De monachismo, or, Orwell on sainthood and renunciation

Yesterday I rediscovered an essay by George Orwell that I first read maybe three years ago. The title is "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," [you can find the whole essay online here] and it does indeed start out talking about a pamphlet that Leo Tolstoy wrote attacking the work of William Shakespeare and in particular "King Lear," which he used as an example of the whole. Orwell, though, does not confine himself to a narrowly literary analysis of Tolstoy's venom but tries to explain it by putting it in the larger context of Tolstoy's religiosity. And when he considers Tolstoy's religious views about the virtue of sainthood and renunciation, he contrasts that perspective with what he calls a "humanist" view:

It is important to realize that the difference between a saint and an ordinary human being is a difference of kind and not of degree. That is, the one is not to be regarded as an imperfect form of the other. The saint, at any rate Tolstoy's kind of saint, is not trying to work an improvement in earthly life: he is trying to bring it to an end and put something different in its place. One obvious expression of this is the claim that celibacy is ‘higher’ than marriage. If only, Tolstoy says in effect, we would stop breeding, fighting, struggling and enjoying, if we could get rid not only of our sins but of everything else that binds us to the surface of the earth — including love, then the whole painful process would be over and the Kingdom of Heaven would arrive. But a normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue. This is not solely because he is ‘weak’, ‘sinful’ and anxious for a ‘good time’. Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life. ‘Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all’ — which is an un-Christian sentiment. Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next. And the enormous majority of human beings, if they understood the issue, would choose this world. They do make that choice when they continue working, breeding and dying instead of crippling their faculties in the hope of obtaining a new lease of existence elsewhere.

Here, in the space of one paragraph, Orwell says what I tried to say at much greater length in my post "Contra monachismum." I like also his deft way of handling the question of suffering. You remember, after all, that both Plato and the Buddha propose their respective forms of asceticism as a way to maximize pleasure by avoiding suffering. Back in 2014, inside of two and a half months, I wrote two posts over on the Patio about this exact topic, one critical and the other sympathetic. (There's also this post, which I kept in this blog even though it is quasi-philosophical because it seemed just a little too raw and a little too extreme for the tame, placid environment of the Patio.) Yes, Orwell says, life is suffering. And it is grand anyway. L'Chaim!

I sometimes wonder whether Friedrich Nietzsche's supposed "love of pain" that some authors find in him is not really, perhaps, just a recognition that pain is inevitable in life and that it is even an inevitable part of the greatest pleasures. It has been too long since I last read Nietzsche for me to be sure of this idea, and I might be confused. Still, Nietzsche did get his philosophical start by analyzing tragedy; and Orwell is clear that this perspective is inextricable from the tragic sense.

Is humanism inseparable from tragedy? Is there any way of integrating what is good and beautiful about monasticism with a philosophy that denies the foundations of monasticism? I don't know. But I like Orwell's essay.