Welcome To Orthodox Habits
Including those habit styles currently in use around the world
including the styles of the Byzantine Rite and early Constantinople.
Here are the beautiful, traditional and glorious Angelic Habit styles, related religious and ascetic customs.
The rich literature and epoch creating spiritual traditions of the various Eastern Orthodox monks and nuns monasteries, hermitages and sketes of past historic periods since the first glorious days of the original contemplative Hermits of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, St. Anthony, St. Basil, St. John of Mt. Sinai, St. John Climacus, etc.
This page is being newly assembled and additional menu links, galleries, art, text and scans will be added. Please visit us again soon & email your friends.
“Life is a ladder”; A ladder reaching from the Earth to heaven, but at every rung the forces of hell are ready to drag the sinner down to damnation. This 12 Century Byzantine icon from St. Catherin Monastery at Mt. Sinai, shirks none of the implications; It was inspired by a treatise by St. John Climacus, a saintly abbot of St. Catherin Monastery about five hundred years earlier, in which the ladder served as a metaphor for moral aspiration, each rung corresponding to a chapter in is famous book: Ladder of Divine Ascent. At the bottom, a band of monks still on Earth pray for the Salvation of their brethren. At the top, Christ and his angels wait to receive them. In between, an army of black devils wielding pikes, ropes and bows and arrows wage eternal war on humanity. To the Church of the Middle Ages this was no fantasy or figure of speech. It was the literal and terrible truth.
St. Catherin Monastery, Mt. Sinai, founded in the 6th Century by Byzantine Emperor Justinian; This monastery has the rare distinction of having the world’s second largest collection of ancient manuscripts; second only to the Vatican Library in Rome. St. Catherin Monastery Library of rare manuscripts also includes The Codex Sinaiticus, the world’s oldest known Bible, and in tact in complete hand written form; And made available to scholars world. wide. This is the only Christian monastery in the world which happily includes a Moslem Mosque on its property and built in the 8th Century, right next to the Monastery’s Basilica Church. The Prophet Muhammed wrote an encyclical giving his official blessing to this great Monastery and the pious monks who live there.
Saint Basil (329-79 AD) Founder of Eastern Orthodox monasticism in Europe
One of ten children of St. Basil the Elder and St. Emmelia, he was born in Caesarea, Cappadocia, Asia Minor, and was educated by his father and his grandmother, St. Marcina the Elder. He took advanced studies at Constantinople and Athens, where St. Gregory Nazianzen and the future Emperor Julian the Apostate were classmates. On the completion of his studies, Basil taught rhetoric at Caesarea and then decided to pursue the religious/monastic life.
He was baptized, visited monasteries in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, and in 358 settled as a hermit by the Iris River in Pontus. He attracted numerous disciples, whom he organized into the first (Christian) monastery in Asia Minor. (And wrote a monastic rule for them which was a model latter for St, Benedict) He was ordained in 363 at Caesarea but returned to Pontus because of a disagreement with Archbishop Eusebius. But remained there until 365, when his friend Gregory requested his assistance in combating Arianism in Nazianzus.
He returned to Caesarea , was reconciled to Eusebius, and in 370, on Eusebius’ death, was elected archbishop of Caesarea and consequently metropolitan of some fifty suffragen bishops, despite the opposition of Arian Emperor Valens.
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