Asceticism & the evil one
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL HINDS John Garvey ASCETICISM & THE EVIL ONE WHY DO WE REFUSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE EVIL? ¦^¦¦^^ ecently I saw Shoah, ^^^^^^B and the terrible question ^^H^^^T came to me again:...
...This is the only border we really control, and the attention we need can't be achieved without effort...
...Christ fasted forty days," Eckhart wrote...
...This tendency is dangerous...
...312...
...What has also always been with us is the possibility of distracting ourselves from the need to struggle for that attention...
...The Epistle of James finds the beginning of war in our hearts' greed and envy...
...We may dismiss such thoughts as the products of a lightened age...
...For early Christians the spiritual life was not only a matter of trying to become more Christlike...
...Noble-sounding defenses always can be found in the layers of self-deception in which we wrap our egos...
...This insight is no doubt what has kept the monastic movement alive in several religious traditions...
...ecently I saw Shoah, ^^^^^^B and the terrible question ^^H^^^T came to me again: Why, ^^¦^^^L in an age which has ^^H l^Hk known the presence of evil like no other, do we find it so hard to acknowledge evil as real, and why do we call evil actions "sick," or "cowardly," or try to explain them in ways which amount to a retreat from a mystery we apparently need to avoid at all costs...
...but we are children of our own age, which has its own forms of naivete...
...We ordinarily think of monks as people who flee what we call "the real world" rather than people who are passionate about encountering reality with a clarity which the world tends to obscure...
...What we avoid is confronting self-interest and the protection of the ego, which, if it did not find these defenses, would always find something else...
...It could sound as if my argument is that prayer and meditation will solve all of our cultural and political problems, and keep us from evil...
...Our egos can take advantage of anything — politics, religion, sex, the pursuit of power — to keep us from confronting our absolutely contingent and mortal nature...
...The attention prayer and fasting brings us to is in any case necessary for getting clear...
...It involves the attention Eckhart wrote about...
...It cut through legalisms of every sort and revealed a central aspect of what is involved in fasting...
...During Lent I came across something by Meister Eckhart which was appropriate for a time of self-denial...
...Follow him by paying attention to the thing that you are most inclined to do, or ready to do, renounce that and watch yourself well...
...Satan tells Jesus in Luke, "Power over all this" — the kingdoms of the earth — "has been given into my hands...
...The monastic tradition involves guarding of the heart, in the words of the Fathers...
...In fact, we have a positive lust for distraction, and live in a time when it is more easily gratified than ever before...
...What I am saying, though, is that without this struggle, without the understanding that there is something which delights in dissolution and destruction, and it is connected with distraction and the flight from silence — without this we will be even worse off than we are...
...311 There is a loose tradition which makes a distinction between personal spirituality and social morality, and it is a sloppy, false one, a convenience...
...A friend of mine, an agnostic, recently told me that as much as he found solitude necessary , it was not enough...
...The evil of Hitler himself is less terrifying than the fact that he had followers...
...The need for that attention has always been with human beings and has taken many forms...
...Even external silence makes most of us uncomfortable, and interior stillness is beyond us...
...it was a freeing/ro/n, a struggle to escape entanglement with evil...
...In the Gospel of John, Jesus refers to "the Prince of this World...
...That is the true horror...
...This may not lead us into anything which looks like ordinary religion: it may lead us into the desert, as Jesus was led, and the Fathers and Mothers of the desert in the first years of monasticism...
...I think what makes our social morality a problem, finally a lethal one, is a failure of spirituality...
...Religious cultures have coexisted with torture and oppression, and religious people are as eager for distraction as any other people are...
...A few days later, in a conversation about something entirely different, a colleague said something similar: the problem she had was not creating a quiet environment, but stopping the interior noise...
...And what we are to be freed from is radical evil...
...Those who find the concept of the satanic an unacceptable anachronism must at least understand its apparent importance to Jesus and to the early church...
...It is often more fitting to keep yourself from anxiety than to abstain entirely from food" (Treatises and Sermons of Meister Eckhart, translated by James M. Clark and John V. Skinner, Harper, 1958...
...We think of silence as an emptiness which must be filled with conversation, reading, or activity of any sort...
...the real problem was becoming still...
...We usually translate the final petition of the prayer Jesus gave us, "deliver us from evil," and this can lead us to think of evil as an abstraction, a catchall term for great harm or misfortune...
...That is plainly too simple...
...In The Power of the Name (SLG Press, 1985) Kallistos Ware writes, "Silence is not merely negative — a pause between words, a temporary cessation of speech — but, properly understood, it is highly positive: an attitude of attentive alertness, of vigilance, and above all of listening...
...Even if he were mad, not possessed, he had followers who were certainly not mad...
...But the New Testament Greek has it, "deliver us from the evil one," and Jesus makes frequent references to the one he considers an adversary who, for whatever reason, has a great deal of power in this world...
...This was the reason for asceticism...
...People will always feel the need for this, despite — or maybe because of — the omnipresence of distraction...
...By spirituality I don't mean religiosity, but rather the attention that can come with prayer and fasting — the only means by which some demons can be cast out, according to Jesus...
...Only guarding the heart, only undertaking the sort of asceticism Eckhart points us towards, can begin to show us the way out...
...One temptation is to explain compliance by evoking authoritarianism...
...As someone once wrote, in our time it is not religion but politics which is the opium of the people...
...Attention may help us to cut through the lies and false appeals made to us at the cultural and political level...
...It is perhaps more accurate to acknowledge the power of authoritarianism,— there are indeed many people who feel obliged for a number of complicated reasons to do what they are told — while at the same time acknowledging the more important fact that many people find advantage in even the worst forms of obedience, and comply with what is asked of them for reasons which are entirely selfish...
...We tell ourselves our compliance involves the fact that we have no real choice in a given matter, or it involves family needs, or the defense of an important cause...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 10
