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Автор:Metz Johann Baptist
CHAPTER IV. The Theology of the World and Asceticism
The Theology of the World and Asceticism
In our day, theology seems to have awakened to a new responsibility towards the world. At the same time, it has come to distrust any over-hasty distinction between the "sacred" and the "profane," which not infrequently serves to release faith itself from the burden and suffering of concrete secular life. Christian faith seeks to understand and accept the situation of our secular world today as a piece of its own history. Did not Paul himself say the same thing? "All things are yours, whether .. . the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours; and you are Christ's; and Christ is God's" (1 Cor. 3, 22f.). To belong to Christ is not to betray the world. Precisely the price of being a Christian is to accept special responsibility for the world, to be ready to be exposed and given over to it.
But how does the no less authentic and central motive of asceticism accord with all of these ideas on faith's responsibility for the world? Even in outline we cannot here indicate all that is meant in Christian terms by the word "asceticism." We are simply pursuing the question of how responsibility for the world and asceticism are related to one another - and this only in very general terms and without any claim to being complete.
Is it possible to see asceticism as an inner element of faith's responsibility for the world? In terms of ordinary feeling and usage everything seems to speak against it. Do we not automatically identify asceticism with an attitude of rejection and denial of the world? Does not Christian asceticism have an inner tendency to flee from the world? We are not concerned here to deny this tendency outright, or to show that somewhere there is a grievous misunderstanding; on the contrary, we affirm this tendency to be true, in a sense. And we consider it an important one - still today. The important thing is to understand it properly and thus find an approach to an elementary feature of Christian responsibility for the world. Ascetic flight from the world should never be simply a flight out of the world, for man cannot in fact exist without a world. Such a "flight" would only be a deceptive entry into some artificial world beside this one (generally only the more convenient religious world situation of yesterday). Not flight from the world, but flight "forward" with the world is the basic movement of ascetic flight from the world: flight from the world that is established only in the present and in what is controllable, whose "time is always here" (Jn. 7, 6), /St. Paul's call to renounce the world, above all his warning "Do not be conformed to this world" (Rom. 12, 2), must be correctly understood. Paul is critical not of solidarity with the world, but of conformism with it. He is critical of men who in their self-prestigiousness seek to fashion the world's future entirely by themselves and to turn everything into a function of the present. He is calling not simply for some undialectical denial of the world, but for the acceptance of painful conflict and self-sacrificing disagreement with the world, for readiness to challenge the present in the name of the promised future of God. What drives the Christian to the flight of asceticism and denial of the world is not, therefore, contempt for the world, but responsibility for it in hope - in hope for that world future as it is announced and sealed in the promises of God, against which we constantly harden our hearts in pride or despair.
Christian asceticism, then, springs from the spirt of scriptural hope and is in the service of this hope for all men. It follows Christ crucified, the unique model of world affirmation and conquest, who in his love for the world both affirmed it and suffered for it. Christian asceticism has the servant quality of crucified hope for the world. Thus it gains a breadth that puts it beyond the suspicion of an ascetic I'art four I'art or of purely individualistic renunciation. Christian asceticism is highly "deprivatized." Its suffering comes from its passionate identification with the world in looking forward to its promised divine future. It is distinguished by two features which are not usually connected with it. The first is its almost revolutionary quality. Its flight from and denial of the world is primarily a rejection of what exists in the present and can be grasped or planned. It protests against the slavery of what is simply present. Its renunciation and its denial have a forward dynamism. In this connection Peguy said once that "the slavery of what is finished is infinitely more likely to get hold of us than the slavery of disorder, and it has far more damaging consequences. ... It has been known that battles have been won in disorder, even through disorder:
panic forwards. But it has never been known that tiredness and senility have accidentally produced a youthful work." Christian asceticism is in the service of this youth, in the service of the promise of that "new" world which is revealed in faith in Jesus, the Christ. Hence it does not come from resignation towards the world, but rather is governed by an initiative spirit towards it coming into being out of God's future, for which process those who live in hope themselves bear the painful responsibility.
It is true - and here we come to the second feature - that Christian asceticism knows in a special measure about the mortal peril to the hope in which it lives. It knows about death, before which all the shining promises threaten to be extinguished. Hence asceticism has been called a rehearsal of death, a rehearsal of a hope which is bigger than any dashing of any particular hope, a rehearsal of hope against hope. But this movement of asceticism must not be narrowed down into an individualistic worldlessness. It takes place in relation to the world of our brothers, in self-sacrificial love for others, the "least," in selfless
hope for them (see 1 Jn. 3, 14). Christian asceticism takes to itself the suffering of death, which threatens our promises, and overcomes it, by entering on the adventure of fraternal love for the least of the brethren. Thus again, asceticism appears as what it must be, and must remain, for a Christian: the servant figure of responsibility for the world which overcomes the world.
In the Christian tradition this asceticism is closely connected with mysticism. In our minds it is generally connected with distance from men and the world and easily acquires for us the character of the subjective and the private. But here also the first impression is deceptive. Christian mysticism is neither a kind of pantheistic infinity mysticism nor an esoteric mysticism of exaltation, tending towards the self-redemption of the individual soul. It is rather - putting it extremely - a mysticism of fraternity. But it does not proceed from an arbitrary denial of men and the world, in order to seek to rise towards a direct nearness to God. For the God of the Christian faith is found only in the movement of his love towards men, the "least," a? has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Christian mysticism finds, therefore, that direct experience of God which it seeks precisely in daring to imitate the unconditional involvement of 'the divine love for man, in letting itself be drawn into the descensus of God, into the descent of his love to the least of his "brothers. Only in this movement do we find the supreme nearness, the supreme immediacy of God. And that is why mysticism, which seeks this nearness, has the place not outside, beside, or above responsibility for the world of our brothers, but in the center of it.
Both asceticism and mysticism can and must be understood in a Christian way, as elements of the world for which responsibility is taken in the hope of faith.
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