“True social life,” says Martensen, “leads to solitude.”  This truth the monks emphasized to the exclusion of the converse, “true life in solitude leads back to society.”  John Tauler, the mystic monk, realized this truth when he said:  “If God calls me to a sick person, or to the service of preaching, or to any other service of love, I must follow, although I am in the state of highest contemplation.”  The hermits of the desert, and too often the monks of the cloister, escaped from all such services, and selfishly gave themselves up to saving their own souls by contemplation and prayer.  Ministration to the needy is the external side of the inner religious life.  It is the fruit of faith and prayer.  The monk sought solitude, not for the purpose of fitting himself for a place in society, but for selfish, personal ends.  Saint Bruno, in a letter to his friend Ralph le Verd, eulogizes the solitude of the monastic cell, and among other sentiments he gives expression to the following:  “I am speaking here of the contemplative life; and although its sons are less numerous than those of active life, yet, like Joseph and Benjamin, they are infinitely dearer to their Father....  O my brother, fear not then to fly from the turmoil and the misery of the world; leave the storms that rage without, to shelter yourself in this safe haven.”

Thus sinful and sorrowing humanity, needing the guidance and comfort that holy men can furnish, was forgotten in the desire for personal peace and future salvation.

Another baneful result of isolation was the strangulation of filial love.  When the monk abandoned the softening, refining influence of women and children, one side of his nature suffered a serious contraction.  An Egyptian mother stood at the hut of two hermits, her sons.  Weeping bitterly, she begged to see their faces.  To her piteous entreaties, they said:  “Why do you, who are already stricken with age, pour forth such cries and lamentations?” “It is because I long to see you,” she replied.  “Am I not your mother?  I am now an old and wrinkled woman, and my heart is troubled at the sound of your voices.”  But even a mother’s love could not cope with their fearful fanaticism., and she went away with their cold promise that they would meet in heaven.  St. John of Calama visited his sister in disguise, and a chronicler, telling the story afterwards, said, “By the mercy of Jesus Christ he had not been recognized, and they never met again.”  Many hermits received their parents or brothers and sisters with their eyes shut.  When the father of Simeon Stylites died, his widowed mother prayed for entrance into her son’s cell.  For three days and nights she stood without, and then the blessed Simeon prayed the Lord for her, and she immediately gave up the ghost.

These as well as numerous other stories of a similar character that might be quoted illustrate the hardening influence of solitude.  Instead of cherishing a love of kindred, as a gift of heaven and a spring of virtue, the monk spurned it and trampled it beneath his feet as an obstacle to his spiritual progress.  “The monks,” says Milman, “seem almost unconscious of the softening, humanizing effect of the natural affections, the beauty of parental tenderness and filial love.”