107 - Practice Makes Perfect: Christian Asceticism

Hi Peter
You still have a sense of humour . Ascerticism at Christmas mmm. But I do hope that Santa puts one marshmellow in my Christmas sock for who knows whether I will be here next year to have two. By that time my desire for marshmellows may have diminished and the pleasere of eating two would not outweight the pleasure of eating one this Christmas.

Roman

Hi Peter, I would suggest as additions to your bibliography these two classics: Hadot's _Philosophy as a Way of Life_ and Brown's _The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity_. My apologies if you have cited these in one of your earlier podcasts; I got up to the later Plato ones and have skipped ahead temporarily to the Christianity ones, but plan to go back to cover the missed ground.

Keep up the great work!

Nick

Dear Peter:

I'm enjoying your podcasts very much, which are helping to fill the many gaps in my knowledge of the history of philosophy. (I'm not listening to them in order, but am skipping around quite a bit.) 

I hope this doesn't come across as my obnoxiously pointing out of a gap in your history of philosophy without any gaps: it's certainly not meant that way. I simply want to recommend an early Christian work (not as containing the truth, but as being representative of asceticism in the realm of sex), if you weren't aware of it. I sometimes teach a course on ancient Greek and early Christian conceptions of love (especially eros), and I begin with the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Plato's Symposium is the centerpiece, and I end with St. Paul's 1 Corinthians 7 and Methodius' Symposium (or On Virginity). It's this last work I wanted to bring to your attention, if you weren't aware of it. Methodius of Olympus (died early 4th c.) wrote a work modelled on Plato's Symposium, but instead of a group of men discussing eros, it's a group of virgins (brides of Christ) discussing virginity (and debating its value in contast to a married life). It's quite extreme (like Jerome's Letter 22), and my students (many of whom are Christian, as I teach at a Catholic University) find it quite shocking, not to say disturbing. Anyway, I think it's an interesting ascetic work, and it counts as philosophical in the way you stipulate that as applied to religious figures. (Of course, if you  know this work, please disregard the above--except for the opening sentence.)

Thanks, and best wishes,

Robert 
 

The marshmallow test has fallen on hard times since this episode came out. It turns out your ability to not eat a marshmallow as a child doesn't really mean much. There is a slight correlation between not eating the marshmallow and academic performance, but this disappears if you control for factors relating to home environment. Maybe the rich kids have marshmallows at home, maybe the kids with shaky family lives are less likely to trust the adult running the test, maybe the poor kids are used to living hand to mouth and aren't concerned with theoretical future marshmallows. Anyways, will doesn't really enter into it. If you want to be successful, have supportive parents. Preferably rich ones. I wonder if the Desert Father's would have enjoyed their poverty so much if they had to work minimum wage jobs all day instead of praying while people fetched them food?

Just plowing through this excellent series and couldn't help but chuckle when you guestimated that you'd be discussing Nietszche a few hundred episodes from here (ep. 107). As it turns out, Ep. 408 is the Huguenots so looks like there were more gaps than anticipated that needed to be filled. Keep it up!