Clash of worlds on Mount Sinai
The fate of St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, which has been functioning since the Emperor Justinian built a castle around the Burning Bush in the 6th century, has become the subject of a court decision, sparking sudden diplomatic tension between two countries that are friends – Greece and Egypt. Christianity’s presence in the area is recorded from the middle of the 4th century, when the great Syrian ascetic Julian Sabas built a church on the peak of the Mountain of Moses. Justinian’s castle was completed in 556-7.
The monastery is important not only for the Greek Orthodox faithful but for all Christians, for Jews and Muslims, as this is where God spoke to Moses through the Burning Bush, where He gave him the Ten Commandments, where the prophet Elijah discerned God in the voice of a gentle breeze. This is where the abbot St John wrote “The Ladder,” describing virtue’s steps upwards towards perfection, towards love. St Catherine’s is the oldest functioning Christian monastery, the riches of its library second only to the Vatican’s. Among its treasures is an official copy of the Prophet Mohammed’s covenant protecting “the followers of the Nazarene in the East and West.” The study of palimpsests in the library are a project of global renown, revealing lost manuscripts and the extent to which – through the ages – visitors made it to the remote monastery from all corners of Christendom. How can this living monument, which survived so many difficulties over 1,500 years, be threatened now?
The main cause for concern is that in our age nothing is impossible. Conventions that are centuries old, rules of behavior, traditional values and alliances are overturned with great ease, as the turbulence in the global system encourages states to try shape developments as they see fit. Governments face domestic pressure from extremist forces, and nationalism is always a useful tool for uniting the greatest part of the population. This encourages division and shows of force against minorities – often religious ones. In the case of St Catherine’s, perhaps a deeper cause for concern is the dissonance between “religious time” and political time.
The monastery has existed for 1,500 years, while Egypt has been an independent state for just over a century. The very concept of independent, sovereign states is only 377 years old, from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. So it is very difficult for a religious community, for a monastery that is the guardian of holy places, relics and treasures, to be obliged to comply with a state’s bureaucratic and political demands. As inconceivable as it is to raise an issue of an ancient, self-governing monastery’s ownership, it is difficult for a state of our time to manage something which is beyond its framework, which basically belongs to another world, another time. An interesting aspect of this dissonance is how we Greeks have a deep-rooted sense of historical time.
The passion and mobilization prompted by the threat to the ownership and religious functioning of St Catherine’s (like our mourning for the Fall of Constantinople) are the living expression of an ancient sense of ecumenism. Things that happened or are happening in faraway places, or in other times, affect us directly – as a nation and as individuals.
Source: ekathimerini.com
