Einsamkeit. Bestimmung und Funktion im hochmittelalterlichen Mönchtum.
Project lead: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Gert Melville
Employee: Marcus Handke, M.A.
Loneliness as a basic state of human existence varies between positive and negative ideas and feelings. On the one hand, modern research emphasises the dangers for the increasingly isolated individual in an "age of loneliness" from different professional perspectives. On the other hand, the active search for loneliness has always shown a need for a healing retreat, for deceleration, relaxation and creative self-realisation. For thousands of years, a positive understanding has also been particularly closely linked to religious forms of life fulfilment. In Christianity, and especially in monasticism, the closeness to God was attempted to be achieved by detaching oneself from earthly ties, values and world view. The importance of social contact for human beings led to necessary compromises even in the first monks who lived as hermits. In ideals, however, the idea of a singular sanctification lived on completely outside any community life. In the high medieval climate of church reform, individualisation and internalisation, those ideals of vita apostolica and early anachoretism were revived and were central elements of the eremitic renewal movement of monastic life. Although the conspicuous desire for loneliness of this period was touched upon several times in historiography, an analysis of the possible ways of thinking about loneliness, its functions, rich symbolic content and references to role models was not a separate research topic.
The temporal focus of the research project is therefore on the 11th and 12th centuries as a distinct period of confrontation with the religiously motivated inner and outer retreat. In the constitution of new monastic communities - such as those of the Carthusians, Cistercians and Camaldolese - a different, much more intense quality of loneliness developed through an unconventional synthesis of eremitic and cenobitic structures. As a technique for coming closer to God, loneliness now became functionally charged and thus attractive - but at the same time increasingly virulent. In view of the manifold efforts and difficulties of social separation, spatial reduction and unsparing confrontation with one's own self, not only does the question of changed life configurations and institutional realisations arise, but the investigation also purposefully brings up those plaintive, oppressive moods and pathological traits. Since a salvation-relevant loneliness could not be brought about by merely setting standards, but rather demanded a shaping of the way of life and inner attitude in the sense of the pedagogical concern of Greek philosophy and its spiritual exercises (askesis), loneliness became the object of both pragmatic writing and scholarly theological reflection. For this study, therefore, normative, paraenetic, but also biographical sources are valuable.
This broad spectrum of the research material will be processed for a comparative perspective of this central idea, taking into account genesis and provenance by means of abstract classification schemes of individual aspects of loneliness. As a result, the blurred and complex concept of loneliness (solitudo) can acquire clear time-specific outlines through exemplary treatment of particularly concise partial aspects. The monastic institutions' endeavours to create a 'sociality of loneliness' are also seen as having considerable potential for innovation and psychosocial competence, which must be justified within the vita religiosa of the High Middle Ages in terms of the history of culture and ideas.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Gert Melville:
Phone: +49 (0) 351 4793 4181
Email: gert.melville(at)tu-dresden.de
Marcus Handke, M.A.:
Phone: +49 (0) 351 4793 4184
Email: marcus.handke(at)tu-dresden.de