It is not out of place, perhaps, to consider the influence of the Platonic habit of thought upon the conception of the virtuous life, particularly of the beginner. The general characteristic of the beginner is that of acquiring the virtues, so that the virtuous life appears to him at first as something outside himself, something that has to be grasped and brought into his own possession. The Golden Epistle of William of St Thierry sets this out very clearly in terms of what he calls the ‘animal man’, the man who lives by his senses rather than by the interior grace within him. Such a man is first moved by authority or admonished by a teacher; he accepts the good where he finds it, but he finds it always in what otheis say and do. So he begins by being obedient and by imitating the ways of others.

When one has traced the bridegroom and the bride motif in the pages of the Old Testament and seen with what divine persistence God wooed his chosen people lest the alliance be forgotten: ‘I will espouse thee to me forever’ (Osee 3, 19), one is the more forcibly struck by the few references in the Gospels of the New Testament to Christ as the Bridegroom of the Covenant. In the writings of the Four Evangelists the nuptial theme practically disappears, at least as far as direct allusion to Christ's fulfilment of the promised espousals goes. It is as if the actual presence of the ‘young man’ whom Isaias prophesied would come and ‘dwell with the virgin’ (Isaias 62, 5) made all further allusion unnecessary. Even in the Gospel of St John, where we find more evidence of the fulfilment-sense than in the other Gospels, there is only one mention made of the Bridegroom

Acertain man made a supper, a great evening meal. If you entertain in the morning, you invite all sorts of people, but in the evening you ask important people, people dear to you and your close friends.

Today Christians keep the feast of the supper which our Lord prepared for his disciples, his close friends, when he gave them his holy body to be their food. This is its first meaning. But the supper has yet another meaning. Morning and noonday must pass before evening comes. God's light breaks into the soul, morning dawns there, and in this light the soul soars up into the high zenith of its noonday. And thereafter it is evening. And there is yet a third meaning to this idea of the evening. When the light fades, it is evening; when the glamour of the whole world fades in the soul, it is evening there and the soul finds peace.

A short time after my conversion to Christianity I had a desire to spend an informal retreat at a Trappist abbey some few hundred miles from my home. As my train sped through the natural wonderland that is New England in the springtime, my thoughts were mostly of a religious nature centring about life in an abbey, ideas gathered from several books that I had recently read.

As my train travelled along I became aware of a sense of doubleretreating, one physical and the other spiritual. My own city being far behind me, and the strange towns and villages going by my window as though framed in a movie film, gave me a strong sense of world-abandonment. I had a feeling that the world, and all that it means, was receding into the distant past. Not only was it receding physically, but spiritually too. I was en route to another kind of world, a world of peace and contentment within the confines of an abbey.

Religious obedience, as it has been developed during the centuries, especially in the West, is a special form of the virtue of obedience, determined by a religious rule, and by a vow. It therefore involves the normal elements of the virtue, and others arising from the vow. The chief elements of religious obedience are, therefore, the virtues of respect and obedience, religion and its act, devotion, the gift of piety, and social justice.