A chapter in a recent defence of intellectual life — Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought (2020) — is titled ‘A Refuge from the World’. Intellectual work and learning for its own sake, she argues, owe much of their value to providing a refuge from the world, by which she means ‘the social and political world … governed by ambition, competition, and idle thrill seeking’.
I was struck by the chapter’s title, for it is fairly rare these days to encounter, in philosophical discussions of the human condition, reference to refuges in the figurative sense Hitz intends. The rhetoric or metaphor of refuge from the world has largely disappeared from religious, social and ethical debate. The contrast with the past is striking. Over the millennia, references to houses, homes, rooms, gardens, monasteries and temples as refuges were not to these places considered simply as physical structures whose walls afforded protection against whatever was outside them. A room may literally be a refuge for a mouse pursued by a cat, but the little back room that Montaigne set aside was an ‘asylum’ because it was somewhere the soul ‘can keep herself company’, a small arena in which the soul ‘turns back on itself’. A Chinese literati garden was not, for its owner, a refuge in the way it might be for a fugitive chased by the police, but as a retreat from the social world that, as a Chinese gardening classic puts it, is ‘under my own control’, an environment where a person may be ‘uninhibited’.
A trawl through sites like Brainy Quote show that most quotations about refuge fall into two groups. Old and serious ones, or more recent and jokey ones. Paradigm examples of the latter are Dr Johnson’s ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’ and Oscar Wilde’s ‘Talking about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative’. More often than not, there is a cynical edge to these quotes. Religion, for instance, has been described as a refuge of human savagery. In most quotes of this genre, taking refuge does not have the positive valence it enjoys both in literal speech and in the older rhetoric. Dr Johnson’s refuge does not provide safety, but an opportunity to dissemble: it is something a person resorts to rather than finds asylum in.
One still sometimes encounters, of course, a serious rhetoric of refuge. When, for example, Maya Angelou refers to music as a refuge in which to ‘curl her back to loneliness’, we hear echoes of a once familiar rhetoric, and it is worth recalling just how ancient and pervasive this was.
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Unsurprisingly, religions — with the prospects they afforded of salvation or liberation — inspired many metaphors of refuge. In Psalm 46, we hear, ‘God is our refuge and strength’, an utterance that set …
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