Son and Steel

Toward a Christian Vitalism

“You have entered upon a noble rivalry with the monks of Egypt by your determination either to equal or surpass them in your training in the way of virtue.” –Athanasius of Alexandria, “Life of Antony”

This piece was inspired by Phocaean Dionysius’ Aristocratical Christianity and Johann Kurtz’ A Liturgy of Death.  The full text of the Life of Antony by Athanasius can be found here.

The right, inasmuch as it has a general philosophy of life, is characterized by a love of tradition, hierarchy, beauty, and excellence.  This is over and against the left’s passion for revolutionary novelty, egalitarianism, ugliness, and mediocrity.  I would argue that above all, however, the right values authenticity, a life lived in truth, the full alignment of values in ones being.  This passion (in every sense of the word) animates the soul of the man of Tradition; he cannot bear superficiality, conformity, or meaninglessness.  He seeks transcendence.

This is, I believe, the general root of rightist critiques of Christianity, and why so many great thinkers have failed to embrace it, or even attacked it.  When men like Nietzsche or Evola look at the faith, they see something of the world, something they long to leave behind on a higher path.  For the former, Christianity was a religion of slaves created to overthrow the better world of aristocratic warring and womanizing; for the latter, the faith was a degeneration of a more primal connection of man with the spiritual universe.  These men were wise in their diagnosis of modern ills, but fell short in their prescriptions.  The anax and the sorcerer might recur in history, but as exemplars they leave much to be desired, and the wish to transcend morality itself is either a prideful rejection of human community or a sublimated longing for something more.  As Seraphim Rose put it in his Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age:

Atheism, true ‘existential’ atheism, burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God Whose ways are so inexplicable even to the most believing of men, and it has more than once been known to end in a blinding vision of Him Whom the real atheist truly seeks. It is Christ Who works in these souls. The Antichrist is not to be found in the deniers, but in the small affirmers, whose Christ is only on the lips. Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ.

At its best, the pagan right seeks the alignment of body, mind, and spirit toward a transcendent purpose, which, as Kurtz notes in discussing Mishima, can only culminate in death.  However, this is, as Phocaean Dionysius points out, not only fully compatible with a Christian life, but is its essence. 

Consider the example of St. Antony.  As a boy, he was brought up in circumstances that would have been familiar to the bourgeois-tier aforementioned intellectuals.  He was conventionally pious, a good son, but nothing extraordinary growing up with his sister in Alexandria, the intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world.  There is no indication that in his youth he sought any kind of conventional path such opportunities as he had afforded him.  Then his life changed in the most profound way with the death of both of his parents.  As his biographer Athanasius describes:

After the death of his father and mother he was left alone with one little sister: his age was about eighteen or twenty, and on him the care both of home and sister rested. Now it was not six months after the death of his parents, and going according to custom into the Lord's House, he communed with himself and reflected as he walked how the Apostles [Matthew 4:20] left all and followed the Savior; and how they in the Acts [Acts 4:35] sold their possessions and brought and laid them at the Apostles' feet for distribution to the needy, and what and how great a hope was laid up for them in heaven.

The psychology of this moment is interesting.  Antony is bereft of his parents and has had the responsibilities of adulthood thrust upon him fully and profoundly.  To this point, he has been a conventional person, and the conventional path is laid before him, to be a landowner, to marry, to fulfill his Christian life in the way of his peers.  Instead, the specter of mortality seems to have affected him, and he chose a different way:

Pondering over these things he entered the church, and it happened the Gospel was being read, and he heard the Lord saying to the rich man [Matthew 19:21], 'If you would be perfect, go and sell that you have and give to the poor; and come follow Me and you shall have treasure in heaven.' Antony, as though God had put him in mind of the Saints, and the passage had been read on his account, went out immediately from the church, and gave the possessions of his forefathers to the villagers — they were three hundred acres , productive and very fair — that they should be no more a clog upon himself and his sister. And all the rest that was movable he sold, and having got together much money he gave it to the poor, reserving a little however for his sister's sake.

Antony does not want goodness; he wants to pursue perfection.  This means stripping himself of all possible barriers to a fully realized spirituality with an actualized self in communion with God.  It means total commitment to a life of struggle for self-mastery.  What Mishima came to realize at the end of an intellectual journey Antony perceived through faith, that the ultimate culmination of the unity of thought and action is death.  Mishima, committed to this principle, disemboweled himself.  Antony, with just as much dedication, crucified his flesh with all its desires.

Lest this be interpreted metaphorically or solely spiritually, Athanasius goes to great and specific length to illustrate the physical struggles of the life Antony chose.  To achieve theosis, which elsewhere Athanasius describes as an endless process of becoming through grace what God is by nature, Anthony practices what even those in his own time would have regarded as extreme mortifications:

He kept vigil to such an extent that he often continued the whole night without sleep; and this not once but often, to the marvel of others. He ate once a day, after sunset, sometimes once in two days, and often even in four. His food was bread and salt, his drink, water only. Of flesh and wine it is superfluous even to speak, since no such thing was found with the other earnest men. A rush mat served him to sleep upon, but for the most part he lay upon the bare ground. He would not anoint himself with oil, saying it behooved young men to be earnest in training and not to seek what would enervate the body; but they must accustom it to labor, mindful of the Apostle's words [2 Corinthians 12:10], 'when I am weak, then am I strong.' 'For,' said he, 'the fiber of the soul is then sound when the pleasures of the body are diminished.

In Nietzsche’s view the essence of the aristocratic spirit was Selbstüberwindung, self-overcoming, the higher bringing into line the lower, the inner hierarchy of the spirit that reflects the cosmic hierarchy of the universe.  For a Christian, this hierarchy has God as its head, but permeates all of creation down to the lowest material level.  For all of Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, there is an intense psychological dimension to this which the professor might have recognized as akin to his own idea of struggle:

But the devil, who hates and envies what is good, could not endure to see such a resolution in a youth, but endeavored to carry out against him what he had been wont to effect against others. First of all he tried to lead him away from the discipline, whispering to him the remembrance of his wealth, care for his sister, claims of kindred, love of money, love of glory, the various pleasures of the table and the other relaxations of life, and at last the difficulty of virtue and the labor of it; he suggested also the infirmity of the body and the length of the time. In a word he raised in his mind a great dust of debate, wishing to debar him from his settled purpose. But when the enemy saw himself to be too weak for Antony's determination, and that he rather was conquered by the other's firmness, overthrown by his great faith and falling through his constant prayers, then at length putting his trust in the weapons which are 'in the navel of his belly' and boasting in them — for they are his first snare for the young — he attacked the young man, disturbing him by night and harassing him by day, so that even the onlookers saw the struggle which was going on between them. The one would suggest foul thoughts and the other counter them with prayers; the one fire him with lust, the other, as one who seemed to blush, fortify his body with faith, prayers, and fasting. And the devil, unhappy wight, one night even took upon him the shape of a woman and imitated all her acts simply to beguile Antony. But he, his mind filled with Christ and the nobility inspired by Him, and considering the spirituality of the soul, quenched the coal of the other's deceit. Again the enemy suggested the ease of pleasure. But he like a man filled with rage and grief turned his thoughts to the threatened fire and the gnawing worm, and setting these in array against his adversary, passed through the temptation unscathed. All this was a source of shame to his foe. For he, deeming himself like God, was now mocked by a young man; and he who boasted himself against flesh and blood was being put to flight by a man in the flesh. For the Lord was working with Antony — the Lord who for our sake took flesh and gave the body victory over the devil, so that all who truly fight can say 1 Corinthians 15:10, 'not I but the grace of God which was with me.'

The devil uses Antony’s own mental weaknesses against him, attempting to turn him from the path of excellence by pointing out how much more reasonable it would be to just be normal. In the end, Antony triumphs, of course.  This is not the imposition of his will on the devil, but rather, the alignment of Antony’s will with the will of God, a type of theophany made possible through humility.  Antony is able to achieve mastery over himself through a type of surrender, a death in which he found life, a self-emptying (kenosis) that created the space that God would fill. 

In defeat, the Devil appears to Antony in a guise of weakness, as a small black child (not sub-Saharan African, but black like the night, which must have made for a grim spectacle).  The Devil tells Antony:

And cringing to him, as it were, he plied him with thoughts no longer, for guileful as he was, he had been worsted, but at last spoke in human voice and said, 'Many I deceived, many I cast down; but now attacking you and your labors as I had many others, I proved weak.' When Antony asked, Who are you who speak thus with me? He answered with a lamentable voice, 'I am the friend of whoredom, and have taken upon me incitements which lead to it against the young. I am called the spirit of lust. How many have I deceived who wished to live soberly, how many are the chaste whom by my incitements I have over-persuaded! I am he on account of whom also the prophet reproves those who have fallen, saying [Hosea 4:12], You have been caused to err by the spirit of whoredom. For by me they have been tripped up. I am he who have so often troubled you and have so often been overthrown by you.' But Antony having given thanks to the Lord, with good courage said to him, 'You are very despicable then, for you are black-hearted and weak as a child. Henceforth I shall have no trouble from you , for the Lord is my helper, and I shall look down on mine enemies.' Having heard this, the black one straightway fled, shuddering at the words and dreading any longer even to come near the man.

The Devil attempts at this moment to get Antony with a final appeal to his pride.  You have conquered me, he says, there is no saint like you.  But Antony is not fooled, and though he recognizes his victory and the ultimate weakness of the Devil, he gives full credit to God.  It is not praise the aristocrat of the soul seeks, nor even power, but authenticity. 

His battles are not over.  Perhaps the most famous episodes of Antony’s tenure in the desert are the fearful physical tortures he experiences at the hands of evil spirits, a subject for various great works of art.  He lives in a tomb for a while, and migrates to the remote parts of the Egyptian desert to inhabit an abandoned fortress.  The martial overtones of this are clear; Antony is a conqueror, advancing into enemy territory singlehandedly to battle the enemies of the divine order.  A hero from Greek myth would fight monsters, unnatural things that fed on men’s bodies, menaces of civilization.  Antony in turn fought things that devoured souls, those supernatural beings that stood against the heavenly kingdom.  The thrust of the story is the same, but more profound, comprehensive, and real.

In the desert, in his struggles, Antony is forced by the crucible of his spiritual combat to divest himself of everything that might hinder him.  He is alone, and his solitude has important consequences for his spiritual development.  As John Chrysostom noted in his sermons on wealth and poverty, men living in society wear masks, a public self constructed to reinforce the ego.  In death the mask is removed and the soul revealed for whatever it always was.  In the desert, Antony experienced this living death of the ego, as the mask atrophied into nothingness in his encounters with the dark forces that could pierce men’s comfortable illusions in any case; they knew him, and to defeat them, he would have to know himself better.  In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers Antony is quoted as saying, “one who knows oneself, knows God: and one who knows God is worthy to worship Him as is right. Therefore, my beloveds in the Lord, know yourselves.”  One who knows himself can control himself; he is dead to himself and yet filled with life, he is a differentiated man, a stone guest, actualized, noble, and possessed by a love of what is best and the power to exercise that love.  It is no wonder that Nicolas Gomez-Davila said that monks are the true aristocrats.

So what is there to be said for a Christian vitalism?  One of the beauties of Christianity is that it works on many levels according to the spiritual state of the individual.  As the parable teaches, some servants are given more talents than others; as Paul notes, not all are called to be apostles and teachers.  Attempting to live as Antony did would result in failure and great spiritual harm were one not actually called to such a life.  This is the essence of knowing oneself.  A Christian vitalism, to the degree it is possible, would to my mind consist of pursuing excellence to one’s fullest capacity and in turn offering that excellence up to God, to live a bold life uniting the physical, mental, and spiritual in a fire that burns away all the dross in each aspect, putting to death the old self and forging something anew, a riddle of steel, wherein the answer is not flesh or will, but a triumphant act that severs one from one’s former self, an offering of that self to God, and a personal resurrection. 

In practical terms- should one lift weights?  Of course, weights are humbling.  One does not lift to discover how strong one is, but how weak; a man who can bench 500 is a man too soft to put up 501.  One only grows through destruction and one trains seeking not success, but to fail.  It’s the steroids and Instagram selfies that rob one of the true value of the exercise.  Should one seek wealth?  Wealth is a challenge, a test of character that any thoughtful wealthy man can attest to (disclaimer: I am not wealthy).  Should one seek to conquer, dominate, and impose one’s will on others?  A man who can conquer himself does not need to conquer others; he is followed naturally.  Should we seek worldly wisdom?  One should fear to know no true thing, and all of my studies in history have only reinforced my opinion that the wisest teachers are as likely to be illiterate hermits as they are PhDs, generally more so.

I believe that the pursuit of excellence is compatible with a Christian life, provided that all pursuits are ultimately subordinated to the ultimate end of love of God and neighbor.  Christian life calls one to excellence; it is the lukewarm bugmen, rather than the worst reprobates, that offend the divine order.  Excellence will mean different things to different men in keeping with their inborn talents and capacities, but we cannot know what are gifts are if we hide our lights under bushels and become piles of flavorless salt.  Strive, put in the work, dig deep, and with God’s help, become worthy.