ABSTRACT
Linking asceticism with the Gospel of Matthew sounds strange because New Testament scholars do not normally use asceticism as a descriptive or analytical category. Matthew’s disciplined, focused way of life demands restraint and personal application, but is it ascetical? The stuff of developed Christian asceticism is prayer or meditation, fasting, vigils, celibacy, poverty, monastic or hermetic withdrawal, renunciation of the world, systematic rejection of bodily pleasures, penitential practices, and so forth.1 This list of practices can be partially universalized, according to John Hick:
It is probably a universal religious intuition that “true religion” is to be found within the wide spectrum that begins with commitment, dedication, singleness of mind, purity of heart, and self-discipline in prayer or meditation; that extends into practices of pilgrimage, fasting, vigils, celibacy, poverty and obedience; and that may go on to further and sometimes extreme austerities, which border in the end on pathological excesses…. It [asceticism] embraces the whole realm of spiritual method and discipline, including the solitude, silence, and devotions of monastics, the austerities of shamans, and the severe practices of ascetics seeking special insights and visions.2
