Asceticism (Askesis)

Before it was a religious term, askesis belonged to the gymnasium: it was the word for an athlete's training, the disciplined, repeated effort that turns a soft body into a strong one. St. Paul reached for exactly this image. "Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain," he writes; the athlete "is temperate in all things" for a fading wreath, while the Christian trains for "an incorruptible" crown. He describes his own labor in the same terms: "I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection" (1 Corinthians 9:24-27).

That last line captures the whole idea. Asceticism is not hatred of the body — Orthodoxy insists the body is God's good creation, destined to share in the resurrection. It is the mastery of a body and will grown disordered by the Fall, the retraining of appetites that have learned to rule rather than serve. The athlete does not despise his legs; he disciplines them so they will carry him where he wants to go.

The tools of Christian training are unspectacular and ancient: fasting, set times of prayer, keeping vigil, prostrations, silence, obedience, confession, and almsgiving. None of them saves by itself, and none is an end in itself. They are, in the Fathers' favorite word, medicine — treatments applied to the diseases of the soul, the passions that darken the nous and enslave the will.

This is why Orthodox asceticism is not the dualism that treats matter as evil and the body as a prison. That idea was condemned as heresy. The ascetic strives against the disorder in himself, not against his own flesh or against the good world. And he strives in cooperation with grace, never alone: the labor is real, but it is synergy — the free working-together of human effort and the grace of God, who does in us what we could never do by willpower. The goal is not exhaustion or a record of feats but apatheia, dispassion — a heart so healed that love can finally move through it unobstructed.

Monastics take up this training intensively, as a kind of living sign to the whole Church of what every Christian is called to. But the calling is universal. Baptism enlists everyone in the same contest; the arena simply differs. For most people the ascetic disciplines are woven through ordinary life — the patience learned in marriage, the self-denial of raising children, the honest labor of a job, the fasts and prayers of the Church's year kept in the middle of a busy household.

Measured, gradual, and undertaken with guidance rather than in bursts of heroism, this everyday askesis is how the Christian life actually moves forward. "Exercise thyself rather unto godliness," St. Paul told Timothy, "for bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things" (1 Timothy 4:7-8). The training is for the whole of life, and the crown it seeks does not fade.