So, there's this thing called theological dualism: a step beyond the mere existence of Good and Evil, but the idea that those two fundamental and opposing forces are baked into the nature of the universe, and literally everything is either one or the other. It's a very old idea - it might actually be the opposite of an idea, in that the concept of neutrality was a more 'advanced' idea that needed to be invented to rival the 'natural' idea of dualism, but that's a whole other digression - and you can find it in the bones of a lot of the old religions in and around the eastern Mediterranean. And even in the languages - the Ancient Greek word for 'good' could also 'brave' or 'competent', and 'evil' meant the opposites.
Then there's a specific subset of this dualism where one puts the entirety of the physical world on the Bad side of the chart. The human body is part of the physical world and so is Evil, therefore the things it wants must also be Evil, and the things it doesn't want must actually be Good. Most of the dualistic religions don't go this far in their mainstreams - it's not a very sustainable idea - but most of them have had it crop up at one time or the other. The prevalence of this idea within Christianity, how it got there, what other ideas it brought with it, and the whole sordid tale of it being variously embrace and rejected by various authorities for various and often cynical reasons is a whole field of study, but the short of it is that the idea has cropped up again and again over the centuries, and when it does the effect of it is various extremes of rejecting as much of the physical world as possible. It did this in quite a few times and places during the Medieval and Renaissance eras in Europe, and led to some of its more distinct institutions. Monastic orders isolate the holy from the endless sea of inherent unholiness that is the outside world, anchorites take it a step further, and flagellants go right into opposite land by saying that if your body says that food is good and pain is bad, then your worldly body must be wrong and it is actually fasting and injury that is needed.
The thing is, these are products of that set of ideas. If you scoop them up in the bucket labelled Memorable Medieval Stuff and dump them into your setting where Good has an entire rolodex and Evil has known names and addresses, you've created a problem. For its entire life Warhammer has been wrestling with the Cult of Sigmar morphing into Hammer Christianity if you leave it unsupervised for five minutes, because writers transplanting tropes from medieval Europe keep bringing in ideas that are completely alien to what the Cult of Sigmar actually is. A successful wrangling of this is how almost all monasteries in the setting have a specific purpose, allowing the aesthetic to be used without it clashing with the worldbuilding. A kind of eh handwave is the flagellants, where more recent lore generally says that they're a recent phenomenon brought about by the imminence of the End Times. And something that isn't even slightly adapted is the stylites - the anchorites on top of a pole. Sitting up there and doing nothing except presumably thinking holy thoughts makes some kind of sense in a theology where all of the reasons why doing so sucks are actually the evil physical world lying to you. It doesn't make any kind of sense if your religion is about the life and legacy of Hammer Guy. Climb down from that pole and do something useful, for Sigmar's sake. The physical world isn't evil! We know what it looks like when the physical world is evil, the streets start bleeding and the buildings start eating people! Also while we're on the topic the whole concept of what you're doing here is extremely Nurgle-coded!
Then there's a specific subset of this dualism where one puts the entirety of the physical world on the Bad side of the chart. The human body is part of the physical world and so is Evil, therefore the things it wants must also be Evil, and the things it doesn't want must actually be Good. Most of the dualistic religions don't go this far in their mainstreams - it's not a very sustainable idea - but most of them have had it crop up at one time or the other. The prevalence of this idea within Christianity, how it got there, what other ideas it brought with it, and the whole sordid tale of it being variously embrace and rejected by various authorities for various and often cynical reasons is a whole field of study, but the short of it is that the idea has cropped up again and again over the centuries, and when it does the effect of it is various extremes of rejecting as much of the physical world as possible. It did this in quite a few times and places during the Medieval and Renaissance eras in Europe, and led to some of its more distinct institutions. Monastic orders isolate the holy from the endless sea of inherent unholiness that is the outside world, anchorites take it a step further, and flagellants go right into opposite land by saying that if your body says that food is good and pain is bad, then your worldly body must be wrong and it is actually fasting and injury that is needed.
The thing is, these are products of that set of ideas. If you scoop them up in the bucket labelled Memorable Medieval Stuff and dump them into your setting where Good has an entire rolodex and Evil has known names and addresses, you've created a problem. For its entire life Warhammer has been wrestling with the Cult of Sigmar morphing into Hammer Christianity if you leave it unsupervised for five minutes, because writers transplanting tropes from medieval Europe keep bringing in ideas that are completely alien to what the Cult of Sigmar actually is. A successful wrangling of this is how almost all monasteries in the setting have a specific purpose, allowing the aesthetic to be used without it clashing with the worldbuilding. A kind of eh handwave is the flagellants, where more recent lore generally says that they're a recent phenomenon brought about by the imminence of the End Times. And something that isn't even slightly adapted is the stylites - the anchorites on top of a pole. Sitting up there and doing nothing except presumably thinking holy thoughts makes some kind of sense in a theology where all of the reasons why doing so sucks are actually the evil physical world lying to you. It doesn't make any kind of sense if your religion is about the life and legacy of Hammer Guy. Climb down from that pole and do something useful, for Sigmar's sake. The physical world isn't evil! We know what it looks like when the physical world is evil, the streets start bleeding and the buildings start eating people! Also while we're on the topic the whole concept of what you're doing here is extremely Nurgle-coded!
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