Discretio and the Golden Mean: Working out Frugality and Thrift in Two Czech Postsocialist Monasteries
Abstract
Since 2000, a few monasteries in Czech Republic have been reestablished after their almost complete suppression in the eighteen century and then being rendered illegal during the socialist regime. In Benedictine monasteries the monks have had to reinterpret what it means to be a monastic community in the twenty - first century. that follows an ancient, sixth-century rule.
In this chapter, based on fieldwork in two monasteries, I focus on how they were working out the best response to the Regula's directives on frugality and thrift, which might, at first sight, seem to be at odds with other moral imperatives associated with care for people, land, and the monastery itself. I explore below how the monastic communities worked out this tension between economic and spiritual logics in practice by at once distinguishing between different domains (spiritual and economic), scales (e.g., the individual soul, the monastic community, regional stewardship), and publics (guests, pilgrims, the local secular community, the public-at-large), uniting them through a shared adherence to a sense of the golden mean.