THOUGHTS ON SOLITUDE
The Ascetic Works of St. Basil. By W. K. L. Clarke. (S.P.C.K. 12s. 6d.)
THE instinct of solitude among men appears to be incredibly ancient, but the motives that may drive men into the physical or metaphorical wilderness may vary. India is preeminent in demanding a remote seclusion amid the immensities of Nature for the initiation into the Divine Secret, and the West has tended—probably unjustly—to see something inhuman in the terrifying isolation of the fakir. But the relative values of solitude and society are hard to disentangle, and we see perhaps the antithesis at its harshest when we compare some hermit rigid in a cave on Himalaya and the multifluous swarming crowd entering the sacred water at Benares. Yet many of the holy hermits of India are easy of access and will hold converse with and give advice to their fellow-men.
This Oriental instinct for solitude in an extreme form pro- duced in Christian ages the extraordinary figures of the Pillar Saints, always figures of fun in utilitarian eyes, and it covered the Thebaid with that marvellous population of hermits from which Christian monasticism most properly derives. But even in this most extraordinary episode we can detect the " realistic " note of the new religion. The primary aim of the Egyptian anchorites was to save their souls by the practice of the Evangelical counsels of perfection, and it seemed very clear to them that immersion in the immense conflux of races at Alexandria, in that city of an elaborate and involved civilization, of luxury, learning and vice, was not the best way of attaining that end. Hence, like Lot, they turned their backs on the cities and in caves and undercliffs led in solitude that mysterious and to us terrible existence which Flaubert has presented in the pages, fantastic and yet strangely true to the spirit of the time, of his great Tentation.
But even this flight into the wilderness, this massive protest of the individual soul against being swamped by a corrupt civilization, was not, at least in its original form, to last. The human instinct for alike-minded society, one of the true keys of this exodus, began to assert itself, and after vindicating the principle of spiritual integrity, as it were, the hermits began to gather, first into little lawns and then into large monasteries, whence in course of time by devious paths the Rule of Saint Basil for the East and later of Saint Benedict for the West were derived. The perfume of this old Egyptian monasticism at its best is imperishably enshrined in the book called The Paradise of the Fathers.
We have, then, in this tremendous episode the seeking for solitude because of an uncongenial environment and the im- possibility of self-perfection except in loneliness. Solitude is
thus not merely an escape or a luxury, but it is a means to an end, the end being purification andspiritual progress in the first place, and in the second, the 'crea'tion of a new and purified society. There is a modern sculptor of some eminence who takes the same view of mechanical labour and an indus. trialized society as Saint Anthony and Saint Paul did of the rich civilization of the Nile delta. In pursuit of spiritual and artistic freedom this artist established a community of hand. workers in Sussex, and afterwards retired into Wiles, finding his former settlement too near " standardized " civilization ; and the gifted American, Sherwood Anderson, has revealed in a recent book the exasperation of an individualist of genius-- with a society whose ideas and whose goods are all equally " ready made."
The social implications of solitude were still further empha- sized in the Middle Ages, when the anchorites in their cells by the parish churches were consulted by the people on spiritual matters and even the austere and majestic Carthusian. order, built up as it was on the isolation of the individual for prayer and contemplation, insisted, and still insists, on the gathering together of its members for communal worship at stated times. Speaking broadly, the Middle Ages introduced the idea of. the attractiveness of solitude ; the world, now become a tumultuous Christendom, seemed less wicked than it had done to the Egyptian solitaries and the first Benedictines,, but it was certainly no less distracting. In the cloisters, alone with the King of Heaven and His Court, the mediaeval soli- taries savoured the sweetness. of contemplation and pursued courses of prayer and learning, emerging atintervals into the communal life of the Abbey. This life of the contemplatives was as essential to the mediaeval Church as the work of the great preachers and the great administrators ; they held up their arms like Moses on the Mtxmt while the battle raged below. On one occasion the times called a solitary to the Supreme Pontificate and to the resignation of that honour ; and the Church has praised that Celestine whom Dante with, some arrogance damned for the Great Refusal." The inward sweetness of this dedicated loneliness of the mediaeval contem-, platives, serenely flowing on behind all those wars and scandals, controversies and plagues, is to be found in that " 0 beata sot it ado ! 0 solo beatitudo " of Saint Peter Damian.
The humanism of the Renaissance introduces a spirit of pure aestheticism into the ideal of solitude, and we find Petrarch at Vaucluse writing .his Life of Solitude amid conditions of re-1 freshing simplicity and retirement. But the great artist is very comfortable in his " cell," and though he quotes the august examples of many famous and holy persons'who practised the sublime art of solitude, the true key to the book is the growth' of the modern " romantic " idea of self-expression. Again, Aeneas Sylvius in the train of Cardinal Albergata comes to Ripaille and sees there the elaborate hermitage of Amadeus of Savoy, who afterwards became the Anti-pope of the Council of Basel, and he criticizes sharply the somewhat lifiurious life of the hermit Duke and his six companions.
There is always something faintly ridiculous about the luxurious or fantastic withdrawal of those who are merely too cowardly or too selfish to face life with its multifarious con- tacts. The remote hedonism of a Des Esseintes amuses us, and even the many-sided egotistic culture of an aristocrat like Horace Walpole in his Gothic Strawberry Hill has its absurd side. And yet the necessary isolation and apparent laziness of the artist for creative purposes is often mistaken for this form of selfish retirement by unobservant people. Wagner himself loved luxurious surroundings and would wear rich and unusual clothes in his own home. We remember the lake-paradise at Triebschen and the red flamingo-feathers, without which he could not compose the music for Parsifal. These things are tested by their fruits, and who shall say that all this supreme music was not worth the gorgeous trifles that pleased the master ? Yet, speaking broadly, it remains that the true solitary, whether artist or saint, is an austere and even some- what tragic figure, while the mere aesthete seems to want the crown without the cross. The true explanation of the call to, solitude is, I am convinced, the profound desire for " value," to use a much abused word. This applies equally to the creative genius whose main achievements are wrought alone and to the creative spiritual leader whose work is the personal ' influencing and, transforming of vast multitudes of men. St. Francis of Assisi leaves his ceaseless evangelism for solitary prayer and receives the Stigmata on lonely Alvernia ; St. Paul, between the coming of the Great Light on the road to Damascus and his mission to the Gentiles, retires into Arabia: Our Lord Himself goes into the mountains to pray when too much beset by the importunity of the crowds. Personality is apt to be wasted and frittered away in an exeess of contacts and interests, and the soul desires, if only for a time, to possess its castle in silence, to contemplate its own First Cause and its Final End, to sec itself and its relation to God in a pure and calm light, undisturbed by the distracting appeals and seductive vagaries of the " creatures." Every soul's secret is ultimately its own, and there is a sense in which the " Alone to the Alone " of Plotinus has an absolute truth. The finger of the God Harpo- crates on his lips is an emblem of this ultimate self-knowledge ; the Psyche who is invisible amid the glare of the market-place becomes clear to see " under the rose " of abstraction, solitude and silence. Further, the very Majesty of Heaven itself demands at 'times this separation in its service ••: it will only speak its solemn admonitions and whisper its consoling can- ticks when the world with all its vain•shows is firmly shut out and the door well-barred against its impertinent intrusion.
These things are part of philosophical and religious truth, but they are not the whole truth of the matter. For solitude is a mystery and a Janus, turning one face to Heaven and the other on the world. The purpose—or, rather, the result—of properly understood solitude, though it may have, as it seems, an almost absolute beauty and finality in itself, is the creation of finer " values " ; it is a social fact, the creation of almost infinite reserves of spiritual power, the nexus whence fresh creative energies once stored up are let loose upon a thirsty world. Whether it be the nun praying for sinners and learning by contemplation to pray better, or the artist elaborating in loneliness a deeper mystery of beauty, a fresh triumph, a new miracle of inspiration wedded to technique, or the genius and sage tortured and exasperated by the imperfections of the race, concentration of energies and the creation of reserves of power are the aims of the true solitary, and this concentration and creation are the means by which new helps and higher values can be realized for society as a whole. The great individual genius, of whatever kind, wrestles with human Destiny in daftness and solitude as Jacob wrestled with the Angel. Many an artist and thinker has been through that Dark Night of the Soul spoken of by Saint John of the Cross and the Christian mystics, and these lonely agonies of creation are not confined to the anchorites' cells. We think of Nietzsche, half eagle and half Prometheus, broken-hearted yet triumphant at Sils Maria, among the mountains thousands of feet " above men and time " ; of the solemn speculations of Pascal ; of Carlyle grinding away 'at his Frederick amid physical misery and de- pression ; of the starry sorrows of Leopardi. These isolated themselves seeking higher " values " for the race, and what- ever weaknesses and faults were theirs, their sacrifices were assuredly not in vain. • Again, out of this bare solitude may be born a vision which sees the underlying unity of life and is capable of detecting the hidden God in unlikely coverings, the Spark lurking in every soul of mans A certain simplicity may be generated in which many distinctions are seen to be unimportant when compared with the supreme distinction between the Divine Unity and its creatures.
The Western mind has always seen religion as largely a social fact, and has condemned the Manichean arrogance or aesthetic insolence of those who in an essential sense " despise " their neighbour ; on the other hand, it has seen the dreadful dangers of the mere mob, of a multitude that has not sense of values. And solitude is the hard school in which this latter evil is faced and overcome in the single mind, and if properly practised it is the best preventive also against the easy scorn of other people or races which is the -negation of the Christian spirit. Nor does it matter if this solitude be actual physical loneliness or a definite and resolute detachment of spirit even in a crowd. Both will avail to exorcise the demons of " shout- ing with the crowd " and of " despising the crowd." For in solitude one should learn to see the absolute unimportance of one's self and ones prejudices in the light of the Infinite Unity, and one should learn the art of sympathy, if possible, even with those wham one believes to be mistaken dr even mad. For the Gospels make it impossible to separate the Love of God and the love of the neighbour, and we are further told that a service done to one of Christ's little ones or His poor it. done to Christ Himself. Hence solitude is both an absolute thing and a relative one ; absolute because the relation between God and the individual soul is a final and unique relationship, and relative because God is present also in His creatures and especially in the human race, who are His brothers through the Incarnation and His children by adop- tion. There is a mediaeval story about a monk who had a vision of Christ and was called away to attend to some poor person and went ; and on his return found that the vision was still there ; and Christ said to him : " If you had not gone, I should not have remained." In that mystical paradox, which reconciles the Majesty of Heaven and the needs of man, we have the ideal of Christian solitude—the absolute relationship of the soul to God, its relative and dependent obligation to benefit in some way or other by its vision seen in solitude the tragic, humorous, afflicted and irresistible human race, with its self-inflicted wounds, its unbounded capacity for self-sacrifice and its unmerited yet appropriate glories.
In thinking of solitude one approaches an infinite sea of thought, for it concerns inevitably no less than human origins and • human destiny. I offer a few pebbles washed by the immense wave of that beneficent tide.
W. R. C.
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