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In the days of the old covenant, spiritual life was manifested in three forms--almsgiving, prayer and fasting. It received its completion in the Sermon on the Mount that placed it in the service of evangelical charity. The post-apostolic age added to it martyrdom and celibacy without making them a novelty. Indeed in late Judaism, believers sealed the confession of their faith with their blood, and, on the other hand, St. John the Baptist reflected the spirituality of the Essenes, and the Lord and the apostles scandalized no one by their celibacy. On the whole, this spirituality responded to the can of the one thing necessary and sought freedom from the bonds of this world in order to go more joyfully to meet the one who was coming.
The great joy of the first spiritual teachers, their optimism also, came from their unshakable confidence in the image of God. This conformity of the divine and the human, already full of grace by its nature, Christ manifests and renders efficacious for all. In its dynamic function, it is “a guiding image” toward the fullness of a cure. The Bible forcefully stresses the therapeutic idea of salvation, and thus conditions Christian spirituality at its very source.
In the light of revelation, salvation has nothing juridical about it; it is not the sentence of a tribunal. The verb yacha in Hebrew means “to be without restraint”, at ease. In a wider sense, it means to deliver, to save from a danger, from an illness, from death; this makes clear the very particular meaning of reestablishing a vital balance, of curing. The substantive yecha, salvation, signifies total deliverance with peace--shalom--at the end. In the New Testament soteria in Greek comes from the verb sozo; the adjective sos corresponds to the Latin sanus and means to restore health to one who has lost it, to save from death, the natural end of every illness. That is why the expression “Thy faith has saved thee” includes the version “thy faith has cured thee”, the two terms referring to the same act of divine pardon, an act that touches soul and body in their very unity. In accordance with this idea, the sacrament of penance is thought of as a “medical clinic”, and St. Ignatius of Antioch calls the eucharist, pharmaxon, a remedy of immortality.
Jesus thus appears as the divine healer, saying: “It is not the healthy who need a physician, but they who are sick... I have come to call sinners, not the just.”21.1 Sinners are the sick who are threatened with spiritual death, more fearful than that of the body. We can then specify the therapeutic meaning of salvation: it is the cure of a being and the elimination of the germ of mortality. This is why the Savior called himself the life, and the saved receive eternal life. The end joins the beginning when man, having received the breath of life, lives by participation in the Holy Spirit, creator of life. Ascesis seeks to refind that deep and adequate conformity of man to his own truth, his norm, as the fertility of the earth and the beauty of a woman are conformed to theirs. Ascesis is practiced in order to render man very much like God's thought of him. In this perspective, “the works of faith” are neither means nor “merits”, but symptoms of health-salvation.
The extent of evil can be measured by the power of its antidote. The sick are cured by a treatment that befits the stature of God. The physician, instead of the patient, passes through death and inaugurates his universal remedy: “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.”21.2 The cross is planted at the threshold of the new life--vita nova--and the water of baptism receives the sacramental value of the blood of Christ. From then on, ascesis teaches participation in the “health” of the Savior, but this entails a victory over death and therefore a preliminary purification. Only the trial of suffering can so deepen and purify life as to lead to conscious and true joy. The Church announces that “by the cross joy has come to all of us”, and this message traces for us an unchanging and perfect itinerary. If every destiny is thus placed under the sign of “the carrying of the cross”, “the cross is vivifying” and its joy transcends all enjoyment of dolorism and agonizing sensibility. Ascesis leads beyond psychism, and spiritual mastery fosters extreme sobriety of feeling.
The Old Testament expectation of the messianic age had already formed a pilgrim type. The New Testament fulfillment only accentuated more forcefully this state of homo viator [man the wayfarer]; it entrusted him with a precise and human task.
According to the Gospel, time is short; this world as we see it is passing away; now that the bridegroom has been taken away, we can no longer enjoy the world and live in the penultimate values of existence. Qualitatively, since Pentecost, we live in the latter times. This situation suggests a great liberation from the cares of the world in order to make our awaiting active. Such an ascetic “activism” corresponds to the taste of our age, which in its spirit of invention and its social preoccupations is opposed to quietism. If we see that spiritual men constantly insist on manual work, this is not simply to occupy their leisure time, because ascetics earn their living in order to practice charity.21.3 The true “impassibility”, according to Evagrius, “is accompanied by an immense love of God and a boundless fervor for the works of charity”.21.4 An angel revealed to Pachomius that “the will of God is that we should put ourselves in the service of men”. Pachomius later said that “the love of God consists in our taking trouble one for another”.21.5 Thus ascetics were true to man's task, discovering in it the dimension of the kingdom; they saw perfection in the fear “of wounding love, however slightly”.21.6
The Fathers were completely conscious of the changing forms of ascesis. The Apophthegms recounts this incident. “The holy fathers were prophesying on the last days. `What have we ourselves done?' they wondered. One of them, the great Abbot Ischyrion, answered: `We have observed the commandments of God.'--`And those who will follow us,' continued the others, `what will they do?' Ischyrion re- plied: `Those will succeed in doing only half of what we have done.' The fathers still insisted. `How will it be with those who come after them?' `The men of that age,' the abbot answered, `will not be rich in works; the time of the great temptation will arise against them; those then who are good will be greater than we are and than our fathers were.”'21.7
Today the spectacular practices of former times have become interior. Exploits are hidden under the mantle of daily life. The superhuman has become more human; it takes the exact measure of the modern world, of its needs and its mentality. Spirituality, without compromising anything, seeks to adapt itself to the evolution of the human psyche. Thus ascesis in its beginnings manifested a biological exuberance; now nervousness and lack of resistance of the normal constitution would advise rather the avoidance of every apparent violence. Medicine, where it can, suppresses suffering and thus makes man more vulnerable, more sensitive to physical pain by the fact that pain has become rarer.
Ascesis places its emphasis elsewhere, and very fortunately it shares the major preoccupations of all free philosophic reflections. After Jung, psychologists know well that a little freedom causes anguish, but much freedom cures it. This is exactly the aim of ascesis: to transcend every limit, to expand souls by the greatest daring of love, and to develop the person by means of gifts and charisms.