Asceticism

As a widespread phenomenon, asceticism was historically significant only within the religious realm. Self-discipline and self-infliction of pain, as voluntary practices of piety, primarily functioned as part of a predetermined contract with the Godhead in the sense of a religious do ut (principle of reciprocity) that anticipated a reward in this and the other world. Asceticism was therefore always commonly seen as a means to an end, although it may have been, for those with corresponding psychosomatic dispositions, a goal in itself. Remarkably, no other religion besides Christianity so positively values suffering and pain. This value begins with voluntary participation in the Passion of the religious leader, attains a decided accent with Paul, the martyrs, and monasticism, and reaches its high point in the era between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. And Christianity alone uses, as its most important symbol, a physical body that has been pierced with nails to an instrument of torture and left there to die. In the third chapter of her major work, Il dialogo, Catherine of Siena emphasizes the foundations of Catholic asceticism: "For God, who is infinite, wants infinite love—and infinite suffering."

With the advent of Protestantism and, above all, through the Catholic Church's own reception of the Enlightenment, such roads to the heavenly realm became obsolete. Behind this change was also a fundamental transformation of the historical perspective on the body, which manifested itself in law with the elimination of torture and capital punishment. From a social psychology perspective, asceticism is defined as an elite organization of conduct of life that critically rejects the general cultural values of the "masses"; psychologically, asceticism is seen as a socially accepted and rewarded overcompensation for guilt feelings, as in masochism and the death instinct. In the Western world of the early twenty-first century, traditional Christian asceticism, with very few exceptions, no longer exists; asceticism only exists in purely personal, secularized, analogous forms, which inspire more criticism than admiration.