The modern-day idea of withdrawing from the world to find some focus has its roots in ancient spiritual practices, says Guy Stagg

Most people who want to change the world follow the path of action, but a few have taken the opposite route. One of those was a young man named Anthony, who started a religious revolution in third-century Egypt. After the death of his parents, Anthony sold off his inheritance, gave the money to the poor and then left the world behind. For the next eight decades he lived in the desert, consuming nothing but bread and water, and often fasting for days on end. Each night he was visited by the devil, who tempted him with boredom and desire, or else tormented him in the form of wild beasts that left his body broken and battered. But still he remained in seclusion, moving deeper and deeper into the desert, seeking the purest solitude.

Anthony was not the first hermit. Christian ascetics had been living in isolation since the very beginning of the religion. Before them, the prophets of the Old Testament regularly withdrew to fast and pray. The same was true for the sages and scholars found in Buddhist, Hindu and other Eastern religious traditions, who passed long years in solitary meditation. Nonetheless, something about Anthony’s retreat captured the imagination of the Early Church. During his lifetime, the hermit attracted dozens of disciples, as well as an admiring letter from the Emperor Constantine. After his death, Anthony was celebrated as the Father of Monasticism.

His story was made famous by an Alexandrian bishop named Athanasius. The bishop’s hagiographic account of Anthony’s life became one of the most popular books of Late Antiquity. It not only inspired Augustine’s conversion, but also offered a charismatic model for numerous solitaries, stylites and aspiring saints. Even though the Bible contained no command to retreat, Anthony showed how, by withdrawing to live in deliberate hardship, the believer could share in the suffering of Christ. And, once the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, retreat offered an alternative martyrdom to those no longer persecuted for their faith.

Anthony’s biography remained popular throughout the Middle Ages – a period when ostentatious displays of austerity reached their peak. Perhaps the best-known ascetic was Francis of Assisi, whose spiritual status was established by long retreats into nature and impressive feats of endurance. Francis was known to wear a hair shirt, to sleep on a bed of stones, and to mix ash into his food to spoil the taste. According to a manuscript written a century after the saint’s death, he once spent Lent on an island in a lake near Perugia, taking nothing with him but two loaves of bread. When he returned to the mainland forty days later, one and a half loaves remained. By modern standards these acts of self-mortification seem mystifying, but at the time denying desire was considered a liberation rather than a loss. As Thomas à Kempis made clear in The Imitation of Christ: “True peace of heart, then, is found in resisting passions, not satisfying them.”

Closer to home, Julian of Norwich showed how the believer could retreat without escaping into the wilderness. At the age of the 30, she fell dangerously ill and experienced a series of visions in which she was comforted by God. In the aftermath of these visions, Julian decided to become an anchoress – a hermit attached to a single institution, living by a strict set of vows. So, she bricked herself up into a cell beside her local church, with one window angled towards the altar and another facing onto the world. This was the late 14th century, when Norwich was a prosperous trading centre with 58 churches. Thirty-six of them boasted their own anchorite’s cell. Julian was the most celebrated example of a much wider trend, where hermits would make their lonely homes among the sounds and smells of urban society. However, by turning their back on human company, the solitary made clear that they valued the city of God above the city of man.

In the 16th century the Jesuits started promoting retreat as a religious exercise for clergy and laity. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises offered a structured 30-day programme of self-examination that could either be performed while staying with a religious community, or else adapted to everyday life. By the 17th century the Jesuits had established the first retreat house for women, where guests mixed prayer and reflection with household chores, sharing in the stripped-back life of monks and nuns. By shedding their regular responsibilities, as well as their status and privilege in the wider world, those on retreat hoped to come closer to the divine. And the simplified routine was part of appeal: like Lenten fasting or all-night prayer, penance was not only proof of devotion, but a way of making space for God.

However, the Reformation dealt a lasting blow to retreat as a popular practice in Protestant Europe. By the end of the 16th century, England’s hermits’ caves and anchorites’ cells had all but disappeared, along with the relics and shrines that venerated solitary saints. Although many Protestant sects placed an emphasis on solitude – either for prayer, or studying scripture, or reckoning with one’s own sins – they viewed monasteries as places of corruption. Similarly, religious communities were not guardians of quiet devotion, but centres of extravagance and vice.

In the 18th century this suspicion spread across much of Europe. For the scientists and philosophers of the period, the idea of fleeing society was at best an eccentric whim and at worse a sign of deviancy. Ascetics were no longer associated with spiritual wisdom, but rather the backward habits of a less enlightened age. It was during this period that the fashion began for ornamental hermits: men who were paid to live in isolation on the estates of wealthy landowners, providing a picturesque detail alongside the sculptures and follies. For instance, when Charles Hamilton created Painshill Park in Surrey, he had a small hermitage built there and hired a man to live in it. The hermit was forbidden to speak with the servants, have his hair, nails or beard cut, or even wear shoes. According to legend he was contracted to live there for seven years but was fired three weeks later after being found drinking in a local pub.

The ascetic tradition that once commanded such respect was now the subject of mockery. Yet the Romantic Movement would soon rescue solitude by decoupling it from any religious calling, and repurposing retreat as an artistic practice. As Rousseau wrote in The Reveries of the Solitary Walker: “long and tranquil meditations […] are impossible in the bustle of society life.” Meanwhile, Wordsworth’s poetry praised the isolated figures of shepherds, farm labourers and even, in Tintern Abbey, the hermit sitting by his fire, whose tranquil existence offers a stark contrast with “the din / Of towns and cities.” Retreat was not transformed from a spiritual practice into a secular one; rather, the sacred was now located in the wonders of nature and the freedom found in solitude. Withdrawing was less an escape from depravity than from crowds, commerce and the coming Age of Industry.

This wish to flee the modern world continued through the 19th century. It was expressed in a growing fascination with medieval culture, which seemed a sanctuary from the spread of factories and railways. Numerous Victorian institutions borrowed the architecture and authority of this half-imagined Middle Ages, complete with its cast of priests, hermits and holy knights. The century also saw a revival of religious orders in Britain and Europe, attempting to recreate a faithful vision of medieval Christendom within their neo-gothic cloisters. Although their retreats initially catered to the smarter levels of society, they became increasingly popular among the working classes, promising an escape from drink and poverty, as well as the suffocating conditions of the Victorian city.

By the 20th century, people’s reasons for retreat had widened, and more options became available. For instance, the format was borrowed by the rehab, fitness and wellness industries, with retreat centres that resembled health spas or luxury hotels, offering vegan menus and on-site masseurs. At the same time, retreat became a way to explore non-Christian religious practices, whether yoga studios and meditation schools, or the more esoteric range of dancing, chanting and psychedelic rites offered by New Age alternatives. But there is also a growing number of creative and intellectual retreats, designed less for the solitary than the culturally curious – from writing courses in country cottages to the week-long retreats offered by the Idler, which combine cordiality and culture with hiking in beautiful countryside. At first, these modern retreats seem to have little in common with the self-punishing projects of medieval anchorites. Certainly, the word retreat has lost its moral weight. But modern retreaters share an insight with those first hermits who made their homes among the desert sands: that in order to learn the truth about ourselves, we have to step back from the world.

This article is from the Idler #105.

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