Asceticism and Saint Friedrich of the Broken Spine

I don't think James Poulos is a madman, but, if he is, it's the madness of a prophet. How else could he so consistently come up with crypto-cryptic nuggets like this one?

I am really satisfied to discover that this post accidentally hints that Nietzsche’s main concern was how to be alone without being an ascetic.

That's what stand-up comedians would call a soaker*, but rather than leave you to get it on the drive home, I'll try to bludgeon James's sentence until it gives up the secret of postmodern conservatism.

I have written before that the contradiction that animates postmodern conservatism, at least for me, is the tension between Christian traditionalism and postmodern audacity. Dan McCarthy describes postmodern audacity as "an obsession with theory, a keen interest in power relationships, and a yen for the transgressive." Paul Gottfried calls it "an iconoclastic exuberance . . . more Nietzschean than neo-Thomistic." Back in the Party of the Right, we just called it the will to badass. Alas, it doesn't quite jive with Christian meekness, and I don't like the "heroic Christianity" that looks like being really, really meek.

Asceticism, defined (a little loosely) as the cultivation of self-discipline at the expense of ordinary pleasure, seems like the best way to fulfill both of my contradictory ambitions, which is where Poulos's sentence comes in: Nietzsche tried to come up with a way for man to be alone in a room with himself besides asceticism, but he failed. ("The ability to be alone in a room with yourself," by the way, means being in touch with the you that stands behind all your public faces; not Helen-at-work, not Helen-at-blog, not even Helen-at-prayer, but simply Helen. If it sounds like something a person can take for granted, think harder; there's nothing automatic about it.)

Crispin Sartwell says that he goes to the gym because "I need, first of all, to feel myself as a person who is capable of making things hapen, but even more, I think, to feel myself to be a person who is incapable of making things happen." It is psychologically impossible to have an honest picture of oneself without knowing where one's limits are. (That's why asceticism is different from stoicism: the latter, inasmuch as it depends upon the fiction that a man can control his experience of life, is about denying human limits.) Spiritual exercises (which might include anything from fasting to anger management to learning how to love your hangover) keep a man strong, but they also keep him honest.

The problem with Nietzsche's recipe for cultivated excellence is that it relies too much on other people. The relationship between a bully and his victims is a sickly dependence that runs both ways, no matter how narcissistic the bully is. Asceticism, on the other hand, is an internal struggle, one that demands "we let ourselves be changed, in our point of view, attitudes, and convictions. This means that we must dialogue with ourselves, and hence we must do battle with ourselves" (Pierre Hadot).

I probably haven't said anything controversial yet—everybody's in favor of excellence, and almost everybody acknowledges that self-discipline is an important kind of excellence. How is this picture of asceticism different from "You should embody as many kinds of awesome as you can?" Well, a good way to make an idea controversial is to bring Christianity into it, so I'll let Virginia Burrus be provocative on my behalf:

The act of confession is, then, at once assertive and yielding, a willful appropriation of the (divine) power of judgment that is at the same time a deliberately mortifying submission of will and self to judgment, and thus also—perhaps—to mercy. It is neither simply coerced nor simply voluntary but rather sits necessarily on the border of what is coerced and what is offered freely. This is why it continues to make trouble for legal systems committed to distinguishing between forced and voluntary confession. One must want, at least a little, to be broken, to be exposed, or the confession is sterile.

Nietzsche reveled in being powerful, Therese of Lisieux in being powerless; asceticism is the revelation that fortitude, like confession, means being both at the same time.

I've written before about this quote from Susan Farr in the context of explaining the fine line between "ascetic" and "ecstatic," but it's exactly the note I want to end on here, too:

I am a person who trusts her body and its sensations more than her mind and its thoughts. This is a difficult discovery after years of formal schooling designed, presumably, to make my mind a well-trained, highly reliable tool. Still, my body serves me better... For one thing, thoughts are censored: some things are unthinkable, but a body that is freed to do whatever feels right will do the undoable.

Cut the antinomian sketchiness of "whatever feels right" and you've got an endorsement of asceticism that Saint Anthony, Friedrich Nietzsche, and I could all sign onto.

*Yale professor Karsten Harries does the same thing. "Isn't Nietzsche's eternal recurrence rather like the eucharist?" "What?" Then, two days later, at three AM . . .