When the description of this regime provokes Adeimantus to remark that “you are not making the men of this class particularly happy,” Socrates is made to reply that while it is not his object to make any class particularly happy, yet it would not surprise him if in the given circumstances even this class were very happy. When we look further for his meaning, we find it to be that the guardians are trained by their ascetic discipline to abandon all private aims and to find their happiness in an appreciation of a perfectly ordered commonwealth. If we understand this we shall, I believe, understand what civilized asceticism means. We shall have come back to the original meaning of the word itself, which is derived from the Greek ἀσκέω, “I practice,” and “embodies a metaphor taken from the ancient wrestling place or palæstra, where victory rewarded those who had best trained their bodies.” An ascetic in the original meaning of the term is an athlete; and it was in this spirit that the early Christians trained themselves deliberately as “athletes of Christ” to bear without flinching the tortures of their martyrdom. When asceticism is irrational, it is a form of totemism or fetich worship and derives from a belief that certain things are tabu or that evil spirits can be placated by human suffering. Or without any coherent belief whatsoever asceticism may be merely a perversion arising out of that ambivalence of the human passions which often makes pain, inflicted on others or self-inflicted, an exquisite [p161] pleasure. But when asceticism is rational, it is a discipline of the mind and body to fit men for the service of an ideal. Its purpose is to harden and to purify, to suppress contrary passions, and thus to intensify the passion for the ideal. “I chastise my body,” said St. Paul, “and bring it into subjection.” The Church, especially in the earlier centuries, was compelled to fight continually against irrational asceticism, and as late as the Middle Ages, the Inquisition pursued sects which regarded marriage as the “greater adultery” and practiced self-emasculation. The rational view was the view of St. Jerome: “Be on your guard when you begin to mortify your body by abstinence and fasting, lest you imagine yourself to be perfect and a saint; for perfection does not consist in this virtue. It is only a help; a disposition; a means, though a fitting one, for the attainment of true perfection.” Now when St. Paul said that he had to bring his body into subjection, when Aristotle defined the barbarians’ ideal as “the living as one likes,” when Plato made Socrates say that the soul is infected by the body, when Buddha preached the extinction of all craving, when Spinoza wrote that because we rejoice in virtue we are able to control our lusts, they accepted a view of human nature which is quite diametrically opposed to one which has had wide currency in our civilization since the Renaissance.