On Christian Simplicity and the Church’s Public Witness
A conversation with Vida Dutton Scudder, Christopher Lasch, Sarah Coakley, and St Augustine
Julian the Apostate, the fourth-century Roman emperor whose attempt to restore the pagan cult marked the last gasp of Roman state paganism, wrote a well-known letter to the pagan high priest Arsacius in which he complained that the restoration of the cult was not accompanied by sufficiently virtuous living on the part of the pagan priests. For Julian believed that Christian success was due in large part to their mode of life, a mode of life distinctively Christian and yet providing a compelling moral witness to those outside the faith: “why do we not observe that it is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism [ie, Christianity]?” The renewal of paganism, Julian believed, demanded not only the splendor of ritual but also a sort of moral renewal by the adherents to the old faith, one which could imitate or surpass the example of Christian communities.
Julian’s attempted reestablishment of traditional religion failed, of course, and the Christianization of the Roman Empire continued apace. And so, the question of whether or how Christian life should be distinct from the life of the broader society or ‘world’ would come to be configured differently in a society which claimed to be, in at least some sense, Christian. To speak in generalities, there have been communities of Christians – medieval groups striving for renewal and often spilling out into heresy, the churches of the Radical Reformation – who consistently argued for and lived out a lasting separation between ‘church’ and ‘world’ for all Christians, marked by distinctive practices such as pacificism, voluntary poverty, a refusal to swear oaths, and the like, seeking a form of life marked clearly by the person of Jesus. On the other hand, there have been those Christians – the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, the churches of the magisterial Reformation – which have been skeptical of any attempt to separate out the wheat and the tares this side of the eschaton and so have looked askance at a clean church/world separation, holding out the possibility of an entirely (visibly) Christian society. As an aside, I tend to think that a key historical function of monasticism in both the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the East has been to provide the institutional enactment of a sharp church/world distinction within broader ecclesial structures which seek to comprehend society as a whole.
But in the most secular parts of the West today, we are closer, it seems to me, to the world of Julian – or perhaps even the centuries before him – than the thoroughly Christianized world in which this debate worked itself out. Of course, the lasting and transformative effect of Christianity on our culture remains unmistakable, as Nietzsche famously mourned, and more recently the likes of Tom Holland and David Bentley Hart have celebrated. And yet: our polities are ordered in a way that is at best neutral, and not infrequently hostile, to Christian faith and practice. Our cultures have abandoned many of the moral commitments that our forebears believed were perspicuous to all rational creatures (not least the obligation to worship God!), and indeed have rendered any form of religious belief implausible to many of our contemporaries. To crib off Augustine, we would-be citizens of the City of Heaven find ourselves among those for whom the very notion of such a city is bizarre at best, offensive at worst – those who, if they locate an ‘Eternal City’ anywhere at all, place it in what Christopher Lasch calls (in a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne) “the true and only heaven” of the eternal progress of human knowledge and achievement. And so we are back to Julian, and to Christian living as evidence to a dubious world about the veracity of Christian claims.
If indeed distinctiveness of a sort from the broader society must be once again the lot of the visible church – if for no other reason than that we do in fact go to church – in what should that distinctiveness consist? What might be particularly important forms of Christian living for now, valuable both for their own sake and as a witness to those outside the faith? I cannot pretend a comprehensive answer to this question, but in conversation with Vida Dutton Scudder, Christopher Lasch, Sarah Coakley, and Augustine, I want to make a suggestion: we might consider foregrounding a simplicity that embraces human finitude and rejects promethean dreams of the erasure of any and all limits in the pursuit of accumulation or pleasure – a simplicity embraced not as a sort of dour repression of desire but in the name of its unapologetic reorientation away from the temporal and changeable and towards the eternal and immutable, an expression of Christian commitments about the nature of God.
I. Scudder and Simplicity
The idea of simplicity, the rejection of the accumulation of goods and especially luxuries beyond those needed to sustain a good life, has a long pedigree in both Christian and non-Christian ethical thought, which I will not endeavor to summarize here. But what I would like to focus on is the notion that simplicity, and specifically Christian simplicity, might have something to do with a Christian response to the particular ills and challenges of capitalist civilization. One of the most compelling advocates of this view is Vida Dutton Scudder, the fin de siècle US Anglo-Catholic socialist and literature professor. For Scudder, simplicity, particularly as enjoined upon wealthy Christians by their churches, would come to be key to not only the faithful witness of the church but also the possibility of a peaceful transition from industrial capitalism to socialism.
This probably sounds somewhat implausible at first blush, and indeed it must be admitted that things did not work out as Scudder had hoped, but let me elaborate before you write her off as another utopian dreamer: Scudder devoted her life to thinking through a Christian response to the crisis of industrial society she saw all around her. Not only was she well acquainted with the horrors of industrial capitalism, but she grew increasingly concerned about news of really-existing revolutionary socialism in the USSR, even while she never renounced the embrace of proletarian class struggle. While she rejected attempts to ally the church with one or the other political faction as a betrayal of its supernatural mission, she held that the church’s message of simplicity, of renunciation was nonetheless a crucial gift it had to offer to a society seemingly on the brink of dissolution. Scudder believed that the church – and especially the churches with social bases in the wealthy, such as her own Episcopal Church – ought to call their members anew to a modern, democratic version of the asceticism characteristic of the life of vowed religious and especially Franciscans. Inspired by the example of St Francis, enabled by the supernatural power of Baptism and Eucharist, rich Christians could well and truly divest themselves of material riches and choose to act against their narrow class interests. This, she hoped, might make possible a socialist future imposed not by violence and envy of a few but by a sort of democratic moral transformation. Now, the church was not the only means of this transformation. But nonetheless the church, with its sacramental access to the very life of God, could and must be an example of Christian simplicity, a new Franciscanism which rescued society from either the continued misery and chaos of capitalism or the violence of socialism imposed by the gun.
Scudder’s thought is far more interesting and careful than I can do justice to in this short precis, but this does highlight what I want to focus on: the retrieval and transformation of an ancient Christian social practice, namely ascetic renunciation, for not only the sanctification of those Christians who participate in it but also a witness for – and potential means of changing – the broader society (still, for her, a Christian society) in which she found herself.
II. Lasch and the Problem with Liberalism
Our moment, of course, is not Scudder’s. While our moment feels like a time of crisis, the specter of revolutionary violence by Communist parties has been well and truly dispersed in the West, at any rate, and the twentieth century state socialist challenge to liberal capitalism has been decisively defeated. One might well ask why – even if renunciation was the correct practice to emphasize in her day – we need to similarly foreground it now, in the Year of Our Lord 2022. And here I want to bring in the thought of Christopher Lasch, the decidedly irascible and iconoclastic historian-cum-social-critic, to help us understand why simplicity is both so necessary and so apparently impossible in ‘the world.’ If it turns out that simplicity is both clearly needed and yet unattainable in the broader social order in which we find ourselves, then it seems to me that Scudder’s suggestion of a new Franciscanism may be just as applicable – perhaps more! – now as when she originally made her call, in terms of providing a distinctively Christian yet broadly admirable moral witness to a dubious society.
As far as the necessity of simplicity or renunciation in some form or another, leaving aside particularly Christian moral claims, it is rather frighteningly clear that the current level of consumption of goods is unsustainable for the environment in which we live. We have all seen the increasingly urgent UN reports about the climate crisis, about the plastic poisoning the oceans, diminishing marine creature and insect populations. We all know that countries are not going to meet the emissions targets that they have set – and that even those emissions targets are too low. And, of course, the current level of consumption includes a great many people around the world continuing to live in an abject poverty that they, understandably enough, wish to escape – an escape which would only increase global consumption under current conditions. Now, I am not a climate change doomer; the predictions that the collapse of industrial society or even the extinction of the human species are just around the corner strike me as overwrought. But one need not accept those scenarios to see that a future in which consumption patterns do not change significantly is likely to be, to say the least, quite difficult for quite a lot of people. And barring a technological deus ex machina, the way to avoid this must be a way of limitation or reduction.
And yet we find ourself in a society particularly allergic to the language of limitation and reduction! I want to suggest that Christopher Lasch helps us see why this is so. As the defender of a tradition of republicanism he sketches from premodernity to the artisans’ and farmers’ movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lasch argues in works like The Revolt of the Elites and The True and Only Heaven that contemporary liberalism, the regnant ideology of both ‘left’ and ‘right’, is defined by two commitments that starkly differentiate it from older political thought. For contemporary liberalism, as Lasch will have it, ‘virtue’ is unnecessary for good government (which can be secured rather through technical means) or responsible citizenship (which means little more than consuming), and the elaboration of new wants and desires is not a vice to be resisted but in fact the very engine of progress. The acquisitive impulse and desire for luxury, while perhaps a private vice, is a public good: the production of new wants, and the transformation of existing wants to needs, is precisely the mechanism by which society functions! An older republican (and religious) skepticism of the acquisitive impulse and the desire for luxury as fatal to the health of a free polity is gradually cast aside; by the time you get to Keynes and his followers, mass consumption becomes instead a sort of civic duty! Lasch remains enough of a Marxist to identify this change in particular with the development of capitalism, but he notes – fairly enough – that the rejection of limits of desire and consumption was as true of most forms of socialism as of capitalism: much of the popular appeal of socialism was that the vast, ever-expanding productive apparatus created by capitalism would under socialism supply endless luxuries not just to the few but to the many. For Lasch, liberalism, whether in ‘left’ or ‘right’ forms, was a rejection of limit and finitude, a positing of an escape from history as a series of cycles of growth and decline for a history (powered by the proliferation of wants!) of endless progress. And this is exactly why the environmentalist talk about careful limitation is bound to fail: because it cuts against the very ideology governing our social, political, and economic life!
If one finds Lasch’s analysis even somewhat plausible – and I do – we find ourselves in a situation in which an embrace of limitation, a rejection of the principle of the endless elaboration of consumption, is necessary for the good of human society, and yet this embrace, this call to virtue against endless acquisition, necessarily undermines core tenets of the legitimating ideology of our society. For our good, we will have to abandon the attempt to locate “the true and only heaven” in endless human progress powered by the proliferation of desires, and yet find ourselves unable to do so. And if this is so, a return to Scudder’s call for an ecclesial embrace of renunciation seems to me to be worth serious consideration. As a son of the magisterial Reformation, I hasten to add that however such simplicity would be configured, it would need to not be a spiritual athleticism restricted to a few. Yet for such simplicity to even be preached, and preached as more than just a bespoke lifestyle choice one might choose to take on but as a duty of Christian living, would itself be a shocking summons to asceticism in a church that has largely made peace with liberal acquisitiveness.
III. Coakley, Augustine, and Desire Redirected
Now, especially in a church at peace with liberalism, to talk of asceticism raises eyebrows more often than not. It conjures of the image of pinched, mean-spirited repression, bleak hostility to joy – it will even be theologized at times as a refusal to receive with gratitude the good things of the world that God has given us. Even among its proponents, it often takes on a decidedly stern character, as though it is a matter of an iron will choosing to deny itself pleasure. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of Christian asceticism and its relationship to desire. It is a mistake to see such asceticism as merely a quenching of desire, merely a denial of the world. Rather, as perhaps one of our best contemporary theologians of desire, Sarah Coakley, teaches us – see here The New Asceticism in particular – proper asceticism is something quite different. It is a redirection, a sublimation of desire from lesser things to higher things, from things of this world to things of God. Desire need not be diminished at all! Perhaps it is in fact the opposite: that no one desires as fiercely as the ascetic. One might say that the Christian ascetic, no less than the Laschian liberal, is involved in a project of the stoking of desire – but whereas the Laschian liberal is forced to distribute that infinite desire amidst an ever-increasing proliferation of goods to consume, the Christian ascetic can direct infinite desire towards the only object capable of satisfying it: God Himself.
Augustine makes a distinction in De Doctrina Christiana between things that are to be used and things that are to be enjoyed. The former things are used for the sake of some other good; the latter are enjoyed for their own sake, not the for the sake of something else. And of course, the thing to be enjoyed par excellence is God and God alone. And it seems to me that this distinction, along with the Coakleyan emphasis on asceticism as redirection not repression, is precisely what needs to be at the heart of a new embrace of Scudder’s project. An Augustinian reading of Lasch’s account of liberalism might be that it confuses things to be used and things that are to be enjoyed, that it seeks the Eternal City not in heaven but in the endless flux of human progress. For the Eternal City to be found here below requires exactly the swearing off of limits and finitude that Lasch finds so troubling. The problem is not exactly the amplification of desire – here I think I diverge somewhat from Lasch – but rather the amplification of desire for the wrong things, for things that will not, cannot ultimately satisfy. The Christian promise is that these desires can be satisfied, beyond the flux of time and history, in God.
We Christians need to embrace simplicity not merely as a stern moralism (although there is a certain degree of sternness involved, certainly!) but as a reordering of desire towards its proper source. The practice of Christian simplicity is thus inextricable from Christian metaphysics, from core Christian beliefs about who God is and who God is for us. This is precisely why we ought to attend to Scudder’s call to Christian simplicity. It is not just that simplicity is needed, although it is. Nor is it that a Christian embrace of simplicity would create a potentially-attractive distinction between the church and a post-Christian world, although it would (leaving aside for the moment the rather large question of what such simplicity ought to look like in practice). Rather, Christian simplicity is a means of witnessing to a world dubious of the very notion of the eternal that “the true and only heaven” is not found here below, but only in God.