history, are the acknowledged foci of its thoughts and feelings. The Northern skald-poetry and the Southern Minnesang correspond to the old love-songs of the Chinese age of chivalry in the Shi-King,[1] which were sung in the Pi-Yung, the places of noble training (hiao). And the ceremonial public archery-displays, like the Early Classical agon, and the Gothic and the Persian-Byzantine[2] tourney, were manifestations of the life on its Homeric side.
In opposition to this side stands the Orphic — the expression of the space-experience of a Culture through the style of its priesthood. It was in accord with the Euclidean character of Classical extension — which needed no intermediaries for intercourse with near and corporeal gods — that in this case priesthood, from beginnings as an estate, rapidly degenerated into city-officialdom. Similarly, it was expressive of the Chinese tao that the place of the original hereditary priesthood came to be taken by professional classes of praying men, scribes, and oracle-priests, who could accompany the religious performances of the authorities and heads of families with the prescribed rites. It was in conformity, again, with the Indian world-feeling that lost itself in measureless infinity that the priest-class there became a second nobility, which with immense power, intruding upon every sort of life, planted itself between the people and its wilderness of gods. It is an expression, lastly, of the "cavern" feeling that the priest of true Magian cast is the monk and the hermit, and becomes more and more so, while the secular clergy steadily loses in symbolic significance.
In contrast to all these there is the Faustian priesthood, which, still without any profound import or dignity in 900, rose up thereafter to that sublime rôle of intermediary which placed it in principle between humanity (all humanity) and a macrocosm strained to all imaginable expanse by the Faustian passion of the third dimension. Excluded from history by celibacy and from time by its character indelebilis, it culminated in the Papacy, which represented the highest symbol of God's dynamic Space that it was possible to conceive; even the Protestant idea of a generalized priesthood has not destroyed it, but merely decentralized it from one point and one person into the heart of each individual believer.
The contradiction between being and waking-being that exists in every microcosm necessarily drives the two Estates against one another. Time seeks to absorb and subordinate Space, Space Time. Spiritual and worldly power are magnitudes so different in structure and tendency that any reconciliation, or even understanding, between them seems impossible. But this conflict has not in all Cultures come to world-historical expression. In China it promoted the tao idea that primacy should reside securely in an aristocracy. In
