Confessor. No. There was one Church both in the world and in the monastery. But the monastery was the most indestructible stronghold of her holiness for the enemy.

   Unknown. But if a monastery is the ancient Apostolic Church in its purity, where did the "abbots," "elders," "novices," these special monastic statutes, monastic "rules," "five hundreds," prostrations, in a word, the entire way of monastic life come from? What is all this for? After all, the "monastery in the world," as you call the Apostolic Church, could do without it.

   Confessor. Leaving the world and beginning a closed, isolated not only internally, but also externally, spiritual life, the monastery could not remain the same as it was in the time of the apostles. There was a different relationship with the world, an internal struggle proceeded differently, a completely different way of life was created. And the monastery began to create its own methods for achieving spiritual goals, in relation to these new conditions of closed church life, and to this new inner well-being of people who had broken off their external ties with worldly life. The "monastic rule" -- liturgical, fasting, and coenobitic, all the rules and the entire structure of monastic life -- everything is created by spiritual experience, prayer, and podvig. In a monastery, everything comes from the inner life, and not from the mind. In everything there is a breath of the Spirit of God's grace, which abundantly watered the chosen soldiers of Christ. They walked the path of Christian perfection in these new conditions, and each left his precious mite in the treasury of the monastic rule.

   Unknown. But can you tell us in more detail what exactly the monastery created in terms of methods for achieving spiritual goals?

   Confessor. Prayer, fasting, and obedience are what monasticism lived by. And if the whole Church created the liturgical and lenten rule and strengthened the principles of obedience, then monasticism created this primarily as a rule. After all, the Church and the monastery are not something opposite to each other or different in essence. A monastery is a certain part of the earthly Church, but in waging a struggle against the enemy of salvation, both the Church in the world and the Church in the monastery, each did its own work, solved its problems to the best of its ability.

   Unknown. I would like you to tell me more about prayer, fasting, and obedience.

   Confessor. Ok. Let's start with prayer.

   To pray means to be in that special inner state when the spiritual principle in a person enters into mysterious and direct contact with the Lord God and the other invisible world. This state is possible in all external conditions. But since everything worldly prevents him, the best condition for prayer should be considered solitude. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself pointed out this path of prayer. He alone remained for prayer, leaving the people and the disciples. He also remained with his disciples, secluding himself with them from the people. In the words of the Evangelist Luke, "He went into the wilderness and prayed" (Luke 5:16). And the Evangelist Mark says: "In the morning, rising up very early, he went out and withdrew into a desert place, and there he prayed" (Mark 1:35). The Evangelist Luke also speaks of solitary prayer together with His disciples: "He prayed in a solitary place, and the disciples were with Him" (Luke 9:18).

   Solitude is an outwardly favorable condition for prayer. Worldly noise interferes from the outside. But there is an internal obstacle. As if there was an internal noise. This noise is created in us by worldly attachments and carnal passions. Therefore, behind the main work of monasticism -- prayer -- there is an inward, invisible battle with temptations and the virtues associated with this struggle: non-acquisitiveness, self-denial, dispassion. Monasticism experienced the path of non-acquisitiveness, self-denial and dispassion, and by experience created a perfect prayerful life. Everything that it gave to the liturgical rule, and everything that took the form of "cell rules," was not armchair fabrications, but the result of great prayerful feats. Prayer filled almost the entire life of the monastery. She created the true heaven on earth. The monk lived in the temple. And he left there only for certain earthly concerns, which he bore patiently, as something inevitable for a person clothed in an earthly shell. But the fulfillment of these earthly deeds did not have time to dissipate what filled the soul in the temple.

   The need to "pray without ceasing" created a special kind of prayerful feat: the practice of the Jesus Prayer: "Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." This prayer, which appeared in the Church, according to tradition, from the time of the Apostles, which was previously performed by all believers, later became the foundation of the prayer life of monks. Without this prayer, prayer became simply impossible for the monk. It was constantly on his lips, in his mind, and in his heart. She accompanied him everywhere. It supplemented prayer in the Church, softening the heart and opening it up for the assimilation of divine services, it replaced the church for him when he went to fulfill his obediences and had to attend to his earthly affairs. She lived with him in his cell, drove away melancholy, self-pity, and thoughts. It gathered wandering thoughts and scattered feelings, it was the most powerful weapon in the struggle against passions, especially in the inevitable contact with the world.

   The Jesus Prayer gave the human soul the opportunity to feel itself in the eyes of God all the time. All the time, in the depths of our hearts, we feel tenderness from the awareness of the immeasurable mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ, Who suffered for our sins, and contrition for sins, and hope for salvation. And all this was like one common feeling that settled in the heart, lived there constantly even when the words of the prayer were not pronounced, and protected the soul from the filth and temptations of the world.

   Prayer, like everything in spiritual life, has its own path and its own stages of ascent. A prayerful state is not always given to a person with unconditional fullness. And here, as in the moral life, much depends on the efforts of the person himself, but the main and perfect thing depends on the mercy of God, on grace as a gift of the Holy Spirit. In the moral life, every good deed is already something positive on the path of perfection, because behind it there is a good will. And in the life of prayer, every word of prayer, even if uttered with one mouth, is already an act of prayer, because it testifies to the desire to pray. And the monastery therefore strictly demanded the observance, at least externally, of the prayer rule. This was not a requirement of the "letter of the law". There was great wisdom in this. The letter of the prayer rule was a necessary step, which the greatest ascetics certainly passed. The rule was what was required of everyone. Further ascent along the inner steps of prayerful perfection was left to the grace of God and the feats of each individual person.

   Thus, monasticism, continuing the work of the Saviour, His holy apostles and the first Christians, by the podvig and grace of God, created a perfect form of the prayer rule and, having experienced the path of prayer, taught all those who sought salvation to follow it.

   The second work of monasticism is fasting. The ascetics call prayer and fasting the two wings, without which it is impossible to rise above the worldly and passionate life. Some of them considered the feat of fasting to be the surest measure of the successful passage of the spiritual path. Fasting is a feat that is aimed at fighting our passions. Behind it is the virtue of impassibility. "Give blood, and receive the Spirit," says Abba Longinus, meaning by "blood" all the sorrows of the ascetic path. By fasting we must understand not only abstinence in food, but the totality of all ascetic means in the struggle with the passions. Its first and basic stage is abstinence from a certain composition of food, its abundance and sweetness, and the subsequent stages concern internal tasks: abstinence from all defilements in general.