#535: Raising the Floor: The Value of Asceticism

+ new book + CiQ Promotion

MLA: Remember that anyone living in the US who becomes a member for at least $20 a year will receive a copy of Called into Questions….which is still batting a perfect 5.0 on Amazon. Let’s go, America! Now, on to it…

Sometimes, a person has to hit rock bottom before they will change. 

This bit of folk-wisdom has deep roots in the American psyche, where we love to read and consume spectacular conversion narratives. We know the kinds of stories that the phrase sums up: a person takes to the bottle, loses their job and family, and ends up crying out to God from a ditch somewhere outside Tulsa. Or, more commonly, a young man finds himself alone in jail after a bit of stupid fun goes wrong, weeping at the prospect of being cut off from their family, work, and friends. 

The latter type of case is especially instructive. Many people who enter prison are in a peculiarly vulnerable condition, which makes them uniquely open to change. They have been stripped of their agency, leaving them feeling destitute and hopeless. They enter into a genuine crisis, which my friend Dustin Benac describes as a point at which we reach the end of our resources, where we come up short for the task ahead of us and are compelled to discover new resources to face the obstacles ahead. People are inclined to convert when they hit “rock bottom” because they finally realize that they are no longer content with their current resources. In that moment, the burden of their sin has become “intolerable” to them—it is both too heavy for them and they are no longer willing to carry it. 

Everyone is in danger of hitting “rock bottom” at some point in their lives, I think—but we also do not do so at the same point. If it takes being thrown into prison to make one person aware that their life stands in need of drastic change, it might only take a particularly disappointed look from a parent for another. To switch the metaphors, we all have a different “floor” for our lives—a bottom level of (dis)functioning where we begin to look around for help. If we imagine the ceiling of our lives as those moments where we feel competent and secure, the floor are those times when we are adrift and overwhelmed, when we no longer seem up to the task of living in the way we ought—when our resources seem to come up short for the life we want to lead. 

So much of our happiness depends upon having resources at hand, which is why abstaining from food or drink can initially make us seem surly and irritable. Sometimes people have told me that they gave up fasting because it was hard to be happy—when, dear reader, the difficulty is the point. As we temporarily renounce the goods of this world, we should expect our lives to get worse before they get better, as removing the resources we usually rely on to get through a day with good cheer exposes how few resources for joy we really have. Deprivation causes a crises, in other words, which means we have to look for new resources to overcome the obstacles of anger and irritation before us. 

This is the aim of a season like Lent, it seems to me—to shift the “floor” of our lives, such that we hit “rock bottom” at a point where it is safe for us and everyone around us to do so. The person who commits to abstaining from food two days a week during Lent will doubtlessly feel tempted regularly to satisfy their cravings. If they give in, though, they have—enjoyed the good gifts of creation. They fail, but upward, as it were, into a good. They will doubtlessly feel the failure as a real one, as violating one’s commitments is a serious and grave wrong. But the fast raises their “floor” for their lives, such that they hit “rock bottom” at a point at which no one is harmed besides themselves (even if others are not benefited by their lack of abstinence). Better to set the “bar” for temptation at ice cream after dinner than telling secrets to join the inner ring. Both people might experience temptation the same way, but one’s floor will be much higher than the other—and will be more equipped to deal with real temptations to sin than the other. 

All of this explains why suggestions that Christians give up racism or sexism instead of chocolate—which happen every year about this time—so badly misunderstand the nature of the Christian life and the indispensable role asceticism plays within it. One gives up chocolate or alcohol or meat in order to become more alive to the weaknesses of will that allows denigrating thoughts and attitudes to persist. 

The aim of ascetical practices, then, is to induce a crisis in our lives before a crisis comes upon us. We renounce goods that we depend upon in order to discover the limits of our resources, so that we are induced to cry out to God for His sustaining help and nourishment. This is why fasting from food and drink is peculiarly powerful, and why Lenten fasts that do not include abstention from it in some respect will fail to bring the transformation we might hope for. For we are nowhere so acutely dependent upon the world than in what we eat and drink; food is our primary and fundamental resource for life itself. To say “no” to food induces a crisis that encompasses the whole of who we are and demands a comprehensive reorientation of our lives toward God.

Confidence in Life: A New Book

Late in January, my new book on procreation was released by T&T Clark. Confidence in Life: A Barthian Account of Procreation is a book I worked extremely hard on. It was originally my doctoral dissertation, but I spent an additional three+ years reading a lot more Karl Barth and revising my thoughts in order to polish it up.

The cost is exorbitant, so I do not expect you to rush out to buy it (unlike, ahem, another book that came out recently!). But if you put one on order from the library to help sales, I would certainly appreciate that. If it sells well enough the next year or so, the odds of a cost-effective paperback version go up.

Jake Meador on CiQ

The contrast to all of this is the sort of Christianity Matt holds out to his readers in his book. It is a faith that doesn't easily fit into the dominant blocs of the American church—he is no promoter of "doubt" as a kind of unambiguous good or essential element of Christian belief, but neither is he selling certainty like so many gurus of the past. He's calling his readers above all to approach their intellectual lives with Christian maturity and is offering them a path toward doing that. But maturity does not mean free from uncertainty and it certainly doesn't mean a faith that no longer needs to study and question but simply declaim and command. Mature Christian faith can't ultimately mean either of those things because on the one hand our own waverings often keep us from the life of love and on the other our false certainties hinder our attempts to know the God beyond all praising.

He is calling his readers, rather, to something like the intellectual approach of St Thomas Aquinas, who could write millions upon millions of words and yet, upon experiencing a more mystical encounter with the divine, recognize that even his learned, scripturally rooted writing about God can still seem like little more than straw when set next to the reality of knowing him.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Around the Web

My friend Elizabeth Corey has a beautiful essay on the consolations of middle age—which is worth reading not only for those who are in it, but for those approaching it as well.

We recorded an episode of Mere Fidelity on C.S. Lewis’ legacy, so you can listen to that for my thoughts on the subject. But you can also read my friend Alastair Roberts’ explanation for how Lewis’s Anglicanism was constitutive of his approach to the world in ways that make him unintelligible to American evangelicals. Brad East’s post on what would happen if Lewis were alive today is also worth reading on this theme.

The Penultimate Word

“Preaching in the congregation, and the theology which serves its preparation, can be faithful to its theme and therefore relevant and adapted to the circumstances and edifying to the community, only if it is surrounded, sustained and constantly stimulated and fructified by the questions and answers of the community.

With his own questions and answers in matters of right understanding and doctrine, each individual Christian thus participates in what the community is commanded to do. If he holds aloof, or slackens, or allows himself to sleep, or (wanders into speculation and error, he must not be surprised if sooner or later the same will have to be said about the community as such and particularly about its more responsible members.

How many complaints about the Church would never be made if only those who make them were to realise that we ourselves are the Church, so that what it has or has not to say stands or falls with us!? There can be no doubt that all the great errors which have overtaken the preaching and theology of the community in the course of its history have had their true origin, not so much in the studies of the well-known errorists and heretics who have merely blabbed them out, but rather in the secret inattention and neglect, the private drowsing and wandering and erring, of innumerable nameless Christians who were not prepared to regard the listening of the community to the Word as their own concern, who wanted privacy in their thinking, and who thus created the atmosphere in which heresy and error became possible and even inevitable in the community.” — Karl Barth, with an anticipatory endorsement of Called into Questions…