It means that synergia is in fact present in synergetics, but only implicitly. Hence the problem arises to display its presence explicitly or, in other words, to reconstruct the concept or paradigm of synergia hidden in synergetics. At the same time, synergia had always another life as well, not hidden, but quite open, that has begun many centuries before the invention of synergetics and went on ever after till nowadays with some interruptions. This other life develops in a completely different sphere, less known and popular than synergetics, the sphere of Eastern-Christian thought. Its history here is rich, and its role quite important: synergia is one of the key concepts of Eastern-Christian spirituality and worldview.

This concept appears in Greek patristics and early Christian ascetics and has a specific nature combining theological and practical, i.e. experiential and anthropological, dimensions. In late Byzantium it becomes one of the cornerstones of a sophisticated theological and philosophical teaching based on ascetical experience and discourse of energy instead of the Aristotelian essentialist discourse of the Western thought. After the fall of Byzantium this teaching was almost  th th forgotten, but it makes gradually its return in the 18-19th cc., and since the mid-20 th c. it is carefully reconstructed on the modern theological and philosophical level and developed further.

Moreover, in the last decades the concept of synergia was closely analyzed in its anthropological dimension and it was found that in this dimension it represents a certain paradigm of human constitution. This result has marked the beginning of a new anthropological theory called synergetic anthropology (obviously, the name synergic anthropology would be more adequate since the theory in question has no relation to synergetics!). Starting with the original Byzantine paradigm of synergia reinterpreted as an anthropological paradigm, synergetic anthropology produces a series of extrapolations or extensions of this paradigm extending it gradually to a universal paradigm of human constitution called the “paradigm of anthropological unlocking”.