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The desire for perfect opponents. One cannot deny that the French have been the most Christian nation on earth: not because the faith of the masses has been greater in France than elsewhere, but because the most difficult Christian ideals have there been transformed into men and not remained merely ideas, beginnings, falterings. There stands Pascal, in unity of fervour, spirit and honesty the first of all Christians and consider what had to be united here! There stands Fénelon95, the perfect and dazzling expression of ecclesiastical culture in all its strength: a golden mean which, as a historian, one might be inclined to declare something impossible, whereas it was only something unspeakably difficult and improbable. There stand Madame de Guyon96 and her companions, the French Quietists97: and all that the fire and eloquence of the apostle Paul endeavoured to discover in the sublime, loving, silent and enraptured semi-divine state of the Christian has here become truth and, thanks to a genuine, feminine, fine and noble old French naivety in word and gesture, has at the same time put off that Jewish importunity which Paul evidenced towards his God. There stands the founder of the Trappist monasteries98, who took the ascetic ideal of Christianity with ultimate seriousness and did so, not as an, exception among Frenchmen, but quite typically as a Frenchman: for his gloomy creation has to the present moment been at home and remained potent only among Frenchmen; it followed them to Alsace and into Algiers. Let us not forget the Huguenots99: the union of worldliness and industriousness, of more refined customs and Christian severity, has hitherto never been more beautifully represented. And in Port-Royal100 the great world of Christian scholarship saw its last efflorescence: and in France men understand efflorescence better than elsewhere. In no way superficial, a great Frenchman nonetheless always preserves his surface, a natural skin to cover his content and depths while the depths of a great German are usually kept enclosed in an intricate capsule, as an elixir which seeks to protect itself against the light and against frivolous hands by the hardness and strangeness of its casing. And now say why this nation possessing these perfect types of Christianness was bound also to produce perfect counter-types of unchristian free-spiritedness! The French free-spirit struggled within himself against great human beings, and not merely against dogmas and sublime abortions, as did the free-spirits of other nations.
96. Madame de Guyon, (Guyon, Jeanne-Marie de la Motte: 1648-1717): French mystic, preacher and practitioner of Quietism.
97. French Quietists: adherents of a school of mysticism that took the path of "true love," which is to say, the renunciation of hope and reward and the acceptance of damnation.
98. Trappist monasteries: the Trappists so-called because their original house was in La Trappe in Normandywas founded by Dominique de Raucé in 1664. The Order was marked by a particularly strict observance of the rules of the Cistercian Order (from which the Trappists splintered): they remained silent, did much manual labor and ate no meat. (It has since once again come under the governance of the Cistercian Order.)
99. Huguenots: another name for French Calvinists. Louis XIV unleashed his forces in acts of extreme cruelty and duplicity when the Huguenots would not conform to Catholicism. Fearing for their lives, 400,000 fled France, taking their well-known industrial skills with them.
100. Port-Royal: site of a Jansenist center, among whom is counted Blaise Pascal (1623-62). (Jansenism was a Christian teaching of Cornelius Jansen; it divided the Roman Catholic Church in France during the seventeenth century, as it stressed the predestination of St. Augustine of Hippo, contra the Jesuits.) The "Jansenist Gentlemen" of Port Royal established a number of schools there, stressing the sciences, as well as love for the child and close contact between students and teachers.
