Valantasis - The Making of the Self: Ancient and Modern Asceticism

Ancient and Modern Asceticism

Richard Valantasis

I was hard-wired for asceticism since I grew up in a Greek Orthodox community in Canton, Ohio, which, in former generations, took the disciplined Christian life very seriously. Fasting, very long liturgies, vigils, abstinence of all sorts, and ritual cleansings all built the ascetical foundation upon which I lived my life. Then as an Episcopal priest now of nearly 35 years, I realized that the Book of Common Prayer with its regular cycle of daily prayer and weekly Eucharist created the structure for myself personally and the communities of which I was a member, to live the ascetical life. This hard-wiring for asceticism enabled me to explore the depth and riches of human striving as a priest and scholar alone and in the various academic and ecclesiastical communities in which I served. So it is not surprising that my work over these years have explored the expanse of ascetical theory and practice. This volume documents that lifelong passion and interest.

I have discovered that asceticism constitutes a human impulse. Something drives humans to dream of being a better person in a more healthy society and in a cosmos that holds promise of helping them to flourish. In dreaming of that wholesome state for self, society, and the cosmos, humans become dissatisfied with their lives, relationships, and connection to the cosmos. The dissatisfaction births the ascetical impulse. Asceticism reflects that attempt to live a different sort of life, to resist the tendency simply to live like all other people, and to branch out into selves defined by dreams for flourishing, not resting in the various selves our societies and mundane living present, but resisting that ease to branch into new directions. Asceticism also drives the desire to create new societies, healthier ways of relating to others, more just ways of connecting to those close-by and far away, as well as biological and constructed families that create a human ecology filled with grace, harmony, respect, sensitivity, and honor. The ascetic impulse also fuels the desire for repairing the physical environment in which humans live after years of abuse, pollution, deforestation, and profligate use of natural resources. Of course all these ascetic dreams of people, societies, and environments depend upon creating a wholesome human, social, and natural ecology that contests the dominant structures that hold dreamers back, or impose debilitating and limiting social structures, and abuse the physical environment. Resistance to those dominant sources begins in the ascetic impulse for personal, social, and cosmic transformation.

I argue that this ascetic impulse is nothing new. Throughout history ascetics have dreamed and resisted. In my work, that historical asceticism began with the Greek and Roman philosophers and Gnostic literature of the Nag Hammadi Library; it continued to early Christian writers. Historically, asceticism was not relegated to the Christian monasteries alone, but began long before Christianity. Asceticism developed in attempts by Greeks and Romans to transform the moral and spiritual status of the person and society and it expanded as many different kinds of Gnostics forged new contemplative ground for the embodied person. Christians seem to have connected quickly with their ancient philosophical counterparts to embrace the ascetical impulse as a permanent way of life and they engaged in vigorous debate with the Gnostics about the parameters of orthodox asceticism and contemplation. If anything, history proves that asceticism pervades the Western intellectual tradition. I have worked to bring this ascetical substratum to light in antiquity, while at the same time to open other people and movements to analysis through the lens of asceticism. My theory of asceticism, now more fully elaborated in these essays, allowed a broader view of the ascetic impulse in historical contexts as well as our postmodern world.

In discussions over the years, some of my critics have argued that according to my theory of asceticism anything can be ascetical. And to my critics I answer a resounding Yes! I have tried to open the space to analyze a wide assortment of behaviors through asceticism in order to understand how societies operate hegemonically and with those who resist. So body-builders, monks, gang members, environmentalists, community organizersin short, anyone who resists in order to create new selves, different ways of socializing, and a cohesive way to relate to the physical world bespeaks the presence of an ascetical impulse. I have a hunch that the more asceticism in religious communities becomes submerged, that is, the more people limit asceticism to specific religious actions and groups of people in history, the more other forms of non-religiously specific asceticism emerge to fill the vacuum created by the submersion. The vigorous attention to the body, its health and transformation through exercise, emerged in postmodernity precisely at the point at which most churches completely ignored the ascetical practices that made religion vital, engaging, and transformative.

Asceticism, broadly defined as I describe it, opens the way to investigating difference, which has become a pervasive theme of postmodern critical theory. Asceticisms focus on resistance, on the difference created by a persons or communitys self-definition in opposition to dominant social, religious, and political structures, opens the way to understanding the various means of personal and cultural transformation. To see the interplay of dominance and subversion within a person and within a society lays bare the contours of desire to change, to renew, to transform, to articulate in often dramatically different modes a way of life that fulfills that desire. By documenting the practices that articulate that difference, ascetical historians and theorists document the practices that articulate the fault lines within a person and society. The ascetical theory developed in these essays point the way to documenting that difference in whatever arena it may be found, wherever desire to be someone different and to live in a different sort of society with a different understanding of the way the world operates. Excavating difference through documenting subversive practices defines the ascetical task. And many of the essays that follow show how that has been accomplished in various historical contexts in order that scholars and religious practitioners today may extend that analysis into the social, religious, and political modes of postmodernity.