The New Monasticism(?) - I
A proposal(?). An apologia for "common life". A catholic-reform life
Preface:
In what follows I will hope to give four installments. (1. a cursory outline of the modern calls for “new monasticism” and it’s possible premises, (2. relate it’s forward and backward looking impulses, demonstrating how there is no real tension between them—nor between the active and religious life, (3. give a theological and ecclesiological apologia for a new monasticism, for a common active/contemplative, lay/religious life, and (4. conclude what sort future this new monasticism could offer in the church and the world: How clergy and congregation formation might be renewed; how christian education might be reinvigorated; how christian political involvement may thus be purified and offered to the world as a gift—the Father’s very Gift of His Son and Spirit.
Today:
The present moment, the epoch in which we live, has many factors at work in it which define and determine its form and shape. Though we rarely have the insight or discernment to know exactly what the determining factors are, I think we can mostly agree “spiritual-ecclesial-political crisis” is a fairly ubiquitous diagnosis. At once there are calls for progress, for forward development from dead human traditions towards vibrant and new possibilities for the Church of Jesus Christ in the world; on the other hand, there is a global revival of interest in Holy Tradition with all of its ancient patristic, sacramental, dogmatic, mystical allure. On the one hand there is a call for a more robustly active political christianity put forward by those who believe “Jesus is Lord” is not a matter of mere private religion but a claim of God upon the whole world which should determine its laws and culture. On the other hand there are those Christians who, in heartfelt fidelity to Jesus, seek to eschew all earthly political involvement and activity for a deeper mystical devotion to the contemplative life—to prayer and intimate repose in Christ’s presence. An example may be given: two of the greatest living—epoch defining—theologians Rev.
and Fr. John Behr writing from both vantages. Green, a pentecostal emerging from the ruins of what has become of pentecostalism in America, who is rightfully leading his churches “back” to the Holy Tradition, writes “Who Reforms the Reformers?”; while Behr, an Orthodox priest thinking through the unchecked traditions of episcopal power at work in Russia’s war on Ukraine, writes “Who Guards the Guardians”. One rightly ministers the old, the “ancient path” (Jer6:16), and the other rightly seeks the new, the “new thing” (Is43:19).Everywhere there are seemingly opposing intuitions—rival instincts compelling us both forward and backward, to more activity and to less. These tensions, between old and new, active and contemplative, institutional and mystical, political and apolitical are cause for a certain sense of uncertainty and confusion in the present moment for the Church. Where do we go from here? What do we do now? Nowhere is this tension more obvious than in the call for a “New Monasticism” whose very terminological structure is characterized by this tension of new and old, active and contemplative life.
A New Monasticsm?
Nearly 100 years ago on January 14th, 1935 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor-theologian and Nazi resistor, wrote a letter to his brother Karl-Friedrich:
“It may be that in many things I seem to you to be somewhat fanatical and crazy. I myself sometimes have anxiety about this… I believe I know that inwardly I shall be really clear and honest only when I have begun to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount. Here is set the only source of power capable of exploding the whole enchantment and specter [Hitler and his rule] so that only a few burnt-out fragments are left remaining from the fireworks. The restoration of the church will surely come from a sort of new monasticism which has in common with the old only the uncompromising attitude of a life lived according to the Sermon on the Mount in the following of Christ. I believe it is now time to call people to this.”1
Not coincidentally, Mother Maria of Paris, an orthodox nun and Nazi resistor, whose life is most well known for her forging of fake I.D.s and passports for Jews during the Nazi occupation of Paris—which saved tens of thousands of Jewish lives—and for her martyrdom in the Nazi death camp at Ravensbruck, wrote a two-part treatise called “Toward a New Monasticism”. The first essay is subtitled “At the Heart of the World” and the second “A Love Without Limits”. In the first she says:
“One often hears mention of “the new monasticism.” Some people endow these words with a positive meaning: it's about time, they say. Others think that “new monasticism” means all but “no monasticism”, and that there is a lie and a temptation hidden here. And yet I do think that even granted this negative attitude, everyone understands that the new monasticism is something that really exists.
First of all I would like to figure out what this notion means. “New”... New things can be invented. Life is the same, nothing has changed, the old needs are still there, yet a man, bored with established traditions, tries to change and break up the old, and invents something new. Even in this there is essentially no temptation, because these notions are bound to fail. There is no demand, and nobody needs the supply. The most inveterate, the most hopeless failures take precisely this path. But there are other ways for the "new" to emerge.
For instance, there existed an ancient tradition, based on a Gospel text, of standing in church at the Palm Sunday vigil holding palm branches. This tradition was observed in Byzantium, and that without any difficulty, since it was easy for them to find palm branches. But imagine a Palm Sunday vigil in Moscow or even in Kiev. Where will they get palm branches? The tradition has to be changed. People start cutting pussywillow branches. Probably warily at first, afraid of leading people into temptation — it's a matter of a clear deviation from the Gospel text. Later nothing was left of the temptation, the new thing became a tradition, and so much so that many would probably be tempted now if they were offered fir or birch branches instead of pussywillows. Now there are probably Russian people in Africa, where palm branches are easily obtained, who think: "How's that? 'Pussywillow Sunday' without pussywillows?" In the same way, probably, Byzantine dried figs and olives during the Great Lent were replaced in the Russian north by pickled cabbage. No Greek Typikon makes any mention of this pickled cabbage, but imagine Russian lenten tradition without it! These are all little everyday things, you may say. Let them be little; they show the essence of the matter more easily, because the same things happen on a serious level as well.
There is thus a "new" that is not invented by the idle human mind, but that follows inevitably from the conditions of life.
Every attempt to preserve the old on such occasions is either impossible (like palm branches in the north), or does not correspond to the spirit of the old tradition: in Constantinople the simplest food was olives, and so they were prescribed during Lent, while in Moscow an insistence on olives would not be the simplest thing — olives are a rarity there, a delicacy. The simple thing would be cabbage. And only after showing by such insignificant examples how the "new" can be born, should we analyze what we understand by the new contemporary monasticism.”2
Mother Maria goes on to admit that, by her estimation, “monastic life has been going through a crisis” for over a century. The classical monastic life and its merits, she argues, “cannot be contested”. However, “the old [monastic] tradition (now corresponding infinitely less to the needs of life) was still being lived out, though no directive for it came from the surrounding life.”3 The “old tradition” of monastic/religious/contemplative life is still being lived, she says, but it is cut off from the conditions which made it necessary and life-giving for the church. “We may say” she continues, “that today not one old [monastic] tradition can seek its basis and justification in the conditions of life that brought it into being. Nothing remains of those conditions. A tradition remains, if it does remain, only as such, as a petrified rite, whose performers gradually forget the reason for it. Even with the sharpest hatred of novelty and the most ardent striving to preserve the old, it is simply physically impossible to remain outside the new conditions.”4
Maria and other Russian monastics found themselves, then, having been expelled in 1922 from Soviet Russia and having landed in Paris with the Russian emigre, as a sort of tribe of monastic nomads wandering about with no traditional form of monastic life available to them. While in Russia a hermit could take a vow of poverty and beg for food, having no possessions, and live off of the customary donations of the faithful it was no longer so in France and modern Europe. “There is an absolute homelessness of contemporary monasticism: in Russia the monasteries have been taken away; here [in Paris, France] they have never existed. The result is an acute orientation towards the world, an immersion in the very depths of the secular element, to the point of earning one’s crust of bread among other secular people, in the same ways they do. The result of this absence of normal monastic life is a certain impression of archaism, of unattachment, almost of untimeliness of contemporary monasticism in the world. We can put it like this: innovation is determined by the fact that the modern monk, whether he likes it or not, finds himself not behind strong monastery walls, within defined, ossified traditions, but on all the roads and crossroads of the world, with no opportunity of orienting himself by old traditions, with no hint of new traditions. And woe to him who dislikes these worlds roads and crossroads: he will neither preserve the old, nor create the new. In other words: today’s monasticism must fight for its very core, for its very soul, disregarding all external forms, creating new forms.”5
Mother Maria, like Bonhoeffer, does not mind “disregarding all external forms” in the formation of the new monasticism; though, she relentless contends for the need of the religious life, the “old” monastic vocation. She asks us to imagine: “Imagine a person who not only strives toward the core, oward the soul of monasticism, but who also does not want to embody his monasticism in the forms of the old tradition. Oh, he knows very well how the brothers used to save their souls, how there used to be sketes, how they lived in seclusion — he knows all that and he does not want any of it. He is tonsured a monk. In most cases he is also ordained a priest. There is no monastery, no skete, no seclusion. Instead, there are the wide roads of life, a parish, maybe even in some backwater, and in the parish all the pains, all the wounds, all the sins of life, with drunkenness, depravity, thoughts of suicide. And, on the other hand, there is the longing for a little material well-being, there is competition, there is peaceful and quiet "everyday" godlessness — all that he saw in the world and that he wanted to leave behind, and did not leave behind, because he had nowhere to go. Nowhere, because as a monk he is not needed, or perhaps monasticism is not needed?
Absolutely wrong. He is both needed and not needed, precisely he, as a monk, because monasticism in general is needed, but it is Needed mainly on the roads of life, in the very thick of it. Today there is only one monastery for a monk—the whole world. This he must inevitably understand very soon, and in this lies the force of his innovation. Here many must become innovators against their will. This is the meaning, the cause, and the justification of the new monasticism.”6
To be clear, the basic premise of these entries is the affirmation of the fundamental “need” for the monastic vocation—the Church cannot exist without it. What we must now discern is the path forward for religious life; which, I think, lies in the reunion of the active and contemplative, the traditional and the innovative, the liturgical and the charismatic, the lay and the religious life in one common life. This life is none other than the Christian life. If this is true then the new monasticism holds the promise of revealing a reformed-catholic ecclesiology which may bring to light the healing and reunion of ecclesial schism. For, what is schism if not ecclesiological passion—“what causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you” (James 4:1)? And what is the religious life if not the uprooting and destruction of the passions of the soul—the channeling of all their energy to Jesus Christ?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to Karl-Friedrich 1/14/1935, from A Testament to Freedom (Harper Collins 1995), pg423-424
Mother Maria Skobstova, Essential Writings (Orbis Books, 2003), “Toward a New Monasticism I: At the Heart of the World” pg91-92
Mother Maria Skobstova, Essential Writings (Orbis Books, 2003), “Toward a New Monasticism I: At the Heart of the World” pg92-93
Mother Maria Skobstova, Essential Writings (Orbis Books, 2003), “Toward a New Monasticism I: At the Heart of the World” pg93
Mother Maria Skobstova, Essential Writings (Orbis Books, 2003), “Toward a New Monasticism I: At the Heart of the World” pg93-94
Mother Maria Skobstova, Essential Writings (Orbis Books, 2003), “Toward a New Monasticism I: At the Heart of the World” pg94