THE GREAT SILENCE

Monastic mysticism as resistance to oppression and revolutionary action

Abstract

Modern Philosophy considered faith to be a private matter. However, for Jürgen Habermas, societies have become complex and the direction of politics is in deep crisis, given the difficulties of the rational formation of the public will. Habermas understands that religions are part of the genealogy of reason and that pluralistic societies cannot forget them. Among the various manifestations of Christian spirituality, monastic mysticism presents a concrete path of resistance to oppression and action to transform reality that needs to be revisited and understood by religious and secular people. In order to answer this problem, it will be necessary to investigate the normative role of faith in deliberative politics for Jürgen Habermas, as well as the implications of the society of the spectacle and social networks on the public sphere; to investigate monastic mysticism as a path not only of individual conversion, but also of resistance to political oppression and revolutionary action present in the apophthegms of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, lay men and women who lived as monks and hermits in the Egyptian deserts during the 4th to 5th centuries AD. The research may reveal that religions have a normative and ethical framework capable of restoring and reinforcing collective bonds that are strained and worn out by power relations, rehabilitating communication and the rational formation of the public sphere in meanders in which strictly scientific rationality is unable to justify or adequately ground. A hermeneutic approach will be used to interpret the texts and apophthegms, integrating the results of the analysis to build a coherent discussion that reflects on the implications of the thought of Habermas and the Desert Fathers and Mothers for understanding the problem of class struggle in the pluralist and unequal political context. This study indicates that monastic mysticism can contribute to the reconstruction of human dignity vilified by power relations, in addition to assisting in discussions about human rights, linked to the notion of dignity, in addition to fostering behaviors that are important for democratic social coexistence.