Many centuries ago, there was another kind of social distancing. There were the plagues, of course, and the separations people sought from those who might spread contagion. And there were those who believed that social connections were in the way not of their physical health but of their spiritual health. These monks and nuns believed, like the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton, that “in hiding himself from the world,” a monk “becomes not less himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order.”
While there are fewer monks and nuns than there used to be, monastic communities continue in religious traditions around the world. So it comes as some surprise that both Rusty Reno, the editor of First Things and Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher who has written widely on religion, have lamented what Agamben calls the “bare life” thrust upon us by coronavirus restrictions. “Justice, beauty, and honor,” Reno argues, cannot be experienced when all that matters is “physical life.” Both know the importance of Christian monasticism, yet they oddly fail to connect it to our current moment. And in so doing, they make the same conflations as President Trump and a growing number of the Republican party: A life outside of a growing stock market is really no life at all.
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