“Keep your mind in hell and despair not”?

Or, What Gillian Rose got wrong about hell and right about sin

‘How does keeping your mind in hell avoid despair?’, someone asked in the Q+A of a launch event for the new version of Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work. This phrase – ‘Keep your mind in hell, and despair not’ – is the book’s epigraph, attributed to the Orthodox monk and saint Staretz Silouan, and used in several ways throughout. It has become a kind of watchword or motto on the left, and is often quoted, or otherwise alluded to; it was recently used as the title of an event. But in some cases I’m not sure that people are using it in the way that Rose used it. And I am by now pretty certain that the way that Rose used it was wrong.

I hope Rose would herself forgive my lack of charity here, or see in it something of her own spirit. Perhaps it is unfair to say that she is using it wrongly, because by ‘wrong’ I don’t mean ‘untrue’ – indeed what I think she makes of it is true, and the point of this post – but that her use of it is wrongly implied to be the same as Silouan’s, and so Orthodox Christianity’s.

To begin with, in the original account, these words are not St Silouan’s, but God’s. The phrase comes from a specific episode in the saint’s life. For years he had suffered from the distracting belief that he was spiritually exceptional. This is the sin of spiritual pride – the belief that you are, spiritually speaking, a bit better than everyone else, holier, doing all the right things, repenting in the right ways and so forgiven. Whenever Silouan tried to pray, he was beset by demons, who taunted him by saying ‘You are a saint’ but then ‘You will never be saved’. He wanted to be sure which was true.

As a novice he had had a vision of Christ. It was an experience of grace of a remarkable intensity, and he desperately wanted a repeat of this state, but instead it became harder and harder to pray at all. Not only this but the vision itself, the fact that he had experienced it, and at such a young age, made it all the harder to resist the idea that he was exceptional. He took up increasingly ascetic practices, sleeping upright on a hard stool, doing manual labour, fasting. But instead of bringing himself closer to God, he pushed himself away, because he wasn’t doing all of these things out of love, but out of pride.

After many years, during an episode in which there were a huge number of demons crowding his cell, with one huge demon blocking the icon in order to make Silouan bow before him, Silouan asked God for help.

‘Lord, you see that I wish to pray to you with a clear mind, but the demons won’t let me. Teach me what I must do so that they cannot distract me.’ And the answer came from within his soul, ‘The proud always suffer like this from demons.’ ‘Lord,’ said Siluan, ‘teach me what I must do to humble my soul.’ Once again the answer came from his heart: ‘Keep your mind in hell and don’t lose hope.’ (source; see also the standard account of the saint’s life)

It’s important, then, that these are words attributed to God and not to Silouan, because Silouan’s problem is self-reliance. He believes he knows what to do, and believes he knows what he deserves from doing it, which is salvation. (What is deserved is also a return of spiritual intensity, something I sympathise with.) The problem with spiritual pride in particular is not that you are doing the wrong things; you are doing the right things – giving alms, helping others, praying, fasting, etc. – but for the wrong reason. You are not doing them because you love God, and because you see that through your openness to him he is working through you; instead it is you who are doing it all, and you who are taking the credit, and you who believe that all this makes you a little bit better than everyone else.

To avoid the sin of pride – the worst of all the sins – and achieve the humility that will allow him to get closer to God, Silouan first has to give up his belief that he is in charge of his own salvation. In order to do that he has to keep his mind in hell – that is, to know himself to be a sinner and to be bound for hell. And to do this, to hold this knowledge, with such intensity that he is literally already in hell – because it is said of Silouan and other Christian ascetics that they had the ability to place themselves in hell while still on earth, to experience its torments and to be surrounded by its demons. (The account I am getting this from says that Silouan had, after this, a new ‘favourite song’: ‘Soon I will die, and my cursed soul will descend into the closed black confines of hell, and there I alone will burn in a dark flame and cry for the Lord, “Where are You, light of my soul? Why have You deserted me? I cannot live without you”.’)

But at the same time he must also not lose hope – that is, lose hope in God’s mercy. This would also be a sin, the sin of despair, in which one believes that one is simply too wicked to be forgiven – that one’s own acts are more powerful than God’s. Hell is not despair, although in Silouan’s case his pride and despair led him to have a supernatural experience of hell, such that they seemed the same. His task is to distinguish the two. So by following both counsels – adopting the practice of imaginatively visiting hell, and simultaneously maintaining hope in God’s forgiveness – Silouan is acknowledging that grace and salvation are not something he has control over. He should perform good works and all his ascetic practices despite knowing that he could – should – go to hell.

The hell of St Silouan is permanent separation from God, i.e. from love. That separation is something which happens after and outside of our world (though it is imaginatively available in this world to a small number of experienced ascetics). Rose’s hell, as I understand it, is different. What we must keep our mind in – which for Rose is more ‘not shy away from’ than ‘dwell on with imaginative intensity’ – is earthly, temporal. It is the knowledge of our vulnerability, the harm we might suffer or cause, and it is also, crudely put, the ‘bad stuff’ that is part of life, the acknowledgement of which will make it possible to live and love more fully, and more authentically, in a way that is closer to the truth. Here is the central passage of Love’s Work that is dedicated to this phrase:

…to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

A crisis of illness, bereavement, separation, natural disaster, could be the opportunity to make contact with deeper levels of the terrors of the soul […].

[…] Existence is robbed of its weight, its gravity, when it is deprived of its agon. Instead of insinuating that illness may better prepare you for the earthly impossibilities, these enchiridions on Faith, Hope and Love would condemn you to seek blissful, deathless, cosmic emptiness – the repose without the revel.¹

Hell is experiences on earth, in the here and now, of ‘agon’ – conflict, difficulty – that are in some sense ‘natural’, like the disasters. These are things, she says, that are proper to life and love, not its antithesis. The examples she gives are of personal suffering – illness, bereavement – and communal. These are present in the idea of natural disaster, here, but also atrocity, such as the Holocaust; the first use of the phrase in the book is in a passage about her mother’s inability to accept that many members of her family were killed in Poland:

Nowadays, my mother denies this; she denies that it happened and she

denies that her mother suffered from it, so deep is her own unresolved suffering. This denial and unexamined suffering are two of the main reasons for her all-jovial unhappiness – the unhappiness of one who refuses to dwell in hell, and who lives, therefore, in the most static despair.

In this passage, as well as in the main section, which I’ve quoted in full below, the main target is forced cheerfulness – ‘all-jovial unhappiness’ – and the ‘positive thinking’ of New Age writing on illness and death (it’s worth recalling that Rose wrote this book when she was dying). One of the people she quotes appears to have believed that you could cure cancer through willpower and positive thoughts, something she likens to the ‘most remorseless protestantism’ (no cap in original). I immediately read this as referring to something that I too often worry about in what I understand as the Calvinist picture of predestination, namely the way that any doubts, lapses, moments of unhappiness and discouragement, could be seen as proof that one is not one of the elect, and is destined for damnation – although my own sense of the cruelty of this position could have affected this reading. In any case there is a difference between doubts indicating damnation and doubts causing it, which – I think – would be a very un-Protestant position to take.

I wanted to check what other people actually made of the phrase, and to see if anyone had complained about the use of St Silouan before, so I searched for people quoting it on Google Books. I didn’t find any examples of complaint, but I did find enough different glosses to confirm my sense of what the phrase has come to mean, and also my sense that it, and perhaps Love’s Work as a whole, has come to mean all things to all men (which my own example above demonstrates). Some of these glosses understand the phrase psychologically, focusing on problems suffered by the individual or interpersonally. Others are political, understanding it as a programme of a shared response to a specific historical moment. For some people, Rose is talking about love, romantic love, with hell and despair being the inevitable suffering and temptations to cause suffering that it involves us in. For others,

to be in hell and to despair is to be melancholic. And it’s not to be able to find a way through. To be in hell is to be able to experience the negations and the losses and the difficulties of your life.

But to try to come to understand them, live with them truthfully, not seek to overcome them, but to have them negated and preserved. So you know them differently and you live them differently. (Rebekah Howes, on the podcast mentioned above)

Of the readings I have called political, there is one in which the emphasis is on hell as external circumstance, ‘wrong life’:

‘Philosophy is keeping one’s mind in hell, in the violence and cruelty of the present, and not despairing, but going on, making, creating, affirming.’ (Simon Critchley)

And one where it is on hell as our own compromised responses to this violence and cruelty:

‘to interrogate our complicity in practices and structures of misrecognition and to take the risk of acting politically in response’ (Kate Schick)

In its emphasis on complicity, this last seems to me to bring us closest to the hell that I understand: here is a picture of us acknowledging our own sinfulness and nonetheless hoping that all is not lost, we can still collaborate in goodness too. And yet as a reading of Rose this seems insufficient, as it cannot account for the inclusion, in her examples, of random, undeserved loss or disaster, in which one cannot be complicit – although there are ways of being complicit in misrecognition, or sin, in one’s response to these experiences. Those glosses which do emphasise ‘negations and losses’, the ‘violence and cruelty of the present’, on the other hand, secularise more fully the idea of hell, making of it something like the everyday use in which it is an experience of almost impossible horror that an individual might undergo unjustly. But the point of hell is that it is not something that happens to you. You go there because you insisted on going there – you insisted on doing things by yourself. Rose’s hell, and all of these versions of it mentioned above, are peopled – it is to do with the pain of being in love with another person, or is a situation marked by their loss, it is a communal experience in which people suffer and work together. What she calls hell is the experience of being human; it is denying hell that isolates. But hell, the Christian hell, is lonely. It is you, alone. You turned away from love.

The reading that seems to me most convincing as a possible way to bridge the gap between Silouan and Rose is the answer Rowan Williams gave to the question I began with.

It’s a key question. I think the hell that she’s talking about is the sheer awareness of one’s own separation, one’s own compromised history, one’s own lack of purity. That is hell if you interpret it as judgment and necessity.

But if you don’t see it as judgment and necessity, but as truthfulness, it means you’re liberated from despair because you do not have to make yourself pure. And so that delivers you into a kind of hope, the kind of hope of failing better, failing better. But the hell is real because we’ve just heard [a few pages before] about the tragic inexorability of the king’s [i.e. Arthur’s] condition, the compromise, the collusion, the complicity.

And denying that, as I said earlier, denying that is actually the way to stay in hell, in despair. Accepting it is the way of not despairing. I think.

When I first read Love’s Work, in a phase of greater piety and also pedantry to now, I was very intrigued to know what Williams, whom I knew to be a friend of Rose’s, made of what seemed to me a scandalous misuse of Christian theology. Here, he begins with the idea of separation, which is how I understand hell in Christian terms. I think his swerve at the beginning of the second paragraph is sneaky: Rose’s account is not about judgement and necessity, i.e. about damnation, but she nonetheless says it is hell that she is talking about. But Williams’s point about impurity and hope seems to me to get at the point of the story of Silouan: that only by understanding ourselves as compromised, or, in another jargon, sinners, can we be free from the belief that we could make ourselves pure, morally perfect.

This strikes me as a useful thing to keep in mind. The idea of sin gets a bad rap but I have found it helpful as a way to think about, and accept, being morally ordinary. Certainly when I first converted, the concept of sin came as a relief, because it offered an account of how and why, when all of the right things had been done and the right processes followed, it was still possible to make moral mistakes (the unconscious, which at that point was still a niche interest on the left, also offers this, as in this entertaining review by Hannah Proctor). Indeed the guidelines of secular ethics were often used as a way to not have to admit a mistake, to put oneself beyond reproach, because a mistake would be the worst thing in the world, something that exposed an inner inadequacy – a secular Protestantism, at least in my partial understanding of it, in which any failure implies lack of faith and therefore exclusion from the elect. Faith, that is, being a ‘good person’, then becomes an anxious and defensive project of never letting the mask slip, and never letting any inconvenient detail get in the way of a coherent story of one’s own goodness.

The theologian James Alison talks about conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism in these terms:

The result is that one of the first fruits of the relaxation which comes with faith is a loss of a story of goodness, a loss of a self-innocenting story, a loss of a defensive story about ‘how right I am’, because you don’t need a story about how right you are. You are being given a story about how loved you are. And this is what it means to be able to see yourself as a sinner: far from ‘seeing yourself as a sinner’ being some sort of moralistic demand that you browbeat yourself and come up with a list of alleged failings, being able to see yourself as a sinner is merely the sign that you are able to hold yourself peacefully and realistically as being who you are, non-defensively, because you know yourself loved. You are no longer frightened of being seen to be, or actually being, a failure.

The concept of sin entails the acknowledgement of failure as a possibilitity, and this is more freeing than ideas of goodness and badness as identities. The demons say, ‘you are a saint’ and ‘you shall not be saved’, and make you forget that in fact, like everyone else, you are ordinary. That you are not perfect does not mean you are necessarily a monster. The coherent story is not one about purity, as Williams puts it, but about love.

In telling the story of St Silouan’s struggle against spiritual pride I have emphasised the idea of self-reliance – and not its cure, humility – because I wanted it to have more purchase in a secular context. I write about Christianity because I am interested in the existing overlaps, and because I want to make its ideas comprehensible, attractive, useful to the secular or non-Christian left. So I’m not against Rose’s use of the phrase because I think theological ideas should not be borrowed for politics or ethics, and I also don’t think that her gloss of it is incompatible with Christian ideas more broadly. The two main directions that the left has taken Rose’s use of the phrase seem helpful ones. I feel justified in wanting to keep separate secular uses of the word ‘hell’ from the Christian hell, precisely because the Christian idea of hell, as permanent separation from love, is worth everyone knowing. But I’m probably mostly annoyed at Rose for what seems to me her wilful and reckless mischaracterisation of an idea that she attributes to someone else. This annoyance may seem reasonable, but is in the end probably just another mistaken longing for purity.

1. The full passage, in its context:

The injunction, which pervades the literature of alternative healing, to become “exceptional” (Bernie Siegal), or “edgeless” (Stephen Levine), to assume unconditional love, is poor psychology, worse theology and no notion of justice at all. While presenting itself as a post-Judaic, New Age Buddhism, this spirituality re-insinuates the most remorseless protestantism. It burdens the individual soul with an inner predestination: you have eternal life only if you dissolve the difficulty of living, of love, of self and other, of the other in the self, if you are translucid, without inner or outer boundaries. If you lead a normally unhappy life, you are predestined to eternal damnation, you will not live.

This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

A crisis of illness, bereavement, separation, natural disaster, could be the opportunity to make contact with deeper levels of the terrors of the soul, to loose and to bind, to bind and to loose. A soul which is not bound is as mad as one with cemented boundaries. To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love.

Exceptional, edgeless love effaces the risk of relation: that mix of exposure and reserve, of revelation and reticence. It commands the complete unveiling of the eyes, the transparency of the body. It denies that there is no love without power; that we are at the mercy of others and that we have others in our mercy. Existence is robbed of its weight, its gravity, when it is deprived of its agon. Instead of insinuating that illness may better prepare you for the earthly impossibilities, these enchiridions on Faith, Hope and Love would condemn you to seek blissful, deathless, cosmic emptiness – the repose without the revel.