Labor and Work in the Ethics of Contemporary Orthodoxy: Restoring a Peasant House, Monastery and Holy Russia

Drawing on the case of the repair of a peasant house by residents of a dilapidated (and also being restored) Orthodox monastery in the Russian North, the article raises the question of the relationship between theology and economics of economic ethics. The ethnographic analysis of this article focuses on the categories of “labor” and “work” in the practice of restoration and on the example of the hegumen of the monastery and his wards. My argument is that the spiritualization of “labor” and the theological understanding of the “laborer” in the context of the restoration of the Church is opposed to the economic (secular) strategies of “work” and “worker”. The hegumen inscribes the reconstruction of the destroyed peasant house into the general concept of the restoration of the church, which is carried out in the conditions of modernity and its challenges. The restoration of the Church seems to the hegumen and his wards not so much a “work” to repair cultural monuments, but a “labor” to return to the pre-revolutionary way of life, which is the prototype of a utopian paradise, Holy Russia. “Labor” and “work” are different by their temporalities: work is aimed at the result in the future while labor as spiritual practice is grounding for the return to the past. The article examines how the methodology of the ideal types of connection between Protestant ethics and capitalism (Weber) can be applied in the context of Orthodox economic ethics (Zabaev) through Weber's “understanding” methodology. The purpose of the article is to point out the inconsistency of binary oppositions used to interpret labor and work practices in an Orthodox monastery, and the need to consider them in the context of the historical continuity of practices and their meanings.