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.[1] 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 realized and can be realized 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 connexion 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,[2] 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
