I am a Catholic Christian. My comments ought to make that pretty clear. I just thought I’d mention it at the outset in order to avoid confusion. Anyway, when one speaks of asceticism it seems to me to make a great deal of difference whether the audience for the story is Christian or not. The following comments may go some way to illustrating why I thing that.
For Christ the practice of asceticism, at least the kind which he proclaimed for his disciples, had no organic or necessary relationship to the ‘desert’. On the lips of the Master, the talk in this regard concerned three practical activities: prayer, fasting, and alms giving.
Moreover, Christ’s instruction on the nuts & bolts of these practices was clear and shocking. So, when you pray don’t make a public exhibition of it but go to your private room and shut the door. When you fast, don’t walk about the town in sackcloth and ashes, wailing and a-weeping; rather, get dolled up in your best clothes and smile like you just won the lottery. And, (best of all) when you give alms, ‘don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing’.
Each of these is an ascetic practice for the same reason; each practice represents one strand in the strategy aimed at the deconstruction of the culturally determined ‘self’. Prayer when undertaken under this sign is the great Amen by means of which God is recognised as God. It is praise and worship of that which is inexpressibly greater than any ‘power’ I might claim for my ‘self’. Fasting is a denial of the authority of sensual pleasure in a world of disordered desires. Alms-giving undermines the desire for material wealth and the power it is assumed to confer.
What Christ proposes is modelled on His own Incarnation. That is to say the downward dynamic of his birth on earth; his Kenosis, the second person of the Trinity ‘taking the form of a man’, a ‘bond servant’ for the sake of the salvation of all Creation.
The ‘humanity’ that Christ modelled was ‘self-emptying’. The purpose of such self-emptying is not to make one’s self feel better about how crappy the world is. It is not undertaken in order to make the world a ‘better place’. It isn’t even a practice that will make me a ‘better person’.
It is a self-surrendering to, a humility before God. And what is the point of this. None whatsoever when judged against the dominant values of our culture. It will not get you a good job. It will not make you popular. It will not make your house the envy of the neighbourhood.
The point of it is to discern more clearly the path we might walk in following Christ. The point of it is that we make of ourselves what Rene Voillaume called, ‘standing delegates of prayer’.
And it is this way because there can be no compromise between the Dark and the Light. Which everyone who has ever seen the Matrix knows; you take the red pill or the blue pill. Which is why, obviously, you never let you left hand know what your right hand is doing.
Jack, I am glad you are writing this substack. I did follow the link to FFatalism's essays and the comments there also -- good conversation. I think this is making me feel my lack of a church sorely. I have never had a good spiritual home since the shattering of our evangelical upbringing about 10 yrs ago. A community of fellow travelers is enlivening.
I actually felt moved to stand up and speak in Quaker meeting two weeks ago about how birth is painful and bewildering but miraculously brings joy and new life; wondering if the painful transition we are in now might not be a birthing. (Marks words are far more eloquent)
In response to the idea that we may all be "forced" into a desert so to speak by the converging crises of the anthropocene I feel some doubt. Like Mark writes, there is an opportunity for loss to bring transformation but it is not automatic. I'm sure you know that, but I also wonder this: if the unraveling of this mess is more protracted, less dramatic -- if the wealthy nations insulate themselves at the expense of others somehow -- what if it doesn't turn out to be "practical" to the worldly mind or necessitated any time soon. Isn't it still what we want? Aren't we hungry for God and aren't we sick and sad and broken-hearted about the devastation and corruption that we are living under and participating in? I don't pretend to know how world events will unfold, but for my part, even if we could keep the seemingly pleasant "gifts" of the machine and delay the reckoning for payment I still can't be happy. It's not self-loathing. It's not being ill adjusted psychologically as far as I can discern. I think it is the genuine hunger for God, for the Divine, for wholeness. Without this hunger, any sort of practical motive will probably fail eventually. I don't know the theology or philosophy behind what I'm saying, just my practical gut instinct. This motive will always be mistaken for insanity or delusion by atheists I guess.
"Is it easy to love God?"
"It is for those that do it."
(CS Lewis attributes this saying to 'a wise old christian')
Firstly technology always does two things. It separates us from our earthly source, the Creation and reorders our relationship to 'her', in so doing it also changes us. I guess that in some sense all the talk of post-human / AI etc. is where this change effectively enters our self conscious. This is so very dangerous. We have internalised and owned the technological paradigm and thus have lost touch with that which is not us. Ironically it is the collapse into self, solipsism, narcissism etc.
Second, and to a degree unrelated. The only way back as always is 'coming to our senses', so hard when we have been taught that what we see is not what we see. But it is to return to our source, and our true being. This is where I think the Arsenios option is so very necessary. for the 'We' of which we have both spoken is humanity together, but if there are those amongst us / within humanity who are outside of this madness, then there is hope. I'm reminded of Merton saying somewhere that there are probably only two people in the world who pray, but they hold us in place, so to speak.
The lost vocation is not to make space for God - something which when we prioritise our life over the Life from Above - we readily speak of in so many ways, such as the brief prayer before business, even in the church. No it is that for which we were made, to be the space for God. there is a sense in which in the centre of things, any of us can choose this path of doing nothing but empty of all else to be space for God.
Maggie Ross somewhere tells a story with a contemporary sound. I don't recall it exactly, but in the midst of a terrible drought a village were all rushing around, trying desperately to hold things together when a dishevilled stranger came to them seeking shelter. They had no time for him and simply directed him to a filthy barn where he locked himself away. Shortly thereafter the clouds began to gather and the rain to fall. the villagers rememebred the stranger and saw him wandering off down the road from the village. When asked what it was he had done, he replied he had only made space for the rain, or for God. It matters not.
I wrote a brief course on Silence and The kingdom of God a couple of years ago for Lent. In it I spoke of the great space within each one of us, that we are created to bear God in the world. But that we only enter that space when we come to the end of ourself. Going into the desert is going to the entry place, where it is God or nothing. The Boundary between Life and death, and indeed the distinction and definition of them becomes less clear
"A good portion of the comments acknowledged the goodness of withdrawing, at least for a time, from distractions or even in undertaking a mild form of asceticism. This group saw doing so as, at best, only a temporary measure. One in which we hopefully find rest and renewed purpose. Ultimately, though, if it wasn’t directed back towards the world, broadly conceived, it was a kind of escape or indulgence. In other words, the default mode in our spirituality is that of the active life, which the contemplative should serve. "
I recognize myself in this group, to a degree. The literal flight to the desert is a vocation and I acknowledge this whole-heartedly. Turning back towards the world is inevitable, however. Even if one remains in the desert - if you attain a certain wisdom, people will flock to you. Do you turn them away?
I for one believe that the prayers of monks and nuns keep this world from falling apart. Vocation, vocation, vocation. My vocation is three-fold: husband, father, contemplative.
How do we face our demons in the dark, in solitude, in silence? How do we combat ego?
As per that quote from DBH, the ascetic does not strive for any benefit that can be measured or weighed, that is profitable or practical - it is the supremely "unpractical" path.
And on one level, I would say that all spiritual paths are a call to the "unpractical" and a rejection of the "survival concerns" that dominate secular society - and inevitably lead to gloom, anxiety, and depression, a loss of the sense of the sacred and the divine.
Perhaps secular society can be characterized by an obsession with practical survival concerns, where the magic, wonder, and beauty of life gets smothered and lost, where the sacred and divine become obscured - and spiritually is a call to a return to a deeper, fuller, richer Life, centered on the sacred.
That is the logic behind the injunction "you must lose your life to find it" - man has a propensity to lose sight of the magic of life, it's beauty, it's sacred divinity, under a welter of "practical" survival concerns - and it is only by surrendering ones "life", (deprioritizing the "practical") that one recovers the vision of the Divine and thus true Life.
Jesus tells us explicitly to not be preoccupied or obsessed with survival concerns, and Taoism is full of that kind of exhortation - and both traditions say that to the average practical man, the mainstream man of civilization, what they are saying sounds crazy. To the Greeks it is foolishness, and when the inferior man (average civilized man), hears of the Tao, he laughs at it.
Thank you very much for bringing the subject of ascetcism into the forefront - the backlash is very characteristic of our times, which has lost its belief in spirit and believes only in material things.
I am however encouraged by the sympathy for ascetcism, solitude, and contemplation - this perhaps points towards a recovery of the spirit and a downgrading of materialistic interests.
I was recently reading a brilliant essay by David Bentley Hart on "Thrift" (which he does not regard as a primary Christian virtue), and found some fascinating remarks on asceticism -
"...The ascetic is never moderate, nor does he or she strive to conserve material resources as such, nor certainly should he or she ever be conscious of cost. The austerities of Simon Stylites or Evagrios Pontikos or John of the Cross were every bit as exorbitant in their way as the decor of Versailles. Asceticism is a giving of the self without reserve: it should be jealous of nothing but purity; it produces nothing profitable; it contributes nothing that can be weighed, measured, or stored; it is a pouring out of one’s entire substance into the sands of the desert or the chill of an isolated cell. Its principal fruits are spiritual progress, bodily inanition, and prayer. The Christian ascetic does not merely deny himself certain pleasures so as to be certain that his goods will not vanish prematurely; he denies himself even the just wages of his labor and even necessary things, in order to place himself in a—quite precisely—“exorbitant” relation to all normal society, all common responsibilities..."
"....There is something in the doctrinal, metaphysical, and moral language of Christianity that seems at times jarringly incompatible with attempts to make the realms of civic and domestic responsibility spheres of spiritual achievement in and of themselves, rather than mere occasions for the exercise of charity, justice, or temperance. We look in vain if we go searching through the works of Christian antiquity and the Middle Ages for warm disquisitions on “family values,” or fiery exhortations to sound and scrupulous stewardship of our possessions, or lustrous portraits of home, hearth, and the hushed sanctity of the dining-room table. The early church’s view of marriage, to be perfectly honest, often verged upon the mildly hostile; 14 and even those church fathers who had indulgent or kind words to say of the domestic sphere still never suggested that it provided any unique opportunities for Christian virtue or that it was comparable to the monastic life as a. path of holiness....."
I’ve just finished reading The Matter with Things, by Iain McGilchrist. The final very lengthy chapter on The Sense of the Sacred, is as one of my fellow readers said ‘devastating’
I couldn’t but hear the words of Gandalf on the bridge of Khazad-Dûm, ‘Fly! You fools!’
I’d had these words on my mind regarding Jesus’ words on Mammon. We are fools if we think we can overcome such Balrogs.
In McGilchrist’s terms- our entire societal discourse is built on the foolish idea that all there are are ‘things’ and we know what we’re doing.
Aug 22, 2022·edited Aug 22, 2022Liked by Jack Leahy
It's also worthwhile remembering that there are forms of ascetcism that are merely world weariness and disgust. As in everything, discernment is key, and religion contains many corrupt strands of spirituality.
That being said, ascetcism has a tremendous social value as well as personal value. This relates to what Fat Caps was saying. The ascetic, the hermit in the mountains, reminds society that the most important things are not the getting of money or the mundane takes of physical survival, but something far higher.
The society that honors it's ascetics is one of much greater spiritual health and one that has retained at least some connection to the right spiritual priorities.
For instance, the weary laborer in the city should derive spiritual sustenance and refreshment from the thought that, say, poet-hermits live in the mountains and deserts celebrating the magnificence of God's nature, and even if he cannot, or lacks the courage to, focus on the most important things in life, he is reminded that the true ends of life are not the mundane tasks of survival, the getting of money, but God.
The ascetic orients society to higher ends than mere money making or surviving.
Aug 22, 2022·edited Aug 22, 2022Liked by Jack Leahy
Jack - thanks for your responses to me on this thread, which contains some good insights.
I'd like to add a few more points about ascetcism, as well as another DBH quote :) While ascetcism is specifically suited to our crumbling historical moment, properly understood (as a form of love not hate) it is important even during ideal civilizational conditions. (In Tang China, it was common for mandarins to become poet-hermits in the mountains)
Related to this, ascetcism has to be seen as something joyful and life affirming and life expanding, not a merely "defensive" reaction to bad social conditions.
Like you, DBH writes that ascetcism may be just the cure our troubled modern times needs, and describes it like this -
".....Christian asceticism is not, after all, a cruel disfigurement of the will, contaminated by the world-weariness or malice towards creation that one can justly ascribe to many other varieties of religious detachment. It is, rather, the cultivation of the pure heart and pure eye, which allows one to receive the world, and rejoice in it, not as a possession of the will or an occasion for the exercise of power, but as the good gift of God. It is, so to speak, a kind of “Marian” waiting upon the Word of God and its fruitfulness. This is why it has the power to heal us of our modern derangements: because, paradoxical as it may seem to modern temperaments, Christian asceticism is the practice of love, what Maximus the Confessor calls learning to see the logos of each thing within the Logos of God, and it eventuates most properly in the grateful reverence of a Bonaventure or the lyrical ecstasy of a Thomas Traherne....."
I also suspect that fighting it on macine terms won't work and also agree that passivity and acquiescence isn't an anwer either. All I have is question after question and an increasing sense of powerlessness along with a foreboding about somehow being duped by placing hope in a return to an ascetic path which historically has already failed quite dramatically as well as a fear that a machine (driven by technology, capital and a will-to-power) is not manageable and consequently offers a potential explanation for what appears to doom advanced societies to the likelihood of extinction.
Is there such a thing as a heroism or sacrifice that is not on machine terms?
How, indeed, can we live to stop feeding this machine?
Thanks for offering a platform for such issues to be discussed.
Ah yes. I was on my annual retreat with the Trappists. I had just bought two books from the gift shop and I was walking back to the guest house. A young man, a fellow guest, caught me on my way back and introduced himself. Over a coffee we began to talk about the books we had read. At some point in the conversation I told him about my introduction to, The Seven Storey Mountain. Then he told me this story. He had been raised a Catholic but had lost his faith during his time studying art and drama at university. After university he spent some time in Paris with a group of radical, street performers. He lived on the top floor of a cheap rooming house. Life wasn't going so well. One day after a hard and unrewarding day, performing on the street he returned home. As he stepped into his garret room he felt the habitual dip in the floor as the loose board made its present felt. Every time he came home this happened. Today it annoyed the hell out of him so he marched down the stairs and asked the concierge for a screwdriver that he might make the necessary repair. Having rolled back the carpet he located the squeaky board and unscrewed it so that he might re-position it afresh. On lifting up the piece of floor board he found a book. And that book was The Seven Storey Mountain written in English. He began to read it that night. And so commenced his return to the faith.
Like I said, small miracle. Heads up, Jack. My wife and I leave for a holiday in rural Wales tomorrow. So I guess we will be off the radar for a couple of weeks. God Bless You, Dear One. And keep up the sterling work.
“…without a deep practice of the contemplative life, the active life tends to dry up and become a burden to us—in short, we burn out.”
I can very much relate to this. Since I’m a teacher, I have the luxury of slowing down in the summer. But I’ve found myself forced in a way to slow down even further this summer. I usually have a to-do list with at least twenty things on it that I work on enthusiastically (more or less). I just didn’t have the motivation this year. I wish the house and yard looked better lol….but I felt the need to spend more time thinking and writing and leaning into the deep tiredness I am feeling.
One can say that if behind technology is the human will to power and if one wants to dilute such a will (and potentially interrupt major counter-productive tendencies in oneself and the world, asceticism offers an extremely worthwhile path. One could also say that it is looking more and more like technology is increasingly capable of consuming human beings through its complexity, increasing autonomy and maybe some type of weird, inherent machine-like desire.
If the extinction of human beings as we know them is what is now potentially at stake (is this simply my catastrophic thinking or a rationalization for my own aggressive instincts?} a significant portion of my being wants to fight back in a quite irrational glee, telling myself I at least I tried to do something to stop such an extinction.
I guess I am not yet convinced that this latter option is simply despair winning out.
Perhaps I will start from the last point of the Arsenios Option and work towards understanding the others. I certainly believe that an ascetic program is necessary for any progress in the spiritual life. All the major religions advocate such a program, and many cultures establish forms of monastic organization that encourage retreat, contemplation, and the embrace of poverty. Sometimes people enter a monastery for life, but sometimes this commitment is for a shorter time, as in traditional Thailand.
Both Orthodoxy and Catholicism have a wide variety of such programs. Even within the Evangelical tradition, Dallas Willard developed an ascetic program for Christ followers. However, for Christians (and I don’t think I’m just speaking for myself, although what follows is true for me) this program is undertaken to encounter the God of purity, beauty and being, not simply as a way of subduing the will.
Human beings are infinitely complex. We desire our own way, and we are greedy, selfish, cruel, and rapacious. But we are also loving, generous, artistic, and able to grasp, beyond the material world, what is spiritual and real. The Kingdom of God is both here now and lies in the future. Because of this complexity, anyone who embraces an ascetic program will inevitably experience tensions.
For the Christian tradition deeply influenced by the Greek/Hellenistic tradition, ambition is one of those tensions. The Greeks understood that life was fundamental tragic, yet citizens were expected to strive for glory and everlasting fame. Odysseus, when he meets Achilles in the underworld, reminds Achilles the ‘we Greeks respected you as we do gods, and you have great power among the dead.’ Achilles rejects the kind words. ‘I would rather be a workman, hired by a poor man on a peasant farm, than rule as king of all the dead.’ (Wilson translation). I do not think we can get rid of this tension.
What an ascetic program can do is build some defenses against the corrupting power of money, power, technology, and decadence, and help us focus on what all religions consider important: justice, mercy, service to others, the worship of God. The Sermon on the Mount can be a working plan, not an ideal. We know people of all ages have not turned away like the rich young man Jesus loved. We can follow their model and create a community of like-minded people.
A new a new political program or order will not save us, but we can recognize useful work and honor it. George Eliot’s last words for her heroine Dorothea seem right. “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” It is such a life I wish to live.
I am a Catholic Christian. My comments ought to make that pretty clear. I just thought I’d mention it at the outset in order to avoid confusion. Anyway, when one speaks of asceticism it seems to me to make a great deal of difference whether the audience for the story is Christian or not. The following comments may go some way to illustrating why I thing that.
For Christ the practice of asceticism, at least the kind which he proclaimed for his disciples, had no organic or necessary relationship to the ‘desert’. On the lips of the Master, the talk in this regard concerned three practical activities: prayer, fasting, and alms giving.
Moreover, Christ’s instruction on the nuts & bolts of these practices was clear and shocking. So, when you pray don’t make a public exhibition of it but go to your private room and shut the door. When you fast, don’t walk about the town in sackcloth and ashes, wailing and a-weeping; rather, get dolled up in your best clothes and smile like you just won the lottery. And, (best of all) when you give alms, ‘don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing’.
Each of these is an ascetic practice for the same reason; each practice represents one strand in the strategy aimed at the deconstruction of the culturally determined ‘self’. Prayer when undertaken under this sign is the great Amen by means of which God is recognised as God. It is praise and worship of that which is inexpressibly greater than any ‘power’ I might claim for my ‘self’. Fasting is a denial of the authority of sensual pleasure in a world of disordered desires. Alms-giving undermines the desire for material wealth and the power it is assumed to confer.
What Christ proposes is modelled on His own Incarnation. That is to say the downward dynamic of his birth on earth; his Kenosis, the second person of the Trinity ‘taking the form of a man’, a ‘bond servant’ for the sake of the salvation of all Creation.
The ‘humanity’ that Christ modelled was ‘self-emptying’. The purpose of such self-emptying is not to make one’s self feel better about how crappy the world is. It is not undertaken in order to make the world a ‘better place’. It isn’t even a practice that will make me a ‘better person’.
It is a self-surrendering to, a humility before God. And what is the point of this. None whatsoever when judged against the dominant values of our culture. It will not get you a good job. It will not make you popular. It will not make your house the envy of the neighbourhood.
The point of it is to discern more clearly the path we might walk in following Christ. The point of it is that we make of ourselves what Rene Voillaume called, ‘standing delegates of prayer’.
And it is this way because there can be no compromise between the Dark and the Light. Which everyone who has ever seen the Matrix knows; you take the red pill or the blue pill. Which is why, obviously, you never let you left hand know what your right hand is doing.
Jack, I am glad you are writing this substack. I did follow the link to FFatalism's essays and the comments there also -- good conversation. I think this is making me feel my lack of a church sorely. I have never had a good spiritual home since the shattering of our evangelical upbringing about 10 yrs ago. A community of fellow travelers is enlivening.
Do you subscribe to Metanoia of VT? Sorry to keep bringing it up here but today Mark published an essay about rites of passage that relates so well to your thoughts...https://metanoiavt.substack.com/p/doorways-to-the-sacred-upheaval-rites/comments.
I actually felt moved to stand up and speak in Quaker meeting two weeks ago about how birth is painful and bewildering but miraculously brings joy and new life; wondering if the painful transition we are in now might not be a birthing. (Marks words are far more eloquent)
In response to the idea that we may all be "forced" into a desert so to speak by the converging crises of the anthropocene I feel some doubt. Like Mark writes, there is an opportunity for loss to bring transformation but it is not automatic. I'm sure you know that, but I also wonder this: if the unraveling of this mess is more protracted, less dramatic -- if the wealthy nations insulate themselves at the expense of others somehow -- what if it doesn't turn out to be "practical" to the worldly mind or necessitated any time soon. Isn't it still what we want? Aren't we hungry for God and aren't we sick and sad and broken-hearted about the devastation and corruption that we are living under and participating in? I don't pretend to know how world events will unfold, but for my part, even if we could keep the seemingly pleasant "gifts" of the machine and delay the reckoning for payment I still can't be happy. It's not self-loathing. It's not being ill adjusted psychologically as far as I can discern. I think it is the genuine hunger for God, for the Divine, for wholeness. Without this hunger, any sort of practical motive will probably fail eventually. I don't know the theology or philosophy behind what I'm saying, just my practical gut instinct. This motive will always be mistaken for insanity or delusion by atheists I guess.
"Is it easy to love God?"
"It is for those that do it."
(CS Lewis attributes this saying to 'a wise old christian')
Your internet friend, Clara
Hello Jack
I've been pondering this one for some time
Some brief thoughts
Firstly technology always does two things. It separates us from our earthly source, the Creation and reorders our relationship to 'her', in so doing it also changes us. I guess that in some sense all the talk of post-human / AI etc. is where this change effectively enters our self conscious. This is so very dangerous. We have internalised and owned the technological paradigm and thus have lost touch with that which is not us. Ironically it is the collapse into self, solipsism, narcissism etc.
Second, and to a degree unrelated. The only way back as always is 'coming to our senses', so hard when we have been taught that what we see is not what we see. But it is to return to our source, and our true being. This is where I think the Arsenios option is so very necessary. for the 'We' of which we have both spoken is humanity together, but if there are those amongst us / within humanity who are outside of this madness, then there is hope. I'm reminded of Merton saying somewhere that there are probably only two people in the world who pray, but they hold us in place, so to speak.
The lost vocation is not to make space for God - something which when we prioritise our life over the Life from Above - we readily speak of in so many ways, such as the brief prayer before business, even in the church. No it is that for which we were made, to be the space for God. there is a sense in which in the centre of things, any of us can choose this path of doing nothing but empty of all else to be space for God.
Maggie Ross somewhere tells a story with a contemporary sound. I don't recall it exactly, but in the midst of a terrible drought a village were all rushing around, trying desperately to hold things together when a dishevilled stranger came to them seeking shelter. They had no time for him and simply directed him to a filthy barn where he locked himself away. Shortly thereafter the clouds began to gather and the rain to fall. the villagers rememebred the stranger and saw him wandering off down the road from the village. When asked what it was he had done, he replied he had only made space for the rain, or for God. It matters not.
I wrote a brief course on Silence and The kingdom of God a couple of years ago for Lent. In it I spoke of the great space within each one of us, that we are created to bear God in the world. But that we only enter that space when we come to the end of ourself. Going into the desert is going to the entry place, where it is God or nothing. The Boundary between Life and death, and indeed the distinction and definition of them becomes less clear
"A good portion of the comments acknowledged the goodness of withdrawing, at least for a time, from distractions or even in undertaking a mild form of asceticism. This group saw doing so as, at best, only a temporary measure. One in which we hopefully find rest and renewed purpose. Ultimately, though, if it wasn’t directed back towards the world, broadly conceived, it was a kind of escape or indulgence. In other words, the default mode in our spirituality is that of the active life, which the contemplative should serve. "
I recognize myself in this group, to a degree. The literal flight to the desert is a vocation and I acknowledge this whole-heartedly. Turning back towards the world is inevitable, however. Even if one remains in the desert - if you attain a certain wisdom, people will flock to you. Do you turn them away?
I for one believe that the prayers of monks and nuns keep this world from falling apart. Vocation, vocation, vocation. My vocation is three-fold: husband, father, contemplative.
How do we face our demons in the dark, in solitude, in silence? How do we combat ego?
As per that quote from DBH, the ascetic does not strive for any benefit that can be measured or weighed, that is profitable or practical - it is the supremely "unpractical" path.
And on one level, I would say that all spiritual paths are a call to the "unpractical" and a rejection of the "survival concerns" that dominate secular society - and inevitably lead to gloom, anxiety, and depression, a loss of the sense of the sacred and the divine.
Perhaps secular society can be characterized by an obsession with practical survival concerns, where the magic, wonder, and beauty of life gets smothered and lost, where the sacred and divine become obscured - and spiritually is a call to a return to a deeper, fuller, richer Life, centered on the sacred.
That is the logic behind the injunction "you must lose your life to find it" - man has a propensity to lose sight of the magic of life, it's beauty, it's sacred divinity, under a welter of "practical" survival concerns - and it is only by surrendering ones "life", (deprioritizing the "practical") that one recovers the vision of the Divine and thus true Life.
Jesus tells us explicitly to not be preoccupied or obsessed with survival concerns, and Taoism is full of that kind of exhortation - and both traditions say that to the average practical man, the mainstream man of civilization, what they are saying sounds crazy. To the Greeks it is foolishness, and when the inferior man (average civilized man), hears of the Tao, he laughs at it.
Thank you very much for bringing the subject of ascetcism into the forefront - the backlash is very characteristic of our times, which has lost its belief in spirit and believes only in material things.
I am however encouraged by the sympathy for ascetcism, solitude, and contemplation - this perhaps points towards a recovery of the spirit and a downgrading of materialistic interests.
I was recently reading a brilliant essay by David Bentley Hart on "Thrift" (which he does not regard as a primary Christian virtue), and found some fascinating remarks on asceticism -
"...The ascetic is never moderate, nor does he or she strive to conserve material resources as such, nor certainly should he or she ever be conscious of cost. The austerities of Simon Stylites or Evagrios Pontikos or John of the Cross were every bit as exorbitant in their way as the decor of Versailles. Asceticism is a giving of the self without reserve: it should be jealous of nothing but purity; it produces nothing profitable; it contributes nothing that can be weighed, measured, or stored; it is a pouring out of one’s entire substance into the sands of the desert or the chill of an isolated cell. Its principal fruits are spiritual progress, bodily inanition, and prayer. The Christian ascetic does not merely deny himself certain pleasures so as to be certain that his goods will not vanish prematurely; he denies himself even the just wages of his labor and even necessary things, in order to place himself in a—quite precisely—“exorbitant” relation to all normal society, all common responsibilities..."
"....There is something in the doctrinal, metaphysical, and moral language of Christianity that seems at times jarringly incompatible with attempts to make the realms of civic and domestic responsibility spheres of spiritual achievement in and of themselves, rather than mere occasions for the exercise of charity, justice, or temperance. We look in vain if we go searching through the works of Christian antiquity and the Middle Ages for warm disquisitions on “family values,” or fiery exhortations to sound and scrupulous stewardship of our possessions, or lustrous portraits of home, hearth, and the hushed sanctity of the dining-room table. The early church’s view of marriage, to be perfectly honest, often verged upon the mildly hostile; 14 and even those church fathers who had indulgent or kind words to say of the domestic sphere still never suggested that it provided any unique opportunities for Christian virtue or that it was comparable to the monastic life as a. path of holiness....."
Hi Jack
Just a brief comment on Arsenios.
I’ve just finished reading The Matter with Things, by Iain McGilchrist. The final very lengthy chapter on The Sense of the Sacred, is as one of my fellow readers said ‘devastating’
I couldn’t but hear the words of Gandalf on the bridge of Khazad-Dûm, ‘Fly! You fools!’
I’d had these words on my mind regarding Jesus’ words on Mammon. We are fools if we think we can overcome such Balrogs.
In McGilchrist’s terms- our entire societal discourse is built on the foolish idea that all there are are ‘things’ and we know what we’re doing.
It's also worthwhile remembering that there are forms of ascetcism that are merely world weariness and disgust. As in everything, discernment is key, and religion contains many corrupt strands of spirituality.
That being said, ascetcism has a tremendous social value as well as personal value. This relates to what Fat Caps was saying. The ascetic, the hermit in the mountains, reminds society that the most important things are not the getting of money or the mundane takes of physical survival, but something far higher.
The society that honors it's ascetics is one of much greater spiritual health and one that has retained at least some connection to the right spiritual priorities.
For instance, the weary laborer in the city should derive spiritual sustenance and refreshment from the thought that, say, poet-hermits live in the mountains and deserts celebrating the magnificence of God's nature, and even if he cannot, or lacks the courage to, focus on the most important things in life, he is reminded that the true ends of life are not the mundane tasks of survival, the getting of money, but God.
The ascetic orients society to higher ends than mere money making or surviving.
Jack - thanks for your responses to me on this thread, which contains some good insights.
I'd like to add a few more points about ascetcism, as well as another DBH quote :) While ascetcism is specifically suited to our crumbling historical moment, properly understood (as a form of love not hate) it is important even during ideal civilizational conditions. (In Tang China, it was common for mandarins to become poet-hermits in the mountains)
Related to this, ascetcism has to be seen as something joyful and life affirming and life expanding, not a merely "defensive" reaction to bad social conditions.
Like you, DBH writes that ascetcism may be just the cure our troubled modern times needs, and describes it like this -
".....Christian asceticism is not, after all, a cruel disfigurement of the will, contaminated by the world-weariness or malice towards creation that one can justly ascribe to many other varieties of religious detachment. It is, rather, the cultivation of the pure heart and pure eye, which allows one to receive the world, and rejoice in it, not as a possession of the will or an occasion for the exercise of power, but as the good gift of God. It is, so to speak, a kind of “Marian” waiting upon the Word of God and its fruitfulness. This is why it has the power to heal us of our modern derangements: because, paradoxical as it may seem to modern temperaments, Christian asceticism is the practice of love, what Maximus the Confessor calls learning to see the logos of each thing within the Logos of God, and it eventuates most properly in the grateful reverence of a Bonaventure or the lyrical ecstasy of a Thomas Traherne....."
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/10/christ-and-nothing
I also suspect that fighting it on macine terms won't work and also agree that passivity and acquiescence isn't an anwer either. All I have is question after question and an increasing sense of powerlessness along with a foreboding about somehow being duped by placing hope in a return to an ascetic path which historically has already failed quite dramatically as well as a fear that a machine (driven by technology, capital and a will-to-power) is not manageable and consequently offers a potential explanation for what appears to doom advanced societies to the likelihood of extinction.
Is there such a thing as a heroism or sacrifice that is not on machine terms?
How, indeed, can we live to stop feeding this machine?
Thanks for offering a platform for such issues to be discussed.
Ah yes. I was on my annual retreat with the Trappists. I had just bought two books from the gift shop and I was walking back to the guest house. A young man, a fellow guest, caught me on my way back and introduced himself. Over a coffee we began to talk about the books we had read. At some point in the conversation I told him about my introduction to, The Seven Storey Mountain. Then he told me this story. He had been raised a Catholic but had lost his faith during his time studying art and drama at university. After university he spent some time in Paris with a group of radical, street performers. He lived on the top floor of a cheap rooming house. Life wasn't going so well. One day after a hard and unrewarding day, performing on the street he returned home. As he stepped into his garret room he felt the habitual dip in the floor as the loose board made its present felt. Every time he came home this happened. Today it annoyed the hell out of him so he marched down the stairs and asked the concierge for a screwdriver that he might make the necessary repair. Having rolled back the carpet he located the squeaky board and unscrewed it so that he might re-position it afresh. On lifting up the piece of floor board he found a book. And that book was The Seven Storey Mountain written in English. He began to read it that night. And so commenced his return to the faith.
Like I said, small miracle. Heads up, Jack. My wife and I leave for a holiday in rural Wales tomorrow. So I guess we will be off the radar for a couple of weeks. God Bless You, Dear One. And keep up the sterling work.
Thanks Jack. I think I would agree with what you say here. :)
“…without a deep practice of the contemplative life, the active life tends to dry up and become a burden to us—in short, we burn out.”
I can very much relate to this. Since I’m a teacher, I have the luxury of slowing down in the summer. But I’ve found myself forced in a way to slow down even further this summer. I usually have a to-do list with at least twenty things on it that I work on enthusiastically (more or less). I just didn’t have the motivation this year. I wish the house and yard looked better lol….but I felt the need to spend more time thinking and writing and leaning into the deep tiredness I am feeling.
One can say that if behind technology is the human will to power and if one wants to dilute such a will (and potentially interrupt major counter-productive tendencies in oneself and the world, asceticism offers an extremely worthwhile path. One could also say that it is looking more and more like technology is increasingly capable of consuming human beings through its complexity, increasing autonomy and maybe some type of weird, inherent machine-like desire.
If the extinction of human beings as we know them is what is now potentially at stake (is this simply my catastrophic thinking or a rationalization for my own aggressive instincts?} a significant portion of my being wants to fight back in a quite irrational glee, telling myself I at least I tried to do something to stop such an extinction.
I guess I am not yet convinced that this latter option is simply despair winning out.
Perhaps I will start from the last point of the Arsenios Option and work towards understanding the others. I certainly believe that an ascetic program is necessary for any progress in the spiritual life. All the major religions advocate such a program, and many cultures establish forms of monastic organization that encourage retreat, contemplation, and the embrace of poverty. Sometimes people enter a monastery for life, but sometimes this commitment is for a shorter time, as in traditional Thailand.
Both Orthodoxy and Catholicism have a wide variety of such programs. Even within the Evangelical tradition, Dallas Willard developed an ascetic program for Christ followers. However, for Christians (and I don’t think I’m just speaking for myself, although what follows is true for me) this program is undertaken to encounter the God of purity, beauty and being, not simply as a way of subduing the will.
Human beings are infinitely complex. We desire our own way, and we are greedy, selfish, cruel, and rapacious. But we are also loving, generous, artistic, and able to grasp, beyond the material world, what is spiritual and real. The Kingdom of God is both here now and lies in the future. Because of this complexity, anyone who embraces an ascetic program will inevitably experience tensions.
For the Christian tradition deeply influenced by the Greek/Hellenistic tradition, ambition is one of those tensions. The Greeks understood that life was fundamental tragic, yet citizens were expected to strive for glory and everlasting fame. Odysseus, when he meets Achilles in the underworld, reminds Achilles the ‘we Greeks respected you as we do gods, and you have great power among the dead.’ Achilles rejects the kind words. ‘I would rather be a workman, hired by a poor man on a peasant farm, than rule as king of all the dead.’ (Wilson translation). I do not think we can get rid of this tension.
What an ascetic program can do is build some defenses against the corrupting power of money, power, technology, and decadence, and help us focus on what all religions consider important: justice, mercy, service to others, the worship of God. The Sermon on the Mount can be a working plan, not an ideal. We know people of all ages have not turned away like the rich young man Jesus loved. We can follow their model and create a community of like-minded people.
A new a new political program or order will not save us, but we can recognize useful work and honor it. George Eliot’s last words for her heroine Dorothea seem right. “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” It is such a life I wish to live.
Thank you, Jack, for your wonderful essay. Filia
Thank you Jack, this is a really fruitful discussion. I hope all is well at the Monastery.