Coenobitic and Idiorrhythmic

Athonite monasteries have historically been organised in one of two ways. The coenobitic (from koinos bios, “common life”) monastery is a community in the full sense: everything is shared — worship, meals, work, property — under an abbot elected for life. The idiorrhythmic (from idiorrhythmos, “following one’s own rhythm”) monastery is a relaxation of this: monks kept their own property, arranged their own meals and much of their own regimen, and were governed not by an abbot but by a committee. Over the twentieth century every one of the twenty ruling houses returned to the coenobitic life, the last in 1992. This file sets out the two forms and the significance of that return.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite)

The Coenobitic Life

The coenobitic monastery is the original and, in the tradition’s judgement, the ideal form of Athonite monasticism. It descends from St. Athanasius the Athonite’s foundation of the Great Lavra in 963, which introduced to the Mountain the fully common life on the model of St. Basil the Great and the Stoudios monastery of Constantinople (see The Early Hermits and Saint Athanasius). In a coenobium everything is held and done in common: the monks worship together in the katholikon at the appointed hours, eat together in the refectory the same food at the same table, work at the tasks assigned by obedience, and own nothing individually — all property belongs to the community (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, ch. 7, on the coenobitic life; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 2015, on the coenobium; on the roots see Orthodoxy: Monasticism).

The coenobium is headed by an abbot (hegoumenos), who in the Athonite coenobitic constitution is elected by the brotherhood and holds office for life, and who is at once the spiritual father and the governor of the community; the monk’s whole life is lived under obedience to him and to the rule (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 7, on the abbot and the coenobitic constitution). The coenobitic ideal is that the sharing of everything and the surrender of one’s own will in obedience are themselves ascetic disciplines — the cutting-off of self-will and self-possession that the tradition regards as the school of humility and love (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015; Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 7). This is why the tradition consistently regards the coenobium as the higher and safer form, and the return to it in the twentieth century as a spiritual recovery.

The Idiorrhythmic Life

The idiorrhythmic monastery was a later development and, in the tradition’s judgement, a relaxation. The word means “self-rhythm” or “following one’s own pace”: in an idiorrhythmic house the strict common life was loosened, so that monks retained the use of their own money and possessions, took most of their meals separately in their own cells rather than in a common refectory, and ordered much of their own daily regimen, coming together for the church services but not for the full common life (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 7, on the idiorrhythmic form; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015). Government, too, was different: instead of a single abbot ruling for life, an idiorrhythmic house was administered by a committee of senior monks (epitropoi) and annually changing overseers (proïstamenoi), a more oligarchic and less personal arrangement (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 7).

The idiorrhythmic form arose above all under the economic and demographic pressures of the later medieval and Ottoman centuries. When communities were impoverished, reduced in number, or unable to sustain the full common life under a single rule — and when the burden of Ottoman taxation made a shared common economy difficult — the relaxation of the coenobitic discipline was a way for a house to survive by allowing monks a measure of individual provision (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, chs. 4 and 7, linking the idiorrhythmic form to the Ottoman-period strains; see Charters, Empires, and Ottoman Centuries). By the later Ottoman and modern centuries a considerable number of the ruling monasteries were idiorrhythmic, and the two forms coexisted on the Mountain, with the coenobitic houses generally regarded as observing the stricter and more authentic discipline (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 7).

It should be said plainly that the idiorrhythmic form was a legitimate and canonical mode of monastic life, not an abuse — many holy monks lived and were sanctified within it — but the tradition consistently judged it a lesser and more perilous form than the coenobium, because the retention of private property and the loosening of obedience remove some of the very disciplines the coenobium exists to impose (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 7; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015). It was this judgement that drove the movement of return.

The Twentieth-Century Return to the Coenobium

One of the clearest signs and instruments of the twentieth-century Athonite renewal was the return of the idiorrhythmic houses to the coenobitic life. As the Mountain revived from its mid-century nadir — largely through the arrival of new brotherhoods gathered around charismatic elders (see The Twentieth-Century Revival) — the idiorrhythmic monasteries were one after another converted to the coenobitic form, an abbot being installed and the full common life restored (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, chs. 6–7, on the conversions). The process ran through the middle and later decades of the century and reached its completion in 1992, when the last idiorrhythmic house, the monastery of Pantokratoros, adopted the coenobitic life, so that from that year all twenty ruling monasteries of Athos have been coenobitic (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 7, on the completion of the return with Pantokratoros in 1992).

The significance of this is not merely administrative. In the tradition’s own reading, the universal return to the coenobium is a spiritual recovery — the Mountain, in reviving, chose the stricter and fuller form of the common life and set aside the relaxation that had been a mark of its decline; the change of form both expressed and reinforced the deeper renewal of monastic seriousness (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, chs. 6–7). That every house is now coenobitic is one of the plainest measures of how far the twentieth-century revival went (see The Meaning of the Mountain). The eremitic and semi-eremitic ways, however, were never abolished by this movement; they persist, as they always have, in the sketes, kellia, and hermitages of the Mountain — the subject of the next file (see Sketes, Kellia, and the Desert of Athos).

See Also

References

  • Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. (Ch. 7 on the coenobitic and idiorrhythmic forms; chs. 4 and 6–7 on the Ottoman-period origins of the idiorrhythmic form and the twentieth-century return to the coenobium, completed with Pantokratoros in 1992.)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Bishop of Diokleia). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (The coenobitic and idiorrhythmic forms and the ascetic rationale of the common life.)