Abbot of Stoudios

The move of Theodore’s community from Bithynia to the ancient, half-empty Stoudios monastery in Constantinople (799), and the strict cenobitic life he rebuilt there: the abolition of private property, the restoration of manual labor, the full singing of the office, the graded hierarchy of offices, and the absolute obedience to the abbot — the reform that made the Stoudios the model monastery of the Orthodox world.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

The Move to the Capital (799)

When Theodore returned from his first exile in 797 (see The Adulterous Marriage Affair), the empress Irene offered his community the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople, an ancient and prestigious house that had fallen nearly empty. The community made the move in 798/799 (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 120–122; the Catholic Encyclopedia gives 799). [Disputed: the move is dated 797/798 by Pratsch and 799 by the older reference tradition (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1912); “799” is the figure most commonly cited.] [Disputed: the cause of the move is often given as Arab raids on Bithynia threatening Sakkoudion, a claim widely repeated in reference works; the strongest scholarly account (Pratsch, pp. 120–122) foregrounds rather Irene’s invitation to take over the vacant ancient house, and treats the raids as at most a contributing factor.]

The Stoudios was no new foundation. It had been built in 462/463 by the consul Flavius Studius (Studios), a Roman patrician settled in the capital, and dedicated to St. John the Baptist (Prodromos); its first monks had come from the rigorist Akoimetoi, the “Sleepless Ones,” famous for their unceasing round of psalmody (Janin, Les églises et les monastères, 1969; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Stoudios”). By Theodore’s day the house was reduced to a handful of monks. Into this venerable but decayed shell Theodore brought the Sakkoudion community and the Sakkoudion discipline, and within a few years had made the Stoudios the foremost monastery of Constantinople.

The Revival of the Cenobitic Life

What Theodore rebuilt at the Stoudios was the strict cenobitic (koinobitic) common life — the fully shared existence under a single rule and a single father, as against the looser, more individualized observance into which much Byzantine monasticism had drifted, where monks might keep private means, eat apart, and live “by their own judgment” (Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, 2007, pp. 322–350; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 130–160). The pillars of the reform were these:

Common property abolished. No monk owned anything of his own — not money, not goods, not the disposition of his own labor. Everything belonged to the community; the renunciation of private ownership was, for Theodore, the very substance of the monastic vow (Hatlie, pp. 322–350).
Manual labor restored. Every monk worked — in the fields, the workshops, the kitchen, the scriptorium — for idleness was the enemy of the soul and the parasitism of unproductive monks a scandal. Labor was not a concession but a discipline (Cholij, pp. 130–160; on the scriptorium see Poems, Canons, and the Scriptorium).
The full office. The whole cycle of the divine services was sung in common, with a near-daily Divine Liturgy, in a liturgical synthesis the Studite house would bequeath to the Orthodox world (see The Studite Typikon).
Absolute obedience. The monk surrendered his own will to the abbot, who answered to God for each soul — the Basilian and Climacan ideal pressed to its sharpest point (Cholij, pp. 130–160; on the sources see The Formation of a Reformer).

Theodore drove this program not by coercion alone but by constant instruction: the Catecheses are the running commentary of the reform, the abbot’s word to the brethren three times a week on the meaning and the cost of the common life (see The Catecheses).

The Scale of the Community

The Stoudios under Theodore became a large community, and its affiliated and dependent houses larger still. The Studite vitae speak of more than a thousand monks attached to the Studite obedience across its dependencies; Theodore himself, in his own writings, speaks of a community of about three hundred at the Stoudios proper (Hatlie, pp. 322–350; Cholij, pp. 130–160). [Disputed: the round figure of “a thousand monks” (sometimes “up to a thousand at the Stoudios”) is a traditional and hagiographic estimate, attested in the vitae and repeated in later medieval pilgrim accounts of the monastery’s heyday rather than secured as a headcount for Theodore’s own community; Theodore’s own “about 300” is the more reliable figure for the Stoudios house itself.] Whatever the exact number, the community was large enough to require — and Theodore supplied — an articulated institutional structure.

The Organization of Offices

The reformed monastery ran on a graded hierarchy of offices, each with defined duties, which Theodore laid out in his catecheses, his iambic epigrams on the officers, and the disciplinary canons (Speck, Jamben, 1968, the Epigrams on the offices; Cholij, pp. 130–160). Under the hegoumenos (abbot) stood a second (deuteros) who governed in his absence; an oikonomos (steward) over the material affairs; an epistemonarches (disciplinarian) charged with order; officers over the church, the refectory, the infirmary, the gate, and the library and scriptorium; and below them the deans and the body of the brethren. The result was a monastery organized almost like a small city — every function assigned, every monk accountable, the whole bound together under the abbot and the rule (Hatlie, pp. 322–350). This institutional achievement, as much as the spiritual one, is why the Studite model proved so transplantable: it was a complete, workable order for the common life, ready to be carried to Athos and to Rus’ (see The Studite Typikon).

The Daily Rhythm of the Reformed House

The reform was not an abstraction but a horarium — a measured division of the day among prayer, labor, and rest that left no hour to “one’s own judgment.” The frame of the day was the full cycle of the divine office, sung in common in the katholikon: the night office (mesonyktikon and orthros), the day hours, and the evening services, the whole psalter carried through in its appointed course, with a near-daily Divine Liturgy — a frequency of celebration that was itself part of the Studite synthesis and would pass into the rule the house bequeathed to Orthodoxy (Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 130–170; on the office see The Studite Typikon and The Divine Liturgy). Between the services stood the hours of obligatory labor — in the fields and gardens, the workshops, the kitchen and bakery, and above all the scriptorium, where the copying of books was prized as the noblest of the manual works (see Poems, Canons, and the Scriptorium).

The refectory (trapeza) was itself a quasi-liturgical act: the brethren ate together, in silence, while one of them read aloud, the common table standing as the visible sign of the common life that the abolition of private property made real (Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, 2007, pp. 322–350). The reformed discipline reached into the smallest details of this rhythm — the signal-strokes (the semantron) that summoned the monks, the order of entry into church and refectory, the penances for lateness, drowsiness at the office, or breaking silence — and it is exactly these details that the penitential canons and the later Hypotyposis codify (Cholij, pp. 130–170; on the canons see The Studite Typikon). The aim throughout was the one Theodore preached in the Catecheses: that the monk’s whole day, divided and accounted for, be turned into an unbroken offering, with idleness — the “mother of vices” — given no room to enter (see The Catecheses).

The Studite Confederation

Theodore did not govern a single house but the head of a network. The Stoudios stood at the center of a cluster of dependent and affiliated monasteries — including the older Sakkoudion community in Bithynia, which Theodore continued to oversee, and other houses drawn into the Studite obedience and observance — so that the reform radiated outward from the capital across a small monastic confederation under one discipline and, in effect, one father (Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, 2007, pp. 322–350; Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 120–160). It is this wider obedience, rather than the Stoudios house alone, that the vitae have in view when they speak of more than a thousand monks under Theodore (see the discussion of numbers above).

The confederation was held together not only by the common rule but by the vast correspondence through which Theodore governed at a distance — directing superiors, settling disputes, and binding scattered communities to the single standard of the reformed life even when persecution had driven him and his monks far apart (see Rome and the Pentarchy). The model that proved so portable to Athos and Rus’ was, then, never merely the rule of one monastery: it was already, in Theodore’s own lifetime, a system for federating many houses under one discipline — which is precisely what later founders, from Athanasius the Athonite onward, found ready to hand (see The Studite Typikon).

The Monastery Itself

The house Theodore reformed was one of the oldest and most distinguished in the city. The monastery of St. John the Baptist (the Prodromos) “of Stoudios” was founded in 462/463 by the Roman patrician and consul Flavius Studius, who built its church — a three-aisled basilica, one of the few surviving pieces of fifth-century church architecture in Constantinople — beside the Sea of Marmara in the southwest of the city, near the Golden Gate (Janin, Les églises et les monastères de Constantinople, 1969; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Stoudios”). Around this katholikon lay the conventual buildings the common life required — the refectory, the cells, the workshops, the library and scriptorium, the infirmary, the cisterns and gardens — the physical plant of the “small city” the reformed community had become (see the organization of offices above). The basilica of Studius, much rebuilt over the centuries and finally ruined, still stands in Istanbul as the Imrahor mosque, the visible relic of the house from which the Studite rule went out to shape the worship of half the Orthodox world.

The Reform Under Fire

The reform was not built in peace. Theodore’s years at the Stoudios were broken by the second Moechian exile (809–811) and then, decisively, by the second iconoclasm, which from 815 scattered the community, drove Theodore into exile, and left the monastery in iconoclast hands for years (see The Renewed Persecution of 815 and The Exiles and Floggings). That the Studite ideal survived these disruptions — that it could be scattered and re-gathered, persecuted and restored, and finally bequeathed intact to the whole Orthodox world — is a measure of how thoroughly Theodore had built it into the lives of his monks and into the written rule. The man and the monastery were both, in the end, indestructible.

References

Hatlie, Peter. The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350–850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. (On the Studite community, its scale and offices, and the cenobitic reform against laxer practice.)
Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On the reformed life and its discipline.)
Pratsch, Thomas. Theodoros Studites (759–826) — zwischen Dogma und Pragma. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. (On the date and circumstances of the move to Stoudios.)
Speck, Paul, ed. Theodoros Studites: Jamben auf verschiedene Gegenstände. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. (The iambic epigrams on the monastic offices.)
Janin, Raymond. La géographie ecclésiastique de l’empire byzantin: Les églises et les monastères de Constantinople. Paris, 1969. (On the foundation of the Stoudios in 462/463 and its history.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.v. “Stoudios.”)