While the practice of asceticism has been widely understood as a world-rejecting phenomenon by philosophers and scholars of religion, recent theorists of asceticism have attempted to refocus on asceticism's affirmative dimensions. I argue that these attempts to explore the affirmative nature of asceticism have lacked full engagement with Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical reflection upon asceticism's world-negating and world-affirming possibilities. By exploring Nietzsche's critique of and approbation of asceticism, I find resources for identifying two broad trajectories according to which ascetic practices can be organized. In the first, asceticism is explicitly engaged by the practitioner with the purpose of achieving a self-mastery that allows the practitioner to wield power over others, the world, and/or the practitioner's fate. In attempting to wield this control over the world, I argue that the ascetic inherently devalues it. In the second trajectory, the adherent's ascetic exercises are aimed at mastering the self in such a way as to resist the impulse to master the world, thus allowing the practitioner to affirm the world "as it is.".

In making this distinction, I develop a new theory of asceticism by both drawing from and critiquing the theoretical contributions of Max Weber and Michel Foucault, as well as those of more recent theorists including Geoffrey Harpham and Gavin Flood. In revealing the ascetic underpinnings of Nietzsche's philosophy, I demonstrate the ways in which the concerns of this bitter critic of Christianity resonate deeply with certain strains of Christian ascetic and mystical theology. Thus, I explore the ways in which Christian asceticism can aim in a world-affirming direction akin to that which Nietzsche endorses. To this end, I examine asceticism's role in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and the films of Terrence Malick, and I elucidate how these two artists depict both the world-denying and world-affirming potential of Christian asceticism. In the conclusion, I explore the applicability of my theory to the study of Islamic asceticism, and, by extension, the study of other manifestations of religious and philosophical asceticism.