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 Wuerzburg compares the Holy Virgin to a lioness who brings her dead cubs, i.e., mankind, to life with loud roaring. Bartolome 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 Wuerzburg, 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 "Phaedros" by the wisest of all Greeks, who refused to leave town because "what could Socrates learn from trees and grass?" And Julius Caesar 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: mphstoes] 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 Provencal 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 Provencal poetry and the Provencal 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. Provencals, 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 naivete 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 Schoenau, 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 Provencal 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 facades 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 aesthetic 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 facades 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 Provencal 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 Buettner 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 Provencal 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 Provencal 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 naivete; 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 Provencal 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.

Provencals 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 Bollstaedt (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 naively 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.