ASCETICISM, the theory and practice of bodily abstinence and self-mortification, generally religious. The word is derived from a Greek word (aoithw) meaning "to practice," or "to train," and it embodies a metaphor taken from the ancient wrestling place, where victory rewarded those who had best trained their bodies. The ultimate origin of asceticism is the antithesis between sacred (or holy) and profane, from which comes the idea that he who belongs to the former sphere, or seeks to enter it, must refrain as much as possible from, or even destroy, all that belongs to the latter. This is originally a non-moral idea (see CONSECRA TION ; TABU) . It is the note of every great religious reformer, Moses, Buddha, Paul, Mani, Mohammed, St. Francis, Luther, to enlighten and direct it to higher aims, substituting a true per sonal holiness for a ritual purity or tabu, which at the best was viewed as a kind of physical condition and contagion, in herent as well in things and animals as in man.
It is useful, therefore, to begin with the facts as they can be observed among less advanced races, or as survivals among people who have reached the level of genuine moral reflection ; and then to proceed to a consideration of self-denial consciously pursued as a method of ethical perfection. The latter is, as a rule, less cruel and rigorous than primitive forms of asceticism. Under this head fall the following :—Fasting, or abstention from certain meats and drinks ; denial of sexual instinct ; subjection of the body to physical discomforts, such as nakedness, vigils, sleeping on the bare ground, etc., vows of silence ; avoidance of baths, of hair-cutting and of clean raiment, living in a cave ; actual self infliction of pain, by numerous, often ingenious, modes of torture. Such customs repose on various early ideas : for example, the self-mutilation of the Galli or priests of Cybele (q.v.) was prob ably a magical ceremony intended to fertilize the soil and stimu late the crops.
Fasting (q.v.) is used in primitive asceticism for a variety of reasons, among which the following deserve notice. Certain animals and vegetables are tabu; i.e., too holy, or (what among Semites and others was the same thing) too defiling and unclean, to be eaten. Thus most or all of the creatures which are unclean in the Jewish law are holy (possibly in origin totemic) animals among many Semites. Such abstinences are ascetic in so far as they involve much self-denial. Examples are the ritual prohibi tions of pork and beef. Similar prohibitions are common in primitive groups. That such dietary restrictions were merely ceremonial and superstitious, and not intended to prevent the consumption of meats which would revolt modern tastes, is cer tain from the fact that the Levitical law freely allowed the eating of locusts, grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches, while forbid ding the consumption of rabbits, hares, storks, swine, etc. The Pythagoreans were forbidden to eat beans.
Another widespread reason for avoiding flesh diet altogether was the fear of absorbing the soul of the animal, which especially resided in the blood. Hence the rule not to eat meats strangled, except in sacramental meals when the god inherent in the animal was partaken of. It is equally a soul or spirit in wine which inspires the intoxicated. The mediaeval Jews held that there is a cardiac demon in wine which takes possession of drunken men ; and the Mohammedan prohibition of wine-drinking is based on a similar superstition. Belief in transmigration of souls often arouses a scruple against flesh diet. Examples of both ways of thinking will be found in Porphyry (q.v.) De Abstinentia (neo Pythagorean) .
The same fear of imbibing the soul of animals, and thereby re enforcing the lower appetites and instinct of the human being, inspired the vegetarianism of the Jewish Therapeutae. An early belief long survived among the Manichaean sects that fish, being born in and of the waters, and without any sexual connection on,the part of other fishes are free from the taint which pollutes all animals quae copulatione generantur. Fish, therefore, unlike flesh, could be safely eaten.
The Manichaeans held that in every act of begetting, human or otherwise, a soul is condemned afresh to a cycle of misery by imprisonment in flesh—a thoroughly Indian notion, under the influence of which their perfect or elect ones scrupulously ab stained from flesh. The prohibition of taking life, which they took over from the Farther East, in itself entailed fasting from flesh. A fully initiated Manichaean would not even cut his own salad, but employed a catechumen to commit on his behalf this act of murder, for which he subsequently shrived him.
We come to a third widespread reason for fasting, common among savages. Famished persons are liable to morbid excite ment and fall into imaginative ecstasies. Among the North American Indians ecstatic fasting is regularly practised. All over the world fasting is a recognized mode of evoking, consulting, and also of overcoming the spirit world. This is why many primitive races distrust a medicine man who is not an ascetic and lean with fasting. In the Semitic East it is an old belief that a successful fast in the wilderness of 4o days and nights gives power over the Djinns. From the first, fasting was practised in the church for similar reason. In the Shepherd of Hermas a vision of the church rewards frequent fasts and prayer ; not a few saints were rewarded for their fasting by glimpses of the beatific vision.
Among the Semites and Tartars worshippers lacerate themselves before the god. So in I. Kings xviii. 28, the priests of Baal engaged in a rain-making ceremony, gashed themselves with knives and lances till the blood gushed out upon them. The Syriac word ethkashshaph, which means literally to "cut one-self," is the regu lar equivalent of to "make supplication." At first sight these rites seem intended to call down the pity of heaven on man, but as Robertson Smith points out, their real import was by shedding blood on a holy stone or in a holy place to tie or renew a blood bond between the god and his faithful ones. But such practices may develop into penances like those of the Flagellants (q.v.) of I259 and Asceticism then, in its origin, was usually not ascetic in a modern sense ; that is, not ethical. It was rather of the nature of the savage tabu (q.v.). Above all, fasting was a mode of preparing oneself for the sacramental eating of a sacred animal, and as such of ten assisted by use of purgatives and aperients. Indian and Buddhist asceticism, in its essence is a more ethical and philosophical product than some of the forms so far considered. The keynote is deliverance from life and its inevitable suffering. The hermit, or wandering beggar, was a familiar figure in India. Such ascetics were common, and their life was and is recommended for those who have lived the life of a householder and, having begotten sons according to the sacred law and offered sacrifices, desire in their old age to abandon worldly objects and direct their mind to final liberation. Very similar is the self-portrait of a Manichaean adept of about A.D. 400 as given in St. Augustine (Contra Faustum v., i.).
The Greek Cynics (see CYNICS) played a great part in the history of asceticism, and they were the precursors of the Chris tian hermits. In striving to imitate their master Socrates, they went to such extremes as rather to caricature him. They affected to live like beggars, bearing staff and wallet, owning nothing, renouncing pleasures, riches, honours. For Plato and Aristotle the perfect life was that of the citizen and householder; but the Cynics were individualists, citizens of the world without loyalty or respect for the ancient city State, the decay of which was coincident with their rise. Their zeal for renunciation often ex tended not to pleasures, marriage and property alone, but to cleanliness, knowledge and good manners as well, and in this respect also they were the forerunners of later monks.
Philo (2o B.c.–A.D. 4o) has left us many pictures of the life which to his mind impersonated the highest wisdom, and they are all inspired by the more respectable sort of cynicism, which had taken deep root among Greek Jews of the day. His own favourite ascetics, the Therapeutae, whose chief centre was in Egypt, had renounced property and all its temptations, and fled, irrevocably abandoning brothers, children, wives, parents, throngs of kinsmen, intimacy of friends, the fatherlands where they were born and bred (see THERAPEUTAE). Here we have the ideal of early Christian renunciation at work, but apart from the influence of Jesus. In the pages of Epictetus the same ideal is constantly held up to us.
In the Christian Church there was from the earliest age a leaning to excessive asceticism, and it needed a severe struggle on the part of Paul, and of the Catholic teachers who followed him, to secure for the baptized the right to be married, to own property, to engage in war and commerce, or to assume public office. One and all of the permanent institutions of society were condemned by the early enthusiasts, especially by those who looked forward to a speedy advent of the millennium, as alien to the Kingdom of God and as impediments to the life of grace.
Marriage and property had already been eschewed in the Jewish Essene (see ESSENES) and Therapeutic sects, and in Christianity the name of Encratite was given to those who repu diated marriage and the use of wine. They did not form a sect, but represented an impulse felt everywhere. In early and popular apocryphal histories the apostles are represented as insisting that their converts should either not contract wedlock or should dissolve the tie if already formed. This is the plot of the Acts of Thecla, a story which probably goes back to the 1st century. Repudiation of the tie by fervent women, betrothed or already wives, occasioned much domestic friction and popular persecution. In the Syriac churches, even as late as the 4th century, the married state seems to have been regarded as incompatible with the perfection of the initiated. Renunciation of the state of wedlock was imposed on the faithful during the lengthy, often lifelong, terms of penance imposed upon them for sins com mitted; and later, as monasticism took the place, in a church become worldly, partly of the primitive baptism and partly of that rigorous penance which was the rebaptism and medicine of the lapsed, celibacy and virginity were held essential thereto.
Together with the rage for virginity went the institution of virgines subintroductae, or of spiritual wives; for it was often assumed that the grace of baptism restored the original purity of life led by Adam and Eve in common before the Fall. Such rigours are encouraged in the Shepherd of Hernias, a book which emanated from Rome and up to the 4th century was read in church. They were common in the African churches, and in Antioch in 26o; in the Celtic church of St. Patrick, and, as late as the 7th century, among the Celtic elders of the north of France. In the Syriac Church as late as 34o such relations pre vailed between the "Sons and Daughters of the Resurrection." It continued among the Albigenses and other dissident sects of the middle ages, among whom it served a double purpose ; for their elders were thus not only able to prove their own chastity, but to elude the inquisitors, who were less inclined to suspect a man of the catharism which regarded marriage as the "greater adultery" (mains adulterium) if they found him cohabiting (in appearance at least) with a woman. There was hardly an early council, great or small, that did not condemn this custom. In the Catholic Church, however, common sense prevailed, and those who desired to follow the Encratite ideal repaired to the monas teries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (19o3) ; Robertson Bibliography.-E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (19o3) ; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (19oi) ; J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion; F. Max Muller, The Sacred Books of the East; Victor Henry, La Magie dans l'Inde antique; J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough; Georges Lafay, Culte des divinites d'Alexandrie (1884) ; Dollinger, Sectengeschichte des Mittelalters (Munich, 189o) ; Fr. Cumont, Mysteries of Mithra (Chicago, 19.33) ; Zockler, Gesch. der Ascese (1863) . See also under PURIFICATION. Goldziher, "De l'ascetisme aux premiers temps de l'Islam," in Revue de l'histoire des religions p. 314 (1898) ; Muratori, De Synisactis et Agapetis (Pavia, 1709) ; Jas. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory (1885) ; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) ; Franz Cumont, Les Religions orientales dans le Paganisme romain (1907) } Porphyrius, De Abstinentia; Plu tarch, De Carnium Esu; C. Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism (1923) .