Training the mind: The ascetic path to self-transformation in late antique Christian monasticism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Christian asceticism assumes that human beings can profoundly transform themselves over years of systematic training, with divine aid. This contribution joins recent scholarship in stressing the therapeutic and transformative dimensions of asceticism, but argues that it was not solely or primarily through bodily training that asceticism implemented this program. In the Eastern monastic tradition of late antiquity, it was primarily the mind that needed to be transformed and renewed through ascetic practice. The form of asceticism at the center of this study thus involves a disciplined and systematic attempt to purify the mind and train attention, in the service of contemplation.