Life
Monastic life is distinct from the "religious orders" such as the friars, canons regular, clerks regular, and the more recent religious congregations. The latter have essentially some special work or aim, such as preaching, teaching, liberating captives, etc., which occupies a large place in their activities. While monks have undertaken labours of the most varied character, in every case this work is extrinsic to the essence of the monastic state. Both ways of living out the Christian life are regulated by the respective Church law of those Christian denominations that recognize it (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Anglican Church, or the Lutheran Church).
Christian monastic life does not always involve communal living with like-minded Christians. Christian monasticism has varied greatly in its external forms, but, broadly speaking, it has two main species (a) the eremitical or solitary, (b) the cenobitical or family types. St. Anthony the Abbot may be called the founder of the first and St. Pachomius of the second. The monastic life is based on Jesus's exhortation to "be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). This ideal, also called the state of perfection, can be seen, for example, in the Philokalia, a book of monastic writings.
Monastic asceticism is a means to removing obstacles to loving God. Monks remember that: "The greatest way to show love for friends is to die for them" (John 15:13)CEV, for, in their case, life has come to mean renunciation. Their manner of self-renunciation has three elements corresponding to the three evangelical counsels: poverty, chastity and obedience.
Monks and friars are two distinct roles. In the thirteenth century “…new orders of friars were founded to teach the Christian faith,” because monasteries had declined. While friars take vows, they live outside of a monastery.
Read more about this topic: Christian Monasticism
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“We can conceive a thinking being to have either many or few perceptions. Suppose the mind to be reduced even below the life of an oyster. Suppose it to have only one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Consider it in that situation. Do you conceive any thing but merely that perception? Have you any notion of self or substance? If not, the addition of other perceptions can never give you that notion.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)