← catalogue

The Evolution of Love

by Emil Lucka · English · Gutenberg #17699 · 568,989 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Evolution of Love
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Evolution of Love

Author: Emil Lucka

Translator: Ellie Schleussner


        
Release date: February 7, 2006 [eBook #17699]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17699

Credits: Produced by Michael Ciesielski, Martin Pettit and the
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE ***




Produced by Michael Ciesielski, Martin Pettit and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE


BY
EMIL LUCKA


TRANSLATED BY
ELLIE SCHLEUSSNER

[Illustration: Publisher's logo]

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1


_First published in Great Britain 1922_


(_All rights reserved_)


_Printed in Great Britain by_
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, LONDON AND WOKING




PREFACE


The object of this book, which is addressed to all cultured men and
women, is to set forth the primitive manifestations of love and to throw
light on those strange emotional climaxes which I have called
"Metaphysical Eroticism." I have taken no account of historical detail,
except where it served the purpose of proving, explaining and
illustrating my subject. Nor have I hesitated to intermingle
psychological motives and motives arising from the growth and spread of
civilisation. The inevitable result of a one-sided glimpse at historical
facts would have been a history of love, an undertaking for which I lack
both ability and inclination. On the other hand, had I written a merely
psychological treatise, disregarding the succession of periods, I should
have laid myself open to the just reproach of giving rein to my
imagination instead of dealing with reality.

I have availed myself of historical facts to demonstrate that what
psychology has shown to be the necessary phases of the evolution of
love, have actually existed in historical time and characterised a whole
period of civilisation. The history of civilisation is an end in itself
only in the chapter entitled "The Birth of Europe."

My work is intended to be first and foremost a monograph on the
emotional life of the human race. I am prepared to meet rather with
rejection than with approval. Neither the historian nor the psychologist
will be pleased. Moreover, I am well aware that my standpoint is
hopelessly "old-fashioned." To-day nearly all the world is content to
look upon the sexual impulse as the source of all erotic emotion and to
regard love as nothing more nor less than its most exquisite radiation.

My book, on the contrary, endeavours to establish its complete
independence of sexuality.

My contention that so powerful an emotion as love should have come into
existence in historical, not very remote times, will seem very strange;
for, all outward profession of faith in evolution notwithstanding, men
are still inclined to take the unchangeableness of human nature for
granted.

The facts on which I have based my arguments are well known, but my
deductions are new; it is not for me to decide whether they are right or
wrong. In the first (introductory) part I have made use of works already
in existence, in addition to Plato and the poets, but the second and
third parts are founded almost entirely on original research.

                                                            E.L.




CONTENTS


                                                                  PAGE

PREFACE                                                              5

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION                                            9

FIRST STAGE: THE SEXUAL INSTINCT                                    21

SECOND STAGE: LOVE

CHAPTER

  I. THE BIRTH OF EUROPE                                            39

 II. THE DEIFICATION OF WOMAN (FIRST FORM OF
     METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM):--(_a_) The Love of the Troubadours;
     (_b_) The Queen of Heaven; (_c_) Dante and Goethe;
     (_d_) Michel Angelo                                           115

III. PERVERSIONS OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM:--
     (_a_) The Brides of Christ; (_b_) Sexual Mystics              217

THIRD STAGE: THE BLENDING OF SEXUALITY AND LOVE

  I. THE LONGING FOR THE SYNTHESIS                                 231

 II. THE LOVE-DEATH (SECOND FORM OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM)        251

III. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND LOVE.--THE SEEKER
     OF LOVE AND THE SLAVE OF LOVE                                 266

 IV. THE REVENGE OF SEXUALITY.--THE DEMONIACAL AND THE OBSCENE     275

CONCLUSION: THE PSYCHOGENETIC LAW.--THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN
     EPITOME OF THE HUMAN RACE                                     284




TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION


Since the triumphant days of the Mechanists some twenty-five years ago,
the wedge of Pragmatism--a useful tool to be used and discarded--has
been driven between materialism and idealism, and it appears that the
whole tendency of philosophy is now in the latter direction. Even in
England the influence of Bergson has led modern thought away from the
pure materialism of the monists, and it seems probable that Benedetto
Croce's _Philosophy of the Spirit_ will carry the movement a step nearer
towards the idealistic concept of reality. And among the latest signs of
the new tendency must be counted the brilliant work of Emil Lucka, the
young Austrian "poet-philosopher," whose conception of the development
of love must rank with the most daring speculations in recent
psychology.

In the great reaction of the last century, love, that most cogent motive
of human thought and action, fell from its high estate and came to be
regarded as an instinct not differing in any essential from hunger and
thirst, and existing, like them, from the beginning, eternal and
immutable, manifesting itself with equal force in the heart of man and
woman, and impelling them towards each other. But Emil Lucka, in his
remarkable new book, _The Three Stages of Love_ (which was recently
published in Berlin, and has already created a sensation in literary
circles abroad), leads us on to speculative heights from which we may
look back upon the whole theory of evolution not as a bar but as a
bridge. "My book is intended as a monograph of the emotional life of the
human race," he says in the preface, and "I am prepared to meet with
rejection rather than with approval." There has been abundance of
criticism and controversy, but Lucka has stated his case and drawn his
conclusions with such admirable precision and logic, that his work has
aroused admiration and appreciation even in the ranks of his opponents.

Love is a theme which at all times and in all countries has been of
primary interest to men and women, and therefore this book, which throws
an illuminating ray of light in many a dark place still wrapped in
mystery and silence, not only impresses the psychologist, but also
fascinates the general reader with its wealth of interesting detail and
charm of expression.

The three vitally important points which the author develops are as
follows:--

Love is not a primary instinct, but has been gradually evolved in
historical time.

Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law is expanded in a psychogenetic law.

Only man's emotions have undergone evolution, and therefore have a
history, while those of woman have experienced no change.

Lucka's book will probably not please the advanced feminists, but the
delicate, although perhaps involuntary homage to her sex which is
implied in his theories ought to rouse a feeling of gratification in the
heart of every right-feeling woman. The very limitations and
restrictions which he lays upon her raise and glorify her. For while man
has been the "Odysseus wandering through heaven and hell, passing from
the bestial to the divine to return again and become human, woman has
always been the same, unchangeable and without problems. That which he
has set up to-day as his highest erotic ideal, the blending of sexual
and spiritual love, has been her natural endowment from the beginning.
Never perfect, he falls into error and sin where she cannot err, for her
instinct is Nature herself, and she knows not the meaning of sin."

Schopenhauer's "instinct of philoprogenitiveness" has to-day become an
article of faith with the learned and the unlearned. This _sub-conscious
instinct for the service of the species_ which, in love, is supposed to
rise to consciousness, and whose purpose is the will to produce the best
possible offspring, is conceded by scientists who reject not only
Schopenhauer's metaphysic, but metaphysic in general. Even Nietzsche,
that arch-individualist, has proved by many of his pronouncements, and
most strikingly by his well-known definition of marriage, that he has
not escaped its fascinations. "Schopenhauer ignores all phenomena which
are not in support of his myth," says Lucka, who denies this instinct of
philoprogenitiveness and would substitute for it a "pairing-instinct."
"The experience of others," he argues, "not our own instinct, has taught
us that children _may_, not necessarily _must_, be the result of the
union of the sexes. Into the mediaeval ideal which reached its climax in
metaphysical love, the idea of propagation did not enter. Moreover, the
desire for children is frequently unaccompanied by any sexual desire,
and therefore to manufacture an instinct of philoprogenitiveness is
fantastic metaphysic, and is entirely opposed to intellectual reality.
This was well understood in the long period of antiquity which strictly
separated the sexual impulse and the desire for children."

Lucka distinguishes three great stages in the evolution of love. In
vivid and fascinating pictures he unfolds the erotic life of our
primitive ancestors, basing his statements on accepted authorities. The
sexual impulse in those remote days, unconscious of its nature and
far-reaching consequences, was entirely undifferentiated from any other
powerful instinct. Every woman of the tribe belonged to every male who
happened to desire her. As is still the case with the aborigines of
Central and Northern Australia, the phenomena of pregnancy and
childbirth were attributed to witchcraft.[1] The concept of _father_ had
not yet been formed; the family congregated round the mother and saw in
her its natural chief; gynecocracy was the prevailing form of
government. In early historical and pre-classical times, promiscuity was
systematised by religion in India and the countries round the
Mediterranean and survived in the Temple Prostitution and the Mysteries.
Man as yet felt himself only as a part of nature, and aspired to no more
than a life in harmony with her laws. The worship of fertility and the
endless renewal of life was the object of the orgiastic cults of Adonis
and Astarte in the East, and Dionysus and Aphrodite in Greece; unbridled
licentiousness and blind gratification of the senses their sacrament.

With the growth of civilisation and the development of personality there
slowly crept into the minds of men a distaste for this irregular
sexuality and a desire for a less chaotic state of things. This longing
and the wish for legitimate heirs gradually overcame promiscuity and, in
Greece, led to the establishment of the monogamous system. It must not
be assumed, however, that the Greek ideal of marriage bore any
resemblance to our modern conception. True, the wife occupied an
honoured position as the guardian of hearth and children and was treated
by her husband with affection and respect, but she was not free. Nor was
her husband expected to be faithful to her. Marriage in no way
restricted his liberty, but left him free to seek intellectual
stimulation in the society of the hetaerae, and gratification of the
senses in the company of his slaves. Love in our sense was unknown to
the ancients, and although there is a modern note in the legends of the
faithful Penelope, and the love which united Orpheus and Eurydice, yet,
so Lucka tells us, these instances should be regarded rather as poetic
divinations of a future stage of feeling than actual facts then within
the scope of probability. Even Plato, in whom all wisdom and
ante-Christian culture culminated, was still, in this respect, a citizen
of the old world, for he, too, knew as yet nothing of the spiritual love
of a man for a woman. To him the love of an individual was but a
beginning, the road to the love of perfect beauty and the eternal ideas.

On the threshold of the second stage of the erotic life stands
Christianity, which, in sharp contrast to antiquity and to the classical
period, sought the centre and climax of life in the soul. The founder of
the "religion of love" _discovered_ the individual, and by so doing laid
the foundation for that metaphysical love which found its most striking
expression in the deification of woman and the cult of the Virgin Mary.
How this change of mental attitude was brought about is worked out in a
brilliant chapter, entitled "The Birth of Europe." The revivifying
influence of Christ's preaching and personality was stifled after the
first centuries by the rigid dogma and formalism which had altered his
doctrine almost past recognition. The Church was building up its
political structure and tolerated no rival. Art, literature, music, all
the enthusiasm and profound thought of which the human mind is capable,
were pressed into her service. Independent thought was heresy, and the
death of every heretic became a new fetter which bound the intellect of
man. But about the year 1100, when the mighty edifice was complete, and
the pope and his bishops looked down upon kings and emperors and counted
them their vassals, when the barbaric peoples which made up the
population of Europe had been sufficiently schooled and educated in the
new direction, a longing for something new, a yearning for art, for
poetry, for beauty, began to stir the hearts of men and women. It found
expression in the ideal of chivalry, the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy
Grail, and suddenly love, bursting out in a brilliant flame, shed its
radiance on the sordid relationship which had hitherto existed between
the sexes, and transfigured it. Woman, the despised, to whom at the
Council of Macon a soul had been denied, all at once became a queen, a
goddess. The drudge, the patiently suffering wife, were things of the
past. A new ideal had been set up and men worshipped it with bended
knees.

     "She shines on us as God shines on his angels,"

sang Guinicelli.

It was in a small country in the South of France, in Provence, that the
new spirit was born. The troubadours, wandering from castle to castle,
sang the praise of love, genuine love, the earlier ones without
admixture either of speculation or metaphysic. The dogma that pure love
was its own reward inasmuch as it made men perfect, was framed later on.

     "I cannot sin when I am in her mind,"

wrote Guirot Riquier, and Dante, in the "Vita Nuova," calls his beloved
mistress "the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all virtues." The
monk Matfre Ermengau, who wrote a text-book on love, says:

     Love makes good men better,
     And the worst man good.

The later troubadours drew a much sharper distinction between spiritual
and sensual love. The latter was regarded as degrading and base (at
least in principle) and woe to the man who held, or rather, avowed,
another opinion. His reward was the contempt of every man and woman of
culture. "I ask no more of my mistress than that she should suffer me to
serve her," protested Bernart de Ventadour.

It goes without saying that, in spite of this high ideal, sensuality
flourished undiminished, and a troubadour who loudly sang the praise of
chastity and blatantly professed his entire disinterestedness in the
service of his mistress, did not see the least inconsequence in carrying
on a dozen intrigues at the same time with other women. Sordello, one of
the best known poets of this period, was charged by a contemporary with
having changed his mistress over a hundred times, and he himself,
impudently bragging, proclaims that

     None can resist me; all the frowning husbands
     Shall not prevent me to embrace their wives,
     If I so wish....

Another poet, Count Rambaut III., of Orange, recommended to his
fellow-men as the surest way of winning a woman's favour, "to break her
nose with a blow of the fist." "I myself," he continued, "treat all
women with tenderness and courtesy, but then--I am considered a fool."

As may be expected, sublimated, metaphysical love was not without its
caricatures and eccentricities. One of the most grotesque figures of the
period of the troubadours was Ulrich von Lichtenstein, a German knight.
As a page, we are told, he drank the water in which his mistress had
washed her hands. Later on he had his upper lip amputated because it
displeased his lady-love, and on another occasion he cut off one of his
fingers, had it set in gold and used as a clasp on a volume of his poems
which he sent as a present to his inamorata.

At the famous Courts of Love, the most extraordinary questions were
seriously discussed and decided. A favourite subject for debate was the
relationship between love and marriage, and some of the decisions which
have been preserved for us prove without a doubt that those two great
factors in the emotional life were considered irreconcilable. At the
Court of the Viscountess Ermengarde of Narbonne, the question whether
the love between lovers was greater than the love between husband and
wife was settled as follows: "Nature and custom have erected an
insuperable barrier between conjugal affection and the love which
unites two lovers. It would be absurd to draw comparisons between two
things which have neither resemblance nor connection."

The contrast between the new, spiritualised love and the older, sexual,
instinct created that dualism so characteristic of the whole mediaeval
period. Sexuality and love were felt as two inimical forces, the fusion
of which was beyond the range of possibility. While on the one hand
woman was worshipped as a divine being, before whom all desire must be
silenced, she was on the other hand stigmatised as the devil's tool, a
power which turned men away from his higher mission and jeopardised the
salvation of his soul. Wagner portrayed this dualism perfectly in
_Tannhauser_. "A man of the Middle Ages," says Lucka, "would have
recognised in this magnificent work the tragedy of his soul."

It was but a small step from the worship of a beloved mistress to the
cult of the Virgin Mary. The Church, hostile at first, finally
acquiesced, and "through her official acknowledgment of a female deity,
open enmity between the religion of the Church and the religion of woman
was avoided." A woman, that is to say, the Virgin Mary, had stepped
between God and humanity as mediator, intercessor and saviour.

Both Dante, the inspired woman-worshipper of the Middle Ages, and the
more modern Goethe, saw in metaphysical love the triumph over all things
earthly. And far above either of these intellectual heroes looms the
awe-inspiring figure of Michelangelo, the scoffer, to whom love came
late in life; in his ecstatic adoration of Vittoria Colonna, the
enthusiasm of Plato and the passion of Dante are blended in a more
transcendent flame.

Sexual Mystics and the Brides of Christ present the darker aspect of
metaphysical love. All the latter, including even Catherine of Siena (a
clever politician who kept up a correspondence with the leading
statesmen of her time), Marie of Oignies, and St. Teresa, are
stigmatised as victims of hysteria and consigned to the domain of
pathology.

While the first stage was characterised by the reign of unbridled sexual
instinct, the second by the conflict between spiritual and sensual love,
the third stage represents our modern conception, the blending of
spiritual and sensual love, which is "not the differentiated sexual
instinct, but a force embracing the psycho-physical entity of the
beloved being without any consciousness of sexual desire." It shares
with the purely metaphysical love the lover's longing to raise his
mistress above him and glorify her without any ulterior object and
desire. "In this stage there is no tyranny of man over woman, as in the
sexual stage; no subjection of man to woman, as in the woman-worship of
the Middle Ages; but complete equality of the sexes, a mutual give and
take. If sexuality is infinite as matter, spiritual love eternal as the
metaphysical ideal, then the synthesis is human and personal." The
apotheosis of this perfect love Lucka finds in the _Liebestod_ (the
death of the lovers in the ecstasy of love), in Wagner's _Tristan und
Isolde_.

An interesting chapter on erotic aberrations, the demoniacal and the
obscene, completes the third part of the book.

There may be much in Lucka's theories which will rouse the scepticism of
the monists; some of his deductions may appear to his readers a little
strained, but no thinking man or woman can read his brilliant
_Conclusion_ without denying him the tribute of sincere admiration. In
this last chapter he applies Haeckel's biogenetic law to the domain of
the spirit. As the human embryo passes through the principal stages of
the development of the individual from lower forms of life, so the
growing male must pass through the stages of psychical development
through which the race has passed. The gynecocratic government of
prehistoric time is revived in the nursery, where the mother rules
supreme and the sisters dominate. The normal, healthy school-boy,
preferring the company of his school-fellows to all others, shunning his
mother and sisters, ashamed of his female relatives, is the modern
individual representative of those early leagues and unions of young men
who opposed matriarchy and finally brought about its overthrow and the
establishment of male government. The promiscuous sexuality
characteristic of adolescence reproduces the first, merely sexual, stage
of the erotic life of the race in the life of the individual. As a rule
this phase is followed by a period of woman-worship; love has conquered
the sexual instinct and the latter is felt as base and degrading.
Atavism is not so much the persistence of the earlier, as the absence of
the later stages of psychical development.

I need not emphasise the fact that the three stages are often
intermingled and not traceable with equal clearness in the life of every
individual. Many men never advance beyond the first stage and others are
fragmentary and undeveloped; but certain phases are more or less
distinguishable in every well-endowed male individual. Lucka finds a
perfect illustration of his theory in the life and works of Richard
Wagner, whose operas _The Fairies_ (based on Shakespeare's _Measure for
Measure_), _Tannhauser_, and _Tristan und Isolde_, successively
illustrate the three stages through which the great poet-composer and
impassioned lover passed, and reflect the principal halting-places in
the erotic evolution of the race. In _Parsifal_, Wagner's last and
maturest work, he conjectures a potential fourth stage, divined by the
genius of the great musician and thinker, a sublimation of our modern
ideal, a stage when love will be freed from all sexual feeling (a
conception not unlike Otto Weininger's), but to which we have not yet
attained and which we are even unable fully to grasp.

I have not been able to do more than touch upon the principal features
of this book, the fame of whose brilliant author has long spread beyond
the boundaries of his own native country. Emil Lucka was born in Vienna
in 1877, and has already achieved a number of remarkably fine books,
most of which have been translated into Russian, French, and other
foreign languages. He is as yet unknown in England, this being the first
of his works to appear in English.

                                            ELLIE SCHLEUSSNER.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] _cf._ Hartland's "Primitive Paternity" and Frazer's "Golden Bough."




THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE

THE FIRST STAGE: THE SEXUAL INSTINCT


To the generations slowly rising from the dark abyss of time to the
twilight of the Middle Ages, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct
offered fewer difficulties than the gratification of any other need or
desire. With every unpremeditated and cursory indulgence the craving
disappeared from consciousness and left the individual free to give his
mind to the acquisition of the necessities of life which were far more
difficult to obtain. Primitive, prehistoric man lived in the moment.
When there was plenty of food he gorged to repletion, heedless of the
starvation which might be his fate to-morrow or the day after. His
thought had neither breadth nor continuity. It never occurred to him
that there might be a connection between an abrupt and quickly forgotten
embrace and the birth of a child by a woman of the tribe after what
appeared to be an immeasurable lapse of time. He suspected witchcraft in
the phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth (to this day the aborigines of
Central and Northern Australia do not realise the connection between
generation and birth). As a rule it was remembered that a certain woman
had given birth to a certain child by the fact of her having carried it
about and fed it at her breast. Occasionally it was forgotten to which
mother a child belonged; perhaps the mother had died; perhaps the child
had strayed beyond the boundaries of the community and the mother had
failed to recognise it on its return. But it was clear beyond all doubt
that every child had a "mother." The conception of "father" had not yet
been formed. Experience had taught our primitive ancestors two
undeniable facts, namely "that women gave birth to children" and "that
every child had a mother."

We must assume that sexual intercourse was irregular and haphazard up to
the dawn of history. Every woman--within the limits of her own tribe,
probably--belonged to every man. Whether this assumption is universally
applicable or not, must remain doubtful; later ethnologists, more
particularly _von Westermarck_, deny it because it does not apply to
every savage tribe of the present day. Herodotus tells us that
promiscuity existed in historical times in countries as far removed from
each other as Ethiopia and the borders of the Caspian Sea. There can be
no reasonable doubt that sexual intercourse took the form of
group-marriage, the exchange or lending of wives, and other similar
arrangements.

The relationship between mother and child having been established by
Nature herself, the first human family congregated round the mother,
acknowledging her as its natural chief. This continued even after the
causal connection between generation and birth had ceased to be a
mystery. In all countries on the Mediterranean, more especially in
Lycia, Crete and Egypt, the predominance of the female element in State
and family is well attested; it is reflected in the natural religions of
the Eastern races--both Semitic and Aryan--and we find innumerable
traces of it in Greek mythology. The merit of discovering this important
stage in the relationship of the sexes is due to _Bachofen_. "Based on
life-giving motherhood," he says, "gynecocracy was completely dominated
by the natural principles and phenomena which rule its inner and outer
life; it vividly realised the unity of nature, the harmony of the
universe which it had not yet outgrown.... In every respect obedient to
the laws of physical existence, its gaze was fixed upon the earth, it
worshipped the chthonian powers rather than the gods of light." The
children of men who had sprung from their mother as the flowers spring
from the soil, raised altars to Gaea, Demeter and Isis, the deities of
inexhaustible fertility and abundance. These early races of men realised
themselves only as a part of nature; they had not yet conceived the idea
of rising above their condition and setting their intelligence to battle
with its blind laws. Incapable of realising their individuality, they
bowed in passive submission to nature's undisputed sway. They were
members of a tribe, and the fragmentary existence of the single
individual was of no importance when it clashed with the welfare of the
clan. The family--centred round the mother--and the tribe were the real
individuals, in the same way as the swarm of bees, and not the
individual bee, makes the whole. They lived in complete harmony with
nature; they had no spiritual life, no history, for civilisation and the
creation of intellectual values which are the foundation of history
depend on the rise of a community above primitive conditions.
Differentiation had hardly begun to exert its modifying influence; all
men (not unlike the Eastern Asiatics of our day) resembled each other in
looks, character and habits.

In the countries on the Mediterranean (as well as in India and
Babylonia) the first stage of sexual intercourse, irresponsible and
promiscuous, was systematised by religion. The annual spring-festivals
in honour of Adonis, Dionysus, Mylitta, Astarte and Aphrodite,
celebrated unbridled licentiousness. The whole community greeted the
re-awakening vitality of the earth by an unrestrained abandonment to
passion. Man aspired to be no more than the flower which scatters its
seed to the winds. The incomprehensible lords of cupidity and rank
vegetation did not suffer the individualisation of desire. The complete
union of the male and female qualities, as manifested both in nature and
man, was solemnised in the Orgies, and not by any means the relationship
of an individual man to an individual woman, or sexuality connected with
individuals and dominated by them. Nor was this unfettering of instinct
a symbolical act; for it to be so, man must have stood over against
nature as an intellectual being, mirroring and transforming her acts by
his own deeds. He was as yet far from this. His ambition did not reach
beyond the desire to fulfil nature in himself. Before the majesty of
sex--worshipped in the vague, shadowy mothers of mankind, Rhea, Demeter,
Cybele, and their human offspring, the phallic Dionysus and the
hundred-breasted goddess of Ephesus--the individual with his piteous
limitations shrank into insignificance. Sex was immortal, sex and
primary matter, the [Greek: ulê] contrasted by Aristotle with the
[Greek: eisos], the form. "The female principle is the mother of the
body, but the mother of the spirit is the male." The substance of those
ancient cults was birth and death, meaningless, purposeless, apparently
without rhyme or reason; their sacrament the perpetual union of the
sexes. Between the succeeding generations there was but one bond, the
natural bond of motherhood. It was the first tie realised by mankind, a
tie not felt as a concrete relationship between two individuals, but as
a general, maternal, natural force. The presiding divinities were the
"mothers," the eternal, incorporeal deities, enthroned outside time and
space, and therefore immortal givers of life and preservers of mankind.
Before their silent greatness the desire of man to know his whence and
whither, to win shape and individuality, became blasphemy. They had
given immortality to sex, but upon the individual they had laid the
curse of death.

Thus we have first a stage of fatherless, natural conception,
corresponding with the philosophical theories which maintained that all
created things had sprung from the elements. Later ages discovered a
spiritual principle, a becoming, or an eternal being, and finally a
conflict between spirit and matter.

But the general attitude towards sexual intercourse underwent a change
as soon as here and there individuals appeared who were conscious of
their individuality. Natural selection could not come into play in a
community the members of which resembled one another so closely that all
personal characteristics were obliterated in a general monotony. One
woman was as good as another, although in all probability a healthy,
youthful and strong individual would be preferred to a sickly, puny
specimen. But apart from this, the wish to choose a partner instead of
being content with the first comer, must have coincided historically
with the outward, and later on with the inward differentiation of the
race. I cannot prove my theory by quoting chapter and verse from ancient
writers, but obviously a feeling of preference could not have arisen
until individuals had begun to show very noticeable traces of
difference. Therefore with growing differentiation a new factor--modest
at first and operating within narrow limits--the factor of choice, had
come into the sexual life. The slow development of personality gave
birth to the feeling which rebelled against universal sexual intercourse
and gynecocracy in general. The men desired to shape their own world;
they had no share in the immortality of maternal life. As (relatively
speaking) single individuals they stood over against the material bond
of the generations living in the chain of the mothers. Demigods, the
sons of the gods of light and mortal mothers, were credited with the
salvation of men from a confused, chaotic existence, and the
introduction of new conditions of life, no longer based on the dictates
of nature but on the moulding genius of man. "Hercules, Theseus and
Perseus overthrew the ancient powers of darkness. They laid the
foundations of man's great achievement, civilisation, and were the
first to worship the gods of light. They delivered humanity from the
gross materialism in which it had hitherto been steeped; they were the
awakeners of spiritual life, which is a higher life than the life of the
senses; they were as incorruptible as the sun from whence they came, the
heroes of a new civilisation distinguished by gentleness, a higher
endeavour and a new dispensation." (Bachofen.)

Heinrich Schurtz has proved (though not in connection with matriarchy)
that side by side with the family, unions of unmarried men existed in
many countries at a very early time. The object of these unions, which
had nothing of the rigidity of blood-relationship, was fellowship. As
soon as the boys had outgrown the care of their mother they were
compelled to combine for the purpose of playing games and later on for
war and hunting; these men's unions therefore were the outcome of the
necessary conditions of life. It is obvious that innovations and
inventions of all sorts originated in these unions rather than with the
temperamentally conservative women, and that we have to look upon them
as the hotbed of all spiritual and social evolution. These
confederations and leagues not based on a natural or blood-relationship,
but on a feeling of brotherhood and friendliness, might well have been
an attack upon the natural ties of the family, an expression of a
feeling of hostility to and contempt for women, and probably stood in
close relationship to a striking characteristic of the past: a widely
spread homosexuality.

Whether Schurtz gives us a correct picture of these men's unions or not,
there can be no doubt that the struggle against matriarchy originated in
them. This struggle led eventually to the victory of the male principle,
the acknowledgment of the authority of the father, the institution of
male government which deprived women of all legal rights, and the
dominion of the spiritual; the victory of the gods of light over the
dark lords of fertility. This revolution of principles was perhaps the
completest revolution humanity has ever known.

A long road, marked by numerous compromises and limitations, led from
casual intercourse to the final establishment of the monogamous system.
Free intercourse had been sanctioned by the gods, who suffered no
restrictions and modifications, and sacrifices in the shape of a
temporary universal unfettering of instinct were required to pacify
their anger and reconcile them to the new system. The first and most
important of these compromises was the temple-prostitution practised by
many nations in Asia Minor, the Greek Archipelago, India and Babylonia.
Many a girl gained in this way the marriage portion which enabled her
later on to find a husband, to whom she invariably remained strictly
loyal. Thus all religious requirements were satisfied. At first this was
an annually recurring rite, but gradually it became an isolated ceremony
in the life of every female individual. "In the place of the annual
surrender," says Priester, "we now have a single act; the hetaerism of
the matrons is succeeded by the hetaerism of the maids; instead of being
practised during marriage, it is practised in spinsterhood; the blind
surrender has given way to a yielding to certain individuals."...

With the growth of civilisation a few girls, the hierodules, were set
apart for the purpose of pacifying the offended deities and their act
ransomed the rest of the female citizens.

It was not on erotic grounds, but for political and social reasons that
the Greek introduced monogamy. The reason which weighed in the scales
more heavily than all others was the necessity for legitimate offspring.
It was natural that a man of property should desire a legitimate heir
who would inherit it on his death. The right of succession from father
to son, incorporated later on in the Roman Right, originated during this
period. But this was not the only advantage connected with the
possession of a son: religion taught that after death the body required
sacrificial food which could only be provided by the legitimate male
descendants of the deceased. (The same belief was held by the Indians
and Eastern Asiatics.) In several Greek States marriage was compulsory
and bachelors were fined. At the same time the contraction of a marriage
did not interfere with the personal freedom of the man; he was at
liberty to go to the hetaerae for intellectual stimulation (unless he
happened to prefer the friends of his own sex) and to his slaves for the
pleasures of the senses. His wife, although she was not free, was
respected by him as the guardian of his hearth and children. There was
but one legal reason for divorce: sterility, which frustrated the object
of matrimony. Conjugal love as we understand it did not exist; it is a
feeling which was entirely unknown to the ancients.

With the exception of the gradually weakening hold of religion on the
imagination of the people towards the decline of the Roman Empire, no
perceptible change occurred in the social life of the old world until
the dawn of the Middle Ages. To quote Otto Seeck: "A wife had no other
task than to produce legitimate offspring; and yet she gave herself airs
and graces, embittered her husband's life with her jealousy and bad
temper or, worse even, set all tongues wagging with her evil conduct. Is
it to be wondered at that marriage was merely regarded as a duty to the
State, and that a great number of men were not sufficiently patriotic to
take such a burden upon their shoulders?"

Thus the victory of the male spiritual principle over universal sexual
intercourse ushered in the second stage which checked the sexual impulse
and directed it upon certain individuals, a distinction however, which
bears no relation to love.

Monogamy had conquered, in principle at least and as an ideal.

The profoundly mystical core of the most powerful Greek tragedy which
has come down to our time, the _Orestes_ of Aeschylus, represents the
victory of the new gods of light over the old maternal powers. Orestes
has sinned against the old law, for in order to avenge his father's
death, he has slain his mother. The sun-god Apollo and the sinister
Erinnys, the upholders of the old maternal right, are waging war over
the justifiableness of the deed. To the Erinnys, matricide is the
foulest of all crimes, for man is more nearly related to the mother than
to the father. But Apollo had commanded the deed, so that the father's
murder should not remain unavenged.

     Not to the mother is the child indebted
     For life; she tends and guards the kindling spark
     The father lighted; she but holds his pledge.----

he explains. And the answer is the lament of the Erinnys:

     Thus thou destroy'st the gods of ancient times!

Athene, the virgin goddess, the motherless daughter of Zeus, appearing
as mediator between the opponents, decides in favour of the new
dispensation which places the father's claim above the mother's. Orestes
is free of guilt; his deed was justifiable according to the canons of
the new law. The tragedy is the symbolical commemoration of the victory
of the male principle in Greece. But Athene is the embodiment of the new
hermaphroditic ideal of the Greek which stood in close connexion to
their homosexuality, and with which I propose to deal later on.

There is a psychical law ordaining that nothing which has ever quickened
the soul of man shall be entirely lost. Were it not so, the storehouses
of the soul would stand empty. New values are created, but the old
verities endure; as a rule they are relegated to a lower sphere, to
inferior social layers, but they persist and frequently merge into the
new. This law applies without exception to the relationship between the
sexes; we shall come upon it again and again. During the second stage,
characterised by the spiritual love foreign to the ancients, the purely
sexual impulse continued as an unimpaired force, but it had lost its
prestige and was not only regarded as ignoble and base, but also
stigmatised as sinful and demoniacal. The hearts of men were stirred by
new ideals.

A similar attitude, perhaps not quite so uncompromising because the
contrast was less pronounced, existed in classical Greece. The more
highly developed, self-conscious Hellenic genius, shrinking from
promiscuous intercourse, had systematised the instinct and set up a new
ideal in Platonic love. But below the surface raged the unbridled
natural force, and in perfect harmony with the Greek spirit--it was not
hysterically hidden, but assigned a place in the new system. Wrapped in
the obscurity of the Mysteries, concealed from the gaze of the new gods
of light, it attempted to assuage its inextinguishable thirst. The
Mysteries were the annual tribute paid as a ransom by Apollo-worshipping
Hellas to chaotic Asia, so that she might be free to pursue her higher
psycho-spiritual aims. The brilliant civilisation of Athens was based on
the dark cult of the Mysteries. On the festivals of the hermaphroditic
Dionysus and Demeter, which are identical with the cults of Adonis and
Mylitta, the impersonal, generative elements were worshipped. Thus,
below the surface of the Greek State, founded on masculine values and
attempting to restrict intercourse for the benefit of a more
systematised progeniture, flourished the orgiastic cult of the ancient
Eastern deities, who had vouchsafed to mortals a glimpse of the great
secret of life in the ardour of procreation and conception. The women
upheld the religion of passion as an end in itself; bacchantes, men in
female attire, emasculated priests, sacrificed to the blindly bountiful
gods. We are told that Dionysus conquered even the Amazons and converted
them to his worship. Euripides described in the _Bacchantes_--the
subject of which is the war between the uncontrolled sexual impulse and
the new order of things--how Dionysus traversed all Asia and finally
arrived in Hellas accompanied by a crowd of abandoned women. But his
religion was more than a cult of wine and sensual pleasure, it embraced
a gentle worship of nature, throwing down the barrier between man and
beast--impassable by the spirit of civilisation--and lovingly including
every living creature. We read in the _Bacchantes_ that the women who
had fled from the town to follow the irresistible stranger, Dionysus,
dwelled in the mountains, binding their hair with tame adders, carrying
in their arms the cubs of wolves and the young deer, and feeding them
with the milk of their breasts; that milk and wine welled up when they
struck the earth with the thyrsus; and so on. Dionysus implores
Pentheus, the representative of the Hellenic masculine system, not to
venture undisguised among the maenads: "They'll murder you if they
divine your sex," and, knowing the secret of the male and female temper:

      .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  First let
     His mind be clouded by a slight disorder
     For, conscious of his manhood he will never
     Wear women's garb; insane, he's sure to wear it.

Pentheus, recognising in Dionysus the foe of a more spiritual conception
of the law, the _effeminate stranger_ who had driven the women to
madness, is torn to pieces by the frenzied bacchantes who fall upon him,
led by Agave, his mother, and sacrificed to the _bull-god_ Dionysus. At
the conclusion of this strange and profound epos, Agave recovers her
senses and curses the acts which she has committed in her madness ...
women submit to the new spiritual dispensation. We realise now why Hera,
the tutelary goddess of the newly introduced monogamous system, hated
Dionysus and attempted to kill him before he was born.

The subject treated in the beautiful myth of Orpheus is the
relationship between the primitive sexual impulse and its
individualisation on a single personality. For seven months Orpheus
bewails the death of Eurydice and regards all other living creatures
with indifference. This loyalty offends and infuriates the women of
Thracia, who divine in it a spirit inimical to a life in harmony with
nature. One night, during the celebration of the Dionysian rites, they
attack the poet--the representative of the higher Hellenic poetical
ideals--and rend him limb from limb. But as the head of the murdered
singer floats down the river, the pale lips still frame the beloved
name: Eurydice! It is certain that in those remote legendary days such
love did not exist. But the prophetic Greek spirit contrasted
promiscuous intercourse with love for a single woman.

So far we have encountered only a general, not an individualised, sexual
instinct and, in a limited measure at least, a struggling tendency
towards individualisation. But even so it was merely a question of
instinct, and did not bear the least resemblance to love as we
understand it to-day. _Love_ did not exist in the old world. I admit
that in the legend of Orpheus we are face to face with a sentiment which
is not unlike modern love, but, as far as I am aware, this is an
isolated case in Greek history, and may be regarded as a divination of
something new, just as we find unmistakable anticipations of
Christianity in Plato's writings. Such phenomena--the occasional
occurrence of which I do not altogether deny, although I regard them as
on the whole improbable as far as the sphere of my research is
concerned--are not infrequently met with in history, but their effect
upon civilisation was nil; they were presentiments, incomprehensible in
their day, and for this very reason probably preserved as curiosities.

In spite of the fact, however, that in those far-off days spiritual love
of a man for a woman was unknown, we find Plato contrasting "a base and
degraded Eros with a divine Eros." Pausanias says in the "Symposium":

"The man who loves with his senses only, loves women and boys equally
well. He loves the body more than the soul.... His only striving is to
obtain the object of his desire, and he cares not whether it be worthy
or unworthy. The Eros he worships is the ally of that younger goddess in
whom male and female attributes are blended. But the other Eros is the
companion of Aphrodite, Urania, the divine; unbegotten by a father,
unconceived by a mother, she is the offspring of the male element, the
elder one, unstained by passion.... The sensualist who loves the body
more than the soul is base. His love passes away like the object of his
passion. But the companion of the Olympic goddess is the Eros who fills
the hearts of the lovers with the longing for virtue. The other Eros is
the confederate of the debased Aphrodite." And Aristophanes, another of
the participators in the feast, says: "The yearning does not seem to be
a desire for the pleasures of the senses, the one taking delight in his
intercourse with the other; far from it, it is obvious that each soul is
craving for something which it cannot express in words, but can only
divine and conjecture." And the mysterious Diotima revealed to Socrates
an entirely novel principle in erotic life; the principle which guides
man beyond the pleasures of the senses and--through love--leads him to
the divine. "The slave of his senses runs after women; but he who loves
with his soul and strives to win immortality through virtue and wisdom,
seeks a great and beautiful soul that he may surrender himself to it
completely." But in the opinion of the classical ages, a beautiful soul
was only to be found in the body of a man; woman belonged to the lower,
animal spheres; she was destined for the pleasure of the senses and the
propagation of the race. Plato's theory of ideas is the philosophical
victory of the male-spiritual principle over nature, matter and their
warden: woman. (Perhaps it is even the revenge of the Greek genius for
man's original enslavement.) "Love between men," continues the seer,
"forms a stronger tie, a closer friendship, than love between parents
and children; it has a mutual share in children which are immortal and
far more beautiful than the children of men." She teaches Socrates that
this noble love is at the root of all the magnificent creations of the
spirit, as carnal love is the origin of human life. "Until he becomes
aware that the beauty of all bodies is closely related, a man must love
an individual with all his heart. If a man will follow after beauty, he
is foolish not to conceive the beauty of all bodies as one and the same.
As soon as he has learned this, he will become a lover of all beautiful
forms; his fervent passion for one will diminish, he will scorn the
individual and hold it cheap."

With the Hellenic homosexuality an element foreign and even hostile to
the original and natural bi-sexual sensuality crept into the erotic life
of the human race; it found its classical representation in the Platonic
dialogues "Symposium" and "Phaedros." In conscious opposition to all
sexuality Platonic love (what is usually called Platonic love is based
on an obstinate misunderstanding) turns to the purely spiritual, that is
to say, the conceptions of truth, beauty and goodness; it is a yearning
for the supernatural, and it knows itself as the path to it. In the
mutual love of all noble souls lies the germ of all higher things; it is
the way to the gods of light which, in this connection, are conceived
philosophically as ideas, though in the true Hellenic spirit as
objective ideas, the prototypes and culminations of everything human. To
grasp the meaning of Platonic love it is essential to realise
that--unlike the spiritual woman-worship peculiar to the Middle
Ages--it is not a personal feeling of one individual for another;
platonically speaking, the love for an individual is only a first stage;
the path which leads to the love of beauty and the eternal ideas. The
characteristic of this metaphysical love which Plato was the first to
conceive, was therefore love for the universal, and not love for an
individual. The latter, as we shall find later on, is the characteristic
of the true or, more modestly speaking, specifically European conception
of love. Platonic love, finally, was the perception of perfection, the
Socratic knowledge; its alpha and omega was not, as the mystic and true
erotic would have it, its ardour and passion, the fulness of its own
being. It had an alien purpose: the knowledge of things divine, by a
later period Christianised and understood as the divine mysteries. To
Plato, the essence and climax of antique, ante-Christian culture, every
individual, even the beloved mistress, was but a preliminary, a
finger-post, pointing the way to the perception of perfect beauty. True
virtue is the outcome of profound knowledge; it transforms men into
gods. The purely spiritual woman-worship of the Middle Ages was only
another aspect of this yearning to attain to virtue and perfection
through the love of an individual. We must not lose sight of the fact
that it was already strongly emphasised and upheld in the Platonic ideal
of love.

In the dark excesses of the Mysteries the beauty of the human form
counted for nothing; voluptuousness and intoxication ruled. In the
Asiatic cult of the sexes there was no room for beauty, no time for
selection. The Greeks were the discoverers of the beauty of the human
form. Beauty kindled the flame of love in their souls, beauty was the
gauge which determined their erotic values. Their ideal was a
_kalokagathos_, a youth beautiful in body and soul.

In "Phaedros" Plato contrasts with far greater force than in the
"Symposium" him "who craves for sensual pleasure like the beasts in the
fields" with him "who strives after beauty and perfection." To the
latter "the face of the beloved is the reflection of the sublimely
beautiful." He would like to sacrifice to her, as to the immortal gods.
All beautiful bodies represent to him in an increasing measure the idea
of the beauty of form, which again is subordinate to the beauty of the
soul. It points the way to metaphysical beauty, the eternal and
imperishable idea of mankind. Socrates could scorn the beauty of the
individual because he saw in it merely an imperfect reflection of
perfect beauty. In its truest sense Platonic love is, therefore,
impersonal; it is not spiritual love for a human being, but a peculiar
characteristic of the Greek cult of beauty. We shall again meet this
principle of beauty-worship in metaphysical love, the adoration of
woman; thanks to Plato, it has for all time become the inalienable
property of the human mind. The striving to rise above all individualism
was another ideal which a later period revived. But the pivot round
which the emotions revolved was the love for a beloved individual, the
modern, European, fundamental motive, as opposed to the antique Platonic
cult of ideas. Thus Plato, too, was a citizen of the old world, at whose
threshold stood universal sexual intercourse, tolerating nothing
personal, knowing of no individuals, acknowledging only unchecked,
uncontrollable instinct, and whose decline was again characterised by
the extreme impersonality of ideas. It had traversed the path of human
existence in a huge cycle. Starting from an unconscious existence in
complete harmony with nature, it had passed through individualised man
to the loftiest spiritual conceptions in the impersonal world of ideas.

The Hellenic ideal of beauty was almost invariably realised in the male
form. The Greeks of the classical period disdained woman; she was for
them inseparably connected with base sensuality, but their contempt had
its source partly in a feeling of horror. The days when matriarchy was
the form of government were not very remote; it survived in a great
number of myths and also, subconsciously perhaps, in the soul of man. To
the Greek mind woman was the embodiment of the dark side of love, and it
was merely the logical conclusion of this conception when, at a later
period, she was regarded as the devil's tool. It is certain that the
origin of the idea must be sought in Plato's time.

In intercourse with women man dimly felt the vague elementary condition
from which he had struggled hard to emerge, and fled to the more
familiar companions of his own sex. Would not love between man and man
deliver him from the basely sensual, strengthen his spirituality and
lead him to the gods? In this connection Zeus is called in "Phaedros"
[Greek: philios], the maker of friendships. Plato, in propounding this
doctrine, drew thereby the most radical conclusion of the new,
apparently male, but at heart hermaphroditic ideal of civilisation,
conceived in the heroic epoch and elaborated and brought to perfection
by the Greek of classical times. This ideal was the victory of the
spiritual principle over promiscuous sexuality and irresponsible
propagation and, quite in the true Hellenic spirit, it was again
interpreted materially.

Because individualised love was an unknown quantity to the ancients,
they ornamented their sarcophagi with symbols of ecstatic life, with
dancing and embracing fauns and maenads. Generations passed away, but
new ones arose, embracing and begetting life--for life was eternal.
Death was vanquished in the ecstasy of the nameless millions, for the
true meaning of life lay in the preservation of the species. The death
of the individual did not have a deep and poignant meaning until the
soul had become the centre and climax of life. An individual had passed
away for ever--nothing could recall him. Death had become the final
issue, the terror, because it destroyed the greatest of all things:
self-conscious man. But love, too, had changed; it was no longer sexual
impulse, depending on the body and perishing with it, but a craving of
the soul, conscious of itself and stretching out feelers far beyond the
earth. A new pang had come into the world, but also a new
reconciliation.




THE SECOND STAGE: LOVE




CHAPTER I

THE BIRTH OF EUROPE


The memory of the figure and preaching of Christ had so powerfully
influenced the centuries that it had gradually permeated and transformed
not only the Platonic doctrine of ideas--that maturest fruit of Greek
wisdom--but also the Semitic mediaeval monotheism. Something new had
sprung into being, something which expressed a hitherto unknown feeling
for life and for humanity, vague and uncertain in the beginning, but
growing in clearness and uniformity. On the throne of the Roman emperors
sat a bishop, whose power was increasing with the development of the new
civilisation, and whom the final victory of the new transcendental
world-principle had made master of the world. The building up of this
new civilisation had absorbed the intellectual force of a thousand
years; it had monopolised thought and every form of energy. The reward
was great. For the first time in the annals of the world the
questionings of brooding intelligence were fully answered, the anguish
of the tortured soul was stilled. The purpose of the universe, the
destiny of man, were comprehended and interpreted, good and evil being
finally known. At the close of the first Christian millenary, all moral
and intellectual values were grouped round and dominated by one supreme
ideal; the loftiest value in this world and the next, side by side with
the greatest secular power, were in the hands of the Church; together
with the imperium she had succeeded to the spiritual and ethical
inheritance of the dead civilisations. Without her uncouth barbarism
reigned, and it was her task, while elaborating the system of the
universe for which she stood, to teach and convert the new nations, to
spread a uniform Christian civilisation.

On the mere face of it it must seem strange that a religion which had
grown on foreign soil, out of foreign spiritual assumptions, should have
been accepted so readily and quickly by nations to whom it must have
been alien and unintelligible. The love of war and valour of the
Teutonic tribes and Christian asceticism were diametrically opposed
ideals, and very often their relationship was one of direct hostility. I
need only remind the reader of the contempt expressed for the chaplain
by Hagen (in the "Song of the Niebelungen"). On the other hand, the
ancient Celtic and Teutonic races shared one profound characteristic
with the Christian world, the consequences of which were sufficiently
far-reaching to raise the religion of Christ to the religion of Europe.
The characteristic common to the still uncultivated European spirit and
Christianity, and meaningless alike to the Asiatic barbarians, the Jews
of the Old Testament and the Greeks, was the importance which both
attached to the individual soul. Through the Christian religion this new
intuition which saw in the soul of man the highest of values, became the
centre and pivot of life and faith--a position to which even Plato, to
whom the objective, metaphysical idea was the essential, never attained.
It had been the most personal experience of Christ, and centuries after
his death the nations rediscovered it as their highest value. It
entitled Christianity to become the natural religion of Europe, and the
soul of its new system of civilisation. It formed the most complete
contrast to all Asiatic cults, Brahminism and Buddhism, a fact which,
since Schopenhauer, one is inclined to overlook. To the Indian, the soul
of man is not an entity; his consciousness is a republic, as it were,
composed of diverse spiritual principles and metaphysical forces which
are not centralised into an "I-centre," but exist impersonally, side by
side. This may be a great conception, but it is foreign to the feeling
of the citizen of Europe. To the latter the I, the soul, the
personality, is the pivot round which life turns. The evolution of the
European world-feeling is in the direction of the independent
development of all psychical forces and their fusion into a unity of
ever-increasing intimacy. New values will be created, but the fusing
power of the soul will strive with growing intensity to co-ordinate and
unify the internal and external life; personality will recreate the
world in conformity with its own purposes, that is to say, it will found
the system of objective civilisation. The incapacity of the Indian to
produce a civilisation perfect in every direction is explained by his
one-sided, morally-speculative thought. The world is to him nothing but
a moral phenomenon, he admits no other explanation; he seeks its true
meaning and the possibility of its salvation in the realisation of the
vanity of life, not in the liberating deed, and not in the inward
change.

The kernel of matured and spiritualised Christianity, which reached its
apex in the German mystics, lies in the soul of man, eager to shed
everything which is subjective and accidental, and become spirit,
profound, divine reality. Eckhart, the great perfecter of this European
religion, deliberately and in direct contradiction to the dogma of his
time, placed man above the "highest angels," whom he considered subject
to limitations; "man," he argues, "thanks to his freedom, is able to
reach a goal to which no angel could aspire. For he is always new,
infinitely exalted above the limitations of the angels and all finite
reason." Of the relationship between the soul and God he says; "The soul
of the righteous man shall be with God, his equal and compeer, no more
and no less." The Upanishads, on the other hand, maintain that the core
of the world is not to be found in the soul of the individual but in
Brahma, the universal soul, outside whom there is no reality. "The
individual soul is but a phantasm of the universal soul, as the
reflection of the sun in the water is but a phantasm of the sun." The
sole purpose of the world is the extinction of individual consciousness,
its absorption in Brahma, the end of all suffering: "When feeling has
ceased, pain must cease, too, and the world be delivered." The Indian
lacks the central conception of love, for which he substitutes
knowledge. Primitive Christianity conceived the connection between body
and soul, the encumbering of the soul by the body, as it were, as a
temptation or a punishment; according to the Vedas, it is merely a
delusion to which the sage is not subject. Before his keen vision, the
deception falls to the ground, and by this very fact he is delivered. To
the feeling of Europe and Christianity, however, life and the universe
are genuine, deep realities, the touchstone of the soul. Love is the
soul's greatest treasure and the only true path to God; knowledge can
never take its place. "The divine stream of love flowing through the
soul," says Eckhart, "carries the soul along with it to its origin, to
the bourne of all knowledge, to God."

The very general identification of the Christian and Indian mystics--a
fact which is accounted for by their common metaphysical tendency--is
based on an error; Indian mysticism and Christian mysticism originated
in different concepts; here the centre of all being is laid in love and
in the soul of man, there it is contained in knowledge and in Brahma.
But ultimately, at the termination of the world-process, they will meet,
although coming from different directions. "While the soul worships a
God, realises a God and knows of a God," says Eckhart, "it is separated
from God. This is God's purpose, to annihilate Himself in the soul, so
that the soul, too, shall lose itself. For God has been called God by
the creatures." The words "The soul creates God from within, is
connected with the divine and becomes divine itself," are highly
significant. To the Vedantist the soul of man is an emanation from the
world-soul: "Although God differs from the individual soul, the
individual soul does not differ from God." At this point it is no longer
an easy matter to distinguish the feeling of the Christian mystic from
the feeling of the Brahmin; though their valuations of man, life and the
world differ, nay, are even opposed to each other, they finally meet in
God. We read in the Vedanta: "The force which created and maintains the
universe, the eternal principle of all being, dwells entirely and
undividedly in every one of us. Our self is identical with the supreme
deity and only apparently differentiated from it. Whosoever has mastered
this truth has become at one with all creation; whosoever has not
mastered it, is a stranger and a foe to all creatures."

I do not intend to depreciate Indian wisdom; I merely desire to point
out its inherent dissimilarity to Western thought; my task of laying
hold of the spirit of Europe in its crises and watching its growth is
bound to be advanced by this division.

The religious experience of Christ, based on the realisation of the
divine nature of the soul, and the road of the soul to God, has
established the fundamental Western principle. A world-system was built
up which emanated from the innermost depth of the individual soul and,
very consistently, related all existing things, heaven and earth, the
creation and the destruction of the world, salvation and perdition, to
the soul of man. This was achieved with the aid of a naïve metaphysic,
created by the Greek genius and externalised by the crude intellect of
barbarians; this metaphysic drew its whole content from a unique
revelation, and the essential was frequently hidden by dialectic and
speculation. One may safely say that the first millenary strove, if not
exactly to set aside the original principle of Christianity, yet to bind
it by dogma in such a way that it often became completely obscured. A
long training was necessary before the immature nations of barbarians
were fit to become citizens of the spiritual world, before they could
fully assimilate the new traditions and grasp their innermost meaning,
which by this very fact became altered and modified. This process of
education came to a temporary conclusion about the year 1100. At last
the European nations had outgrown the guardianship of the Church with
its antiquated methods; a new, a creative epoch was dawning; the
civilisation of Europe, opposed to all barbarism and orientalism, rose
like a brilliant star on the horizon of the world. Spontaneous feeling
for the race, for nature and for the divine verities had again become
possible.

I shall have to exceed the limits of my subject in this chapter, for I
propose showing the seeds from which, in the time of the Crusades, the
new soul of the European, throwing off the lethargy of the first
Christian millenary, began to grow with extraordinary vigour and
rapidity; that new soul which experienced a wider, if not deeper,
unfolding in the period of the Renascence, and to this day pervades and
fertilises our spiritual life. I might have been less digressive, but I
hope that two reasons will justify my prolixity; the first is the great
importance of the subject from the point of view of a history of
civilisation, and the second and more particular one is its close inner
relationship to my principal theme. For, in complete contrast with the
sexuality on which heretofore the relationship between husband and wife
had been based, a new feeling, that of spiritual love, had come into
existence and quickly reached its climax. Projected not only on the
other sex, but also on God and on nature, it permeated the age and
explains its great and unprecedented manifestations: the spiritual love
between man and woman (which deteriorated later on into the deification
of woman), the new religion of the German mystics, the awakening
appreciation of the beauty of nature, the sudden outburst of German
poetry--no sooner born than it reached perfection--the specifically
European Gothic architecture, so completely independent of the old art.
All these new creations had their origin in the strange craving of the
period for something novel and romantic, something hitherto unknown.
This longing begot the ideal of chivalry and a wealth of half human,
half preter-human conceptions, such as the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy
Grail. And all at once, something unprecedented, something of which the
race had as yet no experience, had come to pass: love, which had nothing
in common with sensuality, which was even deliberately hostile to it,
love which welled up in one soul and flowed into the other--presupposing
personality--love was there! If, therefore, I have gone into detail, I
hope that it has served to elucidate the principal theme of this part of
my book, namely, the spiritual part of man for woman aspiring to the
metaphysical, which is so alien to our modern feeling.

It is necessary to begin by sketching a background which shall set off
the new phenomenon. The spiritual achievement of the first millenary was
the construction of the Christian system of the universe the Church had
complete knowledge of all things in heaven and earth--symbols merely of
the eternal verities; her wisdom almost equalled divine wisdom, for the
secrets of life and death had been revealed and surrendered to her; St.
Chrysostom's words uttered in the fourth century, "The Church is God,"
had become a fact. The profoundest wisdom, the greatest power, were
hers; the loftiest ideal had been realised as it has never been realised
before or since. As the wisdom of the Church had been a direct gift of
God, so her power, too, had divine origin and reached beyond this
earthly life. The Church alone held the key to eternal bliss, her curse
meant everlasting damnation. To be excommunicated was to be bereaved of
temporal and eternal happiness. A man who had been excommunicated was
worse off than a wild beast; he was surrendered to the devils in hell,
and he knew it. There was but one road to salvation: to do penance and
humbly submit to the Church. This has been symbolised for all times by
the memorable submission of the Roman-German emperor, who stood for
three days, barefooted and fasting, in the snow in the courtyard of
Canossa, before he was received back into the kingdom of God. The
kingdom of God was synonymous with the Church; Jews and pagans were the
natural children of the devil, but the dissenter, the heretic who dared
to question a single proposition of the divine system, or was bold
enough to think on original lines--in other words in contradiction to
tradition--voluntarily turned his back on God, and with seeing eyes went
into the kingdom of the devil. He was wholly evil, and no earthly
punishment fitted his crime. The emperor Theodosius, as far back as A.D.
380, had called such heretics "insane and demented," and the burning of
their bodies at the stake which prevented their souls from falling into
the hands of the devil, was looked upon as a great and undeserved mercy.
But not only during their lifetime, but after their death, too, the hand
of the Church fell heavily on all those who had strayed beyond her pale;
their bodies were dragged from their graves and thrown into the
carrion-pit. A man whom the Church had excommunicated was buried in the
cemetery of a German convent. The Archbishop of Mayence ordered the
exhumation of the body, threatening to interdict divine service in the
convent if his command were disobeyed. But the abbess, Hildegarde of
Bingen (1098-1179), a woman of great mental power and an inspired seer,
opposed him. Having received a direct message from God, she wrote to the
bishop as follows: "Conforming to my custom, I looked up to the true
light, and God commanded me to withhold my consent to the exhumation of
the body, because He Himself took the dead man from the pale of the
Church, so that He might lead him to the beatitude of the blessed.... It
were better for me to fall into the hands of man than to disobey the
command of my Lord." The saint had interpreted the will of God, and the
archbishop, sanctioning a sudden rumour that the deceased had received
absolution at the eleventh hour, yielded. But the bishop's yielding by
no means countenanced the belief that God might, for once, tolerate the
body of an excommunicate in sacred ground, far from it--the vision of
the abbess Hildegarde had merely served to correct an error.

All those who dared to oppose the clergy by word or deed were doomed to
everlasting perdition--this was a fact which it were futile to doubt; at
the most, a man shrugged his shoulders at certain damnation for the sake
of mundane pleasures--a rich legacy in the hour of death might save him.
Not infrequently the fear of the devil was transformed into
indifference, and sometimes even into demonolatry. A single ungodly
thought might involve eternal death, and as many a man, more
particularly many a priest, realised his inability to live continuously
in the presence of God, he surrendered his soul to the anti-god, not
from a longing for the pleasures of the senses, but from despair. The
worship of the devil, far from being an invention of fanatical monks,
actually existed, and was often the last consolation of those who held
themselves forsaken by God. The hierarchy did not hesitate a moment to
make the utmost use or the power conferred upon them by the mental
attitude of the people. The government of kings and princes, in addition
to the ecclesiastical government, could only be a transient, sinful
condition; the time was bound to come when the pope would be king of the
earth, and the great lords of the world his vassals, appointed by him to
keep the wicked world in check, and deposed by him if he found them
incapable, worshippers of the devil, or disobedient to the Church. The
whole world was a hierarchy whose apex reached heaven and bore, as the
representative of its invisible summit, the pope. He stood, to quote
Innocent III., "in the middle, between God and humanity." The same great
pope has left us a document entitled _On the Contempt of the World_,
which treats of the absolute futility of all things mundane. There is no
reason to look upon the union of this unquenchable thirst for power and
complete "other-worldiness" as a contradiction. The kingdom of God,
Augustine's _Civitas Dei_, must of necessity be established that the
destiny of the world may be fulfilled. Every pope must account to God
for his share in the advancement of the only work which mattered, and
the greater the power the ruler of this world had acquired over the
souls of men, the more he trembled before God, weighed down by the
burden of his enormous responsibility. "The renunciation of the world in
the service of the world-ruling Church, the mastery of the world in the
service of renunciation, this was the problem and ideal of the middle
ages" (Harnack). But not only the pope, every priest, as a direct member
of the kingdom of God, was superior to the secular rulers. This was
taught emphatically by the great St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance,
and Gregory VII., the wildest fanatic of the kingdom of God, said, in
writing to a German bishop: "Who then who possesses even small knowledge
and reasoning power, could hesitate to place the priests above the
kings?" Even the emperor Constantine, though he was still largely under
the sway of the imperial idea, distinctly acknowledged the bishops as
his masters; according to the legend he handed to the Bishop of Rome
the insignia of his power, sceptre, crown and cloak, and humbly held the
bridle of the prelate's horse.

The theoretic backbone of this mental attitude was the doctrine of the
Fathers of the Church and the older scholasticism, pronouncing the
illimitable power of human perception; the world's profoundest depths
had been fathomed, its riddle finally solved; there was consequently no
room for philosophy, the endless meditation on the meaning of the world
and the destiny of man. Science had but one task: to bring logical proof
of the revealed religious verities. The greatest champion of this view
was Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who in his treatise, _Cur Deus
Homo_ proved that God was compelled to become man in order to complete
the work of salvation. Abélard preached a similar doctrine, but carried
away by the fervour of thought, arrived at conclusions which he was
forced to recant ignominiously; for at the end of his chain of evidence
he did not always find the foregone conclusion which should have been
there. This system of a final and infallible knowledge of the world is
the very foundation of ecclesiastical government. The priest alone has
all knowledge, for he has the doctrine of salvation. Had it occurred to
any man to defend his own opinions in contradiction to the system of the
Church, that man would speedily have come to the conclusion that the
devil had tempted him to false observations, or false deductions, and
his submission to the Church would have been the outward sign of his
victory over the evil which had blinded his spiritual vision. A man had
to choose between the worship of God and the worship of the devil, there
was no alternative. Nobody knew the limits of human knowledge;
everybody, the learned ecclesiastic as well as the unlearned, plain man,
believed others to be in possession of the key to profound secrets and
unlimited power. One thing only was needful: to possess one's self of
the philosopher's stone; therefore the belief in witchcraft and the
fear of certain men supposed to be endowed with supernatural power--the
priests--were but the obvious results of a world-system, founded on a
revealed and exact religion.

The Latin poets, whose study would probably have counteracted the
universal barbarism, were regarded as dangerous, the gods of antiquity
being identified with the demons of the Scriptures. This view was
responsible for the loss of many a valuable manuscript. The favourite
haunts of the demons were the convents, originally designed as
battlefields on which the struggles with the demons were to be fought
out, but frequently perishing in superstition and ignorance. Every monk
had visions of devils; miracles occurred continually; the torturing
problem was as to whether they were worked by God or the devil. Nature
was merely a collection of mystic symbols, divine--or perhaps
diabolical--allegories, whose meaning could be discovered by a correct
interpretation of the Bible. Everything which could possibly happen was
recorded in the Scriptures; they contained the true explanation of all
things. It was only a matter of selecting the right word and
interpreting it correctly, for every word was ambiguous and allegorical.
Every natural occurrence--an eclipse of the sun, a comet, or even a
fire--stood for something else; it was the symbol of a spiritual event
concealed behind a phenomenon. The allegorical interpretation of the
Bible was carried to the point of abstruseness because every word was
considered of necessity to have an unfathomably profound meaning. The
following amazing interpretation is by the highly-gifted German poet and
mystic, Suso: "Among the great number of Solomon's wives was a black
woman whom the king loved above all others. Now what does the Holy Ghost
mean by this? The charming black woman in whom God delights more than in
any other, is a man patiently bearing the trials which God sends him."
Abélard's interpretation of the black woman is even worse; he maintained
that though she was black outside, her bones, that is her character,
were white. A really remarkable deed of bad taste was committed by the
monk, Matfre Ermengau, the author of the _Breviari d'Amor_, at a time
when civilisation had already made considerable strides. He sent his
sister a Christmas present, consisting of a honey-cake, mead, and a
roast capon, accompanied by the following letter: "The mead is the blood
of Christ, the honey-cake and the capon are His body, which for our
salvation was baked and pierced at the Cross. The Holy Ghost baked the
cake in the Virgin's womb, in which the sugar of His divinity
amalgamated with the dough of our humanity. In the Virgin's womb the
Holy Ghost also spiced the mead and prepared it from wine; the spice is
divine virtue, the wine is human blood. In addition He caused the holy
capon to issue from the egg; the yolk of the egg is the deity, the white
is humanity, the shell is the womb of the Virgin Mary ...," etc.

The religion of Christ was lost, man had become a stranger to his own
soul--celestial warnings, signs of the Judgment Day, daemonic
temptations, surrounded him, as far as he paid heed to anything
super-sensuous on all sides. The French chronicler, Radulf Glaber (about
A.D. 1000), might have been writing a satire on antiquity when he warned
his contemporaries of the demons lurking everywhere, but more especially
dwelling in trees and fountains. Of a learned man who was studying the
classic poets, he said: "This man, confused by the magic of evil
spirits, had the impudence to propound doctrines contradictory to our
holy faith. In his opinion everything the ancient poets had maintained
was true. Peter, the bishop of the town, condemned him as a heretic. At
that time there were many men in Italy believing this false doctrine;
they perished by the sword or at the stake." We have a letter, written
at the same time by Gerbert, who later on became Pope Sylvester II., to
a friend, beseeching him to obtain for him manuscripts of the Latin
philosophers and poets. He wrote textbooks of astronomy, geometry and
medicine, and introduced the Arabic numbers and the decimal system into
Europe. In consequence he, too, was accused of magic and intercourse
with Arabian pagans. A chronicler relates that he sold his soul to the
devil and became pope through the devil's agency; and that, when he was
on the point of death, he ordered his body to be cut to pieces so that
the devil should not carry it away.

To-day we find it difficult to realise such a state of mind. Every man
of our period who takes the smallest interest in things spiritual--be he
the most orthodox ecclesiastic--at least knows that there are capable
people in the world whose opinions differ from his, who seek fresh
knowledge; he knows it, even though he may pretend that they are people
who have gone astray and have been abandoned by God. No one can be
entirely blind to the new values created by human intellect. But the men
of the Middle Ages were swayed by a monstrous dualism, and despite their
belief in the illimitable power of human cognition, they unquestioningly
accepted the sacred tradition and rejected the naïve evidence of the
senses and intellect whenever it seemed to contradict the dogma. Thus
mediaeval science did not represent what it represented in antiquity,
and what it represents now, the study of the true relationship of
things, but rather the application of truths revealed once and for all.
There was nothing more to be discovered, and therefore scientists took a
delight in logical and dialectical speculations which to a man of our
day seem senseless and childish. Far into the Renascence, natural
history was a medley of ancient traditions, oriental fables and
superficial observations. The strangest qualities were attributed to
animals with which we come almost daily into contact. The following
quotations are culled from a Provençal book on zoology: "The cricket is
so pleased with its song that it forgets to feed and dies singing."
"When a snake catches sight of a nude man, it is so filled with fear
that it does not dare to look at him; but if the man is dressed, the
snake looks upon him as a weakling and springs upon him." "The adder
guards the balsam; if a man desires to steal the balsam, he must first
send the adder to sleep by playing on a musical instrument. But if the
adder discovers that it is being duped, it closes one of its ears with
its tail and rubs the other one against the ground until it is filled
with earth; then it cannot hear the music and remains awake." "Of all
animals there is none so dangerous as the unicorn; it attacks everybody
with the horn which grows on the top of its head. But it takes such
delight in virgins that the hunters place a maiden on its trail. As soon
as the unicorn sees the maiden, it lays its head into her lap and falls
asleep, when it may easily be caught." Of the magnet we learn among
other things that it restores peace between husband and wife, softens
the heart of all men and cures dropsy. "If a magnet is made into a
powder and burnt on charcoal in the four corners of the house, the
inhabitants imagine that they cannot keep on their legs and run away,
sorely affrighted; thieves frequently profit by this fact. If a magnet
is placed under the pillow of a sleeping woman, she is compelled, if she
is virtuous, to embrace her husband in her sleep; if she has betrayed
him, she will fall out of her bed with fear."

All this information was the common property of the period; Richard of
Berbezilh, for instance, an "aesthetic" troubadour, tells us that--like
a still-born lion's cub which was only brought to life by the roaring of
its dam--he was awakened to life by his mistress. (He does not say
whether it was by her roaring.) Conrad of Würzburg compares the Holy
Virgin to a lioness who brings her dead cubs, _i.e._, mankind, to life
with loud roaring. Bartolomé Zorgi, another troubadour of the same
period, likens his lady to a snake, for--he explains--"she flees from
the nude poet and her courage only returns with his clothes." During the
whole mediaeval period the unicorn was a well-known symbol of virginity,
more especially of the virginity of Mary. The _Golden Smithy_ of the
German minnesinger, afterwards monk Conrad of Würzburg, contains a
rather abstruse poem which begins:

     The hunt began;
     The heavenly unicorn
     Was chased into the thicket
     Of this alien world,
     And sought, imperial maid,
     Within thine arms a sanctuary.... etc.

Natural history was in a parlous state, and geographical knowledge was
equally spurious. The Church was averse to natural research, for the
only problem in the world was the salvation of man from everlasting
damnation. Not only Tertullian, but several Fathers of the Church,
regarded physical research as superfluous and absurd, and even as
godless. "What happiness shall be mine if I know where the Nile has its
source, or what the physicists fable of heaven?" asked Lactantius. And,
"Should we not be regarded as insane if we pretended to have knowledge
of matters of which we can know nothing? How much more, then, are they
to be regarded as raving madmen who imagine that they know the secrets
of nature, which will never be revealed to human inquisitiveness?" Here
one is reminded of a remark made in "Phædros" by _the wisest of all
Greeks_, who refused to leave town because "what could Socrates learn
from trees and grass?" And Julius Cæsar wrote an account of his wars to
while away the time when he was crossing the Alps.

Very likely the system of the Church would have been less rigid had it
not largely been occupied in dealing with ignorant barbarians. In the
case of Celts and Teutons, a complete and unassailable form of dogmatics
with its corollary of hieratical intolerance was the only possible
system. The traditions of these peoples were far too foreign to
Christianity to allow Christian germs to flourish in their soil. And the
new nations, accepting what Rome offered to them, were completely
unproductive in their adolescence. The achievement of this fatal first
millenary might be formulated as follows: "The civilised world of
Western Europe was united under the government of the Church of Rome; on
all nations it had been impressed in the same combination of words and
similes that they were living in a sinful world; they knew when this
world had been created and when its Saviour had appeared; they knew that
its end would come together with the bodily resurrection of the dead and
the terrible day of the Last Judgment; they knew that demons were
lurking everywhere, seeking to destroy man's soul, and that the Church
alone could save him. All these facts were as unalterable as the return
of the seasons."

The fundamental sources of antiquity had been sensuality and asceticism,
the elements of the Middle Ages abstract thought and historical faith;
now emotion was to become the principal factor. It welled up in the soul
and soon dominated all life. The fountain which had been dried up since
the dawn of the Christian era, began to flow again in a small country in
the south of France. The civilising centre had again shifted westwards,
as in the past it had shifted from Asia to Greece, and from Greece to
Rome. In the course of the first thousand years Greece and Asia Minor
had separated themselves from Europe, and founded a distinct culture,
the Byzantine, which exerted no influence on the development of Europe.
But not even Italy, the scene of the older civilisation, was destined to
give birth to the new; maybe the memory of the antique, ante-Christian,
period was too powerful here. Its cradle stood on virgin ground, in
Provence, a country wrested from Celts and Teutons by the Roman eagles,
ploughed by the Roman spirit, preserving in some of its coast towns,
notably in Marsilia, the rich remains of Greek settlements, something of
Moorish influence in race and language, and fusing all these
heterogeneous elements into a splendid whole. But why this important
spiritual centre should have been formed just here it is difficult to
say.

For the first time the system of ecclesiastical values was confronted by
something novel, which was not--like the old Teutonic ideal of the
perfect warrior--tainted by barbarism, but may be described as the
system of mundane court values. This new ideal was not founded on an
authority which had to be accepted in good faith; it had its direct
origin in the passionate yearning of the human soul. Man had
re-discovered himself and become conscious of his personal creative
force. A very great thing had been accomplished; the seed which, slowly
gathering strength, had lain in the soil for a thousand years, had at
last burst its husk, and was rapidly growing into the magnificent tree
of the European civilisation. In silent opposition to the system of the
accepted ecclesiastical values, the new ideal of _pretz e valor e
beutatz_ (worth and value and beauty), of _cavalaria_ and _cortezia_
(chivalry and courtesy), was upheld in Provence. Four worldly virtues,
wisdom, courtly manners, honesty and self-restraint, were contrasted
with the ecclesiastical cardinal virtues. The courts of the princes
became centres of new life and art. The new spiritual-aesthetic concept
of feasting and enjoyment transformed the former orgies of eating and
drinking. Woman, who had heretofore been excluded from male society, was
all at once transferred to the very centre of being; for her sake men
controlled their brutal tempers and exerted themselves to please by
good manners, taste and art. She, whom the Church had done everything to
depreciate, who had been denied a soul at the Council of Macon (in the
sixth century), had become the very vessel of the soul; man looked up to
her and bent his knee before the newly-created goddess.

The cultivation of the new courtly manner coincided with the nascent art
of the troubadours. There was no gradual growth and development in the
latter; at the very outset it had reached perfection. The first
troubadour whose name has come down to us was Guillem of Poitiers, Duke
of Aquitania (about 1100); great lords and barons gloried in the
exercise of this new art. Every court boasted its poets, hospitably
received and loaded with presents; the great ones of the earth were
beginning to exercise that patronage of art and letters which in the
Renascence reached such extravagant proportions. Every distinguished
poet employed salaried musicians, the joglars (jongleurs), who wandered
from court to court, singing their masters' new songs. Others again, the
comtaires, related romances of love and adventure, gathering round them
a rapt throng of lords and ladies. Courtly manners and lofty principles
quickly became the recognised ideal; the man who was satisfied with the
pleasures of the senses was held in contempt; the greatest reproach was
"vilania"; in the "Yvain" of the French epic poet Chrestien de Troyes,
this universal feeling is thus expressed:

     A courtier counts though he be dead,
     More than a rustic stout and red.

Dante and his circle, as well as the best of the troubadours,
substituted for the "cortois" of the superficial Chrestien the "cor
gentil," the noble heart, which they accounted more precious than rank
and wealth and power. "Wherever there is virtue there is nobility," says
Dante, "but where there is nobility there need not necessarily be
virtue." A time had come when personal distinction was in every man's
grasp, no matter whether he was learned or unlearned, a nobleman or a
commoner. Certainly the commoner was never on an equality with the
aristocrat, partly because he was dependent on the largess of the great.
Even Dante was compelled to seek princely patronage, and not until the
Renascence do we hear of writers whose sarcastic tongues were so dreaded
that they became independent of charity.

In opposition to the monkish ideal of a contemplative life which had
hitherto obtained, a new ideal, the ideal of the courtier's life, was
upheld; ecclesiastical saintliness was contrasted with knightly honour.
Beauty, which at the dawn of the Christian era had fallen into ill
repute and had become associated with unholy, and even diabolical,
practices, had again come into its kingdom. Above everything it was the
beauty of woman which was re-discovered--or rather, in its new,
spiritual sense, newly discovered--and claimed the enthusiasm and love
of the best men of the period. After a thousand years of gloom and
brutality, joy and culture shed their radiance on a renewed world. The
ideal of chivalry bore very little resemblance to the old Teutonic ideal
of the hero; the older ideal had been based entirely on the appreciation
of physical strength; but chivalry was the disseminator of culture,
leaving ecclesiastical culture, which hitherto had been synonymous with
civilisation, a very long way behind. "Mezura," "masze" (the [Greek:
mphstoês] of the Platonic Greeks) was the new criterion, as compared
with the barbarian's want of restraint.

I do not propose to give a description of the life at the courts of
Provence. The news of it travelled north, and everywhere roused a desire
to imitate it. The need of a renewed life was powerfully stirring all
hearts. Men yearned for beauty and spontaneity, for passionate life,
unprecedented and romantic. This was especially the case in the north,
in France and in Germany, and above all in Wales, the country of the
imaginative and highly-gifted Celts. Here life was harder, poorer, more
barbaric; the cultured mind suffered more from its brutal surroundings
than it did in the favoured south. It was here that the great legends of
the Middle Ages, so clearly expressive of the yearning of the period,
were first collected. The early Middle Ages had produced epic poems,
treating scriptural subjects (such as the Harmony of the Gospels of the
monk Otfrit, written in the ninth century), and celebrating the exploits
of popular heroes, as, for instance, the German Song of Hildebrand, and
the French "Chansons de Geste," which contain episodes from the lives of
Charlemagne and his nephew Roland. The true epic, arising from the rich
and poetical Celtic tradition, came into existence in the eleventh
century in the North of France and immediately burst into extraordinary
luxuriance. The legends of the heroes of the dreamy Celtic race--King
Arthur and his knights, Merlin the magician, the knights of the Holy
Grail--travelling across France, became the common property of the
civilised European nations, and filled all hearts with longing and
fantastic dreams. Chrestien de Troyes, in his romances, extolled
knightly exploits and the service of woman, thus producing by the
combination of the older and the newer ideals the novel of adventure
which has fascinated the world for centuries. It is a mistake to believe
that Don Quixote has struck at the root of it; to this day the masses
wax enthusiastic in reading of the doughty deeds of knights, the beauty
of ladies and their unswerving, undying love.

In addition to the great and heroic subjects, there were lesser, more
intimate, and frequently sentimental, romances, especially enjoyed and
widely circulated by the ladies. The baron, riding forth, left his young
wife at home, shut up in her bower and surrounded by spies; sometimes
even physically branded as his property. A prisoner behind bars, her
imagination went out--not to the unloved husband who had married her for
the sake of her broad acres, and could send her back to her parents as
soon as he found a wealthier bride (he had but to maintain that she was
related to him in the fifth degree and the Church was ready to annul the
marriage), not to him, her lord and master, but to the unknown knight,
the passionate lover, who would gladly give his life to win her. A
jongleur arrived with stories of the courts where love was the only
ruler; where the knights willingly suffered grief and want, if by so
doing they could serve their lady; where the lover, in the shape of a
beautiful blue bird, nightly slipped through the barred windows into the
arms of his mistress. But the jealous husband had drawn barbed wire
across the window, and the lover, flying away at dawn, bled to death
before the eyes of his grief-stricken lady. The jongleur would tell of
the knight who had fallen passionately in love with a beautiful damsel
of whom he had but caught a passing glimpse; month after month he worked
at digging an underground passage; every night brought him a little
nearer to her bower--she could distinctly hear the dull sounds of his
burrowing--until at last he rose through the ground and took her into
his arms. These and similar tales, doubtless all of them of Celtic
origin--preserved for us in the charming "Lais" of Marie de
France--brought tears to the eyes of many a lonely wife and gave shape
to her vague longing. There was no reason why a man, and a lover to
boot, should not transform himself nightly into a blue bird. Those
simple stories in verse fulfilled every desire of the heart; imagination
supplied in the north what the south offered in abundant reality. But
Marie de France, the first woman novelist of Europe (about the end of
the twelfth century), deserves to be remembered for another reason; she
was the first poet voicing woman's longing for love and
romance--woman's adventure. The charming _Lai du Chevrefoile_ ("The
Story of the Honeysuckle") relates an episode from the loves of Tristan
and Isolde, the famous lovers, legendary even at that time. Tristan and
Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Fleur and Blanchefleur--these were the
admired and mythical lovers of whom the poets sang and dreamed. All the
world knew their adventures; all the world repeated them again and
again, reverently preserving the identical words and yet unconsciously
remoulding them. At the recital of their loves, hand clasped hand; "on
that day we read no more," confessed Dante's ill-fated lovers.

The longing, so characteristic of the North of Europe, to see the world
and meet with adventures, was in Provence and Italy less pronounced.
These favoured climes possessed so many of the things dreamed of and
desired by other countries. Events, strange as fiction, actually
occurred. Count Raimond of Roussillon, for instance, imprisoned his wife
in a tower because the troubadour, Guillem of Cabestann, was in love
with and beloved by her. He waylaid the lover, killed him, cut his heart
out of his breast and sent it, roasted, to his countess. When she had
partaken of it, he showed her Guillem's head and asked her how she had
enjoyed the dish. "So much that no other food shall ever pass my lips,"
she replied, casting herself out of the window. When the story spread
abroad, the great nobles rose up in arms against Raimond, and even the
King of Aragon made war on him. He was caught and imprisoned for life,
and his estates were confiscated. Guillem and the countess were buried
in the church, and for a long time after men and women travelled long
distances to kneel at their grave. The charming poems of Melusine and
the beautiful Magelone, which to this day delight the reader, were
composed during the same period.

Before the eleventh century poetry in the true sense of the word did not
exist. There were only Latin Church hymns and legends, perverted
reminiscences of antiquity, and, in the vulgar tongue, legends of the
saints and simple dancing-songs for the amusement of the lower classes.
Thanks to the relentless war which the clergy waged against them, a few
only have been preserved. There can be no doubt that Provence was the
birthplace of European poetry. The "sweet language" of Provence was the
first to reach perfection and perfect maturity. It drove the language of
the German conquerors eastwards and prepared the ground for the French
tongue.

The beginning of the twelfth century saw the birth of the poetry of the
troubadours, which possessed from the first in great perfection
everything that distinguishes modern lyric poetry from the antique.
Instead of the syllable-measuring quantity, we now have the emphasising
accent; the rhyme, one of the most important lyrical contrivances--and
in its near approach to music the most striking characteristic of modern
lyrical poetry as compared with the antique--reaches perfection together
with the complete, evenly-recurring verse which is still to-day peculiar
to lyrical art. The poems of many of the troubadours pulsate with
passionate life, and bear no trace of the traditional or the
conventional. The martial songs of Bertrand de Born stride along with a
rhythm reminiscent of the clanking of iron. I quote the first verse of
one of these:

     Le coms m'a mandat e mogut
     Per N'Arramon Luc d'Esparro,
     Qu'eu fassa per lui tal chanso,
     On sian trenchat mil escut,
     Elm e ausberc e alcoto
     E perponh faussat e romput.

     The count he sent to me one day
     Sir Arramon Luc d'Esparro;
     A song I was to make him--so
     That thousand shields with ring and stay
     And mail and armour of the foe
     To fragments shivered in dismay.

The poetry of the Provençal troubadours had already passed its prime
when, in the other European countries, lyric art was still in its
infancy. The crusade against the Albigenses (1209), undertaken by
Gregory VII. with the object of killing the new spirit and the new
secular civilisation, drove many troubadours to Italy, among others the
famous Sordello, who is mentioned in Dante's _Divine Comedy_. Others
went to Sicily, to the court of the art-loving Emperor, Frederick II.,
where a distinct, but not very original, poetic art arose. In Italy the
perfection of mediaeval poetry was reached in the "sweet, new style"
immortalised by Dante. But not only the great Italians, the trouveres
from the North of France also, and--to some extent--the German
minnesingers, were influenced by the art, and above all, the ideals
which had originated in Provence. The poetry of the earliest Rhenish and
Austrian minnesingers closely follows German folklore, and the songs of
Dietmar of Aist and others are still quite innocent of any trace of
neo-Latin characteristics. But very soon the technical perfection of the
Provençal poetry and the Provençal ideal of courtesy and love, famous
all over Europe, strongly influenced the German mind.

The new poetry and the ideal of chivalry and the service of woman were
the first independent developments able to hold their own by the side of
ecclesiastical culture. The rigid Latin was superseded; the soul of man
sang in its own language of the return of spring, the beauty of woman,
knighthood and adventure. Poetry became the most important source of
secular education, and as each nation sang in its own tongue, national
characteristics shone out through the individuality of the singer.
Provençals, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians realised that they belonged
to different races. This was particularly the case during the Crusades
when, under the auspices of the Church, the nations of Europe had
apparently undertaken a common task.

In Provence, in France and Germany, every poem was set to music, and
thus, simultaneously with the lyrical art, secular music was evolved.
J.B. Beck, the greatest authority on the music of the troubadours,--the
music of the minnesingers has been studied very little,--says, "The
poetry of the troubadours and trouveres represents in its totality a
collection of songs which in their frequently amazing naïveté and
melodiousness, their spontaneity and sound music, intimate congruity of
melody and text and extraordinary originality, have been unparalleled to
this day." All these songs are distinguished by graceful simplicity; but
the ear of the non-musician can hardly perceive the originality on which
Beck lays such stress. In any case, the music is inferior to the
frequently perfect text. This same period saw the inception of our
present system of musical notation.

The new poetry created a desire for "literature," thus giving impetus to
the already existent art of illuminated manuscripts. Every prince kept a
salaried army of copyists and illuminators, producing the manuscripts
to-day preserved and studied in our museums. Studios where this work was
carried on existed at various art centres, especially--as far as we are
able to tell to-day--at the papal courts at Avignon--that meeting-ground
of French and Italian artists--in Paris and at Rheims. These workshops
were the birthplace of miniature painting, which reached perfection in
the famous Burgundian "Livres d'Heures."

To-day the science of aesthetics is attempting to trace the influence
which emanated from the French and even from the earlier English
workshops, and spread over the whole continent. It is very probable that
the French art of miniature painting of the first half of the thirteenth
century was mother of the later North-European art of painting. It was
in Northern Europe that, independently of Hellenic and Byzantine
influence, a new art originated, of which Max Dvorak says: "It would
hardly be possible to find an external cause for the quick and complete
disappearance of the elements of the Neo-Latin art. The past was simply
done with, and an absolutely new period was beginning. Thus the new art
was almost without any tradition." Dvorak calls this complete change the
most important in the history of painting since antiquity. George, Count
Vitzthum, has proved that the famous Cologne school of painting modelled
itself on Northern-French, Belgian, and a quite independent English
school of illuminators. It is even suggested that the English style of
miniature painting influenced Europe as far as the Upper Rhine. It is
also very significant that the Dutch art of the brothers van Eyck, whose
sudden appearance seemed so inexplicable, is now proved to have had its
source in the North of France. On the other hand, we have drawings of
three ecstatic nuns showing decided originality; Hildegarde of Bingen,
already mentioned on a previous occasion, has herself ornamented her
book, _Scivias_, with miniatures which, according to Haseloff, in spite
of their primitive style, reveal a bizarre plastic talent, and are
therefore closely related to her intuitions. Alfred Peltzer speaks of
"fantastic figures surrounded by flames." The two other nuns were
Elizabeth of Schönau, and Herrad of Landsberg; these two were entirely
under the influence of the dawning mysticism.

I will here quote a few more passages from Dvorak, who, in dealing with
the individual arts, does not lose sight of the whole. "Simultaneously
with a new literature," he says, "we have a new art of illustration, new
miniatures, no longer drawing inspiration from antiquity.... We meet the
new style in its full perfection wherever it is a matter of a new
technique (in the art of staining glass, for instance, or of
illustrating profane literature)...." He speaks of a new decoration of
manuscripts invented in Paris in the first half of the thirteenth
century. Thus the close and causal connection between the new poetry
and the illumination of books is clearly apparent, and it may be said
without exaggeration that the Provençal lyric poetry and the
North-French and Celtic cycles of romance led up to the new European
style of painting which did not come to perfection until two centuries
later. (Nothing positive can be said about the influence of France on
Italian art; the monumental character and the art of Cimabue, Giotto and
the Sienese does not, however, suggest that they were much influenced by
the art of miniature painting, but rather hints that they drew
inspiration from antique frescoes.)

I must add a few words on the subject of those miniatures which are not
easily accessible to the layman, but reproductions of which are
frequently met with in books on the history of art. In addition to
religious subjects, the whole courtly company which lives and breathes
in the legends of the Round Table, kings and knights, poets, minstrels,
and fair damsels, hawking, jousting, banqueting and playing chess,
everything which stirred the poet's imagination, is depicted. The spirit
of the romances which in modern times enchanted the English
Pre-Raphaelites, six centuries ago provided food and stimulus to the
industrious illuminators whose names have long been forgotten.

If the art of miniature painting never rose--excepting in its wider
consequences--to universal significance, mediaeval architecture stands
before our eyes magnificent as on the first day. Until the middle of the
twelfth century the monumental structures of Europe were directly
influenced by the later Hellenic civilisation. The Byzantine basilica
was slowly transformed into the Neo-Latin house, and thus, in this
important domain also, Europe drew her inspirations from antiquity. But
only the ground-plan of the Gothic cathedral, that is to say, the idea
of a nave with side-aisles, was traditional and borrowed from Neo-Latin
models. From this invisible ground-plan rose something absolutely
original and autochthonic. This new, specifically Central-European style
of architecture was developed on soil where there were no antique
buildings to stem the new life with their overwhelming domination, and
to bar the way of artistic inspiration with their ominous "I am
perfection!" In every branch of art antiquity had proved itself a foe,
until at last the Renascence was sufficiently mature to assimilate and
overcome the antique inheritance so completely that it became an
excellent fertiliser for the new art. The essence of the Gothic style is
the dissolution of all that is heavy and material--the victory of spirit
over matter. Walls were broken up into pillars and soaring arcades;
monotonous facework was tolerated less and less, and every available
inch was moulded into a living semblance. The result may be studied in
the incomparable façades of many of the cathedrals in the North of
France; and in tower-pieces almost vibrating with life and passion such
as that of St. Stephen's in Vienna. The conflict between matter and pure
form is settled--for the first and only time--in Gothic architecture.
The Greek temple with its correct proportions possessed no more than
perfection of form without spiritual admixture; it was perfect as marble
statues, which are an end in themselves, and do not point the way to
spiritual truths. Gothic architecture is probably unique in its blending
of æsthetic perfection of form and infinite spiritual wealth; in the
fusion of these two elements in a higher intuition. It is the balance of
the two characteristics of genius, inexhaustible wealth and the striving
for harmonious expression. It marked the first powerful working of the
Teutonic spirit on the world; its metaphysical yearning together with a
genuine love of nature, found in this art its own peculiar traditionless
expression, just as it found expression in the newly-evolved mysticism
which no longer re-echoed Aristotle and his commentators, but drew
inspiration from its own intuition. For this reason Gothic architecture
never became acclimatised in Italy. The soaring tower, more especially,
never appealed to the Italian architect.

Ornamentation and capitals, previously a combination of geometrical
figures, which may have been architecturally great and imposing, but was
always more or less formal and rigid, disappeared; the new masters,
whose names have been forgotten, looked round them and drew inspiration
from nature. The forest trees of Central Europe became pillars; grouped
together, apparently haphazard, they reflected a mystical nature pulsing
with mysterious life. Spreading and ramifying, growing together in an
impenetrable network of foliage, they bore buds, leaves and fruits.
Every pinnacle became a sprig, even the pendant icicles reappeared in
the gable-boards. But the assimilation of natural objects did not cease
there; tiny animals, light as a feather, run over the tendrils, lizards,
birds, even the gnomes of German mythology, find their way into the
Gothic cathedral. Not the traditional Greek acanthus leaf, but the
foliage of the North-European oak grows under the hands of the sculptor.
Even the cross is twisted into a flower; the sacro-sanct symbol of the
Christian religion is newly conceived, newly interpreted and moulded so
that it may have a place. The Gothic cathedral with its soaring arches
free from all heaviness is the perfect expression of that cosmic feeling
that inspired Eckhart and reached its artistic perfection in Dante.

But the soul of the mystic in stone contains the same elements as the
soul of Eckhart, who was also a schoolman. The confused and complex
scholastic world of ideas which corresponded so well with the mediaeval
temper and, together with the new art, had emanated from Paris, is
closely akin to Gothic architecture. For the Gothic style and
scholastic thought share the characteristics of the infinitely
constructive and infinitely cleft, the infinitely subtle and
ornamental--perhaps the last trace of the spirit of the north as
compared with the simplicity of the south.

As if from fertile soil, a world of sculptured men and beasts sprang
from the façades of the new cathedrals. The figures on the cathedrals of
Naumburg, Strassburg, Rheims, Amiens and Chartres are far superior to
the artistic achievements of the dawning renascence in Italy. They are
real men, full of life and passion, no longer symbols of the
transcendental glory of the world beyond the grave. "All rigidity had
melted, everything which had been stiff and hard had become supple; the
emotion of the soul flows through every curve and line; the set faces of
the statues are illuminated by a smile which seems to come from within,
the afterglow of inward bliss" (Worringer).

A longing went through the world, stimulating faith in miracles and a
desire for adventure, a longing which no soul could resist. Nothing
certain was known of countries fifty miles distant; the traveller must
be prepared for the most amazing events. No one knew what fate awaited
him behind yonder blue mountains. The existence of natural laws was
undreamt of; there was no improbability in dragons or lions possessing
power of speech. A period incapable of distinguishing between the
natural and supernatural will always indulge in those fancies which are
best suited to its temper. Be the native country never so poor, the long
darkness and cold of the winter never so hard to bear, far away in the
East, or in Camelot, the kingdom of King Arthur, life was full of beauty
and sunshine. The legends of King Arthur powerfully affected the
imagination; they were read, secretly and surreptitiously, in all
convents; on a sultry summer afternoon, during the learned discussion of
their preceptor, one after another of the pupils would fall asleep; the
preceptor, suddenly interrupting himself, would continue after a short
pause: "And now I will tell you of King Arthur," and all eyes would
sparkle as the pupils listened with rapt attention. Francis of Assisi
called one of his disciples "a knight of his Round Table," and three
hundred years later Don Quixote lost his reason over the study of those
legends; some of the finest works of art of the present time, Wagner's
"Lohengrin," "Tristan and Isolde," and "Parsifal," take their subject
from the inexhaustible treasure of the Celtic epic cycle. The longing
for experience and adventure had laid hold of the imagination to an
extraordinary degree. The recital of wondrous adventures no longer
satisfied the listener; he yearned to participate in them. The young
knight, trained in athletics and courtesy, and possessing a little
knowledge of biblical history, left his father's castle to face the
unknown world. There was a sanctuary, mysterious, almost supernal,
carefully guarded in the dense forest of an inaccessible mountain. A
knight whose heart was pure, and who had dedicated himself to the
lifelong service of the divine, could find it; but he would have to
wander for many years, through forests and glens and strange countries,
alone and solitary, before his eyes would behold the most sacred relic
in the world, the Holy Grail.

The time was ripe for a great event, a universal and overwhelming
enterprise which could absorb the passionate longing. Maybe that the
wisdom of the great popes--half unconsciously, certainly, and under the
pressure of the age, but yet led by an unerring instinct--guided this
stream into the bed of the Church; the vague craving found a definite
object: the Crusades were organised. The Holy Sepulchre, the most sacred
spot on earth, was in the hands of the heathens; it was despised and
defiled--what greater thing could a man do than hasten to its rescue
and wrest it from the grasp of pagans, giants and sorcerers? In the
fantastic imagination of the men of that period the Lord's sepulchre was
nothing but the earthly realisation of their yearning for the Holy
Grail.

As far back as A.D. 1000 Gerbert had sent messengers to all nations,
exhorting them to hoist their banners and march with him to the Holy
Land. It had been prophesied that he should be the first to read Mass in
Jerusalem; a few ships were actually equipped at Pisa--the first attempt
at a Crusade. But at that time Europe was not yet quite prepared for the
extraordinary, almost incomprehensible, enterprise--the conquest of a
country which hardly anybody had ever seen and in which nobody had any
practical interest. Before such an enterprise could be carried out all
hearts must be filled by that uncontrollable and yet vague longing, so
characteristic of the great period of fantasy. The suggestion that the
wealth of the East, exciting the greed of the western nations, led to
the Crusades, is an absolutely indefensible idea. Doubtless, rumours of
the fabulous treasure of the Orient had stirred the imagination of
Europe, appealing far less, however, to the cupidity of the individual
than to his desire for something strange, new and incredible. It was
impossible to foresee the result of the first Crusade; the crusader went
to a strange land in order to fight--the return was in God's hand. There
have been at all times men coveting wealth, but to make such men the
instigators and organisers of the Crusades is a deliberate attempt to
represent a characteristic and unique event in the history of the world
in the light of a commonplace and every-day occurrence. In the first
enchanted wood a man might chance upon a beautiful princess sitting
beside a fountain, nude and weeping; but it was equally possible that a
giant would rush upon the Christian knight, break his shield and exact
heavy penalties. It was possible to win the kingdom of a sultan or
emir--it could be achieved by bravery and in a duel--and become a great
king, for a king in those days was no more than a large landed
proprietor. Such dreams were actually fulfilled in the most
extraordinary way. Gottfried of Bouillon, a poor Alsatian knight, might
have become King of Jerusalem, had he not refused to wear a crown of
gold in a land where his Saviour had worn a crown of thorns, and
contented himself with the title of "Protector of the Holy Land."

The embattled citadel of Jerusalem, like the Holy Grail, was pictured as
being situated outside the world. _There_ the longing which had become
so vast that it had outgrown the earth, would be stilled. A direct way
must lead from Jerusalem, the centre of the earth--it still takes this
position in Dante's _Divine Comedy_--to Paradise. Was it not the spot
where the Cross of the Saviour had been raised? Had not once before
heaven opened above the city to receive His risen body? Was it not the
scene of countless miracles in the past? Why should it be different now?
Men knew practically nothing of Palestine; they had in their minds a
fantastic picture tallying, in every respect, with Biblical accounts;
doubtless, the footprints of the Redeemer could easily be traced
everywhere; the possession of the country promised the fulfilment of
transcendental dreams.

The impulse and the strength necessary for the organisation of the
Crusades were spiritual phenomena inherently foreign and even hostile to
the Church; but thanks to the mental superiority of the popes of that
period, and the overpowering conception of a divine kingdom, they became
the instruments of the greatest triumphs vouchsafed to the Church of
Rome. The hosts, driven across the sea by inner restlessness and
ill-defined longing, in reality fought for the aggrandisement of the
Church. The great Hildebrand resolved to lead all Christendom to
Jerusalem, to found on the site of the Holy Sepulchre the divine
kingdom preached by St. Augustine, and invest--a risen Christ--the
emperor and all the kings of the earth with their kingdoms.

The crusader and the knight in quest of the Holy Grail present together
a paradoxical combination of the Christian-ecclesiastical and the
mundane-chivalric spirit, which is quite in harmony with the spirit of
the age. These two worlds, inward strangers, formed--in the Order of the
Knight-Templars, for instance--a union which, while possessing all the
external symbols of chivalry, attributed to it heterogeneous,
ecclesiastical motives; the glory of battle and victory, the caprice of
a beautiful damsel, were no longer to become the mainsprings of doughty
exploits; henceforth the knight fought solely for the glory of God and
the victory of Christianity. In addition to King Arthur's knights, the
classical Middle Ages worshipped the ideal of these priestly warriors
who waded through streams of blood to kneel humbly at the grave of the
Saviour, of those seekers of the Holy Grail who dedicated themselves to
a metaphysical task. King Arthur's Round Table served the actual orders
of knighthood as a model. Not only the Franciscans of Italy, but also
slow, German mystics, such as Suso and the profound Johannes Tauler,
delighted in borrowing their similes and metaphors from knighthood.
Tauler speaks of the "scarlet knightly robes" which Christ received for
His "knightly devotion": "And by His chivalric exploits he won those
knightly weapons which he wears before the Father and the angelic
knighthood. Therefore Christ exults when His knights elect also to put
on such knightly garments ...," etc.

Not infrequently the Saracens behaved far more generously than the
Christian armies. A German chronicler, Albert von Stade, tells us that
A.D. 1221 "the Sultan of Egypt of his own free will restored the Lord's
Cross, permitted the Christians to leave Egypt with all their
belongings, and commanded all prisoners to be set free, so that at that
time 30,000 captives were released. He also commanded his subjects to
sell food to the rich and give alms to the poor and the sick."
Occasionally the pope entered into an alliance with the enemies of
Christendom against the emperor, if the latter proved troublesome. A.D.
1246 the Sultan of Egypt (Malek as Saleh Ejul) taught Innocent IV., the
speaker of all Christendom, the judge of the Christian peoples, the
following lesson: "It is not befitting to us," he wrote to him, "that we
should make a treaty with the Christians without the counsel and consent
of the emperor. And we have written to our ambassador at the court of
the emperor, informing him of what has been proposed to us by the Pope's
nuncio, including your message and suggestions."

The most pathetic symptom of the restlessness of the age was the
Children's Crusade in 1212, which, even at its actual occurrence, caused
helpless amazement. The reports of two German chroniclers are
sufficiently interesting to be quoted verbally: "In the same year
happened a very strange thing, a thing which was all the more strange
because it was unheard of since the creation of the world. At Easter and
Whitsuntide many thousands of boys from Franconia and Teutonia, from six
years upwards, took the Cross without any external inducement or
preaching, and against the wish of their parents and relations, who
sought to restrain them. Some left the plough which they had been
guiding, others abandoned their flocks, or any other task which they had
been set to do, banded together, and with hoisted banner began to march
to Jerusalem, in batches of twenty, fifty and a hundred. Many people
enquired of them at whose counsel and admonishment they were undertaking
this journey, (for it was not many years ago that many kings, a great
number of princes and countless people had travelled to the Holy Land,
strongly armed, and had returned home without having accomplished their
desire,) telling them that in their tender years they had not yet
sufficient strength to achieve anything, and that therefore this thing
was foolish and undertaken without due consideration; the children
answered briefly that they were obeying God's will, and would willingly
and gladly suffer all the trials He would send them. And they went their
way, some turning back at Mayence, others at Piacenza, and others at
Rome; a small number arrived at Marseilles, but whether they crossed the
sea or not, and what happened to them, no one knows; only that much is
certain, that of all the thousands who went forth, only very few
returned." Another chronicler wrote: "And at this time boys without a
leader or guide, left the towns and villages of all countries, eagerly
journeying to the lands across the sea, and when asked whither they were
wending, they replied: 'To Jerusalem, to the Holy Land.' Many of them
were kept by their parents behind locked doors, but they burst open the
doors, broke through the walls and escaped. When the Pope heard of these
things he sighed heavily and said: 'These children shame us, for they
hasten to the recovery of the Holy Land while we sleep.' No one knows
how far they went and what became of them. But many returned, and when
they were asked the reason of their expedition, they said they knew not.
At the same time nude women were seen hurrying through towns and
villages, speaking no word."

If it had not been for the Crusades, something else must have happened
to relieve the unbearable tension. The world was longing for a great
deed, a deed overstepping the border-line of metaphysics, and its
enthusiasm was sufficient guarantee of achievement. In the case of the
individual, vanity and boastfulness played no mean part. Thus the
Austrian minnesinger, Ulrich of Lichtenstein, proposed taking the Cross
"not to serve God but to please his mistress." It is quite probable,
though not historically proved, that this veritable Don Quixote dreamed
of decorating the Holy Sepulchre with his lady's handkerchief, but in
the end he remained at home. A journey to foreign lands, to return after
years of yearning for the beloved, her loyalty, or her treachery,
supplied the romantic imagination of the age with endless material. The
story of the Count von Gleichen and his two wives is famous to this day.
A charming Provençal song tells of a maid who, day after day, sat by a
fountain weeping for her lover. At this spot they had bidden farewell to
each other, and here she was awaiting his return. One day a pilgrim
arrived, and she at once asked for news of her knight. The pilgrim knew
him and had a message for her. After a short conversation he threw back
his cowl and drew the delighted maiden into his arms, for it was he
himself, her lover, who after many years of absence had returned and was
first visiting the spot where, years ago, he had said good-bye to her.

But there was another motive, a religious one, which, joined to the
universal lust of adventure, dominated the whole mediaeval period to an
extraordinary degree; that motive was the idea of doing penance
and--after all the failures of life--returning to God. The Crusades
offered an opportunity for combining one's heart's desire with this
spiritual need. Of all good works there were none more pleasing to God,
and every participator was promised forgiveness of his sins. In the
troubadours' songs of the crusaders there is a strong yearning for
penance and sanctification, quite independent of the idea of the
delivery of the Holy Sepulchre from the rule of the infidels.

     All I held dear I now abhor,
     My pride, my knightly rank and fame,
     And seek the spot which all adore,
     The pilgrim's goal--Jerusalem.

sang Guillem of Poitiers, one of the gayest of the troubadours.

Only very few of the more thoughtful minds realised that divine thoughts
have their source in the soul of man, and that these Crusades were
obviously a senseless undertaking (not to mention the fact that God does
not need human assistance). "It is a greater thing to worship God always
in humility and poverty," said the abbot, Peter of Cluny, "than to
journey to Jerusalem in great pomp and circumstance. If, therefore, it
is a good thing to visit Jerusalem and stand on the soil which our
Lord's feet have trod, it is a far better thing still to strive after
heaven where our Lord can be seen face to face." Both the great
scholastic, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux, were of the
same opinion. "They shall aspire not to the earthly, but to the heavenly
Jerusalem, and travel there not with their feet, but with the desire of
their hearts." And "They seek God in external objects, neglecting to
look into their hearts, in whose innermost depths dwells the divine."
And yet those same men, who even then seemed to have outgrown biblical
religiosity, were under the spell of the all-absorbing idea of the age.
Bernard solved the contradiction in the following way: "It is not
because His power has grown less that the Lord calls us feeble worms to
protect His own; His word is deed, and He could send more than twelve
legions of angels to do His bidding; but because it is the will of the
Lord your God to save you from perdition, He gives you an opportunity to
serve Him." In these words a significant change of the fundamental idea
can already be traced. Peter of Cluny worked for the Crusades, and
Bernard, one of the most influential and venerable personalities of the
Middle Ages, a man before whose word the popes bowed down, journeyed
through the whole of France, inciting all hearts to fanatical
enthusiasm. Whoever heard him preach forsook his worldly possessions and
took the cross, clamouring for Peter himself to lead all Christendom.
"Countless numbers flocked to his banner, towns and castles stood
forsaken and there was hardly one man to seven women. The wives were
made widows during the lifetime of their husbands." Thus Bernard wrote
to the Pope, travelling through Germany, healing the sick by his mere
presence, and preaching to the people in a tongue no one could
understand. But the personality of this physically delicate man, whose
body was only kept alive by his spirit, touched all hearts. The prudent
Emperor, Conrad, resisted for a long time, and would have nothing to do
with such an aimless enterprise. But Bernard's first sermon in the
cathedral at Speyer, on Christmas Day, moved him to tears. Bernard left
the pulpit and pinned the cross on the shoulder of the kneeling emperor.
By this symbolical act the metaphysical spirit of the time, of which the
Church had obtained control for her own purposes, visibly became master
of political common-sense.

The Crusades were one of the great movements matured by the
newly-awakened metaphysical yearning. The same spirit in another,
profounder, way, manifested itself in the efforts of religious reform
which were being made here and there. "The appearance and spread of
heresy has always been the gauge by which the religious life of the
individual must be measured," says Büttner very pertinently in his
preface to his edition of Eckhart. For the first time since the days of
Christ true religious feeling was again quickening the hearts of men;
the ecclesiastical dogma, which until then had represented absolute
truth, no longer satisfied their need. Soon opposition, timidly at
first, made itself felt. Laymen ventured to interfere in the domain of
religion. All knowledge--and consequently all tradition and
religion--had been for a thousand years the exclusive possession of the
clergy; those laymen who had any culture at all knew a little Latin and
a few scholastic propositions. All this was changing. Despite reiterated
ecclesiastical prohibitions, parts of the Bible were translated into
the vulgar tongue and eagerly studied by ignorant folk; everywhere men
appeared to whom religion was a matter of vital importance, men who
strove to find God in their own souls, instead of blindly accepting the
God of foreign doctrine.

The more obvious cause of the growing dislike to ecclesiastical
authority was the immorality of the priests. The contrast between the
professions of humility, and the greed, vice and tyranny of the clergy
was too pronounced. The ecclesiastical offices were publicly sold.
Divine forgiveness was cheaper than a new garment; every priest was
allowed to keep a mistress if he paid a tax to the bishop. Two poems of
the troubadour, Guillem Figueiras, express the state of affairs very
bluntly: "Our shepherds have become thievish wolves, plundering and
despoiling the fold under the guise of messengers of peace. They gently
console their sheep night and day, but once they have them in their
power, these false shepherds let their flock perish and die." In the
other poem he says of the priest:

     He lies in a woman's arms all night,
     And wakes--defiled--in the morning light
     To proffer the sacred host.

Worse invectives even, no less forcible than those of later reformers,
he hurled against Rome. "In the flames and torments of hell is thy
place!... Thou hast the appearance of an innocent lamb, but inwardly
thou art a raging wolf, a crowned snake, begotten by a viper, the friend
of the devil!" Even the good-natured German minnesinger, Walter von der
Vogelweide, found bitter words against Rome: "They point our way to God
and go to hell themselves." Bernard of Clairvaux, the supporter of the
Church, sharply criticised the abuses of pope and clergy in his book,
_De Consideratione_: "The property of the poor is sown before the door
of the rich, the gold glitters in the gutter, the people come hurrying
up from all sides; but not to the neediest is it given, but to the
strongest and to him who is first on the spot." He accused the pope of
extravagance and luxury: "Was Peter clothed in robes of silk, covered
with gold and precious stones? Was he carried in a litter surrounded by
soldiers and vassals?" And he uttered a word which to this day is a
historical truth: "In all thy splendour thou art the successor of
Constantine rather than the successor of Peter."

Dissatisfaction with the life of the clergy and the tyranny of Rome was
the more external reason which, although it vexed even those who were
indifferent to religion, did not question the sacred tradition; the
other reason was more a matter of principle; it was rooted in the desire
for a religious revival and openly attacked perverted truths. The
dreaded, hated, and cruelly persecuted heretics were fearless men,
sturdily fighting for their convictions. The fundamental ideal of these
reformers was the suppression of the outward pomp of the Church and the
return to the simplicity of the gospels. Their fates varied. The gentle
St. Francis of Assisi was canonised; the illumined Eckhart, on the other
hand, was tortured; most of them, like the ardent Arnold of Brescia,
were burnt at the stake. This conduct of the hierarchy towards the truly
religious men is easily explained. The Church was faced by a problem; on
the one hand, the genuine and profound piety of these men was
unmistakable, but on the other, the contrast of their teaching with
Church tradition was too obvious, and by many of them too strongly
emphasised to be silently ignored.

The Provençal heretic, Peter of Bruis, seems to have been the first
reformer who preached against iconolatry and even objected to the images
of the Crucified. He ordered churches to be razed to the ground because
he acknowledged only the invisible community of the saints. He was burnt
at St. Giles' by an infuriated mob. More powerful, and far more
numerous than his followers, the Peterbrusians, were the Cathari and
the Waldenses (founded by Peter Valdez A.D. 1177) who soon spread to
Northern Italy and amalgamated with the sect of the Lombards. The
Cathari advocated a simple and ascetic life, in accordance with the
teaching of primitive Christianity, refrained from all ecclesiastical
ceremonies and despised the sacraments, particularly baptism. More
radical than later reformers, they rejected the doctrine of
transubstantiation, and saw in the eucharist only a symbol of the union
of God and the soul. This made their name synonymous with heresy. But by
far the most famous of heretical sects was the sect of the Waldenses or
Albigenses. It numbered amongst its adherents--if not publicly, at any
rate secretly--many of the great Provençal lords, and there can be no
doubt that this community was permeated by the spirit of a renewed
Christianity, the Christianity of St. Francis and the German mystics.
The Albigenses believed that not Christ, but His semblance only, had
been crucified; they rejected the God of the Old Testament and their
doctrine of the two creators,--the devil who created the objective
world, and the true God who created the spiritual world--is reminiscent
of the loftiest Parseeism and the profoundest gnosticism. They regarded
man as placed between good and evil; the choice lay in his own hand. An
extraordinary poem by Peire Cardinal--not by any means a
heretic--breathes this spirit. He confronts God not with the customary
humility, but as one power confronts the other. "I will write a new
poem, and on the day of the Last Judgment I will read it to Him who has
created me from nothing. If He should condemn me to everlasting
damnation, I will say to Him: Lord, have mercy on me, for I have always
striven against the wicked world," (the troubadour here alludes to his
many polemic poems) "and save me from the torments of hell. The heavenly
host will marvel at my speech. And I shall say to God that He sins
against His creatures if he delivers them into the hands of the devil.
Rather let Him drive away the devils, for then He will win more souls
and all the world will be blessed.... I will not despair of Thee and
therefore Thou must forgive my sins and save my soul and my heart. If I
had not been born I should not have sinned. It would be a great wrong
and a sin if Thou didst condemn me to burn in hell everlastingly, for
truly I may accuse Thee of having sent me a thousand evils for one
blessing."

Most terrible was the punishment inflicted upon Provence by Innocent
III. That highly intellectual pope realised that he was faced by a
revival of the true religious instinct from which the authority of the
Church had far more to fear than from all sultans and emirs put
together. The system of absolute, immutable values was threatened with
destruction. In the year 1208 the Spanish nobleman Dominicus Guzman
founded the order of the Dominicans and the Inquisition, which invaded
Provence together with the papal army supported by France for political
reasons. Half a million men were butchered in order to crush the spirit
understood by a few hundreds at most; one stake was kindled by the
other; in the memory of man no greater sacrifice to tradition and dogma
had ever been made. Simon de Montfort, the head of the expedition, sent
the following laconic report to the pope: "We spared neither sex nor age
nor name, but slew all with the edge of the sword."


The troubadours bewailed the desolate country, the beauty that was no
more. Montanhagol, although greatly intimidated by the Inquisition,
wrote a long poem on the subject, and the otherwise unknown Bernard
Sicard de Marvajols laments:

     Oh! Toulouse and Provence,
     And thou, land of Agence,
     Carcassonne and Beziers!
     As once I beheld you--as I behold you to-day!

Jacob of Vitry, a cultured French prelate, took a different view. He
inveighed against the "foolish poems, the lies of the poets, the
sing-song of the women, the coarse innuendoes of the jesters." "Such
vermin flourishes on the stream of temporal abundance; it literally
crawls over all food, for, as a rule, the meal is followed by a deluge
of idle talk." A reconciliation of the two worlds was impossible.

While the Waldenses flourished in Provence, various heretical sects
arose in the west of Germany and in the Netherlands; prominent among
them were the Apostolics, who took the Gospels literally, and introduced
communism and polygamy, and the communities of the Beghards and
Beguines, which roused little public attention, and did not aim at
reform, but advocated a life of contemplation. They found supporters in
all ranks of the community, and were connected with the later German
mystics. An indictment preserved for us proves the religious originality
of one of those sects, "The Brethren of the Free Spirit," who upheld the
heretical view that it were better that one man should attain to
spiritual perfection than that a hundred monasteries should be founded.
At the same time the inspired seer and hysterical nun, Hildegarde of
Bingen, wrote wild letters to the popes, denouncing the vice existing in
the Church and the degradation of religion. "But thou, oh Rome, who art
well-nigh at the point of death, thou wilt be shaken so that the
strength of thy feet shall forsake thee, because thou hast not loved the
royal maiden righteousness with an ardent love, but with the torpor of
sleep, and thou hast become a stranger to her. Therefore she will desert
thee if thou do not call her back." Pope Adrian IV. replied, almost
humbly: "We long to hear words of warning from you, because men say that
you are endowed with the spirit of the divine miracles." St. Bernard
craved Hildegarde's prayer, two emperors, popes, bishops and abbots
corresponded with her, requesting her prayer and advice, and the
interpretation of difficult passages of the Scriptures. Hildegarde
replied in an obscure, apocalyptical language: "In the mysteries of the
true wisdom have I seen and heard this."

Prophets predicting the revival of the Gospel of Christ and the
regeneration of the world appeared in the north and south. The Italian
monk and fanatic, Joachim of Floris (about A.D. 1200), preached that
this regeneration was predestined to happen. A precursor of Hegel, he
taught three eras: the dominion of the Father, or the first era,
characterised by fear and the severity of the law; the dominion of the
Son, or the era of faith and compassion; and the dominion of the Holy
Ghost, or the era of love. This last era was beginning to dawn, and in
many places Joachim's words were regarded as the prophecies of a seer.
Thus the monk, Gerhard of Borgo San Domino, claimed for the dawning
third era the preaching of a new gospel of the Holy Ghost, an
unmistakable proof that the spirit of heresy was the outcome of
religious enthusiasm.

The people despised the clergy, and were favourably disposed to every
reformer; at the same time they were entirely under the sway of a
superstitious awe of the administrators of mysterious magic which, by
appropriate practices, or by means of presents, could be turned to
advantage. The fetichism of relics flourished everywhere; a sufficient
number of pieces of the Cross of Christ were sold and worshipped to
furnish trees for a big forest--to say nothing of the bones of numerous
saints with which many monasteries, more especially French monasteries,
did a lucrative trade. Even at the time this traffic repelled the finer
intellects; in A.D. 1200, Guibert, the abbot of Novigentum, preached
against the cult of the saints and the worship of relics, adducing all
the well-known arguments which to this day, however, have proved
insufficient to overcome the evil. In Guibert's words, "It was an
abominable nuisance that certain limbs should be detached from the body,
thereby defying the law that all bodies must turn to dust. How can the
bones of any man be worth framing in gold and silver," he asked, "when
the body of the Son of God was laid beneath a miserable stone?" He
exhorted the people to turn from the visible and obvious to the
invisible. He maintained that the worship of relics was opposed to true
religion because "not until the disciples were bereaved of the bodily
presence of Christ could the Holy Ghost descend upon them." He even
rejected the prevalent, entirely materialistic, view of a life after
death, and dared to suggest that the torments of hell should be
interpreted spiritually. "The eternal contemplation of the Lord is the
supreme bliss of the righteous; who could dare to deny that the misery
of the damned consists in the eternal bereavement of the face of the
Lord?"

Religion had been lost; what should have been a vital force had become
as far as the most learned were concerned a knowledge of historical
events. Many saw in a return to evangelical simplicity and love the only
remedy; but it was the life, not the preaching of a man, which once
again was vouchsafed to the world as a great example. "Nobody has shown
me what I should do; but the Most High Himself has commanded me to live
according to the Gospels." Francis of Assisi accepted the accounts of
the life of Christ with the utmost naïveté; he neither searched for an
allegorical meaning (as the theologians did), nor did he subordinate the
man Jesus to the divine principle of the _logos_ (in the manner of the
great mystics). To him the imitation of Christ meant a ministry of love;
he did not conceive religion as dogma and the political power of a
hierarchy, but as a state of the heart. This is a characteristic which
he shares with Eckhart, the great recreator of European religion,
although he was fundamentally alien to him. St. Francis never uttered a
single hostile word against tradition or the clergy; he never inveighed
against the corruption of morals and religious indifference, as other
reformers did; he exerted a reformatory influence solely by his life,
for he possessed the secret of the great love. During his whole life he
was averse to laying down rules for his followers, although continually
urged to do so by popes and bishops. His importance does not lie in the
foundation of an order with certain regulations and a specific object,
but in the fact that he was a vital force. He broke the norms of the
Church whenever it seemed right to him to do so, for he was absolutely
sure of himself; without being ordained he preached to the people in his
own tongue, probably the first man (after the Provençal Peter Valdez)
who did so; without possessing the slightest authority he consecrated
his friend Clara as a nun. Innocent III., who made the suppression of
heresy the task of his life, showed great intelligence and wisdom in
sanctioning St. Francis' sermons to the people and acknowledging his
unecclesiastical brotherhood. This probably transformed a dangerous
revolutionary into a faithful servant of the Church. Maybe the Church
was indebted to St. Francis for being saved from a great early
reformation; signs of it were not wanting, and another Arnold of Brescia
might have arisen and brought about her overthrow. It is doubtful
whether the Church would have come out of a Franciscan crusade as
victoriously as she came out of her struggle with Provence.

St. Francis regarded science with indifference. "Every demon," he said,
"has more scientific knowledge than all men on earth put together. But
there is something a demon is incapable of, and in it lies the glory of
man. A man can be faithful to God." With those words he had inwardly
overcome tradition and theology, and direct knowledge of the divine had
dawned in his soul. He even forbade his brethren to own copies of the
Scriptures. God in the heart--that was the core of his doctrine. With
all his wonderful intuition he was absolutely innocent of the pride of
ignorance; he really felt himself smaller than the smallest of
men--unlike the bishops and popes who called themselves the servants of
the servants of God, without attaching the least meaning to it. How
characteristic of his simple mind was his passionate insistence on the
respectful handling of the vessels used at holy Mass, because they were
destined to receive the body of the Lord. And yet he hardly knew
anything of the symbolic transmutation of bread and wine--he accepted
the miracle without a thought, like a child.

In the year 1219, St. Francis took part in a Crusade. While the battle
of Damietta was raging, he went into the camp of the Saracens and
preached before the Sultan, who received him with respect and sent him
back unharmed. According to the legend, he then went to Bethlehem and
Jerusalem, where the Sultan, touched by his personality, gave him access
to the sacred shrines. To Francis this pilgrimage to the Holy Land had a
profound meaning, for to him Christianity meant the imitation of Christ.

Although he lived on bread himself, and poverty was his chosen lady, he
regarded the asceticism of the early Middle Ages as futile and rejected
it. The fire of life burned in him so ardently that he gave no thought
to the morrow, and literally followed the admonition of the Gospels: "So
likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he
cannot be My disciple." We read in the _Fioretti_ (perhaps the oldest
popular collection of poems in existence) that he expressly prohibited
asceticism as a principle; an idea too foreign to the spirit of the age
to have been an invention. He also disapproved of the secluded monastic
life, then the universal ideal of the _vita contemplativa_, and
insisted on his followers living in the world, radiating love and
sustaining life by the charity of their fellow-men.

There is an anecdote contained in the _Fioretti_, reflecting the great
superiority and lucidity of his mind. On a cold winter's day he and
Brother Leo were tramping through the deep snow. "Brother Leo," said St.
Francis, "if we could restore sight to all blind men, heal all cripples,
expel evil spirits and recall the dead to life--it would not be perfect
joy." And after a while: "And if we knew all the secrets of science, the
course of the stars, the ways of the beasts--it would not be perfect
joy--and if by our preaching we could convert all infidels to the true
faith--even that would not be perfect joy." "Tell me then, Father," said
Brother Leo, "what would be perfect joy?" "If we now knocked at the
convent gates, cold and wet and faint with hunger, and the porter sent
us away with harsh words, so that we should have to stand in the snow
until the evening; if we thus waited, bearing all things patiently
without murmuring--that would be perfect joy: the mercy of
self-control."

"He met death singing," says his biographer, Thomas of Celano, the
author of the magnificent _Dies irae, dies illa_. On his deathbed St.
Francis composed and sang without interruption the Hymn to the Sun, that
lofty song of praise in which the sum total of his noble life, love for
all created things,--is comprised and transfigured. It expresses a new
form of devotion, composed of the ecstasy of love and perfect humility.
He embraced in his heart his brother Sun, his sister Moon, the dear
Stars; his brother Wind, his sister and mother Earth; and on the day of
his death this _brother seraphicus_ added to it a powerful and touching
song of praise of his "brother Death." The legend has it that a flock of
singing-birds descended on the roof of the cottage in which he lay
dying; the songs of his "little sisters" accompanied him to the world
beyond the grave.

We are justified in comparing this death, which was sustained by the
fundamental forces of that era, soul and emotion, to that other, more
famous, death of antiquity. Socrates died without in the least
succumbing to any personal feeling, supported by the purely logical
consideration that it was expedient to obey the laws of the State. His
death was the application of a universal proposition to an individual
case, and because no one could accuse Socrates of a dialectical error,
the conclusion, his death, had to take place.

Francis and some of his successors realised in their lives the simple,
religious, fundamental emotion of love in a way which the people could
clearly understand. "God's minstrels" was the name given to his
followers, because they spoke and sang of the love of God without
ecclesiastical ceremony. Jacopone da Todi (1236-1306), probably next to
Dante and Guinicelli the greatest poet which Italy has produced, praised
the transcendent love of God in ecstatic verses. He was the religious
counterpart of the troubadours; his passionate devotion to the child
Jesus, the Madonna and the Crucified, eclipses their most ardent lyrics.
These southerners could not forgo the visible emblems of their religion;
the infinitely simple principle that only he who calls nothing his own,
and desires no earthly goods, is perfectly free, and can never fall foul
of his neighbour, was, if not lived up to, at any rate understood and
respected. The grateful hearts of the people surrounded the name of St.
Francis with legends; the study of his life inspired Giotto, the father
of the new art, to the study of plant and animal life. The story of St.
Francis is written on the walls of the cathedral at Assisi, the first
monumental work of Italian art.

St. Francis re-lived the terrestrial life of Jesus; in one direction he
excelled his model, for though the love of Christ embraced all mankind,
the heart of St. Francis went out to all things, beasts and plants and
stars. He applied the words, "Whatsoever ye do to the least of my
brethren, ye have done unto me," to _Brother Bear_ and _his sisters the
little birds_. He was one of the first men, since the Greek era, who saw
nature in its true aspect and not as a hieroglyphic of the divine word.
Men had realised with a feeling of helplessness the dangers of the
elements, without perceiving their magnificence; they had speculated on
and attempted to decipher the secret language of the terrestrial and
celestial phenomena. The discovery of the beauty of nature, and with it
the revival of aesthetics, was an essential part of the new-born
civilisation. This fact was accomplished--in an almost sentimental
way--by the troubadours and minnesingers. But the relationship of St.
Francis to nature was something very different. The co-ordination of man
and beast--in his sermon to the birds, for instance--cannot be called
anything but frankly pagan. St. Francis said to his disciples: "Tarry a
little while in the road while I go and preach to my little sisters, the
birds." And he went into the fields and began to preach to the birds
which sat on the ground; and straightway all the others flew down from
the trees and flocked round him, and did not fly away until he had
blessed them; and when he touched them, they did not move. And these
were the words which he spoke to them: "My brothers and sisters, little
birds, praise God and thank Him that He has given you wings with which
to fly and clothed you with a garment of feathers. That he admitted your
kind into Noah's ark so that your race should not disappear from the
earth. Be grateful to Him that He has given you the air for your
kingdom; you sow not, neither do you reap, but your Heavenly Father
gives you abundance of food. He gave you the rivers and fountains; He
gave you the mountains and valleys as a refuge, and the high trees so
that you may build your nests in safety. And because you can neither
spin nor cook, God clothed you and your little ones. Behold the
greatness of the love of your Creator! Beware of the sin of ingratitude
and diligently praise God all day!" And when he had thus spoken, the
birds opened their beaks, beat their wings and bowed to the ground.

More than a hundred years later (1300-1365), a man was living in Swabia
whose soul was kindred to the soul of St. Francis: Suso, who is, as a
rule, classed with the mystics. He had a profound, typically German love
of meadow and forest, and expressed it more exquisitely than the best
among the minnesingers. "Look above you and around you and behold the
vastness of heaven and the speed of its revolutions. The Lord has
emblazoned it with seven planets, each of which--not only the sun--is
far larger than the earth; he has adorned it with myriads of radiant
stars. See how serenely the glorious sun is riding in the cloudless sky,
giving to the earth abundance of fruit! Behold the verdure of the
meadow! The trees are bursting into leaf and the grass is springing up;
behold the smiling flowers and listen to glen and dale re-echoing with
the sweet song of the nightingales and little singing birds; the beasts
which the bitter winter drove into nooks and crannies, and into the dark
ground, are emerging from their hiding-places to rejoice in the sun and
seek a mate. Young and old are glad with an exceeding joy. Oh! Thou
gentle God, how fair art Thou in Thy creatures! Oh! fields and meadows,
how surpassing is your beauty!" Or: "My dear brethren, what more shall I
say to you than that my eyes have seen many gladsome sights. I walked
across the flowering meadows and listened to the heavenly harps of the
little birds praising their gentle and loving Creator so that the woods
echoed with their songs." And, more compassionate even than St. Francis:
"I will say nothing of the children of man; but the misery and sorrow
of all the beasts and little birds, and all created things, is well-nigh
breaking my heart; and having no power to help them, I sighed, and
prayed to the Most High, Most Merciful Lord, that He would deliver
them." His description of a paradisean meadow sounds like the
description of a picture by Fra Angelico: "Now behold with your own eyes
the heavenly meadow! Lo! What summer joy! Behold the kingdom of sweet
May, the valley of all true joy! Glad eyes are gazing into glad eyes!
Hark to the harps and fiddles, the singing and laughter! Young men and
maidens are leading the dance! Love without sorrow shall reign for
ever...." etc. There is a picture, drawn by this same Suso, representing
the journey of man through life, his departure from God and his return.
In this picture the path of humanity is renunciation and asceticism;
death flourishes his scythe above the heads of a dancing couple, and
underneath is written: "This is earthly love; its end is sorrow"; to
such an extent was this sincere and sensitive man under the influence of
the traditional hatred of the world which Eckhart, his great master, had
completely overcome.

Provençals and Italians sang the delight of spring, and the German
minnesingers greeted it as the deliverer from all the hardships of the
severe winter; with the latter it was more a childish delight in the
open-air life which had again become possible, after the long
imprisonment of winter, than pure joy in beauty. But some of the German
epic poems, "Tristan and Isolde," for instance, contain genuine, sincere
descriptions of sylvan beauty. The student of art, especially the German
art of the Renascence, cannot help being struck by the extraordinary
love with which quite insignificant objects of nature, such as a bird,
or a flower, are treated. The familiar things of every-day life were in
this way brought into connection with solemn biblico-historical
subjects.

There is no doubt that at all times a certain keen perception of the
beauty of nature has been inherent in some favoured individuals; but the
universally accepted opinion that only the supernal was really
beautiful, and that terrestrial beauty was merely its reflected glory,
was too strong even for them. Thus we have seen Suso translating the
beauty of the earthly spring to the kingdom of heaven.

At the same time men were beginning to travel to distant countries for
the sole purpose of seeing new scenes and acquiring fresh knowledge. The
famous Venetian, Marco Polo, was the first European who (in 1300)
visited Central Asia, crossed China and Thibet, and brought news to
Europe of the fairyland of Japan. Sight-seeing as an end in itself was
discovered. Long sea-voyages for commercial purposes were no novelty,
but no human foot had ever trod the summits of the Lower Alps, unless it
had been the foot of a peasant whose cattle had strayed. Petrarch was
the first man (in 1336) to climb a barren mountain, the Mont Ventoux in
Provence, voluntarily undergoing a certain amount of fatigue for sheer
delight in the beauty of nature. This was a great, an immortal deed,
greater than all his sonnets and treatises put together. In a long
letter which has been preserved to us, he describes with much spirit and
erudition this extraordinary ascent, before whose profound significance
all the Alpine exploits of our time shrink into paltry gymnastic
exercises.

The beauty of nature discovered and appreciated, interest began to be
evinced in the relationship existing between the various phenomena and
there arose a desire to obtain ocular proof of what was written in the
venerable books--perhaps even make new discoveries. The first man of any
importance in this direction was the German Albrecht Bollstädt (Albertus
Magnus), who, although he contributed more than any other man to the
promulgation of Aristotelian philosophy, wrote a book on natural history
founded on personal observation; his great English contemporary,
however, Roger Bacon, is the true father of modern experimental science.
It was he who coined the expression "scientia experimentalis," and
framed the principle that all research must be based on the study of
nature. He maintained that experience was the "mistress of all
sciences," and said: "I respect Aristotle and account him the prince of
philosophers, but I do not always share his opinion. Aristotle and the
other philosophers have planted the tree of science, but the latter has
not by any means put forth all its branches or matured all its fruit."
This thought, though it seems to us self-evident, was of great moment in
the age of scholasticism. Bacon spent ten years in prison; but in spite
of everything, he was so much under the influence of scholasticism that
he considered it the task of philosophy to adduce evidence for the truth
of the Christian dogma.

Here it is essential roughly to sketch the essence of the philosophical
thought of that period, and point out the way which led from the
Christianity of the Fathers of the Church and scholasticism to the
religion of unhistorical Christianity, the so-called mysticism.
Scholasticism had reached its climax in the thirteenth century;
universities were founded in Paris, Oxford and Padua, and he who aspired
to the full dignity of learning had to take his degrees there; even
Eckhart did not neglect to obtain his scholastic education in Paris.

Scholasticism was an imposing and yet strangely grotesque system of the
world, built up--before a background of blazing stakes--of scriptural
passages and ecclesiastical tradition, lofty, pure thought and
antique-mediaeval superstition. Its fundamental problem, the
determination of the border line between faith and knowledge, was purely
philosophical. While the older scholasticism, based on Platonic
traditions, endeavoured to bring these into harmony with Christianity,
that is to say, prove the revelations by dialectics, Albertus Magnus
and, authoritatively, his pupil, Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274), strictly
distinguished, by the use of Aristotelian weapons, the rational or
perceptive truths from the supernatural verities or the subjects of
faith. This distinction, made in order to safeguard dogma, quickly
revealed its double-face. The handmaiden philosophy rebelled against her
mistress theology, and asked her for her credentials. According to the
classic and dogmatic doctrine of Thomas, the natural verities alone
could be grasped by human understanding; the supernatural or revealed
truths (the dogmas) were beyond proof and scientific cognition. To
submit them to research was not only an impossible task, but Thomas
stigmatised every effort in this direction as heresy, fondly believing
that he had once and for all safeguarded the position of faith. But more
resolute and profound thinkers, although not in so many words attacking
the authority of the Scriptures, and leaving Thomas' border-line
unquestioned, found the unfathomable truths not in ecclesiastical
tradition but in their own souls, thus investing "faith" with a new
meaning, unassailable by criticism.

The idea of drawing a line between perceivable or rational truths and
imperceivable or divine truths, is fraught with the burning question as
to the limits of human knowledge, a question which to this day remains
unanswered. In the course of time the limits were extended in favour of
imperfect knowledge (but the character of the unknowable was
problematised and questioned). While Thomas was still convinced of the
possibility of proving the existence of a God by the power of the human
intellect, Duns Scotus removed the problem of the existence of a God and
the immortality of the soul from the domain of science, and made both
propositions a matter of faith. William of Occam, more uncompromising
than Duns Scotus, maintained the absolute impossibility of acquiring
knowledge of supernatural things, and taught--on this point, too,
anticipating Kant--that objective knowledge acquired through the senses
should precede abstract knowledge. The last conclusion of nominalism was
thus arrived at, the existence of universal conceptions, or universals,
supposed to exist outside material things--the curse of the Platonic
inheritance--declared to be impossible, and reality conceded to the
individual only. Roscellinus, the founder of this doctrine, had still
been content to deny the existence of the conception of "deity," leaving
the individual persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, as real individuals,
untouched.

We see from the foregoing that the universally derided scholasticism
travelled along the whole line of modern thought: from the "realism" of
Thomas, which leaves the universals as yet unassailed by doubt and
occupying the very heart of knowledge, past the first and, to our view,
very modest doubts of the nominalists, to the agnosticism of Bacon, Duns
and Occam.

With the new position of decided nominalism the foundation was prepared
for the experimental sciences on the one hand, and mysticism on the
other. For the conclusion that things supernatural are a closed book to
us may have two results: on the one hand, the rejection of the
transcendental and the victory of science; on the other, the need to
descend into the profoundest depths of the universe and the soul, and
grasp by intuition what common sense does not see.

The time was ripe and the consummators came: Dante in the south, Eckhart
in the countries north of the Alps. With regard to Dante, I will say one
thing only; he gathered together all the achievements of the new art and
transcended them in a work which has never been surpassed. The
profoundly symbolical words, "The new life is beginning," are written at
the commencement of his _Vita Nuova_, and with his _Divine Comedy_ the
art of Europe had attained perfection.

It is necessary to give a more detailed account of Eckhart. He had been
almost forgotten in favour of his pupils, Tauler and Suso, and the
unknown author of the _Theologica Germanica_ (to which Luther wrote a
preface), but to-day a faint idea of the great importance of this man is
beginning to dawn upon the world. Eckhart was the greatest creative
religious genius since Jesus, and I believe that in time his writings
will be considered equal to the Gospel of St. John. He grasped the
spirit of religion with unparalleled depth; everything produced by the
highly religious later mediaeval era pales before his illumination.
Compared to him, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and even St. Francis
dwindle into insignificance; all the later reformers are small beside
the greatness of his soul. Every one of his sermons contains profound
passages, such as "God must become I and I must become God." "The soul
as a separate entity must be so completely annihilated that nothing
remains except God, yea, that it becomes more glorious than God, as the
sun is more glorious than the moon." "The Scriptures were written and
God created the world solely that He may be born in the soul and the
soul again in Him." "The essence of all grain is wheat, of all metal
gold, and of all creatures man. Thus spoke a great man: 'There is no
beast, but it is in some way a semblance of man.'" "The least faculty of
my soul is more infinite than the boundless heavens." "Again we
understand by the kingdom of God the soul; for the soul and the Deity
are one." "The soul is the universe and the kingdom of God." "God dwells
so much within the soul that all His divinity depends on it." "Man shall
be free and master of all his deeds, undestroyed and unsubdued."

Eckhart was the first man who thought consecutively in the German
vernacular, and who made this philosophically still virginal language a
medium for expressing profound thought. In addition he wrote Latin
treatises which were discovered a short time ago; I have not read them,
but I have no doubt that his profoundest convictions were expressed in
the German tongue. The Latin language has at all times fettered the
spirit far more successfully than the still untainted and living German.

The religious genius of a single individual had created Christianity.
But from the very beginning it was misunderstood; the salvation of the
world was linked to the person of a man who had aspired to be an example
to the whole race. The term, "Son of God," was understood in the sense
of the hero-cult of antiquity; possibly the Jewish faith in a Messiah,
the politico-national hope of the Children of Israel, was a good deal to
blame for this. A historical event was translated into metaphysic. The
only truly religious man was made the centre of a new mythology and
naïvely worshipped. It may sound like a paradox, but it is a fact that
the whole of the first millenary was inwardly irreligious; it concealed
its want of metaphysical intuition behind the falsification of
historical events. The entire mediaeval (and a large proportion of the
Protestant) theology laboured to obtain an intellectual grasp of the
doctrine of a unique historical salvation of humanity and frame it into
a dogma. And thus occurred that unparalleled misunderstanding (a
misunderstanding which never clouded the mind of India) which based
religion, the timeless metaphysical treasure of the soul, on the
historical record of an event which had happened in Asia Minor, and had
come down to us in a more or less garbled--some say entirely
falsified--version. This was the great sin of Christianity: It regarded
a historical event, revealing the very essence of religion, and
consequently capable of being formulated, as a divine intervention for
the purpose of bringing about the salvation of the world, instead of
recognising in the sublime figure of the founder of the Christian
religion a great, perhaps even perfect, incarnation of the eternally
new relationship between God and the soul. It promulgated the strange
thought that only the one soul, the soul of the founder, was divine, and
instead of teaching the divinity of humanity, it taught the divinity of
this one man only--Jesus became a God who could no longer be looked upon
as the perfect specimen and prototype of the race, but before whom it
behoved man to kneel and pray for salvation. Perhaps it was not possible
to understand the new doctrine in any other way; before men can conceive
the idea of their divinity, they must have become conscious of their
souls.

This complete misunderstanding and externalising of religion which took
place in the first millenary, and which can never now be retrieved, is
fundamentally pagan, antique. The record of the salvation of the world,
achieved by a hero once and for all time, the historification of the
divine spark which is daily re-born in the soul, entirely corresponds to
the Greek myths of gods and demi-gods which before their new, symbolical
interpretation, were taken quite literally. I am not now concerned with
the problem of how far the antique heroes and Eastern mysteries directly
influenced the conception of the figure of Christ; I only wish to
emphasise the profound contrast between true religion which springs up
in the soul of the individual, and historical tradition. If there is
such a thing as religion, it must exist equally for all men, for those
who accidentally received a report of a certain historical event, as
well as for those who remained in ignorance of the fact. All heretical
demonstrations were rooted in a vague realisation of this contrast. But
Eckhart accomplished the unparalleled deed of once more building a
bridge between the soul and the deity; of relegating to the background
all the ineradicable historical misrepresentations or, if there was no
alternative, of unhesitatingly proclaiming them as erroneous, or
interpreting them symbolically. "St. Paul's words," he says, for
instance, "are nothing but the words of Paul; it is not true that he
spoke them in a state of grace." He did not regard the Scriptures as the
bourne of truth, but as subsequent proof of the directly experienced
truth of the divine event. With this conception Christianity had reached
its highest stage. Henceforth the origin of all truths and values was no
longer sought in doctrine and authority, but in the soul of man; God was
neither to be found in the heavens nor in history, but in the soul; the
soul must become divine and creative; it had found its task: the
recreation of the world. It was true, St. Augustine had said: "_Non
Christianised, Christi sumus_," but this saying had never been
understood, and very probably St. Augustine had not meant it in its
literal sense. At last the fundamental consciousness of Christianity had
triumphed: the principle of the "Son-of-Godship" inspired the soul of
the mystics; in future religion must emanate from the soul and find its
goal in God; written documents and--in the case of the profoundest
thinkers--examples were no longer needed. The heretical sects had been
content to reject post-evangelical tradition, in order to lay greater
stress on the words of Christ. They were genuine reformers, but they
were as much constrained by the historical facts as the Roman Catholic
Church, and their standpoint has to this day remained the standpoint of
the Protestant professions of faith.

The fact of this new conception attaching no importance to the
historical Jesus of Nazareth (had he never lived it would have made no
difference) made of it a new religion. By putting aside this external
and accidental moment, it placed the metaphysical and purely spiritual
core of Christianity, the fundamental conviction of the divinity of the
soul, and the will to eternal life, within the centre of religious
consciousness, and by so doing put itself beyond the reach of historical
criticism and scepticism, Eckhart, more than any other teacher, was
profoundly convinced of the freedom and eternal value of the soul. "I,
as the Son, am the same as my Heavenly Father." He taught that Christ is
born in the soul, that the divine spark is continuously re-kindled in
the soul: "It is the quality of eternity that life and youth are one,"
and that man must become more and more divine, more and more free from
all that is unessential and accidental until he no longer differs from
God. It is only a logical conclusion to say that a perfect man,
mystically speaking, is God; his being and his will are in nothing
differentiated from absolute, universal, divine will--German mysticism
agrees in this with the Upanishads. Kant would have said that the
principles of such a man would become cosmic laws; sin would be the
estrangement from God, the will to draw away from God.

The profound and only mission of religion is the endowment of man in
this hurly-burly of life with the consciousness of eternity. Religion
places our transient life under the aspect of eternity, and therefore it
must, in its essence, remain a stranger to things temporal. Only that
moment in the life of a man can be called religious which lifts him
beyond himself, out of his petty, narrow existence, conditioned by and
subject to accidents, into timeless, universal life; which gives him the
certainty that historical events can never be regarded as definite and
ultimate--that moment which has the power to set free, to deliver, to
save. Thus it is irreligious to regard an event which occurred on the
temporal plane--and were it the greatest event which ever befell on
earth--as the pivot of metaphysical value for all men; to link the
salvation of the world to an occurrence which was relatively accidental,
to base the consciousness of eternity on the knowledge of a fact. This
would be a victory of time over eternity, a victory of irreligion over
religion.

I regard it as the greatest achievement of that great time that
spontaneous religion again became possible. Eckhart rediscovered the
divine nature of man; never has the consciousness of timeless eternity
been expressed as he expressed it in his tract, _On Solitude_. Doubtless
there have been men before him who possessed direct religious
intuitions, and now and then gave timid utterance to them; but the
authority of tradition has always been too great, and they never did
more than compromise between the historical events on which the
Christian religion is based and the genuinely religious experience of
their own souls. Eckhart, too, was careful not to offend against the
letter, and his pupils, after suspicion had fallen on them, made many a
concession in terms, and perhaps even in thought. St. Augustine already
had steered a middle course between the historical and the religious
conception, in his phrase: _Per Christum hominem at Christum deum_, and
Suso (in his _Booklet of Eternal Wisdom_) followed his lead. "Thus
speaks the eternal wisdom: If ye will behold me in my eternal divinity
ye must know and love me in my suffering humanity. For this is the
quickest road to eternal salvation." The brutality of the tenet which
maintains that all those are eternally lost who, without their own
fault, have no knowledge of the salvation of the world (especially
therefore, those who died before the event), was a stumbling-block to
many thoughtful minds. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were looked
upon as saved--to some extent--by the fact of their being the ancestors
or prophets of Christ; but pagans and Greeks, including Aristotle, were
condemned even by the great Dante. At the conclusion of his _Divine
Comedy_ Dante proved himself a truly inspired mystic, for he gave to us
the profoundest vision of the divinity which has ever been vouchsafed to
man. But his genius was directed and restricted by the dogmas of the
Church; his religious standpoint was the standpoint of the early Middle
Ages and dogmatic Catholicism. As poet and lover he was the inaugurator
of a new world; here he represents the culmination and conclusion of the
condemned world-system. He was the iron landmark of the ages--Eckhart,
the creator of eternal values.

The foremost of the precursors of Eckhart was Bernard of Clairvaux
(1091-1153). He was the exponent of the love of God which he placed
above knowledge; in one of his letters he calls love "the existence of
God Himself," basing his definition on the passage in the Gospel of St.
John, "God is Love." "Love is the eternal law which created and
preserves the universe; the whole world is governed by love; but
although love is the law to which all creation is subject, it is not
itself without law, but it is a law unto itself. Serfs and mercenaries
are ruled by laws which are not from God, but which they made
themselves; some because they do not love God, others because they love
the things of this world better than God.... They made their own laws
and subordinated the universal and eternal laws to their own will. But
those (who live righteously) are in the world as God is: neither serfs
nor mercenaries, but the children of God and, like God Himself, they
live only by the law of love." "His greatest happiness is complete
absorption in the vision of the divine and forgetfulness of self." "All
love is an emanation of that one love. It is the eternally creative and
governing law of the universe." "To be penetrated by such emotion is to
become deified. As a drop of water in a cup of wine is completely
dissolved and takes the taste and colour of the wine, so also, in an
indescribable manner, is the human will absorbed in the divine will, and
transformed into the will of God. For how could God become all in all if
anything human were left in man?" "They are completely immersed (the
martyrs) in the infinite ocean of eternal light, in radiant
eternity...." The entranced soul "shall lose all knowledge of itself
and become completely absorbed in God; it shall become unlike itself in
the measure as it has received the gift of becoming divine." Sensuous
metaphors from the Song of Songs and the Psalms are again and again
intermingled with these lofty thoughts. But in spite of his divine
emotion, in spite of his anticipations of the German mystics, Bernard
took the standpoint of ecclesiastical orthodoxy whenever he was not in
the ecstatic state; his contemplative mind was unable to grasp the
importance of independent thought, a fact amply proved by his inglorious
quarrel with Abélard, the greatest thinker of his time. This quarrel was
a typical illustration of the difference between the believer and the
thinker. Bernard forgot all about love, and did not hesitate to stir up
unpleasantness whenever he could do so. So he wrote to Pope Innocent
II.: "Peter Abélard is striving to destroy the Christian faith, and
imagines that his human intellect can penetrate the depths of the divine
mind.... Nothing is hidden from him, neither in the earth below, nor in
the heavens above; his intellectual pride exceeds all limits; he attacks
the doctrines of faith, and ponders problems far above his intellectual
capacity; he is an inventor of heresies ...," etc. Thanks to his
machinations, Abélard was compelled to recant at the Council of Sens,
and was condemned by the Pope to eternal silence. Berengar of Poitier
took Abélard's part, and in a satirical treatise ventured to criticise
St. Bernard's conduct: "Thus philosophise the old women at the looms. Of
course, when Bernard tells us that we must love God, he speaks a true
and venerable word; but he need not have opened his lips to do so, for
it is a self-evident truth." As a matter of fact, these words branded
and contradicted the merely subjective emotional mysticism; to the
emotional mystic salvation lies in the "absorption in God," in
shapeless, thoughtless contemplation. Richard of St. Victor, founding
his theories on St. Bernard, established six stages of meditation. The
Franciscan monk, Bonaventura, the famous author of the _Biblia
Pauperum_, added a seventh, a complete rest in God--"like the Sabbath
after the six days of labour." To Bonaventura, as later on to Dante, the
world was a ladder leading up to God.

If we turn from these thinkers of the Neo-Latin race, who in spite of
their undeniable mysticism were completely under the dominion of the
Church--to German mysticism, we find above and beyond mysticism, we find
above and beyond love, a new principle: The soul of man is the
starting-point of religious consciousness and the content of the
religious consciousness is the soul's road to God. The nativity of
Christ ceased to be regarded as a historical event, and became the birth
of the divine principle in the soul of man. In passing I will mention a
German nun, Mechthild of Magdeburg (1212-1277), who anticipated some of
the great thoughts of Eckhart, although she was incapable of grasping
their mutual connection. "The Holy Trinity and everything in heaven and
earth must be subject to me" (the soul), were words in the true spirit
of Eckhart, leaving St. Bernard far behind. Mechthild found metaphors of
true poetical grandeur when she spoke of the union of the soul with God.
"The dominion of the fire has yet to come. That is Jesus Christ in Whose
hands the Heavenly Father has laid the salvation of the world and the
Last Judgment. On the Day of Judgment He shall fashion cups of wondrous
beauty out of the crackling sparks; therein the Father will drink on His
festival all the holiness which through His dear Son He has poured into
human souls."

Emotional mysticism was the prevailing form of mysticism in those days;
even Eckhart's pupil, Suso, belonged to this class of mystics. This
vague sentimentalism saved many a mind from the rigid dogmas of the
Church, and as its vagueness could be interpreted in more than one way,
it caused very little offence; but these visions and ecstasies, which
are so often mistaken for true mysticism, have done much to bring the
latter into contempt with the seriously minded. Eckhart did not
acknowledge it as genuine mysticism and directly condemned it in many of
his writings; and as he rejected mystic sentimentalism, clearly divining
its pathological cause, so he also rejected asceticism and all religious
ceremonies. The evangelical poverty of the Franciscan monks was an
object of loathing to him. St. Francis (and thirty years before him
Peter Valdez) had naïvely interpreted the imitation of Christ as a life
of absolute poverty, and had been relentless in his denunciation of
worldly wealth, which every monk of his order had to renounce. He
himself never touched money, seeing in it the source of all evil. His
transcendent treasure was "Holy Poverty"; Jacopone wrote an ardent hymn
to "Queen Poverty," and even Thomas, the representative of Dominican
erudition, theoretically took up the cudgels on its behalf. But even in
the primitive Church the principle of worldly and spiritual poverty was
widely spread and encouraged. In the defence of poverty, which was
practically nearly always synonymous with idleness and begging, and
therefore roused much hostility among the people, Bonaventura pointed
out (in his treatise, _De Paupertate Christi_) that Jesus Himself had
never done any manual work. The universal preference for a contemplative
life encouraged the tendency, and the extreme charitableness of the
Middle Ages made its realisation possible. Work was frequently looked
upon as a punishment--a view which could easily be upheld by reference
to Adam's expulsion from Paradise--and inflicted upon the monks for
offences against the rules. Dante's friend, Guido Cavalcanti, expressed
the natural sentiment that poverty is a distressing condition, in a
canzone which bristles with insults hurled at the Queen of the
Franciscans:

     Yea, rightly art thou hated worse than death,
     For he, at length, is longed for in the breast.

       But not with thee, wild beast,
       Was ever aught found beautiful or good;
       For life is all that man can lose by death,
       Not fame and the fair summits of applause;
       His glory shall not pause
       But live in men's perpetual gratitude.
       While he who on thy naked sill has stood
       He shall be counted low, etc.

                                    D.G. ROSSETTI.

The concept of the German mystics was infinitely more profound than the
concept of the merely external poverty of the Franciscans, which in the
case of St. Francis and Jacopone was an inherent characteristic and
pure, but in the case of the others more or less vicious. "Man cannot
live in this world without labour," says Eckhart, "but labour is man's
portion; therefore he must learn to have God in his heart, although
surrounded by the things of this world, and not let his business or his
surroundings be a barrier." There is a passage in the book of an unknown
author, entitled _The Imitation of Christ's Poverty_ (formerly ascribed
to Tauler), which reads as follows: "Poverty is equality with God, a
mind turned away from all creatures; poverty clings to nothing and
nothing clings to it; a man who is poor clings to nothing which is
beneath him, but to that alone which is greater than all things. And
that is the loftiest virtue of poverty that it clings only to that which
is sublime and takes no heed of the things which are base, so far as it
is possible." "The soul while it is burdened with temporal and transient
things is not free. Before it can aspire to freedom and nobility it must
cast away all the things of the world." "Nobody can be really poor
unless God make him so; but God makes no man poor unless he be in his
inmost heart; then all things will be taken from him which are not
God's. The more spiritual a man is, the poorer will he be, for
spirituality and poverty are one...." Pseudo-Tauler even affirms that a
man "can possess abundant wealth and yet be poor in spirit." The meaning
of this is clear: He whose heart is not wrapped up in the things of the
world, will find his way to God; a soul which is without desire is rich.

But there was a still greater contrast between the naïve religion
represented by St. Francis of Assisi and the religion of Eckhart. The
former lived entirely in the obvious and visible; the love of all
creatures filled his heart and shaped his life. The heart of the mystic
too, was filled with love, but it was love transcending the love of the
individual, love of the primary cause. In the last sense Eckhart taught,
contrary to traditional Christianity, and in conformity with Indian
wisdom, that the soul must be absorbed into the absolute and that
everything transient and individual must cease to exist. "The highest
freedom is that the soul should rise above itself and flow into the
fathomless abyss of its archetype, of God Himself."

Even St. Bernard was not quite free from this mystical heresy (_cf._ the
previously quoted passages). "When he has reached the highest degree of
perfection, man is in a state of complete forgetfulness of self, and
having entirely ceased to belong to himself, becomes one with God,
released from everything not divine." Even compassion must cease in this
state, for there is nothing left but justice and perfection.

We recognise here a characteristic of all those who are greatest among
men: of Goethe, for instance, of Bach, or Kant: namely, the
correspondence of intense personality and the most highly developed
objectivity; for the greatest personality ceases in the end to
distinguish between itself and the world, has eradicated everything
paltry, selfish and subjective and has become entirely objective,
impersonal, divine. St. Francis knew nothing of this consciousness. "God
has chosen me because among all men He could find no one more lowly, and
because through my instrumentality He purposed to confound nobility,
greatness, strength, beauty and the wisdom of the world." He was the
disciple of the earthly Jesus, Who went through life the compassionate
consoler of all those who were sorrowful. But Eckhart aspired "to the
shapeless nature of God." "We will follow Him, but not in all things,"
he said of the historical Jesus. "He did many things which He meant us
to understand spiritually, not literally ... we must always follow Him
in the profounder sense." Compared to the religion of Eckhart, the
religion of St. Francis is the faith of a little child, picturing God as
a benevolent old man. Such a religion is equally true and sincere, but
it represents an earlier stage on the road of humanity. If Christianity
were--as we are occasionally assured--the religion of Jesus, then the
great mystics cannot be called Christians. And yet St. Augustine's: "We
are not Christians, but Christs," was fulfilled in them.

The profoundest depth of European religion, of which Eckhart was the
exponent, and which found artistic expression in Gothic art, was not
sounded by music until very much later. Bach, more emphatically in the
High Mass and the Magnificat, but also in his purely instrumental music,
brought the universal feeling of mysticism to absolute artistic
perfection. The deep religious sentiment which pervades the High Mass is
so far above all cults, that it has no real connection with any
historical faith--it is pure consciousness of the divine.

The peculiar state of the soul, called mysticism, could never become
popular, or exert any very great influence. A few men, such as Tauler,
Suso, Merswin, and the unknown author of the _Theologica Germanica_
handed on--not by any means always unadulterated--the doctrine they had
received from Eckhart--which at all times appealed to a few
thinkers--but the real influence on the world and on history was
reserved for the reformers. The reformer, in his inmost nature, is
related to the people; his soul is agitated by formulas and ceremonies,
to which the mystic is indifferent; they are to him obstacles to his
faith and he strains every nerve to destroy them. He has every
appearance of the truly free spirit, but he is secretly dependent on
that against which he is fighting. He suffers under its inefficiency;
his deed is the final reaction against his environment; salvation seems
to him to lie in the improvement of existing conditions, and not until
he has succeeded in accomplishing his purpose can he hope for religious
peace. The mystic is possible in all states of civilisation. He is not
dependent on external circumstances; his whole consciousness is filled
with one problem only, before which everything else pales: the
relationship of the soul to God. But the reformer is possible only under
certain circumstances. He, too, starts from an inner religious
consciousness, but his problem is soon solved, and he devotes all his
energy to the world. The mystic is not even aware of the difference
between his own conception of God and traditional religion; he is under
the impression that he is still an orthodox believer, long after he has
broken fresh ground; for he has taken from the traditional doctrine
everything which he can re-animate. The remainder is dead as far as he
is concerned. To accuse him of heresy appears to him as a monstrous
misunderstanding.

Thus mystic and reformer drink from the same well of direct religious
consciousness. But while in the case of the mystic the well is
fathomless, it is much more shallow in the case of the reformer. Certain
of himself, he directs his energy to the conversion and reformation of
the world. He resembles in some respects the public orator and
agitator; he has a grasp of social conditions, strives to influence his
surroundings by word and deed, and is ready to sacrifice his life to his
convictions. The mystic remains solitary and misunderstood. Luther, who
was to some extent influenced by German mysticism, fought, at his best,
against the dogma of historical salvation.

It is the tragic fate of all religions that they must crystallise into a
system. A reflection of the enthusiasm which animated their founders
still falls on their disciples: Follow me! But the second generation
already demands proofs, tradition and clumsy miracles; reports are drawn
up and looked upon as sacred--religion has become a glimpse into the
past. Most people never have any direct religious experience, their
salvation lies in the dogmas, the universally accepted doctrines. The
founder of a new religion is always regarded by his contemporaries as
abnormal, and is persecuted accordingly; not in malice, but of
necessity. Arnold of Brescia died at the stake; St. Francis was no more
than a heretic tolerated by the Church, and Eckhart escaped the tribunal
of the Inquisition only through his death.

I have attempted to show in diverse domains of the higher spiritual and
psychical life, how powerfully _the Christian principle of the
individual soul, the real fundamental value of the European
civilisation_, manifested itself at the time of the Crusades, and
everywhere became the germ of new things. The deepest thinkers teach the
deification of man as the culmination of existence, the ultimate purpose
of this earthly life, and claim immortality for the soul. This position,
which may roughly be conceived as the raising of the individual into the
ideal, has determined the European ideal of culture and differentiated
it from all Orientalism, including even the loftiest Indian philosophy.
Every attempt to substitute for this fundamental concept and its
emotional content something else--whether it be pantheism, Buddhism, or
naturalism--will always remain a failure.

Side by side with the splendid achievement of the German mysticism, the
Teutonic race has always been apt to give practical proof of its
individualism by endless petty quarrels and by splittings into numerous
cliques. But even before this race began to play a pa

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/17699