CHAPTER XVIII
ASCETICISM
The exaggeration of opposite policies.—Failure of the mores and revolt against expediency.—Luck and welfare; self-discipline to influence the superior powers.—Asceticism in Japan.—Development of the arts; luxury; sensuality.—The ascetic philosophy.—Asceticism is an aberration.—The definitions depend on the limits.—Asceticism in India and Greece; Orphic doctrines.—Ascetic features in the philosophic sects.—Hebrew asceticism.—Nazarites, Rechabites, Essenes.—Roman asceticism.—Christian asceticism.—Three traditions united in Christianity.—Asceticism in the early church.—Asceticism in Islam.—Virginity.—Mediæval asceticism.—Asceticism in Christian mores.—Renunciation of property; beggary.—Ascetic standards.—The Mendicant Friars.—The Franciscans.—Whether poverty is a good.—Clerical celibacy.—How Christian asceticism ended.
672. The exaggeration of opposite policies. It is not to be expected that all the men in a society will react in the same way against the same experiences and observations. If they draw unanimously the same conclusions from the same facts, that is such an unusual occurrence that their unanimity gives great weight to their opinion. In almost all cases they are thrown into parties by their different inferences from the same experiences and observations. There is nothing about which they differ more than about amusement, pleasure, and happiness, and as to the degree in which pleasure is worth pursuing. Those who feel deceived by pleasure and duped by the pursuit of happiness revolt from it and denounce it. Inasmuch as others not yet disillusioned still pursue pleasure as the most obviously desirable good, there are two great parties who divide on fundamental notions of life policy. Two such parties, face to face, tend to exaggerate their distinctive doctrines and practices. Each party goes to extremes and excess. We have seen in the last chapter (secs. 624 ff.) that at the beginning of the Christian era moral restraints were thrown aside and that all living men seemed to plunge into vice, luxury, and pleasure, so far as their means would allow. There were, however, a number of sects and religions in the Greco-Roman world that held extremely pessimistic views as to the worth of human life and of those things which men care for most. They renounced the ordinary standards of welfare and happiness, and sought welfare and happiness in merely denying the popular standards. The old world philosophies no longer commanded faith, and they seemed to be rejected with active hatred, not with mere indifferent unbelief. The poor and those who were forced to live by self-denial joined these sects of philosophy or religion. The age which saw extremes of luxury and vicious excess was also the age which saw great phenomena of ascetic philosophy and practice. Each school or tendency developed its own mores to treat the problems of life in its own way. An ascetic policy never is a primary product of the "ways" in which unreflecting men meet the facts of life. It is reflective and derived. It is a secondary stage of faith built on experience and reflection. It is, therefore, dogmatic. It must be sustained by faith in the fundamental pessimistic conviction. It never can be verified by experience. It purposely runs counter to all the sanctions which are possible in experience. If any one declares evil good and pain pleasure, he cannot find proof of it in any experiment. The mores produced out of asceticism are therefore peculiar and in many ways instructive.
673. Failure of the mores and revolt against expediency. We have seen that the mores are the results of the efforts of men to find out how to live under the conditions of human life so as to satisfy interests and secure welfare. The efforts have been only very imperfectly successful. The task, in fact, never can be finished, for the conditions change and the problem contains different elements from time to time. Moreover, dogmas interfere. They dictate "duty" and "right" by authority and as virtue, quite independently of any verification by experience and expediency. All the primitive taboos express the convictions of men that there are things which must not be done, or must not be done beyond some limited degree, if the men would live well. Such convictions came either from experience or from dogma. The former class of cases were those things which were connected with food and the sex relation. The latter class of cases were those things which were connected with the doctrine of ghosts. There are also a great many primitive customs for coercing or conciliating superior powers,—either men or spirits,—which consist in renunciation, self-torture, obscenity, bloodshedding, filthiness, and the performance of repugnant acts or even suicide. These customs all imply that the superior powers are indifferent, or angry and malevolent, or justly displeased, and that the pain of men pleases, or appeases and conciliates, or coerces them, or wins their attention. Thus we meet with a fundamental philosophy of life in which it is not the satisfaction of needs, appetites, and desires, but the opposite theory which is thought to lead to welfare. Renounce what you want; do what you do not want to do; pursue what is repugnant; in short, invert the relations of pleasure and pain, and act by your will against their sanctions, so as to seek pain and flee pleasure. A doctrine of due measure and limit upon the rational satisfaction of needs and desires is turned into an absolute rule of well-being. Within narrower limits the same philosophy inculcates acts of labor, pain, and renunciation, which produce no results in the satisfaction of wants but are regarded as beneficial or meritorious in themselves, as a kind of gymnastic in self-control and self-denial. It is not to be denied that such a gymnastic has value in education, especially in the midst of luxury and self-indulgence, if it is controlled by common sense and limited within reason. Nearly all men, however, are sure to meet with as much necessity for self-control and self-denial as is necessary to their training, without arbitrarily subjecting themselves to artificial discipline of that kind.
674. Luck and welfare. Self-discipline to influence the superior powers. The notion of welfare through acts which upon their face are against welfare is directly referable to experience of the impossibility of establishing sure relations between positive efforts and satisfactions. The lowest civilization is full of sacrifices, renunciation, self-discipline, etc. It is the effect of the aleatory element and of the explanation of the same by goblinism (secs. 6, 9). The acts of renunciation or self-discipline have no rational connection with the interests which they aim to serve. Those acts can affect interests only by influencing the ghosts or demons who always interfere between efforts and results and make luck. Soldiers, fishermen, hunters, traders, agriculturists, etc., are bidden to practice continence before undertaking any of their enterprises. Hence arises the notion of a "state of grace," not the state produced by work in the workday world, but a state produced by abstinence from work, from enjoyment, and from the experience of good and ill. Abstention from wine, meat, other luxuries of food and drink, and from women gives power which is magical, because it has no real causal connection with desired results in war or industry. Uncivilized people almost always have some such notion of reaching a higher plane of power, or more especially of luck, by self-discipline. Acts of self-discipline, e.g. fasting, gashing, mutilating one's self, also enter into mourning. In some tribes parents who expect a child engage in acts of the same kind.[2150] Asceticism in higher civilization is a survival of the life philosophy of an earlier stage, in which the pain of men was believed to be pleasant to the superior powers. The same sentiment revives now in times of decline or calamity, when the wrath of God is recognized or apprehended. We appoint a fast when we are face to face with calamity. The same sentiment is at work in sects and individuals when they desire "holiness," or a "higher life," or mystic communion with higher powers, or "purity" (in the ritual sense), or relief from "sin," or escape from the terror of ghosts and demons, or power to arise to some high moral standard by crushing out the natural appetites which according to that standard are base and wicked.
675. Asceticism in Japan. The Shinto religion of the Japanese "is not an essentially ascetic religion; it offers flesh and wine to its gods; and it prescribes only such forms of self-denial as ancient custom and decency require. Nevertheless, some of its votaries perform extraordinary austerities on special occasions,— austerities which always include much cold-water bathing. But the most curious phase of this Shinto ascetism is represented by a custom still prevalent in remote districts. According to this custom a community yearly appoints one of its citizens to devote himself wholly to the gods on behalf of the rest. During the term of his consecration this communal representative must separate from his family, must not approach women, must avoid all places of amusement, must eat only food cooked with sacred fire, must abstain from wine, must bathe in fresh cold water several times a day, must repeat particular prayers at certain hours, and must keep vigil upon certain nights. When he has performed these duties of abstinence and purification for the specified time he becomes religiously free, and another man is then elected to take his place. The prosperity of the settlement is supposed to depend upon the exact observance by its representative of the duties prescribed; should any public misfortune occur, he would be suspected of having broken his vows. Anciently, in the case of a common misfortune, the representative was put to death."[2151]
676. Development of the arts. Luxury. Sensuality. In the development of the arts there has been an increase of luxury in the ways of living. This has seemed to be a good. It has seemed like successful accomplishment of what man must do to win and enjoy power over nature. Luxury, however, has brought vice and ill, and has wrought decay and ruin. It is the twin sister of sensuality, which is corruption. Is luxury a good or not? Men have lost faith in it, and have declared that the triumphs of the arts were delusions, "snares to the soul," corruption of the individual and society. They have turned back to the "old simple ways," and have renounced the enjoyments which were within their reach by the power of the arts. Such renunciation has always been popular. The crowd has always admired it. It is certainly a noteworthy feature in the history of civilization that there has always been present in it a reaction, a movement of fear and doubt about the innovations of every kind by which it is attended, which has caused sects of philosophers and religious persons to refuse to go on, to renounce luxurious novelties, and to prefer the older and inferior ways.
677. The ascetic philosophy. Here then we have a life philosophy, or a life standpoint, from which the things to be done are presented inverted. It is ill luck, loss, calamity, etc., which have inverted human nature. The element of luck crossed and cut off the relations between effort and satisfaction, and disturbed all the lessons of industry. All effort would be vain if the ghosts who control luck were not propitiated. If they were friendly, labor was of no importance. Self-discipline, therefore, entered into everything. This is asceticism. It is always irrational or magical, addressed directly or remotely to the superior powers, as an appeal to their will and favor, their mystical friendship, and a prayer for the transcendental communications which they give. Pater[2152] says that asceticism is a sacrifice of one part of human nature to another, that the latter may survive; or a harmonious development of all parts to realize an ideal of culture. If the first sentence of this statement could be accepted as a fair definition, the second cannot. Asceticism does not aim at a harmonious development and never could produce it. It selects purposes and pushes towards their accomplishment. The selection has often been made with the purpose to attain to holiness, or a higher realization of religious ideals. The ideals are necessarily arbitrary and are very sure to be extravagant. They do not have good effect on character, and they produce moral distortion. They are, however, an outflow of honest religious emotion.