~ by Sean Earner
“You can not conquer God, nor an angel, nor a philosopher.”
— From The Ways of Brother Lawrence by Joseph de Beaufort
The coming of Easter is not just the celebration of a past historical event, but the reaffirmation of a divine life, a heavenly kingdom, which is with us now. The perennial wrangling over the proof or lack of proof for Christ’s rising from the dead, as interesting as it may be for the curious, misses an important point. The vain struggle to reduce the miraculous to the natural that can be known or not known with a scientific certainty does violence to the majesty of the spirit that dwells in the eternal present of Revelation. The victory over the grave means nothing if it is not in us, with us, and for us. He rose in vain if we do not partake in His bounty, making Him part of the whole of our life. An empty tomb must also be free of the old man of sin that we bring with us; otherwise, the proclamation of the Gospel is done for naught.
But what is the resurrected life?
To understand better what the dispensation of Christ promises, we must excavate the intellectual and cultural genealogies that prepare the way for the Incarnate Word. In a sense, this Christian vision continues and builds upon the debates about the blessed life that dominated the spiritual landscape of the ancient meditranean, when religions and philosophies vied to provide the most adequate remedy for the sadness that plagued the human condition. The ironic but earnest Socrates had linked the pursuit of wisdom to the pursuit of the best life that went beyond the mass of controversy over empirical facts or conventional poetic fables to the inner citadel where we, knowing ourselves, kept watch with God. The various philosophical schools and mystery cults sought to find the answer to this pressing question through various combinations of logic, mysticism, speculation, science, and ritual.
One of the most original, and controversial attempts to serve as the Physician to humanity was the Epicurean school, also known as the Garden because of the location where the founder Epicurus taught. From antiquity on, the Epicureans have been caricatured as atheists and hedonists, and certainly their thorough materialism makes them far less amenable to Christian appropriation than Plato’s idealism. Also, their denial of providence makes them, unlike the pious lovers of destiny that made up the Stoics, less obvious candidates for the title of naturally born Christians than Seneca or Epictetus. But both accusations are unjust.
The Epicureans did believe pleasure was the chief good of life. But this goal was not accurately summed up in the pursuit of crude (or for that matter, refined) bodily lust for scintillating excess. Instead the Epicureans defined this highest pleasure as the absence of pain derived from moderating desire and removing all fear. To want little and depend on little, not addiction to the extremes of sensation, was the royal road to happiness in this life. They were, in a way, Occidental Buddhists, but with a realist ontology of the world. They did not reject all as illusion, but held fast to the solidity of life even as they sought their freedom from it. Therefore, Epicureans were not contemptible debauchees but ascetics who could rival the saints in self-denial. As for the charge that they did not believe in the divine, it would be more accurate to say that they preached a purer and higher conception of the gods than what was found in the context of Greek polytheism or, for that matter, of most cultures.
The divine beings spoken of by the Epicureans existed in a blissful state between the worlds, needing nothing, wanting nothing, neither causing harm or wishing to cause injury on anyone, free of vengeance or envy towards mortal creatures. They did not interfere with the governance of nature, but the vision of their blessed life raised up all men who opened themselves to it. To honor such beings, only a disinterested piety was adequate, and this love of the gods without expecting them to love you in return was a consistent teaching of the Epicurean school. Such devotion did not drag the divine down to earthly things and made all who practiced it more like the deities it beheld. Forming culturally revolutionary communities open to women, slaves, and non-Greeks (a prefigurement of the Christian ecclesias), the Garden thus spread such teachings that lifted men from the pig stye of all too human sorrows and fixations and gave them a freedom no king or polis could take away.
As summed up by one of Epicurus’s chief later Syrian disciples, Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110 – 40/35 BC) as the tetrapharmakos (the fourfold cure), which goes.
Don’t fear god,
Don’t worry about death;
What is good is easy to get,
What is terrible is easy to endure
Diogenes of Laeritus presented the rationale for each respective counsel in the following manner:
- A happy and eternal being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; hence he is exempt from movements of anger and partiality, for every such movement implies weakness
- Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feeling is nothing to us.
- The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together.
- Continuous pain does not last long in the body; on the contrary, pain, if extreme, is present for a short time, and even that degree of pain which barely outweighs pleasure in the body does not last for many days together. Illnesses of long duration even permit an excess of pleasure over pain in the body.
To many this would seem far from the Gospel, even irredeemably blasphemous. Much of what calls itself Christian would appear to be irreconcilable with such a message. But to those who take seriously the ways of the saints and blessed in the Church as interpreters of God’s will, a way of mutual understanding and harmony between Christianity and the teachings of elevated philosophy, if not fusion, can be reached.
One such holy man whose life affected this bridge between the two discourses was Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, a Discalced Carmelite Friar. Brother Lawrence lacked all scholarly accomplishment but he could defeat with the peace of an extinguished will the subtlety of secular wise men and theologians alike. Brother Lawrence lived a life of light sheltered in obscurity. He hasn’t been honored with the title of Servant of God, let alone that of Saint. But to those who pass his memory on from his own 17th century to our own despairing age, he is a font of living water that fills without satiety, a fire that inflames without burning.
Born of French peasant stock in 1614, and baptized Nicolas Herman, from a young age the future Brother Lawrence saw the extremes of life, and the fragility of all worldly things. Joining the French army out of desperation, he participated as a minor player in the European cataclysm known as the Thirty Years War. He was even captured at one point and almost executed as a spy, but saved by means of his courageous stance in the face of those who would kill him. It was during his time as a soldier that BrotherLawrence saw a tree withered by the winter and was struck with the serene thought that just as this tree would be brought back to life by the coming spring, the sinful heart of a man could be rescued from death by the grace of God. This precious memory remained with him as a blessing for the rest of his life. He was eventually wounded in battle, causing him to be lame. It is thought that his physical wound, and the more unseeable wounds of war, made him recall the deeper sickness of the soul.
As his search for God deepened, he joined the Discalced Carmelites in 1640 at the age of 25. He lived afterwards, in strong contrast to his youth, a highly uneventful life. He mainly worked in the kitchen and mended shoes, in addition to the regular duties of his status as Friar. But despite being nothing that would impress the average visitor of the priory, he began to assemble a circle of spiritual admirers of all classes and backgrounds, from fellow plebeians to the noted theologian Archbishop Fenelon himself. He died at the age of 77 on February 12, 1691, with little fanfare. But by then he had become a bond of the connection between the high and the low, the simple and the intellectual. Little formed by book learning himself, Brother Lawrence had Christianized the infidel philosophy in the air of his day and had made the faith something that an increasingly “enlightened” epoch could find both relatable and genuinely challenging.
One can sum up Brother Lawrence’s way almost exactly as if it was a lived interpretation and application of the Epicurean tetrapharmakos through the universal interpretive key of Christ: As a Christian sage, Brother Lawrence strove to not fear God’s judgement, to not fear death, to find good easy to do, and not to be worn down by evil.
[Brother Lawrence said] he had always been governed by love with no other interest, never worrying whether he would be damned or saved (Conversations Section #8)
For several years, Brother Lawrence became convinced of his own damnation. Today, in an epoch of greater spiritual dryness, he would have striven with the fear of mere nothingness after the grave. But the fear of reprobation was a common spiritual trial in that day, when predestination, for better or worse, was taken more seriously by all branches of Westerrn Christianity. Only some had been chosen for salvation; most were not. Facing the gravity of this stark contrast between the elect and the reprobate, and the mathematical probability that you were more likely to be one of the latter, could lead to a living nightmare. Lawrence wrestled with the darkness that he confused with God for what must have been unending mental epochs. But when he made a breakthrough: He would rejoice that He could love God now in this life, and pay no heed for what would come. Through being loyal to God as God, and not as a judge who gave out rewards and punishments, Brother Lawrence saved himself from living spiritual death. By purifying what he expected from his Lord, he entered into the inner freedom that made him a worthy son of the divine nature. Lawrence looked his Father in the eye, and did not flinch.
“[Brother Lawrence said] that he thought neither of death nor of his sins, nor of paradise, nor of hell, but only of doing little things for the love of God, since he was not capable of doing great things. Other than that, whatever happened to him was God’s will, and he was at peace with that.”
Not fearing God, death had no sting for Brother Lawerence. Neither hoping for heaven nor dreading hell, the end of life meant nothing ominous to him. For a man of the 17th century, this covered the most pressing questions about what we could expect after this life. All things revealed to him the presence of his God. To know and feel this in life was sufficient; whatever happened next could not diminish this sacrament of the present moment.
“He had asked to be admitted to religious life, thinking he would be skinned alive for his awkwardness and imperfections, and thereby would offer God his life and its pleasures. But God had fooled him, for he experienced only satisfaction. This led him to tell God frequently: ‘You have tricked me.’ (Conversations section #3)
Brother Lawrence found in reliance on the grace of Jesus Christ the magic key that opened all doors. Truly the yoke of the Incarnate Lord was easy and his burden light. His major theme was the practice of the presence of God. To love was easy because he came to see the Divine Will shine through every moment and in all people.
[Brother Lawrence recounted] how he was not astonished on hearing every day about miseries and sins; on the contrary, he was surprised that there were not more, considering the evil of which the sinner is capable. He did pray for sinners, but knowing that God could set them straight when he wanted, he worried no more about it.(Conversation Section #6)
Resting on the omnipresence of the Divine, Brother Lawrence would not be burdened by the problem of suffering or moral failings in himself or others. Natural evils like sickness was a means of purification. The burdens inflicted on him by other people, voluntarily or involuntary, similarly brought him closer to God. He did not demand that such things be explained, only that they must not separate him from the love he had for God.
Thus we can see a parallel between Epicureanism and enlightened faith. But what does Christianity add to the blessed way of the pagan path to make its own way preferable? The difference can be summed as follows: The Christian sage, unlike the unchurched philosopher, recognizes the radical evil of man that reason alone cannot cure no matter how often it recites the fourfold cure. He celebrates the positive value of love, both in the form of Divine love and of neighbourly charity. Finally, he points to the real union of God and humanity that could not have been dreamt of by the philosophy of Epicurus, or any Greek, for that matter.
For most of the philosophers of Greece, Epicurean or not, there was no awareness of the mystery of iniquity. The gap between most human beings and the life of the sage was clear to all. But for them, all that was required was greater exertion of will. Like Baron Muchansen caught in the swamp, mankind could pull itself up by its own boot straps if it just had the right philosophical dogmas and exercises. In contrast, the constant refrain of Brother Lawrence was the incapacity of the human will. Sin marred us at the root. This did not make him full of gloom and grief. But he did face it, confront it, and overcome it with his own quiet discipline of mind and heart whose substance was not his own will but the free grace of God.
The Epicureans treasured friendship, so they were not immune to the beauties of affection. Epicurus went as far as to say: “Friendship, dances round the world, calling on us all to awake to blessedness; to the blessedness, that is, of the gods”. But there was a sense in which the bonds of Philia did not lead to self sacrifice or self emptying. Mutual regard was possible and admirable between equals, not inferiors. The gods they took as their models were blessed in part because they were not moved by a compassion that would disturb their peace. An epicurean sage might risk death for a fellow enlightened one; death after all was nothing to him while the pleasure of a companion was one of the sweetest joys imaginable. But it fell outside the vision of the garden to imagine a good man suffering for the sake of those who were beneath him. For the Chrisitian saint though (and Lawrence was that, regardless of whether he will ever be given an official title), life was a continuous self-giving to all people regardless of their merits. Christ had deigned to give Himself to a world that knew him not and reviled him to the point of nailing Him to a cross. Brother Lawrence chose to give his love to a lowly station that to all appearances was beneath the grandeur and liberty of his soul. But in both cases this loving condescension magnified the glory of the giver and gave a light where none otherwise would have been. Both the Christian God and His follower demonstrated a generosity of spirit that was in excess of any prudent justice. And in this liberality the world was raised up and the giver was not erased but magnified in a way that spread joy to all.
Finally, Brother Lawrence posited a way for a real union of God and humanity that no Epicuren, or any pagan philosopher for that matter, could hope for. The School of the Garden could say that the sage was an equal to Zeus himself. But there was a radical difference: The gods existed in their bliss by nature and knew nothing of our lot; and if we could elevate ourselves to their state, our divine models remained far away in their mysterious existence between the stars.
Far different was the case of the Good News of the New Testament. God,Himself, drank the cup of human finitude. And the sage himself could in turn, when his imitation of the Godhead became a reality, cross the barrier of the cosmos to paradise. To see the just man so raised was itself to see the face of the Father. The gap between the world had been bridged, and the God of gods had come down with a gentle smile, with a bloody hand outstretched to His bride.
In the life of Brother Lawrence, the perennial wisdom of the philosophic pagan schools and the message of the Gospel are brought together with shocking simplicity. Ironically closer to Spinoza than the shallow cynical wit of Voltaire or the diabolical libertine mysticism of Diderot, he represents the possibility of an enlightenment that would not be opposed to religion. But it also suggests the possibility of a Christian and Catholic faith that echoes, in its own proper register, the notes of modern liberty.
What Brother Lawrence suggests is an alternative modernity, for the world and for the Church. a route not taken, but which perhaps can be found again in the future.We in this present moment are torn between the nihilism of a so-called “enlightenment” that no longer has strength to believe in itself and the shrill voices of a reactionary celebration of “tradition”.Both are weighed down by a false sense of the past. In the face of such troubles, the buried hopes of people like Lawrence call out to us from their graves. No layer of time can muffle their voice. During this Easter season when we recall the rising of our Lord, it is right and fitting to affect the intellectual and spiritual resurrection of a companion in Christ whose memory can show us how to better believe, better pray, and better love.
Above all, we should remember that Lawrence vindicated the Gospel by being wise in Jesus and not in the world. His was the way of the child in the garden, who could safely enjoy both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge because he had united himself to the wood of the Cross. By making himself little in Christ, he could enjoy a joy the disillusioned sages of Greece could only imagine because they had found peace only in despair. That is how the kingdom of God enters the world, not by subtle theorizing, but the simplicity of trust in God as being ever at our right and left.