Today, in this atmosphere, the very word and idea of asceticism is probably incomprehensible to a very large number of Christian people. Anyone talking about fasting and chastity and voluntary restriction of our individual desires is sure to meet with condescension or mockery. This does not, of course, prevent people from having their “metaphysical convictions” and believing in a “supreme being” or in the “sweet Jesus” who had a wonderful ethical teaching. The question is, however, what is the use of “metaphysical convictions” when they do not go any way towards providing a real answer — as opposed to one that is idealistic and abstract — to the problem of death, the scandal of the dissolution of the body in the earth. This real answer is to be found only in the knowledge granted by asceticism, in the effort to resist death in our own bodies, and by the dynamic triumph over the deadening of man. And not just in any kind of asceticism, but in that which consists in conformity to the example of Christ, who willingly accepted death so as to destroy death — “trampling down death by death.”

Every voluntary mortification of the egocentricity which is “contrary to nature” is a dynamic destruction of death and a triumph for the life of the person.

Christos Yannaras