East Meets West: Consumerism & Asceticism
Part 5: The source of our troubles
Our refusal to fast or why we can’t have nice things.
Failing to fast
Eating, working together with marriage and family life all manifest human dignity. And, as we saw, these are given to humanity by God as the means by which we grow personally and communally in our likeness to the Most Holy Trinity.
But together with the positive demand “to fill the earth and subdue it,” God makes one, negative demand. We hear about this in Genesis 2 and again in the conversation between Satan and Eve in chapter 3 (vv. 1-7).
The refusal to fast (that is, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) is where humanity’s troubles begin. Adam’s troubles—and my own—are the fruit of his (and my!) refusal to accept a life of ascetical struggle.
According to a hymn from the last Sunday before Lent
Through eating Adam was cast out of Paradise. And so, as he sat in front of it, he wept, lamenting with a pitiful voice and saying, ‘Woe is me, what have I suffered, wretch that I am! I transgressed one commandment of the Master, and now I am deprived of every good thing.’ (Aposticha, Doxatikon Tone 6)
Asceticism is not something added on to human life as an afterthought; it is not a response (much less a reaction!) to sin. No, it is there from the beginning together with marriage, family life, work, and eating.
As a way to help us understand a bit more about our condition after the Fall, let me introduce a new, technical term, from Orthodox Christian anthropology: the passions.
A life of crippling uncertainty
In the theology of the Orthodox Church, the passions are those thoughts, desires, and actions that “tear [us] to pieces”; to live according to the passions means “to live according to the senses” and so “change the whole [person] into [a] ‘body.’” Continuing our description, we can say that the passionate individual lives solely “by the senses penetrated by desire and anger” to such a degree that he “is always ahead of himself,” living not by hope, but in a “fear (Angst) . . . [that feeds on his] belonging to the world.”
Because the perfection of created being (human and otherwise) is found in its ability to change, living according to the body means living crippled by uncertainty in the face “of the possibilities which” life offers. This suffering is compounded “by the feeling that [we are] at the mercy of [our] responsibilities. [That we have] to forever launch out toward [some] future possibilities, in other words, towards [some] more appropriate opportunity.” This is “the edge of the abyss of nothingness” that has consumed modernity from Nietzche to Sartre to Seinfeld.
The passions are therefore both the cause and the symptom of my enslavement to sin. As St Maximus says
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. This being so, 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)
Consumerism then is a passion. It is the opposite of life as an event of communion. It doesn’t just undercut the importance of friendship and the other relationships and institutions essential to human flourishing and a life of communion it’s an acid that dissolves flourishing and holiness. For consumerism, all that matters is how I can use stuff to manipulate the other persons, human as well as divine, self as well as other.
So what should we do?
This is powerful. Thank you.