Last year, I created a Lenten Weblog, to which I conscientiously contributed every day from Clean Monday (that’s today) through Lazarus Saturday. This year I doubt that I will have the persistence for such an enterprise, but I’ll try to post occasional thoughts on topics of a suitably Lenten character.
This morning, I took up St. John Climacus’ The Ladder of Divine Ascent, traditional seasonal reading for Orthodox Christians. A passage in translator Colm Luibheid’s preface strikes me as worthy of attention:
[T]here is one feature of the unrelaxed severity and discipline of early monastic life that certainly ought to be advertedto . . . ; namely, the undeniable correlation between hardship and an intense marshaling of inner, and frequently unsuspected, resources. Words cannot really encompass what happens here. But the fact seems well established. In the evidence of the Gulag Archipelago, in the testimony of men like Solzhenitsyn, Tertz, Panin, and Shifrin, in the records of the tidal wave of misery let loose by German Nazism, there is a persistent and humbling proof of the capacity of individuals, trapped amid the worst conditions of deprivation, to unlock an inner dynamism, which often is manifested as a commanding faith in God and which must never be confused with the understandable motive of escapism. It has happened too often in twentieth-century experience to be trivialized or explained away; and somewhere within it lies a common bond with the ordeals, voluntarily undertaken, and the achievements of the first monks of the Church. Sharp differences of time and circumstance do not alter the shared character of the early saint and that prisoner of our day who has climbed beyond gross suffering and oppression to arrive at a level of richness beyond all common imagining.
Don’t we see the opposite phenomenon, too? Men who live soft, comfortable lives, as most of us in the Western world do, flinch from mild hardship. It may not be necessary to look any further for an explanation of the cowardice of our elites in the face of terrorism. Instead of an “intense marshaling of inner, and frequently unsuspected, resources”, we see the dissipation of resources that lie readily at hand. Thus the European Union’s Justice and Security Commissioner avers, “The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression. We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.”
In other words, this civilized European statesman does not have to be shut up in the Gulag or tortured by Islamofascists; his morale breaks under the threat of rowdy gangs of Moslem youths.
Perhaps civilization is inherently temporary and self-limiting. Men toil to construct the edifice. Tantae molis erat romanam condere gentem imperiumque. Then, the labor done, they grow unwilling to undergo the strain of defending their achievements; so they stand listlessly aside as barbarians burn them down. Facilis est descensus.
Comments