In opposition to this--likewise in all the religions of this Culture--we find the spread of Monasticism, with its radical aversion from State, history, and actuality in general. For after all the conflict of being and waking-being--that is, of politics and religion, of history and nature--could not be completely mastered by the form of the Magian Church and its identification with State and nation. Race breaks forth into life in these mind-creations and overpowers the divine, precisely because the latter has absorbed the worldly into itself. But here there was no conflict of Church and State as in the Gothic age, and consequently the split in the nation was between the worldly-pious and the ascetics. A Magian religion relates exclusively to the divine spark, the Pneuma, in the man, that which he shares with the invisible community of the faithful and blessed spirits. The rest of the man belongs to Evil and Darkness. But in the man it is the divine that must rule, overcoming, suppressing, destroying the other. In this Culture the askete is not only the veritable priest--the secular priest, as to-day in Russia, is never really respected, and mostly he is 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.[445] 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.[446] 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.