ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the creative strategies by means of which NMCs (re)invent monasticism. As we hinted in the first chapter, New Monks are not interested in reforming monasticism from within, unlike many traditional communities throughout Europe ( Jonveaux 2014). Although considering themselves ‘children of monasticism’, they refuse to join the ‘authorized descent’, which is to say established monastic orders. They draw freely from tradition, finding in a duly selected past (pre-Benedectine monasticism) a set of references (rules, practices, apophthegms) which – reinterpreted and arranged according to personal charismas, especially the leader’s – inspire their life in common. Since this attitude demonstrates these innovators’ desire to question the historical representation of monasticism, it is reasonable to maintain that they do not collocate themselves within what Winthrop (1981) has defined as ‘the paradigm of monasticism’ (cf. Chapter 1). My thesis is that they (re)invent tradition because rather than renewing the paradigm they substitute it with another which they have themselves elaborated and which, as we shall see, radically modifies the rules and basic assumptions of the paradigm of reference. The most critical observers claim that the New Monks (‘pretenders’) cannot but put forward an imaginary bond with traditional monks (‘legitimate heirs’).1
