Christian Asceticism and the Secular Self
The Rev’d Dr. Gary Thorne
delivered at the 2011 Atlantic Theological Conference, entitled “Recognizing the Sacred in the Modern Secular”
In this paper I seek to understand the notion of ascetic practice as developed in the Early Church and to locate the inheritance of this ascetic practice in the contemporary culture. I shall note the importance of Eucharistic adoration in the recovery of true Christian askësis.
1. Ascetical theology in the Early Church
In the ancient lectionary of the Church as preserved in the Canadian 1962 Book of Common Prayer, the penitential season of Lent begins on Septuagesima Sunday with the reading of the first chapters of Genesis. This is most appropriate because the nature and purpose of ascetic practice follows from anthropology, or the understanding of the place of the person within a broader cosmology. The Early Church predominantly took up Philo of Alexandria’s interpretation of these opening chapters of Genesis in terms of a ‘double’ or two-stage creation. Philo was a contemporary of Jesus. Less than two centuries later Origen, for example, follows Philo’s lead and describes an initial creation of pure spiritual beings (that is, beings with pure spiritual bodies) who in the moment of their turning away from their contemplation of God, acquire physical bodies and become fallen souls in earthly bodies. It is in this second stage of creation that embodied souls manifest sexual difference. The precise description of the two stages of creation will be progressively refined within the Christian tradition, through Gregory Nyssa in the fourth century to Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century. In Maximus, the duality manifest in the second stage of creation is not in itself precisely ‘fallen’, but rather contains within itself the seeds of sinful division. One can easily see how, within this cosmology, the ascetic commitment to a life of chastity (virginity) is an attempt for the Christian to return to his original, natural state before the descent into duality. Adam and Eve in the Garden were a virginal couple. Indeed the whole of the ascetic life, in this view, is intended to overcome the dualities implicit in the fallen human condition. This is accomplished most generally in two ways: through the practice of withdrawal (anachorësis) and self-mastery (enkrateia).
Artistic representation of this anthropology is evidenced in mosaics from as early as the fourth century in which Christ and the saints are shown as ‘lighter than air’. Peter Brown describes these figures: “The dull weight of death has been lifted from them, and, with that, their physicality. They stand on the green grass of Paradise, now effortlessly alive.”[1] These saints are pictured as having returned to their pre-lapsarian spiritual bodies. Through their ascetic struggle and turn toward God, they once again have become true images of God spiritually embodied before their descent into their corporeal bodies. In this anthropology the body is not something to be despised, but rather through ascetic discipline the body is transfigured and transformed precisely because it has a share in the resurrection. The weightless bodies of the saints represented in these fourth century mosaics are those who have returned to the ceaseless contemplation of the primal unity of God.
The fundamental historical text for the beginnings of Christian ascetic practice remains the Life of Antony (Vita Antonii, hereafter VA) by Athanasius, written between 356 and 358. VA presents Antony as an uneducated though wealthy Copt who had been raised as a Christian. One day in his early 20s Antony was meditating upon the passage in the Book of Acts where it describes how the early Christians laid all their possessions at the Apostles’ feet so that they could be distributed according to need. Entering a Church, he heard the Gospel read in which Jesus says to the rich young man: “If you would be perfect, go, and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Matt 19.21). Antony immediately sold all his possessions, sent his sister who had been under his care to ‘respected and faithful virgins’ to be raised ‘in virginity’, and Antony entered the desert (VA 3) to practice ‘the solitary life’. Antony’s ascetic practices included manual labour, sleepless nights in vigils of prayer, a diet of bread, salt and water once a day at most, a rigorous programme of prostrations, etc. (VA 7) At the age of thirty five, Antony barricaded himself in an abandoned military fortress where he remained for twenty years in ascetic discipline. Bread was brought to him twice a year by friends. The description of Antony’s emergence from the fort after twenty years is well-known:
And so for nearly twenty years he continued training himself in solitude, never going forth, and but seldom seen by any. After this when many were eager and wishful to imitate his discipline, and his acquaintances came and began to cast down and wrench off the door by force, Antony, as from a shrine, came forth initiated in the mysteries and filled with the Spirit of God. Then for the first time he was seen outside the fort by those who came to see him. And they, when they saw him, were amazed to see that his body had kept its same condition, neither fat from lack of physical exercise, nor emaciated from fasting and striving with the demons, but he was just the same as they had known him before his withdrawal And again the state of his soul was one of purity, not constricted by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure, nor affected by either laughter of dejection…But he maintained utter equilibrium, like one guided by reason and abiding in a natural state (VA 14).
Later in the VA, philosophers visit Antony and he recalls the doctrine of the Incarnation as the context that makes sense of the condition of his body and soul upon emergence from the fortress. He explains to the visiting philosophers:
The Word of God was not changed, but remaining the same he assumed a human body for the salvation and benefit of mankind – so that sharing in the human birth he might enable mankind to share the divine and spiritual nature.[2]
In his De Incarnatione, Athanasius states clearly that the doctrine of the Incarnation makes possible the deification of man: “The Word of God…became human so that we might become God.”[3]
Ascetic discipline such as Antony practiced enables the body to begin the journey back to its natural state before the fall. Not only was Antony in robust physical condition when he emerged from the fortress after twenty years, but Athanasius tells us that for the rest of his life until his death at 105, he “possessed eyes undimmed and sound” and he lost no teeth, though they were worn down to the gums (VA 93). Upon emergence from the fortress, Antony’s state of soul is described as “one of purity, not constricted by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure, nor affected by either laughter or dejection” (VA 14). Although surrounded by crowds, Antony “maintained utter equilibrium, like one guided by reason (the Logos) and abiding in a natural state” (VA 14). Thus Antony, on the path towards deification, approaches the state of apatheia that Athanasius attributes to Christ who is “by nature free of passion (apatheia)”[4]. As a result of his ascetical struggles, Antony’s body becomes the perfect instrument of his soul, described as its ‘natural state’ before the Fall. Indeed, Antony will respond to a mysterious voice that instructs him to travel into the Eastern Desert to the Inner Mountain to create a miniature Garden of Eden, where he plants a garden in which wild beasts obey him (VA 50).
In the first of seven letters attributed to Antony, he describes the ascetical life as follows:
[The Holy Spirit] sets for [the ascetic] a rule how to repent in their bodies and souls until he has taught them to return to God, their own Creator. He also gives them control over their souls and bodies in order that both may be sanctified and inherit together: First the body through many fasts and vigils, through the exertion of the exercises of the Body, cutting off all the fruits of the flesh…Then the guiding Spirit begins to open the eyes of the soul, to show it the way of repentance that it, too, may be purified…The mind is taught by the Spirit and guides us in the actions of the body and soul, purifying both of them, separating the fruits of the flesh from what is natural to the body, in which they were mingled, and through which the transgression came to be, and leads each member of the body back to its original condition…[5]
Thus Athanasius and Antony describe the ultimate goal of Christian asceticism to be the return to the pre-lapsarian state where the person is restored to his natural image and likeness of God through the practice of withdrawal (anachoresis) and self-mastery (enkrateia).
The theology of asceticism in the East gains a greater articulation with Evagrius in the fourth century (ca. 345-99) who divides the spiritual life into three stages: ascetic struggle (praktikë), contemplation of the created order or physikë, and contemplation of God (theologia). This threefold division would later develop into the categories of purgation-illumination-union.[6]
Noted for his severe abstinence,[7] Evagrius describes the ascetic life as the spiritual method of cleansing the passionate part of the soul. To facilitate this cleansing, Evagrius gives an account of the eight evil ‘trains of thought’ (logismoi) corresponding to the passions of gluttony, fornication, avarice, grief, anger, accidie (listlessness), vainglory, and pride. Attention to these logismoi is the first step in becoming aware of the condition of the soul:
Let him [the monk] note well the complexity of his thoughts (logismoi), their periodicity, the demons which cause them, with the order of their succession and the nature of their associations. Then let him ask from Christ the explanations of these data he has observed.[8]
The emphasis on logismoi as ‘trains of thought’ will become increasingly strong in the East and prompt the development of the role of a geron, or spiritual Father, as necessary for the identification and overcoming of these logismoi. This disclosure of thoughts is different from a confession of sins since many ideas and impulses will be shared which may seem innocent but in which the experienced spiritual father may discern secret dangers or significant signs. Confession is retrospective, dealing with sins that have already occurred; the disclosure of thoughts, on the other hand, is prophylactic, for it lays bare logismoi before they have led to sin. “The purpose of the disclosure is not juridical, to secure absolution from guilt, but its aim is self-knowledge, that we may see ourselves as we truly are.”[9]
Corresponding to the eight logismoi of Evagrius are eight virtues that are acquired by the soul as it progresses. The overall scheme here, as we have seen with Antony, is to achieve apatheia or a serenity of soul. Apatheia naturally leads the soul to practice the virtues, and makes contemplation possible. The initial stage of gnostikë is a natural contemplation (physikë) in which the principles (logoi) of creation are discerned. Andrew Louth explains why apatheia is required for such contemplation:
To see the logoi of the natural order is to see it as it is and to be freed from private prejudices, which are rooted in the disorder created in our hearts by the passions. It is also to understand the providence and judgement of God, as Evagrius puts it, that is, to understand how God has constituted the cosmos as a kind of arena in which fallen souls learn how to turn back their attention to God.[10]
Physikë is followed by the final stage of contemplation, theologia, which is a knowledge or contemplation of God that is transforming “so that the mind becomes God, or is deified.”[11]
With Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century, ascetic theology in the East is given a more positive expression. The goal of the ascetic life shifts from purity of mind to a consideration of love. All passions flow from self-love (turning away from God), and thus the recovery of the image and likeness of God involves our relationships with other persons, and our relationship with God. Apatheia becomes a purified love. The passions are necessary for the acquisition of virtue. Maximus writes,
Knowledge of divine things without passion does not persuade the mind to disdain material things completely…Hence there is a need for the blessed passion of holy love which binds the mind to spiritual realities and persuades it to prefer the immaterial to the material and intelligible and divine things to those of sense.[12]
And again,
For the mind of the one who is continually with God even his desire abounds beyond measure into a divine erös and whose irascible element is transformed into divine love [agapë]. For by an enduring participation in the divine illumination it has become altogether shining bright, and having bound its passible nature to itself it…turned it around to a never ending erös, completely changing over from earthly things to divine.[13]
Although Maximus accepts a two-stage account of creation, the second creation is not precisely identified with the Fall itself. Rather, the second creation manifests a duality that carries with it the possibility, or the seeds, of sinful division. Thus Apatheia is achieved not by the renunciation of the passions, but by the right ordering of the passions.
Augustine came to a similar view of the passions but this led Augustine to an articulation of cosmology and subsequent anthropology that broke with the earlier tradition. The Fall was not an incorporeal descent into a physical state. For Augustine what is created is unambiguously good, including physicality and sexuality. Sexual differentiation is part of the created order, and will characterize the bodies of men and women in the Resurrection.[14] As Peter Brown puts it, there never was a time…
when physical, sexual and social needs had once been irrelevant. Adam and Eve had originally enjoyed a harmonious unity of body and soul. Their bodies had followed the dictates of their wills with the same loving and familiar concord as they themselves had followed the will of God.[15]
The cause of the Fall, and the consequent evil that manifests itself on account of the Fall, is not a corporeal body, but a distorted will. Thus the goal of asceticism is no longer the purification of the body and the overcoming of sexual division. The body is to be loved and cherished. It is the will that must be chastened and reformed.
Let me put it to you yet more intimately. Your flesh is like your wife…Love it, rebuke it; let it be formed into one bond of body and soul, one bond of married concord…Learn now to master what you will receive as a united whole.[16]
The problem is not desire itself, or the pleasures of the senses, but rather the condition of being addicted and enslaved to these pleasures. It is not the body, but the fallen body that is the burden to our souls. Augustine recognizes the body as the primary condition of the soul’s learning. By God’s grace our bodies can be gradually weaned from their addiction to earthly pleasures by discipline and habit. When this happens the body responds more faithfully to the inner life of the soul and both assists and accompanies the soul in its journey to God.[17]
I do not have time to give due consideration to the central place of monasticism in the development of Christian asceticism. From the fourth century various types of monasticism and monastic rule become the primary place of withdrawal for the Christian ascetic, and it is in monastic community that ascetic practices flourish. There are typically four stages of the withdrawal of the monk: withdrawal from family and society; entrance into an intentional community; withdrawal from community to hermitage; living in the transfigured body. Reading and study would become significant ascetic disciplines in the transformation of self.
Also important to the continuing influence of ascësis in the history of the Church is the developing understanding of theosis. Luther and Calvin’s particular understanding of the doctrine of theosis led them to believe that all Christians were equally called to engage in ascetic struggle, and thus the notion of ‘withdrawal’ (anachoresis) no longer meant a re-location to a desert or monastery, but meant the life of the Spirit lived out in the world, but not of the world. Self-mastery (enkrateia) or sanctification, was emphatically denied as the means of salvation, but reinterpreted as the continuing and progressive bearing fruit of one’s salvation. The doctrine of theosis can be traced throughout our Anglican Tradition from Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, the Caroline Divines, and Charles Wesley. In the nineteenth century throughout the Anglican Communion, these themes were re-visited. Andrew Louth has written of theosis as the seminal theme that the Oxford Movement gathered in their perusal of the Eastern Fathers of the Church. Pusey re-established religious communities in the Anglican Communion. “Tracts for the Times” included one on Fasting, and then a subsequent Tract to answer all the responses that had taken such issue with that Tract! Tract XXI was titled “Mortification of the Flesh, a Scripture Duty.” Keble, Newman, Pusey and DuBose all asserted the radical nature of the notion of deification, and the disciplined life of holiness that it called forth from all the faithful. Newman, for example, in 1835 published three anonymous articles on Antony, and his intended readership was the ‘High and Dry,’ High Churchmen of his time who were enamored by Early Church doctrine and held Athanasius in particular regard. His challenge to them was to see that the theology of Athanasius could not truly be understood apart from the sort of asceticism embodied by Antony in the Desert. Newman and his Anglican colleagues at the time insisted on withdrawal from worldly affairs, looking to the Fathers for their example of holiness and reserve.[18]
Nonetheless, although the notion of theosis has been present throughout the Western tradition, along with the call to withdrawal and ascetic practice, this theme has been understated or ignored in most of the Western Church since the time of the Reformation.
2. The contemporary Western Church looks back to ancient forms of Ascetical Theology
In his 2009 Easter Message, the Archbishop of Canterbury reflected:
Early Christians could point to the martyrs – but also to those who freely decided to live lives of continence and poverty in the first monastic communities, the men and women who tried to live out the life of heaven in the daily discipline of life together, giving themselves time to discover their most deeply hidden failings and fears, their most deep-seated difficulties with themselves and other people and not running away but letting the action of God through the life of the community heal them bit by bit. …More people than perhaps ever before want to have access to what the monastic life promises, the wisdom of mutual patience, shared silence and prayer, space to grow out of childish ways – yet the profile of monastic communities and the recognition given to those who seek the path of contemplation is pretty meagre. Is it time to pray for and work for a radical new affirmation of this life and a proper valuation of its gift to the Church and the world? To pray harder for vocations to this life and to encourage people of all ages to explore it and to have the courage to take those costly promises so as to begin to show the world what difference the faith makes – what the resurrection looks like?
It could hardly be a more propitious time for this. The present financial crisis has dealt a heavy blow to the idea that human fulfilment can be thought about just in terms of material growth and possession. Accepting voluntary limitation to your acquisitiveness, your sexual appetite, your freedom of choice doesn’t look so absurd after all as a path to some sort of stability and mutual care. We should be challenging ourselves and our Church to a new willingness to help this witness to flourish and develop.[19]
This challenge of the Archbishop is one that often has been heard in the past few decades and has resulted in a general renewed interest in the ascetic wisdom and practice of the early Church. The rediscovery of the writings of Evagrius and Cassian and the publication of early Christian texts of ascetic theology has contributed to this recent resurgence. Kathleen Norris represents contemporary authors who have helped to make ancient practices of ascësis accessible especially to young Christians in North America. In her reading of the Praktikos of the fourth century monk Evagrius, Norris discovers in the notion of logismoi, or ‘trains of thought’, precisely the diagnostic tools that are most helpful for her own spiritual journey. More, in Evagrius’ eight logismoi the ills of our postmodern age are recognizable – ills so subtle that they eat away at us precisely because they are not named. The ancient wisdom of the Church provides both the diagnostic tools and practical cure for our deepest troubles. Acedia is one such logismos. Norris quotes Evagrius:
The demon of acedia – also called the noonday demon – is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour. First of all, he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour [or lunchtime], to look this way and now that to see if perhaps [one of his brethren appears from his cell]. Then too he instills in the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labour. He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement. Should there be someone at this period who happens to offend him in some way or other, this too the demon uses to contribute further to his hatred. This demon drives him along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself. He goes on to suggest that, after all, it is not the place that is the basis of pleasing the Lord. God is to be adored everywhere. He joins to these reflections the memory of his dear ones and of his former way of life. He depicts life stretching out for a long period of time, and brings before the mind’s eye the toil of the ascetic struggle and, as the saying has it, leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight. No other demon follows close upon the heels of this one (when he is defeated) but only a state of deep peace and inexpressible joy arises out of this struggle.[20]
The term ‘noonday demon’ for Acedia comes from Psalm 91, vv 5 and 6:
You will not fear the terror of the night
Nor the arrow that flies by day, nor
the plague that prowls in the darkness
Nor the scourge that lays waste at noon.
Acedia urges us to move on. It makes us listless, restless. Evagrius’ younger contemporary Cassian will describe how acedia leads the monk to ‘a dislike of place and disgust with his cell.’
Our job, our prayers, our spouse, our family, our friends – all the things that once brought us joy, no longer do so. The people and things that brought us pleasure, no longer do so. Our obligations to family, friends and colleagues all begin to appear as impediments to our freedom. Norris’ book resonates with people today who see in the writing of Evagrius and Cassian an accurate description of our society’s ills: restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, frenetic and ceaseless activity, despair.
And I cannot resist quoting a very short passage from Evagrius that describes the King’s student of the Foundation Year Programme as much as it does the listless fourth century monk:
When he reads…yawns plenty and easily falls into sleep. He rubs his eyes and stretches his arms. His eyes wander from the book. He stares at the wall and then goes back to his reading for a little. He then wastes his time hanging on to the end of words, counts the pages, ascertains how the book is made, finds fault with the writing and the design. Finally he just shuts it and uses it as a pillow. Then he falls into a sleep not too deep, because hunger wakes his soul up and he begins to concern himself with that.[21]
Norris’ book is indicative of a healthy interest that contemporary Christians have taken in re-discovering the depth and relevance of the ascetic theology of the Early Church.
But in his 2009 Easter Message, the Archbishop of Canterbury specifically challenged us to reconsider monastic communities. He was promoting the values of established traditional monasteries and ascetic disciplines as an alternative to our lives of entitlement and consumerism. His words echo similar challenges throughout the twentieth century that encouraged the growth of small ‘monastic-like’ communities. In the 1930s in Germany, a group of Christians left Berlin for a village to establish just such a community, called ‘Bruderhof’. At the same time Bonhoeffer was guiding the ‘Confessing Church’ seminary and wrote his highly influential book, Life in Community. In the same decade, Catholic Worker Houses were established in inner cities or on small sustainable farms; these were communities dedicated to radical hospitality and non-violent resistance to all forms of injustice. More recently, a contemporary phenomenon in the Free Protestant Churches called ‘New Monasticism’ defines itself as ‘rooted in a stringent critique of modernity and postmodernity’. This network of communities that comprise the ‘New Monasticism’ movement developed out of the critique of western culture found in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1984). A chief apologist for the New Monasticism movement, Jonathan Wilson, represents MacIntyre’s argument in the following way:
We are faced, he says, with two paths…We may follow Neitzsche down the path that views morality as simply an expression of emotional preference and social relationships as an arena for the exercise of power. Or we may follow Aristotle down the path that leads to community rooted in the narrative of a tradition and embodied in certain virtues and practices.[22]
Now if you are excited that Free Church Protestants should wed themselves to Aristotle, it is very quickly made clear in the New Monasticism literature that appropriate adjustments must be made for the fact that MacIntyre is more Aristotelian than Christian, and that, for MacIntyre, eschatology is trumped by teleology. Nevertheless, the literature of this movement specifically points to MacIntyre’s account of the failure of the ‘Enlightenment Project,’ its collapse into postmodernity and of the ‘Nietzschean temptation’. The ‘Enlightenment Project’ was the celebration of the ‘autonomous rational individual’, and the ‘Nietzschean temptation’ is that of accepting power over the other as the ultimate reality. Since the movement quite literally takes up the challenge of the concluding paragraphs of MacIntyre’s After Virtue, I quote it here:
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the more misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age…and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. …What they set themselves to achieve – often not recognizing fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. …This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another – and doubtless very different – St. Benedict.[23]
A number of communities of the movement gathered in 2004 and drew together something of a Rule of Life called “12 Marks of a New Monasticism.” The first is ‘withdrawal’ (anachoresis) or ‘Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire’ and the last is ‘Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.’ All of the 12 Marks evolve out of the traditional threefold Benedictine vows of obedience, stability and conversion (conversatio morum). The communities are located primarily in inner city neighbourhoods – places of those living in poverty and the marginalized. They are devoted to disciplines of prayer, vigils, worship, fasting, chastity, to live lives of simplicity and sustainability. They look to the wisdom of the Desert Fathers, study the Rule of Saint Benedict, attend to history of monasticism in the West, and consider the emergence of monastic-like religious communities in the twentieth century.
In the recent enthusiasm for the ascetic theology of Evagrius and Cassian, and in the forming of communities such as the ‘New Monasticism,’ we see an intentional contemporary attempt to recover an asceticism that had been lost to the Church for centuries. But although ascetic practice had been largely lost to the Church, has it been lost to our culture at large? Perhaps the Church is attempting to recover what had been lost to itself – but carried forward in secular forms? Indeed, the ‘ascetic self’ seems very much alive in Western secular culture even if this secular asceticism of the twentieth and twenty-first century vigorously rejects what it takes to be the world renouncing and body-despising themes of early Christian asceticism.
3. The Secular ‘Ascetic Self’
Modern asceticism disciplines the body for its well-being and rejects what it interprets to be Christian hostility to sexuality, the body and its celebration of virginity and chastity. As Julia Twigg explains:
Enlightenment thinkers from Voltaire to Russell have associated asceticism with monkish excess, repressed sexuality and a culture of life denial. Surely modernism is about escaping from all that and about presenting a new secular ideal that views the body and its expression in a positive, healthy form.[24]
Foucault represents just such a view in his essay titled ‘Technologies of the Self’ in which he speaks of askësis as ‘self formation,’ or the creation of subjectivity. He describes the techniques of the self as processes that
permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.[25]
Thus, one strand of modern asceticism is a set of techniques of self-formation to obtain a certain mode of being. For example, diets and dieting are attempts of self-improvement with the goal of happiness, success, popularity and acceptance. Vegetarianism can be a moral choice; a lifestyle choice that avoids participation in cruelty and violence to animals, in order to build up a purer, fresher, healthier body. The shift is from bodily ascetic practice for the sake of the soul’s journey to God, to such practice for the sake of the creation and shaping of the body in particular ways as an end in itself: transformation of the body is transformation of the self, and for no reason other than to achieve a desired image of self. For Foucault the ancient ascetic practices are useful precisely insofar that they are distanced from the ‘renunciation’ of self. In his conclusions to Technologies of the Self, he exhorts us to use ascetic practices,
Without renunciation of the self, but to constitute, positively, a new self. To use these techniques without renouncing oneself constitutes a decisive break.[26]
We all understand the prevailing cosmology of the political economy that has shaped our souls in North America during the twentieth century. When G.K. Chesteron visited Times Square in 1922 he observed that all the ‘lights and colours’ were attached to an endless flow of commodities. Light and fire were once linked to powerful sacred meanings, but this illumination, Chesterton concluded, “has made people weary of proclaiming great things, by perpetually using it to proclaim small things.”[27] In an article in a recent issue of Cross Currents, Larry Rasmussan continues this reflection, “A life of taking, built upon the carefully cultivated desire for small things that distract and in due course thwart the true self, is a perennial protest of asceticism.”[28] The insidious nature of this all-pervasive political economy cosmology is described by Rasmussen:
Materialism and acquisitiveness were rendered not simply the choices some citizens might make. Materialism and acquisitiveness became systemic requirements of life together, entrenched requisites of the good life. Avarice and greed are not, then, left to the relative few; they have been transformed into the structural needs of the political economy. They are required, not as motive and disposition, but as the day-to-day institutional practice of the "mature" economy of "high mass consumption" (Rostow). Persons not greedy by disposition thereby share a way of life with those who are. They fly the same planes, drive the same cars, need the same infrastructure, share the same diet, attain the same degrees, work the same jobs, live in the same housing developments, send their kids to the same schools, and lift the same emissions into the atmosphere.[29]
A secular ‘ascetic self’ has emerged as a resistance and refusal to be shaped by this false cosmology. The secular ecological and environment movement has been hugely successful in inspiring a way of living that resists unnecessary consumption and seeks a simplicity that is respectful of all creation. This secular ecological and sustainability movement has challenged the Church to respond positively. Consequently, Christian leaders today, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Pope Benedict, His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, and many Protestant voices, speak eloquently of a responsible stewardship of nature and plead repentance for the past neglect of the Church in this regard. Thus the ancient Christian practice of asceticism becomes a pathway to sustainability.
Likewise, a secular ‘ascetic self’ has emerged that is committed to a way of disciplining the body as a means of solidarity with the poor and marginalized. Simone Weil[30] is but one example of a twentieth century witness to an extreme asceticism motivated by a commitment to a notion of co-inherence such that our living and dying becomes meaningful only in our intentional solidarity with others. Here again the Christian voice points to ancient asceticism as embracing just such a co-inherence: “My life and my death is with my neighbour”, says Antony. Francis of Assisi voluntarily became poor in order to stand with the involuntarily poor and with the self-emptying God of the poor. The ancient Christian practice of asceticism becomes a pathway to secular authentic solidarity with the poor.
4. The challenge of secular asceticism
In the secular ‘ascetic self’ the disciplines of ancient Christian asceticism are realized: fasting counters gluttony, vowed poverty counters possessiveness, abstinence counters ‘sensuality without heart’, frugality counters excess, seclusion and solitude counter excitement over the small things and frenzy, prayer/meditation counters tedium and fixed social status. Father John Chryssavgis has written extensively about the Desert Fathers and Mothers. In the introduction to one of his books, Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew I, he writes:
I would define asceticism as
Traveling light – we can always manage with less than we imagine;
Letting go – we are to learn to relinquish our desire to control;
Opening up – we are called to create bonds, to re-unite, to reconcile;
Softening up – how can we make our communities less savage, more inhabitable?;
Treading light – we must not hurt, we must stop wounding our environment;
Living simply – not complicating our relationship with each other and with our environment, consuming less;
Simply living – not competing against one another and against nature.[31]
He continues,
Asceticism aims at refinement, not detachment or destruction. Its goal is moderation, not repression. Its cont-ent is positive, not negative. It looks to service, not selfishness – to reconciliation, not renunciation or escape. Without asceticism, none of us is authentically human.[32]
But notice that there is nothing here that is particularly Christian. This is simply a recipe for living ‘authentically human lives’ regardless of one’s commitment to a Christian cosmology.
In fact, the secular ‘ascetic self’ has so embodied a modern askësis, that its powerful presentation of an authentic way of living has pressed the Christian Church to re-discover this secular ascetic ideal in the Christian tradition. The ancient Christian ascetic practices have been searched out in the early Christian writings and presented as insights and teachings that are consistent with living authentically in our secular age. The selective presentation of the ascetic practices of early Christianity is meant to convince the modern reader that ancient Christian asceticism was never about the renunciation but the affirmation of the body. Pavel Florensky, a Russian theologian who died in 1943 but whose writings have recently become popular, says, “Asceticism produces not a good but a beautiful personality.”[33]
In response to the powerful secular asceticism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the ancient ascetic practices of the Christian Church have been re-examined with a view to seeing whether indeed they might not be seen to be ‘world-affirming’ rather than ‘world-denying’ as Kallistos Ware puts it. A critical moment in this re-appropriation of Christian asceticism was the publication in 1981 of a book by Margaret Miles, Fullness of Life, Historical Foundations of a New Asceticism. Miles rejects the discourse of the renunciation of the body wherever it is to be found in historic forms of Christian asceticism, but also discovers in the ancient Christian asceticism an affirmation of the body that must become the ‘New Asceticism.’ She concludes her book with words from a fourth century Eucharistic Prayer of Sarapion of Thumis that expresses what the New Asceticism must espouse. The prayer addresses God: “We entreat you, make us truly alive.”[34] Thus, in this new ‘world-affirming’ asceticism, both anachorësis and enkrateia are given interpretations that redeem them as positive and ‘affirming’ to our modern perspective.
This seems to be Kallistos Ware’s precise intention in his 1995 article: “The Way of the Ascetics: Negative or Affirmative?”[35] Ware points out that in Athanasius’ Life of Antony (VA), Antony’s anachorësis (withdrawal) is followed by a return. After he emerges from twenty years of solitude in the fortress at the age of 55 he spends the remaining 50 years of his life accepting disciples, receiving visitors, and healing the sick, “as a physician given by God to Egypt” (VA 87). Thus Antony’s asceticism becomes not ‘life-denying’ but ‘life affirming’. In a similar way, the passion for solitude or stillness (hesychia) in the caves at Subiaco prepared Benedict in the sixth century for the positive and affirming establishment of his monasteries and his communal Rule that was to have such a profound effect on the development of Western culture.
All practices of enkrateia, mastery over the body, are sanitized by Ware. Enkrateia becomes a prompting for moderation in all things. The literature is scoured for the many passages where moderation in ascetic practice is counseled. Ware points to the Apostolic Canons (Syria, fourth century)
If any bishop, presbyter or deacon, or any other member of the clergy, abstains from marriage, or from meat and wine, not by way of asceticism (askësis) but out of abhorrence for these things, forgetting that God made “all things altogether good and beautiful” (Gen 1.31), and that he created humankind male and female” (Gen 1.27), and so blaspheming the work of creation, let him be corrected, or else be disposed and cast out of the Church. The same also applies to a layperson.[36]
In this article Ware argues that asceticism is not against but for the body. The positive spin on enkrateia thus becomes the transformation of the body to render it a willing instrument of the spirit, a partner instead of an opponent. In his emerging from the fortress after twenty years in perfect form, Ware points out that clearly enkrateia enhanced rather than impaired Antony’s bodily health. Ware acknowledges that the central theologians of the East disparage the passions, but rummages in the literature for stories and descriptions that promote not the renunciation but the re-ordering of the passions. At the end of his article, Ware sums up his argument as did Chryssaugis, “Without asceticism none of us is authentically human.” But there are two problems with Ware’s argument.
The first problem with Ware’s determination to make ancient Christian asceticism palatable to modern notions of askësis is that he must ignore much of the tradition itself. In his portrayal of askësis as moderation, he avoids speaking of Antony chaining himself to a rock, or the decades of Simeon Stylites atop a pillar, and countless other more extreme instances of mortification. He scours through the Christian history of asceticism in order to meet the standards of what it means to be ‘authentically human’ as this is defined in the contemporary secular, and lived out adequately and fully in the secular ascetic self. The Christian witness thus loses its Christian content and the ancient forms of Christian asceticism become an affirmation of an askësis divorced from its particular end. Askësis is given a purpose and meaning apart from its role in preparing the soul for the contemplation of the Blessed Trinity in which the worshipper is taken up in the blessed mystery of the divine life. Ware’s presentation of askësis would be unrecognizable to Antony, Athanasius, Evagrius, Cassian, and Climacus.
Ware’s argument is inadequate to the tradition of Christian ascetic theology. A Christian askësis that is divorced from contemplation of the Trinity cannot be a Christian askësis at all. I am not suggesting that the secular askësis is deficient, for it too leads to, or follows from, a contemplative vision of the natural world that acknowledges an integrity and unity to that order in which humankind finds its meaning and purpose. It certainly is true, as Ware and Chryssaugis insist, that the Christian tradition claims that the practice of asceticism is meaningful only as it contributes to making us ‘authentically human’, but what it means to be human is precisely the question here. The Christian believes that what it means to be human has been revealed in Sacred Scripture as interpreted in the Christian Tradition. To be authentically human is to know ourselves as adopted children of God through Christ in the Spirit. Redeemed by the Cross of Christ, we participate in the Divine Life through the Church: born again in the Sacrament of Baptism and nourished in the Sacrament of the Eucharist we come to know our true humanity only as the mystery of Grace works in us toward the ultimate goal of deification or theosis.
The second problem with Ware’s determination to make ancient Christian asceticism palatable to contemporary secularism is his question: Is the Christian ascetic struggle against the body, or for the body? This question cannot be answered until the crucial distinction is made between the flesh and the body: sarx and soma. Sarx (flesh) is not the body per se, but the orientation of the whole person (body and soul) toward fallen nature – the ‘self’ alienated from God. In the Pauline dichotomy of flesh/spirit, the ‘spirit’ indicates the orientation of the whole person (body and soul) toward God – the ‘self’ in relation to its Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier. Thus, to be ‘in the flesh’ is not to be ‘in the body’, but rather to be in the world as a fallen creature – body and soul equally fallen and corrupt. The ascetic struggles of the body are intended to free the body from enslavement to the flesh, so the body can become a willing instrument for the Spirit. The Russian priest Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944) says, “Kill the flesh, so as to acquire a body.” We kill the flesh precisely so that the body might cooperate with the soul in its yearning for contemplation of God. In Antony’s first letter we read of the separation of
the fruits of the flesh from what is natural to the body, in which they were mingled, and through which the transgression came to be, and leads each member of the body back to its original condition, free from everything alien that belongs to the spirit of the enemy.[37]
In step 15 of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, Climacus has the flesh speak:
I shall never tell you anything which you do not know equally well, but only of things of which we both have knowledge (gnösis). I have my father within me – self-love. The fire which I experience from without comes from humouring me and from general comfort. The fire which burns within and the movement of thoughts come from past ease and bygone deeds. Having conceived, I give birth to sins; and they, when born, in turn beget death by despair. If you clearly know the profound weakness which is both you and me, you have bound my hands. If you starve your appetite, you have bound my feet from going further. If you take the yoke of obedience, you have thrown off my yoke. If you obtain humility, you have cut off my head.[38]
Is the Christian ascetic struggle against the body, or for the body? The answer is this: Christian ascetic struggle is against the flesh and for the body. Thus the extreme renunciations and mortifications of the flesh in the history of Christian asceticism, of which Ware seems embarrassed, are essential to a proper understanding of that Christian asceticism. The utter renunciation of the flesh is achieved through the Body, in order to regain the Body that is submissive to the Spirit. As the Prayer Book Collect for the First Sunday in Lent puts it:
O LORD, who for our sakes didst fast forty days and forty nights: Give us grace to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may ever obey thy godly motions in righteousness and true holiness, to thy honour and glory; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.
Conclusion
The Book of Common Prayer is a manual of ascetic discipline in the Augustinian tradition. Its exhortation to Holy Matrimony declares that marriage was ‘instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency.’ That is, bodily existence and sexual difference were part of the unambiguous goodness of the created order before the fall of the will. It is not the ‘body’ that results from the Fall, but rather the coming into being of the ‘flesh’ (the orientation of body and soul away from God). The purpose of all ascetic discipline, therefore, is the redemption, reformation and transformation of the Will.
The Book of Common Prayer is a minimalist manual of ascetic discipline that sets forth a ‘Rule of Life’ possible for all Christians: housewives, farmers, bankers, truck drivers, academics, the unemployed, the underemployed, the over-employed, male and female. Anglicanism does not seek to be a ‘Confessional Church’[39] but is a Rule of Life true to the Reformation recovery of the principles of radical Grace, Justification by Faith and Sola Scriptura.
It is a Rule of Life by which Baptized Christians experience the gradual reformation and renewing of the Will through the habitual practice of Prayer and Bible Reading, and especially in the regular reception of Holy Communion where the soul achieves union with God though Eucharistic Adoration and participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity. Thus the body, in itself inclined to evil (concupiscence and lust) through the corruption of the will, is transformed through the discipline of an Ascetic Rule to become a cooperative instrument of the motions of the redeemed and reformed will.
The body submits to the disciplines of the Church Year, keeping fasts and feasts according to the logic of the conversion of the soul writ large in the Christian Year. During penitential seasons the Prayer Book invites Christians to more rigorous self-examination, repentance, fasting, self-denial, reading and meditation on Holy Scripture. We are encouraged to turn back to the Spirit with “weeping, fasting and praying.” Major Fast Days are Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Fridays throughout the years are days of Abstinence. Four times during the year, there are Ember Days of Solemn Prayer, and Rogation Days of Solemn Prayer lead us to Ascension Day.
But the goal of all of this discipline is to culminate in an Eucharistic Adoration, and this Eucharistic Adoration will, in turn, effect the transformation in us of both body and soul. As Father Robert Crouse has said,
By faith beholding the glory, we are “changed into the same image” changed by adoration. Here and now the glory of God in Christ is manifest in word and sacrament, in wisdom and gracious power. It is by beholding, by the steady focusing of intellect and will, by the habit of adoration, that we are changed…that must be the basis of spiritual life in us. So, “Be not wise in your own conceits,” but behold the glory and adore.[40]
Father Crouse speaks of the purpose of our Lenten disciplines, and all ascetic practice, in terms of the reformation of the will:
There is nothing truly evil in this world which is not the fruit of ill-will; that is to say, of greed, or lust, or envy, or pride, or bigotry, and so on; and in that ill will, we all have part, however insignificant it may seem. We are called to shape our own lives in the ways of charity and justice…That is at the heart of our struggle: the discipline of will. “I keep under my body,” says St. Paul, and that is exactly what he means – the discipline of will.[41]
But is this an emphasis that is any different from any part of the witness of early Christianity? I do not think so. Simply put, Christian askësis is meaningless aside from this emphasis on the transformation of the will by which the flesh is put to death in order to acquire a body that is responsive to the reformed will – the will that has put on the ‘mind of Christ.’
In the ancient Eucharistic Lectionary from the seventh century, still maintained in the Book of Common Prayer, what is often the final Epistle reading for the entire Christian Year gives meaning to yet another year of ascetic discipline and Eucharistic Adoration, and meaning to all Christian askësis:
For our citizenship is in heaven; from whence also we look for our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change this lowly body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things to himself.[42]
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Notes
[1] Peter Brown, The Body and Society, 1988, Columbia University Press, USA, p. 442.
[2] VA 74, trans. Gregg, CWS 85
[3] Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54, trans. William Harmless, Desert Christians, An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism, 2004, OUP, 89.
[4] Athanasius, Oration against the Arians, 3.34.
[5] Antony, Ep 1:1-32, trans. William Harmless, Desert Christians, An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism, 2004, OUP, 80.
[6] The earliest occurrence of the three-fold activities of purgation, illumination and union is found in Dionysius the Areopagite (fl. c. 1st or 6th century).
[7] In Palladius, Historia Lausiaca 38.10, 12, Evagrius is recorded as saying: “Since I arrived in the desert I have not eaten lettuce or any other green vegetable, nor fruit, nor grapes, nor meat, nor [have I taken] baths.” (William Harmless, Desert Christians, OUP, 2004, p. 286). At the end of his life, Evagrius evaluated his own success in the desert by his endurance in fasting, and by the fact that he had not suffered from sexual desire for the three years before his death (Palladius, 2.12).
[8] Evagrius, Praktikos, 50.
[9] Cf. Kallistos Ware, ‘The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity’, pp. 127-152 in The Inner Kingdom, v. I of the Collected Works of Kallistos Ware, S. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, USA, 2000, pp. 136-137.
[10] Andrew Louth, Maximos the Confessor, London and New York, 1996, p. 37.
[11] Ibid, p. 36.
[12] Maximos Confessor, The Four Centuries of Love, 3.66-67.
[13] Maximos Confessor, The Four Centuries of Love, 2.48.
[14] Augustine, City of God, 14.22 & 26.
[15] Peter Brown, The Body and Society, USA, 1988, p. 405.
[16] Augustine, Enarratio in Ps. 140 16, as quoted by Peter Brown, The Body and Society, USA, 1988, p. 426.
[17] CF. Augustine, Confessions, x.28ff.
[18] King, Newman and the Athanasian Fathers, Oxford, 2009, 8.
[19] http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1071/
archbishops-easter-sermon-2009-proof-of-the-resurrection-has-to-be-lived-not-argued#Sermon
[20] Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, New York, 2008, preface.
[21] Kathleen Norris, Acadia & Me, New York, 2008, p. 5.
[22] Jonathan R. Wilson, Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World: From ‘After Virtue’ to a New Monasticism (2d ed), The Lutterworth Press, UK, 2011, p. xviii.
[23] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (3d ed), Notre Dame USA, 2007, p. 263.
[24] Julia Twigg, ‘Modern Asceticism and Contemporary Body Culture’, p. 228, in Evert Peeters, Leen Van Molle and Kaat Wils (eds.), Beyond Pleasure: Cultures of Modern Asceticism, U.K., 2011, pp. 227-243.
[25] Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of Self’, p. 146, in Rabinow and Rose (eds.), The Essential Foucault, NY & London, 1994, pp. 145-169.
[26] Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of Self’, p. 167, in Rabinow and Rose (eds.), The Essential Foucault, NY & London, 1994, pp. 145-169.
[27] Larry Rasmussen, ‘Earth-honoring asceticism and consumption’, pp. 498-513 in Cross Currents, Winter 2008, p. 503.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid, 503/4.
[30] Simone Weil’s cosmology was admittedly Christian, but she refused to be baptized because she feared that this would be to forsake the Gospel imperative and rather to become part of a Church committed to institutional stability and power. Her popular influence as a political philosopher has not been understood to be from a Christian perspective.
[31] John Chryssavgis, Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew I, Eerdmans USA, 2003/2009, p. 28.
[32] Ibid, p. 28/29.
[33] Pavel Forensky, Salt of the Earth, Saint Herman Press, 1999, p. 11.
[34] Margaret Miles, Fullness of Life, Historical Foundations of a New Asceticism, John Knox Press, 1981, p. 163.
[35] Kallistos Ware, “The Way of the Ascetics: Negative or Positive”, in V. Wimbush and R. Valantasis (eds.), Asceticism, OUP, 1995, pp. 3-15.
[36] Kallistos Ware, “The Way of the Ascetics: Negative or Positive”, Ibid, p. 10.
[37] Antony, Ep. 1:26-32, as cited by William Harmless, Desert Christians, 80.
[38] John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell (trans.), Paulist Press, 1982, p. 186. (J.P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, 904A-B).
[39] Cf. Stephen Neill, Anglicanism, Penguin Books, 1958, p. 417, as representative of the position that Anglicanism insists that it has no doctrine peculiar to itself that is not found in Scripture and the Catholic Tradition.
[40] Robert D. Crouse, A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany, University of King’s College Chapel, Halifax, January 29th, 1998, from the Recollected Pastor at http://www.stpeter.org/crouse/sermons/
epiphany_3.htm
[41] Robert D. Crouse, A Sermon for Septuagesima Sunday, All Saints’ Church, Rome, 1991, from Lectionary Central at http://www.lectionarycentral.com/septuag/Crouse2.html
[42] The Epistle for Trinity XXIII, Philippians 3.17.