Monasticism Today

After a century of catastrophe and recovery, Orthodox monasticism enters the twenty-first century remarkably alive: Athos renewed, the great traditional centers rebuilt, women’s monasticism flourishing, and, most strikingly, monasteries taking root in the Western diaspora and the new lands where Orthodoxy had never before been monastic. This file surveys the present state of the vocation across these settings, notes the debates about the depth and health of the revival, and offers a sober assessment of monasticism’s enduring place in the Orthodox Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Holy Mountain Renewed

The center of gravity remains where it has been for a thousand years: Mount Athos. The renewal that reversed the Mountain’s decline from the 1970s has held (see Persecution and Revival); the Athonite population has stabilized at around two thousand monks, younger and more educated than the aging community of the mid-twentieth century, and all twenty ruling monasteries have returned to the coenobitic life, the idiorrhythmic arrangement having been abandoned (Graham Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002; and the updated picture in Speake, A History of the Athonite Commonwealth, Cambridge, 2018). Athos functions once more as a fountainhead: its elders and their disciples have founded or refounded monasteries across Greece, Cyprus, and beyond, and the spiritual descendants of elders such as Joseph the Hesychast have carried the Athonite hesychast tradition to the diaspora — most visibly in the network of monasteries established in North America under Elder Ephraim of Philotheou from the 1990s (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002; and the deferral of the full Athonite story to Mount Athos).

The Traditional Heartlands

In the post-communist Orthodox lands the institutional recovery has been vast. Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Georgia have seen hundreds of monasteries reopened or newly founded since 1988; the great houses — the Trinity–Sergius and Kiev Caves Lavras, Optina Pustyn, Valaam, Solovki, Diveyevo, and the rest — are functioning communities again, and some have grown large (Nathaniel Davis, A Long Walk to Church, Westview, 1995; and see Orthodoxy: Monasticism, which surveys the reopenings and notes live disputes such as the contested status of the Kiev Caves Lavra amid the Russia–Ukraine conflict as of the mid-2020s). Romania in particular sustains a large and vigorous monasticism, and the Paisian, Philokalic tradition — transmitted in the twentieth century through figures associated with the Romanian Philokalia of Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae — remains a living force there (Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, SPCK, 2015, on Stăniloae and the Romanian tradition).

Women’s Monasticism

A feature of the present that deserves emphasis is the flourishing of women’s monasticism. From the desert ammas onward the monastic vocation has been lived by women as fully as by men, and the modern revival has been, in many places, disproportionately female: convents have multiplied across the Orthodox world, and in the diaspora several of the most influential new foundations are women’s communities (see The Elder and the Disciple on spiritual motherhood; the desert ammas are deferred to The Desert Fathers). The convents preserve the same threefold structure, the same degrees of tonsure, and the same hesychast prayer as the men’s houses, under an abbess exercising spiritual motherhood over her community.

The Diaspora and the New Lands

The most historically novel development is the establishment of Orthodox monasticism in lands where it had never existed — Western Europe, North America, Australia, Latin America, and Africa. Here the emigration of the twentieth century, first a refuge, became a seed. In the West a range of monastic foundations has taken root: Russian houses such as Holy Trinity Monastery at Jordanville, New York, the ROCOR center with its seminary and press; the Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex, founded in 1959 by St. Sophrony (Sakharov), a disciple of St. Silouan the Athonite, which carried the Athonite prayer of the heart into England (see St. Sophrony of Essex); the Greek-Athonite foundations under Elder Ephraim across the United States and Canada; and numerous smaller communities in the various jurisdictions (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002; and Orthodoxy: Monasticism on the ROCOR monasteries). For the first time in history there are indigenous Orthodox monasteries on every inhabited continent — a genuine transplantation of the tradition, not merely its preservation among émigrés.

The Debate About Depth

The scale of the revival is not in question; its depth is. Serious observers, including sympathetic ones, raise honest questions. Can a tradition so nearly severed — its chains of eldership broken by the Soviet decades, its monasteries repopulated rapidly by converts and the newly churched — regain the depth of formation and discernment that a living, unbroken transmission provides? Some warn of the dangers attending rapid growth: the rise of an unhealthy “elderism” (mladostarchestvo), in which inexperienced monks are treated, or present themselves, as startsy and demand a total obedience they are not equipped to receive; the strain of forming large numbers of novices without enough tested fathers; the temptation, in the well-endowed post-Soviet houses, of a return to the wealth-and-influence pattern the Non-Possessors had warned against (the concerns about mladostarchestvo have been raised within the Russian Church itself; see the discussion in the contemporary literature and in The Elder and the Disciple; on the wealth question, Possessors and Non-Possessors). Against these concerns stands the evident vitality of the Athonite renewal, the manifest holiness of recent elders whose lives and counsels have already borne fruit across the Orthodox world, and the simple fact that the vocation continues to draw the young — the deepest sign that the tradition is alive and not merely restored (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

Assessment

A sober assessment must hold several things together. Institutionally, Orthodox monasticism has recovered from near-annihilation with a speed and scope that would have seemed impossible in 1970, and it has done something new — planting itself in the whole world. Spiritually, the recovery is uneven: alongside communities of real ascetic and hesychast depth stand houses still finding their feet, and the questions about formation, eldership, and wealth are genuine and unresolved. But the enduring vocation is intact. The monastic life today is what it has always been — the “angelic life,” the undivided living-out of baptism, the flight from the world for the Kingdom, ordered through ascesis and stillness toward deification (see The Angelic Life and Ascesis, Hesychia, and Theosis). That men and women in the twenty-first century still sell everything, receive the angelic habit, take a new name, and give their lives to prayer in the wildernesses of Athos, the forests of Russia, and the unlikely new monasteries of the West is the surest evidence that the tradition begun in the Egyptian desert seventeen centuries ago remains not a relic but a living way — the nerve-center, as it has been called, of the Orthodox Church, and its permanent witness that the Kingdom is real and worth everything (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 2015; and the hub essay Orthodoxy: Monasticism).

See Also

• Persecution and Revival — the modern trial from which the present revival emerged
• The Angelic Life — the enduring meaning of the vocation
• Ascesis, Hesychia, and Theosis — the goal that keeps the tradition alive
• The Elder and the Disciple — the eldership on which the depth of the revival depends
• Mount Athos and St. Sophrony of Essex — the renewed Mountain and its transmission to the West

References

• Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (The Athonite renewal; the foundations in the diaspora; the demographic recovery.)
• Speake, Graham. A History of the Athonite Commonwealth: The Spiritual and Cultural Diaspora of Mount Athos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. (Athos as a fountainhead radiating to the wider Orthodox world.)
• Davis, Nathaniel. A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. (The post-Soviet reopening and its scale.)
• Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Stăniloae and the Romanian Philokalic tradition; the modern renewal.)
• Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (Monasticism as the nerve-center of the Church; the enduring vocation.)
• Orthodoxy: Monasticism (this repository, hub essay). (The ROCOR monasteries; the post-Soviet reopenings and live disputes.)