Life & Mortality Quote by Johann Arndt

Pleasure is rebranded here as a kind of booby trap, and the severity is the point. Johann Arndt is writing in the bruised spiritual landscape of post-Reformation Europe, where “true Christianity” is defined not by cultural membership but by inner conversion and disciplined practice. His sentence works like a spiritual sorting machine: there is the “natural man,” who experiences the world as a buffet of satisfactions, and there is the “true Christian,” who experiences the same menu as a gauntlet.

The intent is pastoral, but it’s also polemical. Arndt isn’t merely warning against obvious vices; he’s escalating suspicion toward “all things that please.” That totalizing sweep turns ordinary enjoyment into a diagnostic test: if something feels easy, it’s likely dangerous. The phrase “so many crosses” is a clever inversion. The cross is normally an emblem of salvation; here it becomes a daily friction, an instrument of training. Temptation “continually exercise[s] his virtue” casts the Christian life as an endurance sport, not a mood.

Subtextually, Arndt is policing desire. “Allurements of sin and snares of death” doesn’t argue with the world’s pleasures so much as it stigmatizes them, framing the Christian as perpetually out of sync with the surrounding culture. There’s comfort in that alienation: if you feel conflicted, you’re doing it right. Read in the context of Arndt’s devotional program (the move toward heartfelt piety and self-scrutiny), the line functions as a manual for interpretation: treat your appetites as hostile terrain, and your resistance as proof of authenticity.