Press release at the conclusion

 

The work of the Conference

“It is difficult to see Christ in the midst of the crowd,” wrote Augustine, “for that, solitude is needed. In solitude, in fact, if the soul is attentive, God lets himself be seen. The crowd is noisy; to see God silence is necessary.” To learn to dwell in solitude — that face to face with oneself that every man knows — means at the same time to learn to dwell in the space of relations with others, to acquire a hospitable heart that knows how to listen to the other. Solitude is correlative to communion.

The symposium, by listening to Scripture and the teachings of the fathers (from Basil to Isaac the Syrian, from the fathers of the desert to those of Byzantine and Russian monasticism), but also interrogating the philosophical and theological reflections of the Christian East and of some great spiritual figures of Orthodoxy, tried to rediscover the fruitful relation of these two poles that constitute human living.

After the greeting of the prior of Bose, Enzo Bianchi, and the reading of the messages received, the opening talk by bishop Irinej of Ba?ka (Novi Sad) on The Church and the monastic experience underlined the roots of the monastic movement within the Church. The interpenetration between solitude and communion, as Petros Vassiliadis (Communion and solitude: Biblical elements) observed, is a constant both in Scripture and in the course of the Church’s history, where two tendencies seem to be in contrast with one another: “on the horizontal plane of the people called by God (ekklesia — liturgy — community/communion) and on the vertical plane of the individual’s relation with God (monasticism — anachoretism — eremitism)”.

A point of equilibrium between the spiritualistic (and individualistic) impulse and the ecclesial dimension (the theological meaning of communion) of the monastic experience, but more in general by Christian spirituality itself, is represented undoubtedly in the fourth century, not by chance the period of the great Christological controversies, in the theological reflection of Basil the Great (Michel van Parys, Communion and solitude according to St Basil of Caesarea).
The coordinates of “communion and solitude”, thus, constitute the space of understanding not only the phenomenon of monasticism, but also the very oscillations of Christian spirituality in various ways in both East and West. In this way the development of these lines of force in dissimilar contexts were presented diachronically. It appeared sufficiently clear, as a substantial convergence of views by various speakers showed, that a too rigid contraposition between “hermitage” and “cenobium”, between solitary life and life in common, is arbitrary. Outlines of classification, which appear also in ancient writers, are abstract and totally inadequate if they are taken as a rigid mirroring of a living and fluid spiritual reality, always ready to place under discussion in concrete life every hasty theoretical approximation. This is true of Byzantine monasticism (studied by Kriton Chryssochoidis, Cenobium and hermitage in the Byzantine monastic tradition ) and of Russian monasticism, analyzed by Tat’jana Karbasova and Tat’jana Rudi on the basis of hagiographical texts (Cenobium and hermitage in old Rus’: the hagiographic tradition, fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) and by Gleb Zapal’skij with relation to the historical experience of Optina Pustyn’ and its skete of St John the Forerunner. The indissoluble circling between personal search of God and opening to a universal communion is even central in the monastic experience and works of a father who is fundamental for the spirituality of the Christian East and West: Saint Isaac the Syrian (presented by Sabino Chialà). The continual inter-relation between solitary life and the community dimension, between desert and cenobium, applies also to the West, as father Armand Veilleux, abbot of Scourmont, repeated in his paper on Cenobium and hermitage in the Western monastic tradition.

The two dimensions of solitude and communion must not be disjointed if one does not want to risk a dangerous deviation. This is all the more timely on the post-modern horizon of the atomization of the subject. It is the Christian notion of “person” that permits a harmonious composition of the two needs of “subjective freedom” and “communal being”. A close examination of what Orthodox thought reserves to the concept of person and communion (Konstantinos Agoras, Athens; Konstantin Sigov, Kiev), thus, introduced a reflection concerning today. This continued with an analysis of the spiritual experience of two extraordinary figures of contemporary solitaries, father Cleopa of Sihistria (1912-1998) and father Porfyrios of Kafsokalyvia (1906–1991), who were capable of a universal and cosmic communion, presented at the conference by metropolitan Serafim of Germany and by Athanasios N. Papathanassiou.

The Round Table dedicated to the monastic experience,  Living in communion, living in solitude, completed this itinerary by listening to the concrete experience of the life of contemporary monks and nuns. Taking part in this were bishop Nazarij of Vyborg, supeior of the Holy Trinity lavra of St Alexander Nevskij (St Petersburg), father Placide Deseille (monastery of St Antony the Great), delegate of the igumen of the Athonite Simonos Petra monastery, igumen Damaskinos (Gavalas) of the monastery of the Prophet Elias (Santorini), sister Salome of the Panaghia monastery (Sayde), mother Annamaria Canopi of the monastery of Isola San Giulio d’Orta, father Andrej (?ilerdži?) of the Holy Archangels monastery (Kovilj).

In the context of those countries that until recently lived the dramatic experience of state atheism, the reconstitution of church communion can run the risk of a self-sufficient isolation in a ghetto-like sectarian closure. Christians should know how to open those systems of human relations that tend to close in upon themselves, in order to give space to the Spirit’s transfiguring energy, who in them and through them vivifies the universe (Kirill Hovorun, Initiation to ecclesial communion today: from its isolation to transfiguring opening).

It is the energy of hope that shines even in the hell of isolation and of estrangement from God, as saints like Seraphim of Sarov or Silvan of Mount Athos have shown. “By becoming burning flames of prayer, the saints transform the surrounding world by their existence alone, by the simple fact of their secret presence” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Communion and solitude yesterday and today).