Why read Asceticism of the Mind?

Book cover of Asceticism of the Mind: Forms of Attention and Self-Transformation in Late Antique Monasticism

Book description

Asceticism is founded on the possibility that human beings can profoundly transform themselves through training and discipline. In particular, asceticism in the Eastern monastic tradition is based on the assumption that individuals are not slaves to the habitual and automatic but can be improved by ascetic practice and, with the…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Asceticism of the Mind as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Jamie Kreiner

Author

Early Christian monks in the eastern Mediterranean chalked up many of their mental struggles to demonic interference—and yet their approaches to the problem of attention share some striking similarities to modern psychology.

Graiver makes the case that monks’ talk of demons was not a superstitious diagnosis but a pragmatic one: it helped monks try to strike a balance between monitoring their thoughts and thinking too hard about them, deal with unwanted thoughts before they became all-consuming, and figure how to keep it together when their thoughts were all over the place.

I love that this book takes early monks and…

From Jamie's list on medieval brainiacs.