The Idealist by Justin Peters

Author:Justin Peters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

7

GUERILLA OPEN ACCESS

As long as man has lived in society, he has yearned to escape that society and run off to live in a cave. This dream is usually abandoned once the would-be escapee realizes that caves are uncomfortable and that society is where his things are. The material comforts of civilization are magnetic, indeed, and those few individuals who do escape society’s pull are almost always drawn by some more powerful force, love or religion or misanthropy or madness, occasionally all at once.

Faith first brought Paolo Giustiniani to the Caves of Massaccio in 1520, faith and disaffection.1 Born to a noble Venetian family, Giustiniani traded his finery for a friar’s habit and joined the Camaldolese, a religious order founded in 1012 by the monk Romuald, who counseled his followers to “put the whole world behind you and forget it.”2 But such exhortations are easier to address than to follow—the world has a way of intruding, even in a cloister. Giustiniani found monastic life insufficiently contemplative, and his fellow monks insufficiently detached from the outside world. When his brethren balked at his suggestion that they resuscitate Romuald’s rule, Giustiniani left the community, in search of a spot where he and others could live apart in silence and self-abnegation, contemplating the wickedness of the world and the glories of God, in hopes that the latter would soon obviate the former.3

He found his hermitage in a canyon near Cupramontana, in central Italy, where earlier travelers had carved a warren of caves into the rough tuffaceous rock. The caves offered shelter and silence; the canyon was sylvan, serene. In a letter to a friend, Giustiniani noted that he was forced to write “on my knees, not even having a stool.”4 But if you wanted to save the world, you had to first be willing to forsake it. Giustiniani moved in. Others soon followed. For centuries, the monks lived there in the transcendent quiet.

Then modernity came, and with it came disrepair. As went the monastery, so went the friars; vocations, like buildings, can grow worn and weathered.5 The few remaining monks dispersed between the First and Second World Wars, and today the entire property is deconsecrated and privately held, used as a retreat and conference space by secular groups that also seek to escape society, if only for days at a time.6

Though it has evolved from its original purpose, the hermitage still stands as a monument to radical idealism, a physical reminder that we have a choice, that we are not bound inextricably to social convention. It takes courage to opt out of the world, its comforts and vices, in pursuit of less tangible rewards, but it can be done. Uncomfortable as caves may be, we can eventually learn to live in them. If society makes no sense, we can always stop listening. If the world disappoints us, we can leave it behind.

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