Monks and Nuns

What you'll notice

Sooner or later someone in black will turn up at your parish: a monk with a long beard, or a nun in a black veil, dressed in black from head to foot. Then a friend invites you on a weekend at a monastery, and you find out what that life is like from the inside: long services from the Midnight Office to Compline, meals eaten in silence while someone reads aloud from the Lives of the Saints, and a quiet so complete you can hear yourself think, which is more than some people bargained for.¹

What it's called

A man is a monk, a woman a nun, and they live in a monastery. Its head is an abbot or abbess; Hapgood's book has a service for making an abbot, praying that he be "a wise and faithful steward" of the flock given to him.² A monk who is also a priest may be raised to archimandrite (a senior monastic priest).³ The black outer garment is the mantle, which Hapgood calls "the Angelic vestment," its folds standing for "the strictness, piety and meekness of the monastic life."⁴

The OCA's catechism names the grades of monastic life: the novice, in "the rank of obedience"; the riasa-bearer, who wears the monastic robe; the small schema; and the great schema. At the small schema the monastic is tonsured, makes the profession, pledges "perpetual obedience" to the abbot or abbess, and receives a new name; the great schema brings another.⁵

What's actually happening

A monastery is a household that prays. Monks and nuns keep the full cycle of services, fast, work, and live under obedience to an abbot or abbess. The same catechism calls monasticism "a personal gift of God to the individual soul for his salvation and service to the Body of Christ," a calling to repentance lived chiefly through prayer and fasting, and names the virtues it trains: "poverty, chastity, humility and obedience." It isn't one of the sacraments, though the Church holds it in the highest honor.⁶

Monasteries aren't a church of their own. Since the Council of Chalcedon in 451 the canons have put the monks "in every city and district" under the local bishop: no one may found a monastery "contrary to the will of the bishop," and monks are to "give themselves only to fasting and prayer."⁷ The same council forbade monks and consecrated virgins to marry.⁸ And the traffic runs the other way too: for centuries the Church's bishops have been chosen from among the monks.⁹

Why it matters

It began with a young man in an Egyptian church. Saint Athanasius tells how Antony, his parents dead, walked in while the Gospel was being read and heard the Lord say to the rich man, "If thou wouldest be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor; and come follow Me and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." He went out and did it: he gave his family's property to the villagers, sold the rest, and gave the money to the poor.¹⁰

That's what monasticism is for. It takes the Gospel at its word, all of it, all day, for life. The rest of the Church fasts, prays, and repents in a measure that fits a family and a job; monks and nuns do the same things without the margins. They aren't a spiritual elite with a different religion. They're the part of the Body that has nothing else to do but pray, and the Church leans on those prayers.

Where it came from

After Antony, Athanasius writes, "the desert was colonised by monks, who came forth from their own people."¹¹ By 451 there were enough monks, and enough trouble with people "using the pretext of monasticism," that the Council of Chalcedon wrote canons to keep them in order.¹²

The best-known monastic place in Orthodoxy today is Mount Athos, the "Holy Mountain," in Greece. UNESCO describes it as self-governing, with "an autonomous statute since Byzantine times," and twenty monasteries with their dependent houses; it's "forbidden to women and children."¹³

In America, the OCA's Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, was founded in 1905 by Father Arseny (Chagovetz), with the blessing of Archbishop Tikhon; the OCA calls it North America's oldest Orthodox Christian monastery, and it has held a pilgrimage every Memorial Day weekend for more than a century.¹⁴ Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York, of the Russian Church Abroad (ROCOR), began in 1928 and houses Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary.¹⁵ A 2016 atlas published for the Assembly of Bishops lists nearly eighty Orthodox monasteries in the United States.¹⁶

What you do

If you're Orthodox: go on pilgrimage. A weekend at a monastery is the closest most people get to living the Church's day as it was meant to be kept. Go to the services, eat what you're served, work if you're asked, and give something; monasteries depend on gifts.

If you're visiting: you're welcome, but go prepared, because monasteries keep stricter rules than parishes, and each one publishes its own. Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, for example, asks men to wear long pants and long sleeves, asks women entering the church to wear a head covering, a loose knee-length skirt or dress, and a long-sleeved blouse, keeps silence from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m., asks guests to stay no longer than three days, and asks you not to photograph a monk without asking.¹⁷ Read the rules for the monastery you're visiting and keep them; you're a guest in someone's home.

Field Note: the reading at dinner. At a monastery meal nobody talks. One monk or nun reads aloud, usually from the Lives of the Saints, while everyone else eats, and the meal is over in fifteen or twenty minutes.¹⁸ Newcomers find it unnerving for about two bites. Then they notice they're actually tasting the food, and listening to a story, and not thinking about what to say next. It's a small picture of the whole life.

Go deeper

• Saint Athanasius, Life of Antony (NPNF2 4).
• Council of Chalcedon, canons 4 and 16 (NPNF2 14).
• Alexei Krindatch, ed., Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Monasteries (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2016).
• Ordination and the Clergy Family; Prayer at Home.

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