Therefore, my children, let us hold to the discipline, and not be careless. For we have the Lord for our co-worker in this, as it is written, God works for good with everyone who chooses the good. And in order that we not become negligent, it is good to carefully consider the Apostle’s statement: I die daily. For if we so live as people dying daily, we will not commit sin. The point of the saying is this: As we rise daily, let us suppose that we shall not survive till evening, and again, as we prepare for sleep, let us consider that we shall not awaken. By its very nature our life is uncertain, and is meted out daily by providence. If we think in this way, and in this way live — daily — we will not sin, nor will we crave anything, nor bear a grudge against anyone, nor will we lay up treasures on earth, but as people who anticipate dying each day we shall be free of possessions, and shall forgive all things to all people. The desire for a woman, or another sordid pleasure, we shall not merely control — rather, we shall turn from it as something transitory, forever doing battle and looking toward the day of judgment. For larger fear and dread of the torments always destroys pleasure’s smooth allure, and rouses the declining soul. (Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 19)

Here we have the desert monk’s clear adaptation of the Stoic practice of meditating on death, and to do so daily. Why daily? Why undertake a seemingly morbid envisioning of oneself so frequently? The force of Anthony’s speech, as reported by Athanasius, is the need for the monk to confront acedia. This confrontation is core to the life of the monk, and it is the major theme of the speech. Acedia arises from the commitment to the life itself, which because of its repetitive nature can seem like drudgery at times. Evagrius will, a generation or two later, formalize acedia as one of the eight evil thoughts, and will spend considerable time and effort creating and teaching specific techniques for dealing with it. But in this speech from Anthony to a community of monks who have chosen a way of life that is still in its early stages, we see how important this particular demon would be.

Anthony speaks from his own experience as the ground of his credibility:

… I, as your elder, will share what I know from the fruits of my experience. In the first place, let us hold in common the same eagerness not to surrender what we have begun, either by growing fainthearted in the labors or by saying, ‘We have spent a long time in the discipline.’ Rather, as though making a beginning daily, let us increase our dedication. (16)

Dealing with acedia will require daily acts of renewal to the commitment one has made to the life of the monk. This is not a doctrinal pronouncement but a practical one that is at the heart of the ascesis that is at the heart of anachoresis — the choice to live with a community of others undertaking a spiritual quest that they don’t believe is possible by living in the villages of their ancestors. They are seeking a different way of living that is solely devoted to the transformation of themselves untethered from the social and political requirements of the life of the Egyptian villager.

Such a life that untethers itself from prior traditions will confront acedia. It is the experience of time as dragging on and the choice of the ascetic life as drudgery. Evagrius called acedia “the noonday demon” because it tends to arise in the middle of the day when the daily act of renewal is behind you and the hour of community with other monks is still a few hours away. In this time of “noonday” the demon sneaks up and encourages the monk to see time as stretched out as an unending monotony. This feeling, if not cut off (through the practices of antirrhetikos), can grown into a passive or active nihilism.

What does all this have to do with the daily meditation on one’s own death? It is a way of changing one’s experience of time and our desires. It works like this: when I imagine my own life as very soon coming to an end, my perspective automatically changes about what is of value to me. At times, whenever I feel like I need to put something I’m dealing with into proper perspective, I imagine myself as my grandfather must have imagined his life at its end. Looking back at that moment when you realize you are in your last hours, what must you see? What was important? What do you hold onto? Will this moment that I am dealing with right now rise to that level of importance? Nothing like imagining one’s own death and what will be remembered as important at that moment has the power of cutting off desires by putting them into perspective, as the saying goes.

I don’t see this as Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal. This is closer to amore fati. To love one’s fate is to make a virtue of death as the inevitable event that will, at the moment of its occurrence, put everything in perspective. Montaigne captured it beautifully when he wrote that at that moment “Wherever your life ends, it is all there” (Essays I:20). All of time is gathered at that instance and the meaningful stuff is sorted from the meaningless. To imagine one’s death as immanent is paradoxically to find meaning by jumping forward to the immediate and inevitable end. This is the very definition of amore fati, as Nietzsche envisioned it. It is what makes Nietzsche and Anthony and Athanasius and Evagrius all indebted to Stoicism. It is what allows me to see beauty in the imagining of my own death without actively desiring it.

The lesson of loving our fate and of imagining our own death as its ultimate practice is this: it is an practice of ascesis that helps us distance ourselves from current desires so that we can look at them from the perspective of our whole lives and what we want our whole lives to have been when we are at the end. This is not an act of asceticism as cutting off our desires as inherently sinful. When Anthony says, “as people dying daily, we will not commit sin,” he is not saying that we are inherently and irredeemably sinful. This is not Pauline Christianity as Nietzsche imagined it. To “commit sin” is to not have a self-reflective disposition to our own desires. This is a crucial point to understand. If Nietzsche was right in saying that Paul implanted sin as the origin of our desires — as our human condition — then we can only have a nihilistic disposition toward ourselves and toward others. Conversion will have to pass through self-destruction, but will never be complete until we are dead. We must destroy ourselves as the only way to overcome our fallen and sinful human condition. This is the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche found so dangerous.

Anthony’s message (and the other monks of the Egyptian desert) is not necessarily to see sin as the human condition — at least not sin as an evil implanted in us as our truth. Rather, to “commit sin” is to let our desires run amok and dictate our actions without any attempt to reflect upon them. We can be self-reflective, and one technique for activating self-reflection is to imagine our own death as immanent. What will we think of ourselves at that moment? What will arise as truly important? In this act, just enough time and energy is created to slow ourselves down in order to evaluate what we are going through right here, right now and to put ourselves at the end when, as Montaigne said, “it is all there.”