medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
I am going to chime in here, too. In the Eastern Christian monastic complex, the eremitic life has continued to be the ideal. Still today, one does find hermits, but they are almost always associated in some way with a monastery (i.e., their cave or hermitage might be a dependency of a larger skete or monastery). In the Russian tradition, in fact, there are hermitages on monastery property. There is a good article on the geography of the Egyptian Desert that pointed out that it was impossible for the hermits to survive if they were too far from the River and from villages.
Typically, a monastic has to receive a blessing from an abbot or other elder to become a hermit in the first place. Such a blessing would typically be given only after he or she has been in the monastic life for some time to acquire the necessary experience. According to most of the hermit saints' lives they have some contact with members of the community (who bring them necessities, such as food or they still go to the katholikon for major feast-days; in fact, I know that this is still true of a few monks, such as where I spent Christmas) and often they receive some sort of directive from God or a saint to either move back to the monastery or to occupy a hermitage nearer the main grounds and to receive pilgrims. It appears that female monastics in the Byzantine era did not recieve blessings to live eremitic lives, but instead most lived in urban (particularly in Constantinople itself) coenobia of varying sizes. Every once in a while, one will encounter a monastic, such as the nineteenth-century Photini who managed to set herself up in a cave in Palestine without anyone knowing about it until a "chance" encounter where a couple of monks were wandering through the wilderness and stumbled upon her cave and had a little conversation with her (vaguely similar to Zosimas in the Life of St. Mary of Egypt). I can think of one modern hermit whose eremitic life was more or less a matter of circumstances--Elder Cleopa of Sihastria in Romania. When the communists took over and started shutting down monasteries, he and another monk fled into the forests and for something like 30 years, they met up with one another only once or twice a year and a pious peasant would make food drops (mostly potatoes, but that's actually the main item in the Romanian diet, anyway, as I understand it--potatoes with salt and vinegar and maybe a couple of mushrooms) for him. When Elder Cleopa died, a former professor of mine said, "I was just thinking about you because I read the obituary of some Romanian hermit in the New York Times and it read just like an early medieval saint's Life" (that conversation is actually how I first heard of Elder Cleopa).
I think it's also important to remember the critical social and religious function that highly spiritual monastics played in medieval society (certainly in Byzantine and Slavic regions--I'm not recalling any off the top of my head from the High or Late Middle Ages in the West). They were the go-to people for spiritual advice and prayers and miracles. As a result, they always attracted disciples and pilgrims (even if they evidently didn't want them, according to their Lives and some of 'em seem cranky enough that I don't think it's all a matter of typology in Vitae).
- Kurt
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From: medieval-religion - Scholarly discussions of medieval religious culture [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul Chandler [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2011 2:57 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [M-R] 'hermits'
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
This discussion has been marred by an attempt to apply a dictionary definition to a situation of great complexity and fluidity. Almost no hermits lived entirely alone, which, as has been pointed out, is almost impossible. They lived in small or large communities, more or less institutionalised, or they were solitaries supported by a community (diverse forms of life from Wendy Beckett in a caravan in a convent's grounds to a medieval anchorite attached to a parish church). Even quite extreme forms of eremitical life--Simon Stylites on his pillar, for example--were necessarily enabled by support networks, sometimes of considerable social extent and significance. Many of the 12th-c. apostolic life groups considered themselves as preaching hermits. The OED sheds very little light on these complex phenomena and the medieval categorisations of them.
It is often forgotten that all the 13th-c. mendicant orders were transformations of eremitical groups, with the single exception of the Dominicans, who sprang from a canonical background. The early Franciscans had a strong eremitical element in their spirituality, part of the reason Francis did not originally want the brothers to spend the night in cities: before the gates closed they were to leave for the countryside. Francis also wrote a rule for hermitages. The Augustinian friars were a union of Italian hermit groups created by papal decree and encouraged to take up urban ministry. They continued to call themselves "hermits" in their official name until the 1960s, and argued that solitude was an inner state rather than an outer one. The Carmelites were also originally hermits and only founded urban houses after 1247; they continued to speak of living in the desert even when their houses were in cities. The Servites, too, had a strong eremitical streak and still have an important "hermitage" on Monte Senario outside Florence.
De diversis ordinibus in ecclesia, which Giles Constable edited some time back, makes it clear that 12th-c. categories for classifying forms of religious life correspond very little to those developed by later canonists, never mind the OED.
In the Life of Guthlac, when Guthlac finds the ideal spot for a hermitage in Crowland, the first thing he does is return to his monastery to find some brother monks to live with him "in solitude". It is not necessary to invoke the Red Queen. It is simply that words like hermit, solitude, desert and the like did not have have simple definitions, no matter what the OED may say.
Jean Leclercq said somewhere that medieval eremitism was so various that it is almost impossible to explain, but that little can be explained without it. -- Paul
Paul Chandler, O.Carm.
Holy Spirit Seminary | Banyo. Qld. 4014
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On 23/12/2011, at 8:42 PM, Christopher Crockett <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> From: Karl Brunner <[log in to unmask]>
>
>> Sorry, we never will hear much about a totally successful, i.e. solitary
> hermit ...
>
>
> yes, i suspect that they all just died off (the very definition of
> "unsuccessful").
>
> it was hard enough to survive in the Dark Ages with a functioning Support
> Network (vassals, fideles, extended family, village infrastructure, whatever)
> --trying to Make a Go of it off on one's own was just asking for trouble.
>
> c
>
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