CHAPTER XVI
THE HERMIT TEMPER
Peter Damiani; Romuald; Dominicus Loricatus; Bruno and Guigo, Carthusians
To contemplate goodness in God, and strain toward it in yearning love, is the method of the Christian vita contemplativa. In this way the recluse cultivates humility, patience, purity, and love, and perfects his soul for heaven. And herein, in that it is more undistracted and more undisturbed, lies the superiority of the solitary life over the coenobitic.
Yet this conceived superiority is but the reason and the conscious motive for the solitary life. The call to it is felt as well as intellectually accepted. It is temperament that makes the recluse; his reasons are but his justification. In solitude he lives the reaches of his life; from solitude he draws his utmost bliss. To leave it involves the torture of separation, and then all the petty pains of unhappy labour and distasteful intercourse with men. “Whoever would reach the summit of perfection should keep within the cloister of his seclusion, cherish spiritual leisure, and shudder at traversing the world, as if he were about to plunge into a sea of blood. For the world is so filthy with vices, that any holy mind is befouled even by thinking about it.”[444]
Here speaks the hermit temper, by the mouth of a supreme exponent. If Hildebrand, who compelled all men to his purposes, kept Peter Damiani in the world, that ascetic soul did not cease to yearn for the hermit life. His skilful pen served it untiringly. Its temper, its merits, and its grounds, appear with unique clarity in the writings of him who, sore against his will, was the Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia.[445]
“The solitary life is the school of celestial doctrine and the divine arts (artes divinae),” says Damiani, meaning every word. “For there God is the whole that is learned. He is also the way by which one advances, through which one attains knowledge of the sum of truth.”[446] To obtain its benefits, it must be led assiduously and without break or wandering abroad among men: “Habit makes his cell sweet to the monk, but roving makes it seem horrible.... The unbroken hermit life is a cooling refreshment (refrigerium); but, if interrupted, it seems a torment. Through continued seclusion the soul is illuminated, vices are uncovered, and whatever of himself had been hidden from the man, is disclosed.”[447]
Peter argues that the hermit life is free from temptations (!) and offers every aid to victory.