Askesis and the Eros of Distance

Where the Real Spiritual Combat Lies

An inspiration came to me as I drove along Mulholland Highway in the afternoon sun. It’s a somewhat lonely section of road that runs past the King Gillette Ranch somewhere between Calabasas and Agoura. I turned onto the highway, and immediately in front of me was a motocyclist — for some reason, I felt, a young woman, not on a new or fancy bike or a racing bike, but something homely and old fashioned.

She was not dressed for the part — a denim jacket flapping in the wind, a red backpack like a schoolchild’s, a white helmet. But she was going fast. I also enjoy going fast. Sometimes when I am alone on this stretch of road I take it at unreasonable speed. I felt her pace as an invitation, so I followed, keeping a safe distance, but staying with her, just at the limit of my comfort. I saw her taking the turns aggressively, leaning into them.

All of a sudden, I felt: I should let her go, I should just let her go. I felt her joy in the road, in speed, in the day; I was feeling it too, but I felt it magnified in her, on her bike, in the wind, closer to the road and the sun and the hills and the sky and the wheeling birds.

And I felt — I could catch her, but I want to let her go. She is so alive and so beautiful, I want to let her go. She is feeling the fierce bliss of skill and speed, she deserves the road alone, the road deserves her alone, the hills deserve her alone, God deserves her alone, it is better if that flame is alone, burning. I eased off, let her race ahead out of my sight.

I wondered: does it ever happen that an animal predator suddenly sees the pure, vital beauty of its prey shining out, a bright star of being, bright against the sky — does an animal predator ever see this, and let its prey go? I know immediately, no, it doesn’t. No, an animal would never step back from itself in that way, never be enraptured by the sheer beauty of another creature for which it has an appetite. The sheer beauty!

And there is something — this says something — about the core of the meaning of human life on Earth, the core of the meaning of human beings: we are the creatures who can step away from our vital needs and vital experience, step away simply out of sheer joy in the splendor of another being. Animals, self-enclosed, cannot do this. Angels, without appetite, cannot do this. Humans, living souls, animal spirits — we can do this.

This is not self-abnegation. It’s an extraordinarily erotic feeling to take that step back, because the stepping back comes to us in a moment of supreme erotic communication with the other being. And the act is deeply charged.

This stepping back is very much not a falling back into powerlessness. There is something extraordinarily potent and masterful about it. Maybe this is — not to compress it into something someone else has already thought — Scheler’s basic defense of aristocratic Christianity against the accusations of ressentiment. It is indeed aristocratic, this impulse is so regal: to perceive the other’s glory and to deliberately allow the other its glory.

This is a godlike power. Perhaps it’s the first flash of godhood along the path of exaltation or theosis.

This is where a disastrous mistake gets made. The ascetic tradition reads this ecstatic renunciation in favor of the glory the soul has beheld, and it somehow imitates only its form. It imitates this form outwardly, turns it into an ascetic discipline.

Asceticism sees only the self-abnegation of this fierce, divinely generous ecstasy. But it doesn’t feel the inward glory of it, the inward glory of the stepping-back to allow the beloved to be without seeking to devour or to possess — not out of impotence, but out of love. And so of course, not only does asceticism thus forget the real purpose of askesis, it also fails ever to enter the ring, to engage in the real combat, to behold and release what it could possess if it wished.

Here is the Klagesian “eros of distance.” The eros of distance presents itself precisely at the moment where the being with whom there is erotic communion is allowed to pass irretrievably beyond some horizon. Perhaps that horizon is the moment of relinquishment, the moment where you let that being go. It’s passing beyond a horizon. And the eros that is then experienced is therefore the eros of distance. Klages is correct in seeing that eros of distance as being the highest form of eros. But this is absolutely not asceticism.

Askesis is deliberate training. This gesture, this allowing, this veneration, this burning worship, is what the askesis is training for.

This is my primary objection to asceticism: that asceticism mistakes the training for the contest. It mistakes the training for the accomplishment. It turns its face entirely away from the accomplishment or even the actual effort to achieve it, the very crux of the matter, and it just gets stuck in training for training’s sake, training and training and training and training.

But it never enters the lists, so to speak. It never steps into the ring. And so it never conquers. It never triumphs. It never experiences the glory, it never experiences the life. That asceticism continued forever becomes a kind of death, a real spiritual death, because it has refused the life of the contest.

Don’t fail to engage in askesis: but also don’t fail to engage in the real contest, in the real life, in an erotic communion that passes into a free non-possession of what is desired.

Perhaps this is the vocation of the age. I would say this is Evdokimov’s “monasticism in the world,” but I mean something more radical. The note should be on the heroic. The note should be on the vital. The note should be on the endeavor, on the trial.

As Joseph Smith says, truth is proved by contraries.

This positive eros of distance, this achievement that is the purpose of askesis as training, is something available to us and in which we can engage perpetually in daily life. And it’s fiery. It’s a way of being erotically engaged with the world without seeking to devour the world.

This relinquishment of possessing the glory of a being in its brightness — this is full of fire, full of eros, at the same time that it’s not grasping at anything. It’s not seeking to devour or consume anything. And it is most definitely not a falling back into some kind of passivity or self-abnegation. That would be a complete betrayal.

I am gesturing towards something that’s anti-ascetic in the way that the word “ascetic” has come to be. “If you will, you can become all flame.” And the idea of becoming all flame is surely a very vitalist conception.

This is something fiery and alive, not dead, fierce and joyful. A fiery, alive, erotic communion with the world that is not grasping, that is not devouring, that is not assimilating.

Mustn’t this be the image of divine Eros? Because that’s the very nature of divine Eros — divine Eros is creative in the sense of tzimtzum, in the sense of creating a space within which finite beings can be, a withdrawal. Withdrawal is the divine Eros. Withdrawal is the highest manifestation of the divine Eros.

And you can be sure that our experience of the glory of a creature is just a flash, the briefest moment compared to God’s experience of the glory of the creature, which he knows to its apophatic depths. And we approach the experience feeling such depths, but still those depths are not the apophatic depths of God’s experience of the creature, (if one can speak of God’s experience, which I believe one can). Surely that’s the flavor of divine Eros.

In this inspiration I feel a moment of getting a bead on what that divine Eros means in terms of my own felt experience and felt reality. As Ursula Le Guin puts it in the verse of her epic poem, The Creation of Éa, in the Earthsea trilogy:

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight
on the empty sky.

That sense of exultation in seeing Iand releasing the bright flight of the hawk on the empty sky is what I’m reaching for. If you could have the power to pull the hawk down from the sky, and you didn’t. If you had the power to assimilate it, but you didn’t, that would be the feeling, the gesture, the movement of this divine Eros.