hermit's thatch

The link between the life and behavior of a philosopher, thinker, or creative person and that person’s work is often made, even insisted upon. In The Book of Dead Philosophers, Simon Critchley even makes the manner of death linked to the style of life — though, of course, it does not hold up, and his flippant attempts at humor are not very sympathetic to the whole subject. Usually, a link between life and expression is made to argue that the ideas or beliefs are flawed because of the person’s behavior — or the opposite, that the manner of a person’s life proves the value of the idea.

What an irony — the linkage works both ways! Whether we condemn or praise the ideas, those ideas are made the responsibility of the person. Or, conversely, whether we condemn or praise the person’s behavior, that behavior becomes the basis of the ideas.

So we are trapped having to accept both or none — if we insist on a link.

More likely, and more realistically, there is no absolute link because there is no completely new idea, nor is there any completely new personality or behavior.

A creative person skirts the edge in forms of expression and what a given society will look like socially or technologically, but that appearance involves historical or accidental elements that simply distinguish one era from another, one culture from another — not necessarily one person from another, or one idea from another. New ideas are not channeled from the dead and morphed upon arrival into some human receptacle that will express the ideas. Rather, old ideas are textured by the atmosphere in which the ideas arrive. Every era is a modernity to the ideas of the past. The genealogy of ideas is traceable because “nothing is new under the sun.” Through the prism of the moment are applied the myriad factors of what is called “the world” and it looks familiar.

But neither does this mean that no linkage between existence and expression can be maintained.

Ideas are the epiphenomena of mental activity, which is in part a physical and physiological foundation for our thoughts. The mind’s complexity will probably never be unraveled. Science will not pursue the issue that far. No only because it cannot. Rather, it explores neuroscience on behalf of others, its funders, its protectors, its front-room desk wardens. Why should science exist at this point except to control our environment, our food, our material conditions, our autonomy, and our thoughts?

Not only must we weigh many factors before judging the thoughts of a person, but the myriad conditionals make no thought autonomous, original, new. Humanity shares the same experiences, whether as instincts still haunting the brain mechanisms, or primordial experiences poured into the pool of collective unconscious.

Psychological trauma or environment or ingested stuff (even food, now contaminated with so many substances) can change the ideas, expressions, and behaviors of people. The epidemic of autism and attention-deficit disorder in young children, suicides among soldiers on prescribed chemical cocktails that enable them to continue their sanctioned behavior, depression among adults — all appear to be very modern insofar as they are linked to modern environmental factors or pharmaceuticals. Behavior in the past was in that since more “rational” and predictable, even if not more benign or violent by extremes. Thousands and thousands of chemical exist today that did not exist in the past, but more to the point is their proliferation and justification.

Thus, when we hear arguments or creative expressions from music to film to fashion to scandal made today as if they are new, we must filter them through the clouded atmosphere of what it means to exist in modern times.

Additionally, we have little experience in what material conditions affected our best-thinking ancestors. Yet we can identify those trains of thought so well. We can even, by methodically subtracting the products of industry and technology, vaguely reproduce their world, though not so well their thoughts. But how can we ever apply this to better our lives today when the material conditions that nurtured our best-thinking ancestors are gone, and when nearly everyone’s identification with modern society is so strong?

This challenge is the prime reason that solitude and silence are essential to our well-being. Despite the many relaxation techniques trumpeted today, they have no ancient context, no continuity other than name and form, if we use them only to postpone value-making decisions, if we use them to allay stress just long enough that we are recovered for the next day’s rat race.

So to with our material lives, wrapped up in technology, petroleum, industry, pollution. So, too, these words, made visible as dancing electrons, are my thoughts, evanescent, doomed to disappear if anything changes in our power grid, or network of dependence. So much thatch.

The link between behavior and ideas is authentic only if we are able to understand the context of the person’s life and times. Thought and art is a combination of a complex of mental interchanges, among which is plain personality, that tightened bundle of heredity, environment, life circumstances. The best art, like the best ideas, are anonymous, and come to us over the centuries as a perennial wisdom, self-effacing and deeply resonant, like a deep still pool of water undisturbed from which any can drink. Such is Jung’s collective unconscious, the waters of which all must drink. Such is the tradition of the self-effacing spirituals who did not write anything, or reputedly did so but probably did not: Buddha, Lao-tzu, Jesus, the mystics whose works are mere ashes of the fire that burned, the poets and painters of antiquity whose reflectiveness enabled them to see into the nature of things. Even the wisdom philosophers who wrote, and wrote a great deal, were only trying to express what they could barely retain.

We can read and study as much as we can, but without changing our environment and behavior, little will be accomplished. We can identify ourselves with the dead and the past, but until we understand the tenuous link between behavior and expression, we are apt to make overstatements on the one hand or on the other hand lack comprehension of or tolerance for the many ignorant of the modern world.

The slender thread that links us to wider reality is more important than anything we think or dream, anything in our environment that impedes us, though we must be scrupulous not to obscure our view of it. Solitude and silence alone will enable us to hear it, to feel it resonating within.

Simeon Stylites, the famous 5th-century hermit who stood on a pillar in the desert most of his life, is an anomalous figure even among the early Christian desert fathers. Despite many contemporary writers such as Theodoret, Zosimus, John Cassian, and others, Simeon’s life is only barely summarized in a couple of paragraphs of Evagrius’ Ecclesiastical History. No sayings are collected or recorded. We must wait until 13th-century hagiographic compilation, The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, for a richer report.

The modern sentiment on eremitism has been best expressed by the historian Edward Gibbon, who sees hermits in general but Simeon in particular as an exemplar of barbarism worthy of the Enlightenment’s scorn and vituperation. Gibbon has no interest in the hagiographical version of Simeon, dismissing his life as a long “aerial penance.”

So it is refreshing to discover Simeon anew through the film lens of the Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Despite his reputation as an anticlerical dialectical materialist and atheist (though it was quite the intellectual mode in his heyday), Buñuel is far more judicious than critics and contemporaries wanted him to be. In his film Simon of the Desert (Simón del desierto), the protagonist Simon is a strong-willed and unflinching personality, not merely in moral terms but in character, personality, and in terms of people and circumstances. Simon looks out symbolically over the world from his pillar, from a solitude disengaged from a fallen and irredeemable world. Even among his supposed petitioners, supporters, and fellow Christians, there is vice, envy, lust, cruelty, though he speaks to them, albeit in lofty words. The pillar is a device or extension of what enables Simon to remain steadfast in consciousness and state of mind.

Clearly Buñuel identified with Simon. In an interview (reproduced in a pamphlet accompanying the DVD of the film), Buñuel says:

The character really moves me. I enjoy his sincerity, his lack of interest, his innocence. … [For example,] Simon neither knows nor understands what property is. He is even more innocent than a child because children cling to objects. Simon needs nothing more than air, a little water, and lettuce. He is free and would be free even in a jail cell. By the same token, Robinson Crusoe — and here is the difference between the two — is not free, because he has a desperate need for company.

And Buñuel places Simon in the context of a tradition of solitude and silence.

Solitude can be terrible, but also desirable. I can see this in myself: at times, when I am alone, I want a friend or two to come visit because I get bored looking at the tips of my shoes or watching a buzzing fly. But I also like to be alone with my soul, to daydream, to image the imaginable … and the unimaginable. What sense is there in going out into the street to see nothing but the hoods of cars and to suffer from the noise? Silence is nearly impossible today; it’s something precious that is very difficult to find anywhere. For example, if you went to the North Pole to enjoy the silence, I wouldn’t be surprised if an Eskimo immediately appeared on his sled … with a noisy portable radio. Can you imagine what the silence must have been like in the Middle Ages? Leaving a town or city, within a few steps you could find silence, or natural sounds, which are marvelous: songs of birds, of cicadas, or the murmur of the rain. We have lost this in our time. There is an infernal instrument that really could have been invented by the devil or by an enemy of mankind: the electric guitar. What diabolical times we live in: crowds, smog, promiscuity, radios, etc. I would happily return to the Middle Ages, as long as it was before the Great Plague of the fourteenth century.

Buñuel is always ironic but not a deceiver. Buñuel is not kidding in his admiration for Simon, although Buñuel’s interlocutors goad him towards admitting some salacious purpose or secret joke or ridicule of Simon. Buñuel acknowledges the black humor of some moments in the film, as when the monks confuse various and obscure theological terms, or when a miracle restores a man’s hands only to see him use it to slap his little daughter on the head. But this is just how people are, in every age. The irony is only in the people, not in Simon. Modernist viewers will think that the foibles of the people, the coreligionists, somehow denigrate Simon’s purpose, mock him for absurdity. They do not realize that Simon is not there for them, or for anyone else. As the Marxist critic Robert Sayres has noted, the desert hermits not only fled the world, they also fled the world that was in the Church.

The co-star of the film is, of course, the devil. Here is showcased Buñuel’s originality and genius, for The Golden Legend does not even suggest this intricate relationship, beyond even that of the traditional accounts of hermits beset by demons. And the devil is, not unexpected, a woman, in various disguises of schoolgirl, villager, shepherd boy, temptress. Each time she is foiled by Simon’s steadfastness, until she wearies of the game and announces that she is taking him far away. The film ends in a noisy New York City discotheque, where a shorn, professorial-looking Simon, tugging on a pipe, seated at a table, looks on patiently at the gyrating dancers amid the deafening noise of the rock band. He asks the devil the name of the dance, and she replies “Radioactive Flesh.” “It is the last dance,” she assures him, and Simon merely replies that he wants to go home. And shortly the word “Fin” appears. The story is done. The last dance is over.

Buñuel weakly protests that the abrupt ending was not his intention — the budget fell short, and he had wanted to include other scenes from “The Golden Legend. But it is perfectly apropos. The hell to which Simon has been taken, like the view from the pinnacle of the citadel in the Gospel story, is the world, Buñuel’s contemporary world. Bunuel admits a certain nostalgia. “Culturally, I’m a Christian,” he states. That is bound to have a sensibility for framing his allegory, his symbols, and life’s observations. And when his critics retort that the religious questions Buñuel poses have already been resolved, Buñuel replies that he doesn’t care. “I don’t make thesis films or religious ones or atheist ones.” That no one knows may be his message, but even that message he casts doubts upon.

Simon of the Desert is an exemplary film, an allegory, not merely on the eremitic question but on any universal question one may wish to pose.

The juxtaposition of Freud and Jung is famous, and their break was both of substance and personality. Among the differences of substance was diagnosis of ills. While Freud believed that one’s childhood revealed the source of neuroses, and developed the analyst’s couch to allow the patient to explore a forgotten or repressed world, Jung concentrated psychological healing in the here and now, on the innate potentials of the self, consciousness, and the unconscious.

Jung’s childhood solitude (described in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections) is the source of his imaginative and flexible professional methods. He was not interested in the scientific character of psychology or psychiatric methodology. He was even less interested in a scientific criteria for his personal beliefs. Solitude suggests the formation of Jung’s personality but also his rejection of a mechanical or material foundation for his work. A person growing from an intuitive and imaginative childhood often has little interest in what more “normal” upbringing affirms as reality.

One factor in Jung’s childhood was the prolonged absence of his mother (prolonged hospitalization due to mental illness) beginning when Carl was three. It did not leave him insecure so much as profoundly distrustful of others and skeptical of the concept of love. Here is the root of a break from Freud, for whom eros played a central part. Jung concluded that the central role of love and interpersonal relations in general was negative or insufficient to account for growth and potential. The self is necessarily autonomous. It develops its protective devices through introversion. By introversion Jung did not mean mere reticence in the social sense but the defining of self by an inner world, versus extroversion which defines the self from external stimuli. The ongoing depressive invalidism of his mother left his experience of nurturing not suspended so much as displaced from an external object to an inner world, and this ability Jung carried on successfully through his life.

While bullied in school by classmates as much as by schoolmasters (who distrusted his intelligence as plagiarism), Jung intensified his imagination and intuition. The masterfulness of Jung’s personal responses at this time is that he did not wallow in bitterness or resentment, did not fight back with anger and aggression, and did not succumb to depression. Rather, one could say that in his solitude, he successfully transcended his vicissitudes.

There were necessary devices. Once he was struck on the head by a companion and fell in a faint, but a little too long, reflecting that this incident would get him out of school for a while. He deliberately avoided other children, preferring to play alone in his home, or stroll through the woods — a wonderful setting for the imagination. At home, for example, he hid a favorite manikin in the attic, where he would steal away to converse with it, bringing secret documents in strange languages to the manikin. In the woods he would hold dialog with a great stone upon which he liked to sit. Observers have traced the attic to his adult study, where he pored over arcane subjects and ideas in his library. The dialog with the stone reflects a notion of nature that goes beyond mere interest — we might say “Gaia” if it was popular in his day, but certainly a simple alchemy.

Perhaps the most obvious childhood memory was that of dreaming or imagining a castle on an island in a lake, a grand castle with a hidden keep and tall watchtower — later a clear symbol of the unconscious inner citadel of self. Such a dichotomy has been called schizoid; indeed, Jung described his outer self, child of his parents, as “number one” and his true self, remote from the world and human society, as “number two.” But this dichotomy exists in everyone, if less articulated. Jung’s research and writing often explores the interplay of opposites between ego and self, between self and culture.

While Jung’s mother was absent, his father was a poor influence. Though a vicar, Jung’s father had lost his faith. Because of the comfortable income — and lack of any other skill or means — his father kept his position, living a dichotomous, if not hypocritical existence, with a social face of believer and pastor, and a domestic face of shame and contradiction. Jung’s mother did not respect her husband for it, and neither did his son Carl. Naturally, Carl came not to accept dogma or religious belief, and his solitude made him self-reliant, seeing the mature self as a prototype of God, guiding him through dreams, insights, and personal vision. Jung’s disdain for his father increased after being forced into confirmation in adolescence.

Jung’s father died when Carl prepared to go to the University of Basel. His mother remarked, coldly,”He died just in time for you.” Jung seemed thereafter to blossom, reading widely in literature, philosophy, and religion, though he was to study science and medicine as a career. (His favorites authors were Heraclitus, Meister Eckhard, and Goethe.)

Jung presents the image of solitude resolving its negative sense of isolation and alienation with a positive sense of personality, imagination and intuition. Though withdrawn and self-occupied, there is no evidence that he succumbed to dysfunction. For example, aural hallucination (hearing voices) he took in stride as evidence of a psychological need for thoughtful input, and so he dedicated himself to consciously working at his own inner problems. Jung turned a mid-life crisis into constructive insights into the workings of the mind. In contrast to Freud’s dogmatism and his proverbial reluctance to accommodate others or revise challenged ideas, Jung’s curiosity and catholic interests shine forth in all his work, which remains fresh today. Even in youth, Jung responded to the challenges of his parents’ personalities with efforts to improve himself, developing traits that were the opposite of his father’s lack of courage and intellectual curiosity, and his mother’s neurasthenia.

How Jung overcame youthful vicissitudes and transformed a potential crushing childhood and adolescence into a positive and constructive use of solitude is a model of psychological well-being.

Minimalism is often confused with simplicity. Minimalism is negative, a cutting away. Simplicity is positive, a selection and assembling. Minimalism is conscious after the fact, simplicity before.

Minimalism is usually reduced to modern experiments in aesthetics, to architecture lacking ornament, or to art works reduced to mathematical exactness — while ignoring the equally exact fractals in nature. Because they have things “taken out,” works of minimalism are supposed to be more functional, more logical, more efficient, or more aesthetically pleasing. But the difference between minimalism and simplicity is really between modernism and those minimal works that transcend mere modernism.

Simplicity does not mean lacking in knowledge or depth. Anymore than minimalism means apprehension of the essential and discarding of all the rest. A haiku is structurally minimalist, but that is a structual criterion. Is it simple? Only those inspired by past masters will be.

Simplicity involves removal of complexities and superfluities, but it begins from the ground up. Minimalism suggests a baroque extravagance followed by a purgative. Simplicity stops before the first bite, the first brushstroke, the first line of poetry. A Japanese Zen calligraphy student struggled to paint an enso, always failing at the point of completion. All the while, his instructor lingered over his shoulder. Then the instructor stepped out a moment. The student seized the moment and drew a perfect enso. The instructor returned, expressing approval. He had left the room, intentionally, at the right moment. Sometimes we need to be alone to figure out beauty and perfection. What was taken out (the instructor’s overbearing presence) minimized the scene, but what was created from scratch (the enso) was a profound simplicity.

Our first obligation is to recognize what our task entails: they is much to get rid of, but that alone will not make for creativity. Both minimalism and simplicity are inadequate to the point of our human project when we miss the criteria that makes for psychological and aesthetic satisfaction, namely the fulfillment of harmony with nature.

Nature here means not the picturesque world of flora and fauna but that pattern of existence that predominates in an overarching way the activities of human beings (and everything else, though humans can identify with their our species’ dilemmas more readily). Without evidence of the connection of human imagination and sentiment to larger issues of proportion, function, and flow in nature, the product — be it an art work or a life style — is not genuine and is merely a cerebral contrivance, as so much minimalist art and architecture is, and so much simplicity is in the pages of advice books and glossy magazines.

Everything is necessarily contrived, but art is intended to minimize this obvious contrivance and shape the object and ideas into something that harmonizes with ourselves, creating an art form that is what used to be called — somewhat ambitiously — “universal.” Thus we sense the wider applications of minimalism and simplicity. We need not be artists, writers, composers, etc. Rather we are crafting the art of living every day.

So there is every possibility of making things that project a universal quality, and making our lives as close to that quality as possible because of the harmony it will bestow upon us. Our universalism will be small, local and modest, in keeping with the character of nature in a given time and place. Everything must be where it is supposed to be. Everything that is in contradiction to nature is not where it is supposed to be. It can be cut down (minimalism) but ultimately must be redone (simplicity).

A true minimalism would be simplicity. Making a living or making one’s clothes may be a minimalism if executed with anger or resentment, chopping or cutting our way through life and money. But they may be a simplification if we rethink our direction in life, make priorities, stake out our purpose more carefully. A work of music, a cottage, a painting, a routine of exercise, can all be approached with this dichotomous purpose and difference of mindset: cut after the fact or create before the fact.

Economy and efficiency are not achieved by cutting out from a faulty grandiose plan. Better to have begun with modest ends that harmonize with the modesty of nature, and our human nature. We learn more from applying the simplicity about which we may read to that which is naturally simple rather than works of human contrivance: a night sky, a bird in flight, the colors of a vegetable garden, the cleanliness of a snowfall.

Whether we have exceeded the natural and must cut back, or we are venturing on a new path of interest and can afford to begin simply, our methods always have a wider social context. Our lives are patterned after larger social and cultural patterns. We are not autonomous little experiments all our own. We are bundles of cultural and environmental inheritance: our language, habits, preferences, fears. We must make friends with them and not abhor what we are. Then we can selectively decide what to cut, what to nurture.

Modern society takes advantage of our interconnectedness to culture and the world around us by playing up the grandiose from which we can only retreat with great pain from the cutting and bleeding. Modern society encourages consumption, compulsion, acquisition, satiation, social networking — an inevitable clash of spirit with nature, harmony, health, and self. The prospect of anything less than relentless power smacks to some of renunciation, sacrifice, and asceticism. Yet these are historical forms of creating, in simple fashion, personal strength; they become painless efficiencies from which larger projects can be founded.

The stranglehold of modern society on the self is built not on individual empowerment but parasitism, wherein each self is rendered an object to feed a grand organism. It is the opposite of host-parasite relationship because it is the opposite of nature. We deal more with these human abstractions and contrivances than we do with fellow-humans.

Minimalism may be a necessary tool because so much must be knocked away to save the very structure. But the structures of society and culture are not eternal. They were assembled as controls. They will not survive. Individuals do, but not structures, which are only the projection of humans. We must give up things in minimalist style, but ultimately pare down that which obstructs a view of the self, of the spirit. At that point can we begin again, but from principles of simplicity. Simplicity is a component not of art but of life style. No structure is simple.

Simplicity is a disengagement from the furor of the world, from the social mileau that ultimately cannot be knocked down from without. Rather we must walk away or dispel it, like the ancient Chinese recluses. Whether we minimize painfully or begin modestly to create from little, a philosophy of eremitism can provide a versatile philosophical tool for slashing brambles or pruning vines. How we work our gardens is how we work life itself.

With the recent death of J. D. Salinger, a spate of articles on the famous “recluse” is appearing in the media, most of it adding little to the understanding of solitude, reclusion, privacy, or psychology.

Salinger’s reclusion consisted in neo-Confucian reclusion from the empire, from society — in which the supposed important things always happen — to go to the countryside, the village, the outlands, where nothing important happens, where people live simply and not very self-consciously.

Salinger’s daily life in Cornish, New Hampshire, is neatly described in a New York Times article: “A Recluse? Well, Not to His Neighbors” that shows Salinger a recluse to the world of fame but not to his town neighbors. He made regular rounds to the post office, the restaurant, the church supper. His neighbors conspired to protect his desired privacy, not unlike the privacy they valued for themselves. New England is like that and Salinger’s decision to recluse there was a conscious and deliberate one.

A Washington Post letter to the editor by a then-feature writer recalls how one day in 1978 he managed to find Salinger’s house and pull into his driveway. When Salinger asked what he wanted, the feature writer started to explain. “Get out of here,” Salinger told him in curmudgeon-like fashion. Was the feature writer invading Salinger’s privacy or was he not also invading the ethos of the entire community?

Reclused in a village, Chuang-tzu was sitting by a river bank, swishing his feet in the cool stream waters when a contingent of imperial bureaucrats, having tracked him down, began urging him to accept appointment to the palace. “You know that ancient turtle in the palace brought out for public viewing once a year? Compare that turtle to the one there, on the river bank, enjoying the cool mountain stream. Do you think that turtle here wants to be like the one in the palace?” The bureaucrats understood and left. Chuang-tzu, not so curmudgeon-like, had told them, “Get out of here.”

In so many articles on Salinger, no one seems to offer an explanation for Salinger’s decision to recluse. They perceive fame and glory as a norm, a goal. They cannot conceive of turning away from the lights, the glitter, the falseness — for something so primitive as a small town and solid simplicity. Not that Salinger was a hermit or solitary, as the New York Times article rightly shows. Not that he could not afford to recluse, given royalties from his ever-popular The Catcher in the Rye. Rather, Salinger reverted to the status of every other resident in a typical small town. He intended to blend into an anonymity toward outsiders, but perfectly himself to his neighbors, who value autonomy and privacy.

Perhaps Salinger did not publish much because he did not want to risk failure after the pristine success of The Catcher in the Rye. He did publish Franny and Zooey, with its memorable evocation of the starets, the iconic hermit elder of Russian Orthodoxy. Nor did Salinger every really quit writing — he reportedly left many notebooks of scribblings and manuscripts that he would probably wish, like Kafka, be destroyed after his death. Or perhaps not, since he seemed to have one eye on worldly dealings, jealously protecting his Holden Caulfield creation with copyright lawsuit.

Sam Anderson, author of a New York Magazine article titled “Social Salinger: Literature’s Oddly Companionable Hermit,” captures the meaning of Salinger better than most. Just as the disaffected adolescent protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye appears as a disembodied voice who rejects his origins, so too did Salinger effectively reject his “origins” in big city social complexity to get on with the real story of his life, which didn’t matter in the end after all. Says Anderson with great insight:

Salinger always struck me as an odd candidate for hermitude. Despite his misanthropic characters and flights of antisocial mysticism, the energy of his prose was relentlessly sociable, charming, and connective — he was practically sitting right there with you as you read, reaching over and turning the pages. He captured, in his sentences, the urgency of humans talking to actual humans. It seemed ridiculous — a parody of his work, almost — that in real life he was nowhere to be found. That became, in the end, one of the odd pleasures of reading him: You had to imagine Salinger, the actual man, the same way you imagined his characters, to summon a reality out of a disembodied voice. … It’s hard to know how to mourn a recluse — all we have is the absence of an absence.

In seeking to construct a philosophy of solitude, resources are nearly endless, for solitude is a common thread in much Western thought, and in Eastern traditions solitude is an intrinsic value. Perhaps solitude is more ambiguous in the West because of the dichotomy of egoism and social obligation, of self and other, and ultimate of God versus everything else or “not-God.” This dualism cannot be resolved by Western reason, science, psychology, or social thinking, for the social contract and the political construction of the individual as an inviolate entity automatically removes the possibility of a solitude so profound as to link that which can be called God and not-God.

Nor does the West dare to call “not-God” the same as God in order to relieve the tension of dualism, in order to permit the relaxation of the warfare of good and evil. Dualism seems inevitable and necessary in Western thought.

Western religion, the three dominant scriptural religions, originated in a primitive tribalism and failed to evolve beyond a crude dualism. Even the development of a universalism was not authentic but merely an adaptation of the tribe to the world, a conglomerate rather than a unity, a wider subjugation. Western religion has witnessed many who sought, from different psychological and spiritual angles, to break through the limitations of a mentality still rooted in the tribalism of its origins, but all of them, from gnostics to mystics, cannot succeed working on Western terms alone. Limitations of knowledge, whether of non-western approaches or of a deep understanding of its own psychology, has and always will frustrate such efforts.

Science has not transcended the dualism of Western thought. In obliterating traditions, it has fended off institutional control, liberating its methodology but also its purpose, replacing itself as God and the universe of objects as “not-God,” for it cannot be “not-God” and see itself. How can the eye see itself?

In the East, surely tribalism was the same social origin of peoples as in the West. But time and circumstances allowed the evolution of a more subtle perception of the universe. On the one hand, the primitive stages of animism and pantheism (or “pandivinity,” as one might prefer) gave no preference to absolute depictions of God. Even the Brahma of Hinduism can be traced back to an Aryan introduction. The subsequent evolution of Hinduism properly fixes a dispersion of divinity within a non-dualism that no one can mistake for anthropomorphism in a strict sense. Let the popular manifestations of religion carry on as the poor recompense of a sad world intent on a little conviviality. Poetry and enthusiasm will always attempt humane depictions of divinity. But in ancient India it is the Jainism and Buddhism subsequent to the Vedic era that forced expression to a stricter system of non-dual thinking.

The wisdom of Buddhism is the understanding of the many realms, deities, and forces as manifestations of the greater consciousness that seethes in the current of the planet’s complexity and the universe’s mystery. Western religion, however austere will not go so far as to gainsay its own origins and traditions, to eviscerate its angels and its supreme deity.

But to gather all these forces into fragments of consciousness is not but the beginning for Eastern thought, especially Taoism, esoteric Buddhism, and Zen. Here the premise is no longer the claim that our purpose is to break through the pain and suffering of existence in order to storm heaven or even to studiously define divinity. The premise is early made, and put to rest, so to speak, for the great task. Suffering is built-in, it is consciousness itself, it is every manifestation of consciousness and thought.

So our use of consciousness and thought must be severely measured. Every word can be the destruction of self, every thought can be the annihilation of virtue. Not in the superficial social or political sense of regulating thought and expression. These are noises and temporal forays that need every latitude. Words and thoughts are not the privilege of powerful regulators. There are more urgent issues, though. For the arrest of suffering is not in the relief of suffering as such but in the relief of perception and thought. This relief effort goes on even while, as Pai-chang, the Chinese Chan master, says, we are every moment compelled by the logic of being to behave as bodhisattvas.

The premise from which we may begin is that what we may call “divinity” — if it must be called or identified as something like an object or status — is not subject to reason. Such a statement does not support religion as such. The term only means that which is the counterpart of reality, of mundanity, of what Pai-chang calls the “non-existent.” The context of this notion breaks through the religious debate as much as it breaks through the anti-religious point of view (which is primarily a Western one sharing the confines of Western religion as theism; atheism being “anti-theism” but saying nothing more than theism says).

The excesses of Western thought, including Western religion and philosophizing, is the confident attitude that human reason or reasoning is accurate, true, reliable, insightful, a machine for revealing the secret mechanisms of the universe. And the history of the West, culminating in this mad era of science, technology, and near-annihilation, gives witness to the radical arrogance of the notion that reason is eventually right no matter what is being proposed, even if it is used to defend one view against another view. Everything is partly right, according to Western thought, especially modern expression. Everything is partly right because it exists as cultural tradition or expression, even when the view contradicts its own tradition because it is itself a counterpoint, a necessary opposite that maintains the credence of the other half in clean Hegelian cycles. Thus the good requires the bad, the black requires the white, and God requires the devil — not in the Eastern sense of a continual flow between elements, but as distinct and absolute entities, beings, as necessary applications of universal reason.

Western dualism means that God equates with the existence and necessity of evil, that consciousness always equates with suffering, that existence itself equates with non-existence, that life equates with death.

The Chan master Pai-chang, like so many sages, wrote nothing but had disciples who remembered and recorded the essence of his sayings in the “Record of Sayings” and the “Extensive Record.” Over and over, Pai-change demolishes the premises of thought and consciousness itself and its tendencies to spin dualisms, beginning at the basic point of witness and object. That may be so, he argues, but that is immediately to separate ourselves and our consciousness from the rest of the universe. Yes, this is inevitable, but is it true? Does it reveal anything new that the universe does not already have? Pai-chang admits that:

In language you must distinguish the esoteric and the exoteric, you must distinguish generalizing and particularizing language, and you must distinguish the language of the complete teaching and the incomplete teaching.

Here, the lesser vehicle is the incomplete teaching and the greater vehicle is the complete teaching, but ultimately Pai-chang will argue that scriptures and teachings, all these utterances, are automatically incomplete, versus the complete teaching, which is unnameable and ineffable — as Lao-tzu would say of the tao. This is not an ineffability that means an abstraction invented for the occasion or a non-verifiable phenomenon. Enter consciousness and perception to see immediately the duality-making propensity of the mind. It does not invent but observes in one sweep. Invention comes later. It is not necessary to deny the dualism between mind and objects. The pompous Zen student who claimed to have reach that transcendent point got a bamboo stickblow on the shoulders from his master, as if to say “Have you transcended even this pain?”

Even while Pai-chang bids us start practicing and to leave off scriptures and discourses, practice is only half-way there. Meditation takes us to a point of feeling good, of self-confidence. This is another necessary virtue, but to stop there, like the foolish student, is precarious. Japanese Zen master Takusui called meditation the sickness of submergence. We see this sickness in the profligate use of Eastern techniques in the Western world. Yoga and meditation become remedies for stress, palliatives that refresh us so that we can charge full throttle again into the rat race. This is the sickness of attachment, though in ignorance we pride ourselves on a work ethic and integrity.

The beginning of detachment is the fruit of meditation, but it is never attained by allegiance to the world and its insistence on service to itself and by extension (it will say) service to others. After we have wrestled with the dilemma of attachment, non-attachment becomes a new obstacle. We cannot apply the same desire and grasping for worldly objects to a new desire and grasping for non-attachment. Non-attachment is what Pai-chang calls the “intermediate good,” the “half-word teaching.” At least you “avoid falling into the way of the two vehicles, and avoid falling into the way of demons.” But its practice is still meditation sickness.

Once you no longer dwell in non-attachment, and do not even make an understanding of not dwelling either, this is the final good, this is the full-word teaching. You avoid falling into the formless realm, avoid falling into meditation sickness, avoid falling into the way of bodhisattvas, and avoid falling into the state of the king of demons.

Thus we have not only the barrier of knowledge — that inheritance of nature, culture, socialization, environment, heredity, and experience that comprises our personality — but also have the barrier of station, which is our present existential situation, no matter what the barrier of knowledge. Conscience is a “wound,” Pai-chang says, and we all share this characteristic of being.

But further, the practice we undertake, such as meditation, presents a third barrier, the barrier of activity. We want to act, to strive, in our new-found realization of a path. Yet while the first two barriers are existential in character — and can theoretically be addressed and mitigated — the last barrier merely shows how weak and vulnerable we are as fickle human beings. We cannot contrive a device for transcendence because we fall back on our finitude.

A deep understanding of self, in practice that goes beyond the mere desire for equanimity — in short, a radical solitude — is inherent in the Eastern traditions and will work, Pai-change insists. Even the doctrinal school will show this, he notes. We don’t need to be scholars to get there; there isn’t enough time. So we have to start now by grasping the essence of the teaching. This is the “highest knowledge,” says Pai-chang.

This is called an enlightened one beyond confinement — no thing can capture or bind such a one. Here is one of the Buddhas succeeding to the Burning Lamp. This is the supreme vehicle, the highest knowledge — this is standing on the way of enlightenment. This person is Buddha, and has the enlightened nature; he is a guide, able to employ the unobstructed wind. This is unimpeded illumination.

Author Robert Wright spends 400+ pages of his book The Evolution of God describing the transition from polytheism to monolatry to monotheism in the three Western scriptural religions, the “Abrahamic” religions. Wright only spends the last 50+ pages wrapping up the idea of God today. The evolution of God, says Wright, is essentially the evolution of religion’s perception of God as a projection of its own moral evolution. He sees monotheism as a precursor to universalism and tolerance, necessary elements for a modern globalized world in which more cultures are being thrust into relations with other cultures.

The evolution in the scriptural religions Wright identifies as enabling such an international and intercultural perspective. He does not mean conversion but a process that began in those scriptures, was picked up by philosophy and science (as well as by theology) in later centuries, and desperately needs to find the vitalizing factors that will transform modern societies. No other force, he argues, seems to be capable of evolving and applying a moral criteria to world affairs.

Wright calls himself a materialist and says that the word “god” has two senses, the literal historical one (“These gods exist in people’s heads and, presumably, nowhere else”) and in the subtler sense of historical and moral order. In pursuing this latter sense, he addresses science, atheism, and human nature. If science can posit things that ought to exist as an explanation for observed phenomena but cannot confirm such things, is it a matter of time in terms of sophisticating scientific knowledge or techniques before such things are seen and explained as natural? Wright argues that the same is the case for “god,” a thing posited, unverifiable, but pliable enough in human conception to be either a myth or a “ground of being.” Historical religion has been identified as unsophisticated myth, but recent thought has pushed it beyond its mythic structures to an identification of being and “suchness.”

Functioning as the public face of science, atheism still rests on an anthropomorphic view of “god” when vying in the marketplace of popular culture. Its chief argument is that evolution has no design, and no designer need be posited. Wright responds to this argument that the process that inevitably streamlines and forms, functions as a creative force. Granted that natural selection is not the designer. Many products of evolution are not as efficient as could have been if a conscious designer had guided the process. But this is the old preoccupation with design and anthropomorphism. And the old argument about the existence of God in the presence of suffering begs the same question. The concept of “god” is not eliminated by dismissing straw figures.

Wright argues that moral progress is a higher process than evolution or natural selection — “higher” in the sense of the potential for a conscious and deliberate progress. God remains, as Wright puts it, “somewhere between illusion and imperfect conception.” Not unlike posited scientific concepts which eventually break through the conceptions to reveal more factual content on the other side of doubt, with newer conceptions in which to house the new facts. The process, Wright would say, is parallel to most human activity, to cultural progress, and to the unfolding moral order that may or may not be distinct from human beings, even genetic.

Ultimately, religion is based on self-interest. The cynical view will see a formula for power and exploitation, which is largely the history of Western religion as institution and authority. But an alternative view of self-interest exists, as in William James. In his The Varieties of Religious Experience James wrote that religion “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

James considers religion irrefutably as one of many expressions of mind, culture and spirit. The cynical view sees religion as the desire to change the behavior of supernatural beings. That remains the chief straw figure of modern atheism. William James’ view does not exclude this obvious historical reality on the part of world religions, but emphasizes the psychological character of the religious mind-set, and understands that the burden is on the seeker and not on something external. To “harmoniously adjust” to the existing order is essentially a moral process. Whether this order is good or not is irrelevant. The harmonious adjustment is part of the process of moral reflection and discovery, but it cannot be denied.

Perhaps the weakness of Wright’s frame of thought is his conclusion that while religion needs to mature in order not only to survive but to positively influence the moral atmosphere of the present, globalization will provide an opportune backdrop for this process. His fiath in progress and reasonableness is an idealism, respectable but still seeing transformation as a social rather than individual process.

Encounters of cultures have often been creative throughout history, but a cursory survey of history shows a succession of war, exploitation, and suffering. Nor has the grand encounter been societal as much as the work of individuals. Not “great men” as meant by Carlyle’s theory but great sages. Even the Abrahamic religions have often been the work of individual sages — or been depicted as such because of the identification with great individuals. But modern globalization, as the continuation of centuries-long Western quests for power, abetted now by technology, has itself provoked the fundamentalisms that Wright objects to, and to which the New Atheists cling to as religions’ only form of expression. Globalization is but the latest expression of power. What can be expected?

Religion in James’ sense is all that can be called “true” religion. Without this component, all the trappings of theology, scriptures, edifices, and institutions, fall flat. They are left to the polemics of the new fundamentalists. We enter the pursuit of the “unseen order” and the solitude of self.

New Atheism is a popular topic of late. Propelled by celebrity authors, documentaries, websites, bestsellers, and social networks, the new atheism (versus the old) is decked out in the trappings of the Information Age, with marketing campaigns geared to hip youth, and coffee klatches for the oldsters. New Atheism has dusted off a page from religious evangelism.

For religion it is — every bit as dogmatic and fundamentalist as its purported targets. Atheism’s arguments are otherwise familiar, and many of its points valid as philosophy and cultural critique. But what makes New Atheism different is its probable popularity boost from the September 11, 2001 backlash to other fundamentalisms, namely Muslim and Christian.

Because it is engaged in Anglo-American culture (it doesn’t thrive elsewhere), New Atheism mimics and mocks the concerns of that irony of modernity: the most powerful nations in science and technology are the most predominantly religious in the Western biblical sense. No wonder 9/11 makes New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens despise Islam — and its religious counterparts, fundamentalist Christians. Without these soft targets, however, there is only the discontent and thoughtless masses slogging away at narrow lives of consumption and spectacle, presumably good subjects for missionary work.

New Atheism is another panacea for human discontent — get rid of this or that or the other thing and the world will be perfect, neither modern nor post-modern.

Biologist Richard Dawkins, the chief patron of New Atheism, states in his The Blind Watchmaker:

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

This is not a new claim. Thomas Henry Huxley stated the same thing a few years after Darwin’s 1859 publication of The Origins of Species: “Teleology, as commonly understood,” he wrote, “received its deathblow at Mr. Darwin’s hand.”

Perhaps the “commonly understood” part referred to Christians in general, but few theologians or scientists since then have accepted the notion of a deathblow. Instead, most have seen Darwin’s work as a prompt to deeper and more universal thinking, accepting the mechanics of scientific explanation as dutifully explicated knowledge about nature. Whether out of humility or personality, Darwin himself never made such a claim, either.

Dawkins has written that he converted from his childhood religion to atheism by reading Darwin. But whatever Dawkins means by an “intellectually fulfilled atheist” cannot mean Darwin except in his personal life. The statement assumes that atheism could exist philosophically before Darwin, but not be provable before “science” — that it could not exist intellectually without Darwin, without “science.” By analogy, proofs of the existence of God could exist with Anselm or Aquinas or Paley, but they lacked being “intellectually fulfilled” because they lacked the element of absolute proof that science supposedly carries. Thus science is seen as a necessity to truth, indeed as truth itself. With Darwin, science becomes a new dogma akin not to philosophy or natural philosophy or even theology but to the authority of revelation — a new fundamentalism.

Philosophy has always claimed logic and reason to make its arguments palatable. Scriptural religion, in contrast, has relied on “revelation.” Acceptance of a creed becomes a cultural phenomenon, a social and cultural process. Dawkins himself, back in the 1970’s, wanted to call this process a “meme” but he ignored sociological processes that have already described this phenomenon without reverting to what sounds like a virus or cancer. But New Atheism is not immune to memes, or, rather, wants to infect or inoculate (depending on your point of view) others with a new one. As the ancient Roman naturalist Lucretius knew long ago: “No fact is so obvious that it does not at first produce wonder, nor so wonderful that it does not eventually yield to belief.”

Belief, as in religion. In that basket, we can place New Atheism.

One of the major shortcomings of Dawkins is that he does not place any currents of thought into a context, as if religion, science, atheism, etc., all spring full grown from some vacuum. But everything has a cultural and social context, even an anthropological and psychological one, let alone an intellectual history. For example, in his popular The God Delusion, Dawkins does not mention Nietzsche at all. One would think that the prophetic voice announcing the death of God would catch the author’s attention as a further supporter of atheism to accompany the claim that Darwin was.

But perhaps Dawkins would not want to do this after all. Yes, Nietzsche employs all the polemic style of atheism. But Nietzsche, and not Dawkins, extends the logic of Darwin to its implications for society and power, implications which are inimical to humanity. Following Nietzsche, the individual must not merely understand the genealogy of power but strive toward a holistic transcendence, a philosophical disengagement, in order to achieve self-fulfillment. Granted that Nietzsche entangled will to power with eogism, materialism, and atheism. But he is the first to extend the logic of contemporary science and atheism to its inevitable conclusion, namely that the theory of progress latent in science and evolution theory continue and strengthen an ideology of cultural suppression.

New Atheism wants science to reign as independent, free, and transcendent dogma. But science is, especially now, the handmaiden of the State, of the powerful. Whatever science produces today will be technologized and used against humanity. This is the ominous lesson Nietzsche tried tortuously (and not entirely successfully) to approximate in his late writings. The theory of progress celebrated by the ruling classes of 19th century state and society (and throughout history, for that matter) was self-congratulatory egoism. Progress, technology, and conquest would henceforth be the new weapons of societal control, not conventional religion, which no longer held the modern mind and heart. The ideology of science which informs and energizes the powerful was now to be the death of God. Old atheism was a protest against whoever happened to be in power, though too weak save to change the personnel, not the paradigm.

The new priests are today the captains of industry and finance, the war leaders and their enormous armies and weapons. For to get to this point in history, the capacities of science, technology, and the disciplines that abet them have had to reach a fruition one may call “modernity.” New Atheism differs from the old one in deliberately turning a blind eye to the separation of these interwoven sectors of cultures and societies. Worse, New Atheism deflects attention from the true sources of evils in the world, which New Atheism not only glosses over but strengthens.

Why do so many cultures observe New Year’s Day with such fanfare? The mundaneness accentuates the forgotten origins of the holiday. In more northern latitudes New Year’s Day is in the thick of earliest winter, coming on the heels of the winter solstice, suggesting a seasonal origin.

But January first is not what is apparently universal about New Year’s Day. For the ancient Celts New Year’s Day was November first, which as a pastoral people signified the coming of cold when the animals could now long find pasture. The Chinese New Year is famously dated as the first day after the new moon of February, meaning the first day of spring. This latter practice exemplifies the seasonal character of optimism in the return of warmth, sunlight, long days, and renewed life.

Seasonal optimism was not a passive observation or mere hope. The return of spring involved appropriate propitiation, the sacrificial death of what anthropologist James Frazer called a “worshipful animal,” be it a wren, a boar, a goat, a pig, or a dog, as cultures universally marked a scapegoat to be driven into the deathly cold, or slain there before the assembled villagers. Thus New Year’s Day was the original and universal Day of Atonement.

The literalness of scapegoating can be seen in early modern Eastern Europe, where the overlay of Christian holidays and the urgency of midwinter propitiation blur ominously. The twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany were called the Witching Days or the Witching Time. During these days, witches and their protective female spirits must be driven from forests and fields, from every nook and cranny of the land and villages in order to assure good fortune for the coming year. Not merely prayers and exorcisms would accomplish this but the people took to torchlight processions, great bonfires, and, above all, noise: bells, horns, drums, kettles, and later shots ringing in the air.

Do we not have in the Witching Time an exemplar of today’s New Year’s Eve celebrations?

In medieval and later Japan, a custom among poets was to pen the year’s first poem, a New Year’s Day haiku, quietly mocked by the 18th century poet Buson:

New Year’s first poem
written — now self-satisfied,
O haiku poet!

Other poets, too, applied a reduction to seasonal images to dispel society’s aggrandizement of the first day of the year. Kikaku and Ransetsu reflectively observe birds; Issa observes the sky.

New Year’s dawn —
quietly the cranes
pace up and down.

New Year’s Day —
clear dawn, sparrows
telling tales.

New Year’s Day here —
utter simplicity,
sky deep blue.

We leave to haiku master Basho a restoration not only of seasonal imagery to this calendar day but also emotional sensibility essential to the interpretation of the passage of time and the panoply of nature. Basho, the oft-hermit, best captures the seasonal and intuitive characteristic of the day.

New Year’s Day —
each thought a loneliness
as winter dusk descends.

One of the more complex figures of history is the Christian reformer Martin Luther. His reform ushered a religious revolution in Europe, not only as the end of the religious domination of the Catholic Church in the precedent it gave to the entire Protestant Reformation, but also in philosophy, especially German and northern European thought for centuries to come.

The famous religious scruples of Luther, considered as expressions of the contemporary milieu, were not entirely outside of the cultural context of medieval mentality. Luther’s insistence on resolving psychological and cultural issues into religious ones was consistent with the late medieval, which saw the rise of dynamic individuals not atypically medieval despite their “modern” thrust: Francis of Assisi to Joachim of Fiore, John Wycliffe to Jan Hus. But Luther viewed his core theological concerns with the nature of sacraments and priesthood, for example, as incompatible to the age. Viewing through a scriptural lens, Luther obliterated the medieval tension that had surrounded typical figures mentioned above and created what for lack of a better term must be called a “modern” point of view.

Not modern in the Renaissance sense — the very term “renaissance” suggests a rebirth of antiquities but not something new. Not modern, either, in the scientific sense; the preoccupations of a Galileo or Copernicus would have struck Luther as irrelevant. Not modern, initially, even in a theological sense, where scruples about abuses would have been reflective of as much a medieval as a modern point of view. Luther was not given to intellectualizing or rationalizing or accommodating the spirit of the age. This spirit was already brewing storms, and he successfully matched the storms of his inner being with those of the age, especially in reflective the restiveness of the German nobility and clergy.

Luther’s mode of thought and action was both his personal strength and his foible. With bracing clarity he could discern the necessities of his religious belief and was no hypocrite. But with equal energy, he could tangle himself in the psychological realm wherein his scriptural authorities offered no relief but dogged outlasting of the assaults of conscience. He thus reduced his inner capacity to wrestling his way past his demons.

From Luther’s scruples — and they are not mere psychological foibles but intrinsic philosophical concerns not resolved by theology alone — history draws a direct line to the doubts of Pascal, the fear and trembling of Kierkegaard, the vehemence and thunder of Nietzsche, the tragic irony of Unamuno.

This drama can best be followed in Luther’s views of solitude. To Luther, as in Judaism (and Islam, for that matter), solitude contradicts the solidarity of the family and community of believers, which is strong not only from belief but as a cultural and ethnic solidarity. While some mystics in these traditions escape the strictures of this proscription — and see solitude as a viable mechanism — Luther was not a mystic. He had no desire to escape or transcend his age and its problems. He was acutely conscious of an individuality that troubled him, and restricted himself to the limited psychological tools available in religion. At times he prayed and yet wondered not merely at God’s answer but doubted the very efficacy of prayer. His was not a dark night or a spiritual dryness but a lifetime of doubt and struggle. In the end, only faith, blind or stubborn, uninformed or inevitable, could overcome.

When in hiding at Wartburg Castle after the trial at Worms, Luther described his dwelling-place as “my Patmos,” or “my wilderness.” Doubts reeled in his mind — as can be understood at such a momentous point in his life, but the doubts were not viewed by him as human, as part of the crisis he had created, the turmoil he had engendered. The doubts were demonic, and the Prince of Darkness taunted him:

Are you alone wise? Have so many centuries gone wrong? What if you are in error and are taking so many others with you to eternal damnation?

And Luther himself, languishing the the castle, experienced an insecurity reminiscent of a novice desert hermit. He wrote to his friend Melancthon:

I can tell you in this idle solitude there are a thousand battles with Satan. It is much easier to fight against the incarnate Devil — that is, against men — than against spiritual wickedness in the heavenly places. Often I fall and am lifted again by God’s right hand.

As sympathetic biographer Roland Bainton notes: “Solitude and idleness increased his distress.” The forces against him were building, yet he could not abide patient waiting. Luther was so restless with solitude, with what Bainton calls his “loneliness and lack of public activity,” that Luther averred: “I wanted to be in the fray. … I had rather burn on live coals than rot here.” His digestive ailments worsened and he suffered a virulent insomnia.

When I go to bed, the Devil is always waiting for me, When he begins to plague me, I give him this answer: “Devil, I must sleep, That’s God’s command, ‘Work by day. Sleep by night.’ So go away.” If that doesn’t work and he brings out a catalog of sins, I say, “Yes, old fellow, I know all about it. And I know some more you have overlooked. Here are a few extra. Put them down.” If he still won’t quit and presses me hard and accuses me as a sinner, I scorn him and say, “St. Satan, pray for me. Of course, you have never done anything wrong kin your life. You alone are holy. Go to God, and get grace for yourself. If you want to get me all straightened out, I say, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’”

At other times, Luther writes, he argued with God for remaining hidden and denying the virtue of his challenge to Christendom.

Luther’s restlessness with himself translated into an opposition to solitude. Luther was of peasant stock, with the virtue of community and conviviality as foremost ways of living, and this formed his character in a compelling way. After so many years as a monk, however, his liberation did not bring peace, for relations with God remained, by his own belief, at an individual level, without intermediate church or priesthood. So his advice to himself for overcoming solitude, whether psychological or theological solitude, was a good dose of the world — not worldliness, but the world of his upbringing and that of his peasant and humble compatriots. Solitude is the field of temptation and the devil, he tells himself. Don’t fight there. As Bainton notes, Luther’s final solution was to “banish the whole subject. Seek company and discuss some irrelevant matter as, for example, what is going on in Venice. Shun solitude.”

As Luther himself put it: “Eve got into trouble when she walked in the garden alone. I have my worst temptations when I am by myself.'”

Bainton continues paraphrasing Luther’s sentiments on solitude:

Seek out some Christian brother, some wise counselor. Ungird yourself with the fellowship of the church. Then, too, seek convivial company, feminine company, dine, dance, joke, and sing. Make yourself eat and drink even though food may be very distasteful. Fasting is the very worst expedient. Once Luther gave three rules for dispelling despondency: the first is faith in Christ; the second is to get downright angry; the third is the love of a woman.

Music was especially commended. The Devil hates it because he cannot endure gaiety. Luther’s physician relates that on one occasion he came with some friends for a musical soiree only to find Luther in a swoon; but when the others struck up the song, he was soon one of the party. Home life was a comfort and a diversion. So also was the presence of his wife when the Devil assaulted him in the night watches. …

Manual labor was a relief. A good way, counseled Luther, to exorcise the Devil is to harness the horse and spread manure on the field. In all this advice to flee the fray Luther was in a way prescribing faith as a cure for the lack of faith. To give up the argument is of itself an act of faith akin to the Gelassenheit of the mystics, an expression of confidence in the restorative power of God, who operates in the subconscious while man occupies himself with extraneous things.

Ultimately, then, Luther was to abandon the strictures against conviviality of his own St. Augustine. He was now in a lay state, or, rather, that novelty to medieval culture of lay priesthood or ministry, new even to him. Solitude could have no place in this realm, banished as the cause or field of his psychological problems, and of his theological doubts. Solitude was the tool of the devil, who hates sociability, conviviality, and gaiety. Solitude betrayed his childhood ideals and his new-found theology that the virtuous soul could only expect doubt and mental struggle.

Yet even those who seemed at peace with the world and their nature, those whom the Gospel already identified as children, were deemed by Luther to lack the fire of truth. Or, rather, this mental struggle was projected upon them. Once, Luther’s infant son was nursing and elicited a melancholy remark: “Child, your enemies are the popes, the bishops, Duke George, Ferdinand, and the Devil. And there you are sucking unconcernedly.” And when his little daughter prattled about Christ and heaven and angels, Luther said wistfully, “If only we could hold fast to this faith.” The little daughter replied innocently: “Why, papa, don’t you believe it?”

Martin Luther was an unwitting catalyst of great revolutions of thought. One of these was to banish solitude from modern Christian tradition, though it lingers in the human condition, and dogs the thinkers, secular and religious, centuries later.