Personal Dimension of Orthodox Asceticism
In
describing the process of the Orthodox ascetic practice in terms of relation
between subject and object, we can say that it has its goal in maximal
subordination of human nature as an object for Godlike personality presented as
subject. Saving transfiguration of human nature as spiritual and bodily entity
does not depend on its internal, unconscious "organic" processes but
on the conscious, "super-organic" creative action of the personality.
Of course, this transforming force of personality can not be considered as
external to the transformed nature, since the personality itself never exists
outside nature, but from a formal logical point of view it is necessary to
distinguish the personality as active conscious origin in man from his nature
as a passive unconscious origin. As a fundamental personality trait is its
consciousness, the fundamental condition of ascetic transfiguration of human
nature should be awareness and responsibility of every step along this
difficult path, maintaining the necessary sober-mindedness, without which this
path may turn in the opposite direction. In this regard the Orthodox asceticism
is fundamentally different from many so-called oriental ascetic practices where
not only specifically Christian idea of personality is absent, but the path of
spiritual and bodily transfiguration involves the rejection of personal
awareness and cultivation of unconsciousness, an analog to which can be
regarded as the subordination of the personality to impersonal nature.
Personalism
of Orthodox asceticism stems directly from the common personalistic ontology of
Christianity, that is sufficient detailed in the writings of the leading
Orthodox theologians of the era of ‘Cappadocian synthesis’ in 4th century until
our times when personalism long outgrew the framework of a particular
philosophical school and became a commonplace of Christian thought. However,
this does not mean that in the secular world there is sufficient recognition of
the personalistic nature of Christianity. It is quite possible to establish the
fact that importance of the value of the human personality in Christianity
remains either new or very questionable for a significant part of the secular
world. It is especially true for the secular worldview, for which the idea of
the value of the human person entitled to its rights and freedoms stems from
philosophical and political manifestos of Modern Age (Modern), and for which it
not only cannot be derived from Christianity but directly contradicts it. From
this point of view, Christianity serves merely as a "reactionary," "conservative"
movement from the medieval past, known only by their constant appeals to the
prohibitions and restrictions, and in this context the concept of
"Christian conservatism" seems as superfluous tautology. For the most
modern secular people Christianity is, by definition, conservative, it is
Christianity that can only prohibit but cannot permit. Accordingly, if a modern
secular man knows something about Christianity for sure, it is its asceticism
that restricts "natural" manifestations of human freedom and that becomes
almost the only sign of a certain image of Church. That is mostly why
anti-clerical critics pay so much attention to an imaginary "wealth"
of Church, because its main message to the society seams to them as ascetic
life understood as an end in itself. Therefore, the accusation of Church in
"improper luxury" is the reverse of its accusation in excessive
asceticism.
Meanwhile,
the lack of understanding of the meaning of Christian asceticism on the part of
the modern secular criticism is directly related to non-recognition of the very
value of human personality which the secular worldview supposedly puts into the
spotlight. In fact, as well as the ascetic imperatives of Christianity derive
directly from its idea of the value of the personality, indifferent treatment
of the ascetic issues by the secular worldview follows directly from its flawed
understanding of the value that remains purely a convention for it. The fact is
that in Christian worldview a personality is ontological, it exists as an objective
reality rooted in the Lord. In Christianity the Holy Trinity reveals the unity
of Three Persons who created man’s personality in His own image and likeness
(Gen. 1:26). As, for example, Filaret, Metropolitan of Minsk and Slutsk, puts
it: "Man was originally created in the image of God that should be
identified with His personality, i. e.
with the hypostatic image of His being. Thus personality in Christianity
is a basic ontological reality which exists a priori and is not derivable from
any subjective processes. In Christianity, man is a person from the very
beginning of his existence and keeps being him in all situations, even when he
reaches the limit of mental and physical degradation. That's why man always
have a relatively free choice between good and evil, between different ways of
his existence, and therefore imputation is possible to him, that is why he can
be judged both by temporal and divine justice. Therefore, the ability for
ascetic self-restraint is not simply one of the desirable qualities of a
Christian person, but it constitutes the very personality of man as the
ontological basis on which all the other qualities are layered. Impersonal
being is not capable of asceticism because it is not capable of free choice in
principle, and only a person not only can but must reveal his ascetic power
that he is capable to control one's own nature. At the same time, control of a
person over his nature can not be reduced to the restrictions which human soul
sets for flesh. In this connection it is necessary to make two principal
reservations.
First, it
is not soul which limits the human corporality, but the person controls his
entire human nature, physical and mental, because the soul is part of human
nature. This is a very important reservation, because restriction of emotional
passions is incomparably more difficult than of carnal desire. Moreover, what
we call carnal desires, in fact they are very often associated with specific
mental experiences without which these desires could not be present. I give the
most primitive but illustrative example: a propensity of man to any particular
food forbidden to eat during Lent may be connected to certain associations and
aesthetic experiences aroused from this food, but not to the body's need. In
other words, this propensity is not due to the objective need of the flesh but
the subjective need of the soul, often grown into a habit. In this sense, an
ascetic calms and improves more his flesh than his soul which state affects his
flesh to some extent as the external instrument of his soul. Otherwise, there
is a risk of falling into overt Manichaeism, with its opposition of spiritual
and material sides, and confusing cause and effect.
Secondly,
ascetic control of a person over the nature is not limited to the function of
restriction for spontaneous self-will of soul and flesh, but it also goes to a
certain co-guidance, the direction of the mental and physical forces to those
or other actions that contribute to the saving improvement of man. Otherwise,
the ideal of asceticism would be a complete renunciation of all actions and
thoughts, like the Buddhist ‘nirvana.’ And while following this way it becomes
much more complicated and important to overcome mental vices than just bodily
ones. By contrast to this, the popular view of Christian asceticism in the
modern world sees it as nothing more than the forced restriction of a purely
physical lust and inclination to be isolated from the outside world as much as
possible rather than to participate in it. Therefore, modern uninformed people
often do not see the difference between lay asceticism, on the one hand, and
monastic one, on the other hand, or between the asceticism of the Orthodox
monasticism, and the so-called Buddhist monasticism. This flaw in the view of
Church connects to ignorance and incomprehension of personalistic basis of the
Christian worldview.
The idea
of the value of the human person is also present in modern European secular
worldview, because this worldview inherits, to some extent, some ideas of the
Christian worldview, but the very idea of "person" is deprived of its
ontological status here and remains conditional collective designation of some
human qualities, like the equally conventional notions as "soul,"
"spirit," "spirituality", etc. In the secular context,
"personality" is not objective ontological reality but subjective
psychological desire, it's not a fait accompli, but only initial process,
ending with the death of every human being as the strange creature which is
called "personality". In strict contrast to de-ontologized status of
personality in the secular world view, if something exists objectively in it,
it is nature, and therefore the phantom of "personality" can always
be derived only from nature. Thus in the secular context, personality arises
from impersonal formation, like the man himself do it from the development of
animal species. Therefore, in a secular worldview, it is impossible in
principle to call for austerity as the mortification of nature corrupted by
sin. The very thesis of the imperfection of nature is absurd from the secular
point of view, because nature can not be perfect or imperfect; it is
"natural" and manifests itself as the source of any "naturalness",
so any assessment of it from a perspective of some supernatural values is
meaningless. Of course, in objection to this thesis, a variety of theories and
practices within the Modern history can be exemplified, which call for
self-restraint, and even for overcoming human nature. Just remember that the
culture of Baroque and Classicism in XVII-XVIII centuries, which is based on
the rationalist philosophy of Descartes and his followers, that is the classic
Modern culture, perceived the natural state as sinful and calling for elevation
from the perspective of the Spotless Mind. This contradiction is explained by
the fact that the ideology of classical Modern age of the XVII-XVIII centuries
differs from its radical variants of the XIX and XX centuries in the respect
that it still retains a certain conception of God, which is increasingly
reduced to the impersonal absolute, and hence the notion of personality that is
increasingly deprived of its ontological foundation.
Secularism
of the classic Modern Age is not so much a rejection of the Creator but of
religion as a mystical system of mediation between the Creator and the
creature, which means rejection of Church for the Christian culture. That is
why the emergence of Protestantism was an essential step on the path from
traditional Christianity to the secular "Enlightenment". On this
path, it was not about the emancipation of nature but the emancipation of the
Spotless Mind, a substitute for integral personality, so that nature keeps
their subordinate position in the classical Modern age. This position most
consistently manifested itself in deism with his refusal of the synergy between
God and man, and hence of the very idea of Church. However, it must be kept in
mind that the emancipation of the Spotless Mind was one of the pillars of
secularism, but not the sole, and after it, as its principal competing
alternative, the idea of the emancipation of nature comes out, the idea of
liberation of natural origin from artificial layers, which manifested itself already
during the Renaissance and constantly asserted itself during the Enlightenment.
As the most striking expressions of this contradiction, the anthropological
pessimism of Hobbes, with his condemnation of "state of nature" as
savage and barbaric, and the anthropological optimism of Rousseau, with his
apology for the "natural man" (l`homme naturel), can be called to
memory.
The idea
of the emancipation of the natural breaks through in the romantic reaction to
the primacy of the artificial in classic Modern age, but this idea seems very
ambiguous, because on the one hand, the romantics try to rehabilitate the
"medieval" religious mysticism, but, on the other hand, they proclaim
the primacy of the natural origin over the artificial form, up to the apology
of savagery and barbarism. This is often overlooked by contemporary Christian
conservatives who ascend their roots to the Romantic reaction in the beginning
of the XIX century. They are impressed by the mystical mood of romanticism, but
they do not consider heterodox nature of this mysticism. Movement towards each
other by mysticism and naturalism found himself in a overt pantheistic spirit
of romantic synthesis which replaced the rationalistic deism. In pantheism,
which has become a generic disease of many mystics of Modern Age, personality
disappears completely as unnecessary and any man is only seen as part of the
"divine nature" enslaved by the rational formal civilization. If
following this path it is possible to speak of "austerity", it is
only in the sense opposite to the Christian one – not as overcoming the
imperfect nature, but as overcoming all the non-natural: from social
conventions and pretensions of reason up to the idea of God the Creator, and
creationist and personalistic worldview in general.
To a
greater extent, romantic reaction was not so much a step toward Christianity,
but more a step towards the return of paganism. It is interesting to note that,
initially acting as a fierce enemy of the rational-bourgeois civilization of
the Enlightenment, Romanticism gave only unnecessary revolutionary power to the
formation of this civilization, because the pathos of "exceptional man in
exceptional circumstances", eventually was directed not so much to
destruction of the secular world as to the final destruction of the "old
world". In other words, "super activists", full of reactionary
romantic pathos, went to the barricades against the "soulless"
authorities, and only contributed post factum to the formation of the national-bourgeois
secular republics. The known use of soil and conservative, and religious and
sectarian sentiments in the secular movement of the Russian Revolution of the
early twentieth century can be regarded as a special case of this European
process. As a result of this controversial romantic symbiosis of the XIX
century the problem of ascetic transfiguration of man in Christianity have been
either synthesized or tampered with openly neo-pagan idea of "return to
nature" which was often understood as "nature" of a particular
nation as the "blood and soil", fettered by conventions of the
cosmopolitan civilization. If during the classic Modern era nationalist
movements went hand in hand with the processes of secularization, during the
romantic reaction nationalism suddenly appears in a religious guise, where the
mystical nature of a nation serves as an extension of the pantheistic nature of
the world. An appeal to Christ here is replaced by an appeal to national myths,
reconstructed or even re-invented by contemporaries, and this implies a distorted
interpretation of Christian asceticism, when, for example, fasts during many
days are explained by some "natural cycles”, which also are especially
attributed to a particular national territory. The very orientation towards
"the revival of national tradition" skips its Christian meaning and
turns into the revival of pre-Christian, pagan forms. The idea, known in the
Neo-pagan context, that Christianity is supposed seeking to tame the
"national elements" by imposing ascetic self-restraint and defeatist
mentality on "the healthy forces of the nation" has become the
apotheosis of this trend. The logic of this thesis is quite consistent: if
every person primarily is a representative of a particular "national
element", he is intended to represent this element, like sparks of flame
represent the fire and sea drops represent the water, and thus setting limits
for this elementality is unnatural. At first glance, this position seems more
or less marginal in today's world, but it is the most consistent ontological
justification for any ethnic nationalism. The official ideology of the modern
secular national-states not only does not share this position, but did not
answer the question about the ontological basis of the concept of
"Nation" or "State". In itself this position could be
considered as extreme, but the problem is that any alternative to it within the
secular worldview also reduces man to his nature and does not provide an
ontological justification of his personality.
By analyzing the history of development of modern ideologies of XIX-XX
centuries, one can distinguish four main thought movements, all of them
reducing human personality to his impersonal origin, although explaining this
reduction in different ways.
The first
ideology can be called liberal and individualistic, and today it is actually
the leading ideology of the West, although it suffers a significant crisis for
internal and external reasons. The philosophical basis of this ideology is
mostly neo-positivism which sees the very category of "personality"
as pseudo concept along with "spirit", "soul",
"substance", etc. From the
liberal and positivist point of view, every person is an atomic individual, who
represents a sort of "atom" of human nature, which, in turn, is part
of the entire animated nature. Positivism not only does not explain the
ontological uniqueness of man, but not even bother about the uniqueness,
emphasizing the general biological regularities of homo sapiens as an organism.
Moreover, if the positivists of the 19th century can make quite particularistic
conclusions in a spirit of frank and social eugenics from these regularities,
the neo-positivism of twentieth century derives the need for ethical and
political universalism from the same ground: if all human beings belong to the
same biological species, then they should be given equal rights, and all the
differences between people – from biological to cultural – are not principle
and should not affect their equal political and economic rights. From this
point of view, the human species is a specific link in the overall evolution of
the species, and it is unacceptable to insist on keeping any of its biological
and cultural attributes as immutable values. The ideas of transhumanism and
transsexualism are the last word in the development of this concept, they
eventually erode the notion of man as an ontological constant. But only because
liberalism after all is a political ideology rather than an ontological
worldview, it is more interested in man as an atom of human society rather than
an atom of human nature. In this sense, the liberal concept of man is
trans-biological, but also trans-ontological, and it does not consider the
ontological status of the human person. Unfortunately, the political elite of
modern liberal states rarely think about the philosophical premises and
axiological consequences of the default secular and liberal ideology, while
these consequences constantly affect public life. Under this ideology, every
person defines their moral values for themselves and should be limited only by
the external formal law being understood as a convention ("a social
contract") of all other atomic individuals. Of course, no ascetic
challenges are set by the liberal and individualist ideology for "an
atomic individual", which desire to meet their own psycho-physical needs,
regardless of their content, perceived by this ideology as the norm. Despite
the fact that liberalism looks as the most politically correct and less
aggressive of all modern ideologies, the Orthodox Church has to deal with it in
the modern West in most cases, so the supporters of Orthodoxy should be aware
of the deep philosophical basis of this ideology. It should be understood that
the popularization of the notorious homosexuality and other perversions in
modern society is related not only to the ill will of some dark forces, but,
above all, to the dominant ideology, which is established in the secular
democracies of the last century.
The
second modern ideology can be collectively called the "left" or
"left-liberal," and though it has common roots with the liberal
individualism, its approach to human being is fundamentally different. Despite
the fact that the left ideology has evolved in the twentieth century, its
philosophical basis is still Marxism, heavily flavored with ideas of
"cultural revolution" (A. Gramsci) and psychoanalysis. It is worth
noting that the communist regimes, due to their party dogmatism, directly have
the smallest bearing on the development of left-wing ideology, and the main evolution
of this ideology was held in the liberal West, where an ideological revolution
of the New Left actually occurred at the end of 1960s, which defines the face
of Western culture until today. Unlike liberal individualism, left ideology
recognizes the value of social solidarity and social justice, and is ready to
justify the violence of any scope in the name of that same justice. Like
liberalism, left-wing ideology sees a man not so much a natural phenomenon as a
social one, but sees it also not as an "atomic individual" who needs
to be left alone, but as "the totality of all social relations"
(Marx) that constitutes its humanity only in its social manifestations. Hence,
there is a compulsive social holism of the left ideology, gradually turning
into a plain totalitarianism. One of the few Soviet philosophers who sought to
creatively transform the official Marxism-Leninism, E. Ilyenkov (1924-1979),
tried to justify the concept of human personality, but did not come to anything
new in relation to the old Marxist concept of personality as "an ensemble
of social relations”, which should manifest and develop its sociality
("What is personality?", 1984). It can be said that the left ideology
recognizes human person insofar as he is involved in social development, and,
just as it is understood by the left ideologues themselves. As for the rest,
left-wing ideology completely sympathizes with liberalism: man as a species
evolves and therefore temporal properties of his nature and culture can not be
assigned to him as permanent. Therefore, in regard to the problem of
transhumanism or transsexualism most radical liberals and the most radical
lefts will always be on one side, which is quite logical. Moreover, if Western
liberalism itself rather allows the ideas of all kinds of nihilistic
emancipation than establishes them, it is the left movement acted as their main
conductor in the 60s of the twentieth century. For example, liberalism itself
does not raise any special treatment to gay marriages, but only allows them,
while the left ideology establishes homosexual relationships as a value
indicating emancipation of "a person”, understood as an agent of general
social emancipation. If a person insists
on maintaining some standards of so-called traditional society, it seems as if
he betrays his purpose of liberating the society from all its traditions in the
name of infinite "progress". So, by establishing the evolution of the
human species, the left ideology establishes the evolution of his values and
eventually comes to the real nihilism, which in fact makes human existence
meaningless. In this perspective, human control over its own nature is
perceived as the violence caused by the maintenance of class-hierarchical
relationships in the society, one part of which is constantly exploiting
another. Here, Marxism merges with psychoanalysis and generates Freido-Marxist
synthesis of the philosophy of the Frankfurt School (Erich Fromm, Herbert
Marcuse and others) and post-structuralism (M.Foucault, G.Deleuze and others),
which became the basis of ideology of the New Left. Any social norms and taboos
are seen in this context as inspired by specific social forces for the
suppression of other forces, and in this sense, every culture, as "a
system of norms and prohibitions" according to Y. M. Lotman, is
potentially repressive. Unlike liberalism, the "new left" ideology
has not received yet his incarnation as a public regime, perhaps because of its
anarchic nature, but it has a decisive influence on the minds of European
intellectuals of the late XX – early XXI century, and it heats the liberal
sentiments of Western politicians much more than liberalism itself.
The third
modern ideology, resisting to Christian personalism, can be most accurately
called organicism, and it includes a whole scope of all sorts of nationalistic,
racist and soil ideas, which perceive human person as the embodiment of
impersonal collective "body." As we have already noted, this ideology
goes back to the Romantic reaction of the beginning of the XIX century, and in
this respect it claims to be the "right-wing" and
"conservative" because its direct opposites are the liberal and
leftist ideas of the Enlightenment. But we also noticed that the soil and
reactionary views often come in resonance with the secular-revolutionary ideas,
and even turn into a bizarre, at first glance, symbiosis, of which the idea of
so-called "Conservative Revolution" of 20s-30s can be considered as a
notable example. Twentieth century and the European "New Right" of
70-90-ies. Here, man is called to fully manifest the impersonal spontaneous
nature of his "blood and soil", and this alone determines his
personality, which, in turn, remains an empty metaphor from the humanistic
vocabulary despised by organicists. Of course, in the modern world organicistic
ideas are considered marginal and extremist up to a certain time, though they
have a very large influence wherever seek for ontological rationale for the
"anti-globalization" demands, but, most importantly, they are quite
common among Christian conservatives who are trying to equally combine
universalism of the New Testament and the explicit "zoological"
particularism. All the conceptual contradictions of the modern Christian
conservatism lie in this attempt, "unsteady in all his ways" (James
1:8). If Christianity requires making an unambiguous moral evaluation of each
historical event and being ready to condemn the crimes of the past, the
conservative organicism certainly justifies every historic steps of the nation
as manifestation of collective will, recognized as the greatest ontological
value. In this sense, organicism merges directly with the ideas of Nietzsche (Genealogy
of Morals, 1987), and through Nietzscheanism – with the philosophy of New Left
(Genealogy of Power by Foucault). Any "universal values" in this
context are interpreted as false phantoms invented by "the biologically
weak" to tame "the biologically strong", just like in Marxism
they only manifest the claim of one class to exploit another endlessly. It is
important to note that any person in this perspective remains a helpless
hostage of "organic” origin and can gain power only by cultivation of this
origin. Against this background, Christian asceticism seems like totally
senseless practice, at least, because it has no relation to the health of the
collective body of the nation, ethnicity, race, etc., and serves the purpose of
personal salvation, regardless of the condition of the collective body.
The
fourth modern ideology can be directly called spiritualist or even more frankly
– Neo-pagan. In the same way as left ideology forms the conceptual pair to a
liberal one, spiritualistic ideology is also a parallel alternative to
organicism, but with the difference that while the liberal and left ideologies
are based on the common ontological assumptions, and then come to somewhat
different conclusions, organicist and spiritualistic ideologies proceed from fundamentally
different ontologies but then come to the almost same ethical and political
conclusions. Where organicism treats every person as an individual embodiment
of the common "collective body", spiritualism puts overall "team
spirit" in its place. Philosophical mind inevitably wonders about what is
the ontological structure of the "spirit" – whether it exists as the
highest super value, as an impersonal pantheistic god, or whether it represents
an intermediate body between the pantheistic God and man, whether it exists in
itself regardless of people or he is "bottled" in humans and found
only in them – but all these valid questions are not principal in this case. It
is easy to see, unlike the first three directions, Spiritualism is not a secular
but religious ideology, and it remains the common denominator for many
neo-pagan ideas and movements of our time. Along with this, spiritualism is not
necessarily limited to particularistic models, sometimes it arrives at
"globalistic" conclusions, if only instead of the "national
spirit" it refers to "the spirit/soul" of humanity, world,
space, Earth, etc. An immediate consequence of this ideology is relatively
popular occultist and cosmic doctrines, which often try to combine religious
and mythological worldview with scientific one. And then pan-spiritualism in
the tradition of Schelling or Soloviev is suddenly combined with evolutionism
of Darwin or Lorenz. It is worth noting that cosmic synthesis is quite
widespread in Russia, where independent "Russian cosmism" appears,
while the pantheistic ideas of "total unity" were very characteristic
for Russian religious philosophy.
In the
history of Orthodox theology there have been attempts to classify modern types
of social teachings, depending on their view of the dichotomy of personality
and nature. In his article, Personality and the thought of His Holiness
Patriarch Sergius (MPM, 1984, No 11) Vladimir Lossky proposed his own
classification, worthy of special attention. The first teaching subordinates
personality to nature and turns into "totalitarianism of supra myth",
with whom we met in case of organicism and spiritualism. The second doctrine
identifies person with the private nature of man and take shape in "the
individualism of the spiritual philistinism, with whom we deal in the case of
liberalism. The third teaching in the classification of V. Lossky is more
complicated and less easily recognizable: it completely separates person from
nature and brings down the latter in "the lower spheres of existence”.
Lossky defines this false teaching as "personalism, peculiar to certain
representatives of existential philosophy, born in the Protestant world,"
which prefers "person with no life, consciousness in a void, freedom
without content," and he projects it to the "rootlessness of
perpetual revolution. In fact, here we are talking about left-wing ideology,
but from our point of view, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by
Vladimir Lossky under its philosophical roots. The fact is that the term
"personalism" in the 30-50-ies was closely associated, if not
directly identified, with existentialism, because both thought movements were
actually closely intertwined. The idea of "existence" as an
autonomous entity which can not be reduced to the essence (essentia) was the
closest correlate of personality as a hypostasis (substantia), which is also
irreducible to nature essence. But the existence is impersonal and even
unconscious, while the hypostasis of Christian theology is personal and
conscious, and therefore the proper personalism begins where existentialism
ends. If existentialism is quite compatible with a variety of social teachings
and totalitarian ideologies from the extreme left-wing ones (eg, Sartre) to the
extreme right-wing ones (eg, Heidegger), the true personalism is
anti-totalitarian from beginning to end. It is very important to note this
distinction, because existentialism is still very popular philosophical setting
and is often seen as a panacea for impersonalistic ideologies. We also note
that anti-naturalistic existentialism, Vladimir Lossky is referring to, is
Sartre's existentialism, of which indeed we can draw conclusions about the need
for "perpetual revolution" in the spirit of the New Left, while the
Protestant existentialism (Tillich, and others) has no relation to left-wing
ideologies. So, the classification of V. Lossky needs significant
clarification. Difference in classification we proposed is that, firstly,
person is understood by the left-wing ideology not as an autonomous reality,
but as "a set of social relationships", and secondly, that the
ideology of the “totalitarian supra myth” according to Lossky’s definition, is
principally divided into organicistic ("materialistic") and
spiritualistic ("idealistic") variants.
All four
ideologies of today’s world: liberalism and the left-wing ideology, organicism
and spiritualism, all represent four different worlds of the non-Christian
modern consciousness, apparently contradicting each other, but united in
denying the ontological status of the human person, and therefore they are deaf
and indifferent to the problems of Christian asceticism.
In order
to perceive the ascetic path not as "gymnastics of the soul and
body," but as a necessary condition for the transfiguration of the person,
understanding of the personality as an ontological entity is needed. Neither
secular nor spiritualist types of worldview do not recognize the ontological
status of the personality, and therefore pointless to call their supporters on
the ascetic self-conquest without abandoning their ideological setting.
However,
the decisive importance in understanding the meaning of Christian asceticism
has not only ideological, but also a psychological aspect. As long as the
problem of Christian asceticism in the mass perception will be identified
solely with the forced self-restriction and, as a rule, the restriction of
bodily needs, adequate understanding of the ascetic asceticism is impossible.
People exterior to Church have a right to ask why they should abandon sensual
and psychical pleasures in Orthodoxy, if exactly the same thing, in their view,
is required by so-called Eastern "spiritual practices" from them? And
Orthodox missionaries should give them a clear answer to this question. In
turn, the Orthodox Christianity would be also very poorly perceived, if it
would be associated exclusively with the ascetic self-restraint, as if it is
not a means but the purpose and main contents of Church life. So, an unpleasant
paradox can be acknowledged in the mutual perception of Church and secular
medium. On the one hand, the modern secular society formally declares the value
of human person, but does not make demands on any ascetic requirements because
it denies his ontological status. On the other hand, Church recognizes the
ontological reality of the human person and that's why it makes ascetic demands
to it, but the recognition of personality in Church is not quite obvious to the
outside secular world, while these demands are quite obvious. An explanation of the necessity of these requirements
from the Christian view is possible only if we can first prove objective,
existential value of the free and conscious personality to which they relate.
By Arkadiy Maler
Source: http://www.bogoslov.ru/en/text/1243180.html
