A new economy... inside yourself

What if desert ascetics were escaping from the political realities of violent rule—in the one place they could control?

Part 5 of our Ulterior Lives series: A Slow Research Project into The Outsider Politics of Monasticism. Read the introduction here.

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They said of Agatho that for three years he kept a stone in his mouth to teach him silence.

They said of Helladius that he lived twenty years in his cell, and did not once raise his eyes to the roof.

Some brothers went to a hermit in Scetis and wanted to give him some oil. But the hermit said, “Look, there is the little jar of oil which you brought me three years ago…”

Dioscorus of Namisias made his bread out of barley and his soup out of lentils. Every year he made one particular resolution: either not to meet anyone for a year, or not to speak, or not to taste cooked food, or not to eat any fruit, or not to eat vegetables. This was his system for everything. He made himself a master of one thing, and then started on another, and so on each year.

Evagrius quoted a hermit saying, “I cut away bodily pleasure in order to get rid of occasions for anger.

The saddest estimation of the ascetic religious life would be a life that simply loathes itself. Or perhaps a life that imagines some bargain with a joyless god who delights in misery, and will exchange it for happy afterlives.

Or perhaps they are formed of a neurotic moralising horror about the body, about food and sex and physical pleasure. Various shades of indifference or contempt for physical life have certainly been articulated in particular religious spheres, so one may well look askance at a man who goes about with a stone in his mouth to learn silence.

When I read the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the question often raises its head. They were almost comically severe. And yet there is a certain kindness, peaceableness and delight therein that will always warm my misgivings.

Approaching monastic life with material and political questions—as a kind of outsider politics—has led me to a different hypothesis about ascetic dearth.

I'm fascinated by the proposition that the dawn of agricultural civilisation might be reckoned to be the starting point of the Anthropocene: the geological epoch of human domination. Roughly twelve thousand years ago, humans began to farm, instead of hunt. From here they built cities, with hierarchies to manage things, stores for grain, walls and armies for defence.

Previously, survival had been conditioned on natural equilibrium; now survival was ensured by increased accumulation. The more you had, the better your chances. The economists of modernity called this creature homo economicus. It was a rational certitude that he would always accumulate when possible, and there has been no other game in town. But the gifts of civilisation demand violence: violence against enemies, violence against nature, and the violence that guarantees orderly cities and towns. Here is a sort of fall, if you will. In a time when this pattern has capitulated toward extinction events, one may ask what kind of creature the human must now become in order to return to patterns of equilibrium from the violence of accumulation.

My hypothesis is that the Desert Fathers and Mothers, having found themselves at the waning end of a bloated Roman Empire, were somehow energised by the same question. What must they become in order to find their way to somewhere different? Each performed, in their own body, an exorcism of the violence of civilisation. Each embraced their own body as the place where the human creature might experience a joyous redemption from political economies of violent rule. Each staged an insurrection against the dominion of homo ecomicus.

For this reason, power, status, accumulation, patriarchal lust and the dominating voice were all considered traps of the devil. Simplicity and restraint might seem to be punishing processes, but they were not exactly understood as punishments. They were, rather, the route to a very political kind of liberation, toward an ideal that has always eluded hierarchical civilisations: I am referring to that extraordinary and very material pleasure known as peace.

Sisois said, “Be despised; put your self-will behind your back; be free of worldly concerns, and you will have peace.”

This insurrection was performed in the only space it could conceivably be done without the violence that would obviously undermine it: it was to be staged by the individual in the site of their own body, bodies they took with intent out of the city walls and out into the wilderness. Out in the desert they lived as a completely decentred and unregulated community quite peaceably for several hundred years. Their only structure was a fluid and improvised Christian spirituality that took the form of some kind of parody of economic and political accumulation and competition. They lived their lives in a comedic drama in which they, with knowing irony I suspect, competed to be less, to have less, to say less, to want less, until finally they had no cause whatsoever for conflict with anyone or anything, besides that old devil himself, homo economicus.

This individualistic approach has tended to exclude monastic forms of life from consideration at the table of political and economic questions. It would appear to be the story of a lot of individuals seeking personal salvation. They had fled the world and thus had fled the conversation. This is true enough. It is also precisely why they might be all the more fascinating to a world where the same boring conversation loops endlessly. Everything is political. The body is political. Being rather clearer than Rome about matters of autonomy and consent, they performed a new political economy, each in the world of their own body, and never over another's. In a very short time, the desert was well populated with the human creature, living almost without kings, or armies, or money or property, or various other such things.

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This slow research project is supported by the Passionists, a Catholic religious order committed to works of solidarity with suffering people and the suffering creation, founded in 1720. You can read our previous series exploring Passionist writings here, or find out more about the modern-day order on their website.