A second limitation of the ideal is its neglect of the intellectual virtues, which by the Greeks had been assigned such a high place in their ethical standard.[637] The slighting of this important domain of ethics by Christian theology arose naturally from its exaltation of faith above reason, and from its assumption that in the revealed word the Church was already in possession of all knowledge really essential to man’s welfare and salvation.[638] But the chief defect of the ideal, the lamentable historical consequences of which we shall witness later, is, as we have already pointed out, in its making the acceptance of all the articles of a given creed an indispensable virtue. In assigning orthodox belief this place in the ideal of moral goodness, theological ethics has marred Christian morality by fostering the faults of intolerance and intellectual insincerity. This dogma inspired in the Church, as soon as it became powerful, a persecuting spirit, and made Christianity for centuries something altogether alien to its real genius and spirit--one of the most intolerant of the world’s religions. At the same time this dogma, by making religious unbelief and nonconformity a sin so heinous as to be worthy of death by the most exquisite torture, and of everlasting punishment in the hereafter, discouraged intellectual veracity and open-mindedness, and fostered the vice of insincere conformity, which, more than any other fault, has marred Church morality from the end of the early age of the martyrs to the present day. [Sidenote: Conclusion] In the following pages we shall follow the fortunes of this ethical ideal through medieval and modern times. We shall trace the modifying influence upon it of the different and changing elements of the civilization of which it has formed a part, and shall note the reaction of the ideal, in its successive types, upon the history of the passing centuries. CHAPTER XIII MORAL HISTORY OF THE AGE OF CHRISTIAN ASCETICISM I. CONCEPTIONS OF LIFE AND HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES THAT PRODUCED THE ASCETIC IDEAL [Sidenote: General fostering causes of asceticism] Before the close of the third century the development in the Christian communities of the East of asceticism, the germs of which were immanent from the first in Christianity, had given a remarkable trend to the moral movement inaugurated by the new religion. We shall gain a sympathetic understanding of this phase of Christian ethics only as we bear in mind the conceptions of life and of the world, and the historical conditions which in general tend to foster the development of the ascetic ideal of goodness.