A modern observer, accus tomed to privacy, needs no further persuasion of the attraction of the hermit life than a picture of a common cloister, refec tory and dormitory. A brief visit to the most celebrated of medieval hermitages—to the Chartreuse, to Camaldoli, the Carceri above Assisi, each set in a position of great natural beauty and quiet, surrounded by woods and streams and mountaintops—reveals some of the positive attractions of the hermit's life. Not all the hermits lived in such places; surprisingly enough, the monks of the Chartreuse and Camaldoli set up houses in the middle of towns such as Pisa and Bologna, but their natural habitat, and the country which inspired their founders, lay in the hills and woods. It was the solitude and peace that first attracted the hermits to these places. If they had thought of natural beauty as an alluring or distracting thing, no doubt they would have rejected it. In this guise it presumably appeared to Milton, when he counted the leaves of Vallombrosa:
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’Etrurian shades
High overarch’t imbowr—
and likened them to an army of devils. Yet if the founders of the Chartreuse, Camaldoli and Vallombrosa rejected the idea that the natural beauty of their new homes could be a temptation, they were in each case positively attracted by a dramatic piece of scenery nonetheless. The Italian sites are on hilltops, by an elementary symbolism felt to be—not nearer to heaven, a concept cruder than any they entertained—but above the habitations of men, as it were on Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb. More important, they were inspired by the feats of the fathers of the desert, whose manner of life in sober fact, not without some embellishment in the Lives, was often a heroic struggle against natural forces unnaturally made as tough as man could devise.
The Carthusian life has always been a vocation for the very few. From the first, there were some who felt a superficial call, tasted the rigors and fled. From approximately 1180 to 1186 St. Hugh was prior of the first English Carthusian house, at Witham in Somerset, and his biographer records how one of his monks, called Alexander, fled from Witham after a bitter complaint.
Wretch, you have deluded us...and have brought us to this wild and lonely place, taking us away from our pleasant dwellings and a civilised way of life. You have forced us to lurk amongst beasts and thorns, as if there were not places of monastic retirement in the world.
The whole land is full of communities of monks, and the mutual support provided by the communal life pro vides us with a sufficiently good example of religious perfection. Here, alone and without companionship, we become torpid and dull through boredom, seeing no one for days at a time whose example can inspire us, and having only the walls which shut us in to look at.
Your apparently unanswerable arguments shall not con vince us, since what you have to say is always in oppo sition to our sound and excellent judgement. The yoke of this new law which you tell us must be borne, as if all Christians everywhere would be damned except the Carthusians [a doctrine of which Hugh was conspicuously innocent] and the way of salvation open to very few, is almost unendurable in this world. Since we know better, we must not and cannot endure this unprofitable and narrow way of life any longer. We are going to seek something saner, and absolutely refuse to stay for a fur ther period.”9
Most of the traffic described in the Life was in the other direction, though Witham, like the Carthusian Order itself, was always of modest size, reflecting its call for the few What is noticeable is that it flourished when other orders were lan guishing; in England especially it enjoyed an Indian summer in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when its most famous house, the London Charterhouse, brought silence to the very edge of the city, and the priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, the one English house whose remains can still be inspected, was also founded.10
Alexander became a Cluniae monk, and later in life begged to be allowed to return; but Hugh refused.
from the book The Age of the Cloister The Story of Monastic Life in the Middle Ages by Christopher Brooke
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