Abstract
Loneliness has always been a cause of deep existential struggles. It can threaten us with a sense of despair where we find no one, or no thing, to fill our inner emptiness. For some, however, such struggles have occasioned personally enriching experiences of solitude. This can happen when hope unexpectedly presents itself to us and forces the despair of loneliness to loosen its grip. But what can we do in order to make this happen? Is there anything we can do at all? For one, solitude requires spending time alone, which is increasingly difficult in a world that constantly offers us new ways of staying electronically connected. But let us not think that this is the main hindrance to experiences of solitude. Being alone does not magically produce the solitude we are looking for. On the contrary, we now live in a time where many have become acutely aware of this. Spending too much time alone can sink us even more deeply into the despair of loneliness. It can give us the sense that a pursuit of solitude is nothing but chasing a mirage. All of which increases our need to understand the mystery of solitude and how it can help us find our way back out of loneliness.
In his book On Solitude, Conscience, Love and Our Inner and Outer Lives, Ron Haflidson points us in the direction of practising a Christian solitude of self-examination in dialogue and communion with God. In a gently probing style, he argues that this is a moral necessity for the good life, and for us to become better at loving others. He encourages us to learn this from Augustine’s thoughts on solitude, as well as Augustine’s warning against the sin of pride and seeing ourselves as superior to others. We have to let ourselves be guided by conscience. Doing so enables us to love others according to the way God sees them. Haflidson draws his argument primarily from Augustine and the Christian scriptures and uses various authors and literary works to illustrate and further support it. He concludes that the private practice of solitude sends us back into the world, better able to love others as our equals, the way Jesus did.
The Introduction opens with the claim that solitude is under the threat of serious decline. This is followed by snapshots from the works of four contemporary authors who form what Haflidson calls a ‘coalition for the preservation of solitude’ (p. 3) and who see solitude as ‘a valuable resource in the living of a good life’ (p. 10). As a believer in the Christian God, Haflidson wants to add his own voice to this coalition, whose approaches to solitude he critiques as rather abstract. To this end, he draws on Augustine who has convinced him that the practice of solitude is a moral necessity. The private solitude of individuals is indispensably important for a church community of compassion.
Chapter 1, ‘Solitude and Its Companions’, rests on the claim that self-criticism is a key task of the ongoing process of our moral formation. Drawing us forward, solitude opens a space in us where we can welcome three important dialogue companions: our own self, nature, and God. Haflidson briefly discusses the first two and moves us quickly to Jesus Christ as our primary exemplar of solitude as companionship with God. Here we arrive at the high point of Haflidson’s book and we sense his deep commitment to the kind of solitude that Jesus practiced. No hardships or successes kept Jesus from withdrawing to the secret and only place where one can ‘gain critical distance from others’ influence and expose oneself more fully to God’s influence’ (p. 40). Jesus teaches us to do the same as we follow him. This practice will expose us to ‘God’s seeing of us’ and empower us to reject public expectation, ‘yet doing so with the public good ultimately in mind’ (p. 46). Attending to how God—‘Our Father’—sees both ourselves and others, we learn to love as Jesus loved.
In chapter 2, ‘The Privacy of Conscience’, Haflidson turns to Augustine, in particular his commentary on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He begins with Augustine’s distinction between inner and outer, explaining how he adopted Plotinus’ understanding of our ‘inner’ as spacious, and then added that it has space enough for God’s constant presence also. This is morally significant because God is the standard against which we are to evaluate our judgements. Our inner space is where we form our judgements of the outer world, and without God there, we would not be able to consider which of them truly have God’s approval. This is the background for our internal dialogue with God and the solitude of conscience and self-criticism that Jesus taught us to practise. This chapter also contains some very keen passages where Haflidson relies on Augustine’s interpretation of Jesus’ parable of the Ten Virgins to show us that the approval of others does have its own outer rewards. But the more desirable inner reward is available to us when we entrust ourselves to God, who both knows us and loves us all completely and equally. It is the reward of knowing ‘that within the desert of our conscience we can retreat and there “rest in hope”’ (p. 85), the hope of heaven and a ‘perfected community of creatures and Creator’. We prepare ourselves for this community when we seek God’s approval as opposed to the approval of others.
In Chapter 3, ‘The Publicity of Love’, Haflidson calls us to a practice of self-criticism in solitude, where we ask ourselves two specific questions regarding love. First, am I communicating God’s goodness by loving others? Second, do I attend to all others as communicators of God’s goodness and love (pp. 91–92)? God’s love must flow in both directions, and Augustine points the way by making his self-searching and raw dialogue with God publically available through his Confessions. It is there for us to imitate as we interrogate our own loves. All creatures are fundamentally equal under God and we must be rigorously honest with ourselves as we admit to envy, anger and even hatred of others. The presence of hatred within us ‘is one of the ways that our inner space of retreat will become repellent to us and we won’t want to rest there with God’ (p. 103). Jesus has already warned us against this and defined perfection as loving even one’s enemies, i.e. those we hate. If we take this teaching to heart, we may experience the kind of change in our ‘viewing of others’. Haflidson directs us to an acclaimed contemporary novel to illustrate this, reminding us of what happened between Ames and Jack in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Ames’s faith in God enables him to review Jack’s wrongs and to look at them in a new way. Faithfully expecting to find something good about Jack, Ames enters a process of reviewing his memories in light of the way God sees Jack. As if listening to Augustine’s advice, Ames alters his perception of Jack in a way that amounts to forgiveness. ‘In coming to a wider recognition of Jack’s goodness, Ames can also acknowledge their equality as siblings under God’ (p. 112).
Chapter 4, ‘The Flight from Solitude’, returns to the contemporary threats against our practice of solitude which Haflidson now describes, negatively, as a fear of the evil of loneliness. This affirms, positively, our nature as social creatures, but Haflidson argues that our fear of loneliness is fuelled by the sin of pride, or ‘love of one’s own power’ as Augustine defines it. We learn from Augustine, he says, that our rejection of dependence on God and other human beings is the beginning of pride, just as it was for Adam and Eve. A disastrous consequence is that we become busy with three kinds of lusts. The lust of the flesh (sensual pleasure), the eye (restless craving for the stimulation of knowledge), and life itself (desire for domination). It is bad enough that lust of the eye crowds our inner room with stimulating images and causes us to ‘think that there is no space inside us’ (p. 127), but falling for the desire to dominate is more pervasive and destructive. This is the pride of desiring to be like God, and it makes us ‘pursue others’ recognition of our superiority’ (p. 129). In turn, this makes solitude look irrelevant and gives licence to criticism of others. Jesus famously confronted this sin in a group of Pharisees who regarded themselves as superior to a woman caught in adultery. They desired to judge her but Haflidson brings Augustine into this situation and suggests that ‘Jesus’ strategy is to invite the Pharisees to dwell in solitude before God and take their own lives as the subject of interrogation’ (p. 133). This brings Haflidson to the conclusion of his book: a call for us to retreat regularly into solitude and God’s company alone. Here we can practise private self-evaluation and dialogue with God which may help us to love better in public.
Is there anything, then, we can do in order to force the despair of loneliness to loosen its grip? Where are we to find hope? Haflidson’s book gently nudges us to re-read Augustine and do so reflectively. Following his example, we can look to Augustine’s writings for an effective response to our fear of loneliness. As I prepare myself for this, however, I expect to find help for myself to love others better, but in the company of God alone I will push myself to look for something more. I will look for a love that is strong enough to match the power of the despair of loneliness. Why? Because I think we live in a world where the despair of loneliness has a stronger pull on us than the power of solitude and moral obligation. Still, there is no doubt about it, On Solitude, Conscience, Love and Our Inner and Outer Lives points us in the direction of God’s love. And we need this.