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Restless Souls. Leigh Eric Schmidt
Читать онлайн.Название Restless Souls
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520954113
Автор произведения Leigh Eric Schmidt
Издательство Ingram
In a new nation steeped in the joined dicta of Protestantism and the Enlightenment, such fears of civic and religious deformity necessarily haunted American thinking on solitude. The entry on hermits and anchorites in the first edition of the Encyclopedia Americana (1829–1833) had some of Gibbon's vituperative tone: “the spirit of retirement and self-torment raged like an epidemic among the early Christians”; “the melancholy of solitude” had often degenerated into “fanatical excesses” and “moral insanity.” In 1850 Henry Ruffner, one of a venerable troupe of Protestant college presidents in antebellum America, took up the history of “the primitive monks and hermits” as a cautionary tale in two volumes. Depicting the rise of early Christian asceticism as a descent into ever “deeper and drearier solitudes,” Ruffner saw these “saintly savages” of the desert as men of wild superstitions about demons, angels, poverty, and sexuality. The hermits, already perverse in their lewd chastity, gave way to the still greater depravity of monks who underwrote “the monstrous system of Popish tyranny and persecution” and who served as a warning to any professed Protestants for whom High Church Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism offered even a remote temptation.7
In the nineteenth-century Protestant imagination, the ancient desert fathers seemed at best exotic in their saintly warfare upon temptations of flesh and spirit. In Hours with the Mystics (1856), one of Robert Alfred Vaughan's interlocutors remarked that she had been “looking at the pictures in Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art, of those strange creatures, the hermit saints–the Fathers of the desert.” Vaughan's Protestant discussants were both appalled by the “wonderworking pretensions” of these sanctified anchorites and yet drawn into the tormenting visions of St. Anthony and the rest, which were “not without grandeur.” For refined Protestant audiences, the desert hermits of Egypt remained present especially through their iconography, an inherited part of nineteenth-century fine arts. The book that inspired Vaughan's exchange, Anna Jameson's guide to sacred art, was especially popular; it went through multiple editions after its initial appearance in 1848 and contained numerous images of the hermit saints in all their archaic difference. Their oddities, in other words, were something to examine in well-illustrated books or on the walls of museums, not an example to imitate.8
Even when not focused on the corruption of Christianity that the perverse desire for the hermit's cell had precipitated, evaluations of solitude often remained admonitory. “In solitude the heart withers,–God meant it for social life,” the Reverend William Peabody preached in a sermon published in 1831. An enemy of social benevolence and domestic happiness, solitude produced religious presumption, not mutual regard. “It is less a virtue than a sin,” Peabody concluded. It was seen as one more solvent that corroded civil society and highlighted the danger of new democratic freedoms turning into self-loving vices. The American experiment with freedom and equality, Alexis de Tocqueville warned in his classic commentary Democracy in America (1835–1840), was begetting “a novel expression” of “individualism.” The new democracy, however robust, remained vulnerable; it seemed to throw each citizen “back forever upon himself alone” and “to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” From the vantage point of a fragile republic, solitude appeared the very antithesis of a religiously cohesive nation.9
The popular tales that circulated in the first half of the nineteenth century about more recent hermits reinforced the low and fearful standing of solitude as destitution. In the lore of contemporary wonders and marvels, hermits were known far more for lost love and unredeemed suffering than spiritual potential. Telling in this regard was Life and Adventures of Robert Voorhis, the Hermit of Massachusetts, Who Has Lived 14 Years in a Cave, Secluded from Human Society (1829), a narrative of a former slave from Princeton, New Jersey, who resided in a “solitary hermitage” close to Providence, Rhode Island. An object of local curiosity, Voorhis was thought by many to be a melancholy misanthrope, but the narrator revealed him to have been a cruelly mistreated slave, separated at age four from his mother and sister and as a young man from his wife and two children. The solitude of his “rude cell” was, Voorhis reported to his inquirer, a deliberate response to “the bitter cup of my afflictions!—afflictions which had more or less attended me through life!” To some, from the outside, the hilltop retreat might seem “a most romantic situation” as it supplied the hermit's simple wants from “the bountiful hand of nature,” but the narrator quickly disposed of that idyll. Living in a dark, cold, cramped cave was not a resource for practical Christian faith; instead, only a hope for the ultimacy of divine justice sustained Voorhis, as did the principle “that human beings, whatever might be their complexion[,] were all created equally free.” These were not religious and political convictions that he garnered from solitude, but ones he held on to despite his sorrow and separation. The life of Robert the Hermit was intended to inspire others not to devotional imitation, but to feelings of “sympathy for distress.” His narrative was expressly published as a project of benevolence to raise funds to improve his condition and to further the antislavery cause.10
The woes of Robert Voorhis, a former slave turned solitary, exemplified the ways in which the hermit was presented as a tragic and forlorn figure in antebellum America. (Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.)
Other hermit narratives of the period told similarly forlorn stories of loss. John Conrad Shafford, whose tale of woe was published in 1841, spent his last fifty years living “a secluded and lonely life.” He was driven to it through “being deprived of an only child, a beloved daughter,” who was taken captive by Indians at age fifteen and who died “a wretched victim of their barbarity.” Three months later he was “bereaved of my wife” as well, and so, like Robert, this “Dutch Hermit” had chosen “solitary retreat” as a result of “heavy afflictions.” As one spiritual guide of the period put it, “The grieved heart, like the wounded deer, retreats into solitude to bleed.”11
Ruinous calamity also marked the life of Sarah Bishop, popularly known as the Hermitess. (Firestone Library, Princeton University.)
Similarly tragic was Sarah Bishop's story. During the American Revolution, British soldiers plundered her family's home on Long Island, and she “was made a victim of one of those demoniac acts, which in peace are compensated by the gibbet, but which, in war, embellish the life of the soldier.” Bishop fled the shame of her rape and apparently lived in a desolate cave for most of the next three decades. Both Shafford and Bishop were reputed to take consolation in their gloom from reading precious (if tattered) copies of the Bible, and so both could be pictured as looking beyond this vale of tears to “a brighter and happier existence.” In neither case was solitude thought to be the vehicle for spiritual attainment, however; instead, it was an isolated state of grief that was partially assuaged through the otherworldly vision of the Scriptures. When Walt Whitman actually met “a real hermit” in “one of my rambles,” he projected only heartache upon him and his “lonesome spot,” remarking that the man “did not unbosom his life, or story, or tragedy.”12
The Protestant suspicion of monasticism and the pained commiseration of reform-minded benefactors were less than promising