That's not really how one is supposed to look at a source text though, is it? At least one should be critical as to whom it addresses and what purpose it could serve.
Equally, merely assuming that what it says is false is just as foolish as uncritically assuming that what it says is true. However, in the absence of any reason whatsoever to think that it's false, why not take it at face value?
Whether Paul actually believed what he wrote was the truth or if rhat was what he wants his readers to believe isn't really answered by simply accepting Paul's word for it.
Again, you seem to be countenancing that Paul was not merely wrong but that he was deliberately deceitful. I don't regard that as a feasible hypothesis - unless (yet again) YOU HAVE EVIDENCE.
(And I already mentioned that Luther translates it as a "fee", which, omce again you choose to ignore.)
Why on earth should I care how the word was translated FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO by someone who is notoriously controversial in the field of Pauline interpretation? Scholarship has moved on just a tad since then. Find me a
reason to think that the word
should be translated "fee", rather than just an appeal to a highly partisan authority half a millennium old, and you might have a case. You haven't even bothered to give the chapter and verse where this supposed word "fee" appears.
I'm not going beyond anything: I merely mentioned a fact that isn't contested.
One of us must be living in a fantasy world, then, because I really think I remember contesting it. Again, if the only evidence you can find for your interpretation is a single word from an unspecified text in a five-hundred-year-old translation by a biased theologian in a foreign language, then I think I'm entitled to question the assessment of this interpretation as "a fact that isn't contested" until I see just a little bit more
evidence.
I wonder if you think all scholarship consists of people shouting assertions at each other until someone gets bored, or whether you think it's only theology that doesn't require evidence and reasoning.
Could you give a sort of brief overview of asceticism in Christianity, and recommend major primary and secondary readings on the subject?
That's a bit of a tall order. I can say something very brief at least.
Asceticism was very important to Christianity from a very early stage. Here's a thing I wrote recently about asceticism (and especially sexual asceticism) in early Christianity:
Most Christian writers of the second and third centuries AD did not have a huge amount to say about sexual matters, and what they did say tended to reflect the views of pagan moralists of the time. The status of women in the ancient world meant that sex outside marriage was not a very large concern, since everyone was married. The only alternative to marital sex was adultery, which Christians condemned just as Jews did. So when they discussed sexual matters, Christians of this period usually assumed that they were talking about sex between husbands and wives and did not generally offer different guidelines for different situations. One striking exception to this rule came in the prescription of Callistus, bishop of Rome in the early third century. It seems there was a problem of upper-class Christian women being unwilling to reduce their rank by marrying lower-class Christian men or compromise their faith by marrying pagan men of their own class. But at the same time they did not want to lead lives of chastity. No doubt this was a consequence of the fact that there were simply more Christian women than there were men. Callistus ruled that these women were allowed to sleep with whoever they liked, and they could be considered “married” to their lovers in practice if not in law, thereby keeping their official social status intact. Callistus was known for his fairly liberal views on moral questions; he issued another ruling that Christians who had sinned and been expelled from the church could be allowed back in after a period of penance. His contemporaries Hippolytus and Tertullian bitterly attacked this ruling, in the first round of what would become a very long-running dispute within the church over how strictly its moral code should be enforced.
As a rule, the Christians had a fairly negative attitude towards sex. They generally regarded it as necessary, but to be done for the sake of having children rather than for any other reason. This went for sex in general, including that between husbands and wives. Many Christians seem to have practised complete abstinence; we hear of husbands and wives converting to Christianity and continuing to live together chastely. There seem to have been two main motivations for this sort of behaviour, although they were not clearly distinguished. The first was a belief that sex was, in itself, something to be avoided – not something bad, but at best a necessary evil. The Acts of Thomas, which was written in Syria in the early third century AD, describes the apostle Thomas as interrupting a newly married couple on their wedding night, and saying to them:
...know this, that if you abandon this filthy intercourse you become holy temples, pure and free from afflictions and pains both manifest and hidden, and you will not be girt about with cares for life and for children, the end of which is destruction. But if you get many children, then for their sakes you become robbers and avaricious, people who flay orphans and defraud widows, and by so doing you subject yourselves to the most grievous punishments. For the majority of children become unprofitable... In Schneemelcher, W., ed. New Testament apocrypha Cambridge: Clark 1992 vol. 2 p. 344
Rather improbably, according to the Acts of Thomas, the couple are convinced by the apostle’s words. In the morning, the bride tells her parents:
I have set at naught this man, and this marriage which passes away from before my eyes, is because I am bound in another marriage. And that I have had no intercourse with a short-lived husband, the end of which is remorse and bitterness of soul, is because I am yoked with the true man. In Schneemelcher, W., ed. New Testament apocrypha Cambridge: Clark 1992 vol. 2 p. 344
This is the second reason why sex was to be avoided. Christians were supposed to be focused not on the material world around them but on the spiritual world. Their primary allegiance was not to any family member or other human being, but to Christ alone. Abstinence from sex was a way of both showing this allegiance and strengthening it, and it formed part of a more generally ascetic lifestyle that many Christians followed. They might avoid eating meat and drinking alcohol, wear only simple clothes, and deprive themselves of sleep. We hear of the famous third-century Alexandrian theologian Origen, for example, sleeping on the floor. Many thought it a good idea to minimise contact of any kind between the sexes. Some Christian groups – known as the “encratites” or “abstainers” – took this further and dedicated themselves to complete abstinence. They rejected marriage altogether and lived extremely ascetic lifestyles. Such a lifestyle seems to have been especially common to the east, in the Syriac-speaking churches. It is possible that here, at least in some churches, a vow of celibacy was mandatory for all Christians. Some of these ascetic groups seem to have developed particular justifications for their behaviour. For some, eating and sex alike were closely associated with the sin of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3; they sinned when they ate the forbidden fruit, and upon being cast out of Eden, they slept together and had children. The encratites therefore avoided both eating and sex as far as they could. And some, at least, seem to have been associated with gnosticism. The gnostics believed that the physical world was fundamentally evil; it was therefore wise to live a life as free from matter as was humanly possible and force the body to submit to the soul. Other encratites were associated with Montanism, whose prophecies seem to have been concerned mostly with moral injunctions; they not only tried to live ascetic lifestyles but expelled those who failed to live up to their exacting standards.
After the fourth century or thereabouts, asceticism became less of an ideal for the ordinary Christian - at least in the west - but it remained important as a demonstration of God's power. With the ending of the age of martyrs, divine power could no longer be seen in the church in martyrs and confessors, and it came to be seen in extreme ascetics instead. This was especially the case in Syria, where the "stylites" or pillar saints became very popular. People came from miles around to look at the saints standing on their pillars, and they believed that God's power was manifested in their emaciated bodies. Meanwhile, the "desert fathers", mainly in Egypt, provided a similar ideal of extreme asceticism. A lot of this revolved around food and some of the accounts make it sound like they were all basically anorexic (although of course it would probably be anachronistic to apply that category to ancient characters). Here's an extract from something I wrote on this subject with particular reference to Evagrius Ponticus:
Extremely frugal diets were the norm among monks in fourth-century Egypt, where it was believed that indulgence of the flesh would give demons a foothold to tempt the mind. Most monks ate only once a day, and their diet was largely restricted to bread, oil, and water; fish was available but many were vegetarians. One source gives a vivid picture of a group of monks eating together, each one trying to eat as little as possible but without drawing attention to the fact:
Some of them, after helping themselves to bread, or olives, or whatever else was set before them, raised their hand to their mouth only once or twice, and having tasted once from each dish, were satisfied with such food. Others, chewing their bread slowly and abstaining from everything else without trying to dissemble, practised endurance in this manner. Others ate only three spoonfuls of soup and refused any other food. Historia monachorum in Aeygpto 3.2, in Russell, N., ed. (1980) The lives of the desert fathers Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
The behaviour is very reminiscent of that of people diagnosed with anorexia today, although the monks’ aim was not to look thin but to discipline the body and train the mind not to be distracted by physical desires.
Evagrius Ponticus was noted for following a particularly severe dietary regime even by these standards. According to Palladius, Evagrius ate even less than most monks in Egypt; he consumed only a pound of bread and a pint of oil in the space of three months while living at Kellia, and boasted that he never ate vegetables or fruit of any kind. Eventually he became ill, and had to subsist instead on porridge and herbs, which kept him going for two years until his death. Evagrius himself reports the following saying by the monk Macarius, his own mentor, which he presents as edifying advice:
Take courage, my child! For all of twenty years I have not taken my fill either of bread or water or sleep. I ate my bread by weight, drank water by measure, and I have snatched some little portion of sleep by leaning against the wall. Praktikos 94 M 40 1249 G&G 698 S 113
And Evagrius advises his readers:
Fasting circumscribes immoderation in foods; abstinence combined with prayer eliminates the licentiousness of fornication. Institutio ad monachos 1.1 M 79 1236 S 218
It's important to remember that in orthodox Christianity, such behaviour has never been about denigrating or punishing the body, but rather about training it. It is sometimes assumed that an ascetic lifestyle represents a hatred of physical things or the body or a belief that they are unimportant. It can sometimes do that, as in some forms of gnosticism, where we are told that because the gnostics believed material things to be intrinsically evil, they would eat as little as possible to avoid having anything to do with material things. We see the same thing in the Cathars, who not only practised asceticism but avoided having children and sometimes just killed themselves to get away from it all. In orthodox Christianity, however, the marginally less extreme ascetic feats were intended to discipline and train the body and spirit equally. Matthew 24:42-44 instructs its readers to keep awake and watch for the coming of the Lord, and Christian ascetics regarded themselves as following this instruction (going without sleep has also been an important element of Christian asceticism - it explains the popularity in antiquity of the name "Gregory", which means "wakeful").
I think that in later centuries the ascetic ideal remained an
ideal, as it was in the age of the desert fathers, with the idea that only certain elements of Christian society (i.e. monks and a few others) were called to it. I suppose that idea was that as long as
someone was being ascetic somewhere, that was what was important, whether or not
you personally were being ascetic. I'm not sure I can come up with any more details than that off-hand.
As for primary and secondary literature, I'm not sure. Anything involving the desert fathers is a good place to start and Evagrius Ponticus is the best of all. Most of his works are now available in good translations - which did not yet exist when I first studied him - so there's no excuse not to have a look.
Well I mean a "thing" in the way that Catholics consider Grace a "Thing" (I think in the last thread you referred it in the Theologically technical term as "Stuff"), and all christians consider a soul a "thing." While obviously it possesses no physical properties, it is at least a "thing" in that it exists, rather then just being a term to collectively identify certain action.
I'm not sure quite how Catholics officially regard grace. Certainly they
speak about it as a thing, or possibly as stuff, and have done since the Middle Ages, but how literally this hypostasising language is meant to be taken, I'm not sure. In the case of the soul it's equally problematic. I don't think all Christians regard it as a "thing" at all; in scholastic theology, at least, it is not substantial, being merely the form of the body (although at the same time it is somehow a form which can exist without its matter, a notion that frankly does violence to Aristotelianism). And of course there are plenty of Christians who deny that any soul exists, in the sense of a "thing" of any kind beyond the processes of the body.
But even if one doesn't take language of grace and the soul as "things" literally, one can still use or make sense of such language. Even the most thorough-going materialist can talk about the soul in some sense. So the fact that Christians have often spoken of "sin" as if it were things/stuff doesn't, in itself, mean that this language should be taken literally. I remember reading plenty of modern theology which argues that traditional language of demons and devils can be taken seriously without being taken literally, in the sense that to a person suffering from some psychological pressure, ordinary objects or situations or institutions or whatever can be considered objective oppressors to the extent that they become really, if not literally, demonic. In the case of sin we could say that the weight of guilt upon the person who has committed the sins is real, in the moral sense that they are culpable for committing the sins, and perhaps in the psychological sense that they feel a sense of guilt for doing so and it occupies their mind. So one could make sense, in that way, of talk of the weight of sin oppressing a person without having to assume that sin is literally some kind of stuff or thing that does so.