Chapter IX: Problems of the Arabian Culture (2)

Out of these last surviving traces, however, an outline of the Early Classical religion emerges bright and distinct. Just as all Gothic inwardness directed itself upon Mary, Queen of Heaven and Virgin and Mother, so in that moment of the Classical World there arose a garland of myths, images, and figures around Demeter, the bearing mother, around Gaia and Persephone, and also Dionysus the begetter, chthonian[488] and phallic cults, festivals and mysteries of birth and death. All this, too, was characteristically Classical, conceived under the aspect of present corporeality. The Apollinian religion venerated body, the Orphic rejected it, that of Demeter celebrated the moments of fertilization and birth, in which body acquired being. There was a mysticism that reverently honoured the secret of life, in doctrine, symbol, and mime, but side by side with it there was orgiasm too, for the squandering of the body is as deeply and closely akin to asceticism as sacred prostitution is to celibacy--both, all, are negations of time. It is the reverse of the Apollinian “halt!” that checks on the threshold of Hybris; detachment is not kept, but flung away. He who has experienced these things in his soul has “from being a mortal become a god.” In those days there must have been great saints and seers who towered as far above the figures of Heraclitus and Empedocles as the latter above the itinerant teachers of Cynicism and Stoicism--things of this order do not happen namelessly and impersonally. As the songs of Achilles and Odysseus were dying down everywhere, a grand, strict doctrine arose at the famous old cult-places, a mysticism and scholasticism with developed educational methods and a secret oral tradition, as in India. But all that is buried, and the relics of the later times barely suffice to prove that it once existed.

By putting the knightly poetry and folk-cults quite aside, then, we can even now determine something more of this (_the_) Classical religion. But in doing so there is a third pitfall to be avoided--the opposing of Greek religion to Roman religion. For in reality there was no such opposition.

Rome is only _one_ of innumerable city-states that arose during the great epoch of colonization. It was built by Etruscans. From the religious point of view it was re-created under the Etruscan dynasty of the sixth century, and it is possible indeed that the Capitoline group of deities, Jupiter, Juno, Minerva--which at that time replaced the ancient trinity, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, of the “Numa” religion--was in some way connected with the family cult of the Tarquins, in which case Minerva, as goddess of the city, is unmistakably a copy of Athene Polias.[489] The cults of this single city are properly comparable only with those of _individual_ Greek-speaking cities of the same degree of maturity, say Sparta or Thebes, which were in nowise more colourful. The little that in these latter discloses itself as generally Hellenic will also prove to be generally Italian. And as for the claim that the “Roman” religion is distinguished from that of the Greek city-states by the absence of myth--what is the basis of our knowledge on the point? We should know nothing at all of the great god-sagas of the Springtime if we had only the festival-calendar and the public cults of the Greek city-states to go upon, just as we should learn nothing of Jesus’s piety from the proceedings of the Council of Ephesus or of that of St. Francis from a church constitution of the Reformation. Menelaus and Helen were for the Laconian state-cult tree-deities and nothing more. The Classical myth derives from a period when the Poleis with their festivals and sacral constitutions were not yet in existence, when there was not only no Rome, but no Athens. With the religious duties and notions of the cities--which were eminently rational--it has no connexion at all. Indeed, myth and cult are even less in touch with one another in the Classical Culture than in others. The myth, moreover, is in no way a creation of the Hellenic culture-field as a whole--it is not “Greek”--but originated (like the stories of Jesus’s childhood and the Grail legend) in this and that group, quite local, under pressure of deep inward stirrings. For instance, the idea of Olympus arose in Thessaly and thence, as a common property of _all_ educated persons, spread out to Cyprus and to Etruria, thus, of course, involving Rome. Etruscan painting presupposes it as a thing of common knowledge, and therefore the Tarquins and their court must have been familiar with it. We may attach any implications we please to “belief” (whatever that may mean) in this myth; the point is that they will be as valid for Romans of the period of the Kings as for the inhabitants of Tegea or Corcyra.

That the pictures of Greek and Roman mythology that modern research has developed are quite different from this is the result not of the facts, but of the _methods_. In the case of Rome (Mommsen) the festal calendar and the State cults, in that of Greece the poetic literature, were taken as the starting-points. Apply the “Latin” method which has led up to Wissowa’s picture to the Greek cities, and the result is a wholly similar picture, as, for example, in Nilsson’s _Griechische Festen_.

When this is taken into consideration, the Classical religion is seen to be a whole possessing an inner unity. The grand god-legends of the eleventh century, which have the dew of Spring upon them, and in their tragic holiness remind us of Gethsemane, Balder’s death, and Francis, are the purest essence of “theoria,” contemplation, a world-picture before the inner eye, and born of the common inward awakening of a group of chosen souls from the world of chivalry.[490] But the much later city-religions are wholly _technique_, formal worship, and as such represent only one side (and a different side) of piety. They are as far from the great myth as they are from the folk-belief. They are concerned neither with metaphysic nor with ethic, but only with the fulfilment of sacral acts. And, finally, the choice of cults by the several cities very often originated, not, like the myth, from a single world-view, but from the accidental ancestor- and family-cults of great houses, which (precisely as in the Gothic) made their sacred figures the tutelary deities of the city and at the same time reserved to themselves the rights of celebrating and worshipping them. In Rome, for example, the Lupercalia in honour of the field-god Faunus were a privilege of the Quinctii and Fabii.

The Chinese religion, of which the great “Gothic” period lies between 1300 and 1100 and covers the rise of the Chóu dynasty, must be treated with extreme care. In presence of the superficial profundity and pedantic enthusiasm of Chinese thinkers of the Confucius and Lao-tse type--who were all born in the _ancien régime_ period of their state-world--it seems very hazardous to try to determine anything at all as to high mysticism and grand legends in the beginning. Nevertheless, such a mysticism and such legends must once have existed. But it is not from these over-rationalized philosophies of the great cities that we shall learn anything about them--as little as Homer can give us in the Classical parallel, though for another reason. What should we know about Gothic piety if all its works had undergone the censorship of Puritans and Retioralists like Locke, Rousseau, and Wolff! And yet we treat the Confucian _close_ of Chinese inwardness as its beginning--if, indeed, we do not go farther and describe the syncretism of Han times as “the” religion of China.[491]

We know nowadays that, contrary to the usual assumption, there was a powerful old-Chinese priesthood.[492] We know that in the text of the Shu-Ching, relics of the ancient hero-sagas and god-myths were worked over rationalistically, and were thus able to survive, and similarly the Hou-li, Ngi-li, and Shi-King[493] would still reveal a good deal more if only they were attacked with the conviction that there was in them something far deeper than Confucius and his like were capable of comprehending. We hear of chthonian and phallic cults in early Chóu times; of orgiastic rites in which the service of the gods was accompanied by ecstatic mass-dances; of mimic representations and dialogues between god and priestess, out of which probably (as in Greece) the Chinese drama evolved.[494] And we obtain an inkling finally of why the luxuriant growth of early Chinese god-figures and myths was necessarily swallowed up in an emperor-mythology. For not only all saga-emperors, but also most of the figures of the Hia and Shang dynasties before 1400 are--all dates and chronicles notwithstanding--nothing but nature transformed into history. The origins of such a process lie deep in the possibilities of every young Culture.[495] Ancestor-worship ever seeks to gain power over the nature-dæmons. All Homeric heroes, and Minos and Theseus and Romulus, are gods become kings. In the _Heliand_,[496] Christ is about to become so. Mary is the crowned Queen of Heaven. It is the supreme (and perfectly unconscious) mode which enables men of breeding to venerate something--that is, for them, what is great must have breeding, race, must be mighty and lordly, the ancestor of whole families. A strong priesthood is able to make short work of this mythology of Time, but it won through partially in the Classical and completely in China--exactly in proportion to the disappearance of the priestly element. The old gods are now emperors, princes, ministers, and retainers; natural events have become acts of rulers, and onsets of peoples social enterprises. Nothing could have suited the Confucians better. Here was a myth which could absorb social-ethical tendencies to an indefinite extent, and all that was necessary was to expunge the traces of the original nature-myth.

To the Chinese waking-consciousness heaven and earth were halves of the macrocosm, without opposition, each a mirror-image of the other. In this picture there was neither Magian dualism nor Faustian unity of active force. Becoming appears in the unconstrained reciprocal working of two principles, the _yang_ and the _yin_, which were conceived rather as periodic than as polar. Accordingly, there are two souls in man, the _kwei_ which corresponded with the _yin_, the earthly, the dark, the cold, and disintegrated with the body; and the _sen_, which is higher, light, and permanent.[497] But, further, there are innumerable multitudes of souls of both kinds outside man. Troops of spirits fill the air and the water and the earth--all is peopled and moved by _kweis_ and _sens_. The life of nature and that of man are in reality made out of the play of such units. Wisdom, will, force, and virtue depend on their relationship. Asceticism and orgiasm; the knightly custom of _hiao_, which requires the noble to revenge an impiety towards an ancestor even after centuries, and commands him never to survive defeat;[498] and the reasoning moral of the _yen_, which, according to the judgment of rationalism, followed from knowledge--all proceed from conceptions of the forces and possibilities of the _kwei_ and the _sen_.

All this is concentrated in the basic word “_tao_.” The conflict between the _yang_ and the _yin_ in man is the _tao_ of his life; the warp and woof of the spirit-swarms outside him are the _tao_ of Nature. The world possesses _tao_ inasmuch as it possesses beat, rhythm, and periodicity. It possesses _li_, tension, inasmuch as man knows it and abstracts from it fixed relationships for future use. Time, Destiny, Direction, Race, History--all this, contemplated with the great world-embracing vision of the early Chóu times, lies in this one word. The path of the Pharaoh through the dark alley to his shrine is related to it, and so is the Faustian passion of the third dimension, but _tao_ is nevertheless far removed from any idea of the technical conquest of Nature. The Chinese park avoids energetic perspective. It lays horizon behind horizon and, instead of pointing to a goal, tempts to wander. The Chinese “cathedral” of the early time, the Pi-Yung, with its paths that lead through gates and thickets, stairs and bridges and courts, has never the inexorable march of Egypt or the drive into depth of the Gothic.

When Alexander appeared on the Indus, the piety of these three Cultures--Chinese, Indian, Classical--had long been moulded into the historyless forms of a broad Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. But it was not long before the group of Magian religions arose in the region intermediate between the Classical and the Indian field, and it must have been at about the same time that the religious history of the Maya and Inca, now hopelessly lost to us, began. A thousand years later, when here also all was inwardly fulfilled and done with, there appeared on the unpromising soil of France, sudden and swiftly mounting, Germanic-Catholic Christianity. It was in this case as in every other; whether the whole stock of names and practices came from the East, or whether thousands of particular details were derived from primeval Germanic and Celtic feelings, the Gothic religion is something so new and unheard-of, something of which the final depths are so completely incomprehensible by anyone outside its faith, that to contrive linkages for them on the historical surface is meaningless jugglery.

The mythic world that thereupon formed itself around this young soul, an integer of force, will, and direction seen under the symbol of Infinity, a stupendous action-into-distance, chasms of terror and of bliss suddenly opening up--it was all, for the elect of this early religiousness, something so entirely natural that they could not even detach themselves sufficiently to “know” it as a unit. They lived in it. To us, on the contrary, who are separated from these ancestors by thirty generations, this world seems so alien and overpowering that we always seek to grasp it in detail, and so misunderstand its wholeness and undividedness.

The father-godhead men felt as Force itself, eternal, grand, and ever-present activity, sacred causality, which could scarcely assume any form comprehensible by human eyes. But the whole longing of the young breed, the whole desire of this strongly coursing blood, to bow itself in humility before the _meaning of the blood_ found its expression in the figure of the Virgin and Mother Mary, whose crowning in the heavens was one of the earliest motives of the Gothic art. She is a light-figure, in white, blue, and gold, surrounded by the heavenly hosts. She leans over the new-born Child; she fells the sword in her heart; she stands at the foot of the cross; she holds the corpse of the dead Son. From the turn of the tenth century on, Petrus Damiani and Bernard of Clairvaux developed her cult; there arose the Ave Maria and the angelic greeting and later, among the Dominicans, the crown of roses. Countless legends gathered round her figure.[499] She is the guardian of the Church’s store of Grace, the Great Intercessor. Among the Franciscans arose the festival of the Visitation, amongst the English Benedictines (even before 1100) that of the Immaculate Conception, which elevated her completely above mortal humanity into the world of light.

But this world of purity, light, and utter beauty of soul would have been unimaginable without the counter-idea, inseparable from it, an idea that constitutes one of the maxima of Gothic, one of its unfathomable creations--one that the present day forgets, and _deliberately_ forgets. While she there sits enthroned, smiling in her beauty and tenderness, there lies in the background another world that throughout nature and throughout mankind weaves and breeds ill, pierces, destroys, seduces--namely, the realm of the Devil. It penetrates the whole of Creation, it lies ambushed everywhere. All around is an army of goblins, night-spirits, witches, werewolves, all in human shape. No man knows whether or not his neighbour has signed himself away to the Evil One. No one can say of an unfolding child that it is not already a devil’s temptress. An appalling fear, such as is perhaps only paralleled in the early spring of Egypt, weighs upon man. Every moment he may stumble into the abyss. There were black magic, and devils’ masses and witches’ sabbaths, night feasts on mountain-tops, magic draughts and charm-formulæ. The Prince of Hell, with his relatives--mother and grandmother, for as his very existence denies and scorns the sacrament of marriage, he may not have wife or child--his fallen angels and his uncanny henchmen, is one of the most tremendous creations in all religious history. The Germanic Loki is hardly more than a preliminary hint of him. Their grotesque figures, with horns, claws, and horses’ hoofs, were already fully formed in the mystery plays of the eleventh century; everywhere the artist’s fancy abounded in them, and, right up to Dürer and Grünewald, Gothic painting is unthinkable without them. The Devil is sly, malignant, malicious, but yet in the end the powers of light dupe him. He and his brood, bad-tempered, coarse, fiendishly inventive, are of a monstrous imaginativeness, incarnations of hellish laughter opposed to the illumined smile of the Queen of Heaven, but incarnations, too, of Faustian world-humour[500] opposed to the panic of the sinner’s contrition.

It is not possible to exaggerate either the grandeur of this forceful, insistent picture or the depth of sincerity with which it was believed in. The Mary-myths and the Devil-myth formed themselves side by side, neither possible without the other. Disbelief in either of them was deadly sin. There was a Mary-cult of prayer, and a Devil-cult of spells and exorcisms. Man walked continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit. Life in this world is a ceaseless and desperate contest with the Devil, into which every individual plunges as a member of the Church Militant, to do battle for himself and to win his knight’s spurs. The Church Triumphant of angels and saints in their glory looks down from on high, and heavenly Grace is the warrior’s shield in the battle. Mary is the protectress to whose bosom he can fly to be comforted, and the high lady who awards the prizes of valour. Both worlds have their legends, their art, their scholasticism, and their mysticism--for the Devil, too, can work miracles. Characteristic of this alone among the religious Springtimes is the symbolism of _colour_--to the Madonna belong white and blue, to the Devil black, sulphur-yellow, and red. The saints and angels float in the æther, but the devils leap and crouch and the witches rustle through the night. It is the two together, light and night, which fill Gothic art with its indescribable inwardness--that, and not any “artistic” fancifulness. Every man knew the world to be peopled with angel and devil troops. The light-encircled angels of Fra Angelico and the early Rhenish masters, and the grimacing things on the portals of the great cathedrals, _really_ filled the air. Men saw them, felt their presence everywhere. To-day we simply no longer know what a myth is; for it is no mere æsthetically pleasing mode of representing something to oneself, but a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every corner of the waking-consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being. These creatures were about one all the time. They were glimpsed without being seen. They were believed in with a faith that felt the very thought of proof as a desecration. What we call myth nowadays, our littérateur’s and connoisseur’s taste for Gothic colour, is nothing but Alexandrinism. In the old days men did not “enjoy” it--behind it stood Death.[501]

For the Devil gained possession of human souls and seduced them into heresy, lechery, and black arts. It was war that was waged against him on earth,[502] and waged with fire and sword upon those who had given themselves up to him. It is easy enough for us to-day to think ourselves out of such notions, but if we eliminate this appalling reality from Gothic, all that remains is mere romanticism. It was not only the love-glowing hymns to Mary, but the cries of countless pyres as well that rose up to heaven. Hard by the Cathedral were the gallows and the wheel. Every man lived in those days in the consciousness of an immense danger, and it was hell, not the hangman, that he feared. Unnumbered thousands of witches genuinely imagined themselves to be so; they denounced themselves, prayed for absolution, and in pure love of truth confessed their night rides and bargains with the Evil One. Inquisitors, in tears and compassion for the fallen wretches, doomed them to the rack in order to save their souls. That is the Gothic myth, out of which came the cathedral, the crusader, the deep and spiritual painting, the mysticism. In its shadow flowered that profound Gothic blissfulness of which to-day we cannot even form an idea.

In Carolingian times, all this was still strange and far. Charlemagne in the first Saxon Capitulary (787) put a ban on the ancient Germanic belief in werewolves and night-gangers (_strigæ_), and as late as 1120 it was condemned as an error in the decree of Burkard of Worms. But twenty years later it was only in a dilute form that the anathema reappeared in the _Decretum Gratiani_. Cæsarius of Heisterbach, already, was familiar with the whole devil-legend and in the _Legenda Aurea_ it is just as actual and as effective as the Mary-legends. In 1233, when the Cathedrals of Mainz and Speyer were being vaulted, appeared the bull _Vox in Rama_, by which the belief in Devil and witch was made canonical. St. Francis’s “Hymn to the Sun” had not long been written, and the Franciscans were kneeling in intimate prayer before Mary and spreading her cult afar, when the Dominicans armed themselves for battle with the Devil by setting up the Inquisition. Heavenly love found its focus in the Mary-image, and _eo ipso_ earthly love became akin to the Devil. Woman is Sin--so the great ascetics felt, as their fellows of the Classical, of China, and of India had felt. The Devil rules only through woman. The witch is the propagator of deadly sin. It was Thomas Aquinas who evolved the repulsive theory of Incubus and Succuba. Inward mystics like Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, developed a full metaphysic of the devilish.

The Renaissance had ever the strong faith of the Gothic at the back of its world-outlook. When Vasari eulogized Cimabue and Giotto for returning to Nature as their teacher, it was this Gothic nature that he had in mind, a nature influenced in every nook by the encircling troops of angels and devils that stood there, ever threatening, in the light. “Imitation” of Nature meant imitation of its soul, not of its surface. Let us be rid at last of the fable of a renewal of Classical “Antiquity.” Renaissance, _Rinascita_, meant then the Gothic uplift from A.D. 1000 onward,[503] the new _Faustian_ world-feeling, the new personal experience of _the Ego in the Infinite_. For some individual spirits, no doubt, it meant a sentimental enthusiasm for the Classical (or what was thought to be the Classical), but that was a manifestation of taste, nothing more.[504] The Classical myth was entertainment-material, an allegorical play, through the thin veil of which men saw, no less definitely than before, the old Gothic actuality. When Savonarola stood up, the antique trappings vanished from the surface of Florentine life in an instant. It was all for the church that the Florentines laboured, and with conviction. Raphael was the most deeply intimate of all Madonna-painters. A firm belief in the realm of Satan, and in deliverance from it through the saints, lay at the root of all this art and literature; and every one of them, painters, architects, and humanists--however often the names of Cicero and Virgil, Venus and Apollo were on their lips--looked upon the burning of witches as something entirely natural and wore amulets against the devil. The writings of Marsilius Ficinus are full of learned disquisitions on devils and witches. Francesco della Mirandola wrote (in elegant Latin) his dialogue “The Witch” in order to warn the fine intellects of his circle against a danger.[505] When Leonardo da Vinci, at the summit of the Renaissance, was working upon his “Anna Selbdritt,”[506] the “Witches’ Hammer” was being written in Rome (1487) in the finest Humanistic Latin. It was _these_ that constitute the real myth of the Renaissance, and without them we shall never understand the glorious and truly Gothic force of this anti-Gothic movement.[507] Men who did not feel the Devil very near at hand could not have created the _Divina Commedia_ or the frescoes of Orvieto[508] or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

It was the tremendous background of this myth that awakened in the Faustian soul a feeling of what it was. An Ego lost in Infinity, an Ego that was all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity of greater forces;[509] that was all will, but a will full of fear for its freedom. Never has the problem of Free-will been meditated upon more deeply or more painfully. Other Cultures have simply not known it. But precisely because here Magian resignation was totally impossible--because that which thought was not an “it” or particle of an all-soul, but an individual, fighting Ego, seeking to maintain itself--every limitation upon freedom was felt as a chain that had to be dragged along through life, and life in turn was felt as a living death. And if so--why? For _what_?

The result of this in-looking was that immense sense of guilt which runs throughout these centuries like one long, desperate lament. The cathedrals rose ever more supplicatingly to heaven, the Gothic vaulting became a joining of hands in prayer, and little comfort of light shone through the high windows into the night of the long naves. The choking parallel-sequences of the church chants, the Latin hymns, tell of bruised knees and flagellations in the nocturnal cell. For Magian man the world-cavern had been close and the heaven impending, but for Gothic man heaven was infinitely far. No hand seemed to reach down from these spaces, and all about the lone Ego the mocking Devil’s world lay in leaguer. And, therefore, the great longing of Mysticism was to lose created form (as Heinrich Seuse said), to be rid of self and all things (Meister Eckart), to abandon selfness (_Theologie deutsch_).[510] And out of these longings there grew up an unending dogged subtilizing on notions which were ever more and more finely dissected to get at the “why,” and finally a universal cry for Grace--not the Magian Grace coming down as substance, but the Faustian Grace that unbinds the Will.

_To be able to will freely_ is, at the very bottom, the one gift that the Faustian soul asks of heaven. The seven sacraments of the Gothic, felt as one by Peter Lombard, elevated into dogma by the Lateran Council of 1215, and grounded in mystical foundations by Thomas Aquinas, mean this and only this. They accompany the unit soul from birth to death and protect it against the diabolical powers that seek to nest themselves in its will. For to sell oneself to the Devil means to deliver up _one’s will_ to him. The Church Militant on earth is the visible community of those who are enabled, by enjoyment of the sacraments, to will. This certainty of free being is held to be guaranteed in the altar-sacrament, which accordingly suffers a complete change of meaning. The miracle of the holy transformation which takes place daily under the hands of the priest--the consecrated Host in the high altar of the cathedral, wherein the believer sensed the presence of him who of old sacrificed himself to secure for his own the _freedom to will_--called forth a sigh of relief of such depth and sincerity as we moderns can hardly imagine. It was in thanksgiving, therefore, that the chief feast of the Catholic Church, Corpus Christi, was founded in 1264.[511]

But more important still--and by far--was the essentially Faustian prime-sacrament of Contrition. This ranks with the Mary-myth and the Devil-myth as the third great creation of the Gothic. And, indeed, it is from this third that the other two derive depth and meaning; it discloses the last secrets of this Culture’s soul, and so sets it apart from all other Cultures. The effect of the Magian baptism was to incorporate a man in the great _consensus_--the _one_ great “it” of the divine spirit took up its abode in him as in the others, and thereafter resignation to all that should happen became his duty. But in the Faustian contrition the _idea of personality_ was implicit. It is not true that the Renaissance discovered personality[512]; what it did was to bring personality up to a brilliant surface, whereby it suddenly became visible to everyone. Its birth is in Gothic; it is the most intimate and peculiar property of Gothic; it is one and the same with Gothic soul. For this contrition is something that each one accomplishes for himself alone. He alone can search his own conscience. He alone stands rueful in the presence of the Infinite. He alone can and must in confession understand and put into words his own past. And even the absolution that frees his Ego for new responsible action is personal to himself. Baptism is wholly impersonal--one receives it because one is _a_ man, not because one is _this_ man--but the idea of contrition presupposes that the value of every act depends uniquely upon the man who does it. This is what differentiates the Western drama from the Classical, the Chinese, and the Indian. This is what directs our legislation more and more with reference to the doer rather than to the deed, and bases our primary ethical conceptions on individual doing and not typical behaviour. Faustian responsibility instead of Magian resignedness, the individual instead of the _consensus_; relief from, instead of submissiveness under, burdens--that is the difference between the most active and the most passive of all sacraments, and at the back of it again lies the difference between the world-cavern and infinity-dynamics. Baptism is something done upon one, Contrition something done by oneself within oneself. And, moreover, this conscientious searching of one’s own past is both the earliest evidence of, and the finest training for, the _historical sense_ of Faustian mankind. There is no other Culture in which the personal life of the living man, the conscientious tracing of each feature, has been so important, for this alone has required the accounts to be rendered in words. If historical research and biography are characteristic of the spirit of the West from its beginnings; if both in the last resort are self-examination and confession; if our lives are led with an assuredness and conscious reference to the historic background that nowhere else has been even imagined as possible or tolerable; if, lastly, we habitually look at history in terms of millennia, not rhapsodically or decoratively as in the Classical World and in China, but directionally and with the almost sacramental formula “_Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner_” ever in our minds--we have this sacrament of the Gothic Church, this continual unburdening of the Ego by _historical_ test and justification to thank for it. Every confession is an autobiography. This peculiar liberation of the will is to us so necessary that the refusal of absolution drives to despair, even to destruction. Only he who senses the bliss of such an inward acquittal can comprehend the old name of the _sacramentum resurgentium_, the sacrament of those who are risen again.[513]

When in this heaviest of decisions the soul is left to its own resources, something unresolved remains hanging over it like a perpetual cloud. It may be said, therefore, that perhaps no institution in any religion has brought so much happiness into the world as this. The whole inwardness and heavenly love of the Gothic rests upon the certainty of full absolution through the power invested in the priest. In the insecurity that ensued from the decline of this sacrament, both Gothic joy of life and the Mary-world of the light faded out. Only the Devil’s world, with its grim all-presentness, remained. And then, in place of the blissfulness irrecoverably lost, came the Protestant, and especially Puritan, heroism, which could fight on, even hopeless, in a lost position. “Auricular confession,” said Goethe once, “ought never to have been taken from mankind.” Over the lands in which it had died out, a heavy earnestness spread itself. Ethic and costume, art and thought, took on the night-colour of the only myth that remained outstanding. Nothing is less sunlit than the doctrines of Kant. “Every man his own priest” is a conviction to which men could win through, but only as to that part of priesthood that involves duties, _not as to that which possesses powers_. No man confesses himself with the inward certainty of absolution. And as the need of the soul to be relieved of its past and to be redirected remained urgent as ever, all the higher forms of communication were transmuted, and in Protestant countries music and painting, letter-writing and memoirs, from being modes of description became modes of self-denunciation, penance, and unbounded confession. Even in Catholic regions too--in Paris above all--art as psychology set in as doubt in the sacrament of Contrition and Absolution grew. Outlook on the world was lost in ceaseless mine-warfare within the self. In lieu of the Infinite, contemporaries and descendants were called in to be priests and judges. Personal art, in the sense that distinguishes Goethe from Dante, and Rembrandt from Michelangelo, was a substitute for the sacrament of confession. It was, also, the sign that this Culture was already in the condition of a Late period.[514]

IV

In all Cultures, Reformation has the same meaning--the bringing back of the religion to the purity of its original idea as this manifested itself in the great centuries of the beginning. In no Culture is this movement missing, whether we know about it, as in the case of Egypt, or not, as in that of China. It means, further, that the city and with it the city-spirit are gradually freeing themselves from the soul of the country-side, setting up in opposition to the latter’s all-power and reconsidering the feelings and thoughts of the primitive pre-urban time with reference to its present self. It was Destiny and not intellectual necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Faustian worlds, to the budding-off of new religions at this point. We know to-day that, under Charles V, Luther was within an ace of becoming the reformer of the whole undivided Church.

For Luther, like all reformers in all Cultures, was not the first, but _the last of a grand succession_ which led from the great ascetics of the open land to the city-priest. Reformation is _Gothic_, the accomplishment and the testament thereof. Luther’s chorale “_Ein’ feste Burg_” does _not_ belong to the spiritual lyrism of the Baroque. There rumbles in it still the splendid Latin of the _Dies iræ_. It is the Church Militant’s last mighty Satan-song.[515] Luther, like every reformer that had arisen since the year 1000, fought the Church not because it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little. The great stream flows on from Cluny: through Arnold of Brescia, who preached return to Apostolic simplicity and was burned in 1155; through Joachim of Floris, who was the first to use the world “_reformare_;” the spirituals of the Franciscan Order; Jacopone da Todi, revolutionary and singer of the _Stabat Mater_, the knight whom the death of a young wife turned into an ascetic and who tried to overthrow Boniface VIII for governing the Church too slackly; through Wyclif and Hus and Savonarola; to Luther, Karlstadt, Zwingli, Calvin, and--Loyola. The intention of these men, one and all, was not to overcome the Christianity of the Gothic, but to bring it to inward fulfilment. So also with Marcion, Athanasius, the Monophysites, and the Nestorians, who sought in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon to purify the faith and lead it back to its origins.[516] But so also the Orphics of the Classical seventh century were the last and not the first of a series that must have begun even before 1000 B.C. So with the establishment of the Re religion in Egypt at the close of the Old Kingdom, the Egyptian Gothic. It is an ending, not a new beginning, that these signify. Just so, again, a reform-fulfilment happened in the Vedic religion about the tenth century and was followed by the setting-in of late Brahmanism. And in the ninth century a corresponding epochal point must have occurred in the religious history of China.

However widely the Reformations of the various Cultures may differ amongst themselves, the purpose is the same for all--to bring the faith, which had strayed all too far into the world-as-history and time-secularism (“_Zeitlichkeit_”), back into the realm of Nature, clean waking-consciousness, and pure cause-controlled and cause-pervaded Space; out of the world of economics (“wealth”) into that of science (“poverty”), out of patrician and cavalier society (which was also that of Renaissance and Humanism) into that of spirituals and ascetics; and lastly (as significant as it is impossible) out of the political ambitions of vestmented human thoroughbreds into the realm of holy Causality that is not of this world.

In those times the West--and the situation was the same in the other Cultures--divided the _Corpus Christianorum_ of the population into the three classes of _status policticus, ecclesiasticus, and œconomicus_ (that is, urban), but as the outlook was that of the city and no longer that of the castle and the village, officials and judges belonged to the first-named class, men of learning to the second--and the peasant was forgotten. This is the key to the opposition of the Renaissance and Reformation, which was an opposition of class and not a difference in world-feeling like that of Renaissance and Gothic. Castle-taste and cloister-soul moved into town, and remained there, as before, in opposition--as in Florence the Medici to Savonarola, and as in old Greece the noble families of the cities--with their Homer now finally written down--to the last Orphics--these, too, writers. The Renaissance artists and Humanists are the legitimate successors of the Troubadours and Minnesingers, and just as there is a line from Arnold of Brescia to Luther, so there is a line from Bertrand de Born and Peire Cardinal, through Petrarch, to Ariosto. The castle has become the town-house, the knight the patrician. The whole movement adhered to palaces, as courts; it limits itself to those fields of expression that affect and interest polite society; it is bright and gay, like Homer, because it is courtly--an atmosphere where problems were bad taste, where Dante and Michelangelo cannot but have felt themselves out of place--and it spread over the Alps to the courts of the North, not as a new world-outlook, but as a new taste. The “Northern” Renaissance of the mercantile and capital cities consisted simply in the fact that the _bon ton_ of the Italian patriciate replaced that of the French chivalry.

But the last reformers, too, the Luthers and Savonarolas, were _urban_ monks, and this differentiates them profoundly from the Joachims and the Bernards. Their intellectual and urban askesis is the stepping-stone from the hermitages of quiet valleys to the scholar’s study of the Baroque. The mystic experience of Luther which gave birth to his doctrine of justification is the experience, not of a St. Bernard in the presence of woods and hills and clouds and stars, but of a man who looks through narrow windows on the streets and house walls and gables. Broad God-perfused nature is remote, outside the city wall; and the free intellect, detached from the soil, is inside it. Within the urban, stonewalled waking-consciousness sense and reason part company and become enemies, and the city-mysticism of the last reformers is thus a mysticism of pure reason through and through, and not one of the eye--an illumination of concepts, in presence of which the brightly coloured figures of the old myth fade into paleness.

Necessarily, therefore, it was, in its real depths, a thing of the few. Nothing was left of that sensible content that formerly had offered even to the poorest something to grip. The mighty act of Luther was a purely intellectual decision. Not for nothing has he been regarded as the last great Schoolman of the line of Occam.[517] He completely liberated the Faustian personality--the intermediate person of the priest, which had formerly stood between it and the Infinite, was removed. And now it was wholly alone, self-oriented, its own priest and its own judge. But the common people could only feel, not understand, the element of liberation in it all. They welcomed, enthusiastically, indeed, the tearing-up of visible duties, but they did not come to realize that these had been replaced by intellectual duties that were still stricter. Francis of Assisi had given much and taken little, but the urban Reformation took much and, as far as the majority of people were concerned, gave little.

The holy Causality of the Contrition-sacrament Luther replaced by the mystic experience of inward absolution “by faith alone.” He came very near to Bernard of Clairvaux in this concept of contrition as lifelong, as a continuous intellectual askesis in contrast to the askesis of outward and visible works. Both of them understood absolution as a divine miracle: in so far as the man changes himself, it is God changing him. But what no purely intellectual mysticism can replace is the “Tu” outside, in free nature. The one and the other preached: “Thou must believe that God has forgiven thee,” but for Bernard belief was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge, whereas for Luther it sank to doubt and desperate insistence. This little “I,” detached from the cosmos, nailed up in an individual being and (in the most terrific sense of the word) alone, needed the proximity of a powerful “Thou,” and the weaker the intellect, the more urgent the need. Herein lies the ultimate meaning of the Western priest, who from 1215 was elevated above the rest of mankind by the sacrament of ordination and its _character indelebilis_: he was a hand with which even the poorest wretch could grasp God. This _visible_ link with the Infinite, Protestantism destroyed. Strong souls could and did win it back for themselves, but for the weaker it was gradually lost. Bernard, although for him the inward miracle was successful of itself, would not deprive others of the gentler way, for the very illumination of his soul showed him the Mary-world of living nature, all-pervading, ever near, and ever helpful. Luther, who knew himself only and not men, set postulated heroism in place of actual weakness. For him life was desperate battle against the Devil, and that battle he called upon everyone to fight. And everyone who fought it fought alone.

The Reformation abolished the whole bright and consoling side of the Gothic myth--the cult of Mary, the veneration of the saints, the relics, the pilgrimages, the mass. But the myth of devildom and witchcraft remained, for it was the embodiment and cause of the inner torture, and now that torture at last rose to its supreme horror.[518] Baptism was, for Luther at least, an exorcism, the veritable sacrament of devil-banning. There grew up a large, purely Protestant literature about the Devil.[519] Out of the Gothic wealth of colour, there remained black; of its arts, music, in particular organ-music. But in the place of the mythic light-world, whose helpful nearness the faith of the common people could not, after all, forgo, there rose again out of long-buried depths an element of ancient German myth. It came so stealthily that even to-day its true significance is not yet realized. The expressions “folktale” and “popular custom” are inadequate: it is a true Myth that inheres in the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies, house-sprites, and sweeping clouds of the disembodied, and a true Cult that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjurings that are still practised with a pious awe. In Germany, at any rate, the Saga took the place, unperceived, of the Mary-myth: Mary was now called Frau Holde, and where once the saints had stood, appeared the faithful Eckart. In the English people what arose was something that has long been designated “Bible-fetishism.”

What Luther lacked--and it is an eternal fatality for Germany--was the eye for facts and the power of practical organization. He did not bring his doctrines to a clear system, nor did he lead the great movement and choose its aim. The one and the other were the work of his great successor Calvin. While the Lutheran movement advanced leaderless in central Europe, he viewed his rule in Geneva as the starting-point of a systematic subjection of the world under a Protestantism unfalteringly thought out to its logical conclusion. Therefore he, and he alone, became a world-power; therefore it was the decisive struggle between the spirit of Calvin and the spirit of Loyola that dominated, from the Spanish Armada on, the world-politics of the Baroque and the struggle for sea-supremacy. While in mid-Europe Reformation and Counter-Reformation struggled for some small imperial city or a few poor Swiss cantons, Canada, the mouth of the Ganges, the Cape, the Mississippi, were the scenes of great decisions fought to an issue by France and Spain, England and Holland. And in these decisions the two grand organizers of the Late religion of the West were ever present, ever opposed.

V

Intellectual creativeness of the Late period begins, not with, but after, the Reformation. Its most typical creation is free science. Even for Luther learning was still essentially the “handmaid of theology,” and Calvin had the freethinking doctor Servet burnt. The thought of the Springtimes--Faustian like Egyptian, Vedic, and Orphic--had felt its vocation to be the justification of faith by criticism. If criticism did not succeed, the critical method must be wrong. Knowledge was faith justified, not faith controverted.

Now, however, the critical powers of the city intellect have become so great that it is no longer content to affirm, but must test. The stock of believed probables, and especially that part of it which was received by the understanding and not the heart, was the first obvious target for dissecting activities. This distinguishes the Springtime Scholasticism from the actuality-philosophy of the Baroque--as it distinguishes Neoplatonist from Islamic, Vedic from Brahmanic, Orphic from Pre-Socratic, thought. The (shall we say) profane Causality of human life, the world-around, the process and meaning of cognition, become a problem. The Egyptian philosophy of the Middle Kingdom measured up the value of life in _this_ sense; and akin to it, in all probability, was the late pre-Confucian philosophy of China from 800 to 500 B.C. Only the book ascribed to Kwan-tse (d. 645) remains to give us some dim idea of this philosophy, but the indications, slight though they be, are that epistemological and biological problems occupied the centre of the one genuine philosophy of China, now utterly lost.

Within Baroque philosophy, Western natural-science stands by itself. No other Culture possesses anything like it, and assuredly it must have been from its beginnings, not a “handmaid of theology,” but _the servant of the technical Will-to-Power_, oriented to that end both mathematically and experimentally--from its very foundations a practical _mechanics_. And as it is firstly technique and only secondly theory, it must be as old as Faustian man himself. Accordingly, we find technical works of an astounding energy of combination even by 1000.[520] As early as the thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste[521] was treating space as a function of light. Petrus Peregrinus in 1289 wrote the best experimentally based treatise on magnetism that appeared before Gilbert (1600). And Roger Bacon, the disciple of both, developed a natural-scientific theory of knowledge to serve as basis for his technical investigations.[522] But boldness in the discovery of dynamic interlinkages went further still. The Copernican system was hinted at in a manuscript of 1322 and a few decades later was mathematically developed by the Paris Occamists, Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Oresme.[523] Let us not deceive ourselves as to the fundamental motive-power of these explorations. Pure contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment for ever, but not so the Faustian symbol of the _machine_, which urged us to mechanical constructions even in the twelfth century and made “_Perpetuum mobile_” the Prometheus-idea of the Western intellect. For us the first thing is ever the _working hypothesis_--the very kind of thought-product that is meaningless to other Cultures. It is an astounding fact (to which, however, we must accustom ourselves) that the idea of immediately exploiting in practice any knowledge of natural relations that may be acquired is alien to every sort of mankind except the Faustian (and those who, like Japanese, Jews, and Russians, have to-day come under the intellectual spell of its Civilization). The very notion of the working hypothesis implicitly contains a dynamic lay-out of the universe. Theoria, contemplative vision of actuality, was for those subtly inquiring monks only secondary, and, being itself the outcome of the technical passion, it presently led them, quite imperceptibly, to the typically Faustian conception of God as the Grand Master of the machine, who could accomplish everything that they themselves in their impotence only dared to wish. Insensibly the world of God became, century by century, more and more like the _Perpetuum mobile_. And, imperceptibly also, as the scanning of nature became sharper and sharper in the school of experiment and technique, and the Gothic myth became more and more shadowy, the concepts of monkish working hypotheses developed, from Galileo onwards, into the critically illuminated numina of modern science, the collisions and the fields, gravitation, the velocity of light, and the “electricity” which in our electrodynamic world-picture has absorbed into itself the other forms of energy and thereby attained to a sort of physical monotheism. They are the concepts that are set up behind the formulæ, to endow them with a mythic visibility for the inner eye. The numbers themselves are technical elements, levers and screws, overhearings of the world’s secrets. The Classical Nature-thought--and that of others also--required no numbers, for it strove for no powers. The _pure_ mathematic of Pythagoras and Plato had no relation whatever to the nature-views of Democritus and Aristotle.

Just as the Classical mind felt Prometheus’s defiance of the gods as “hybris,” so our Baroque felt the machine as diabolical.[524] The spirit of Hell had betrayed to man the secret of mastering the world-mechanism and even of himself enacting the part of God. And hence it is that all purely priestly natures, that live wholly in the world of the spirit and expect nothing of “this world”--and notably the idealist philosophers, the Classicists, the Humanists, and even Nietzsche--have for technique nothing but silent hostility.

Every Late philosophy contains this critical protest against the uncritical intuitiveness of the Spring. But this criticism of the intellect that is sure of its own superiority affects also faith itself and evokes the one great creation in the field of religion that is the peculiarity of the Late period--every Late period--namely, Puritanism.