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. [128] 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 realised and can be realised
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 connection 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, [129] made the theme of his life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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