Asceticism

Asceticism refers to the methodical performance of practices that aim to transform the body and the self in relation to religious or secular moral values and are characterized by an attitude of self-criticism. Examples of ascetic practices include the renunciation of the following: material wealth, all or some sexual behaviors or sexual desire itself, particular types of food and drink, conventional social arrangements (such as family life), or various norms of social behavior. Ascetic practices tend to be embodied critiques of opposed behaviors and values within the same culture and therefore seek to be morally transformative of the surrounding culture as well as of the person. In the context of contemporary consumer culture, asceticism often takes the form of rejection of the ideology of consumerism and hedonistic forms of consumption.

Asceticism has played an enduring and significant part in the history of religion and philosophy for over 2,500 years in both Eastern and Western cultures and has more recently emerged in secular forms, especially in opposition to Western consumer culture. The term asceticism is derived from the Greek askēsis, which originally referred to exercise and the training of athletes in ancient Greece. Ascetic practices played an important role in ancient Greek religion and philosophy. For instance, the Pythagorean tradition, alongside sexual abstention and the renunciation of wealth, favored a vegetarian diet, which was related to a belief in the transmigration of human souls to other animals. Cynicism rejected material wealth and flouted social convention, for example, through public sexual acts, which were intended to embody a return to a more “natural” life stripped of the trappings of society.

Asceticism has a central place in religious traditions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, and Judaism, and according to Gavin Flood, the ascetic self is esteemed as the ideal form of human being in the Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist scriptural traditions. This esteem is related to the association of asceticism with enhancing the spiritual quality of human life and with transcendence of the material world. For instance, Christian asceticism in the first three centuries after the crucifixion included varieties of dietary, sexual, and social abstinence, which were practiced to purify the soul and facilitate the contemplation of God, and which laid the foundations for monasticism. Asceticism has endured within religious traditions and, more recently, in secular forms, though the specificity of ascetic practices and the meaning and wider social significance of asceticism varies according to the cultural context.

The most influential account of the social significance of asceticism is found in sociologist Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1997). Weber argues that Christian asceticism developed a novel “this worldly” form during the sixteenth-century Reformation, as opposed to “other worldly” types of religious asceticism that aimed toward the transcendence of the material world. This-worldly asceticism differed by aiming not just at the living of a morally exemplary life but also toward the transformation of the material world. This-worldly asceticism developed as a result of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination: the belief that God preordained who is destined for salvation or damnation at the moment of creation. Predestination, combined with the virtue of fulfilling God's will through diligent labor in one's calling or vocation, produced paradoxical effects.

...