THE CHRISTIAN SIGNIFICANCE OF VOLUNTARY CELIBACY AND MONACHISM.
The idea of man as a species, and with it the significance of the
life of the species, of humanity as a whole, vanished as Christianity
became dominant. Herein we have a new confirmation of the position
advanced, that Christianity does not contain within itself the
principle of culture. Where man immediately identifies the species
with the individual, and posits this identity as his highest being,
as God, where the idea of humanity is thus an object to him only as
the idea of Godhead, there the need of culture has vanished; man has
all in himself, all in his God, consequently he has no need to supply
his own deficiencies by others as the representatives of the species,
or by the contemplation of the world generally; and this need is alone
the spring of culture. The individual man attains his end by himself
alone; he attains it in God,--God is himself the attained goal, the
realised highest aim of humanity; but God is present to each individual
separately. God only is the want of the Christian; others, the human
race, the world, are not necessary to him; he is not the inward need
of others. God fills to me the place of the species, of my fellow-men;
yes, when I turn away from the world, when I am in isolation, I first
truly feel my need of God, I first have a lively sense of his presence,
I first feel what God is, and what he ought to be to me. It is true
that the religious man has need also of fellowship, of edification in
common; but this need of others is always in itself something extremely
subordinate. The salvation of the soul is the fundamental idea,
the main point in Christianity; and this salvation lies only in God,
only in the concentration of the mind on him. Activity for others is
required, is a condition of salvation; but the ground of salvation is
God, immediate reference in all things to God. And even activity for
others has only a religious significance, has reference only to God,
as its motive and end, is essentially only an activity for God,--for
the glorifying of his name, the spreading abroad of his praise. But
God is absolute subjectivity,--subjectivity separated from the world,
above the world, set free from matter, severed from the life of the
species, and therefore from the distinction of sex. Separation from
the world, from matter, from the life of the species, is therefore
the essential aim of Christianity. [125] And this aim had its visible,
practical realisation in Monachism.
It is a self-delusion to attempt to derive monachism from the East. At
least, if this derivation is to be accepted, they who maintain
it should be consistent enough to derive the opposite tendency of
Christendom, not from Christianity, but from the spirit of the Western
nations, the occidental nature in general. But how, in that case,
shall we explain the monastic enthusiasm of the West? Monachism
must rather be derived directly from Christianity itself: it was
necessary consequence of the belief in heaven promised to mankind
by Christianity. Where the heavenly life is a truth, the earthly
life is a lie; where imagination is all, reality is nothing. To him
who believes in an eternal heavenly life, the present life loses
its value,--or rather, it has already lost its value: belief in the
heavenly life is belief in the worthlessness and nothingness of this
life. I cannot represent to myself the future life without longing
for it, without casting down a look of compassion or contempt on this
pitiable earthly life, and the heavenly life can be no object, no law
of faith, without, at the same time, being a law of morality: it must
determine my actions, [126] at least if my life is to be in accordance
with my faith: I ought not to cleave to the transitory things of this
earth. I ought not;--but neither do I wish; for what are all things
here below compared with the glory of the heavenly life? [127]
It is true that the quality of that life depends on the quality, the
moral condition of this; but morality is itself determined by the faith
in eternal life. The morality corresponding to the super-terrestrial
life is simply separation from the world, the negation of this life;
and the practical attestation of this spiritual separation is the
monastic life. [128] Everything must ultimately take an external form,
must present itself to the senses. An inward disposition must become
an outward practice. The life of the cloister, indeed ascetic life in
general, is the heavenly life as it is realised and can be realised
here below. If my soul belongs to heaven, ought I, nay, can I belong to
the earth with my body? The soul animates the body. But if the soul is
in heaven, the body is forsaken, dead, and thus the medium, the organ
of connection between the world and the soul is annihilated. Death,
the separation of the soul from the body, at least from this gross,
material, sinful body, is the entrance into heaven. But if death is
the condition of blessedness and moral perfection, then necessarily
mortification is the one law of morality. Moral death is the necessary
anticipation of natural death; I say necessary, for it would be the
extreme of immorality to attribute the obtaining of heaven to physical
death, which is no moral act, but a natural one common to man and the
brute. Death must therefore be exalted into a moral, a spontaneous
act. "I die daily," says the apostle, and this dictum Saint Anthony,
the founder of monachism, [129] made the theme of his life.
But Christianity, it is contended, demanded only a spiritual
freedom. True; but what is that spiritual freedom which does not
pass into action, which does not attest itself in practice? Or dost
thou believe that it only depends on thyself, on thy will, on thy
intention, whether thou be free from anything? If so, thou art greatly
in error, and hast never experienced what it is to be truly made
free. So long as thou art in a given rank, profession, or relation,
so long art thou, willingly or not, determined by it. Thy will,
thy determination, frees thee only from conscious limitations and
impressions, not from the unconscious ones which lie in the nature
of the case. Thus we do not feel at home, we are under constraint,
so long as we are not locally, physically separated from one with whom
we have inwardly broken. External freedom is alone the full truth of
spiritual freedom. A man who has really lost spiritual interest in
earthly treasures soon throws them out at window, that his heart may
be thoroughly at liberty. What I no longer possess by inclination is
a burden to me; so away with it! What affection has let go, the hand
no longer holds fast. Only affection gives force to the grasp; only
affection makes possession sacred. He who having a wife is as though he
had her not, will do better to have no wife at all. To have as though
one had not, is to have without the disposition to have, is in truth
not to have. And therefore he who says that one ought to have a thing
as though one had it not, merely says in a subtle, covert, cautious
way, that one ought not to have it at all. That which I dismiss from
my heart is no longer mine,--it is free as air. St. Anthony took the
resolution to renounce the world when he had once heard the saying,
"If thou wilt be perfect, go thy way, sell that thou hast and give to
the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come and follow
me." St. Anthony gave the only true interpretation of this text. He
went his way, and sold his possessions, and gave the proceeds to the
poor. Only thus did he prove his spiritual freedom from the treasures
of this world. [130]
Such freedom, such truth, is certainly in contradiction with the
Christianity of the present day, according to which the Lord has
required only a spiritual freedom, i.e., a freedom which demands
no sacrifice, no energy,--an illusory, self-deceptive freedom;--a
freedom from earthly good, which consists in its possession and
enjoyment! For certainly the Lord said, "My yoke is easy." How harsh,
how unreasonable would Christianity be if it exacted from man the
renunciation of earthly riches! Then assuredly Christianity would
not be suited to this world. So far from this, Christianity is in
the highest degree practical and judicious; it defers the freeing
oneself from the wealth and pleasures of this world to the moment of
natural death (monkish mortification is an unchristian suicide);--and
allots to our spontaneous activity the acquisition and enjoyment
of earthly possessions. Genuine Christians do not indeed doubt
the truth of the heavenly life,--God forbid! Therein they still
agree with the ancient monks; but they await that life patiently,
submissive to the will of God, i.e., to their own selfishness,
to the agreeable pursuit of worldly enjoyment. [131] But I turn
away with loathing and contempt from modern Christianity, in which
the bride of Christ readily acquiesces in polygamy, at least in
successive polygamy, and this in the eyes of the true Christian
does not essentially differ from contemporaneous polygamy; but yet
at the same time--oh! shameful hypocrisy!--swears by the eternal,
universally binding, irrefragable sacred truth of God's Word. I turn
back with reverence to the misconceived truth of the chaste monastic
cell, where the soul betrothed to heaven did not allow itself to be
wooed into faithlessness by a strange earthly body!
The unworldly, supernatural life is essentially also an unmarried
life. The celibate lies already, though not in the form of a law,
in the inmost nature of Christianity. This is sufficiently declared
in the supernatural origin of the Saviour,--a doctrine in which
unspotted virginity is hallowed as the saving principle, as the
principle of the new, the Christian world. Let not such passages as,
"Be fruitful and multiply," or, "What God has joined together let
not man put asunder," be urged as a sanction of marriage. The first
passage relates, as Tertullian and Jerome have already observed,
only to the unpeopled earth, not to the earth when filled with men,
only to the beginning, not to the end of the world, an end which
was initiated by the immediate appearance of God upon earth. And
the second also refers only to marriage as an institution of the Old
Testament. Certain Jews proposed the question whether it were lawful
for a man to separate from his wife; and the most appropriate way of
dealing with this question was the answer above cited. He who has once
concluded a marriage ought to hold it sacred. Marriage is intrinsically
an indulgence to the weakness or rather the strength of the flesh,
an evil which therefore must be restricted as much as possible. The
indissolubleness of marriage is a nimbus, a sacred irradiance, which
expresses precisely the opposite of what minds, dazzled and perturbed
by its lustre, seek beneath it. Marriage in itself is, in the sense
of perfected Christianity, a sin, [132] or rather a weakness which
is permitted and forgiven thee only on condition that thou for ever
limitest thyself to a single wife. In short, marriage is hallowed
only in the Old Testament, but not in the New. The New Testament
knows a higher, a supernatural principle, the mystery of unspotted
virginity. [133] "He who can receive it let him receive it." "The
children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: but they which
shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection
from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage: neither can
they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the
children of God, being the children of the resurrection." Thus in
heaven there is no marriage; the principle of sexual love is excluded
from heaven as an earthly, worldly principle. But the heavenly life is
the true, perfected, eternal life of the Christian. Why then should
I, who am destined for heaven, form a tie which is unloosed in my
true destination? Why should I, who am potentially a heavenly being,
not realise this possibility even here? [134] Marriage is already
proscribed from my mind, my heart, since it is expelled from heaven,
the essential object of my faith, hope, and life. How can an earthly
wife have a place in my heaven-filled heart? How can I divide my
heart between God and man? [135] The Christian's love to God is not
an abstract or general love such as the love of truth, of justice, of
science; it is a love to a subjective, personal God, and is therefore
a subjective, personal love. It is an essential attribute of this love
that it is an exclusive, jealous love, for its object is a personal
and at the same time the highest being, to whom no other can be
compared. "Keep close to Jesus [Jesus Christ is the Christian's God],
in life and in death; trust his faithfulness: he alone can help thee,
when all else leaves thee. Thy beloved has this quality, that he will
suffer no rival; he alone will have thy heart, will rule alone in
thy soul as a king on his throne."--"What can the world profit thee
without Jesus? To be without Christ is the pain of hell; to be with
Christ, heavenly sweetness."--"Thou canst not live without a friend:
but if the friendship of Christ is not more than all else to thee,
thou wilt be beyond measure sad and disconsolate."--"Love everything
for Jesus' sake, but Jesus for his own sake. Jesus Christ alone is
worthy to be loved."--"My God, my love [my heart]: thou art wholly
mine, and I am wholly thine."--"Love hopes and trusts ever in God,
even when God is not gracious to it [or tastes bitter, non sapit];
for we cannot live in love without sorrow.... For the sake of the
beloved, the loving one must accept all things, even the hard and
bitter."--"My God and my all, ... in thy presence everything is
sweet to me, in thy absence everything is distasteful.... Without
thee nothing can please me."--"Oh, when at last will that blessed,
longed-for hour appear, when thou wilt satisfy me wholly, and be
all in all to me? So long as this is not granted me, my joy is only
fragmentary."--"When was it well with me without thee? or when was
it ill with me in thy presence? I will rather be poor for thy sake,
than rich without thee. I will rather be a pilgrim on earth with thee,
than the possessor of heaven without thee. Where thou art is heaven;
death and hell where thou art not. I long only for thee."--"Thou
canst not serve God and at the same time have thy joys in earthly
things: thou must wean thyself from all acquaintances and friends,
and sever thy soul from all temporal consolation. Believers in
Christ should regard themselves, according to the admonition of the
Apostle Peter, only as strangers and pilgrims on the earth." [136]
Thus love to God as a personal being is a literal, strict, personal,
exclusive love. How then can I at once love God and a mortal wife? Do
I not thereby place God on the same footing with my wife? No! to a
soul which truly loves God, the love of woman is an impossibility,
is adultery. "He that is unmarried," says the Apostle Paul, "careth
for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord;
but he that is married careth for the things that are of the world,
how he may please his wife."
The true Christian not only feels no need of culture, because this
is a worldly principle and opposed to feeling; he has also no need
of (natural) love. God supplies to him the want of culture, and in
like manner God supplies to him the want of love, of a wife, of a
family. The Christian immediately identifies the species with the
individual; hence he strips off the difference of sex as a burdensome,
accidental adjunct. [137] Man and woman together first constitute
the true man; man and woman together are the existence of the race,
for their union is the source of multiplicity, the source of other
men. Hence the man who does not deny his manhood, is conscious that
he is only a part of a being, which needs another part for the making
up of the whole of true humanity. The Christian, on the contrary,
in his excessive, transcendental subjectivity, conceives that he is,
by himself, a perfect being. But the sexual instinct runs counter to
this view; it is in contradiction with his ideal: the Christian must
therefore deny this instinct.
The Christian certainly experienced the need of sexual love, but only
as a need in contradiction with his heavenly destination, and merely
natural, in the depreciatory, contemptuous sense which this word
had in Christianity,--not as a moral, inward need--not, if I may so
express myself, as a metaphysical, i.e., an essential need, which man
can experience only where he does not separate difference of sex from
himself, but, on the contrary, regards it as belonging to his inmost
nature. Hence marriage is not holy in Christianity; at least it is so
only apparently, illusively; for the natural principle of marriage,
which is the love of the sexes,--however civil marriage may in endless
instances contradict this,--is in Christianity an unholy thing, and
excluded from heaven. [138] But that which man excludes from heaven he
excludes from his true nature. Heaven is his treasure-casket. Believe
not in what he establishes on earth, what he permits and sanctions
here: here he must accommodate himself; here many things come athwart
him which do not fit into his system; here he shuns thy glance,
for he finds himself among strangers who intimidate him. But watch
for him when he throws off his incognito, and shows himself in his
true dignity, his heavenly state. In heaven he speaks as he thinks;
there thou hearest his true opinion. Where his heaven is, there is his
heart,--heaven is his heart laid open. Heaven is nothing but the idea
of the true, the good, the valid,--of that which ought to be; earth,
nothing but the idea of the untrue, the unlawful, of that which ought
not to be. The Christian excludes from heaven the life of the species:
there the species ceases, there dwell only pure sexless individuals,
"spirits;" there absolute subjectivity reigns:--thus the Christian
excludes the life of the species from his conception of the true
life; he pronounces the principle of marriage sinful, negative;
for the sinless, positive life is the heavenly one. [139]