The Position of the Ecumenical Patriarch.

Curiously enough the Byzantine Imperial Church was in a better position to exert authority when, after the downfall of the Byzantine Empire, it came under Turkish overlordship. The Turkish conquest strengthened rather than weakened the power of the Ecumenical Patriarch, for the Sublime Porte accepted him as the representative — in secular matters, too — of all Orthodox believers in the Turkish Empire. Consequently he was legally invested with a number of political and civil rights over the Christian citizens of the realm. In practice this meant that the Sublime Porte accorded to the Patriarch of Constantinople rights far exceeding those he had exercised before the conquest. The centuries-old disputes between Byzantium and the separatistic Balkan churches were decided unequivocally in favor of the former; the provincial churches were officially placed directly under the jurisdiction of Constantinople.

The Byzantine patriarchs took advantage of this new legal position to establish a Greek cultural hegemony throughout their ecclesiastical territories. Once again the episcopal seats in the Balkan churches were occupied by Greeks; the Greek liturgy was restored and Greek theologians were charged with the training of the clergy. The various national churches were by no means pleased by this monopolistic state of affairs. The moment they succeeded in shaking off the Turkish yoke in the nineteenth century, they likewise overthrew the artificial hellenization and the jurisdictional hegemony of the Byzantine patriarch. National independence was accompanied by ecclesiastical independence. The nineteenth-century struggles between the Byzantine and the Bulgarian churches represented the climax in the long strife between the unifying tendencies of the Byzantine Greek Church and the nationalistic, racial principle in ecclesiastical matters.

The numerous Orthodox churches in exile owe their particular character to the special conditions under which each specific group went into exile. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries numerous Orthodox believers, members of various national churches, emigrated to America. Even where these emigrants assimilated quickly in language and customs, they clung to their national church affiliation as the cornerstone of their culture. In the United States and Canada, and in South America, particularly in Brazil and Argentina, Orthodox church organizations of Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Syrians and Arabs sprang into being. These formed the center of the respective emigrant groups, and the strong clannish ties of their members deeply affected their mode of life. In Brazil, for example, the Orthodox Syrians came to be the rich business element in the large cities. The manner in which these emigrant churches were linked with their home churches was again highly individual. Some home churches, such as the patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria, attempted to maintain exarchates of their own on American soil. For the most part, however, these Orthodox emigrant churches struck out on their own paths. Sometimes they would unite to form new groupings. With new waves of immigration to the United States, new Orthodox church organizations were often set up, each of which would reflect the principal problems of ecclesiastical and general politics in the home church at the time of emigration.

T here is a common misconception that monasticism developed in the early Church after the persecutions ended. According to this view, it was a movement to counter the secularization that crept in once Christianity had become the official Church of the Roman Empire, with a resultant mass membership. This idea is quite inaccurate. The beginnings of monasticism go back to the very origins of Christendom. Most of the features characteristic of later monasticism were to be found in the oldest Christian communities. Common property, poverty and celibacy are apostolic ideals that are preached in the New Testament. Unmarried ascetics, both men and women, were early recognized by the Church as a special class; even in the epistles of Paul the ideal of celibacy is highly praised. The ascetically inclined Christians formed the core and the elite of the Christian fellowship; they were the cement that held the group together. In theology Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 210) and Origen (c. 185-c. 254), the heads of the Alexandrian catechetical school, forged that curious conjunction of asceticism and mysticism which was to become the intellectual basis for later monasticism.

The word monk — monachos — originally did not mean, as is generally assumed, a hermit or solitary. Its primary meaning is “the unique one.” The oldest Syrian term for monk, ihidaja, is even more unequivocal; it means simultaneously “the unique one” and “the perfect one.” Within the Christian community the monk was originally “the perfect one” who strove to fulfill the evangelical commandment: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). The Syrian word likewise means “the only begotten.” The Messianic title of Christ as the only-begotten Son (John 1: 14) was thus carried over to the perfect Christian, the monk. He was the image of Jesus Christ and, being so, was exalted to the rank of an only begotten son of God.

A scetics early took to living outside the community and outside the urban settlements, in solitary places and walled off areas. After this development had become common, the meaning of the word monk acquired the additional sense of one living apart. The way of life pursued by these monks was obviously influenced by the precedent of older Hellenistic and Jewish religious communities, such as the monkish groups of Pythagoreans and the Essenes, of whom we have only recently learned through the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the excavations of an Essene community in Palestine.

Monasticism became an established institution of the Christian Church during the fourth century, at a time when the ascetic currents throughout the Church were gaining strength. This growing asceticism has been looked upon as a sign of the general pessimism, the world-weariness and decadence of late antiquity. The reality was just the opposite. The spread of asceticism was directly related to the spread of Christianity in the fourth century; it emerged not out of the population of the declining Empire, but out of the vigorous rural peoples of Egypt and Syria. The explanation must be sought in the thing itself: asceticism became more ascetic because there was a growing enthusiasm for it. The ascetics found that they could not shut themselves off from other men as much as they desired as long as they lived in the vicinity of populated places. In the search for greater isolation they moved into tombs, into abandoned and tumbledown homes and villages, into caves, and finally into the “great desert.” Here they were excellently situated to carry out their principal task, the struggle with devils; for the solitude of the desert was regarded as the true dwelling place of demons, the refuge to which the old pagan gods had retreated before triumphantly advancing Christianity. Thus the spread of Christianity in Egypt and the fourth-century rise of monasticism in that country were two aspects of the selfsame process. Because the reversal of imperial religious policy had sent masses of new converts pouring into the churches, the number of those who sought perfection naturally increased; and these resolute warriors of Christ betook themselves to the desert. Sociologically speaking, this ascetic trend was a tremendous countermovement on the part of the Christian rural population against the moral decay of urban society in the late Empire — that decay which is plain to see in the literary and historical documents of the period.

The Church itself supported this movement to the best of its ability. The Life of St. Antony, by Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 295-373), the most important bishop of his day, represents the hermit's fearful struggle against demons in the desert as the model of a life of Christian perfection. This book meant more than the sanctioning of monasticism by the Church; it was official propaganda for the institution. It inspired innumerable Egyptian and Syrian Christians to depart for the solitude of the desert, there to strive for lives of perfection in spite of all demons. The eremitic movement of the fourth and fifth centuries, then, was nothing new; it was a variant of the kind of monasticism that had already existed in the primitive Church, the sole difference being that the “unique ones” lived in waste places remote from the communities of their fellow Christians.

Y et even these solitary battlers against devils did not remain alone. The hermits in the desert gradually gathered into more tightly organized fellowships who accepted the leadership of some spiritually eminent monk and met together for divine services, to exchange thoughts for the good of their souls, to instruct one another in Holy Scripture, and for meditation. A further step was taken when the hermits enclosed their small, usually conical, tent like huts within a wall or a fence. Such enclosure brought with it the necessity for regulating the labor of the individual monks. The original form of the monastery in the East was not a common building with many cells united under one roof, but an assemblage of hermits' huts within a fenced area: architectural expression of the bridge between the ideal of solitude and the ideal of community life.

Pachomius (c. 292-346), a former Roman soldier, created the first monastery in the sense we give to the term today, gathering the monks together. About the year 320 he founded the first real monastery in Tabennisi, north of Thebes in Egypt; thirty to forty monks lived together in their clustered huts, each group under their own head. This same Pachomius established a monastic rule also, although it served more to regulate the physical life of the monastery than to provide spiritual guidance. The rule of Pachomius spread rapidly, even outside Egypt; monastic communities of the type he originated were soon to be found in Ethiopia. Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, during his exile from 340 to 346, brought the rule to the West. Mar Awgin introduced the Pachomian monastic rule into Mesopotamia around the middle of the fourth century. St. Jerome made use of it when he established his monastery in Bethlehem in 404. The rule of Benedict of Nursia, which was so enormously to affect the character of Western monasticism, was likewise influenced by the rule of Pachomius.

The final shaping of monastic community life and the clearest statement of its nature and principles must be credited to Basil the Great (c. 330-79). His treatises on asceticism, originally written for the monks of Cappadocia, provided the theological and pedagogical foundation for cenobitism, [4]the community life of monks. He was the creator of the monastic rule that, although it underwent many changes and modifications, later became the standard one for Orthodox monasticism.

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