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Blog
entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and
reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer
have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent
essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them
with all who are interested.
Post
#120 offers notes and reflections stimulated by a book I read in Jan, 2000,
about the contribution individuals make to the emergence of post-patriarchal
society.
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HERMITS,
Peter France, St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
This is a
well done book. The author lives in England, but spends part of each year as a
hermit on the island of Patmos, with Bishop Kallistos as his spiritual father.
There are
chapters on Christian hermit groups, including the Desert Fathers and the
Russian startsy,
as well as individuals such as Charles de Foucauld, T. Merton and Merton’s
friend Robert Lax (who also lives on Patmos but as a full time hermit, which he
has done for thirty years). There also are chapters on non-Christian hermits
such as the early Greek Cynics, Thoreau and the Hindu Ramakrishna.
The
chapter on the Optina monastery is of great interest and the one on Merton is
especially stimulating, but the best is the one on the Desert Fathers; it’s
likely the best thing written about them since Merton’s own work.
The
Taoists were probably the earliest hermits to arise within a civilization. The
author nods to them and the early hermits of India.
Within
western civilization, Socrates and those followers of his known as the Cynics
emerge as the first humans to consciously live as individuals rather than more
or less unconsciously as group participants in a city- state.
The
author stresses how totally immersed in the collective people were in the
Homeric age. As I have observed previously, with regard to the Grail legends,
it is difficult for us today to appreciate how little a person’s self-worth
came from within rather than from external approval and socially-conferred
status.
The
author says the Socratic Cynics emerged not too long after the early Taoists,
and were likely influenced, via trade routes, by the religious thought of
India. The Cynics sound very much like the early Christians, and the author
claims there is a fairly direct link from the Cynics to the Desert Fathers. (An
in-depth comparison between the life-styles of the Cynics and the early
Christians might be a source of major insights into what might be unique about Christianity.)
The essence
of the hermit life of the Cynics and of the Desert Fathers is independence from
conventional human society: opting more for life with nature than with culture.
The hermit is an outsider, a stranger to the conventional perspectives of the
culture of the day.
This is
expressed primarily, at least in terms of the Desert Fathers, by living apart
from society and especially by not commenting on the established culture: being
silent and having no expressed opinions. (Clearly this distinguishes the hermit
from the prophet; although the eremitical life may be prophetic, the individual
hermit does not take on a prophetic role.)
The
Desert Fathers persisted for several centuries (longest in Syria) and their
heritage eventually passed to the hermits of Mount Athos and still later to
those of northern Russia.
In
western Christianity, the trend was to cenobitic (communal) monasticism, via
the Rule of St. Benedict, although the eremitical life emerged again around
1000 AD with the Camaldolese in Italy and the Carthusians in France.
In modern
times, outside the established Christian traditions, eremiticism appeared at
about the same time (early 19th century) with Ramakrishna in India and H. D.
Thoreau in New England, both of whom had and continue to have immense influence
in the modern world. Charles de Foucauld did his thing in the late 19th
century, and Merton his in the mid-20th century. The author says Merton did
more to publicize the hermit life than anyone since Simon Stylites.
===
Personally,
the hermit archetype has been a powerful image for me since adolescence. I
found the chapter on Merton especially interesting for several reasons. One is
that I am able to compare my own inner development chronologically with
Merton’s, but that’s primarily of only personal interest. More importantly, the
chapter on Merton helps make clear what being a hermit is all about (the
essence of the hermit ideal), and perhaps even more significantly, it points
out two aspects of the eremitical life which represent, via Merton, evolutionary
advances.
Merton’s
first hermitage was nothing more than a room, newly built following a fire at
the monastery, near the infirmary stairs, where he was able to spend some time
daily. Of reading in this special cell he writes, "One is alone, not on
guard, utterly relaxed and receptive." I think those words (especially
“not on guard”) may capture the essence of the hermit’s wants and needs.
Later
Merton used an outside tool shed and still later a cabin the woods, where he
was gradually permitted to spend more and more time, and where eventually he
lived full time. What he does there, he says, is simply to "live in
complete harmony with what is around me." That, I think, is the essence of
the hermit’s goal, communion with all. And the means to that goal: freedom from
the need of being "on guard."
Of the
two evolutionary developments within the eremitical perspective which seem
especially significant to me, the first is a reappraisal of asceticism. Merton
eventually got electricity in his hermitage and, with it, a refrigerator. On
that occasion (probably, I would guess, in reaction to criticism) he wrote of
his doubts about the intrinsic value of the past ascetical practices within the
church.
"Depth
psychology… has made these things forever questionable. They belong to another
age and another kind of consciousness. Artificially austere practices… prevent…
and can be a substitute for deep change. (We) need to avoid all trappings and
décor of a theatrical eremiticism-- the hood, the costume, the diet, the stone
pillow…. These things are affectations."
Later he
wrote, "The hermit exists today to realize and experience in himself the
ordinary values of a life lived with the minimum of artificiality."
The other
change in perspective which seems especially significant to me is mentioned
almost in passing by the author. If, as Jung indicates, the Grail legends along
with Gnosticism and Alchemy are part of
a great tradition of individuation outside the patriarchal establishment, and
if we are indeed moving toward a post-patriarchal era, then a major shift in
the hermitical tradition would seem to be called for.
As
outlined in this book, eremiticism arose within the context of patriarchal
civilization. Yet we know that the shamanic personality, characterized by that
same developmental reality we today call the individuation process, appeared
much earlier. And so it is the pre-patriarchal perspectives of the Paleolithic
hunting culture that we must recover if we are to move toward a
post-patriarchal world and into the future.
Merton
points this out in a wonderful passage. Once, alone in the woods, he saw three
deer-- a stag and two does. Afterwards, he wrote:
"The
thing that struck me most-- when you look at them directly and in movement you
see what the primitive cave painters saw. Something you never see in a
photograph. It is most awe-inspiring. The ‘muntu’ or the ‘spirit’ is shown in
the running of the deer. The ‘deerness’ that sums up everything and is sacred
and marvelous. A contemplative intuition, yet this is perfectly ordinary,
everyday seeing-- what everybody ought to see all the time. The deer reveals to
me something essential, not only in itself, but also in myself. Something
beyond the trivialities of my everyday being, my individual existence. Something
profound. The face of that which is in the deer and in myself."
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