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"ascetic" is applied to conduct originating on diverse psychological
levels, which I might as well begin by distinguishing from one another.

1. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted
with too much ease.

2. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity, and
non-pampering of the body generally, may be fruits of the love of
purity, shocked by whatever savors of the sensual.

3. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they may appeal to the
subject in the light of sacrifices which he is happy in making to the
Deity whom he acknowledges.

4. Again, ascetic mortifications and torments may be due to
pessimistic feelings about the self, combined with theological beliefs
concerning expiation. The devotee may feel that he is buying himself
free, or escaping worse sufferings hereafter, by doing penance now.

5. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may be entered on
irrationally, by a sort of obsession or fixed idea which comes as a
challenge and must be worked off, because only thus does the subject
get his interior consciousness feeling right again.

6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted by
genuine perversions of the bodily sensibility, in consequence of which
normally pain-giving stimuli are actually felt as pleasures.

I will try to give an instance under each of these heads in turn; but
it is not easy to get them pure, for in cases pronounced enough to be
immediately classed as ascetic, several of the assigned motives usually
work together. Moreover, before citing any examples at all, I must
invite you to some general psychological considerations which apply to
all of them alike.

A strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over
our Western world. We no longer think that we are called on to face
physical pain with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he
should either endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the
recital of cases of it makes our flesh creep morally as well as
physically. The way in which our ancestors looked upon pain as an
eternal ingredient of the world's order, and both caused and suffered
it as a matter-of-course portion of their day's work, fills us with
amazement. We wonder that any human beings could have been so callous.
The result of this historic alteration is that even in the Mother
Church herself, where ascetic discipline has such a fixed traditional
prestige as