The Last Hermits of Medieval Europe

Hermits in the European Middle Ages championed a theology of evangelical poverty versus ecclesiastical centralization, control, and corruption. From the point of view of ecclesiastical authorities, however, eremitic spirituality was too mystical, and, in its last centuries, too concerned with individual contemplation.

As late as the early fifteenth century, the last medieval guide for recluses, the Speculum inclusorum (or “Mirror for Recluses”) couched its directives disparagingly. Historian E. A. Jones notes that the guide warns against conversation with visitors, idleness, and sloth. It chastises aspiring anchorites for potential bad motives: seeking reclusion for its supposed ease (versus living in the world), using reclusion as penance for past sins (versus having a spiritual positive aspiration), and for pursuing reclusion as escape from the world and its temptations.

Ultimately, hermits proved unable to resist church authority or the suppression of anchorites accused of being heretics and vagabonds. The subsequent Protestant reformers and secular authorities completed the suppression of monks, priests, and nuns in key countries.

The three hermits highlighted below are not literally the last hermits of the Middle Ages, but their stories are representative of the fate of eremites in the waning centuries of the medieval era.

1. Hermit and Pope: Pietro Murrone & Celestine V

In the late thirteenth century, Italy was a battlefield of religious controversy, political intrigue, and incessant warfare. The pro–papal Guelphs fought the imperialist Ghibellines, authoritarian Dominicans opposed Spiritual Franciscans, and rival Roman families, the Colonna and the Orsini, fought for control of the Church.

In the last decades of the 1200s, France, England, Spanish Aragon, and the reigning popes fell into bitter conflict over ecclesiastical and secular prerogatives such as taxation of clergy and control of Naples and Sicily. Into this whirlwind comes Pietro di Murrone (1215–1296), a life–long hermit.

At the age of twenty–five, Benedictine monk Pietro Angelerio left his monastery for Mt. Murrone to become a hermit. After five years living in a cave he joins two companions to form a laura on Mt. Majella. News of his piety spreads. A community of fellow hermits develops. Pietro calls them “Hermits of St. Damiano” and gives them a rule. With Pietro as superior and with papal approval, the order grows and spreads over the next twenty years with thirty–six monasteries and hundreds of hermit–monks.

Pietro intended to retire at sixty but returns to work helping construct a church in Aquila. With a new superior for the order, the nearly seventy year old Pietro withdraws at last to Mt. Majella.

Amidst ongoing war and conflict, Pope Nicholas IV dies in 1292. The rival Colonna and Orsini families fight a two–year stalemate to have their preferred papal candidate elected. The ideal candidate must not represent a faction, but at the same time be malleable to the stronger family. An Orsini cardinal reports that God has told him to elevate a pious hermit to the papacy or face divine chastisement, and that the hermit is the unpretentious, retired lover of solitude Pietro Murrone.

In the spring of 1294, Pietro Murrone accedes to the demand of cardinals and kings and is crowned as Pope Celestine V.

How miserable the old hermit must have been in the midst of the cor-ruption and intrigue of Rome! For all his simplicity, Pietro clearly refused to submit to the farce, instead cranking out lofty spiritual correctives. From the start, Pietro threatened to resign. An exasperated Cardinal Caetani, the very Orsini who appointed Pietro in the first place and who continued to insist on Pietro’s cooperation, accedes at last to papal resignation—in order to himself succeed Pietro as Pope Boniface VIII!

Boniface rightly fears that the secular powers competing for control of Italy will challenge the validity of Celestine’s resignation. Pietro had been winding his way back to Mt. Majelli when Boniface orders his arrest and detention, to assure that all parties will accept the resignation.

Pietro’s friends hide him for months. They prepare his escape to Greece but the old man is caught. At first Boniface puts Pietro in the cardinal’s residence, insisting on statements to mollify the secular powers that Boniface fears. Getting nowhere, Boniface imprisons Pietro in a prison cell for nine months, where the exhausted old man dies in 1296 at the age of eighty-one, though many sources believe that Pietro Murrone was murdered at Boniface’s order.

2. Nicholas of Flue, Hermit of Switzerland

Nicholas of Flue (1417–1487), also called Nikolaus or Claus, is Switzerland’s only canonized saint. The eremitism of Nicholas is a paradox to contemporaries, representing two psychological dimensions of his personality: eremitism and a political–mystical persona.

The late Middle Ages was a chaotic time throughout Europe, as mentioned, including Switzerland. The contest of great powers around Switzerland exacerbate its historical mix of languages and cultures, as does the traditional absence of young Swiss men perennially seeking their fortunes as mercenaries in the wars of neighboring powers. Young Claus spent his youth in such wars.

Son of well–to–do peasants, the piety of Nicholas was unexceptional and predictable. He settled into marriage with a local peasant girl. They raise ten children while he continues heeding soldierly calls when summoned, rising to the rank of captain. Nearly illiterate and without practical political experience, Nicholas is elected or appointed to his town council, then to a judgeship he holds for nine years.

Among other accomplishments, Nicholaus resolves a dispute between the local parish and neighboring Engelberg monastery. Nicholas is even offered the governorship of his canton (which he declines). This staid life may have led Nicholas to deep reflection. By design, or because of a vision of God, the fifty–year old one day announces to his family his urgent desire to become a wandering hermit.

Nicholas declares his intent to travel to foreign lands, but walking to Basel, divine inspiration bids him stop and take up residence in Ranft, about an hour’s walk from his home. Here he built a crude hut for his dwelling, renouncing winter clothing for a mere gown, and refusing food and drink for nearly two decades. He called himself “Brother Klaus.”

When a dangerous fire in the nearby town of Sarnen miraculously extinguishes itself, the prayers of Nicholas are credited. His fame spreads. Civil authorities build a cell and chapel for him, the latter dedicated by vicar–general and bishop of Constance. After the pope grants an indulgence for pilgrimage to Nicholas’s hermitage, visitors from throughout Europe stream to his quarters seeking counsel, both personal and political. The Ranft location is declared part of the Way of St. James, the route to the pilgrim shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

In 1480, Swiss delegates attending the Diet of Stans threatened one another with dissolution of the confederacy. The pastor of Stans hastened to Nicholas, begging his intervention. But Nicholas had vowed to never leave his cell. Instead he entrusts a simple statement to the pastor, urging a peaceful settlement of the issues, with a few modest propositions. The pastor hurries back to Stans. The delegates heed the advice of Nicholas, averting disastrous civil war. Though the content of the advice was never publicized, letters of thanks to Nicholas from the cities of Berne and Soleure survive.

Popularizations of the life of Nicholas of Flue conflate his influence on contemporary events with his mysticism. Throughout his hermit life, Nicholas experienced visions. A significant dream justified his eremitic life, wherein he saw a pilgrim approaching him, who is transformed into Christ but also into Wotan, berserker and wild man, like a bear. Psychologist Carl Jung interpreted this dream as Nicholas identifying himself with animal or subhuman shadow, bearlike and cold, as in his separation from family, committing a necessary “sin” that removes him from human accretions and the world.

Saint and beast are reconciled opposites. For the eremitic life means reconciling the impulses and instincts of aggression, anger, lust, and pride with the spiritual values of renunciation, disengagement, humility, and non–possession. The Christ–figure has never completely engaged the worldly, never been fully understood as anything but pain and suffering. Jung understands this representation of opposites at the heart of the psychological tension within Christianity.

Jungian psychologist Maria–Louise von Franz notes that “compared to such holy sages as Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu, Brother Klaus as a solitary hermit is a humbler figure.” The identification of eremitic solitude as a vocation not only exempts him in the eyes of his Swiss compatriots as a gifted person, but gives Brother Klaus the psychological space to grow as a hermit reconciling the opposing needs of spirituality and sociability, of mystical vision and contribution to others. His abandonment of the world is an abandonment of its false values, but not of his fellow human beings in their simple yearnings.

THE BOOK OF HERMITS

A History of Hermits from Antiquity to the Present

Robert Rodriguez