The Call to Neamț

The passage from the world to the monastery: Ilie Iacob’s military service of 1934–1935 as an army medical orderly at Dorohoi, his entry into the great Moldavian monastery of Neamț, and his tonsure there on 8 April 1936 as the monk Ioan — the beginning of a monastic life that would carry the Neamț tradition of prayer and letters to the Judean desert.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox (20th-c. hermit of the Judean desert; glorified 1992)

Military Service as a Medic

Before the monastery came the army. Like other young men of interwar Romania, Ilie Iacob was called to compulsory military service, and the Romanian accounts place his service in the years 1934–1935 at Dorohoi, the county town of his native district, where he served not as a combatant but as a medical orderly (sanitar), caring — in the recurring phrase of the Lives — “with love and compassion for the sick” (Romanian synodal Life, Viața Sfântului Cuvios Ioan Iacob de la Neamț; parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro, “Viața Sfântului Ioan Iacob Hozevitul”). The detail connects backward to the hospital work of his youth and forward to the whole shape of his sanctity: John Jacob’s holiness would be marked less by wonders than by mercy and self-effacing service, and the army infirmary is the first public arena in which that trait is recorded. It is worth noting the ordinariness of the setting — this is a saint whose formation ran through the barracks and the sick-ward of a provincial Moldavian town, and the sources do not romanticize it.

The Monastery of Neamț

The monastery to which Ilie went was no ordinary house. The Monastery of Neamț (Mănăstirea Neamț), in the Neamț County of eastern Moldavia, is one of the oldest and most important in the Romanian lands, a center of manuscript-copying, printing, and learning since the Middle Ages and, above all, the house where in the eighteenth century St. Paisius Velichkovsky had gathered a great international brotherhood and made Neamț the fountainhead of the Slavo-Romanian Philokalic revival — the renewal of the Jesus Prayer, of patristic translation, and of eldership that reshaped Orthodox monasticism across Moldavia, Russia, and Athos (on Neamț and Paisius, see St. Paisius Velichkovsky; Bălan, The Romanian Patericon). To enter Neamț in the 1930s was to enter that tradition of prayer and letters, and the coincidence is not idle: the future John Jacob, an educated young man with a gift for verse and translation and a bent toward hesychast solitude, was formed in precisely the monastery whose historic vocation was the marriage of Philokalic prayer with the copying and translating of the Fathers. Much of what he became — the praying hermit who was also a poet and translator — is legible as the fruit of the Neamț tradition carried to a new desert.

The Romanian accounts note that his monastic formation at Neamț was guided by an experienced elder, naming the hieromonk Ioachim Spătarul, superior of the Pocrov Skete dependent on Neamț, as among those who directed him (Romanian Wikipedia, Ioan Iacob de la Neamț, as locator to the synodal tradition; synodal Life). [Disputed: the sources differ slightly on the sequence of his military service and his entry to Neamț — some place a first period as a brother at Neamț before the 1934–1935 army service, others the reverse; all agree that by 1935–1936 he was a settled member of the Neamț brotherhood. The collection reports the tonsure date, on which the sources agree, and flags the ordering of the preceding years as unsettled in the devotional Lives.]

The Tonsure of 1936

The decisive act is precisely dated. On 8 April 1936 — Great Wednesday of Holy Week that year — Ilie Iacob was tonsured a monk at Neamț by Archimandrite Valerie (Valeriu) Moglan, receiving the monastic name Ioan (John), the name by which the Church now knows him (Romanian synodal Life; egumenita.ro and the prefatory matter to editions of Hrană Duhovnicească, which name Moglan and the date). The choice of Great Wednesday — the day of the Church’s remembrance of the sinful woman who anointed Christ, and of the setting of Judas’s betrayal — for the death-to-the-world of the tonsure is the kind of liturgical fittingness the Romanian tradition remarks; whether it was deliberate or simply the day appointed, the accounts do not resolve, and the collection does not press it beyond what the date itself attests.

He was now the monk Ioan of Neamț, twenty-two years old. Had he remained, he might have lived out an unremarkable Moldavian monastic life, copying, praying, and serving. But the same year that saw his tonsure saw also the decision that would define him: within months of becoming a monk he set out, with two companions, for the Holy Land, never to return to Romania. The road from the orphan’s cottage at Crăiniceni had led through school, hospital, army, and the great monastery of the Moldavian hills; from Neamț it now turned toward the Judean desert. That pilgrimage, and the wilderness at its end, are the subject of the next section.

See Also

References

  • Viața Sfântului Cuvios Ioan Iacob de la Neamț (Hozevitul) — the Romanian synodal Life, in Viețile Sfinților for August. (Military service 1934–1935 at Dorohoi as a medical orderly; entry to Neamț; the tonsure.)
  • “Viața Sfântului Ioan Iacob Hozevitul.” parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro. (Details of the military service.)
  • Hrană Duhovnicească, ed. Lumina din Lumina (Bucharest, 2000), prefatory matter; and egumenita.ro product notice. (The tonsure of 8 April 1936, Great Wednesday, by Archimandrite Valerie Moglan; the name Ioan.)
  • Bălan, Archimandrite Ioanichie. The Romanian Patericon. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (Neamț and the Paisian tradition; his monastic formation.)
  • Ioan Iacob de la Neamț, Romanian Wikipedia — used as a locator (the naming of Ioachim Spătarul of Pocrov Skete among his guides).