It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to...

In Nietzsche’s usage, the word ‘Christianity’ does not even refer primarily to the religion; using it like a code word, he is thinking more of a particular religio-metaphysically influenced disposition, an ascetically (in the penitent...

In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road totheological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of God and the truth of...

The ascetic remembrance of death is opposed to akedia, to anxiety, to depression, and becomes a powerful reminder of eternity, its joyful nostalgia.

contrary to nature” is a dynamic destruction of death and a triumph for the life of the person.

Does biblical psychology, then, merely ask us to value good things a little less? Does the Bible seek a reduction of guilt by an overall deflation of the currency of moral ideals, so we can...

This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world’s disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with...

It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men’s badness, which is impossible.

Ah Buddha, you boastful charlatan. You may have learned nothing after 6 years of suffering, but then what of 7 years? What of 17? What might you have learned from a lifetime of pain? […]...

As for karma itself, it is apparently only that which binds “jiva” (sentience, life, spirit, etc.) with “ajiva” (the lifeless, material aspect of this world) – perhaps not unlike that which science seeks to bind...

[Nietzsche’s] questions – transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? – would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his...

The de-spiritualization of asceticisms is probably the event in the current intellectual history of mankind that is the most comprehensive and, because of its large scale, the hardest to perceive, yet at once the most...

Here we may observe fully developed the doctrine of passing away in God (fanā) which from Abū Yazīd’s time onwards assumes a central position in the structure of Sufi theory. It was after all not...

The stakes in this game are not low. Our enterprise is no less than the introduction of an alternative language, and with the language an altered perspective, for a group of phenomena that tradition tended...