Rust and Radiance: Asceticism Beyond Detachment
We live in an age of neon delirium and endless scroll, a time of hyperstimulation and spiritual dehydration. In Times Square or its digital equivalents, the senses are barraged by a kaleidoscope of wants – every billboard and notification igniting fresh desires. Faced with this onslaught, many modern seekers turn to ancient wisdoms of detachment. The Stoic disciplines himself to feel neither itch nor ache, armoring the soul with apatheia (freedom from passion). The Buddhist renounces worldly craving, aiming to snuff out desire like a candle flame to end suffering. Yet amid the cacophony of stimuli and the vogue of detachment, another ancient voice invites us not to extinguish desire but to transfigure it. In the lyrical theology of St. Maximus the Confessor, asceticism is not a repression of the self but a restoration – a radiant rediscovery of the soul’s original clarity. In reading his “On the Ascetic Life,” I was struck by this nuanced vision of a vibrant alternative for our overstimulated times.
Rusted Iron and the Restoration of Desire
In Maximus’s understanding, the soul is like fine iron glinting in the sun – except it has rusted over. Our desires and faculties are not inherently corrupt; they are good metal, given by God, now obscured by corrosive accretions. Asceticism, for Maximus, is the gentle removal of this rust so that the metal may regain its shine. “With the removal of things that are contrary to nature,” he explains, “only things proper to nature are manifest. Just as when rust is removed, the natural clarity and glint of iron are manifest”. This encapsulates the foundational difference in how Maximus views human passion. The Stoic might attempt to scrape off desire itself, viewing passions as irrational invaders to be eradicated for the soul’s tranquility. The Buddhist similarly diagnoses tanhā (craving) as the root of suffering and prescribes its total cessation for Nirvana. But Maximus does not see desire as a poison to be purged from the system; he sees it as a divinely minted energy, presently misdirected and in need of redirection. Our loves and longings are like heat in that iron – dangerous when dispersed into wild sparks, but life-giving when forged under the right hand.
Consider the image of a blacksmith at his anvil: before any strike of the hammer, he decides what tool he intends to shape from the raw metal. Stoic and Buddhist ascetics often aim to cool the iron – to still the heat of passion until it lies inert. Maximus’s asceticism instead takes the fire of desire and forges it into virtue. “Even the passions become good among the diligent, when they wisely separate them from corporeal objects and use them to acquire the things of heaven”, he writes. In this view, anger, craving, even lust – energies that, in their fallen form, lead us to sin – can be purified and turned toward love, compassion, and holiness. For example, zealotry against others can be transmuted into zeal for truth; physical desire can become an ardent yearning for God. Unlike the Stoic, who prides himself on feeling nothing toward what is indifferent, Maximus challenges us to feel everything rightly. And unlike the Buddhist seeker who might call even the self an illusion and desire a trap, Maximus affirms that the self, the body, and all created things are originally good – it is only their misuse that brings evil. “Food is not evil, but gluttony is… Money is not evil, but avarice is… Indeed, there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse”. In other words, our world and our passions are not traps to escape from; they are gifts to be set in order. Ascetic discipline, then, is the artful practice of realignment. It is the soul’s restoration, not its negation – a process of scraping away deception and distortion until our innate capacity for truth and goodness shines forth as naturally as polished iron catching the light.
Suffering as Furnace, Not Illusion
Such an ascetic restoration is no painless affair. Maximus lived and taught that suffering has a crucial place in this transformation: it is the furnace that burns away the rust. In a culture addicted to comfort, this notion feels bracing. The Stoics approached suffering with a kind of grim pragmatism – pain is inevitable, so bear it with dignity and don’t let it disturb your inner peace, they advised. Stoic philosophers like Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius counseled that we should not fear hardship; yet, for them, suffering was chiefly something to endure with reason’s help, not something inherently fruitful. Buddhists similarly acknowledge suffering (dukkha) as a fundamental truth of existence, but their answer is to uproot its cause (desire) and thereby transcend suffering altogether. The ideal is to become so unattached that one neither greatly sorrows nor greatly rejoices – one simply is, beyond the reach of suffering’s flames.
Maximus’s vision, by contrast, sees the flames of suffering as capable of refining the soul rather than merely testing or eventually extinguishing it. In his own life, Maximus suffered mutilation and exile for the faith – he knew firsthand that pain can either break or make a person. His counsel to fellow ascetics reflects a startling paradox: embrace the very struggles that others flee, for within them lies hidden grace. “Whenever you are suffering intensely from insult or disgrace, realize that this can be of great benefit to you,” Maximus writes. The sting of humiliation, for instance, burns away the rust of pride: “disgrace is God’s way of driving vainglory out of you”. Here is asceticism as an alchemy of pain into purity. The Stoic might clench his jaw at insult and tell himself it is indifferent; Maximus urges us to open ourselves to the wound so that vainglory (the diseased swelling of self-regard) may drain out.
This approach is not masochism, nor a denial of suffering’s reality; rather, it is a revaluation of suffering. Maximus and the ascetic tradition see physical hardship, emotional slights, and worldly deprivations as tools in the divine forge, tempering the soul’s metal. Fasting, sleepless vigils, manual labor – all these voluntary pains check the wild growth of passions, like a damper on a flame. As Maximus enumerates, such practices “do not allow concupiscence to grow,” and prayerful solitude and longing for God can even make lust “disappear”. Likewise for anger: practicing long-suffering and meekness prevents its eruption, while acts of love and kindness “make it diminish”. Each ascetic labor is a medicine targeting a spiritual ailment. The goal is not to ignore suffering or pretend it doesn’t hurt; the goal is to harness it, to let it purify our disordered affections. Where the Buddhist seeks to escape the cycle of suffering entirely, Maximus teaches engagement with suffering in faith. Pain is real – but in Christ, it can become a source of redemption. It’s as if the very experiences we dread (hunger, insult, fatigue) are revealed as secret surgeons of the soul, cutting away tumors of vice. Maximus’s Christ-centered asceticism even dares to see glory in suffering: by voluntarily taking up our little crosses of self-denial, we participate in Christ’s Passion, and thereby in His victory. The iron in the fire is not being destroyed; it’s being refined and reshaped.
Beyond the Self: Asceticism in Community and Grace
Another striking difference in Maximus’s ascetic vision is its inherently communal and sacramental context. The wise Stoic imagines the inner citadel of the self – virtue is a solitary stronghold of reason within, which the slings and arrows of fortune cannot breach. There is something deeply individualistic about Stoic practice: Marcus Aurelius could pursue wisdom amid the chaos of war by retreating into his own rational mind. The Buddhist path, too, ultimately rests on individual enlightenment. While Buddhism highly values the Sangha (community of practitioners) and has monastic orders, the moment of Nirvana is a singular awakening – only you can walk the Eightfold Path for yourself, and the final detachment is a profoundly personal letting-go, beyond all social bonds. In modern adaptations of these traditions, it’s not uncommon to see people practicing mindfulness or stoic journaling alone, using these disciplines as personal wellness techniques isolated from any larger community or cosmic story.
Maximus’s asceticism, however, is never a solo project of self-improvement. It is Christ-anchored and Church-centered. We must remember: Maximus was a monk, formed in a community of prayer, and a theologian of the Incarnation who saw no sharp divide between spiritual and physical, solitary and communal. For him, ascetic discipline is woven into the fabric of the Church’s life. Fasting goes hand in hand with the Eucharistic feast; personal prayer is buoyed by the liturgy and shared psalmody; chastity and charity are learned in the rough and tumble of actual community living. In one treatise, Maximus even interprets the liturgy itself as an ascetic journey of the soul. The Church, in his beautiful phrase, is “envisioned as the sacrament of human deification” – a mystical society where every ritual, from baptismal water to communal meal, contributes to our transformation in God. Asceticism, then, is not about willpower in a vacuum; it’s about cooperation with grace in a sacred fellowship. The Church is “a realm of sacred relations and actions” in which the lonely struggle of the monk is buoyed by the prayers of the saints, and the entire cosmos is invited into a dance of restoration.
This communal, sacramental grounding is utterly foreign to Stoic and Buddhist frameworks. A Stoic may draw strength from friends or a teacher, yes, but ultimately no one can be virtuous for you. In Buddhist monastic life, there is community support, but enlightenment remains an individual achievement – and classical Buddhism lacks the concept of a transmitting grace that can heal and elevate the nature of individuals. Maximus, by contrast, insists on the synergy of divine grace and human effort. The ascetic does not claim progress as a personal accomplishment; it is grace-enabled. We struggle, but every victory is a gift of God. And this grace flows especially through tangible means: through holy mysteries, through spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, through the very material elements Stoics and Buddhists treat as indifferent or illusory. In Maximus’s view, the bread and wine of Eucharist, the touch of holy oil, the unity of believers in love – all these “corporeal” things become conduits of theosis. The body and its desires are not obstacles to spirituality, but vehicles of it when rightly oriented. He honors the body as an integral part of the person destined for glory, not a mere shell to be discarded nor a temptation to be shunned. Thus, asceticism is embodied and ecclesial: fasting trains the body even as prayer lifts the mind; almsgiving binds one to the poor and to Christ in them; obedience and humility are learned in real relationships. It is in the push-and-pull of communal life that virtues like patience, forgiveness, and genuine compassion are exercised – far from the ego’s isolating fantasies. Maximus would agree with the adage that one cannot be saved alone. The Stoic sage’s self-sufficient virtue and the Buddhist monk’s solitary nirvana find their counterpoint in the Christian monk’s humility within a spiritual community, all of which depends on Christ together. In the Church, ascetics discover that to ascend to God is simultaneously to descend into love of neighbor, carrying each other’s burdens. As one modern interpreter put it, for Maximus, “there is experienced divine and deifying activity” precisely in the liturgical community. The holy struggle is a team effort – indeed an effort of the whole Body of Christ, head and members, earth and heaven together.
The Goal: From Apatheia and Nirvana to Theosis
All these threads – the affirmation of desire, the embrace of redemptive suffering, the communal-sacramental journey – converge in the ultimate end that Maximus envisions for asceticism. What is the telos of this arduous path? What awaits the soul that has been purified of rust and polished to mirror-brightness? For the Stoics, the ideal end is a state of unperturbed virtue. They seek ataraxia, a serene freedom from distress, governed by reason and in harmony with nature’s law. The Stoic sage, perfectly rational and self-controlled, wants nothing and fears nothing; his happiness consists in living ethically and accepting the universe’s outcomes with equanimity. It’s a noble picture, a kind of moral heroism that ends in calm strength – yet notably, the Stoic end is still within the limits of human nature. It is man as he is, just perfected in virtue.
Buddhism articulates its end as Nirvana, often described as the “blowing out” of the flame of craving and the cessation of the rounds of rebirth. Especially in Theravada thought, Nirvana is an extinction – not of existence per se (its precise nature is beyond concept), but of ignorance, desire, and suffering. It is a profound peace beyond all conditions, sometimes likened to a drop of rain merging into the vast sea. Selfhood is transcended; one awakens to sunyata (emptiness) or the unconditioned reality. Where the Stoic sage remains very much a person—lucid, engaged, if emotionally invulnerable—the Buddhist arhat or bodhisattva aims for a liberation that is impersonal in a sense: it is the end of “I” and “mine,” a quietude where even the categories of being and non-being no longer bind.
Maximus the Confessor offers a radically different summit: not calm absorption, but radiant communion. The destiny of the ascetic, in Maximus’s theology, is Theosis – deification. This does not mean one ceases to be a creature or loses personal identity; on the contrary, one becomes fully a person in the image of the ultimate Person (or rather, Persons of the Trinity). Theosis is participatory union with the living God, a sharing by grace in the very life and energies of God. It is what Eastern Christianity calls glory, and it is anything but a flat calm or a void. Maximus would say the polished soul begins to shine like the sun, reflecting God’s light. In the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor, the disciples beheld Jesus’s face shining with divine light – an image of what humanity is meant for. The ascetic journey, for Maximus, ends not in a stoic impassivity or a Buddhist negation, but in a personal relationship so intense it is described as union. The lover of God becomes “all flame,” to borrow the words of an earlier desert father. Maximus, commenting on this union, insists that it is made possible by grace transforming nature. We empty ourselves of passions so as to be filled with God. The final state is ecstasy in the literal sense – a going out of oneself, not into nothingness, but into the infinite love and knowledge of God. There is tranquility there, yes, but also rapture, an eternal newness of life. It is like comparing the stillness of a starry night (beautiful, but cold and dark) to the dynamic light of the sun at dawn. Stoic apatheia is the night sky clear of storms; Buddhist Nirvana might be the mysterious hush before dawn; Theosis is the sunrise – clarity and warmth flooding the world, revealing all colors and forms in their true beauty. The person who attains theosis does not disappear or close in on themselves; they radiate outward, fully alive. As Maximus taught, Christ did not come to nullify our humanity but to elevate it: God became man so that man might become god, a truth that animated all his ascetical teaching. Thus, the ascetic’s ultimate horizon is communion – an interpersonal, loving union with God and all others in God. We become by grace what Christ is by nature, all without losing our distinct personhood. In the words of Maximus’s tradition, we become “partakers of the divine nature” – an end that fulfills every rational hope of the Stoic and every mystical intuition of the Buddhist, yet surpasses them beyond measure.
A Lyrical Meditation for Our Age
Why does this ancient vision of asceticism matter now? Because our own age, for all its differences, is riven by the same human longings that drove an emperor like Marcus Aurelius to philosophy and a prince like Siddhartha to renounce his palace. We hunger for peace in a world of whirlwind. We feel the weight of suffering and seek its meaning. We sense the poverty of shallow pleasures and wonder if there is a joy that doesn’t fade. The modern landscape is paradoxical: never have we had so many means to indulge desire, yet never have we been so weary of our indulgences. Hyperstimulation is the norm – our attention splinters across flashing ads and algorithmic feeds, leaving us jaded and numb. In response, a kind of rootless detachment has become a coping mechanism. We dabble in mindfulness apps that promise calm without commitment; we adopt Stoic mottos as life-hacks to get through stressful workdays; we speak of “cutting toxic people out of life” and “not catching feelings” as if dispassion alone were salvation. There’s a surge of interest in “ancient practices” precisely because we are adrift. Walker Percy once quipped on the modern malaise – one can have every material comfort and still flunk life. Jacques Barzun chronicled how a culture that loses its unifying vision turns to diversions and decadence, mistaking motion for meaning. In our time, we see a thousand offers of counterfeit transcendence: psychedelic spirituality without morality, techno-utopian dreams of uploading consciousness, consumerist “experiences” sold as moments of escape. Yet, the soul remains restless.
Maximus the Confessor’s voice rises like a chant above the digital din, calling us to a different way – one both older and fresher than the fragmented prescriptions of Stoic or Buddhist minimalism when divorced from their fuller contexts. He would have us consider that perhaps desire isn’t the problem; rather, it's disordered desire. In an economy that exploits our attention and fans every lust for profit, real asceticism is an act of rebellion – not by forsaking desire, but by reclaiming it. We turn our desire away from the candy of endless notifications and toward the nourishment of truth and love. We say no to some pleasures not because they are evil, but because we seek the higher pleasure of a sound mind and a pure heart. This is the “radiant restoration” Maximus speaks of: like a piece of rusted iron forgotten in a junkyard, the soul in modernity is caked with false wants, fears, and frustrations. By grace-enabled effort, that rust can be gently scrubbed off – a little fasting from media here, a little courageous vulnerability in relationships there, the daily practice of prayer which recenters us – and slowly, the original metal shines. We begin to see again what is real and good. Our capacity for wonder returns as the overstimulation recedes. In community, we find that detachment need not mean alienation; rather than simply cutting bonds, we reshape them rightly. The ascetic path teaches us to be in the world but not of it: to love others without lust to exploit, to use things without being used by them.
What makes Maximus’s asceticism especially urgent now is its insistence that true transformation is relational. In an era of “bowling alone,” of lonely screen-lives, he reminds us that no one attains wholeness by oneself. The Stoic impulse to self-reliance can turn into a spiritual pride or a despair of others; the pseudo-Buddhist impulse (as adopted by many Westerners) to “detach from outcomes” can slide into a cool indifference toward injustice or a retreat from love. Maximus implores us to enter the refiner’s fire together. Our wounds are too deep for a merely DIY wellness regimen; we need the Divine Physician, and we find His healing touch in the sacramental life and in each other. Asceticism in Maximus’s key is not a competitive Olympics of self-denial to see who can be most disciplined. It is a healing journey, where the hard medicines of fasting or solitude are always taken with the sweet consolations of communion with God and support of the faithful. In an age where many try to curate an invulnerable self – whether through Stoic emotional stoicism or the Buddhist-inspired refusal to form attachments – Maximus gently points out that invulnerability is not the same as transcendence. A heart may be armoured and yet empty; a soul with no attachments may also have no love. The Confessor directs us to Christ, who did not numb Himself against suffering but embraced it for the sake of love, and who teaches that only by losing ourselves in love for God and neighbor do we truly find ourselves.
Finally, imagine the outcome if we heed this ancient wisdom. The modern person, fragmented and weary, could become integrated and luminous. Instead of a gray Stoic resilience or a passive Buddhist quietude, we might witness the birth of modern saints who are on fire: compassionate in action, serene in spirit, brimming with a joy that doesn’t depend on the next stimulus or distraction. Their presence would be like light in a room – not calling attention to themselves, but illuminating reality for others. This is the radiance Maximus promises, the soul’s original clarity restored. It is a light that does not fade, because its source is beyond the screens and neon of our cities – it is sourced in the Eternal Light. In an age of counterfeit transcendence, where every new gadget or ideology is hyped as the answer and then quickly found hollow, the real transcendence of theosis stands quietly, like a mountain at dawn, waiting to be noticed. It invites us not to escape our humanity, but to fulfill it.
As we conclude this meditation, a lyrical image arises: picture a rusted iron lantern, caked in years of neglect, suddenly taken into caring hands. With patience, the rust is scrubbed away; with skill, the bent pieces are repaired. A small flame is lit inside. The lantern begins to glow – first faintly, then with growing confidence, until it casts a warm light in the surrounding darkness. This is what St. Maximus offers our age. In the midst of noise, he speaks of stillness filled with presence. In the face of despair, he speaks of suffering transfigured into glory. Against both the iron cage of Stoic self and the dissolving void of false Nirvana, he reveals the image of a person made beautiful by love, bound in a tapestry of fellow pilgrims, all moving toward a horizon of endless Day. Such a vision matters now more than ever. It whispers to us that the cure for our modern ennui and excess is not less desire, but holy desire; not isolation, but illuminated community; not the end of longing, but longing finally finding its end – in the radiant, resurrecting embrace of the Living God.
Sources:
1. St. Maximus the Confessor, Four Centuries on Charity (Chapters on Love) – Cent. 3.4, on the goodness of created things and the evil of their misuse.
2. St. Maximus, Question to Thalassius 55 and Disputation with Pyrrhus – teaching that when what is unnatural is stripped away, the soul’s natural virtues shine, just as polished iron glints; even the passions can be redirected to good.
3. St. Maximus, Selected Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality) – advice on the ascetic struggle: how insults cure vainglory and how practices like fasting, vigils, solitude, and prayer heal the passions of concupiscence and anger.
4. Adam Cooper, Life in the Church according to St. Maximus (Mystagogia) – analysis of Maximus’s view of the liturgical life as the communal sacrament of deification, underscoring the ecclesial, grace-filled context of ascetic effort.