What was there, in fact, in asceticism that was incompatible wit obedience, or what was there in obedience that was essentially antiascetic? In the first place, I think that ascesis is an exercise of self on self; it is a sort of close combat of the individual with himself in which the authority, presence, and gaze of someone else is, if not impossible, at least unnecessary. Second, asceticism is a progression according to a scale of increasing difficulty. It is, in the strict sense of the term, an exercise,46 an exercise going from the easier to the more difficult, and from the more difficult to what is even more difficult. And what is the criterion of this difficulty? It is the ascetic’s own suffering. The criterion of difficulty is the difficulty that the ascetic actually experiences in moving on to the following stage and doing the next exercise, so that the ascetic with his suffering, with his own refusals, his own disgust, and his own impossibilities, the ascetic at the point when he recognizes his limits, becomes the guide of his own asceticism and it is through his immediate and direct experience of the block and the limit that he feels pushed to overcome it. Third, asceticism is also a form of challenge, or rather it is a form of internal challenge, if one can put it like that, which is also a challenge to the other. The accounts describing the lives of ascetics and Eastern, Egyptian, and Syrian anchorites, are full of these stories passing from ascetic to ascetic, anchorite to anchorite, in which we learn of one making an extremely difficult exercise, to which the other responds with an even more difficult exercise: fasting for a month, fasting for a year, fasting for seven years, fasting for fourteen years.47 So, asceticism has a form of both internal and external challenge. Fourth, asceticism strives for a state that, to be sure, is not a state of perfection, but which is nonetheless a state of tranquility, of appeasement, a state of that apatheia I talked about last week,48 and which is at bottom another kind of asceticism. It is different in the pastoral practice of obedience, but the ascetic’s apatheia is the mastery he exercises over himself, his body, and his own sufferings. He reaches a stage in which he no longer suffers from what he suffers and in which anything he inflicts on his own body no longer troubles him, no longer disturbs him, and provokes no passion or strong sensation. Again we have a number of examples, like the Abbot Jean I spoke about last week,49 who reached a point of asceticism such that a finger could be poked in his eye and he would not move.50 There is something in this that is clearly very close to Buddhist asceticism and monachism.51 All in all, it is a matter of overcoming oneself, of vanquishing the world, the body, matter, or even the devil and his temptations. Hence the importance of temptation is not so much that the ascetic must suppress it, as that he must constantly master it. The ascetic’s ideal is not the absence of temptations but to reach a point of mastery where he is indifferent to temptation. Finally, the fifth feature of asceticism is that either it refers to a refusal of the body, and so of matter, and therefore to that kind of acosmism (acosmisme) that is one of the dimensions of the gnosis and of dualism, or else it refers to the identification of the body with Christ. Being an ascetic, accepting the sufferings, refusing to eat, whipping oneself, and taking the iron to one’s own body, one’s own flesh, means turning one’s own body into the body of Christ. This identification is found in all the forms of asceticism, in Antiquity of course, but also in the Middle Ages. Recall the famous text by Suso,52 in which
he recounts how, in the glacial cold of a winter morning, he flogged himself with a whip with iron hooks that removed lumps of flesh from his body until he reached the point of tears and cried over his own body as if it were the body of Christ.53
You can see a number of typical elements of asceticism here which refer to the athletic contest, or to mastery of oneself and the world, or to refusal of matter and Gnostic acosmism, or to glorifying identification with Christ’s body. This is clearly incompatible with a pastoral structure that (as I said last week) involves permanent obedience, renunciation of the will, and only of the will, and the deployment of the individual’s conduct* in the world.
[...]
Asceticism is a sort of exasperated and reversed obedience that has become egoistic self-mastery. Let’s say that in asceticism there is a specific excess that denies access to an external power.
Michele Foucault, Security, Territory, Population
he recounts how, in the glacial cold of a winter morning, he flogged himself with a whip with iron hooks that removed lumps of flesh from his body until he reached the point of tears and cried over his own body as if it were the body of Christ.53
You can see a number of typical elements of asceticism here which refer to the athletic contest, or to mastery of oneself and the world, or to refusal of matter and Gnostic acosmism, or to glorifying identification with Christ’s body. This is clearly incompatible with a pastoral structure that (as I said last week) involves permanent obedience, renunciation of the will, and only of the will, and the deployment of the individual’s conduct* in the world.
[...]
Asceticism is a sort of exasperated and reversed obedience that has become egoistic self-mastery. Let’s say that in asceticism there is a specific excess that denies access to an external power.
Michele Foucault, Security, Territory, Population
