The Idea of Interiorized Monasticism

“Interiorized monasticism” (le monachisme intériorisé) is Evdokimov’s claim that what is essential in the monastic vocation — the total claim of the Gospel, the ascetic struggle, the orientation of the whole person to the one thing needful — is not the property of monks but the birthright and the obligation of every baptized Christian, and can be lived under any conditions, including marriage and secular work. This file sets out the thesis, its patristic warrants, its Russian antecedents, and its limits.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Thesis

Evdokimov’s argument begins from a question about definitions. What is a monk? He answers with the ancient descriptions: a monk is one who wishes to be saved, who seeks to live according to the Gospel, who seeks the one thing needful, who does violence to himself in all things (Evdokimov, essay on monasticism in Le millénaire du Mont Athos 963–1963: Études et mélanges, tome I, Chevetogne, 1963, reproduced under the title “Le monachisme intériorisé”; the same argument in Les Âges de la vie spirituelle, 1964). Then comes the pivot: not one of those descriptions is peculiar to monks. Every one of them is required of every Christian. If the definition of the monk contains nothing that is not asked of all the baptized, then the difference between monk and layman is a difference of form and circumstance, not of substance or of degree.

The consequence Evdokimov draws is that the Gospel is addressed to everyone in its full demand — “C’est dans sa totale exigence que l’Évangile s’adresse à tous” — and that monasticism therefore “poses a universal vocation”: for each person it is a matter of finding the personal equivalent, the adaptation of the monastic vows to his own condition (Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé,” in Le millénaire du Mont Athos, tome I, 1963). Interiorized monasticism is that adaptation. It does not mean an interior life instead of an exterior discipline. It means the same discipline, interiorized — carried inside a life that from outside looks like everyone else’s.

Michael Plekon, who has done more than anyone to make the idea available in English, insists on a point that is easily lost: interior monasticism does not mean inferior monasticism. “The point is that both the monk and the secular Christian are engaged in the same struggle” (Plekon, “‘Interiorized Monasticism’: A Reconsideration of Paul Evdokimov on the Spiritual Life,” American Benedictine Review 48:3 [1997]: 227–253; the same formulation is quoted in the Catholic World Report essay “Interior Monasticism,” 17 February 2022). Evdokimov is not proposing a diluted asceticism for people too weak for the real thing. He is proposing that the real thing has a lay form.

The Patristic Warrants

Evdokimov did not present this as an innovation. He presented it as a recovery, and he anchored it in the Fathers, three of whom he cites repeatedly:

St. Nilus (of Ancyra/Sinai), for the claim that “all monastic practices are binding on worldly people” — that is, that the ascetic prescriptions are not a code for a caste (cited in Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé”).
St. John Chrysostom, whose insistence in the homilies is that “those living in the world, though married, must resemble monks in everything else,” and that both will render the same account — a formulation Evdokimov treats as decisive, since it denies that the layman is judged by a lower standard (cited in Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé”; the theme is pervasive in Chrysostom’s homilies Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life and on Matthew; see St. John Chrysostom).
St. Theodore the Studite, who, writing to a Byzantine court dignitary, applies the monastic programme to him “entirely and equally” as a layman (cited in Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé”).

To these Evdokimov adds a structural observation about the patristic period: the Fathers speak of the universal priesthood of the baptized without erecting the modern pluralized theologies of separate states — episcopate, clergy, monasticism, laity — each with its own spirituality. That partition, he argues, would have been unintelligible to them (Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé,” in Le millénaire du Mont Athos, tome I, 1963).

[Disputed: whether Evdokimov's patristic case proves what he wants it to prove. The texts he cites unquestionably establish that the Fathers held laypeople to the Gospel's full demand and refused a two-tier morality — this is not in serious doubt. Critics of the thesis observe that the same Fathers, including Chrysostom and Theodore, also praise the monastic state as objectively higher and counsel it where possible, and that the ancient tradition's *taxis* of states cannot simply be dissolved into a difference of circumstance without loss. Evdokimov's defenders answer that he never denies the monastic state its honour, and that his target is not monasticism but the modern habit of treating the spiritual life as a monastic speciality. The collection reports the tension and does not resolve it. See [Orthodox Monasticism](../../orthodox-monasticism/README.md) for the tradition's own account of the monastic vocation.]

The Russian Antecedents: Bukharev and Dostoevsky

The immediate source of the phrase is Russian. Evdokimov took the notion of interiorized monasticism from the nineteenth-century theologian Alexander Bukharev (in religion Archimandrite Theodore, 1824–1871) — a monk and academic who left the monastic state, married, and spent the rest of a broken career arguing that Orthodoxy must be brought into contact with modern life rather than sheltered from it (Plekon, American Benedictine Review 48:3 [1997], on Evdokimov’s debt to Bukharev; the derivation is noted in the Catholic World Report essay “Interior Monasticism,” 2022). Bukharev’s own experience — a monk who concluded that the monastic principle must go into the world, and who paid for the conclusion — stands behind Evdokimov’s use of the idea.

The second antecedent is Dostoevsky, whom Evdokimov had spent a decade studying (see The Student Years and the Dostoevsky Thesis). In The Brothers Karamazov the elder Zosima sends Alyosha out of the monastery and into the world, telling him that his place is not in the cell; and the same novel places the ideal of universal responsibility — each is guilty before all, for all — in the mouth of a dying monk addressing laypeople. Evdokimov reads this as Dostoevsky’s version of the same intuition, and the standard summaries of his thought make the connection explicit: “following Dostoevsky and Bukharev, Evdokimov highlighted the importance of authentic spiritual life for all lay people… and emphasized the ‘interiorized monasticism’ to which every Christian is called.”

What the Thesis Is Answering

Interiorized monasticism is not a piece of abstract systematics. It is a response to a diagnosis, and the diagnosis is about the twentieth century. Evdokimov thought the modern situation had made the older arrangement — a Church whose spiritual intensity is concentrated in monasteries, surrounded by a Christian society that supports it — unavailable. In a secularized, atheist-pressured, urban world, the Christian is a minority presence with no supporting culture, and either the layman becomes an ascetic and a witness in his own right or there will be no witness. Hence the framing that recurs in his late work: modern believers must live this spirituality as witnesses to the Kingdom in the midst of a secular culture, against what he called the triple temptation of the age — material consumption, the magical pursuit of power, and political totalitarianism (Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé,” in Le millénaire du Mont Athos, tome I, 1963; the three temptations are treated at length in The Three Vows and the Royal Priesthood of the Laity).

This is the point at which Evdokimov converges with — and diverges from — his contemporaries. He shares with Fr. Alexander Schmemann the conviction that the layman’s life is the Church’s frontier and that secularism must be met theologically rather than by retreat; he shares with Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev the eucharistic and baptismal grounding of the lay vocation. What is his own is the decision to keep the monastic vocabulary rather than replace it. He did not want a new spirituality for the laity. He wanted the old one, unabridged, in a new place.

What It Does Not Claim

Three clarifications, because the idea is easy to caricature:

It is not an abolition of monasticism. Evdokimov honoured the monastic tradition, wrote for the Athos millennium volume, and drew his spiritual doctrine from the desert fathers and the Philokalia. His subtitle for Les Âges de la vie spirituelle is precisely Des Pères du désert à nos jours — “from the desert fathers to our own day.” The monastery is the source; the question is whether the water reaches everyone.
It is not a claim that the layman’s life is easier. The reverse: the whole force of the Chrysostom citation is that the same account will be rendered.
It is not the Church’s dogma. It is Evdokimov’s theological proposal, offered as a reading of the tradition. Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, this collection expounds it as his, and reports both its enthusiastic reception (notably in Roman Catholic monastic and lay-spirituality circles, where the American Benedictine Review article and the subsequent literature carried it far) and the objections to it.

References

Catholic World Report. “Interior Monasticism.” 17 February 2022. (Evdokimov’s derivation of the term from Bukharev; the insistence that interior monasticism is not inferior monasticism; the shared struggle of monk and secular Christian.)
Evdokimov, Paul. “Le monachisme intériorisé.” In Le millénaire du Mont Athos 963–1963: Études et mélanges, tome I. Chevetogne: Éditions de Chevetogne, 1963. (The definition of the monk; the Gospel’s total demand addressed to all; the citations of St. Nilus, St. John Chrysostom and St. Theodore the Studite; the universal priesthood in the Fathers; the triple temptation of the modern age.)
Evdokimov, Paul. Les Âges de la vie spirituelle: Des Pères du désert à nos jours. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1964. English: The Struggle with God (Paulist, 1966) and Ages of the Spiritual Life, trans. and rev. Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov (SVS Press, 1998). (The sustained exposition of interiorized monasticism.)
Plekon, Michael. “‘Interiorized Monasticism’: A Reconsideration of Paul Evdokimov on the Spiritual Life.” American Benedictine Review 48, no. 3 (1997): 227–253. (The standard English study; Evdokimov’s debt to Bukharev; interior not inferior.)
Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (1880). (Zosima’s sending of Alyosha into the world; universal responsibility.)