The Three Vows and the Royal Priesthood of the Laity

Evdokimov gave interiorized monasticism a concrete structure. The three monastic vows — poverty, chastity, obedience — he read as the Church’s answers to the three temptations of Christ in the wilderness, and therefore as universal Christian liberations rather than monastic specialities; and he grounded the layman’s competence to live them in baptism and chrismation, which he understood as an ordination to the royal priesthood. The home becomes the “domestic church,” and the ordinary life becomes the material of an offering.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Vows as Answers to the Temptations

The most original move in Evdokimov’s account of the vows is to derive them not from monastic custom but from the Gospel narrative of the temptations in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13). The three refusals of Christ — of bread from stones, of the miraculous descent from the pinnacle, of the kingdoms of the world — are for him the archetypal form of the three renunciations, and the vows are the Church’s way of taking them up (Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé,” in Le millénaire du Mont Athos 963–1963, tome I, Chevetogne, 1963, where the three vows are traced to Christ’s three answers in the wilderness; the same schema in Les Âges de la vie spirituelle, 1964).

The pairing runs as follows:

Poverty answers the temptation to turn stones into bread — the reduction of human life to the economic, the belief that man lives by bread alone. Poverty, in Evdokimov’s formula, “frees from the grip of the material” (“la pauvreté libère de l’emprise du matériel”).
Chastity answers the temptation to cast oneself from the pinnacle — the demand for the spectacular, the magical use of God, the refusal of the ordinary. Chastity in his sense is not simply continence; it is the integrity of a person who is not fragmented by desire and does not use others as instruments.
Obedience answers the temptation of the kingdoms — the will to power, the readiness to worship whatever gives dominion. Obedience is the deliberate refusal of autonomy as an absolute.

Read this way, the vows are not withdrawals from creation but liberations within it, and there is no reason in principle why a married person with a job and a mortgage cannot make them. Their monastic form (renunciation of property, celibacy, submission to a superior) is one realization; it is not the only one. The layman’s poverty is a relation to possessions rather than their absence; the married person’s chastity is the nuptial fidelity treated in Eros, Chastity, and the Nuptial Mystery; the layman’s obedience is exercised toward a spouse, a community, a confessor, and the unarguable claims of other people’s needs.

Evdokimov also applies the schema to his diagnosis of the age. The modern world presents, he argues, a triple temptation exactly answering to the three: material consumption, the magical pursuit of power (including through technology), and political totalitarianism (Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé,” 1963). A man who had lost his country to one totalitarianism and lived through the occupation by another was not speaking abstractly. The vows, on this reading, are not archaisms; they are precisely the disciplines the twentieth century required.

Baptism, Chrismation, and the Royal Priesthood

The second pillar is sacramental. Evdokimov’s claim is that the layman does not need a special commission to live this life, because he has already received one: in baptism and chrismation every Christian is made a priest in the sense of 1 Peter 2:9 — “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people” — and of Revelation 1:6, and is anointed for a charismatic vocation (Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé,” 1963, on baptism and chrismation making all Christians priests with a charismatic capacity; Le Sacrement de l’amour, 1962, whose chapters include “the royal priesthood of the believers”).

Two guards should be noted, because the doctrine is routinely misheard.

First, Evdokimov is not collapsing the ordained priesthood into the baptismal one. The Orthodox Church confesses a sacramental priesthood conferred by ordination, without which there is no Eucharist; nothing in Evdokimov denies this, and he was himself a layman who never sought and never claimed liturgical function. The royal priesthood is a different thing from the ministerial priesthood — a distinction the tradition has always drawn — and it is exercised in the offering of one’s life, one’s work, and the world itself back to God. This is standard Orthodox teaching, and Evdokimov’s contribution is emphasis rather than innovation (see The Holy Mysteries and Ecclesiology).

Second, Evdokimov’s emphasis has an ecclesiological neighbour: Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev’s eucharistic ecclesiology, which recovered the ancient sense of the laity as the laos, the consecrated people, and of no baptized Christian as a mere spectator at the liturgy. Afanasiev’s work on the priestly character of the laity was known to the fathers of Vatican II, where he and Evdokimov sat together as observers (Bordeianu, “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council,” Theological Studies 79/1 [2018]: 95 n.39; see Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev). Evdokimov’s interiorized monasticism is, in effect, the spirituality corresponding to Afanasiev’s ecclesiology.

Tonsure and Baptism

There is a further connection Evdokimov exploits, and it is the linchpin of the whole argument. In the Byzantine rites, the tonsure of a monk and the baptism–chrismation of a Christian share a structure and a symbolism: the cutting of hair, the putting off of the old and the putting on of the new, a change of name, the reception of a habit. The tradition itself has spoken of monastic profession as a “second baptism.” Evdokimov reverses the direction of the inference. If the monastic tonsure is a second baptism, then baptism is already a first tonsure: what the monk vows explicitly, the Christian has already promised implicitly at the font, in the renunciation of Satan and the adherence to Christ. He establishes, as the summaries of his argument put it, a direct pathway between baptism and monasticism through the rite of tonsure, so that the total claim of baptism and chrismation places every Christian in tension toward the ultimate — and marriage, in turn, interiorizes the monastic state (Evdokimov, Le Sacrement de l’amour, 1962, and Les Âges de la vie spirituelle, 1964; on the marriage–monasticism relation, see Marriage as Sacrament and Way).

The Domestic Church

The place where the lay priesthood is exercised is the home. Evdokimov revives the Pauline and patristic language of the église domestique — the domestic church (Romans 16:5; 1 Corinthians 16:19; Colossians 4:15; and the theme in Chrysostom’s homilies on marriage) — and gives it full weight: the household is not a Christian family that goes to church, it is itself a cell of the Church, with an altar (the table), a liturgy (the common prayer), a priesthood (the baptized), and an ascesis (the daily giving way of each to each) (Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé,” 1963, on the laity actualizing monastic principles in daily life and transforming homes into églises domestiques; developed at length in Le Sacrement de l’amour, 1962).

This is where the doctrine becomes practical, and where Evdokimov is most concrete. The elements of a lay rule as he sketches it are unspectacular and old: a fixed rhythm of prayer, including the Jesus Prayer (see The Jesus Prayer); the reading of Scripture; the keeping of the fasts as they can be kept; regular confession and communion; almsgiving; hospitality; and a spiritual father or mother. There is nothing here that a monk would not recognize, which is the point. And there is nothing that requires a monastery, which is also the point.

Reception and Objection

The idea travelled unusually far, and — a fact worth recording — travelled furthest among Roman Catholics. Plekon’s American Benedictine Review study was written for a Benedictine readership, and the notion of “interior monasticism” has been taken up in Catholic writing on the lay vocation and on new monastic movements (Plekon, American Benedictine Review 48:3 [1997]: 227–253; Catholic World Report, “Interior Monasticism,” 2022). Within Orthodoxy it has been received widely at the level of pastoral practice, where it is now close to a commonplace that laypeople are to keep a rule.

[Disputed: whether "interiorized monasticism" is a healthy recovery or a category error. (a) The affirming reading — that Evdokimov restored to the laity a spiritual seriousness the tradition always intended for them, that his patristic warrants are genuine, and that in a post-Christian society this is the only realistic form of Christian life for most believers — is held by Plekon, by Olivier Clément, and by the broad current of contemporary lay-spirituality writing that has adopted the phrase. (b) The critical reading — that applying monastic categories to lay life risks either an impossible burden or a sentimental dilution; that monasticism's institutional forms (stability, enclosure, obedience to a living superior, celibacy) are not incidental packaging but the very conditions under which the vows are livable; and that a "monasticism" without them is a metaphor rather than a vocation — is a recurrent objection from monastic quarters and from theologians who hold to the tradition's ordering of states. The collection names both and adjudicates neither.]

References

Bordeianu, Radu. “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics.” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 (2018): 86–106, at 95 n.39. (Afanasiev on the priestly character of the laity and its influence at the Council.)
Catholic World Report. “Interior Monasticism.” 17 February 2022.
Evdokimov, Paul. “Le monachisme intériorisé.” In Le millénaire du Mont Athos 963–1963: Études et mélanges, tome I. Chevetogne: Éditions de Chevetogne, 1963. (The three vows derived from Christ’s three answers in the wilderness; “la pauvreté libère de l’emprise du matériel”; baptism and chrismation conferring a charismatic priesthood; the église domestique; the triple temptation of consumption, magical power, and totalitarianism.)
Evdokimov, Paul. Le Sacrement de l’amour: Le mystère conjugal à la lumière de la tradition orthodoxe. Paris: Éditions de l’Épi, 1962. English: The Sacrament of Love, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel and Victoria Steadman. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985. (Chapters on marriage and the monastic state and on the royal priesthood of believers.)
Evdokimov, Paul. Les Âges de la vie spirituelle. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1964. English: Ages of the Spiritual Life, SVS Press, 1998.
Plekon, Michael. “‘Interiorized Monasticism’: A Reconsideration of Paul Evdokimov on the Spiritual Life.” American Benedictine Review 48, no. 3 (1997): 227–253.
Scripture: Matthew 4:1–11 and Luke 4:1–13 (the three temptations); 1 Peter 2:9 and Revelation 1:6 (the royal priesthood); Romans 16:5, 1 Corinthians 16:19, Colossians 4:15 (the church in the house).