A strange poem in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Stunden-Buch tells of monks who “buried themselves deep down in the earth,” returning, as it were, into the womb; of a life that was “as a thousand years ’ because it was no longer divided into night and day; of pilgrims who come to gaze with reverent eyes upon the “buried ones” whose bodies have never known decay.¹ Rilke was writing about the monks of a cave-monastery in Kiev which had become a famous place of pilgrimage; he was also—unwittingly, no doubt —creating an image of the fate of monasticism in modern times.
With the spread of the ideas of the French Revolution, the very concept of monasticism became increasingly unintelligible to the West. A purely utilitarian world had little place for otherworldly aspirations. Besides, monastic life must perforce be looked upon as contrary to nature. The objection, of course, was not new; it had been raised by men like Erasmus in the sixteenth century, as it had been raised by men like Jovinian in the fourth. But in the Age of Enlightenment the opposition to monasticism gathered into veritable frenzy, forcing the dissolution of numerous monasteries. And monasticism, like the monks in Rilke’s mysterious verse, responded by retreating into the catacombs, hibernating, so to speak, in the caverns of the earth, the better to preserve its secret from impious eyes.
It had not disappeared for good; monasticism is far too deeply rooted in the human heart ever to disappear completely. Signs of a revival were already apparent in the nineteenth century. And just as St. Paul, speaking of the resurrection of the dead, cried out to the Corinthians: “Behold, I show you a mystery!” (I Cor. xv, 51), so we today must tell the world none the less urgently: see, monasticism descended into the bowels of the earth only that it might rise again! Indeed, the true significance of the descent lay in the patient preparation of an imminent reawakening.
The process is a hidden one unperceived by those whose concern is only with externals; from a religious point of view, however, it is one of the most significant developments of our time, and it requires of us a new encounter with monasticism. Here we may recall Franz Overbeck’s dictum that monasticism is a phenomenon that neither Catholic nor Protestant theology is able to assess adequately. Catholic theology having long since lost the necessary purity of understanding, Protestant theology never having been sufficiently objective.² For all that it is so disputable, the statement sounds a warning that merits attention.
To grasp the reality of monasticism is clearly not as easy as it might appear to be. Wel-nigh impassable mountains of prejudice have to be scaled first. And that means, to start with, that the whole subject has to be lifted right out of the context of sectarianism. For sectarianism—not to be confused with membership of the particular denomination in which Providence has been pleased to place a particular individual—is all too conducive to malice, and tends to blur one’s vision of truth. It should be remembered, moreover, that the great monastic orders were founded in the marvelous climate of an as yet undivided Christendom. If only on ecumenical grounds, therefore, it is necessary to break through all narrow partisan attitudes in a Christian spirit that transcends polemics and keeps one mindful of the duty to serve all denominations. In such a spirit, we shall approach monasticism with a new openmindedness, and we shall look upon this mighty edifice of Christian spirituality with loving veneration, though not, of course, uncritically.
Scholarship can provide some of the means of gaining a better understanding of monasticism. Historical methods have been invaluable in the assembling of source material, and the author recalls with sincere gratitude the numerous monographs he has read on particular aspects of the monastic movement. Academic objectivity, however, often leads to an inner aloofness that blinds the scholar to the essential. Although research is necessary, therefore, it must remain peripheral to the subject and cannot be regarded as constituting the final authority.
More than scholarly treatment is needed if there is really to be a new encounter with monasticism. The academic approach has to be completed and lifted to a higher plane by an altogether different approach, such as was formulated, for instance, in the very heyday of rationalism, by the fascinating visionary who called himself Novalis (1772—1802). That Johannine emissary of the divine, having passed through the “Gothic arches of pure reason,” was able to survey the world of sense from the vantage point of a higher reality; in one of his most bewitching poems he speaks of a future when “those who sing or those who kiss will know more than all the great scholars.”³ The man who, “through tales and poems, penetrates to the heart of things” can arrive at the deeper vision of a Novalis. The supra-scholarly approach is not founded on mere emotion; intuitive perception depends upon the illumination of the Logos, and precisely this makes of the new inquiry into monasticism an act of living religion rather than an exercise in academic hairsplitting.
II
In re-evaluating monasticism, we can adopt various points of view. It is doubtless wisest to begin by considering the subject from the point of view of history; we tend, nowadays, to be very conscious of the importance of historical perspective. And history will at once show us that monasticism is heir to a venerable tradition, and that it is common to many religions.
The phenomenology of religious history shows us that there is a deep connection between man’s religious aspirations and the monastic life. India, with its extraordinary talent for religion and its profusion of monasteries, affords an interesting illustration of the point.
Indian monasticism is most strongly marked by the influence of the Buddha, that tremendous figure whose significance no Western mind has yet succeeded in comprehending to the full. Buddha opens his lapidary admonitions with the stereotyped “This, O monks, is the sacred truth, thereby indicating that he is addressing himself exclusively to men who have embraced the monastic state. And Buddha s true disciple is the radiant monk who passes through the world absolved and filled with inner peace: “His heart overflowing with loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic gladness, and even-mindedness, he abides, raying them forth toward one quarter of space, then toward the second and third, then toward the fourth, above and below, thus all around. Everywhere, into all places the wide world over, his heart overflowing, streams forth, ample, expanded, limitless, free from enmity and all ill-will.”⁴
Buddha sent forth his monks, freed from all worldly ties, for the salvation and joy of many, out of pity for the world and for the good of mankind, to announce a teaching that they were also to manifest by their own holiness, reconciling men wherever they went. Buddha s radiant monk is free of earthly dust; the love of his liberated heart transcends the baser preoccupations of the majority of men as the moonlight outshines the brightness of the stars.
Thus, the Buddhistic form of monasticism alone should give us pause: perhaps our opinion of monasticism was overhasty, and needs revision.
Monasticism is, above all, a valid development of Christianity. The single answer to the largely unfruitful discussions on the origins of Christian monasticism is that the monastic life is implicit in the Church, not the product of pagan influences. The eschatological teachings of Jesus brought about a turning-away from the world, an attitude that was already very marked in St. Paul. Christian monasticism is rooted in the New Testament, and the first hermits appealed to the Bible to justify their way of life. Oswald Spengler, whose philosophy of history was certainly innocent of all denominational bias, remarked that “Christian monasticism did not begin with Pachomius (320); he was merely the builder of the first cloister. The movement began with the original community in Jerusalem itself.”⁵
Historically speaking, Christian monasticism stemmed directly from the earliest Christian ascetics, a response to the danger that a secularized Christendom would stifle all genuine religious life. Monasticism and the teachings of the Fathers are the fairest flowers of the early Church. And it is logically impossible to recognize the fundamental importance of the early Church for all subsequent Christian generations and, at the same time, to reject as an aberration monasticism, which was an integral part of that Church. In the deplorable entanglement of ecclesiastical and political issues which was already apparent in the fourth century, the monks represented “as it were the other side of the Church,” and, “thanks to their asceticism, preserved the balance.”⁶ That, in effect, is the ultimate significance of monasticism: to express most purely what is purest in Christian spirituality. We must focus our attention on this other, oft-neglected side of the Church.
The Eastern Church was molded by monasticism; indeed, it cannot be understood at all in isolation from its monastic life. “If you want to know what Christianity really means, you have to know monasticism,” wrote Kirejewsky.⁷ This is no isolated opinion; it is echoed, for instance, by Konstantin Leontiev.⁸ And the legends of the Russian saints make abundantly clear that the Eastern Church is wholly penetrated by monasticism. The growing interest in Eastern Christianity, therefore, will be something more than a vague enthusiasm for the Russian soul only if it also extends to Eastern monasticism, which conceals a truly marvelous piety under its alien garb.
Religious Russians have always been convinced of the immense importance of monasticism in the life of their people. Gogol, for instance, himself a deeply religious man, testified to the intimate connection between faith and the monastic life in the Eastern Church when he wrote: “There is no higher vocation than the monk's. Please God that we may one day don the cowl for which my soul longs. Merely to think of it fills me with great joy. But by our own strength we can never attain to this; we can attain to it only if God calls us to it.”⁹ Even Tolstoy, for all his opposition to the Church, was to experience the loving-kindness of Russian monasticism. During his last flight, at dead of night, he knocked at a monastery door to ask whether he might spend the night there even though he had been excommunicated. “We receive everyone, was the doorkeeper’s answer. Those simple words epitomize an attitude permanently characteristic of Eastern Christian monasticism.
It was in Western Christendom, however, that monasticism flourished most abundantly. During the barbarian invasions that engulfed the Roman Empire like a second Flood, the monasteries served as so many arks, salvaging the greater part of the writings of the classical authors, of the primitive Church, and of the Fathers.
Monasticism reached its peak in the Middle Ages; nearly all the great religious figures of the time were members of orders, and it is mostly to them that we owe whatever great Christian achievements the period produced. The religious orders constituted the spiritual arsenal of the Church; monks were the mainstay of medieval Christendom.
Most of the orders were founded in pre-Reformation times, but only within the Catholic Church have they continued to receive the care and the encouragement they require. That is why one tends to identify monasticism with the Catholic Church. In any case, they are intimately connected, and have constantly enriched one another.
For the Church the orders have been an inexhaustible well of holiness without which the Christian soil would long since have dried out. They have given the Church an abundance of saints whose lives have both demonstrated the transcendent character of Christianity and inspired other men to love it. Catholicism without monasticism is, indeed, unimaginable. It is not surprising, therefore, that those who desire to deal a mortal blow to the Catholic Church always begin by attacking the monasteries, the true powerhouses of Catholicism.
Yet while the Catholic Church lives primarily by the spiritual substance of her orders, and not by their political action, the progress of monasticism within the Church has been neither smooth nor steady. The curve shows sheer ascents succeeded by steep declines—but these latter are always made up again. New orders have constantly sprung up, affording the best proof of the Church’s inner vitality. This fruitfulness certainly did not come to a halt with the founding of the Society of Jesus, with which the present work concludes. The founders of orders we treat in these pages are only the outstanding ones; they are far from exhausting the list.
That Protestantism saw the light of day in the lonely cell of a monastery is too often forgotten. For nineteen years Luther belonged to a religious order, and monasticism was an aid far more than an obstruction in his path. His religious development, however, brought him into serious conflict with the monastic world, and only at the very end of his life did he come to appreciate the regenerated monasteries as fortresses of peace in a wicked world.¹ Btit he arrived at this conclusion too late to prevent Protestantism from inheriting his earlier antagonism to monasticism, and that anti-monastic attitude has remained with it ever since. Luther’s tragic step is too often oversimplified, and there is a tendency to forget that, in the depths of his soul, “he remained a monk, even though he no longer belonged to an order.”²
There are positive overtones even in Melanchthon’s Apologia Confessionis Augustinae, with all its attacks on monasticism; he speaks, for instance, of a few monasteries that “do know the holy Gospel of Christ,”³ and considers that “Bernard, Francis, and other” founders of orders should not be identified with the corrupt monasticism of his own day.⁴ In any case, early Protestantism was hardly in a position to debate these matters; it was in a state of active warfare, and was therefore obliged to combat monasticism in all its forms, eradicating it down to the last decaying institutions for ladies of noble birth. The modern Protestant attitude on this score was expressed by Adolf von Harnack: “The Reformation abolished monasticism, and was bound to abolish it. It rightly affirmed that to take a vow of lifelong asceticism was a piece of presumption; and it rightly considered that any worldly vocation, conscientiously followed in the sight of God, was equal to, nay, was better than, being a monk. But something now happened which Luther neither foresaw nor desired: ‘monasticism’ of the kind that is conceivable and necessary in the evangelical sense of the word disappeared altogether. But every community stands in need of personalities living exclusively for its ends.
The Church, for instance, needs volunteers who will abandon every other pursuit, renounce 'the world' and devote themselves entirely to the service of their neighbor; not because such a vocation is ca higher one, but because it is a necessary one, and because no Church can live without also giving rise to this desire. But in the evangelical Churches the desire has been checked by the decided attitude they have been compelled to adopt towards Catholicism. It is a high price that we have paid; nor can the price be reduced by considering, on the other hand, how much simple and unaffected religious fervor has been kindled in home and family life.”⁵
Protestantism was the poorer for suppressing monasticism. The Baptists who attempted in their own way to remedy this loss were accused by Heinrich Bullinger of new monkery. Nevertheless, various attempts have been made to introduce monasticism within the framework of Protestantism, and these attempts should not be regarded as the product of mere romantic enthusiasm. We might mention the gentle Gerhard Tersteegen, who organized a Protestant monastic community on the Otterbeck estate, giving it rules that have become a revered document of Protestant monasticism. Following in the footsteps of the Muhlheim weaver, Jean de Labadie tried to organize a similar group in Holland. And Albrecht Ritschl noted the connection between monasticism and the sort of Pietism evident in the rule for German deaconesses.
Some individual Protestants, moreover, have shown quite unexpected leanings toward the monastic life. Soren Kierkegaard, in particular, makes repeated references to medieval monasticism in his principal work Concluding Unscientific Postscript. It is characteristic that he should not only have been the first once again to regard Christianity as an existential doctrine, but also should have felt that he himself belonged to the monastic world. In his autobiographical work. The Point of View for My Work as an Author, he remarks that when he was writing Either-Or, in which he set out his views on ethics and esthetics, he was already, religiously speaking, in the cloister—as shown by his use of the name “Victor- Eremita.” He saw himself as a man dwelling in a monastery, and Martin Thust in his monograph on Kierkegaard stresses the theme: “Kierkegaard was a Protestant monk in the sense that he was able to achieve a unique combination of what was deepest in the old monastic way of life with that vindication of life in the world which is characteristic of the Reformation.”⁶ -These different attempts in the direction of monasticism must not, of course, be overestimated; nevertheless, they are symptomatic of a deficiency in Protestantism. The problem has never been fully resolved in the Protestant Church, and it should, indeed, be kept alive. To deal with it is more than ever important, now, when it has become only too apparent that community consciousness by itself offers too narrow a basis for the Christian life. The tragedy occurs when the community, as one of Bernanos’s characters has it, becomes a dead community. The Christian life has to be anchored in something deeper than church communities, and Christian brotherhood offers just such an anchorage.
III
A historical sketch of the development of Christian monasticism would be incomplete without a further analysis undertaken from the point of view of religion. This would be in the nature of an inquiry into the essential significance of monasticism, a weighing of it, as it were, on Job’s scales, to assay its worth in the light of eternity.
We are reminded, in this connection, of the famous words of a sixteenth-century German general, Georg von Frundsberg: “My dear little monk, you are taking a step the like of which neither I nor many a commander in our fiercest battle would take. If you are sure of being right, thoroughly convinced that your cause is of God, then proceed in the name of God, and be of good cheer: God will never forsake you.⁷ These words, spoken on a memorable occasion, could be applied validly to all monks. Nor has the diminutive “little” any derogatory intent; on the contrary, it betrays something akin to tenderness. For the path of the monk has never been easy or smooth; it leads to stark heights and somber depths, and keen courage is needed to tread it.
We shall not grasp the religious significance of monasticism by looking at it through rose-colored spectacles. Uncritical admiration is the principal defect, for instance, of the Comte de Montalembert’s monumental study The Monks of the West; it is doubtless to be ascribed to the author’s personal inexperience of the monastic life. The seasoned religious speaks in very different tones from those of the French romanticist, but he loves his cloister none the less for that. What is needed is not insipid, sometimes downright dishonest, eulogy, but an altogether new language. And this means discarding completely the kind of apologetics which, like Job’s friends, uses deceit in defense of God (Job xiii, 7); it means pointing frankly to shortcomings. Nor does such frankness derogate from the reverence that the subject deserves. It is quite unnecessary to gloss over the infirmities of monasticism. The reality of monasticism encompasses both heroic fulfillment and pitiful failure, and it proves its Christian vitality precisely when it endures the hardest blows.
The monk is called to a life that is far from ordinary. Unfortunately, too many merely ordinary men have sought to embrace it and, being unequal to the hardships it entails, have failed lamentably. It is they who have given rise to the absurd notion that the cloistered are prisoners of their own making, gloomily wasting their lives and depriving their countries of useful citizens. It is they, too, who have created the repulsive character of the monk who seeks to deceive God by means of his tonsure, as Benedict of Nursia puts it in his rule. Such people, who have no vocation, would do better to leap over the wall like Monica Baldwin, but it is certain that no one who has really been called will leap after them. The saddest part of it is the general corruption to which such individual attitudes have led. The decline of monasticism in the late Middle Ages which resulted from the decay of monastic discipline had catastrophic consequences for the whole of Christendom.
The dark pages of monasticism, which its adversaries cite with glee, must not be mistaken for monasticism itself. At the same time, we have no intention of overrating the importance of monasticism by calling it the highest form of the Christian life. Monks themselves have warned against that kind of exaggeration. In the letters of the Russian staretz Feofan, for instance, we read: “It is best not to consider whether or not one is called to the cloister; that is not the point. If the cloister is in a man’s heart, it is immaterial whether the building is actually there. The cloister in one’s heart means only this: God and the soul.”⁸ How admirably put! In appraising the monastic life, we must not be more monkish than the monks.
Considered from the point of view of religion, monasticism cannot but impress one by its greatness. In certain periods its positive contribution far outweighs its deficiencies. Its cultural achievements are there for all to see, and their value is permanent.
And yet to consider only its cultural achievements is to miss the whole point of the monastic life. For Christian monasticism can be comprehended only in terms of its own premises, and they are of an eminently religious nature. If we do not see monasticism as an absolutely Christian phenomenon, we do not really see it at all.
What is far more significant than all its external achievements is the love of God, a love directed straight to the eternal, a love that flourishes in the cloister like a rose.
The monk is the religious man par excellence, whose ardent desire to save his soul governs his every action. He sacrifices everything to his fervent love of Christ, which blazes in him like another burning bush. By means of the rule that he seeks to fulfill, he achieves discipline, and the Christian precepts to which he deliberately submits shape and illumine his whole life. His wholehearted submission to the supremacy of an absolute lends his life an aspect of order to which all confusion, internal or external, is wholly alien. This inner security gives the monastic life its aura of the divine.
By his deference to the rule, the monk is freed from the agitation and perplexity that harass the lives of other men. He knows where he wants to go, and he knows the way there; when he entered the cloister, he resolved to tread that way unfalteringly. The monk is a guide who does not simply tell others where to go, but goes there himself. It is hardly possible to predicate anything greater of a human being, and here we approach the permanent mystery of all monasticism. One of the main causes of the attraction that monasticism has never ceased to exercise lies precisely in the monk’s spiritual power to draw from the rich storehouse of his superior religious experience a positive answer to the problems of our troubled lives. There is nothing we need more, in our cheerless times, than these people who can direct souls, and from whom a healing virtue goes forth.
The objection that this is not a life that suits everyone is easily dismissed. Of course it does not suit everyone. But is there any way of life that would? Nevertheless, monasticism possesses a mysterious power of irradiation capable of penetrating to the darkest recesses of man s being. There are few institutions, indeed, in which the power the Gospel can release in man is so clearly visible. We must learn once more to see monks with the eyes of Leon Bloy: “Those men of prayer, unlettered, uncomplaining under the goad of persecution, whom we, in our idiotic sufficiency, assume to despise, those men bore the heavenly Jerusalem in their hearts and in their minds. They translated their ecstasies, as best they could, into the stone of the cathedrals, into the burning windows of the chapels, into the parch' ments of the books of hours. And all our endeavor, if we have but a particle of genius, is to return to that source of light.⁹
IV
These words bring us to another point: the mission of contemporary monasticism, which we should consider in the light of our analysis of monasticism from the historical and religious points of view.
There is no question, here, of championing a cause with single-minded passion; we are simply anticipating a particular result. The comments that follow should be regarded as the logical conclusion of the work as a whole; they are an epilogue offered as a prologue.
If we look squarely at the twentieth century, which refuses to learn from the experience of two world wars, we can hardly do otherwise than call it the century of destruction. Hurtling from one catastrophe into another, our world seems unable to find a way out of this vortex of death. The hideous symbol of this century is the man armed with a machine gun, stumping off over endless heaps of ruins. And every Christian who really takes his faith seriously is weighed down by the questions: What solution is there to this demonic apocalypse? Who is capable of offering effective challenge to the Beast from the Abyss? Who has the inner strength to meet the robot of our times and defeat him in spiritual combat? These are the tremendous questions that will run like a basic theme through Christian history in the coming decades.
To expect any solution from statesmen is vain. They cannot give what they do not possess. Governments think too exclusively in terms of politics and military strategy, to the total neglect of the spirit. That is why they are now so completely barren of any new ideas, and have to depend solely on diplomacy, which has constantly proved its inadequacy. Only Christianity can provide the means of reversing the tide that threatens to engulf civilization.
By Christianity we do not mean an interpretation of the Gospel which is itself tainted by corruption, but rather a renewed Christianity whose heralds will again go forth wholly unarmed, like sheep among wolves, truly obedient to the new commandment of love by which Christ’s disciples are known, and constituting am other little flock that has been granted the living hope of the kingdom.
Any attempt to achieve this renewal, to arrive at a Christianity free from compromise of any sort, must necessarily involve a return to the founders of the religious orders. Indeed, a renewal of the orders, in their original intent, would be one of the most effective aids in the spiritual conflict of our times. Such a reversion to the founders, unfettered by any preconceived ideas, would lead to a wonderful flowering of the noblest traditions of Western Christendom.
The fundamental and timeless virtues of the primitive Church find their purest expression in the founders of the great orders, and those monasteries whose primitive zeal has ebbed will be reinvigorated only by hearkening to their founders. The founders of the orders can be likened to a seed able to germinate, quite unexpectedly, centuries later. That is why a return to the spirit of the founders is the precondition for the new mission of monasticism in our times. If their first coming had such powerful effect, how great will be the consequences of their second epiphany for the life of the world!
Another major possibility is the deliberate endeavor to create new orders. A seemingly fantastic undertaking, perhaps, until we consider that, at a time when the face of monasticism is so radically changing, it need be no utopia. Indeed, that idea is really the purpose of the present work. And the reader must therefore bear with the author if he sometimes presents in faltering tones thoughts to which he would rather have lent the accent of adjuration.
The Christian knows, of course, that the Almighty is able to fulfill His plans in a thousand different ways that man has not even dreamed of. Yet it is difficult not to believe that it will be new religious foundations that will transform our times. Salvation, one feels, will come from a new, transfigured monasticism.
In order to realize the need for new monastic foundations, we have only to recall the significance of the religious orders of knight-hood for the Middle Ages. How much poorer Christendom became when these lines of communication between religion and the state disappeared! Nor will modern Christendom endure unless the spirit of monasticism is injected into our society anew. The urgency of this problem can no longer be ignored, but it must on no account be approached from a partisan, sectarian point of view, which never serves truth. Threatened Christendom needs new orders because only a new “brotherhood of those marked by pain,” as Albert Schweitzer put it, can provide the antidote to the spiritual malady of our day.
The creation of new orders is by no means outside the realm of possibility, as modern skeptics would have us believe, arguing that nowadays people are no longer capable of such self-sacrificing renunciation, of such an otherworldly approach to life. To this doubt, faith makes answer in the words of Christ: with God all things are possible. And the first timid steps are already being made in that direction. We might mention, among the various indications of this kind, the Protestant venture of Taize, near Cluny, even though it is still in its infancy. The development of similar communities of women in western Switzerland and Germany is proof that this undertaking is meeting a deep-seated need.
Deliverance from the distress of our times can come only from small groups with the courage to remain small, at first, so as not to be burdened by unsuitable elements. Their community life must be based on monastic rules that include binding vows and recognize the principle of religious sacrifice. In the new religious foundations the waters of mysticism are again beginning to flow. For the mystical life, which is one of the most essential conditions of a Christian renaissance, can flourish only in silence, and only in the mystical life can man achieve true union with God, without which there is no recovery.
But the new monasticism can bring about a real transformation in contemporary attitudes only if it does not remain entrenched behind a wall of traditional thinking. Instead of acting simply as the custodian of the past, it must deliberately turn toward the future.
The new foundations must blaze new trails and not be satisfied with being mere replicas of earlier orders. Throughout monastic history such daring ventures have been undertaken. For all that they are rooted in eternity, the new orders must wear the colors of the twentieth century, just as the eremitic movement was cast in a fourth'century mold.
However much we may long for new orders, they cannot be artificially created if they are not to be a mere sham. What is holy can never be commanded; it always grows like a living organism, and almost in silence. That the founders of the old orders were saints, sent by God at particular historical moments, is no coincidence. Holiness is as inseparably linked with the emergence of an order as is the order’s providential mission in history. New orders can only be prayed for; their creation depends on the breath of the Spirit. The founders of orders were vessels of the divine choice, and their foundations were works of grace. Authentic orders are always creations of the Spirit; hence their irresistible advance in their own times. And that is why, too, a new order may come into being at any time.
Until such time, we might well recall Dostoevsky’s Alyosha, that unique figure of holiness in an unholy setting. Surprisingly enough, Dostoevsky, who contributed so greatly to the understanding of the Russian monk, and who saw in him the bulwark against nihilism, does not let Alyosha, the beloved disciple, remain in Father Sossima’s monastery, but expressly sends him out into the world which needs him so very urgently. The intention is not that Alyosha should share in that “Karamazov vileness” which was the downfall of his brothers, Mitya and Ivan. On the contrary, Alyosha hastens off like an angel in human form to bring the message of salvation into the very heart of his brothers’ pain-racked world. Inwardly, Alyosha is enclosed in Father Sossima’s monastery, but outwardly he is in the world. By this duality he personifies the hidden cloister in the midst of the sinister world of the Karamazovs. By his mission, he appears as one of the first harbingers of that transfigured monasticism which we are waiting for and which will surely come. The Alyosha of our times will be a new kind of monk, proclaiming to the modern world a Christian message that alone can save it from its present peril.
WALTER NIGG
No comments:
Post a Comment