Monasticism is the royal road of mysticism. Its significance lies in raising up the spiritual vertical, the axis of eternity that joins heaven and earth. Monasticism is not directed outward, but is rather hidden, an inner organ of the Body of Jesus Christ. Monks are guardians of the innermost sanctuary.

True monasticism is grounded not in this world, but in God, in eternity. It cannot be reduced to forms of life and rules, nor to human ideas or inclinations. It is explicable neither psychologically nor sociologically. Whoever fails in the world will fail all the more in the monastery.

A monk is one who has been touched by God in his innermost being and torn out of earthly normality; and who then, in perfect freedom and love, offers himself to God as a whole burnt offering, consecrating his life to Him with all his strength, with all his heart and mind, with body and soul. The monk lives in God; in Him he breathes, in Him and through Him he acts. This high ideal becomes concrete reality when one enters the Holy Fellowship of a living elder. Through the total offering, the human being crosses the threshold into the Holy of Holies of the spiritual temple.

Beyond all visible activities, the monk practices the unceasing spiritual prayer, the direct communion with God, so as to be wholly in God already in this earthly life. The goal of Orthodox monastic life is deification, the becoming-form of the eternal archetype. God’s thought, His longing, is to be known and fulfilled.

Whoever wishes to become a monk must already have seen through the deceit of this fallen world to some degree, yet without despairing. He must be inwardly and outwardly free. The fundamental impulse must not be rejection, contempt, but love.

In holy Tradition, monasticism is also described as the Christian continuation of Old Testament prophetism. John the Baptist is the last monk of the old covenant; John the Evangelist is the first monk of the new covenant. This points to the monk’s immediacy to the Spirit.

The “Ascetical Instructions” of our holy father Basil the Great are not a “monastic rule” in the Western sense, but a practical unfolding of the Gospel, fundamental guidance for the life consecrated to God. Beyond this, the oral, so-called “unwritten” Tradition remains indispensable, passed on by the elder in common life to his disciples from mouth to ear, from heart to heart, from spirit to spirit. God’s claims, as they are handed down in certain words of Jesus Christ in the Gospels, are accepted undiminished and in their full spiritual sense. In obedience to the elder and in learning and interiorizing holy Tradition, everything else then follows. To grow into this life one must begin early. Many outstanding elders in the Orthodox countries were already on the way at fifteen. The best age for entering the novitiate is, according to experience, between eighteen and twenty-four years.