Concluding remarks of the conference

From the first, our conference, thus, renounced reading the coordinates of “communion and solitude” according to a predefined scheme of historical simplification as “eremitism and cenobitism”, which reduce an existential and spiritual dynamic in continual inter-relation (archbishop Ieronimos in his message spoke of perichoresis) to the incongruous contraposition of abstract types (cenobites, hermits). Man’s concrete life demands instead that even the community experience be built as a whole according to nature, where the logikos seed planted in man (this is still Basil’s idea) leads to the completion of God’s creative work in the beauty and goodness of life in communion. In Basil’s etiology man is naturally a koinonikos being, a opposed to the lion, by nature wild and "solitary", monastikos…

Only an authentic Christian anthropology, thus, can lead to a better understanding of monasticism and of the oscillations in Christian spirituality between life in solitude and life in common, with different shades and modes in East and West. The diachronic study of this polarity (communion/solitude) in different contexts, showed clearly the arbitrariness of abstract schemes of classification (hermitage/cenobium) applied to a living spiritual reality.

Metropolitan Kallistos reminded us that in eastern monasticism a clear line of demarcation does not exist between life in community and eremitical life and that this very fluid and porous boundary is a sign of “enrichment and blessing”. The indissoluble circuit between the two dimensions, as we have heard in the first days of this conference, is in fact at the very heart of Byzantine and Russian monasticism. The tie between personal search of God and openness to a cosmic community is even central in a father who is fundamental for Christian spirituality of the East as of the West: St Isaac the Syrian.