[[Hi Sister Laurel, so when the catechism speaks of hermits being hidden from the eyes of men, are you saying this is not about being anonymous, or not wearing a habit, or not using the title Sister or Brother, for example? What I hear you saying is that eremitical hiddenness is about the inner and ordinary nature of the hermit's journey to deeper union with God. No one can look in at this journey; it is always a hidden part of a human being's life. I wonder, though, if there isn't some degree of external hiddenness from others. Are you saying that there is no hiddenness except for the inner journey the hermit makes to God?]]
Great question!! Important too, since the Catechism of the Catholic Church refers to the hermit's life being hidden from the eyes of men, not just the hermit's work or ministry. Yes, you have pretty well captured what I am saying. Still, let's look at the statement of the Catechism re hermits and see what it actually says, especially in paragraph 921: [[[Hermits] manifest to everyone the interior aspect of the mystery of the Church, that is, personal intimacy with Christ. Hidden from the eyes of men, the life of the hermit is a silent preaching of the Lord, to whom he has surrendered his life simply because he is everything to him. Here is a particular call to find in the desert, in the thick of spiritual battle, the glory of the Crucified One.]]
The first thing I want to point out is that hermits' lives manifest something to others. That is, in their everyday way of being, they make something known that others might not be able to see so well via other vocations. That something is the interior aspect of the mystery of the Church and of the human person. So, right off the bat, we have the notion that something is hidden (or interior at this point in the text) and also that it is made universally known. Hermits are called to make the inner life of the Church, consisting in intimacy with Christ, manifest in a very specific and unusual way (I argue this way is most accurately defined as paradoxical), and they do this for the sake of everyone, not merely for a limited or elitist few.
The paragraph goes on to describe another way of thinking about the inner or interior life of the Church, namely, as personal intimacy with Christ. Here is the real key to understanding the hiddenness of the hermit's life. It is about intimacy with the Risen Christ, and with the words "silent preaching," we are introduced explicitly to the paradoxical nature of making such a hidden reality manifest. Hermits' lives are all about the journey to ever deeper union with God in Christ, just as Jesus' life was about this same journey or pilgrimage through all the exigencies of a life and death burdened and shaped by human -- though not by personal -- sinfulness. Luke describes this journey as one where Jesus grew in grace and stature, and other NT writers describe the journey as one of, "being about his Father's business" and traveling from the heights of blessedness and divine intimacy to the depths and horror of apparent abandonment by God. Even so, in all of this Jesus' life is a pilgrimage to the depths of human existence and relatedness that we identify as union with God.
We all read the Scriptures as assiduously as we can, and the truth is, we are often struck by how little of Jesus' own journey we can truly know or how little of the nature of his pilgrimage to God we comprehend. (Huge historical quests and theological debates have focused on this and related questions during the 19th, 20th, and into the 21st centuries.) This inner life and journey is a hidden reality, and Jesus himself, though a public figure with a strikingly public vocation, remains essentially obscure to us.
So it is with the inner life of
anyone we know, no matter how well we know them. However, with regard to hermits and paragraph 921 of the
Catechism, it is important to recognize that the Church uses this paragraph, not merely to assert
the fact of essential hiddenness associated with the hermit vocation, especially when hiddenness is mistaken by some to imply external isolation or remaining entirely anonymous or unknown to others, but rather to explain
the nature of that hiddenness and
the paradoxical forms of relatedness it requires or in which it is rooted and flourishes.
I believe it is true that large parts of the hermit's life, besides their inner life, will be hidden from others, though I also believe that apart from more ordinary requirements of privacy, this is really because the whole of the hermit's life is about growing in intimacy with God in the "silence of solitude". This requires more silence and solitude than most people experience or require. However, even those parts of the hermit's life that are public (in the common, not canonical sense of this word) and observable will remain obscure because they are motivated and colored by dedication to this inner relationship. The experience that corresponds to such hiddenness and that hermits may describe to others (especially directors and one another) is the sense that their vocation is not truly understood by anyone except those whose life commitments are similar. Even then, there will be a core of undisclosable truth which cannot be known by others --- just as is true regarding the inner life and personal mystery of any human being.
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So, no, I don't deny there are significant degrees of external "hiddenness" from others in a hermit's life. What I assert and know from experience is that these are always secondary to the inner mystery and obscurity to which this vocation is dedicated. They must reflect and serve this inner mystery, which is always primary. One makes a serious misstep if one primarily identifies the
hiddenness of the eremitical vocation with externals like anonymity or a refusal to relate to others, especially if one absolutizes these as though they are what this vocation is all about. At the same time, it should be noted that some externals can also make manifest something of the fact and nature of this inner mystery and journey. Thus, besides the
relative lack of active ministry, for instance, the Church celebrates such vocations publicly, and grants hermits permission to wear habits and prayer garments, style themselves as Sister or Brother, use post-nominal initials, and so forth.
While some folks may believe these things are clearly and completely understood, my own sense is that in our contemporary world, they themselves are mysterious and point to something countercultural and even more profoundly mysterious, grounded in the Ineffable. In any case, I would argue that because c 603's focus is on mirroring (revealing) the inner nature of the Church and the exhaustive incarnational journey of the hermit doing so, and because such external elements have the power to point beyond themselves to Divine Mystery, there is a wisdom in the fact that c 603 does not require or even invite anonymity, that it involves public profession and consecration, and that it grants the use of visible signs of one's consecration. These are always balanced by the completely ordinary dimensions of the hermit's life, which also have a significant, if paradoxical, sign value. Even so, they have a place, and it has nothing to do (as some will argue) with self-aggrandizement or violations of eremitical hiddenness.
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