o carry the isolation of the individual to its farthest
possible extreme it constructs, within these cloisters, cells, in
imitation of the ancient hermits--a seclusion the immediate consequence
of which is the most limitless and most paltry curiosity.--

Sec. 241. Theoretically the monkish Pedagogics seeks, by means of the
greatest possible silence, to place the soul in a state of spiritual
immobility, which at last, through the want of all variety of thought,
goes over into entire apathy, and antipathy towards all intellectual
culture. The principal feature of the practical culture consists in the
misapprehension that one should ignore Nature, instead of morally
freeing himself from her control. As she, again and again asserts
herself, the monkish discipline proceeds to misuse her, and strives
through fasting, through sleeplessness, through voluntary self-inflicted
pain and martyrdom, not only to subdue the wantonness of the flesh, but
to destroy the love of life till it shall become a positive loathing of
existence. In and for itself the object of the monkish vow--property,
the family, and will--is not immoral. The vow is, on this account, very
easy to violate. In order to prevent all temptation to this, monkish
Pedagogics invents a system of supervision, partly open, partly secret,
which deprives one of all freedom of action, all freshness of thinking
and of willing, and all poetry of feeling, by means of the perpetual
shadow of spies and informers. The monks are well versed in all
police-arts, and the regular succession of the hierarchy spurs them on
always to distinguish themselves in them.

Sec. 242. The gloomy breath of this education penetrated all the relations
of the Byzantine State. Even the education of the emperor was infected
by it; and in the strife for freedom waged by the modern Greeks against
the Turks, the _Igumeni_ of the cloisters were the real leaders of the
insurrection. The independence of individuality, as opposed to monkish
abstraction, more or less degenerates into the crude form of soldier and
pirate life. And thus it happened that this principle was not left to
appear merely as an exception, but to be built up positively into
humanity; and this the German world, under the guidance of the Roman
Church, undertook to accomplish.

II. _The Epoch of Chivalric Education._

Sec. 243. The Romish Church negated the abstract substantiality of the
Greeks through the practical aim which she in her