Category: ASCETICISM

  • He never succumbed, due to old age, to extravagance in food, nor did he change his mode of dress because of frailty of the body, nor even bathe his feet with water, and yet in every way he remained free of injury. For he possessed eyes undimmed and sound, and he saw clearly. He lost none of his teeth—they simply had been worn to the gums because of the old man’s great age. He also retained health in his feet and hands, and generally he seemed brighter and of more energetic strength than those who make use of baths and a variety of foods and clothing.

    —Athanasius, The Life of Antony

  • The desire for a woman, or another sordid pleasure, we shall not merely control—rather, we shall turn from it as something transitory, forever doing battle and looking toward the day of judgment. For the larger fear and dread of the torments always destroys pleasure’s smooth allure, and rouses the declining soul.

    —Athanasius, The Life of Antony

  • When I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:10) For he said the soul’s intensity is strong when the pleasures of the body are weakened.

    —Robert C. Gregg on St. Antony the Great
    Athanasius, The Life of Antony

  • His watchfulness was such that he often passed the entire night without sleep, and doing this not once, but often, he inspired wonder. He ate once daily, after sunset, but there were times when he received food every second and frequently even every fourth day. His food was bread and salt, and for drinking he took only water.

    —Robert C. Gregg on St. Antony the Great
    Athanasius, The Life of Antony

  • Bodily Exercises

    The body is by nature pure. Therefore we must only estrange from it unnatural cravings and strengthen it in those things which are natural to it; in other words, we must return it to its natural state.

    Besides this, the body should assist the soul as its constant companion. Therefore, besides returning it to its natural state, we must turn the very satisfaction of its basic needs to the benefit of the soul and spirit. In satisfying these needs, some sort of exercise should be assigned to each bodily function as another means of healing our fleshliness, thus benefitting us spiritually as well.

    Here are the prescribed rules:

    1) For the senses: Guard the senses altogether, especially the hearing and vision (nervous system). 2) Guard the tongue. 3) Abstinence and fasting (the stomach). 4) Moderate sleep and vigilance (the stomach). 5) Physical purity (the stomach).

    For the body in general. Wear out (muscular), constrain (nervous system) and emaciate yourself (the stomach). It is obvious how through these ascetic practices the body little-by-little returns to its natural state, becomes alive and strong (muscular), bright and pure (nervous system), light and free. It becomes a most capable instrument of our spirit and a worthy temple of the Holy Spirit.

    —St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation

  • Struggle with your flesh until it is humbled. Once it is used to this modest and rough environment, it will become your mute slave. Humility of the flesh will be granted at last. You should always keep this in sight and strive for it as a reward for your labors. Physical podvigs [spiritual struggles] foster physical virtues: solitude, silence, endurance, vigilance, labor, patience in deprivations, purity, and virginity.

    You should remember that this friend of yours will end up in the grave. They say: Do not trust the flesh—it is deceitful. When you come to believe it is humbled, you relax, and it immediately grabs you and conquers you. This war with it continues to the grave, but it is much harder at first. Later it gets easier and easier until finally there remains only attention to its behavior with occasional light sensations of fleshly upsurge.

    —St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation

  • “There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.”

    —Amma Syncletica

  • and how he was able on account of his sparing diet to hold out to the evening, not even requiring to relieve himself by any evacuations except at the usual hour;

    —Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

  • The more you limit yourself, the more resourceful you become.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    Instil into him an overweening asceticism and then, when you have separated his sexuality from all that might human-is it, weigh in on him with it in some much more brutal and cynical form. If, on the other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that ‘Love’ is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, ‘noble’, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis