The Angelic Life

Orthodox tradition calls monasticism the “angelic life” (bios angelikos) — not because monks cease to be human, but because they anticipate now the life of the age to come, where “they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). This file treats what monasticism claims to be at its root: the radical and undivided living-out of the baptismal vows, the flight from the world for the sake of the Kingdom, and the response to Christ’s counsel of perfection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Monasticism as a Way of Keeping the Gospel

Orthodox theology does not treat the monastic life as a second, higher Gospel added onto the ordinary Christian one. There is a single Gospel and a single set of commandments, given to all the baptized; monasticism is one way — the most concentrated and undistracted way — of keeping them. Kallistos Ware puts the point sharply: the monk is not doing something different from other Christians but is doing, with an undivided heart, what every Christian is called to do; “the monk is simply a Christian who takes his baptismal vows with full seriousness” (Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed., Penguin, 2015, ch. on the monastic life; and Ware, “The Monk and the Married Christian,” Eastern Churches Review 6, 1974). The monastic profession is therefore understood as a kind of renewal or intensification of baptism — so much so that the Byzantine commentators and the office of tonsure itself speak of it as a “second baptism,” a fresh washing in tears and repentance (this language is a commonplace of the tradition; it is developed at length in St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 5, “On Repentance,” and the tonsure rite gives the monk a new name as at baptism; trans. Luibhéid and Russell, Paulist Press, 1982).

The single word that the tradition uses to name the goal is undivided. St. Paul’s counsel that “the unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord… his interests are divided” (1 Corinthians 7:32–34) became one of the load-bearing scriptural texts of the ascetic movement: the monk renounces marriage, property, and self-will not because these are evil but because renouncing them frees the whole person for the one thing needful (cf. Luke 10:42). Peter Brown’s classic study traces how, in the early Christian centuries, virginity and continence came to be read precisely as this freeing of the heart for God, an anticipation in the body of the resurrection life (Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Columbia University Press, 1988, esp. the chapters on Egypt and Asia Minor).

“If You Would Be Perfect”: Matthew 19:21

The charter text of monastic renunciation is Christ’s word to the rich young man: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21). Athanasius’ Life of Antony — the single most influential monastic text ever written — turns on this verse. Antony, a young Egyptian of about eighteen or twenty, enters a church, hears this Gospel read as though it were addressed to him personally, and immediately gives away the family land and goods and takes up the ascetic life (Athanasius, Life of Antony 2–3; trans. Robert C. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality, Paulist Press, 1980). The scene became paradigmatic: the monastic vocation is a hearing of the Gospel as a direct and total summons, and a corresponding total response. The desert tradition preserved the same note in its own idiom — Abba Antony’s counsel that a monk should always keep God before his eyes, and the repeated sayings that bid the brother “sell all that you have and give to the poor” and follow (a recurring theme of the Apophthegmata Patrum; see The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward, Cistercian, 1984, Antony sayings).

Christ’s “if you would be perfect” was read alongside his distinction between what is commanded of all and what is counseled to those able to receive it — “not all can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given… he who is able to receive this, let him receive it” (Matthew 19:11–12, on those who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom). Out of these texts the tradition drew its language of the “evangelical counsels” — poverty, chastity, and obedience — as the voluntary undertaking of what the Gospel holds out to the willing. Orthodox writers are careful, however, not to let this harden into a two-tier Church in which monks keep the counsels and the laity merely the commandments; the counsels are the sharpening of the one call to holiness addressed to all (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015; and the balance struck in St. Basil, whose Asketikon addresses the baptized Christian as such — see Saint Basil and the Asketikon).

The Angelic Life

From at least the fourth century the monastic life is called the “angelic life,” and the great schema, the highest monastic degree, is called in Greek the “angelic habit” (to angelikon schema) (the term is standard in the Byzantine rites of tonsure and in the fathers; see the discussion in The Monastic Tonsure and the Degrees). The phrase does not mean that the monk becomes an angel or ceases to be flesh and blood. It means that the monk anticipates, within this mortal life, the condition of the age to come, which Christ describes precisely in terms of the angels: in the resurrection “they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30; cf. Luke 20:35–36, “equal to angels… sons of the resurrection”). The monastic vocation is thus fundamentally eschatological: it is the attempt to live now, ahead of time, the life of the Kingdom — a life of ceaseless prayer, of praise, of purity, of freedom from the anxieties of possession and self-will (this eschatological reading is developed by Ware and is a theme of the desert literature and of Climacus; Ladder, esp. the higher steps on stillness, prayer, and dispassion).

The angel is above all the being whose whole existence is turned toward God in worship. To call monasticism angelic is therefore to say that its center is prayer — the standing before God that the monk takes up as a permanent occupation on behalf of himself, the Church, and the world. The desert fathers understood the monk’s flight not as a rejection of other people but as a taking up of a hidden intercessory station: the monk withdraws in order to pray, and the world is sustained, the tradition holds, by such prayer (a theme pervasive in the Apophthegmata and later crystallized in the Athonite understanding of the Holy Mountain as praying for the world; see Athos, the Monastic Republic).

Flight from the World for the Kingdom

Anachoresis — “withdrawal,” the root of the word anchorite — is the concrete shape the vocation first took: a going-out from the inhabited and cultivated world, the flight to the desert (see The Birth in the Egyptian Desert). But the tradition is careful about what “the world” (kosmos) means here. It is not the created order, which is good, nor other human beings, whom the monk is bound to love, but “the world” in the Johannine sense — the whole complex of passions, distractions, and self-will that pulls the heart away from God (1 John 2:15–17). St. Isaac the Syrian, one of the most penetrating of the ascetic writers, defines “the world” precisely as the sum of the passions, so that to flee the world is to flee not places or persons but the reign of the passions in oneself (Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, on the meaning of “the world”; trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 2011). The physical withdrawal to the desert is the outward sacrament of an inward withdrawal that must in principle be made by every Christian.

This is why the same tradition can insist, without contradiction, both that flight from the world is essential to the monk and that the goal — purity of heart, unceasing prayer, love of God and neighbor — is the goal of every baptized Christian. The desert is the school; the lesson is one that the whole Church must learn. The monastic vocation stands in the Church, in the tradition’s own understanding, as a permanent sign and reminder of the “one thing needful,” a living witness that the Kingdom is real and worth the sale of everything to buy the field in which its treasure is hidden (Matthew 13:44; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015, on the monk as prophetic sign within the Church).

See Also

References

  • Athanasius of Alexandria, St. The Life of Antony. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (Antony’s hearing of Matthew 19:21; the paradigmatic conversion.)
  • The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI / London: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Antony sayings; the theme of total renunciation.)
  • John Climacus, St. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibhéid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Monastic profession as “second baptism”; repentance, stillness, dispassion.)
  • Isaac the Syrian, St. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. 2nd ed. Boston, 2011. (The definition of “the world” as the passions.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (Monasticism as the undivided living-out of baptism; the monk as prophetic sign; the angelic life.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. “The Monk and the Married Christian: Some Comparisons in Early Monastic Sources.” Eastern Churches Review 6 (1974): 72–83.
  • Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. (Virginity and continence as the freeing of the heart; the anticipation of the resurrection life.)
  • Scripture: Matthew 19:11–12, 19:21, 22:30; Luke 20:35–36; 1 Corinthians 7:32–34; 1 John 2:15–17.