The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. In theopathic characters, like thosewhom we have just considered, the love of God must not be mixed with any other love. Father andmother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distractions; for sensitiveness andnarrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require above all things a simplified worldto dwell in. Variety and confusion are too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation. Butwhereas your aggressive pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder anddivergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he dwells himself and from which he eliminates it altogether.
Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons, dragonnades, and inquisition methods, wehave the church fugient, as one might call it, with its hermitages, monasteries, and sectarianorganizations, both churches pursuing the same object--to unify the life,[208] and simplify thespectacle presented to the soul. A mind extremely sensitive to inner discords will drop one externalrelation after another, as interfering with the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things.
Amusements must go first, then conventional "society," then business, then family duties, until atlast seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into hours for stated religious acts, is the only thingthat can be borne. The lives of saints are a history of successive renunciations of complication, oneform of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the purity of inner tone.
[209] "Is it not better," a young sister asks her Superior, "that I should not speak at all during thehour of recreation, so as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sin of which I mightnot be conscious?"[210] If the life remains a social one at all, those who take part in it must followone identical rule.
Embosomed in this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more. Theminuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities, whether monastic or not, issomething almost inconceivable to a man of the world. Costume, phraseology, hours, and, and there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in thisstability an incomparable kind of mental rest.
[208] On this subject I refer to the work of M. Murisier (Les Maladies du sentiment Religieux,Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the mainspring of the whole religious life. But ALLstrongly ideal interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to subordinate everythingto themselves. One would infer from M. Murisier's pages that this formal condition was peculiarlycharacteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison almost neglect material content, instudying the latter. I trust that the present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty ofmaterial content which is characteristic and which is more important by far than any generalpsychological form. In spite of this criticism, I find M. Murisier's book highly instructive.
[209] Example: "At the first beginning of the Servitor's [Suso's] interior life, after he had purifiedhis soul properly by confession, he marked out for himself, in thought, three circles, within whichhe shut himself up, as in a spiritual intrenchment. The first circle was his cell, his chapel, and thechoir. When he was within this circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The secondcircle was the whole monastery as far as the outer gate. The third and outermost circle was the gateitself, and here it was necessary for him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outside thesecircles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild animal which is outside its hole,and surrounded by the hunt, and therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness." The Life ofthe Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by Knox, London, 1865, p. 168.
[210] Vie des premieres Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congregation de St. Dominique, aNanc with her, he would sanction everything at oncehe answered. y; Nancy, 1896, p. 129.