This youthful inwardness proceeds always out of a townless country-side, out of villages, hovels, sactuaries, solitary cloisters, and hermitages. Here is formed the community of high awareness, of the spiritual elect, which inwardly is separated by a whole world from the great being-currents of the heroic and the knightly. The two prime estates, priesthood and nobility — contemplation in the cathedral and deeds before the castles, askesis and Minne, ecstasy and high-bred custom — begin their special histories from this point. Though the Caliph was also worldly ruler of the faithful, though the Pharaoh sacrificed in both holy places, though the German King built his family vault under the cathedral, nothing gets rid of the abyssal opposition of Time and Space that is reflected in the contrast of these two social orders. Religious history and political history, the histories of truths and facts, stand opposed and irreconcilable. Their opposition begins in cathedral and castle, it propagates itself in the ever-growing towns as the opposition of wisdom and business, and in the last stages of historical capacity it closes as a wrestle of intellect and power.
But both these movements take place on the heights of humanity. Peasantdom remains historyless under it all, comprehending politics as little as it understands dogmatics. Out of the strong young religion of saintly groups, scholasticism and mysticism develop in the early towns; reformation, philosophy, and worldly learning in the increasing tumult of streets and squares; enlightenment and irreligion in the stone masses of the late megalopolis. The beliefs of the peasant outside remain "eternal" and always the same. The Egyptian hind understood nothing of this Re. He heard the name, but while a grand chapter of religious history was passing over his head in the cities, he went on worshipping the old Thinite beast-gods, until with the XXVIth Dynasty and its fellah-religion they regained supremacy. The Italian peasant prayed in Augustus's time just as he had done long before Homer and as he does to-day. Names and dogmas of big religions, blossoming and dying in turn, have penetrated to him from the towns and have altered the sounds of his words — but the meaning remains ever the same. The French peasant lives still in the Merovingian Age. Freya or Mary, Druids or Dominicans, Rome or Geneva — nothing touches the innermost kernel of his beliefs.
But even in the towns one stratum hangs back, historically, relatively to another. Over the primitive religion of the country-side there is another popular religion, that of the small people in the underground of the towns and in the provinces. The higher a Culture rises — Middle Kingdom, Brahman period, Pre-Socratics, Pre-Confucians, Baroque — the narrower becomes the circle of those who possess the final truths of their time as reality and not as mere name and sound. How many of those who lived with Socrates, Augustine, and Pascal understood them? In religion as otherwise the human pyramid rises with increasing sharpness, till at the end of the Culture it is complete — thereafter, bit by bit, to crumble.
