y a Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos,
who said in his _Guia Espiritual_[49] that "he who would attain to the
mystical science must abandon and be detached from five things: first,
from creatures; second, from temporal things; third, from the very gifts
of the Holy Spirit; fourth, from himself; and fifth, he must be detached
even from God." And he adds that "this last is the completest of all,
because that soul only that knows how to be so detached is that which
attains to being lost in God, and only the soul that attains to being so
lost succeeds in finding itself." Emphatically a true Spaniard, Molinos,
and truly Spanish is this paradoxical expression of quietism or rather
of nihilism--for he himself elsewhere speaks of annihilation--and not
less Spanish, nay, perhaps even more Spanish, were the Jesuits who
attacked him, upholding the prerogatives of the All against the claims
of Nothingness. For religion is not the longing for self-annihilation,
but for self-completion, it is the longing not for death but for life.
"The eternal religion of the inward essence of man ... the individual
dream of the heart, is the worship of his own being, the adoration of
life," as the tortured soul of Flaubert was intimately aware (_Par les
champs et par les greves_, vii.).

When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance,
the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took concrete form in
the knightly ideal with its codes of love and honour. But it was a
paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman--_la donna_--was the divinity
enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the
memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full
force and purity; the Universe is woman. And so it was in Germany, in
France, in Provence, in Spain, in Italy, at the beginning of the modern
age. History was cast in this mould; Trojans and Romans were conceived
as knights-errant, and so too were Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan
and Saladin.... In this universal fraternity mingle angels, saints,
miracles and paradise, strangely blended with the fantasy and
voluptuousness of the Oriental world, and all baptized in the name of
Chivalry." Thus, in his _Storia della Letteratura italiana_, ii., writes
Francesco de Sanctis, and in an earlier passage he informs us that for
that breed of men "in paradise itself the lover's delight was to look
upon his lady--_Madonna_--and that he had no desire to go thither if h