Vigils Reading

ASCETICISM

AS A WAY OF LOVE

By Paul Evdokimov

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The methods provided for asceticism reflect the epoch which practices it

and adapt themselves to its way of thinking. In the conditions of modern life,

under the weight of overwork and nervous exhaustion, emotional reaction

changes. Medicine protects and prolongs life but at the same time diminishes

the resistance to suffering and to privations. Christian asceticism is never an

end in itself; it is only a means, a method in the service of life, and it will seek to

be in harmony with new requirements.

Formerly, the asceticism of the desert Fathers imposed fasts of a severe

kin, and constraints; today the battle is shifting to other ground. Man has no

need to impose supplementary suffering upon himself; to use [highly artificial

methods] would be to risk breaking him to no purpose.

Today ‘mortification’ means being relaxed from all necessity to ‘dope’

oneself: through speed, noise, excitements, drugs, alcohol, [and similar] stimuli

of all kinds. Asceticism would be, rather, the repose that is imposed upon us, the

discipline of calmness and silence in which a man rediscovers the faculty to

pause for prayer and contemplation, even at the heart of all the noises of the

world, in the [train and bus stations], in the crowd, at the crossroads of a town;

but above all it is the faculty of appreciating the presence of others, the friends of

each encounter.

Fasting, contrary to the maceration which one inflicts upon oneself,

would be the joyous renunciation of all that is superfluous, sharing it with the

poor, and a smiling, natural, peaceful equilibrium. Back beyond the [bodily] and

psychological asceticism of the Middle Ages, we should seek the eschatological

asceticism of the first centuries, that act of faith which transformed the whole

human being into the joyous expectation of the Second Coming, an expectation

which was not chronological, but qualitative, and which discerns the final and

sole necessity, for, according to the Gospel, the time is short and “the Spirit and

the Bride say ‘Come!’”

Asceticism thus becomes a means of paying attention to the challenges of

the Gospel, to the standard of the Beatitudes: it will seek for humility and purity

of heart, in order to deliver its neighbor and to restore him to God. In a world

that is weary, crushed with cares, living to an intensely accelerated rhythm, the

task is to find and to live a ‘spiritual childhood’, the freshness and the

evangelical simplicity of the ‘little way’ which leads to sitting at the table of

sinners, to blessing and breaking bread together.…

Thus, [asceticism] is never anything but a means, a strategy… The

evangelical asceticism of the Gospel goes to extremes, not out of fear, but out of

a love that overflows with tenderness towards the world. St. Dorotheus gives a

beautiful picture of salvation, in the form of a circle. Its center is God, and all the

people stand at the circumference. The nearer one draws to the center — God —

the nearer do the rays of the circle — one’s neighbor — draw to one another.

[And so] St. Isaac can say [a similar thing] to his disciple: “Here is a

commandment for you: let mercy always [be the measure] your scale, until…

you feel within yourself the mercy that God feels towards you and towards the

world.”