Primitive religions have something homeless about them, like the clouds and the wind. The mass-souls of the proto-peoples have accidentally and fugitively condensed into _one_ being, and accidental, therefore, is and remains the “where”--which is an “anywhere”--of the linkages of waking-consciousness arising from the fear and defensiveness that spread over them. Whether they stay or move on, whether they alter or not, is immaterial so far as concerns their inward significance.
From life of this order the high Cultures are separated by a deep soil-boundness. Here there is a mother-landscape behind all expression-forms, and just as the State, as temple and pyramid and cathedral, _must_ fulfil their history _there_ where their idea originated, so too the great religion of every Springtime is bound by all the roots of its being to the land over which its world-image has risen. Sacral practices and dogmas may be carried far and wide, but their inner evolution stays spellbound in the place of their birth. It is simply an impossibility that the slightest trace of evolution of Classical city-cults should be found in Gaul, or a dogmatic advance of Faustian Christianity in America. Whatever disconnects itself from the land becomes rigid and hard.
It begins, in every case, like a great cry. The dull confusedness of terror and defence suddenly passes into a pure awakening of inwardness that blossoms up, wholly plantwise, from mother earth, and sees and comprehends the depth of the light-world with _one_ outlook. Wherever introspectiveness exists as a living sense, this change is felt and welcomed as an inward rebirth. In this moment--never earlier, and never (at least with the same deep intensity) later--it traverses the chosen spirits of the time like a grand light, which dissolves all fear in blissful love and lets the invisible appear, all suddenly, in a metaphysical radiance.
Every Culture actualizes here its prime symbol. Each has its own sort of love--we may call it heavenly or metaphysical as we choose--with which it contemplates, comprehends, and takes into itself its godhead, and which remains to every other Culture inaccessible or unmeaning. Whether the world be something set under a domed light-cavern, as it was for Jesus and his companions, or just a vanishingly small bit of a star-filled infinity, as Giordano Bruno felt it; whether the Orphics take their bodily god into themselves, or the spirit of Plotinus, soaring in ecstasy, fuses in henosis with the spirit of God, or St. Bernard in his “mystic union” becomes one with the operation of infinite deity--the deep urge of the soul is governed always by the prime symbol of the particular Culture and of no other.
In the Vth Dynasty of Egypt (2680-2540), which followed that of the great pyramid-builders, the cult of the Horus-falcon, whose _ka_ dwelt in the reigning monarch, faded. The old local cults and even the profound Thot religion of Hermopolis fell into the background. The sun-religion of Re appears. Out from his palace westward every king erects a Re-sanctuary by his tomb-temple, the latter a symbol of a life directional from birth to sarcophagus-chamber, the former a symbol of grand and eternal nature. Time and Space, being and waking-being, Destiny and sacred Causality are set face to face in this mighty twin-creation as in no other architecture in the world. To both a covered way leads up; that to the Re is accompanied by reliefs figuring the power of the sun-god over the plant and animal worlds and the changings of seasons. No god-image, no temple, but only an altar of alabaster adorns the mighty terrace on which at day-break, high above the land, the Pharaoh advances out of the darkness to greet the great god who is rising up in the East.[482]
This youthful inwardness proceeds always out of a townless country-side, out of villages, hovels, sanctuaries, solitary cloisters, and hermitages. Here is formed the community of high awareness, of the spiritual elect, which inwardly is separated by a whole world from the great being-currents of the heroic and the knightly. The two prime estates, priesthood and nobility--contemplation in the cathedral and deeds before the castles, askesis and _Minne_, ecstasy and high-bred custom--begin their special histories from this point. Though the Caliph was also worldly ruler of the faithful, though the Pharaoh sacrificed in both holy places, though the German King built his family vault under the cathedral, nothing gets rid of the abyssal opposition of Time and Space that is reflected in the contrast of these two social orders. Religious history and political history, the histories of truths and facts, stand opposed and irreconcilable. Their opposition begins in cathedral and castle, it propagates itself in the ever-growing towns as the opposition of wisdom and business, and in the last stages of historical capacity it closes as a wrestle of intellect and power.
But both these movements take place on the _heights_ of humanity. Peasantdom remains historyless under it all, comprehending politics as little as it understands dogmatics. Out of the strong young religion of saintly groups, scholasticism and mysticism develop in the early towns; reformation, philosophy, and worldly learning in the increasing tumult of streets and squares; enlightenment and irreligion in the stone masses of the late megalopolis. The beliefs of the peasant outside remain “eternal” and always the same. The Egyptian hind understood nothing of this Re. He heard the name, but while a grand chapter of religious history was passing over his head in the cities, he went on worshipping the old Thinite beast-gods, until with the XXVIth Dynasty and its fellah-religion they regained supremacy. The Italian peasant prayed in Augustus’s time just as he had done long before Homer and as he does to-day. Names and dogmas of big religions, blossoming and dying in turn, have penetrated to him from the towns and have altered the sounds of his words--but the meaning remains ever the same. The French peasant lives still in the Merovingian Age. Freya or Mary, Druids or Dominicans, Rome or Geneva--nothing touches the innermost kernel of his beliefs.
But even in the towns one stratum hangs back, historically, relatively to another. Over the primitive religion of the country-side there is another popular religion, that of the small people in the underground of the towns and in the provinces. The higher a Culture rises--Middle Kingdom, Brahman period, Pre-Socratics, Pre-Confucians, Baroque--the narrower becomes the circle of those who possess the final truths of their time as reality and not as mere name and sound. How many of those who lived with Socrates, Augustine, and Pascal understood them? In religion as otherwise the human pyramid rises with increasing sharpness, till at the end of the Culture it is complete--thereafter, bit by bit, to crumble.
About 3000 in Egypt and Babylon two great religions began their life-courses. In Egypt the “reformation” period at the end of the Old Kingdom saw solar monotheism firmly founded as the religion of priests and educated persons. All other gods and goddesses--whom the peasantry and the humble people continued to worship in their former meaning--are now only incarnations or servants of the one Re. Even the particular religion of Hermopolis, with its cosmology, was adapted to the grand system, and a theological negotiation brought even the Ptah of Memphis into harmony with dogma as an abstract prime-principle of creation.[483] Exactly as in the times of Justinian and Charles V, the city-spirit asserted mastery over the soul of the land; the formative power of the Springtime had come to an end; the dogma was essentially complete, and its subsequent treatment by rational processes took down more of the structure than it improved. Philosophy began. In respect of dogma, the Middle Kingdom was as unimportant as the Baroque.
From 1500 three new religious histories begin--first the Vedic in the Punjab, then the Early Chinese in the Hwang-ho, and lastly the Classical on the north of the Ægean Sea. Distinctly as the Classical man’s world-picture and his prime symbol of the unit body is presented to us, it is difficult even to guess the details of the great Early Classical religion. For this lacuna we have to thank the Homeric poems, which hinder rather than help us in comprehending it. The new notion of godhead that was the special ideal of this Culture is the human-formed body in the light, the hero as mediator between man and god--so much, at any rate, the Iliad evidences. This body might be light-transfigured by Apollo or disjected to the winds by Dionysus, but in every case it was the basic form of Being. The σῶμα as ideal of the extended, the cosmos as sum of these unit bodies, “Being” and “the one” as the extended-in-itself and “Logos”[484] as the order thereof in the light--all this came up before the eyes of priest-men, grandly visible and having the full force of a new religion.
But the Homeric poetry is purely aristocratic. Of the two worlds--that of the noble and that of the priest, that of Taboo and that of Totem, that of heroism and that of sanctity--only the one is here living. It not only does not understand, but actually despises, the other. As in the Edda, so in Homer, it is the greatest glory of an immortal to know the way and code of nobility. The thinkers of the Classical Baroque, from Xenophanes to Plato, regarded these scenes of god-life as impudent and trivial, and they were right; they felt exactly as the theology and philosophy of the later West felt about the Germanic hero-sagas and even about Gottfried of Strassburg, Wolfram, and Walther. If the Homeric epics did not vanish as the hero-songs collected by Charlemagne vanished, it was only because there was no fully formed Classical priesthood, with the result that the Classical cities, when they arose, were intellectually dominated by a knightly and not a religious literature. The original doctrines of this religion, which out of opposition to Homer linked themselves with the (probably) still older name of Orpheus, were never written down.
All the same, they existed. Who knows what and how much is hidden behind the figures of Calchas and Tiresias? A mighty upheaval there must have been at the beginning of this Culture, as at that of others--an upheaval extending from the Ægean Sea as far as Etruria--but the Iliad shows as few signs of it as the lays of the Nibelungs and of Roland show of the inwardness and mysticism of Joachim of Floris, St. Francis, and the Crusades, or of the inner fire of that _Dies Iræ_ of Thomas of Celano, which would probably have excited mirth at a thirteenth-century court of love. Great personalities there must have been to give a mystical-metaphysical form to the new world-outlook, but we know nothing of them and it is only the gay, bright, easy side of it that passed into the song of knightly halls. Was the “Trojan War” a feud, or was it also a Crusade? What is the meaning of Helen? Even the Fall of Jerusalem has been looked at from a worldly point of view as well as from a spiritual.
In the nobles’ poetry of Homer, Dionysus and Demeter, as priests’ gods, are unhonoured.[485] But even in Hesiod, the herdsman of Ascra, the enthusiast-searcher inspired by his folk-beliefs, the ideas of the great early time are not to be found pure, any more than in Jakob Böhme the cobbler.[486] That is the second difficulty. _The great early religions, too, were the possession of a class_, and neither accessible to nor understandable by the generality; the mysticism of earliest Gothic, too, was confined to small elect circles, sealed by Latin and the difficulty of its concepts and figures, and neither nobility nor peasantry had any distinct idea of its existence. And excavation, therefore, important as it is in respect of the Classical country-faiths, can tell us as little about the Early Classical _religion_ as a village church can tell us about Abelard or Bonaventura.
But Æschylus and Pindar, at any rate, were under the spell of a great priestly tradition, and before them there were the Pythagoreans, who made the Demeter-cult their centre (thereby indicating where the kernel of that mythology is to be sought), and earlier still were the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic reformation of the seventh century; and, finally, there are the fragments of Pherecydes and Epimenides, who were not the first _but the last_ dogmatists of a theology in reality ancient. The idea that impiety was a heritable sin, visited upon the children and the children’s children, was known to Hesiod and Solon, as well as the doctrine (Apollinian also) of “Hybris.”[487] Plato, however, as an Orphic opponent of the Homeric conception of life, sets forth very ancient doctrines of hell and the judgment of the dead in his _Phædo_. We know the tremendous formula of Orphism, the Nay of the mysteries that answered the Yea of the agon, which arose, certainly by 1100 at latest, as a protest of Waking-Consciousness against Being--σῶμα σῆμα, that splendid Classical body a grave! Here man is no longer _feeling_ himself as a thing of breeding, strength, and movement; he _knows_ himself and is terrified by what he knows. Here begins the Classical askesis, which by strictest rites and expiations, even by voluntary suicide, seeks deliverance from this Euclidean body-being. It is an entirely erroneous interpretation of the Pre-Socratics to suppose that it was from the view-point of enlightenment that they spoke against Homer. It was as _ascetics_ that they did so. These “contemporaries” of Descartes and Leibniz were brought up in the strict traditions of the old great Orphism, which were as faithfully preserved in the almost claustral meditation-schools--old and famous holy places--as Gothic Scholasticism was treasured in the wholly intellectual universities of the Baroque. From the self-immolation of Empedocles the line runs straight forward to the suicide of the Roman Stoic, and straight back to “Orpheus.”
Out of these last surviving traces, however, an outline of the Early Classical religion emerges bright and distinct. Just as all Gothic inwardness directed itself upon Mary, Queen of Heaven and Virgin and Mother, so in that moment of the Classical World there arose a garland of myths, images, and figures around Demeter, the bearing mother, around Gaia and Persephone, and also Dionysus the begetter, chthonian[488] and phallic cults, festivals and mysteries of birth and death. All this, too, was characteristically Classical, conceived under the aspect of present corporeality. The Apollinian religion venerated body, the Orphic rejected it, that of Demeter celebrated the moments of fertilization and birth, in which body acquired being. There was a mysticism that reverently honoured the secret of life, in doctrine, symbol, and mime, but side by side with it there was orgiasm too, for the squandering of the body is as deeply and closely akin to asceticism as sacred prostitution is to celibacy--both, all, are negations of time. It is the reverse of the Apollinian “halt!” that checks on the threshold of Hybris; detachment is not kept, but flung away. He who has experienced these things in his soul has “from being a mortal become a god.” In those days there must have been great saints and seers who towered as far above the figures of Heraclitus and Empedocles as the latter above the itinerant teachers of Cynicism and Stoicism--things of this order do not happen namelessly and impersonally. As the songs of Achilles and Odysseus were dying down everywhere, a grand, strict doctrine arose at the famous old cult-places, a mysticism and scholasticism with developed educational methods and a secret oral tradition, as in India. But all that is buried, and the relics of the later times barely suffice to prove that it once existed.
By putting the knightly poetry and folk-cults quite aside, then, we can even now determine something more of this (_the_) Classical religion. But in doing so there is a third pitfall to be avoided--the opposing of Greek religion to Roman religion. For in reality there was no such opposition.
Rome is only _one_ of innumerable city-states that arose during the great epoch of colonization. It was built by Etruscans. From the religious point of view it was re-created under the Etruscan dynasty of the sixth century, and it is possible indeed that the Capitoline group of deities, Jupiter, Juno, Minerva--which at that time replaced the ancient trinity, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, of the “Numa” religion--was in some way connected with the family cult of the Tarquins, in which case Minerva, as goddess of the city, is unmistakably a copy of Athene Polias.[489] The cults of this single city are properly comparable only with those of _individual_ Greek-speaking cities of the same degree of maturity, say Sparta or Thebes, which were in nowise more colourful. The little that in these latter discloses itself as generally Hellenic will also prove to be generally Italian. And as for the claim that the “Roman” religion is distinguished from that of the Greek city-states by the absence of myth--what is the basis of our knowledge on the point? We should know nothing at all of the great god-sagas of the Springtime if we had only the festival-calendar and the public cults of the Greek city-states to go upon, just as we should learn nothing of Jesus’s piety from the proceedings of the Council of Ephesus or of that of St. Francis from a church constitution of the Reformation. Menelaus and Helen were for the Laconian state-cult tree-deities and nothing more. The Classical myth derives from a period when the Poleis with their festivals and sacral constitutions were not yet in existence, when there was not only no Rome, but no Athens. With the religious duties and notions of the cities--which were eminently rational--it has no connexion at all. Indeed, myth and cult are even less in touch with one another in the Classical Culture than in others. The myth, moreover, is in no way a creation of the Hellenic culture-field as a whole--it is not “Greek”--but originated (like the stories of Jesus’s childhood and the Grail legend) in this and that group, quite local, under pressure of deep inward stirrings. For instance, the idea of Olympus arose in Thessaly and thence, as a common property of _all_ educated persons, spread out to Cyprus and to Etruria, thus, of course, involving Rome. Etruscan painting presupposes it as a thing of common knowledge, and therefore the Tarquins and their court must have been familiar with it. We may attach any implications we please to “belief” (whatever that may mean) in this myth; the point is that they will be as valid for Romans of the period of the Kings as for the inhabitants of Tegea or Corcyra.
That the pictures of Greek and Roman mythology that modern research has developed are quite different from this is the result not of the facts, but of the _methods_. In the case of Rome (Mommsen) the festal calendar and the State cults, in that of Greece the poetic literature, were taken as the starting-points. Apply the “Latin” method which has led up to Wissowa’s picture to the Greek cities, and the result is a wholly similar picture, as, for example, in Nilsson’s _Griechische Festen_.
When this is taken into consideration, the Classical religion is seen to be a whole possessing an inner unity. The grand god-legends of the eleventh century, which have the dew of Spring upon them, and in their tragic holiness remind us of Gethsemane, Balder’s death, and Francis, are the purest essence of “theoria,” contemplation, a world-picture before the inner eye, and born of the common inward awakening of a group of chosen souls from the world of chivalry.[490] But the much later city-religions are wholly _technique_, formal worship, and as such represent only one side (and a different side) of piety. They are as far from the great myth as they are from the folk-belief. They are concerned neither with metaphysic nor with ethic, but only with the fulfilment of sacral acts. And, finally, the choice of cults by the several cities very often originated, not, like the myth, from a single world-view, but from the accidental ancestor- and family-cults of great houses, which (precisely as in the Gothic) made their sacred figures the tutelary deities of the city and at the same time reserved to themselves the rights of celebrating and worshipping them. In Rome, for example, the Lupercalia in honour of the field-god Faunus were a privilege of the Quinctii and Fabii.
The Chinese religion, of which the great “Gothic” period lies between 1300 and 1100 and covers the rise of the Chóu dynasty, must be treated with extreme care. In presence of the superficial profundity and pedantic enthusiasm of Chinese thinkers of the Confucius and Lao-tse type--who were all born in the _ancien régime_ period of their state-world--it seems very hazardous to try to determine anything at all as to high mysticism and grand legends in the beginning. Nevertheless, such a mysticism and such legends must once have existed. But it is not from these over-rationalized philosophies of the great cities that we shall learn anything about them--as little as Homer can give us in the Classical parallel, though for another reason. What should we know about Gothic piety if all its works had undergone the censorship of Puritans and Retioralists like Locke, Rousseau, and Wolff! And yet we treat the Confucian _close_ of Chinese inwardness as its beginning--if, indeed, we do not go farther and describe the syncretism of Han times as “the” religion of China.[491]
We know nowadays that, contrary to the usual assumption, there was a powerful old-Chinese priesthood.[492] We know that in the text of the Shu-Ching, relics of the ancient hero-sagas and god-myths were worked over rationalistically, and were thus able to survive, and similarly the Hou-li, Ngi-li, and Shi-King[493] would still reveal a good deal more if only they were attacked with the conviction that there was in them something far deeper than Confucius and his like were capable of comprehending. We hear of chthonian and phallic cults in early Chóu times; of orgiastic rites in which the service of the gods was accompanied by ecstatic mass-dances; of mimic representations and dialogues between god and priestess, out of which probably (as in Greece) the Chinese drama evolved.[494] And we obtain an inkling finally of why the luxuriant growth of early Chinese god-figures and myths was necessarily swallowed up in an emperor-mythology. For not only all saga-emperors, but also most of the figures of the Hia and Shang dynasties before 1400 are--all dates and chronicles notwithstanding--nothing but nature transformed into history. The origins of such a process lie deep in the possibilities of every young Culture.[495] Ancestor-worship ever seeks to gain power over the nature-dæmons. All Homeric heroes, and Minos and Theseus and Romulus, are gods become kings. In the _Heliand_,[496] Christ is about to become so. Mary is the crowned Queen of Heaven. It is the supreme (and perfectly unconscious) mode which enables men of breeding to venerate something--that is, for them, what is great must have breeding, race, must be mighty and lordly, the ancestor of whole families. A strong priesthood is able to make short work of this mythology of Time, but it won through partially in the Classical and completely in China--exactly in proportion to the disappearance of the priestly element. The old gods are now emperors, princes, ministers, and retainers; natural events have become acts of rulers, and onsets of peoples social enterprises. Nothing could have suited the Confucians better. Here was a myth which could absorb social-ethical tendencies to an indefinite extent, and all that was necessary was to expunge the traces of the original nature-myth.
To the Chinese waking-consciousness heaven and earth were halves of the macrocosm, without opposition, each a mirror-image of the other. In this picture there was neither Magian dualism nor Faustian unity of active force. Becoming appears in the unconstrained reciprocal working of two principles, the _yang_ and the _yin_, which were conceived rather as periodic than as polar. Accordingly, there are two souls in man, the _kwei_ which corresponded with the _yin_, the earthly, the dark, the cold, and disintegrated with the body; and the _sen_, which is higher, light, and permanent.[497] But, further, there are innumerable multitudes of souls of both kinds outside man. Troops of spirits fill the air and the water and the earth--all is peopled and moved by _kweis_ and _sens_. The life of nature and that of man are in reality made out of the play of such units. Wisdom, will, force, and virtue depend on their relationship. Asceticism and orgiasm; the knightly custom of _hiao_, which requires the noble to revenge an impiety towards an ancestor even after centuries, and commands him never to survive defeat;[498] and the reasoning moral of the _yen_, which, according to the judgment of rationalism, followed from knowledge--all proceed from conceptions of the forces and possibilities of the _kwei_ and the _sen_.
All this is concentrated in the basic word “_tao_.” The conflict between the _yang_ and the _yin_ in man is the _tao_ of his life; the warp and woof of the spirit-swarms outside him are the _tao_ of Nature. The world possesses _tao_ inasmuch as it possesses beat, rhythm, and periodicity. It possesses _li_, tension, inasmuch as man knows it and abstracts from it fixed relationships for future use. Time, Destiny, Direction, Race, History--all this, contemplated with the great world-embracing vision of the early Chóu times, lies in this one word. The path of the Pharaoh through the dark alley to his shrine is related to it, and so is the Faustian passion of the third dimension, but _tao_ is nevertheless far removed from any idea of the technical conquest of Nature. The Chinese park avoids energetic perspective. It lays horizon behind horizon and, instead of pointing to a goal, tempts to wander. The Chinese “cathedral” of the early time, the Pi-Yung, with its paths that lead through gates and thickets, stairs and bridges and courts, has never the inexorable march of Egypt or the drive into depth of the Gothic.
When Alexander appeared on the Indus, the piety of these three Cultures--Chinese, Indian, Classical--had long been moulded into the historyless forms of a broad Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. But it was not long before the group of Magian religions arose in the region intermediate between the Classical and the Indian field, and it must have been at about the same time that the religious history of the Maya and Inca, now hopelessly lost to us, began. A thousand years later, when here also all was inwardly fulfilled and done with, there appeared on the unpromising soil of France, sudden and swiftly mounting, Germanic-Catholic Christianity. It was in this case as in every other; whether the whole stock of names and practices came from the East, or whether thousands of particular details were derived from primeval Germanic and Celtic feelings, the Gothic religion is something so new and unheard-of, something of which the final depths are so completely incomprehensible by anyone outside its faith, that to contrive linkages for them on the historical surface is meaningless jugglery.
The mythic world that thereupon formed itself around this young soul, an integer of force, will, and direction seen under the symbol of Infinity, a stupendous action-into-distance, chasms of terror and of bliss suddenly opening up--it was all, for the elect of this early religiousness, something so entirely natural that they could not even detach themselves sufficiently to “know” it as a unit. They lived in it. To us, on the contrary, who are separated from these ancestors by thirty generations, this world seems so alien and overpowering that we always seek to grasp it in detail, and so misunderstand its wholeness and undividedness.
The father-godhead men felt as Force itself, eternal, grand, and ever-present activity, sacred causality, which could scarcely assume any form comprehensible by human eyes. But the whole longing of the young breed, the whole desire of this strongly coursing blood, to bow itself in humility before the _meaning of the blood_ found its expression in the figure of the Virgin and Mother Mary, whose crowning in the heavens was one of the earliest motives of the Gothic art. She is a light-figure, in white, blue, and gold, surrounded by the heavenly hosts. She leans over the new-born Child; she fells the sword in her heart; she stands at the foot of the cross; she holds the corpse of the dead Son. From the turn of the tenth century on, Petrus Damiani and Bernard of Clairvaux developed her cult; there arose the Ave Maria and the angelic greeting and later, among the Dominicans, the crown of roses. Countless legends gathered round her figure.[499] She is the guardian of the Church’s store of Grace, the Great Intercessor. Among the Franciscans arose the festival of the Visitation, amongst the English Benedictines (even before 1100) that of the Immaculate Conception, which elevated her completely above mortal humanity into the world of light.
But this world of purity, light, and utter beauty of soul would have been unimaginable without the counter-idea, inseparable from it, an idea that constitutes one of the maxima of Gothic, one of its unfathomable creations--one that the present day forgets, and _deliberately_ forgets. While she there sits enthroned, smiling in her beauty and tenderness, there lies in the background another world that throughout nature and throughout mankind weaves and breeds ill, pierces, destroys, seduces--namely, the realm of the Devil. It penetrates the whole of Creation, it lies ambushed everywhere. All around is an army of goblins, night-spirits, witches, werewolves, all in human shape. No man knows whether or not his neighbour has signed himself away to the Evil One. No one can say of an unfolding child that it is not already a devil’s temptress. An appalling fear, such as is perhaps only paralleled in the early spring of Egypt, weighs upon man. Every moment he may stumble into the abyss. There were black magic, and devils’ masses and witches’ sabbaths, night feasts on mountain-tops, magic draughts and charm-formulæ. The Prince of Hell, with his relatives--mother and grandmother, for as his very existence denies and scorns the sacrament of marriage, he may not have wife or child--his fallen angels and his uncanny henchmen, is one of the most tremendous creations in all religious history. The Germanic Loki is hardly more than a preliminary hint of him. Their grotesque figures, with horns, claws, and horses’ hoofs, were already fully formed in the mystery plays of the eleventh century; everywhere the artist’s fancy abounded in them, and, right up to Dürer and Grünewald, Gothic painting is unthinkable without them. The Devil is sly, malignant, malicious, but yet in the end the powers of light dupe him. He and his brood, bad-tempered, coarse, fiendishly inventive, are of a monstrous imaginativeness, incarnations of hellish laughter opposed to the illumined smile of the Queen of Heaven, but incarnations, too, of Faustian world-humour[500] opposed to the panic of the sinner’s contrition.
It is not possible to exaggerate either the grandeur of this forceful, insistent picture or the depth of sincerity with which it was believed in. The Mary-myths and the Devil-myth formed themselves side by side, neither possible without the other. Disbelief in either of them was deadly sin. There was a Mary-cult of prayer, and a Devil-cult of spells and exorcisms. Man walked continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit. Life in this world is a ceaseless and desperate contest with the Devil, into which every individual plunges as a member of the Church Militant, to do battle for himself and to win his knight’s spurs. The Church Triumphant of angels and saints in their glory looks down from on high, and heavenly Grace is the warrior’s shield in the battle. Mary is the protectress to whose bosom he can fly to be comforted, and the high lady who awards the prizes of valour. Both worlds have their legends, their art, their scholasticism, and their mysticism--for the Devil, too, can work miracles. Characteristic of this alone among the religious Springtimes is the symbolism of _colour_--to the Madonna belong white and blue, to the Devil black, sulphur-yellow, and red. The saints and angels float in the æther, but the devils leap and crouch and the witches rustle through the night. It is the two together, light and night, which fill Gothic art with its indescribable inwardness--that, and not any “artistic” fancifulness. Every man knew the world to be peopled with angel and devil troops. The light-encircled angels of Fra Angelico and the early Rhenish masters, and the grimacing things on the portals of the great cathedrals, _really_ filled the air. Men saw them, felt their presence everywhere. To-day we simply no longer know what a myth is; for it is no mere æsthetically pleasing mode of representing something to oneself, but a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every corner of the waking-consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being. These creatures were about one all the time. They were glimpsed without being seen. They were believed in with a faith that felt the very thought of proof as a desecration. What we call myth nowadays, our littérateur’s and connoisseur’s taste for Gothic colour, is nothing but Alexandrinism. In the old days men did not “enjoy” it--behind it stood Death.[501]
For the Devil gained possession of human souls and seduced them into heresy, lechery, and black arts. It was war that was waged against him on earth,[502] and waged with fire and sword upon those who had given themselves up to him. It is easy enough for us to-day to think ourselves out of such notions, but if we eliminate this appalling reality from Gothic, all that remains is mere romanticism. It was not only the love-glowing hymns to Mary, but the cries of countless pyres as well that rose up to heaven. Hard by the Cathedral were the gallows and the wheel. Every man lived in those days in the consciousness of an immense danger, and it was hell, not the hangman, that he feared. Unnumbered thousands of witches genuinely imagined themselves to be so; they denounced themselves, prayed for absolution, and in pure love of truth confessed their night rides and bargains with the Evil One. Inquisitors, in tears and compassion for the fallen wretches, doomed them to the rack in order to save their souls. That is the Gothic myth, out of which came the cathedral, the crusader, the deep and spiritual painting, the mysticism. In its shadow flowered that profound Gothic blissfulness of which to-day we cannot even form an idea.
In Carolingian times, all this was still strange and far. Charlemagne in the first Saxon Capitulary (787) put a ban on the ancient Germanic belief in werewolves and night-gangers (_strigæ_), and as late as 1120 it was condemned as an error in the decree of Burkard of Worms. But twenty years later it was only in a dilute form that the anathema reappeared in the _Decretum Gratiani_. Cæsarius of Heisterbach, already, was familiar with the whole devil-legend and in the _Legenda Aurea_ it is just as actual and as effective as the Mary-legends. In 1233, when the Cathedrals of Mainz and Speyer were being vaulted, appeared the bull _Vox in Rama_, by which the belief in Devil and witch was made canonical. St. Francis’s “Hymn to the Sun” had not long been written, and the Franciscans were kneeling in intimate prayer before Mary and spreading her cult afar, when the Dominicans armed themselves for battle with the Devil by setting up the Inquisition. Heavenly love found its focus in the Mary-image, and _eo ipso_ earthly love became akin to the Devil. Woman is Sin--so the great ascetics felt, as their fellows of the Classical, of China, and of India had felt. The Devil rules only through woman. The witch is the propagator of deadly sin. It was Thomas Aquinas who evolved the repulsive theory of Incubus and Succuba. Inward mystics like Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, developed a full metaphysic of the devilish.
The Renaissance had ever the strong faith of the Gothic at the back of its world-outlook. When Vasari eulogized Cimabue and Giotto for returning to Nature as their teacher, it was this Gothic nature that he had in mind, a nature influenced in every nook by the encircling troops of angels and devils that stood there, ever threatening, in the light. “Imitation” of Nature meant imitation of its soul, not of its surface. Let us be rid at last of the fable of a renewal of Classical “Antiquity.” Renaissance, _Rinascita_, meant then the Gothic uplift from A.D. 1000 onward,[503] the new _Faustian_ world-feeling, the new personal experience of _the Ego in the Infinite_. For some individual spirits, no doubt, it meant a sentimental enthusiasm for the Classical (or what was thought to be the Classical), but that was a manifestation of taste, nothing more.[504] The Classical myth was entertainment-material, an allegorical play, through the thin veil of which men saw, no less definitely than before, the old Gothic actuality. When Savonarola stood up, the antique trappings vanished from the surface of Florentine life in an instant. It was all for the church that the Florentines laboured, and with conviction. Raphael was the most deeply intimate of all Madonna-painters. A firm belief in the realm of Satan, and in deliverance from it through the saints, lay at the root of all this art and literature; and every one of them, painters, architects, and humanists--however often the names of Cicero and Virgil, Venus and Apollo were on their lips--looked upon the burning of witches as something entirely natural and wore amulets against the devil. The writings of Marsilius Ficinus are full of learned disquisitions on devils and witches. Francesco della Mirandola wrote (in elegant Latin) his dialogue “The Witch” in order to warn the fine intellects of his circle against a danger.[505] When Leonardo da Vinci, at the summit of the Renaissance, was working upon his “Anna Selbdritt,”[506] the “Witches’ Hammer” was being written in Rome (1487) in the finest Humanistic Latin. It was _these_ that constitute the real myth of the Renaissance, and without them we shall never understand the glorious and truly Gothic force of this anti-Gothic movement.[507] Men who did not feel the Devil very near at hand could not have created the _Divina Commedia_ or the frescoes of Orvieto[508] or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
It was the tremendous background of this myth that awakened in the Faustian soul a feeling of what it was. An Ego lost in Infinity, an Ego that was all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity of greater forces;[509] that was all will, but a will full of fear for its freedom. Never has the problem of Free-will been meditated upon more deeply or more painfully. Other Cultures have simply not known it. But precisely because here Magian resignation was totally impossible--because that which thought was not an “it” or particle of an all-soul, but an individual, fighting Ego, seeking to maintain itself--every limitation upon freedom was felt as a chain that had to be dragged along through life, and life in turn was felt as a living death. And if so--why? For _what_?
The result of this in-looking was that immense sense of guilt which runs throughout these centuries like one long, desperate lament. The cathedrals rose ever more supplicatingly to heaven, the Gothic vaulting became a joining of hands in prayer, and little comfort of light shone through the high windows into the night of the long naves. The choking parallel-sequences of the church chants, the Latin hymns, tell of bruised knees and flagellations in the nocturnal cell. For Magian man the world-cavern had been close and the heaven impending, but for Gothic man heaven was infinitely far. No hand seemed to reach down from these spaces, and all about the lone Ego the mocking Devil’s world lay in leaguer. And, therefore, the great longing of Mysticism was to lose created form (as Heinrich Seuse said), to be rid of self and all things (Meister Eckart), to abandon selfness (_Theologie deutsch_).[510] And out of these longings there grew up an unending dogged subtilizing on notions which were ever more and more finely dissected to get at the “why,” and finally a universal cry for Grace--not the Magian Grace coming down as substance, but the Faustian Grace that unbinds the Will.
_To be able to will freely_ is, at the very bottom, the one gift that the Faustian soul asks of heaven. The seven sacraments of the Gothic, felt as one by Peter Lombard, elevated into dogma by the Lateran Council of 1215, and grounded in mystical foundations by Thomas Aquinas, mean this and only this. They accompany the unit soul from birth to death and protect it against the diabolical powers that seek to nest themselves in its will. For to sell oneself to the Devil means to deliver up _one’s will_ to him. The Church Militant on earth is the visible community of those who are enabled, by enjoyment of the sacraments, to will. This certainty of free being is held to be guaranteed in the altar-sacrament, which accordingly suffers a complete change of meaning. The miracle of the holy transformation which takes place daily under the hands of the priest--the consecrated Host in the high altar of the cathedral, wherein the believer sensed the presence of him who of old sacrificed himself to secure for his own the _freedom to will_--called forth a sigh of relief of such depth and sincerity as we moderns can hardly imagine. It was in thanksgiving, therefore, that the chief feast of the Catholic Church, Corpus Christi, was founded in 1264.[511]
But more important still--and by far--was the essentially Faustian prime-sacrament of Contrition. This ranks with the Mary-myth and the Devil-myth as the third great creation of the Gothic. And, indeed, it is from this third that the other two derive depth and meaning; it discloses the last secrets of this Culture’s soul, and so sets it apart from all other Cultures. The effect of the Magian baptism was to incorporate a man in the great _consensus_--the _one_ great “it” of the divine spirit took up its abode in him as in the others, and thereafter resignation to all that should happen became his duty. But in the Faustian contrition the _idea of personality_ was implicit. It is not true that the Renaissance discovered personality[512]; what it did was to bring personality up to a brilliant surface, whereby it suddenly became visible to everyone. Its birth is in Gothic; it is the most intimate and peculiar property of Gothic; it is one and the same with Gothic soul. For this contrition is something that each one accomplishes for himself alone. He alone can search his own conscience. He alone stands rueful in the presence of the Infinite. He alone can and must in confession understand and put into words his own past. And even the absolution that frees his Ego for new responsible action is personal to himself. Baptism is wholly impersonal--one receives it because one is _a_ man, not because one is _this_ man--but the idea of contrition presupposes that the value of every act depends uniquely upon the man who does it. This is what differentiates the Western drama from the Classical, the Chinese, and the Indian. This is what directs our legislation more and more with reference to the doer rather than to the deed, and bases our primary ethical conceptions on individual doing and not typical behaviour. Faustian responsibility instead of Magian resignedness, the individual instead of the _consensus_; relief from, instead of submissiveness under, burdens--that is the difference between the most active and the most passive of all sacraments, and at the back of it again lies the difference between the world-cavern and infinity-dynamics. Baptism is something done upon one, Contrition something done by oneself within oneself. And, moreover, this conscientious searching of one’s own past is both the earliest evidence of, and the finest training for, the _historical sense_ of Faustian mankind. There is no other Culture in which the personal life of the living man, the conscientious tracing of each feature, has been so important, for this alone has required the accounts to be rendered in words. If historical research and biography are characteristic of the spirit of the West from its beginnings; if both in the last resort are self-examination and confession; if our lives are led with an assuredness and conscious reference to the historic background that nowhere else has been even imagined as possible or tolerable; if, lastly, we habitually look at history in terms of millennia, not rhapsodically or decoratively as in the Classical World and in China, but directionally and with the almost sacramental formula “_Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner_” ever in our minds--we have this sacrament of the Gothic Church, this continual unburdening of the Ego by _historical_ test and justification to thank for it. Every confession is an autobiography. This peculiar liberation of the will is to us so necessary that the refusal of absolution drives to despair, even to destruction. Only he who senses the bliss of such an inward acquittal can comprehend the old name of the _sacramentum resurgentium_, the sacrament of those who are risen again.[513]
When in this heaviest of decisions the soul is left to its own resources, something unresolved remains hanging over it like a perpetual cloud. It may be said, therefore, that perhaps no institution in any religion has brought so much happiness into the world as this. The whole inwardness and heavenly love of the Gothic rests upon the certainty of full absolution through the power invested in the priest. In the insecurity that ensued from the decline of this sacrament, both Gothic joy of life and the Mary-world of the light faded out. Only the Devil’s world, with its grim all-presentness, remained. And then, in place of the blissfulness irrecoverably lost, came the Protestant, and especially Puritan, heroism, which could fight on, even hopeless, in a lost position. “Auricular confession,” said Goethe once, “ought never to have been taken from mankind.” Over the lands in which it had died out, a heavy earnestness spread itself. Ethic and costume, art and thought, took on the night-colour of the only myth that remained outstanding. Nothing is less sunlit than the doctrines of Kant. “Every man his own priest” is a conviction to which men could win through, but only as to that part of priesthood that involves duties, _not as to that which possesses powers_. No man confesses himself with the inward certainty of absolution. And as the need of the soul to be relieved of its past and to be redirected remained urgent as ever, all the higher forms of communication were transmuted, and in Protestant countries music and painting, letter-writing and memoirs, from being modes of description became modes of self-denunciation, penance, and unbounded confession. Even in Catholic regions too--in Paris above all--art as psychology set in as doubt in the sacrament of Contrition and Absolution grew. Outlook on the world was lost in ceaseless mine-warfare within the self. In lieu of the Infinite, contemporaries and descendants were called in to be priests and judges. Personal art, in the sense that distinguishes Goethe from Dante, and Rembrandt from Michelangelo, was a substitute for the sacrament of confession. It was, also, the sign that this Culture was already in the condition of a Late period.[514]