Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/303/en

The pre-Christian cultural epochs. At the centre of the village land, rising high above the gabled rooftops, stands the church with its tower and nave — a work of art in a double sense: vertically aspiring, the tower stands as an outwardly shaped image of inner I-experience; horizontally extending, the nave is a projection of soul-experience in community. This setting of a centre-point is the constructive achievement of the entire village community. What arises here, as it were as a baptismal act of an earthly place amid a wild nature, is the complete inversion of the perfected work of art from pre-Christian times — the Greek temple. Just as the temple presented its high aesthetic outward, pre-eminently in the composition of its columns, while the interior — the cella, the dwelling of the deity — was withdrawn from profane view behind nearly hermetic walls, so in the Romanesque basilica the exterior is firmly walled, the columns have been taken inward, and the inner space is opened to the congregation. The artistic force of the mind soul of each individual within the village community was permeated by the image-filled experience of the esoteric folk Christianity working beneath the surface, and was supported and carried by the institutionally exoteric Christianity working pre-eminently in monasticism and among the nobility. Both modes of experience united and concentrated themselves inward upon the centre-point of the village land, and fashioned for the congregation and the cultic happening at the altar an enclosing form-sheath in artistic configuration.