Notes On Askēsis (Part 2 of 2)
Notes On Askēsis (Part 2 of 2)
Or, the itinerary of a word through the Ancient world, its various contexts and meanings
1.
In the first part of these notes we surveyed across 8 centuries the itinerary of askeo: from its emergence in early agrarian and proto-democratic Greece, through to its expansion and continuation in tragedy and the democratic practice of the polis, as askēsis, across the counter-currents of aristocratic and anti-democratic rhetorical schools and the emergence of philosophy, its deformation and fossilisation in the Alexandrian, Hellenistic and Roman periods following the collapse of democracy, and its usurpation by the emergent Judeo-Christian tradition, where finally askēsis becomes asceticism.
In the process, it may be seen how this emerging ethos has assumed an almost opposite shape from when it began. From being associated with the common man (and then the citizen) to being associated exclusively to the elect; from being associated with working the land and participating in the polis to being associated with a withdrawal from the community and a rejection of the earth; from worshipping the fruits of the earth to denying the appetites associated with it; from living without appeal to a higher authority to subordinating oneself to such an authority; from forming an individual ethos to the surrendering of one’s individuality; from acquiring wisdom through experience to gaining knowledge through instruction, by denying experience and submitting oneself to some text; and so on.
This deformation of askēsis may become perhaps more discernible if this process is reversed and a number of other descriptive devices are incorporated into the analysis. This will be the purpose of this second set of notes. We may begin by picking up where we left off.
2.
Philo of Alexandria’s addition of new meanings to askēsis, especially in the sense of a spiritual exercise, predominated in the early period of the new millennia, following the emergence of Christianity. Taking Philo’s Life of Moses as his model, Gregory of Nyssa (335-394AD) defines an ascetic process as imitatio Christi, in which Jesus Christ is the model for the emergence of a distinctly Christian way of life. Interestingly, askeo and its cognates are not found in New Testament, or in the Apostolic Fathers of the 1st century AD. Except in one instance in Acts of the Apostles, where askeo is used by St Paul in the sense of a man who strives for or trains himself to have a clear conscience before God. It is therefore through adopting Greek models of askeo that Gregory of Nyssa develops his form of asceticism. What he adds to this is Philo’s nascent Jewish spirituality, something absent from the Greek world.
This form of spirituality becomes more distinct in the later work of St Augustine (354-450AD), located within the intersection of time conceived as a straight line and the emergence of individual interiority linked to knowledge of God exterior to the world. This state of affairs is incompatible with the Greek world-view, in which time is somewhat circular, with little individual interiority; and the individual ethos is linked to the community, of which their gods are a manifestation, with no God exterior to the known world. This gradual shift in world view is expressed in Gregory of Nyssa’s distinction between Greek morphosis and Christian metamorphosis, in which the formation of the self, through the intervention of a vertically oriented time, breaks free of the circular realms of the known world, and the individual is transformed, via the discovery of their interiority, into the spiritual realm which hitherto has remained unknown.
3.
Between the work of Philo of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa is that of Plotinus (205-270AD). The work of Plotinus offers us another descriptive device with which to analyse the period prior to Philo: allegory. Initially deployed by Plotinus in order to stem the growing tide of Christianity, and to protect the pagan philosophical tradition issuing from Plato, allegorical revisions of Plato’s texts were performed in order to import the notion of spiritual exercise. But both the notion of spiritual exercise and the allegorical interpretive practice were taken by Plotinus from Philo of Alexandria.
Allegory goes back to the Stoics, where it is used in order to conform mythus to nomoi. This also marks first use of term allegoria, from allos, meaning ‘other’, and agora, meaning ‘to speak in the assembly’, where allegoria means ‘to speak in another assembly’, in secret, private, away from the crowd.
Ironically, considering Plotinus’ later use of allegory in order to defend Plato’s philosophy, Plato himself rejected outright the practice of allegory (although this term was not then in use). At that time a form of ‘allegory’ was being used to subsume mythic notions into the growing rational discourses associated with the sophists, and Plato wanted to carve his own discourse – ‘philosophy’ – in opposition to such practices, but also in opposition to these earlier poetic traditions.
The later Stoic adoption of the allegorical method was, in part, because the vagaries of time had removed them from the presence of their master; all that remained was their master’s texts. Also, in part, because the allegorical method reinforced the non-democratic nature of their philosophy: allegoria, ‘to speak in another assembly’, required an elect few who could understand the master’s texts, the meaning of which remained hidden to the uninitiated and the untrained.
A further irony to the emergence of ‘allegory’ is that its first use, which perhaps has its origins in Pherecydes of Syros (c600BC), and with Theagenes of Rhegium (c525BC), was in order to defend the poetry of Homer against its detractors, by showing that the mythical gods represented natural elements. This method was later used against the poets by subsuming all mythus under certain nomoi, in the same way that Plotinus’ attempts to defend Plato from Christianity required going against Plato, and later resulted in the same allegorical method being used to subsume Platonism under Christianity.
4.
The shift in dominance from an ethos grounded in physus (nature) to nomoi (law) is traceable through the shift from nomos (custom or habit) to nomoi (law). The earlier agrarian-based ethos grounded in askeo and ergon (work) formed the basis of the early polis and civic values engendered therein. In part, this was extended through the early sophist schools. Here there existed a balance between physus and nomos, and the citizenry was educated through a balance of nature and custom or habit. This reflects, in part, the mediation of tragedy in the dissemination of civic virtues in the polis.
The lessons of tragedy are based upon notions of fate. Zeus’ nomos is basically an anti-law: ‘to learn through suffering’. The link with askēsis is present in this conception of fate: where wisdom is the result of practice or acquired through experience. ‘To learn through suffering’ means that the future is beyond calculation and rational arrangement: you cannot know before going through an experience. And there is no way to conform to this wisdom in advance, no a priori knowledge. Emphasis is on action, and to accept the consequences of the action, for good or ill.
The emergence of nomoi, replacing nomos, in the works of Isocrates, Xenophon and Plato is effectively anti-tragic: it eradicates the ambiguity and moral indeterminacy of tragedy. It achieves this by replacing nomos (custom or habit) with an underlying nomoi (law or rule), now said to be found a priori. It operates through narrowing and fixing meaning. The underlying movement and energeia of physus is thus fixed and made insubstantial.
The appeal of an ethos based on the law is that it creates the promise of a safe haven, free from the vagaries of reality. It is a normalising process, eradicates differences, controls mimesis (reducing it to imitatio), and assimilates individuals beneath a fixed model. It exchanges uncertainty for authority, physus for nomoi, which later under the Hellenic schools gives rise to dogma. In the Stoics, this reversal is complete: they do not live according to nature, but rather according to the nomoi of nature, a nomoi determined through certain philosophic discourses and no longer acquired through experience. This prepares the ground for later Christian conceptions of asceticism built upon the denial of physus.
5.
The lesson of Zeus ‘to learn through suffering’ is balanced in tragedy by the maxim of Apollo: ‘to think human thoughts’. This is associated with the practice of sophrosyne, which does not carry much weight in the earlier works of Homer, but finds its first major role within the democratic polis. Apollo’s ‘think human thoughts’ proposes a way to deal with the indeterminacy of fate: through imposition and respect for limits, an ethos which first emerges out of early agrarian practices. Limits are imposed by physis, by the gods (through mythus) and by the polis.
Hybris, in turn, marks the violation of these limits. Hybris in tragedy is designed to restrain heroes, to bring them in line with the polis. Here tragedy is basically concerned with the formation of character, and that character is essentially that of the citizen. The noun form of askēsis first appears at this stage, and within the limits of tragedy and the polis. It cannot be conceived outside the polis, outside the limits set by physis and mythus.
But in the late 5th and early 4th centuries, a growing criticism levelled against democracy was levelled also against sophrosyne. The condemnation of the virtue of sophrosyne, and the respect for limits, culminated in the work of Isocrates, Xenophon and Plato. The rise of philosophy, especially, sees a systematic dismantling of sophrosyne: the limits between humans and nature are transgressed, and nature is replaced by fixed laws (as seen in the shift from physus to nomoi); the limits between humans and gods are transgressed, with humans no longer confining themselves to ‘thinking mortal thoughts’, preferring instead the (assumed) contemplation of immortal thoughts; and the limits between humans and humans (which is the basis of the Athenian democracy) are transgressed and the many are subordinated to the authority of the few, an authority that is now based upon (an assumed) knowledge of immortal things and the fixed laws (nomoi) of nature.
This transgression becomes legitimated under the rubric of dogma in Hellenic and Roman times, and through the later allegories of the likes of Plotinus. Here we can see, running parallel to the deformation of askēsis, the shift from sophrosyne as self-restraint (in tragedy), to its usurpation by enkrateia (in Xenophon and, later, in Plato) as practicing self-control while under the influence of a master; and finally, to ascetic self-denial.
In the process, however, this final self-denial is built upon the denial of the very roots of askēsis.
Bibliography
Hermigild Dressler, The usage of askeo and its cognates in Greek documents to 100AD, 1947
Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization, 1999
Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (3 Vols), 1939
Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, 1909
Loeb Classical Library, various texts
Helen North, Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature, 1966
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