 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Practice Makes Perfect – Christian Asceticism Perhaps you've heard about this rather unsettling psychological experiment they did in 1972 known as the marshmallow test. A researcher would sit young children in a room and offer them a marshmallow or other treat. The children would be told that if they could restrain themselves from eating the marshmallow until the researcher returned, they would get an additional marshmallow as a reward. Some children ate the marshmallow the second they were alone, while others managed to get through the intervening time as the effort led them to writhe in their seats, pull their own hair, or loudly lament how slowly the time was passing. The unsettling part, aside from the whole how do psychologists get away with these mildly sadistic experiments issue, is that they checked in with the kids years later and discovered that those who managed to restrain themselves turned out to do better in life, educationally and in other ways. It's disturbing to think that our fate as adults is already determined by our powers of self-control at a very young age. To be honest, even at my age I would have a bit of difficulty passing the test, at least if the treat on offer were an almond croissant rather than a marshmallow. I think I'm not alone in this. Most of us fight our inclinations and desires every day, from the moment we resist the urge to stay in bed that little bit longer in the morning to the moment we decide to forgo that one more glass of wine before turning in for the night. It is not just a quotidian challenge, but also a philosophically puzzling phenomenon. Researchers often call the failure to resist desire a krasia, using a Greek word meaning lack of self-control, sometimes translated weakness of will. In the strict sense, we are a kratik when our desires lead us to act against our judgment about what is in fact best for us to do. This is hard to explain. A naive but appealingly simple analysis of human action would go like this. A person considers what is best for them to do, reaches a decision, and then acts accordingly. But in cases of akrasia, we reach such a decision and then ignore it, our judgment overcome by something as humble as a marshmallow. As the use of the Greek term akrasia suggests, this phenomenon was discussed by a number of ancient philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. For Socrates, as depicted in Plato's early dialogues, and for the Stoics, akrasia in the strict sense is impossible. When we seem to act against our better judgment, this simply means that deep down we are judging, for instance, that it is better to stay in bed than get to work on time, even if we claim to believe otherwise. Aristotle, meanwhile, takes the view that strong desires can make a judgment temporarily inactive. So for him akrasia is possible, but only in a weak sense. One cannot be clear-headed in judging that one should do something even as one is failing to do it. To explain such clear-eyed akrasia, we would need a more complicated moral psychology, such as the one found in Plato's Republic. Plato proposes that the soul has three aspects which compete for control—reason, spirit, and desire. When I judge rationally that it's time for bed, but drink more wine anyway, this happens because the desiring part of my soul dominates the rational part. Plato's was the most influential ancient theory of akrasia, but for philosophers who take the theory to its most radical conclusion, we must turn to the late antique Christians known as ascetics. The term asceticism comes from the Greek ascesis, which means practice. These Christians were indeed putting Plato's theory into practice, pushing themselves to the ultimate limits of self-control. Many pagan Greek thinkers had assumed that truly virtuous people simply lack any vicious desires. For instance, Aristotle believes that the virtuous always want to do the right thing. Thus, he distinguishes virtue from self-control, or ankratia, which is the state of character you have if you have bad desires, but manage to overcome those desires through rational judgment. By contrast, the Christians assumed that, at least in our fallen, sinful state, human life inevitably involves a struggle to defeat temptation. It was the unique prerogative of Christ to be without sin, perhaps even without inclination towards sin, though the story of his temptation by the devil gives a rather different impression. What the ascetics were practicing for was a Christ-like state in which desire had been completely defeated by rational judgment, insofar as is possible in this life. The most famous philosophical treatment of asceticism is not an ancient one, but Nietzsche's withering critique of the ascetic impulse in Christianity. I suppose many listeners will be familiar with his complaint that asceticism is a denial of life itself, a nihilistic rejection of embodied existence. Let's reserve judgment as to whether this is an oversimplification of Nietzsche. We'll decide that when we discuss him a few hundred episodes from now. But it is certainly an oversimplification of ancient Christian asceticism. In fact, the 4th century ascetics based their way of life around the belief that God himself had become embodied in this world. This is shown by the career of one of the most famous ascetics, Anthony the Great. He is known to us through a biography written by Athanasius, a theologian also known for his controversial writings about the Trinity. Athanasius presents Anthony as a fellow critic of the Arians, whom I mentioned when we were discussing the Cappadocians. For Arius and his followers, the Divine Son was above all a mediator between God the Father and humanity. Accordingly, the Arians placed the Son on an exalted, but still subordinate level, below the Father. One sign of this was their admission that the Divine Son was not co-eternal with the Father. Rather, as they put it, there was a time when the Son was not. For critics like Athanasius and Anthony, all this amounted to a denial that Jesus Christ was fully God. They insisted that Christ was wholly human and wholly divine, and thus both embodied and perfect. For Anthony, asceticism was accordingly a way of imitating God, of striving for a perfect embodied life, not a way of fleeing the body. On these theological foundations, Anthony built the life immortalized by Athanasius in a biography that would be read and imitated by many generations of Christians, beyond late antiquity and into the medieval age. Some measure of its potential impact is given by Augustine, who tells us of a man who converted to Christianity immediately upon reading it. In the biography, we first hear how Anthony gave away his family fortune to charity. He reserved only a little for the upkeep of his sister, but then thought better of it and gave even that away, arranging for the sister to live in a community of other ascetics. Athanasius doesn't tell us how the sister felt about all this. The existence of that community shows that Anthony was not, as sometimes claimed, the first to live a deliberately ascetic life. In fact, Athanasius describes him learning from other ascetics. But Anthony took things further than most. Others had moved to the outskirts of villages at the edge of the Egyptian desert, subsisting on little food and sleeping on the ground. Anthony though, had himself shot into a tomb, with instructions that a bit of bread should be brought to him every few days. With such dramatic gestures, Anthony won fame as one of the so-called Desert Fathers, radical ascetics of the 4th century AD whose struggle against desire also earned them the title Athletes of God. Like Anthony, many started wealthy but gave away their fortunes. Riches to rags stories abound in the ascetic literature. Having chosen poverty, they would reside in conditions of bare survival, devoting their lives to prayer and living in isolated cells or within communities that were forerunners of medieval monasteries. Even more famous than Anthony is Simeon the Stylite, who was known for living on top of a pillar for years at a time, supposedly without food. He had himself tied down so he would not fall off when hunger weakened him. Simeon's pragmatic reason for this lifestyle, elevated in both the literal and the metaphorical sense, is that it would remove him from the visitors who constantly came to interrupt his contemplation. But it had the reverse effect, as he became something of a tourist attraction, so he made the pillar higher. The stories about Simeon are vivid and even graphic, as when he had himself chained to a rock but was then persuaded that his strength of will should be chain enough to keep him there. When he had the chain removed, a swarm of insects was revealed squirming in his chafed flesh, which he had been enduring without complaint. With this sort of memorable detail, it's no wonder that literature about the Desert Fathers found a wide readership in later antiquity and the medieval age. The ascetic movement also provided a rare opportunity for women to take starring roles in Christian literature. For there were desert mothers as well. Unfortunately, we have no works actually written by female ascetics. Indeed, in all of late antiquity, only a small handful of Christian women produced surviving writings. The most prominent example is the poetry of the 5th century Byzantine empress Eudokia, and it doesn't get much less ascetic than being a 5th century Byzantine empress. Still, collections of sayings by heroes of asceticism, another very popular genre in the centuries to come, frequently included pious remarks ascribed to women like the 4th century hermit, Synkletica. Aristocratic women could also make an impact by sponsoring ascetic communities. An outstanding example was Melania the Elder, who founded such a community in Palestine and who associated with Rufinus. We already met him a few episodes back as a translator of origin. For the history of philosophy, the most significant female ascetics were those connected with the Cappadocians. We saw that Macrina, the sister of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, helped bring her brothers to the path of Christian devotion, and she helped many others along this road by founding an ascetic community, as did Melania the Elder. We also saw Gregory present his sister as a keen connoisseur and critic of Hellenic philosophy in his work on the immortality of the soul. This casts her in the Socratic role of a philosopher facing death with arguments and without fear. Gregory depicts her rather differently in his life of Macrina. Here the emphasis is on her piety, her humility, and her spirituality. After the man she was intended to marry died before they could wed, she dedicated herself to virginity and domestic labor. Though Gregory clearly considers it possible for a woman like Macrina to be a Christian exemplar, he does not drop his assumptions about gender roles. He compliments her for living and working along with the household maids, and in this text gives no hint that she also enjoyed a good old-fashioned Socratic discourse on immortality. Still, there is some continuity between the Macrina of this biography and the Macrina of Gregory's dialogue on the soul, in that the life presents her as a model of measured grief in the face of family deaths. If that doesn't impress you, she is also said to have worked miracles, using nothing but prayer to cure a child of eye disease and herself of a dangerous tumor. Other themes arise in a funeral oration written by the other Cappadocian Gregory, Gregory of Nazianzus, for his sister Gorgonia. In this case, Gorgonia did marry, but she persuaded her husband to take an oath of chastity with her. As with Anthony's sister, we don't hear how he felt about Gorgonia's vow, except that he went along with it, and this before the invention of the cold shower. Like Macrina, Gorgonia enjoyed miraculous recovery from injury and illness through prayer. Without casting doubt on the sincerity of these ascetic heroines, we may note that refusing marriage or marital relations as in the case of Gorgonia gave them a chance to escape the strictures of the patriarchal society of late antiquity. The idea that asceticism could restore equality between men and women, lost through sin, is a powerful undercurrent in this literature. In fact, Gregory of Nyssa believed that the distinction between male and female gender is itself a result of our sinful state. There was no such distinction in the initial creation of humankind, and it will be eliminated in the hereafter. In this life, meanwhile, outstandingly holy women could wield influence openly, something quite rare in antiquity. They had a significant intellectual impact, even if we learn about it only from men like the Gregories and Augustine, who saw his mother Monica as a paragon of Christian wisdom. Women's use of family wealth to house groups of like-minded ascetics was another way to exert influence. As all this suggests, despite the image of ancient ascetics as loner hermits, the movement had a decidedly political dimension. Melania, Macrina, and other founders wanted their communities to show how humans could live together, devoted to God, rather than to competition over wealth and secular power. To some extent, even gender inequalities could be eliminated in such groups, though that particular political bombshell was partially diffused during the 4th century, as it became less acceptable for women and men to join in the same communities. Historians referred to ascetics who lived in communities as kenobitic, from the Greek koinos bios, which means living in common. They are contrasted to ascetics who lived alone or in relative isolation, who are called eremitic, from the Greek word eremos, meaning desert. This is the root of our word, hermit. One could think of the kenobitic collectives as enactments of the first kind of virtuous city Socrates describes in the Republic, in which there are no luxuries and all individuals share the same goals. But Socrates' interlocutor Glaucon dismisses as a city of pigs was seen more favorably by these late ancient Christians. As for the more isolated ascetics, a different animal may leap to mind, the dog. The counter-cultural exploits and rough lifestyle of men like Anthony and Simeon inevitably bring to mind the cynics, whose name, as you'll remember, comes from the Greek for dog. And like the cynics, these eremitic ascetics did not lose political relevance by withdrawing from normal civic life. Admittedly, they did not, like Diogenes, sit in the midst of the city criticizing passing citizens for their hypocrisy. They didn't need to. An audience sought them out, even in the desert. Simeon on his pillar was a magnet for visitors who sought his advice on matters ranging from the theological to the mundane. The same is true of Anthony, and Athanasius records that the Desert Father had, at best, mixed feelings about this. Just as Gregory of Nazianzus wished to abandon his pastoral duties to join Macrina in a life of self-restrained retreat, Anthony would sometimes have preferred to be left in peace. But he engaged with his fellow Christians, through advice to visitors and of course by setting an example. We shouldn't underestimate the symbolic power and even the political subversiveness of Anthony's decision to abandon his wealth in favor of a lifestyle the ascetics referred to simply as philosophy. For the philosophical underpinnings of this philosophical way of life, the key author is Evagrius of Pontus. He hailed from Cappadocia and was a student of Gregory of Nazianzus. Like other Desert Fathers, he adopted a hermetic lifestyle to escape temptation, in this case quite literally since he began to compete as an athlete of God after a politically dangerous liaison with a woman in Constantinople. Once he fled to the desert, Evagrius wrote extensively about the challenges and tactics of asceticism, in works that were greatly admired by last week's subject, Maximus the Confessor. Not everyone was a fan though. There are clear borrowings from the thought of Origen in Evagrius' writings, so critics of Origen did not hesitate to attack Evagrius too. Indeed, Evagrius sometimes seems to agree with the controversial Origenist claims that all souls existed free from body before they sinned, and that all souls will ultimately achieve salvation. This link between Origenism and asceticism is no coincidence. For one thing, Origen himself had ascetic leanings, to say the least. Supposedly, he castrated himself as a teenager to escape the temptations of sex. At a more philosophical level, he also described human perfection in highly intellectualist terms as a process of reaching freedom from the body after many cycles of incarnation. So it's natural that he and his followers would see bodily desire as an obstacle to perfection. Yet like Anthony, Evagrius saw the war against desire as one that must be fought in the here and now, while we are embodied. His writings frequently referred to Plato's three-part soul, and described the ascetic project as the attempt to silence the lower desires, leaving mind free to contemplate God through prayer. Thus, his meditations on the ascetic struggle were really a subtle exploration of how to avoid acrasia. He made the struggle personal by blaming the lower desires on demons that lay constant siege to the ascetic. The demons undermine prayer by introducing unwanted thoughts, for instance lustful fantasies that might come to a monk as he tried to pray in his cell, or memories of the ascetic's previous life. He classified these distracting thoughts into eight types, gluttony, avarice, lust, and so on, a list that became the basis for the later tradition of seven deadly sins. His talk of demons here is not mere metaphor. Athanasius too described Anthony's battles for self-control as a battle against demons, and Evagrius discusses the demons' deceitful tricks in detail. They disguise themselves as angels, they make distracting noises when the ascetic tries to pray, or they temporarily retreat so as to lull the ascetic into false confidence. We might smirk at all this, yet a fairly sophisticated theory of the human soul is implicit in Evagrius' remarks. He saw the imagination as the aspect of the soul that could be targeted by the demons of desire, because imagination is allied with the senses rather than with the mind, a psychological analysis that goes back to Aristotle. He also draws on the Stoics, saying that the senses deliver impressions, or representations, to the mind, which the mind can then choose to follow or reject. These representations constitute the main weapon used by demons. They are trying to distract us from the pure mental apprehension of God. Since God is immaterial, He is not grasped through any impression or representation, but through pure thought, which is the goal of prayer. Evagrius also cites a wise man who claims the brain is a frequent target of demonic attack, apparently because this is a center for the reception of sense images. For some context, it would be worth turning briefly to a rather different author from around the same period, Nemesius of Emesa. He was a bishop and possibly another associate of the Cappadocians, who wrote in the late 4th century. He is known to us through his treatise On the Nature of Man, a kind of textbook summarizing the teachings of both pagan and Christian philosophers. For modern scholars, it is a goldmine of references to early thinkers whose works may be lost. For a 4th century audience, it was a useful guide to contemporary ideas about anatomy, psychology, free will, and other aspects of human nature. In one section, he describes several psychological faculties, including memory and imagination, and explains that they are seated in the brain. But Nemesius is enough of a Platonist to think that the soul also has functions that are exercised without the body, the kind of pure reasoning or contemplation Evagrius too encourages. And though Nemesius is clearly no ascetic himself, he does mention that a pious man will indulge only the desires that Plato called natural and necessary, meaning those we need to satisfy simply to survive. Anthony, Simeon, Macrina, and Evagrius would agree with this. They did not push their asceticism to the point of suicide, but swore off unnecessary yet pleasant activities such as sex, decent clothes, washing, or food and drink beyond the bare minimum. Marshmallows and almond croissants were definitely off the menu, and not only because they hadn't been invented yet either. Something else Nemesius has in common with the ascetics is the immense historical reach of his writings. His On the Nature of Man was translated into Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, and Latin, while collections of sayings about the desert mothers and fathers found their way into all these languages and more. The monastic culture that transmitted the literature of asceticism also became a crucial conduit for mainstream philosophy. The works of Aristotle passed through Christian monasteries of the East, where they were read in Syriac before they were later translated into Arabic. Thus, the Syrian monastic communities which grew out of the ascetic movement provided a bridge across which philosophy traveled from late antiquity to the Islamic world. That's a story we'll be telling very soon. But first, we have some unfinished business here in late antiquity. We've looked at the Greek tradition pretty thoroughly, but have barely touched on Latin authors who include the greatest Christian thinker of antiquity, Augustine. These Latin patristic authors are the next stop on our itinerary. But before moving on, I'd like to pause to reflect on the Greek church fathers. Hopefully, the last seven episodes have convinced you that the faith of these fathers made a major contribution to ancient philosophy, but if you still aren't sure, I devoutly believe you'll be converted by my interview with George Boyce-Stones next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.