“budding ecstasy,” but finds that his thoughts have left no trail. “I was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear my thoughts will not come back to me,” the Hermit laments. Resigning himself to his lost opportunity for heightened spiritual awareness, the Hermit goes off with the Poet to fish. Confessedly, fishing in itself evoked mixed feelings for Thoreau; it was, by turns, an instinctual means of subsistence and sport, an offense to his “higher” inclinations to abstain from all “animal food,” and an emblem of meditative retreat. Fishing was potentially redeemable from the uncleanness of killing when viewed as a spiritual practice. It was for some, Thoreau surmised, “a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their bibles.”3
Henry David Thoreau led the way in the American reevaluation of the spiritual potential of solitude. (Concord Free Public Library.)
Thoreau's hermitage at Walden Pond constitutes no doubt the most famous American exploration of solitude. “If any American,” a contemporary commented a few years after Thoreau's death, “deserves to stand as a representative of the experience of recluseness, Thoreau is the man.” Courting notoriety, the Concord hermit created religious controversy in seeking his inspiration primarily beyond the pale of the churches and its saints. He set up the Buddha especially as a sign of his desire to move beyond the usual ligatures of New England Protestantism and to question standing religious authorities: “I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.” If Thoreau staked the originality of his religious journey upon the apparent confluence of the Concord and the Ganges, he still wrote in the shadow of the Bible and the church. His own solitude, however distinctive and celebrated, represented a wider cultural convergence and realignment, a crossing from Christian exemplars of holiness to more diffuse sources and inspirations. It took a lot of cultural work to get to Thoreau's Walden, let alone to produce William James's eccentric seeker for whom “at any time the word hermit was enough to transport him.”4
Walden, with its powerful evocation of Thoreau's pond-side hermitage, emerged as the classic text in the Transcendentalist reconfiguration of solitude. (Concord Free Public Library.)
Thoreau's experiment occupies a critical juncture in the long and rich history of the solitude of hermits, one of the romantic crossroads in the making of American spirituality. Transcendentalists were those strange philosophers, the historian Henry Adams wryly remarked in their wake, who “sought conspicuous solitudes” and who “looked out of windows and said, ‘I am raining.’” Adams may have found Transcendentalism's attention-grabbing hermits “unutterably funny,” but the movement's rise was crucial to the reconfiguring of the anchorite's practice. Thoreau and company revalued solitude, opening it outward from specifically Christian forms of retired devotion into more diffuse forms of aspiration, religious and artistic. “Spirituality did ever choose loneliness,” the second-generation Transcendentalist William Rounseville Alger (1822–1905) declared in his formative work The Solitudes of Nature and of Man in 1866. “For there the far, the departed, the loved, the unseen, the divine, throng freely in, and there is no let or hindrance to the desires of our souls.” Solitude, in effect, underwent a post-Protestant transformation in which the search for isolation and retreat became the spiritual motto for more than one generation of seekers. Thoreau and his circle managed to leave a lasting mark on American imaginings of spirituality, evident in a long train of figures from John Muir and John Burroughs to Thomas Merton and Annie Dillard who made the solitary life an object of meditation and desire. As Barbara Erakko Taylor cheerily explains of her “hunger for unbroken solitude” in Silent Dwellers (1999), “We all have idealized, even romantic, ideas of a hermit. Mine had a self-denying, Thoreau-like quality: a rustic cabin with wood furniture.”5
The Encyclopædia Britannica of 1797 defined the hermit or eremite as “a devout person retired into solitude, to be more at leisure for prayer and contemplation.” It took the early Christian history as its baseline, reckoning the story from fourth-century accounts of St. Paul the Hermit and St. Anthony; indeed, it had no other frame of reference beyond these desert fathers and their austere devotions. That starting point was hardly one of unambiguous faith and heroic asceticism for wary Protestants and equally wary philosophers of the Enlightenment. In his famed history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), Edward Gibbon portrayed the “perpetual solitude” of anchorites as the product of a “savage enthusiasm.” “These unhappy exiles from social life were impelled by the dark and implacable genius of superstition,” Gibbon wrote with horror of the spreading influence of these ascetic ideals throughout the empire and the peril they had posed to civil society and its manlier virtues. The solitary life of the hermit was a matter of “blind submission” to ecclesial tyranny and the very opposite of “the freedom of the mind” to which Enlightenment learning aspired. These supposed saints of the desert had their lives “consumed in penance and solitude, undisturbed by the various occupations which fill the time, and exercise the faculties, of reasonable, active, and social beings.” The challenge that these Christian recluses posed to pagan virtues made them potentially ominous signs of decline and ruin. Gibbon's suspicion of hermits, in short, was akin to Henry Coventry's contempt for mystics.6
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
