Athonian monastic life and the (re)emergence of relational ontology beyond "Eastern" and "Western" Christianities: Moral dilemmas and practical challenges in the formation of the World Society

Abstract

This paper brings together ethnography as practice research, and theology as experiential theory, towards a comparative ontological interdisciplinary understanding of relational personhood in the world society. The first part of the paper consists of ethnographic data gathered from two monasteries of Mount Athos during my fieldwork between 2002 and 2004, using the anthropological discourse of the "sacred" in terms of reciprocity to represent and interpret the exceptional, heterogeneous, and distinctive character of Orthodox monastic life in ethnographic descriptive terms. In doing so, the paper focuses on the revival of two Byzantine oppositional movements in the 20th century: Hesychasm and Zealotism. In this context, the material raises questions regarding detraditionalization and re-traditionalization, disenchantment and re-enchantment. The paper places these challenges within the postmodern turn to spirituality and subjectivity, and the wider emergence of global Christianity as a postmodern phenomenon. The second part of the paper focuses on the revival of the Greek neo-patristic theology in the 1960s and the writings of Christos Yannaras, interpreted as a postcolonial critique of the discourse of modernity from the relational ontological perspective of Trinitarian theology. It places the empirical material gathered from Athos within the millennial turn to relational ontology, by following the two fundamental elements of personhood: Freedom and Otherness. The paper argues that the millennial opening of Christianity to the world stage and its increasing engagement in the formation of a world society takes place in terms of how one relates both to the invisible God and the visible material World. The paper argues that the (re) emergence of relational ontology in monasticism gives it a distinctive and economic character in a symbiosis with nature and the Others via God's grace, as it emerges within this moment of history and the creation of Ecumenical Christianity. The paper points out to the grey challenging areas that reveal contestation between different understandings of the same relations, traditions, and practices, sometimes even in opposition to each other. It argues that it is though these series of dialectics that constitute the relational ontology of the monastic persona as heterogeneous and ever-changing experience of being and becoming in the World via God's energies, based on the relational ontological Freedom and Otherness (rather than a sterile theoretical concept or a singular stereotype). In this experiential and relational manner, the paper develops the dialectics of these forces from both social anthropological and theological perspectives, sketching the (re)emergence of millennial relational ontology both as a theory (Yannaras) and in practice (monastic living) beyond the modern categories of "East" and "West," and towards the potential role the monastics could play in this moment of History. The material is based on my own fieldwork on Athos that took place back in 2002 to 2004, as well as subsequent research in both Athonian history and archives, from the interdisciplinary perspective of the sociology of religion and contemporary Greek theology. As part of my research on contemporary monastic life on Athos, I chose to do my fieldwork in two neighbouring but rival monasteries, because they represented two opposite attitudes in how the monk relate to the world. Accordingly, the material for this paper looks at the impact of new technologies and world politics on the vocation of the monasteries revealing the heterogeneity and challenges facing monastic life on Athos today in the prospect of the emergence of a new global Christianity within the world setting. It argues that monastic life offers both a model of an alternative and distinctive way of living in relation to the "self", the Others, as well as, world issues, via God's grace on the relational ontological basis of Freedom and Otherness. The opening of the monastic vocation to the world shows however a diversity of modules of engaging with the world that reveal the heterogeneity of ways of relating to God via God's energies because of the same open principles. As the "field" changes within the world system, the challenge for monastics today is both to open and enlarge their vocation in the world via new technologies, but at the same time, to avoid the homogenization of those voices, to preserve the heterogeneity that freely exists in Christian thought in relation to the Other - beyond rigid categorizations and stereotypes of "Eastern" and "Western" Christianities.