Previous
Posts:
2008:
#51-60
(7/13)
#41-50
(5/27)
#31-40 (2/15)
2007:
#21-30 (10/3)
#11-20 (6/28)
#1-10 (3/31)
On St. Augustine (2/3)
On St. John Climacus (1/26)
2006:
12/25
9/24
9/5
8/23
6/1
An Introduction (5/10)
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On St. John Climacus (1/26/07)
I want
to talk about
St. John Climacus
when he says
But to secure a rocklike
foundation, those with a mind for the religious life will turn away from
everything, will despise everything, will ridicule everything, will
shake off everything. (76)
The anger evident in
my previous post
is a reaction to reading his book,
The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a superb
and wise thing, but at turns awful and degrading and disgusting. (The
introduction clearly admits its reputation—even among Christians, I
assume—for “undue severity and pessimism” (34)). It took reading about
Christian monasticism to understand how people can hate the world; and
re-learning the smallest bit about Buddhism even a week after showed me
how silly that hate was. (This shouldn’t be taken as the cliche that
abounds nowadays, the lapsed Catholic shunning it for the East. Both are
getting at the same thing, and in their own ways go as far as they can
in helping people live, which is all that is worth teaching.) In some of
his extremes Climacus is tough to accept, and easy to argue with inside.
Some of what he says I would even think silly, if it weren’t obvious
that many take similar ideas seriously:
No one who knew in advance the hour
of his death would accept baptism or join a monastery long before it,
but instead would pass all his time in sin and would be baptized and do
penance only on the day of his demise. Habit would make him a confirmed
and quite incorrigible sinner. (133)
This is revolting. It is the defense of every fundamentalist no
matter what religion, and inevitably reflects back on the speaker.
Climacus includes himself here, I assume, and every religious person
I’ve heard use this defense has as well, speaking more of their own
weakness than the overall weakness of humanity. Granted we are all weak
(I’m as weak as they come) but to assume that if we knew for sure we
were to die in five or fifty days, or that without a belief in God
everyone (and it must be everyone!) would become hedonists, or
murderers, or criminals of whatever kind—this is ridiculous, and makes
humanity a joke, our striving a joke, and the “religion” or “God” that
comes out of such striving a joke too, the flimsiest prop for the most
poorly-built house. It offers no hope but blind faith, and people can’t
live blindly (as we know) without demanding everyone else does, too.
What I’m after is finding what people can believe in without
immediately making a defense of it, without immediately taking as a
prerequisite for belief not their own faith, even, but everyone else’s
agreement.
The hate that came across previously was also swept aside when I heard
someone say When Jesus said “Love your enemies,” he didn’t say not
to have enemies. What a thought! Enemies are inevitable,
disagreements are inevitable, and as long we live in the world someone
will get in our way. This is unavoidable. The thing to do isn’t to make
the person not your enemy, but to realize they are your enemy, and find
a way to live with them, to love them. In a much deeper sense, it’s
true, it is entirely about realizing they aren’t really your
enemy, that even if they treat you horribly that in itself is an
opportunity for you to reflect on how you react to antagonism, and in
its own way may be of great value. But the essential difficulty of life
should never be forgotten; the first thought cannot just be Well you
just cut me off, but I love you; the first thought must be
acknowledging what was done and purposely considering our reaction. It
cannot be a knee-jerk reaction, thoughtless, to immediate love. (Most
things in life worth anything are sought with difficulty—why should love
be any different?) Whether easy Christianity or easy new-age jargon,
this essential struggle and suffering of life is often passed over to
imagine a world of daisies and peace, where we can simply say I love
you and not have to think for a second; but for me, so long as we
live in the world this will never happen, and so long as we live in the
world the very purpose of a religion isn’t to rid ourselves of
discomfort or tough decisions, but to help us live decently and happily
with those discomforts and tough decisions. (Is there a better
way of honoring God?) It is not to teach us how to live amid happiness
and be so happy amid all this happiness (anyone can do this), but to
find happiness where previously there was none, to find meaning and
order where previously there was none. Heaven, or Enlightenment, or the
final leave-taking, the going-home, whatever you’d like to call it—this
is something else entirely, and should not be confused with the actual
living of a human life in a world where, as the Buddha says, All
life is sorrowful, and where things are in a constant state of
change, and where so much hurts.
While it’s made clear that Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent
was written “for a particular group, the abbot and community of a
monastic settlement at Raithu on the Gulf of Suez” (xxi) (and even that
in the sixth and seventh centuries), it’s still worth asking what use
his words have to people living now, in the world. Is it enough to
“despise” and “ridicule” everything, even those things you judge as
harmful not only to your immediate neighbors, but to the world as a
whole? Is it enough to hate the materialism, the race for money, the
race for recognition and fame, the living of life solely for the
reactions of others? It is enough to hate these things, and dismiss
them?
The anger in my previous post might suggest so, but it can’t be. A
friend remarked that I seemed to have turned my back on many things I
once cherished, and I assume these were the things essential to me as a
writer. How could I write stories or poems or novels about the
contemporary world—how could I see meaning in doing so—when at bottom I
hated all of it? How could I anymore love to listen to a stranger
somewhere, overhear him, and catch the quirks and beauty that made him a
human individual, if all I’m doing afterwards is judging what he was
saying, hating was he claimed interest in, even ridiculed him for not
reading St. John Climacus? I’ve depended on the outside world for
material since I began writing, and it’s true I’ve largely given that up
in favor of looking directly at what makes a good life, and what
contributes to a miserable one. But to hate the world and hate the
people in it is as ridiculous as embracing it wholeheartedly. There are
Wallace Stevens’ wonderful lines, “The world is ugly,/And the people are
sad”—lines so simple they beg the questions, And so? What after
that?
This situation comes to mind: at a four-way intersection cars in the
turn lane have the green light, and are making their way; but even as
the light turns yellow, and then red, people keep turning, so that for
about ten seconds two or three cars are left in the middle of the
intersection before the cars that now have the green light can go. This
is irresponsible, even dangerous—but what can the responsible and safe
drivers do? Lacking a time machine, they can’t reverse what’s happened,
and they don’t have the right to drive through the offending cars.
What’s to be done? They simply have to deal with it. And in a
way this a majority of our lives, others cutting us off or supposedly
slighting us or doing whatever it is—but the responsibility, in the face
of even the smallest act of inhumanity or selfishness, falls on us
(whoever we are, the supposedly selfless and humane) to react
in a way where our decency is kept intact. It’s not fair or
just (to suggest Job’s terminology), but the more I think about it,
the more our Biblical accent on justice seems to do us great
harm. We spend all our time meting out justice and not enough wondering
what the experience has done to ourselves. Much better to observe and
discipline our own reactions to unfairness first, and worry about the
offending person later.
The primary responsibility is in the individual, and whether this is
unfair or not, it can’t be denied. Whether your parents were horrible to
you or whether your neighbor is playing their music too loud, the
primary responsibility for how you live your life after the event is
yours, and no one else’s. Some kind of peace must be found within,
regardless of how the outside world reacts (or doesn’t react) to what
they’ve done. Those startling first words of
The Dhammapada
are it: “Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think.” And
the hardest sections to take in Climacus still lag far behind this. In
the chapter on obedience, he describes situations where monks are
intentionally insulted (and worse) by their superiors, or even punished
for crimes both the monk and his superior knows he never committed—all
to gain humility:
Father, I too know he is innocent. But
just as it would be a pity and indeed quite wrong to snatch bread from
the mouth of a starving child, so too the director of souls does harm to
himself and to the ascetic if he denies him frequent opportunities to
gain crowns such as the superior thinks he deserves at each hour,
through having to put up with insults, dishonor, contempt, and mockery.
(99)
We would think a good reason to enter a monastery, and get away from the
world, would be to free yourself from the world’s games, and the people
who only want to manipulate you. But now there is only more of it, more
tests. Even God is nothing but a boss or a friend who needs to mess with
you—and even in a monastery you are only meant to be weak. And in the
chapter on penitence, Climacus himself takes a tour of “The Prison,” a
separate monastery where monks are punished. Here is only a bit of that:
I saw some of those accused yet
innocent men stand all night until dawn in the open air, their feet
never moving, pitifully pounded by the natural urge to sleep, giving
themselves no rest, reproaching themselves, driving sleep away with
abuse and insults.
Others raised their eyes to heaven, wept, cried, and implored help from
there.
Others prayed with their hands tied behind their backs, like criminals,
their faces blackened with grief and bent earthward, since they thought
themselves unworthy to look up to heaven. Overcome by their reflections
and the weight of conscience, they could not speak, could not pray to
God, could not even make a beginning of prayer; and filled, as it
seemed, with darkness and empty despair, they could offer God only a
blank soul and a wordless mind.
Others sat in sackcloth and ashes on the ground, hiding their faces
between their knees, striking the earth with their foreheads.
Others constantly beat their breasts, recalling their past lives and the
condition of their souls. Some shed their tears on the ground, while
others, unable to weep, struck themselves. Some raised over their own
souls a lament for the dead, since the strength to bear their heart’s
grief had left them. Others moaned inwardly, stifling the sounds of
their wailing until, unable to bear it any longer, they would suddenly
cry out. (122)
It is hard to see religion in any of this, and as I read it I
remembered one of the last steps the Buddha took before he found his own
path, the last school or guru he looked up to before he found his own
way. He became an ascetic too, and punished his body, only to realize it
wouldn’t get him anywhere—whereas Climacus says, after more catalogues
like the above, “And I, my friends, was so pleased by their grief that I
was carried away, enraptured, unable to contain myself.” (128) He says
elsewhere that “obedience is self-mistrust up to one’s dying day, in
every matter,” (92) yet all he suggests is transferring our trust to
others human beings who are equally unworthy of trust, who will continue
the games and tests of will and faith and obedience, or demand feats of
mortification and suffering. Yet it’s hard to see a difference, at some
point, between this and someone’s submission to a dominatrix—both feed
on the lowest levels of humanity (the part where God is least) where we
simply want something to bow to, no matter what it is or what it says;
we want something to bow to, something or someone to obsess over—we want
someone to make up our minds, we don’t want to choose or make decisions
or even think. This isn’t religion at all, but an escape from it as much
as it is an escape from life, both of which requires us to make
decisions and still find happiness and meaning no matter how good or bad
the consequences of those decisions are.
Yet I said at the beginning that The Ladder of Divine Ascent is
a wise book, and it is, even though I’ve focused mostly on what I
disagree with. Much of it is dead-on—to free ourselves from fear, from
most attachments the world considers important. Even his tough stance on
leaving one’s family can be taken in many instructive ways by people
today, without literally leaving everyone you’ve ever known behind. The
names of many of his chapters are enough to think on—avoiding anger,
malice, slander, talkativeness, lying, despondency, gluttony, lust,
avarice, fear, pride; and cultivating simplicity, humility, discernment,
stillness, prayer, dispassion, and love. This focus on making yourself
aware, of realizing what you are and are not feeling, what you are and
are not doing—of making yourself, in the best sense, completely
conscious and aware of how you are leading your life—this is admirable,
and shouldn’t be overlooked. Much of what he says are close to
aphorisms, or Zen koans (“Fear is danger tasted in advance,” “Snow
cannot burst into flames. It is even less possible for humility to abide
in a heretic,” “A condemned man on his way to execution does not discuss
the theater,” “The difference between a theologian and a mourner is that
the one sits on a professorial chair while the other passes his days in
rags on a dungheap.”); other times he appears harsh only to suggest
something else, and he opens out:
Someone caught up in the affairs of
the world can make progress, if he is determined. But it is not easy.
Those bearing chains can still walk. But they often stumble and are
thereby injured. The man who is unmarried and in the world, for all that
he may be burdened, can nevertheless make haste toward the monastic
life. But the married man is like someone chained hand and foot.
Some people living carelessly in the world put a question to me: “How
can we who are married and living amid public cares aspire to the
monastic life?”
I answered: “Do whatever good you may. Speak evil of no one. Rob no one.
Tell no lie. Despise no one and carry no hate. Do not separate yourself
from the church assemblies. Show compassion to the needy. Do not be a
cause of scandal to anyone. Stay away from the bed of another, and be
satisfied with what your own wives can provide you. If you do all this,
you will not be far from the kingdom of heaven.” (78)
Married men suddenly go from surely being “chained hand and foot”
to possibly being “not far from the kingdom of heaven.” It’s something
to read that last paragraph, since there is no dogma in it at all, no
theology, and the only mention of church or God is to make sure you
aren’t separate from the assemblies—which could be as much a social as a
religious obligation. I don’t mean that the list he gives is exhaustive,
or should have been, only that in essence the ideas of ethics are
essentially common sense, so that in a way the strongest person—who in
their strength isn’t a person at all, an individual with an
identity—doesn’t need theology or ritual at all. The virtues enumerated
in the steps up Climacus’ ladder are seen, in the end, as obvious.
This isn’t to discount the difficulty of even trying to perfect
one’s life, this isn’t to suggest that any of it is easy, and that for
most of us any of it is even possible only with the backdrop of a
specific religious tradition, a specific discipline, a specific dogma or
creed or set of rituals. What it means—as opposed to Climacus’ earlier
statement that we would all be hedonists and criminals if we had the
chance—is that it’s possible, and is an accent more on our
strength than our weakness. When I think of the monks Climacus was
writing for, and those who really did believe that if their faith in God
were shattered they would finally “do what they’d always wanted to
do”—what experience of God can come from this kind of quivering and
weird weakness? Or not the weakness itself, but actually believing life
is all weakness, all groveling, all feeble and fragile? One of the monks
Climacus talks to does say that through “the lowest depths of abasement”
he could now “repel every onslaught, while others declared that they had
attained complete freedom from the senses and had obtained serenity amid
every calumny and insult.” (96) But certainly this is possible without
hatred and disgust for the world, oneself, and the body. It hardly seems
worthwhile to live in the world if such things can’t be accomplished
somehow within it. Even a monastery exists in the world, even a complete
hermit is in the world, in the smallest way.
Climacus also says, towards the end, that "Unadorned simplicity is the
first characteristic of childhood. As long as Adam had it, he saw
neither the nakedness of his soul nor the indecency of his flesh." (216)
This may well have been, but even if then, since the time of Adam we’ve
had to live with the nakedness of our souls and the indecency of our
flesh (and so much else)—and we’ve had to live with completely adorned
complexity. If there is a heaven or Nirvana or peace, perhaps “unadorned
simplicity” is there; so long as we are alive I would think it’s best,
not to strive for that, but to find a way to live decently and happily
amid complexity, with the nakedness of our souls, with the indecency of
our flesh (and so much else)—and finally to somehow find meaning and
holiness in those same things: meaning and order amid the complexity,
sacredness and significance amid the nakedness of our souls, blessedness
and sanctity even—and especially—in our flesh—and so much else.
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