# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S169
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Ecclesiastical Present. 169

devoted to divine worship and to a Christian walk proceeding plainly in God's commandments. How else could we meet with statements such as this, that Euphrasia, who from her eighth year led a strict life of renunciation in an Egyptian cloister, deserves to be called an "overcomer of the world," "inasmuch as indeed he too overcomes the world who tears himself away from its enjoyment and subdues himself by mortification" (p. 78)? As though the world to be overcome did not also exist in the solitude of cloister-life, and as though one could conclude with certainty, from the fact that someone has renounced a particular form of worldly enjoyment, that he has overcome the world outright. How could the author, with such complacency and without the slightest touch of the polemic otherwise practiced so liberally, report on the unnatural conduct of Benedict of Nursia (p. 40 ff.), who at his last meeting with his sister Scholastica refused her request to spend the night conversing with her about the blessedness of eternal life, "because it was against the rule of the monastery to spend a night outside it" — so that Scholastica had to call forth lightning and thunder by her prayer before her brother would be compelled to break his own self-made law in favor of the natural commandment! How could he, going even further than his own judgment about the "contingency of monasticism," expatiate at length in unmeasured praise of Benedict, whose name in the church "must retain, under all circumstances, a pleasant ring" — "not despite the fact that he introduced monastic life, but precisely because of it" — for "some circumstance may for one time have lost all significance which for another was of the highest significance"? It is, namely, "not at all in the author's mind that he must first excuse himself to his contemporaries by these sentences, when he names Benedict of Nursia" (p. 40). He will, however, permit us, without disputing the "high significance" of monasticism, to say that such a judgment, precisely because it throws together truth and falsehood, is not fit to stand in "morning lessons for women and maidens." For if, as we heard above, this is the sense and the right of monastic renunciation, "to overcome the world within the church, inwardly and outwardly," then the women readers will hardly come to clarity as to why the renunciation of monastic life "should have lost all significance" for an age such as ours, in which there is truly as much cause "to overcome the world within the church" as at any other time.

But utterly misleading is the remark with which Löhe, after admiring "the significant strength of soul" in the renunciations of Clare of Assisi, seeks to silence possible Protestant criticism. He holds that "those who would judge or even condemn such a thing should first of all learn, at the very least, to bear the deprivations and sufferings of life in the same peace and with the same joy as Clare and her companions did — sufferings not self-chosen, but laid upon them by God" (p. 246).