Author: Meng-hu

A friend of Hermitary notes with regard to consciousness the primordial sense of the indeterminate, prior to even the basic yin-yang, as found in Confucius. This is what Chuang-tzu refers to in saying: “At the great beginning there was non-being, which had neither being nor name.”

The indeterminate It is not quite equivalent to the “great ultimate” which is the force that precipitates or engenders the yin-yang motion, the fundamental motion of all things.

From a Western perspective, one might say that the indeterminate is what is described (in a sense) in the second line of Genesis: “And the earth was void and without form; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The great ultimate, then, would be closer to the rest of the passage: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” — leaving aside a definition of “Spirit of God.”

The problem for the Western sensibility is that these passages come after, not before, the engendered forces of yin-yang or equivalent. The first line, before the above lines, is: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” So the philosophical assumption for Western thought is the a priori status of God or the Prime Mover or First Cause, etc.

As our friend points out, referring to Kant, the a priori status of everything is derived as consciousness, reason, ethics, etc. In this sequence, we never get to posit the peace, rest, and “nothing” state first, but we are immediately thrown into motion, forces, dualism, and what Taoism calls the “ten thousand things.”

The chief characteristic of origin stories is the rush to justify or explain what “is” rather than accept a certain indeterminacy in the primordial universe. The stories attempt to explain what “is” and how it got that way to the satisfaction of the given culture, which is why so many creation myths sound naive and amusing to our modern minds. At the same time, in attempting to justify or give reason, the stories address why things exist rather than do not exist. At this point, they merely fall back on the facticity of the universe, of the heavens and earth, and derive their perception of moral or ethical necessity from the contemporary culture that has already evolved them.

How, then, to understand the primordial nature of the universe as rest and balance and peace and stability if we cannot get behind what is called God? For God represents the active element that in effect forces all of creation to enter the endless cycle, the endless turning of the wheel. Zoroastrianism, like Genesis, presents creation as orderliness, the opposite of the intolerable void and darkness of the primordial universe before God casts light into it and begins separating and identifying its parts. From this and other origin presentations the West takes its dichotomous universe: good and evil, darkness and light, truth and falsity, order and chaos.

Eastern thought presents an Absolute either as a descriptive Brahman or a less descriptive Void. The attempt to reach back into the original state is based on the insight of how the mind and consciousness function. The mind and consciousness in the state of peace and meditative emptiness are not social functions, busy with activities, events, and processes. They reflect a truer, more genuine state of being, and to describe these mechanisms is the goal of these traditions. Yet the momentum of spiritual life in, say, the Christian mystics, early hermits, and hesychasts is toward transcending duality, even while accepting the necessity of a literalist presentation to the masses.

For that matter, perhaps all philosophical and spiritual traditions originate in this context of non-duality, but accept duality as what seems to be real and necessary for the ordered evolution of culture and society. Society never returns to an exploration of the primordial because the culture has driven out speculation in favor of ritual, law, and centers of power and authority. Such speculations are left to shamans and mystics — if they are allowed to disrupt the established order.

Additionally, our friend notes correctly that Nietzsche did much to attempt to break through this conundrum — if largely by sweeping away the philosophers and religionists altogether and starting over! Nietzsche seeks to identify the primordial motion within us, rejecting ideas of consciousness up to that time as contrived projections. He hits upon the formula of will, but the conundrum of consciousness and the contrived state of mind when functioning as a social and cultural “will” still needs to be integrated. That was the challenge for existentialism in the twentieth century, or at least in part. Western thought is still preoccupied with things “post-creation” — and not making much progress in insight. Western thought is by-and-large not working on the primordial, the indeterminate.

Many popular images are intended to demonstrate that how we view things is a matter of perspective. For example, the image of a glass of water: the optimist says it is half-full, and the pessimist says it is half-empty. All a matter of perspective, we are told triumphantly.

Except that the perspective cannot end with the glass as is. The water in the glass is at a specific level and how it got that way we don’t know, but it matters. In real life we tend to accept conditions and situations because their mere existence gives them credence; their longevity or their persistence tends to legitimize them as necessary and real. As Hegel insisted, “What is real is right, what is right is real.”

Both perspectives of looking at the glass of water are looking not at the past or even the present but extrapolating into the future. The optimist says, “It can always be filled up,” while the pessimist replies, “It can always be emptied altogether.” Perspective is not just a matter of what exists here and now. Perspective must take into account a variety of factors.

In Hindu tradition, the story of the person entering a house at dusk and mistaking a coil of rope for a serpent is an old parable. The story illustrates not just how we mistakenly perceive things (that are remedied with time) but how we respond emotionally to misperceptions and assumptions.

The issue is not the physical limits of our optics and brain but the response that extends our personality and values. The apparent snake frightens us to no end, our heart racing, our palms sweating, blood rushing to our head. That is all physiology and much of it out of our control. But worse is how we implement subconsciously the values we have already cultivated. Do we prepare to strike violently with a shovel or whatever is at hand? Are we altogether paralyzed with indecision or fright? Do we run in fear? Or do we stay and observe just one fraction of a moment to allow comprehension to arise?

The snake and the rope is a parable for daily life experiences. Perspective has more to do with response than with action or miscalculation. Wise people doubt perception in the first place, not because they cannot judge or assess. Rather, they know that with values long cultivated and now steady and clear, all phenomena will fall into place for them. Judgment need not be instant or hasty. How long merely depends on how important the situation. And in many cases, the situation will end up being of low enough importance that the wise person will not have had to worry or be angry or be moved at all, as the situation merely falls away. Taoism considers inaction (wu wei) one of the highest virtues.

Nor is perspective a matter of cultures and societies and mores being relative; rather, these are expressions of physical and intellectual limitations, products of an unwise and unreflective collectivity. If we acknowledge the origins of ideas around us, we can begin to free ourselves from relativism. We are then able to organize what we perceive into a perspective that does not depend upon circumstance, accidentals, chance or the limitations of society, body, and mind.

Consciousness plunges into a full discussion of so many other universal questions. Even apparently opposing points of view about consciousness seem to approach one another after all, then diverge suddenly like charged particles. Even defining consciousness provokes forays into divergent topics, as if eluding sight of the subatomic particle.

One can begin at an extreme, that of the radical opponents of consciousness like B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist. The behaviorist dismisses consciousness as non-existent. If it cannot be weighed, measured, or quantified then it does not exist. Instead, according to behaviorism, everything humans do is conditioned long before, just conditioned reflexes. This may simplify our understanding of, say, motor reflexes, but it assumes that we are products of upbringing and of society’s acculturation — which is true to a large degree. That is, most people seem to function as automatons in some perverse avoidance of thinking and reflecting on what they have inherited and on what is surrounding them.

But that is not what consciousness or denying consciousness is all about. Instead, denial is the denial of a human nature other than whatever physical juices have evolved. Human propensity for violence is due to inevitable shortages of electrical impulses or to an overlarge amygdala. All of this sounds sufficient if we are assessing the human being as a composite of society and culture over the centuries. It does not address the individual or potentialities. And we can sense the inadequacies of scientific explanation when we see how it is as much dependent on society’s values at the time, as in behaviorism’s heyday of the 1950’s infatuation with technology and progress. The modern behaviorist fears Descartes’ ghost in the machine, the theologian’s soul, the universal self , because ultimately behaviorism cannot accept will.

The existential philosopher Sartre appears to represent the very opposite point of view. Consciousness is demonstrated by the very fact that we are completely, starkly, and imminently free to define our selves and exercise our wills. This is the insight of existentialism, which is not trying to make of the will a hero or metaphysical champion but instead to recognize the profoundness of our individual capability to become aware of the content and nature of society and culture. We are conditioned in an anecdotal sense, in that we are born with this or that set of parents, learn this or that language and set of values, cultivate this or that personality. All of this is grist for consciousness: to recognize all of this socialization and to wonder at its significance — and yet at its insignificance in assessing what it means to be human, really human.

Yet Sartre concludes that when we look behind all of this accoutrement of social face and presentation to the world, consciousness is not that. Consciousness is not the sum of acculturation, not the sum of the parts. But neither is it the soul or the ghost in the machine. Sartre says, simply, that it is nothing.

Now, “nothing” and nothingness have a long career despite their 20th century tone of nihillism. In Vedanta, for example, we catalog the objects of our senses and conclude that what “is” is “not that, not that.” It is the nada that John of the Cross spoke of. It is the object of meditation east and west when our minds rest in emptiness. It is no “thing.” But, then, what is it? It is our awareness of this emptiness, this nothingness, that constitutes consciousness. Equating this nothingness with consciousness does not define consciousness but sets out its existential parameters. It identifies what the individual can “do” with the objects it encounters. What it “does” reflects the maturation of will, the refinement of self, and, ultimately, the qualities of consciousness.

A sense of what consciousness is might be to consider a flower. How conscious is a flower of not its surroundings but of its self? We would say not at all but, well, it does not matter. The flower’s surroundings are its self — to the delight and the denial of the behaviorist, who will gleefully not assign the flower (or the human being) a self, and will see the growth of the seed, the stem, the leaves, and the flower, as the equivalent of “conditioning,” needing no consciousness, which is dismissed as a primitive anthropomorphism. The flower will have no more meaning than the universe.

But we have as much of a career as the flower. The only difference is that, as Heidegger says, “being” is an issue to us. We are reflexive, we are out of our emptiness and nothingness, unlike the flower, which exists in perfect harmony with the universe, its surroundings, its self. Our human restlessness makes the behaviorist in turn restless about the possibility that we humans have — even as we grow, mature, age, and pass away like a flower — awareness. Who can deny that we are painfully and achingly aware of this, that we have “consciousness,” be it the ghost, the soul, the self, the unit of expression by the universe, or an eternal flower.

So the challenge is to search for consciousness but with the expectation of finding, well, nothing. And everything.

A traveler is not a wanderer and the wanderer is not a hermit, but there are affinities among them.

The Japanese Zen poet and hermit Basho traveled throughout Japan visiting shrines and places of interest — but on his last journey he had renounced his property, a hut, expecting not to return. Basho’s journey was as a pilgrim and a traveler but he was not lost, in the sense that we typify the classic wanderer. In part due to age and infirmity, he traveled in company and not strictly as a hermit, but in spirit he was still so.

What is a wanderer but a homeless soul, or perhaps a dwelling-less one? The hijiri of Japan, also inspired by spiritual motives, considered themselves homeless, much like the sadhu of Hindu India and the digambara of Jainism. These are wanderers in that they trek across the geography without possession or claim to anything on the earth. In this way they belong unabashedly to it. But they, too, are not lost.

Wanderers have been made so, too, in history — exiles, fugitives, and survivors of war and disasters. Their pitiable states are hardly to be romanticized. Victims of injustice or historical circumstance fall into the category of involuntariness. That is a social consequence, not a freely elected pursuit.

Thus the “Wanderer” of Old English elegy (see Hermitary article) borders on eremitism not because of any less involuntariness but because he concludes that to be alone and a solitary is his fate — though how he got there was not of his choosing. He reflects and writes and universalizes, and so becomes a wanderer.

Odysseus of Greek lore is a homeless victim of war, too, but he savors adventure, mingling pleasure with the sorrow of exile and the longing for home. The difference with the Old English poet is that Odysseus has not lost his home but only lost his way home. Because he can still identify with home, and with a wife and child and property, Odysseus is a wanderer by proxy.

Sea poems with their vigor and optimism make wandering the opposite of tragic tales of exile and loss. The poetry of John Masefield, for example, should be read aloud for its exquisite capture of rhythm:

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by. …
I must go down to the sea again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry-yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

These are rousing lines even if we adhere to the Portuguese saying: “Love the sea but stay on the land.” Masefield could be giving voice to the Dharma Bums at sea, or even Han-shan were he to trade his Chinese mountain haunts for the ocean, assuming he could tolerate his fellow mariners. Masefield is not a hermit, of course, but the secret pleasure that he enjoys being both alone and simultaneously in company is not unlike a coenobite’s monastery flung open to the sky and seas, with cabin provisions for the hermit.

Such enthusiasm should infect eremitism and solitude just as throughly. Except for the struggles with philosophizing and emotions, a hermit can awaken each day just as intensely. Ascending mountains of logic can have its reward, but a wild appreciation for what is right there in front of us, filling our eyes or nostrils or sweeping our hair, can bring to our days as wanderers a great joy.

Soren Kierkegaard’s concept of truth illustrates the “efficacy” of faith and the distinction between the expression of faith, which is universal, and the content of faith, which is not.

Kierkegaard distinguishes between objective and subjective truth or thinking. The emphasis of objective thinking is on the whatness of things, the content of science or mathematics or historical events. Whatever we may think of the facts of these fields of knowledge, new information in them does not change our daily lives. Dates may change in historical chronology or details of theoretical physics may be refined. These changes will not alter our daily lives. (Granted that changes will create controversy and may affect lives collectively or societally, but the changes themselves are not the content of our daily behavior but practical applications of society’s technology and power.)

Subjective truth is not the what but the how of our perceiving of things. We cannot appeal to anything outside of ourselves in order to confirm the validity of subjective truths. We cannot prove these subjective perceptions, yet it is here where faith dwells, where our will and decisiveness rest. Subjectivity is where the core of our self resides: values and beliefs that drive our daily lives, our behavior. Yet we cannot prove their validity, their objectivity. This unprovability is the core of faith. Faith’s efficacy exists because it is the style of expression or the “personality” of faith that corresponds to our subjective mind. Thus the content of faith is made to correspond to the subjective mind, making the “package” of faith efficacious for us.

But Kierkegaard does not see the content of faith as so readily assimilating to subjective truth. Our decisions and actions are not motivated by facts or the content of faith, for these may be but pretexts. In many, this realization may produce discomfort and anxiety. But this is the sad fact of the history of Christianity and of virtually all religions. Values have not corresponded to actions. And not only in the realm of religion. In politics and other fields of worldly contention the same story can be read. Yet the individual (especially the solitary) has the psychological and even the intellectual disposition for detecting this gap between what is said and what is done.

Kierkegaard notes that we cannot examine our subjective truths the way we can apply criteria to objective truths. We cannot “know” if our values and actions are absolute and finished because we have not tested them under every possible experience. As the ancient Greek historian Herodotus said, “Call no one happy until they are dead.” But we have criteria nevertheless.

We may live our entire lives suspended on the tinder hooks of what we think to be the objective and the irrefutable (though even science and human knowledge is not all irrefutable). Yet we may never live our values fully or naturally. We may never exhibit the courage of our values in ethical behavior, how we consume, how we treat others, how we think of our world. We may never smell a flower, gaze at a star, feel a wind-swept breeze or warm sunlight. We may never recognize what we are doing at any given moment. That is, we may never be conscious of these real events, the objective truths that we can make fully subjective.

For this connection between subjective and objective to happen is like the image of a striking bolt of lightning often used as a metaphor in eastern thought, or the elusiveness of the kingdom of heaven suddenly attained, as used in the parables of Jesus. Consciousness never purports to intellectualize the realization of what it means to be alive. Our understanding must ultimately be subjective, making the real world part of our lives and values, not mere abstract beliefs or intellectualisms. If we reach this insight, then, as Kierkegaard says to his readers of Either/Or, “throw this book down!”

Faith is a universal element of religious traditions everywhere, and even has a “data-sustaining” role in science and philosophy. In no case is an absolute proof or certainty sustainable, only a deduction based on probability and sentiment. Within everyday life, faith is sufficient because it is efficacious. That is, “It works for me.”

We push content into faith based on our socialization, acculturation, and personal affinities. Why does a person hold a particular religious faith but for the circumstances of culture and socialization, even when the content of that faith changes? Where a person was born, in what period, to what upbringing — all are not only contributing factors but for many are exclusive and insulated. What happens later in life only shapes the individual’s attitude to the content, always tending towards social harmony and practical efficacy. In turn, the loop feeds the regularly demonstrated efficacy of their adopted point of view, confirmed by an attained equanimity that all of us seek and which we may call a philosophy of life.

The balance or tendency we naturally have toward efficacy is our reconciliation of consciousness and the world around us. We long for what the philosopher Santayana called “animal faith,” that stolid and unconscious view that projects equanimity with regards to what we feel as humans: fear, suffering, death. As human beings, we want to assert what is unique to our consciousness, what amounts to “human faith”: creativity, imagination, transcendence.

Somewhere between the non-articulated consciousness of animals and the strivings for triumph beyond the limits of human nature, is faith. Faith is the desire to achieve this balance, or, perhaps, the insistence that it can be done. Sometimes in modesty we assert that at least the breakthrough balance can be achieved by great souls, such as mystics, but not ourselves. Sometimes the great souls themselves, lurching and striving to achieve the heights, assert that at least it can be achieved in glimpses (looking up from the fallen state of dryness experienced by a John of the Cross). And sometimes, being neither self-deprecating nor self-aggrandizing, we can see clearly that both the humility of the small soul is unnecessary, and the strivings of the great soul are contrived and unnatural.

Faith is a form of authenticity, what existentialists consider a self-realization that is trusted by and invested in by the individual. “Bad faith,” as Sartre calls it, is when we renounce that potential to shape our values and instead succumb to culture and society around us, succumb to what Heidegger calls the “they-selves,” and what Gabriel Marcel calls the renouncing of personhood. To have faith, then, in this sense, is to integrate the self and then to be conscious of the effort to integrate.

Faith in the sense of authenticity does not make reference to the content of faith. Faith is not only usually identified with religion but especially with a religious creed or a set of beliefs. But what we need to look at is not a set of beliefs but the very act of having faith, the act of believing or thinking or reasoning.

These acts involve the core of what it is be human. The content that follows is largely based on culture and society. Authenticity in one or another person must have a continuity of value, a quality that is separate from and transcends culture, society, or even the set of beliefs. Otherwise, faith is merely a description of someone’s beliefs, and pits one faith against another, one person against another person.

The tension between authentic faith and what is derived thoughtlessly from culture and society is both humanity’s opportunity and curse. If we can focus on core human consciousness or potential, then we can see human expressions as universal. We can begin to find what is the core of any possible authenticity in faith. Thus the Dalai Lama will express to visitors that he does not say to them to become Buddhists but rather to become compassionate. Compassion as a human efficacy both precedes and transcends any particular culture, society or religion. Humanity’s opportunity resides here, in this search for fundamental authenticity.

But the curse is in the residue of our non-conscious behavior. Not non-consciousness as in the animal faith of Santayana, which can be seen as a pure existence in the moment, a state or faculty which humans seldom achieve. Rather, the residue is in the apparently involuntary tendency to grasp power, to desire, to have greed. All of these are topmost in our social and individual behavior, and consume our lives as worldly beings.

We may call this a curse without knowing where it comes from, like the Fall or some divine punishment, or some mistake of evolution accelerated and not smoothed out by time. However we choose to see this “curse,” we are bound to pursue alternative paths, which we will call faith because we need an efficaciousness to overcome the failings and vices. We need a system of values and virtues to make ourselves authentic, to make of ourselves individuals who are doing exactly what makes them content.

And this contentment is itself the beginning of faith.

Faith is a process of self-discovery that involves various faculties such as intellectual, imagination, will, but also a renunciation of input that has preempted the process, namely accretions of society and culture and upbringing. In solitude and silence we create the conditions for such a process, and ensure that the process with be authentic.

“Stories of God” is an early collection by Rilke (he was 23 when he wrote it) inspired by a journey to Russia and the religious sentiment and folk literature he encountered there. Rilke later called these stories “youthful fantasies,” in part because they were somewhat imitative, if not naive in the primitive sense — Tolstoy’s folk tales come to mind — but chiefly because he could no longer cling to the childlike faith they project.

In one of the stories, “The Song of Justice,” Rilke describes a favorite character named Ewald, a disabled man who sits at the veranda of his house all day, watching the passing scene and waiting for the narrator to come by and stop and share a story. Ewald ably compensates for his physical handicap with his simple insight, as when he is speaking with the narrator about how he does not get around much physically.

It is a long passage but full of a wistful sentimentality that affects many who were once religious, versus the harder edge of practitioners. The important theme here, however, is solitude — a room of one’s own, to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase — which was to become one of Rilke’s thematic passions, even when he left these stories behind.

“Yes,” said Ewald with a strange smile, “I can’t even go to meet Death. Many people run into him when they are out going places. But he is afraid to enter their houses and draws them out into alien territory, away to a war, to a precipitous tower, to a wobbly bridge, out into the wilderness, or into insanity. Most people pick him up, at least outside somewhere, and then carry him home on their shoulders without realizing it. For Death is sluggish and lazy; if people were not eventually prodding at him, who knows, he might fall asleep.”

The ailing man thought a while about this and then continued with a certain pride, “But in my case, Death will have to come to me. Here, to my sunny little room, where flowers last so long, over this old carpet, past this cabinet, between the table and the end of the bed (it isn’t that easy to get by), all the way here, to my dear old roomy chair, which will probably die along with me, since it has, in a manner of speaking, lived with me. And he will have to do all that in a normal, accepted manner, without making a fuss, without knocking anything over, without doing anything out of the ordinary, just like anyone paying a visit. This makes me feel oddly close to my room. Everything will play out here, on this narrow stage, and for that reason even this final incident will not be very different from all the others that have taken place here and will in the future.”

Not all who are mentioned in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers are hermits. Theophilus, archbishop of Alexandria, plays the foil of torpid authority against eremitic sagacity and understatement. This is one of the subtler senses of humor the compiler(s) offer for those who have eyes.

Here are a few encounters with Theophilus.

Theophilus meets Arsenius, the archetype desert hermit, saying he would like a word of wisdom from him. After a short silence, Arsenius asks Theophilus if he will do what he advises. Theophilus says yes. Well then, replies Arsenius, “if you ever hear that Arsenius is anywhere, don’t go there.”

On another occasion, Theophilus had sent a messenger ahead to ask if Arsenius would receive him. Arsenius tells the messenger that if Theophilus insists on coming, then he must receive him, but if he receives Theophilus he will have to receive everyone and thus not be able to live anymore where he lives. The messenger goes back and relates this to Theophilus, who concludes that if that is the case he will not go and see Arsenius.

The above example is not a duplicate of the first anecdote. Here the point additional to hermit solitude is the subtle equation of the archbishop and just “anyone.” This is perhaps lost on Theophilus. It is characteristic of the hermit’s attitude toward authority, or at any rate the assumption that hermits need to be patronized.

By this time, then, Theophilus has come to an understanding about Arsenius, for when a wealthy widow comes from Rome expressly to visit Arsenius and receive his blessing, she is rebuffed and comes tearfully to Theophilus to commiserate. Arsenius had sent her away and told her not to prattle about her visit in Rome and thus turn the sea into a thoroughfare of visitors to him. Worse, the widow asked Arsenius to remember her and he said, on the contrary, that he would try to forget her. Theophilus comforts the widow by saying that Arsenius meant forgetting her physical presence and temptation but that he would pray for her soul. While this assuaged the widow, Theophilus must have realized what a dilemma Arsenius represented for a church intent on cultivating the pious, especially pious and wealthy widows.

Theophilus might have been exasperated by hermits but he did not get along with monks either, suspecting them of Origenism, a heresy identified with the spiritually-minded of the day. Perhaps it is the archbishop’s rectitude or pompous air or indiscretion, but when he visited a desert abbot and asked him what was the best life to follow (the abbot’s or the bishop’s, perhaps?) the answer was quick: to accuse oneself always, to constantly reproach oneself.

On another occasion, Theophilus comes to Scetis, the famous monastery. The abbot tells one elder to say something edifying to his excellency (perhaps winking, or perhaps not needing to). The old man replies: “If he is not edified by my silence, he will not be edified by my speech.”

Finally, there is the time Theophilus invites several abbots and monks to his quarters in Alexandria. They are having a fancy meal, apparently, and the archbishop remarks about how fine is a cut of meat, offering it to one old man. The old man stops. “To this moment,” he says, “we believed that we were eating vegetables. If this is meat, we will not eat it.” One can imagine the abrupt end of the meal and probably the visit, hapless Theophilus blurting out some words as he trails behind his departing visitors or, perhaps, just left speechless for once.

The concept of private property has a paradoxical career. On the one hand it is held sacrosanct in developed economies as well as primitive autocracies. In the former, private property has been presented as a safeguard to privacy and autonomy, reserving space for self-sufficiency and solitude. In the former, private property has commodified natural and human-made things, making them objects for the taking based on power and privilege. These two threads have merged in the modern world.

Early modern England provides an excellent example of the evolution of the concept and practice of private property. But, furthermore, the impact of private property on the hermit in this history is important because it demonstrates what will or can happen to not only solitaries but anyone.

Two significant movements toward private property occurred in early modern England: 1) the dissolution of the monasteries, and 2) the enclosure movement.

The dissolution of monasteries and appropriation of church lands was an aggrandizement of elite power, not an extension of religious reform or an economic opportunity for the mass of society. The appropriation of monastic and church lands increased the power of the monarchy and its supporting elites, the nobility.

The later enclosure movement designated great tracts of public lands such as forests and grazing meadows into private lands owned, again, by friends of the monarchy and its supporting elites. The new theory of private property provided the rationale.

What was the consequence for hermits? Secular hermits such as forest-dwellers or shepherds using common lands became trespassers. Religious hermits and anchorites were literally turned out of their monasteries and anchorholds. Both were forced to find a way of purchasing what society once granted on the basis of usufruct or of religion.

The Roman legal concept of usufruct meant that the state protected access and use of public property until it deemed the property needed for another purpose. If grazing land or church land was better suited to serve as agricultural land for the community, this was understood to be the privilege of power, which had a kind of moral limitation. At least this is how usufruct functioned in an ideal sense. Rapacious elites of society always found ways of appropriating the lands and houses of orphans and widows, so to speak, but this was understood to be criminal, not a new theory of economics, as was private property.

Thus, privatization did not reassign purpose but dissolved the usufruct status and relationship. It made nature and resources beyond the means of use for any without power or money. But, moreover, it did not even have to do with use. The key to private property is ownership, not use. Certainly the hermit had neither power or money, but is the paragon of mindful use.

We have reached a near-terminus with the possibilities of privatization today. No wonder that there are so few wilderness hermits when there is so little wilderness, when wilderness has been commodified and placed beyond the reach of solitaries seeking solitude in that most natural of places.

But it is not only that natural things like trees and mountains have become private property to the elimination of hermits. It is that these natural things, and now including water and clean air and soil, have been or soon will be eliminated altogether, because society (whether powerful elites or consumption-minded masses) will have consumed them altogether.

Art, especially painting, is often the product of imitation, but usually of predecessors and works held in high esteem by cultural authorities. But at critical periods of history, as the monotony of imitation stagnates creativity, a breakthrough occurs.

Not that anything can be other than human imagination and the technology of the time, but the source of inspiration and imitation makes all the difference.

The lives of all artists tend to show the necessity of solitude, but solitude without insight has little value.

Leonardo da Vinci points out in his Notebook how “from age to age the art of painting continually declines and deteriorates when painters have no other standard than work already done.”

Leonardo’s breakthrough painter is Giotto. Giotto, writes Leonardo, was “reared in mountain solitudes, inhabited only by goats and such.” Unlike his predecessors, Giotto’s solitude in nature showed him that he should begin drawing what he actually saw, specifically landscapes and “all the animals which were to be found in the country,” as opposed to merely imitating his predecessors.

Leonardo’s conclusion is relevant to art and to life:

Mark the supreme folly of those who censure such as learn from nature, leaving uncensored the authorities who were themselves the disciples of this very same nature!

Eremitism as a creative force in human imagination must necessarily imitate its authorities and predecessors. But eremitism uses solitude as the core of manifested imagination and not merely out of necessity. Thus eremitism is a form of art or craft that seeks a balance between human sensibility and nature.