ASCETICISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
This essay has three parts. Click here for the second part, “Gethsemane”. Click here for the third part, “The Prison”.
1. David Rousset, A World Apart, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Seahouse (1945; London: Secker and Warburg, 1951), p. 106. Original title: L’univers concentrationnaire.
2. Ibid., p. 109.
3. οὐκ οἴδατε ποίᾳ ὥρᾳ ὁ κύριος ὑμῶν ἔρχεται (Matt. 24:42).
4. Αὐτοὶ γὰρ ἀκριβῶς οἴδατε ὅτι ἡ ἡμέρα κυρίου ὡς κλέπτης ἐν νυκτὶ οὕτως ἔρχεται (1 Thess. 5:2).
5. See Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, trans. Leland de la Durantye (2010; London: Seagull Books, 2012) for a discussion of sojourning (1 Pet. 1:17) as an experience of uneasy waiting.
6. See John 14:30: “I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming“ (Οὐκέτι πολλὰ λαλήσω μεθ’ ὑμῶν ἔρχεται γὰρ ὁ τοῦ κόσμου ἄρχων).
7. St Neilos the Ascetic, “Ascetic Discourse”, in The Philokalia: The Complete Text Compiled by St Nikodimus of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, ed. and trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, vol. 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 240.
8. St Hesychos the Priest, “On Watchfulness and Holiness”, in The Philokalia, vol. 1, p. 171: “Let the model for stillness of heart be the man who holds a mirror into which he looks. Then you will see both good and evil imprinted on your heart.”
9. “Ascetic Discourse”, p. 241.
10. See St John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Archimandrite Lazarus Moore (London: Faber and Faber, n.d. [1959]), p. 111: “A true sign of those who are mindful of death in the depth of their being is voluntary detachment from every creature.”
11. “Ascetic Discourse”, p. 242.
12. Ibid.
13. “On Watchfulness and Holiness”, p. 166: “The spider hunts small flies; but you will continually slay “the children of Babylon.’” And p. 190: “[E]very monk will be at a loss when he sees the abyss of his evil thoughts and the swarming children of Babylon. But again Christ will resolve this doubt if we always base our mind firmly on Him. By dashing them against this rock we can repulse all the children of Babylon.”
14. St Maximos the Confessor, “Two Hundred Texts on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation of the Son of God”, in The Philokalia: The Complete Text Compiled by St Nikodimus of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, ed. and trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, vol. 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 161: “The kingdom of God is present in all believers in potentiality; it is present in actuality in those who, after totally expelling all natural life of soul and body from their inner state, have attained the life of spirit alone.” See Nikolai Berdyaev’s criticism in Spirit and Reality, trans. Boris Jakim (1939; San Rafael CA: Semantron Press, 2009), p. 89: “There is nothing more repulsive than petrified lifeless virtues, than an ascetic turned mummy, become an enemy of all human impulses.”
15. See The Ladder of Divine Ascent in regard to friends and family who may object to the monastic choice, p. 63: “When they surround you like bees, or rather wasps, do not for one moment hesitate.”
16. Job 41:13–14: “Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook, / Or snare his tongue with a line which you lower?” (NKJ). See “Ascetic Discourse”, p. 220, for a pertinent citation of this chapter of Job: “Satan has no visible face, for he conceals his cunning beneath many garments.” The remark exemplifies asceticism’s bias towards personification: it is the presumed true face of evil that is said to be concealed rather than what might be its true facelessness.
17. “Ascetic Discourse”, p. 243.
Ordinary people do not know that everything is possible. Even when the weight of evidence forces their mind to admit this, they do not really believe it in their bones.2
I
THE DESERT AND THE SEA
Even if every individual Christian can, after the Resurrection, follow a personal path towards salvation, mankind (which includes the masses of the dead) must await its deliverance: “you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”3 And the Apostle Paul writes: “For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.”4 In a pending, inconclusive world,5 the power of evil thrives for the time being,6 endangering everyone.
The first ascetics departed sinful places in order to strive for holiness in the marginal territory of the desert: “[T]he saints fled from the towns, for they knew that the company of corrupt men is more destructive than a plague.”7 The evil the monks left behind naturally still remained. The question can therefore be asked whether monastic life involves a retreat from the common struggle against evil. Despite all its hardship, is the ascetic pursuit of deiform soul-perfection a mode of escapism so individualised and apolitical as even to justify being called narcissistic?8
Any answer to this question must be qualified immediately. For a start, the hesychasm is not simply personal. It is undertaken in humble subjugation to the Logos. Therefore it may be said to be an individualistic practice only outwardly. Furthermore, the monk’s soldierly self-discipline stems from awareness of human frailty and susceptibility, including his own. According to St Neilos the Ascetic, the monks “fled from the sophisticated wickedness of men and from all the unnatural things of which the towns are full, not wishing to be swept off their feet and carried along with all the others into the whirlpool of confusion”.9 In other words, the pull of the wicked social vortex is too strong even for virtuous and wary people. By their rejection of ordinary community, the desert founders were determined to overcome intrinsic human weakness. They showed little pity for those left behind to drown: detachment was valued above solidarity.10 The moral strictness of early asceticism is reflected also in its attitude to childhood. “We are more feeble than tiny children,”11 says St Neilos the Ascetic: “Abandoning all effort to attain higher things and to develop an adult intelligence, we are seduced by worldly amusements, making ourselves a laughing-stock to those who judge things at their true value.”12 Harshly, St Hesychos the Priest more than once cites Psalm 137 to champion a form of spiritual infanticide.13
Unappealing to some modern sensibilities, this spiritual militancy is less significant in itself than as a typical expression of ascetic anthropocentrism (and anthropomorphism). Notably, in order for virtue to be considered a weapon against evil, evil must be understood as an adversary and combatant: personification holds the doctrine together. Even demons are approximately human in form, and the spiritual offspring of Babylon certainly are too. But anthropocentrism is philosophically the weakness of ascetic thought. The claim that it is spiritually possible to ascend to the Kingdom of God, with the saint becoming an empty vessel for the Logos,14 results in an eschatologically premature disregard for the impersonal dimension of evil. If passions and temptations are mere heathen babes to be battered against rocks, then the fight against evil is a manageable though admittedly brutal enterprise. The desert monks turned away from what they themselves recognised to be the challenge of diffuse, formless and enveloping evil such as is represented by images of plague, whirlpool or swarm15—evil not in person but plural and pervasive; evil as culture, environment or climate; evil overwhelming like the Leviathan but, unlike that beast, mindless and lacking any singular creaturely form.16 One meaning of the desert, as opposed to the town, is that it is the region where evil only shows a human-like face. What is more, the desert is the quintessence of land (stability) rather than sea (liquidity), which in turn is the quintessence of shapelessness. St Neilos the Ascetic asks, “Why is the fear of God less powerful than fear of the sea?”17 It may be because the sea is a faceless picture of danger so changeable and vast as to appear infinite.
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