hermit's thatch

Concepts of God and God’s functionality in the universe are as often derived from experience and feeling as any formal philosophizing or theologizing. Darwin, for example, was as much influenced in his agnosticism by the evangelists’ images of hellfire and the tragic death of his daughter as by anything to do with evolution and natural selection. Our reflections on nature can dwell on “tooth and claw” as much as on the butterfly and the sunset. Likewise our reflections on humanity may dwell as much on love and mutual aid as on the cruel destruction of innocent life. The theories spun by thinkers never resolve the dichotomies, nor does society ever seem to progress in addressing them. But the solitary can pursue the necessary path: slowing the cultural influences in one’s life, reducing the ego’s affinities for easy social solutions, and awaiting a pattern of silence from which will emerge at least a modest personal equanimity. This is a life-time’s work, to be sure, but it is the only work we need pursue.

Albert Camus was one of the more acute and responsive thinkers of the past century. When he speaks of “the unreasonable silence of the world” (The Myth of Sisyphus), we quickly appreciate his reflections on the bleak history of humanity, violence, injustice, and the absurdity of collective efforts to reform society or to cheat death, which is to say, reality. Collective responses to perennial concerns have failed historically. What curbs people’s cold hearts but exhaustion! Sisyphus is condemned by gods or fate to roll a great boulder up a mountain only to watch it slip past down and have to roll it up again, indefinitely. But Camus thinks that his archetype must yet be happy. Sisyphus must study and ponder and take meager delight in “every atom of the stone,” every “mineral flake of that night-filled mountain.” And Sisyphus is, in the final analysis, a solitary, condemned by the gods to solitude, but making the best of it, the very best.

One of the paradoxes of traditional religions and sects is that when they are pursued exclusively in their ritual and formulaic modes as institutions of power and privilege, they are invariably attacked as belief systems. However, when religions and sects take on a humanitarian and social function of helping the lowly and oppressed, for example, their belief system is suddenly tolerated and alliances from otherwise antithetical quarters emerges. This is a curious sociological phenomenon of mutual aid and toleration, but a tenuous argument for the truth of a given sect’s beliefs. Which religion with a benign face do we accept for its social face, and does this toleration exempt it from a critique of its beliefs and actions? What method separates the two?
The solitary can best negotiate this underexamined paradox in religion and society by teasing out the valid expressions of the new social face of the religion while constantly pressing the abstract belief system for it spiritual fruit. Because the solitary has no particular public function as do institutions and sects, what can emerge is an insightful and sustainable model of spirituality that does not depend on either one pole or another of this dichotomy.

The first major atheist of the modern West, Paul-Henri-Dietrich d’Hollbach (1723-89), described the atheist as “one who destroys human chimeras in order to summon people back to nature, experience and reason.” The atheist, says d’Hollbach, “has no need to imagine ideal forces, imaginary intelligences or rational beings in order to explain the phenomena of the universe or the operations of nature.” We know today that science and reason do not explain these phenomena either, except in the grossest sense of error and description, or in the pragmatic sense of technology. We know, too, that nature and experience are richer in the spiritual sense than the chimerical forces, intelligences, or beings of which d’Hollbach writes. It has taken the exhaustion of science, technology — and classical atheism — to recognize this. But the “ideal” (or otherwise) “forces” that do explain the universe and the operations of nature continue to elude humanity.

Archaic thinking proposes the existence of a soul or spirit within living things like birds and insects and trees, and even within inanimate things like stars and rocks. So Jainism and Shinto, both influential in the course of world thought. This is distinct from the magic of animism, with its anthrocentric point of view, its preoccupation with power and control.
Our philosophy of life and nature inevitably suggests this primitive or archaic notion of universally indwelling spirit or Spirit percolating from the past. This is true no matter what the technicalities of animation or sustainability or creation in our thinking. And this is good and right, and can be tested with simple logic. Because if we reserve the worthiest form of life only to ourselves as humans, what should even higher beings (whether you accept it as fact, possibility, or myth) think of our claim? Would they crush us in fear or repulsion? Destroy our habitat and well-being for their own selfish ends? Eat us? Presumably they would not because they are “higher.” Yet archaic religions have always expressed the fear that higher beings would and do exactly what we fear. They believed this because these higher beings were projections of the culture’s own malevolence. Even now, however, we humans inflict that suffering on “lower” forms of being. We still project these cultural accretions. Only the positive view of animating all of nature in some universal and benign way will move us to a higher philosophy of life.

One of the great malevolencies of modern (if not Western) culture is the treatment of the habitat of hermits and solitaries, which is to say the habitat of all animate and other beings, but especially of those beings that appreciate the solitude, the silence, and the benignity of simple nature. The heart of the West is rooted in the false premises of Hebrew antiquity, the narrow experience of a hunter-herder culture of the semi-desert. This is succinctly expressed by Aldo Leopold in his classic A Sand County Almanac, published in 1948:

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. … That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.

Khalil Gibran’s short story, “The Tempest,” tells the tale of a young man who quits society to live as a hermit. The narrator is eager to engage the man in conversation, to learn his motives, his vision of the world. After contriving a few false starts, the narrator finds himself in the countryside during a tempest, and the weather draws him to seek shelter in the house of the very hermit who perplexed and challenged him. There is no particular action in the story, but the ensuing conversation is a polished articulation of Gibran’s image of eremitism. The story is a long series of wonderful sayings. Here is one representative quote:

I departed the world and sought solitude because I became tired of rendering courtesy to those multitudes who believe that humility is a sort of weakness, and mercy a kind of cowardice, and snobbery a form of strength.

The open and shut door is an image used of the mind: the open and closed mind. An open mind lets things pass to and fro, while a closed mind shuts out both that without and that within. But a strong wind through an open door can send delicate things within flying or shut the door inadvertently, just as a strong experience can scatter or shut a mind or heart. Who within can reopen the door when the strong winds continue to blow against it? Who without will come to assist us if they cannot see what is on the other side of the door? That is the trouble with doors. A butterfly can pass through a closed gate but not a closed door.

The characteristic of a gate is that it swings back and forth but is never permanently shutting the observer out of viewing one side or another. Perhaps it is locked but we can see through it. A door, in contrast, shuts, and we cannot see what is on the other side. Hence the wisdom literature always speaks of the gate, seldom of the door — except, perhaps, to show how we do not know what is on the other side of some experiences. “Knock and it shall be opened” suggests that we are not sure what is on the other side of the door, that we do not know what to expect, that we are hoping for the best. Knocking on a door involves trepidation, anxiety, uncertainty. Like a child in a dark house, we need reassurance that what is behind the shut door is benign. Will the experience we are soliciting or pursuing (“knocking” on) be what we want or hope? Who can tell? This is called faith.

The gate is a universal metaphor. In the Gospels, Jesus speaks of the narrow gate, and refers to himself as the gate. The Lotus Sutra speaks of the gate of knowledge as being difficult to enter. In the Koran, Muhammed describes himself as the city of knowledge and Allah as the gate. And Zen points to the “Gateless Gate.”
The ultimate gates are birth and death. Birth is literally a difficult passage for the “traveler” who would enter the world, and life is a search for easy gates to one temporal state or another, often distracted from the necessary end, which is to learn how to recognize the final gate.
The image of the gateless gate suggests that our anticipation, preparation and study may not get us to the expected gate. Events may change our minds, blind us to the road before us, mislead us down a fruitless path. The gate, like death, like life, is before us right now. We have but to enter it and abide in the place we have accessed, finding in the end that it is the same place from which we entered.