Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 edition. Excerpt: ... AUTHORITY, LIBERTY & FUNCTION IN THE LIGHT OF THE WAR THE GERMAN HERESY The Man Of The Renaissance It has been said that the central ideas of the Middle Ages consisted in looking upon the world as a vale of tears, and upon man as " I, a sinner." That is why the Middle Ages have been accused of darkening the world and diminishing man, as if their judgments of both were not recognitions of two facts, but the expressions of a malignant and anti-human will. But that the world is a vale of tears, and that man is "I, a sinner," are not judgments characteristic of a given period of humanity. They must have been thought by men of all ages in consequence of that which really distinguishes man from all other beings on earth: the ideal of perfection in his soul. When this ideal of perfection is applied to the region of the senses, the world must appear to us as a vale of tears; when it is applied to the moral plane man has to be depicted as "I, a sinner." Desire has nothing to do with these judgments. They are the judgments of experience. They are facts. There may come a day when God will deprive man--to give it to other animals; perhaps to the frogs--of this privilege, at once his glory and his tragedy, of being the only living thing which can conceive perfection; but so long as he does conceive it he is bound to say, when he looks outward with impartial eyes: "This world is a vale of tears," and when he looks inwards: "I am a sinner." The characteristic of the Middle Ages is not the acknowledgment of these two eternal and inevitable facts; but the imaginative way in which they reacted against them. The men who lived in Europe between the eighth and the twelfth centuries may be compared to those lonely children who create a playmate with their...
