Category: SolitaryLife

incognito: the hiddenness of the solitary life

For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Col 3:3)

The individual does not stop being a human being, take off finitude’s motley in order to be dressed in the abstract garb of the monastery; but nor does he mediate between the absolute τέλος and finitude. In immediacy the individual is rooted in the finite; when resignation has convinced itself that he has acquired the absolute orientation towards the absolute τέλος, … He is a stranger in the world of the finite, but does not define his difference from worldliness by an alien mode of dress (a contradiction, since it would define him as worldly); he is incognito, but his incognito consists precisely in looking just like everyone else.

Kierkegaard: Concluding Unscientific Postscript

the law and the solitary

Whereas Western canon law regarding hermits has been marked until recently by an extreme rigidity, Eastern monasticism is distinguished in this, as in other respects, by flexibility and variety. … Such matters cannot and should not be made the subject of detailed legislation; freedom must be left to the conscience of the individual, guided by the Holy Spirit and by his spiritual father. Canon law should not displace the personal relationship between the abba and his disciple.

Metropolitan Kallistos in Solitude and Communion: Papers on the Hermit Life

public & individual

The performance of the liturgy, which the Orthodox Church sees as the fundamental reason for its existence, is a public event in which the words and gestures of the priest, familiar to all, are repeated before the eyes of the faithful; any variation or deviation can be recognised. The deep spiritual truths of the Faith, on the other hand, were communicated to individuals by spiritual fathers who had prepared themselves through long periods of solitude and prayer.

France, Peter. Hermits: The Insights of Solitude

thin places

Through their hidden lives of sacrifice and attentiveness to the Holy, hermits help to create more “thin places” in the world, allowing influences from the spiritual realm to more freely touch human lives.

Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life

… not institutional

Sophronius’ account of Mary of Egypt is rich in theological and symbolic meaning. Her life dramatizes the Christian doctrine of metanoia, or radical repentance. In contrast to idealized virgin martyrs or pious abbesses, Mary’s starting point is one of abjection and vice. Her sanctification, however, does not stem from institutional religion, monastic guidance, or sacramental regularity, but from personal encounter with divine grace. Sophronius portrays the desert as both a site of temptation and a crucible of transformation—echoing the biblical paradigm of the Israelites and Jesus himself.

Rule

Sit in your cell as in paradise.
Put the whole world behind you and forget it.
Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish,
The path you must follow is in the Psalms — never leave it.

If you have just come to the monastery,
and in spite of your good will you cannot accomplish what you want,
take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart
and to understand them with your mind.

And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up;
hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.

Realize above all that you are in God’s presence,
and stand there with the attitude of one who stands
before the emperor.

Empty yourself completely and sit waiting,
content with the grace of God,
like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing
but what his mother brings him

work of the soul

Abba Theodore of Pherme once complained: “When I was in Scetis, the work of the soul was our real job (ergon), and our handiwork we thought of as a sideline (parergon). But now the work of the soul has become the sideline and the handiwork has become the real job.”

solitary and the “church”

In the carliest, least structured stage of monasticism the lines of “control between the church and the desert monks of Egypt seen to have been highly tenuous, after which their gradual imposition can be traced. Initially, retirement from the world entailed also retirement from the body of the church, since the earliest mont were solitaries. There is evidence too of a strong charismatic tendency among these ascetics which on occasion to served by-pass an important aspect of the authority nexus in the primitive church which was located in the dispensing of sacraments. So of the Egyptian hermits claimed to have received a miraculous distribution of the eucharistic sacraments, and this was representative of a more general devaluing of the church’s sacrame control which was the logical corollary of, if not the general practice of, the desert solitaries.

The Religious Order, 22