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.”[1] 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.[2] 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
- ↑ Thomas à Kempis de Imit. (1. ii. c. 7, c. 8, 1. iii. c. 5, c. 34, c. 53, c. 59). “Felix illa conscientia et beata virginitas, in cujus corde praeter amorem Christi . . . . nullus alius versatur amor.”—Hieronymus (Demetriadi , Virgini Deo consecratae).
- ↑ “Divisa est . . . . mulier et virgo. Vide quantae felicitatis sit, quae et nomen sexus amiserit. Virgo jam mulier non vocatur.”—Hieronymus (adv. Helvidium de perpet. Virg. p. 14. T. ii. Erasmus).
