The recovery of asceticism:

...In describing the simple and humble practices that helped historic people to overcome habituation, addiction, and deadness, the texts of historic Christianity describe a way different from the ultimately numbing "consciousness-raising" method...

...Another interpretation of the content and goal of Christian life reached full articulation in Francis's contemporary, St...

...Praktikos 53...

...They understood the body as method and were grateful...

...But even some of Francis's immediate and most devoted followers rejected the harshness of the continual ascetic practices which Francis imposed on himself as his method of achieving ecstasy...

...he denied himself sleep, shelter, and food to such extremes that those of his followers with less robust physiques could not imitate him...

...Happiness, as Thomas describes it, occupies a range of human experience between what he calls "delight" and "the ease of the lover with the beloved...

...yet we are not so much in danger of too-harsh ascetic practices as we are of forgetting the usefulness of any asceticism...

...Physical exercise, periods of solitude, of silence, or of celibacy: any of these ascetic practices might at some time be highly effective and valuable for locating and treating the habit and addictions that result in deadness...

...Have theologians been talking about souls for so long that we no longer know how to think about bodies - human bodies and the body of our earth...

...Praktikos 53).em a body...

...The deadness of ordinary life was seen as leading inevitably to the drugged acceptance of physical death...

...No one of these practices is predictably good for everybody at any time...

...Attention to historical Christian attitudes to the human body can address both the global situation in which we stand and the contemporary failure of Christian theology to take the body as seriously as God did in taking a human body...

...Traditional Christian asceticism of the gentler sort we saw illustrated by Evagrius Ponticus and Aquinas offers us another way to go - one not afflicted with the death orientation of the ecstatic model...

...Whatever else ascetic disciplines do, they are a way of taking responsibility for one's own life, for taking, in the best sense, one's life in one's own hands and thereby confronting the nearly overwhelming seductions of a culture equipped with unparalleled techniques to make us "sit back" to be a voyeur instead of a participant, a spectator instead of an actor...

...Francis of Assisi...

...Are not the two definitions of what constitutes the experience of lifefulness still with us - the ecstasy model, that uses, works, and damages the body in order to "get high," and the less frequently encountered lifefulness model, that recognizes care for the body as an important aspect of integrated happiness...

...Asceticisms of fasting, watchfulness, and celibacy are urged in the gospels and in Paul as a method of overcoming the sluggishness that dulls perceptions and promotes inertia in the face of the urgency of what the New Testament authors and Jesus himself took to be a rapidly approaching apocalypse...

...One thinks of the civil-defense ditties featured in the film The Atomic Cafe, or the deluded complacencies of the government officials interviewed by Robert Scheer in With Enough Shovels, or the dottie stiff-upper-lip of the British couple who would go genteelly into that dark nuclear night in Raymond Briggs's satiric When the Wind Blows Repeatedly, for example, Mr...

...Addiction requires the continual upping of the dose in order to experience the same high and thus inevitably comes to threaten physical existence...

...The first historical example is that of St...

...A powerful tool always carries a danger of becoming an end in itself, an escape from the problems and the responsibilities of the communal world...

...The methods of the ecstasy model are easily identified: alcoholism, drug dependence of all kinds, overeating, promiscuity, overwork, a killing life-pace, and a polluted environment...

...in some measure have applied themselves to the contemplation of created things know the grace of the Creator in giving them a body...

...We will neglect Francis's intimate empathy with the natural world in order to focus on one feature of his life that has not received as much attention...

...Again and again in national crises the prophets preached a program of altering habitual behavior, fasting - acting differently - in order to wake people up to a threatening situation...

...The recovery of asceticism MARGARET R. MILES JONATHAN SCHELL'S The Fate of the Earth is only one of the recent works that ponder the gap between the unprecedented possibility of nuclear annihilation and apparent inability to respond to this danger in any but the most conventional ways...

...But asceticism is relevant to the capacity to respond, to remove the cushioned incomprehension and the deadened sensibilities that muffle our voice as individuals and as a culture...

...Christian tradition shows two very different - even contradictory - attitudes toward the meaning and value of the human body, one which may be leading us to extinction and one which offers concrete suggestions for arresting the hypnotized shuffle toward the cliff...

...It is a striking but largely ignored aspect of scriptural injunctions to asceticism that these practices are always urged in the context of the need to become aware of pressing threat and that they are for communal awareness, not for purposes of solitary "enlightenment" or escape...

...Let us look first at Scripture: In the Old Testament, ascetic practices were the means, the method, of political sensitivity...

...He traces the symptoms of this torpor as they affect every aspect of our lives - sex, personal relationships, social and political attitudes...

...Another kind of fasting whose usefulness is fully demonstrated only by doing it, is fasting from the media...

...After Francis's time, the interest of western Christians in the stigmata continued...

...Whatever the answer or response is, it must be worked out on many fronts - political, ideological, and personal...

...if we love one another, God lives in us and God's love is perfected in us...

...Ascetic practices which make people alert and passionate are assumed to be the most directly efficacious activity that the community and individuals within the community can undertake...

...These addictions deaden our senses and our awareness...

...They support the massive inertia in the face of nuclear threat, environmental pollution, and a host of other social problems...

...We cannot afford the habits and addictions that sustain and cushion, that mask and protect, settled perspectives, conditioned life styles, and conventional patterns of relationship which keep us from effective protest against a suicidal course...

...We are as much ascetics as the medievals were...

...The stories of the atrocities of Hiroshima, descriptions of kill and overkill, facts and figures that boggle the mind - all these, unless our minds and bodies are already clarified, tend only to terrify briefly and then to deaden us even further in the face of such overwhelming data...

...And the methods by which each of these goals were realized in historic Christianity, the ascetic practices that either (in the ecstasy model) damaged the body, or (in the integrated lifefulness model) were used to locate and address the habits and addictions which dulled the senses, the sensibility, and the intellect - these methods are still with us also...

...I trust this method - the body as method - to achieve the "alert and passionate" consciousness necessary for changing our situation more than I trust the "consciousness-raising" methods employed by many people alarmed about the nuclear threat...

...And Christian faith also presents us with an alternative to the ecstasy model - the model of integrated lifefulness...

...Why don't Christian theologians talk more about this enfee-blement of sense and will - and its effects on our social and political life...

...Any asceticism in this model - the lifefulness model - is and must be for the benefit of body and soul alike...

...Then death...

...Here again, in the face of societal inertia, ascetic practices are urged for the purpose of overcoming communally reinforced blindness, the blindness of trying not to see what lies before and all around the community...

...This must be recognized...

...Schell puzzles over the attitude of an overwhelming majority of the American population over this "fact of life" with which we have lived for the last thirty-six years...

...It is a humble first step, not as dramatic and perhaps not as immediately persuasive as an enormous rally or sit-in...

...Of course, to take on the sensitizing process of mild ascetic practices requires us to trust that change in the individual is a significant first step toward significant social and political change...

...These masochisms of modern life rival, in deadliness, the cavalier abuse of the body of the harshest medieval ascetic...

...The New Testament, on the other hand, is full of injunctions to asceticism that are directly related to an expected imminent end of the world...

...If we do end the world, the sequence is likely to be not a burst of strong-willed activity leading to a final explosion, but enervation, dulled senses, enfeebled will, stupor and paralysis...

...The capacity to love, it seems, is the opposite of "deadness, failure of response, dullness, and coldness...

...version of traditional asceticism that has forgotten its original context...

...the most personal actions \vere understood to be the most public and political...

...Gentle ascetic practices are simply a method of clarifying and energizing body and soul together...

...The disorientation and discomfort that result from stopping the constant barrage of newspapers, magazines, television, and radio show us to what a large extent our consciousness is controlled and ordered by the media...

...Various disciplines of meditation, - as in some historic Christian communities - involving breathing exercises and bodily postures can be useful for gathering and concentrating attention and energy...

...Nor do these ascetic practices that are good for body and soul imply the disparagement of food, drink, friends.or sex, the good gifts of God for the good of body and soul alike...

...Private and public ascetic practices always accompanied the prophets' calls to repentance and awareness...

...It is in the participation of the whole human being, body and soul, in the unique activity of God that happiness can be achieved, and this activity is love: "God is love," Augustine keeps repeating, ' 'no one has seen God at any time...

...We have need of its recovery...

...People, not expecting to live a whole life of rounded years, have sometimes chosen the short-term kick, the addictive high, the ecstatic o.d...

...He characterizes this attitude as "deadness," "failure of response," and "dullness and coldness...

...Francis is the first saint reported as receiving the stigmata...

...If Christian faith and the western Christian tradition has anything to say to us in our present situation it is to help us to question whether the ecstasy model is really consonant with Christian faith, a faith whose doctrinal statements insist on the permanent integrity of the human body as given in creation, modeled in the Incarnation of Christ, and consummated in the resurrection...

...American culture contains a caricature of ecstasy-oriented asceticism...

...As Carlos Castaneda said in one of the Don Juan novels, the progressive deadening of the body through increasing doses leads insensibly to death, "the biggest high of all...

...Thomas described the content of Christian life not as ecstasy but as integrated lifefulness...

...Francis lived what one of his contemporaries called a "life of continuous ecstasy...

...The happiness of human beings is that of experiencing God in the activity of living lovingly, not only, Thomas would later say, by' 'delight of the mind," but also in the'' quickening and perfecting of the bodily senses...

...Here we have a different attitude toward, and treatment of, the body than that dictated by a longing for ecstasy...

...Thomas Aquinas...

...Integral happiness," Thomas wrote, "requires a perfect health of body...

...Medieval people like Francis were fascinated with the way in which physical pain can produce ecstatic states...

...We know intimately and all too well about the use and abuse of the body for purposes of feelings of intoxication...

...They require that individuals become aware of their own particular areas of compulsiveness and address a particular area with a practice designed for it...

...Asceticism is not the answer to nuclear threat or any other social or political problem...

...As one desert ascetic said: "Those who...

...WHAT HAS all this to do with us...

...Oddly enough, the continuing human taste for ecstasy at any cost and willingness to destroy the body has often been the result of the "consciousness-raising" approach to awareness, for instance, of the nuclear threat...

...Passivity deadens, and as settled disposition it deadens absolutely...

...After a vision on Mount Alvernia, Francis, his biographer wrote, "retained a most intense ardor and flame of love in his heart . . . and a marvelous imprint and image of the passion of Christ in his flesh.'' These wounds, it is recorded, gave Francis "very great joy to his heart, and unbearable pain to his flesh and physical senses...

...Both self-interest and fellow feeling seem to have died," he writes...

...The necessity of being "alert and passionate" has never been as important in the public sphere as it is now - when a few human beings have in their control the life and death, not only of individuals nor even of nations, but of the human race and the planet that is our home...

...If we are worried - as we should be - about the failure of response, the sluggishness, dullness, and coldness of many Americans to nuclear war, the persistence of poverty and world hunger, and so on, we must find ways to identify and confront the sources of this deadness, not only in the more dramatic and obvious addictions of drug abuse, alcoholism, etc., but in the many minor but muffling addictions of contemporary life...

...These historic people discovered that what they did was as important as what they thought, that insight is quite as likely to follow change - in behavior, in habits of daily life - as change is to follow insight...

...Asceticism was a political and social act...

...If the "sharp quick sense of life" is our goal, the "alert and passionate'' energy for effective protest and correction of our situation, the dehabituation of our daily lives must be placed high on our agenda...

...This method of achieving ecstasy is that of seizing the energy and vitality of the body for purposes of the soul...

...They saw that as long as people continued to be cushioned by their habitual daily living, they would not recognize the peril in which they stood...

...Let us examine two historical representatives of these different ways of conceiving the content of "life," and then consider how pervasively and powerfully operative are these two ideas in our own culture...

...This literal physical participation in the suffering of Christ was the direct accompaniment of the "habitual ecstasy" in which Francis lived...

...He fasted to the point of starvation, keeping his body at the point of death for several years at a time...

...Just as we Americans are habituated to the violence that we read in newspapers and observe on television, the facts and figures about nuclear devastation may, by themselves, deaden us to a possible future so "unthinkable...

...Short fasts, of benefit both to body and soul, for example, can demonstrate to most of us the degree to which we have become addicted, not only to food for nourishment and enjoyment, but to mealtimes as a structure for organizing our days...

...HISTORICALLY, ascetic practices themselves became addicting...

...Thomas's description of human happiness is of an integrated pleasure that includes every aspect of human being...

...Predictably, Thomas's method of achieving happiness is very different from Francis's method of work-ingthebody...

...The ecstasy model is always a death orientation...

...First, I think we share with these historic people the longing to be alive, awake, and sensitive to our personal and public situation...

...His description echoes those of many historic western Christians who have been aware of the usefulness of bodily disciplines but have thought that there was nothing intrinsically Christian in the severe ascetic practices that get one "high" but damage the body...

...Ascetic practices along this model are designed to address and correct the habituations and addictions that deaden, the self-indulgences that are - in reality - extremely hard on the body...