Claudio Mésoniat

This article by Swiss journalist Claudio Mésoniat offers a field report on the so-called "neo-orthodox" movement that emerged in Greece in the early 1980s. Through encounters with left-wing intellectuals, academic activists, and theologians — notably Kostas Zouraris, Christos Yannaras, and members of the student movement Exon — the author analyzes the driving forces behind an unexpected rapprochement between the Greek Marxist intelligentsia and the Orthodox Church. The central idea is that the crisis of ideologies, combined with the rediscovery of the Athonite monastic tradition, gave rise to a spiritual and communal quest that Marxism could no longer satisfy. The contribution of the article lies in documenting, through direct testimonies, the way in which Orthodox theology — particularly the notion of freedom as deification and personalist spirituality — established itself as an existential and social response in a context of political disillusionment.

This article offers a journalistic perspective on the "neo-orthodox" movement in Greece in the early 1980s, through an interview with Greek singer Dionissis Savopoulos and the presentation of a collective work entitled *Orthodoxy and Marxism*. The approach is that of reportage and direct testimony. The central idea is that intellectuals and artists from the Greek left are rediscovering Orthodoxy not through ideological rupture, but as the culmination of a search for meaning rooted in shared experience and living tradition. The Athonite monastic tradition plays the role of a spiritual revealer. On the theological level, the article highlights the capacity of Greek Orthodoxy to constitute a place of convergence between social commitment and ecclesial rootedness, while pointing out the movement's limitations: a sometimes schematic anti-Westernism and insufficient reflection on the mediations between faith and politics.