Project Details
Projekt
Primary Forms of Asceticism. Antagonist physical exercises and writing-regulated forms of life as interpretative models of ascetic practice.
Applicant
Dr. Antonio Lucci
Subject Area
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 515365112
The research project starts by analysing a selection of specific historical figures associated with asceticism and then pursues a general theoretical approach that leads to the formulation of a two-sided interpretive model that defines the main characteristics of ascetic practice. The project's fundamental theoretical assumption is that there is a qualitative difference between those ascetic practices that aim to modify subjectivity through bodily exercises and those that aim to modify subjectivity through the embodiment, appropriation, and internalisation of a written apparatus of transmitted rules. The former are practices that express a form of dissidence from one's context of belonging, while the latter tend to form an organised community that recognises itself in the corpus of rules that are followed. The project consists of two intertwined parts: historical and theoretical. The historical part is concerned with the analysis of three "work packages", each of which is represented by two paradigmatic figures of asceticism, as follows: 1. The Greco-Roman asceticism between politics and ethics. Two philosophical currents will be examined as examples of ascetic practices in the Greco-Roman world: Greek Cynicism in the fourth century BCE and Roman Stoicism from 100 BCE to 200 CE. 2. Christian asceticism between body and text. A second historical-theoretical core is formed by Christian asceticism, which is treated based on two paradigmatic figures: Macrina the Younger (c. 327–379 CE) and Basil of Caesarea (330–379 CE). 3. Aspects of asceticism in the modern age: secularisation and aestheticisation. The work “El Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia” (1647) by the Spanish Jesuit and courtier Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658) and the English ornamental hermits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are analysed as paradigmatic examples of the secularised aestheticisation of asceticism. The two ascetic forms explored in each of the work packages address on one hand a form of asceticism based primarily on physical exercises and on the other a form of asceticism conveyed in writing. The latter illustrates how the transmission of a given canon of written rules results in asceticism that consists of the internalisation and incorporation of the proposed model. The analyses of the historical part lead into the theoretical part of the project, which consists of determining the structural and recurrent features of the ascetic practices to design a basic theoretical model that allows the concept of asceticism to be emancipated from being reduced to the meanings used in research of "renunciation" on the one hand and "practice" on the other.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Austria, France, Italy, USA
