"Being Benedictine does not preclude one from being an authnetic Eastern Monastic. Amalfion on Athos used the Rule of St. Benedict (and the Roman Rite)"

But why would a Benedictine monastery have used the Roman Rite? One would have expected them to use some variety of the Missale Monasticum.

Fr Serge

However charitable the language of disagreement, there was enough of an unliveable reality to cause a separation, if that's all right to use as a descriptor, and of course your community has not been the only one over time for many the same reasons.

Something is wrong. There is no real caritas in burying one's head. And I am not speaking to you directly there at all, at all!

So using the language of separation and rejection may not necessarily be inaccurate or uncharitable.
For if one refuses to accept a position is that not also a rejection of that very same position? Sometimes language may indeed be merely descriptive.

Eli

Father Maximos,

I stand corrected. It is more complex than the word "rejection" would suggest. In any event we have no purely Eastern Monasteries left unless Trinity be counted as one.

CDL

Could be, then again, the Antiochian Orthodox Church in America might give reason to rethink this idea.

Or it could be another example that verifies it.

Nick

I suppose the truth is that monasticism is, almost by definition, a controversial proposal in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Always has been. At its core monasticism is a "hard saying", pointing to Last Things.

Even within the institutional structures of monasticism the primitive monastic *ideal* is also controversial. How do we live in the world but not of it?

If different monasteries resolve this irresolvable tension differently can we expect entire churches to do otherwise? The Antiochian solution seems to be to attempt to draw its members to perfection in holiness through the Mysteries and evangelical action. In this work their hierarchy seems to regard monasticism as unnecessary. The majority of Orthodox seem to think that it is dangerous to attempt this work without the radical reminder that monasticism offers of the ultimate futility of a purely human "activism".

I really don't know whether monasticism is necessary for the survival of any Church. I suspect it is, but the only thing I really know is that it is essential for my own salvation.

unworthy hierodeacon Maximos

In the history of the Latin rite after the dissolution of the monasteries in Great Britain and their decline in Europe, there has been an ever increasing humanistic and nominalistic heterodoxy let loose in monastic life and in parish life, that often uses quite orthodox constructions, yet finds expression in exclusion and the superiority of vainglorious pronouncements, and fear tactics used on the ordinary soul.

It is also among the monastic theologians that order and orthodoxy are being restored.

I hope that puts your dear heart and mind at rest, monk Maximos.

Christ's peace,

Eli