Monk

A monk is bound by vows, and it is the vows rather than any ordination that constitute the office, a point that distinguishes the monastic life from the priesthood.

Bound by profession

In the Benedictine tradition the vows are of stability, of obedience, and of conversion of life, which encompasses celibacy and the renunciation of private property, and a man becomes a monk by professing them within a community, not by being ordained, so that many monks are not priests and the two states are distinct. The monk life is ordered around the round of communal prayer, the work of the community, and the seeking of God within the enclosure, under a rule and an abbot.

A wide and old ideal

Entry is by a period of testing, the novitiate, followed by profession, first for a term and then for life, so the office is entered gradually and by free commitment. The monastic ideal is far older and wider than Christianity: the Buddhist bhikkhu bound by the monastic code, the Hindu and Jain renunciant, and the monks of other traditions represent the same fundamental impulse, the withdrawal from ordinary life under vows for the sake of a spiritual end. What the Christian monk shares with these is the constitution of the office by renunciation and vow rather than by any sacramental order, the monk being first of all one who has professed a way of life.

Christian monasticism began in the deserts of Egypt in the late third and fourth centuries, with hermits such as Anthony withdrawing alone and Pachomius shortly after organising the first communal monasteries with a shared rule, an innovation that made monastic life reproducible rather than dependent on one extraordinary individual. Basil of Caesarea shaped the communal model that became standard in the Greek East, while Benedict of Nursia's sixth century rule, moderate by the standards of the harshest desert asceticism, became the near-universal template for Western monasticism for the following thousand years.

Medieval Western monasticism went through repeated cycles of reform, the tenth century Cluniac reform centralising hundreds of houses under one abbey, the Cistercians reacting against that same wealth and centralisation in the twelfth century with a return to austerity and manual labour, and each new order in turn accumulating land and influence that a later reform movement would react against. The English Reformation's dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII in the 1530s eliminated the office almost entirely in one country within a few years, a scale of sudden loss with no real parallel elsewhere in Western monastic history. Monastic vocations in Western Europe and North America have fallen steeply since the 1960s, while communities in parts of Africa and Asia have grown, a pattern that broadly mirrors vocations to the priesthood and religious life generally.