rites and proceedings more or less related to magic and which are calculated to assure their present and future happiness in spite of their sins.[1]
Theoretical Christianity has never been a religion suited to worldly people; the doctors of the spiritual life have always reasoned about those people who were able to escape from the conditions of ordinary life. "When the Council of Gangres, in 325," said Renan, "declared that the Gospel maxims about poverty, the renunciation of the family and virginity, were not intended for the ordinary Christian, the perfectionists made places apart where the evangelical life, too lofty for the common run of men, could be practised in all its rigour." He remarks, moreover, very justly, that the "monastery took the place of martyrdom so that the precepts of Jesus might be carried out somewhere,"[2] but he does not push this comparison far enough; the lives of the great hermits were a material struggle against the infernal powers which pursue them even to the desert,[3] and this struggle was to continue that which the martyrs had waged against their adversaries.
These facts show us the way to a right understanding of the nature of lofty moral convictions; these never depend on reasoning or on any education of the individual will, but on a state of war in which men voluntarily participate and which finds expression in well-defined myths. In Catholic countries the monks carry on the struggle against the prince of evil who triumphs in this world, and would subdue them to his will; in Protestant countries
- ↑ Heinrich Heine claims that the Catholicism of a wife is a very good thing for the husband, because the wife is never oppressed by the burden of her sins; after confession she begins again "to chatter and laugh." Moreover, there is no danger of her relating her sin (L'Allemagne, 2nd edition, vol. ii. p. 322).
- ↑ Renan, Marc-Aurèle, p. 558.
- ↑ Catholic saints do not struggle against abstractions but often against apparitions which present themselves with all the signs of reality. Luther also had to fight the Devil, at whom he threw his inkpot.
