more from Ladner

Another fragment from Ladner's essay, "Homo Viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order":

The metaphor [...] of the viator, the traveller, who seeks only temporary comfort in an inn on the road is found in Augustine's works, whence Gregory the Great may have taken it. The topoi of xeniteia and peregrinatio, of pilgrimage, of homelessness, of strangeness in this world, are among the most widespread in early Christian ascetic literature, and not a few ascetics, monastic and otherwise, practiced it by voluntary and migratory exile from their fatherland.

In a footnote Ladner refers to a work on self-exile as spiritual discipline that I so want to read but which sounds so long and German that it really might defeat me!

H.v. Campenhausen, Die asketische Heimatslosigkeit im alterkirchen und frümittelalterlichen Mönchtum (Tübingen, 1930).

Will see if I can even find a copy...