East and West Monasticism

Benedict placed within the one monastic tradition of the undivided Church: the deep common roots that bind the father of Western monasticism to the fathers of the East, and the differing emphases that grew up on either side. The file traces the shared desert origins (Antony, the Apophthegmata, the Lives of the Fathers, and above all John Cassian, who carried the Egyptian wisdom into Latin); Benedict’s explicit and substantial debt to St Basil the Great’s Asketikon, the great Eastern legislation for the common life; the comparison of the Benedictine Rule with the Studite tradition of St Theodore of Stoudios, the parallel Eastern monastic constitution; and the underlying unity of ascetic theology — the renunciation of self-will, the ladder of humility, the warfare against the passions — beneath the real differences of institutional shape between the cenobitism of East and West.

Tradition: Pre-Schism Western (Latin) / Orthodox reception

One Tradition, Two Families

Benedict lived and wrote five centuries before the schism of 1054, in a Church that was still one. His monasticism is not a “Western” alternative to “Eastern” monasticism but a Latin branch of a single tree whose root is the Egyptian and Syrian desert. To set Benedict beside Basil, beside the desert fathers, beside the later Studites is therefore not to compare two religions but to trace two growths from one stock — and the comparison is illuminating precisely because the kinship is so deep. The differences that later ages would magnify into “Eastern” and “Western” types are, at this period, differences of emphasis and circumstance within a shared inheritance.

The Common Desert Root

The wellspring of all Christian monasticism is the Egyptian and Palestinian desert of the fourth century — Antony the Great, whose Life by Athanasius set the pattern of the monastic flight from the world (see St. Antony the Great); Pachomius, the father of the organized common life; the abbas of Scetis and Nitria, whose terse wisdom was gathered into the Apophthegmata (the Sayings of the Desert Fathers) and the Lives of the Fathers (see St. Macarius the Great). This desert tradition is the explicit foundation of Benedict’s Rule. In its closing chapter he sends the monk who would advance to “the Conferences of the Fathers, and their Institutes and Lives” (RB 73.5) — that is, to Cassian and to the desert literature itself. The whole spiritual vocabulary of the Rule — the warfare against the eight (or seven) principal faults, the logismoi or assaulting thoughts, the renunciation of propria voluntas (self-will), the goal of puritas cordis (purity of heart) and apatheia — is the desert’s vocabulary, inherited and Latinized.

The chief channel of that inheritance was John Cassian (c. 360–435), a monk formed in Egypt who settled at Marseilles and wrote, in Latin, the Institutes and the Conferences — the books that carried the spirituality of the Egyptian desert into the Latin West. Cassian is, after the Rule of the Master, Benedict’s deepest source (see The Regula Benedicti); the Rule’s teaching on discretio, on the degrees of humility, and on the ascetic life is steeped in him. Through Cassian, the Latin monasticism of which Benedict is the lawgiver is umbilically joined to the Greek and Coptic East.

Benedict and Basil

Benedict’s single most important named Eastern authority is St Basil the Great (c. 330–379), the Cappadocian father whose Asketikon (the “Long Rules” and “Short Rules”) is the great Eastern legislation for the cenobitic life. Benedict closes his Rule by directing the monk to “the Rule of our holy father Basil” (RB 73.5) — calling Basil “our holy father,” the same intimate title he uses of no Western authority — and his own Rule shows Basil’s influence throughout: in the priority of the common life over the solitary for most monks, in the theology of obedience and of community, in the conviction that charity is best learned among brethren. Benedict knew Basil through the Latin translation made by Rufinus, and the kinship is real and acknowledged: the Western Rule and the great Eastern Rule are, on the cenobitic life, close cousins. When the Orthodox Church venerates Benedict, it venerates a Latin son of Basil.

Benedict and the Studite Tradition

A further and instructive comparison is with St Theodore of Stoudios (759–826) and the Studite tradition of Constantinople — the monastic reform that gave Byzantine (and, through it, Russian and Athonite) cenobitism its lasting institutional shape (see Russian Monasticism for the broader Eastern monastic context this tradition shaped). Theodore wrote some two and a half centuries after Benedict, in a different Church and language, yet the parallels are striking: both legislated for a disciplined, fully cenobitic common life under an abbot; both regulated the daily office, the labor, the obediences, the diet, and the discipline of the community in detail; both stood for the reform of monastic life against laxity. The Studite Hypotyposis and the Benedictine Rule are the two great constitutional documents of organized cenobitism in the undivided Church, East and West — independent growths from the common desert root, addressing the same problem (how to make a holy community of ordinary men) with the same fundamental answer (obedience, stability of life, the Opus Dei, manual labor, the abbot as father). The Russian cenobitic tradition that descends from the Studites (see Russian Monasticism) is, in this sense, Benedict’s Eastern counterpart and cousin.

The Differences of Emphasis

Within this deep unity, real differences of emphasis grew up, and honesty requires naming them — though they are differences of temper, not of essence:

The place of the Rule. The West, especially after the Carolingian imposition (see The Rule Conquers the West), came to have one dominant written rule, Benedict’s, around which a whole legal and institutional culture crystallized. The East never centralized in this way; it retained a plurality of typika (foundation-charters) and a stronger continuing role for the unwritten transmission from elder to disciple — the living tradition of the abba and the starets (see Spiritual Direction). The East has rules; the West, for a thousand years, had the Rule.
The eremitic and the hesychast. The East kept a more continuous and prominent place for the solitary, the hermit, and — later — the hesychast tradition of the Jesus Prayer and the vision of the divine light. Benedict honors the hermit’s vocation (RB 1) but builds for the cenobite; the Western tradition, while it produced great solitaries, tended to subordinate the eremitic to the communal.
The institutional and the charismatic. The West, especially through the reforms and orders, developed strong institutional structures — congregations, orders, centralized observances. The East remained, on the whole, more decentralized and more oriented to the personal holiness of the elder than to the institution.

The Question of the Jesus Prayer

A reader coming to Benedict from the Christian East will naturally ask after the Jesus Prayer and the hesychast tradition of continual invocation of the Name — the heart of later Eastern spirituality. The Rule does not know them in that developed form; the systematic hesychasm of the Name, and the theology of the uncreated light articulated by St Gregory Palamas, lay centuries in the future and developed within the Greek East. What the Rule does know is the same root from which that tradition grew: the desert ideal of unceasing prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17), the meditation on Scripture and the Psalms that fills the mind with the word of God, the short repeated verse (the Deus in adiutorium meum intende with which every hour of the Office opens). Cassian, Benedict’s master, had transmitted from Egypt the practice of repeating a single short verse continually as a way toward ceaseless prayer — a practice closely akin in spirit to the later Jesus Prayer, drawing on the same desert source. The difference is one of development, not of contradiction: East and West drew the same well-water and let it run in different channels. Benedict’s monasticism contains, in its desert roots and its lectio and its constant psalmody, the seed of which the hesychast tradition is one great Eastern flowering.

None of these is a difference of doctrine, and none separates Benedict from the East. The Orthodox Church receives him as one of its own pre-schism fathers (see The Orthodox Veneration) precisely because what he taught — the renunciation of self-will, the ladder of humility, the warfare against the passions, the Opus Dei, the abbot as spiritual father, charity above all — is the common patrimony of the one undivided monastic tradition. The ladder of humility he set out in RB 7 is the Western twin of the ladder his Eastern near-contemporary John Climacus set out at Sinai (see St. John Climacus); the two together are the witness that, in the sixth and seventh centuries, the one Church was climbing, East and West, the same ladder to the same God.

References

The Rule of St Benedict, RB 1, 7, 73 (the kinds of monks; the ladder of humility; “the Rule of our holy father Basil” and “the Conferences, Institutes, and Lives of the Fathers”). Ed. de Vogüé, SC 181–182; trans. Fry, RB 1980 (Collegeville, 1981).
Basil the Great. Asketikon (the “Long Rules” and “Short Rules”), in the Latin of Rufinus. (The Eastern cenobitic legislation Benedict names as his model.)
Cassian, John. Institutes and Conferences. (The channel of Egyptian desert spirituality into the Latin West and Benedict’s deepest patristic source.)
de Vogüé, Adalbert. La Règle de saint Benoît, SC 184–185 (the doctrinal-historical commentary: Benedict’s relation to Basil, Cassian, and the desert). Paris: Cerf, 1971.
Theodore the Studite. Hypotyposis and the Studite typikon tradition. (The parallel Eastern cenobitic constitution; cross-checked against standard Byzantine monastic scholarship.)