Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GREEK AND ROMAN ASCETIC TENDENCIES Self-discipline and self-denial for religious ends are practices which we do not ordinarily associate with the Greeks and Romans. It is indeed true that the Greeks more than most peoples ancient or modern, long' found satisfaction in the enjoyment of living, unhampered by severe restrictions; self-restraint they prized chiefly for its practical value; in the teachings of Socrates, temperance, preeminent of virtues, had an immediate ethical aim. But the later philosophic schools, in which philosophy became more and more the hand-maid of religion, consciously endeavored to uproot the innate passions and affections, that the soul of man might grow unhampered toward the divine. The firmness of character, the even balance (constantia), which was one of the chief virtues of the Romans, was due to that people's inborn genius for control and orderly rule, and did not have its origin in any religious impulse. Yet at a comparatively early period the Greeks became familiar with certain ascetic practices intended to serve religious ends; and if among the earlier Romans asceticism had no place apart from a few prohibitions of a primitive sort, none the less the western part of the Roman world was destined in due season to prove itself a ready pupil of Greece and the nearer East. It is my purpose in the present paper to sketch the chief lines of the development of ascetic tendencies among the Greeks and Romans from the time when these tendencies first appeared down to the period when an extreme asceticism manifested itself in the Christian church. In this study no sharp distinction will be made between philosophic and religious thought, for apart from the truism that philosophy and religion can never long be separated, it is a fact that classical anti...
Synopsis
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