Crossing the timescape of the ‘Here and Now’ on Mount Athos

Abstract

This article focuses on how the monks of Mount Athos embody its unique timescape in their presentation of the monastic self in everyday life, as it emerges out of the musicality of the Athonian landscape. The article unfolds the embodied dialectics in play between the experience of messianic time and its spiritual affordances against which one's bodily resilience is sociomaterially tested in and by the ‘Here and Now’, following the metronomic measuring of time and its historical affordances. By comparing two ways of measuring each ‘hour’, the article further investigates the use value given to one's personal time as an experiential means of teaching the ‘techne of time’ for cultivating a monastic ‘self’ within and against a ‘world’ out there. The article draws three overlapping nested temporal cycles in terms of per‐forming the ‘self’ within the organic community and the institution, through which one naturalizes, synchronizes, and interiorizes the horologion with the tempos of everyday life. Finally, it argues that the crossing from the secular to the monastic timescape disrupts the continuity of common life and its expectations, by opening a self‐revelatory time rupture revealing Eternity in every instance of one's paradoxical presence in the present moment in and out of time.