Spontaneous Activity in Education by Maria Montessori (best historical biographies txt) 📕

On the other hand, it is "feeling" which spurs us on towards perfection.

There have been persons with an extraordinary power of recognizing good and evil, just as the Greek artists showed extraordinary powers of recognizing the normal forms of the body under the guidance of the æsthetic sense. Saint Teresa tells us that when some worldly person who was not good approached her, she suffered as if she were inhaling a bad smell. She explained that of course she did not smell anything at all, in the material sense; but that she actually suffered, not merely in imagination; her suffering was a real spiritual distress which she could not tolerate.

More interesting still is the following story which refers to the early Fathers of the Church, who lived in the desert. "We were seated at the feet of our Bishop," says one of the monks, "listening to and admiring his holy and salutary teaching. Suddenly there appeared on the scene the leading 'mime,' the most beautiful of the public dancers of Antioch, covered with jewels; her bare legs were almost concealed by pearls and gold; her head and shoulders were uncovered. A throng of persons accompanied her; the men of the period never wearied of devouring her with their eyes. An exquisite perfume which exhaled from her person scented the air we breathed. When she had passed, our Father, who had looked steadfastly at her, said to us: 'Were you not fascinated by so much beauty?' We were all silent. 'I,' continued the Bishop, 'experienced great pleasure in looking at her, for God has appointed that some day she shall judge us. I see her,' he added, 'as a soiled and blackened dove; but this dove shall be washed and shall fly heavenwards, white as snow.' As a fact, this woman returned and asked to be baptized. 'My name is Pelagia,' she said, 'or such is the name my parents gave me, but the people of Antioch call me The Pearl, because of the quantities of jewels with which my sins have adorned me.' Two days later she gave all her goods to the poor, put on a hair shirt, and took up her abode in a cell on Monte Oliveto, which she never left until her death." (Montalembert, Les Moines d'Occident, vol. 1, p. 86.)

Our insensibility.—How remote are we from that delicate sensibility which responds to evil by suffering and to the good perceived in others as it were miraculously, by a feeling of pleasure! In our society it is possible for us to live for a long time with a criminal, to esteem him, press his hand, etc., until he is at last exposed by the scandalous discovery of his misdeeds. Then we say: "Who would have thought it? He always seemed an excellent person."

And yet it is impossible that the criminal showed no signs, no perversities of feeling, no heartlessness which should have revealed him to us from the outset. No one will say that we ought all to become wonderful æsthetes like the Greek sculptors, or as sensitive as the saints; but if we admit that it is a barbarous thing to pass by the beauties of art without perceiving them; that it is the mark of defective civilization to confound horrible coarseness and monstrosity with ideal beauty, to be unable to distinguish the strident noise of the tram-car wheels, or the deafening crash of ill-tuned instruments from the harmonies of Bellini or Wagner; that each of us would blush for such insensibility, and would conceal it—how is it we do not perceive that such obtuseness is habitual to us in moral matters? We see that we are capable of confusing virtuous persons and criminals, without any foreboding. How is it that so often in the case of judicial errors, the voice of the innocent did not resound in our ears, although his trial was a public one, and we allowed him to languish in prison for years? How is it that goodness should be so obscure a thing that we confound it with prosperity? How is it that those rich men of whom the gospel says "Woe unto you, rich men, for ye have your reward," can think of "improving the morals" of the poor, without any examination of their own moral lives or the lives of those belonging to them? almost as if they believed that the rich are essentially good and the poor essentially bad.

If such darkness as this reigned in the intellectual field, we should be unable to conceive the form of madness which would present itself to our eyes. There are confusions in the moral field which it is impossible to imagine in any other domain of life. If some day the youth of the nations, more clear-sighted than those of to-day, hear that the Christmas feast was kept on the battlefields of the European war, they will understand the origins of the war itself. In such a situation, David (to whom indeed it would have been inconceivable) would have accepted the taunt of his enemies as well deserved, when they asked him: "Where is now thy God?" "We have lost God" would have been a fitting lamentation. But to celebrate His festival indifferently under such conditions is to be unconscious of having lost Him. How long ago did the soul die, and when did the building up on death begin? What a terrible episode of madness is this monstrous slaughter, upon which the tree of peace was planted in honor of the Savior!

Far indeed are we from the delicate sensibility to evil of Santa Teresa, or the keenness of spiritual vision which enabled the man of God to see the white dove beneath the soiled feathers of the sinful woman. The difference is not as that between the taste of a peasant and that of an artist, but as that between a corpse and a living man. It is evident that we have suffered death, albeit we are unconscious of having died.

Here, then, and not in hygiene, must we find the secret of our life. We have something more corruptible than our bodies, a life more fragile than our physical life; and the peril of darkness hangs over us. This is the secret of man.

If man loses the light that leads him on towards a better world, he falls into an abyss far below all created animals.

He who loves, therefore, will bestow all his care on these wellsprings of life; how frail are the lungs of a new-born infant, how easily can an unnatural mother deprive him of air and so suffocate him! Yet what is this easily accomplished act, which nevertheless destroys a life, in comparison with the infinitely easier and more deadly act by which we may procure the death of the soul?

The death of the soul, like that of the body, may be readily distinguished from a state of insensibility; in vain do we apply a red-hot iron to a corpse; there is no response.

He who is alive, however, is not only capable of reacting to a stimulus very much less intense than a red-hot iron; he who lives and feels may perfect himself—and this is life.

It is enough that souls should "feel." How, then, could they live quietly amidst evil? If under the windows of our house people were piling up refuse until we felt that the air was being vitiated, could we bear this without protesting, and insisting on the removal of that which was causing us to suffer? If, moreover, we had a child, we should clamor still more loudly, and should even set to work to clear away the nuisance with our own hands, in our solicitude for his health. But if the bodies of mother and child lay dead, they would no longer be conscious of the pestilential air.

It is characteristic of "life" to purge the environment and the soul of substances injurious to health. Christ was called "the Lamb that taketh away the sins of the world," not the Master who preaches, but He who purifies. And this is the morality that springs from sensibility: the action of purifying the world, of removing the obstacles that beset life, of liberating the spirit from the darkness of death.

The merits of which every man feels he owes an account to his conscience are not such things as having enjoyed music or made a discovery; he must be able to say what he has done to save and maintain life.

These purifying merits, like progress, have no limits.

"Leave all ties and follow Me," said Christ to those who asked Him what they should do.

For man can reinforce his own strength by other powers which will urge him on upwards towards the infinite; before him who sleeps is the invisible ladder of Jacob, trodden by angels who call him heavenwards, that is, towards the supernatural life. Yes, to be more than man. This is a dream to him who lacks faith; but it is the realizable goal, the aim of life, to him who has faith.

To Friedrich Nietzsche, the superman was an idea without practical consequence, strange and erroneous even when tested by the very theories of evolution which inspired him. His conception offered no help in overcoming the ills of humanity; rather was it as a chain binding man to earth, there to seek means to create of himself the man superior to himself; and thus leading him astray into egotism, cruelty and folly.

But innumerable saints have felt and acted in accordance with their profession of faith: "I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."

If, as our poet says, man is "the chrysalis destined to become the angelic butterfly," there is no doubt as to the road he must take: spiritually, he must either ascend or die.

Hence it is not the whole of life to obey the laws of hygiene, physical and psychical; but it is only life which can draw from its environment the means of its own purification and salvation; that life, however, which is supernatural, asks of love and divine light the strength necessary for its transformation.

Of a truth, it is not ecstasy which characterizes the saints; it is the real and victorious struggle of the higher against the lower nature.

Morality and religion.—It is well known that in strong religious impressions, such as the crises of what is called conversion, the phenomenon is characterized by "an inner light," an "order" which suddenly establishes itself, and by means of which that which was before unseen becomes manifest: the distinction between good and evil, and hence the revelation of oneself. Indeed, the converted, at the moment when the revelation takes place, seem little concerned with divinity, or dogmas, or rites; they are persons given over to a violent commotion, who seem forgetful of all their physical and intellectual life, and who are absorbed in contemplation of themselves in relation to a central point of their consciousness, which seems to be illuminated by some prodigious radiance. The cry of the convert in the majority of cases is: "I am a sinner!" It seems as if darkness had fallen away from him, together with all the evil which was corroding, weakening, and suffocating him, and which at length he saw, when it was separated from him, terrible, obscure, and