The abbot of one of the oldest Russian monastic monasteries – the Danilov Stavropegic Monastery in Moscow, a member of the Synodal Commission for Monastic Affairs, Archimandrite Alexy (Polikarpov) visited the Saratov diocese and answered questions from the magazine “Orthodoxy and Modernity”. The topic of our conversation was monasticism; after all, it is a kind of salt of the Church, without it the Church cannot exist. Monasticism has never fit either into the concepts of mundane consciousness or into the general context of the life of the sons of this age (cf. Luke 16:8); the perplexed question: “How is it possible for a normal person to consciously accept this?..” has been asked in all eras. And similarly, in all eras, monastic life was not only difficult, which is quite natural, but also very problematic, one might say, constantly puzzling.