Nevertheless, Greek and Oriental Christianity contains within itself an element which for centuries has been capable of offering, and still offers here and there to-day, a certain resistance to the combined forces of traditionalism, intellectualism, and ritualism—I mean monasticism. To the question, Who is in the highest sense of the word a Christian? the Greek Christian replies: the monk. The man who practises silence and purity, who shuns not only the world but also the Church of the world, who avoids not only false doctrine but any statement about the true, who fasts, gives himself up to contemplation, and steadily waits for God’s glorious light to dawn upon his gaze, who attaches no value to anything but tranquility and meditation on the Eternal, who asks nothing of life but death, and who from such utter unselfishness and purity makes mercy arise—this is the Christian. To him not even the Church and the consecration which it bestows is an absolute necessity. For such a man the whole system of sanctified secularity has vanished. Over and over again in ascetics of this kind the Church has seen in its ranks figures of such strength and delicacy of religious feeling, so filled with the divine, so inwardly active in forming themselves after certain features of Christ’s image, that we may, indeed, say: here there is a living religion, not unworthy of Christ’s name. We Protestants must not take direct offence at the form of monasticism. The conditions under which our Churches arose have made a harsh and one-sided opinion of it a kind of duty. And although for the present, and in view of the problems which press on us, we may be justified in retaining this opinion, we must not summarily apply it to other circumstances. Nothing but monasticism could provide a leaven and a counterpoise in that traditionalistic and ritualistic secular Church, such as the Greek Church was and still is. Here there was freedom, independence, and vivid experience; here the truth that it is only what is experienced and comes from within that has any value in religion carried the day.
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