Jain initiates removing every hair from their heads. Theravada Buddhists deep in meditation. Sramanas striving for renunciation through yogic practices. Desert anchorites subsisting for weeks on a couple of pieces of stale bread. Ascetic practices are undertaken in many different religious traditions and also play a role in some nonreligious pursuits such as sports. In fact, the Greek term askēsis refers to athletic or military exercises, and the imagery of training or athletic discipline is often employed in descriptions of the ascetic life. Ascetic practices are an important dimension of many religious traditions; they are attested in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sufi, Sikh, Zoroastrian, and various other traditions. Many indigenous religions also feature ascetic elements and occasionally even long-term pursuits of ascetic lives (as in some forms of Shamanism). Even at first glance, these experiences have common features. They all seem to involve rigorous practices of abstention from the comforts and delights of ordinary life. They all appear to have an intense focus on the ascetic’s inner life, emotions, and actions. They are often characterized by silence, various forms of meditation, and strong mental discipline, sometimes even by an attempt to empty the mind altogether. Ascetic practices are usually not elaborate, beautiful, or “showy.” There is not all that much to see; it is often more about removal from or renunciation of everyday life. Many religions emphasize that ascetic practices cannot be separated from their context in the pursuit of a religiously inflected life. For example, this is a criticism often made of Western appropriations of yoga: It loses something when it is severed from its broader spiritual focus and the ascetic forms of prayer in which it originated. All the same, it is not unusual for people to appropriate ascetic elements into their personal lives for a variety of purposes.
Within Christianity, forms of ascetic behavior and experience were among the earliest manifestations of a dedicated religious life, especially in areas of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Often called the “desert movement,” it is also credited with giving rise to monastic forms of behavior and practice. In fact, these two types of life are frequently conflated with each other. Mary Hughes-Edwards, in her study of medieval anchorites, laments: “Definitions of asceticism are seldom attempted by modern scholars. Henry Chadwick does not define it in his survey of the history of ascetical ideals. Conrad Leyser does not gloss it in his survey volume Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great, but instead conflates ‘ascetic’, ‘mystic’ and ‘religious’ and synonymizes the ‘ascetic’ with the ‘monastic movement’. Such synchronizations are common.”Footnote 1 More recent works exacerbate this confusion. William Harmless in his study of the desert ascetics refers to them throughout as monastics, and the book posits itself as a history of early monasticism.Footnote 2 In his book on mysticism he examines Evagrius – a key figure of the early desert movement – as the quintessential mystic.Footnote 3 Terms like ascetic, monastic, mystical, devotional, spiritual, and Christian are often employed more or less interchangeably in the literature. Hughes depicts the detrimental effects of this lack of definition: “The absence of ascetical definition results in extremely broad contemporary applications of the term, often too inclusive to be useful. These may focus on austerity and abstemiousness, but can obscure, through ambiguity, the precise nature of medieval asceticism, which the anchoritic guides reveal as a rigorous set of practices; a circumscribed form of devotional worship commanding a specialized vocabulary.”Footnote 4 The same is surely true of earlier forms of asceticism when they are conflated with monasticism or mysticism.
Clear distinctions between these solitary forms of withdrawal from the world and the phenomenon of communal monasticism emerge early. Sometimes the two types are referred to as “anchorite” and “coenobitic,” respectively, although there are also intermediate forms – like the loosely organized “lavra” (or “laura”), in which individual ascetics lived in cells but came together for some activities, such as regular liturgy and celebrations of Pascha/Easter – or combined forms, such as a monastery that also had some reclusive hermits attached to it (Barsanuphius and John of Gaza are particularly prominent examples of the latter).Footnote 5 Although ascetic practices can and often do occur in monastic settings, they are also distinct ways of pursuing a religious life. Many ascetics do not live in a monastery and some monastics do (or did) not undertake recognizably ascetic practices.
Asceticism overlaps with other ways of living a religious or spiritual life as well. For example, mystical experience can be preceded or even seen to be induced by ascetic practices, yet it can also occur without ascetic preparation and many ascetics never have mystical experiences. In fact, most ascetic writings are profoundly suspicious of such experiences. One might say something similar of liturgy or ritual: Many ascetics participated in basic ritual functions, meeting on Sundays for the Eucharist or at least celebrating Pascha together. Yet ritual does not feature prominently in their descriptions. Many forms of ritual can involve ascetic practices, but the two are not identical and there are many elements of ritual that are quite different from ascetic behavior or experience. The nature of the practices and experiences of ascetic, monastic, mystical, devotional, and ritual manifestations can be described with distinctive characteristics that do not agree or overlap in all respects.
The operating hypothesis of this chapter, then, will be to treat the ascetic phenomenon as its own kind of experience, trying to determine its specific characteristics, without denying that it could and can often occur together with or as a stage toward other experiences or behaviors in particular cases – and that there may well be some overlap between ascetic and monastic experience or between both of them and mystical or ritual experience. There are three elements that the present phenomenological analysis will highlight as especially crucial in ascetic experience: the practices of withdrawal and abstention, the emphasis on vigilance or discernment, and the forms of self-denial or self-abnegation. Ascetic experience, the chapter will seek to show, grapples in heightened fashion with the fundamental human sense of failure and inadequacy, which it seeks to relieve through intense training, disciplining, and cleansing of the self.Footnote 6 First, however, it will provide some brief historical background and examination of the types of sources that might lend themselves to phenomenological depiction of the ascetic phenomenon in its Christian forms of manifestation.
Background, Context, and Sources
Although forms of ascetic behavior occur across centuries of Christian experience to the present day and can be observed in many other religious traditions and even in nonreligious activities, the “peak” of Christian asceticism can be said to have occurred in the third through seventh centuries, most famously in lower or northern Egypt by the Nile delta, but also in upper Egypt, in the areas around Gaza and Sinai, and other areas of the Middle East.Footnote 7 The most famous “character” – although probably not the originator – was Antony the Great, as depicted by Athanasius of Alexandria in his famous Life of Antony.Footnote 8 Many other so-called desert fathers or elders, including some women,Footnote 9 retreated from the bustle of urban life into nearby or remote areas of various degrees of wasteland and the desired solitude.Footnote 10 Sometimes the desert or even the solitude is more metaphorical than physical, inasmuch as some ascetics exercised their practices in the middle of the city, pursuing their various professions while practicing an inner withdrawal.Footnote 11 Such withdrawal – whether “geographical” or “metaphorical” – becomes an abiding and distinguishing characteristic of the very nature of asceticism.
Accounts of the desert ascetics (active from the 330s to the 460s), especially those living in northern or lower Egypt in the areas of Nitria, Kellia, and Sketis,Footnote 12 can be found in the late fourth-century text History of the Monks of Egypt (Historia Monachorum in Aegypto), the early fifth-century Lausiac History by Palladius of Aspuna, and the Apophthegmata patrum or “Sayings of the Fathers,” which exists in several different collections, some ordered alphabetically by the name of the elder, some organized by topic.Footnote 13 Descriptions of ascetic lives and practices can also be found in some other texts, especially ecclesiastical histories (such as that of Eusebius) and hagiographic accounts.Footnote 14 The advice provided in the shape of brief anecdotes in the Apophthegmata and the Lausiac History is given a much fuller theoretical development in the writings of Evagrius of Pontus (c. 345–99),Footnote 15 and the Institutes and Conferences (composed 425–28) of John Cassian (c. 365–c. 435), through whom they had a profound influence on the development of Western monasticism.Footnote 16 Further sources of brief advice, specific instructions, or longer addresses include the discourses of Isaiah of Scetis (fifth century),Footnote 17 the writings of Mark the Monk (fifth century),Footnote 18 the letters of the ascetics Barsanuphius and John (early sixth century Gaza),Footnote 19 the discourses of Dorotheos of Gaza (sixth century),Footnote 20 the “ladder of divine ascent” of John Climacus (probably sixth century, possibly seventh century Sinai),Footnote 21 and texts from the Philokalia, an extensive collection of ascetic writings from the fourth to fifteenth centuries.Footnote 22 Evagrius’ suspect association with the Origenic tradition and the related crisis in Egyptian monasticism around 400 pushed some of his teachings underground (thus some texts are only extant in Syriac and Armenian, in which they were immensely popular),Footnote 23 but their spirit is preserved and carried forward in many of the writings collected in the Philokalia.
These sources can be roughly grouped into two genres, although there is some overlap between them. One crucial type of sources includes reports about ascetic figures, which can take the form of travel reports (e.g., Cassian’s Conferences or the History of the Monks of Egypt), descriptions of individual “lives” (like that of Antony the Great, of Daniel of Scetis, and many others), or brief anecdotes as illustrations within more didactic texts (e.g., the Apophthegmata patrum or the Lausiac History). While some of these clearly have a historical basis, as evidenced by reliable and verifiable references to geographical specificities or political events, their main aim is not to produce an accurate historical compilation of biographical facts, but rather to present these figures as exemplars of the ascetic life.Footnote 24 In this regard, they are actually especially useful for phenomenological analysis, because they present not simply empirical or anecdotal data, but instead a paradigmatic or exemplary experience, one that lends itself especially to ascertaining the nature or type of an experience.Footnote 25 Such reports for the purposes of instruction or emulation may well be more useful for achieving a good sense of ascetic experience than a more strictly empirical account in the modern sense of historical recording.
A second type of source is the sets of instructions or discourses about ascetic life and practices, often set within the reports of lives or linked to them in some form. These include the letters of Barsanuphius and John, the discourses of Isaiah of Scetis and Dorotheos of Gaza, the discourses of individual ascetics reported in Cassian’s Conferences and his more straightforward descriptions in his Institutes, Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent, almost all of the texts in the Evagrian corpus, and most of those gathered in the Philokalia. Here also paradigmatic experience is set forth, albeit in a somewhat different form, less as exemplified by a particular ascetic (aside from the occasional illustrative anecdote) and more describing broad patterns of behavior that anyone undertaking this sort of life should pursue or emulate.
Both types of sources lend themselves well to phenomenological analysis because they are deeply interested in describing the ascetic life in such a way that it might be recognized, distinguished, and imitated. That is to say, portraying ascetic experience accurately as a pursuit or practice that can be emulated and evaluated is a vested and crucial interest of the authors. While individual writers might not always have met their desired goal, the texts were also subject to a selection process inasmuch as lives or discourses that seemed especially valuable, paradigmatic, or exemplary were more likely to be disseminated more widely, translated more frequently, and preserved more carefully. More idiosyncratic or exceptional practices that were not seen as representative do not tend to be copied as avidly or to be disseminated as widely and are thus less likely to survive.Footnote 26 Although certainly descriptions of individual ascetics differ in emphasis and in the characteristics they report, this material is surprisingly cohesive and presents a very clear picture of what was taken to be essential for ascetic life and experience. These include recognized processes of withdrawal and abstention, as well as shared practices of vigilance and discernment, for the purposes of disciplining and reshaping the self.
Processes of Withdrawal and Abstention
Probably the most obvious and certainly one of the most important elements of ascetic experience is its emphasis on withdrawal from the “world,” whether literal or metaphorical (anchorēsis, in fact, means “withdrawal”). In such withdrawal, the desert – of varying types and degrees – plays an especially important spatial role to the point that early Christian asceticism is often simply described as the “desert” movement or its exemplars as the “desert fathers” or elders. Withdrawal from or renunciation of the world is often the first step in instructions to anyone wishing to undertake an ascetic life.Footnote 27 Cassian has Paphnutius explain that renunciation can result from a direct call from God, from the wish to imitate someone else’s holy life, or from the need for repentance and fear of death.Footnote 28 Although such withdrawal can involve a singular dramatic act of abandonment of one’s former life, family,Footnote 29 and property – as in Athanasius’ Life of Antony, where Antony is depicted as heeding a biblical injunction to give up everything to follow Christ – it is also clear throughout that there are often successive stages of increasing withdrawal and that indeed it turns into an attitude that must be practiced throughout an ascetic’s life.Footnote 30 Withdrawal is not just a one-time act, but becomes a way of life.Footnote 31 Cassian tells several stories of ascetics withdrawing further and further into the desert or seeking out monasteries with more rigorous discipline.Footnote 32 The prologue to the History of the Monks of Egypt reports that many of the ascetics encountered by the visitors “are astonished when they hear what goes on in the world, for they have attained a complete forgetfulness of earthly affairs.”Footnote 33 There are also several dramatic stories of long-time ascetics returning to the world, often precipitated by pride and the conviction that they have succeeded and are now immune to temptation.Footnote 34 Such stories and especially their telling as admonition to the hearer viscerally make the point that one is never finished withdrawing and that renunciation has to be practiced to one’s dying day. Many ascetics proclaim their inadequacy even on their deathbed and sometimes beg for additional time for further repentance.Footnote 35
The withdrawal from regular life and the flight to the desert thus highlight spatiality as an important feature of the phenomenality of ascetic experience. This is a particular type of spatiality: The point is not the beauty or the intricacy of the space; the place itself does not even really matter. It is the absence of spatial features that matters, the starkness of the place, its distinction from regular space. Interestingly, time seems to play no comparable role in the ascetic experience, except perhaps in the suspension of any relation to time by repetitive activity. There is no sense of time passing in the desert and, although it will be sometimes pointed out how long an ascetic has dwelled in the desert, these numbers tend to have symbolic functions or just to exemplify that it has taken one’s entire life to repent.Footnote 36 Ascetic experience thus constitutes itself in terms of the emptiness of place and the absence or insignificance of time, as a withdrawal from or even rejection of regular space and time.
Another form of withdrawal or denial is exhibited in an especially excessive form by the ascetics who pretend to be mad and do things that would (and do) usually invite strong censure by society.Footnote 37 Here the withdrawal is not just from society – not necessarily in the physical sense but in the sense of being an accepted member of society – but even, at least apparently, from one’s own reasoning faculties. The “holy fool” – ascetics pretending to be mad or deranged – is a particularly dramatic and variously attested phenomenon of separating from the world, taking leave of one’s own mind in a rigorous separation from regular society. Caring for lepers occasionally becomes another such example.Footnote 38 The ascetic life involves withdrawal in many stages and respects, not just from the world, from one’s property or relatives, giving up one’s former way of life, but also withdrawal from temptation, from one’s own affects and dispositions, from desires or patterns of thought. In these respects, the primary thrust of ascetic instruction is “negative,” not in the sense that it would be dismal or devoid of joy or humor (humor is actually often employed in various anecdotes), but in the sense that the stress is on the practices and thoughts one should avoid or the passions one should eliminate or subdue.Footnote 39 Its practices are characterized by subtraction and elimination, not by increase or multiplication, except in effort. The phenomenality of the ascetic experience is characterized by abstention, removal, withdrawal. It is an experience of separation and renunciation.
In the Christian manifestations, the goal of such withdrawal is partly to induce an increasing awareness of one’s inadequacy or sinfulness and, even more fully, to repent for one’s sins and combat them. This becomes another – and obviously related – distinguishing characteristic of ascetic experience, which often features an overwhelming sense of sinfulness and need for penitence, some of which can go to excessive extremes.Footnote 40 This often entails the denial of many basic human needs, such as severely reducing or even avoiding food (or types of food), clothing, sleep, shelter, and interaction with others. The desert is sought out partly for its void, for its emptiness, its lack of crowds or comforts. When it becomes too populated, because too many others pursue or seek to imitate them, ascetics will regularly withdraw further into the desert or practice more rigorous withdrawal and abstinence.Footnote 41 Scetis is founded when the cells (Kellia) become too full. Many of the ascetics in Judea seem to have originally escaped Egypt in search of increased solitude. Barsanuphius and John refuse to allow anyone apart from a single intermediary to see them and communicate only by letter. Although many hagiographical accounts report trips to cities, these always serve a particular purpose of exhortation or other demonstration. Some early texts indulge in what almost amounts to competition with regard to rigorous feats of abstention (especially from food, sleep, and the sight of women).Footnote 42
Such a void or emptiness becomes an important feature of ascetic experience. One might thus speak of it as a minimalist or abnegating phenomenon. It is not an exorbitant or enthusiastic religious experience; it features no superlative visions or ecstatic enthusiasm. Rather, the ascetic life seems to reduce human experience to its essentials and sometimes even to minimize those essentials further. One might perhaps hazard to say that the ascetic drills down to the fundamental structures of the human condition by trying to withdraw from their particular ordinary or everyday manifestations. Through their rigorous control over their own lives, they cut off anything superfluous or superficial, leaving only what is absolutely necessary to human survival. Asceticism is phenomenologically minimalist.
Later texts or specific instructions try to temper the worst excesses, making individual allowances for someone with a weak constitution, counseling a more moderate regimen, or even admonishing individuals to take care of their bodies and their health. Dorotheos of Gaza, for example, whose health was often in a precarious state, is repeatedly admonished to take care of his body. Barsanuphius and John frequently counsel moderation to others as well. Isaiah of Scetis says: “Keep your vigil modestly, and do not deprive your body of its needs, but perform your duties leniently and sensibly, lest your soul is darkened by the degree of sleeplessness and gives up the struggle.”Footnote 43 Even Evagrius already warns: “There will also be times when sickness of the body comes along and makes it necessary for you to eat a second and third time or even more often; so do not let your thoughts be saddened by this.”Footnote 44 Several elders insist that one must care for the body and avoid excessive behaviors.
Such rigorous control of one’s body has many parallels in the ascetic practices of other religious traditions and also in nonreligious forms of ascetic practice such as athletic training or dieting. Here, too, nonessentials are set aside in order to focus on what is most important. A rigorous training of the body, as desired in athletic competition, requires foregoing many ordinary pleasures and occupations. While other religious traditions or nonreligious ascetic practices may not share the sense of sinfulness that the Christian ascetics expressed, such practices are often linked to a felt experience of failure (as in some forms of dieting) or at least of the sense that something is seriously wrong with the world and that withdrawal from it might be the only remedy (as in some Buddhist practices). Obviously, such parallels would need to be investigated more fully.
An awareness of sin and a commitment to removing or combatting it is often a very personal endeavor. While individual ascetics undertake extreme penitential practices, these are seldom advised for others. Ascetics frequently think of themselves as more sinful than anyone else – and this is counseled as exemplary, partly to induce humility, partly to maintain the ascetic way of life, which is generated by an awareness of one’s sinfulness. Rarely are blanket statements about everyone’s sinfulness issued; such an admission is generally made in the first-person singular.Footnote 45 In this regard, Isaiah of Scetis says, “each of them bears his own burden.”Footnote 46 One accuses oneself, not others.Footnote 47 In the few cases where others are accused, this usually occurs within the context of community, and solely as an illustration to cultivate further individual pursuits of penitence and to guard against pride.Footnote 48 This, too, is crucial from a phenomenological perspective: The ascetic experience provides an insight into the self, but not necessarily an empathetic thinking or feeling into another (in the sense of Einfühlung). The ascetic life has a crucial first-person perspective that cannot simply be applied to others. Important differences in this regard will emerge in other types of religious experience, such as monastic or compassionate experience.
One dramatic element of this quest for repentance is the frequent stress laid on cultivating a spirit of penitence or compunction (katanyxis) involving copious weeping and profound grieving as ways of inducing sorrow over one’s sin.Footnote 49 Penitence has to be “mixed with wailing and inexpressible laments.”Footnote 50 Isaiah of Scetis compares it to a criminal in prison who realizes he deserves the punishment for his crimes and thus is concerned entirely with himself and not with judging others. He does not worry about food or about correcting others or even about personal slights, but instead is focused entirely on his own pain, grieving his crimes, and fearing the coming judgment.Footnote 51 Similarly, the ascetic is not anxious about food, sleep, or anyone else, but is entirely devoted to his or her own repentance. In a later discourse Isaiah affirms: “If someone searches for the Lord with a heart full of sorrow, he listens to his condition, asks with knowledge and becomes anxious with heartache, that he is not attached to a worldly thing but fearfully takes care of his soul.”Footnote 52 The elders frequently compare the sorrow needed for true repentance to a woman’s grief at her husband’s death.Footnote 53
Although some types of personal devotional practices also operate with a strong consciousness of sin, no other form of religious experience makes tears and grief such an important tool of its endeavor or such a crucial element of its life.Footnote 54 In fact, this is probably the affect most characteristic of the ascetic experience, which in many other respects tries to stamp out excessive affect, especially in the form of the “passions.”Footnote 55 There is a careful line drawn, however, between the kind of mourning associated with contrition leading to compunction and the kind of sadness or despondency leading to despair.Footnote 56 For example, an elder who has no compassion for a younger person and causes him to despair is upbraided quite harshly.Footnote 57 An affect that moves to greater withdrawal and abstention is an important tool, but affects that disturb such withdrawal and form or revive attachments with the “world” are to be avoided.
Combatting the passions and the patterns of thought associated with them or precipitated by them is one of the central endeavors of ascetic life and practice. The very point of withdrawal from the world is the elimination of temptation and the undivided focus on prayer and subjugation of the passions. A significant bulk of the discourses and instructions are devoted to this topic. For this purpose, the ascetic texts develop elaborate lists and descriptions of such attitudes and behaviors, most fully systematized in several treatises by Evagrius (To Eulogios, On the Vices Opposed to the Virtues, On the Eight Thoughts, and the most famous text, Praktikos or The Monk) and in Cassian’s Institutes, which first outlines basic monastic practices, including what to wear and how to sing psalms, and then devotes one chapter (or “book”) each to the “spirits” of gluttony, fornication (or lust), avarice (or greed), wrath (or anger), despondency (or sadness), acedia (or listlessness), vainglory, and pride, respectively.Footnote 58 In a different way, the various stories told about ascetics also illustrate these vices or the corresponding virtues and are sometimes deliberately organized so as to focus on them more fully, for example grouping together all the stories about pride or vainglory.
The term for these thoughts or dispositions in Evagrius and much of the subsequent (Greek) tradition is logismos (pl. logismoi). Like the other crucial term, pathos (pl. pathei), some authors treat logismoi as neutral, able to become either positive or negative; others consider them more fully developed trains of thoughts or attitudes that are evil and must be combatted.Footnote 59 The same will be true of the “passions,” which for some authors are natural (even Christ is said to have natural human passions), but in some texts always have a negative connotation.Footnote 60 When they are used in more neutral or natural fashion, the aim becomes to direct and guide the thoughts and passions; when they are used with a purely negative meaning, the advice usually is to root them out and eliminate them altogether. A similar ambivalence exists over the source of these thoughts and temptations; sometimes they are considered self-generated by one’s own imagination or desires, sometimes they are thought to be due to demonic influence and to come from the outside.Footnote 61 They are blameworthy only when one gives in to these thoughts, cultivates them, acts on them, and establishes habits and patterns of behavior. Some writers will use logismoi or pathei only for these blameworthy full-blown dispositions; some will employ them even for the initial first movement of heart or mind. The point, obviously, is the same in both cases: not to allow something to have destructive power over one’s thinking and emotion. Dorotheos of Gaza explicitly says that renunciation and purification become practiced by the early ascetics because they realized that thereby the soul or mind “starts functioning as nature intended it to.”Footnote 62 There is a profound recognition here about the relationship between affect, thinking, and action.
A first clear characteristic of ascetic experience therefore is an often radical withdrawal from the world, both physically and emotionally. Such withdrawal serves the purpose of seeking to eliminate all temptations, trying to avoid the passions, in order to purify body, heart, and mind. Ascetic experience engages in lifelong repentance in a single-minded focus on one’s own life through an increasing awareness of one’s sins, including the temptations that might arise through patterns of thought or affect. Such a focus requires a stripped-down experience of space and time in such a way that they become of no account, are neutralized in their particularities. The ascetic withdraws from ordinary life and negates its specific manifestations in order to examine the affects and thoughts of consciousness in single-minded attention. This requires careful practices of discernment and constant vigilance.
Practices of Vigilance and Discernment
In order to combat vices at their root and to produce virtues instead, the ascetics engage in rigorous processes of discernment, constantly monitoring their own thoughts, attitudes, and actions. Such self-examination is undertaken in a variety of ways, which all cultivate attitudes of attentiveness and vigilance as an absolutely crucial element of ascetic practice. “Be attentive to yourself” is a constant refrain in Evagrius, Cassian, Dorotheos of Gaza, the correspondence of Barsanuphius and John, and other texts. Abba Poemen says: “Being on the alert, paying attention to oneself, and discretion – these three virtues are the working tools of the soul.”Footnote 63 Another elder asserts: “Without vigilance a person makes no progress, not even in a single virtue.”Footnote 64 Isaiah of Scetis warns: “Always examine where you falter, and try to correct yourselves.”Footnote 65 The examination is marked both by the discovery of sin or false attitudes and by the goal of curtailing and ultimately eliminating them. Dorotheos summarizes: “The fathers used to tell us how we should purify ourselves bit by bit, that is, by examining ourselves carefully every evening about how we have passed the day, and again at dawn about how we have passed the night.” He insists that “we really need to scrutinize our conduct every six hours and see in what way we have sinned.”Footnote 66 Therefore, we must “keep watch over ourselves always.”Footnote 67 Being attentive to oneself by examining one’s thoughts and attitudes is at the core of the daily practice of the ascetic life. Ascetic experience manifests to a large extent as a continual process of observation, discernment, and judgment: “Therefore stand over your heart, watching your senses.”Footnote 68 This requires constant vigilance. Such an examination of consciousness itself already has phenomenological leanings. Although it would surely be anachronistic to refer to the ascetics as phenomenologists, in many ways their examination of consciousness, careful attention to their thoughts, and analysis of their affects have parallels to the phenomenological method, albeit obviously with a quite different goal than philosophical phenomenology. They seek to understand the movements of consciousness, to discern the pattern of thoughts and the ways in which they generate emotions, affective attachments, and actions.
Over time, such practices of self-examination become increasingly codified and structured.Footnote 69 One becomes able to examine oneself through the practices of stillness (hēsychia), attentiveness (prosochē), and watchfulness or vigilance (nēpsis), which aim to achieve serenity or dispassion (apatheia).Footnote 70 Even apatheia is not a final goal, however, but an intermediate goal on the way toward the higher goal of the Christian life, namely knowledge of God (theologia). Already Evagrius makes these distinctions: on the one hand, the ascetic practice (praktikē) of elimination of vices and cultivation of virtues; on the other hand, the pursuit of “theology” or “mystical knowledge” (gnōstikē).Footnote 71 Cassian also explicitly distinguishes between the “practical” stage, consisting in the elimination of vices and acquiring of virtues, and the “theoretical” stage, involving knowledge of self and ultimately of God.Footnote 72 The latter is “incomparably superior” to the former; its “dignity is greater than all the dignity of righteousness and all the zeal for righteousness.”Footnote 73 The great majority of the texts are devoted to the “practical” dimension, however, and especially to the elimination of vices and governing of thoughts. For this, discernment (diakrisis) of one’s thoughts and affects is essential. Isaiah of Scetis affirms: “All things are abolished by discernment, when it gathers and considers them, but it is impossible for discernment to come to you, unless you cultivate the ground, beginning with silence.”Footnote 74 Such discernment is able to analyze not only whether a temptation is inflicted from the outside or arises from one’s own thoughts, but also how to cut it off at the root before it becomes more entrenched or even develops into a regular habit or disposition.
The phenomenology of this progression of entrenchment in consciousness becomes quite sophisticated over time. An overall consensus emerges about the ways in which thoughts and desires influence action and become established habits. The order or naming of the stages occasionally varies somewhat, but broadly speaking the sequence is usually described as follows:Footnote 75 (1) a thought (in the widest sense of imagination, perception, memory, etc.) arises within consciousness either of its own accord or put there by temptation (prosbolē); (2) one becomes disturbed by or preoccupied with this thought, at least momentarily (pararripismos); (3) one “connects” with the thought by entertaining it and dwelling on it (homilia or syndyasmos); (4) one agrees to the thought and intends to act on it (synkatathesis); (5) through repeated action one develops a disposition or habit of this pattern of thought (prolēpsis); (6) finally it has become a full-blown passion or vice.Footnote 76 This describes well how a fleeting thought can ultimately give rise to entrenched patterns of behavior. The ascetic undertaking is primarily directed at preventing this sequence, namely by cutting off the temptation or thought at the root before it becomes established in the mind, heart, or consciousness (nous, kardia, and even dianoia are often used interchangeably in that respect, although kardia/heart is more frequently employed to speak of the person as a whole). It obviously also tries to combat dispositions that have already developed and either seeks to exterminate them altogether (for the case of habits of vice) or to guide them into better directions and reform them (for dispositions that tend to passions).
Anger can serve as a particularly vivid example of how this works. The ascetics think of anger as a passion that masters us, maybe even renders us less than human.Footnote 77 Dorotheos describes the process like that of starting a fire: Someone else’s “provoking remark” is like a “spark” thrown into tinder. If one ignores the remark, the spark is snuffed out. If one dwells on it and thinks the remark was intended to annoy, one feeds the flame by adding wood or fuel to it. The mind becomes disturbed like the first smoke of kindling. This disturbance stimulates the mind with more thoughts and emotions, increasingly setting it aflame and generating ideas of vengeance. Thus, at first the flame can be easily extinguished and even a little fire can be put out with some effort, but “if you dwell on it and inflame your heart and torment yourself with thoughts and conflicting emotions the heart catches fire and there you are in a passion.”Footnote 78 Even at this point the fire can still be controlled and extinguished with effort, but if it is fed further “like someone piling logs on a blazing hearth and flaming the fire and so making more firebrands” it becomes a raging inferno.Footnote 79 In another context, he compares the growing of a basic desire into a harmful passion to pulling up a cypress: easily done when it is a mere seedling, increasingly difficult as it grows, and finally impossible when it has become a deeply rooted and large tree.Footnote 80 Isaiah of Scetis compares the process to rust eating away at iron or a worm gnawing on wood.Footnote 81
Again, there is profound phenomenological insight here about how emotions and affects function, including how something like “moral emotions” – in Anthony Steinbock’s sense – are formed, in both positive and negative senses. The ascetic analysis reveals how emotions like anger can develop into destructive rage or deep resentment and how one might prevent this from happening by paying attention to the more primordial movements of affect before they become patterns of thought, emotion, and action. Thus, in this case, phenomenology is not only helpful for understanding how ascetic practice operates, but the ascetic analysis and advice can themselves become useful phenomenologically by showing us how various movements of consciousness become entrenched, develop into dispositions, and ultimately result in addictive and destructive behaviors.
Aside from detailing how emotions are generated and develop into full-blown passions, Dorotheos also draws insightful distinctions between anger and resentment: One might with an apology erase momentary anger and yet could maintain an underlying disposition of resentment that can be irritated by a new instance. He compares this to “a person who has a wound and puts a plaster on it; after a while, through the plaster, the wound heals and forms a scar, but it still remains a weak spot and if someone throws a stone at him, this place is more easily damaged than the rest of the body and begins to bleed.”Footnote 82 Thus, a particular instance of anger can be healed and yet remain a sore spot to be irritated more easily by a subsequent instance. Dorotheos also repeatedly points out that people are different, not only tempted in different ways, but also requiring different measures for an effective response. Indeed, as is true of bodily illnesses, some people might have a predisposition for certain vices and succumb to them much more quickly than others. Thus, certain situations pose much greater danger to them, leading them to fall into addiction or depression, when another person might not have been affected at all by such a minor occurrence. He concludes from this that “there is need therefore of much vigilance and zeal.”Footnote 83 Again, attentiveness is of the highest importance.
In a different address he distinguishes what he calls “three conditions” or, perhaps better, three possibilities of response, namely allowing the passions to run freely, trying to control them, or seeking to uproot them altogether.Footnote 84 He describes in detail how each of the three responses may operate. In that context he advises: “They ought to grope about in themselves not so much for the how and wherefore of their passion itself as to come to grips with the cause of their passionate reactions and so to come to see why they were defeated or seized by their passions.”Footnote 85 Dorotheos argues that many different aspects need to be considered in attending to one’s conscience. After describing several of them, he concludes: “To put it simply, all the hidden things that happen inside of us, things which no one sees except God and our conscience, we need to take account of.”Footnote 86 He also depicts situations in which habits become addictive and seem impossible to break even if the person does not want to engage in the action, knows it to be wrong, and gains no benefit from it.Footnote 87 This is partly why they are called passions: They subject us and rule over us, making us passive and hindering our self-directed activity. To pursue virtue is to give rest to the soul because it returns it to its natural and healthy state.Footnote 88 Similar insights into the working of emotions and passions are elaborated in many other ascetic texts.
Thus, in this literature an analysis of consciousness is developed that is attentive to the development of momentary feeling into fuller emotional response, becoming cemented into destructive habits that form dispositions of pathos, which can fuel pernicious and destructive patterns of behavior. At the same time, advice is provided on how one might break such habits, interrupt the patterns, and begin to cultivate healthier dispositions.Footnote 89 This is a process: Dorotheos stresses that one learns only through repeated acting and making mistakes: “Always he has to start by doing – and doing it wrong – making and unmaking, until, little by little, working patiently and persevering, he learns the trade.”Footnote 90 Yet instead of being simplistically anti-body, as is often assumed, many texts are carefully attuned to the movements of the body and the intellect.Footnote 91 Cassian argues, for example, that because certain passions are linked more fully to corporeal expressions than others, they also require a bodily response.Footnote 92 Fasting and sexual abstinence are such prominent measures in the ascetic withdrawal partly because they address most directly the fundamental bodily temptations of gluttony and fornication. The ascetics recognize that our desires for food and sex are deep-seated and profound urges that cannot be erased (maybe should not be erased), but can very easily be subverted into destructive patterns of behavior that can cause tremendous harm to ourselves and to others.
Both the analysis of the mind and heart developed here and the guidance suggested by the elders display acute psychological awareness and profound insight into human dispositions and their development that may well allow for a “genetic account” of certain dispositions of consciousness in a phenomenological sense.Footnote 93 Although that cannot be undertaken here, as the concern is to understand and describe ascetic experience as a religious phenomenon rather than a broader analysis of consciousness, it is important that such description, analysis, and advice are central characteristics of this literature. In the case of asceticism, the religious experience takes on a profound dimension of self-examination, a singular focus on one’s own consciousness in regard to its movements, patterns, and dispositions.Footnote 94 Discernment is inscribed into the very structure of this way of living religion. To a large extent the ascetic experience is defined and described as precisely such a focus on self-examination. The elements of withdrawal and silence already discussed are in the service of such analysis and diagnosis.
Purposes of Denying and Disciplining the Self
Another element of this focus on the interior state of consciousness and on mental attitudes is the fact that the concrete actions ascetics undertake are often deliberately futile. The strong emphasis on obedience in the literature exacerbates this, both in terms of the need for guidance and in the sense that the elder will often command actions that seem nonsensical or unproductive (sometimes that is their very point, in that they are meant to train the ascetic in obedience). Obedience to a wiser guide is crucial to eliminating vices and controlling passions, because it frees one from subjugation to them and teaches new patterns of behavior.Footnote 95 Yet despite their rigorous ascetic exercises, the ascetics report very little in the way of concrete encounters with the divine and are singularly suspicious of vivid manifestations, which are often suspected to be demonic. They do not celebrate their own achievements, refuse adulation, and never claim sanctity for themselves.Footnote 96 In a couple of dramatic examples, dreams or visions confirm that an ascetic has succeeded, usually on the person’s deathbed, but “success” here always means full repentance and forgiveness of sins, rather than reaching some sort of pinnacle of holiness. Some stories deliberately upset even such norms of “success”; for example, David of Scetis tells the story of a prostitute who is fully forgiven for her dissolute life by a few hours of penitence.Footnote 97 That is to say, ascetic experience is in many ways a minimalist experience, marked by denial and emptiness, rather than affirmation and overflowing fullness, as will be the case for other sorts of religious experiences.
The focus on the more “negative” dimension of withdrawal or abnegation does not entail that asceticism does not also seek to cultivate “positive” virtues, but even these often feature an element of denial. Abba Aaron tells a newcomer that “this way of life is labor and suffering up to the very end.”Footnote 98 Humility in the sense of not thinking anything good of oneself is a distinctive virtue that ascetics are often told to cultivate above all others.Footnote 99 Dorotheos has an elder say: “Humility is a great and divine work and the road to humility is labor, bodily labor, while seeking to know oneself and to put oneself below everyone else and praying to God about everything.”Footnote 100 Even love is not usually applied to the self but always means love of others.Footnote 101 This directing of all focus away from the self is in a curiously paradoxical relationship with an almost singular focus on the self. Ascetic experience is deeply characterized by this need to know the self; it is “necessary for ascetics at all times to know their own lives, as in a mirror.”Footnote 102 Another elder is reported as saying: “Know yourself and you shall never fall.”Footnote 103 Ironically, this results in an almost obsessive focus on the self. Asceticism is perhaps the religious life and practice most singularly preoccupied with the self, knowing oneself intimately, and being wholly focused on such self-examination at every moment of the day.
Such examination is obviously not just geared at knowledge or discernment, but rather aims at self-discipline, self-control, and ultimately transformation of the self. Although most of the ascetic literature focuses on repentance and purification of the self, it is clear that the aim is ultimately an intense kind of self-discipline that enables living a pure or holy life, which would no longer succumb to sin, even as temptation always remains a danger, especially in the form of pride. This involves severing the control of internal or external compulsions and instead developing and exercising supreme self-control (enkrateia). Such self-control does not merely regard physical things but is especially concerned with mental and emotional dimensions, such as curbing one’s tongue, desires, and affections. Control over one’s thoughts is deemed superior to control over one’s bodily desires.Footnote 104 Being in full control of oneself heals not just the body but also the soul, and it renders one’s entire being well-balanced and healthy. Besides the athletic imagery, this literature is suffused with medical imagery: Ascetic practices are perceived as pedagogical means or medical tools for the healing of the person, not only physically but also spiritually and intellectually.Footnote 105 Evagrius compares the combat with one’s “thoughts” to the pain caused by “scalpel and cautery” – both aim at healing the wound.Footnote 106 Pierre Hadot calls this a “therapeutics of the passions.”Footnote 107 Such imagery and exhortation are employed in the patristic texts not only for the radical ascetic withdrawal to the desert, but also for the more “ordinary” ascetic practices in urban or regular Christian life.Footnote 108
Relying especially on Cassian, Michel Foucault argues that a new experience of the self emerges in early Christian asceticism, an accusing or exhibiting of the self (exomologesis) that actually constitutes an important element of self-accusation (exagoreusis) and of “practicing” the self.Footnote 109 He calls it a “self-revelation” that is at the same time a “self-destruction,” an exposure of the self in order to deny or eliminate the self.Footnote 110 He argues for this as a radically new conception of the self that has an essential link to truth (it develops a “truth-technology”): “We have to sacrifice the self in order to discover the truth about ourselves, and we have to discover the truth about ourselves in order to sacrifice ourselves.”Footnote 111 Foucault contends that while ancient (“pagan”) askēsis led to self-formation and self-constitution, Christian forms of askēsis aimed at self-renunciation, at an elimination of the subject, albeit via the “objectification of the self in a true discourse.”Footnote 112 Even later medieval practices of confession, Foucault contends, have as their goal articulating the truth about the self, rather than formation of a certain kind of subject.Footnote 113
Yet ascetic practice does not aim simply at sacrifice or annihilation of the self. Rather, the ascetic experience tries to eliminate or severely restrain certain aspects of the self, in order to cultivate other aspects or generate a new kind of self. Pointing to the Apophthegmata and similar texts, Hadot argues that “attention to the self translates into self-mastery and self-control, which can be obtained only by habit and perseverance in ascetic practices.”Footnote 114 He contends that Christianity took its inspiration from ancient philosophy, and accordingly “attention to the self, the search for impassivity, peace of mind, and the absence of worry, and in particular the flight from the body became the primary objectives of spiritual life.”Footnote 115 Ascetic experience does not flee the body as such, however, but instead seeks to eliminate the thoughts and passions that seek to dominate it and lead it astray. Indeed, many hagiographies stress the bodily health and vigor of great ascetics as a kind of “proof” of their spiritual health.Footnote 116 It is fairly clear that even intense bodily practices (like deprivation of food or sleep) aim at control of the body, its thoughts, emotions, and desires, rather than its annihilation.
Such self-control is accomplished through a subjugation of the will, which is partly why obedience plays such an important role. Dorotheos is especially clear about this subjugation of the will in order to reform and redirect it: “Do yourself violence in all things and cut off your own will, and, by the grace of Christ living in you, you will become so habituated to cutting off self-will that you do it without constraint or trouble as naturally as you do your own will.” As a consequence, “no longer will you want certain things to happen, but what is happening will be the thing you want and you will be at peace with all.”Footnote 117 At stake is a realignment of the will with what is truly good and desirable, rather than the false desires and affects that lead us astray and seek to possess us, so that we become obsessed with and addicted to them. As in the case of cutting off the initial temptations to annoyance before they develop into a full disposition of anger and rage, so self-denial is practiced in little steps in order to develop it into a more continuous disposition: “A man denying himself in this way comes little by little to form a habit of it, so that from denying himself in little things, he begins to deny himself in great without the least trouble.” This leads to a state of peace, tranquility, and “holy indifference.”Footnote 118 This denial of one’s will hence leads not to an annihilation of the self, but to self-mastery.Footnote 119
The point throughout is purity of the heart or of the person as a whole.Footnote 120 Evagrius describes it as shaking off anything that stifles the inner self, leading ultimately to peace within oneself.Footnote 121 Cassian calls it “a perfect and integral purity of heart,” a “will and invisible purity of the heart” that renders us “free from clamoring thoughts” and leads to “integrity.”Footnote 122 It entails freedom from what binds us, freedom of mind, heart, and body.Footnote 123 Evagrius describes the state of apatheia as one of knowledge and serenity that need no longer worry about abstinence or even perseverance, because virtue has become firmly established and so such a person naturally does the good.Footnote 124 If we “give more attention to ourselves,” so as to “make progress in virtue,” our self becomes renewed.Footnote 125 The various kinds of renunciation accordingly always have as their goal an inner (and outer) freedom and greater knowledge.Footnote 126 Thus, although he affirms that “the beginning of salvation is condemnation of yourself,” that is assuredly not its end.Footnote 127 Rather, it is self-knowledge and knowledge of God, in that order: “You want to know God? First know yourself.”Footnote 128 Cassian describes different degrees of perfection that result in “friendship” with God.Footnote 129 Ultimately, Cassian concludes that leading this kind of life is the only way to prevent one’s own ruin.Footnote 130
This paradoxical tension between supreme focus on the self and simultaneous denial of it can be felt in other ways in the ascetic sources as well. The desire to be free from bodily temptations leads to intense bodily practices. The abstention from food is conjoined with a strong emphasis on hospitality.Footnote 131 There is fierce independence coupled with an almost morbid emphasis on absolute obedience. The ascetic has no possessions and yet is told to treat everything with care. Deep sadness over one’s sins will result in “spiritual joy.”Footnote 132 One is exhorted both to stay away from others and to imitate their good life. The ascetic remains silently in his or her cell, yet craves a “word” from the spiritual elder and recites psalms or other prayers all day long.
This emphasis on silence, coupled with the desire for a “word” from a spiritual elder, is especially interesting. Stillness (hēsychia) is a crucial element of ascetic practice from early (e.g., Evagrian) texts to much later ones (such as those gathered in the Philokalia). Ascetics are exhorted to avoid speech, especially useless chatter, and exhortations often feature anecdotes of ascetics who do not speak for years – this is especially the case for transvestite ascetics (presumably because they might have given themselves away if their voice was heard or perhaps also to combat the perception of women as more garrulous). Logismoi – not just thoughts but also patterns of speech – are to be avoided and combatted. At the same time, “give me a word” is the standard request addressed to an elder, presumably someone who had already practiced years of renunciation and silence, thus learning the wisdom of speech. It is telling that these “words” are often dispensed in brief phrases rather than long discourses. Even when visited by people who have traveled a long way to see them, the ascetics frequently refuse to speak or give only brief instructions or pronounce enigmatic sayings. There are certainly longer discourses and speeches, although these typically occur in the context of texts that are framed as instructions for others (especially in the case of Cassian) and rarely in the context of descriptions of the lives or practices of individual ascetics.Footnote 133 Silence becomes the “negative” symptom of the inner serenity that is the mark of a pure life.
This strong emphasis on the individual self in asceticism is rather surprising for the ancient world and for religious experience across many traditions and centuries.Footnote 134 It stands in marked contrast to liturgical or ritual and monastic experiences, which are almost always communal. Ascetic experience – like mystical experience, but in quite different fashion – is usually a solitary experience and may well be even more solitary than the highly singular experience of the mystic. While mystical experience, despite its excess and ineffability, is almost always communicated to others, sometimes even exhibited for others or at least observed by them, ascetic experience deliberately flees the presence of others. At the same time, the ascetic sources largely agree that such pursuit of the self should be undertaken only under the guidance of a wise guide or elder who has experience leading others. One becomes such an elder only after decades of submission to others, practice in one’s own life, and the cultivation of wisdom. Only after the most intense self-scrutiny under the guidance of experienced elders can one begin to aid others in their own self-examination.
Phenomenality of Abnegation
Ascetic behavior is thus in various ways characterized by the moves of emptying or eliminating, in the most radical instances, or at least of subduing and disciplining, in its less radical forms. Ascetic experience involves the movements of withdrawal from or renunciation of ordinary life through a careful and vigilant examination of affects and dispositions in order to shape a self in supreme control of itself. Ascetic experience focuses uniquely on the self; it makes oneself the subject of constant investigation, in order to achieve a purification of the self, removing everything that might tempt one to failure. The phenomenality of the ascetic life is a highly disciplined, minimalist phenomenality of abnegation or suspension that discards everything useless or tempting.
While mystical or liturgical experience often features abundance and beauty as important elements of its practices and experiences, such descriptions are almost entirely absent from ascetic reports or instructions. Almost no ascetic figure claims clear or excessive experiences of divine manifestations, and even lesser “manifestations” are often rejected as misleading and attributed to demonic influence or temptation. The ascetic effort of renunciation, discipline, and penitence continues to the moment of death; it becomes an entire life lived in this way. This is an important element that clearly distinguishes ascetic experience from other forms of religious life. Although repentance and even rejection of certain behaviors are an element of many types of religious behavior, no other form of religious life features such rigorous, consistent, and practically unending renunciation and emptiness.
Ascetic practices are defined by strenuous forms of abnegation and usually framed in terms of a liminal desert state on the edge of the abyss. In this regard, Jean-Yves Lacoste correctly describes “being before the Absolute” in terms of abnegation and liminality (as noted in the Introduction, he calls this “liturgical” experience, even as he makes clear that he is not focusing on ritual practice).Footnote 135 In fact, most of his concrete examples are about ascetics or about ascetic practices. He depicts the ascetic all-night wakefulness as a suspension of time, the withdrawal to the desert as a suspension of space, and various ascetic forms of prayer as a suspension of normal human interaction. Such practice, in his view, is essentially kenotic. For Lacoste, this is a “nonexperience,” a nonspace and nontime, at the very limit – or even beyond the limit – of all human experience.Footnote 136 Experience before the Absolute for him anticipates the parousia or eschaton, although it cannot yet live in it. He calls it “the symbolic space of definitive existence in the margins of the world, and the subversive space of its inchoation.”Footnote 137 The holy fool and other modes of ascetic performance challenge everyday human forms of living in the world and present them with a kenotic possibility of what he calls “parousiac” existence.Footnote 138 Such existence overturns or denies all normal ways of living.
Lacoste’s analysis is a good portrayal not so much of “liturgical” experience, but of various aspects of ascetic practices. Ascetic experience is, in fact, experience at the “limit”: at the limit of human society, at the limit of human endurance, at the limits of time and space. It does not seem accurate, however, to identify it as nonexperience. While ascetic practice seeks to eliminate certain experiences, affects, and thoughts and avoids many places, it does seek out other places and does constitute a lived experience. It suspends ordinary place and time in order to penetrate to a more fundamental experience of the self. The ascetic suspension of or withdrawal from regular time, space, and community makes it exist in a liminal time and space, on the boundary not simply of human habitation but of human experience. It seeks to suspend ordinary human experience via a personal limit experience that can potentially become a model for others but remains personal. (That is, it does not usually aim at a revolutionary overthrow of social or political structures.) In this way, the ascetic is an exemplar of a particular kind of humanity, but not necessarily representative of all of humanity. Ascetic experience is deliberately marginal. It never counsels that all people should abandon their jobs, their spouses, their possessions, and all forms of procreation.Footnote 139 Rather, it functions as a warning that all those apparently “normal” aspects of life can come to possess or control us and that instead we are to control them or at least use them rightly. The most important and standard human “cares” (food, clothing, sleep, safe and comfortable shelter, human companionship, sexuality) are suspended or at least significantly minimized.
In this way, the time, place, corporeality, affectivity, and relation to others within the ascetic experience all imply a “break” with the “regular” world of ordinary life. The ascetic experience is defined by a laying aside or suspension of “care” rather than its embrace. Heidegger argues that human existence is most fundamentally defined by Sorge, worry or concern (though usually translated as “care”), the constant preoccupation that marks our immersion in daily life.Footnote 140 Human existence usually drifts along submerged in the concerns of daily life, following the patterns provided by society, acting as others do, often unthinkingly and automatically. It is only when something uncanny (unheimlich, i.e., weird, creepy) occurs that we are ripped out of our complacency by no longer feeling at home (Heim) and coming face to face with our finitude. This amorphous angst or dread for our existence (as opposed to fear of a specific danger) confronts us with ourselves and enables us to grasp our own existence decisively (entschlossen) and to own it (achieving Eigentlichkeit, often misleadingly translated as authenticity).Footnote 141 We do so by existentially grasping and owning our finitude, the possibility of our nonexistence, thus living consciously toward death.Footnote 142 Heidegger contends that these describe the most fundamental structures of human existence (Dasein).
By contrast, the ascetic life is no longer a life defined by care, in all its senses of concern, worry, and self-preoccupation. At the same time, it constitutes being-toward-death in the most radical manner through a constant holding of death before oneself and embracing it fiercely. As in Heidegger, this confrontation with one’s finitude and end is enabled through a loss or abandonment of the home and a confrontation of the self within the “un-homely” space of the desert. The ascetic fiercely embraces his or her death, practices it in a sort of anticipatory fashion, meets it with intensive decisiveness or resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), and yet does not do so for purposes of authenticity or self-appropriation (Eigentlichkeit), not in order to “own” (eigen) the self but rather to let go of it or, more precisely, to direct it toward God. The ascetic is neither “in the world” in Heidegger’s sense nor out of it (as perhaps in Lacoste’s sense), but the place where asceticism is practiced is that of emptiness and liminality, in which time is suspended or becomes artificial and space becomes all-consuming in its very absence and emptiness.
Heidegger argues that the call of conscience (Gewissen) calls us out of our unthinking immersion in daily life, our going along with the crowd, and confronts us with our own Nichtigkeit, which means not only annihilation in the sense of nonexistence, but also implies unimportance, insignificance, or smallness. Even if they do not speak of conscience in the same way as Heidegger does, the ascetics clearly strive for such a sense of Nichtigkeit, for a recognition of their own finitude and fallenness, and they oppose what they consider passions and temptations as resolutely as possible. The call that drives the ascetics to the desert is not first of all a divine revelation, but a deeply felt sense of their own unworthiness and the need for a fundamental change of attitude and disposition. They work on this with the most single-minded attention imaginable, suspending all care for the everyday in rigorous fashion, by removing themselves from ordinary ways of being in the world and being with others. Their solitary and decisive being-toward-death does not rely on some comfortable assurance of salvation that would make unnecessary the difficult task of existence and self-examination.
Despite its clear moves of abnegation, the ascetic experience is a refusal of passivity, in the sense of being ruled by the passions, in favor of supreme self-control coupled with intense humility and obedience, which, ironically, require a different kind of passivity and giving up of control. It refocuses or even eliminates many desires, affects, and thoughts, channeling them into the supreme desire for repentance – attendant with its affect of grieving – and into the constant redirecting of thoughts. Consciousness is examined by stilling it, rather than filling it. Pride, greed, vanity, and so forth are scrutinized as forms of consciousness, affect, and thought, seen to be produced by the confluence of thought and affect, entrenched by repeated practice that turns into habitual dispositions. These vices are exterminated in a similar “staged” and progressive effort at renunciation and retraining of mind and affect.
Ascetic experience thus manifests most fundamentally as an experience of rigorous withdrawal and deep contrition committed to a transformation of one’s consciousness and actions via sustained practices of discernment. It exercises such transformation of the very patterns and structures of consciousness by persistent silence, vigilant attentiveness, and careful analysis. Ascetic experience is marked so profoundly by withdrawal from and negation of distractions and temptations because it seeks to focus in singular fashion on the development and health of a self that is seen to stand in fundamental tension with the present self of the ascetic, experienced as weak, deficient, and easily distracted. Ascetic experience has a far more profound sense of inadequacy and failure than perhaps any other form of religious experience, yet pursues an elevated goal of purity with unequaled determination. It is maybe not coincidental that language of the demonic and the angelic is so prevalent in this literature. Surely that is at least to some extent due to the time and place: Egypt seems to have had a particularly vivid sense of “spiritual powers.”Footnote 143 But it also fits the extremes of ascetic experience: the fear of sinking into the demonic, the determination to purge it forcefully from one’s own experience, actions, habits, and dispositions, and the elevated goal of living an “angelic” life already here on earth, not in terms of its heavenly satisfactions, but in terms of its purity and separation from earthly needs.Footnote 144
Perhaps more than any other form of religious pursuit or at least in quite different fashion, asceticism is an intensely singular experience. Its emphasis on withdrawal from others and total focus on self-reformation entails eschewing many communal forms of religious manifestation. Although ascetic writers do sometimes speak of the importance of love for the neighbor and some performed charitable actions for others, this is not their primary occupation.Footnote 145 It is not excluded but also not highlighted or made of prime importance, as will be the case for other ways of living religion. While mystical experience can certainly be extremely singular, it does not feature the intense self-preoccupation of the ascetics. Mystical experience usually comes suddenly, surprisingly, as a gift, without any doing on the part of the recipient. Ascetic experience, instead, is focused almost exclusively on the effort and labor one must undertake – even when this work on the self is not physical – and very rarely speaks of fulfillment or reception of abundant gifts. While devotional experience is also often very individual and personal, it is so in much more arbitrary and looser fashion than ascetic experience, which pursues a rigorous schedule and imposes tight discipline on the self. And while much devotional experience capitalizes on generating religious feeling, ascetic experience seems positively allergic to it. Pathos of any sort tends to be distrusted. Even the authors who do not condemn it wholesale as evil counsel rigorous control of it. Emotions are to be purged, tightly controlled, and redirected. This is quite different from the role emotion or affect plays in liturgical, mystical, and devotional experience where both are significant, albeit in different ways.
Ascetic experience, then, can be clearly distinguished from other sorts of religious experience, although that will obviously have to be demonstrated far more fully once these manifestations have been examined more closely. Unlike liturgical or monastic experience – but like many forms of mystical or devotional experience – it is solitary or singular, to some extent even deliberately turned away from others. Unlike mystical or ritual experience it is defined by abnegation, poverty, and withdrawal, not by excess or abundance. Unlike devotional or compassionate experience it is clearly delineated by patterns and practices that in many ways must be rigorously followed; it has a religious “blueprint,” so to speak, in a way that these other manifestations do not. The role played by discernment and examination of consciousness in the ascetic experience is also extraordinary. Although other forms of practicing religion can include discernment – and many expressions of mysticism were under suspicion by various ecclesial authorities – they do not necessarily feature discernment and judgment as among the key characteristic features of their very exercise.
Ascetic experience deals perhaps more than any other kind with the human sense of failure and inadequacy. It develops a cure for it, an athletic program of bodily and mental discipline that trains the ascetic to transform patterns of thoughts, even memories and imaginations, to shape new dispositions. Liturgical experience also tries to shape dispositions, but it does so through the filling of memory and imagination rather than by emptying or purging them. Ascetic experience constitutes a disciplined, lifelong effort to overcome what is regarded as a fragile and sick self and to create a robust and healthy self. Such a reformed self is turned away from everything that might prove tempting or distracting and focused entirely on mastering itself. Language of divine revelation or of experiences of fulfillment or abundant love is basically absent in ascetic texts; they are almost singularly focused on admission of sinfulness and the need for self-control. Asceticism devises a religious solution for humans’ sense of their own failures and inadequacies, an extreme way of examining them and coping with them.
In this regard there are certainly parallels between the religious practice of asceticism and other contemporary ascetic practices that do not occur in the context of any particular religion. For example, many dietary regimens have uncanny parallels to ascetic practices, although more fully focused on the body and perhaps less explicitly on interior dispositions.Footnote 146 Some therapies attempting to address addictive forms of behavior also display ascetic features. Not surprisingly, the intense forms of discipline practiced by athletes often take semi-ascetic forms. One might say that these are family resemblances that show the broader human need for self-examination, self-control, and self-discipline that are channeled within asceticism in a particularly religious context and manner. Dieting and sports aim at health of the body in a way similar to how religious asceticism aims at health of the whole person through a single-minded focus on training and self-discipline. Asceticism also recognizes – in a way that many diet fads or self-help literature, for example, do not, but organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous do – that such intense work on oneself and a denial of certain desires for the cultivation of new habits require guidance and support, that they are almost impossible to accomplish on one’s own. At the same time such work does require a removal of the self from temptations, or even from communities or individuals that will draw one back into the attitude and practices one is seeking to eliminate.Footnote 147 That is not to say that there is nothing distinctive about religious forms of asceticism or, among them, Christian asceticism, but it is to acknowledge that ascetic experience addresses something that matters to the human condition, that is shared by human experiences more broadly. Asceticism is unique in the particular concrete ways in which it approaches and engages this broader human characteristic, but it is also exemplary of it and has connections with other ways of pursuing similar needs, desires, and attitudes.
Many individuals or groups of people in various cultures have experienced and expressed such needs and pursued such experiences, in both religious and nonreligious ways. Many Asian forms of religious or spiritual expression – such as Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, and various forms of Buddhism and Hinduism – have strongly ascetic elements, involving fasting, simple dress, extensive practices of meditation, removal from ordinary ways of living, sometimes even forms of self-mutilation. It would be interesting to explore how the patterns of Christian asceticism uncovered in this chapter “fit” ascetic experiences in other religious traditions. Do Sikh or Jain forms of asceticism, for example, manifest in similar ways? A much fuller examination would be needed to give a substantive response, but there are certainly many at least superficial parallels, such as the renunciation of ordinary life, the extensive practices of attention and meditation, and an exorbitant focus on one’s own spiritual pursuits that paradoxically seems aimed at denying or minimizing the self. Whether such parallels hold beneath the surface would have to be shown through careful and detailed studies.Footnote 148 Clark finds it “dubious that the study of early Christian renunciation locates an ‘essence’ of asceticism that holds cross-culturally.”Footnote 149 While one might not be able to “locate” such an “essence,” the chapter has sought to demonstrate shared crucial features – withdrawal, vigilance, self-renunciation – in Christian manifestations of ascetic experience that allow it to emerge as a particular kind of living religion, one that is different in important ways from other manners of living religion while also maintaining some continuity with them.
