ASCETICISM. Among the Greeks, ct.4k.e..ti.4 denoted the exercise and discipline prac ticed by the athletes or wrestlers, who had to harden their bodies by exertion and to avoid all sensual and effeminating indulgences. In the schools of the philosophers, especially of the Stoics, the same word signified the practice of mastering the desires and passions, or of severe virtue. In these senses it passed into the language of the early Christians. The language of St. Paul in comparing the Christians to wrestlers who had to contend with Satan, the world, and the flesh, contributed to this. But the philosophy of the time had more to do with it, which held the freeing of mind frown matter to be the means of union with God; or, at least, that the refraining from all luxurious pleasure was the way to restore the soul to its original purity. To understand the vast influence that ascetic ideas have exercised on the Christian religion, we must look beyond the bounds of its history. Their root lies in the oriental notion that the absolute or all is the only real existence; and that individual phenomena, especially matter in all its shapes, are really nothing, and are to be despised and avoided, as involving the principle of separation from the absolute. The east, accordingly, is the native soil of A. The glowing imagination of the oriental carries the practice of it to a monstrous extravagance, as is seen in the frightful self-tortures of the yogis and fakirs, the suicides in the sacred Ganges and under the wheels of Juggernauth, and the practices now or recently preva lent of offering children in sacrifice, and of burning widows; most of which, however, have been humanely suppressed by the efforts of the British government. Buddhism,which may be considered as a kind of puritan revival or reformation—the methodism of the Indian religion—carried the principle beyond its previous bounds. In its contemning the world, in its inculcating a life of solitude and beggary, mortification of the body, and abstinence from all uncleanness and from all exciting drinks, the object was to keep as distant and detached as possible from this "vale of sorrow" (see Brnnitts3t and Nut YANA). The sober Chinese, and the more moral and rational Persians, never carried asceticism to these extravagances; and the earnest Egyptians sought to confine it to monogamy of the priests, abstaining from the flesh of swine and from beans, rigid purity, circumcision, moderate flagellation, and frequent contemplation of death (which there were arrangements for bringing to remembrance, even in the midst of festivities). These are certainly milder forms of A., but the principle is the sane.
It is in the light of this fore-history that we must consider Judaic and Christian ascet icism. In the oriental mind, especially in Egypt, circumcision, avoiding of all unclean ness, and fasting, were signsed humiliation before God; and in the Mosaic ritual they were conditions of the favor of the holy Jehovah. Voluntary vows, abstaining even
from lawful food, wine, etc., were held to have a special purifying, consecrating efficacy, particularly for prophets and men of special callings. But self-castigation continued for long foreign to the sobriety of Judaism, and even hermitism came into established prac tice only shortly before Christ, in Palestine among the Essenes (q.v.), in Egypt among the Therapeutic though doubtless Jewish A. had become more stern and gloomy since the exile in Babylon.
A. was far less congenial to the reflective nations of the west, above all to time cheer ful Greeks. A Greek felt himself entitled to enjoyment as well as his gods; hence Greek religious festivals were pervaded by cheerfulness. The only exception appears to be the E]eusinian mysteries, which never took bold of the people generally, and the passing phenomenon of the Pythagorean fraternity. The attack made by the Socratic school upon the body as the prison of the soul—a view reminding one of the east—and the extravagant contempt for the elegances and even decencies of life, professed by the later Stoics and Cynics, were no genuine fruits of the popular Greek mind: and we must also ascribe to the infusion of oriental philosophy the ascetic tendencies of Neoplatonism, in holding abstinence from flesh and from marriage as chief conditions of absorption into the It was into the midst of these ideas that Christianity was introduced. The Jewish converts brought with them their convictions about fasting. Fasting and Nazaritie observances were thought sanctifying preparatives for great undertakings; and the incul cation of abstinence from marriage, on the ground of the expected speedy re-appearance of Christ, falls in with the same notion, namely, that the flesh, that is, the sensuous part of our nature, is the scat of sin, and must therefore, before all timings, be rigorously chained. The old oriental traditions of A. ; the spirituality of Christianity, pointing away from earth to heaven; opposition to the corruption of the heathen world; the dis tinction made between belief and knowledge, as a higher and lower stage of intelligence, leading to a corresponding distinction of a higher and lower stage of virtue: all com bined to make the Christians of the first two centuries hold aloof from the world and its wisdom, and favor abstinence from marriage, more especially on the part of the clergy. This ascetic spirit began as early as the commencement of the 2d c. to court trial in the perilous practice of men and women living together under vows of continence. We find Cyprian dissuading from the dangerous experiment, and even the authority of the church interposed to the same effect. But during the first three centuries no irrevo cable vows yet bound the devotees to a life-long A. Fasting was also comparatively rare.