Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/299/en

Point and Periphery

At the root of the becoming of European cultural landscapes lies an eminently Christian impulse — the artistic reshaping, namely, of wild nature into cultivated nature according to the principle of point and periphery. This is the formative principle of all organism formation — for example, cell nucleus–*cytoplasm*, or *embryoblast–trophoblast* in embryonic development. The arising of the village and its village land shall serve to make this concrete: if we transpose ourselves into the time after the Migration of Peoples and before the first great clearing period of the seventh and eighth centuries, wide stretches of Europe were forest-and-marsh landscapes, thinly settled by peoples who, for the most part, had no share in the ennobling through-forming of body and soul as the members of the pre-Christian great ancient civilizations had. As with the primordial force of nature, there dwelt in these early peoples an untamed power, a tempestuous strength of courage — an unformed, combative soul-nature strongly bound to blood forces. The I, however — the eternal kernel of the human being — was, like a bud opening itself to a sunbeam, receptive to spiritual impulses pointing toward the future. This unformed and at the same time spirit-open disposition of soul was met by the one who wandered in solitude through the elemental wildness of the forest landscapes