Asceticism

Asceticism, from the Greek word askeo (“to exercise”), involves disciplining the body for spiritual purposes. Most global religions include a variety of ascetic practices, such as fasting, chastity, social isolation or withdrawal, sleep deprivation, and other forms of bodily control or even torture. In some religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and non-Protestant Christianity, distinct categories of people known as ascetics have frequently played prominent roles. In other religious traditions such as Judaism their roles have been more circumscribed. Influential ascetic groups are usually given titles specific to their tradition, including monks (in Christianity); sufis or fakirs (in Islam); sadhus, sanyāsins, or babas (in Hinduism); and bhiksus (in Buddhism). However, even when ascetic groups do not figure prominently in a religion, ascetic practices are often a part of the common spiritual practices of the individual—for example, fasting on Yom Kippur in Judaism or self-flagellation during the Shi'a Muslim festival of Ashura. As a field of academic inquiry, cross-cultural asceticism has often suffered from a sort of ex post facto intellectual history—ascetic examples were corralled into an “ism” before asceticism itself was subjected to scrutiny. The result has been a long, sometimes frustrating, attempt to develop a framework that adequately defines asceticism generally while also accounting for the culturally specific contexts of global religions.

During the century following the 1880s, when the academic reflection on asceticism began, asceticism was seen as a deliberate rejection or repulsion of “natural” desires for food, sex, and social intercourse, and thus a morbid denial of life. Most of these Protestant-influenced theologians and historians looked on ascetics of all traditions with suspicion, if not contempt, as misguided Christians, exoticized easterners, or superstitious savages, who were all willfully alien from “true” religion.

For psychologists of this early period, asceticism was seen as a pathological neurosis, a sign of an unhealthy and masochistic mind. In 1938, Karl Menninger argued that asceticism is nothing more than a form of slow suicide. Not all psychologists saw asceticism as inherently destructive, however. Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna identified an ascetic phase through which all humans pass, in which they deny themselves as a way to internalize paternal and cultural norms. This view of asceticism as a universal and necessary stage in individual development eventually led to Geoffrey Harpham's more recent 1987 argument that asceticism acts as a sort of underlying operating system through which different cultural programs and norms are inscribed on individuals. Thus, some believe that asceticism plays a positive and indeed critical constructive function in the formation of every cultural system across time and place.

Philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Frederick Nietzsche also recognized a value of asceticism, which they saw as a natural (if weak) response to a candid assessment of a world marked by misery and suffering. However, they believed that the triumph of humanity required the rejection or at least restriction of asceticism.

The theoretical focus on the negating aspect of asceticism dominated speculation on asceticism until the work of Margaret Miles and Michel Foucault in the early 1980s. While coming from vastly different perspectives, these two authors dramatically shifted the discussion of asceticism away from its negating principles by highlighting the positive construction of a new “self” through asceticism. This “subjectivity” platform emphasized the transformative process of asceticism—the way in which the negation of the existent self was matched by a simultaneous positive movement that constructed a new higher self in its place. For example, the monk is not just rejecting his prior self but actively seeking to become a saint. Thus [Page 66]understood, asceticism was not solely a negative process of self-denial but a largely positive vehicle of self-transformation.

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