Monks and nuns aren’t weird people who, out of some sort of personal whim, have left the cities to go and lived in some monastery or other. They are, in fact, ‘angels of God’ according to Saint John Chrysostom; ‘those who live in accordance with the Gospel’, as Evagrios Pontikos calls them; ‘witnesses to free will’ according to Athanasios the Great, ‘the heirs to the suffering Church’ as Saint Symeon the New Theologian puts it; ‘the adornment of the head of the Church’, to quote Saint Gregory of Nyssa, since they have become dead to the world and bedeck the head of the Church. There should be no distinction between the monastic and the married life, because, if there is, ...
