“Love,” he there says, “pays more heed to the inward than to the
outward, but the spirit of the world mocks at what is inward and
sets great value on what is outward.” He opposed the principles
tending to formalism and the deterioration of the religious life
and shows himself to be imbued with a true and deep appreciation of
his profession. He entitles that portion of his treatise directed
against deviations from the Rule: “Concerning the wild beasts who
lay waste the religious life.” He writes with so much feeling and in
so vivid a manner that the reader of to-day almost fancies that he
must have foreseen the approaching storm and the destruction of his
Congregation. He scourges those who allow themselves to be led away by
the appearance of what is good (“_sub specie boni_”), who introduce
new roads to perfection according to their own ideas and require men
to do what lies beyond them; they thus endanger the carrying out of
the ordinary good works and practices of the religious life which all
were able to perform. This, he says, was a temptation of the enemy
from the beginning, who seduced such innovators to rely upon their own
ideas and to consider themselves alone as good, wise and enlightened.
“If the Babylonians [this is the name he gives to the instigators of
such disturbances] force their way into the Order and if they obtain
the upper hand, that will be the end of discipline, or at least it
will be undermined; but if the spirits of Jerusalem [the city of
Peace] retain the mastery, then the religious life will flourish and
its development will not be hindered by certain defects which are, as
a matter of fact, unavoidable in this life.” These words are found
in a book written by the clear-sighted and zealous Augustinian and
published at Erfurt the year before Luther begged for admittance at
the gate of the Augustinian monastery of that town.[714] The monk of
liberal views was already on the point of becoming to his Order one of
the “Babylonians” above referred to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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