Note 8 — Chapter XVI · THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND HEATHENISM.

The unworldly, supernatural life is essentially also an unmarried life. The celibate lies already, though not in the form of a law, in the inmost nature of Christianity. This is sufficiently declared in the supernatural origin of the Saviour,—a doctrine in which unspotted virginity is hallowed as the saving principle, as the principle of the new, the Christian world. Let not such passages as, “Be fruitful and multiply,” or, “What God has joined together let not man put asunder,” be urged as a sanction of marriage. The first passage relates, as Tertullian and Jerome have already observed, only to the unpeopled earth, not to the earth when filled with men, only to the beginning, not to the end of the world, an end which was initiated by the immediate appearance of God upon earth. And the second also refers only to marriage as an institution of the Old Testament. Certain Jews proposed the question whether it were lawful for a man to separate from his wife; and the most appropriate way of dealing with this question was the answer above cited. He who has once concluded a marriage ought to hold it sacred. Marriage is intrinsically an indulgence to the weakness or rather the strength of the flesh, an evil which therefore must be restricted as much as possible. The indissolubleness of marriage is a nimbus, a sacred irradiance, which expresses precisely the opposite of what minds, dazzled and perturbed by its lustre, seek beneath it. Marriage in itself is, in the sense of perfected Christianity, a sin,8 or rather a weakness which is permitted and forgiven thee only on condition that thou for ever limitest thyself to a single wife. In short, marriage is hallowed only in the Old Testament, but not in the New. The New Testament knows a higher, a supernatural principle, the mystery of unspotted virginity.9 “He who can receive it let him receive it.” “The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage: neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.” Thus in heaven there is no marriage; the principle of sexual love is excluded from heaven as an earthly, worldly principle. But the heavenly life is the true, perfected, eternal life of the Christian. Why then should I, who am destined for heaven, form a tie which is unloosed in my true destination? Why should I, who am potentially a heavenly being, not realise this possibility even here?10 Marriage is already proscribed from my mind, my heart, since it is expelled from heaven, the essential object of my faith, hope, and life. How can an earthly wife have a place in my heaven-filled heart? How can I divide my heart between God and man?11 The Christian’s love to God is not an abstract or general love such as the love of truth, of justice, of science; it is a love to a subjective, personal God, and is therefore a subjective, personal love. It is an essential attribute of this love that it is an exclusive, jealous love, for its object is a personal and at the same time the highest being, to whom no other can be compared. “Keep close to Jesus [Jesus Christ is the Christian’s God], in life and in death; trust his faithfulness: he alone can help thee, when all else leaves thee. Thy beloved has this quality, that he will suffer no rival; he alone will have thy heart, will rule alone in thy soul as a king on his throne.”—“What can the world profit thee without Jesus? To be without Christ is the pain of hell; to be with Christ, heavenly sweetness.”—“Thou canst not live without a friend: but if the friendship of Christ is not more than all else to thee, thou wilt be beyond measure sad and disconsolate.”—“Love everything for Jesus’ sake, but Jesus for his own sake. Jesus Christ alone is worthy to be loved.”—“My God, my love [my heart]: thou art wholly mine, and I am wholly thine.”—“Love hopes and trusts ever in God, even when God is not gracious to it [or tastes bitter, non sapit]; for we cannot live in love without sorrow.... For the sake of the beloved, the loving one must accept all things, even the hard and bitter.”—“My God and my all, ... in thy presence everything is sweet to me, in thy absence everything is distasteful.... Without thee nothing can please me.”—“Oh, when at last will that blessed, longed-for hour appear, when thou wilt satisfy me wholly, and be all in all to me? So long as this is not granted me, my joy is only fragmentary.”—“When was it well with me without thee? or when was it ill with me in thy presence? I will rather be poor for thy sake, than rich without thee. I will rather be a pilgrim on earth with thee, than the possessor of heaven without thee. Where thou art is heaven; death and hell where thou art not. I long only for thee.”—“Thou canst not serve God and at the same time have thy joys in earthly things: thou must wean thyself from all acquaintances and friends, and sever thy soul from all temporal consolation. Believers in Christ should regard themselves, according to the admonition of the Apostle Peter, only as strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”12 Thus love to God as a personal being is a literal, strict, personal, exclusive love. How then can I at once love God and a mortal wife? Do I not thereby place God on the same footing with my wife? No! to a soul which truly loves God, the love of woman is an impossibility, is adultery. “He that is unmarried,” says the Apostle Paul, “careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.”