THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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weight of character, or however else this peculiarly tough substance has been described. Its most usual discipline is military, Spartan, a voluntary, extremely masculine
renunciation of desires, which practises in obedience the beginnings of command. All soldiers bear Spartan features, they are unmistakable wherever they appear; they
are marked with stringent force, authority of command. But this sharpening of energetic capacity to a kind of lance­posture and lance­head of itself is only a beginning
of that which subjective force has believed it can do. In the Spartan­military posture the will remains only abstractly polished as it were, it is of course allied with
believed images and ideas here too, but mostly in a superficial, at least not in a necessary way. Thus the will shaped in an abstract­Spartan fashion was often able to
fight for or lend executive support to anything at all: officers, and also officials in the Baroque period, served in foreign service, an attitude that if you are not for us you
are against us does of course exist, but its contents are still interchangeable here. Even the fealty of the knight was formal, it did not yet pull together directions of the
will which remained separate (ma coeur à dame, au Dieu mon âme, ma vie au roi, l'honneur pour moi)* into an irresistible unity. Only the religious war was able to do
this, hence the entry of a content­laden, object­based, indeed object­based demanding goal into the militarily sharpened will. The will with believed ideas now no longer
becomes transportable to any foreign service, that is, whose content it finds unimportant. Instead it is strictly fixed, which means it becomes fanatical; and it is this
fanaticism which, where it occurs, now first produces the most monstrous increase of force or kindling of force in man. The pure force of command is now joined by
the strength, fixing in accordance with an idea, of an idée­force; it alone overcomes what was formerly insurmountable. Loyola gave the most impressive coinage of
idée­force, moreover in the connection which remained with military discipline. The ‘Exercitia spiritualia’ of this former officer, and visionary fanatical founder of an
order are technology of the will to the highest degree reached in Europe so far; punctuality, obedience, authority of command, cruel authority of faith become one and
the same here. They are joined by imagination on command, inflamed by the service of Christ, by the image of heaven and hell, opened and capable of being switched
off on the dot. What the heretical sects had carried into the field in the way of courage and obsession was now made up for against the heretics themselves. Above all
Moslem influences were not lacking on
* ‘To the lady my heart, the soul is God's part, my life for the king, but honour I'm keeping.’