its
emotional content something else--whether it be pantheism, Buddhism, or
naturalism--will always remain a failure.

Side by side with the splendid achievement of the German mysticism, the
Teutonic race has always been apt to give practical proof of its
individualism by endless petty quarrels and by splittings into numerous
cliques. But even before this race began to play a part in history, at
the beginning of the third century, the principle of the individual soul
was outwardly carried to extremes. While it was the ideal of the man of
antiquity to serve the higher community of the State with body and soul,
nascent Christianity cared solely for the salvation of the individual
soul, and frequently proved this by quite external evidence, by living a
hermit's life in the desert, for instance. Children left their parents,
husband and wife separated, dignitaries forsook their office to seek
solitude and prepare their souls for the world beyond the grave. The
first convents--the outcome of Christian individualism and
asceticism--were founded; and the anti-social extreme of this
individualism acquired such ominous proportions that the Emperor Valens
in the year of grace 365, was forced to legislate against the monastic
life.

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