Monastic Catechesis in the Parish

By The Rev. Dr. Greg Peters

Servants of Christ Research Professor of Monastic Studies, Nashotah House

Once when Abba Macarius was praying in his cell, a voice came to him, saying: ‘Macarius, you have not yet attained the stature of those two women of this city.’ The elder got up early, took his palm-wood staff and began to make the journey to the city. When he got there and identified the place, he knocked at the door. One of the women came out and invited him into the house. He sat there for a little while then the other woman came. When he invited them to approach, they did so, seating themselves beside him. The elder said to them: ‘It is on your account that I have put up with the journey and so much toil in getting here from the desert. Now, tell me about your work; what kind is it?’ ‘Believe us, Father,’ they told him, we have not been absent from our husbands’ beds to this very day; what sort of work do you expect of us?’ The elder apologized to them and begged them, saying: ‘Show me the way you live,’ at which they told him: ‘We are unrelated to each other in the worldly sense, but it happened that we were married to two natural brothers and, look, today we have been living in this house for fifteen years. We are not aware of ever having quarreled or spoken a shameful word. It crossed our mind to leave our husbands and to join the ranks of the virgins but, despite frequent pleading on our part, our husbands did not agree to release us. So, frustrated in that project, we took an oath to each other and before God that we would let no secular talk pass our lips until we died.’ When Abba Macarius heard this, he said: ‘Truly, there is no virgin or married woman or monk or worldling [κοσμικός], but God looks for a deliberate choice and he gives the Holy Spirit to everybody.’ (1)

Abba Macarius is so taken aback by the holiness of the unnamed women in this narrative that, despite their living in the world, he determines there is no distinction between the virgin, married woman, monk, or person of the world (i.e., worldling). Within our twenty-first-century context such an assessment does not strike us as particularly revelatory or shocking, but in Macarius’ late third-century monastic context this would have caused quite a bit of scandal. But is it true? Or is this just the exclamation of an overly-excited monk? Is there a way to think of monks apart from their historical institutional forms? It seems so.

 In the words of Christoph Joest, the fourth-century monks “are not simply ‘alone’ in the sense of being unmarried, but they are people who have turned their hearts completely to God. They have oriented themselves unwaveringly toward one single cause.”(2) Further, Hannah Hunt says that “For the Greeks monachos described the way of life of a man devoting his life to a singleness of purpose: devotion to and contemplation of God . . . The monachos might lead a solitary life, but in any event would maintain a single focus, undeflected by material considerations.” (3) Though the word “monk” is often seen as synonymous with “one who is single/celibate,” that is not the oldest understanding of the word. What these early believers had in common was not celibacy but the sharing of material resources and a common exercise of spiritual practices. Thus, to be a monk is to be one, not divided. Though many believers live in a multitudinous manner, a monk will set himself apart by living simply and singularly. A monk is single-minded, possessing a unity of mind and heart.

Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) writes of the word monk or μόνος:

Μόνος means “one,” but not any kind of one. One person may be present in a crowd; he is “one,” but one with many others. He can be called “one” but not μόνος, because μόνος means “one alone.” But where people live together in such unity that they form a single individual, where it is true of them, as scripture says, that they have but one mind and one heart (Acts 4:32)—many bodies but not many minds, many bodies but not many hearts—then they are rightly called μόνος, “one alone.” (4)

In essence Augustine is simply saying that a monk is not a man who is alone in the sense of being completely separated from others. Nor is a monk a man who is alone in spite of being in the midst of others (i.e., a lone shopper in a busy market). Rather, a monk is a man who is alone in the midst of a community that is already characterized by its one-ness in mind and heart. Two important things to notice here: 1) Augustine does not understand “monk” to mean alone, as in solitary, but a monk is a man who turns his heart (and mind) completely to God; and 2) one can only be a monk in the midst of a community and not just any community but one that is united (in unum = as one) in mind and heart. As Terrence Kardong comments, “Augustine has become convinced that the real meaning of [“monk”] is unity with another person.” (5) Yet this unity with another person is not just with other monks (or even other Christians) but ultimately with God.

So, if a monk is one who is single-mindedly focused on God while living alone in the midst of a community, then it seems reasonable to think of every Christian as a monk, inasmuch as we are single-minded in our devotion to and pursuit of God. In our single-mindedness we will cultivate virtues like humility, for example (an essential for Benedict of Nursia), but those elements of a robust monastic spiritual theology are secondary to the essence and telos of monasticism: single-mindedness. Further, and importantly, as we saw from Augustine, this single-mindedness—this oneness—is worked out in community. For monks who enter traditional monasteries they work it out alongside their monastic confreres, whereas for those of us who do not join historic monasteries, we work it out in the community of the church, by way of our local parish. In one sense, then, all catechesis is monastic catechesis, inasmuch as we are all monks—of a certain sort at least—moving toward single-mindedness. 

Do not mistake the means for the end, however. We must make the goal of our parish catechesis monastic by ensuring that its end, its telos, is single-mindedness, and not something as mundane as confirmation preparation, for example. The monk John Cassian (d. 435) is helpful here. Cassian made a distinction between skopos and telos. Skopos is a this-worldly end whereas telos is the final end. Thus, our telos as Christians (i.e., monks) is single-mindedness, but our skopoi are those disciplines or practices that help us achieve our telos of single-mindedness. That is, I need to live in such a way that my marriage, for example, provides this-worldly ends that help me achieve the final end of single-mindedness. I need to cultivate virtues like humility for the final end of single-mindedness. I need to be catechized not only to know the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and some basic theology, for example, but to be catechized so as to be trained to live monastically, seeking and fervently pursuing single-mindedness. Not only must we not limit catechesis to knowledge acquisition, we must also not limit it to character formation (as important as that is). Rather, a properly understood and executed monastic catechesis is concerned with the ultimate thing, and not with any of the lesser goods that it may accomplish along the way. This is what separates good catechesis from traditional understandings of, say, Sunday School. Again, things like knowing the Bible and understanding the sacramental nature of the Holy Eucharist are good; in fact, they are really good. But they are not the Greatest Good, who is God. So these things are learned for the sake of God. We are catechized for God’s sake. In short, catechesis is monastic when it is single-mindedly focused on the One who can make us, monastically speaking, truly one.

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(1)  John Wortley, trans., The Anonymous Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 327.

(2)  Christoph Joest, “Once Again: On the Origin of Christian Monasticism,” American Benedictine Review 61.2 (2010), 164.

(3)  Hannah Hunt, “The Monk as Mourner: Gendered Eastern Christian Self-Identity in the Seventh Century,” Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies 2 (2013), 28.

(4)  Augustine of Hippo, Enarrationes 132.6; Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 121-150 (III/20), trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004), 181. Italics in the original.

(5)  Terrence G. Kardong, Pillars of Community: Four Rules of Pre-Benedictine Monastic Life (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010), 176.