Asceticism and Desire
Olivier Clément
Translated From:
Olivier Clément. Corps de mort et de gloire: Petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995.
A deeper reflection on asceticism will allow us to perceive the transmutation of desire both in monasticism and in the faithful encounter between man and woman.
It is only from the perspective of the resurrected body, the liturgical body, that one can understand asceticism. This is the effort — not a voluntarist effort but one that involves a kind of surrender to grace, an attention without tension — meant to strip away the masks incorporated into our face, the neurotic characters who usurp our personal vocation; in short, to shed dead skins and let rise within ourselves, in trust and humility, the life of the risen Christ, that is to say, the breath of the Spirit (forgive the pleonasm). It is the effort/surrender of openness and faith that allows this breath to transform the anonymous body of the species into a body of language of the person and of the communion of persons, so that little by little we move from the possessive body, which treats the world as prey, to the body of celebration, which is united with the ecclesial liturgy and, through it, with the cosmic liturgy.
Asceticism, by “unsticking” us from “this world,” allows us to discover the world as creation, as language, poetry, even as the fantasy of God.1 The narcissistic and predatory man throws himself upon beings and things and thus masks and misses their depth. His blindness to the sacramentality of matter hides the glory of God. Instead of opening to mystery, the world becomes an impenetrable wall — this “wall” that haunted modern literature, from Dostoevsky to Sartre — or sometimes a magic mirror, the water that closes over Narcissus. The passions of heaviness — gluttony, greed, closed and perverse sensuality — hold back things and beings from what they truly are. They reduce, to borrow common expressions, everything to what “falls under the senses,” to what one can “put one’s hands on.” They become opaque. A repetition of Adam’s gesture, who eats instead of respecting. Instead of trusting.
Thus asceticism sets a limit to this objectification (which is intensified by technology and by the cycle — rendered frantic for some — of production and consumption); it allows one to see something other than objects to be owned, consumed, destroyed.
To see in things the “mute words”2 of the Word that is expressed in the Bible and is given as nourishment in the Eucharist. The asceticism of faith, the asceticism of humility and trust, once again makes each of us the Adam called to “name” the living — by a knowledge that is at once rational, poetic, and spiritual — the first man, filled with wonder before the first woman, and engaged with her in the first dialogue. A double birth of language!
The entire post-1968 period, especially during the “sexual revolution” that followed as a consequence or compensation for the aftermath of the drama of 1968,3 exalted the positivity of the body and desire, of the body as a body of desire. For example, Georg Groddeck, who transfigured the Freudian “id” to see in it the primordial energy of life. Or Wilhelm Reich, now largely forgotten, who celebrated this energy — the “orgone” — in all the dynamism of the universe, but saw no other authentic expression of it, quite Freudian in this, except in the fulfillment of orgasm. Or the “philosophers of desire,” Deleuze and Guattari for example, for whom Reich “brought a song of life into psychoanalysis,” but who themselves intended to maintain a materialist approach to desire, that of “desiring machines.”
The whole problem is knowing what is the aim of this desire. Plato already said that through the ladder of beauty that goes from earth to heaven, desire seeks immortality and contests death either through the perpetuation of the species, or through the contemplation of the heavenly. Christianity, especially in its patristic expression, completes the revelation of its significance: desire is this dynamism that God breathes into his creation so that it may leap toward him. Not through some neo-Platonic hierarchy, but through Christ, who is God leaping simultaneously toward us, like the Father meeting the prodigal son. Eros is the anticipation of agape. God has “two hands,” said Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, his Son and his Spirit.4 The Spirit torments the creature with a desire that is insatiable except through the revelation of the Son. The two “hands” of God join together in the Incarnation.
When Wilhelm Reich declares that eros animates the universe, he says the same thing as Dionysius the Areopagite, or as Dante, concluding his Divine Comedy by celebrating “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” But when he sees in fulfilled sexuality alone the ultimate accomplishment of desire, he errs, and would like — as in so many New Age currents today — to bring humanity back to old paganisms: sometimes seductive but irremediably called into question by the biblical and Christian revelation of the person. Sexual paroxysm, sought for its own sake, makes one forget death only for an instant. If it is not integrated into tenderness, it casts one back into solitude and sadness, that which Saint Paul identifies as a “sorrow [that] worketh death.”5 To liberate desire without direction in a world enclosed by death is precisely to render it deranged. It is to free a wild beast infuriated by an ignorance of its aim. For the aim of desire in its original impulse is God.
“Passions” divert desire, fold it back upon the relative — which it destroys while vainly seeking the absolute therein. Only the resurrection of Christ opens to desire its true path, reveals to it that it is contestation of death, aspiration to agape.
One then understands the apparent folly of the monk — and it is the greatest wisdom. In him desire is directly attracted, magnetized, consummated and consumed by the Face of the Lord, in its tragic and resplendent beauty, by the Ocean of Limpidity, as the Syrian mystic says, which comes to beat against this Face and flow from its gaze. In the light of this Face-ocean is revealed, in a radical non-possession, beyond the anonymous game of the species, the face of the neighbor in his personal transcendence. So that the monk, to use Evagrius’ magnificent expression, is at once “separated from all and united with all.”6
This is why the great spiritual person is not at all asexual, as certain texts, more Manichean than Christian, would sometimes suggest.7 On the contrary, if it’s a man, he fully accomplishes his virility; if it’s a woman, her femininity; while integrating, in a certain way, sexual polarity, the animus and the anima of which Jung speaks. The spiritual father acquires a maternal tenderness, the spiritual mother a virile strength.
“By his mysterious divinity, God is Father. But the tenderness he bears for us makes him become mother. The Father becomes feminine in loving.”8
For the monk, eros is not crushed, but transformed, transfigured. This is why Saint John Climacus could write: “May physical eros be a model for you in your desire for God,”9 and also: “Blessed is he who has a passion for God no less violent than that of the lover for his beloved.”10
Continuity, but also discontinuity: desire must pass through a true death-resurrection. Asceticism, here, concerns obedience, humility, even humiliation. For erotic desire, in its impersonal wandering, is a form of “self-idolatry” denounced by Saint Andrew of Crete. Yet asceticism, simultaneously, is carried by the joy of the Resurrection: for erotic desire, in its futile anonymity, is a form of despair. “It is the Word consubstantial with the Father who makes chastity perfect,” says Saint John Climacus.11 And Saint Isaac the Syrian, in his 38th treatise, notes that “the heart no longer receives the attacks of passions because it lives something else [...] Another desire, stronger than they, has carried it away.”12 Another desire: or rather, desire transformed through the liberating intervention of agape.
Monastic life has been deeply and extensively explored by traditional wisdom. We will also need to study the ways of the glorified body in human love.
Evolution is the writing of God, certainly thwarted, sometimes to the point of monstrosity, by the forces of nothingness. Yet the insect that seems most hideous will be revealed in the Kingdom to be as beautiful as a constellation.
Translator’s note: This recalls the characterization of the world by Origen as a λόγος ἄλογος.
Translator’s note: The social and political upheaval that occurred in France in May 1968, marked by student protests, worker strikes, and occupation of universities and factories. What began as student demonstrations against university conditions evolved into a broader challenge to authority, capitalism, and traditional values. The events profoundly influenced French intellectual thought, particularly in how philosophers approached concepts of power, desire, and social structures. Though the immediate revolutionary moment subsided, its cultural and intellectual impact continued to shape French philosophy and politics for decades afterward.
Against Heresies, III, 20, 1.
Translator’s note: 2 Cor. 7:10
On Prayer, 124. Philocalie des Pères Neptiques, vol. 1. Translated by Jacques Touraille. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995.
In reality, the “angelic life” (bios angelikos) refers rather to the monk’s “vigilance,” because the word that means “angel,” in Semitic languages, is that of “watchman.”
Clement of Alexandria, Which Rich Man Can Be Saved? 37, PG 9, 642.
The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 26th degree, 34.
Ibid., 30th degree, 11.
Ibid., 15th degree, 23.
Translator’s note: cf Holy Transfiguration Monastery, trans. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Revised 2nd edition. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2011.