Einsamkeit. Bestimmung und Funktion im hochmittelalterlichen Mönchtum.
Project manager: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Gert Melville
Researcher: Marcus Handke, M.A.
Loneliness as a basic condition of human existence varies between positive and negative ideas and feelings. On the one hand, modern studies emphasize the dangers for the increasingly isolated individual in an "age of loneliness" from various professional perspectives. On the other hand, the active pursuit of solitude has always reflected a need for a healing retreat, for deceleration, relaxation and creative self-realization. A positive understanding has also been deeply linked to religious forms of life fulfillment for thousands of years. In Christianity and especially in monasticism, people tried to achieve closeness to God by detaching themselves from earthly ties, values and world views. The importance of social contact for people led to necessary compromises even among the first monks who lived as hermits. However, the idea of singular sanctification lived on in ideals completely outside of any communal life. In the high medieval climate of church reform, individualization and internalization, those ideals of the vita apostolica and early anachoretism were revived and were central elements of the eremitic renewal movement of monastic life. Although the conspicuous desire for solitude of this period has been touched upon several times in historiography, an analysis of the possible concept of solitude, its functions, rich symbolic content and references to role models has not been a research topic in its own right.
The temporal focus of the research project is therefore on the 11th and 12th centuries as a clear boom in the examination of religiously motivated inner and outer retreat. With the constitution of new monastic communities - such as those of the Carthusians, Cistercians and Camaldolese - a different, much more intense quality of solitude emerged through an unconventional synthesis of eremitic and cenobitic structures. As a technique for approaching God, solitude was now functionally charged and therefore attractive - but at the same time increasingly virulent. In view of the manifold hardships and difficulties of social separation, spatial reduction and relentless confrontation with one's own self, not only does the question of the changed life configurations and institutional realizations arise, but the investigation also purposefully brings up those lamenting, oppressive moods and pathological traits. Since a solitude relevant to salvation could not be brought about by merely setting norms, but rather demanded a shaping of the way of life and the inner attitude in the sense of the pedagogical concern of Greek philosophy and its spiritual exercises(askesis), solitude became the subject of both pragmatic writing and learned theological reflection. Normative, paraenetic and biographical sources are therefore valuable for the study.
This broad spectrum of research material is prepared for a comparative perspective on this guiding idea, taking into account genesis and provenance through abstract classification schemes of individual aspects of loneliness. As a result, the fuzzy and complex concept of solitude(solitudo) can be given clear, time-specific contours through the exemplary treatment of particularly concise partial aspects. In addition, the efforts of monastic institutions to achieve a 'sociality of solitude' are seen as having considerable potential for innovation and psychosocial competence, which must be justified in terms of cultural and ideological history within the vita religiosa of the High Middle Ages.
Staff contact
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Gert Melville:
Tel: +49 (0) 351 463 41313
Email: gert.melville(at)tu-dresden.de
Marcus Handke, M.A.