Biography IV

The theologian, known better in our time than in his own, held the Nietzschean opinion that individualism was the invention of the church; that Christian doctrine had shaped and formed the landscape of the individual appealed to the theologian. In his typical irony, he reveled in the notion that the individual as a concept was invented by the turbulent crowd of mystics. What jollity! What oddity! What verity! I believe, and I am not alone in asserting this, that the comedy of the occasion unfettered the theologian from the Scythian rock. Sometimes, I even believe, though unpopularly, that his sense of farce had more to do with his celibacy than his oaths.