Building Religions 28: Asceticism

We get the English word asceticism from Greek, where it referred to the training of athletes. How it became associated with practices of self-denial largely has to do with the ways that accounts of early Christian hermits described them: as athletes competing against the temptations of the world. That metaphor, in turn, may have been applied in response to the descriptions of the martyrdoms of certain saints, particularly those who died in the Roman arenas. Even though the narratives all ended with the deaths of the martyrs, they were often represented as defeating wave after wave of animal and human opponents before the Roman authorities finally had them executed. They were, in short, superior athletes.

From that origin, however, asceticism expanded to become a general term for a lifestyle of self-discipline and -denial, and so continues to be used broadly in the field of religious studies. It can encompass an entire range of practices: fasting, sexual abstinence, voluntary poverty, the use of pain as an instrument of self-control, and so on. Although most religious cultures will incorporate some forms of ascetic activity as part of specific rituals or celebrations, the idea of full-time ascetics seems to be limited to those cultures that have enough of an infrastructure in place to support individuals who choose to adopt the lifestyle. Even then, not every religion has such an ascetic tradition; it requires a particular attitude toward the material world in order for it to come into being.

If you're creating your own fictional religion and are considering including an ascetic branch of that religion, then it's that attitude that you need to consider. What sort of worldview encourages and supports asceticism?

One possibility is a worldview that makes a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual, especially if the physical realm is considered flawed or corrupted. In that case, the ascetic is striving to demonstrate his mastery of that flawed world in the most personal way possible: through the conquest of his own body. By starving (literally or figuratively) the body, he hopes to burn away its imperfections and leave room only for the spirit. It is a kind of purification, then, or a way of focusing attention on a realm beyond that of mundane human concerns.

A second option is one that emphasizes interior states over exterior ones. If the ascetic believes that the sacred realm is one that she can access primarily through concentrated attention, then bodily needs are distractions that she needs to set aside. In such a view, the world itself may not be seen as problematic. It could be seen as ultimately irrelevant in comparison to the sacred, but without necessarily being thought of as hostile.

(The difference between these two is fairly minor. It comes down to whether or not the body is treated as an adversary or simply one of many obstacles between the self and the ascetic goal. The actual practices cultivated by followers of both worldviews could look much the same.)

A third form of asceticism could be based on the imitation of a mythic figure whose suffering or death is significant to the religion. Christian ascetics would be the best-known example of this form in the real world, but it's easy to imagine some fictional devotee of Osiris who sleeps in a cramped sarcophagus in order to re-enact the death of his patron deity, or a follower of Odin who hangs himself from a tree in an act of self-sacrifice.

There are two further academic perspectives on asceticism that I'd like to mention briefly. The first is Peter Berger's, and has to do with his interpretation of the motivation behind ascetic practices. For Berger, asceticism is fundamentally a masochistic act: it is the attempt to erase the self while embracing the absolute power of another—in this case, the object of devotion. By granting that object status as the only 'real' being of significance, the ascetic can transfigure her own suffering into a bearable, even welcomed, experience. It's worth noting, however, that Berger also claims that such efforts must ultimately fail, because no matter how hard the ascetic tries, the self still persists until death. Asceticism must therefore be a constant practice, wearing away at the remnants of the self until death finally completes the act.

Caroline Walker Bynum, in her influential Holy Feast and Holy Fast, concentrates on specific historical aspects of Christian women's asceticism. Bynum argues that practices surrounding food—fasting and the distribution of food to others—were far more important to mediaeval women's religiosity than they were to men's, largely because food and their own bodies were two of the very few things over which women had control. While her evidence is very much grounded in the European Middle Ages (and so shouldn't be taken as a general statement about men's vs. women's attitudes to religion), it does serve as a reminder that when you are creating a set of ascetic practices for a world, you need to ask yourself what aspects of that world the ascetics are able to give up meaningfully.

In my next post, I'll write about rites of passage, which share some features with asceticism insofar as they often incorporate temporary practices or rituals of self-denial.