This hatred of the world, which was quite in harmony with the spirit of Christianity, was only overcome by the profounder concepts of German mysticism, for in the primitive dualistic view of the first millenary the renunciation of the world was the only possibility of avoiding sin. The Emperor Justinian decreed that any man who induced a consecrated nun to marry him should be punished by death. The thought that personal greatness did not consist in renouncing the world but in living in it and overcoming it, had not yet been conceived.
The delight in the human form, characteristic of antiquity, was extinguished, a crude dualism denied all antique values. The body must be hated, so that the soul could flourish. But as the Hellenic period was preceded by vague, unindividualised, material life, so the impersonal, chaotic, spiritual life of the first thousand years of Christianity matured the individual soul. It found its climax in Dante and Eckhart, the greatest poet of the Neo-Latin race, and the most illumined religious genius of Germany. These two men, who were contemporaries (Dante died in 1321 and Eckhart in 1329), finally revealed the character of two kindred nations, completing and fructifying each other. In Dante the great artistic power of the Neo-Latin race appeared for the first time in its full intensity; it took possession of the whole visible universe, and poured new beauty into the traditional myths of Christendom. Eckhart experienced and recreated the shapeless depths of the soul, the regions of the blending of the soul with God. With these two men Europe definitely severed herself from antiquity and barbarism, henceforth to follow her own star.
The new world had come into existence! Renascence, the lucky heir, gathered the ripe fruit from the tree of art which had blossomed so marvellously. God was no longer sought in the depth of the soul, all emotion was projected into the world of sense. Churches were built, not from an irresistible impulse, but as store-houses of the pictures which were painted with amazing rapidity. The fundamental principle of personality was externalised in the Renascence. Vanity and boasting, traces of which frequently appeared in the age of chivalry, grew exuberantly. No less manifest than the incomparable genius and _esprit_ of the heyday of the Renascence--although far less frequently commented on--was the desire to be conspicuous, to shine, to display wealth and learning. The essence of personality, instead of being sought in the soul, was sought in outward magnificence. As a matter of fact, the much extolled Renascence only perfected the various branches of art and poetry, which had sprung up in the period of the Crusades. The latter was the time of the planting of the tree of European culture; all that followed was merely its growth and ramification. Only exact science had its origin in the Renascence, and this fact, in historical perspective, must be regarded as the supreme glory of this period. However paradoxical it may sound--the "impersonal" science is the perfection of the European system of individualism, its most potent weapon for taking spiritual possession of the world and all that the world contains. The consciousness of personality had to permeate the whole soul before it could recover its external function: organic existence justified by itself. While art borrows from nature and mankind all that we ourselves deem beautiful, perfect, valuable, and imposes on the world a man-made law--science strives to understand all things and all creatures according to the law which dominates them; it strives to comprehend nature and humanity--even where they are foreign and hostile--not according to human values, but according to their inherent nature--and this is only possible when the individuality of all things is respected. The method of science has slowly become the perfect weapon by whose aid Europe has attained the mastery of the world; it rests on the fundamental feeling for the material, and is capable of confronting the "I" with the whole system of natural phenomena, the "not-I," and expresses the final victory of comprehending spirit over matter.