Orders (or lack thereof) in the East

[Hesychios]

From what I understand, the East never saw the rise of orders such as they exist in the West (e.g., Franciscans, Jesuits, Carmelites, etc). You are either, if a male, a deacon/priest or a monk (though some monks can be priests). Each monastic community has it’s own rule. Does any one know why in the West things went the way they did and we ended up with so many orders, and even among these we have “active” and “contemplative”? I’d really like to understand why the apparent rift. Thanks in advance!

It is not a rift, as such.

The rise of religious orders in the west occurs after the great schism. Before them the practice in the west was very similar to the east (although the particular rule any house would follow is up to them).

In the earlier church, monks would leave a house to establish another, and if this new house was in another bishop’s territory, they needed to establish a relationship with him. In the era of Saint John Cassian it was not unusual for a monk to live in several different houses in his lifetime, and possibly found a small new house of his own before he died. Often, the rule they followed was composed uniquely to that one location, or simply brought from another location. The common rules we know today did not become dominant until later.

At some point a few great well-endowed monasteries in the west began to establish subordinate houses in other locations, like extensions. The mother house in this case was not giving up control, but actually sending picked men to the new location. They were able to accomplish this at great distances across diocesan bounds and resist local episcopal claims of oversight by placing their house under the supervision of the Papacy.

Presumably there was some revenue sharing between the houses (I cannot state this as a certainty), the control was in the mother house. This was an entirely new concept in it’s day.

Cluny was a good example of this change, and this monastery had a great deal of influence in the Papacy due to the Gregorian Reformation (which does correspond chronologically with the great schism). It became a practice of the bishop of Rome establishing organizations which were not dependent upon the local bishops, but on the Pope himself. This concept was subsequently applied to other types of (active) groups, like the orders of preachers and the knighted monks.

Later this system was introduced into eastern Catholic churches. For instance the Basilian order OSBM was established sometime after the Union of Brest (actually 1631AD) by taking monasteries from the ownership or control of the local bishops and linking them together across diocesan/eparchial boundaries.