ESSAY

Christianity: asceticism, world-denying, world-affirming, and doctrine of original sin

Christianity: asceticism, world-denying, world-affirming, and doctrine of original sin

Christian asceticism in the first three centuries after the crucifixion included varieties of dietary, sexual, and social abstinence, which were practiced to purify the soul and facilitate the contemplation of God, and which laid the foundations for monasticism. Weber argues that Christian asceticism developed a novel “this worldly” form during the sixteenth-century Reformation, as opposed to “other worldly” types of religious asceticism that aimed toward the transcendence of the material world. This-worldly asceticism differed by aiming not just at the living of a morally exemplary ...