Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/317/en

The Migration of Peoples had brought about, north of the Alps, the decline and destruction of all the cities founded by the Romans: the new settlement form arising from the Christianized soul-disposition of *ora et labora* became the village. Only later, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, were individual village-organisms raised to the status of cities — bound up with the seats of nobility, with monasteries, with central trading places, and equipped with particular privileges. The beginning was made by the setting of a chapel as the central point and the taking-into-culture of a piece of wild nature round about, followed by the building of a Romanesque basilica and the settling of farmsteads oriented towards it, together with the surrounding, outwardly bounded land. In the measure in which the centre — the church — with tower and nave raised itself up and formed itself out in plastic-artistic configuration, in just that measure did the once rank-growing wild nature of the village land take on form and articulation, becoming cultivated nature. This development of progressive artistic harmonizing and ennobling reached its height in the rising of the Gothic. In the Romanesque there appears in germinal traits, in the artistic image, what had gradually unveiled and interiorized itself in the souls of human beings as the deepest being of Christianity — in humility and devotion. The Grail impulse, stepped forth from the stream of esoteric Christianity in the eighth and ninth centuries, permeated the souls of human beings and awakened in them to high degrees the force of interiorization. In the Gothic there blossoms from this inwardness of soul-life an extraordinary artistic formative force. The tower strives still higher, filigree into the heights; the long, high, many-aisled nave spreading wide, with transept and choir, encloses a vast inner space flooded with coloured light that streams in through the biblical scenes and the figures of the saints in the glass windows — as though from a higher world. How must the peasant human being have experienced himself, who dwelt there in simple, earth-pressed habitation at the foot of the mighty building? Outward his gaze fell upon nature formed by the work of his hands, in its shapes and colours; stepping into the inner space of the lofty structure, he beheld shapes and colours of quite another kind. His intuitive beholding was offered, in high artistic configuration, an image of his own soul-tinged spiritual-soul experience.