Asceticism and the New Testament

Leif E. Vaage, Vincent L. Wimbush

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135962234
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

As a complex historical phenomenon, asceticism raises the question about ordinary impulses, the orientation and practices, the power dynamics and politics with transcendental religions. The question of the role of asceticism has often been overlooked in examining the New Testament. This book is both comprehensive and comparative in its representation of how the question of asceticism might reorder the way in which we interpret the New Testament. Looking at the New Testament from an ascetic perspective asks questions about issues including the milieu of Jesus and Paul, and the social practices of self-denial, and considers the Scriptural texts in light of a desire to separate oneself from the world. In interpreting all the books in the New Testament, this collection is the first effort to take seriously the crucial role played by asceticism--and its detractors--in the formation of the New Testament.

Part One
(All About)
JESUS

1
Asceticism and the Gospel of Matthew

Anthony J.Saldarini

INTRODUCTION

Linking asceticism with the Gospel of Matthew sounds strange because New Testament scholars do not normally use asceticism as a descriptive or analytical category. Matthew’s disciplined, focused way of life demands restraint and personal application, but is it ascetical? The stuff of developed Christian asceticism is prayer or meditation, fasting, vigils, celibacy, poverty, monastic or hermetic withdrawal, renunciation of the world, systematic rejection of bodily pleasures, penitential practices, and so forth.¹ This list of practices can be partially universalized, according to John Hick:

It is probably a universal religious intuition that “true religion” is to be found within the wide spectrum that begins with commitment, dedication, singleness of mind, purity of heart, and self-discipline in prayer or meditation; that extends into practices of pilgrimage, fasting, vigils, celibacy, poverty and obedience; and that may go on to further and sometimes extreme austerities, which border in the end on pathological excesses…. It [asceticism] embraces the whole realm of spiritual method and discipline, including the solitude, silence, and devotions of monastics, the austerities of shamans, and the severe practices of ascetics seeking special insights and visions.²

This type of descriptive definition also calls to mind similar definitions of apocalyptic literature such as writings containing historical reviews, pseudonymity, eschatological thought, fantastic imagery, and so forth.³ Both have a rich content with little structure or obvious intelligibility.

Traditional Christian ascetical practices have been linked hermeneutically with New Testament texts, but these practices are not explicitly described, praised, and recommended there. Traditional theology made the link between the gospels and the later ascetical tradition by imposing abstract categories that encompassed both: “In the gospels asceticism is presented under the concrete theme of following the historical Christ and thus sharing the hardships, dangers and penalties that loyal discipleship to Him exact”; following Jesus “implies an ascetic self-renunciation by the disciple.”⁴ According to this view, experiencing what Jesus experienced and participating in his fate mean denying self and all that separates oneself from Christ. While this approach may serve a relatively uncritical spiritual formation, it will not stand up to thorough analysis or support cross-cultural comparisons.

Recent work on the connections between the New Testament documents and Greco-Roman literature has stressed the common role of self-mastery and virtue in both. The mastery of oneself through control of the passions is a major concern of Greek and Roman philosophy and ethical literature.⁵ The New Testament patently encourages self-control in the face of human passions and proclivity to sin and teaches about virtues and vices, but these topics do not receive the extended thematic attention characteristic of later Christian literature. In the gospels and in Acts, exhortations are brief and models of virtue implicit.

Some scholars define Christian asceticism by its worldview and motivations, which are based on a contrast between this world and a higher, more spiritual and more sacred world, a view that again can be partially universalized for the study of religion. As Walter Kaelber summarizes it:

[Asceticism], when used in a religious context, may be defined as a voluntary, sustained, and at least partially systematic program of self-discipline and self-denial in which immediate, sensual, or profane gratifications are renounced in order to attain a higher spiritual state or a more thorough absorption in the sacred. Because religious man (homo religiosus) seeks a transcendent state, asceticism—in either rudimentary or developed form—is virtually universal in world religion.⁶

Certainly, some rudimentary comparisons among religions and their literatures can be made using these abstract categories. But such schemes tend to reinforce what we “already know” and hide the riches and particularities of the texts we read. For example, in the New Testament the oppositions between the physical and spiritual worlds, body and soul, self and God, and spiritual and worldly knowledge are either not explicitly thematized or are heavily qualified by the traditional Jewish insistence that “body and soul” form some kind of permanent whole. Behaviors and motives, attitudes and goals, and language and metaphors in the New Testament are significantly different from those in later Christian ascetical literature. A comparison of very different texts must lead to more flexible categories that enable us to encompass the varieties of attitude and behavior in a coherent but varied whole.

An adequate definition of asceticism involves epistemology, categorization, and the systematic comparison of texts that reflect diverse patterns of human thought and behavior. Categories of sameness or difference highlight certain aspects of the things to be compared and contrasted and allow us to relate them to one another positively or negatively. However, these same categories inevitably conceal and suppress other aspects of the things to be compared and contrasted and thus conceal and suppress other relationships that might be noted and evaluated. For example, a comparison that focuses on the presence or absence of life after death might ignore a religion’s attitudes toward life and communal survival in this world.

Thus, more importantly, categories used in a comparison are implicit and must be thought of explicitly as part of a system or theory. When we describe, compare, and contrast, we do so against a whole field of experience and thought that is filled with potential similarities and differences. Trivial comparisons and distinctions endanger understanding every step of the way because they obscure the important and central aspects of a religion or text. Only a systematic comparison, which critically accounts for and evaluates its own procedures, categories, and conclusions, can claim to have grasped dissimilar phenomena with some kind of intelligibility. And, finally, the fashioning of theories and categories and the observation and description of phenomena in texts or experience must be ongoing processes that continually influence and modify one another. Thus a highly abstract, precise definition from which other definitions may be clearly deduced tends to obscure cogent, precise, and significant comparisons among different religions or different positions within a single religion. Similarly, a single, tight deductive scheme eliminates numerous perspectives and theories that might be useful for understanding a complex field of phenomena. The wrong kind of system may be reductionist in an epistemologically impoverished sense.

At this point, a type of vague abstraction may be helpful. Charles Sanders Pierce developed this notion to accommodate modern science and to supplement traditional Aristotelian logic. It has recently been used for the comparison of religions by Robert C.Neville.⁷ According to this view, abstraction comes in two forms: general (the usual way we think of abstraction) or vague. General abstractions can be applied directly to a subject matter, for example, “human being.” Vague abstractions can only be applied to a concrete subject matter through intermediate specifications and theories. The instantiations of a vague category may be very different from one another, mutually exclusive, or contradictory. Even so, they may still be intelligible instances of a vague category:

That the theory is vague means that it can be specified by two or more less vague theories or interpretations, that might not be compatible with one another or even commensurable except when reformulated as specifications of the vague theory. The theoretical elements are determinate with respect to one another, but indeterminate with reference to their applicability, depending on less vague determinations.⁸

In such a procedure, the highest-level categories are very important for the unity of the theory, but “the singularity of at least some of the elements in the subject matter is equally determinative. Both angles of determination are requisite for importance.”⁹ For example, in a discussion of ultimate realities, the figure of God would be central for West Asian religions, a harmonious universe for Chinese religions, and a critique of all “realities” or nothingness for the Buddhist tradition. The criterion for the relevance of items to a topic and for success in comparison is not a precise fit, as in a mathematical theory, or a conceptual similarity, as in logic, but the cogency of the comparisons within a theory of religions.

How then might a series of interrelated categories illuminate ascetical behavior and an ascetical outlook both in individuals and in communities? I shall argue for a set of categories different from, but not totally opposed to, those suggested in recent studies of asceticism. Ascetical attitudes, commitments, and behavior are a specification of the vaguer, more general, flexible category of “discipline,” which may encompass activities and attitudes oriented toward virtue, knowledge, achievement, social standing, survival, religion, and productive activity, among others. Asceticism in this scheme would be a type of religious discipline.¹⁰ Understanding asceticism as a specific kind of religious discipline implies inner human tensions among needs, passions, feelings, desires, thoughts, spiritual aspirations, and strivings for achievement. Kallistos Ware has captured this aspect of asceticism as a discipline well. In its most general sense,

asceticism…leads us to self-mastery and enables us to fulfill the purpose that we have set for ourselves, whatever that may be. A certain measure of ascetic self-denial is thus a necessary element in all that we undertake, whether in athletics or in politics, in scholarly research or in prayer. Without this ascetic concentration of effort we are at the mercy of exterior forces, or of our own emotions, and moods; we are reacting rather than acting. Only the ascetic is inwardly free.¹¹

This view of asceticism owes much to ancient Greco-Roman teaching on discipline, detachment, self-mastery, and striving for virtue and can be found in vestigial form in the New Testament documents.

Discipline, in turn, is a specification of an even vaguer category: education. Education, in its root sense, encompasses individual and social formation,which varies greatly according to factors such as culture, geography, history, and politics. According to Leif E.Vaage, the overall human enterprise of education is aimed at fashioning a mode of existence, one that would offer a higher or better way than the natural or fallen state.¹² Asceticism, in this case, is

a certain disciplinary techne of the body as the specific means deemed most likely to permit the achievement of a stipulated end. All share, in other words, the same form of cultural “engineering,” a discernible and distinct style of “crafting” the social self. Thus the pragmatic and theoretical wager that, through “asceticism,” one can enjoy a still unrealized, but progressively anticipated, greater sense of personal well-being.¹³

I would add that the personal well-being sought in religious discipline and especially in asceticism is an ultimate or spiritually deep well-being, the type of “reward” designated as a general compensator by Rodney Stark. A general compensator actually substitutes for a greatly desired reward—eternal life, continual intimacy with a divine being, or complete happiness—that cannot be obtained in ordinary life. A general compensator is the promise of such reward, substantiated by some overarching worldview such as a religious system.¹⁴ Thus Vaage’s category of asceticism implies an underlying theory of human happiness or wholeness, whether religious or not, and, if religious, some greatly desired goal or reward that transcends the ordinary achievements of human life.

Thus far, the definition of asceticism has kept the social functions of asceticism in the background. Richard Valantasis, in his most recent effort to define the term, attempts to transform asceticism into a category of cross-cultural analysis, using social scientific theories of power. He stresses that power must be understood within the context of intentional human activities as a type of social relation.¹⁵ Thus “asceticism may be defined as performances within a dominant social environment intended to inaugurate a new subjectivity, different social relations and an alternative symbolic universe.”¹⁶ Asceticism is a construction and expression of power within a social world. The new subjectivity created through ascetical practice may come about through a reaction against the prevailing culture (combative), a transformation or enrichment within the culture (integrative), an educative process,...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE (ALL ABOUT) JESUS
• PART TWO PAUL (THE REAL THING)
• PART THREE IMITATIO PAULI
• PART FOUR UN-PAUL
• EPILOGUE THE NEW TESTAMENT IN ASCETICISM