Concluding remarks of the conference

 

During these days we have concentrated on the dynamic that leads from the isolation of individuals to the communion of persons, which necessarily passes through an authentic interior life in liberty. More than once the messages of the heads of the Churches represented here have shown this, pointing out the teaching offered by the monastic experience, where solitude and silence introduce a person “to relations and to being in communion with others” (Bartholomew I of Constantinople), and showing how the dimensions of solitude and communion find a model of harmonious mutual penetration in the life of Jesus himself as it is given us in the Gospel narrative (patriarch Kirill of Moscow and pope Benedict XVI).

Perhaps here we have already traced the basic lines that have guided our reflection. Solitude and communion are constituent elements of being human in the world, but they are illuminated by Christ. In the mystery of the Church, one and multiple, is manifested the christological foundation of solitude and communion and together with it the pneumatogical dimension of this fundamental polarity of the spiritual life. “The action of Christ unifies, the action of the Holy Spirit diversifies” (Vladimir Lossky).

This interpenetration of solitude and communion is a constant in Scripture and in the Church’s history. The dimension of “desert” (eremos) as a place of trial and of meeting with the living God, a time and place of obedience and of disobedience to the Word, is fundamental for the spiritual experience of Israel, the event that constitutes it as the “holy assembly”. Before the word of communion comes the word of separation: to become in the likeness of God — the biblical definition of man — is to become in the likeness of a God who lives distant, in hiding, a God who calls to communion, not to fusion. Jesus himself deepens the meaning of his vocation in the desert: the knowledge of God in solitude opens us to communion in truth.

In the New Testament the term communion (koinonia) indicates essentially participation in the divine life revealed by Jesus Christ, which manifests itself in particular in its Eucharistic dimension, “in the communion of Christ’s body and blood” (cf. 1Cor 10,16). It is in eucharistic community that even the monastic experience is rooted ecclesially, which preserves it from those sectarian deviations that are always possible and which contradict communion.

Thanks to the theological and spiritual reflection of St Basil in the fourth century, which not by chance was the period of the great Christological controversies, the monastic experience too was re-conducted to that fundamental human and Christian balance between the individual’s interior freedom and communion in the company of men. This was perfectly realized in Christ, who for the love of the Father and of men shed his blood in the total abandonment of the cross. “In the absolute solitude of the cross Jesus caused communion to be born” (Olav Tveit).