The Narrow Gate

On Modernity and the Lost Art of Suffering.

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.

―Walter M. Miller Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz

To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.

―Walter M. Miller Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz

Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

—Matthew 7:13-14

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There is a story about Elvis Presley that I have long found revealing. He had decided, apparently, that the easiest way to lose weight was to be put in a medically-induced coma. According to this plan, it would require neither any effort nor, perhaps even more importantly, even the merest hint of discomfort on his part. All gain and no pain! Simply take a long nap and wake up fit and svelte and be on your way. What could be better? As bizarre as all this might sound, the legend has that some Las Vegas quack actually agreed to go through with it. The plan was foiled, or so the story goes, when Elvis fell out of bed and woke himself up. Seeing the folly of his ways he vowed not to do the like again. Instead, he took up Karate.

There is a strong, and admittedly quite understandable, tendency to want to find the easy way out of the intractable difficulties of being human. We don't feel it right that we should suffer, and consider it at times a grave injustice. There are, of course, forms of suffering that are entirely debilitating and destructive, and their elimination is wholly beneficial. But it becomes a very real question of whether the elimination of suffering per se makes us any happier. A technological and utilitarian view of human advancement equates civilization with the increase of our ability to control and exploit the world around us to increase our pleasure and minimize our pain. In this, we have been wildly successful. We control the exterior world to meet our material needs and desires. If that weren’t enough we have created many new ones we never knew we had or even ever wanted.

But when it comes to what is most important about being human—the quality of our inner spiritual lives—the attempt to circumvent suffering can only make matters worse. Technology is largely unable to help us here. For even if we were eventually able to cure every disease, eliminate every hunger, satisfy every need, medicate every dissatisfaction—however good that might all be¹—it would still not satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart. Rather the more our physical, and material needs are met, the greater we feel the hunger for what the material world can never satisfy. Whether we like it or not, and many of us don’t seem to like it, the human heart aspires to something greater.

Yet we have been constantly sold on some scientifically-proven and paradigm-busting revolutionary new methods that promise to bring us creativity, love, and unending happiness. Yet despite this, there has been no real change to the stubborn existential questions of the human condition. Our failure to eliminate them only seems to harden our resolve to collectively keep heading in the wrong direction. That these stubborn questions remain become not only a technical problem to be solved, but also an insult to our pride, and an unwelcomed indication of our limitations. Despite the comforts and unprecedented abundance now available to us, we want to make being human itself easy².

In this sense, we are all Elvis now.

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Comfort is one of those words that have slowly inverted its meaning over time. The original sense of the word was literally, “with fortitude” or to strengthen³. Only in the mid-17th century and for reasons one can only guess at, did we reverse its meaning to, "a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint⁴." Too much comfort and we begin to atrophy. Too much comfort and we become addicted to it and are diminished. This is not only true physically but psychologically. We were not made to live a life of ease and freedom from pain or constraint. Yet this is exactly what we are promised by modern civilization.

This etymological shift is related, I think, to our frustrated efforts to make life effortlessly pleasurable through science and technology. The assumption is that finally, we don’t need to suffer anymore. In this shift, we may see the beginning of the Age of Ideology⁵. If Christianity, for example, had once counseled a hard path of cultivating virtue and purifying the heart of disordered passions through contemplation had failed, this presented enlightened moderns the opportunity to throw that all away and to make all things new. With the old superstitions finally swept were finally going to get things right. It turned out that, at least in their eyes, there wasn’t much worth saving.

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A dog is content to sleep in the sun all day provided he is fed, because he is not dissatisfied with what he is. He does not worry that other dogs are doing better than him, or that his career as a dog has stagnated or that dogs are being oppressed in a distant part of the world. If man reaches a society in which he has succeeded in abolishing injustice, his life will become--it will resemble that of a dog.

—Francis Fukuyama. The End of History and the Last Man⁶

The not-so-hidden telos of liberal modernity is to unburden us from our longing for the Infinite, for God, as mistaken. Instead, we are offered the false infinity of endless consumer goods and entertainment. We are offered the dubious comfort of becoming a well-fed dog sleeping in the sun. It can never be achieved⁷. The more we are attuned to making our lives about pleasure the more we are further tuned to pain as well. The paradox of avoiding suffering is that in many ways it only increases our suffering. The more we run from it, the more we fall directly into its arms. If we sleep at all now, well-fed or not, we sleep only fitfully.

Central to this intention is the need to remake the world in our own image. The modern scientific project is one of altering anything which impedes the human will and its desires. Technology is the means by which we do this. Technology is the instantiated will to power and is never neutral. The same kind of paradox applies as was noted above. We shape our technology and are shaped by it in return. Increasingly we aren’t merely remaking the world in our own image, but we ourselves are being remade in the image of our technology.

Ideology won’t save us, it never could. Neither will technology. These can indeed remake us, but they are doing so only to our ultimate detriment.

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Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

—1 Corinthians 13:4-6

We must learn the art of suffering again. To suffer⁸ means to bear, to undergo. To relearn this lost art is to be reminded that we are not in control nor could we be. To suffer well is not only to undergo the inevitable pain of being human but to learn to be entirely receptive to the fragile beauty of our life on earth as it quickly passes from us. It is to begin to learn to bear all things, believe all things, hope for all things, and endure all things. The path of suffering is nothing other than the path of love. This is the only possible way to resist what is coming, what is already upon us.

To take the Arsenios Option is to admit that the modern project to avoid suffering has finally failed. We will not be able to remake the world. That dream was always impossible and will now only keep failing ever more catastrophically in front of our eyes. Instead, to flee the false world of distraction and ambition and control, to sit silently in silence, and to dwell in stillness is not a shortcut to circumvent the pain of the human condition—of our actual, singular, and concrete life—but rather a path directly into it⁹. And that doing so will cost us no less than everything. Like Dante, only having traversed the depths of our own Inferno can we emerge once again to look upon the stars¹⁰.

To enter the narrow gate of suffering is to enter simultaneously the path of love. Without love I am nothing. Which is the only way back to finding oneself, the earth, and each other, and ultimately to find God. Contemplation is the practice of learning how to suffer, to undergo, and bear all things. And only in and through this patient undergoing of pain and suffering, for everything that prevents us from love being burnt away, can our joy possibly be complete¹¹.

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CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

His concern is not with the ideas of men;
Nor with their classes, or states, or nations, or warring
factions;
Nor with what they call their rights,
These pass from day to day like clouds.

Many say that He wishes us to be happy.
They try to make Him what they want Him to be.
The truth is, He cares not for that happiness,
For that happiness is not real, but a dream.
It too is like clouds,
Clouds that change shape and vanish into air.
Who remembers yesterday's clouds?

Beneath the clouds is the ground we call sorrow.
The sorrow is our earth, the dust of the ground,
The very substance of life.
Unlike the clouds, it is solid and firm.

Beneath the earth are hidden reservoirs of water,
And this water we call joy,
A joy deeper than the happiness of the clouds.
But this water may not come to the surface of its own accord.
Therefore one must labor to dig the ground of sorrow
In order to tap it. 

Christ the Eternal Tao. by Hieromonk Damascene.

1. Or not.

2. The prevalence on the internet of “life hacks” and “one simple trick” is an indication of our desire to find a shortcut and make transformation easy.

3. Middle English (as a noun, in the senses ‘strengthening, support, consolation’; as a verb, in the senses ‘strengthen, give support, console’): from Old French confort (noun), conforter (verb), from late Latin confortare ‘strengthen’, from com- (expressing intensive force) + Latin fortis ‘strong’. The sense ‘something producing physical ease’ arose in the mid-17th century

4. My guess is that Pascal holds a key to understanding this linguistic/philosophical shift. He was one of the first to see the rise of diversion and distraction in order to avoid boredom, i.e., in order to avoid oneself. In avoiding ourselves we avoid the realization that our desire is for the infinite, and therefore no finite thing or experience can satisfy us. To see this is to see the inevitable failure of the modern project. The more this conclusion manifests itself the more desperate we are to hide from it. Hence the need for distraction. Truly a vicious circle.

5. As I see it and Ideology is a rational human construction whose purpose is solve the human problem of suffering and pain once a for all. To put it provocatively, and ideology is always a final solution. It never works, because it can’t ever work. We live now in an inescapable Age of Ideology. A utopia is the instantiation of an ideology.

6. As quoted in After God by H. Tristam Engelhardt. And at: https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/svsvoices/preaching_the_word_of_the_lord

7. It can only be achieved in addiction, overdose, and death.

8. mid-13c., "allow to occur or continue, permit, tolerate, fail to prevent or suppress," also "to be made to undergo, endure, be subjected to" (pain, death, punishment, judgment, grief), from Anglo-French suffrir, Old French sofrir "bear, endure, resist; permit, tolerate, allow" (Modern French souffrir), from Vulgar Latin *sufferire, variant of Latin sufferre "to bear, undergo, endure, carry or put under," from sub "up, under" (see sub-) + ferre "to carry, bear," from PIE root *bher- (1) "to carry," also "to bear children."

9. T.S. Eliot:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
If which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error
The only hope, or else despair
     Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre
     To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamilar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
     We only live, only suspire
     Consumed by either fire or fire.

Little Gidding. The Four Quartets.

10

He leading the way and I following,
until the beautiful things that Heaven bears
appeared above through a round opening
And we came out again and saw the stars.

The Inferno. Canto XXXIV. Dante Aligheri. Stanley Lombardo Translation.

11. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you. These things I command you, that you love one another.

—John 15:11-17