A vast and varied thematic itinerary of international seminars has already been covered around “Our Monastery” in Cabeceir, which is now unanimously and happily recognized, cherished and experienced as an essential identity anchor and lever for regional progress. This itinerary represents a whole approach to the cultural and patrimonial role of Benedictine monasteries, which UNESCO is keen to protect and consecrate, a whole synoptic, loving and careful study of the insertion of Refojos de Basto and the network of monasteries in north-west Portugal in which it is part of the trends and rhythms of European cultural and artistic production (Medieval, renaissance-humanistic, mannerist, baroque and illustrated), without overlooking or neglecting, together with the focus on the “spatialities” and “materialities” in which the heritage is developed and presented, the “spiritualities” that it itself presupposes and cherishes. “Nature” and the “natural environment in the life, languages and imagery of monastic life” were naturally not left out of this itinerary, but it seemed to us that this seminar required a slight inflection and an attempt to delve deeper. The identification of the good with the beautiful, and of God as the Highest Good, in whose nature human beings are called to participate, corresponds not only to a crucial and perennial Christian philosophical or theological paradigm, which the most awake monk or layperson could intuit, induce or deduce; for this very reason, in the context of the history of culture in a monastic environment, this inspiring thematic axis would justify itself. However, today’s violent global environmental and war threats to the natural order and to the harmonious construction of the “Common Home” make it all the more dramatically useful and possibly eloquent – in the face of the present we are all experiencing – for us to reflect on the well-founded and scientifically sound way in which our ancestors historically combined the terms of the conceptual trilogy that we propose here as the consigna of this Seminar: Ecology, Ethics and Aesthetics.

This seminar will feature the participation of leading experts and researchers.

Program: https://cabeceirasdebasto.pt/index.php?oid=33304