Concluding remarks of the conference

 

The continuous inter-relation between solitary life and the community dimension, between desert and cenobium, finally, is valid for the West, where cycles of renewal of the spiritual life alternate, characterized by either an accent on the eremitical life or on a reform of cenobitic life.

An exceptional witness of this interaction was the historic experience of Optina Pustyn’, which significantly placed at the center of the dynamic between cenobium and anachoretism the life of prayer, personal and common. Here, of course, we touch on a very profound and ample topic, which by itself could constitute the subject of a conference.

It is just here that we come to the question that modernity poses to the Christian experience. If the great modern parabola can be described as a passage from heteronomy to autonomy — the exit from a hierarchical, closed world towards an open universe based on the principle of equality, in which everyone is theoretically the maker of his own future — the paradoxical result is a radical solitude of the individual, of which the anonymous character of the crowd is only the hidden face.

The challenge of community on the postmodern horizon is perhaps that of having communities that are capable of instilling hope, not a utopia of a completely transparent relation, but concrete common life with manifold relations. The modern suspicion of every coercion of the self paradoxically risks annulling the free gift of meeting the other in collective ideology or in the indifference of individualism. An authentic dialectic between communion and solitude demands instead to be realized in confidence and gratitude towards the other: in an ever new thanksgiving, in eucharistic practice.

Koinonia not only defines the horizontal plane of relations between persons, but opens a glimpse on the life of the divine Persons. “To be signifies life, and life signifies communion” (Zizioulas). Without person there is no communion, but without communion there is no person.