And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can
leave ethics on one side. But our religion--although its doctors may
protest against this--is fundamentally and for the most part a
compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed
into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the
eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline
apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind those words which the _Theologica
Germanica_, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the
mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with
good, for I am and have none other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps
knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the
social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and
hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly
eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is
a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element
preponderating. The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism,
is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual
soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of
virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to
perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?
The ascetic morality is a negative morality.
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