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It is often said, in rather a facile way, that Benedict had tried out the hermit life, decided it was no good, and renounced it to become a cenobite i.e. to live in community. I beg to differ. There is nothing in Benedict’s Rule which does not imply the highest respect for the hermit life.

  The hermit is obviously a member of the monastery. The help and guidance of his brethren has trained him to fight at first hand against the devil. He is strong enough spiritually and psychologically to ‘go from the battle line in the ranks of their brothers to the single combat of the desert.’ He has the resources to ‘grapple single-handed with the vices of body and mind’ (RB ch.1).

Benedict does not depict a weak escapist. His own early experience as a hermit has evidently brought him to certain conclusions. An untrained hermit life is dangerous psychologically and spiritually, and facilities for training the hermit must be integrated into monastic training.

In this he is a man of his time. He did not live in a world where the modern version of the cenobia had the dominance it has today. He lived in a world with a variety of forms of monastic life, of which the cenobia was one. If you look at Athos today, you can see the astonishing variety of monastic life which he would have considered the normal environ.

  If you try to imagine yourself in Benedict’s world, you would have seen that the big problem of his time was a sound training for all sorts of monks, with all shades of vocation. Like the other monastic fathers of the east, he firmly believed that those with hermit vocations should not be left, untrained, to their own devices. They believed hermits needed training in community, where they would gain an accurate assessment of their own weaknesses, prejudices and idiosyncrasies.

  Bishop Kallistos - coming to the Rule from an eastern monastic perspective - puts  Benedict in the tradition of Cassian in which the monk may advance from ‘prima schola cenobii’ to ‘secundus anchoreosis gradus.’ He points out that the deficit in the Rule, in not indicating practical steps from the community to the hermitage, has tended to discourage any real consideration of the Rule as a basis for hermit life. This deficit can easily be remedied in the usual Benedictine way, of interpreting the Rule through Statutes or Declarations.

  Benedict makes the proviso that the hermit should have a ‘long probation’ in the monastery. What we have to bear in mind is that the normal length of training for a monk or nun nowadays is between five and nine years. In Benedict’s day he prescribed a probationary period of one year! The main ruling on hermit life in Orthodox canon law ( Canon 41, Council in Trullo 692 CE) sets this in perspective. The prospective hermit must ‘enter a monastery and there be trained in the manner of life appropriate to a hermit.’ They spend at least three years in the cenobium and are then examined by the local bishop. If accepted, they spend a further year in the cenobium and then are ‘permitted to enter solitude.’ When the monk is permitted to enter solitude, he still remains a monk of the monastery. He is under the discipline of the Superior and can be recalled.

  Let us now see how we can apply this, in terms of western canon law today. There is in fact, a system already in place which can be used. I refer to the training of extern Sisters in a papally enclosed monastery. The extern Sister ( who, incidentally, is in Perpetual  vows, as are hermits professed under 603) is trained as a Sister of the monastery and is a member of the community. However, the extern is trained in a way appropriate to her vocation, which involves spending time in the outer Church, serving the guests of the monastery, and external transactions for the community. If we apply a similar system to training the hermit, but instead of introducing the hermit to duties outside the enclosure, we introduce the hermit gradually to the hermitage, building up to longer periods of solitude, until we are sure they can retain stability and mental balance within the life, we have an authentic training within monastic life.

  This can only be sketched out at Sancti Angeli, and obviously our ‘pilot project,’ will have the many deficiencies inherent in new beginnings. However our aim is, using the present building as our noviciate kellia, to develop, firstly, temporary hermitages for Sisters to spend short periods of solitude (which can be rented out for retreat when not in use) and secondly, to obtain a permanent site where more remote ‘hidden’ hermit cells may be erected. Such cells need be no more than simple eco-housing - a visitor ‘pod.’

  Hermits would, of the nature of their vocation, be concerned to conserve the local environment and habitat, and so complement the work of bodies concerned for the protection of the environment. This might lead to the establishment of sketes and lavras in areas of outstanding natural beauty, or where particularly sensitive areas of habitat need management.

  Benedict, I believe, would be pleased with this. The emphasis on stability, and living and working in a way appropriate to your environment (Ch. 66 et al.), runs like a golden thread through the Rule. There is something in the hermits heart - the call to return to spiritual and natural roots - which propels him to closeness with the natural environment and reverence for nature.