Fragmentos

Num pequeno ensaio intitulado A Case for the Hermits, G. K. Chesterton faz a apologia dos eremitas, especialmente na tradição dos Padres do Deserto. Começa por fazer uma distinção:

Doubtless there have been merely sulky solitaries; unquestionably there have been sham cynics and cabotins, like Diogenes. But he and his sort are very careful not to be really solitary; careful to hang about the market-place like any demagogue. Diogenes was a tub-thumper, as well as a tub-dweller. And that sort of professional sulks remains; but it is sulks without solitude. We all know there are geniuses, who must go out into polite society in order to be impolite. We all know there are hostesses who collect lions and find they have got bears. I fear there was a touch of that in the social legend of Thomas Carlyle and perhaps of Tennyson. But these men must have a society in which to be unsociable. The hermits, especially the saints, had a solitude in which to be sociable.

Mas o centro do argumento, está contido nos dois parágrafos seguintes:

The man was a hermit because he was more of a human being; not less. It was not merely that he felt he could get on better with a lion than with the sort of men who would throw him to the lions. It was also that he actually liked men better when they let him alone. Now nobody expects anybody, except a very exceptional person, to become a complete solitary. But there is a strong case for more Solitude; especially now that there is really no Solitude.

That is something of the secret of the saints who went into the desert. It is in society that men quarrel with their friends; it is in solitude that they forgive them. And before the society-man criticises the saint, let him remember that the man in the desert often had a soul that was like a honey-pot of human kindness, though no man came near to taste it; and the man in the modern salon, in his intellectual hospitality, generally serves out wormwood for wine.

Em companhia guerreamos, em solidão perdoamos. Em companhia rimo-nos dos amigos, em solidão choramos por eles. Em companhia esquecemo-nos deles, em solidão lembramo-nos do quanto necessitamos deles.

Chesterton conta então uma deliciosa história de dois eremitas e de como eles nos ensinam, não o comunismo que professavam (comunismo no sentido de comunidade, de partilha dos bens, não no sentido de partilha dos bens dos outros), mas a solidão que practicavam. Deixo-a aqui, na tradução Inglesa de Benedicta Ward (The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, série anónima):

Two old men had lived together for many years and had never fought with one another. The first said to the other, 'Let us also have a fight like other men do.' The other replied, 'I do not know how to fight.' The fist said to him, 'Look, I will put a brick between us, and I will say it is mine, and you say, "No, it is mine," and so the fight will begin.' So they put a brick between them and the first said, 'This brick is mine', and the other said, 'No, it is mine', and the first responded, 'If it is yours, take it and go'—so they gave up without being able to find an occasion for argument.

Depois de contar a história, Chesterton acaba o ensaio com a seguinte reflexão

Now you may agree or disagree with the Communist ideal, of cutting oneself off from commerce, which those two ascetics followed. But is there not something to suggest that they were rather nicer people than the Communists we now meet in Society? Somehow as if Solitude improved the temper?