Ascesis

The Neo Platonic philosophy, it will now be seen, is monism, and the completion, consequently, of ancient philosophy, so far as it would reduce the totality of being to a single ultimate ground. As able, however, to find its highest principle, from which all the rest are derived, not through self-consciousness and natural rational explanation, but only through ecstasy, mystic annihilation of self, ascesis, theurgy, it is a desperate overleaping of all—and, consequently, the self-destruction of ancient—philosophy.

This intellectual discipline, this progressive unification and concentration of the mind is an important part of the preparatory ascesis, the work of purification which must be carried through before any approach towards the mystical union can be expected.

The happiness of the Oriental psyche lies in the ecstasy of feeling united with the universal cosmos. Ascesis, self-redemption, and poverty are better realized ideals in Oriental culture than in our Western society.

The involuntary poor lived, day in and day out, with circumstnaces that might make a zealous monk green with envy: ready-made rags, stench, starvation, fiscal penury, and unbounded physical and social suffering. Yet this population has received less attention in religious history and scholarship than those who chose their asceses, and ancient sermons about the poor have often been neglected in favor of more "theological" themes.

How do I speak to you at the same time, my female and male readers? […] I long for these exchanges because of what they reveal to me, their discoveries, but also their opacities or nights. I want them for their resources and the affective asceses which they bring with them.

The body of this book consists of three related case studies, which take up particular problematics surrounding the hermeneutics of the transgendered agent, the askeses of organized weight-loss dieting, and attempts to represent the subjectivity of cosmetic surgery recipients.

Unlike dreams, visions tend to remain in one's memory, especially those experienced in meditative and related forms of asceses.

And this we do find in the Basilican, the Byzantine, and the Romanesque architectures, each more perfect than another, and each lacking in an ever diminishing degree much of the perfect holiness of the Saint of "the most high,"—they came and passed away like different periods in the askesis of a holy soul aiming after the perfection of the spiritual life, and truly therefore they are Christian.

Saint Anthony the Great described a process of purifying the nous by eliminating the disturbances aroused in it by thoughts, feelings, images, imitative movements—all the things that have been unconsciously taken in and remembered by the personality. [...] To achieve this illumination and separation requires a special kind of effort, and this is the real nature of ascesis, noetic ascesis for the enlightening of the nous.

The virtues to be attained through ascesis are Christ’s virtues, not our own, and theosis is always granted, never achieved by the individual. This connects the ascetic life essentially with the eucharistic ethos: we offer to God only what we receive from him; […]