Disease of cloisterphobia

 As one might expect, cloisterphobia is not exclusively a modern phenomenon. Long before the Renaissance, Aristotle’s dictum that man is by nature a “political animal” was widely quoted in debates about the virtues of social over solitary life. Aristotle goes on to say that “anyone who by his nature and not simply by ill luck has no state is either too bad or too good, either subhuman or superhuman—he is like the war-mad man condemned in Homer’s words as having no family, no home. He is a ‘non-cooperator’ like an isolated piece in a game of draughts.”⁸ The Greek myth of Narcissus conveys a similar moral warning, as does Lucian’s report on the self-immolation of Peregrinus.

Later, when Christian hermits showed their displeasure with current society by fleeing in droves to live spiritual lives in deserts and on desolate islands, the tenor of their critics’ reactions turned from bemusement to disgust. The fifth-century Latin poet Rutilius Namatianus was astonished to find that so many of his youthful countrymen would choose intentionally to live an apparently painful, unhealthy, and stupid life of ascetic isolation:

…they dub themselves ‘Monks,’ with a Grecian name, because they wish To dwell alone, observed by none. They dread The gifts of Fortune, while her ills they fear. Who, to shirk pain, would choose a life of pain? What madness of a brain diseased so fond, As, fearing evil, to refuse all good?⁹

During the Middle Ages, when Christianity gained the field of Western culture, we hear few such critiques, but things changed after the worldly spirit of the Renaissance took hold. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the philosopher David Hume, in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), looked with horror and amazement on the uselessness, not only of religious solitude but, apparently, of all solitude:

Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society, neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? We observe, on the contrary, that they cross all these desirable ends; stupefy the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper.¹⁰

Surveying the rise of Christianity from his vantage point in nineteenth-century England, Edward Gibbon took even stronger offense than did Rutilius at the Christian hermits’ renunciation of the world:

There is perhaps no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper and more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous distorted and emaciated maniac without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, spending his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and Cato.¹¹

To Gibbon, the whiny, world-renouncing attitude of the hermit and the monk was one of the sickly roots that caused the fall of the Roman Empire. Somewhat surprisingly, Nietzsche is the most vehement modern critic of monkish asceticism, exceeding even Gibbon in heated rhetoric. He viewed religious asceticism and solitude as a wrong-headed yearning for an illusory spiritual absolute deriving from thoughtless, degenerate passion that is capable of destroying civilization. Is there anything more disgusting than the desert hermits of Egypt? he asked.

Perhaps a whole Hell of criminals could not produce an effect so oppressive, poisonous to air and land, uncanny and protracted as is this noble little community of unruly, fantastic, half-crazy people of genius who cannot control themselves and can experience pleasure in themselves only when they have lost themselves.¹²

In the last century, Sir J.G. Frazer continued the Gibbonian-Nietzschean tradition by bemoaning the onslaught around the time of Christ of “Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for.” Frazer denounced their “selfish and immoral doctrine,” which, he believed, bred contempt for the present life and withdrew the devotee more and more from public service.

The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero who, forgetful of self, lives and is bred to die for the good of his country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the City of God coming in the clouds of heaven.¹³

Frazer argued for “saner, manlier views of the world,” such as those he found in pagan mythology, in classical civilization more broadly, and in Western civilization since the Renaissance—when “the tide of the Oriental invasion had turned at last.”

Given the influence of humanism and Protestantism in the modern world, this vitriol is to be expected in the West. But I was particularly surprised to learn that many of the same arguments against religious solitude are also to be heard in the East—specifically, in India, that fount of Oriental religion which produced the world’s most intense, longest-lasting eremitic tradition.

Indian religious literature, as we have heard, is replete with anecdotes of sensational eremitic mortifications of the sort that Gibbon, Nietzsche, and Frazer detested. Yet in spiritually inclined India it is not generally the ardor or unhealthiness of these exercises that appalls the critical observer. The chief complaint, rather, is lodged against the hermit’s flight from social responsibilities. A story is told in the Mahabharata that when King Janaka cast off wealth, family, and his entire kingdom to take up the life of a religious mendicant, one of his wives admonished him roundly:

Having been a large and sacred lake unto all creatures, having been a mighty tree worthy of adoration and granting its shelter unto all, alas, how can you wait upon and worship others? If even an elephant desists from all work, carnivorous creatures coming in packs and innumerable worms would eat it up…If you can act up to your resolution of abandoning everything then who am I to you, who are you to me, and what good is your grace to me? If you would be inclined to grace, rule this Earth!¹⁴

Nonreligious Friends such as Horace or T’ao Ch’ien tend by nature to be less open to critiques that they are antiworldly ascetics. But they are often criticized as being irresponsible, uncompromising, stupid, or mad, particularly in those few societies where secular eremitism became an institution. The philosopher Han Fei Tzu critiqued the recluse scholars, arguing that such “men of wisdom” refuse to make the compromises necessary for effective statecraft. As a result, “armies grow weaker and the government cannot escape disorder.” Though praised by the people and honored by the ruler, such idealism, he added, will “lead to the ruin of the state.”¹⁵

When the ideal of secular retirement to the quiet country life of solitude came into vogue in England around the middle of the seventeenth century, it likewise provoked criticism. The diarist John Evelyn probably penned the strongest—and most whimsically imaginative—diatribe in this regard, indicting both Lady Solitude’s secular and religious manifestations in one fell swoop. Mincing no words in his “Public Employment and an Active Life Prefer’d to Solitude,” Evelyn charges that

Solitude produces ignorance, renders us barbarous, feeds revenge, disposes to envy, creates Witches, dispeoples the World, renders it a desart, and would soon dissolve it.¹⁶

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REPLY TO CLOISTERPHOBES

IT IS EASY, ESPECIALLY IN MODERN TIMES, to criticize solitude. Perhaps the hermit bashers’ eloquent invective strikes a chord with us because it appeals to the persistent work ethic in modern civilization, particularly in American culture, which makes us feel instinctively that there is something sinful about leisure for its own sake. Sometimes I think that just as there was an ingrained reverence for the solitude of the cloister and the hermitage in the Middle Ages, now there is an underlying fear that should solitude again become popular all the achievements since the Renaissance will be lost and the world would again plunge into medieval darkness.

Just how deep-seated that fear is lodged in us can be heard in Hamlet’s soliloquy: “To be or not to be; that is the question…” Confronted with “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” Hamlet considers only two options: continue to suffer his fortune or end it in suicide, with the help of “a bare bodkin.” He does not consider a third option: the time-honored alternative of retreat to a life of solitude. He does order his fiancée, Ophelia, to “get thee to a nunnery.” But in Shakespeare’s England, a few years after the dissolution of the monasteries, “nunnery” was another term for “brothel.”

If a retreat to solitude is now seen as in any way unmanly or a sin, there must be some misunderstanding. Hamlet’s choice to continue fighting amid calamity may be seen as a kind of heroic acting out of fate, but it ended only in further calamity and death. Moreover, there are many forms of solitude, spiritual as well as secular, which do not entail a permanent withdrawal from society or responsibilities. As Petrarch reminds us, even the heroic Romans revered occasional retreat to gentlemanly leisure. And if we read the hermit bashers more carefully, we find that many spoke highly of solitude on occasion.

Aristotle, as we have heard, reasoned that contemplation is the highest achievement of life in the polis. As for Hume, in the same long essay in which he debunks time alone he concedes that the pleasure of solitary reflection is “the origin of my philosophy.” Even Gibbon conceded that one may find value in solitude. Conversation enriches the understanding,” he wrote in his magnum opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “but solitude is the school of genius.” Gibbon was referring to what he called Muhammad’s “addiction to religious contemplation.”³⁰ In his memoirs, Gibbon further acknowledged his own ability to enjoy solitude, saying: “I was never less alone than when by myself.”³¹

And surprisingly, John Donne, whose off-handed maxim, it seems, will forever remind English speakers that “no man is an island,” demonstrated through his own experience that solitude can have a profoundly positive and joyful effect on one’s life. Following an extended sickness, Donne writes in his essay “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions” that his return to society from the solitude of his hospital bed was a transformative occasion. “I have had three Births,” he boasts, “One, Naturall, when I came into the World; One, Supernatural, when I entered into the Ministry; and now a preter-naturall Birth, in returning to Life, from this Sicknes.”³² He implies that it was his return that brought joy, while his sickness in solitude may have been a hell—but maybe not. Without the time he spent suffering alone he would not have experienced his life-enhancing third birth.

Among the most striking things about the critiques of the hermit bashers, then, is that nearly all of them are issued from the viewpoint of society at large rather than personal experience. And most are critiques of particular forms of aloneness: notably intense, world-renouncing solitude; psychic isolation that is caused by madness; or secular retirement. That leaves the implication that all forms of time spent alone are therefore useless and absurd. But as our brief history shows, there may be value in what the hermit bashers left out that far outweighs the social and personal dangers of solitude.

Secular critics, for instance, tend to ignore the fact that great, albeit unpredictable, social value may result when men or women retire to rethink the bases of their troubled lives and civilizations. That is precisely what the historian Arnold Toynbee asserts in his theory of “withdrawal and return,” which posits that a flight into solitude is the first movement of a process of discovery and social influence that has been the mainspring of change throughout history. According to Toynbee, a soon-to-be-world-historical figure withdraws into solitude at a certain troubled time in his life, and at a crucial turning point in the development, more commonly the disintegration, of his civilization. Alone, he rethinks the predicaments in which he finds himself. Then, in a mysterious action of the soul, he produces new seeds of thought that may be capable, at one extreme, of altering the growth pattern of the entire civilization or, at the other, of destroying genius in madness.

Of the latter extreme, perhaps Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Diogenes the Cynic are typical cases. Countless others are not known, having been completely destroyed in their withdrawal. Of the former, Toynbee cites the lives of mystics, saints, and statesmen, including several soloists already discussed above: Moses, Jesus, the Buddha, and Muhammad. Each of these superhuman creators spent his “forty days in the desert,” and each returned with sufficient “power of spirit” to found religions or otherwise transform or enrich society, often for the better.

Petrarch’s withdrawal to Vaucluse is neglected in Toynbee’s analysis, but among secular-minded lovers of solitude he mentions the Italian philosopher-statesman Machiavelli, who was imprisoned, then “exiled,” to a perpetual rustication on his farm in the Florentine countryside following the French occupation beginning in 1494. There, he devoted his days to humdrum social and sporting activities. Each night, he exchanged his mud-caked country clothes for courtly dress and entered, through his studies, “into the ancient mansions of the men of ancient days” and feasted himself on what he termed “that food which alone is my true nourishment.” One product of that retreat was his famous book The Prince, which embodies an “Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians.” As a practical effort to free Italy, the book was a failure. Nevertheless, says Toynbee, Machiavelli rose above his vexation of spirit and “succeeded in transmuting his practical energies into a series of mighty intellectual works—The Prince, The Discourses on Livy, The Art of War and The History of Florence—which have been the seeds of our modern Western political philosophy.”³³

Toynbee also notes that the withdrawal-and-return motif is to be found in mythology, notably in foundling myths such as that of Zeus, whose father, Chronos, cast him away in infancy out of concern that the child would grow up to supplant him, but whose mother, Rhea, bore him secretly in the cave of Ida. When Zeus grew to manhood, he overthrew his father to take his place as the supreme god in the Greek pantheon.

In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell finds a similar consistency across world mythology relating to rites of passage, what he calls the “monomyth” of separation—initiation—return. In that mythic structure, says Campbell “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons to his fellow men.”³⁴

Campbell, too, cites the withdrawal and return of the Buddha and Moses, along with Prometheus’ ascent to the heavens to steal fire from the gods, and Jason’s journey through crashing rocks and a sea of marvels to obtain the Golden Fleece, with its power to wrest his rightful throne from usurpers. Among many other examples, he also points to the shaman’s descent to the underworld and flight to the spirit world where he or she receives wisdom and supernatural powers. In all these myths, some form of separation from society is a starting point. “Willed introversion,” Campbell explains, “is one of the classic implements of creative genius.”³⁵

In his A Study of History, Toynbee explains how the process may work:

The withdrawal makes it possible for the personality to realize powers within himself which might have remained dormant if he had not been released for the time being from his social toils and trammels. Such a withdrawal may be a voluntary action on his part or it may be forced upon him by circumstances beyond his control; in either case the withdrawal is an opportunity, and perhaps a necessary condition, for the anchorite’s transfiguration.³⁶

Toynbee finds a concise rendering of the value of that transformative adventure in a statement by the English social scientist Walter Bagehot: “All the great nations have been prepared in privacy and in secret. They have been composed far away from all distraction.”³⁷ John Cowper Powys extends the scope of that tribute even further when he muses that “all the nobler instincts of our race are born in solitude and suckled by silence.”³⁸

The contemporary psychologist Anthony Storr takes a similar position in Solitude: A Return to the Self, which to date is undoubtedly the most insightful analysis of solitude by any psychologist, ancient or modern. Storr argues that the creative “fantasy life” of thoughts and ideas provoked by suffering and cultivated in solitude are “part of man’s biological endowment.” Man’s extraordinary success as a species, says Storr, “springs from his discontent, which compels him to employ his imagination. The type of modern man who exhibits more discontent than any other, Western man, has been the most successful.”

It is imagination in the broadest sense that is ultimately responsible for that success, says Storr. “The human mind seems to be so constructed that the discovery, or perception, of order or unity in the external world is mirrored, transformed, and experienced as if it were a discovery of a new order and balance in the inner world of the psyche.”³⁹ The best place to foster that creative imagination, Storr concludes, is in solitude, free from the distractions of social life. His position is not very far from that expressed metaphorically by Chuang Tzu, who maintained: “Emptiness, stillness, limpidity, silence, inaction are the root of the ten thousand things.”⁴⁰

Reading Toynbee, one might think that the creative powers of solitude would apply only to geniuses on the order of Buddha or Muhammad and that a creative withdrawal that does not finally return to society to promote great historical change may not be worthwhile. But Toynbee does manage to cite Machiavelli as a transformative creator, though his influence on history was subtle and not immediate. In the same way, few question the aesthetic or philosophical worth of Horace or Democritus or, more recently, Wang Wei, Rumi, Montaigne, Rousseau, Wordsworth, or Dickinson. They may not have pushed the course of history along radically new paths, but it is beyond doubt that their writings, conceived in solitude, were widely appreciated in their own day and still preserve rich, provocative food for the souls of subsequent generations.

Just as one need not be a genius to be a wise man, so the solitudes of many lesser figures may hold value. For if, as I will argue, the power of solitude stems from timeless qualities of human consciousness, then its creative potency is available to all. The shaman is capable of withdrawing at will into a solitary trance-state in order to dive into the underworld or fly like an angel to the haunts of the gods to bring back a boon for his or her tribe. Some shamans may be geniuses, surely not all. We may say the same for the creative productivity of countless writers, artists, philosophers, and scientists whose work is carried out alone.

At the same time, an obsessive focus on immediate action in the world may itself be dangerous, both for geniuses and us lesser mortals carried along by the tide of events. In this age of information explosions, mass democracy, and fast-paced economic competition, the harried citizen’s natural tendency is to shoot from the hip and to either skip thinking altogether or confine thoughts to the shallowest of contemporary issues.

That is a shame, argues Louis Mumford in his book The Conduct of Life: “For every person who is lost so completely in reverie or abstract thought that he forfeits the capacity to act, there are now a hundred so closely committed to actions or routine that they have lost the capacity for rational insight and contemplative reconstruction.”⁴¹ As a result they have lost the very possibility of re-formation and self-direction through which life becomes meaningful and purposeful. Those who omit this act of recuperation and re-creation by over submission to the pressure of practical affairs will lose their hold over those affairs, says Mumford. In that light, reverie before action has value for living:

Detachment: silence: innerness—these are the undervalued parts of our life, and only by their deliberate restoration, both in our personal habits and in our collective routines, can we establish a balanced regimen.⁴²

When we isolate thought from its immediate obligation to action and from the anxious distractions of society, we may find that it is “new and improved.” It is beyond doubt, as we see again and again in the history of solitude, that being alone for a while can add depth, clarity, and perspective to thought that might otherwise be drowned out in the clamor of social life. As an added benefit, quiet meditation may be therapeutic. Or it may be charged with inspiration, divine or otherwise.

I can find no reason, therefore, other than the most deeply ingrained social temperament or personal prejudice, why solitude might not be beneficial to anyone. Petrarch reminds us that the wilderness of solitude has neither porter nor watchman but is open to all. It certainly cannot be harmful when taken in moderation; for the prescription of being alone is a placebo in the purest sense of the term, the medicine that doesn’t do anything but leave you alone.

From: Adventures in the History of Solitude

David Balcom