Alone with God

By Dom Jean Leclerq

Upon the recommendation of a Scottish publisher, we are reprinting as a single volume this most critically acclaimed and popular of modern Camaldolese books. It is a guide to the hermit way of life, based on the teaching of Blessed Paul Giustiniani and featuring a memorable preface by Thomas Merton. Jean Leclerq, O.S.B. (1911-1993) is widely regarded as the foremost twentieth century scholar of Western monasticism, and this is one of his most impressive achievements. If you are only going to read one work of monastic spirituality in your lifetime, this could be your best choice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Faith & Family Publications
• Release date: Feb 2, 2010
• ISBN: 0972813217

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Alone with God

Alone with God

Dom Jean Leclercq

Ercam Editions

Bloomingdale, Ohio

www.Camaldolese.org

The English translation of Alone With God by Elizabeth McCabe, from the

French Seul avec Dieu: La Vie Eremitique, and preface by Thomas Merton,

copyright © 1961 and copyright renewed 1989 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

Revised and reset by Ercam Editions, 2008

ISBN 978-0-9728132-1-1

Library of Congress Call Number: BX2845.L413

Subject heading: Hermits—Alternate name:Giustiniani Paolo, 1476-1528

IMPRIMI POTEST: Dom Jacques Winandy

Abbot of Claravalle

September 8, 1955

IMPRIMATUR: Michael Potevin

Vicar General

Paris, September 14, 1955

Front cover: Blessed Paul Giustiniani, seventeenth century, artist unknown

Back cover: Allegory of the Camaldolese Order (1599-1600), El Greco

Printed in the United States of America

Preface

by Thomas Merton

Just as the Church of God can never be without martyrs, so too she can never be without solitaries, for the hermit, like the martyr, is the most eloquent witness of the Risen Christ. It was on the night of Easter that the Risen Savior breathed upon His Apostles, that they might receive of His Spirit, Who had not been given before because Christ was not yet glorified. Saint Paul has told us that all who are sons of God are activated and moved by the Spirit of God. They have the Spirit of Christ because they belong to Christ. Having His Spirit, they live no longer according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. Qui vero secundum Spiritum sunt, quae sunt Spiritus sentiunt. ¹ Therefore they are of one mind and one Spirit with Jesus Christ.

Now at the beginning of His public life, Jesus was led into the desert by the Spirit, that He might engage in single combat with the devil. The struggle in the desert was the prelude to the struggle in the Garden of the Agony. This last was the exemplar and meritorious cause of the charity of all the martyrs and all the hermits who would be tested, like Christ himself, in the furnace of tribulation because they were pleasing to God. The Church of God, triumphing in her martyrs and ascetics, would thus be able to declare with Christ Himself: The prince of this world indeed comes, and he has no part in me: but he comes that the world may know that I love the Father!²

There must, therefore, be hermits. Nor is this only because there will always be men who desire solitude. The Christian hermit is one who is led into the desert by the Spirit, not by the flesh, even though he may well have a natural inclination to live alone. Our own time has seen hermits like the Dominican, Père Vayssière, who entered the Order of Preachers knowing that he wanted to preach the Gospel, and completely unaware that he would spend most of his life in solitude at La Sainte Baume. Nor must there always be hermits, merely because there are always contemplative souls, or because the contemplative naturally seeks physical solitude (for without the efficacious desire of exterior solitude, interior solitude will always remain a fantasy or an illusion). The true reason for the persistence of hermits even in ages which are most hostile to the solitary ideal is that the exigencies of Christian life demand that there be hermits. The Kingdom of God would be incomplete without them, for they are the men who seek God alone with the most absolute and undaunted and uncompromising singleness of heart. If we have forgotten that the Fathers of the Church assigned to the hermit a high, even the highest place among all Christian vocations, a modern theologian, Dom Anselm Stolz, is there to remind us of the fact.³ And now another Benedictine, Dom Jean Leclercq, has added an important volume to the slowly growing collection of works on the solitary life appearing in our own time.

This book is all the more important because it introduces us to a hermit as interesting as he is unknown: a surprising figure, rising up almost unaccountably in the Italy of Raphael and Machiavelli, Castiglione and Michelangelo Buonarotti. Paul Giustiniani, as we learn from the brief note on his life which opens the author’s introduction, became a novice at Camaldoli in 1510 — that is to say that he entered the most ancient of the eremitical orders that have survived in the Western Church. Camaldoli goes back to the tenth century and Saint Romuald. Less famous than the Chartreuse, Camaldoli nevertheless has retained more of the aspect of an ancient "laura" than we would find in any Chartreuse. The Camaldolese idea is simply to apply the Rule of Saint Benedict to the eremitical life. Saint Benedict declared, of course, that his Rule was written for cenobites, but he also holds the solitary life in high honor, and suggests that certain monks, after a long probation in the monastery, may be called by God to a hermitage. Saint Romuald made it possible for monks to have solitude without losing anything of the bonum obedientiae, that blessing of obedience which is the treasure of monastic life, and without departing from that life in common, the life of fraternal charity, which is the security of all who do not feel themselves equal to the heroism of another Anthony. The Sacro Eremo of Camaldoli is, therefore, a community of hermits, a village of ancient cells hidden in a pine forest several thousand feet above sea level in the Apennines behind Arezzo.

Paul Giustiniani entered Camaldoli at a time when the fervor had lost some of its ancient heat, and he left it for a stricter solitude. Eventually he was to start a new eremitical congregation of his own, the hermits of Montecorona, who still have a community at Frascati outside Rome, and several others in Italy, Spain, Poland, and the United States.⁴ Giustiniani thus bears the same relation to Camaldoli as the Abbé de Rancé does to the Order of Cîteaux, and, in another sense, as Dom Innocent Le Masson does to the Chartreuse. Like each of these great men, Paul Giustiniani seeks to rekindle the ancient fire that is burning low in an age that has no love for asceticism, for contemplation, or for solitude. It is therefore of the greatest interest to have at our disposal a volume that brings together from his various works, most of which are inaccessible, a complete doctrine of the solitary life.

Let us now turn to the doctrine of Blessed Paul, whose name recalls to our minds the half-legendary figure of the first hermit whom Saint Anthony is supposed to have discovered in the cave where he had lived for over a hundred years unknown to men. The eremitical life is above all solitary. Saint Romuald chose to settle in the once inviolable forests of Camaldoli and to seek God in a solitude that was sacred, that is to say entirely consecrated to Him. The inviolable character of holy solitude is a witness to the infinite transcendence of Him whose holiness elevates Him above all things. In order to seek Him Who is inaccessible the hermit himself becomes inaccessible. But within the little village of cells centered about the Church of the Eremo is a yet more perfect solitude — that of each hermit’s own cell. Within the cell is the hermit himself, in the solitude of his own soul. But — and this is the ultimate test of solitude — the hermit is not alone with himself — for that would not be a sacred loneliness. Holiness is life. Holy solitude is nourished with the Bread of Life and drinks deep at the very Fountain of all Life. The solitude of a soul enclosed within itself is death. And so the authentic, the really sacred solitude is the infinite solitude of God Himself, Alone, in Whom the hermits are alone.

From this obligation to seek interior solitude flow all the other demands made upon the hermit, the other essential obligations of his state: silence, stability, recollection, mortification, labor, fasting, vigils, and prayer. These detach the soul from all that is not God. They are not peculiar to the hermit. They belong to the monastic life wherever it is found. But the hermit has a very special obligation to practice them, without, however, departing from discretion which is one of the most important virtues of the solitary. After all, it is discretion which teaches us to live by the interior guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is discretion which teaches us to distinguish between the voice of the Spirit and the voice of the flesh or of the evil one. Discretion does not permit us to be cowards, but neither does it allow us to fall headlong into the abyss of vanity, pride, or presumption. Without discretion, the solitary life ends fatally in disaster. In the true spirit of Saint Benedict, Paul Giustiniani declares that even in the hermitage the best mortifications are those which are not of our own choice, and that even the hermit should seek to please God more by great fidelity in his ordinary duties than by extraordinary feats of ascetic heroism. The life of the solitary will be a continual warfare, in which the flesh fights not only against the spirit but against the flesh itself and in which the spirit also fights not only against flesh but even against the spirit. It is here, in this inexpressible rending of his own poverty, that the hermit enters, like Christ, into the arena where he wages the combat that can never be told to anyone. This is the battle that is seen by no one except God, and whose vicissitudes are so terrible that when victory comes at last, the total poverty and emptiness of the victor are so absolute that there is no longer any place in his heart for pride.

Such is the eremitica puritas, the hermit’s purity, which opens the way for contemplation. Without this annihilation the solitary might perhaps be tempted to seek rest in the consolations of God for their own sake. He might enjoy a selfish and self-complacent solitude in which he was delivered from responsibilities and inundated with supernatural favors. In words that remind us of Saint John of the Cross, Paul Giustiniani speaks of the false contemplatives who are displeased by everything that deprives them of the rest they think they have found in God but which they seek, really, in themselves. Their only care is to seek after peace, not in things below them, not in themselves, but in God; however they desire this peace not for the glory of God, but out of love for themselves.

Nor does the sacredness of solitude and the true eremitic purity allow the hermit to become absorbed in a zeal that does not extend beyond the welfare or reputation of his own monastery and his own order, still less beyond his own progress and his own virtues. A life alone with God is something too vast to include such limited objectives within its range. It reaches up to God Himself, and in doing so, embraces the whole Church of God. Meanwhile, the hermit supports this interior poverty of spirit with the greatest exterior poverty. He must live like the poorest of the poor. Eremitica puritas is the peace of one who is content with bare necessities. Such peace is impossible where poverty is a mere matter of exterior form. The hermit is not one who, though deprived of the right to possess them, actually has the use of better objects and enjoys more plentiful comforts than could ever be afforded by the materially poor. The eremitical community itself must be a poor community. And although this simplicity guarantees the hermit a high place in the Church, he himself will remember that his elevation is in reality a matter of humility and abjection. He takes no part in the active affairs of the Church because he is too poor to merit a place in them. For him to accept prelacy would be an infidelity because it would be an act of presumption. Paul Giustiniani pursues this subject of poverty into the most remote corners of the hermit’s soul. The solitary will not even pride himself on his strict observances, or compare himself with religious of other orders. He will avoid the supreme folly of those who, having nothing in the world but their humility, lose even that by boasting of it! By this perfect forgetfulness of himself, the hermit merits to be called the successor of the martyrs.

There is a positive side to all this. Solitude is not sought for its own sake. If the eremitical life is the highest form of Christianity it is because the hermit aspires more than anyone else to perfect union with Christ. Jesus Himself is the living rule of the hermit, just as He is the model of every religious. It is Christ Himself Who calls us into solitude, exacting of us a clean break with the world and with our past, just as He did of Saint Anthony. Perhaps more than any other the solitary life demands the presence of the Man Christ Who lives and suffers in us. Even if we worshiped the one true God in the desert, without the Incarnate Word our solitude would be less than human and therefore far short of the divine: without Him no one comes to the Father. Without Jesus we all too easily fulfil the words of Pascal — "qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête [He who would play the angel ends by playing the beast"]. Solitude therefore must translate itself into the three words: cum Christo vivere — to live with Christ. Solitude is a fortress that protects the heart against all that is not Christ, and its only function is to allow Christ to live in us. Solitude spiritualizes the whole man, transforms him, body and soul, from a carnal to a spiritual being. It can only do so in the Spirit of Christ Who elevates our whole being in God, and does not divide man’s personality against itself like those false asceticisms which Saint Paul knew to be enemies of the Cross of Christ.

In a hymn to this solitude which is too unknown, Giustiniani says: It is thou that announcest the coming of the Holy Spirit: and not only announcest Him, but bringest Him into the human heart just as the dawn, which announces the day, brings to our eyes the brightness of the sun.

This