Asceticism (review)

This volume contains the proceedings of the International Conference on Asceticism convened by Vincent Wimbush and Richard Valantasis at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in April 1993. The conference itself represented the culmination of an eight year long conversation on asceticism held among a group of scholars of early Christian and other late antique religions; one scholar of Eastern religions also participated from the beginning. The Project on Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity, as the group was called, was directed by Vincent Wimbush and met annually in conjunction with the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature. In the course of its existence, the group produced a volume of ascetic texts (Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook) and a collection of studies on asceticism (Discoursive Formations, Ascetic Piety and the Interpretation of Early Christian Literature = Semeia 57–58). As the conversations of the group deepened, however, they generated among some members broader interests of a more interdisciplinary and cross-cultural kind. The International Conference on Asceticism represents the outreach of the group beyond its late antique, Mediterranean expertise to, as the editors of the present volume note, “encourage and model a significant degree of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural discussion that could provide broader, critical perspectives from which many different types of questions about the ascetic in religious life and culture could be persued” (xxvi).

The present volume preserves the organizational structure of the conference. It includes an introduction, forty-two separate entries, a select bibliography, and an index. The Introduction explains the impetus for the conference, its organization and goals. Plenary addresses by Kallistos Ware and Edith Wyshogrod (“Part 1: General Challenges and Reconsiderations”) serve to “set the stage for the dialogue that follows.” The dialogue is represented by twenty-four major papers and eight responses arranged in four broad categories: “Part 2: Origins and Meanings of Asceticism”; “Part 3: Hermeneutics of Asceticism”; “Part 4: Aesthetics of Asceticism”; and “Part 5: Politics of Asceticism.” Each category contains two sets of three papers, each set followed by a critical response. Elizabeth Clark’s valuable summation of the conference’s proceedings (“Part 6: The Discourse Refracted”) completes the major portion of the volume. Six short papers and a panel discussion close out the volume in an Appendix entitled “Ascetica Miscellanea.”

The Introduction frames the conference in the broader history of the western academic study of asceticism. While acknowledging the impressive scope and productivity of the scholarship on asceticism, the editors argue that “we are still without a comprehensive theoretical framework for the comparative study of asceticism” (xxv). The problem inherent in the study of asceticism is traced to the insular nature of academic disciplines which approach asceticism “with a view to the limitations of their own presuppositions, and without the benefit of a broad cross-cultural view” (xxv). The conference was envisioned as “something of a gamble” designed to encourage scholarly conversation across disciplines and cultures to break what the conveners understood as the current impasse in the study of asceticism. The goal was not to establish “the new definition or conceptualization or meaning of asceticism,” but rather “to explode all simple notions about asceticism, including the notion that it has to do simply with the negative and simply with the distant past.” The modality of conversation was envisioned as the conference’s most significant contribution.

Conversation occurs at various levels in the volume. The sheer array of papers approaching asceticism through diverse topics, cultures and methodologies represents well the current state of affairs in the study of asceticism. The conversation is not, however, often apparent in the individual papers themselves, a fact noted by more than one of the respondents who found difficulty in finding a common thread among the papers around which they were to build a response. Nonetheless, the excellent responses serve to deepen the conversation by drawing comparisons, noting differences, and raising serious questions. They are so central to the conversation, in fact, that the editors advise readers to...