An ascetic is "a person who renounces material comforts and leads a life of austere self-discipline, especially as an act of religious devotion" (Yahoo Dictionary). It is to this topic that Nietzsche turns his analysis in his Third Treatise.
Asceticism, most commonly thought of as abasement, is viewed by Nietzsche as "a holy form of excess" and a priest's "best tool of power" (67). It is a life of selfishness rather than selflessness. People that pursue it are actually "thinking…of what is most precisely indispensable to them" and "the truest and most natural conditions of their best existence, of their most beautiful fruitfulness" (76).
Asceticism is viewed as "life against life" (85). A practitioner "treats life as a wrong path that one must finally retrace back to the point where it begins; or as an error that one refutes through deeds" (83).
Richard J. Foster addresses this topic in the book Celebration of Discipline. "Scripture declares consistently that forcefully that creation is good and is to be enjoyed. Asceticism makes an unbiblical definition between a good spiritual world and an evil material world and so finds salvation in paying as little attention as possible to the physical realm of existence" (84). A better pursuit of freedom is found in simplicity, which sets "possessions in proper perspective" and "knows contentment in both abasement and abounding" (84).
WORK CITED
Foster, Richard J. Celebration of Discipline. New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1988.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998.
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