Essay on Asceticism and Christian Optimism

It's a popular opinion in the modern day that Christianity is a radical pessimism, inasmuch as it's believed (by some believers and non-believers alike) that it teaches the despair of the world and assurance of escaping it. Paul condemns the "sins of the flesh", Jesus never ceases to preach on rejecting wordly goods, and famed ascetics of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and the Copts are now seen as rejecting the world as an evil. Is it not the rejection of those rejection - this great affirmation - one of the great traits of the modern conscience? A confidence in the intrinsic worth of the world, hope for its indefinite progress, and the benefit of all man is what we know as our modern optimism. Have we not overcome such hate?

Surely to come to understand this situation better we need to look to the ascetics - the so-called heroes of the interior life - and from it we grasp an affirmation from the very beginning of the Bible. The claim, from the creator, that he made the creation and made it all good (very good, to be precise). Yet to explain evil many claims had come to be, more assured of their position being the Gnostics. To reconcile the very good universe with evils they threw responsibility to an inferior 'Demiurge' between God and Creation. Some took it further to express Plotinus' idea that matter in itself is evil and thus taught a clear rejection of the material world for the "immaterial" good. St. Augustine wrestled with the Gnostics early in his life, trying to understand them. "If there is no God, whence comes the good? But if there is a God, whence comes the evil?" was an early dilemma in his life. After being a Gnostic for some time he came to understand that neither position could be coherent in a Christian scheme, particularly Plotinus' view. To assert that matter is both evil and created is an impossible pessimism unreconcilable with Christian teaching, same as Plato's claim that we are a soul imprisoned in the body, which Augustine also wholly rejected. To them, every nature works towards its own natural end (it's own good) and yet good comes from God and so all natures come from God.

But then what is evil? He grasped from teaching and from reason that evil has no body to itself - if something were made evil, to fulfill it's nature as evil would be good and we're in a contradiction then where evil is good - and so evil is grasped akin to darkness: It has no material form to itself, it's simply the lack of light. Evil would be a dislocation of things from their natural ends and evil stems necessary but the universe's own mutability. This is how early Christianity grasped good and evil. Evil is truly reduced to the sum of the positive good. The notion of the good world being tainted by the original transgression against God and sinful to its roots later in Christian development that extends from later thinkers such as Calvin and Jansenius.

The Christian view of humanity, despite the fallen nature assumed of every person, is not one of being fallen. We behold a human race that is still of such fecundity as to spread over the entire Earth. An admirable man whose intelligence, dormant in the infant, progressively awakens and develops until it partakes in the fruits of the world - art, invention, agriculture, love, poetry, navigation - and although damaged by its irrational desires still grows and reaches for great heights towards a great eternal destiny. Our fall had weighed us down and bred conflict between us and our natures but we are still of God despite. The universe is not a proving ground or some consolidation but rather a gift that we struggle to fully accept and through our work and through our love we will come to accept it. But how we accept it is the core of the issue in this lengthy talk.

As I've said, it is not consistent with the teachings of the ascetics that we are to reject the world nor the body. This can be found best, I find, with St. Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Brother Sun wherein not only the water, earth, and the air would receive their praise and benediction but also the very death of the body itself as simply a love of the nature that is. If anywhere the heart of man entered into a fraternal communion with all that exist and all that lives, it is a love of God as to love the works of God is to love it's creator by extension.

Here I would say we have reached the core of the issue, for the Middle Ages knew no stronger asceticism than in St. Francis of Assisi - or any more absolute confidence in the goodness of nature. Far from excluding optimism, Christian asceticism is the reverse side of its optimism. The ascetics will mention contempt for the world and a renunciation of the world it is not a hatred of the world but a hatred for the world as it is. By wrestling with the flesh, the ascetic seek to both restore the man to his rational self before the fall, no longer guided by irrational desires. By wrestling with the world the ascetic rejects not the world in itself but its sinful disorder and wishes to restore it to its own integrity rather than the modern optimism, where the world is praised for the world's sake. Nothing could be more optimistic and genuinely hopeful than the Christian ascetic by this view. He turns away from disorder and the evils of the world to, in his own way, to adhere with all his hearts to the order, beauty, and good of the world that others have attempted to will away. The question is not whether the world is good or bad but rather whether the world is sufficient to itself and whether it suffices.

If optimism is grasped as hope for the good to the point of looking evil in the face and fighting it then we can accurately see Christian Optimism in the ascetics. It is but through that love and hope that the ascetic works not to accept the gift of creation as damaged but try to fix it back together again.