ASCETICISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
This essay has three parts. Click here for the first part, “The Desert and the Sea”. Click here for the third part, “The Prison”.
18. See St Maximos the Confessor, “On the Lord’s Prayer”, in The Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 289: “The Logos destroys the tyranny of the evil one.”
19. The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Gospel of St. Matthew (Oxford: John Henry Parker; London: F. and J. Rivington, 1860), p. 1097.
20. Περίλυπός ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου (Matt. 26:38). Also Mark 14:34.
II
GETHSEMANE
GETHSEMANE
The lesson of the journey from Gethsemane to Golgotha recorded in the Gospels is that human resilience meets its limit not only in death but also in extremes of fear and grief. Unless this pathos is factored in, eschatology is nothing but symbolism, for evil is already vanquished.18 The lesson may be difficult for Christians to accept at depth. Certainly, ascetic emphasis on watchfulness stands in uneasy relation to the loss of vigilance at Gethsemane. It is as though the early monks wished unconsciously to atone for, or even somehow to undo in retrospect, the disciples’ exhausted inability to accompany Jesus while He trembled at what He was being called to face. The hesychasm seems to aim at creating holy men who can outdo in endurance not only the hand-picked followers of Jesus but even the God-man Himself. Such a project is imaginable only if evil as an environmental power is discounted, for man cannot master the cosmos. But the horror of Gethsemane is precisely of the pervasive and impersonal kind. In this perspective, laziness or weakness of faith are not the issue. The disciples’ sleep is not everyday fatigue; it is their way of surviving the agony of metaphysical revelation which is occurring. The horror is that, all around the garden, soon to break into it, massive evil is quietly building up to its world-altering act of unrestrained violence, and Jesus and His companions sense the magnitude of what is coming, as though they were the only ones able to hear the first rumblings of an avalanche. In this high place, signs of the great cataclysm appear. Leviathan approaches in the distance, the flood waters rise, tectonic plates shift, plague is unleashed. All this is perceived on the spiritual plane by the witnesses at Gethsemane, and it is simply not bearable at first. It is no wonder that the disciples falter for a while, leaving Jesus alone to falter in His own fashion. They can no more flee from the cataclysm than someone who has been sucked too far into a maelstrom. Holy dread isolates and subdues them. St John Chrysostom says of the disciples: “they were so drowned in despondency, as not to have any sense even of His Presence.”19 And Jesus Himself says: “My soul is very sorrowful [Περίλυπός, perilupos], even to death,”20 with Περίλυπός conveying His engulfing, all-encompassing, near-deathly apartness of sorrow. There is no safety in this brief and appalling moment because what is now evidently at work in the world is not a demon of sin, but an amorphous and spreading evil powerful enough to recruit the whole multitude standing before Pilate to clamour for the ritual murder of the Christ, and to have that murder be done.
GO TO PART 3