What does Askesis mean in the body as temple?

Askesis (Christian contemplative): Greek: ἄσκησις (áskēsis) — exercise, training, practice. The word belonged to the gymnasium before it belonged to the desert: it is what an athlete does.. A term from the body as temple in the Pleroma Gnosis Lexicon.

What is the origin of Askesis?

Greek: ἄσκησις (áskēsis) — exercise, training, practice. The word belonged to the gymnasium before it belonged to the desert: it is what an athlete does.

Askesis — Definition & Meaning | Pleroma Gnosis Lexicon

Definition

Askesis is training: the deliberate, repeated restriction a practitioner takes on in order to change what they are capable of. It is the root of the English ascetic, and in its original Greek it is an athlete's word, not a sufferer's. The restriction is the instrument. It is never the point.

Primary source

The demons that seize the passionate part of the soul are said to oppose the ascetical life, while those that disturb the reasoning [ part ] are called enemies of all truth and foes of contemplation.

— Praktikos, ch. 84, trans. Luke Dysinger (2005). Open-access copy

Deep Understanding

The word is borrowed. Before any monk used it, askesis was what a runner did in the months before a race: structured deprivation undertaken by someone who wanted a particular capacity and had worked out what it cost. When the desert tradition took the word over, it kept the logic intact. The deprivation is a method with an object, and the object is stated.

Evagrius names the object plainly: the aim of the ascetical life is love, and the aim of knowledge is contemplation. The division in the passage above is the practical one. Askesis works on the passionate part of the soul, meaning appetite, anger, the part that wants and refuses, while contemplation works on the reasoning part. A discipline aimed at the wrong half of yourself is not askesis; it is just discomfort with a spiritual vocabulary attached.

This is why the tradition is so uninterested in the impressive version. A practice that produces a visible result and leaves the practitioner exactly as reactive as before has failed on the tradition's own terms, however severe it was. And it is why gastrimargia sits first among the eight tempting thoughts: the appetite is the first and loudest resident of the passionate part, so it is where the training necessarily starts.

The modern inheritance of the word has lost the object and kept the restriction. Ascetic now names a style, spare and severe and slightly punitive, rather than a programme with a stated aim. Recovering the original sense is mostly a matter of asking the athlete's question of any practice: trained for what? Nepsis is the watchfulness askesis builds, hesychia the stillness it makes possible, and apatheia the condition the whole arc is aimed at.

Often confused with

Gastrimargia — the appetite askesis trains, where askesis is the training itself. Apatheia — the state it aims at, not the work. Hesychia — the stillness it opens, which is a condition rather than an exercise.

In Practice

Tonight, take any restriction you already keep. A food you avoid, an hour you do not give to the screen, a word you do not say. Finish this sentence about it in writing: I do this in order to be able to ___. If the blank fills with a bodily or social outcome, you have a regimen. If it fills with a capacity, such as staying in the room, not answering, hearing the second thought before acting on the first, you have askesis. Neither answer is shameful. Only one of them is what the desert meant.

In Pleroma's Words

"The athlete is not admired for going hungry. He is admired for what the hunger bought. Nobody in the desert thought differently; we are the ones who kept the hunger and forgot to name the purchase."

@online{alkimia2026askesis, author = {{Stefan's Alkimia}}, title = {{Askesis}}, organization = {{Pleroma Guide}}, date = {2026-10-07}, year = {2026}, url = {https://pleroma.guide/en/lexicon/askesis}, langid = {english} }

Askesis