Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/125

 The Monks and the Conversion of the Germans 89 Jut for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some " no ! no ! " must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power. . . . Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity, and non-pampering of the body generally, may be fruits of the love of purity, shocked by whatever savors of the sensual. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they may appeal to the subject in the light of sacrifices which he is happy in making to the Deity whom he acknowledges. Again, ascetic mortification and torments may be due to pessimistic feelings about the self, combined with theo- logical beliefs concerning expiation. The devotee may feel that he is buying himself free, or escaping worse sufferings hereafter by doing penance now. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may be entered on irrationally, by a sort of obsession or fixed idea which comes as a challenge and must be worked off, because only thus does the subject get his interior consciousness feeling right again. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted by genuine perversions of the bodily sensibility, in consequence of which normally pain-giving stimuli are actually felt as pleasures. II. THE DEVIL AND HIS WICKED ANGELS The following passages give some idea of the religious world in which the monks and missionaries lived, and the views of the next world which they inculcated in the minds of the newly converted barbarians.