For Those Who Despair

St. Anthony visits St. Paul the Hermit

The solitary life

The purpose of solitary life is, if you will, contemplation. But not contemplation in the pagan sense, of an intellectual, esoteric enlightenment, achieved through an ascetic technique. The contemplation of the solitary Christian is to have our eyes wide open on the divine mercy that transforms and elevates its emptiness and converts it into the concreteness of a perfect love, of a perfect fullness.

The call to perfect solitude is a call to suffering, darkness and annihilation. Yet, when a man is called there, he prefers it to any other earthly paradise. The hermit remains there to demonstrate, with his lack of practical usefulness and the apparent sterility of his vocation, that the monks themselves should have little or no importance in the world.
His poverty is spiritual. He pervades his soul and body entirely, so that in the end all his heritage is insecurity. Experience the pain and spiritual and intellectual destitution of those who are truly poor. This is exactly the hermit vocation, a vocation to inferiority at every level, even the spiritual one. It is certain that there is a hint of madness in it.

The hermit remains in the world as a prophet that no one hears, as a voice crying in the desert, as a sign of contradiction. The world does not want him because he has nothing in him that belongs to the world, and he no longer understands the world. Not even the world understands him. But this is his mission, to be rejected by the world which, with that gesture, rejects the frightening solitude of God himself. Like every other aspect of Christian life, the vocation to solitude can only be understood in the perspective of God's mercy towards man. The vocation to solitude is therefore, at the same time, a vocation to silence, poverty and emptying. But emptying oneself is in view of fullness: the purpose of solitary life is, if one wills, contemplation. But not contemplation in the pagan sense, of an intellectual, esoteric enlightenment, achieved through an ascetic technique. The contemplation of the solitary Christian is to have our eyes wide open on the divine mercy that transforms and elevates its emptiness and converts it into the concreteness of a perfect love, of a perfect fullness. There have always been, and always will be, hermits who are alone among men without knowing the reason. They are condemned to their strange isolation by temperament or circumstances, and they are used to it.

It is not of these that I am speaking, but of those who, having led a committed and multifaceted existence in the world of men, leave behind their former lives, to go into the desert. Such a vocation, in general, is not for young people. It cannot flow only from a ferment of idealism or an adolescent rebellion, from the simple disgust for conventional attitudes and ways of life. But there comes a time when one is just tired of preserving the fictions necessarily present in social life. He understands that he can't take it anymore. Of course, anyone with common sense sees, from time to time, in a moment of clarity, the madness and superficiality of our conventional attitudes. Everyone can dream of freedom. But to assume the unarmed austerity of living in complete honesty, without conventionalism, and therefore without support, is quite another thing. the solitary life is an arid, harsh purification of the heart. Jerome and Eucherius wrote rhapsodies about the flowering desert, but Jerome was the busiest hermit who ever lived and Eucherius was a bishop who admired the hermit community of Lérins only from afar. The hermitages cultores, the farmers of the desert sand, had less to say about this experience. They have been dried up by drought and their burnt lips are tired of words. If a loner were one day to find his way, by the grace and mercy of God, in a deserted place where he is not known, and if he were granted by divine piety to live there, and to remain unknown, he may be able to do more good to humanity as a loner than he could ever have done by remaining a prisoner of the society in which he lived.

Physical loneliness sometimes takes on the appearance of a bitter defeat. It is an earthly paradise only in the imagination of those who find their solitude in the crowded city, or who know how to be hermits for a few days or for a few hours, no more. But the call to perfect solitude is a call to suffering, darkness and annihilation. Yet, when a man is called there, he prefers it to any other earthly paradise.

The solitary who no longer communicates with other men except for the basic necessities of life, is a man with a difficult and particular vocation. For the rest of the world he immediately loses all value. Yet that value is great. The hermit has a very significant role in a world like ours, which has degraded the human person and has lost all respect for loneliness. But in such a world the vocation of the hermit is more terrible than ever. In the eyes of our world, the hermit is nothing more than a failure. He must be a failure: we absolutely do not need him, there is no place for him. And outside of all our projects, programs, movements, assemblies. We can tolerate it as long as it remains a fiction, or a dream. As soon as it becomes real, we are disgusted by its insignificance, its poverty, its sloppiness. Even those who consider themselves contemplative often harbor a secret contempt for the hermit. Because in the contemplative life of the hermit there is nothing of that noble security, of that intellectual depth, of that artistic finesse that the professional contemplative seeks in his quiet community. Yet the hermit must always remain the true model of the monk. The man who wears the warm, well-ironed cassock should remember that what he himself is trying to be, has some resemblance to the chalked-handed loner, who works like crazy outside his shack in the woods, or who perhaps engages in occupations devoid of honor and utility. It is the hermit's lack of usefulness that is the great scandal. It is without effectiveness, without certainty: in a certain sense, indolent. He looks too much like a tramp.

The solitary life is something that cannot in the least move its scale of values. It is "nothing", a non-entity. Yet Paul says: "God has chosen what in the world is foolish to confuse the wise, God has chosen what is weak in the world to confuse the strong, God has chosen what in the world is ignoble and despised and what is nothing to reduce to nothing the things that are" (1 Cor 1:27-28). The hermit remains there to demonstrate, with his lack of practical usefulness and the apparent sterility of his vocation, that the monks themselves should have little or no importance in the world. They died to the world, they should no longer appear in it. And the world died for them. They are pilgrims, secluded witnesses of another kingdom. The life of the hermit is a life of material and physical poverty without visible support.

We must remember that Robinson Crusoe was one of the great myths of the bourgeoisie, of the commercial civilization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the myth not of a hermit solitude but of a pragmatic individualism. Crusoe is a symbolic figure in an era when every man's house was a castle in the trees, but only because every man was a very prudent and ingenious citizen, who knew how to make the most of every situation and conduct a deal with any competitor to his advantage, even with life itself. The worry-free Crusoe was happy because he had an answer for everything. The real hermit is not so sure that he has an answer to everything.

In truth, the hermit should not be a completely naïve person. He should have something of Crusoe's manual skill, so as to be self-sufficient at least at some level. But there is a limit to self-sufficiency. And even in the spiritual field the eremitic life is not totally independent. The hermit is not subjected to the complexity of religious institutionalism and its vanities, but sometimes he needs one to guide him, if he does not have it.

The hermit, in our time, is one and only a man of God. This should be clear. But what a prayer! What a meditation! Nothing more than bread and water this inner prayer of his! Radical poverty. The hermit, day and night, bangs his head against a wall of doubt. This is his contemplation. Don't get me wrong. It is not a question of intellectual doubt, an analytical search for theological, philosophical or other truths. It is something else, a kind of lack of knowledge of one's own self, a kind of doubt that questions the deepest roots of his life, a doubt that undermines the very reasons for his existence and what he is doing. It is this doubt that leads him definitively to silence, and in the silence that ceases to ask questions he receives the only certainty he knows: the presence of God in the heart of uncertainty and nothingness, as the only reality, but as a reality that cannot be "localized" or identified. That is why the hermit does not speak. He does his job and is patient, but he generally has peace. It is not the kind of world peace. He is happy, but he never enjoys it. He knows where he's going, but he's not sure of his way, he just knows by going there.

All that we can say about this poverty of the true hermit must not make us forget that he is happy in his solitude, but particularly because he has ceased to consider himself as a loner in opposition to others who are not solitary. He simply is. And if he has been made poor and set aside by God's will, this is not a distinction but only a fact. His loneliness is something frightening, sometimes it is a heavy burden, yet it is more precious to him than anything else because it is God's will for him. His loneliness is, for him, the obvious reality.

The hermit remains in the world as a prophet that no one hears, as a voice crying in the desert, as a sign of contradiction. The world does not want him because he has nothing in him that belongs to the world, and he no longer understands the world. Not even the world understands him. But this is his mission, to be rejected by the world which, with that gesture, rejects the frightening solitude of God himself.