From the later days of the Renaissance onward, the notion of God has steadily approximated, in the spirit of every man of high significance, to the idea of pure endless Space. The God of Ignatius Loyola’s exercitia spiritualis is the God also of Luther’s “ein’ feste Burg,” of the Improperia of Palestrina and the Cantatas of Bach. He is no longer the Father of St. Francis of Assisi and the high-vaulted cathedrals, the personally-present, caring and mild God felt by Gothic painters like Giotto and Stephen Lochner, but an impersonal principle; unimaginable, intangible, working mysteriously in the Infinite. Every relic of personality dissolves into insensible abstraction, such a divinity as only instrumental music of the grand style is capable of representing, a divinity before which painting breaks down and drops into the background. This God-feeling it was that formed the scientific world-image of the West, its “Nature,” its “experience” and therefore its theories and its methods, in direct contradiction to those of the Classical. The force which moves the mass—that is what Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel; that is what we feel growing more and more intense from the archetype of Il Gesù to the climax in the cathedral façades of Della Porta and Maderna, and from Heinrich Schütz to the transcendent tone-worlds of 18th-Century church music; that is what in Shakespearian tragedy fills with world-becoming scenes widened to infinity. And that is what Galileo and Newton captured in formulæ and concepts.

The word “God” rings otherwise under the vaulting of Gothic cathedrals or in the cloisters of Maulbronn and St. Gallen than in the basilicas of Syria and the temples of Republican Rome. The character of the Faustian cathedral is that of the forest. The mighty elevation of the nave above the flanking aisles, in contrast to the flat roof of the basilica; the transformation of the columns, which with base and capital had been set as self-contained individuals in space, into pillars and clustered-pillars that grow up out of the earth and spread on high into an infinite subdivision and interlacing of lines and branches; the giant windows by which the wall is dissolved and the interior filled with mysterious light—these are the architectural actualizing of a world-feeling that had found the first of all its symbols in the high forest of the Northern plains, the deciduous forest with its mysterious tracery, its whispering of ever-mobile foliage over men’s heads, its branches straining through the trunks to be free of earth. Think of Romanesque ornamentation and its deep affinity to the sense of the woods. The endless, lonely, twilight wood became and remained the secret wistfulness in all Western building-forms, so that when the form-energy of the style died down—in late Gothic as in closing Baroque—the controlled abstract line-language resolved itself immediately into naturalistic branches, shoots, twigs and leaves.

Cypresses and pines, with their corporeal and Euclidean effect, could never have become symbols of unending space. But the oaks, beeches and lindens with the fitful light-flecks playing in their shadow-filled volume are felt as bodiless, boundless, spiritual. The stem of the cypress finds conclusive fulfilment of its vertical tendency in the defined columniation of its cone-masses, but that of an oak seems, ever restless and unsatisfied, to strain beyond its summit. In the ash, the victory of the upstriving branches over the unity of the crown seems actually to be won. Its aspect is of something dissolving, something expanding into space, and it was for this probably that the World-Ash Yggdrasil became a symbol in the Northern mythology. The rustle of the woods, a charm that no Classical poet ever felt—for it lies beyond the possibilities of Apollinian Nature-feeling—stands with its secret questions “whence? whither?” its merging of presence into eternity, in a deep relation with Destiny, with the feeling of History and Duration, with the quality of Direction that impels the anxious, caring, Faustian soul towards infinitely-distant Future. And for that reason the organ, that roars deep and high through our churches in tones which, compared with the plain solid notes of aulos and cithara, seem to know neither limit nor restraint, is the instrument of instruments in Western devotions. Cathedral and organ form a symbolic unity like temple and statue. The history of organ-building, one of the most profound and moving chapters of our musical history, is a history of a longing for the forest, a longing to speak in the language of that true temple of Western God-fearing. From the verse of Wolfram von Eschenbach to the music of “Tristan” this longing has borne fruit unceasingly. Orchestra-tone strove tirelessly in the 18th Century towards a nearer kinship with the organ-tone. The word “schwebend”—meaningless as applied to Classical things—is important alike in the theory of music, in oil-painting, in architecture and in the dynamic physics of the Baroque. Stand in a high wood of mighty stems while the storm is tearing above, and you will comprehend instantly the full meaning of the concept of a force which moves mass.

Out of such a primary feeling in the existence that has become thoughtful there arises, then, an idea of the Divine immanent in the world-around, and this idea becomes steadily more definite. The thoughtful percipient takes in the impression of motion in outer Nature. He feels about him an almost indescribable alien life of unknown powers, and traces the origin of these effects to “numina,” to The Other, inasmuch as this Other also possesses Life. Astonishment at alien motion is the source of religion and of physics both; respectively, they are the elucidations of Nature (world-around) by the soul and by the reason. The “powers” are the first object both of fearful or loving reverence and of critical investigation. There is a religious experience and a scientific experience.

Now it is important to observe how the consciousness of the Culture intellectually concretes its primary “numina.” It imposes significant words—names—on them and there conjures (seizes or bounds) them. By virtue of the Name they are subject to the intellectual power of the man who possesses the Name, and (as has been shown already) the whole of philosophy, the whole of science, and everything that is related in any way to “knowing” is at the very bottom nothing but an infinitely-refined mode of applying the name-magic of the primitive to the “alien.” The pronouncement of the right name (in physics, the right concept) is an incantation. Deities and basic notions of science alike come into being first as vocable names, with which is linked an idea that tends to become more and more sensuously definite. The outcome of a Numen is a Deus, the outcome of a notion is an idea. In the mere naming of “thing-in-itself,” “atom,” “energy,” “gravitation,” “cause,” “evolution” and the like is for most learned men the same sense of deliverance as there was for the peasant of Latium in the words “Ceres,” “Consus,” “Janus,” “Vesta.”[[490]]

For the Classical world-feeling, conformably to the Apollinian depth-experience and its symbolism, the individual body was “Being.” Logically therefore the form of this body, as it presented itself in the light, was felt as its essence, as the true purport of the word “being.” What has not shape, what is not a shape, is not at all. On the basis of this feeling (which was of an intensity that we can hardly imagine) the Classical spirit created as counter-concept[[491]] to the form of “The Other” Non-Form viz., stuff, ἀρχή, ὕλη, that which in itself possesses no being and is merely complement to the actual “Ent,” representing a secondary and corollary necessity. In these conditions, it is easy to see how the Classical pantheon inevitably shaped itself, as a higher mankind side by side with the common mankind, as a set of perfectly-formed bodies, of high possibilities incarnate and present, but in the unessential of stuff not distinguished and therefore subject to the same cosmic and tragic necessity.

It is otherwise that the Faustian world-feeling experiences depth. Here the sum of true Being appears as pure efficient Space, which is being. And therefore what is sensuously felt, what is very significantly designated the plenum (das Raumerfüllende), is felt as a fact of the second order, as something questionable or specious, as a resistance that must be overcome by philosopher or physicist before the true content of Being can be discovered. Western scepticism has never been directed against Space, always against tangible things only. Space is the higher idea—force is only a less abstract expression for it—and it is only as a counter-concept to space that mass arises. For mass is what is in space and is logically and physically dependent upon space. From the assumption of a wave-motion of light, which underlies the conception of light as a form of energy, the assumption of a corresponding mass, the “luminiferous æther” necessarily followed. A definition of mass and ascription of properties to mass follows from the definition of force (and not vice versa) with all the necessity of a symbol. All Classical notions of substantiality, however they differed amongst themselves as realist or idealist, distinguish a “to-be-formed,” that is, a Nonent, which only receives closer definition from the basic concept of form, whatever this form may be in the particular philosophical system. All Western notions of substantiality distinguish a “to-be-moved,” which also is a negative, no doubt, but one polar to a different positive. Form and non-form, force and non-force—these words render as clearly as may be the polarities that in the two Cultures underlie the world-impression and contain all its modes. That which comparative philosophy has hitherto rendered inaccurately and misleadingly by the one word “matter” signifies in the one case the substratum of shape, in the other the substratum of force. No two notions could differ more completely. For here it is the feeling of God, a sense of values, that is speaking. The Classical deity is superlative shape, the Faustian superlative force. The “Other” is the Ungodly to which the spirit will not accord the dignity of Being; to the Apollinian world-feeling this ungodly “other” is substance without shape, to the Faustian it is substance without force.

VIII

Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances,” this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, and had not the morphology of history remained to this day an almost unexplored field, the supposedly universal mythopoetic power would long ago have been found to be limited to particular periods. It would have been realized that this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols—like and consistent amongst themselves—belongs most decidedly not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures.[[492]] Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There—it must be.

I make the assumption that that which a primitive folk—like the Egyptians of Thinite times, the Jews and Persians before Cyrus,[[493]] the heroes of the Mycenæan burghs and the Germans of the Migrations—possesses in the way of religious ideas is not yet myth in the higher sense. It may well be a sum of scattered and irregular traits, of cults adhering to names, fragmentary saga-pictures, but it is not yet a divine order, a mythic organism, and I no more regard this as myth than I regard the ornament of that stage as art. And, be it said, the greatest caution is necessary in dealing with the symbols and sagas current to-day, or even those current centuries ago, amongst ostensibly primitive peoples, for in those thousands of years every country in the world has been more or less affected by some high Culture alien to it.