What can we learn from three great minds who retreated from the world?

Times

19-07-2025

The subtitle of this book sets a false trail. 'Why writers, artists and thinkers retreat,' it says, and Guy Stagg goes on to describe the withdrawal from the world of three mysticism-haunted greats: Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Jones and Simone Weil. Or, as he describes them, the saint, the hermit and the martyr.
Wittgenstein's retreat, Stagg suggests, was moral. The philosopher worked as a gardener at Klosterneuburg Abbey in Austria as part of his lifelong quest to become a better man. Jones's purpose was creative: he visited a religious community on Caldey Island to paint and write as well as pray. Weil was plagued by migraine. Listening to plainchant helped to relieve it. So she travelled to the Abbey Saint-Pierre de Solesmes in France. Her motivation was therapeutic, as Stagg describes it.
Three different motivations. Three dissimilar paths — although all three seem to have spent much of their lives wrestling with God. But Weil, Jones and Wittgenstein are linked by war, childlessness and suicide as well as genius and retreat. Jones fought at the Somme and, more than 20 years later, gave us In Parenthesis (1937), his epic work about a soldier's experience of the First World War.
During the same conflict, Wittgenstein volunteered to man an observation post, and was decorated for courage. Weil served with the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war. A coroner later found her to have starved herself to death. At least two of Wittgenstein's brothers killed themselves, and Wittgenstein himself repeatedly considered doing the same. Jones was so depressed when his lover broke off their engagement that, according to one account, 'he seemed close to suicide'.
Death, childlessness and war. Monks, nuns and friars live towards the first, embrace the second (at least in most cases) and pursue the last, at least metaphorically: spiritual battle is an ancient metaphor. But withdrawal from the world, undertaken for the wrong reasons, can be a kind of suicide, Stagg suggests. He sees through the vogue for retreat: 'Health spas and holiday rentals and summer festivals all advertise themselves as some kind of refuge.' These can degenerate into 'nothing more than a self-righteous holiday … no flight from the ego but sinking deeper into ourselves'.
Spoken by some, this judgment would sound harsh. Written by Stagg, it comes over as measured because it's done with self-knowledge. He says that the first half of his twenties was marred by 'heavy drinking and deep depression' before going on to suggest that the appeal of religious life can be 'a simple wager: forfeiting the chance of pleasure to protect yourself from pain'. Oscar Wilde wrote that experience is the name that men give to their mistakes. Stagg seems to have learnt from his, and this book shows him still learning.
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Is Stagg a believer himself? This is his second book. His first, The Crossway, published in 2018, described a journey he took from Canterbury to Jerusalem. So at the least he's religion-curious. But he doesn't say.
His method is to alternate a chunk of writing about his subjects with another section about himself: he follows in Wittgenstein's footsteps to the ornate, operatic setting of Klosterneuburg, in Jones's to the modern community at Caldey, where there are sometimes no boats to the mainland, and in Weil's to Solesmes, 'hemmed in on one side by water, and by the high street on the other side'. The back and forth holds one's attention. If Weil begins to try one's patience, or Jones or Wittgenstein does, theauthor steps in. And the other way round.
Stagg writes masterfully. How plainchant was reconstituted, how Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus works or how stained glass is assembled are three subjects with little if anything in common. Stagg describes and makes sense of them all in a way that can hold the general reader. He can evoke a sense of place and give a sense of people: the three religious devotees who host him at the three monasteries he visits are utterly unlike each other: one once worked on Wall Street, a second joined his monastery in his twenties, another was a press photographer for Formula 1.
Stagg writes of Brother Titus, the petrolhead turned guest-master at the monastery on Caldey, that he does not spend his days thinking about God and Heaven and whether he is saved. 'It's what's down here that matters. It's what happens in this life that counts,' Titus says.
Amen to that, some would say — adding that retreat and withdrawal are escapism, an avoidance of dealing with reality, and that to live an exceptional life, or to try to, is self-delusion. 'Pick a quarrel, go to war,/ Leave the hero in the bar,' Auden wrote. 'Hunt the lion, climb the peak:/ No one guesses you are weak.' The verse suggests that the best life is the humdrum one.
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Stagg argues that for the artist 'retreat can play a vital role in the early stages of an artistic career. When a writer is learning their craft, or a painter is searching for material, there is value in creating work without any audience.' In this version of events, one withdraws from the world so that one may later re-enter it.
But neither Wittgenstein nor Weil, as Stagg makes clear, retreated to further their philosophy or their writing. It's true that writers, artists and thinkers may improve their art or craft by retreating, but ultimately they withdraw for the same reason that any everyman or everywoman withdraws.
Believers say that one retreats to seek God. And perhaps that's as good an explanation as one is going to get — if one truly withdraws to do so, retreat may turn out well, but if one withdraws to run away from life outside, it may well not. The merit of this book is that it demonstrates how damaging that search can be if undertaken for the wrong reasons — because it can intensify loneliness, depression and suicidal impulses. At the same time it demonstrates how necessary that search is, because where there is no failure, there can be no learning and hence no progress.
'I glimpsed the hardness at the heart of the religious calling: in order to be saved, you must die to the world,' Stagg writes. 'Which may explain why over time my subjects' lives began resembling thesicknesses they were supposed to cure.'
The World Within: Why Writers, Artists and Thinkers Retreat by Guy Stagg (Scribner £20 pp320). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members