Monk: Hermit; in Spiritus

Quotes from Pere Louis Bouyer's The Meaning of the Monastic Life

...the monk is and must be the 'Spiritual' in the Chuch, the man of the spirit par excellence. All Christians have received the Spirit through the mystery of the Holy Chrism, but he does not manifest himself equally in all.

Confirmation confers the gift of the Spirit, yet the Sacrament of Chrism seems now downplayed. If the monastic life is defined within the integral Christian life, then it must be accomplished as a life in the Holy Spirit. Monks who attained to the heights of the spiritual life were to manifest the Holy Spirit to others. Such was the case of Saint Seraphim of Sarov (and others) who imparted the Holy Spirit to the faithful even appearing in vision to do so.

The world of the spirit seems to exist as a reality, to the senses, as a world behind, as it were, the world of the senses, and this is seen by the light of faith. The Spirit reveals a new world, a new life, through putting into us a new life and makes us discover this new life in others. The Spirit alone can give the experience of Agape, the love which St. John indicated as the life of God, that God is Love.

It is the kind of love that strips itself of the good it posesses, that strips its very self. It is the kind of love that gives, a love that gives itself. God alone is capable, properly speaking, fo giving--he to whom all things belong. And he alone, the infinite, can give himself continualoly with no loss or diminution. In God, the Spirit is precisely the Gift, in which the depths of the divine life, of hte divine being, are revealed as something utterly different from the being of a creature who by making himself the centre of all things becomes paralyzed. Thus, it is the Spirit communicated from God to man who will shed abroad in our hearts the love which creates, which is the life of God. The Spirit will enable us to live this life, all o fus together, transporting us all into God himself, or , i fyou prefer, by bringing God into us, at the root of all our thoughts and all our affections.

Just as the monk in his capacity as man of hte Spirit will be a prophet, because filled with the vision of the divine Wisdom, so he will be a wonder-worker because the mystery o flove which is the key to this Wisdom will operate in him and through him. Just as the Spirit creates in him spiritual senses which mean that even in the midst of this world he sees what God sees and as he sees it, so he creates in him a spiritual heart, through which creative and redeeming love permeates the world to create it anew. By his very contemplative prayer, in which his faith sees God's great design infalliby realized, his love--which, to repeat, is the very love of God himself shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit--brings it about in the order of fact.

But the culminating effect of the Spirit in the soul is to bring about a relationship with God, a supernatural contact with God. This comes once more to the fundamental and overriding truth that God, and not ourselves, is the end and aim of our religion. Man is to glorify God.

In this sense, monastic/eremitic life is "theocentric"--turning man toward God and away from self.
The Holy Spirit assimilates God to us; this is the great work of the Spirit. This engrafting is that of our being taken into God, added to God in a way that our limitations vanish, that our lives become His life; we are one in Him and He in us. Thus we shall escape from our loneliness, from the solitude of every creature, of all creation separated from its Creator by sin. Henceforward, literally, "It is no longer I who live, it is Christ who liveth in me."

The flowering of the soul in the Spirit is beautifully expressed in The Odes of Solomon.

The monk is the man who is raised up by the Spirit, not this time from the primordial chaos...but from the sacrificial ashes in which death, freely accepted, has consumed sin....But this man reborn of Christ...is the man of the Spirit. He is not merely living soul but man living by the Spirit. His heart of flesh has become the temple of the true God. In him God begins to be all in all things. Henceforward he is free of the earth....He no longer gazes on the burning bush merely from outside. He himself is burning without being consumed amidst the lamps of the Spirit, around the Lamb Who was slain, standing near the throne.