East Meets West: Consumerism and Asceticism
Part 1: Understanding Consumerism & Asceticism
This is a serialization of the second of two lectures I gave earlier this summer at Acton University. It examines the relationship between consumerism and the ascetical life, the latter presented as a cure for the former. In addition, it serves as a practical introduction to the spirituality of the Orthodox Church. Often when Orthodox Christians talk about our tradition we do so in terms that are abstract and divorced from the daily concerns of Christians from other traditions. One of the blessings of my 15+ years of involvement with the Acton Institute is that it has taught me how to get past the “Ortho-speak” favored by too many Orthodox Christians and instead speak to the concerns of people of goodwill.
The other thing I should say about this series of lectures is that it served as the basis of an Acton monograph on the subject The Cure for Consumerism. If you’d like to read more about consumerism or especially what Orthodox asceticism teaches us about our economic life consider reading my monograph.
It’s NOT about stuff
Consumerism is a sin but it is not fundamentally a sin about stuff; it is rather about my relationship with stuff. Maybe it’s the stuff I own. Maybe the stuff I want. Of course, it could be your stuff. But whatever the stuff is, the problem isn’t the amount of stuff or the cost of the stuff but my attitude toward stuff and how I use stuff
Writing almost 14 centuries ago St Maximus the Confessor looks at our relationship with stuff and says this:
It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not esteem but self-esteem.
Though it wasn’t a word he would have known, he nevertheless diagnoses the cause of consumerism (and really all sins) when he goes on to write that
…it is only the misuse of things that is evil, and such misuse occurs when the intellect fails to cultivate its natural powers (On Love, 3.4).
So if I want to understand why consumerism is a problem—to say nothing about curing my own tendencies toward consumerism—I need to first understand the right use of things. And to do this I need to ask why has God created all this stuff? Only in answering this question, can I hope to become a virtuous consumer.
You’re a consumer by nature
What I’ll ask you to consider here is that you are—by nature—a consumer. This is to say that consumption is an essential part of what it means for you to have been created in the image of God and called to cultivate your personal likeness to Him. While it can at times be a distraction, consumption has an essential, God-willed, role to play not only in your flourishing but also in your growth in holiness.
And how could it be otherwise? Lovely though you are, you are not an angel. This at least is what the desert father John the Dwarf (d. AD 405) found out himself.
As the story goes it was said of Abba John the Dwarf, that one day he said to his elder brother, “I should like to be free of all care, like the angels who do not work, but ceaselessly offer worship to God.”
So he took off his cloak and went away [naked] into the desert. After a week he came back to his brother. When he knocked on the door, he heard his brother say, before he opened it, “Who are you?” He said, “I am John, your brother.”
But he replied, “John has become an angel, and henceforth he is no longer among men.” Then the other begged him saying, “It is I.”
However, his brother did not let him in, but left him there in distress until morning. Then, opening the door, he said to him, “You are a man and you must once again work in order to eat.”
Then John made a prostration before him, saying, “Forgive me.”
John’s folly gives us a hint not only about our right relationship to consumption but also the cure for consumerism: yes, both require that we work but we need to engage in a particular type of work. This necessary work is the second theme of today’s lecture: asceticism.
Asceticism is the cure for consumerism
As I hope to show you, at least as understood by the Orthodox Church asceticism is not an afterthought; asceticism is natural to me and I only fall into sin when I fail to live the ascetical disciplines of prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and manual labor.
Asceticism is a cure for consumerism (and sin more generally) precisely because, in addition to our being consumers by nature, we are also by nature ascetical beings. God created us to live lives characterized by prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and manual labor. Asceticism, in other words, is not something necessitated by sin but rather is willed by God for us from “the beginning.”
Now if I were giving this lecture at the seminary where I teach, I would jump right to a theological discussion of consumerism and asceticism. But our concern here is with Orthodox social teaching; what does the Gospel tell us about how we are to relate to stuff?
Answering this question requires that we join good intentions to sound economics. And while we are concerned with holiness, we also want to foster human flourishing because while these are all related they are distinct.
So rather than going right to theology, let me spend a few minutes talking about consumption from the point of view of the social sciences and specifically, cultural anthropology. After that, we’ll look at consumption theologically.
This will set us up to talk about what went wrong in our relationship with the material world and how asceticism represents a way to undo the damage that’s been done.
In keeping with the title of this talk, “East Meet West: Consumerism & Asceticism,” I’ll be drawing primarily on the writings of the Greek Church fathers and more recent Eastern Orthodox authors.