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The Hellenic Origins Of Christian Asceticism (1916)
The Hellenic Origins Of Christian Asceticism - 1916 Author:Joseph Ward Swain 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: CHAPTER III Asceticism In Plato The preceding chapters of this essay have been devoted to a study of the ascetic features of the religion of early Greece. ... more »We have found numerous interdictions of the most elementary sort, greatly resembling the taboos found among all primitive peoples; we have seen that any approach of such interdicted things to a person polluted that person; he who would remain pure had to keep away from them. It has also been seen that a person polluted in this way had to undergo purifications which were sometimes of a most stringent sort, demanding acts of veritable asceticism. An unusual degree of purity was demanded before important religious acts, the attainment of which required, at times, fasting and continence. It has been seen, too, that back of practices was a belief in evil spirits, which were supposed to reside in the tabooed things, and which attached themselves to a person's body whenever they got a chance, polluting it and thus making it impossible for that person to approach sacred things'; back of the whole thing, therefore, was a division of the world, or at least of the spiritual world, into two parts, one good and the other bad, one fas and the other nefas, and the belief that these two worlds, or two orders of spirits were so radically heterogeneous that they could not even approach one another. As to the why and the wherefore of all this, these primitive peoples did not ask; persons in their intellectual stage seem to take it pretty much for granted. During the seventh and sixth centuries, however, a new religious movement came over Greece, which was marked by the appearance of new cults, and which showed a great advance in the religious development of Greece. One example of these new cults is found in Orphism. The followers of this ...« less