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 second part, “Gethsemane”.

ThIS ESSAY IS THE FIRST IN the ENCOUNTERS WITH CHRISTIANITY series. CLICK HERE FOR THE SECOND ESSAY, “EMPIRE OF SADNESS”.

21. ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ (Luke 11:4, also Matthew 6:13).

22. Οὐκ ἐρωτῶ ἵνα ἄρῃς αὐτοὺς ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου, ἀλλ’ ἵνα τηρήσῃς αὐτοὺς ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ (John 17:15).

23. “Two Hundred Texts on Theology”, p. 162.

24. Just one report of slaughter undertaken by Latin Christians during the First Crusade can stand in for all the annals of this lamentable history, quoted in Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (1963; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 68: ‘“In the Temple and the porch of Solomon,” wrote Raymond of Argiles, “men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. … The city was filled with corpses and blood”’ (ellipsis in the original).

25. André Schwartz-Bart, The Last of the Just, trans. Stephen Becker (1959; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 43.

26. 1 Peter 5:8: “Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion” (ὁ ἀντίδικος ὑμῶν διάβολος ὡς λέων ὠρυόμενος περιπατεῖ).

27. Contrast “On the Lord’s Prayer”, p. 289: “[W]hat was once captured and made subject to death now captures the captor.”

28. Tὸ γὰρ μυστήριον ἤδη ἐνεργεῖται τῆς ἀνομίας· μόνον ὁ κατέχων ἄρτι, ἕως ἐκ μέσου γένηται (2 Thess. 2:7).

29. See Giorgio Agamben, The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days, trans. Adam Kotsko (2013; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).

30. “Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (μή τις ὑμᾶς ἐξαπατήσῃ κατὰ μηδένα τρόπον· ὅτι ἐὰν μὴ ἔλθῃ ἡ ἀποστασία πρῶτον, καὶ ἀποκαλυφθῇ ὁ ἄνθρωπος τῆς ἁμαρτίας, ὁ υἱὸς τῆς ἀπωλείας, 2 Thess. 2:3).

31. Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert (Oxford: Lion Books, 2003), p. 38.

32. Ibid., p. 36.

33. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, p. 99.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., p. 100.

37. Ibid., p.101.

38. Ibid, p. 103.

39. Ibid, p. 106.

40. There is also a striking resemblance to historical descriptions of unreformed western mental hospitals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio, The Church and the Kingdom, trans. Leland de la Durantye (2010; London: Seagull Books, 2012).

————, The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days, trans. Adam Kotsko (2013; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).

Berdyaev, Nicolas [Nikolai], Spirit and Reality, trans. Boris Jakim (1939; San Rafael CA: Semantron Press, 2009).

Chitty, Derwas J., The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, n.d. [1966]).

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).

St John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Archimandrite Lazarus Moore (London: Faber and Faber, n.d. [1959]).

Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

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).

————, vol. 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).

Rousset, David, A World Apart, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Seahouse (1945; London: Secker and Warburg, 1951).

Schwartz-Bart, André, The Last of the Just, trans. Stephen Becker (1959; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977).

Ware, Timothy, The Orthodox Church (1963; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1983).

Williams, Rowan, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert (Oxford: Lion Books, 2003).

III
THE PRISON

“[D]eliver us from evil”:²¹ the words of the prayer indicate that deliverance is out of human hands. And so it is that Jesus calls for God’s protection of His flock: “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.”²² One canonical description of Christian life is therefore that it is precarious, a life spent treading carefully through hazardous country. It is the existence of a sojourner. Christian life is defined somewhat differently in the ascetic tradition; the goal of the hesychasm is indeed personal deliverance. “He who through practice of the virtues has succeeded in mortifying whatever is earthly in him,” says St Maximos the Confessor, “will experience no more affliction; for he will have already left the world and come to be in Christ.”²³ Such is the Orthodox meaning of sainthood. It may be so for those who are able to achieve this purification, but when it comes to the majority, the possibility of deliverance is more remote.

Historically, evil has been entwined with Christian religion like a deep-rooted but unsuspected false teaching. There is no other explanation for all the schisms, wars and inquisitions.²⁴ A Jewish author after the Shoah could with justification refer to “the whole Christian universe of violence”.²⁵ An image such as the prowling lion is intimidating enough if contemplated in earnest,²⁶ but evil must also be understood as the institutional, systematic, cosmic and metaphysical force of deceit operating often undetectably in groups, families, organisations, nations. It is something seeming to be another thing or even turning tragically into its opposite—an inhuman, ever-changing and diverse principle of perversion. This force is more terrible and difficult to understand than evil embodied in creaturely form. If it could simply be unmasked or captured, the world would not be as it is.²⁷ Evil is a mystery, above all in an eschatological sense. Therefore Paul writes: “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it [κατέχων, katechon] will do so until he is out of the way.”²⁸ There are many interpretations of the katechon;²⁹ it is associated with empire, for example, but no one is sure of the exact meaning. Paul’s saying is profoundly enigmatic, but one thing seems clear. The katechon is no simple benevolence. It prolongs as well as impedes the dominion of evil by delaying both the messianic return and the apostasy of the last days.³⁰ In the grey zone of metaphysical confrontation, there is no absolute separation between resistance and collusion, friend and enemy, order and anarchy. The katechon, this inscrutable crux of Christian eschatology, is, like the Cross itself, an aporia.

Katechon is a political concept. As such it would seem irrelevant to desert monasticism, which began precisely with departure from the polis and its whirlpools of sin. However, despite appearances, an eschatologically significant politics can be discerned in the hesychasm, so long as a fashionable error is avoided. An ecumenical book like Rowan Williams’ flippantly entitled Silence and Honey Cakes imposes on the early monastic texts an alien, liberal-democratic ideology which substantially and obviously distorts the ascetic tradition: “What is to be learned in the desert is clearly not some individual technique for communing with the divine, but the business of becoming a means of reconciliation and healing for the neighbour.”³¹ The fearsomely austere elements of monasticism—from the pitilessness of its social detachment to the intensity of its project of self-mortification—are set aside by Williams in casual and unworthy phrases: “[W]e read things about the need for penance that can freeze the blood of a liberal modern believer.”³² The author has to censor his source material in order to make it fit with his guiding idea of therapeutic neighbourliness.

By contrast, if the texts are not expurgated, with the blood-freezing parts being taken seriously, a completely different function of religious community can be noticed. This is some of what St John Climacus actually writes about monastic penitence in The Ladder of Divine Ascent:

I heard that there was a certain powerful and strange way of life and humility for those living in a separate monastic establishment called ‘The Prison’[.]³³

[A]s if filled with darkness and a blank despair, they offered to God nothing but a speechless soul and a voiceless mind.³⁴

Others sat on the ground in sackcloth and ashes, hiding their faces between their knees, and striking the earth with their foreheads.³⁵

In their great disconsolateness they had become like dumb men in complete darkness, and were insensible to the whole of life.³⁶

One could see how the tongues of some of them were parched and hung out of their mouths like a dog’s.³⁷

From the number of their prostrations their knees seemed to have become wooden, their eyes dim and sunk deep within their sockets. They had no hair. Their cheeks were bruised and burnt by the scalding of hot tears. Their faces were pale and wasted. They were quite indistinguishable from corpses. Their breasts were livid from blows; and from their frequent beating of the chest, they spat blood. Where was to be found in this place any rest on beds, or clean or starched clothes? They were all torn, dirty and covered with lice. In comparison with them, what are the sufferings of the possessed, or of those weeping for the dead, or of those living in exile, or of those condemned for murder? Their involuntary torture and punishment is really nothing in comparison with this voluntary suffering.³⁸

I, my friends, found so much pleasure in their grief that I forgot myself, and was wholly rapt in mind, and could not contain myself.³⁹
The similarity of these observations to descriptions of the Nazi death camps is so close that it is possible to consider them as prophecy.⁴⁰ This outpost monastery perhaps had an eternal, timeless dimension. Here evil as a cosmic power of lawless violence could be prefigured, microcosmically, like catching lightning in a bottle. But if so, the containers could only be the monks’ own bodies. In this collective activity of redirected violence—which may somehow be able to draw the metaphysical essence of evil out of its web of deceit—collusion and resistance are once more inseparable.

Something of the full meaning of katechon may be glimpsed in the hell-like holiness of the desert Prison. Perhaps the metaphysical importance of the harsh monastic regimen lies not so much in doctrine, but rather in the real effect over centuries of its willing incorporation of violence. The penitents in the Prison gladly let the mystery of evil invade them. Using this awful method, not one but many hooks have been cast by cloistered martyrs into the tongue of Leviathan. Troubling, strange and not escapist after all, this communal practice of self-sacrifice would be world-fleeing asceticism’s unspoken redemptive politics.