«Every athlete is moderate”, Paul shouted to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 9, 25), and she placed himself among the athletes, well convinced that, if we do not keep ourselves in high spirit, everything decays, also in the spiritual life.

In fact, throughout the centuries of the Christian tradition and of the methodical “practice” –this is the sense of the Greek ascesis- they spoke insistently and, above all, they organised a practical system made up of mortifications and privations, sacrifices and denials, fear and therapies, before which one remains perplexed. Culture has simply thrown it away, with a dry loss even of its own wisdom.

For many centuries and, perhaps also for a certain number of believers today, the true greatness of a “saint” is measured on the forms of “penance” and of “extra-ordinary mortification”: quite far, therefore, from the Biblical model of tenderness, vulnerability, of a meek and humble heart. Certain saints were champions more similar to the “fakirs” than to the invitees to the banquet of the Kingdom, with the beautiful dress on. However, why was this stereotyped saint, “enemy of all that is human”, so very lucky?

A historical tangle  

Though we can see a series of extra-Biblical influences, such as: stoic, platonic, Cathar influences, there is no doubt that there has been a certain intense application, often therapeutic for good ends, but often also masochist, almost as if the body, its exigencies and pulsations  were “diabolic” pathologies of the soul, to be uprooted pitilessly. Experts know very well that this “dualist” vision is not a monopoly of the Christians, but is transversally found  in all the religions; perhaps the Christians, in their pre-ideological identity (namely in the foundation element, Jesus of Nazareth), are rather less polluted, thanks to the basis of incarnation on which rests their salvation vision.  

We would have a lot to narrate about this, starting from the desert monks, who in their rigid solitudes dragged with them a certain tint of exasperated stoicism, to the Irish missionary monks who invented also the penance with a tariff, better to rule the penitential traffic, to the medieval associations of the “beaten ones” who went around to exhibit their prolonged and admonition “beatings”; then the holy anorexic women, who nourished themselves only with the Eucharistic bread; to the folkloric baroque custom of strange and spectacular penances to call people to conversion (let us think of the Lenten processions). I shall give just a hint about the flourishing of texts centred on the spiritual fight, which the Teatine Lorenzo Scupoli synthesised excellently towards the end of the year five hundred. A scenography of battles and skirmishes, of banners and assaults, of army and strategies as evident sign of more contexts. Yet, around this imaginary a “combative” spirituality has gone on protracting up to Vatican II, of course always less believable, but anyhow comfortable  to oppose good to evil. 

However, we must put in between also part of modernity which, with the exaltation of our human dignity and all that is correlated to it, has gone on eroding the rampant arches of the implantation which launched the ascetical edifice, pulling down, and casually shifting, in order to serve as support for self-realisation as a new religiosity

Certainly, the centuries of modernity do not knock down everything all of a sudden, but starting from the canon of bodily beauty (merit of the artists) and then the autonomy of thought (Deckard is to be quoted), as well as with the exaltation of progress and rationality, against every form of evasive mythology and religiosity with the removal of responsibility (Kant and Marx deserve to be quoted), have disseminated cracks and mines which  proved fatal in the latest century. It is a pity that with the removal of structures everything  has fallen, good as well as bad principles, secular wisdom and pseudo-religious stupidity, secularised messianic realities and evangelical utopia.   

The “ascetic” patrimony, not wholly despicable, in the span of some decenniums has volatilised, evaporated under the push of a desecrating secularisation, first, and then with the arrival of more anthropologies, which have removed the soil under the feet of these traditions. First of all, the new approach to the body and to our corporeity, has caused the old ascesis, with its “despise”, to be lucky, and has evidenced an often pathological uneasiness; while now a holistic, positive approach is proposed, as that of making all the values and potentialities of the individual visible; a re-evaluation of the body, but unhooked from the Christian paradigm of its state as creature,  and from the relation with the divine breath of life (in traditional terms: the immortal soul). Here they truly risk the divinisation of the body, since the soul by now is a topic that comes to nothing. Rightly somebody has spoken about the “theft of the soul” in our cultural context (See. P. Barcellona).

Where to start from once again?

We could ask ourselves whether it is worth-while to re-launch the ascesis today, in our secularised and consumerist context. First of all we must be vigilant because the schizophrenic tendency natural/supernatural, heaven/earth, body/soul, sin/grace, World/church etc. has not disappeared at all from the mentality and the language, the imaginary and also the religious sensitivity of the simple people and of many religious persons.

Rather, there are certain signals of a confused and magmatic resurgence, starting from the  overflowing on angels and devils, widening with the reappearance of “ascetical” forms  (clearly also like this, but with some benevolence) somehow similar to masochistic veining and the taste of “harming oneself”.

When I read, in the square of a famous Italian square, the sentence “A body to suffer and a heart to love”, written in very large letters, I ask myself whether I have lost contact with reality or whether it is somebody else who remains entangled with no longer significant flowered languages, contexts and epochs. 

Thus, first of all, I would say that we need to abandon the dualistic language, suspicious of corporeity, and consider this as a dynamic unity (of body and soul), subjected to becoming and shaping an axiological assumptions of values, less centred on the miniature of the soul ensnared in the tentacles of the body and more on the dynamic of the actualisation of the personality’s potentiality (which is made up of indivisible soul and body), which is an existence in relation, no longer solipsistic, as it was yesterday.

The thing that Gaudium et Spes calls “a dramatic fight  between good and evil” (GS 13), is not to be understood as experience of reciprocal annihilation, just as if it were the case of opposing armies tending to destroy each other.

Rather, it is to be seen as a progressive experience of synthesis and equilibrium between tendencies “according to the flesh”, to say it in Pauline terms, (that is where egoism prevails, where there is lack of transcendence, a hostile and ambitious closure, the bad use of bodily pulsations , etc.), and the “tendencies according to the spirit” (or works of the spirit), where on the contrary, the following attitudes prevail: oblation, forgiveness, service, collaboration, mercy and peace. In fact, only in more unique than rare cases we find ourselves in front of persons from whom the works of the flesh have completely disappeared. Generally, all of us  drag ourselves with fatigue among high ideals and less elevated possibilities. We must find an orientating equilibrium, a self-control without manias, but realistic and patient. We need to find a progressing equilibrium whose end be the total, transfiguring journey according to the Spirit, but that, as St. Paul sincerely confessed, it may watch over the corporal pulsations, by incarnating and controlling  them according to the principle of a positive and communitarian synergy.

Not a “symbolic” suicide of the body

 It is the matter of getting used to and of educating us to the gift of self, without imagining of belonging to the angelic beings, but in the frail and sinful reality which communes us all. In the past they insisted on the expiatory and lacerating practice. Today they more opportunely insist on personal vigilance and on a communitarian synergy that may support the dialogue and the embrace: vigilance and discernment, intuition and patient awaiting. At times we have the impression that “to save the soul” it is good to work something like a symbolic “suicide” of the body, thinking that this is a way of honouring God who is “divine”, namely he has nothing “human”  (that is, frail)). However, this is not the faith of the Christians; they adhere to the “incarnated” crucified and humiliated Word”.

In our life we experience sufficient “phenomena of attrite”, without the need of going to have them built by anxious somnambulists: in other words, we have elements of finitude, sickness, death, natural disasters…sensations, tormented conviviality. It would be opportune to manage these situations with wise perspectives. First of all by committing ourselves to transform evident evils into less tragic resources, to live together in solidarity. Then by living the awareness that suffering must become “dangerous memory” which ferments the conviviality and our own life in the perspective of redemption worked by the humiliating but redemptive cross; finally we must learn “an active forbearance” (like that of Job) who grinds its teeth in faith and remains stable in waiting for a decisive light, without magic-sacral  subterfuges. The trial of the obscure night and faith of St. Theresa could teach us something good.  

Human solidarity in suffering is not the sum of more or less known personal sufferings, but the strategy we use as believers, in the light of Him who gave up himself for our sake, to remain in the awareness of the insoluble human limitation compared with our eternal destiny. We are in solidarity not to the end of denying the painful precariousness, or at least to find some bliss in “the common troubles”, but to recognise that the passio mundi, which associates, us is like a groaning of the earth and of the entire creation, for a transforming redemption, but not a purely angelic one. By pressing hands and heart in solidarity, we state that our eon will not be transfigured if not in the hope flowing from the icon of the crucifix.   

Bruno Secondin
Lecturer in the Pontifical Gregorian University  
Borgo S. Angelo, 15 – 00193 Rome