so what??? That's my whole point. Doesn't that suggest to you that nobody really knows what the hell they are talking about?
Those conflicting schools of thought is just a brand name.
Chastity is not a rule or a precept, but an ideal, or, more correctly, one
of its conditions. An ideal is only then an ideal when its realization is
possible in the idea only, in thought, when it presents itself as attainable
only at infinity, and when, therefore, the approach to it is infinite. If an
ideal were not only attainable, but we could imagine its realization, it
would cease to be an ideal. Such is Christ’s ideal, the establishment of the
kingdom of God upon earth, — an ideal which had been foretold even by the
prophets when they said that the time would come when the people would be
instructed by God, when the swords would be forged into ploughshares and the
spears into sickles, when the lion would lie with the lamb, when all the
creatures would be united in love. The whole meaning of human life consists
in a motion toward this ideal, and therefore the striving after the
Christian ideal, in all its entirety, and after chastity, as one of the
conditions of this ideal, not only does not exclude the possibility of life,
but, on the contrary, the absence of this Christian ideal would destroy all
movement forward and, consequently, all possibility of life.
“Love God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,
and thy neighbour as thyself. — Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is
in Heaven is perfect.”
Such is the teaching of Christ.
The verification of the execution of external religious tenets is the
coincidence of the acts with the injunctions of these tenets, and this
coincidence is possible.
The verification of the execution of Christ’s teaching is the consciousness
of the degree of its non-correspondence with the ideal perfection. (the
degree of approximation is not visible; what is visible is the deflection
from perfection.)
A man who professes an external law is a man who is standing in the light of
a lamp which is attached to a post. He is standing in the light of this
lamp, he sees the light, and he has no other place to go to. A man who
professes the teaching of Christ is like a man carrying a lamp before him on
a more or less long pole: the light is always before him; it always incites
him to follow it, and continually opens up in front of him a new illuminated
space which draws him on.
