Perfection: The Purpose of the Monastery

Here is one of a series of occasional reflections on the Monastic Typikon by Hieromonk Maximos.

Title III, the first "content rich" part of our Typicon begins with a call to perfection, or rather it echoes the Lord's own call in Matthew 5:48, "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect."

The Greek word for perfect, teleios carries with it overtones of something ‘finished', or ‘accomplished'. Something in which there is nothing lacking.

Perfection is, at one level at least, a natural state. We come (or at least came, pre-fall) that way. Then we throw things away, virtues, strengths, qualities, and we arrive at our present state of imperfection. Imperfection does not consist in things, but rather the absence of things. Evil has no existence, no substance. This is an idea taken over by the Fathers, especially the Cappadocians, from Greek philosophy, especially the Platonist schools. But it is also a revealed truth. God is both Creator and Good. Evil has no footing in Him. Evil can only be the place where good ought to be.

But there is another level of perfection, the supernatural level. When Christ tells the young man to sell all in order that he may have "treasure in heaven" this was a call to supernatural perfection.

To some degree the supernatural perfection is inconsistent with natural perfection. An aspect of the latter must surely be to be in possession of those natural goods upon which life depends: not only physical health, but also food, clothing, shelter. The Greeks would have added to those requirements for natural perfection even such things as physical beauty, good proportions, strength, grace and so on. The ideal of human perfection held up in the Gospel is very different indeed. No Greek would have regarded the widow and her mite as a model of perfection. Let alone, of course, a beaten and crucified corpse.

Yet it is precisely this kenotic perfection that the young man is called upon to embrace. Everything his hellenised society would have told him was essential for perfection, the young man is told to cast aside for the sake of another kind of perfection, a heavenly treasure.

The difference is Christian anthropology. Man is not measured by this life, a life in which his body is born, grows and either achieves heroism or ignominy. He is measured instead by that life in which his spirit is reborn and becomes united with that for which it was created (not, be it noted, that from which it naturally sprung).

Monastic life is the expression of faith in man's eternal destiny. It is the only way in which the Church has found a practical answer to the pagan tendency to regard this life as either all important or else entirely ephemeral. A monastery, the fathers teach, is truly "heaven on earth." It is the place where men and women commit themselves as fully as they can to that union of natural and supernatural perfection we call sanctity.

How easy it is to let that little phrase slip through our grasp: "Heaven on earth." The monastery is truly the most heavenly place in the world, redolent with the intense light of that other world. But it is also the most earthly. It is the place where every sin and imperfection is held up against that light and is revealed in all its shabby, muddy insignificance. It is for this reason that the fathers teach us that the life of the monk is "nothing but toil." Monastic life is the season and the time for work, for the labor of gathering every human energy and activity and submitting it to the purifying Fire of that heavenly Light. It is the workshop in which natural imperfection is molded by grace into the supernatural perfection of the New Adam grown into the measure of the stature of Christ.