"The worship of the modern Eastern Orthodox Church is fundamentally monastic, and the near hegemony of “philokalic” theological reflection in modern Orthodox thought—that is, an approach to theology inspired by the collection of fundamentally monastic ascetic and mystical texts published in 1782 as the Philokalia—only reinforces a sense of the centrality of monastic experience in modern Orthodoxy." - Andrew Louth in The Reception of Dionysius in the Byzantine World; Maximus to Palamas
What are your thoughts on this quote? Is Louth correct in his generalization? Is t here something essentially monastic in Orthodoxy that is lacking in other Christian traditions?
I'd have to agree. In his book on the theology of St. Maximus he outlines this quite well. The terminology we use is often quite directly taken from very early (e.g. Desert Fathers) sources and those sources are monastic. Additionally, many of the books we look to for theological reflection were often written by monastics for monastics (not exclusively) like Maximus' Centuries, John Climacus Ladder, the Philokalia.
ReplyDeleteThe famous quote from St. John Chrysostom that says the two wings of the church are required for the Church to be healthy (the parish and the monastery) points to this difference. The Orthodox Church can look to its monastic for askesis in a way other traditions do not. Certainly the Catholic Church has monks, but recent encyclicals don't emphasize monastic sources, the people don't go to the monasteries for starets/geron-layperson relationships, and the advent of universal celibacy providing people for the episcopate instead of the monastic sources that Orthodoxy draws from, all culminate in an unintentional amnesia about the very monastic shared origins of our Churches.