Ascetic Freedom and the Relationship Between Body and Emotions in Eastern Orthodox Spirituality

Abstract

This study proposes a theo-phenomenological reading of asceticism in Eastern Orthodox spirituality, with particular attention to the Philokalic tradition, analyzing the relationship between the body, emotions, and spiritual freedom. Drawing on the phenomenological distinction between the physical body (Körper) and the lived body (Leib), the article describes asceticism as a limit-experience that de-limits: an exercise of bodily and affective finitude oriented toward the transfiguration of life within the horizon of divine grace. Methodologically, the research combines textual analysis of representative Philokalic authors with insights from modern Orthodox thinkers and phenomenological concepts such as intentionality, affectivity, reduction, and apatheia, in order to describe from within the lived body, the synergy between ascetic will and the working of grace as it manifests itself in lived ascetic experience. Asceticism is presented as a dynamic process unfolding in stages: inauguration through the discovery of finitude; confrontation, in which the limits of the body and emotions are tested; and liberation as apatheia, in which the body becomes co-praying and co-serving with the soul. Emotions are interpreted as an intermediate space between body and soul—as affects of awareness, struggle, and ultimately transfiguration—through which human existence before God is manifested. The contribution of the article lies in articulating a theo-phenomenological model of Philokalic asceticism in which freedom is not the absence of emotions nor the negation of the body, but an affective and bodily reconfiguration through grace, making possible the communion of love with God and with others.

1. Introduction

Asceticism is a phenomenon characteristic of all religions, although its meanings and significance depend on the doctrinal context of each tradition, taking on radical or moderate forms according to the underlying philosophy of the relationship between body and soul. Religious asceticism thus appears in a plurality of forms, according to the spiritual logic of each tradition and the ends it seeks to realize. In dualistic conceptions, where the body tends to be regarded primarily as an obstacle to true knowledge or spiritual fulfillment, asceticism may become radicalized in the hope of achieving a definitive liberation that is often conceived as being fulfilled only through death. In this sense, Plato—who famously described the body as “the tomb of the soul” (sōma/sēma) (Plato 1997, 400c)—maintained that death removes the barrier of a corporeality incapable of pure knowledge, so that the philosopher attains only after death wisdom purely (Plato 1975, 68b). Accordingly, philosophers should be “willing to die lightly,” rather than flee from death (Plato 1975, 62c). This emphasis on liberation from the body should not obscure the fact that Platonic philosophy also contains important ascetic and purificatory elements, including the discipline of passions and the orientation of the soul toward the good and the divine. By contrast, however, when the body itself is called to resurrection, as in Christianity, asceticism becomes a path not merely of liberation from corporeality, but of liberation and transfiguration of the body itself through communion with God, while also representing, together with mystical experience, a response to the ethical proposals of various schools of Greek antiquity (see Athanasopoulos 2020, p. 61). This contrast remains here a background horizon, while the analysis that follows is restricted to a theo-phenomenological description of Philokalic asceticism as the purification and transfiguration of embodied life within the horizon of divine grace.

There are several forms of asceticism within Orthodox spirituality, ranging from bodily practices (fasting, vigil, physical exercises, manual labor, voluntary poverty), to obedience to a spiritual father and the renunciation of one’s own will, and finally to the practices of guarding the mind (nepsis). In all these forms, bodily asceticism plays a primary role, even though its purpose is the overcoming of the passions that rule the soul. While motifs such as guarding the mind and liberation from the bondage of passions have antecedents in ancient Greek philosophy, especially in Platonic and Stoic traditions, their Philokalic articulation is decisively reconfigured within a theological horizon oriented toward communion with God and the transforming work of divine grace. Even theological knowledge requires this ascetic preparation, which aims to subordinate the body to the soul.

We will next examine the way the phenomenon of asceticism is presented within Orthodox spirituality, especially in the writings of the Philokalia, and from here we will ask what the relationship is between the body and the emotions. We employ a theo-phenomenological method, as it has recently begun to be developed as a legitimate mode of encounter between theology and phenomenology (see Depraz 2008, pp. 261–80; Turcan 2020, pp. 4–5). According to these authors, theo-phenomenology holds that the encounter between phenomenology and theology is methodologically legitimate and that, in the case of religious phenomena, the acceptance of certain theological premises in their reception allows the given phenomenon to manifest itself from itself and on its own terms. By combining phenomenological reductions with a theological reduction, theo-phenomenology situates itself in the overlapping field between the two disciplines, in the wake of the so-called theological turn in French phenomenology. Although it may be regarded as an “impure” phenomenology—one that bridges the gap between a phenomenology of religion and a phenomenological theology—its aim remains the same as that of phenomenology proper: to offer the most adequate possible description of religious phenomena that cannot be properly understood in the absence of theological reference. This approach does not claim to extend classical phenomenology as such, nor to derive theological claims from phenomenological premises. Rather, it operates within a deliberately hybrid space in which phenomenological description is mobilized to clarify how theological realities—such as grace, ascetic struggle, and transformation—are lived and experienced, without suspending their theological horizon. This does not imply that Christianity grounds phenomenology, nor that theological claims are derived from phenomenological premises. The point is descriptive: phenomenological tools are used to render intelligible the lived grammar of an Orthodox ascetical experience whose very givenness includes theological reference.

If bodily asceticism also involves a profound dimension of the soul, then a description of the ascetic phenomenon must take into account both the body and the emotions, as they are shaped and lived within a concrete ascetical and ecclesial tradition, in order to understand more clearly how spiritual freedom is affirmed through the struggle against the passions.

The central claim of this article is that Philokalic asceticism constitutes an embodied and affective configuration of spiritual freedom. Bodily practices and emotions are approached here as intrinsic dimensions of ascetic experience, shaping the way in which human freedom is exercised and transformed within the horizon of divine grace. By employing a theo-phenomenological approach, the study seeks to clarify how ascetic experience is lived, structured, and progressively transfigured at the level of the lived body. The analysis is intentionally restricted to the ascetical stage of praxis and to the bodily–affective dynamics through which freedom is exercised and reshaped. Phenomena proper to higher stages—such as contemplative visions and the hesychastic experience of light—are acknowledged as significant, yet they fall outside the present scope and will be addressed in a separate study.

The guiding questions of this study are the following: How can the phenomenon of asceticism be described, what is phenomenologically given in it, and what are its defining features? How does the relationship between body and emotions appear within ascetic practice? Which phenomenological concepts can help us understand and deepen the analysis of ascetic experience? What is the relevance of the lived experience of asceticism within one’s own embodied existence, and what semantic, ontological, and theological displacements or relocations does it produce? What is donated in the experience of asceticism at the bodily, emotional, and spiritual levels? And how does ascetic practice shape spiritual life and theological thinking?

2. Inauguration: Discovering One’s Own Finitude

2.1. Discovering One’s Own Finitude

Asceticism—any form of asceticism—is an exercise of the limit, a kind of violence directed toward oneself. No one undertakes it without understanding its rationale in relation to another, far more perilous loss of self: one’s own finitude. The experience of our limitation—revealed in illness, suffering, and in the discovery of the certainty of our own death—grounds ascetic practice. The facticity of being-toward-death (Heidegger 1996, §§50–53) calls for a response that takes into account the existential attunement of Dasein understood as a possibility-of-being. This response, through asceticism and faith, engages a lucid affectivity articulated around the hope that comes from the eschatological future. Ascetic practice thus places itself in the service of “our highest good” (Wimbush and Valantasis 1995, p. ix). From an ethical perspective, this response to finitude is not exhausted by lucidity or acceptance, but takes the form of an ascetic commitment that assumes responsibility for the transformation of one’s life in the light of an eschatological hope. The one who practices asceticism knows himself to be ontologically poor and “wants nothing other than to accede to the truth of his being” (Lacoste 2004, p. 173).

Remaining within the horizon of this eschatological hope, asceticism is also an exercise provoked by the confrontation with one’s own limits. Its temporality anticipates a resolution in the future Kingdom of God, beginning from the finitude already experienced in the past and present. Holding both the awareness of finitude, on the one hand, and the call of God to true life, on the other, the human being becomes open to a struggle with himself in search of a lost, primordial beauty: “asceticism is philokalia, love for the beauty of that ‘uncompleted perfection’” (Yannaras 1984, p. 111).

2.2. The Body Between Phenomenology and Theology

The phenomenological distinction between body and flesh is essential for understanding the role of asceticism in Philokalic writings. In the Husserlian sense, the body (Körper) refers to the physical object situated in the world, subject to natural laws and perceived from the outside, whereas the living body (Leib) is the body lived from within, the seat of sensibility and self-affectivity (Husserl 1960, p. 131). If biology concerns itself with the former, phenomenology is concerned with the latter. This distinction enables a phenomenological reading of asceticism as an experience that rediscovers corporeality in its affective, lived depth.

According to Christian theology, the human being is composed of both body and soul; indeed, the human person is simultaneously body and soul. Because they cannot be separated, these two dimensions of human existence communicate with and influence one another. The body, understood as Leib, is the empirical self, the seat of emotions and of one’s own ipseity, and not merely material substance subject to necessity.

From this perspective, the living body participates in the freedom of asceticism, being at once the place of struggle and of revelation, of finitude and of grace. This understanding of the living body should not be confused with materialist or reductionist accounts of embodiment, since it refers to the phenomenological and theological notion of the lived body (Leib) as the irreducible locus of experience, freedom, and grace. As phenomenology shows, we cannot have access to the world without the body, nor can we understand ourselves as having a world except by recognizing at the level of lived experience, the unity of body and soul presupposed by the tradition and enacted in ascetical practice. In turn, drawing on the Philokalic writings, one could say that we cannot aspire to the knowledge of God without the transfiguration of the body—a transfiguration granted through the grace of God; we cannot remain determined by sin, we cannot remain merely “flesh” (Gen. 6:3).

The theological—and simultaneously ontological—problem of the body is that, as a consequence of the ancestral sin, it has been affected by death. The experience of this condition is not limited to the final event of physical death at the end of life; rather, it takes the form of existential experiences which, although they cannot offer us an experience of our own death, nevertheless present a phenomenon marked by partial anticipations—through illness and suffering, or through meditation on death (see Turcan 2021, pp. 34–36). As St. Gregory Palamas writes: “…our body was rendered mortal. Death is thus a kind of protracted process or, rather, there are myriads of deaths, one death succeeding the next until we reach the one final and long-enduring death” (Gregory Palamas 1995a, para. 52).

Therefore, the body—like the soul—has acquired an inclination toward evil, a heaviness against grace, and a resistance to God. While this description resonates with certain Platonic motifs concerning the disorder of the soul–body relation, in the Philokalic context this inclination is not understood ontologically or naturally, but as a historical and spiritual condition resulting from the fall, which calls not for escape from the body but for its ascetic purification and transfiguration by grace. Consequently, asceticism becomes a constant and necessary component of the spiritual life. As the Apostle Paul states: “So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:26–27; The Holy Bible, English Standard Version 2001).

It is no less true that the Incarnation of Christ has changed the destiny of the human being. If the Son of God became truly human while remaining truly God, then every person who believes in Him may hope for his own resurrection through an ascetic participation in the death of Christ: ontologically and theologically, we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:10). We become children of God “through the good thoughts of the Holy Spirit and through the sufferings of Christ, if we truly bear them in our own body” (Isaia Pustnicul 1991, IX, 1; my translation). More than physical and moral effort, asceticism presupposes this paradoxical communion by which one’s own body becomes the place of Christ’s suffering and, at the same time, of the manifestation of His life, which has overcome death. Bearing the cross of Christ in one’s own body transforms the body into the affective locus of asceticism, recognized as the first step in the pursuit of the love of God.

2.3. The Double Intentionality

The ascetic struggle to gain mastery over the body resembles the phenomenological reduction, insofar as one’s personal world is, together with the body, bracketed to a certain degree. The difference lies in the fact that this abstention (epoché), theological in its very nature, does not illuminate the reduced phenomenon—the living body, in this case—but is primarily oriented toward God. It brackets everything that rises like a wall between the human being and God, whether it be the world, the self-will that binds us to the world, or the passions that feed themselves through the body and affect the soul.

Ascetic reduction implies a primordial intentionality toward God—an apophatic intentionality, in fact—directed toward the mysterious presence of God Himself, who works synergistically with the human person in the struggle for purification. In this sense, ascetic practice does not oppose divine grace, but constitutes the concrete, bodily, and affective mode through which the human person freely cooperates with the divine initiative, making synergy experientially possible. Yet the Philokalia shows us that, given our embodied ties to the world, such intentionality is difficult to sustain without bodily asceticism and without restraint: “What sets a person in motion is the orientation toward God, and what brings about this orientation is self-restraint. And what safeguards self-restraint is bodily toil.” (Isaia Pustnicul 1991, IV, 11; my translation)

Thus, the intentionality toward God is doubled by an intentionality toward one’s own body, as the finitude that inhabits us, and, through the senses of the body, toward the world. The body is part of the world; it is the world within us. Through asceticism, the human being negates himself in a certain way, leaving behind—through struggle—whatever kept him at a distance from God, so that his self-negation may become abnegation for God.

St Isaac the Syrian speaks of the double orientation of the mind: either it is drawn by the senses and “feeds with them upon the food of the beasts,” or it draws the senses upward, making them partake of “the sustenance of the angels” (Isaac of Nineveh 1923, IV.45). Thus, asceticism presupposes a double intentionality: toward oneself, in the form of struggle and self-sacrifice, and toward God, in the form of love, in order to receive what only God can give—adoption through the Son and a life untouched by death.

St Maximus the Confessor writes: “When your intellect is concentrated on the love of God you will pay little attention to visible things and will regard even your own body as something alien” (Maximos the Confessor 1981a, I.6). This stage of love is in fact the goal and crown of the ascetic effort, which the Orthodox tradition regards as the first phase of spiritual progress. Yet this first stage (praxis) is followed by the contemplation of God in creation (illumination) and, finally, by mystical union (perfection) (see Stăniloae 2002, pp. 66–72). It is a progress that must be understood as endless, and its stages as present in different degrees within each step of the journey. Just as “the dawning in the soul” of union with God begins already in the course of ascetic striving (Stăniloae 2002, p. 7), so asceticism remains, through its fruits, present within contemplation and union.

The intentionality toward God intensifies, while the intentionality toward one’s own body changes as one advances in the spiritual life: on the second stage, the contemplation of the divine logoi in creation, it becomes a contemplative intentionality toward the world—a world previously subjected to desires fueled by the passions; and on the stage of mystical union, it may be wholly taken up into the grace-filled intentionality directed toward the ineffable God.

2.4. Sacrifice

Asceticism is an ascent of the human being toward the God who descends, through His grace, in order to help and encounter the human person, for God “gives Himself to those who give themselves to Him” (Stăniloae 2004, p. 425; my translation) in a kind of “vertical givenness” (Steinbock 2007, pp. 12–18). This response through grace highlights, on the one hand, the impossibility of reducing God to our consciousness—He is, therefore, phenomenologically irreducible; on the other hand, it makes manifest the existence of a divine counter-intentionality which, taking the form of grace, is more than a mere thought of alterity. Grace may thus be described as a counter-intentionality that does not arise from the subject nor from its transcendental categories (Kant). This notion of counter-intentionality designates a mode of givenness that does not originate in, nor is constituted by, the intentional structures of consciousness, but rather interrupts and reorients them from without. In this sense, grace resists reduction to the horizon of subjective meaning and confronts the human person as an irreducible alterity that precedes intention and calls forth a response. Under these conditions, ascetic sacrifice appears as the response of our affectivity, corporeality, and rationality to a givenness that precedes us. Asceticism belongs to the very definition of the monk: “To become a monk does not mean to abandon men and the world, but to renounce the will of the flesh, to be destitute of the passions” (Nikitas Stithatos 1995, para. 76). The same idea is expressed by St John Climacus: “Who has won the battle over the body? The man who is contrite of heart. And who is contrite of heart? The man who has denied himself, for how can he fail to be contrite of heart if he has died to his own will?” (John Climacus 1982, Step 15). No passivity can be conceived here, but rather a synergistic work in which there is an immense difference between human self-renunciation and the kenosis of God. For the grace of God operates even within the ascent of the human being who, at the same time, exerts his full ascetic effort in offering himself to his Creator. The existence of the human being before God and in God—theosistence (see Turcan 2025, p. 13)—takes place through the encounter between human effort and the working of grace. Communion with God is conditioned by sacrifice: for the fallen human being, “the sacrifice is necessary for communion,” and “Thus communion is the result of sacrifice” (Stăniloae 2011, p. 110). Ascetic sacrifice, though a loss of self according to the logic of the world, is the gaining of a richer life, since the one who sacrifices himself “grows in life by giving his life” (Stăniloae 2004, p. 473; my translation).

The emotions that accompany this inaugural experience are those through which the human being discovers his own finitude: the fear of death, the shame of exposing one’s sins, the pain of ascetic effort, the hope for the possibility of change, and the longing for the kingdom of God. These are not merely psychological reactions, but existential affective tonalities through which the human being opens himself both to his own limits and to the possibility of receiving grace. Emotions may be regarded as affects of awareness, modes of self-affection through which the person becomes conscious of fundamental vulnerability and finitude, as well as of the transcendent call.

The experience of restlessness oriented toward the eschatological future—which Lacoste contrasts with Heideggerian care (Lacoste 2004, p. 82)—points, as toward an opening, to the ascetic reduction. Here emotions become triggers of an existential search for God, through which the human being escapes the becoming of facticity and moves from the possibility-of-being to the possibility-of-being-saved.

3. Confrontation: The Testing of One’s Limits

3.1. The Ambivalence of the Body

The most difficult experience of asceticism lies in the confrontation with oneself, which reveals one’s own limits. This confrontation arises from the ambivalence of our relation to the body, which is at once “mine, and yet not mine […] enemy and friend” (John Climacus 1982, Step 15), part of me and yet set against me. This double valuation—both positive and negative—is determined by the power granted to the passions: when they are allowed to rule, the body becomes an enemy of the soul and rises up against it: “The enemy of the soul is our body, which continually wages war against us through the uprising of the passions within it,” writes St Maximus the Confessor. (Maxim Mărturisitorul 1993, Question 27; my translation).

Acting as true idols, the passions take possession of the soul and cancel human freedom, causing the person, on the one hand, to confuse his own definition with their activity, and on the other, to regard the absence of meaning—emerging from this bondage in the form of despair—as his natural state. Of course, when integrated into the spiritual life and in service to the soul, the body can be considered a friend; vigilance is nevertheless required, for although love for it is natural, it remains “an ungrateful and treacherous friend” (John Climacus 1982, Step 9).

Phenomenologically speaking, this ambivalence presents a double givenness of the body: (1) the body gives itself as the possibility of appropriation, through the “I can,” and (2) as resistance or opacity, through the “I cannot.” Freedom and limit at once, this tension calls for an ascetic confrontation in order to diminish the fluctuation in the givenness of the body—now transparent, now opaque—so that the freedom of the soul, and therefore of the human being as an ensouled body, may not be impaired.

3.2. The Confrontation Between Body and Soul

Asceticism becomes necessary for the one who, seeking the spiritual life, knows that mastery over the body means the elevation of the soul. The link between mind and body remains essential; therefore, bodily asceticism precedes the vision of the mind: “The mind will not be subjected, if the body is not subjected. The reign of the mind is the crucifixion of the body” (Isaac of Nineveh 1923, XXXIV.223).

Thus there exists a body–mind dialectic that reveals the importance of asceticism for purification and contemplation. Spiritual knowledge presupposes the ascetic exercise that purifies body and mind alike. “The first virtue is to reject the demands of the flesh” (Anthony the Great 1979, para. 129). Without being a Platonic anti-somatism, the contempt for the body aims at its subordination for the sanctification of the soul and the purification from the passions in order to receive the grace of God. Asceticism aims at enlarging the heart to make it capable of receiving grace, and it operates an emancipation of attention from the passions, making it available as attention toward God.

Asceticism is neither moralism nor mere technique. It should be understood as a lived experience of the limit, undertaken for the sake of transcending one’s own finitude. Asceticism is part of the response to facticity, a radical change of meaning through self-emptying so as to make room for the givenness of grace and divine healing. In the Philokalic writings, this ascetic reduction appears under various expressions: “the shut off the body’s senses” (The Blessed Patriarch Kallistos 2023, para. 4), “the mortification of passions” (Theodoros the Great Ascetic 1981a, para. 17), “the mortification of the flesh” (Theodoros the Great Ascetic 1981b, p. 46), “self-restraint” (Maximos the Confessor 1981a, II.64).

The measure of asceticism is not excess, as one might suppose, but balance and mastery of the body, lest one collapse into the realm of its pleasures: “Waste your body with fasting and vigils, and you will repulse the lethal thoughts of pleasure” (Thalassios the Libyan 1981, I.25).

One of the emotions present in the ascetic struggle is desire, and asceticism aims at its mastery. From the perspective of the phenomenology of emotion, desire may be defined as a psycho-somatic emotion intentionally directed toward the satisfaction of a hunger or lack in a present moment under its pressure. Excess characterizes it when it ceases to correspond to a vital, necessary fulfillment and exceeds natural limits. Rooted in natural affects, desire is the movement that seizes both body and soul, transforming need—almost hallucinatorily—into an insatiable and tyrannical longing. An emotion with a compulsive and excessive structure, desire calls for psycho-somatic asceticism, that is, self-restraint and effort.

Philokalic ascetic thought highlights the opposition between the desires of the flesh and those of the spirit. The conflict is affirmed in Scripture—“For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh” (Gal. 5:17). Hence the advice is straightforward: “for those who desire to be spiritual, he [Lord] advised the rejection of the flesh” (Barsanuphius and John 2006, Letter 124). What remains to be analyzed is how far this rejection can legitimately go.

St. Maximos speaks of two different laws, a bodily law and a spiritual law: “Since man is composed of body and soul, he is moved by two laws, that of the flesh and that of the Spirit (cf. Rom. 7:23). The law of the flesh operates by virtue of the senses; the law of the Spirit operates by virtue of the intellect. The first law, operating by virtue of the senses, automatically binds one closely to matter; the second law, operating by virtue of the intellect, brings about direct union with God” (Maximos the Confessor 1981c, II.9).

Seeking to submit himself to the spiritual law, the ascetic fights against the body not in order to destroy it, but in order to subject it to that law. It is a struggle against the self-idolatry of one’s own body so as to render it obedient to the law of the spirit—a struggle that can become, through asceticism, an extreme experience.

The ontological fragility of the body is visible in its perishability. This does not mean that the body cannot become a merciless tyrant when given the chance. The solution is to treat it with prudence until death, watching over it so as not to fall again under the burden of the bodily law: “So as long as you live, never trust that clay of which you are made and never depend on it until the time you stand before Christ Himself” (John Climacus 1982, Step 15).

The struggle between body and soul serves the call to the spiritual life, not an absolute separation, for both work together and both—as representing the whole human being—will rejoice in the final resurrection. What matters is that the body submit to the ruling soul, for there is a dialectic between them: the weakening of one leads to the strengthening of the other. Asceticism is concerned with the increase in the soul: “though the body may fall short in the work of fasting on account of its great weakness, yet vigils, by their lonely character, afford the mind steadfastness in prayer” (Isaac of Nineveh 1923, XVII.137)

In conclusion, the struggle with one’s own body entails a dis-placement from natural habits, an opening—through lived experience—toward a spiritual realm that remains closed as long as the body remains the sign of the world’s presence within us. The confrontation with one’s own body, and therefore with oneself, makes room for an opening scarcely perceptible in the natural attitude, where the body is dominant and central, the manifestation of an almost insurmountable egoism that affects even our relations with others. What matters is that the shift of intentionality from the body toward God does not remain merely an intellectual and ineffective attitude, but engages the whole human being. Asceticism is an entry into a spiritual realm whose opening cannot be discerned by the one still imprisoned in his own body—except rarely, in illness, suffering, or the anticipation of death. Yet even then, if faith in the love of Christ, who descended into our suffering, is lacking, lucidity remains bitter and without solutions.

In fact, the double intentionality involved here—the horizontal toward the world and the vertical toward God—offers two distinct grammars of affectivity: one that possesses and seeks to possess the objects of the world; the other that receives the grace of God. Asceticism provides the stability of the vertical whenever it overcomes the centrifugal attractions of the “captive intentionality” (see Turcan 2025, pp. 7–8) of the horizontal and, beyond this, is able through grace to transfigure the horizontal intentionality into contemplation and love.

3.3. The Bodily Works of Asceticism

Peter of Damascus speaks of seven bodily works (Peter of Damaskos 1984a, pp. 89–93). (1) Through “stillness” (hesychia) a person withdraws from the distractions of the world in order to fix his attention upon God, having only the single concern of pleasing Him. (2) “Moderate fasting” is practiced so that one may overcome “gluttony, greed, and desire,” and gain collectedness for the contemplation of God through what He has created and given. (3) “Moderate vigil” consists of dividing the night into a period for sleep (half the night) and a period for prayer (the other half). By this, as by fasting, one begins to master the body, while the soul gains “fortitude and illumination.” (4) “Recital of psalms” fatigues the body and humbles the soul. (5) “Spiritual prayer, prayer that is offered by the intellect and free from all thoughts,” is prayer of the mind, which asks that only the divine will be done in all actions and thoughts, accepting no shape, no color, no light, no fire “or anything at all of this kind.” It is the prayer of one at the stage of praxis, a pure prayer, yet surpassed by those on the level of contemplation. (6) “Reading the writings and lives of the fathers” in order to learn the struggle against the passions and the acquisition of virtues. (7) “Questioning those with experience,” so as not to fall into self-delusion and go astray. What is striking about these ascetic exercises is that, although called “bodily,” they are intrinsically linked to the spiritual, being oriented toward it. The intentionality at work here aims at acquiring spiritual virtues and at the liberation of the human person for communion with God.

In the phase of confrontation, emotions are no longer merely affects of becoming aware of finitude (as in the inaugural moment), nor do they yet become the stable fruits of dispassion (as in the stage of liberation). Rather, they take the form of an affectivity marked by oscillation and ambivalence. Here arise frustration in the face of the body’s resistance, anger directed sometimes against one’s own weakness and sometimes against God, the pain of inner dryness, and the temptation to abandon the struggle. At the same time, paradoxical emotions appear, such as a certain care for one’s rediscovered fragility, combined with joyful gratitude for progress on the way, despite inevitable partial defeats.

Phenomenologically, these emotions describe the resistance of the body and the counter-resistance of the soul: the body defends its old automatisms, while the soul seeks to reorient captive intentionality toward God. Ascetic confrontation is thus marked by this affective dynamic in which the human being has not yet reached the stillness of dispassion but exercises his freedom in the effort of purification.

4. The Double Synergy

4.1. Restoring the Hierarchy of Soul and Body

Through the ascetic struggle the natural hierarchy is restored, in which the ruling part is the soul—a hierarchy constantly exposed to the risk of being overturned into its opposite. Instead of the body submitting to the world and the soul to the body, as its slave, asceticism and grace re-establish the authority of God, whom the soul now obeys, bringing the body as well into a transforming spiritual obedience. Confrontation thus becomes a double synergy: between soul and body, leading to the inner spiritual unification of the self, and between the human being and God, in the ineffable experience of deifying grace.

Because of their unity and interpenetration, the relation between soul and body does not become a subject–object relation in which the soul commands and an objectified body simply executes. The lived experiences involved engage the whole field, bodily and psychic, in a true affective and spiritual symphony. When the soul, as ruling principle, is purified, the affective tonality of life as a whole is transformed, so that the body allows itself to be shaped by this new existential-theological reality. The opacity of the body gives way to a spiritual transparency.

The ascetic work that a person performs upon the body proves effective in the soul as well, an efficacy made possible by their intrinsic bond. Phenomenologically, we are our ensouled body with its affects, just as, theologically, we are our immortal soul in a mortal body that is nevertheless called to the final resurrection. According to this anthropology with a “holistic character” (Noje 2021, p. 391), we are a unity of life in which affectivity traverses both body and soul. The emotions that accompany the passions belong equally to body and soul and once again affirm this unbreakable bond in this life. Consequently, bodily exercises precede the spiritual ones, which are far more important yet influenced by the state of the body. Bodily asceticism is revealed as a way of purifying the mind, so as to receive spiritual gifts; whoever does not practice the former cannot receive the latter, which are much higher. The meaning of ascetic effort goes beyond the body, for material fasting “is nothing without spiritual fasting” (Barsanuphius and John 2006, Letter 77); self-restraint is justified when it “disciplines all things and bridles the mindless impulses of soul and body, directing them towards God” (Peter of Damaskos 1984b, XVIII).

4.2. Care for the Body

The synergy between body and soul is possible through this mutual influence and their indissoluble bond. For example, given that love for one’s own body is natural, the body must be cared for in such a way that it can serve the soul. Discernment, of course, determines the measure of this care, so that the body does not enslave the soul through its passions, for the body must be watched so that it is neither overburdened nor weakened in its way of life: “Give it neither too much nor too little. […] But give the body just a little less than it requires” (Barsanuphius and John 2006, Letter 212). “To eat moderately and reasonably is to keep the body in health, not to deprive it of holiness” (John Cassian 1979, p. 74). By giving the body what it needs to live and not fall ill (see Cadenhead 2013, p. 287), a person exercises a dispassionate love for it, “and cares for it as a servant of divine things, supplying it only with what meets its basic needs” (Maximos the Confessor 1981a, III.9). These ascetic efforts must be relaxed in times of sickness “so that you may regain the strength to take them [ascetic labours] up once more” (Evagrios The Solitary 1979, p. 36). Otherwise, in the absence of discernment, measureless self-restraint weakens the body, making a person to fall into sin. By the virtue of discernment (diakrisis), a person resists the demons’ attempts to draw him into an ascetic effort beyond his strength, only to cast him afterwards into incapacity and despair.

This ascetic discernment, present in the synergy between soul and body, is accompanied by the awareness of the eschatological vocation of the body, which will be raised by God. This anthropological synergy between soul and body is grounded in, and made possible by, the more fundamental synergy between divine grace and human freedom, which ascetic practice renders experientially effective. The resurrection of the body justifies both care for the body and the necessity of its purification. Abba Isaiah the Recluse writes about both: “Take care of your body as a temple of God; take care of it as destined to rise again and to give answer to God,” writes St Isaiah the Solitary (Isaia Pustnicul 1991, IV.1; my translation); “He who believes that his body will rise again by nature (through the natural union with Christ) on the day of resurrection must take care to cleanse his body from every defilement” (Isaia Pustnicul 1991, XV.2; my translation). Thus, mastery over the body in this life never loses sight of its destiny in the life to come. Called to resurrection and purification, the body works together with the soul in the service of God, while passionate affectivity is gradually purified and transfigured into an affectivity in which the love of God reigns.

4.3. Against the Passions

Self-restraint is a struggle against the passions, and the call to transfigure the affectivity bound up with them reveals us as killers of the passions, not killers of the body (Kallistos and Ignatios Xanthopoulos 2023, p. 34). The passions, grounded in natural affects (see Stăniloae 2002, pp. 82–88), are both bodily and psychic, and the emotions that accompany them are likewise present in both body and soul. Although they are interconnected and mutually influential, they have distinct causalities and different remedies: “Some passions pertain to the body, others to the soul. The first are occasioned by the body, the second by external objects. Love and self-control overcome both kinds, the first curbing the passions of the soul and the second those of the body” (Maximos the Confessor 1981a, I.64).

As this passage from St Maximus the Confessor shows, self-restraint and love are the remedies in the struggle against the passions. If the emotions accompanying the love of God are self-evident and play a fundamental role in the battle with the soul’s passions, self-restraint is likewise accompanied by specific emotions: one example is anger, which becomes a weapon against the passions when used with a spiritual purpose. Moreover, what was once a primary emotion such as desire can, through asceticism, illustrate a transfiguration, becoming a longing for divine realities.

St Gregory Palamas underlines the dialectical and transformative relationship between the desires of body and soul, on the one hand, and the “desires of the Spirit,” on the other. The path from passions to the love of God (see Blowers 1996, pp. 76–77) is a conversion of intentionality from body and world to God, an intentionality accompanied by a certain affective disposition. Ascetic practice therefore concerns this affective disposition and, by implication, the emotions and feelings that compose it and that differ according to the spiritual stage on which the ascetic finds himself. For beginners, the struggle is hard; for those on the middle level, it is “sometimes difficult, sometimes not”; and for the advanced, who no longer act according to their own wills, it “is liberation from the senses and freedom from pain” (John Climacus 1982, Step 4). Asceticism thus concerns both body and soul, and affectivity accompanies it—first as an increased intensity of pain and, in the end, as an intensification of peace and dispassion.

4.4. The Ruling Soul

The final goal of asceticism is the restoration of the spiritual hierarchy in which the body is called to obey the soul, and the soul, in turn, is called to obey the will of God. This is a true order of love that must be restored.

There is an inverse proportionality between body and soul, visible in the movement from one to the other, regardless of direction. For example, concerning the influence of the body upon the soul, Abba Antony the Great writes that “what delights the body harms the soul” (Anthony the Great 1979, para. 101; my translation).

As for the opposite influence, that of the soul upon the body, we learn from St John Climacus that “the more faith blossoms in the heart, the more the body is eager to serve” (John Climacus 1982, Step 4). The true order of service presupposes a “physical self-denial” that leads the intellect “to submit to the contest of love” (Yannaras 1984, p. 269). The idea of the body’s subordination to soul and reason is expressed very clearly in various Philokalic passages: “May your body be your slave” (John Climacus 1982, Step 3); “If you keep your body free from disease and sensual pleasure it will help you to serve what is more noble” (Maximos the Confessor 1981a, I.21); “we must hate and discipline the body as an enemy that fights against the soul” (Anthony the Great 1979, para. 117).

As the hierarchy God–soul–body is realized, the body obeys the soul, participating in turn in the work of deification by grace. When the soul rules the body, the person becomes dispassionate and reaches a state of purity that bears witness to his destiny of being deified by grace. Theological reduction—a reduction of the human being to spiritual life—is in this case so evident that “he who has trampled down the pleasures and provocations of the flesh is in a certain sense outside the body” (John Cassian 1979, p. 75). This is a form of freedom that raises the person above his ordinary, worldly conditions.

This double synergy—between soul and body and between the human being and the grace of God—also takes place at the level of the emotions, which appear as modes of the givenness of meaning in and through the body. We encounter the same movement of transforming negative emotions into positive ones; yet, as the hierarchy of soul and body is restored through asceticism, the latter increase in presence: peace expands the field of understanding and attention; joy confirms the spiritual meaning of the human being; love unifies all the powers of the soul in their orientation toward God. These emotions make visible, at the level of affectivity, the synergy of soul and body and the cooperation of human intentionality with the experienced counter-intentionality of grace.

5. Liberation

5.1. Liberation from the Passions

The ascetic’s freedom appears both as liberation from the passions, a “freedom from”, and as availability for the love and will of God, a “freedom for” (cf. Pavlyk 2022). First of all, it is liberation from the passionate pressures of the body, according to a definition of St Antony the Great: “A man is free if he is not a slave to sensual pleasures, but through good judgment and self-restraint masters the body and with true gratitude is satisfied with what God gives him, even though it is quite scanty. If the soul and the intellect that enjoys the love of God are in harmony, the whole body is peaceful even against its wishes; then, should the soul so want, every bodily impulse is extinguished” (Anthony the Great 1979, para. 56).

The ruling soul is not oriented only toward the body but, as mentioned above, has an apophatic intentionality toward God that takes the form of love. The love of God functions here as an ethical principle that reorients freedom away from self-centered desire and toward the good of communion, making possible both self-mastery and responsibility toward others. As mediator between God and the body, the soul sanctifies the body through the grace of God that permeates it. Although they are bound together, the dispassion of the soul and the dispassion of the body are distinct: the former sanctifies even the body through the light of the Spirit, whereas the latter by itself is useless. Therefore, bodily asceticism, if not accompanied by the asceticism of the soul, amounts to nothing more than physical exercise.

The work of the Holy Spirit is felt in the body, transforming the “bodily” person into a spiritual one, born anew and recreated in the Holy Spirit: “When the Logos of God is raised up in us by our practice of the virtues and by contemplation, He draws all things to Himself (cf. John 12: 32); He sanctifies in virtue and spiritual knowledge our thoughts and words about the flesh, the soul and the nature of beings; He sanctifies also the very members of our bodies and our senses, and He places them all under His yoke” (Maximos the Confessor 1981b, II.32).

This “drawing to himself” may be understood as a phenomenon of affective concentration of intentionality, in which consciousness and body rediscover their unity under the action of grace. Freedom is not only a decision but an affective unification of the human being. Spiritual dispositions are imprinted in the body, deifying it and underlining that “the resurrection of the soul—its return to God through obedience to the divine commandments—is followed by the body’s resurrection and its reunion with the soul” (Gregory Palamas 1995b, para. 12).

Liberation means dispassion (apatheia), which is not reduced to insensibility but is rather a sensitivity untainted by the ego’s self-idolatry; it is the experience of the original affectivity of life that gives itself through grace. Moreover, dispassion is the freedom to do good. Consequently, human freedom is the availability for the good and the actual doing of good, resembling the freedom of God. This freedom is itself a gift of the Holy Spirit, “a stage of experience that cannot be guaranteed by any amount of asceticism but that cannot take root without the habits of self-examination and self-control” (Williams 2012, II).

5.2. Communion, Knowledge, and Love

Phenomenologically, this is a paradoxical freedom, for it is the freedom to receive. Ascetical freedom is thus the supreme form of receptivity: the human being’s availability to be deified by the grace of God, uniting liberation from the passions with freedom for communion with God and with others, “to love as God loves” (Bingaman and Nassif 2012, para. 4). Asceticism by itself, however radical, is insufficient to raise the human being to union with God: “It is not by askesis and following the negative way that they attain that union. But it is the action of God, who performs it through divine energies” (Farina 2020, p. 168). Therefore, in addition to ascetic purification, the work of God’s grace and the gift of a life that transcends the world are required: “As defined by the hesychasts, the experience consists of a divine gift in synergy with human askesis by which divine life manifests itself, however briefly, in the immanence of the human body” (Sumares 2020, p. 122).

Moreover, since the goal of this work of purification is union with God and communion, Christian asceticism must be understood as an ecclesial rather than an individual exercise. It is participation in the love of Christ manifested in his body, the Church, with the aim of transfiguring the impersonal character of our desires and bringing to light a free personal will “which brings into being the true life of love” (Yannaras 1984, pp. 109–10).

Philosophy has thematized, since the pre-Socratics, the problem of the relation between knowledge through the senses and knowledge through the intellect. The senses can obscure knowledge, producing an illusory and false cognition, whereas the intellect is capable of true knowledge. To the extent that the two are bound together in the human body and mutually influence each other, access to knowledge is linked to liberation from the passions. In order to see the spiritual meanings of the world, it is necessary to rise above one’s own passions, freeing the activity of the mind from the bondage of passionate desires. For this reason, bodily asceticism becomes a condition, alongside intellectual effort, both for the interpretation of Scripture (Vild 2020, p. 25) and for theological knowledge. “In the Church,” writes Yannaras, “bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road to theological knowledge” (Yannaras 1984, p. 116).

In the stage of liberation, affectivity attains a transparency hitherto unknown, the emotions reflecting the freedom of a life grounded in grace. Joy filled with gratitude for the mysterious presence of God is accompanied by peace of heart and by humility which, from a passing affect, acquires a stability that becomes constitutive for the person. Phenomenologically, the affectivity of liberation from the bondage of the passions is one of openness and communion. Emotions rediscover their original function: to be signs of a life in a communion of love with God and with other human beings.

6. Conclusions

Religious asceticism adds, paradoxically, an additional measure to the sufferings of this world. It does so, however, because it has understood the call of divine love and hopes for a true future life, untouched by finitude and death. Eschatological consciousness inhabits the human being as an anticipation of the kingdom of God.

Asceticism discloses the primordial struggle that dwells within us in the difference between soul and body. It represents the outcome of an awareness of that interior war between ourselves and ourselves—between what we believed we were and what we might become. The restlessness born from the strangeness of not being at home in this world becomes an assumed confrontation with oneself, an attempt to overcome the root of all passions, namely philautia, the “carnal self-love” (Maximos the Confessor 1981a, III.8, III.57).

Through asceticism, the body participates in the encounter with God; it becomes a place of giving and receptivity, where emotions and pain are transfigured for the sake of spiritual openness. Ascetic exercises do not aim at the destruction of the body (Körper), but at the purification of embodied experience—that is, the restoration of the body to its condition as servant of the soul. Only once this hierarchical position is attained can body and soul together become the locus of spiritual life and of the mysterious presence of God.

From a phenomenological perspective, asceticism is a phenomenon that contains, on the one hand, a theological-ascetical reduction taking the form of self-sacrifice, and on the other hand, the experience of grace. It highlights the layer of the gift of grace as a gift of spiritual meaning received, rather than produced. Not merely psychological—since it does not arise apart from a religious orientation—the sense of grace belongs to the spiritual senses. It cannot be measured by asceticism itself, just as it cannot be provoked by it, for it is the gift of God.

Emotions appear as the meeting place between body and soul, a kind of intermediate space in which the two encounter one another and life reveals itself simultaneously as bodily experience and as spiritual intentionality. As primordial modes of self-affection, emotions constitute the human being’s affective experience of self, as one open not only to mundane meanings but to the highest meaning spoken by the call of God and by the eschatological future.

Within the experience of asceticism, this complex affectivity becomes both the battleground of the passions and the space of transfiguration: emotions, as movements of life, are purified of their intramundane dynamics and raised, through God’s grace, to a spiritual transparency. Through fasting, prayer, and self-restraint, the affects that compulsively tied the human being to the world are reoriented toward communion with God. Thus, the freedom of asceticism does not consist in the absence of emotions but in the recovery of their original meaning prior to the fall: they no longer close the person in upon himself but open him toward the Other, becoming expressions of a life that, while suffering deification, is oriented toward communion with God and with fellow human beings. In this transformation, which culminates in the attainment of dispassion (apatheia), the body becomes the language and servant of the soul, and the emotions—the living form of freedom through which grace becomes felt in the human being. Asceticism is the first and necessary stage of a process that seeks the renunciation of self-centeredness in order to attain union with God.