What a Monastery Is
μοναστήριον — monasterion · mon-as-TEE-ree-on
In brief
A monastery is a community of men, or of women, who have given up marriage, personal property, and their own will in order to seek God with undivided attention through prayer, worship, work, and repentance. It exists not to flee the world in contempt but to love God single-mindedly and to pray for the whole world. In Orthodoxy monasticism is one path to holiness and marriage is another — two roads, both leading to the same Kingdom.
What monks and nuns are
The Greek word behind "monastery" and "monk" points to the monos, the single or solitary one — a person who has chosen to belong to God alone. Monks (men) and nuns (women) take up a life shaped by vows: chastity, poverty, and obedience. Their day is built around the cycle of church services, hours of manual labor, and private prayer, above all the unceasing repetition of the Jesus Prayer. Most monks are not priests; some are ordained to serve the community's needs, but the monastic calling is not in itself a clerical office.
Monastic life takes several forms — the shared common life of a large community, the small in-between settlement, and the solitary life of the hermit — described more fully under cenobitic, skete, and eremitic life. Within a community a person advances gradually, from newcomer to fully professed monastic, through stages set out under monastic ranks. What unites all of it is a single aim: to remove the ordinary distractions of life so that the whole person can turn toward God.
Why it exists
Monasticism grows directly out of the Gospel's counsels. To the rich young man the Lord said, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me" (Matthew 19:21). He spoke of those who "have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake" (Matthew 19:12), and St. Paul observed that "he that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord" while the married rightly care for a spouse and household (1 Corinthians 7:32-34). The monk or nun takes up that undivided care as a whole vocation.
The movement began in earnest in the Egyptian desert of the fourth century, with figures like St. Antony the Great, and spread across the Christian world. It is emphatically not a judgment that marriage or the body is evil — that would be a heresy the Church has always rejected; it is ascetic struggle taken to its fullest, freely chosen. St. John Climacus offered one of the tradition's terse definitions of a monk: one who keeps his body chaste, his speech pure, and his mind illumined.
Its place in Orthodoxy
Monasticism has shaped Orthodox Christianity out of all proportion to the number of monastics. Much of the Church's liturgical prayer, its spiritual writing, and its theology was forged in monasteries; a great many of the Fathers were monks; and by long custom bishops are chosen from among the monastic clergy. Monasteries have served as schools of prayer, refuges in persecution, and centers to which ordinary believers come for confession, counsel, and rest (see visiting a monastery).
Yet the monastic ideal is held up for all without being imposed on all. The layperson is not asked to copy the monastery's schedule, but to draw on its wisdom inside a life of family and work — a translation worked out under monasticism and the layperson. Women's communities have their own long and rich history (see women's monasticism). Marriage and monasticism stand side by side in Orthodox esteem: not a higher and a lower calling, but two God-given ways to the one holiness.