allowed to marry — but, what is more, he is the true man of piety. Outside monasticism it was simply not possible to fulfil the demands of religion, and consequently communities of repentance, monasteries, and convents assume quite early a position that, for metaphysical reasons, they could never have had in India or China — let alone in the West, where the Orders were working and fighting — that is, dynamic — units.[1] Consequently, we must not regard the people of the Magian world as divided into the "world" and the "cloister" as two definitely separate modes of life, with equal possibilities of fulfilling all the demands of religion. Every pious person was a monk in some sort.[2] Between world and cloister there was no opposition, but only a difference of degree. Magian churches and orders are homogeneous communities which are only to be distinguished from one another by extent. The community of Peter was an Order, that of Paul a Church, while the Mithras religion is at once almost too wide for the one designation and too narrow for the other.
Every Magian Church is itself an Order and it was only in respect of human weakness that there were stages and grades of askesis, and these not ordered, but only permitted, as among the Marcionites and the Manichæans (electi, auditores). And, in truth, a Magian nation is nothing but the sum, the order of all the orders, which, constituted in smaller and smaller, stricter and stricter groups, come out finally in the eremites, dervishes, and stylites, in whom nothing more is of the world, whose waking-consciousness now belongs only to the Pneuma. Setting aside the prophetic religions — out of which, and between which, the excitation of Apocalypse generated numerous order-like communities — the two cult-Churches of the West produced unnumbered monks, friars, and orders, distinguishable from one another in the end only by the name of the Deity upon whom they called. All observed fasting, prayer, celibacy, poverty. It is very doubtful which of the two Churches in 300 was the more ascetic in its tendency. The Neoplatonist monk Sarapion went into the desert in order to devote himself entirely to studying the hymns of Orpheus. Damascius, guided by a dream, withdrew into a noisome cave in order to pray continuously to Cybele.[3] The schools of philosophy were nothing but ascetic orders; the Neopythagoreans stood close to the Jewish Essenes; the Mithras cult, a true order, admitted only men to its communion and its fraternities; the Emperor Julian had the intention of endowing pagan monasteries. The Mandæan religion seems to have been a group of order-communities of varying rigour; amongst them was that of John the Baptist. Christian monasticism did not begin with Pachomius (320); he was merely the builder of
- ↑ The Faustian monk represses his evil will, the Magian the evil substance in himself. Only the latter is dualistic.
- ↑ The purity- and food-laws of the Talmud and the Avesta cut far deeper into everyday life than, for example, the Benedictine rule.
- ↑ Asmus, "Damaskios" (Philos. Bibl., 125 (1911). Christian anchoritism is later than pagan: Reitzenstein, "Des Athanasius Werk über das Leben des Antonius" (Sitz.. Heid. Ak. (1914), VIII, 12).
