§ 237. The Greek Church seized the Christian principle still abstractly
as deliverance from the world, and therefore, in the education
proceeding from it, it arrived only at the negative form, positing the
universality of the individual man as the renunciation of self. In the
dogmatism of its teaching, as well as in the ascetic severity of its
practical conduct, it was a reproduction of the theocratic principle.
But when this had assumed the form of national centralization, the Greek
Church dispensed with this, and, as far as regards its form, it returned
again to the quietism of the Orient.
§ 238. The monkish education is in general identical in all religions,
in that, through the egotism of its way of living and the stoicism of
its way of thinking, through the separation of its external existence
and the mechanism of a thoughtless subjection to a general rule as well
as to the special command of superiors, it fosters a spiritual and
bodily dulness. The Christian monachism, therefore, as the fulfilment of
monachism in general, is at the same time its absolute dissolution,
because, in its merely abstracting itself from the world instead of
affirmatively conquering it, it contradicts the very principle of
Christianity.
§ 239. We must notice as the fundamental error of this whole system,
that it does not in free individuality seek to produce the ideal of
divine-humanity, but to copy in external reproduction its historical
manifestation. Each human being must individually offer up as sacrifice
his own individuality. Each biography has its Bethlehem, its Tabor, and
its Golgotha.
§ 240. Monachism looks upon freedom from one's self and from the world
which Christianity demands only as an abstract renunciation of self,
which it seeks to compass, like Buddhism, by the vow of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, which must be taken by each individual for all
time.
--This rejection of property, of marriage, and of self-will, is at the
same time the negation of work, of the family, and of responsibility for
one's actions. In order to avoid the danger of avarice and covetousness,
of sensuality and of nepotism, of error and of guilt, monachism seizes
the convenient way of abstract severance from all the objective world
without being able fully to carry out this negation. Monkish Pedagogics
must, in consequence, be very particular about an external separation of
their disciples from the world, so as to make the work of abstraction
from the world easier and more decided. It therefore builds cloisters in
the solitude of deserts, in the depth of forests, on the summits of
mountains, and surrounds them with high walls having no apertures; and
then, so as to carry the isolation of the individual to its farthest
possible extreme it constructs, within these cloisters, cells, in
imitation of the ancient hermits--a seclusion the immediate consequence
of which is the most limitless and most paltry curiosity.--
§ 241. Theoretically the monkish Pedagogics seeks, by means of the
greatest possible silence, to place the soul in a state of spiritual
immobility, which at last, through the want of all variety of thought,
goes over into entire apathy, and antipathy towards all intellectual
culture. The principal feature of the practical culture consists in the
misapprehension that one should ignore Nature, instead of morally
freeing himself from her control. As she, again and again asserts
herself, the monkish discipline proceeds to misuse her, and strives
through fasting, through sleeplessness, through voluntary self-inflicted
pain and martyrdom, not only to subdue the wantonness of the flesh, but
to destroy the love of life till it shall become a positive loathing of
existence. In and for itself the object of the monkish vow--property,
the family, and will--is not immoral. The vow is, on this account, very
easy to violate. In order to prevent all temptation to this, monkish
Pedagogics invents a system of supervision, partly open, partly secret,
which deprives one of all freedom of action, all freshness of thinking
and of willing, and all poetry of feeling, by means of the perpetual
shadow of spies and informers. The monks are well versed in all
police-arts, and the regular succession of the hierarchy spurs them on
always to distinguish themselves in them.
§ 242. The gloomy breath of this education penetrated all the relations
of the Byzantine State. Even the education of the emperor was infected
by it; and in the strife for freedom waged by the modern Greeks against
the Turks, the _Igumeni_ of the cloisters were the real leaders of the
insurrection. The independence of individuality, as opposed to monkish
abstraction, more or less degenerates into the crude form of soldier and
pirate life. And thus it happened that this principle was not left to
appear merely as an exception, but to be built up positively into
humanity; and this the German world, under the guidance of the Roman
Church, undertook to accomplish.