The Ascetic Principle

The average man to-day, when he hears the word asceticism, is likely to think of St. Simeon Stylites who sat on top of a pillar, of hermits living in caves, of hair-shirts, of long fasts, chastity, strange vigils, and even of tattooing, self-mutilation, and flagellation.

Or if he does not think of such examples, which the modern man regards as pathological and for the psychiatrist to explain, the word asceticism may connote some such attitude of mind as Herbert Asbury has recorded in the biography of his kinsman, Bishop Asbury, the founder of American Methodism, of whom a friend, who knew him well, wrote: "I never saw him indulge in even innocent pleasantry. His was the solemnity of an apostle; it was so interwoven with his conduct that he could not put off the gravity of the bishop either in the parlour or the dining-room. He was a rigid enemy to ease; hence the pleasures of study and the charms of recreation he alike sacrificed to the more sublime work of saving souls He knew nothing about pleasing the flesh at the expense of duty; flesh and blood were enemies with whom he never took counsel."

If asceticism meant only this sort of thing, it might be interesting only as a curiosity. But apart from the asceticism of primitive peoples and of the pathological, there is a sane and civilized asceticism which presents a quite difference face. There is, for example, the argument of Socrates in the Phædo that the body is a nuisance to a philosopher in search of truth. It is, he says, "a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after true being: it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in fact, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? Whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? Wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body; and by reason of all these impediments we have no time to give to philosophy; and, last and worst of all, even if we are at leisure and betake ourselves to some speculation, the body is always breaking in upon us, causing us turmoil and confusion in our inquiries, and so amazing us that we are prevented from seeing the truth."

Plato, in pursuing the argument in this particular dialogue, concludes that because the body is such a nuisance the only pure philosopher is a dead one. It is, perhaps, a logical conclusion. But in other places, particularly in the Republic, Plato described a system of education which he thought would produce philosophers: the neophytes were put through a stern discipline of hard living and gymnastics and learning, were compelled to live in tents, to own nothing which they could call their own, and to cut themselves off from all family ties.

When the description of this regime provokes Adeimantus to remark that "you are not making the men of this class particularly happy," Socrates is made to reply that while it is not his object to make any class particularly happy, yet it would not surprise him if in the given circumstances even this class were very happy. When we look further for his meaning, we find it to be that the guardians are trained by their ascetic discipline to abandon all private aims and to find their happiness in an appreciation of a perfectly ordered commonwealth. If we understand this we shall, I believe, understand what civilized ascetism means. We shall have come back to the original meaning of the word itself, which is derived from the Greek ?????, "I practice," and "embodies a metaphor taken from the ancient wrestling place or palæstra, where victory rewarded those who had best trained their bodies." An ascetic in the original meaning of the term is an athlete; and it was in this spirit that the early Christians trained themselves deliberately as "athletes of Christ" to bear without flinching the tortures of their martyrdom.

When asceticism is irrational, it is a form of totemism or fetich worship and derives from a belief that certain things are tabu or that evil spirits can be placated by human suffering. Or without any coherent belief whatsoever asceticism may be merely a perversion arising out of that ambivalence of the human passions which often makes pain, inflicted on others or self-inflicted, an exquisite pleasure. But when asceticism is rational, it is a discipline of the mind and body to fit men for the service of an ideal. Its purpose is to harden and to purify, to suppress contrary passions, and thus to intensify the passion for the ideal. "I chastise my body," said St. Paul, "and bring it into subjection." The Church, especially in the earlier centuries, was compelled to fight continually against irrational asceticism, and as late as the Middle Ages, the Inquisition pursued sects which regarded marriage as the "greater adultery" and practiced self-emasculation. The rational view was the view of St. Jerome: "Be on your guard when you begin to mortify your body by abstinence and fasting, lest you imagine yourself to be perfect and a saint; for perfection does not consist in this virtue. It is only a help; a disposition; a means, though a fitting one, for the attainment of true perfection."

Now when St. Paul said that he had to bring his body into subjection, when Aristotle defined the barbarians' ideal as "the living as one likes," when Plato made Socrates say that the soul is infected by the body, when Buddha preached the extinction of all craving, when Spinoza wrote that because we rejoice in virtue we are able to control our lusts, they accepted a view of human nature which is quite diametrically opposed to one which has had wide currency in our civilization since the Renaissance.
This contrary view was undoubtedly provoked by the evils which came from the attempt to put the ascetic principle extensively into practice. Rabelais is by all odds the most convincing of the moderns who revolted, for Rabelais not only talked about the natural man but actually knew him and delighted in him. Thus when Villers writes to Madame de Staël that in her work "primitive, incorruptible, naive, passionate nature" is "in conflict with the barriers and shackles of conventional life," we feel, I think, that neither Villers nor the lady would really have cared very much for primitive nature in all its naivete. The natural man that they were talking about lived in Arcady and his passions were as violent as those of a lapdog; throughout the romantic movement, with rare exceptions, the talk about passion and impulse and instinct has this air of unreality and of neurotic confusion. There is not in it, as there is in Rabelais, for example, an honest gusto for the passions that are to be liberated from the restraints imposed by that "rabble of squint-minded fellows, dissembling and counterfeit saints, demure lookers, hypocrites, pretended zealots, tough friars, buskin-monks, and other such sects of men, who disguise themselves like masquers to deceive the world."

Rabelais advised his readers that if they desired to become good Pantagruelists, "that is to say, to live in peace, joy, health, making yourself always merry--never trust those men that always peep out through a little hole." And in establishing the Abbey of Theleme, Gargantua furnished it magnificently and barred the gates against bigots, hypocrites, dissemblers, attorneys, barristers, usurers, drunkards, and cannibals; he invited in all noble blades and brisk and handsome people, faithful expounders of the Scripture, and lovely ladies, proper, fair, and mirthful. "Their life," he says, "was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but at their own free will and pleasure. They rose from bed when they thought good, drank, ate, worked, slept, when the desire came to them. None did awaken them, none constrained them either to drink or eat, nor to do any other thing: for so had Gargantua established it. The Rule of their order had but one clause: Do What Thou Wilt."

But there was a catch in this rule. Not only had drunkards and cannibals been excluded in the first place, but Rabelais assures us that those who were admitted, because they were "free, well born, well educated, and accustomed to good company, have by nature an instinct and spur which prompts them to virtuous acts and withdraws them from vice. This they call honor." And in another passage Rabelais limits the propensities of the natural man even more radically when he speaks of "a certain gaiety of spirit cured in contempt of chance and fortune."

There is always a catch in any doctrine of the natural goodness of man. For mere passive obedience to impulse as it comes and goes, without effort to check it or direct it, ends in something like Alfred de Musset's Rolla, of whom it was said:
It was not Rolla who ruled his life,
It was his passions; he let them go
As a drowsy shepherd watches the water flow.

So even Dora Russell at the crisis of her assault upon the Christian tradition advises us to "live by instinct and intelligence," which must mean, if it means anything, that intelligence is to be in some respects the master as well as the servant of instinct. That this is what Mrs. Russell means is abundantly plain by her fury at capitalists, imperialists, conservatives, and churchmen, whose instincts lead them to do things of which she does not approve. For like her distinguished husband she trusts those impulses which are creative and beneficent, and distrusts those which are possessive and destructive. That is to say, like every other moralist, she trusts those parts of human nature which she trusts.