Coenobitic and Eremitic Monasticism

The two forms of monastic life the Thirteen Fathers are remembered as founding in Iberia — the coenobitic (communal, organized in a lavra) and the eremitic (solitary, the life of the desert) — and how, between them, the Fathers seeded the full ascetic repertoire of Eastern monasticism in a single founding generation. This file draws out the distinction, its Syrian derivation, and its significance for the depth of the monasticism the Fathers planted.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Two Forms, One Founding

The genius of the Fathers’ founding, as the tradition presents it and as scholarship reconstructs it, is that it planted not one kind of monasticism but the whole range. Eastern Christian asceticism had, since its fourth-century Egyptian and Syrian beginnings, developed along two great lines: the coenobitic (from Greek koinos bios, “common life”) — monks living together under a superior and a rule, sharing property, labor, and the daily cycle of services, the form associated with St. Pachomius and St. Basil; and the eremitic (from eremos, “desert”) — the solitary life of the hermit or anchorite, and its semi-communal form the lavra, where solitaries live in scattered cells loosely gathered around a church and an elder (on the two forms in the wider tradition, see Orthodoxy: Monasticism). The Thirteen Fathers are remembered as founding both in Georgia at once.

The two type-specimens among their foundations make the point. St. Shio’s Shiomgvime is the classic coenobitic development: a hermit’s cave that grew, under royal endowment, into a great organized lavra with a rule, a superior, and a settled brotherhood (see The Lavra and the Rule). St. David’s Gareji is the classic eremitic and desert development: a hermit’s withdrawal into a barren wilderness that seeded a whole landscape of cave-monasteries and hermitages (see The Gareji Monastic Desert). And several Fathers embodied both in one life — St. Shio himself founding a coenobium and then withdrawing from it into the pure solitude of a pit, the two forms held together in a single ascetic career (see The Cave-Dweller of Mgvime).

The Syrian Derivation

That both forms are Syrian in derivation is central to the scholarly case for a genuine transmission behind the legend. The ascetic repertoire the Fathers are remembered as bringing — the lavra, the desert hermitage, the recluse in his pit, and above all the stylite (St. Anton of Martqopi on his pillar) — is the recognizable repertoire of Syrian and Mesopotamian monasticism, the world of Simeon the Stylite and the desert fathers of the Syrian Orient, not a set of forms native to Georgia (Loosley Leeming, Architecture and Asceticism, Brill, 2018, ch. 1, on the Syrian ascetic forms; Matitashvili, “The Monasteries Founded by the Thirteen Syrian Fathers in Iberia,” Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]: 4–39, describing the Fathers as bearers of “a Syrian tradition combining heroic ascetic endeavor and apostolic mission”). The presence of this specific repertoire — especially the stylite, a form that would not naturally be invented by a later Georgian imagination — is one of the strongest arguments that a real current of Syrian-influenced monasticism flowed into sixth-century Iberia, whatever the historicity of the individual narratives (see History and Hagiography).

The Fathers thus function, in the history of monasticism, as the channel through which the mature ascetic tradition of the Christian Orient was transplanted, whole, into Georgia. What had taken generations to develop in Egypt and Syria arrived in Iberia as a formed inheritance, and the Fathers planted it in a single generation across the land.

Why the Range Matters

That the Fathers seeded both forms, rather than one, is what made Georgian monasticism a complete and self-sustaining tradition from its beginning. A monasticism of only hermits produces holiness but not institutions; a monasticism of only coenobia produces institutions but can lose the eremitic fire at its root. By planting the lavra and the desert together — and the whole spectrum between, from the great endowed house to the solitary’s cave — the Fathers gave the Georgian Church the full internal dynamic of Eastern monasticism: the coenobium forming monks in obedience and the common life, the desert drawing the most ardent into solitary struggle, and the constant movement between them, as souls went out from the community into the wilderness and hermits’ cells grew into communities (on this dynamic in the tradition, see Orthodoxy: Monasticism).

This completeness is why the Fathers could be founders in the strong sense — not the authors of a few isolated monasteries but the planters of a self-reproducing monastic culture. The lavras trained monks who founded new houses; the deserts drew new hermits whose cells became new lavras; the whole system propagated itself across the centuries, so that from the sixth-century founding grew the monastic Georgia of the golden age, with its great houses and academies (see Legacy). The range of forms the Fathers planted is the reason their founding did not merely add monasteries to Georgia but made Georgia a monastic land.

Held to the Sources

As with everything in the cycle, the specific attributions — this Father founded this house in this decade — are hagiography attested centuries later (see The Lives and Their Dating). But the structural claim of this file rests on firmer ground than any single Life: the physical monasteries survive, in both their coenobitic and their eremitic forms; the ascetic repertoire is demonstrably Syrian and demonstrably present in sixth-century Georgia; and the self-propagating monastic culture is a documented fact of later Georgian history. The Fathers’ founding of both forms of monasticism is thus among the most secure things the tradition transmits — not because the miracles can be verified, but because the monasticism itself, in its two forms and its Syrian pedigree, is visible on the ground and in the subsequent history of the Church (Loosley Leeming, Architecture and Asceticism, 2018; Matitashvili, Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]).

See Also

References

  • Loosley Leeming, Emma. Architecture and Asceticism: Cultural Interaction between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity. Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 13. Leiden: Brill, 2018. (Ch. 1 on the Syrian ascetic forms — lavra, desert, recluse, stylite — and their transmission to Georgia.)
  • Matitashvili, Shota. “The Monasteries Founded by the Thirteen Syrian Fathers in Iberia: The Rise of Monasticism in Sixth-Century Georgia.” Studies in Late Antiquity 2, no. 1 (2018): 4–39. (The Fathers as bearers of a Syrian ascetic-and-missionary tradition; the rise of both forms of monasticism.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The great Georgian monasteries and the self-propagating monastic culture.)