Asceticism Across Traditions

From the opening pages

Asceticism begins with a curious proposition: that a human being may become better, purer, wiser, freer, holier, or at least more impressive by deliberately refusing things that other human beings work hard to obtain. Food is available, so the ascetic fasts. A bed exists, so the ascetic sleeps on the floor. Money can be kept, so it is given away. Warm clothes are at hand, so somebody decides that winter is an opportunity for character formation. The ordinary person sees discomfort and asks how to end it. The ascetic asks whether discomfort might have a point.

The word comes from the Greek askēsis, meaning exercise, training, or practice. In classical usage it did not originally imply religious self-torment. Athletes engaged in askēsis; so did people undergoing disciplined preparation. The later religious sense grew naturally from this older idea. Early Christian writers adopted the language, and the “athlete of Christ” became a familiar ideal. Athanasius’s fourth-century Life of Antony presents Antony of Egypt as a heroic practitioner of spiritual discipline, enduring hunger, fatigue, solitude, temptation, and the exceptionally active demon population that late antique hagiography located in the desert.

Yet asceticism is broader than any one religion and narrower than mere suffering. It is not simply having a hard life. A famine victim is deprived, but not therefore an ascetic. A prisoner may sleep badly, eat monotonous food, and own almost nothing, but these facts alone do not place him among monks, sages, renouncers, or philosophers. Asceticism requires some meaningful element of voluntary restraint or voluntarily accepted hardship in the service of an ideal. That ideal may be salvation, purity, self-mastery, philosophical independence, liberation, repentance, or spiritual insight. Misery imposed from outside is misfortune. Misery deliberately accepted may become a discipline.