Asceticism

The word asceticism derives from the Greek askeo, which means to work at something artfully and with great care, to work something out, represent it, also, embellish it. It further denotes exertion, diligence, practice, training, and expertise. From here proceed the words askena and askesis, which imply exercise, particularly physical exercise. The ascetic is really the sportsman in the classical Greek sense, though he may also be an expert in a certain discipline. Asketon is that which is artfully rendered. One can see now in what milieu this word, or family of words, expands. Here we may distinguish three aspects: first, that of craftsmanship, which presupposes ability and a precise plan of what needs to be executed; secondly, an exertion which brings the creative process into play; and thirdly, persevering attention—the time factor being definitely a part of it.

If we take a look at the special characteristics which this word family exhibits, we see first of all the artist—the primary meaning as we have described above—and the artful elaboration of artists in every field. So, for example, the shoemaker is an artist, because he possesses expertise in making objects, albeit objects extrinsic to man. Then there is the athlete whose skill is a physical one; and, finally, he whose expertise catches hold of the entire man. Hence, it is not surprising that in early Christian time the concept of the ascetic (he is so to speak the sportsman in the Christian field, if the term is understood in the original English sense) had been applied to the martyr. Although the nomen does not occur in the New Testament, it was increasingly employed throughout the whole of Christian literature. The emphasis here is not on the fullness of Christian witness, but rather on the chiseling out of the Christian personality—a process which involved a great deal of effort, that is, discipline and self⁠-⁠denial. The purpose was the extrication, the freeing of the image, which was to be extracted from the human raw⁠-⁠material.

Man is indeed a microcosm inserted into the various layers of the world; he reaches from the apex of the spirit down to the lowest matter, from the conscious to the unconscious region. Not as if there existed a horizontal division between spirit and matter—but through almost imperceptible transitions across the animal and plant world down to the material, at all stages we encounter man; this is the reason why the Ancients called man a microcosm. He has to round off into a single image these multiple realms of being which he carries within himself, encompassing freedom and natural law. No longer is it sufficient to make grandiose decisions from on high, but, as Plato and Aristotle have explained, the entire human being has to be domesticated under the spirit. Aristotle calls it ethizesthai, meaning that our ethos needs to be carried into the material, through all the various realms: this is the acclimatization of the spirit to matter.

Nevertheless, man cannot be all things at the same time. He must extract a form out of this world material. He must choose, choose what he wants to be and what he can be. And in order to choose this—for choice always denotes an exclusion—he has to renounce much, almost everything else. For this reason have the Greeks, from Plato to Plotinus, employed the analogy of the statue which has to be chiseled out. Somewhere within this lump, the statue is hidden, and I must chip away, steadily remove, so that the core within may emerge. It may happen that this image which should emerge may claim the whole of a person’s physiological and natural constitution. The man of Antiquity constantly has the image of Socrates, who quarried the hierarchy of values out of his very existence, before his eyes. He renounced everything, including his life, for the sake of the image he wanted to present to the world. When flight from prison was suggested, the laws of Athens, so he tells us, confronted him, claiming his ethos and requiring him to stay, to die. The image of Socrates has illuminated the total history of philosophy, emerging over and over again. Boethius, too, when in prison rebels against the injustice of his condemnation, but the philosophy bearing the image of Socrates is there, persuading him to admit that the law should prevail. From here the curve reaches Dante, who could have left bitter exile and returned to Florence had he agreed to make certain compromises. He rejects them for the sake of the idea he has of himself, and he renounces. Gandhi, too, had an image of what he wanted to show to the world by his existence, and he also possessed the art, the askesis, to make this image credible before all nations; it cost him his life, it required it. The one thing he envisioned as necessary, he knew how to deliver. In our day, it was the Buddhist monks and nuns who set themselves on fire, and so made a flame out of their existence, and it blazed mightily to protest Christian integralism and intransigence.

Man is constantly faced with a choice: he must make a decision to himself. He would not be human were it not so. And this spells renunciation in every case. Every Christian deed is a renunciation: renouncing a non decision; renouncing to let oneself go, including the dolce vita; renouncing the pleasure to be and to know and to be permitted everything and the thousand possibilities I could have; yet I choose the one. Fundamentally, the question is not: should I submit to discipline? If I am human, I am bound to accept it. Rather, the problem is how I accept it, to what purpose and to what end.

Roughly speaking, there exist three such possible objectives: one is the idea of Man, the height by which he towers above what is not human, the loftiness of his spirit and his freedom soaring above all that is merely nature, merely instinctual and to which he could succumb. Reason eo ipso demands freedom. Without freedom thinking is not possible, for the process of thinking always includes making a choice. And at that height, at that majestic height at which man has been placed as ruler of the world (as mentioned in Genesis 1), he possesses his nobility as against baseness—here the distinction is drawn. This is the idea of Man. Secondly, there is the idea of achievement, of the work accomplished, of the mission, if you will—this strange human obsession to do something in the world, to change it, to serve a cause, to squander all one’s energy upon some work. But over and above all this there is a third object, and it only flares up in the Christian realm—we shall save this for later—it is the idea of love. When love is genuine, it invariably moves toward a Thou. It wants the Thou and not the I, and for this reason love in its essence is renunciation.

When we ponder these three main objectives, we may already see that renouncing is in all cases meaningful, pointing in a positive direction. In considering the image of man, I want the higher value. When I regard the image of achievement, I want the strongest deed. When I behold the image of love, I want the most precious gift.

It was Greece, the land of philosophy, which determined the image of the spirit for Western civilization. All culture is composed of spirit, of reason, of nous and logos. It is cultura, if you read Virgil’s agrarian poem The Georgics, it describes how man takes the trees and animals under his control, and how this again puts him under control of himself—labor improbus, Virgil calls it. And how Virgil is in contrast to his mentor, the rustic poet Hesiod, when he says: God has withdrawn ease from mankind, not in punishment for the seizing of the fire, but in order to cultivate him, so that by exerting himself in labor, that which is precious should emerge: cultura and discipline. All reason is ascetical. And no matter how much Nietzsche may scoff at the Christian ascetics, he nevertheless introduces askesis again, and this law that the spirit must hurt itself, if it wishes to accomplish something. This law runs alongside the entire course of his work. The greatest exertion of man with himself, including the heroic, constitutes the history of the human spirit, long before the rise of Christianity. Images appear before our eyes, terrifying images: they speak of a radicalism of almost senseless demands on our fragile human nature. Shuddering with awe the Greeks mention the gymnosophists in India, who have put aside all else in order to turn their gaze on the innermost point, in order to be nothing but spirit. India has achieved the first pure victory of the spirit over matter, that overwhelming experience of freedom, of being lifted above the world. Hegel, in his “Outlines to the History of Philosophy,” has also presented it thus. So radically, that all else becomes illusory and of no consequence at the point where we can unite ourselves to the ultimate, namely the Absolute. If we turn to the Greeks and open out Homer, we discover that the heroes he draws for us are heroes because they perpetually live in the midst of death, risking their lives at every moment in deeds of unspeakable daring for the sake of fame and glory. Odysseus, he who endures, must battle the gods themselves, must suffer a cow’s hoof and a footstool thrown at his head, because the Goddess commands: “You must endure it, await your hour.” Suffer it, my heart, more brutishness you have endured, says Odysseus to his howling heart. And then there is strange Pindar, so difficult to follow, because in these utmost human exertions he lets a flash of the superhuman shine forth in man. The Victory Odes, composed for athletes, are indeed images of the superhuman. The highest endeavor, says Pindar, is at the same time the favor of the gods. And when the victor suns himself in the glory of his feat, the family, the city, the whole of Hellas is illuminated by this victory, and when the poet places wreaths at his feet, dedicated to his divine muse, he admonished him at the same time: “do not forget that it was the grace of the god.” The greatest exertion, the highest askesis are united in the radiance of the human victory. And then the tragedians; the persons they place on stage are robbed of all human value, all earthly possession—shipwrecks without number. Once more they are the deserted ones, stripped naked, pleading for protection. How odd that they are invariably kings or royal persons, as if only the rarest of mortals could endure such trials as Antigone and Oedipus, or Iphigenie who learns that she will be slaughtered. And we can see in Euripides how she must wrestle with herself to make this voluntary sacrifice for her country.

It is clear, then, that asceticism begins long before Plato and before philosophy, which demonstrates that man, having a soul, possesses freedom over his body and that virtue consists in establishing an ordered domain, a polis. This he can only accomplish by standing above it, in possession of justice, the highest of virtues which measures to each his own: to body and soul, to lust and anger, precisely in the degree in which it is controlled by the spirit. Aristotle will elaborate on this further. The beautiful things Plato has to say on Eros which he fully acknowledges as one of the mighty drives in man, he does not suppress, but brings within the order of a cosmic dimension. Eros arises from below, from love of a beautiful body and, passing through all the diverse stages, arrives at that which is beautiful in itself. He then proceeds to advise us in the Phaedrus how to master our bodies in this Greek love of friendship. Not everyone is going to be strong enough, he says, but he who is, ought to attempt to control all this by the spirit through renunciation. And when Alcibiades staggers into the symposium drunk and full of rather lewd tales: how he tried it with Socrates—that is, to seduce him—and how, that night when they were alone, they ended up lying together like father and son; for Socrates could not be seduced. And he continues: this Socrates may have the image of Silenus on the outside, but there exist images one can open up (like small reliquaries), and inside we discover images of the gods. And this divine image I have seen, says Alcibiades.

We need not concern ourselves for long with the Stoics. We know their asceticism well enough. But a word may be in order about Epicurus, the philosopher of pleasure. What is pleasure? Pleasure is that silence—the silence of the sea, “galene” he calls it—by which human beings possess a balance of emotions. That is the best declares Epicurus. He was a simple man, content with very little. He said that one should cling to nothing, he who was so brave in enduring pain. He advised us to conquer our false fears, for which reason he pushed the gods far away. He did not think much of the beyond, and of the priests he thought very little. He did esteem friendship and generosity. He wanted nothing that would tarnish man’s conscience. For, he writes, one may never be sure that something will remain undiscovered. He rejects the boundless greed of the flesh in favor of the spirit that is satisfied within its limits, so he writes in the 20th axiom of his Philosophy. Epicurus is not quite what we understand by an Epicurean. For such a one would not be a philosopher. We do not want to mention Plotinus, who virtually placed his bet on God alone. Spirit I am, he says, and everything I am otherwise must be lifted up into the spirit, not by denying but by transfiguring it.

It was the Greeks who coined philosophy. It is a very hard, a very demanding philosophy. One could preface it with Kierkegaard’s words: “To be spirit means to be living as if one were dead.” This is also the point of Socrates and the rest of the philosophers: that one’s actions and one’s life must conform to the spirit. From the image of man much can be adapted for everyday life and for the teaching of the young; from here we could easily develop an ethics of love. Just as love itself is a personal act and encounters a person who is himself spirit; just as sex is an expression of a universal love and therefore needs to be tempered by the spirit’s measure; just as, according to Plato, nature has embedded joy and pleasure in man as a reward for his treating it with respect, a joy which finds its right order within the form of arete, virtue, as described in Plato’s Philebos. For this reason any misuse of the function is senseless, contrary to the spirit and to the person. What should one say about self⁠-⁠gratification in the sexual sphere? It is not to be justified philosophically; it is contrary to reason, because the function of love fulfills itself only in the other and can fulfill absolutely nothing in me. From this perspective one can survey the discipline of the entire human being who demands self⁠-⁠realization as ruler over himself and over the world. Like a general, he needs to make sure that his troops are ever attentive and flexible, and that, as Fr. Lippert has put it, he should check whether the switches are still working and have not become rusty. I must once again test my moderation in the various fields: eating, drinking, smoking or whatever it may be: am I still in control? am I still the master? Not only in these indifferent matters, but also in regard to very noble ones, in which one can also acquire a certain obsessiveness; so, for instance, a musician can practice too much, can play himself into a frenzy, or other matters of such kind. I am merely making these suggestions because they are grounded in philosophy—they have nothing to do with Christianity, not yet. One can find all this in Plato’s Politeia or in the Aristotelian Ethics.

This is, however, only a static idea of man, whereas the second category involves an active endeavor. The Greeks are philosophers; the Romans and the Jews possess the asceticism of work and mission. Perhaps the idea of Rome has never been more beautifully depicted than in the Aeneid. The initial situation is the Fall of Troy, the city is in flames, a people finally defeated and annihilated. Everywhere there is disgrace, ruin, despair, fire, suicide. Then a god whispers to Aeneas: “You have been called!” He does not yet know to what, but he believes in his mission and ventures forth with his aged, crippled father on his back, holding his small son by his hand, the household gods in the other. And now he must struggle through countless trials and defeats, going astray, pushing ahead, asking the oracle repeatedly: which way, which path am I to follow? He gropes his way from place to place. Temptation assails him, Rome’s Asiatic temptation, Carthage, Dido. It is the time of the battle of Actium, the time of Cleopatra, who almost consumed Caesar, and who completely consumed Marc Anthony. And again the god must awaken him, impress anew his mission upon him. “If you yourself are not aware of your mission,” says the god, then think of your son, Julus, says the god, “from whom the house of the Julians will be descended.” He tears himself away, leaving the woman behind, who commits suicide. Later he will meet her again in the Inferno. His father dies, the women rebel in Sicily and stay behind, but he is driven ever further, straight on throughout twelve cantos, until he has accomplished his mission.

The asceticism of the man of action knows but one idea—all else is of no concern. Next to Aeneas one should in fact place Abraham. There too, a god whispers, you have been called! And he sets out straight away on a vague prophecy, one does not know what it will be. And the whole of Israel represents this faith, just as Rome did, in its entirety. Moses drags them all along with him, into the desert, away from the flesh pots of Egypt. The prophet takes the people where it does not will to go; and finally, as they still do not want to go, God forces them into the worst asceticism of exile, into the role of the suffering servant—so much so, that reading these texts one wonders whether it is Christ or Israel. One may well have to say, both together. First Israel, the remnant, those who substitute for all who do not wish to go—and in the center there is a glowing core, Jesus Christ. Every great man is obsessed with his mission; one does not need to prove this, one simply knows. Everyone, however, who permits himself to receive a mission, who listens to the voice, will also receive one. And it is odd how the most beautiful, the most jubilant works, which bring joy to millions, emerge from ascetical lives of self⁠-⁠denial. One barely dares to think how that young man must have felt, who added 650 works to the Kochel⁠-⁠Verzeichnis only to die at the age of 35. The suffering and renunciations that are hidden in that marvelous music! The same is true of Schubert or Schiller: what a drudgery it was, this daily routine. And of Goethe we probably harbor a false picture. One only has to read the Elective Affinities, and Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, which bear the subtitle: “The Renunciants.” It also should be remembered that Goethe had suffered a great deal from the figure of the one who did not renounce—from Clavigo to Faust to Eduard. The examples are legion. But the person is convinced of the inner wealth of his mission, is raised above all the prefabricated entertainments of modern culture. As a Christian, one may scoff at the Autarkeia of the Greeks and call it arrogance. Autarkeia, I am sufficient to myself. There is some truth in this. An old Jewish friend now living in America once told me jokingly: “When I am alone, I am in bad but interesting company.” The man with a task cannot really be bored. He is forever stretched toward something, occupied. Although he may appear ambitious, at a closer look, it is not personal praise he craves, but rather an objective one. The cause should shine, no matter whether he is appreciated or not. That I have done it, is not so important as the joy of having placed it there; that is what many people nowadays live by: scientists, explorers, physicians, and many others spend themselves in a quite impersonal service, an ethos for a great cause, even a flight to the moon.

Only beyond all this lies the third, the Christian category. It exceeds the former two without devaluing them; for the human order, on which the Greeks insisted, is a good one. It ought to prevail at all costs; but it could happen that without anything else in his head, man might become a pharisee, an egoist, an aesthete who cultivates his beautiful human personality. And what about dedication to one’s work? It is good, but should man not ask himself whether what he is doing is really worthwhile? Nowadays so many come to grief at this question. How much genuine dedication had a Hitler received and accepted; how many generous sacrifices were made for his cause. How much asceticism is demanded today by factory and office life. Should I spend my unique and vital existence for the improvement of a vacuum cleaner or the sale of a newspaper article to which I am totally indifferent? Am I born for this—is this my mission? This is a question which has become perhaps more acute today than it was in the age of the artisan and the farmer, when everyone could attain a personal, though modest achievement.

Philosophy, the wisdom of the world, offers here, once more, a word—a last word, namely, the service of the whole, integration into the whole. Plato teaches this in his Republic and so does Hegel and Marx. But that whole could perhaps be also the meaningless, the cruel, the monster which devours the living hearts—and now the last blind hope surfaces, the meaning of the totality, which we view in modern times as the totalitarian revolution. This blind hope could in all likelihood be formulated thus: because I dedicate myself to it, then it cannot be meaningless. Magnanimity—indeed, it exists everywhere in humankind, involuntary, voluntary magnanimity—but how close it is to despair.

Christianity, on the other hand, goes beyond all this, and says something very different. It simply says: God loves you; he loves you unto death, the death on the cross. Do you wish to love him back? That is the Christian message and ethic. All else can be integrated into this: be human, be spirit, be free, so that you may render your entire love to God in return for his. And secondly: God, who has done everything for you, now calls you into his service. Assume, then, this Christian mission and vocation. After this has been accepted, questions and hesitations are no longer possible, because the responding love is in every case meaningful and rich. May the worldly profit of the entire evolutionary process be computed or not. This love of God, who has shown us in Christ his absolute love, is indeed the key to the entire Christian asceticism—where it is naturally human and where it adds something new of its own.

Here again the sexual sphere exemplifies this most clearly. For the sexual stands somewhere in the center of Christianity. Because Christianity is love, a new and positive dimension needs to be introduced here. Philosophy, as such, will always have a certain reservation requiring a going beyond and a leaving behind. However, the Christian answer points in the opposite direction. Philosophy proceeds from man to God, whereas in Christianity God descends to man, and man is definitively affirmed. The totality of human life becomes a symbol, an expression, a vessel of eternal love and fidelity. This was already so in the Old Testament and attains finality in the New. Christian marriage between man and woman turns into an image of the eternal love between God and man. This is the way St. Paul understands human marriage, demanding an equal totality of surrender of one to the other, in view of God’s surrender to man. Husbands have the disposition of Christ to humanity and to the Church. For this reason the act which was already considered universally human from a philosophical standpoint, because it contained both nature and spirit, is now raised up and transfigured into a grace⁠-⁠filled love between human beings. Love of neighbor, too, rises to the highest human possibility, because it is equally drenched in divine love. If one keeps this in mind, sexual problems, no matter how grave and bitter in individual instances, will be clarified and polarized. Perhaps this will explain why during the time of a promise or an engagement one ought to seriously consider the totality of the love one bears each other, and so remain at that distance that permits one to encompass the beloved person in its totality. This does, of course, require great self⁠-⁠denial. But to this I must submit, if afterwards I wish to live the Christian life to the full, beyond that time where I am carried by physical desire. For love must stay its course when it no longer has this support, faithful to one’s vow unto death.

Behind this hides a deeper mystery—I speak here to believing Christians—that God has become flesh, as we read in John 17, in order to obtain power over all flesh, by his humbling unto death, his renouncing love. This ineffable mystery of the Lord’s supper, the Eucharist, does indeed signify that here a body has been surrendered to infinity, poured out and become fruitful, so that man, the Church, and all humanity are to maintain a bridal attitude vis⁠-⁠à-vis of this mystery in order to receive the seed of God—the word is St. John’s—in the humility of the handmaid of the Lord.

What lines could be drawn from here, from the love⁠-⁠possibilities of natural man to the highest, most hidden, most efficacious divine manner of spiritual⁠-⁠physical love! Here the concept of virginity has its place. Whoever can comprehend it, let him do so, Jesus says in the Gospels. Celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom—what for? Because love is dangerous? No, but because the greater love of God may require that a human being should respond in this total manner, placing all he has at God’s disposal. A rapturous image lies at its origin: the image of the Virgin⁠-⁠Mother, who by her virginity becomes mother, because she puts body and soul at God’s disposal like a bride, and so by the action of God, becomes fruitful in an ineffable and unimaginable manner as mother and bride. Everything that goes by the name of “evangelical counsels” in the history of the Church, the history of religious orders—it all originates here. A person does not enter a religious order to cultivate his personality or because the world is evil; rather, he enters because of the greater love, in order to be at Christ’s disposal undividedly, just as God has given himself undividedly to the world. Therese of Lisieux has repeatedly described it thus. And this exclusivity of love, visible in Mary, goes together hand in hand with poverty: dear Lord, I want nothing for myself—may you dispose of everything—the Church, the poor, the world may have it all…; it goes together with obedience, in the sense that I do not wish to direct, control, and decide, but wish to remain at your disposal; let it be according to your word.

How this works itself out in different styles of life we do not wish to discuss here. A person, for instance, may be so completely available, as to lead a life of contemplation exactly as Mary of Bethany did in the Gospels: she had chosen the better part. She desired nothing but his love. This contemplative life is the most fruitful one in Christianity. Why else would Therese of Lisieux have become patroness of the missions? After that comes the active life in the Church: to make oneself available for the sake of God’s Kingdom and all its needs. Today new possibilities are emerging within the secular institutes—to be at the service of God’s Kingdom by exercising one’s secular profession: I work as lawyer, doctor, journalist, or whatever else. And why should I not do this in a love permitted by the Gospels?

Charles de Foucault, who had lived thirty years as a laborer in the world, who had spent forty days alone in the desert praying and fasting, three years at the most in active apostolic service for the kingdom of God, has once remarked that all these styles of life represent a direct following of Christ. In the world, in the cloister, in the priesthood, everywhere it is one and the same love, which, from a human perspective, requires renunciation (as spelled out in the Counsels), yet never considers it thus, but holds itself simply in readiness. Counsels exist so that they may make space for God, for the requirements of God.

Now it is true that St. Paul tells us in his First Letter to the Corinthians that the spirit of the Counsels has to be present and effective in every Christian life, because every Christian has died to the world with Christ, to the old Adam, the old man, and has now become the new man, has risen with Christ, not perhaps into a far⁠-⁠off heaven, but into the new world, which Jesus Christ has already accomplished in baptism, in the baptism of the Covenant, in the baptismal vow. Hence, “those who possess, should live as though they possessed nothing, and they who have wives, live as though they had none, and those who deal with the world, as though they had no dealings with it.” All the worldly functions are present here, and yet they are lifted up into the love of God, into love’s Absolute, which comes from above and reigns from there. It is possible that this is not easy and that we can feel this tension throughout our entire Christian existence, and we may ask ourselves every day anew: how can one make this work? There are no ready⁠-⁠made solutions. It can only be lived and borne. And in the Christian decision of every day and every hour, the question arises: is the demand today what I use and enjoy, or do I rise above and renounce, to be available for something greater? And what I use and enjoy must of course fit into the universal Christian order, the universal plan of existence. That is the freedom of which Paul speaks in the Letter to the Galatians. This freedom is achieved in the positive asceticism of love. For only Christian asceticism is wholly positive. We have already said that the philosopher, the person outside of Christianity, is on his way from man to God. He is in search of the Absolute. Thus the tendency outside of Christianity is always—if we may dare to use that strong word—an escape. India, Socrates, Plato, the Stoa, Neoplatonism: a shadow forever falls on the finite, the Veil of Maya always appears to descend. In the Christian realm, however, God becomes man, and the entire man becomes an expression of God’s love. Now it is a joy to be ascetical, which means to make ourselves into an instrument of Christian love. This is an image of man that is worthwhile, in which we need not essentially renounce any genuinely human function—as, for instance, passions which the stoics consider evil. No, they are good, if they are well⁠-⁠ordered. Physical love also, and what love is not always physical too; is there such a thing as a purely spiritual love? No more than there is a purely spiritual person. Hence, physical love belongs to man and requires the same positive clarification through the higher, greater, greatest possible love. Love itself is the most severe Askesis, for love demands constant selflessness, affection, readiness to serve, hospitality, and whatever else there may be. Why not read some of St. Paul’s admonitions to the communities—almost all the commandments are here resolved in the aspects and facets of love. Everywhere man needs to renounce in order to have something to give.

This being⁠-⁠a–purpose⁠-⁠in⁠-⁠itself, or this freedom of purpose which love possesses, should never become a deliberate purpose. It is beautiful the way it is, meaningful in itself. The same may be said about God who is love. And what should I do with the chapter on neighborly love? Nothing at all; I leave it alone, let it be, let it blossom. It is the absolute in our time, already living and interlacing. What is most essential in everything is the free gift. And the question which man must ask himself, and this is our last: how can I become liquid, give myself away, turn into pure light and pure water—so that I may become what Paul calls a fragrance for God and for men?