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“Put on the armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”16.1 St. Paul exhorts all the faithful to exercise themselves in the combats of the faith and gives us an image taken from military life and from that of sports--the soldier and the athlete.
The word “ascesis” comes from the Greek askesis and means exercise, effort, exploit. One can speak of the athletic ascesis when it seeks to render the body supple, obedient, resistant to every obstacle. The ascesis of scientists and doctors shows their magnificent abnegation that sometimes costs them their lives.
Monastic tradition has given to this term a very precise meaning; it designates the interior combat necessary in order that the spiritual acquire a mastery over the material.
Among the first monks, there were some called messalians, who had the notion of forming an aristocracy of super-Christians. Tradition, especially that of St. Basil, has always rejected this false conception. In his works, St. Basil hesitated to use the word “monk” on account of these messalianic pretensions. He insisted in his Rules on the fact that the monk is anyone of the faithful who wishes to be thoroughly Christian to the very end. He did not wish to hear monasticism spoken of as a state above another. An apothegm of Marcarius specifies that “a monk is called a monk because he converses day and night with God”.16.2 This is a grace offered all Christians.
In this wide sense Christian ascesis protects the spirit from any hold on the part of the world. It recommends overcoming evil by the creation of the good. Thus ascesis is never anything but a means, a strategy. Evagrius gave the counsel never to make a passion out of the ascetic means against the passions. “Do not turn into a passion the antidote of the passions,”16.3 he said. He thus foresaw the ascetic obscurantism that would consider itself an end; this comes from an excessive concentration on sin and from a mortification in which ends and means are identical. “Because many who used to weep over their sins have forgotten the aim of tears, they have been seized with madness and have been led astray.”16.4 Man can create a morbid and fantastic atmosphere where he sees everywhere only evil and sin and where he lives in the company of demons and in the fear of hell. We must admit that a certain kind of ascetic literature fosters such a state of mind, but there is an abyss between the Gospel and such literature. In the Gospel it is God who speaks; in mediocre texts it is a misguided man who discourses without ever having assimilated the spirit of the Gospel. Christ was a perfect ascetic, but he lived among men and descended into their hell in order to bring his light there. Then the good thief in a moment of repentance sees opening before him the door to the kingdom, and tax-gatherers and sinners may perhaps advance beyond “the just ascetics” on the path of salvation.
The Gospel is messianic and explosive; its rejection of the world is very particular to it, for it is never ascetic but eschatological. It sets before us the exigency of the end, the balance sheet, the passage to the pleroma. During the liturgy, before the anaphora, there is a command to close the doors of the church. In fact one closes the doors of time and opens the one giving access to eternity; all history enters and finds itself “in the nuptial chamber of Christ”.16.5
The Gospel ascetic is a witness and an apostle. That is why the monastic tradition, later than that of the desert, dwelt upon the letters of St. John, and insisted on love of neighbor and the ascesis of the heart. It is striking in its excess, not of fear, but of overflowing love and of cosmic tenderness “for every creature, even for reptiles and demons”.16.6
The “individual salvationist” who is concerned only with the salvation of his soul manifests a dangerous distortion. We can never keep ourselves alone before God; we are saved only together, “collegially”, as Solviev said: he will be saved who saves others. St. Dorotheus16.7 gives a beautiful and clear picture of salvation under the form of a circle. Its center is God, and all men are on the circumference. In directing themselves toward God, each one follows a ray from the circle, and the nearer he approaches the center, the nearer the rays are to one another. Thus the shortest distance between God and man passes through the neighbor. Those exclusively devoted to action should understand that the hermits, by their incessant prayer, intervened actively in history. The efficacy of all human action is dependent on the intercession of their prayer, on the flame of their prayer that they send into the heart of the world. They know that man cannot respond to the entreaties of earth, and that is why they become hermits. St. Isaac the Syrian (in his Sentences) said so to his disciple: “Here, my brother, is a commandment that I give you--let mercy turn the balance of your scales until the moment that you feel in yourself the mercy that God feels toward the world.” At this moment of maturity the recluse can return to the world.
This ascesis requires a great lucidity in order to see oneself as one really is. The balance that is sought is accompanied by a clear vision of one's own reality, but it advises against too much self-analysis. To look perpetually at oneself as in a mirror can cause a morbid state of excessive scruples. More than anywhere else perfect moderation is necessary here, as well as an experienced guide and the beneficial atmosphere of a living community.
Self-love and its tyrannic wishes build a wall between the soul and God; the art of obedience destroys it.
Origen admirably explains the ministry of the elders: “In every place where masters are found, Jesus Christ is in the midst of them, on condition, however, that the masters keep themselves in the temple and never leave it.”16.8 “The temple” for Origen meant an uninterrupted contemplation of Jesus.