We have discussed the ascetic self in the histories of three scriptural traditions and presented an argument for shared structures in its formation. It remains for our concluding chapter to place the ascetic self in the context of modernity, both in terms of cultural and social developments and in terms of theory. The location and trope of the ascetic self in cosmological, liturgical traditions has, of course, been significantly eroded over several centuries in the West. The general demise of the ascetic self in modernity as both cultural trope and social fact is linked to the demise of traditional cosmologies, to the rise of the human sciences and Enlightenment reason and to the demise of broader religious tradition with the twofold death of ‘God’ and ‘Man’. The idea of progress that goes beyond medieval Christian theology implies that the ascetic self looking back to before creation and forwards to an eschaton is redundant, merely an echo of the past.