this blog, is a member in good standing of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He is a canonically tonsured monk of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He belongs to a canonical Eastern Orthodox jurisdiction. He follows the traditional Orthodox rite of his jurisdiction, not a western rite. By preference he uses ‘Orthodox’ instead of ‘Eastern Orthodox;’ throughout this blog the two are synonyms.

Now to the issue that intrigued us. As far as we know, St Isaac the Syrian is not the exclusive reading of any novice in any monastery anywhere in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Since, however, we don’t know everything, and since the matter genuinely intrigued us, we went to the trouble of contacting a Greek monk on Mount Athos who has been there for about twenty years. This monk began his monastic career outside of Mount Athos, in Greece. We asked him if he knew of any Eastern Orthodox monastery where St Isaac the Syrian was the exclusive reading material of the novice. He replied, ‘No.’ He further remarked that in such a case the novice would leave the monastery. To our uncertainty why, he clarified that the novice would be impelled into the desert. The monastery would lose its novice to eremiticism. A self-defeating approach to the formation of your novice.

It seems to us that the only likely candidate in the Eastern Orthodox Church for a work given to the novice in a monastery as exclusive reading is the Ladder of Divine Ascent by St John of Sinai. That work is indeed prescribed by the Eastern Orthodox liturgical typikon (liturgical rule) to be read in the monastery refectory throughout Great Lent. But in fact we do not know of any monastery in the Eastern Orthodox Church where even St John of Sinai is given to the novice as his exclusive reading material.

In fact, we do know that in the Monastery of Dionysiou on Mount Athos, the liturgical typikon prescribes a great number of readings during Orthros (matins) on a regular basis. These are taken from the ‘classics’ of Eastern Orthodox monasticism. At another monastery on Mount Athos, the liturgical typikon prescribes the regular reading of the catechisms of St Theodore Studite.

Now, given our uncertainty about Miss Ross’ terminology, it is possible that Miss Ross means that in some ‘Oriental Orthodox’ Churches, traditionally known by the Eastern Orthodox as Monophysite or Nestorian, the novice is given such a formation as she describes. We have no information.

In our next post, we will return to our series on the historical survey of Eastern Orthodox monasticism, where we will, as previously planned, discuss the School of Sinai, whose pre-eminent member is none other than St John of Sinai, author of the Ladder of Divine Ascent.

Orthodox Monasticism 9 — Reply to Maggie Ross (Updated March 25, 2008)

Miss Maggie Ross is an Anglican solitary who publishes a blog called A Voice in the Wilderness. (Update, March 25, 2008: As we discuss in this post, ‘Maggie Ross’ is the pen name of Sister Martha Reeves, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Anglican and Ecumenical Studies at the University of Tulsa.) We came across a passing reference in a very recent post of Miss Ross to the Orthodox monk and his spiritual formation, all in the context of the recent uncovering of Syriac texts which purportedly show a Semitic Christianity, ‘that shows little Hellenizing influence, texts that reveal a Christianity much closer to the Gospel of Jesus than what has evolved inside institutions, East or West.’ Miss Ross continues, after a reference to the efforts of Dr Sebastian Brock to translate Syriac texts into English, and after an unattributed quotation, apparently from such a Syriac text, as follows:

Why, the inevitable question arises, have these texts remained so long hidden from us, especially when they open scripture and pierce the heart, leading us to the silence of the divine exchange? The Orthodox monk may nod wisely, having had a Greek, somewhat altered, version of [St] Isaac [the Syrian] as his sole guide in the early years of his monastic life. But monasticism is legendary for its role in ecclesiastical power politics, and the churches of Eastern Christianity play the same power games as the churches in the West on a different board. [Emphasis added.]

(We recommend that the reader read the whole post given in the above link; it would be too time-consuming for us to put it here in toto. Moreover, the post itself is part of a numbered series in a large blog, so the reader might want to browse around Miss Ross’ blog to get a better idea of what ‘it’s all about’.)

We would like to address the issue of the Orthodox monk’s formation in the context of Miss Ross’ reference to St Isaac, in the context of the general issue of an unhellenized Christianity closer to the Gospel of Jesus Christ than the Christianity of the Orthodox Church, and in the context of the relation of the monk to his bishop (‘the same power games’).

We came across Miss Ross by accident and we are by no means au courant with her writings and thought. We looked at a couple of posts on her blog to get an idea of what she was all about, but she is obviously an accomplished and prolific writer and it would be very difficult to get a handle on all her thought so as to attack it. We do not intend to do that, not having the knowledge, time or inclination to attack anyone, especially Miss Ross. However, the Orthodox monk’s formation is fair game, and indeed fits into our present historical survey of Orthodox monasticism.

First of all, what is the role of St Isaac the Syrian in the Orthodox monk’s formation? For the most part, none at all. Why should that be? It’s simple. St Isaac is for Hesychasts. Very few monks are Hesychasts. Hesychasts live alone, often in a cave—even today—concentrating on the Jesus Prayer as taught by the Philokalia. The monk in the coenobium would ordinarily not read St Isaac. He might read him as a novice, say, out of curiosity and enthusiasm, but St Isaac does not speak to the concerns of coenobites and the serious coenobite will turn to other authors.

We discussed this matter with our friend George who has visited Mt Athos much more than we have. George tells us the following: The great Elder, Paisios of Mt Athos (†1994), who was a Hesychast, was very much given to reading St Isaac, in the Greek translation done at St Sava’s Monastery near Jerusalem around the 10^th Century, the translation that Miss Ross seems to remark was ‘somewhat altered’. Elder Paisios was once asked on what page of St Isaac he was. He gave a very early page number, saying that he had not got very far because he insisted on putting what he had read into practice before he continued any further. So he was on the early pages. Elder Paisios did miracles, but he had not got very far in St Isaac.

George tells us that he once spoke with an English-speaking Athonite monk who had in his hands Dr Dana Miller’s English translation of St Isaac, the one published by Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Boston, the one that is largely from the Greek edition of St Sava’s but also from the Syriac. George says that the monk asked his Elder, gifted with very, very strong gifts of charismatic spiritual discernment, about the English translation. The Elder simply remarked: ‘With the Greek translation, you are safe.’ This was not to suggest that Dr Miller’s translation was in any way faulty, but to point out that the translation done in the 10^th Century was done with an Orthodox phronema (habit of thought) by monks who were strongly gifted with spiritual discernment.

George also tells us that he heard that Elder Ephraim (†1998) of Katounakia on Mt Athos, who was a disciple of Elder Joseph the Hesychast of Mt Athos (†1959) and whom George had met, was himself very given to reading St Isaac, even over the Philokalia. Elder Ephraim was a very important Hesychast and, George was assured, had read the Philokalia, even though his spiritual formation was largely through his immediate personal contact with Joseph the Hesychast. Elder Ephraim was endowed with gifts of prophecy.

Before we turn to St Ephraim the Syrian, we would like to make one further remark on St Isaac. St Isaac has an endearing spiritual texture in his writing that makes him beloved of all, but it must be understood that much of the ascetical content of his homilies derives from Evagrius Ponticus. But Evagrius is as Greek as they get.

Next, any Orthodox who goes to Church during Holy Week has a taste of St Ephraim the Syrian. Certain of his homilies are prescribed to be read during Orthros (matins) of Holy Week, especially on Holy Wednesday: the limpid purity of St Ephraim’s devotion comes through even in the Greek as St Ephraim talks about the fallen woman who goes to the city to buy nard to anoint the Lord.

Indicative of the status of St Ephraim in the Orthodox Church is that he is said to have travelled to Caesarea to meet St Basil the Great, and to have had—through an instance of the gift of tongues—a conversation with St Basil.

Coenobites will read St Ephraim.

One text that is very popular in Orthodox spiritual circles is the Spiritual Homilies of St Macarius, now thought to have been written in Mesopotamia. The Orthodox receive these writings, although they avoid a certain opinion in them. They have never accepted modern scholarly arguments that the writings are Messalian.

One very important Syrian monastic saint is St Symeon Stylites. Orthodox monks read his life as recorded by Theodoretos of Cyr, who also wrote the lives of other Syrian monastic saints.

Finally, it should be remarked that most of the Desert Fathers of Egypt, being Copts, were not Greek but related to the Semite peoples. While the texts that the Orthodox Church received were written in Greek, it cannot be ignored that most of the Desert Fathers were not Greek. It is very clear that Athonite monasticism derives from the Egyptian monasticism of the Desert Fathers. This includes Hesychasm, which has its roots in the desert of Egypt.

But why might the Syriac texts to which Miss Ross has referred have ‘remained so long hidden from us’, as Miss Ross puts it? Well, one of the obvious reasons is that the Orthodox Church was not in communion with the Syrian Churches after the disputes over the relation between the human and divine natures of Christ that gave rise to the terms Monophysite and Nestorian. The Syriac Churches were one or the other. There was no particular conspiracy.

After this very quick treatment of the Orthodox monk’s formation in the context of Syriac Christianity, and having ignored here what we wrote in an earlier post on the influence of Syrian monasticism on Orthodox monasticism, let us turn to the broader issue of an unhellenized Christianity ‘much closer to the Gospel of Jesus than what has evolved inside institutions, East or West’.

Let us hope that Miss Ross does not take what she is saying seriously. She would be in great danger of her salvation. We poor monks have seen from experience that Westerners who get enamoured of Syrian Christianity to the exclusion of hellenized Jews like St Paul get into deep spiritual trouble. We do not know what it is, but there is something about Semitic/Syriac Christian texts that spiritually disorients fellows (and gals) who go that road. We could name names, but we do not. They are casualties.

Add to that prayer in solitude and you have all the presuppositions of spiritual catastrophe.

We would like to expand on the remark of the Elder that George referred to: in the Orthodox Church you have certainty, you have safety. St Silouan the Athonite, a sinner who became a saint, put it roughly this way: He did not pass judgement on other Churches, but he emphasized that in the Orthodox Church, the Orthodox have the Holy Spirit given to us by God. And it is the existential experience of the grace of God that leads the Orthodox ‘into all truth.’

That brings us to our final remarks.

As must be known to anyone with any knowledge of the Orthodox Church, despite its emphasis on the existential experience of the grace of God in the Holy Spirit—and above we mentioned some attainments of Athonite elders to indicate that this is not mere words—the Orthodox Church has a very strong emphasis on the dogmatic unity in faith of all believers. Indeed, Elder Sophrony, St Silouan’s disciple, discusses the attainment of ‘dogmatic consciousness’ as a stage of the spiritual journey of the Hesychast, an advanced stage.

Moreover, Orthodox ecclesiology is such that the monk ideally stands in relation to his bishop as a son to a father. Moreover, this ecclesiology is also an existential spiritual discernment given by the Holy Spirit. There is not a monk in the Orthodox Church if he does not have a father. And that is his bishop. And the true monk encounters his bishop in the Holy Spirit in an organic unity of faith, in the spontaneous obedience of a child to his father. And this harmony of spirit is given in the Holy Spirit. Was it not St Ignatios, the one said to be the child of the gospel whom Christ held in his arms and blessed, who said: ‘Where the bishop is, there is the Church.’?

May God rest his mercy on her [i.e. Sr Martha Reeves'] brow. Amen.

Orthodox Monasticism 8 — Early Palestinian Monasticism

The earliest Palestinian monasticism was of course that of the primitive Church: the description in acts of the way of life of the early Church is considered by the Fathers to be a model of the coenobitic life.

After the destruction of Jerusalem, however, the Christian community of Jerusalem was a distinct backwater for a long period of time.

Further south, we know that St Hilarion, who for a period of time was in Egypt with St Anthony the Great (3^rd to 4^th Century), founded a monastery in or near Gaza.

By the mid-4^th Century, when St John Cassian starts his monastic career in Bethlehem, there is already a monastery there for him to enter.

When in the late 4^th Century Evagrius Ponticus comes down from Constantinople, then the centre of things in the East, he finds Melania the Elder in charge of a monastery near Jerusalem. Melania is an Origenist, and her fellow ascetic Rufinus will later translate Evagrius’ works into Latin. Evagrius moves on to Egypt, then the veritable centre of Orthodox monasticism.

St Chariton, although his dates are problematical, had already founded a monastery of a type that foresaw informally organized groups of partly independent ascetics.

Another strand of Palestinian monasticism is that represented by Abba Isaiah the Ascetic, who represents a non-Origenist strand of Egyptian desert monasticism, and who was one of the begetters of the monasticism of Abba Seridos, St Dorotheos, St Dositheos and the two great charismatic Elders of the 6^th Century, Sts Barsanuphios and John. This strand of Palestinian monasticism is both very ascetical and very anti-Origenist.

We see two elements already in Palestinian monasticism: a very severe asceticism and an Origenist influence. These two elements will play out with and against each other until the condemnation of Origenism in the Sixth Century.

In the 5^th and 6^th Centuries, St Euthymios and St Savas the Sanctified will come down from Cappadocia to become monks, and will found monasteries of their own. They will play a very strong role in the battle for Orthodoxy against Origenism. By this time, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem is intellectually more solid, although at times under the influence of the Origenists.

Orthodox Monasticism 7 — Cappadocian Monasticism

Cappadocia is really not well understood from the point of view of the history of Christian monasticism. It was the home of the three Cappadocian Fathers, St Gregory the Theologian (329–389), St Basil the Great (c.330–379) and his brother St Gregory of Nyssa (c.331–c.394). It brought forth two great figures of early Palestinian monasticism, St Euthymios the Great (377 – 473) and the St Savas the Sanctified (†532). In more modern times, it has brought forth both St Arsenios the Cappadocian (†1924) and the beloved Elder Paisios of Mount Athos (†1994).

That great theoretician of the spiritual life, Evagrius Pontikos (344? – 399), although not himself from Cappadocia but from Ibora in Pontus, entered into the circle of the Cappadocian Fathers at an early age. He was for a time in the retinue of St Basil the Great, who ordained him Reader. He later joined St Gregory the Theologian, who ordained him deacon, made him archdeacon and ‘taught him the rudiments of theology’.

Yet for all that, and even given the ascetical writings of St Basil, the mystical writings of St Gregory, the writings of Evagrius and the contemporary lives of St Euthymios and St Savas, we really don’t know much about Cappadocia as a monastic centre. For example, today a tourist can visit Cappadocian monasteries which date to roughly the 6^th Century. The wall-paintings of those monasteries have a thematic cycle which is not strictly Orthodox, but no one knows who the monks were, nor where they belonged.

St Gregory the Theologian and St Basil the Great hailed from aristocratic Christian families. Even at home they were well educated, and they later studied at the University of Athens, then the Oxford of the world. St Basil left the University before his friend St Gregory and first travelled to Egypt, where he visited the monks of the desert. He was said to be the most impressed with the Pachomian system of monasteries—the more so than with the solitary ascetics of the desert. When he returned to Cappadocia, however, and when St Gregory had returned from Athens, the two friends lived together as Hesychasts (i.e. hermits) in the country-side. Moreover, St Gregory explicitly states in his funeral oration for St Basil that St Basil wanted to have Hesychasts living in close proximity to his coenobitical monasteries. Hence, the notion that St Basil was a strict coenobite uninterested in the ascetical life of the Hesychast must be tempered by the facts.

Although the coenobitical monasticism of St Basil was influenced by the concept of St Pachomios, it was really quite different from St Pachomios’ monasticism. First of all, St Basil was a highly educated Greek aristocrat, whereas St Pachomios was an uneducated Egyptian (Coptic) desert ascetic. As we pointed out in the last post, St Pachomios was essentially organizing Egyptian desert asceticism on a large scale for the sake of the weak. However, although he himself had experience of asceticism and was himself a great faster (one of the reasons he died so young), St Basil was organizing a socially relevant coenobitical monasticism inserted into the (urban) society of his day. Even given the wish of St Basil to have Hesychasts living close to his coenobitical monasteries, there is a completely different attitude here. To take but a small example, the Egyptian desert ascetics did not foresee a monk having any contact whatsoever with a nun. However, St Basil foresees that his monks and nuns will have occasion to meet each other, and he legislates concerning proper relations between monks and nuns.

Moreover, although obedience is very strongly emphasized in St Pachomios’ monasteries (see the lives given in the last post), obedience is actually secondary to the ascetical life of the monk in the Pachomian system. But in the Basilian monasteries, it is so not far off to say, bodily asceticism played second fiddle to obedience, which itself was the primary tool of asceticism. These differences come into play when later reformers such as St Theodore Studite (759–826) and St Athanasios of Athos (930–1001) introduce the typika or rules of their monasteries.

However, an even more precise explanation of the role of obedience in the Basilian monastery, as compared to the Pachomian monastery, is that St Basil assumes that the monk is perfect and legislates accordingly. St Pachomios treated the monk or nun as an imperfect human being striving towards God and perfection—albeit in a very severe ascetical context. St Basil assumes that the monk or nun is already in complete control of his or her emotions, dispassionate (although he certainly does not use that word)—in a word, an angel. That is why St Basil’s prescriptions for the erring monk or nun who is obstinate about his or her behaviour are always the same: expulsion from the monastery: the angel has fallen and must be expelled from Paradise.