St. Paisios the Athonite

Chapter XIV

The Desert and the Mountain

Monks, nuns, the Desert Fathers — and the skulls

In an ossuary on Mount Athos there is a wooden shelf of skulls, each one washed with water and wine, each one inscribed in ink with a man's name and the date he fell asleep. The bones of his arms and legs are stacked along the wall with everyone else's. Three years earlier he was buried in the earth without a coffin, in the robe he was tonsured in, and when the three years were up his brothers opened the grave, gathered what was left of him, carried it inside and wrote on it. A visitor from Ohio finds this appalling. The monk who did the washing finds it comforting, and he can tell you precisely why. Getting from the first reaction to the second is most of what this chapter is for, because the skulls are not an eccentricity at the edge of Orthodox monasticism. They are its argument, made in bone. But a Protestant reader usually arrives with no category for any of it, not for the monk, not for the nun, not for the vow, and certainly not for the shelf, and often with a settled conviction that the whole enterprise is unbiblical escapism. That conviction has to be answered first.

The objection deserves its strongest form before anything else. Christ sent the apostles into the world and not out of it, and the shape of the New Testament is centrifugal: preach, baptize, plant, write letters. Paul lists the qualifications of a bishop and assumes he has a wife and children (1 Timothy 3:2, Titus 1:6). He warns of a coming teaching that forbids marriage and calls it a doctrine of demons (1 Timothy 4:1-3). Nowhere in Acts is there an institution of men who withdraw from society to fast. Set beside that, a peninsula of celibate men eating one meal a day looks like a later invention, and worse than an invention: a two-tier Christianity in which some believers are professionals and the rest are laity, which is close to the thing the Reformation was against. That is a serious case and it is not answered by changing the subject.

It is answered, if at all, by noticing how much of the Old Testament it has to leave out. Israel had companies of men living in community around a prophet: the sons of the prophets at Bethel, Jericho and Gilgal, who tell Elisha that the place where they dwell with him has grown too small (4 Kingdoms 6:1-2 [2 Kings 6:1-2]) and who eat from a common pot in a famine (4 Kingdoms 4:38-41). Elijah himself lives by the brook Cherith fed by ravens, and goes forty days without food to the cave at Horeb (3 Kingdoms 17 and 19 [1 Kings 17 and 19]). The Law itself provides for voluntary asceticism in the Nazirite vow of Numbers 6:1-8: a man or a woman, for a period of their own choosing, separated to the Lord, no wine or strong drink, no razor on the head, no contact with the dead. Nobody is commanded to take that vow. The Law blesses it when it is taken. And in Jeremiah 35 God holds up the Rechabites, who drank no wine and lived in tents, as a rebuke to Judah for disobedience.

Then John the Baptist, who is the Church's pattern of the monk and not by accident. He is in the deserts from his youth (Luke 1:80); he wears camel's hair and a leather belt and eats locusts and wild honey (Mark 1:6); he is celibate, poor, and outside the settled world, and the Lord says no one born of women is greater. When the Orthodox tonsure service and the monastic hymns want an image for what a monk is, they reach for John. Behind him stands the forty days of Christ Himself in the wilderness, fasting (Matthew 4:1-2), which the rite of profession names explicitly: the pleated mantle given to the new monk is explained as a memorial of those forty days.

Then the two sayings of the Lord that a Protestant has the most trouble placing. In Matthew 19:12 Christ speaks of those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake, and adds, "He who is able to accept it, let him accept it." That is a saying about voluntary renunciation of marriage for the kingdom, and it is explicitly not addressed to everyone. Ten verses later, to the rich young man: "If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me" (Matthew 19:21). Notice the conditional. Christ does not legislate; He puts a counsel to a particular willing man. That distinction between a commandment binding on all and a counsel offered to some is the whole basis of the monastic vocation in Orthodox theology, and it is not read into the text. It is the grammar of the text.

Paul makes the same distinction and is scrupulous about it. On virgins he says he has no commandment from the Lord and gives his own judgment (1 Corinthians 7:25). He wishes all men were as he is, and immediately concedes that each has his own gift from God (7:7). He wants the Corinthians free of care, and observes that the unmarried man cares for the things of the Lord and how he may please the Lord, while the married man cares for the things of the world and how he may please his wife (7:32-34). He ends by saying that the man who gives his daughter in marriage does well and the man who does not does better (7:38). Paul is not commanding celibacy and says so twice. But he is plainly saying that celibacy undertaken for the Lord is a genuinely freer thing for those to whom it is given, and Protestant preaching on 1 Corinthians 7 tends to stop one clause early.

For the common life there is Acts. The Jerusalem church had all things in common, sold its possessions and goods, and divided them among all as anyone had need (Acts 2:44-45); nobody said that anything he had was his own, and the proceeds of sold land were laid at the apostles' feet and distributed according to need (Acts 4:32-35). That is the nearest thing in the New Testament to what a cenobitic monastery actually is: voluntary common ownership under an authority, for the sake of need. Basil the Great will build his whole argument for community out of exactly these verses. The honest caveats are that the Jerusalem community was neither celibate nor withdrawn, and that the arrangement does not appear to have survived the first generation even in Jerusalem. But it is not nothing that the one time Christians pooled their property, Luke describes it with approval.

Two more. In Luke 2:36-37 there is Anna, a prophetess of the tribe of Asher, widowed after seven years of marriage, a widow of about eighty-four, who "did not depart from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day." That is a consecrated widow living an ascetic life inside the temple precinct, and she is one of the two people in Luke who recognize the infant Christ. And Hebrews 11:38, of the faithful before Christ: "of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth." When Athanasius and Jerome come to describe what they have seen in Egypt, that is the verse they reach for, because they think they are watching the same thing happen again.

None of that adds up to a command. It does not have to, and this is where the Orthodox answer has to be stated carefully rather than triumphantly. Monasticism is not commanded of anyone. Celibacy is a gift, not an achievement and not a rank; Paul says it is a gift and the Church has never said otherwise. A monk is not a better class of Christian than a married deacon, and the Church has gone further than merely declining to say he is: it anathematized the people who said it.

The council was at Gangra in Paphlagonia, usually dated around 340, though the range serious historians propose runs from the 330s into the 350s and the question is genuinely unsettled. It was called against the followers of Eustathius of Sebaste, ascetics whose rigor had curdled into contempt for ordinary Christian life. Canon 1 anathematizes anyone who condemns marriage or says that a faithful and devout married woman cannot enter the kingdom. Canon 4 anathematizes anyone who refuses to receive communion from a married priest. Canon 9 anathematizes anyone who is celibate out of abhorrence of marriage rather than for the beauty and holiness of virginity itself. Canon 10 anathematizes a celibate who is arrogant toward the married. Canon 14 anathematizes a wife who leaves her husband because she despises marriage. The epilogue states the council's own position: it admires virginity when virginity is humble, it honours the holy companionship of marriage, and it is condemning not asceticism but the pride that had attached itself to asceticism. These canons were received into the canonical corpus of the whole Church and remain in force in Orthodox canon law.

So the position fixed in canon law within a generation of Anthony has two halves, and both are meant. Virginity freely undertaken for the kingdom is a higher way. The man who holds it while despising marriage is under anathema. A Protestant is usually told that Orthodoxy teaches the first half. He is rarely told that it legislated the second.

Eustathius of Sebaste is a reminder that the Church's argument with extreme asceticism came from inside the ascetic movement, not from a comfortable establishment resisting it. The bishops at Gangra were not opposed to monks. Basil the Great was Eustathius's admirer before he was his opponent, and Basil's own monastic rules were written partly to show what disciplined asceticism looks like when it is not contemptuous.

St. Anthony the Great (c. 251-356) was a Coptic-speaking farmer's son from Coma in Middle Egypt, left an orphan around the age of eighteen or twenty with a considerable property and a younger sister to provide for. Athanasius, who knew him, says that he walked into church still turning over the example of the apostles and heard the gospel of the day read aloud: sell what you have and give to the poor. He took it as addressed to himself personally. He sold the land, which Athanasius specifies as some three hundred arourae and good, gave the money away, kept a little back for his sister and then gave that away too, and placed her with a community of virgins (Life of Anthony 2-3). That last detail is easy to skim and worth stopping on: organized female asceticism already existed in Egypt before Anthony went anywhere.

He went in stages, each one further out. First to the edge of the village under the direction of an old ascetic; then to the tombs outside it, shut in by a friend who brought bread; then, around 285, across the Nile to an abandoned fort at Pispir, where he stayed roughly twenty years, taking bread over the wall twice a year and speaking to no one. What made the book famous is what Athanasius says happened when the crowd that had gathered outside finally broke the door down (Life of Anthony 14). They expected a wasted man, or a deranged one. Athanasius says his body was in the same condition as before, neither fattened by inactivity nor emaciated by fasting, and his soul was free of extremes, neither contracted by grief nor dissipated by pleasure; he came out, in Athanasius's phrase, as though from a shrine. Then he preached, and the sermon fills a third of the book.

The Life of Anthony was written around 357-362, within a few years of its subject's death, by the bishop who had sheltered with the Egyptian monks during his own exiles. It was translated into Latin twice, and the version by Evagrius of Antioch went everywhere. In Confessions VIII.6, Augustine has Ponticianus tell him about Anthony, and then about two officials of the imperial court at Trier who picked up the Life, read it, and walked out of their careers that afternoon. Augustine says the story turned him inside out and set him against himself. A few pages later, in VIII.12, he hears the child's voice in the garden, opens the book at Romans 13:13-14, and is converted; and the scene is deliberately shaped to rhyme with Anthony hearing the gospel read in church. One short biography of one illiterate Egyptian is a proximate cause of the conversion of the most influential theologian in the West.

Anthony was not the first and the Life does not claim he was; it has him apprenticed to an older ascetic near his own village. Around 376 Jerome wrote a Life of Paul of Thebes (d. c. 341) arguing that Paul had gone into the desert before Anthony, and the raven with the bread and the two lions that dug the grave come from that work. Historians generally treat the Vita Pauli as substantially a literary composition with a polemical purpose, and whether Paul of Thebes existed at all cannot be established. Say so plainly; the Orthodox veneration of him does not require pretending otherwise. What is documented is that within Anthony's own lifetime the number of monks in Egypt had become large enough to astonish every visitor who wrote about it.

The man who made monasticism an institution was St. Pachomius (c. 292-348), a conscript soldier who had been fed in prison at Thebes by Christians and was baptized after his release. Around 320, at Tabennisi on the Nile, he did something no hermit had done: he put a wall around a community, set a common table, common work and common prayer, and wrote the rule down. His Praecepta survive in Coptic fragments, in Greek, and in Jerome's Latin translation of 404. By his death the koinonia, the federation, had nine monasteries of men and two of women under a single superior, with fields, trades, boats on the river and an accounting system; his sister presided over the first women's house across the water. The eremitic life is a vocation. Pachomius turned the common life into an organization with an economy, and everything institutional in later monasticism descends from that.

The three forms he left behind are still the three forms.

Hermit (eremitic): One man or woman alone in a cell or cave, keeping the offices privately. Anthony's form, and the rarest today. Orthodox tradition treats it as a graduate degree, not an entry point: a monk is normally expected to have spent years in community first.
Cenobite (koinobion, the common life): A walled community under an abbot or abbess. Common table, common services, assigned work, nothing owned privately. Pachomius's invention, and the normal shape of an Orthodox monastery now.
Skete or lavra: The middle way. Separate cells or cottages scattered around a central church, the inhabitants alone for most of the week and together for the Saturday-night vigil and the Sunday Liturgy. This was the Egyptian pattern at Nitria, Kellia and Scetis, and the Palestinian pattern of the lauras of Chariton, Euthymius and Sabbas. Note that the words have drifted: on Athos a skete is a dependency of a ruling monastery, and in Russian usage a lavra now means a great senior monastery such as Kyiv Caves or Trinity-Sergius, which is nearly the reverse of the original sense.

The desert's own literature is the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Fathers: a few thousand very short units, most of them a question and a sentence. They circulated orally in Coptic and were written down in Greek and arranged alphabetically by the name of the abba, probably by the end of the fifth century, which is a century or more after most of the speakers died. So the collection is memory rather than transcript, and the wording of a given saying can differ between the alphabetical, systematic and anonymous collections. What it is not is pious invention. The texture is too strange, too funny and too unflattering to its own heroes for that.

Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.Abba Moses, Sayings of the Desert Fathers, alphabetical collection, Moses 6

Moses the Ethiopian, who said that, had been a slave and then a bandit before he came to Scetis, where he was made a priest; the Sayings also record that he was killed by raiders because he refused to flee, and that he said elsewhere that the man who lives in solitude is like a bunch of grapes ripened by the sun while the man who stays among men is like an unripe grape (Moses 7). Abba Arsenius (c. 354-449) had been a highly placed man at the court of Theodosius. The Sayings have him pray to be shown the way of salvation and be told to flee from men; and, once he was a monk and prayed again, to be told to flee, be silent and be still, because these three are the roots of sinlessness (Arsenius 1 and 2). St. Macarius the Great of Scetis (c. 300-390) told a brother not to use many words in prayer, but to stretch out his hands often and say, Lord, as You will and as You know, have mercy; and if the fighting grows heavy, Lord, help (Macarius 19). That is the Jesus Prayer in embryo, three centuries before anybody wrote a manual about it.

A caution about quoting the desert. The Sayings are short, memorable and endlessly mis-attributed on the internet, usually by moving a good line from an obscure abba to a famous one. Where this chapter quotes, it gives the name and the number in the alphabetical collection so the reader can check it in Benedicta Ward's translation. Where a saying is only paraphrased here, it is because the exact wording differs between the collections.

Start with the honest thing. The record is badly lopsided, and the lopsidedness is partly the sources and partly the desert itself. The alphabetical Apophthegmata names three women, Theodora, Sarah and Syncletica, against well over a hundred men, and the collections together preserve only about forty-seven sayings attributed to women. Women's ascetic communities existed from the beginning, as Anthony's own arrangements for his sister show, but they tended to be urban and household-based rather than desert-based, for reasons that are not mysterious: a woman alone in the Egyptian desert faced a different order of danger than a man did. What follows is not a footnote to a male story. It is a second line of transmission that happens to have been recorded worse.

Amma Syncletica of Alexandria, fourth century, came from a wealthy family, gave away her inheritance after her parents died, and lived in ascetic seclusion in a tomb outside the city with her blind sister. Some twenty-odd sayings survive under her name. The long Life of Syncletica that circulated under Athanasius's name is not by Athanasius; it is a fifth-century work by an unknown author and it is a treatise on the ascetic life as much as a biography. Her first saying in the alphabetical collection is the desert's most exact description of what beginning feels like.

In the beginning there are a great many battles and a good deal of suffering for those who are advancing towards God and afterwards, ineffable joy. It is like those who wish to light a fire; at first they are choked by the smoke and cry, and by this means obtain what they seek: so we also must kindle the divine fire in ourselves through tears and hard work.Amma Syncletica, Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Syncletica 1

Amma Theodora gave the short answer to the charge that the desert was trading effort for salvation: neither asceticism, nor vigils, nor any kind of suffering are able to save, and only true humility can do that (Theodora 2). Amma Sarah is the most vivid of the three. The Sayings report that she lived sixty years beside a river and never once lifted her eyes to look at it, and that she fought the demon of fornication for thirteen years and never prayed for the fighting to stop, only that God would give her strength. Two distinguished anchorites came to her district near Pelusia having agreed between themselves to humiliate her, and opened by warning her not to get conceited about male ascetics visiting a mere woman. She answered: according to nature I am a woman, but not according to my thoughts (Sarah 4). Read in its own fourth-century idiom rather than a modern one, that is still a remarkable piece of nerve, and the compilers kept it.

St. Macrina the Younger (c. 327-379) matters for a different reason. She was the eldest of ten children of a Cappadocian landowning family; her brothers were Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and Peter of Sebaste. Betrothed young, she refused to be given to anyone else when her fiance died, on the ground that he was not dead but living in God, and stayed with her mother Emmelia. Together the two women turned the family estate at Annisa in Pontus into an ascetic community, and the detail that matters most is that they dissolved the distinction between themselves and their household servants, who became sisters on the same terms. Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina, written shortly after her death, credits her with turning Basil away from the vanity of a rhetorician's career toward the ascetic life. His dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection is set at her deathbed, with Macrina as the teacher and Gregory as the pupil; he calls her simply the Teacher. Parts of the Life are plainly hagiographic, including a healed tumour and a ring containing a relic of the Cross, and Gregory is her brother and an interested witness. The shape of the thing is nonetheless historical. One of the founding intellects of Eastern monasticism was a woman running a household community in Pontus, and she formed the man the Church calls Basil the Great.

Two Roman fortunes went the same way. Melania the Elder (c. 350-410) travelled to Egypt to see the monks and then founded a monastery on the Mount of Olives around 378 with Rufinus of Aquileia. Her granddaughter Melania the Younger (c. 383-439), with her husband Pinianus, liquidated one of the largest private estates in the empire, property scattered across Italy, Sicily, Africa, Spain and Britain, and founded houses at Thagaste near Augustine and later again on the Mount of Olives; her Life survives in Greek and Latin, and the scale of the divestment is among the better-documented facts of late Roman social history. St. Olympias (c. 361-408) was a young widow of enormous wealth in Constantinople, ordained deaconess of the Great Church, who refused a remarriage the emperor wanted and had her property sequestered for the refusal. She maintained a community of around two hundred and fifty women on land adjoining Hagia Sophia and financed much of the city's charity. She was St. John Chrysostom's closest ally; seventeen of his letters to her survive from his exile, and they are not devotional trifles but the correspondence of a man who trusted her judgment and leaned on it. After his fall she was fined, harassed and exiled.

St. Mary of Egypt belongs here, with a warning attached. The record for her is a single Life, written by St. Sophronius of Jerusalem (d. 638), perhaps a century or more after the events it narrates. It presents a woman who spent seventeen years in Alexandria driven not by money but by lust, who went to Jerusalem with a boatload of pilgrims for the same purpose, who found herself physically unable to pass through the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, who repented before an icon of the Theotokos in the courtyard, crossed the Jordan, and lived forty-seven years alone in the desert until the monk Zosimas found her. Whether the details are history is not knowable. What the Church does with her is perfectly clear and deliberate: the fifth Sunday of Great Lent is hers, and her Life is read aloud in church during the fifth week, at the service where the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete is sung in full. At the point in Lent where people are tired and starting to despair of themselves, the Church reads them the life of a prostitute who became the equal of the desert fathers.

In Russia women's monasticism became the larger half of the whole. In 1914 the Russian Church counted 550 monasteries and 475 convents, but the convents held the majority of roughly ninety-five thousand monks, nuns and novices, because women's houses were bigger. Diveyevo, under St. Seraphim's direction, is the most famous. The most striking modern foundation is St. Elizabeth Feodorovna's (1864-1918). A granddaughter of Queen Victoria and sister of the last Tsarina, she saw her husband Grand Duke Sergei killed by a bomb in 1905 and visited his assassin in prison. In 1908 she founded the Martha and Mary Convent of Mercy in Moscow, named for both sisters on purpose: the sisters kept the offices and also ran a hospital, a free pharmacy for the poor, an orphanage for girls and a kitchen serving three hundred meals a day, and went out in pairs into the Khitrovka slum. There were ninety-seven sisters at its height, drawn from every social class. Elizabeth pressed for them to be recognized as deaconesses, reviving an ancient order; the Holy Synod would not go that far. On 18 July 1918 she was taken to Alapaevsk with the nun Barbara Yakovleva and others and thrown alive down a mineshaft. The community was dispersed in 1926, its churches looted by 1928, and the sisterhood re-established in 1994. Her statue stands among the twentieth-century martyrs on the west front of Westminster Abbey, which is an unusual place to find an Orthodox nun.

It is worth saying what that convent was, because it answers the escapism charge better than an argument does. Elizabeth's sisters prayed the monastic offices and then went into the worst slum in Moscow to collect syphilitic children. The Orthodox tradition does not regard those as two activities in tension; Basil had said five hundred years before the schism that they are one activity, and Elizabeth's convent is what his Longer Rules look like when a grand duchess reads them.

Women's monasteries in America are recent and growing. The Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration at Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, dates from the 1960s. The larger wave came in the 1990s, when the Athonite elder Ephraim of Philotheou founded some twenty monasteries across North America, a good many of them women's houses, and they now range from Arizona to New York. They are worth visiting before forming an opinion about monasticism, and most of them will feed a visitor who calls ahead.

St. Basil the Great (c. 330-379) toured the monks of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia as a young man and came back convinced that the solitary life, taken as the norm, was a mistake. His Asketikon is not a rule in the Western sense at all; it is a body of answers to questions put to him by monks, surviving as the Small Asketikon, preserved in Rufinus's Latin of 397, and the Great Asketikon, which is what is meant by the Longer Rules, fifty-five questions, and the Shorter Rules, three hundred and thirteen. The central argument is in Longer Rules 7. The commandments are commandments of love; love requires an object; and the man alone in his cell has no one to bear with, no one to be patient with, and no one whose feet he can wash. Basil adds a second argument that is harder to answer: the gifts of the Spirit are distributed among many members, so the solitary is cut off not only from those he might serve but from what God has given his brother for him.

What follows from that is a monasticism with obedience and works of mercy structurally built in. Basil's foundation outside Caesarea, later called the Basileias, comprised a hospital, a hospice for travellers and a house for lepers, staffed by monks and physicians together; Gregory of Nazianzus, in his funeral oration for Basil, describes the complex as practically a new city (Oration 43). The point for a Protestant reader is worth stating flatly, because it cuts against the picture of monks as a withdrawal from usefulness: in the Christian East the hospital and the monastery were founded by the same man, in the same year, out of the same theology, and the theology is Matthew 25.

The Western difference begins with Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-547), whose Rule dates from around 530-540 and ends, in chapter 73, by directing any monk who wants more to the Rule of "our holy father Basil." The Rule of Benedict is short, humane and legally precise, and in the West it became something no Eastern rule ever became: the constitutional basis of religious orders. The West went on to develop Cluny, the Cistercians, the Carthusians, then the friars and eventually the Jesuits, each a distinct order with a distinct charism, a general, provinces and a centralized government. The East has none of that, and the absence is structural rather than accidental. There is one monasticism. Each monastery is its own house, governed by its own typikon under its abbot or abbess, answerable to the local bishop or, if it is stauropegial, directly to a patriarch. A monk's stability is to that house and not to an order; a Greek monk and a Russian monk belong to no organization in common. Protestants who assume that monk means member of an order are importing a Western fact into an Eastern institution.

The other structural fact is that Orthodox bishops are taken from the monastic ranks. A married priest can be a dean, an archpriest and a confessor to hundreds, but the episcopate is drawn from celibate monastics, which means the Church's entire governing order is formed in monasteries. That is worth absorbing before deciding that monasticism is peripheral to Orthodoxy. It is load-bearing in a way it is not even in the Latin West, where most bishops are diocesan clergy, and obviously not in Protestantism.

St. Theodore the Studite (759-826) gave the East its second great reform. As abbot of the Studion in Constantinople from 799 he rebuilt a decayed house into a strict cenobium of several hundred monks, with real common poverty, daily manual labour, a large scriptorium, and an internal discipline spelled out in detail and enforced. He was exiled three times for refusing to compromise on the icons, and his letters from exile are among the best sources for the second iconoclasm. His longest legacy, though, is liturgical. Theodore and his brother Joseph of Thessalonica composed a great deal of the Lenten Triodion, and the Studite typikon became the service order of Constantinople and from there of Kyiv and of Rus'. When the Russians eventually replaced it with the Sabbaite typikon of Jerusalem in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they were swapping one monastery's timetable for another's. That is what a parish service book is: a monastic rule, domesticated. It explains more about the length of an Orthodox Vespers than any amount of theorizing about Byzantine taste.

The oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world sits at the foot of Mount Sinai. It was dedicated first to the Theotokos of the Burning Bush and only later to St. Catherine, and the Emperor Justinian built it as a fortress between roughly 548 and 565 around an existing chapel and a community of hermits going back to the fourth century. It has never been abandoned since, and it is an autonomous archdiocese with, most of the time, a small number of monks. Because Sinai lay outside the reach of Byzantine iconoclasm, it holds the greatest surviving collection of early icons anywhere, including sixth-century encaustic panels that are the oldest Christian portraits still used in worship; its library is second only to the Vatican's for ancient Christian manuscripts. The Codex Sinaiticus was there until the nineteenth century, when Tischendorf removed it in circumstances the monastery still disputes.

Sinai also produced the most-read ascetic book in Orthodoxy. St. John Climacus, abbot of Sinai in the seventh century, wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent in thirty steps, one for each year of the Lord's hidden life, as a manual for monks who had asked for one. Step 4, on obedience, is the longest in the book. Step 7 is on the mourning that produces joy and coins a word for it, charmolype, joy-grief, which has no English equivalent. Step 6 is on the remembrance of death, and in it John says that as bread is the most necessary of all foods, so the thought of death is the most necessary of all works. The Ladder is read aloud in monastery refectories through Great Lent every year, and the fourth Sunday of Lent is dedicated to its author. Hold on to Step 6. What a monastery does with it in practice comes later in this chapter.

On the difference between East and West it is easy to overclaim. Benedict drew on Basil and on Cassian, who had brought the Egyptian tradition to Gaul, so the two traditions share their sources. And the East is not ruleless: every monastery has a typikon, and the Studite and Sabbaite typika functioned as codes. The real difference is organizational rather than spiritual. The West grew orders; the East grew autonomous houses and personal lines of discipleship.

Athos is the easternmost of the three fingers of the Chalkidiki peninsula in northern Greece, about fifty kilometres long, ending in a marble peak of 2,033 metres that drops almost straight into the Aegean. Hermits were living on it before the tenth century. Its institutional history begins with St. Athanasios the Athonite, who arrived in 958 and in 963, with the backing of his friend the Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas, founded the Great Lavra, still the senior of the twenty monasteries. The mountain's first constitution, the Tragos, was written on goatskin and signed in 972 by the Emperor John I Tzimiskes, by Athanasios, and by forty-six abbots; the original is still kept at Karyes, which makes it one of the oldest working constitutions on earth.

There are twenty ruling monasteries and no more may be founded: seventeen Greek, plus Hilandar (Serbian), Zographou (Bulgarian) and St. Panteleimon (Russian). Beneath them are twelve official sketes and several hundred kellia, kalyves and hesychasteria, which are farmhouses, cottages and hermitages held from a ruling monastery by a small group or by one man. Government is by a Holy Community of twenty representatives sitting at Karyes. Athos is Greek territory and its monks are Greek citizens, but it is self-governing under Article 105 of the Greek constitution and under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch, and entry requires a permit, the diamonitirion, issued in limited numbers each day. The mountain held some seven thousand monks early in the twentieth century, fell to a low of 1,145 in 1971, at which point most observers wrote it off, and has recovered to roughly two thousand, with a population markedly younger and better educated than in 1971. The other great change of the last century is that idiorrhythmia, the looser arrangement under which a monk kept his own property and his own table, has been abolished; the last idiorrhythmic ruling monastery became cenobitic in the early 1990s, and all twenty are now fully communal.

Athos keeps the Julian calendar, thirteen days behind the civil one, and most of its monasteries keep Byzantine time, in which the twenty-four hours are counted from sunset, so the clocks are reset every few days as the sunset shifts. A watch on Athos is deliberately wrong by several hours, and Iviron uses a different reckoning again. This is not quaintness for its own sake. The services are tied to the actual sun, and the calendar is a considered refusal of the civil one rather than an oversight.

Now the hardest thing to explain about the place, which should be stated plainly rather than managed. No woman may set foot on the peninsula. The prohibition is called the avaton, it is roughly a thousand years old as law, and it is enforced. Imperial decrees proclaimed it repeatedly, most famously a chrysobull of Constantine IX Monomachos in 1046; an earlier typikon had already excluded beardless youths, eunuchs and female animals. The tradition the monks give for it is that the Theotokos claimed the mountain as her own garden and that she is the one woman there, the story usually told in the form of her ship being driven ashore near the site of Iviron. The reason they give in conversation is more practical: a community of celibate men has organized every hour of its life around the absence of one particular temptation, and the whole point of the mountain is that there should be one place on earth where that is so. Greek law backs the avaton with a criminal penalty of between two and twelve months' imprisonment. The European Parliament passed a resolution in 2003 calling it a violation of gender equality; Greece has not moved, and the exemption was protected in its accession terms. Women have been on the mountain in emergencies, notably as refugees during the Greek Civil War, and a handful have trespassed since. An Orthodox reader can hold two things at once here: that the avaton is an ancient ascetic discipline freely accepted by the men living under it, and that it is genuinely difficult to defend to a woman who simply wants to venerate the relics at Vatopedi. Orthodox writers disagree about it, and pretending the tension is imaginary would be dishonest.

Hesychasm, and the argument that became dogma

The word is hesychia, stillness, and it means something more like the settling of a stirred pot than silence. The practice is the continuous invocation of the name of Jesus, usually in the form Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, said with attention, loosely joined to the breath, with the aim that the mind should descend into the heart and prayer become unceasing in the sense of 1 Thessalonians 5:17. Its roots are the publican's prayer and the blind man's cry in Luke 18, the single-phrase prayer of the Egyptians, and the fifth-century advice of St. Diadochos of Photiki to keep repeating the name of the Lord Jesus. St. Gregory of Sinai (c. 1265-1346) came to Athos around 1310 and taught the method systematically, and his disciples carried it into Bulgaria and the Slavic lands. Two things should be said about it that Orthodox teachers always say and popular accounts often leave out. It is not a technique for generating experiences, and the tradition's constant warning is against plani or prelest, spiritual delusion, which is precisely what happens to people who pursue the experience. That is why the Fathers insist the prayer be practised under obedience to someone.

Then, in the 1330s, a learned Calabrian Greek named Barlaam attacked the Athonite monks as omphalopsychoi, men with their souls in their navels, and accused them of claiming to see God's essence with bodily eyes. St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), an Athonite who became Archbishop of Thessalonica, answered in the Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts, and his answer is now the centre of Orthodox theology on this question. God's essence is utterly unknowable and cannot be participated in. But God's energies, His activities and grace and glory, are not created intermediaries between God and man; they are God Himself, freely given, and man really does participate in them. The light the apostles saw on Tabor at the Transfiguration was therefore neither a created symbol nor the divine essence, but the uncreated light of the divinity, seen by bodily eyes that grace had made capable of seeing it. Salvation on this account is not principally a legal transaction but real participation in the life of God, theosis, with the distinction between Creator and creature fully intact. Councils at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 vindicated Palamas and condemned his opponents, and the decisions of 1351 were entered into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy that is read on the first Sunday of Great Lent. He was canonized in 1368, nine years after his death, and the second Sunday of Great Lent is his.

Notice what that means for the question this chapter opened with. A dispute about what monks experience when they pray became, in the fourteenth century, a doctrinal definition binding on the entire Orthodox Church, and it is one of the definitions that most sharply distinguishes Orthodoxy from both Rome and the Reformation. Monasticism is not a department of Orthodoxy that a reader can skip on the way to the doctrine. Some of the doctrine came out of it.

The transmission of all this to the rest of the Church has a date and a book. In 1782, in Venice, St. Makarios of Corinth and St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain published the Philokalia, the love of the beautiful: an anthology of thirty-six writers from the fourth century to the fifteenth on inner prayer and the passions, much of it never printed before and some of it copied straight off Athonite manuscripts. It was compiled for monks and it escaped immediately. St. Paisius Velichkovsky translated a selection into Church Slavonic and the Dobrotolubiye was printed in Moscow in 1793; in the nineteenth century St. Theophan the Recluse produced a much larger and freer Russian version in five volumes. That chain, Venice to Moscow to a peasant with a knapsack, is the reason the next section exists.

Monasticism came to Rus' with the faith itself. St. Anthony of the Caves (c. 983-1073) was tonsured on Athos, at Esphigmenou by tradition, and came back to settle in a cave above the Dnieper that the priest Hilarion had dug for his own prayers. St. Theodosius of the Caves (d. 1074) became abbot and obtained a copy of the Studite rule, which gave the community a written cenobitic order rather than a collection of hermits. The Kyiv Caves Monastery, traditionally dated to 1051, became the mother house of Russian and Ukrainian monasticism, and the Kyiv Caves Paterikon, compiled in the thirteenth century out of older material, is its Sayings of the Fathers. One detail there matters for the end of this chapter: the bodies of the Caves saints lie in the caves themselves, naturally preserved, visible and venerated whole. That is a quite different practice from the ossuary described below, in the same Church.

St. Sergius of Radonezh (c. 1314-1392), born Bartholomew, went with his brother into the forest north of Moscow in the 1330s and built a cell and a chapel of the Holy Trinity; the house that grew around it is the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra at Sergiev Posad. Epiphanius the Wise wrote his Life around 1418. Sergius refused the metropolitan's throne, reconciled feuding princes, and, according to the Life and the later chronicles, blessed Grand Prince Dmitry before the battle of Kulikovo in 1380; historians argue about whether the meeting happened as described, and the sources for it are later than the event. What is not in doubt is the pattern he set. His disciples went further into the forest and founded dozens of monasteries across the north, the Northern Thebaid, and the Church's presence in the Russian north is largely their work. Rublev's Trinity was painted for Sergius's own monastery.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Russian Church had a serious argument with itself about whether monasteries should own land and peasants, and the argument is instructive because it was never settled. St. Nilus of Sora (c. 1433-1508), who had spent time on Athos and brought back both the skete rule and the hesychast prayer, said no: a monastery should live by its own labour and by alms, own nothing, and above all not hold villages. St. Joseph of Volotsk (1439-1515) said yes: the estates fund churches, schools, famine relief and the Church's independence from princes, and a poor Church is a Church at the mercy of the state. They also disagreed about executing heretics, Joseph for and Nilus against. The possessors won at the council of 1503 and dominated the century that followed, with all the consequences that great monastic wealth has anywhere. Both men are canonized saints and both are on the calendar, which is the Orthodox Church's usual way of handling a question it has not resolved.

Russian monastic life was then gutted from above, first by the Petrine reforms and then decisively by Catherine II's secularization of church lands in 1764, which closed more than half the monasteries in the empire. The revival came from outside Russia. St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722-1794), born near Poltava and educated at Kyiv, went to the Romanian principalities, then spent seventeen years on Athos, then returned to Moldavia and governed Dragomirna, Secu and finally Neamt, where he built a community of more than five hundred monks on hesychast lines and made his Slavonic translation of the Philokalia. Follow that line carefully, because it corrects a common impression: a Ukrainian-born monk, formed on Greek Athos, at the head of a Romanian monastery, produced the book that revived Russian spirituality. Romanian monasticism, Neamt and Sihastria and Putna and Frasinei, is not a provincial appendix to the Russian story. It is one of its sources, and it survived the twentieth century with its own confessors and its own losses.

Optina and what an elder was

A brotherhood, photographed before the century turned on them

Optina Pustyn, near Kozelsk in Kaluga province, received a skete dedicated to St. John the Forerunner in 1821, and Paisius's disciples brought starchestvo with them. Starchestvo, eldership, meant a specific practice rather than a mood: a monk disclosed his thoughts to an elder regularly and completely, and obeyed him. The elder held no office and was not necessarily the abbot; he had only discernment and the trust of the people who came to him, which is also why the practice was resisted at various times by monastery authorities and by the Holy Synod. Fourteen Optina elders are canonized, among them Leonid (1768-1841), Macarius (1788-1860), Ambrose (1812-1891), Anatole, Barsanuphius and Nektary, who died in 1928. Two things made the place unusual. First, the elders received laypeople in enormous numbers: Ambrose, half-paralysed and often lying down, saw peasants and princes from morning to night for thirty years. Second, Macarius's circle turned the monastery into a publishing house, with lay intellectuals including the Kireevskys editing translations of the Fathers into Russian.

Which is why the writers came. Gogol came in 1850 and the visit marks his last years. Dostoevsky came in June 1878, a few weeks after the death of his three-year-old son Alexei, in the company of Vladimir Soloviev, and saw Elder Ambrose; the Elder Zosima of The Brothers Karamazov is drawn from Ambrose and from St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, and the novel's description of peasants queueing at a cell door is reportage rather than invention. Konstantin Leontiev lived at Optina for years and was tonsured shortly before his death. Tolstoy came repeatedly across forty years, argued with the elders, disapproved of the whole institution of eldership, and came one last time at the end of October 1910, having walked out of Yasnaya Polyana at eighty-two. He circled the monastery and did not go in, went on to see his sister, a nun at nearby Shamordino, and died days later at Astapovo railway station. He did not return to the Church, and the story should not be told as though he did.

St. Seraphim of Sarov (born Prokhor Moshnin at Kursk in 1754, died 2 January 1833) entered Sarov in 1778 and was tonsured in 1786. His Life reports a thousand nights of prayer kneeling on a rock in the forest and a thousand days on another stone in his cell; the figure is a pious round number and the account is hagiography assembled from the testimony of people who knew him, though the practice of stone-standing is independently well attested among Russian ascetics. In 1804 three peasants attacked him with his own axe while he was cutting wood. He put the axe down and let them beat him, and was bent double for the rest of his life. He lived in strict silence, then in reclusion, and from about 1825 received anyone who came to the door, greeting every visitor the same way in July as at Pascha: my joy, Christ is risen. He was the spiritual father of the Diveyevo convent, which he regarded as given to him by the Mother of God.

In November 1831, in a clearing near the Sarovka river with, by the record, about eight inches of snow on the ground, Seraphim told a layman named Nicholas Motovilov that the true aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God, and that prayer, fasting, vigil, almsgiving and every good work done for Christ's sake are the means of acquiring Him and not the thing itself. Motovilov wrote that Seraphim's face then became unbearably bright, like the sun at noon, that he could feel warmth and smell fragrance, and that the snow went on falling on them both. Be honest about the source: Motovilov's manuscript was not published until 1903, when the writer Sergei Nilus found it and printed it, seventy years after the conversation, and some scholars treat it cautiously for that reason. But the theology in it is Palamas's theology exactly, restated by a Russian monk to a married layman in a field, and the fact that it surfaced in the same year Seraphim's relics were exposed is a large part of why modern Orthodoxy sounds the way it does.

That sentence is the best short answer in the Russian tradition to the suspicion that Orthodox asceticism is works-righteousness. Fasting is not the point. Fasting is a means, and Seraphim says so, in those words, to a layman, in the snow. The aim is the Holy Spirit, and everything else in this chapter, the cells and the ropes and the shelves of bone, is instrumental to that or it is nothing.

Then the destruction, which should be given in numbers. In 1914 the Russian Church had 550 monasteries and 475 convents with around ninety-five thousand monks, nuns and novices. By the late 1930s there was effectively nothing functioning on Soviet territory. The Solovetsky Monastery in the White Sea, founded in 1436, was turned in 1923 into SLON, the Solovki Special Purpose Camp, which served as the laboratory and prototype of the whole Gulag system; the monastery's churches became punishment blocks, and the church on Sekirnaya Hill a place from which men were thrown down a long flight of stairs. Bishops imprisoned there issued a joint declaration to the Soviet government in 1926. Solzhenitsyn gives Solovki a chapter of The Gulag Archipelago; Dmitry Likhachev, who survived it as a young man, spent the rest of his life on medieval Russian literature. Optina's last abbot, Archimandrite Isaac (Bobrakov), was arrested in December 1937 and shot at Tula, and in 1939 and 1940 the monastery held Polish officers, many of whom were murdered at Katyn. A limited reopening after the war was rolled back under Khrushchev, leaving about twenty houses by the mid-1960s. Then Optina was returned in 1987, the millennium of the baptism of Rus' in 1988 loosened everything, Solovki came back in 1990, and by 2019 the Moscow Patriarchate counted 972 monasteries. The recovery is real and the cost is not to be smoothed over. The ossuaries described in the next section hold the bones of men who died in their beds and were prayed for by name. Russia's twentieth century filled pits with monks whose names nobody wrote down.

In a cenobitic Athonite monastery a monk walks the corridors beating a wooden board, the talanton, at around three in the morning by the clock, though the hour moves with Byzantine time and the season. What follows is a continuous block: the Midnight Office, then Matins with its psalms and canons, then the First Hour, then the Divine Liturgy, finishing near sunrise. That is four to six hours on one's feet, mostly in near-darkness, with the reader audible and the rest sung without instruments. The brotherhood goes straight from the church into the trapeza and eats in silence while a monk reads aloud from a stand; the abbot rings a small bell to stop the reader, and the meal is over, whether or not anyone has finished. Then obediences, the assigned work, for several hours. In the afternoon the Ninth Hour and Vespers, then the second meal on days when there is one, then Small Compline with an akathist or a canon to the Theotokos. Then the cell rule, which is the part nobody sees: prostrations and the prayer rope, alone, for a length the monk's elder has set for him and nobody else. Sleep is short and taken in two pieces. On a feast the whole pattern is replaced by an agrypnia, an all-night vigil, which can run ten or fourteen hours from dusk to dawn.

Practice differs, and the differences are not trivial. In Russian, Ukrainian and Serbian monasteries the hours of the Horologion are distributed differently, with the Midnight Office and Matins often at five or six in the morning, Liturgy after, and Vespers in the evening, and genuinely all-night vigils only a few times a year. In a skete or a kellion the offices are not sung in choir at all: the hermit reads or prays them alone with the rope on a reckoning his elder gives him, and comes to the central church, the kyriakon, for the Saturday-night vigil and the Sunday Liturgy. That weekly rhythm is the oldest one in the book. It is what the monks of Scetis were doing in the fourth century.

The prayer rope is wool: komboskini in Greek, chotki in Russian, metanier in Romanian, and among Old Believers and some Russian houses the older leather lestovka, shaped like a ladder. Thirty-three knots, or fifty, a hundred, three hundred, five hundred. Each knot is one Jesus Prayer, or in the Romanian usage one prostration, which is what the Romanian name means. The knots are tied in a pattern of interlocking crosses, and the story told about the pattern is that an angel taught it to a desert father whose knotted cord the devil kept untying; that is a legend and it is told as one. Wool, because the monk is a sheep of the flock. The rope is put into the monk's hand at his tonsure, and in the rite it is named as a sword.

Obedience is the centre of the whole system and also the place where it goes wrong, so both have to be said. It is not military and it is not really about tasks. A monk discloses his thoughts to his spiritual father, or a nun to her spiritual mother, regularly and without editing, and takes direction about what to do with them, on the premise that the one thing a beginner cannot do reliably is assess his own inner state. Climacus gives obedience the longest step in the Ladder and says it is better to be under a mediocre elder than to direct oneself. This is also the practice with the worst failure modes in Orthodoxy, and the Church has said so in writing: in December 1998 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church issued a formal ruling on abuses by confessors, addressing what Russian writers call mladostarchestvo, young-elderism, the phenomenon of priests and monks without the gift claiming an elder's authority over other people's marriages, medical decisions and vocations. The harm was described in plain language. Anyone drawn to Orthodox monasticism, or shopping for a spiritual father, should read about that before reading another word about Optina.

Four things are promised at profession in the Byzantine rite: obedience, chastity, poverty and stability, which means remaining in this house. Poverty is literal. A monk in a cenobium has his habit, his books and his rope, and strictly speaking not even those. Fasting is heavier than a layman's and differently shaped: monastics eat no meat at all, ever, not as a seasonal abstinence but as a settled diet; oil, wine, fish and dairy come and go with the calendar; on strict days there is xerophagy, dry food without oil, and in the strictest weeks one meal in the day. Work is real work. Athonite monasteries paint and sell icons, press olive oil, keep bees, tend vineyards and gardens, cast beeswax candles, and make incense by kneading olibanum with fragrant oils, rolling it and cutting it into grains. They keep archives and libraries that scholars travel to use, do their own carpentry and stonework, and above all run the guest house. Hospitality is an obedience, not a sideline: an Athonite monastery is obliged to lodge and feed any pilgrim who arrives with a permit, without charge, and the archontaris who does it is doing monastic work. Romanian monasteries are known for their textile and painting workshops, Russian ones historically for large-scale farming, schools and printing.

The ranks of tonsure

Novice: Greek dokimos, Slavic poslushnik, one under obedience. No vows and no tonsure; usually an inner cassock and a soft cap. The stage can run for years, and is meant to.
Rassophore: Rasophoros, robe-bearer. The first tonsure: four locks cut in the form of a cross, then the outer robe (rasson), the kalimavkion and the veil. No formal vows in Greek practice, but a real moral commitment; in Slavic practice a new name is usually given at this point.
Stavrophore, or the Lesser Schema: Stavrophoros, cross-bearer; in Slavic use the malaya skhima, the monk of the mantle. Profession proper, with the vows of obedience, chastity, poverty and stability. He receives the paraman, a square of cloth embroidered with the instruments of the Passion, worn on the back and tied by cords to the pectoral cross; a wooden hand cross; a lighted candle; and in Slavic use the mandyas, the long sleeveless mantle whose pleats are explained as the forty days in the wilderness.
The Great Schema: Megaloschemos; in Slavic use skhimnik or skhimonakh. The paraman is replaced by the analavos, a broad band worn crosswise over the shoulders and covered with crosses, the instruments of the Passion and inscriptions: the Trisagion, the words Jesus Christ conquers, and the line the Church sings at the Cross, that the place of the skull has become paradise. With it goes the koukoulion, the pointed cowl embroidered with crosses, which the rite calls the helmet of salvation after Ephesians 6:17.
Where practice differs: On Athos the great schema is the normal profession; an Athonite monk is generally a megaloschemos within a few years, and the intermediate rank is little emphasized. In Russian practice the lesser schema is the ordinary profession and the great schema is given later, often to the very old or the dying, and a schema-monk is released from administrative duties for prayer. Greek and Slavic forms of the koukoulion differ in cut, and the Slavic one has shoulder lappets.

And the name. At tonsure the hair is cut in the form of a cross and the candidate is given a new name, usually beginning with the same letter as the old one, the name of a saint he has not chosen and is not consulted about. The Fathers call the rite a second baptism, and the logic of the name is the logic of baptism: the name is new because the man is. The practical effect is that for the rest of his life he is addressed all day long by a name that is not of his own making and that belongs to somebody in heaven, which is a small, constant and unignorable reminder that his life is no longer a private project. And when he dies the name will be written on his skull.

An Athonite monk is buried on the day he dies or the day after, without a coffin. He is dressed in his habit; a great-schema monk goes into the ground wearing his analavos with the koukoulion drawn down over his face, an icon laid on his breast, and his own rassa sewn shut around him in place of a coffin. The grave is a plot of thin soil inside or just outside the walls, marked with a wooden cross bearing his name and the date. For the next three years the brotherhood commemorates him by name at the Liturgy and serves memorial services over the grave. Then, at the end of the three years, they open it.

If flesh remains, the grave is closed again, more prayers are said, and it is opened later. If only bones remain, which in the dry climate of the peninsula is normal after three years, the bones are lifted, washed thoroughly with water and wine, and dried. The skull is then inscribed in ink or paint with the monk's name, sometimes his rank, and the date he fell asleep, and set on a shelf in the ossuary with the others, rows of them, names outward. The long bones are stacked separately along the walls, femurs with femurs. The building is a chapel with services in it, and the Greek word ordinarily used for it is the plain word for cemetery, koimitirion, the sleeping-place. English has to reach for charnel house, which is a colder word than the Greeks are using.

A skull, washed, inscribed and set on the shelf

The grave is then used again for the next brother. This is the part a Western visitor tends to miss and it may be the most important part. A monk does not own a grave. He has no plot with his name on it, no perpetual lease, nothing his family can visit in a hundred years, because he has no family and nothing of his own. The same few square metres of mountain soil have taken brother after brother for a thousand years. Athos has very little earth and a great many dead, and it should be said honestly that the practice began in that necessity, as it did in Greek villages and across much of the Balkans, and that the theology grew up inside the necessity rather than the other way round. That does not make the theology less serious. It makes it the kind of theology that grows where people actually have to live.

Athonite tradition also reads the state of the remains as a sign, and here popular accounts get careless. Bones that come up clean and dry, yellowish or the colour of old wax, sometimes with a fragrance, are taken as a good sign; plain white bones as the mark of an honest monk; dark, damp or foul remains, or a body that has not decomposed at all, are taken as a sign that the man needs prayer, and the brotherhood answers by serving more Liturgies and memorials for him and burying him again. Four things have to be said about that. The Church has never dogmatized it. It is not a verdict on anyone's salvation, and Athonite fathers asked about it will usually say so first. An undecomposed body can mean a dozen things, including clay in the soil. And it is a different matter altogether from incorruption as a sign of sanctity, which is rare, judged by the Church rather than by a brotherhood, and never assessed on its own. What the practice reliably produces, whatever one makes of the sign, is prayer for the dead by name, at length, by people who knew them.

A monk in the ossuary, holding a brother's skull

The memory of death

Now the reason a monk finds the shelf comforting rather than appalling. The discipline is called mneme thanatou, the memory of death, and it is among the oldest and most insisted-upon things in Christian asceticism, older than monasticism, because the Old Testament already commands it. Sirach 7:36 tells a man to remember his last end in everything he does, and promises that he will not sin; the numbering varies between editions, and the Vulgate has it at 7:40. Psalm 89 [90] sets seventy years, or eighty for the strong, against the everlastingness of God, and asks God to teach the numbering of days so that a man may gain a heart of wisdom; the Septuagint's wording of that verse differs noticeably from the Hebrew, and the honest thing is to say so, but the sense the Church has always read out of the psalm is the same. Climacus puts it at its bluntest in Step 6 of the Ladder: as bread is the most necessary of all foods, the thought of death is the most necessary of all works. The Fathers call the memory of death the beginning of wisdom. They do not call it the end of joy, and they are careful to distinguish it from despair, which they treat as its counterfeit.

The desert had the practice as a place and not only as a thought. Anthony's first cell was a tomb. Syncletica lived in a tomb outside Alexandria. And the Sayings have Macarius the Great answer a brother who asked how he could be saved by sending him to the cemetery to insult the dead, and then, the next day, to go back and praise them; when the brother reported that the dead had said nothing either time, Macarius told him to go and become like that (Macarius 23). A monk who takes down a skull and says remember death is doing exactly what his fathers did, and it is worth being precise about why it is not morbidity. Morbidity is a fascination with death that leaves a man frightened and paralysed by it. What this discipline aims at is the reverse: a man who has genuinely accepted that he is going to die stops needing to be flattered, stops needing to win the argument, stops accumulating, and discovers that most of what seemed urgent an hour ago was not urgent at all. Whether it works is a separate question. What it is for is not obscure.

This is also why there is a skull at the foot of the Cross in every Orthodox Crucifixion icon. The tradition, which Origen already knew and reported in the third century as something that had come down to him, is that Golgotha, the place of the skull, is where Adam was buried, so that the blood of the second Adam runs down into the grave of the first. It is tradition and not Scripture, and Orthodox writers say so when they explain the icon. But it is why Russian crosses carry the abbreviation for the words the place of the skull became paradise, with the letters for Adam's head beside the skull itself. And the same phrase is embroidered on the analavos of the great schema. So a schema-monk wears across his shoulders, every day for forty years, the sentence that the place of the skull became paradise; and three years after he dies, his own skull is set on a shelf with his name on it. The garment and the ossuary are one argument, made twice.

When a monk picks up a skull he is not handling a memento mori in the Western sense, an object arranged by an artist to unsettle the living. He is handling Father Efthymios, who slept in the next cell and snored, whose name is written on the bone in his own brother's handwriting, and for whom he will pray by name at the Liturgy tomorrow morning. The bones are not hidden away. They are visited. The ossuary is a chapel and the monks go into it on purpose, and the claim being made physically, with the skulls in rows and the femurs stacked, is the closing article of the Creed, the resurrection of the dead. Those bones are going to be needed.

Practice differs, and the differences matter. Exhumation after three years is Greek and broadly Balkan, and it is not only monastic: in many Greek villages a family opens the grave after three years and moves the bones to the village ossuary, for the same mixture of reasons. Romanian and Serbian monasteries keep ossuaries too, with local variation in the interval, and seven years is common in parts of the Balkans. Russian practice is different again: the grave is normally left undisturbed, and a Russian Orthodox pilgrim standing in an Athonite ossuary for the first time is nearly as startled as an American one. The Kyiv Caves are a third case, where the naturally preserved bodies of the saints lie whole in the caves and are venerated there. None of this is dogma. All of it is one theology in different hands.

So what is the whole of it for, and what has any of it to do with a Protestant in a city with a mortgage and two children in school? The first answer is the one Orthodoxy actually gives, and it is narrower than either its admirers or its critics expect. Monasticism is not a higher Christianity. It is the same Christianity with one thing turned all the way up. The commandments are identical for the monk and for the married man, and the canons of Gangra exist to keep anyone from saying otherwise. What the monk has done is arrange his life so that he has no excuses and nowhere to hide, and the Church keeps him in view as a standing demonstration of what the gospel is actually asking of everybody. Nobody is asked to copy the arrangement. Everybody is shown it.

The second answer is that the layman is already living on monastic capital, whether he knows it or not. The service book in his parish is a monastery's timetable, shortened. Great Lent is the monastic fast, moderated and handed to everyone. The Jesus Prayer and the prayer rope came out of the Egyptian desert and are now in the hands of accountants and nurses. The Fathers he reads were copied by hand in monastic scriptoria; the oldest icons survived iconoclasm because Sinai was out of the emperor's reach; the doctrine of grace he confesses at the Transfiguration was settled in a fourteenth-century argument about what Athonite monks saw when they prayed; and the bishop who ordained his priest is a monk. There is no version of Orthodoxy with the monasteries subtracted. Remove them and what is left is not a simpler Orthodoxy but a different religion.

Which suggests the practical shape of the thing, and the tradition is more specific about it than outsiders expect. What a layman is normally given is a rule of prayer from his confessor rather than out of a book: morning and evening prayers of a length he can actually keep, the Jesus Prayer with a rope if he has been given one, the fasts of the calendar as far as his work and his health allow, confession at intervals, and his own dead commemorated by name at the Liturgy. That is monastic practice handed down in a portion, and the portion is the point. The Fathers who wrote most severely about asceticism were also the ones who warned hardest against a married man practising it at his family's expense; a father who fasts his children thin, or who prays through hours he owes his wife, has not become a monk but has only found a spiritual reason to neglect his household. Obedience for a layman means his own priest and his bishop, not an elder he has read about in a book. Poverty means what he actually gives away. Stability means staying where God has put him, which in a city with a mortgage is harder and considerably less photogenic than a cell.

The third answer is the portable part, and it is the reason this chapter ends where it does. A layman cannot go to Athos, and most cannot get to a monastery for more than a weekend a year. But the memory of death requires no permit and costs nothing, and neither does the cell. Amma Syncletica put the whole thing better in one sentence, in the fourth century, than any modern writer has managed since.

It is possible to be a solitary in one's mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.Amma Syncletica, Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Syncletica 19

She meant that to cut both ways, and it does. The desert is not a place, and the monks who went there would be the first to say that a man can carry the whole city into the Thebaid and never notice he has done it. And the city is not a disqualification; a man can keep a cell in it, and the tradition assumes he will try. What the monk has that the layman usually does not is not holiness but clarity about the length of his own life. He has written his brother's name on his brother's skull and set it on a shelf where he will see it on his way into Vespers, and he knows with certainty that someone will do the same for him within three years of his last breath. He is not frightened by this. That is the whole of the strange claim, and the shelf in the ossuary is where the Church keeps it on file.