Category: Solitaries

In the presence of God. He's growing older, Kierkegaard, though he is not so very old. Older – though, in a sense, he's already outlived himself. He began his authorship with full certainty that he was reaching his end. Wouldn't he die, like his siblings, at 34? 34: and in his 35th year? his 36th?

He had outlived himself and outlived his authorship, which culminated – peaked – in the 700 page Concluding Unscientific Postscript … his summa, his anti-summa, written, like so many of his works, under a pseudonym. Outliving himself, he began again, now making himself the deliberate target of a satirical review. He invited their jibes; welcomed them.

Wasn't he soon to write that blessedness consists in suffering mockery for a good cause? Well, he was mocked. He was – mostly in his own head – reviled. But wasn't he to write, in the last period of his authorship, that suffering was the sanctifying mark of God? Wasn't he to claim that the school of sufferings was a dying to and quiet lessons in dying to the world and worldliness?

After all, Christ himself was lowly – or his lowliness, the fact that he was a poor, suffering and finally powerless human being, was inextracable from his loftiness, that he claimed to be God and spoke and acted as though he were God.

The Christian suffers. He must suffer, if he is to be a witness to the truth. He must die away from the world, to forsake all to follow Christ. And in this sense, for Kierkegaard, more is asked of the Christian than of Abraham in the Old Testament, who was asked only to give up his son.

To foresake the world; to give it up – that is Christianity, and that is also the freedom of Christianity. For to suffer for the Gospel – to live, like the apostles, in poverty, lowliness and abasement; to be mocked, insulted and hated: this is to prepare the way for developing our inwardness, of becoming the individual God wants us to be.

For God, too, suffers when we do not. God suffers, says Kierkegaard, when he sees what his church has become, when he sees in Christendom only the emptying of the content of Christian language, liturgy and belief. 'There is truly a fellowship of suffering with God', Kierkegaard says, 'a pact of tears, which is intrinsically very beautiful'.

A pact of tears: then our suffering must be an analogue of God's, just as it is an analogue of Christ's. Then we must learn the poverty of our earthly riches. Then we must learn that to lose is to gain, and that to accept suffering might also be to invert its meaning, to regard it as our honour, as our pride.

The way of hardship is the only way to perfection. And the way of increasing hardship – for the further one goes, the more one understands one's shortcomings and sin, the more that grace is the gift we need, even as, at the same time, we know the joy that grace does come.

And so hardship and joy are one; so suffering harbours the possibility of freedom, and the exodus is also a way of coming to the kingdom. That's what Kierkegaard understood, as he came to the end. In his last writings, discovered, after his death, laid out for the printer on his desk, he calls the suffering of his life the work of God's love.

A pact of tears – but what a pact, what a covenant! Kierkegaard wept – and outlived his death sentence. He wept – and, after his first authorship, began his second. Now was the time for clarity. Now was a reckoning-time, the Christian versus Christendom. And so Kierkegaard went into his desert.

'If you would be perfect, go and sell all that you have and give to the poor, and come and follow me': so God to St. Anthony in Athanasius's Life. And when Anthony had sold his possessions, save what would provide thereafter for his sister, God spoke to him again: 'Take no thought for the morrow'. The future saint sequesters himself in the cowshed at the bottom of his garden, departing only now and again to learn the teachings of other solitary devotees on the matter of perfection.

Anthony is illiterate, but is able to remember the Scripture he heard in church; and by the work of his hands, he's able to look after himself, making rope, mats, baskets and sandals from the palm-blades and rushes. Anthony prays. He prays unceasingly, the work of his hands not diverting his prayer for purity of heart. He prays to be delivered from the demons that plague him – not figurative demons, these, temptations of the flesh, but real ones – so real that he shuts himself in a tomb at the edge of the village to confront them in solitary combat.

When his admirers find him unconscious, carrying him to the village church, Anthony wakes and demands to be taken back to his tomb. He challenges them again, the demons: do your worst!, he tells them, praying all the while. And when morning comes, the light of Christ suffuses that of the lambent sunlight. – 'Where were you, Lord?', asks Anthony to the morning. 'Why did you not appear from the beginning to cease my pains?' And the answer comes: 'Anthony, I was here, but I was waiting to see your contest'. Anthony, I was here: there was light all the time in the darkness.

And now Anthony feels the need to leave behind his cowshed and village. He feels a need for the solitude of the desert. He is thirty-five years old when he crosses the Nile, and encloses himself in an abandoned fort in the desert, having bread brought to him twice a year. And he is fifty-five years old when his admirers break down the fort door to find him strong and alert, full of light and radiance.

There were other solitaries before Anthony, of course. There were prophets who sought to enclose themselves from the madness of the world, and warn others of that madness. But Anthony became the prototype of a new kind of existence, at least in the West. It is in Athanasius's life that we first find the words monk and monastery. And it is there we find Anthony's long discourse to his fellow monks – to those solitaries who joined in the desert, finding their own abandoned dwelling places in which to seek union with the Lord.

Because they did follow him, persecuted Christians fleeing into the desert, and remaining there even when the persecution stopped. And indeed there were others out there before him – did God not summon Anthony, age ninety, yet deeper into the desert to meet Paul of Thebes, who had fled there from Decius as a young man? There were other anchorites, as they came to be called – others who withdrew into the deserts, as there would be others in the centuries to come.

'If you would be perfect, come and follow me'; 'Take no heed of the morrow': when he dies at one-hundred-and-five, Anthony is in the deepest desert of all, out beyond anyone, beyond his admirers. To the deepest desert, that's where he went at ninety-nine, the white bearded solitary striding out, still strong, still vigorous of mind, to be more alone than ever with his God …