In the late Middle Ages, the realization that institutional eremitism would not last pointed some observers toward an individual option. Thus the sentiment of French poet Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406): “If the times remain so, I shall become a hermit. / For I see nothing but grief and torment.”
The Renaissance Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), known chiefly for his lyric poetry, penned a notable essay titled De Vita Solitaria (“On the Life of Solitude” or “On the Solitary Life”), begun in1346 and finished ten years later. Petrarch dwelt in the whirlwind of literary life versus ecclesiastical politics, himself a minor cleric (though not a priest). For a period of years he longed to escape his personal moral entanglements. He established a “fair transalpine solitude” in the town of Vaucluse, out-side of Avignon, France, where he retreated to avoid the papal court that employed him.
Petrarch’s essay on solitude extols the saints who embraced solitude: Ambrose, Augustine, Remigius, Peter Damian, Francis of Assisi. He mentions “orators who loved the life of solitude”: Cicero, Seneca, Demosthenes. His identifications are overstated. The essay returns to arguments favoring solitude, compatible with ancient civic virtues as much as Christian spirituality. The theme of active versus contemplative life was an old topic dominated by religious writers, but Petrarch rejects the attempts to balance the two, preferring a humanist and philosophical point of view–plus a serene rural setting and a composed mind. Still, Petrarch’s stays in Vaucluse were sporadic, always lured away by his worldly ambitions.
In 1347, Petrarch wrote De otio religioso (“On Religious Leisure” or “Repose of the Cloister”) to his beloved brother Gherardo, who had entered a Carthusian monastery. In this work Petrarch extols spiritual quietude and condemns worldliness, ruing the very life he had been pursuing. Petrarch eventually retired to the Padua town of Arquà, now called Arquà Petrarca.
The Spaniard courtier and bishop Antonio de Guevara’s 1539 Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldrea (“Contempt for Court and Praise of the Village”) strikes a picaresque tone to his clear criticisms of court, safeguarded by the positions the author held. The French poet Maurice Sceve’s 1547 Saulsaye: eglogue de la vie solitaire (“Willow Run: Ecologue of the Solitary Life”) helped revive the Roman writers Cicero and Seneca on the subject of solitude. Sceve composed Saulsaye after entering country retirement.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), French lawyer and civil servant of the monarchy, crafted a consummate literary style in his Essays, at once a Latin classicist and a modern, a fideist, a Stoic, and a skeptic, allied to no extreme, marked by melancholy and resignation. His essay, “On Solitude,” is a stoic acceptance of the folly of society and the wisdom of living a life of imagination and virtue. Montaigne’s solitude entails separation from the crowd, disdain for ambition, aloofness in the heat of conflict, and a tragic sense of life.
Like Petrarch, Montaigne rejects the religious dichotomy between contemplative and active lives, instead construing the contemplative as the solitary. Montaigne recommends that the wise person flee the vicious crowd and its contagion. We have not gotten rid of our own vices in order to have to contend with the vices of others, he argues. Solitude brings leisure and ease for the pursuit of virtue. But fleeing the crowd is not enough, he avers; one must root out gregarious instincts in the self, in order to repossess the self, to assure contentment with the self. While Seneca may have said that we are all chained to fortune, Montaigne would say (not quoting Seneca) that the chains are of our own making. Even the worldly householder, with wife, children, possessions, and good health, must not depend on them for happiness. Wisdom does not shirk loyalty or duty, but reserves “a back shop” all one’s own, to establish true liberty, a retreat to solitude.
Montaigne represents the paradox of solitude, wherein his solitude is a moral protest against society, while the act of becoming solitary itself provokes social fragmentation. The retreat to solitude is itself an expression of the new individualism of the early modern era. The aristocratic humanist tradition of maintaining a country retreat, hearkening to Roman times, conceives of rural solitude as a means to retreat into self. But rural solitude is both a privilege for the well–born and a path negating the communitarian recovery of society. For Montaigne, the solitary is a community itself, the solitary communing with his ideas, thoughts, and readings.
In Petrarch, and less so in Montaigne, the life of the solitary aspires to parallel the life of the hermit. Whereas the hermit communes with God through private meditation in his retreat from monastic life, the solitary enjoys privacy as a secondary retreat from renouncing the social.
A peculiar twist in the rise of solitude is evidenced in the French–born philosopher and scientist René Descartes (1596–1650). Weary of crowded Paris for pursuing writing and research, Descartes moved to Amsterdam, boasting of being able to “live without being deprived of any of the conveniences to be had in the most populous cities, and yet as solitary and as retired as in the midst of the most remote deserts.” Descartes embraced the ancient sentiment from Strabo to Erasmus to Francis Bacon that “a great city is a great solitude.” However, Descartes did not fully comprehend the paradox of his desired solitude—urban access to goods and services versus rural quiet, isolation, and nature. Rather, Descartes valued a circle of close intellectual friends and like–minded colleagues always at hand. His philosophical views countenanced an aristocratic retirement versus an eremitic or ascetic motive.
This paradox of solitude was observed by French writer Jean de La Bruyere (1645–1696) in his posthumous Dialogues sur le Quiétism (“Dialogues on Quietism”). The essay is a product of Le Bruyere’s friendship with Cardinal Bossuet, both authors supporting a restrictive traditional theological interpretation of solitude.
Quietism arose in France as a challenge to traditional theology. The Jansenist movement commended an inward spirituality marked by a pessimistic view of human nature that clashed with Jesuit activism. Quietism was based on contemplation, personal piety, and private austerities, and did not solicit ecclesiastical or doctrinal approbation. These preferences were cautiously reflected in the personal asceticism of the philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), whose quietude is reflected in his disapprobation of “divertissement,” saying that the people’s unhappiness is the result of being unable to stay quietly in own’s room.
La Bruyere criticized contemporary adherents of quietism as having no personal obligations yet having no self either, essentially solitaries. The term La Bruyere uses is “isole”—the solitary is isolated, though not quite alienated in the modern sense. La Bruyere opposed the desire for physical solitude that is not inspired by religion but is a self–constructed philosophy. The controversy highlights the transition of solitude in this era.
François Fénelon (1651–1715), an archbishop and poet, sympathized with quietism, though with cautious deference to tradition. In his 1697 Maxims of the Saints (“Explication des maximes des Saints sur la vie interieure”), Fénelon emphasizes the spiritual values of austerity and silent prayer over the external pieties favored by the ecclesiastical authorities of the era. “Christ Himself,” Fénelon writes suggestively, “Whose retirement to solitary places... [is] not to be forgotten, has given us the pattern which it is proper for us to follow...” In 1699, the papacy condemned quietism, proscribing and suppressing Fénelon’s Maxims. Fénelon quietly assented.
In the same year 1697 when Maxims appeared, Fénelon’s novel Adventures of Telemachus was published, presenting an unambiguous eremitic theme. In the novel, the king’s advisor witnesses the treachery around the throne and quietly recluses to the isle of Samos to live as a hermit in a cave, later returning to the Greek mainland to live in solitude on his own rural estate. The novel explores the ethical dilemma of service versus withdrawal in a version of the classic Confucian dilemma, updated for the intellectuals of early modern Europe contemplating revolt not merely against wealth and power but against an entire ethical system. Rural solitude represented a moral dimension that contrasted sharply with the corruption of court and city.
Jean–Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) is primarily identified with his Social Contract (1762). But that work, in turn, proposes a solution to more fundamental questions about the nature of society addressed in two earlier key writings of Rousseau. Despite his chronological status as an Enlightenment era thinker, Rousseau proposed a social and philosophical system opposed to the momentum of the rationalist age, one built on the notion that human nature is essentially solitary.
Where Enlightenment philosophers optimistically argued for reason, science, and progress, Rousseau’s first discourse, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750) announced the radically contrary notion that Western civilization was now experiencing social and ethical regression. According to Rousseau, government and law arose to secure order, and the arts and sciences consolidate this authority in order to protect and justify a decadent facade. Luxury dissipates morality. Economic disparity of class reduces the value of the individual to the measure of his consumption.
In his second discourse, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind (1754), Rousseau identifies two species of inequality, that based on nature and that based on social and political inequality. Natural or physical inequality refers to bodily constitution, health, and mental capacities. Political and social inequality is deliberate, based on law, authority, power, prejudice, culture, convention, and subjugation. The latter are detrimental accompaniments to the advantages gained by the development of society and its transformation from an animal–like existence.
Describing this transition from a primitive to civilized state, Rousseau anticipates modern findings of anthropology and paleontology. He is not far off in his description, while himself acknowledging that his sketch is conjectural and hypothetical.
Human pursuit of survival irrevocably transformed into associations between humans, the foundation of social groups. Chronologically this transformation led from hunting and gathering to clans and tribes, to viability of larger populations, then to territoriality, competition, and the development of hierarchy and power. In the primitive era, humans largely resided in nature, had simple appetites, were tolerant of weather, enjoyed keen eyesight, and slept well. Unlike the view of Hobbes, humans are not intrinsically evil or vicious, Rousseau maintains. A natural empathy emerged from their common life. In the state of nature, each person was his own master, without bonds of constraint, and enjoyed a solitary nature.
Will and consciousness transformed the state of nature and redirected it towards the path to civilization. Animals choose, humans will. Consciousness provokes the capacity to select and to will. Will promotes a sense of potential or perfectibility. External accidents radically shift primitive human behavior, making humans sociable, therefore (says Rousseau) “wicked.”
As Rousseau puts it, the first man to enclose property and announce that it is his (and found others to believe him) was the true founder of society. This was the source of many crimes, war, murders, and horrors, pitting the ego against others, violating the ethos of the solitary state of nature. Thus, Rousseau sees property as the source of societal problems, and in ethical terms the source of greed, pride, covetousness, and egoism. Property engenders the mentality of civilization.
Rousseau elaborates on the impact of his premises. The disappearance of equality leads to property, wealth of the few leads to servitude of the many. Society emerges, with oppression destroying empathy. Institutions emerge to safeguard the new order. The end of the original state of nature is the end of solitude. Rousseau cites two ancient philosophical exemplars of solitude: Diogenes and Stoicism. Of Diogenes, Rousseau states that the Greek solitary could not find a wise man because such men were of a bygone era.
Rousseau’s essential anthropology of solitude and human nature is expressed in the two discourses, yet his Social Contract receives the most critical interest today, primarily because it intended to resolve a necessary or inevitably corrupted human condition given the premises of the discourses. In the Social Contract, Rousseau attempts to address the issue of society as a contemporary given; there can no longer be a system that recovers original human nature. Hence his famous opening declaration that “Man was born free, and is everywhere in chains” refers to social man, contemporary people in contemporary society.
Rousseau was proscribed and exiled by both church and state for his radical writings advocating a freedom and individual autonomy untenable in his day. He unwittingly collected many enemies among the elite of France and Switzerland until he was literally fleeing for his life. The philosopher David Hume invited him to England but they soon fell out, Hume indignant at Rousseau’s penchant for solitude. Rousseau safely returned to Paris under a wealthy patron’s protection. Out of the experience of persecution and exile came the collection of essays posthumously published in 1782 as Reveries of a Solitary Walker (“Les reveries du promeneur solitaire”).
The Reveries are sketchy essays Rousseau composed in his seventies for his own perusal and solace. In the “First Walk,” Rousseau acknowledges that his work emulates the style of Montaigne, noting that while Montaigne wrote his essays for public consumption and therefore discretely held back deeper feelings, Rousseau writes only for himself, holding back nothing.
While the Reveries can be counted significant among writings on solitude, Rousseau was understandably brought to the work in bitterness. From the opening lines he describes himself as “alone on the earth.” Of his critics and foes, he says:
I am a thousand times happier in my solitude than I could possibly be living amongst them. … Whatever they may do, my contempo-raries shall ever be nothing to me.
And in “Sixth Walk” Rousseau notes:
The conclusion I am able to draw from all these reflections is that I was never truly adapted to society, where all is constraint, obligation, duties; and that my independent disposition always rendered me incapable of a subjection necessary to him who wishes to be something in the world.
From: The Book of hermits: the history of hermits from antiquity to the present / Robert Rodriguez
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