With Lent now upon us, it seemed a good time to try to formulate some thoughts I’d been developing about the idea of asceticism. “Asceticism” is not a word one hears very often, at least in popular culture, and when one does, it almost always has a negative connotation. Even within Christianity, the term is almost never used, especially outside of the Orthodox tradition. I think this is sad, because “asceticism” is a good word that helps to convey and focus our attention on a necessary aspect of a genuine Christian life. I want to focus here briefly on what I think are two general misconceptions about it which may help to remind us what we are about as we begin our own Lenten struggles. They are, it turns out, both variations of the gnostic rejection of physical reality as truly good.
The Iconic and the Apophatic: Charles Williams and the Two Ways
I’m not sure when I first read the novels of Charles Williams. Perhaps in seminary. Perhaps in the early 80s. I do know that my copy of The Place of the Lion, for example, originally cost me $2.95. (Was there really a time when I could slip a dime into the machine and pull out a six-ounce bottle of Coke?)
I recall my initial response to the novels—absolute, dizzying disorientation. I had never read anything like them before. I had been an English lit major in college and had read tons and tons of British and American novels, but Williams’s novels were unlike anything I had encountered before. I am tempted to say that they are a genre unto themselves. They are often described as “supernatural thrillers.” This is accurate as far as it goes, but the novels are also so much more. At their best they might be…
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Nihilism, Ivan, and the Brothers Karamazov
Reading Nietzsche’s discussion of nihilism directly after the Brothers Karamazov, the question came up (in the existentialism class I was TA-ing) whether we should think of Ivan as a nihilist. This got me reflecting on Ivan, who is one of the most difficult characters in the novel, and his role. Here’s what I could come up with (in condensed form).
Ivan espouses, at several points in the novel, clearly nihilistic views, most famously that there is no God and no immortality, and, thus, that everything is permitted. He’s also pretty miserable most of the time, with no clear meaning to his life, and ends up on the verge of insanity. This fits with Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism as a ‘pathological psychological state’ and an ‘illness’ that involves the ‘devaluation of all values’.
But at the same time, Ivan is clearly conflicted, he is filled with a love of life and has a good heart. He loves his brother and is horrified by his own moral failings. He is clearly conflicted. Now, I don’t think this on its own precludes him from counting as a nihilist in Nietzsche’s sense, since Nietzsche says that one cannot live without positing values and that there is an active form of nihilism which is a striving for new values when the old meaning has lost its meaning. But I don’t think that’s what Dostoevsky had in mind for Ivan; to see why, we have to look at the (polemical) structure of the novel as a whole.
At the most basic level, I think the Brothers Karamazov is best seen as a slavophilic work and a defense of Orthodoxy. The main ideological impetus comes from Ivan, in the most famous two chapters of the novel, ‘Rebellion’ and ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. And in his personal notebooks, Dostoevsky claims that the chapter ‘The Russian Monk’ is supposed to be the primary answer to the challenge of the Grand Inquisitor (though he also says the novel as a whole is the answer).
What’s going on here? My (again, abbreviated) take is this: If you pay attention closely to the Grand Inquisitor, the ‘argument’ is between a Roman Catholic Cardinal, who wants to rule the masses for their own good, and a silent Jesus, to whom the Grand Inquisitor attributes the view that people, given freedom, are able to live happily and choose the good all on their own. Thus, though the views are no doubt caricatured, the debate seems to be entirely between an authoritarian Roman Catholicism and an individualist Protestantism. (This basic idea comes from Hubert Dreyfus)
In other words, precisely what seems left out is the Orthodox view point, the approach of the humble Russian monk. Father Zosima, the spokesperson of this view in the novel, constantly admonishes others on the interconnectedness of all things, the need to take responsibility for others, and the importance of active love. Put in terms of the church, Ivan presents a false dichotomy between the absolute authority of the Catholic pope and the chaos of Protestantism, where each man is his own pope. What he misses is the more mystical, conciliar approach of Orthodoxy. It is this approach that Dostoevsky thinks will save the world, beginning with the Russian monk.
Returning to Ivan, then, it’s important to remember that, though Russian, he was abandoned as a child and ended up almost entirely educated abroad, in Europe. It was in Europe that Ivan came to understand the death of God and absorbed his nihilistic tendencies. But these tendencies are only on the surface. Deep down, at heart, Ivan is still Russian, still above all concerned with God and immortality, and this is the source of his conflictedness – though he longs to believe in Christianity, he only understands the dead Christianity of the West, and fails to understand the more simple faith of his homeland. Thus I think Ivan is, as many Christians have understood Nietzsche, a nihilist in spite of himself in search of a Christ outside of that offered by European Christianity.
Changing my Mind about Mary
Like most Protestants, the Virgin Mary was conspicuously absent from my religious life and thought. Calling her the Mother of God seemed strange, if not blasphemous, and I was quite sure that the devotion showed to her by Roman Catholics (Orthodoxy was not something I was familiar with) was idolatrous. Like most converts, leaving those ideas behind and replacing my former devotional habits with new ones was not something that happened overnight. But it did happen fairly painlessly, simply as a result of immersing myself in the life and prayer of the Church. In spite of any initial reservations I may have had, my experience was not of something unnatural or on the borderline of idolatry, but of something fitting, something right, fulfilling a need I didn’t know that I had.
Still, there were a few turning points or revelations that did help me on my way, and I figured that now, as we approach the falling asleep of Our Lady, would be a good time to share them.
The first happened almost by accident, when I had first begun thinking my way towards an Orthodox understanding of things. I was at my dad’s house and, as I almost always do when I visit a house, I was browsing through his bookcases. A little book – On the Apostolic Preaching by St Irenaeus (a second century saint who was taught by those who knew the apostles), stood out to me and I picked it up and began flipping through it randomly. I don’t even remember the context, and am not even sure of the exact passage, but in the page I read he argued that, just as Christ was the second Adam, who re-united God to man in his person and through his obedience undid the disobedience of Adam, so we need to think of Mary as a second Eve. Her role in salvation history was not accidental or a mere prerequisite. Rather, it was her ‘yes’ to God, her free acceptance of the will of God, that undid the original ‘no’ of Eve. Just as Adam’s fall depended on the prior sin of Eve, the rise of Christ depended on the prior godliness of Mary.
I’m not sure why reading this affected me the way that it did, but I felt suddenly as if my eyes were opened. It became clear to me that Mary occupies a place of importance in the Christian faith that is second only to Christ. Her role and the respect owed to her is infinitely greater than the apostles. And the thought occurred to me: God does not do anything arbitrarily. Is it really the case that he could have chosen just any woman to play her part? Or would it not require someone incredibly special to be worthy to be the mother of God?
And this leads to the second revelation, which came from a renewed focus on the personhood of Christ. As I studied the early heresies and the great councils of the early church, a theme emerged: the controversies that rocked the church were not just about abstract details of speculative theology. They were about how we have to understand Christ for the faith even to make sense. No, they were about who Christ must have been (and must be) if he is to be our savior. And a couple important truths were held to be essential: That Christ is both fully human and fully God, and that these two natures are united in a single person. In other words, our Lord was a human being who was also God. This is why the Council in Ephesus declared in 431 AD that Mary must be confessed to be Theotokos, the God-bearer, the Mother of God; because she gave birth to that human person who was and is God.
And this made me think: Jesus, though God, was a fully human person who had a mother. And if love for a mother is a good thing, then Jesus, the perfect Man, must have loved and respected his mother even more than the best of us loves and respects his or her own mother. Would she not always be special and near to him, even after she left this world? And if we are co-heirs with Christ, his adopted brothers, and in some mystical way part of Christ himself in the Church, then she is our Mother too; and in fact the Church has always understood Christ’s words to St John, “Behold your Mother,” as applying to the whole Church. Therefore, we must love her with all of our hearts as well.
Finally, her importance as a role model has become more and more apparent to me, especially in the current age. First, as mentioned above, she is the ultimate example of obedience to God and openness to his will in spite of appearance to the world (an unwed mother) or personal cost. And if we think of salvation as theosis, as bearing God in our bodies, incarnating him through our virtue, then, again, she illustrates this in the most extreme and literal way possible. Second, with all of the concern for gender equality and the question of the role of women in the Church, we can point to Our Lady as someone who we love and revere second only to God himself, and far more than any other mortal man. Third, and I got this from a very interesting essay from St. Maria of Paris, she exhibits a particular and unique kind of holiness that is much in need in our day. Many of our saints are monastics and ascetics; separate from the world and doers of great deeds. They set an example of extremes. And in today’s climate of extreme interconnectedness and social media, where every act must be performed for the approval of others, we are tempted to think that a thing done quietly, without notice, cannot be truly worthwhile. But our Mother sets a different example. In spite of her greatness and her centrality in the worship of the Church, little is known of her life and, besides her initial obedience, we celebrate no great and singular works. She was satisfied with ‘the little way’, serving God and his people in the little things, in the everyday and the ordinary, the things that mostly go unnoticed but without which nothing good can be accomplished and no one can become holy. And that little way is also what most of us are called to, despite our pretensions and our preoccupation with ‘greatness’; and like her Son, I think our Mother here beckons to us, “Come, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
There’s much more that could be said, of course, and what has been said is barely a beginning. But I hope this will be helpful to someone.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
The Life of Pi: An Aesthetic Pascalian Wager
I was left a bit speechless after my wife and I watched Life of Pi. There was much that was beautiful about the movie, both visually and ethically, but I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t put it all together. Especially disappointing to my analytical mind was my inability to figure out the ending and how the story was supposed to be an argument for the existence of God. After speaking with a few people about it, things began to click a little bit in my mind. Perhaps ironically, it was reading Joel Miller’s negative discussion about it here that opened my eyes to what seems to me its profound positive content.
A quick reminder of some of the key plot points (spoilers): The movie opens with scenes of a young indian boy, Pi Patel, whose father owns a zoo. Many years in the future, an aspiring Canadian author is interviewing Pi about his story, having been told that it will make him believe in the existence of God. Pi tells the following story: For economic reasons, Pi’s father has to close the zoo and he and the family board a ship to move to Canada, along with their animals who will be sold there. During a storm, the ship sinks and Pi is the only one to escape onto a small lifeboat with a few scared and injured animals. He soon discovers that there is another survivor on the boat, a fierce Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, and soon they are the only two left. For the next 227 days, the pair share an incredible struggle for life on the open sea until they land in Mexico and the tiger runs off into the forest as Pi is rescued. Faced with telling skeptical investigators his frankly incredible tale, however, Pi begins to tell a second, less incredible version of the story, in which he was joined on the lifeboat by three humans from the ship whose personalities remarkably resemble those of the animals from the first story. Through various struggles they each die until Pi survives alone. Both stories are consistent with all of the known evidence and neither can be demonstrably proved. The first is beautiful but seems fantastic. The other, though depressing and less detailed, seems more consistent with everyday experience. At a climactic point, Pi asks which of the stories the author (and, implicitly, the audience) prefers. When the story with the animals is chosen, Pi states “And so it goes with God.”
Miller’s criticism, which I initially shared, is something like this: We can’t just choose to believe something because it makes a nice story, especially if it is not true. And that not because of something about the nature of belief, but because a knowably false worldview is incapable of playing the role in one’s life that it is meant to: “if your preferred story is just a self-made construct, then it’s not truly transcendent. It’s a brightly painted ceiling in the rather cramped closet of your own mind and experience.” (He has related worries about the religious pluralism of the films beginning, which I also find potentially problematic; but I don’t think it’s central to the film’s key insight.)
The problem with this objection is that it assumes that we know which of the stories is true and which false. More subtly, it presupposes that Pi himself knows which story is true and which is false. Almost every negative review I’ve read depends on this. But I don’t think this is ever stated. From the outside, both are explanatory and consistent. And knowing how traumatic an experience it would be to see one’s whole family die and then nearly die of starvation oneself while lost at sea, we can imagine that a thoughtful person like Pi might even be unsure whether the extraordinary story with the animals was not just a result of some psychological coping mechanism. Thus it seems to me the question the film poses is an existential one: how do you decide on what to believe about reality in a situation of uncertainty?
In this context, I think the film (and the book) is proposing a sort of aesthetic version of Pascal’s Wager. It is not suggesting that we go against what we know by the use of our theoretical reason, but rather is giving us a practical criterion for belief when theoretical reason ceases to help: Beauty. The author himself says: “Pi makes a parallel between the two stories and religion. His argument (and mine) is that a vision of life that has a transcendental element is better than one that is purely secular and materialist. A story with God (“God” defined in the broadest sense) is the better story, I argue, just as I think the story with animals is the better story.”
And this resonates very deeply for me. For all my interest in apologetics and the philosophy of religion, I don’t think that Christianity can be demonstrably proven. I don’t think it is unreasonable, but I don’t think reason alone can establish it. I can’t at this time say with confidence that I know Christianity is true (though, God willing, I hope one day I will be able to do so). But it makes sense of my experience, I want it to be true, and it strikes me as an exceedingly beautiful view of the world. So that is where I make my wager. That is the version of the story of the cosmos that I prefer.
The Elder Zosima and St Isaac the Syrian
Though the teachings of Elder Zosima from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karmazov seem exotic to many western readers and possibly unorthodox, they in fact show a remarkable similarity to those of a favorite 7th century eastern saint, St Isaac the Syrian. We know that Dostoevsky owned a newly-available translation of St Isaac’s Ascetical Homilies, and this volume is in fact mentioned by name twice in the novel, though in seemingly inconsequential contexts. Dostoevsky was no doubt deeply affected by the saint’s spirituality, and I think Zosima’s principle views in fact reflect and are indebted to those of St Isaac. Below I will list some of these distinctive views, with illustrating quotes from both the fictional Elder Zosima and St Isaac himself. (And note: these were simply the quotes that I could find very easily; I’m sure more digging would find even more striking parallels)
Love for all creation:
Elder Zosima: “Love God’s creation, love every atom of it separately, and love it also as a whole; love every green leaf, every ray of God’s light; love the animals and the plants and love every inanimate object. If you come to love all things, you will perceive God’s mystery inherent in all things; once you have perceived it, you will understand it better and better every day. And finally you will love the whole world with a total, universal love.”
St Isaac: “What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, and for all that exists. By the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful person pour forth tears in abundance. By the strong and vehement mercy that grips such a person’s heart, and by such great compassion, the heart is humbled and one cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in any in creation. For this reason, such a person offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm her or him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner such a person prays for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns without measure in a heart that is in the likeness of God.”
Responsibility for all:
Elder Zosima: “There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all. Whereas by shifting your own laziness and powerlessness onto others, you will end by sharing in Satan’s pride and murmuring against God. ”
St Isaac: “Be a partaker of the sufferings of all…Rebuke no one, revile no one, not even those who live very wickedly. Spread your cloak over those who fall into sin, each and every one, and shield them. And if you cannot take the fault on yourself and accept punishment in their place, do not destroy their character.”
Love is Paradise on Earth:
Elder Zosima: “”Gentlemen,” I cried suddenly from the bottom of my heart, “look at the divine gifts around us: the clear sky, the fresh air, the tender grass, the birds, nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, we alone, are godless and foolish, and do not understand that life is paradise, for we need only wish to understand, and it will come at once in all its beauty, and we shall embrace each other and weep”
St Isaac: “Paradise is the love of God, wherein is the enjoyment of all blessedness, and there the blessed Paul partook of supernatural nourishment…Wherefore, the man who lives in love reaps life from God, and while yet in this world, he even now breathes the air of the resurrection; in this air the righteous will delight in the resurrection. Love is the Kingdom, whereof the Lord mystically promised His disciples to eat in His Kingdom. For when we hear Him say, “Ye shall eat and drink at the table of my Kingdom,” what do we suppose we shall eat, if not love? Love is sufficient to nourish a man instead of food and drink.”
Non-literal ‘fire’ of hell:
Elder Zosima: “Fathers and teachers, I ask myself: “What is hell?” And I answer thus: “The suffering of being no longer able to love.”…People speak of the material flames of hell. I do not explore this mystery, and I fear it, but I think that if there were material flames, truly people would be glad to have them, for, as I fancy, in material torment they might forget, at least for a moment, their far more terrible spiritual torment. And yet it is impossible to take this spiritual torment from them, for this torment is not external but is within them”
St Isaac: “As for me I say that those who are tormented in hell are tormented by the invasion of love. What is there more bitter and violent than the pains of love? Those who feel they have sinned against love bear in themselves a damnation much heavier than the most dreaded punishments. The suffering with which sinning against love afflicts the heart is more keenly felt than any other torment. It is absurd to assume that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is offered impartially. But by its very power it acts in two ways. It torments sinners, as happens here on earth when we are tormented by the presence of a friend to whom we have been unfaithful. And it gives joy to those who have been faithful. That is what the torment of hell is in my opinion: remorse”
Beer Review: Pranqster by North Coast Brewing Co.
This is a ‘Belgian Style Golden Ale’ by one of my favorite breweries. It pours a cloudy light honey color with a one finger head that quickly dissipates. Smell is floral yeast, banana, and cloves. Smooth and medium-light on the tongue, high carbonation. Initial spiced sweetness, followed by a tropical fruitiness with a hint of sour in the aftertaste. Delicious, probably the best Belgian style I’ve had. Pretty close to 5/5.
St Maximus the Confessor on Three Levels of ‘Incarnation’
Obviously, the divine Logos is most clearly and fully present to us in the person of Jesus Christ. We also talk about the Scriptures as God’s Word, as a type of incarnation and revelation of God. But I love St Maximus’ stark claim that creation itself is an incarnation of God; that all things, insofar as they have being, participate in Being itself and thus tell us something of God’s beauty and majesty. God, he says, is ‘fully present’ in all created things (so that nature really is a sacrament):
The Word is concentrated and takes bodily form.
That can be first understood in this sense…that by coming in the flesh he deigned to concentrate himself in order to assume a body and teach us in our human tongue, and by means of parables, the knowledge of holy and hidden things, which surpasses all language…
It can also be understood to mean that for love of us he hides himself mysteriously in the spiritual essences of created beings, as if in so many individual letters [of the alphabet], present totally in each one in all his fullness…In all the variety is hidden the one who is eternally the same, in composite things the one who is simple and without parts, in those things which had to begin on a certain day the one who has no beginning, in the visible the one who is invisible, in the tangible the one who cannot be touched…
It can finally be understood to mean that for love of us who are slow to comprehend, he has deigned to use these letters to express the syllables and sounds of Scripture, in order to draw us after him and unite us in his spirit. (from the Ambigua)
GK Chesterton on Cheese
“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese.
The only other poet that I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: ‘If all the trees were bread and cheese’ – which is indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus.
Except Virgil and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in an exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to breeze’ andseas’ (an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. For their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often say ‘Cheese it!’ or even ‘Quite the cheese.’
The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient – sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with soda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale. Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.”
MacIntyre’s Project in After Virtue
The basic thesis is that we moderns (and post-moderns) find ourselves in an unenviable predicament with respect to our moral discourse. Though we continue to have moral convictions and confidently use moral language, our moral lives are in a state of grave (and unconscious) disorder. The basic problem is that we fail to recognize the specific contexts in which our different moral concepts arose and the way that those contexts gave meaning to the concepts. Being divorced from those contexts, we are bound to be unable to properly grasp or live by the moral understanding that arose in them: “What we possess…are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.” (2)
As an analogy of our situation, he asks us to imagine a world like ours which experiences a catastrophic loss of scientific knowledge for a time. Scientists are put to death, no one is taught science, most of the major works are destroyed. After several generations, people recognize the loss they’ve experienced and try to piece things together based on the fragments that remain. Children memorize portions of the periodic table, learn some of Euclid’s theorems, read fragments of Einstein, etc. And in doing so, they think they are doing science. They use various scientific words in seemingly interrelated and systematic ways, but the basis for such use is largely unknown. Arguments about use abound and often conclude in appeals to authority or self-evidence or intuition. This is the situation MacIntyre thinks we are in with respect morality.
Given the situation, MacIntyre doesn’t think philosophy as traditionally conceived will be able to help us either diagnose the problem or correct it, insofar as philosophy typically limits itself to understanding the underlying connections of our current way of using concepts. So what we need is a certain type of evaluative, philosophical, history. That is, we need to come to an understanding of our situation which shows it to be analogous to the story just given – as involving a flourishing, a catastrophe of understanding, and a confused appropriation of concepts from the past. And that is what he hopes to give us.
On Ancient Paths 