ABSTRACT
As Hervieu-Léger (2012) suggests, it is reasonable to suppose that the scarcity of sociological studies on monasticism is due to the diculties which this object of research present to the sociologist. As a general rule, the rst operation carried out by researchers when studying social reality is a criticism of commonsense denitions and conceptual categories produced by the social actors. But a particular problem arises when the researchers approach monasticism: the indeterminate nature of the concept for the actors themselves. Monks and nuns – interviewed recently by sociologists (Genova and Palmisano 2014) –
supply several dierent answers to the question ‘Who is a monk or a nun today?’. Many of them, inspired by the Rule of Saint Benedict, state that anybody ‘who seeks God’ is a monk; others – alluding to the Greek monos – that it is ‘whoever is one in the sense of united or unied’; still others that it is anybody ‘who has detached him/herself from the world with the aim of completing one’s own spiritual perfection rather than of serving others’. ere is even more variety in the range of responses to the question ‘How do monks and nuns seek God today?’ e most important dichotomy can be seen between those who separate from the world (with grills, walls or watercourses) and those who – albeit maintaining a critical distance from the world – are incorporated into it, which is to say not taking refuge from it, rejecting the habit and enclosure and, as in urban monasticism, residing at the heart of the city.
