Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Hellenic Origins of Christian Asceticism
2tures Of Christian asceticism by invoking Greek parallels Zeller tried to explain the ascetic movement among the Chris tians of the first centuries as a survival of Cynicism;4 many years later Weingarten attempted to derive Christian mo nastieism from an ascetic cult which he had found in the temple of Serapis at Memphis;5 Reitzenstein, approaching the subject from the point of view of comparative literature, has more recently shown the in?uence which the contempo rary aretologies had upon the early stories Of Christian monks.6 But these writers have only dwelt upon certain sides of the subject: if they attempted to generalize, as Wein garten did, and held that they had discovered the true and only source of Christian asceticism, their conclusions were wholly false.7 The trouble was that there has been, up 'to' the present, no rounded picture of the asceticism of the Greeks at the time, and consequently when scholars noticed resem blances between early Christian ascetics and the Cynics, or the recluses of the Serapeum, or some other special cult, they at once concluded that they had found the source Of the Christian ascetic movement, for they completely ignored the other Greek forms of asceticism then prevalent. It is the purpose of the present study, then, to attempt to draw such a picture of Greek asceticism as will enable others to see to exactly how great an extent the Christians were dependent Upon the Greeks for their ascetic ideas and ideals; it is the intention to give a rounded picture of Greek asceticism in the various forms in which it appeared at the time of the spread of Christianity. But no attempt will be made to show how these ideas were transferred into Christianity, or to write of early Christian asceticism: that would be too large a subject.
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