When the emperor was converted, and the ever-present danger of martyrdom disappeared, monasticism arose to take its place. There was a fear that Christianity would be secularized, that, as it stood, it would become the cement of an earthly city. Monasticism was the revolt against all compromise.
Monasticism, in its early form, was a steep path, that of ‘the violent, who take the kingdom of heaven by force’. Utter obedience to the Gospel demands the rejection of conformity and ambiguity. For the monk, only God is wholly interesting. To people busy with the affairs of this world, the monk is a marginal figure, mad, an outlaw; indeed he does try to escape the law by going beyond it, by living that life of the Spirit of whom we know not ‘whence it comes or whither it goes’.
Some Fathers have called monasticism a ‘holy aberration’. If the persecution of Christians actually began again, there would no longer be any good reason for institutionalized monasticism to exist; there would only be celibacy practised within clandestine worshipping communities, who would sometimes be called to martyrdom. That was the situation during the three first centuries A.D.; and the cult of the saints, which began with the sub-apostolic period, was initially the cult of the martyrs.
We must understand what martyrdom means in Christianity. It is not only the witness, before earthly judges, of the sole divinity of Christ; it is the mystical state par excellence. The martyr is not an ascetic, but a person of total faith. A young Christian woman, brought pregnant into the Roman prisons, groaned when her child was born. ‘What will you say when you are thrown to the beasts?’ a gaoler mocked. But she replied, ‘Then there will be someone else within me who will suffer for me’. If at the very moment of falling headlong into suffering, the martyr holds to the Crucified and Risen Lord with all the force of his suffering, and indeed with all the violence of the fall itself, he is pervaded by the power of the resurrection and the sensation of joy. St Ignatius of Antioch said -and testified by his own death- ‘He is ground into fine flour by the lions’ teeth’, and becomes ‘the purest bread’; in some way he becomes the eucharist. And when the political situation changes and martyrdom is temporarily abolished, then the monk appears, who in another way, according to an old saying, ‘gives his blood and receives the Spirit’.
Like the witness of the martyr, that of the monk is a thorn in the flesh of the world, salt in the wound- ‘You are the salt of the earth’- which prevents history from being closed in upon itself. In him the End is present here and now, and the world is transformed into a ‘burning bush’.
At certain moments in history, the fullness of the gospel witness passes from the martyr to the monk. In Russia, for example, all organized monastic life disappeared between the wars. But there were many martyrs and we know that they prayed for their tormentors. Today most of the monasteries which had been reopened just after the war have been closed again. But there is evidence that there are monks living in secret, undergoing a new kind of martyrdom, which consists of humiliation and oppression, the ‘martyrdom of life’. They live under vows, they are occupied in prayer, they do not marry.
The monk does not marry because he actually wishes to hasten time, to replace the birth of others, into time, with the birth of self, into eternity. It is good to have children, because each is a person wanted by God and because the Kingdom will not come before the predetermined number of the elect has been made up (elect, that is, not for their own sake, but in order to work for the salvation of the world). But abstention from marriage for the sake of God is a clearer announcement of the Kingdom, a refusal to settle down in history and in the continuation of the species. It is to consume the seed of time within oneself, instead of allowing it to spread.
And we see something similar in true love between a man and a woman: they do not come together in order to have children, but because they love each other, and their love, without further delay, would go on to transfigure the universe. But delay there must be.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
