I’ll start today with Luke 6:37-38:

Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.

This need not be the ascetic ideal. This is a passage about the reciprocal power of giving up our ressentiment-fueled demands for justice as eye-for-an-eye reciprocity. It was a good passage for me to find this morning (March 6, 2023) as I’ve been struggling with Descartes and Cartesianism. My mode in these mediations since re-engaging with Augustine and Plato has been to try to read them against the grain of my intellectual upbringing. My re-engagement has meant giving them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t want to read Plato’s Socrates’ as Nietzsche read him — as the tyrant of reason. I don’t want to read Augustine as a champion of an oppressive self-discipline and an intolerant Nicene Christianity. I don’t want to read the desert fathers (particularly Evagrius and St. Anthony) as champions of the denigration of the passions in favor of a purely mystical relationship with another world that is an escape from this one. I found a way through Plato, just as I a found a way through Evagrius. Both show me a way through asceticism by restoring to it ascesis as self-transformative training and discipline that channels one’s energy into this life and not away from it.

I think that the restoration of ascesis to asceticism is the proper reading of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity’s nihilism. How else are we to understand his validation of Jesus and condemnation of Paul in Anti-Christ? How else are we to understand his admiration of Mirabeau in the Genealogy whose defining quality is his ability to let things go and never give into ressentiment:

To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long — that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget (a good example of this in modern times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was unable to forgive simply because he — forgot). Such a man shakes of with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others… (GM 1.10)

Is not Mirabeu clearly presented here as an example of the lesson of Luke Chapter 6? A “strong, full nature” does not strike back; it adjusts to the circumstances as given and moves on. Presumably he has the power to strike back but either chooses not to or does not even think that a reciprocation is required — he has no need for forgiveness as a virtue, which must arise from a judgmental stance, which he does not have. Whether he chooses this stance or has it naturally does not matter. Nietzsche’s Mirabeau is not the exemplar of a slave morality that makes weakness into a virtue. His is a “strong, full nature,” and he is an exemplar of amore fati — the willed and conscious decision to love one’s fate as a way of dealing with nihilism.

Plato and Evagrius are counter-intuitive in this respect, but I read them as Nietzsche read Mirabeau and Jesus, not as he read Paul. I know this isn’t how philosophers read Plato. Doesn’t he give us the Forms as perfection outside of the world and the things of this world are mere imitations? Doesn’t Plato’s Socrates argue that true enlightenment happens outside of the cave? If we can’t answer the question “what is [the eternal nature of ] virtue?” can we not be virtuous? Isn’t the care of the soul of the Phaedo a desire to leave behind this world and commune with other similar lovers of wisdom in the afterlife? Similar questions could be asked of Evagrius. Isn’t anachoresis (withdrawal) into the desert the epitome of the ascetic ideal? Aren’t the self-disciplinary ascetic practices of the monk designed to dominate the passions in favor of a communion with God as perfection outside of this world? Isn’t anachoresis the degradation of this world in the name of the metaphysics of a higher and better one that can only be accessed by ignoring this world and living a solitary life as a desert monk?

All these things are true to some extent, but like Plato’s philosopher who leaves the cave, our wisdom must return to this world with the energy gained by withdrawing from it. We do ourselves a disservice if we ignore the cyclical aspect of what Plato and Evagrius and Luke are giving us in their ethical practices. We must see this world as it is, not because it is evil, but because we need to return the energy we gain in contemplation of “the Good” as the measure we give that will be given back. Luke, like Plato, envisions a cycle where “the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” It will overflow you and be passed onto others. Evagrius does the same. His path was to withdraw into the desert, but in that withdrawal he wrote prolifically and publicly about the spiritual practices that help channel the energy of the monk’s encounter with God back into the community in which one lives. This energy returns as strength, not weakness. It returns as renewal against the passive nihilism of acedia.

Evagrius’ neoplatonic practices have a lot to say to us non-monks today, especially about dealing with the passive nihilism of acedia and the active nihilism of anger. If you need to engage in daily renewal of your will to continue to embrace the Good and channel it into the world, Evagrius is an excellent teacher. His God was Plato’s Good: we know this from the neoplatonic influences that flowed through the late Roman Empire, especially in and around Alexandria at the time. This Good/God flows through everything and cannot be reduced in a finite concept. It exists like the light of the sun (Republic Book 6) that permeates everything.

Yet we shouldn’t concentrate our attention on the sun separate from its light. Nietzsche cautioned us to not separate the lightening from its flash — the subject from its expression. The lightening and the flash are one and the same. Just so, we should see the sun and its light as one and the same. The ascetic ideal goes looking for the definitive source of the Good/God as an object of finite knowledge so that we can bludgeon others with the Truth we think we’ve understood. This is to reduce the Good and God to doctrinal claims — to seek the Truth of the sun that explains the light. In doing so we end up reducing them to finite concepts that are the foundations of belief systems. What if we concentrate on the power of the light itself without trying to trace it back to a source that allows us to capture it and pin it down as an object of definitive knowledge? Plato warned us against treating the Good in this way:

SOCRATES: You must say, then, that what gives the truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good. And as the cause of knowledge and truth, you must think of it as an object of knowledge. But knowledge and truth are beautiful things. But if you are to think correctly, you must think of the good as other and more beautiful than they. In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly thought to be sunlike, but wrongly thought to be the sun. So, here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as godlike, but wrong to think that either of them is the good — for the status of the good is yet more honorable. (508e-509a, emphasis added)

Shortly after this, he delivers the key line to Glaucon: “the good is not being, but something yet beyond being, superior to it in rank and power” (509b). The good can be an object of knowledge, but not in the same way as temperance and justice and other virtues (506d). The good is not only beyond those, but it gives them power and is their cause. It weaves them together as harmonious beauty. The good is energy (power and cause) that flows and binds — Plato will later use the term we translate as “yoke.” Knowing this energy is gnosis, not episteme, and most certainly is not techne. We should see gnosis as more of an aesthetic experience of harmonic energy rather than a Cartesian exercise of the procedural cogito, which reduces objects of knowledge to expressions of mechanics and mathematics that can be know with absolute certainty. Plato is trying to show us how to have knowledge without an object. The good is a power experienced as beauty. It permeates this world in the here and now. Contemplation of it — when the philosopher leaves the metaphorical cave — is useless unless it comes back into the world as energy and power. It is a cycle, not an escape.

Should we not read Luke’s passage the same way? Is such a reading not a corrective to seeing Christianity, God, and the Good as objects of definitive knowledge — as the lightning that causes the flash? Luke 6 seeks a virtuous cycle between ourselves and the others we live with not by confronting judgment with judgment, condemnation with condemnation, hatred with hatred. This is what ressentiment does. To defuse these energies requires other energies — forgiveness and channeling of the good into our relationships with others. Luke is not describing the passive self-nihilistic actions of a slave morality. He is describing powerful forces that defuse ressentiment and bring others along through the contagion of an alternative energy.

We must understand the rhythm and reciprocation of meeting one experience of energy with another in Luke’s ethics:

But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who absue you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. (6:27-31)

What is the reward for doing so?

Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. (6:35-36)

There is no promise of an afterlife here. We misread Luke if we think “children of the Most High” is a permanent state of salvation. We must continue reading the following sentences to understand what his state is: it is the promise that you can participate in a cycle of energy that returns to you. All that God is (if there is a conventional God in this passage) is the exemplar of that energy: “he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” The return of this energy to you is not the reward of an end point. All it can be is a commitment to the infinite renewal of a disposition: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you… Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” These are not end points as permanently achieved states of being. The verbs “do” and “be” do not simply double back on the self as an ever deepening interiority. These verbs are grammatically connected to “just as” phrases that, when properly understood as the expression of a practice, stretch us out from ourselves: “do unto others as you would have them do to you” and “be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” We have here a cycle that pushes outward from the self to connect with an energy outside of ourselves, but this energy returns to ourselves only to continue to power the cycle again and again and again.

Like Plato’s philosopher who leaves the cave, the true sin is to try to stay outside of the cave and not return to try to make things better. The attempt to stay is the problem. It represents the bottling up of that energy into yourself as the attempt to hold onto a reward.

SOCRATES: It is our task as founders, then, to compel the best natures to learn what was said before to be the most important thing: namely, to see the good; to ascend that ascent. And when they have ascended and looked sufficiently, we must not allow them to do what they are allowed to do now.

GLAUCON: What’s that, then?

SOCRATES: To stay there and refuse to go down again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors, whether the inferior ones or the more excellent ones. (519c-d, emphasis added)

The first part is easily understood as the ascetic ideal — escaping the cave and attempting to stay there through an experience of the good that is inseparable from condemnation of the cave. But it is the second half that is the ascetic ideal’s undoing. It is also the part that simplified philosophical readings of Plato leave out. We lovers of wisdom who strive to “see the good” as “the most important thing” must return, not as superior beings standing above it all in self-aggrandizing judgment, but as ones who “share their labors and honors” — share the good and the bad of this world in this life in the cave together. If one returns with a Truth, that Truth cannot be the definitive content of a doctrine. It is a set of ethical practices that can only be demonstrated and enacted. “Share their labors and honors, whether the inferior ones or the more excellent ones.” “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” “Be merciful just as your Father is merciful.” “The measure you give is the measure you get back.” Are these phrases not the very expression of a beautiful cycle that we are responsible for?

__________

This cycle must start from one’s own self-transformation:

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice he log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, “Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye”, when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. (Luke 6:41-42)

The ethical practice is one that starts from oneself but does not seek one’s own salvation as the end point:

The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks” (6:45).

Your disposition matters because it is the energy you give that is the energy you get back.

If the reward for this behavior only resides in yourself, then we are within Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal. The virtuous cycle is broken by the ascetic ideal because the flow of energy gets stopped up inside the self. This bottling up can be experienced as ressentiment or bad conscience or guilt (Nietzsche) or pride or vainglory (Evagrius). We take ourselves as the ones who understand what God and the Good truly is, and in doing so we hold the rest of the world in contempt because it doesn’t understand the Truth that we now know. When Luke writes of “turning the other cheek” (to use the more familiar English translation), we understand this as the ascetic ideal and slave morality only if this becomes the occasion to judge the other as evil and to reward oneself for knowing this — only if this becomes the occasion for bludgeoning the other (ressentiment) or oneself (guilt) with the Truth. Turning the other cheek is not by itself the expression of a slave morality or of the ascetic ideal. It becomes the ascetic ideal only when we embrace our weakness and use it to condemn and to judge rather than to recycle and re-channel another kind of energy into the situation.

The slave morality and ascetic ideal are broken when we see turning the other cheek as the absorption of bad energy and transformation of it into good energy that we flow back into the world. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.” It is at these moments that we must embrace amor fati and channel that love of fate as the love of what has happened and flow it back into the situation. This does not require the denial and repression of one’s passions. It requires a profound engagement with what we are feeling and thinking at the moment when, to use Seneca’s phrasing, “we think we have been harmed.”

Seneca, who lived only a generation or two before the author we call Luke, captured this beautifully in On Providence, which was the fullest expression at the time of amor fati:

Clearly good men must do the same [as wrestlers who train with stronger opponents]. They must not flinch at hardships and difficulties, and must not level complaints against fate; but whatever happens, they must find the good in it — should turn it to good. It is not what you face that counts, but how you face it. (On Providence 2.4, emphasis added)

This is not the call for weakness as a virtue. This is restoring ascesis to asceticism as a deliberate and intentional strengthening of the will and therefore of one’s agency in the world. This is the cultivation of Mirabeau’s “strong, full nature.” We miss Seneca’s point if we ignore the fact that On Providence is actually an essay on ascesis as the training one must undergo to maintain agency within the unpredictable but necessary vicissitudes of life. To envision the universe as providential is to adopt amor fati as a commitment. To make this commitment requires a great deal of self-discipline and ascesis that is not contained by our traditional concepts and self-denying practices of asceticism.

When Nietzsche first formulated amor fati in The Gay Science, he stated it as his intentional act and not as the realization of a metaphysical truth. It takes the form of both a new year’s resolution and a reversal of Descartes:

For the new year — I still live; I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought that ran across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not want to even accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all on the whole: someday I wish to be a Yes-sayer. (276, emphasis added)

The echoes of Luke and Seneca are clear, as is the direct reference to, and reversal of, Descartes. Taking the phrase I emphasized in this passage: this can be seen as Plato’s exit from and return to the cave as a never-ending cycle — a commitment to see beauty and the good and to return to the cave as the bearer of that energy. To learn to see what has happened as good and beautiful and worthy of love is to “be one of those who make things beautiful.” It is like Seneca who doubles back on the phrase “to find the good in it” and changes his emphasis: “to turn it to good.” Resolving to see the good and the beautiful as a way of creating the good and the beautiful is the cycle in action. “Looking away” and “turning the other cheek” need not be the expressions of the ascetic ideal or slave morality. They can be the enactment of amor fati as the resolution to see and thus to create better energy in our relationships with others. The ascetic ideal is disavowed in the line, “I don’t want to accuse; I don’t want to even accuse those who accuse.” Can the channeling of Luke 6 be any clearer? “Do not judge so that you are not judged. Do not condemn so that you are not condemned.” It is for these reasons that I see Luke 6 as the undoing of the ascetic ideal, not its embrace.

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My reading of Nietzsche’s slave morality and ascetic ideal may not fit the common reading. It seems to me that the common understanding of these terms goes something like this: both slave morality and ascetic ideal create a binary opposition that separates reason from passions. To which of these capacities will our will be wedded is the moral question. The human will is thus imagined as the psychological mechanism for the subjection of the passions to reason. Nietzsche sees this as nihilistic because it is the denial and denigration of our collective human instincts as the representatives of the powers and pleasures of this world here and now. Reason uses the will to suppress these passions in favor of some form of salvation that is either an otherworldly afterlife or an apocalyptic revolution here on earth.

We have to be careful with this reading. It wants to trap us in the binary of reason versus passion where one is good and the other is evil. We may want to swing the pendulum away from reason toward the passions. Isn’t this just hedonism as a gateway to a nihilistic undermining of all collective values? Eventually, the pendulum will swing back as we lament the loss of reason. Hasn’t this happened already as evidenced by the legion of liberal commentators on the Death of Truth and the End of Reason? We must be better Nietzschean’s than this, though he did seem to have a deeper love for Dionysus than for Apollo.

We can’t swing between the binary. Rather, we have to go through it, which means finding a way through the ascetic ideal by inhabiting it deeply. The genie of the will is out of the bottle and isn’t interested in going back:

We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself — all this means — let us dare grasp it — a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presupposition of life; but it is an remains a will! . . . And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will. (GM 3.28)

The ascetic ideal is therefore the ground on which we stand. To even be able to call it out as our inheritance may rely on the ascetic ideal itself. Is the ascetic ideal just another object of our ressentiment? Is it another instance of the fallen world that we need to crush? Is it Plato’s cave that we need to hate and therefore to permanently escape? The ascetic ideal is the way we think and act, and we cannot just walk away from it in disgust or in hatred. If we do so, we are just reproducing its nihilistic dynamic.

Nietzsche’s challenge is to walk right into the midst of the reason/instinct binary, which means using the ascetic ideal to find its undoing from within itself. The ascetic ideal gave us this binary, and we can’t just pretend to ignore it or stand aside from it. To do so is to reproduce it yet again. This is why I find in Plato’s insistence that the philosopher return to the cave with an understanding of the good as shining a light on the ascetic ideal. Without the return the exit is without value. This is what I find when Luke writes, “the measure you give is the measure you get back.” This is what I find when Evagrius teaches us how to overcome acedia through acts of daily renewal. We have to think about overcoming the ascetic ideal by using its own metaphors and practices as a way to find its exteriority. This means not letting ourselves get trapped in a pendulum swing between binaries. Instead of a pendulum swing, can we not think about a dynamic cycle that takes seriously Luke’s challenge that the measure you give is the measure you get back? We must think about neoplatonic energy and not ascetic end points.