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Franz Nahrada:

"When we are assembling today in this wonderfully renovated monastery, I feel this place is talking to us. The story is not only about the Paulines and the Carmelites who inhabited this monastary for centuries. The story is about a way of life that once upon a time was an important reality and has gradually lost significance through the centuries.

The story is about a deep desire to live our life in wholeness. It is about a place that manifests our desire as human beings to be in resonance with something from within that we feel is constantly drowned out by the noise of the world. An external constraint, a closed space created to unfold inner freedom. But this retreat is not just a refuge, it is every once in a while of utter importance for society at large.

Since 20 years I am working with an increasing number of friends on a project called Global Villages. Its the infinite idea that global information flows have the potential to spark an unprecedented renaissance of the local. Its what McLuhan called the law of retrieval: any new medium has the potential to retrieve and revive formerly obsolesced patterns, so history is never linear, but very often recycling. Think for example how email brought back traits of written personal correspondence which was obsolesced before by the telephone.

We use villages as a symbol for the local, but in fact the local is a rich ecosystem which consists of landscape, farms, villages, small towns, early industries. But more than that. Historically, we see centers of wealth and power, the castles and palaces, and we see centers of spirituality and knowledge. Often these forms were mixed. In European history, wee see a period dating from the 8th to the 12th century where the monastery was the prevailing focal point of a local renaissance after the collapse of the Roman empire.

The tradition was older, though. Some people opted out of their regular lives in the very moment shortly before and after Christianity became the state religion of the empire. These became the famous desert fathers, like Paul and Anthony, depicted later in the influental Collationes Patrum (Conferences by John Cassianus. Their goal was to keep the original energy alive and to keep their heart clean and they saw no other way than the refuge to the desert. This refuge is seen as heroic fight against inner demons which represent chaos, the prize of this fight being the ability to establish divine order and the spirit of creation.

From this very beginning, Western monastic history is unfolding as a constant interplay between the goal of individual growth and the felt necessity to do this within a protecting and protected community. The wall became a substitute for the desert, but what happened inside the wall was to be a long and complex evolutionary development. The main points of contention were the role of work, the rhythms between individual and community life and the degree to which certain amenities were allowed or being considered destructive. The ideal of hermitage was never completely abandoned, the rule of Benedikt for example sees it as the ultimate ideal after a long training in community.

But very soon after the first congregations of the hermits in upper Egypt emerged around the famous abbot Pachomius and his first rule - they called themselves cenobites, the ones living together - monasteries not only protected and supported their members, but assumed roles for their environments. They started with healing and caring for the sick and the elderly, they started to educate youth.

The Golden Age of Monasteries

The decay of the western Roman Empire, the barbarian migration, the rise of Islam were factors that led to a more and more important and different role of monasteries. Starting from Lerins near Cannes monasteries became institutions that evolved into an ambigous character: the dormitory replaced the cell, monks were recognized as part of the clergy, the monastery became a place of higher education and of higher internal discipline. What had started as a retreat from the world ended as an ever growing social assignment. This was echoed from the north, especially Ireland, where monasteries were a priori more a social service to the tribes - often voluntarily christianised druids. When they decided to "globalise" their service, they were the catalizers of the first medieval renaissance of the 8th/9th century. They also brought the love for books and the art of brewery into the monastic world.

Again it was the work of a monk of different nature that built on all that and gave form and place to one of the most important developments in history. Bonifatius was Anglo Saxon and missionary. He catalyzed the idea to revitalise Roman Law and Legitimity in the Franco-Karolingian world, including the idea of (theocratic) Empire. His ideas fell on fertile ground: for several centuries, the monasteries became the spearheads of internal colonisation, the development of feudalism in Europe. The Benedictine Rule became a law backed by worldly powers. Monasteries were endowments and foundations of regional lords, they became equipped with enormous wealth, eventually had armies of servants and often enough even real armed forces. They became the centers of popular piety, often with enormous churches. The monks spoke Latin and Greek. They started engaging in poetry and music and even laid the foundation to western musical notation. Monasteries started discovering architecture, astronomy, painting, sculpturing and carving. Abbots became travelling political consultants and leave their daily work to the prior.

It is this time I mostly refer to when I want to talk about the retrieval of the monastic pattern. Of course all the later reforms and counterreforms, all decay and all diversity is rooted in this ambiguity between retreat and purpose. We learn horrible details when we hear about the methods of punishment for disobedience. We see that even in the year 800 there was corruption and greed, some monasteries were only looking out for rich novices. And yet, for several centuries this ambiguous construction of monasteries showed enormous results.

Maybe it is even justified to see the monasteries as the birthplace of the modern individual. Around the year 1000 the mystics started to bloom and seek a radically individualistic way to god, including the Carthusian retrieval of individual meditation. A new idea of brotherhood emerged, laypersons were allowed to enter the monasteries, double monasteries hosted men and women in cooperation. Berengar, Anselm of Canterbury and Abaelard started to evangelize reason and independent thinking.

So the history of monasteries is colorful and interesting, full of glorious moments and breakdowns. As the 12th century renaissance took place, the center of thought and social impact migrated to cities, universities, academies. And only in the 16th century the age of reason could really prevail.

But what justifies the idea that monasteries would be a pattern whose time is coming up again?

A New Beginning

We can look at history in full details and we see how lines on necessities and simultaneous developments come together, catalyzed by the ideas and visions and passion of Individuals. The monastic age in Western Europe was an age of transformation, of the passing of a great empire, of a power shift. It was an age of innovations in agriculture, and landscaping, of the move of knowledge and technology to areas that were largely wilderness.

Today we have a situation where again the future is open. We know by now, just from the experience of the last three years, and many people of course know it since much longer time, that we are facing a great transformation again. Like in the age of the desert fathers, the empire has overstretched its capacities and is facing the rebound effect. The passing of todays empire might overshadow its historical analogy in speed and drama. The slavery to money and debt and the battles of production have exhausted the capacities of earths ecosystems. The capitalist paradox is that it is too much wealth that brings the systems performance down to zero. The violence following the synchronous 4, the resource crisis and economic crisis, the climate crisis and the political crisis can lead to deadlier wars than ever experienced in history. Millions of people around the globe are protesting, but no one has an alternative to the current system and its disastrous dynamics. People are getting numb by the shere dimension of the issues at stake.

"Today the pressures on the human person are growing and simultaneously many of humanity's traditional support-systems are weakening. There is a need to establish “healing points" of refuge and recultivation, and this will necessitate looking afresh for inspiration at the world's monastic traditions." (John Orme Mills)

As much as the threatening scenarios are multiplying, the elements of the solution are growing, too. Never before in history was it possible to share the knowledge of the whole world in any single place of this planet. Never before was it possible to solve so many issues locally. Automation has given us the tools to drastically miniaturize production and services, to interact technologically with nature, to build humane ecosystems. Electrical power can be yielded from sunlight and wind like never before, allowing for massive decentralisation of life and an enormous reduction of transportation. We are beginning to fully understand the integrated wisdom of natural ecosystems and we are starting to build organically instead of linear. We are surrounded by thousands of infinite ideas that help us build a new world - and we can share them instantly.

The only problem: if we wait for someone to pay for this, we are being doomed. We need to create the spheres where we can unfold in active doing. We can learn from the monastic tradition that if we believe in our collective power then we easily can let go of the things we thought we needed to keep us alive. The monastic tradition as the building that hosts us today tells us about the power of belief which can move mountains.

Some starting points

I confess I have failed 2 times with bringing a (neo)monastic idea to life, once in Croatia (Mljet) and once in Austria (Neuberg) but this is exactly why am I standing here. The thought must be spread first, even before we look at a particular building or site.

When we were talking about the idea of opening underused monasteries of the catholic church to well - reviewed communities of inspiration and vision in Rome in 2002, I used a metaphor. I said as each one of the catholic orders fulfills a great role in the great family of the church, we need to ask if there is a similar possibility of a concert of cultures and religions, a global family of mankind working for a common goal. At that time, the church reacted negatively to this thought.

But those who want to oppose the growing religious tensions must set a practical example. What if religious communities around the world would engage in knowledge cooperation of various kinds, in simple subjects they could possibly agree on? Fields like technology, healing, arts allow many complemeting visions, views and solutions to be exchanged and assembled. Maybe existing monasteries or wats could engage in also becoming experimental laboratories to live light on this earth, to use the infinite power of nature to replenish and renew itself, to arrange life in flows.

At the same time, we need to look at non-religious intentional communities that want to intensify their work. A good example is the free software movement, that already uses the coming together in physical places to achieve difficult tasks.

A far fledged vision

Many of you might be familiar with the novel "The Glass Bead Game" by Hermann Hesse. In this novel which is set to describe a 23rd century reality a neomonastic tradition has successfully re-established a public education system after a so called "Age of Feuilletonism" that resembles our age.

What is interesting about this novel, is that science, art and spirituality merge in an interesting proposal. The glass bead game is even superior to mathematics and music. "It is a game that encopasses all contents and values of our culture, it plays with them as, say, a painter - in the great age of the arts - might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras; and all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values - the Glass Bead Game player plays all of that like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its register are almost beyond number. Theoretically the whole content of the world in all details relevant to insight and understanding could be recreated with this game.“

This is a concept of almost religious reverence. The goal of the monastic life, to get in touch with the essence of creation, is achieved by the combination of science and play.

I want to point to an ongoing development in the intellectual world that in a very exciting way seems to fulfil Hesses prophecy. Recently Christopher Alexander published his book "The Nature Of Order" in which he claims that science so far has been unable to understand the nature of life and the nature of a living, evolving universe. By understanding that there are laws of spontaneous, self - organizing order, that even without the presence of a master controller this universe is constantly and intelligently designing and redesigning itself, we come to a point very similar to what religion was looking for. We understand that humans can either be a destructive force or join in to a development that is much older and greater than us. We understand that we are players and we can aply the rules correctly and start to really take care the living reality around us. This is the key to oneness, wholeness and ataining the best possibility of our self. So the Glass Bead Game might just become reality."

Monasteries of the Future

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