“…There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places — places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society — which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality…” (— Michel Foucault in Of Other Spaces)

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Frescoes in the Monastery of Panagia Soumela, founded 386, Pontic Mountains, Turkey. Full view of monastery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumela_Monastery#/media/File:Sumela_From_Across_Valley.JPG

It is not necessary to travel back in time to Jesuit colonies in 18th century Paraguay; the quintessential heterotopia can be found today, in any traditional Eastern Orthodox monastery.
If we look at the several examples of heterotopias presented by Foucault, we can find them all co-existing in the extraordinary space that is the Orthodox monastery. One reason there is no need for time-travel is because Orthodoxy takes very seriously the notion that “one day is as a thousand years” — aside from having electricity, indoor plumbing and (sometimes) labour-saving devices, little has changed in the rhythms and practices of daily life since the first cenobitic monasteries were founded under the Rule of St Basil in the mid-4th century, and the very design of the monastery itself has remained static to reflect the original notions of life lived in the kingdom of God on earth, “in this world but not of it” — the Church at the centre and walls to define the “inside” and “outside” worlds.

Monastery of St Catherine of Sinai, built in the mid-6th century, as it looks today. (http://www.sinaimonastery.com/) The monk John who wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent was a monk at this monastery in the 7th century. The current brotherhood is made up of men from all over the world.

The mirror: we are ourselves, but elsewhere. Upon permanently entering the Orthodox monastic order (there is just one), while we are obviously the product of our previous lives in the body, the tonsure makes us into another. With a new name and the injunction to forget the past and all those whom we knew, we live in a community which only sees the mirror-version of ourselves and reflects it back to us. The Church as a whole participates to create an entire new world for the nun or monk, with its capitol cities in Constantinople — the utopia of Byzantine dreams — and other now functionally non-existent places like Alexandria and Antioch. And the Church herself (the worldly typos of the theological Virgin Mary as Theotokos, Christ-bearer) both exists as physical buildings and members, but is also — as it’s central ‘reality’ — located in ‘eternal time’, the souls of communicants being continually divinized on the journey from birth to death (theosis).

Heterotopia of Crisis

The monastery is first and foremost a heterotopia of deviation. One “leaves the world”, or as we find it in the writings of Ἰωάννης τῆς Κλίμακος, or The Ladder of Divine Ascent: Step 1 is renunciation of the world. (http://www.prudencetrue.com/images/TheLadderofDivineAscent.pdf). What brings people to turn their backs on society and the comforts of friends and family, material possessions, power over one’s time and even thoughts, to renounce individual freedoms and prefer communal living and labour to autonomy? In my own experience, and in most modern accounts, it is a sense of crisis. The monastery is a separate space where the big questions find answers, a space where gender is transcended, virginity is ‘restored’, the past is negated, ageing and even death no longer alienate or separate one from the life of the community, and it all takes place hidden from the eyes of outsiders.
Countless times women have said to me, “you know, I once wanted to become a nun myself” — the seductive nature of the monastic heterotopia is easily understood; reading the promises of monastic texts such as The Ladder can inspire faith and the desire for God even in those who had never seriously considered religion. To be able to “leave your life” without actually committing suicide, to walk away from the guilt incurred from cooperating with an unjust society, to be relieved of responsibility for what is outside of our control and the weight of history, our own as well as the world’s, to redefine “reality” and find meaning in the deepest sense; the privations of the monastic rule can pale into insignificance compared to the tremendous freedom the liberation from self-care can bring.

The Russian Orthodox community of Jordanville, NY, founded in 1935, which centres around Holy Trinity Monastery; here, nuns, monks, and laypeople in the nearby town live (and dress!) as 19th century peasants, segregating themselves in their 21st century heterotopia. http://www.jordanville.org/ ; http://saintelizabethskete.org/

Heterotopia of the Garden; Of Time and Space

Monasteries are often called gardens, microcosms not of Earth but of Paradise (though while we try our best to behave as angels, there is enough of the ‘old Adam’ to keep things village-like). The layout of a Byzantine-style cathedral leads one from the outside world to where the congregation stands, to behind the iconostasis and into the altar, which is like a portal to the divine Energies of God in the Holy Mysteries. The monastery is insulated from the concept of time; bells are rung according to clocks, but ‘morning’ begins at night: on Mount Athos, the clocks are reset to 12 noon at sunrise every day (which they call ‘Byzantine time’), and many monasteries use the Julian calendar which runs about a fortnight behind the “outside” world of the Gregorian reform. The yearly cycles of the daily offices ordered by the commemoration of saints, along with those larger circles of the Church calendar, create their own extra-worldly rhythms; chanting medieval hymns throughout all-night vigils punctuates the year with marathon prayer, while the joyful “Bright” week after Pasxa is notable for leisure and indulgence. Theology permeates one’s way of thinking through the multilevelled symbols encountered throughout the year of Despotic (Christ) and Theomitoric (Mary) feasts and fasts, along with the readings from scripture or other texts. Surrounded by icons, immersed in ancient liturgical rituals and customs, and always dressed in the simple black robes which symbolize death to this world, it is impossible not to come round to accepting the alternate “reality” as the “true” one.
In the 1970s, in Ormylia, Greece, a woman’s monastery was founded by an Athonite elder that has become a large “monastic town”, where over a hundred and twenty — many professional women — from Greece and other countries, professed vows and serve not only the monastery but the community at large, as dentists, doctors, scholars, and much more. The idea that the monastery houses not transformed sinners but angels in training is what makes it an idealized space for those on the outside; they support the illusion in order to perpetuate their own, less consuming participation in the Church and the salvation of the baptized.

The Monastery of the Annunciation and its outlying fields, Ormylia, Greece. The nuns are also famous for their Byzantine chanting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmCy-2ZtTak ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVZ9BXeEzjk

Heterotopia of the Cemetery

The cemetery, more usually a crypt, is located within the monastery, or somewhere nearby on monastery land. When a monastic dies, they are buried wrapped only in a sheet, to be disinterred after three years when their bones are washed, anointed and secured in the crypt. But monastics “die” before their own physical death; the sxima (or schema) the pictured monk is wearing symbolizes the vows of worldly death and existence in the heavenly kingdom as part of the “10th order of angels”, one below the 9 orders spoken of in the early 6th century text The Divine Names, of Dionysios the (pseudo)Areopagite. The monastic life is also called the Angelic Life, as they seek to conform, through ceaseless prayer and prescribed activity, all their energies to the Divine Energy of God; this is mystical theology at its most sublime and most typically monastic.

Hieromonk in the crypt of Serbian Orthodox Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos, founded in 1198, wearing the Great Sxima (http://www.inathos.gr/athos/en/)

Easter 2013, Romanian Orthodox nuns sing in the ossuary at the Pasărea Monastery near Bucharest, founded 1813.

Heterotopia of Opening and Closing; the Space that Remains

This is a space of illusion par excellence. Because everything is, on the one hand, “real” — the buildings, spaces, inhabitants, literature, ritual, furnishings and history actually exist in the material world — the transformation into the parallel “reality” is facilitated by the power of faith. Though it was indeed a paradisical existence in many ways, I was ultimately compelled to leave the order after about 12 years, because the essential condition for maintaining the new reality had gone missing; to remain in the monastic community after the irretrievable loss of faith can be overcome in two ways, neither of which I was capable.
The first way is, of course, to fake it. I knew a monk in Jerusalem who espoused double-think on a level as yet unparalleled in my experience. He regarded his monastic vows as possessing an unlimited elasticity, to be bent but never quite broken; also, he developed over time a stupefying pragmatism. If he thought he didn’t believe in God, that was because sin had blinded him to the true faith he possessed; consequently, it wasn’t his problem that God appeared not to exist. He would go on doing whatever he could get away with without being chucked out, sleeping the sleep of the blessed each night, Brother Falstaff in his well padded-out cell. But for me, even as an old 4th-generation New Yorker, this level of self-con-artistry was beyond my powers.
The second route was that chosen by the Nobel-winning Roman Catholic nun Mother Theresa. In letters only revealed after her death, the now-beatified nun spoke of how she had entirely ceased to feel God’s presence, and that this state of spiritual desolation began shortly after she founded the Sisters of Charity. It is a mystery to me how she could have endured this situation for the subsequent decades, but I know I certainly couldn’t have toughed it out any longer than the few months I was forced to. Eventually, I entered another sort of heterotopia: the idyllic parameters of the University of Cambridge and academia, where I continue to dwell in a more appropriate bliss.

1997, chanting vespers with a novice who is now a Great Sxima nun in the Monastery of Our Lady of All Protection in Bussy-en-Othe, France

The purification rituals one undertakes to enter the monastic heterotopia are intended to prevent this conflict. A long novitiate before tonsure, daily askesis in prayer and fasting, the unbroken cycle of services and rituals of the Church calendar, frequent participation in the sacraments of Holy Communion and confession, hours of reading and study, constant physical labour, seclusion from the outside world, and a commitment to silence and reticence about sharing thoughts with any but the most experienced elders, are meant to decrease opportunities for indulging doubts and disbelief. And that would have worked; it was the intrusion of outsiders into the community which finally undermined the stability of daily life, breaking the spell, as it were. The heterotopia of illusion is the essence of the monastic life; the heterotopia of compensation creates a “real space”, but one that must remain “other”.

Holy Monastery of Varlaam, Meteora, Greece, founded 1350, completed 1637; Greek Orthodox monks still live there today.

Questions

The idea of a heterotopia to which you can run to escape “the world” seems appealing to many people, but what makes a successful alternative is the infrastructure that makes it all seem “real”. People have long spoken of “escaping into literature”, and certainly literature can provide the mind with imaginary worlds to dream in. There have been many efforts to create “real” worlds from literature (https://www.universalorlando.com/Theme-Parks/Wizarding-World-Of-Harry-Potter.aspx), but from these literary worlds, at some point one always has to return to “reality”.
But what if you don’t want to, refuse to, or even can’t return?
Some people have escaped into virtual reality on the internet to the point where they have no will to get offline (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/06/chinese-internet-addiction-center-photos), or even let their own children die while they play (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/05/korean-girl-starved-online-game). Is it the “massively multiplayer” part of MMOWs that make virtual reality games like Second Life viable heterotopias? Do the hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of writers who contribute to these worlds make them as real as the real, populated, material world that contains it?
Is it ableist to suggest people with extreme disabilities might benefit from being able to live an able-bodied virtual reality through an avatar? (http://tcf.pages.tcnj.edu/files/2013/12/kelSmith_virtual_worlds_disabilities_032409.pdf) Foucault posits negative heterotopias that could be imposed, such as prisons; but are they heterotopias or dystopias? Is Second Life a utopia because it’s virtual, or a heterotopia (because it “really exists” for players)? We talk of “going” online, but is it a topos at all, or a mirror, where we are in one place but see ourselves elsewhere?

Sources

http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/08/24/us-teresa-letters-idUSN2435506020070824

On the Divine Names, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/rolt/dionysius.toc.html

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (spring 1986): 22–27.

Sayers, Jentery. “The MLab: An Infrastructural Disposition.” http://maker.uvic.ca/bclib15/