I mentioned in my last essay about false archetypes that the saint’s pursuit of godliness is, in some ways, a pursuit of power over the self, I want to expand on that, because it’s a dynamic which spreads much further than the pursuit of any kind of sainthood does, and, as such, has a much larger impact on our culture than you might initially expect. And also as a side note here: if you are reading this and haven’t read my last essay, don’t worry, this is much more of a related topic than a sequel essay, so we’ll be covering everything important here.
To start let us look into the conception of the virtue of self-denial. It’s a very pervasive virtue within the Christian tradition stretching back to the early days of the desert fathers with roots in the scriptures, especially in the writings of the apostle Paul. The idea is rather simple—the order of one’s personal priorities should go like this: first God, then others, then the self. In situations in which those priorities conflict, say, when God’s mission requires personal sacrifices, or when the good of others conflicts with what is good for oneself, then self-denial is exercised. The self-denying man puts aside his own needs and wants for the good of whomever needs him. All very well and good, we might think, but we need to understand what’s really going on here underneath the surface.
How does the self-denying man choose to do what’s better for others rather than the thing that’s better for himself? It’s key to identify here that we’re not talking, broadly, about situations in which there is a moral imperative placed upon this action—we’re not talking about someone being seriously hurt or killed if they are not placed first, we’re talking about often very mundane actions: holding the door open, not taking the last piece of the pie, performing charity work, taking someone’s place in an unpleasant task, or even things that don’t necessarily involve someone else, like exercising, praying, or reading one’s bible. In these kinds of situations in order for the self-denying man to choose to serve the other person first, he has to make an internal choice between his personal desires and what he perceives to be the “good” choice, in other words he is using his will to override his personal desires for the sake of a perceived good. This seems innocuous, even positive to many, and in its singular form it is just that—innocuous, but the self-denying man does something very foolish and dangerous in that he makes this kind of internal overriding his modus operandi for interacting with the world.
He makes it his mission to never be the person to take the last piece of pie, to always be the first person to do the chores, to always jump to help a person in need, because to not do so, in his worldview, becomes not just neutral, but actively negative, a moral failing, a sin, which must be repented of and prevented from happening in the future. But inevitably he will begin to fail at these tasks, but not, as he will think, because he is a morally corrupt creature, but because in each act of self-denial he is expending willpower which is an inherently finite internal resource.
In other words the self-denying man becomes, unwittingly, embroiled in a war against himself. Each failure or setback becomes a reprehensible “failing of the flesh” or “wile of the devil.” Around every corner there is a battleground, a twisted temptation, a honey-laced trap, all of which serve to further entrench him in his own determination to become a perfect version of himself, a more powerful version of himself. Because in every successful act of self-denial there is a little kickback of the pleasure of power, power over the self to arbitrarily demand the body to do things, to overcome this weakly mortal frame by the strength of one's own spirit. It’s this pleasure, the way it makes one feel capable of anything, the way it makes you feel big, unstoppable, infinite, that becomes the drug feeding this whole cycle. If it started out as a journey to be more virtuous, grow closer to God, serve others better, or, in the case of secular society, get jacked or get one’s life together, it becomes underwritten by this pursuit of power, this addiction to it and worship of it. To tie back into our last essay, this is the driving force behind the hypocrisy of the saint archetype: the saint is ostensibly doing good for goodness’ sake, but behind it there is this constant thirst for the sense of power that comes when the person denies themselves for the sake of that good, and so the saint’s actions become more and more defined not by what is truly good, but by what makes them feel powerful, a feeling which is then recast as holiness or discipline, a triumph over the sinful flesh of the body.
But if this is all the case, you might ask, is there any hope for us doing good? Any hope that we can genuinely put others first, do what is right for its own sake, be better people? The answer to that question is an emphatic yes, but the way we get there has to be through a completely different approach than the doubling-down upon the power of the will that we get within self-denying people. The self-denying approach is an inherently self-alienating approach, the self is embroiled in an internal civil war, the will or the intellect becomes disconnected from and actively antagonistic against the self’s feelings and body, trying to overcome what ultimately cannot be overcome short of death.
In order to pursue virtue we have to come to the realization that we can only become good people as whole people—any approach which involves internal war, repression, self-division, etc. is not going to make you a good person, it’s only going to make you, at best, a more good-seeming person, by bringing up what is best in you to the surface, and pushing down everything else into the subconscious. It’s for this reason that a more wholistic approach to virtue can seem inherently frightening and wrong to the person caught in internal battles, because the first step often involves the acceptance of those parts of us which are unseemly and broken. And worse, before a self-denying person gets to that step, they often have to begin dismantling the bulk of the “progress” that they think they have made.
When I was stuck in the trap of self-denial deciding to take the first steps out of it, the first things that I had to do to de-escalate my internal war was to give up many of the “godly disciplines” that I had come to identify with my own holiness and self-worth, and to let myself do things which I desperately wanted to do, which I had been keeping myself from because I thought they were wrong. Those were very much, not easy steps to take, but taking them had become critical for me, because my disconnection from my body and from my emotions had become intensely dangerous and harmful for me after I got my concussion and found myself in constant pain, unable to do many of the things I had done before, and far too prone to push myself way over my new limits.
There’s a lot more I could get at about what the pursuit of wholistic virtue looks like past those first steps, but it’ll all have to wait for another time. There’s just one more thing that I wanted to get at here before I get to Trump and the wider dangers of this philosophy—I’ve been focusing largely on the aspect of self-denial which is specifically virtue-centric, as it’s the aspect I’m most personally familiar with, but I want to spend a little time here on an aspect of it, which is perhaps even more pervasive in modern culture—self-denial for the sake of productivity or the pursuit of strength.
Self-denial isn’t limited to people with the ostensible goal of virtue, in fact we often see it in settings in which the relationship with the thirst for power is far more obvious. A lot of exercise culture can get caught up in this, especially around men, the goal for these men being the pursuit of both physical power in stronger muscles and also the spiritual or mental power that we’ve been talking about in terms of overcoming their own limits. But, unfortunately, this approach still leads to self-alienation and internal civil war, which is no longer fought along the Christian’s good vs. evil lines, but rather along the lines of strong vs. weak.
Another form we find in contemporary society is in our work culture. Some people, especially sometimes in the tech industry, or other related fields, have an obsession with their own level of productivity. All conception of work-life balance is thrown out the window, and these people throw themselves into their work for really not much reason other than it makes them feel powerful to pull 80 hour weeks and continuously push themselves beyond their limits to arbitrarily perform, it gives them a sense of validation in how much work they’re able to produce, and perhaps it makes them feel they deserved a promotion even if they didn’t actually get one. Perhaps it goes without saying that all of these dynamics are extremely ableist, all of them find validation and self-worth in how much they can do or deliver, which can very quickly turn on a person if they find themselves sick or injured or disabled, which is exactly what happened in my own life.
So we’ve seen how self-denial can be a kind of lie, can breed a rife kind of hypocrisy, by putting the individuals who fall into it in an internal struggle against themselves, which then comes to define how the individual sees themselves and defines their own worth. But there’s one more aspect here, which we need to explore, about just how dangerous this philosophy can be not just for the people to adhere to it, but for everyone around them, and that’s the way in which people engaged within the internal war of self-denial almost always begin to project that internal war on the society around them.
It’s a stark fact from any outsider’s perspective just how significantly Christianity differentiates between its in group and its out group. There’s an intense demonization that goes on within the church even from the most thoughtful and balanced Christians. It’s always us vs. them, the church vs. the sinful world, the unbelievers, those who have succumbed to the desires of the flesh. And this may really seem odd at first glance, given that Christians are so dedicated to the idea of conversion and of love for their neighbor. Surely, you’d think, they’d want to be more understanding of the non-christians for how are you supposed to convert or love someone you don’t understand and are actively demonizing? But that’s seemingly not what happens in the vast majority of American churches.
Why is that? Well, at least a significant factor involved within this is a projection of the internal battle onto the outer world. Within themselves Christians are struggling constantly against what they think is the “sinful flesh,” a representation of their own inescapable corruption, which they must constantly be trying to overcome. This battle is hard, because, as we’ve seen before, it’s unbeatable—the opponent is only another natural part of the self and cannot be entirely overcome. It’s easy to look up from that, especially having shared experience with other Christians, and go “this is happening in every human heart, this is happening across the entire world, this battle I see in my own heart is part of a cosmic struggle.” And it’s only a couple of natural steps from there, a point which doesn’t even have to be reached psychologically because it’s taught in their theology, to the demonization of the non-Christian. Because if non-Christians aren’t doing the same things I’m doing, aren’t fighting the same battle I’m fighting, than that must be because they have surrendered the fight, or, worse, have actively joined the other side—non-Christians, thus, have become synonymous with the internal enemy, and their views and desires in society must be an active piece of the Enemy’s plan to subvert the light.
This also leads into what’s seen from the outside as Christians’ self-absorption and martyrdom-complex. If the other members of society are actively a part of the Enemy’s team in this cosmic battle, then of course their actions must be aimed at harming and hurting Christians and the Christian cause. It’s hard for them to even imagine that someone could just be not on the battlefield whatsoever. This is a big reason so many Christians support Trump. The utter imperative of this battle, along with their underlying worship of power, makes many evangelicals today support or even adore Trump as a kind of cultural warrior who will cut through the red tape, undermine the corrupt political system, and bring to pass a huge victory for “their side,” whatever that has come to mean for them. If all of life is viewed as a war, all that matters in the end is victory, by any means.
This projection can extend to those pursuing strength or productivity as well, though in their cases it looks a little different. In the worship of strength you often get a demonization of women, LGBTQ people, and disabled people as people who are subverting patriarchal ideals of strength and masculinity, who have surrendered the battle for strength, and have found peace in their own bodies. These people have to be demonized, because otherwise the internal need or justification for the pursuit of strength is undermined. Within the self-denial framework everything must be binary and singular, there can only be one axis for good and evil, and the ideals of acceptance and inclusion of diverse positions and abilities must be abhored to sustain the internal conflict. For people worshiping productivity, the demon becomes people who are lazy, needy, poor, or uneducated. They are prone to hate immigrants, the disabled, the homeless, those who depend on welfare, and those who are able to have a healthy relationship with their work-life, because these are the people who are subverting their own need to perform constantly at max capacity, subverting the idea that that performance is necessary and good and virtuous.
It’s interesting to note here, or perhaps rather depressing actually, that each group’s demons carry over somewhat between groups. Those caught within the framework of self-denial seem to be far more likely to agree and bond with the other kinds of self-deniers and to share their demons or at least sympathize in their hate of them rather than to hold to any kind of deeper ground. So you get a man like Trump who hates all of them—liberals, women getting abortions, women in general, LGBTQ people, disabled people, immigrants, the homeless, basically anyone anyone in these dynamics might have any reason to dislike, and probably more besides. And because he hates all these people, and is “fighting against them,” he’s praised as a hero or a deliverer, as brutally honest in a time when we supposedly need honesty more than ever, or as the necessary evil we need to keep the liberals at bay, all because of who he hates.
I suppose it’s worth mentioning here at the end, that self-denial isn’t an all-or-nothing game, there’s a spectrum here, and as we’ve already explored in the essay, various flavours and ends that can be aimed for. So maybe you’ll find a Christian who’s far more into productivity than they are into virtue, or maybe you’ll find someone who only embodies parts of these dynamics, only invests part of their time and energy into the self-denial framework. People are diverse and complicated, and I don’t want to make anything seem simpler than it is. But I think what we’ve covered here in terms of the fundamentals of self-denial—the inherent worship of power, the inner conflict which becomes projected onto the rest of the world, the demonization of out-groups—will be in one degree or another present in any framework where self-denial is present. It’s how it works, and we can change what we do and how we approach virtue and eachother, but we can’t change that. It’s an irredeemable approach and it’s time we recognized that and gave it up.
Thanks for reading! If you notice this post has two authors listed, that’s not actually because two people wrote it (it’s just me, hi!), but because I’m transferring to using my newer pen name Emily Wilding for this publication as well as Wildspace, the serialized fiction publication I run. Nothing else will change, I’ll still be posting the kinds of analytical and memoirish essays that I normally post here on my somewhat irregular schedule, but I feel like it makes sense to have the unification of the pen name across publications if nothing else. Anyways, if you liked my work and want to support it, there’s a tip jar down below. You can also like, comment, subscribe to the newsletter, or share this post with your friends. Thanks!