Among the many problems which confront the historian of Christian thought and life in the early centuries one of the most complex and difficult is that of the relations, practical as well as theoretical, between Christianity and asceticism. Since the age of the Reformation there has been incessant controversy over the question whether the anthropological assumptions which underlie ascetic morals—the dualistic conception of the constitution of human nature and the conviction that there is an irreconcilable opposition between body and spirit—are really identical with the principles of Christian anthropology so that there can be no experience of the gospel message apart from a radically pessimistic estimate of the possibilities of good inherent in human nature, and without the acceptance of a scale of ethical values based upon the progressive stages of an ascetic discipline.
After centuries of acrimonious theological controversy fomented by prejudices on both sides, we are now perhaps for the first time in a position to consider objectively the historical relations between the development of ascetic ideas and the propagation of the Christian piety, and consequently to solve satisfactorily the problem of the interaction between asceticism and Christianity.