Dying like Jesus: Louis Bouyer's Thoughts on Monks [for Hermits]

Jesus said, "This is why the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again. This command I have received from my Father" (John 10:17-18).

Pere Bouyer reminds the monk [hermit, Catholic, integral Christian] that we natural creatures, impure in sin, cannot come to God and to the source of life which is in God, without undergoing a total refashioning. It is necessary, thus, in order to see God and live, to die to oneself--no longer live a mortal life but to live life with the immortals, with the life of the angels in heaven.

How can this be? By passing through death. Yet it is not necessarily or at all a mortal death, but a death as St. Paul said: You have undergone death and your life is hidden away now with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). It is not a choice between the mysticism of the cross or resurrection but of both, and the cross is necessary to lead to the ascension. Bouyer emphasizes the point: One cannot live, like the monk [hermit], wholly for the world to come, unless one has abandoned everything in this present world. And dying means just that....'If anyone will come after me', he said,--'come after him, where to?--to the bosom of the Father--'let him follow me,' along what road?--that of the cross, for there is no other which leads in sinu patris.

This does not mean a morbid desire for physical dying. Yet it is not meant to be toned down, either, to something less than what it means and is. It is not in imitating romantic ideas, such as mimicking the early desert fathers, and not a reminder that someday we will die physically; it is being really and truly dead: You are dead and your life is hidden away with Christ in God.

The monk/hermit no longer belongs to earthly humanity. Hebrews 13:14 applies literally: For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come. Renunciation is necessary--renunciation of worldly items through poverty, of the body through chastity, of the will through obedience (in consideration of concrete actions). For all others, renunciation is necessary but not immediate; for the monk/hermit, it has an urgency to live dead to the world, here and now.

And here, Pere Bouyer makes an important distinction. What does this mean if not but this death finds its significance and its possibility in life--but a life at present hidden, although in no wise destined to be so always. In other words, what gives its meaning to the 'dead' life of the monk [hermit], that which alone renders it possible, is that it is the life of faith, life in faith....Without faith, monasticism [eremitic life] would be the most senseless undertaking conceivable. The cross transfigures the monks death into the life of ascension, but in Christ, all in Christ.

At this point, the monk/hermit must say with Christ, "This my Father loves in me, that I am laying down my life, to take it up again afterwards. Nobody can rob me of it; I lay it down of my own accord... That is the charge that my Father has given me." This is a mystery, and it must be accepted in faith.

And it is the confronting of this death to the world (and by this is meant the world that keeps us from ascending), death to the self requires struggles against the demons. The monk's/hermit's life is one of conflict, and it is meted out in actual experience.

Why go out into the desert? What is the desert? It is to go out to be tempted. The desert is the terrain in which man has not yet appeared, where the devil is sole master of the terrain. Here divine grace is pitted against the devil. As death is the supreme enemy of God, Christ goes out into the desert to confront it, to overcome death, and the monk/hermit must follow and do likewise. Christ conquers death and leads man back to paradise, and the monk/hermit must follow in order to return there, as well. It is sin that has kept man from paradise, and these chains must be broken.

Thus the deliberate confronting of death by the monk [hermit] brings us back to the fundamental aspect of monastic [eremitic] ascetism in the tradition of the Fathers. ...its aspect of struggle, of strife, and, more precisely, its struggle against the demons.

The monk/hermit does not retire into the "desert" for the comfort of solitude, serenity, detachment that aid the interior life, but goes to be buried there, driven by the Holy Spirit, as Christ was led out by the Spirit of God.

The supreme manifestation of God must be life, the divine life, communicated in the incarnation and final resurrection of Christ and of His mystical body. In the same way death is the supreme manifestation of Satan. And that is why, without accepting death, we cannot finally triumph over him. Thus is it in death the monk, like Christ, must overcome Satan if he is to overcome him at all.

The monk/hermit who imitates Christ successfully is precisely found to be conformed in Him in what is the essential act of his mission. The monk/hermit must freely accept death, as a death conceived of as a struggle not only with ourselves or with the world, but with Satan, the enemy of God. The monk/hermit loves and desires is the cross, but it is not simply death--physical, removal, escape--but it is the triumph, the life that is reverenced through the cross in faith.

It may seem that the body is merely a tomb for the soul, but it is only Christ who can kill death--who ransomed us from death by his own conquering of death, in rising to eternal life. It is through Christ that we can come alive again.

The monk [hermit] goes forward to meet death because he believes that this miracle, the greatest of all, has been accomplished in the death of Christ; because he believes that Christ was Life, the very Life of God, and in making physical death his own, he has robbed the evil one of all his power and all his empire which are annihilated by this very act. Again he goes forward to meet death because he believes that Christ now and for the future lives in him: and finally because what he believes has taken place in Christ will be reproduced in himself, in the same manner.

Pere Bouyer next offers the final and fundamental, the sole justification, for the existence of monasticism, and points out that it came into being when martyrdom was disappearing. As "martyr" means "witness", the monk/hermit is to be a witness, to carry forth the witness of Christ, of the death and resurrection, of triumph over evil and rising in Christ to eternal life.

Bouyer explains the motive which inspires the martyr, and which indeed inspires the monk/hermit. He advances toward death with the sole purpose of finding Christ there, or, what amounts to the same thing, to find himself in Christ. For him death is the place where he must meet Jesus, where he in some way must be identified with him. A second motivation is that of Eucharistic image: the martyr/monk/hermit [and integral Catholic!] desires the union with Christ's body and blood, to be the grain of wheat crushed, desire and love of the crucified flesh and blood.

And the Eucharist for him is at once the realization of the unity of the Church in God, through communion in love incorruptible, and the real consuming of Christ crucified and risen, who assimilates each and every one of us to himself.

Through dying to self, through martrydom, the monk/hermit/Catholic can truly experience the reality of the Eucharist. It is the passing of the Catholic Christian into Jesus Christ. St. Polycarp's martyrdom, in fact, seems like he himself is the altar bread transubstantiated into Jesus Christ. St. Gregory of Nyssa's account of his sister's death (Abbess Macrina) demonstrates the Christian's passing into Christ. Her final words express the desire for being consumed into Christ. Let not the spirit who is envious of the happiness of man appear in my path to hinder me from going to you.

Deaths can be like that of the martyrs, of like Christ Himself, if transfigured by the life led and consummated for and in Christ. They are no longer the fate to which we were inexorably destined by sin. They are sacrifices freely consented to, by faith in Jesus Christ, by the faith that literally transports us unto him: the sacrifice that a whole life of abnegation produces as its perfect fruit.