Orthodox asceticism

Communion with God, as the ultimate goal of a Christian, is realized gradually as the believer achieves holiness. This realization has its own degrees, and the beginning of communication with God must necessarily be made in a person’s earthly life, and in his afterlife only the completion or continuation of this realization is possible, but not the beginning, contrary to his previous direction in life. That is why eternal life does not come to a person only after death in the form of some external good independent of his internal content, but is gradually revealed in him even in his earthly existence, among the usual external conditions of his life. This idea is clearly expressed in the Holy Scriptures: “He who believes in the Son has eternal life” (John 3:36), “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life” (John 6:54), “Take hold of eternal life, to to whom you were called” (1 Tim. 6:12). The patristic heritage clearly expresses the idea that a person already on earth either actually lives a true, eternal life of communion with God, or actually dies the eternal death of harmful separation from Him. In the words of St. Basil the Great, “Through Baptism the Lord dwells in the souls of the sanctified.” According to the teachings of the Venerable Macarius of Egypt, the soul of a Christian even now accepts the kingdom of Christ into itself, is at rest and illuminated by eternal light, so that the resurrection, revival and glorification of the soul also occurs in the body, and in the future resurrection the glorification will also affect the body. Thus, eternal life, having begun in a person in Baptism, then gradually reveals itself in the continuation of his earthly existence, provided that this life proceeds normally, in accordance with its idea. A true Christian, while still on earth, as he develops religiously and morally, becomes a participant in heavenly bliss - sublime, spiritualized joy due to communion with God. Holiness and likeness to God, cultivated and partly realized by the believer in union with Christ while still on earth, will be the content of his life even after death, stipulating the possibility of direct communication with God, as the source of his highest bliss. According to the Monk Macarius of Egypt, “worthy souls, through the communion of the Holy Spirit, still here receive the guarantee and the firstfruits of that pleasure, that joy, that spiritual joy, of which the saints in the kingdom of Christ will partake in eternal light.” According to St. Gregory the Theologian, a righteous Christian receives after death those benefits that the streams reached before him on earth, for the sake of his sincere desire for them.

If the future life is sometimes contrasted in the Holy Scriptures and in the Fathers of the Church with the present, then only when we are talking about moral struggle, or about suffering from external needs and deprivations, or about the state of the bodily organism and the physical life of a person. In such cases, either the external conditions of earthly existence are understood, or the position of Orthodox teaching is revealed that complete bliss will be achieved only in the afterlife. This is the sense in which Holy Scripture says that Christians “by the power of God through faith” are kept “for the salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet. 1:5), or that “we are saved in hope” (Rom. 8:24) . Therefore, in the words of St. Isaac the Syrian, “only in the next century the glory of man receives his full wealth.”

The reason for the impossibility of the perfect revelation of eternal life on this earth lies in the conditions of the earthly existence of a Christian, i.e. in the state of the world and nature surrounding man on earth, as well as the imperfection of his own nature, especially bodily, subject to the law of death and decay. After the Fall of Adam, the state of all created nature, among which a Christian lives, is abnormal, “for the whole creation groans and suffers together until now” (Rom. 8:22). This state of creation, with which man is connected organically through his body, cannot but be reflected accordingly, on the well-being and self-awareness of a person, even a perfect, true Christian. At the same time, for the reason that the coming of Christ has not actually yet completely broken the kingdom of evil, and the action of forces hostile to God has not been destroyed in the world, man’s assimilation of Christ’s salvation throughout his life does not occur through calm, unhindered development, but is carried out through an intense struggle with hostile forces that seek to suppress the sprout of eternal life. In this regard, a Christian must constantly be on guard, fully armed with all his powers strengthened by the grace of God, using all God-given means to resist the attacks of the spirit of “this world”, manifested in specifically worldly “customs” and “now working in the sons of disobedience” (Eph. 2, 2). That is why, according to St. Theophan the Recluse, on earth eternal life “is not visible, it is buried, sometimes by the disorder of external life, sometimes by internal struggles; but nevertheless it matures under the cover of this invisibility,” and only in the kingdom of glory will this eternal life “already shine in its lordship.” Only with the opening of the kingdom of glory will all favorable conditions arise for the religious and moral endless development of man, and, consequently, for achieving ever closer unity with God in Christ.

The blissful state of the righteous in the next century will stem from the complete satisfaction of all the true needs of spiritualized human nature. The rational side of the human spirit will find its highest satisfaction in the knowledge of God, which will be accomplished in the form of contemplation of Himself directly, as well as in the form of penetrating contemplation of Divine wisdom and providential power, revealed in the renewed created nature. The sensitive, emotional side of a person will be nourished by the communication of love with God, with angels and holy people. Volitional activity will consist of serving God and the host of perfect personal creatures according to the principles of pure holy love. The external, visibly observable difference of the righteous will be their luminous state: “then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43).

The normative requirements of Christianity are not something extraneous, alien, incommensurable with its own needs for the human spirit, but, on the contrary, only Christianity meets with all its requirements precisely all the most essential, ineradicable, deepest needs and demands of man. This completely refutes the opinion that a pessimistic color is assigned to Christianity. On the contrary, the internal state of a Christian in earthly life is primarily, and in the next century, entirely a state of sublime joy, complete peace in God, undisturbed peace. This state captures the entire area of the human heart, penetrates all his thoughts so that no one can take away Christian joy from a person and by any means available to worldly power. Worldly pleasures and fun cannot bring true joy to a person. Worldly joy is short-lived, for it comes before “tears,” and worldly laughter comes before “weeping” (Luke 6:25). There is no true joy in the world and no inconsolable sadness in the Kingdom of Christ. The temporary, external suffering of Christians does not exclude their joy, which is the guarantee of their perfect joy in the kingdom of glory. Thus, Christianity, calling man to victory over the world and giving him real strength and means for this victory, develops in the believer a vigorous consciousness of the divine powerful power of Christ acting in him and through him, so that every true Christian, together with the Apostle, can exclaim: “ I can do all things through Jesus Christ who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13). At the same time, Christianity is alien to the fact that, neglecting the inherent desire for bliss in a person, usually thought of in the form of achieving happiness, preaching the need for a person to fulfill his Christian duty, denying the moment of individual bliss both in this earthly and in the future life. “Cold severity is moralizing,” wrote St. Theophan the Recluse, - to act according to the mere consciousness of duty is alien to Divine teaching. It surrounds man with impulses to which human nature responds sympathetically at all stages of its development.” Even at the highest stage of Christian development, the moment of bliss not only loses its essential meaning, but also reveals itself with increasing intensity, reaching the highest perfection in the life of the next century.

This bliss in itself is not the goal of human life. But it serves as a necessary and obligatory consequence of its true goal - communion with God, since God is the focus of all goods, and communication with Him makes a person a participant in all goods. According to St. Gregory of Nyssa, “whoever sees God, in this vision already has everything that is among the blessings - endless life, eternal incorruptibility, immeasurable bliss, endless kingdom, unceasing joy, true light..., unapproachable glory, unceasing joy and all kinds of joy.” good". It is precisely the element of “amusement”, “joy”, according to patristic teaching that turns out to be, although secondary, a necessary companion of true holiness, an obligatory consequence of the dominance of virtue in the soul. The connection between virtue and joy is necessary - one cannot exist without the other, according to St. Gregory of Nyssa, virtue among the successful becomes spiritual joy. It goes without saying that Christian bliss, the essence of which is joy and peace in the Holy Spirit, is incommensurable with ordinary joy imbued with sensuality.

Christian teaching contains a fundamental, general proposition that external goods, in a form completely inaccessible to our current understanding, will also be included in future bliss in the sense that all external objective conditions of the eternal life of the righteous will be in complete harmony with the glorified state of man . “According to His promise, we look forward to new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:13). According to the Apostle Paul, all creation “will be freed from the bondage of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). The righteous and those around them will contemplate the perfect revelation and complete implementation of the law of Divine Truth. One of the requirements of this law, which forms the basis of the creation of man, is the complete correspondence of man’s external position in the world with his religious and moral dignity, the essence of which lies in communion with God. It is when “God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), that the Lord will bring all external conditions of human existence into full compliance with his spiritual state: the righteous “will be His people, and God Himself with them will be their God; and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death; there will be no more crying, no crying, no sickness” (Apoc. 20:3-4). Similarly, in relation to sinners, external conditions will correspond to the gloomy, painful state of their personal spiritual life, the cruel torment of their conscience, so that the eternal torment of sinners will not be determined as its cause, but will only be supplemented by the external conditions of their environment in which they will be delivered. Thus, external conditions, being not the defining and producing moment of one or another state of a person in a future life, but only an accompanying and harmonious agreement with his internal state, actually cannot be called external in the precise sense, since they fully correspond to the internal religious and moral human condition. It should be noted that, according to the original purpose of the creation of man, he was the manager of all creation, called upon to spiritualize and comprehend its forces, laws and phenomena and to imprint in external nature the constructive, creative work of the spirit, so that not one human organism, but all nature had to serve an obedient instrument, like the body of the human spirit. This goal will be truly and completely realized in the kingdom of glory.

The blissful state of a person in the future century will exactly correspond for each righteous person to the degree of his ability to communicate with God, the degree of his receptivity to the spiritual benefits of communion with Christ, therefore, the degrees of bliss of the righteous will be different. However, this difference in the degree of bliss will not in any way harm the completeness of bliss of each of them individually. Everyone will have in its entirety the measure of bliss that he is able to perceive and assimilate due to the development of the god-like aspects of his nature. According to Rev. Ephraim the Syrian, the Lord called the monasteries many not according to the presence of places, but according to the degree of talent: just as everyone enjoys the rays of the sensual sun according to the purity of visual power and their own impressionability, so in the next century all the righteous will be inseparably settled in one joy, but each in his own measure will be illuminated by one mental sun and, according to the degree of dignity, will draw joy and joy, and no one will see the measure of the highest and the lowest.

Consequently, a person’s afterlife fate depends on his own religious and moral state, on the direction of his main life aspiration, which ultimately consists either in the desire for communion with God, or in a firmly defined mood of alienation from God. Bliss will be communicated from God to the righteous not in the form of external reward for labor, hardship and suffering, but eternal bliss in its main content will be determined by the basic character of human life, responding fully to the needs of his being. Moreover, a person’s own intense activity for the real participation of his eternal life is obligatory and essential. The significance of this activity is determined solely by the fact that without Christian achievement, without a person’s participation in the assimilation of the truth of Christ, accompanied by the exertion of all his forces, the grace of God itself cannot change a person’s personal life definition, force him to strive entirely towards God in Christ in order to achieve real sharing His eternal, blessed life.

In the same way, sinners are deprived of true life and bliss only because they themselves do not strive with their whole being for this blissful life, they are not capable of communion with God. Life in Christ is alien to their internal religious and moral structure, it is disgusting to them, and therefore it cannot give them the highest pleasure. They understand their bliss differently, placing it in self-indulgence, and not in love for God. According to the teachings of Sschmch. Irenaeus of Lyons, those who, through apostasy from God, have lost all real blessings, as deprived of them, find themselves in any kind of torment, not because God Himself subjected them to punishment in advance, but punishment befalls them precisely as a result of the deprivation of all goods; The blessings of God are eternal and infinite, and therefore their deprivation is eternal and infinite.

The teaching on asceticism from the holy fathers

The Church has given the world many great ascetics. Each person’s way of life has its own characteristics, but there is one goal towards which the holy fathers strove. And therefore the path to it is common for everyone. It is described by the teaching developed by ascetics from their own experience.

Reasons

The Christian ascetic proceeds from the fact that:

man is the unity of soul and body; salvation is sent to the whole person, and not just to the soul;
bodily exploits are a means of changing the heart and achieving repentance;
no matter what the feats, a person cannot reach God only through his own efforts. According to the Apostle, “salvation does not depend on the one who wills, nor on the one who runs, but on God who has mercy” (Rom. 9:16). The job of a person is to show free will, a desire to be healed.

Asceticism in monasticism and in the world

For a long time, many Christians, working on their souls, sought to get away from the bustle of the world. From III-IV centuries. the deserts were filled with hermits who devoted themselves to prayerful works.

St. Isaac the Syrian says: “No one can approach God unless he withdraws from the world. I don’t call removal from the body, but removal from worldly affairs.”

It was the hermits who wrote most of the works on asceticism. But the lives of desert ascetics sometimes contain stories about the asceticism of the laity, which is often edifying for monks.

St. Anthony the Great once heard a voice during prayer that, despite all his exploits, he had not yet reached the measure of holiness of a shoemaker who lived in Alexandria. The elder left the desert and found this man. The simple artisan was surprised by the arrival of the great Abba, and even more so by the request to tell about his exploits, which he himself had not seen at all. Except that every day, when meeting with people, he repeated: “Everyone will be saved, I alone will perish!”
St. Silouan of Athos said that once, as a layman, he once, out of forgetfulness, prepared a dish with meat on a fast day. The saint's father told him about this... six months later, all this time waiting for a convenient time so that the remark would not be taken as a condemnation. “I have not come to the measure of my father!” - the old man repeated with tears.

Holy ascetics and women ascetics

The Church knows hundreds of ascetics whose exploits won them eternal salvation, and who now serve as an example for believers. Among them:

St. Paul of Thebes, who is considered one of the founders of monasticism; avoiding persecution for his faith, he retired to the desert of Egypt, where he spent 91 years; the world would not have known about the ascetic if St. It was not revealed to Anthony the Great about him;
Venerable himself Anthony, the founder of monasticism, also left the world when he was young, and spent his entire life in the exploits of fasting and prayer;
St. Mary of Egypt; the saint left the world where she led a sinful life, devoted more than 40 years to the struggle with passions, acquiring holiness;
Isidora, a modest nun of a female cenobitic monastery who lived in the 4th century, walked a difficult path; For years she suffered humiliation from her sisters, who even considered her crazy; when the truth of the ascetic’s holiness became clear, she, avoiding human praise, left the monastery; Only the Lord knows her future fate.

Antonym and synonym

The antonym of asceticism can be called hedonism, which proclaims sensual pleasures as the goal of life.

The opposite paths to spiritual work are:

despair in the possibility of salvation, leading to a life position described by the words of St. Paul “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we will die” (1 Cor. 15:32);
commitment to the material world, neglect of the needs of the soul;
laziness for any spiritual achievements.

Synonyms for the word asceticism are asceticism, abstinence.

What is the difference between Christian asceticism and its understanding in other religions

The main differences between Christian asceticism and the spiritual work of other religions boil down to the fact that Christian ascetics:

The first stage of asceticism is considered not to be physical feats, but repentance as a change of soul;
do not attribute the results of asceticism to their efforts; from the lives of saints there are many cases when the Lord abandoned an ascetic for the slightest arrogance, so that he was deprived of all the gifts of grace;
They approach various visions and revelations extremely strictly, which in other religions are considered a sign of achieving the goal of Communion with God. They tell about a hermit who saw an angel and greeted him with the words: “I am a sinful man, look, have you been sent to someone else?”

What is the difference between Christian asceticism and its understanding in philosophy

The philosopher's asceticism is a means of focusing on acquiring knowledge. However, unlike religious asceticism, this is knowledge about the material world. However, as Patriarch Kirill emphasized at a meeting with scientists in Sarov on August 1, 2021, “science and religion certainly complement each other in the overall picture of our knowledge about the world, making it more voluminous and vibrant”

. Therefore, the asceticism of a scientist focused on studying the world of God can lead to Christian asceticism itself.