On Hermits

April 12, 2020 timothywstanley@me.com

The Thebaid is a collection of texts telling of the saints who in the first centuries of Christianity retreated to the barren lands around the Egyptian city of Thebes. In the Uffizi painting we meet a mass of isolates, each man declaring: ‘I want to be alone...’ It is harder to achieve the via contemplativa in the age of rolling news. That’s one virtue of the desert: no wifi. What one needs is a Working From Home hero. I have set Antonello da Messina’s ‘Saint Jerome in His Study’ (c.1475) as my desktop background. Jerome, one of the four fathers of the western church, the scholar who translated the Old and New Testaments into Latin, sits at his desk. Formerly a penitent in the desert, where he removed a thorn from a lion’s paw, we meet Jerome now serenely retired to a spacious cell in Bethlehem... Jerome’s colonnaded cell is a proper work-in-progress study: books propped, spines bent, ribbons marking places. Vincenzo Catena’s ‘Saint Jerome’ (c.1510), also in the National Gallery collection, is a one-tome-at-a-time man. His tidy cubbyholes hold clasped volumes, candlesticks, flasks and what looks promisingly like a biscuit tin. He seems to be nodding off. But that’s all right. ‘Read often,’ Jerome advised his followers, ‘and learn all you can. Let sleep steal upon you with a book in your hand, and let the sacred page catch your drooping head.’

Laura Freeman, “The Art of the Hermit” - spectator.co.uk/article/the-art-of-the-hermit. Kindle owners will know that the device screensaver includes an image of Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving of Saint Jerome in his Study (included here), a popular renaissance theme. For another reflection on the ebb and flow of isolated life, see also Terry Eagleton’s review of David Vincent'’s A History of Solitude here: theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/19/history-solitude-david-vincent-biography-loneliness-fay-bound-alberti-review