East Meets West: Consumerism & Asceticism

Part 6: Acting like adults

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn observed that “Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success.” but on the quest for worthy spiritual growth.” In criticizing the hazards of material prosperity, we easily can overlook that what undermines this quest is that we “have forgotten God.”

We fail to solve the problem of consumerism by simplistically assuming that “more” is the problem, so “less” is the solution. The hard truth is that you aren’t necessarily any better off materially or morally if I have less; “less” isn’t the solution because “more” isn’t the problem.

In addition, I shouldn’t imagine that my abstention is somehow necessarily morally better than your consumption; both are tainted by sin even as both can be a source of goodness. 

“If we are to give up money … because many people use money for evil purposes,” writes the 19th-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, then “we ought to give up the power of … speech since many use it for swearing, idle talk, and slander.”  

If we give up money and the creation of wealth, then by the same logic we should also “give up using fire for fear of conflagration and water for fear of persons committing suicide by drowning.” This anti-development ideology he says is simply and purely an act of “unpardonable childishness.”

So let’s stop acting like children and instead act like the adults we are and are called by to Christ to become.

---

My economic life requires virtue

Because I am a sinner, all of my life is marked by conflict. Not surprisingly this includes my life as a consumer. As a result and just like the rest of my life, my economic decisions are marred by sin.

To help me move past the conflict that sin stirs up in my life, I need to avoid the extremes of what we might call prodigal consumption and parsimonious abstinence. This is precisely what Christian asceticism seeks to do: to foster in me those habits of thought and action that help me walk the middle path between the extremes of life.

This middle way is what we mean by the life of virtue. The virtuous person lives a life that is dynamic, wholistic, and balanced,

It’s important to say upfront that acquiring virtue or living a virtuous life doesn’t mean I won’t fail. I will and in fact I do so on a daily basis. Failure is the one thing at which I excel.

But asceticism and the virtues it foster gives me the tools I need to recognize the dangers of the moment and, more importantly, the foundation I need to find my way back to Christ after I sin. They do this because rightly understood and practiced, asceticism and the life of virtue embodied the life of the Cross.

The True Middle Way

St Athanasius says, “it is only on a cross that a man dies with his hands spread out.” Jesus spreads out His hands on the Cross so that “with the one he might draw the ancient people, and with the other those from the Gentiles, and unite both in himself” (On the Incarnation).

The Cross is the True “mean between extremes,” the True via media, or the True Golden Mean that Aristotle says the virtuous person must walk between the extremes of life. Through our personal asceticism, we take up the Cross in the service of developing a way of life that avoids excessive forms of consumption and sinful economic living. 

The ascetical disciplines of prayer, fasting, manual labor, almsgiving, and the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability foster in us a life of balance and consonance. 

But there’s something else going on as well.

Back to the beginning

Wholesome asceticism is more than a life of renunciation; it requires more than simply learning how to not misuse use things, how to give them up or do without them.

Rooted in the sacraments, Christian asceticism is a return to life as it was meant to be lived “in the beginning.”  

This return is intrinsic to the development of my personal likeness to God. 

Above all else, asceticism is the quest for communion with the All-Holy Trinity Who is the Source, Pattern, and Fulfillment of our personal identities—or if you prefer, asceticism is how we become who we truly are or our true self.

St Paul reminds us that 

…everyone who competes for the prize is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown. Therefore I run thus: not with uncertainty. Thus I fight: not as one who beats the air. But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified (1 Corinthians 9:25-27, NKJV).

In response to grace, Christian asceticism is the lifelong process by which we move from fearful uncertainty to a life of personal communion with God, creation, neighbor, and self. It is the intentional cultivation of those habits of thought and action that fosters the “inner transformation of the human person, [and] his being progressively conformed to Christ” (Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching, #42).