Joona Salminen: Urban Asceticism in The Epistle to Diognetus

Asceticism has often been linked with the citizenship of Heaven in a monastic context. However, various ascetic tendencies existed before monasticism. This paper argues that early Christian apologetic works contain ascetic discourses regarding Christian lifestyle in an urban environment. The Epistle to Diognetusrepresents and contextualizes Christians and their lifestyle in a city environment providing an ascetic discourse that opens intriguing perspectives to apologetics as a genre of early Christian literature. The Epistlehas a clear apologetic out-group function: Christians are portrayed as good, pious citizens (e.g. in chapter 5). While describing the Christian citizenship, the anonymous author also constructs himself an ascetic authority. This authority has an important ascetic in-group function in describing the Christian way of life. For the out-group, The Epistle to Diognetusserves as an apology (defense), but for the in-group it depicts Christians as ascetics with higher moral standards than their non-Christian peers. The author does not aim only at convincing the out-group about how good citizens Christians are, he gives high praise for his community in order to edify them as ascetics. In my reading, The Epistle to Diognetuscontextualizes Christians as urban ascetics in a way that resembles how Clement of Alexandria constructs a Christian lifestyle in Paedagogusor how Tertullian (e.g. Apol. 42-43), Cyprian (Demet. 3; 5) and, later, Augustine (Civ. 1.30-31) represent Christians as good citizens in their apologetic works.