Paper short abstract:

This paper explores freedom through the existential struggles of first hermits in the Candelaria Desert during the 1600s. Examining conflicts within the asceticism of Augustinian friars in the New World, I revise the category of the hermit as a mode of subjectivity at the base of the colonial order.

Paper long abstract:

Hermits have been recently rediscovered during the Covid-19 pandemic. The secrets of those living in solitude and seclusion became appealing for citizens around the world experiencing severe lockdowns. However, more than a trend, hermits have stayed across time and space exemplifying a viable and “deliberately” intense way of life centred on liberating isolation (e.g. from the material world, from others, from themselves). This paper explores the other side(s) of (mental and spiritual) freedom through the experiences of the first hermits founding the Candelaria Desert and Candelaria Convent at the heart of the Colombian Andes in the early 1600s.

Hermits of Candelaria Desert or “Candelarios” lead the expansion of Christianism in the New World. Their evangelizing mission was based on a great asceticism oscillating between two conflicting dimensions: outside the convent, they practised an intense and dynamic catechesis of indigenous populations; while inside, friars´ lives were ruled by seclusion and introspection. Isolation was seen as a route towards freedom but also as a source of mental unrest and disquiet. Drawing on the documents of the Augustinian order and my ethnographic material on present-day exchanges between locals and Augustinian friars, this paper seeks to explore how hermits’ existential struggles became constitutive of particular moral and social beings with sets of relationships within colonial order that still haunts the present predicaments of a free life.