A Non-Believing Theologian, an Early Gay Rights Activist, and a Thing Called Asceticism. Franz C. Overbeck as a Reader of Edward Carpenter

Late notes from Franz C. Overbeck’s Kirchenlexicon unveil some astonishing outlines of a ‘general ascetology’ of culture premised on a natural theory of asceticism. The sketched theory argues for the cultural balance of two universal but contrary in-born impulses, the asketischer Trieb and the Lusttrieb. We pondered : whence does this particular theory, seemingly foreshadowing some of Sigmund Freud’s most renowned dyads, originate ? The unforeseeable source turns out to be a prolific writer and pamphleteer whose 1896 liberationist booklet Love’s Coming-of-Age one would have hardly expected to find in Overbeck’s decent and bourgeois library: the English socialist, gay rights advocate, and prison reform activist Edward Carpenter. The paper peers into this curious discovery