Teaching ascesis: Recovering the neglected center of early Christian pedagogy

John Chrysostom

John Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed preacher whose hundreds of extant sermons remain some of the most intriguing and inspiring texts of the post-Nicene period, was himself a committed ascetic. Even after his ordination and re-engagement in public ministry following a period of intense asceticism that had left him nearly dead, Chrysostom continued to view himself as “a monk at heart” (Kelly, 1995: 35). Thus, in his own commitment to ascetical practices amidst a relentlessly busy and politically cutthroat world not entirely unlike our own, Chrysostom is able to speak with authority about how the ascetical life can be pursued by all Christians.

For our purposes, the most interesting of Chrysostom’s homilies is his On Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children. In this lengthy discourse, Chrysostom sets out a clear link between pedagogy and asceticism. For Chrysostom, the goal of education is to produce an “athlete for Christ” (Vain. 19; Laistner, 1951: 95). This metaphor suggests that what Chrysostom is after is a program of education that will “exercise” the soul in the habits and practices of virtue through careful “discipline” (Vain. 18–19; Laistner, 1951: 95). Christou (2018: 109) picks up on this thread of Chrysostom’s approach to education, noting that, “If we use muscular and corporeal terms to unpack this image, children in their formative years who have yet to receive education are tender and soft, whereas educated and mature individuals are hard and strong.” For Christou (2018: 109), this training and discipline is primarily applied to the mind and its habits, but it seems the more literal, embodied applications of this image, so prominent throughout the homily, have dropped from Christou’s analysis apart from passing references to education as encompassing the training of mind, soul, and body. We must, however, recover this central aspect of Chrysostom’s understanding of how teachers are to train an “athlete for Christ” by taking seriously the ascetical presuppositions that inform Chrysostom’s entire approach to virtue and faith formation. Indeed, as Bullis (2018: 369) summarizes a central insight of the pedagogical approach of the church fathers, “our bodies are a physical witness to our soul’s education,” for our students’ “senses and the Holy Spirit are partners in Christian education.”

In the central section of the homily, Chrysostom compares the soul of a student to a walled city and identifies the various bodily senses as the “gates” by which various formative “citizens” transit in and out of the city. In his survey of the five gates which he calls teachers to carefully guard, Chrysostom emphasizes bodily asceticism in his discussion of two of the five gates. First, with respect to the gate of the sense of smell, Chrysostom (Vain. 54; Laistner, 1951: 110) argues that teachers should guard students from “fragrant scents and herbs”; thus, he tells teachers, “Let no one bring [a student] perfume; for, as soon as it penetrates to the brain, the whole body is relaxed. Thereby pleasures are fanned into flame and great schemes for their attainment. So bar this gate, for its function is to breathe the air, not to receive sweet odors.” Here, Chrysostom clearly points to ascetical training—in this case, abstention from perfume and other such “sweet odors”—as a fundamental part of a child’s education. Recognizing that some people even in his own day might find this a stretch, Chrysostom provides an explanation of his reasoning: sweet scents relax the body, cultivating a desire for further bodily pleasures that will then need to be met (see further Harvey, 2006: 158–62). This is not a tangential problem for Chrysostom; rather, it connects directly to his central concern in the homily, which is that young people do not grow up, as they naturally would without an explicitly counter-formational program of education, to be vainglorious pursuers of earthly, material pleasures, distracted from the pursuit of good works and those heavenly things which are the ultimate telos of believers in Christ (see Vain. 13–18; Laistner, 1951: 91–95).

Likewise, with respect to the gate of touch, Chrysostom (Vain. 63; Laistner, 1951: 112) insists, “Let us not allow it [that is, the skin] to have any truck with soft raiment or bodies. Let us make it austere. We are raising an athlete, let us concentrate our thought on that. And so let him not use soft couches or raiment.” Though he does not spell out his reasoning in this instance, his logic is undoubtedly like his reasoning regarding the gate of the sense of smell: the feel of comfortable clothing or furniture relaxes the body, acclimating it to comfort and ease of living, and thereby disposes the student to continue a life that pursues such things. Thus, what is necessary for growth in faith and virtue is for there to be a “conscientious training of the body through the disciplined reordering of sensory experience” (Harvey, 2006: 160).

Indeed, if our natural state is to become vainglorious hedonists in constant pursuit of bodily pleasures, Chrysostom identifies the trajectory of the Christian life to lie in precisely the opposite direction. Rather, he insists, in line with the ascetical tradition stretching back to the Apostle Paul and even Christ himself, the pursuit of God is characterized by an active, intentional willingness to deny oneself the desires of the body to better focus on God and on heavenly things. Thus, Chrysostom (Vain. 79; Laistner, 1951: 118) prescribes fasting as a means of growing in virtuous, sober conduct, encouraging teachers to help students “learn to fast” on Wednesdays and Fridays, the church’s traditional days of fasting. Besides this, Chrysostom (Vain. 80; Laistner, 1951: 119) identifies persistent prayer as a further way of training the soul in virtue: “Let the boy be trained to pray with much contrition and to keep vigils as much as he is able, and let the stamp of a saintly man be impressed on the boy in every way.” Anticipating possible objections, Chrysostom insists that the Bible is full of examples of children who were devoted to God in prayer, and so there is no reason that the youths of his day should be incapable of the same. This point notwithstanding, it is notable that Chrysostom’s discussion of training in asceticism focuses on avoiding negative inputs more than on actively pursuing positive ones. Thus, while Chrysostom correctly points us to the fact that an education that aims at formation in faith and virtue will of necessity include training in the renunciative aspects of asceticism, lest our teaching contribute to students’ natural bents toward bodily pleasure and comfort, we will need to further fill out our understanding of the pedagogical implications of a truly Christian asceticism with a brief study of Chrysostom’s younger contemporary, Basil of Caesarea.

Basil of Caesarea

Basil of Caesarea, the famous Cappadocian bishop and theologian of the post-Nicene period, was very similar to John Chrysostom in that he too remained committed to an ascetical way of life even while serving as a leader of the church. As “a model ascetic bishop” (Hildebrand, 2018: 9), a category which rose in prominence and influence during this period (Rapp, 2005), Basil also saw asceticism as an integral part of the training in virtue and the life of faith that was to be a part of every Christian’s formation. Basil applies this insight to the specific domain of the education of young people in his address To Young Men, to which we now turn.

Basil’s primary concern in this work is to defend the use of pagan literature in the education of Christian youths, insofar as its right and careful use in the curriculum can invite students to a life of virtue and provide them with examples of virtuous deeds (See “Basil as exemplar for reading pagan texts” in this issue). In the last major section of the work, Basil outlines his vision for “a concentrated program of training” in virtue (Holder, 1992: 407), drawing deeply on athletic imagery to underscore the hard work involved in developing the habits of virtue (To Young Men 8; Deferrari, 1934: 411). As Basil (To Young Men 9; Deferrari, 1934: 417, 419) goes on to explain, “purification of the soul” involves “scorning the pleasures that arise through the senses, in not feasting the eyes on silly exhibitions of jugglers or on the sight of bodies which gives the spur to licentious songs to enter through the ears and drench your souls.” As with Chrysostom, Basil connects our embodied nature with the realization that those things that we take in through our senses can have a profound formative impact on what we go on to desire and pursue, here linking asceticism with the distinctively Christian aim of the “purification of the soul.” Basil goes on to give several examples from Greek literature that demonstrate how a failure to cultivate an ascetical approach to the body and the world leads to ruin; he takes the biblical teaching on this subject to be so self-evident that he can merely suggest in an aside that “we Christians shall doubtless learn all these things more thoroughly in our own literature” (To Young Men 10; Deferrari, 1934: 429, 431). Other Christian writers of the period indeed produced voluminous writings on biblical characters whose lives served to illustrate the ethics demanded of followers of Christ, with Ambrose’s treatises on the Old Testament patriarchs being just one well-known example (Colish, 2005).

Still, Basil does not stop at merely providing examples from classical literature or the Bible that demonstrate the connection between asceticism and Christian virtue; for Basil, the role of the teacher must include actively training students in what Holder (1992: 408) calls “a moderate asceticism” that will steer young people away from those vices “to which Basil thought his adolescent hearers would be most susceptible: gluttony, vanity of dress or personal appearance, revelry, desire for wealth, and ambition for flattery.” To this end, Basil (To Young Men 9; Deferrari, 1934: 421) both calls on young people to avoid “cultivating the pleasures associated with the senses of touch and taste” and to actively engage in practices whereby they can “chastise the body and hold it in check.” Basil does not provide much in the way of specific examples to flesh out this point, but we can infer from his other writings that he doubtless had in mind various forms of renunciation that would enable one to become more mindful of God (Hildebrand, 2018: 37). For instance, to combat the vice of gluttony, the church has traditionally prescribed the practice of fasting, and so we can easily imagine Basil insisting on moderation or abstention from certain foods at certain times as a way of training students not to cultivate the pleasures of taste, instead cultivating their ability to gain the kind of self-control that is germane to growing communion with God.

Lest Basil’s audience doubt the seriousness with which he advocates for training young people in the way of asceticism, Basil (To Young Men 10; Deferrari, 1934: 433) exhorts students to “gaze towards that long and ageless eternity whose limit the mind can in no wise grasp any more than it can conceive an end for the immortal soul,” and therefore he tells them, “it is for this eternity that I would exhort you to acquire travel-supplies, leaving no stone unturned, as the proverb has it, wherever any benefit towards that end is likely to accrue to you.” Again, as with Chrysostom, Basil connects the present pursuit of virtue and asceticism with the ultimate end of the Christian life. Thus, as Holder (1992: 409) summarizes, the implication is that students need to seize the present opportunity “to amass a supply of virtue that will sustain them through their long journey to eternity.” Here we see a clear statement of Basil’s approach to asceticism that goes beyond abstaining from negative behaviors to one that encompasses the pursuit of positive actions, habits, and virtues. Basil is after nothing less than a process of transformation along the lines of that suggested by Paul: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2 NRSV).

While it may be tempting to think that this process is best reserved for older, more mature believers, Basil nevertheless sees a youth’s education as a foundational “preliminary training” (To Young Men 2; Deferrari, 1934: 383). Basil’s underlying assumption is, of course, fundamentally Aristotelian: we become people of virtue by practicing those virtues until they become habits. In Aristotle’s words, becoming virtuous is akin to becoming an artist; “we acquire [virtues] by first having actually practiced them, just as we do the arts” (Nicomachean Ethics 2.1.4; Rackham, 1934: 73). In this way, then, education provides a means of exercising the spiritual and moral muscles of young people even before they can fully grasp the philosophy or theology that undergirds such a curriculum of virtue. For Basil, therefore, inculcating asceticism in young people as a part of their education is part and parcel of his broader understanding of how spiritual formation and growth in virtue happens. It is not enough to simply turn away from the bad; students must also intentionally seek the good, beautiful, and true.

Asceticism in modern Christian classrooms

Having seen that both John Chrysostom and Basil of Caesarea identify asceticism as a significant component of an education that works toward forming young people in faith and virtue, we can now briefly consider some of the ways that this insight could inform current approaches to Christian teaching and learning. It is striking, after having sat with the weight of the church fathers’ depth of understanding of the need for training young people in asceticism, to find that even the best contemporary works on Christian education (or, for that matter, literature on education more generally) have little or nothing to say about this topic. Thus, in this concluding section I wish to go beyond proposals that merely see teaching as “an ascetic practice of the self” (De Marzio, 2007: 350) or view asceticism as an “educational metaphor” (O’Brien, 2004: 357) to consider how Christian educators today might take seriously the church fathers’ (and, indeed, the Scriptures’) injunction to inculcate actual practices of asceticism in the lives of young people. As these suggestions will inevitably fall far short of engaging students with the kind of holistic, totalizing approach to asceticism desired by the church fathers, we can pray that, as with all our efforts at spiritual formation, our students’ engagement with these practices even on a more limited scale can cultivate curiosity and plant seeds that may reap further growth later in life.

Basil gives us an accessible place to start developing such an approach. Basil understood that expanding students’ imaginations through stories and examples from classical antiquity and the Bible was a foundational step in training young people in faith and virtue. In the same way, we need to provide our students with examples of those Christians who have gone before us and have chosen to reject materialism, consumerism, and comfort as their driving vision of the good life in favor of their pursuit of Christ. An approach to asceticism in modern Christian classrooms, therefore, must begin by providing students with a biblical, theological, and historical foundation for understanding the importance of asceticism in the Christian life and how it can contribute to a counter-cultural, kingdom-minded form of true human flourishing.

Basil, however, was not content to leave the teacher’s role at merely providing inspiring examples or words of exhortation; rather, as we saw above, Basil considered a key part of the educational process to be actively training students in virtue. Similarly, Smith (2018: 135) reminds us, “Practices nurture and sustain an imagination that might in turn help to carry further practice.” Having demonstrated to our students the importance of asceticism and provided examples of what the ascetical life looks like in the lives of real people, how then could we introduce, in age-appropriate ways genuinely connected to the broader learning objectives of our classes, opportunities for students to grow their spiritual muscles in asceticism? As is embedded in this question, there can be no “one size fits all” approach to how to go about this task, as the age and spiritual development levels of the learners, the instructor’s own aptitudes and inclinations, and the school’s denominational or theological contexts will all undoubtedly play a role in how such an approach must be crafted. While some may therefore be tempted to throw up their hands and not even attempt to engage their students with ascetical practices, we can take confidence in the fact that spiritual formation—and therefore the practices of asceticism—is for everyone. Regardless of a student’s (or teacher’s) place on their individual spiritual journey, what church they attend, or what grade they are in, engaging in the shared practices of the historic Christian faith—which, again, would include those of asceticism—has the potential to direct students’ heads, hearts, and hands to Christ, trusting that the Holy Spirit will meet them in the process.

What, then, might some specific applications of practicing asceticism in modern Christian classrooms look like? The following examples are not meant to be prescriptive, much less comprehensive. Rather, they are intended to stimulate further reflection on how Christian teaching and learning might incorporate ascetical practices that would serve as “invitations to indwell the world in particular ways, to live within the long shadow of particular worldviews and moral visions” (Smith, 2018: 41), in this case a life that is characterized by the ascetical virtues of self-control and self-denial for the sake of deeper intimacy with God.

The historic church has given us one such ready-made opportunity to practice asceticism with the season of Lent. If, with Smith (2018: 103), we envision the classroom as a place where it is possible to engage in “shared practices” of Christian community, it becomes possible to imagine how the liturgical year can serve as a way of ordering time according to the story of Christ and the church rather than the rhythms of the world or the academic calendar. As such, in the high school course I teach on Church and Medieval History, my students and I commit not just to learning about how the development of the church calendar impacted the religious lives of Christians across the centuries, but to “trying on” this practice for ourselves and seeing how it “fits” in our own lives. After teaching a lesson on the origins and development of the Lenten season, I have each student pick something they would like to give up for Lent (sweets, video games, and TikTok usually top the list), as well as a spiritual practice they would like to take on during Lent (some form of regular prayer or Bible study). For nearly all of my students, even though many of them come from Christian families, this is their first time engaging with the season of Lent, and the reflections they share with me at the end of Lent highlight what a meaningful experience it was for many of them. The following excerpts were written by students in spring 2020 and are used with their permission. Sometimes, the student “fails” in Lent and that becomes the basis for an increased awareness of needing God’s grace:

My Lent experience taught me a lot about my self-control, or lack thereof. Cutting out sweets was a lot harder than I anticipated, and honestly on hard days, I failed. Some days I felt like I just needed a cookie or something sweet to cheer me up, and while that isn’t true, in the moment it did help. I also didn’t read my devotion every day like I wanted to, sometimes I simply forgot, or sometimes I used the excuse that I didn’t have time. Either way, through this journey I realized I am not capable of even small things like not eating sweets or remembering to do my daily devotions. However, this Easter I was reminded that my weakness, mistakes, and mess is made perfect in God’s overwhelming grace and power. I think my biggest takeaway from all of this is that I cannot do anything on my own, but I am able to through God’s power in me and my faith in him.

Other students, though, recognized that their ascetical muscles were in fact stronger than they had anticipated. One student, unknowingly echoing Chrysostom’s insistence on guarding the sensory “gates” into the soul, made the following reflection:

The thing I wanted to give up in my life during Lent was music. And I decided not to cut it out completely but to focus on cutting down the hours I listen to music by at least half. On average, before Lent, I listened to at least 4 hours of music in a day, now I have cut it down to at least an hour. I am proud of this: although it has been difficult, it has given me more of an ability to hear God rather than the artist singing a song. It’s also given me a chance to listen to my own thoughts rather than the lyrics thinking and speaking for me. I’ve been really happy with my progress and the opportunities it has brought with it with both God and myself. I’ve also been able to communicate and hang out with my family more rather than isolating myself.

While not every student reflection reached the level of depth and self-examination that I hoped for, I do trust that introducing the idea of Lent and its related disciplines of self-control, self-denial, and increased prayerfulness will plant seeds that will bear fruit later in their lives.

Turning to another example, we will discover that such programs for training in ascetical practices need not be restricted to classes on the Bible or theology. As I have detailed elsewhere (Hughes, 2022: 81, 89), one former colleague used a unit on George Orwell’s book Animal Farm in her eighth-grade English class as a springboard into conversations about the possible harmful effects of propaganda, advertising, and social media on our understanding of ourselves and our world. As a real-life extension of what they were learning in class, she then joined her students on a two-week social media fast, aiming to show them how exercising more self-control in this area of their lives might lead to improvements in their social, emotional, and spiritual health. The willingness of the teacher to go on this ascetical journey with her students underscored the truth that she, like her students, was herself in the process of being spiritually formed, helping her students better recognize the Christian life as something which one grows in over the course of a lifetime.

Even beyond examples related to fasts of various kinds, Christian teachers can create learning experiences that are designed around pushing students out of their attachment to creature comforts in order to create space for deep encounters with God and one another. As I have also described further elsewhere (Hughes, 2022: 99), I have been a part of a very successful senior retreat that involves several days and nights in which students are disconnected from their devices, push their bodies on hikes and white-water rafting trips, and sleep in cabins without air-conditioning in the blazing summer heat of the American South. Students are invited into new rhythms of worship and prayer, including an optional observance of the Morning Office at sunrise. My observation from the several years that I have participated on this retreat is that it is precisely these elements of physical discomfort that have led to students having more authentic conversations with one another and more meaningful time with God. In their denial of things that they have otherwise come to depend upon, they are able to experience the surprising truth that the hard work of ascetical training can lead to greater joy and contentment. For most students, this retreat is in fact the highlight of their entire senior year, and some manage to incorporate some of the rhythms learned on the retreat into their lives upon their return.

To reiterate, no one such example is going to transform a student into an ascetic who will withdraw his college enrollment to take a monastic vow. But a series of such instances of practicing the ascetical life, taken over a student’s entire time in a classroom or at a school committed to such training, does have the potential to grow their ascetical muscles in ways that might, we pray, form them more into Christ’s likeness over the course of their lifetimes. Furthermore, reflecting at an institutional level, it is clear that no one teacher is going to be able to turn their school overnight into Bonhoeffer’s Finkenwalde, much less any kind of actual monastery. Nevertheless, even a few colleagues committed to such an approach to student formation could begin gradually and creatively steering their institutions along ancient paths.