The Double Economy of two monasteries of Mount Athos: Contemporary issues and moral dilemmas

In the monasteries of the autonomous monastic Republic of Mount Athos, the term 'economy' means the 'law (nomos) of the house (ecos)'. The term is as old as the rule of the Avaton (meaning 'no pass'), the thousand year old prohibition of all females from the peninsula,which separates monastic from secular life. The economy of the Athonian monasteries has internal and external aspects: Internal exchanges take place in the night through a set of private and collective practices associated to spiritual activities regarding the cultivation of the self in terms of apatheia (meaning ‘no passions’). Such activities take place within an informal and spiritual hierarchical system, that equally emphasizes both on the detachment of each monk from his materialist and sexual desires, and from the emotional ties that he carries into the monastery from his secular past, in order to liberate him from such ‘passions’. On the other hand, external activities refer to the daily work that needs to be done regarding the financial survival, legal status, and vocation of the Monastery as a contemporary institution in the Orthodox world. The two realms are conceived separately: the spiritual hierarchy is headed by the priest-monks with liturgical duties in the night and working tasks in the day regarding the running of the community from inside, while the administrative hierarchy is headed by the Elders, who are responsible for administrative, financial, and legal matters of the monastery. However, as I shall show, in everyday practice, the spiritual and material realms are complementary to each other. Their interdependence becomes evident by looking at the impact of recent changes in monastic life, namely, the importation of new technologies such as the Internet that undermine the Avaton, the impact of the increasing religious tourism that burdens the daily timetable of the monks, the exploitation of the forest for logging and exporting wood, the exploitation of Athonian tradition by selling copies of ‘miraculous’ items through the Internet and a network of shops and churches from Greece to the US, the consequences of accepting funding from the EU, the issue of monastic properties outside Athos (metochia) and taxation, and the political involvement of the monasteries in Greek public life regarding ‘matters of faith’, all reveal the increasing tension between the spiritual conduct of each monk inside the monasteries, in contrast to the external conduct of the monastic institutions outside Athos, which largely contradicts their ‘virgin’ way of life and communal values inside. The paper will briefly investigate these tensions between internal(informal) and external (formal) aspects of monastic economy, by comparing the economic organization of two rival monasteries, in order to highlight the contradictions and moral dilemmas rising from their conduct within the neo-liberal market and contemporary politics of faith. Key Words : economy, virginity, Avaton, apatheia, tamata, metochia, kosmikos, Old Calendar