The Nature of Evil

A philosopher's view of life is a fabric of the spirit in which thread-patterns of reasoned truth or error are woven into the warp of his personal character or bias, the temper of the man. In some cases the woof may be so thick or the warp so thin that the texture produced is of a scientific or otherwise colorless impersonality. In other cases the thinnest and most threadbare woof strings together the strong cords of sentimental or fanatical bias. In still other cases warp and woof color and reflect and modify each other in reconciled or unreconciled rivalry. These are humanly the most interesting textures of the spirit, and, who knows, perhaps the most precious. "The sort of philosophy a man has," Fichte told us, "depends on the sort of man one is."

Towards the middle of the fourteenth century a priest and warden of the House of the Teutonic Order on the bank of the Main, in Frankfurt, wrote a book which Martin Luther declared had taught him more of God and Christ and all things than any other next to the Bible and St. Augustine. The kernel of this Theologia Germanica is a gospel of self-denial. Sin is infatuate self-will, blindness to good and to God; in the true life of Christ the self must be forsaken and lost, must die altogether. "Be simply and wholly bereft of self. . . . Put off thine own will, and there will be no hell."¹

Five centuries later, on the right bank of the Main, opposite the Frankfurt House of the Teutonic Order, the deepening

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