was working upon his "Anna Selbdritt,"[1] the "Witches' Hammer" was being written in Rome (1487) in the finest Humanistic Latin. It was these that constitute the real myth of the Renaissance, and without them we shall never understand the glorious and truly Gothic force of this anti-Gothic movement.[2] Men who did not feel the Devil very near at hand could not have created the Divina Commedia or the frescoes of Orvieto[3] or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
It was the tremendous background of this myth that awakened in the Faustian soul a feeling of what it was. An Ego lost in Infinity, an Ego that was all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity of greater forces;[4] that was all will, but a will full of fear for its freedom. Never has the problem of Free-will been meditated upon more deeply or more painfully. Other Cultures have simply not known it. But precisely because here Magian resignation was totally impossible — because that which thought was not an "it" or particle of an all-soul, but an individual, fighting Ego, seeking to maintain itself — every limitation upon freedom was felt as a chain that had to be dragged along through life, and life in turn was felt as a living death. And if so — why? For what?
The result of this in-looking was that immense sense of guilt which runs through these centuries like one long, desperate lament. The cathedrals rose ever more supplicatingly to heaven, the Gothic vaulting became a joining of hands in prayer, and little comfort of light shone through the high windows into the night of the long naves. The choking parallel-sequences of the church chants, the Latin hymns, tell of bruised knees and flagellations in the nocturnal cell. For Magian man the world-cavern had been close and the heaven impending, but for Gothic man heaven was infinitely far. No hand seemed to reach down from these spaces, and all about the lone Ego the mocking Devil's world lay in leaguer. And, therefore, the great longing of Mysticism was to lose created form (as Heinrich Seuse said), to be rid of self and all things (Meister Eckart), to abandon selfness (Theologie deutsch).[5] And out of these longings there grew up an unending dogged subtilizing on notions which were ever more and more finely dissected to get at the "why," and finally a universal cry for Grace — not the Magian Grace coming down as substance, but the Faustian Grace that unbinds the Will.
To be able to will freely is, at the very bottom, the one gift that the Faustian soul asks of heaven. The seven sacraments of the Gothic, felt as one by Peter Lombard, elevated into dogma by the Lateran Council of 1215, and grounded
- ↑ Italian, "Anna Metterza." The reference is to the St. Anne of the Louvre and the Royal Academy Diploma Gallery, London. — Tr.
- ↑ Cf. Vol. I, p. 232. — Tr.
- ↑ Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli. — Tr.
- ↑ The sense of such a relativity led to a mathematic (the calculus) which is literally based on the ignoring of second- and third-order magnitudes. — Tr.
- ↑ See article "Mysticism" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.
