Chapter 3

See a paper by Guthe, “Die Ruinen Ascalons,” in theZeitschriftof the Deutsche Palastina-Verein, ii. 164 (translated in Palestine Exploration FundQuarterly Statement,1880, p. 182). See also C.R. Conder in the latter journal, 1875, p. 152.

(R. A. S. M.)

ASCANIUS,in Roman legend, the son of Aeneas by Creüsa or Lavinia. From Livy it would appear that tradition recognized two sons of Aeneas called by this name, the one the son of his Trojan, the other of his Latin wife. According to the usual account, he accompanied his father to Italy on his flight from Troy. On the death of Aeneas, the government of Latium was left in the hands of Lavinia, Ascanius being too young to undertake it. After thirty years he left Lavinium, and founded Alba Longa. Ascanius was also called Ilus and Iulus, and the Julian gens claimed to be descended from him. Several more or less contradictory traditions may be found in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Strabo and other writers.

Virg.Aen. ii. 666; Livy i. 3; see also Klausen.Aeneas und die Penaten(1840).

ASCENSION,an island in the Atlantic Ocean, between 7° 53′ and 8° S., and 14° 18′ and 14° 26′ W., 800 m. N.W. of St Helena, about 7½ m. in length and 6 in breadth, with an area of 38 sq. m. and a circumference of about 22 m. The island lies within the immediate influence of the south-east trade-wind. The lee side of the island is subject to the visitation of “rollers,” which break on the shore with very great violence. Ascension is a volcanic mass erected on a submarine platform. Numerous cones exist. Green Mountain, the principal elevation, is a huge elliptical crater, rising 2820 ft. above the sea, while the plains or table-lands surrounding it vary in height from 1200 to 2000 ft. On the north side they sweep gradually down towards the shore, but on the south they terminate in bold and lofty precipices. Steep and rugged ravines intersect the plains, opening into small bays or coves on the shore, fenced with masses of compact and cellular lava; and all over the island are found products of volcanic action. Ascension was originally destitute of vegetation save on the summit of Green Mountain, which owes its verdure to the mists which frequently enshroud it, but the lower hills have been planted with grasses and shrubs. The air is clear and light, and the climate remarkably healthy, notwithstanding the high temperature—the average day temperature on the shore being 85° F., on Green Mountain 75° F. The average rainfall is about 20 in., March and April being the rainy months. Ascension is noted for the number of turtles and turtle eggs found on its shores, the season lasting from December to May or June. The turtles are caught and kept in large ponds. The coasts abound with a variety of fish of excellent quality, of which the most important are the rock-cod, the cavalli, the conger-eel and the “soldier.” Numbers of sheep are bred on the island, and there are a few cattle and deer, besides goats and wild cats. Feathered game is abundant. Like St Helena, the island does not possess any indigenous vertebrate land fauna. The “wideawake” birds frequent the island in large numbers, and their eggs are collected and eaten. Beetles and land-shells are well represented. Flies, ants, mosquitoes, scorpions, centipedes and crickets abound. The flora includes purslane, rock roses and several species of ferns and mosses.

The island was discovered by the Portuguese navigator, João da Nova, on Ascension Day 1501, and was occasionally visited thereafter by ships. In 1701 William Dampier was wrecked on its coast, and during his detention discovered the only spring of fresh water the island contains. Ascension remained uninhabited till after the arrival of Napoleon at St Helena (1815), when it was taken possession of by the British government, who sent a small garrison thither. A settlement, named George Town (locally known as Garrison), was made on the north-west coast, water being obtained from “Dampier’s” springs in the Green Mountain, 6 m. distant. The island is under the rule of the admiralty, and was likened by Darwin to “a huge ship kept in first-rate order.” It is governed by a naval captain borne on the books of the flagship of the admiral superintendent at Gibraltar. A depot of stores for the navy is maintained, but the island is used chiefly as a sanatorium. Ascension is connected by cable with Europe and Africa, and is visited once a month by mail steamers from the Cape. Formerly letters were left by passing ships in a crevice in one of the rocks. The population, about 300, consists of seamen, marines, and Krumen from Liberia.

SeeAfrica Pilot, part ii., 5th ed. (London, 1901); C. Darwin,Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. “Beagle”(London, 1844);Report of the Scientific Results of the Voyage of the “Challenger,”vol. i. part 2 (London, 1885); andSix Months in Ascension, by Mrs Gill (London, 1878), an excellent sketch of the island and its inhabitants. It was at Ascension that Mr, afterwards Sir, David Gill determined, in 1877, the solar parallax.

ASCENSION, FEAST OF THE,one of the oecumenical festivals of the Christian Church, ranking in solemnity with those of Christmas, of Easter and of Pentecost. It is held forty days after Easter, or ten days before Whitsunday, in celebration of Christ’s ascension into heaven forty days after the resurrection. It always falls on a Thursday, and the day is known as Ascension Day, or Holy Thursday. The festival is of great antiquity; andthough there is no discoverable trace of it before the middle of the 4th century, subsequent references to it assume its long establishment. Thus St Augustine (Ep.54ad Januar.) mentions it as having been kept from time immemorial and as probably instituted by the apostles. Chrysostom, in his homily on the ascension, mentions a celebration of the festival in the church of Romanesia outside Antioch, and Socrates (Hist. eccles.vii. 26) records that in the year 390 the people of Constantinople “of old custom” (ἐξ ἔθους) celebrated the feast in a suburb of the city. As these two references suggest, the festival was associated with a professional pilgrimage, in commemoration of the passing of Christ and his apostles to the Mount of Olives; such a procession is described by Adamnan, abbot of Iona, as taking place at Jerusalem in the 7th century, when the feast was celebrated in the church on Mount Olivet (de loc. sanct.i. 22). ThePeregrinatioof Etheria (Silvia), which dates fromc.A.D.385, says that the festival was held in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem (Duchesne,Chr. Worship, p. 515). In the West, however, in the middle ages, the procession with candles and banners outside the church was taken as symbolical of Christ’s triumphant entry into heaven.

In the East the festival is known as theἀνάληψις, “taking up,” orἐπισωζομένη, a term first used in the Cappadocian church, and of which the meaning has been disputed, but which probably signifies the feast “of completed salvation.” The wordascensio, adopted in the West, implies the ascension of Christ by his own power, in contradistinction to theassumptio, or taking up into heaven of the Virgin Mary by the power of God.

In the Roman Catholic Church the most characteristic ritual feature of the festival is now the solemn extinction of the paschal candle after the Gospel at high mass. This candle, lighted at every mass for the forty days after Easter, symbolizes the presence of Christ with his disciples, and its extinction his parting from them. The custom dates from 1263, and was formerly confined to the Franciscans; it was prescribed for the universal church by the Congregation of Rites on the 19th of May 1697. Other customs, now obsolete, were formerly associated with the liturgy of this feast;e.g.the blessing of the new beans after the Commemoration of the Dead in the canon of the mass (Duchesne, p. 183). In some churches, during the middle ages, an image of Christ was raised from the altar through a hole in the roof, through which a burning straw figure representing Satan was immediately thrown down.

In the Anglican Church Ascension Day and its octave continue to be observed as a great festival, for which a special preface to the consecration prayer in the communion service is provided, as in the case of Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday, and Trinity Sunday. The celebration of the Feast of the Ascension was also retained in the Lutheran churches as warranted by Holy Scripture.

See Herzog-Hauck,Realencyklopädie(1900), s.”Himmelfahrtsfest”; L. Duchesne,Christian Worship(2nd Eng. ed., London, 1904);The Catholic Encyclopaedia(London and New York, 1907).

ASCETICISM,the theory and practice of bodily abstinence and self-mortification, generally religious. The word is derived from the Gr. verbἀσκέω, “I practise,” whence the nounἄσκησιςand the adjectiveἀσκητικός; and it embodies a metaphor taken from the ancient wrestling-place or palaestra, where victory rewarded those who had best trained their bodies. Not a few other technical terms of Greek philosophic asceticism, used in the first instance by Cynics and Neo-pythagoreans, and then continued among the Greek Jews and Christians, were metaphors taken from athletic contests—but only metaphors, for all asceticism, worthy of the name, has a moral purport, and is based on the eternal contrast of the proposition, “This is right,” with the proposition, “That is pleasant.” The ascetic instinct is probably as old as humanity, yet we must not forget that early religious practices are apt to be deficient in lofty spiritual meaning, many things being esteemed holy that are from a modern point of view trifling and even obscene. We may therefore expect in primitive asceticism to find many abstentions and much self-torture apparently valueless for the training of character and discipline of the feelings, which are the essence of any healthy asceticism. Nevertheless these non-moraltaboosor restraints may have played a part in building up in us that faculty of preferring the larger good to the impulse of the moment which is the note of real civilization. Aristotle in hisEthicsdefines, as the barbarian’s ideal of life, “the living as one likes.” Yet nothing is less true; for the savage, more than the civilized man, is tied down at every step with superstitious scruples and restrictions barely traceable in higher civilizations except as primitive survivals. It is not that savages are devoid of the ascetic instinct. It is on the contrary over-developed in them, but ill-informed and working in ways unessential or even morally harmful. It is the note of every great religious reformer, Moses, Buddha, Paul, Mani, Mahomet, St Francis, Luther, to enlighten and direct it to higher aims, substituting a true personal holiness for a ritual purity ortaboo, which at the best was viewed as a kind of physical condition and contagion, inherent as well in things and animals as in man.

It is useful, therefore, in a summary sketch of asceticism, to begin with the facts as they can be observed among less advanced races, or as mere survivals among people who have reached the level of genuine moral reflection; and from this basis to proceed to a consideration of self-denial consciously pursued as a method of ethical perfection. The latter is as a rule less cruel and rigorous than primitive forms of asceticism. Under this head fall the following:—Fasting, or abstention from certain meats and drinks; denial of sexual instinct; subjection of the body to physical discomforts, such as nakedness, vigils, sleeping on the bare ground, tattooing, deformation of skull, teeth, feet, &c., vows of silence to be observed throughout life or during pilgrim-ages, avoidance of baths, of hair-cutting and of clean raiment, living in a cave; actual self-infliction of pain, by scourging, branding, cutting with knives, wearing of hair shirts, fire-walking, burial alive, hanging up of oneself by hooks plunged into the skin, suspension of weights by such hooks to the tenderer parts of the body, self-mutilation and numerous other, often ingenious, modes of torture. Such customs repose on various superstitions; for example, the self-mutilation of the Galli or priests of Cybele was probably a magical ceremony intended to fertilize the soil and stimulate the crops. Others of the practices enumerated, probably the greater part of them, spring from demonological beliefs.

Fasting (q.v.) is used in primitive asceticism for a variety of reasons, among which the following deserve notice. Certain animals and vegetables aretaboo,i.e.too holy, or—what among Semites and others was the same thing—too defiling and unclean, to be eaten. Thus in Leviticus xi. the Jews are forbidden to eat animals other than cloven-footed ruminants; thus the camel, coney, hare and swine were forbidden; so also any water organisms that had not fins and scales, and a large choice of birds, including swan, pelican, stork, heron and hoopoe. All winged creeping things that have four feet were equally abominable. Lastly, the weasel, mouse and most lizards weretaboo. All or nearly all of these were at one time totem animals among one or another of the Semitic tribes, and were not eaten because primitive men will not eat animals between which and themselves and their gods they believe a peculiar tie of kinship to exist. Men do not eat an animal for which they have a reverential dread, or if they eat it at all, it is only in a sacramental feast and in order to absorb into themselves its life and holy properties. Such abstinences as the above, though based ontaboo, that is, on a reluctance to eat the totem or sacred animal, are yet ascetic in so far as they involve much self-denial. No flesh is more wholesome or succulent than beef, yet the Egyptians and Phoenicians, says Porphyry (de Abst.ii. 11), would rather eat human flesh than that of the cow, and so would two hundred and fifty millions of modern Hindus. The privation involved in abstention from the flesh of the swine, ataboohardly less widespread, is obvious.

Similar prohibitions are common in Africa, where fetish priests are often reduced to a diet of herbs and roots. That such dietary restrictions were merely ceremonial and superstitious, and notintended to prevent the consumption of meats which would revolt modern tastes, is certain from the fact that the Levitical law freely allowed the eating of locusts, grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches, while forbidding the consumption of rabbits, hares, storks, swine, &c. The Pythagoreans were forbidden to eat beans.

Another widespread reason for avoiding flesh diet altogether was the fear of absorbing the irrational soul of the animal, which especially resided in the blood. Hence the rule not to eat meats strangled, except in sacramental meals when the god inherent in the animal was partaken of. It is equally a soul or spirit in wine which inspires the intoxicated; the old Egyptian kings avoided wine at table and in libations, because it was the blood of rebels who had fought with the gods, and out of whose rotting bodies grew the vines; to drink the blood was to imbibe the soul of these rebels, and the frenzy of intoxication which followed was held to be possession by their spirits. The medieval Jews also held that there is a cardiac demon in wine which takes possession of drunken men; and the Mahommedan prohibition of wine-drinking is based on a similar superstition. The avoidance of wine, therefore, by Rechabites, Nazirites, Arab dervishes and Pythagoreans, and also of leaven in bread, is parallel to and explicable in the same way as abstention from flesh. Porphyry (de Abst.i. 19) acquaints us with another widespread scruple against flesh diet. It was this, that the souls of men transmigrated into animals, so that if you ate these, you might consume your own kind, cannibal-wise. Contemporary meat-eaters set themselves to combat this prejudice, and argued that it was a pious duty to kill animals and so release the human souls imprisoned. In the same tract Porphyry relates (ii. 48) how wizards acquired the mantic powers of certain birds, such as ravens and hawks, by swallowing their hearts. The soul of the bird, he explains, enters them with its flesh, and endows them with power of divination. The lover of wisdom, who is priest of the universal God, rather than risk the taking into himself of inferior souls and polluting demons, will abstain from eating animals. Such is Porphyry’s argument.

The same fear of imbibing the irrational soul of animals, and thereby reinforcing the lower appetites and instincts of the human being, inspired the vegetarianism of Apollonius of Tyana and of the Jewish Therapeutae, who in their sacred meals were careful to have a table free from blood-containing meats; and the fear of absorbing the animal’s psychic qualities equally motived the Jewish and early Christian rule against eating things strangled. It was an early belief, which long survived among the Manichaean sects, that fish, being born in and of the waters, and without any sexual connexion on the part of other fishes are free from the taint which pollutes all animalsquae copulatione generantur. Fish, therefore, unlike flesh, could be safely eaten. Here we have the origin of the Catholic rule of fasting, seldom understood by those who observe it. The same scruple against flesh-eating is conveyed in the beautiful confession, in theCretansof Euripides, of one who had been initiated in the mysteries of Orpheus and became a “Bacchos.” The last lines of this, as rendered by Dr Gilbert Murray, are as follows:—

“Robed in pure white, I have borne me cleanFrom man’s vile birth and coffined clay,And exiled from my lips alwayTouch of all meat where life hath been.”

“Robed in pure white, I have borne me clean

From man’s vile birth and coffined clay,

And exiled from my lips alway

Touch of all meat where life hath been.”

This Orphic fast from meat was only broken by an annual sacramental banquet, originally, perhaps, of human, but later of raw bovine flesh.

The Manichaeans held that in every act of begetting, human or otherwise, a soul is condemned afresh to a cycle of misery by imprisonment in flesh—a thoroughly Indian notion, under the influence of which their perfect or elect ones scrupulously abstained from flesh. The prohibition of taking life, which they took over from the Farther East, in itself entailed fasting from flesh. A fully initiated Manichaean would not even cut his own salad, but employed a catechumen to commit on his behalf this act of murder, for which he subsequently shrived him.

We come to a third widespread reason for fasting, common among savages. Famished persons are liable to morbid excitement, and fall into imaginative ecstasies, in the course of which they see visions and spectres, converse with gods and angels, and are the recipients of supernatural revelations. Accordingly King Saul “ate no bread all the day nor all the night” in which the witch of Endor revealed to him the ghost of Samuel. Weak and famished, he hardly wanted to eat the fatted calf when the vision was over. Among the North American Indians ecstatic fasting is regularly practised. A faster writes down his visions and revelations for a whole season. They are then examined by the elders of the tribe, and if events have verified them, he is recognized as a supernaturally gifted being, and rewarded with chieftaincy. All over the world fasting is a recognized mode of evoking, consulting and also of overcoming the spirit world. This is why the Zulus and other primitive races distrust a medicine man who is not an ascetic and lean with fasting. In the Semitic East it is an old belief that a successful fast in the wilderness of forty days and nights gives power over the Djinns. The Indianyogifasts till he sees face to face all the gods of his Pantheon; the Indian magician fasts twelve days before producing rain or working any cure. The Bogomils fasted till they saw the Trinity face to face. From the first, fasting was practised in the church for similar reason. In theShepherd of Hermasa vision of the church rewards frequent fasts and prayer; and it is related in extra-canonical sources that James the Less vowed that he would fast until he too was vouchsafed a vision of the risen Lord. After a long and rigorous fast the Lord appeared to him. Not a few saints were rewarded for their fasting by glimpses of the beatific vision. Dr Tylor writes on this point as follows (Prim. Cult.ii. 415): “Bread and meat would have robbed the ascetic of many an angel’s visit: the opening of the refectory door must many a time have closed the gates of heaven to his gaze.”

Among the Semites and Tatars worshippers lacerate themselves before the god. So in I Kings xviii. 28 the priests of Baal engaged in a rain-making ceremony, gashed themselves with knives and lances till the blood gushed out upon them. The Syriac wordethkashshaph, which means literally to “cut oneself,” is the regular equivalent of to “make supplication.” Among Greeks and Arabs, mourners also cut themselves with knives and scratched their faces; the Hebrew law forbade such mourning, and we find the prohibition repeated in many canons of the Eastern churches. At first sight these rites seem intended to call down the pity of heaven on man, but as Robertson Smith points out, their real import was by shedding blood on a holy stone or in a holy place to tie or renew a blood-bond between the God and his faithful ones. We have no clear information about the mind of the Flagellants, who in 1259, and again in 1349, swarmed through the streets of European cities, naked and thrashing themselves, till the blood ran, with leather thongs and iron whips. They were penitents, and no doubt imbued with the ancient belief that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.

Asceticism then in its origin was usually not ascetic in a modern sense, that is, not ethical. It was rather of the nature of the savagetaboo(q.v.), the outcome of totemistic beliefs or a mode of averting the contaminating presence of djinns and demons. Above all, fasting was a mode of preparing oneself for the sacramental eating of a sacred animal, and as such often assisted by use of purgatives and aperients. It was essential in the old Greek rites of averting theKêresor djinns, the ill regulated ghosts who return to earth and molest the living, to abstain from flesh. The Pythagoreans and Orphicmystaeso abstained all their life long, and Porphyry eloquently insists on such a discipline for all who “are not content merely to talk about Reason, but are really intent on casting aside the body and living through Reason with Truth. Naked and without the tunic of the flesh these will enter the arena and strive in the Olympic contest of the soul.”

It is time to pass on to Buddhist asceticism, in its essence a more ethical and philosophical product than some of the forms so far considered. The keynote of Buddhist asceticism is deliverance from life and its inevitable suffering. Once at avillage where he rested the Blessed One (Buddha) addressed his brethren and said: “It is through not understanding and grasping four Noble Truths, O brethren, that we have had to run so long, to wander so long in this weary path of transmigration, both you and I.” These noble truths were about sorrow, its cause, its cessation and the path which leads to that cessation. Once they are grasped the craving for existence is rooted out, that which leads to renewed existence is destroyed, and there is no more birth. The Buddha believed he had a way of Truth, which if an elect disciple possessed he might say of himself, “Hell is destroyed for me, and rebirth as an animal, or a ghost, or in any place of woe. I am converted, I am no longer liable to be reborn in a state of suffering, and am assured of final salvation.”

Suffering, said the sage in his great sermon at Benares, is inseparable from birth and old age. Sickness is suffering, so is death, so is union with the unloved, and separation from the loved; not to obtain what one desires is suffering; the entire fivefold clinging to the earthly is suffering. Its origin is the thirst for being which leads from birth to birth, together with lust and desire, which find gratification here and there; the thirst for pleasures, for being, for power. This thirst must be extinguished by complete annihilation of desire, by letting it go, expelling it, separating oneself from it, giving it no room. This extinction is achieved in eight ways, namely rectitude of faith, resolve, speech, action, living, effort, thought, self-concentration.

In this gospel we must be done with the outer world, participation in which is not the self, yet means for the self birth and death, appetites, longings, emotions, change and suffering, pleasure and pain. He that has put off all lust and desire, all hope and fear, all will to exist as a sinful, because a sentient, being, has won to the heaven of extinction or Nirvana. He may still tread the earth, but he is a saint or Brahman, is in heaven, has quitted the transient and enjoys eternity.

Such was the Buddha’s gospel, as his most ancient scriptures enunciate it. Nirvana is constantly defined in them as supreme happiness. It is not even clear how far, if we interpret it strictly, this philosophy leaves any self to be happy. However this be, its practical expression is the life of the monk who has separated himself from the world. Five commandments must be observed by him who would even approach the higher life of saint and ascetic. They are these: to kill no living thing; not to lay hands on another’s property; not to touch another’s wife; not to speak what is untrue; not to drink intoxicating drinks.

Though couched in the negative, these rules must be interpreted in the amplest and widest sense by all believers. The Order, however, which the would-be ascetic can enter by regular initiation, when he is twenty years of age, entails a discipline much more severe. He has gone forth from home into homelessness, and has not where to lay his head. He must eat only the morsels he gets by begging; must dress in such rags as he can pick up; must sleep under trees. Mendicancy is his recognized way of life. Furthermore, he must abstain all his life from sexual intercourse; he may not take even a blade of grass without permission of the owner; he must not kill even a worm or ant; he must not boast of his perfection. In practice the lives of Buddhist monks are not so squalid as these rules would lead us to suppose. Thanks to the reverent charity of the laymen, they do not live much worse than Benedictine monks; and the prohibition to live in houses does not extend to caves. Everywhere in India and Ceylon they hollowed out cells and churches in the cliffs and rocks, which are the wonder of the European tourist.

But long before the advent of Buddhism, the hermit, or wandering beggar, was a familiar figure in India. No formal initiation was imposed on the would-be ascetic, save (in the case of young men) the duty to live at first in his teacher’s house. One who had thus fulfilled the duties of the student order must “go forth remaining chaste,” says theĀpastamba, ii. 9. 8. He shall then “live without a fire, without a house, without pleasures, without protection; remaining silent and uttering speech only on the occasion of the daily recitation of the Veda; begging so much food only in the village as will sustain his life, he shall wander about, neither caring for this world nor for heaven. He shall only wear clothes thrown away by others. Some declare that he shall even go naked. Abandoning truth and falsehood, pleasure and pain, the Vedas, this world and the next, he shall seek the Universal Soul, in knowledge of which standeth eternal salvation.”

Such a life was specially recommended for one who has lived the life of a householder, and, having begotten sons according to the sacred law and offered sacrifices, desires in his old age to abandon worldly objects and direct his mind to final liberation. He leaves his wife, if she will not accompany him, and goes forth into the forest, committing her and his house to his sons. He must indeed take with him the sacred fire and implements for domestic sacrifice, but until death overtakes him he must wander silent, alone, possessing no hearth nor dwelling, begging his food in the villages, firm of purpose, with a potsherd for an alms bowl, the roots of trees for a dwelling, and clad in coarse worn out garments. “Let him not desire to die, let him not desire to live; let him wait for his appointed time, as a servant waits for the payment of his wages. Let him drink water purified by straining with a cloth, let him utter speech purified by truth, let him keep his heart pure. Let him patiently bear hard words, let him not insult anybody, let him not become any one’s enemy for the sake of this perishable body.... Let him reflect on the transmigrations of men, caused by their sinful deeds, on their falling into hell, and on their torments in the world of Yama.... A twice-born man who becomes an ascetic thus shakes off sin here below and reaches the highest Brahman” (Laws of Manu, by G. Bühler, vi. 85).

This old-world wisdom of the Hindus, a thousand years before our era, is worthily to be paralleled from the Manichaeism of about the year 400. Augustine has preserved (contra Faustum, v. 1) the portraiture of a Manichaean elect as drawn by himself:—

“I have given up father and mother, wife, children and all else that the gospel bids us, and do you ask if I accept the gospel? Are you then still ignorant of what the word gospel means? It is nothing else than the preaching and precept of Christ. I have cast away gold and silver, and have ceased to carry even copper in my belt, being content with my daily bread, nor caring for the morrow, nor anxious how my belly shall be filled or my body clothed; and do you ask me if I accept the gospel? You behold in me those beatitudes of Christ which make up the gospel, and you ask me if I accept it. You behold me gentle, a peacemaker, pure of heart, a mourner, hungering, thirsting, bearing persecutions and hatreds for righteousness’ sake, and do you doubt whether I accept the gospel.... All that was mine I have given up, father, mother, wife, children, gold, silver, eating, drinking, delights, pleasures. Deem this a sufficient answer to your question and deem yourself on the way to be blessed, if you have not been scandalized in me.”

The Greek Cynics (seeCynics) played a great part in the history of Asceticism, and they were so much the precursors of the Christian hermits that descriptions of them in profane literature have been mistaken for pictures of early monasticism. In striving to imitate the rugged strength and independence of their master Socrates, they went to such extremes as rather to caricature him. They affected to live like beggars, bearing staff and wallet, owning nothing, renouncing pleasures, riches, honours. For older thinkers like Plato and Aristotle the perfect life was that of the citizen and householder; but the Cynics were individualists, citizens of the world without loyalty or respect for the ancient city state, the decay of which was coincident with their rise. Their zeal for renunciation often extended not to pleasures, marriage and property alone, but to cleanliness, knowledge and good manners as well, and in this respect also they were the forerunners of later monks.

Philo (20B.C.-A.D.40) has left us many pictures of the life which to his mind impersonated the highest wisdom, and they are all inspired by the more respectable sort of cynicism, which had taken deep root among Greek Jews of the day. One such picture merits citation from his tractOn Change of Names(vol. i. 583, ed. Mangey): “All this company of the good and wise have of their own free will divested themselves of too copious wealth; nay, have spurned the things dear to the flesh. For ofgood habit and lusty are athletes, since they have fortified against the soul the body which should be its servant; but the disciples of wisdom are pale and wasted, and in a manner reduced to skeletons, because they have sacrificed the whole of their bodily strength to the faculties of the soul.”

His own favourite ascetics, the Therapeutae, whose chief centre was in Egypt, had renounced property and all its temptations, and fled, irrevocably abandoning brothers, children, wives, parents, throngs of kinsmen, intimacy of friends, the fatherlands where they were born and bred (seeTherapeutae). Here we have the ideal of early Christian renunciation at work, but apart from the influence of Jesus. In the pages of Epictetus the same ideal is constantly held up to us.

In the Christian Church there was from the earliest age a leaning to excessive asceticism, and it needed a severe struggle on the part of Paul, and of the Catholic teachers who followed him, to secure for the baptized the right to be married, to own property, to engage in war and commerce, or to assume public office. One and all of the permanent institutions of society were condemned by the early enthusiasts, especially by those who looked forward to a speedy advent of the millennium, as alien to the kingdom of God and as impediments to the life of grace.

Marriage and property had already been eschewed in the Jewish Essene and Therapeutic sects, and in Christianity the name of Encratite was given to those who repudiated marriage and the use of wine. They did not form a sect, but represented an impulse felt everywhere. In early and popular apocryphal histories the apostles are represented as insisting that their converts should either not contract wedlock or should dissolve the tie if already formed. This is the plot of theActs of Thecla, a story which probably goes back to the first century. Repudiation of the tie by fervent women, betrothed or already wives, occasioned much domestic friction and popular persecution. In the Syriac churches, even as late as the 4th century, the married state seems to have been regarded as incompatible with the perfection of the initiated. Renunciation of the state of wedlock was anyhow imposed on the faithful during the lengthy, often lifelong, terms of penance imposed upon them for sins committed; and later, when monkery took the place, in a church become worldly, partly of the primitive baptism and partly of that rigorous penance which was the rebaptism and medicine of the lapsed, celibacy and virginity were held essential thereto, no less than renunciation of property and money-making.

Together with the rage for virginity went the institution ofvirgines subintroductae, or of spiritual wives; for it was often assumed that the grace of baptism restored the original purity of life led by Adam and Eve in common before the Fall. Such rigours are encouraged in theShepherd of Hermas, a book which emanated from Rome and up to the 4th century was read in church. They were common in the African churches, where they led to abuses which taxed the energy even of a Cyprian. They were still rife in Antioch in 260. We detect them in the Celtic church of St Patrick, and, as late as the 7th century, among the Celtic elders of the north of France. In the Syriac church as late as 340, such relations prevailed between the “Sons and daughters of the Resurrection.” It continued among the Albigenses and other dissident sects of the middle ages, among whom it served a double purpose; for their elders were thus not only able to prove their own chastity, but to elude the inquisitors, who were less inclined to suspect a man of the catharism which regarded marriage as the “greater adultery” (maius adulterium) if they found him cohabiting (in appearance at least) with a woman. There was hardly an early council, great or small, that did not condemn this custom, as well as the other one, still more painful to think of, of self-emasculation. In the Catholic church, however, common sense prevailed, and those who desired to follow the Encratite ideal repaired to the monasteries.

Authorities.—E.B. Tylor,Primitive Culture(London, 1903); Robertson Smith,Religion of the Semites(London, 1901); J.E. Harrison,Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion; F. Max Müller,The Sacred Books of the East; Victor Henry,La Magie dans l’Inde antique; J.G. Frazer,The Golden Bough(London, 1900), andAdonis, Attis, Osiris(London, 1906); Georges Lafay,Culte des divinitês d’Alexandrie(Paris, 1884); Döllinger,Sectengeschichte des Mittelalters(Munich, 1890); Fr. Cumont,Mysteries of Mithra(Chicago, 1903); Zöckler,Gesch. der Ascese(1863). See also underPurification. Goldziher, “De l’ascetisme aux premiers temps de l’Islam,” inRevue de l’histoire des religions(1898), p. 314; Muratori,De Synisactis et Agapetis(Pavia, 1709); Jas. Martineau,Types of Ethical Theory(Oxford, 1885); T.H. Green,Prolegomena to Ethics(Oxford, 1883); Franz Cumont,Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain(Paris, 1907); Porphyrius,De Abstinentia; Plutarchus,De Carnium Esu.

(F. C. C.)

ASCHAFFENBURG,a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Bavaria, on the right bank of the Main, at its confluence with the Aschaff, near the foot of the Spessart, 26 m. by rail S.E. of Frankfort-On-Main. Pop. (1900) 18,091; (1905) 25,275. Its chief buildings are the Johannisburg, built (1605-1614) by Archbishop Schweikard of Cronberg, which contains a library with a number ofincunabula, a collection of engravings and paintings; theStiftskirche, or cathedral, founded in 980 by Otto of Bavaria, but dating in the main from the early 12th and the 13th centuries, in which are preserved various monuments by the Vischers, and a sarcophagus, with the relics of St Margaret (1540); the Capuchin hospital; a theatre, which was formerly the house of the Teutonic order; and several mansions of the German nobility. The town, which has been remarkable for its educational establishments since the 10th century, has a gymnasium, lyceum, seminarium and other schools. There is an archaeological museum in the old abbey buildings. The graves of Klemens Brentano and his brother Christian (d. 1851) are in the churchyard; and Wilhelm Heinse is buried in the town. Coloured and white paper, ready-made clothing, cellulose, tobacco, lime and liqueurs are the chief manufactures, while a considerable export trade is done down the Main in wood, cattle and wine.

Aschaffenburg, called in the middle ages Aschafaburg and also Askenburg, was originally a Roman settlement. The 10th and 23rd Roman legions had their station here, and on the ruins of theircastrumthe Frankish mayors of the palace built a castle. Bonifacius erected a chapel to St Martin, and founded a Benedictine monastery. A stone bridge over the Main was built by Archbishop Willigis in 989. Adalbert increased the importance of the town in various ways about 1122. In 1292 a synod was held here, and in 1474 an imperial diet, preliminary to that of Vienna, in which the concordat was decided which has therefore been sometimes called theAschaffenburg Concordat.

The town suffered greatly during the Thirty Years’ War, being held in turn by the various belligerents. In 1842-1849, King Louis built himself to the west of the town a country house, called thePompeianum, from its being an imitation of the house of Castor and Pollux at Pompeii. In 1866 the Prussians inflicted a severe defeat on the Austrians in the neighbourhood.

The principality of Aschaffenburg, deriving its name from the city, comprehended an area of 654 English sq. m. It formed part of the electorate of Mainz, and in 1803 was made over to the archchancellor, Archbishop Charles of Dalberg. In 1806 it was annexed to the grand-duchy of Frankfort; and in 1814 was transferred to Bavaria, in virtue of a treaty concluded on the 19th of June between that power and Austria. With lower Franconia, it now forms a district of the kingdom of Bavaria.

ASCHAM, ROGER(c.1515-1568), English scholar and writer, was born at Kirby Wiske, a village in the North Riding of Yorkshire, near Northallerton, about the year 1515. His name would be more properly spelt Askham, being derived, doubtless, from Askham in the West Riding. He was the third son of John Ascham, steward to Lord Scrope of Bolton. The family name of his mother Margaret is unknown, but she is said to have been well connected. The authority for this statement, as for most others concerning Ascham’s early life, is Edward Grant, headmaster of Westminster, who collected and edited his letters and delivered a panegyrical oration on his life in 1576.

Ascham was educated not at school, but in the house of Sir Humphry Wingfield, a barrister, and in 1533 speaker of the House of Commons, as Ascham himself tells us, in theToxophilus, p. 120 (not, as by a mistake which originated with Grant and has been repeated ever since, Sir Anthony Wingfield, who was nephewof the speaker). Sir Humphry “ever loved and used to have many children brought up in his house,” where they were under a tutor named R. Bond. Their sport was archery, and Sir Humphry “himself would at term times bring down from London both bows and shafts and go with them himself to the field and see them shoot.” Hence Ascham’s earliest English work, theToxophilus, the importance which he attributed to archery in educational establishments, and probably the provision for archery in the statutes of St Albans, Harrow and other Elizabethan schools. From this private tuition Ascham was sent “about 1530,” at the age, it is said, of fifteen, to St John’s College, Cambridge, then the largest and most learned college in either university. Here he fell under the influence of John Cheke, who was admitted a fellow in Ascham’s first year, and Sir Thomas Smith. His guide and friend was Robert Pember, “a man of the greatest learning and with an admirable facility in the Greek tongue.” On his advice he practised seriously the precept embodied in the saying, “I know nothing about the subject, I have not even lectured on it,” and “to learn Greek more quickly, while still a boy, taught Greek to boys.” In Latin he specially studied Cicero and Caesar. He became B.A. on the 18th of February 1534/5. Dr Nicholas Metcalfe was then master of the college, “a papist, indeed, and yet if any young man given to the new learning as they termed it, went beyond his fellows,” he “lacked neither open praise, nor private exhibition.” He procured Ascham’s election to a fellowship, “though being a new bachelor of arts, I chanced among my companions to speak against the Pope ... after grievous rebuke and some punishment, open warning was given to all the fellows, none to be so hardy, as to give me his voice at that election.” The day of election Ascham regarded as his “birthday,” and “the whole foundation of the poor learning I have and of all the furtherance that hitherto elsewhere I have obtained.” He took his M.A. degree on the 3rd of July 1537. He stayed for some time at Cambridge taking pupils, among whom was William Grindal, who in 1544 became tutor to Princess Elizabeth. Ascham himself cultivated music, acquired fame for a beautiful handwriting, and lectured on mathematics. Before 1540, when the Regius professorship of Greek was established, Ascham “was paid a handsome salary to profess the Greek tongue in public,” and held also lectures in St John’s College. He obtained from Edward Lee, then archbishop of York, a pension of £2 a year, in return for which Ascham translated Oecumenius’ Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles. But the archbishop, scenting heresy in some passage relating to the marriage of the clergy, sent it back to him, with a present indeed, but with something like a reprimand, to which Ascham answered with an assurance that he was “no seeker after novelties,” as his lectures showed. He was on safer ground in writing in 1542-1543 a book, which he told Sir William Paget in the summer of 1544 was in the press, “on the art of Shooting.” This was no doubt suggested partly by the act of parliament 33 Henry VIII. c. 9, “an acte for mayntenaunce of Artyllarie and debarringe of unlawful games,” requiring every one under sixty, of good health, the clergy, judges, &c., excepted, “to use shooting in the long bow,” and fixing the price at which bows were to be sold. Under the title ofToxophilushe presented it to Henry VIII. at Greenwich soon after his triumphant return from the capture of Boulogne, and promptly received a grant of a pension of £10 a year, equal to some £200 a year of our money. A novelty of the book was that the author had “written this Englishe matter in the Englishe tongue for Englishe men,” though he thought it necessary to defend himself by the argument that what “the best of the realm think it honest to use” he “ought not to suppose it vile for him to write.” It is a Platonic dialogue between Toxophilus and Philologus, and nowadays its chief interest lies in its incidental remarks. It may probably claim to have been the model for Izaak Walton’sCompleat Angler.

From 1541, or earlier, Ascham acted as letter-writer to the university and also to his college. Perhaps the best specimen of his skill was the letter written to the protector Somerset in 1548 on behalf of Sedbergh school, which was attached to St John’s College by the founder, Dr Lupton, in 1525, and the endowment of which had been confiscated under the Chantries Act. In 1546 Ascham was elected public orator by the university on Sir John Cheke’s retirement.

Shortly after the beginning of the reign of Edward VI., Ascham made public profession of Protestant opinions in a disputation on the doctrine of the Mass, begun in his own college and then removed for greater publicity to the public schools of the university, where it was stopped by the vice-chancellor. Thereon Ascham wrote a letter of complaint to Sir William Cecil. This stood him in good stead. In January 1548, Grindal, the princess Elizabeth’s tutor, died. Ascham had already corresponded with the princess, and in one of his letters says that he returns her pen which he has mended. Through Cecil and at the princess’s own wish he was selected as her tutor against another candidate pressed by Admiral Seymour and Queen Katherine. Ascham taught Elizabeth—then sixteen years old—for two years, chiefly at Cheshunt. In a letter to Sturm, the Strassburg schoolmaster, he praises her “beauty, stature, wisdom and industry. She talks French and Italian as well as English: she has often talked to me readily and well in Latin and moderately so in Greek. When she writes Greek and Latin nothing is more beautiful than her handwriting ... she read with me almost all Cicero and great part of Titus Livius: for she drew all her knowledge of Latin from those two authors. She used to give the morning to the Greek Testament and afterwards read select orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles. To these I added St Cyprian and Melanchthon’s Commonplaces.” In 1550 Ascham quarrelled with Elizabeth’s steward and returned to Cambridge. Cheke then procured him the secretaryship to Sir Richard Morrison (Moryson), appointed ambassador to Charles V. It was on his way to join Morrison that he paid his celebrated morning call on Lady Jane Grey at Bradgate, where he found her reading Plato’sPhaedo, while every one else was out hunting.

The embassy went to Louvain, where he found the university very inferior to Cambridge, then to Innsbruck and Venice. Ascham read Greek with the ambassador four or five days a week. His letters during the embassy, which was recalled on Mary’s accession, were published in English in 1553, as a “Report” on Germany. Through Bishop Gardiner he was appointed Latin secretary to Queen Mary with a pension of £20 a year. His Protestantism he must have quietly sunk, though he told Sturm that “some endeavoured to hinder the flow of Gardiner’s benevolence on account of his religion.” Probably his never having been in orders tended to his safety. On the 1st of June 1554 he married Margaret Howe, whom he described as niece of Sir R. (? J., certainly not, as has been said, Henry) Wallop. By her he had two sons. From his frequent complaints of his poverty then and later, he seems to have lived beyond his income, though, like most courtiers, he obtained divers lucrative leases of ecclesiastical and crown property. In 1555 he resumed his studies with Princess Elizabeth, reading in Greek the orations of Aeschines and Demosthenes’De Corona. Soon after Elizabeth’s accession, on the 5th of October 1559, he was given, though a layman, the canonry and prebend of Wetwang in York minster. In 1563 he began the work which has made him famous,The Scholemaster. The occasion of it was, he tells us (though he is perhaps merely imitating Boccaccio), that during the “great plague” at London in 1563 the court was at Windsor, and there on the 10th of December he was dining with Sir William Cecil, secretary of state, and other ministers. Cecil said he had “strange news; that divers scholars of Eaton be run away from the schole for fear of beating”; and expressed his wish that “more discretion was used by schoolmasters in correction than commonly is.” A debate took place, the party being pretty evenly divided between floggers and anti-floggers, with Ascham as the champion of the latter. Afterwards Sir Richard Sackville, the treasurer, came up to Ascham and told him that “a fond schoolmaster” had, by his brutality, made him hate learning, much to his loss, and as he had now a young son, whom he wished to be learned, he offered, if Ascham would name a tutor, to pay for the education of their respective sons underAscham’s orders, and invited Ascham to write a treatise on “the right order of teaching.”The Scholemasterwas the result. It is not, as might be supposed, a general treatise on educational method, but “a plaine and perfite way of teachyng children to understand, write and speake in Latin tong”; and it was not intended for schools, but “specially prepared for the private brynging up of youth in gentlemen and noblemens houses.” The perfect way simply consisted in “the double translation of a model book”; the book recommended by this professional letter-writer being “Sturmius’Select Letters of Cicero.” As a method of learning a language by a single pupil, this method might be useful; as a method of education in school nothing more deadening could be conceived. The method itself seems to have been taken from Cicero. Nor was the famous plea for the substitution of gentleness and persuasion for coercion and flogging in schools, which has been one of the main attractions of the book, novel. It was being practised and preached at that very time by Christopher Jonson (c. 1536-1597) at Winchester; it had been enforced at length by Wolsey in his statutes for his Ipswich College in 1528, following Robert Sherborne, bishop of Chichester, in founding Rolleston school; and had been repeatedly urged by Erasmus and others, to say nothing of William of Wykeham himself in the statutes of Winchester College in 1400. But Ascham’s was the first definite demonstration in favour of humanity in the vulgar tongue and in an easy style by a well-known “educationist,” though not one who had any actual experience as a schoolmaster. What largely contributed to its fame was its picture of Lady Jane Grey, whose love of learning was due to her finding her tutor a refuge from pinching, ear-boxing and bullying parents; some exceedingly good criticisms of various authors, and a spirited defence of English as a vehicle of thought and literature, of which it was itself an excellent example. The book was not published till after Ascham’s death, which took place on the 23rd of December 1568, owing to a chill caught by sitting up all night to finish a New Year’s poem to the queen.

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