signify. Just so, again, a reform-fulfilment happened in the Vedic religion about the tenth century and was followed by the setting-in of late Brahmanism. And in the ninth century a corresponding epochal point must have occurred in the religious history of China.
However widely the Reformations of the various Cultures may differ amongst themselves, the purpose is the same for all — to bring the faith, which had strayed all too far into the world-as-history and time-secularism ("Zeitlichkeit"), back into the realm of Nature, clean waking-consciousness, and pure cause-controlled and cause-pervaded Space; out of the world of economics ("wealth") into that of science ("poverty"), out of patrician and cavalier society (which was also that of Renaissance and Humanism) into that of spirituals and ascetics; and lastly (as significant as it is impossible) out of the political ambitions of vestmented human thoroughbreds into the realm of holy Causality that is not of this world.
In those times the West — and the situation was the same in the other Cultures — divided the Corpus Christianorum of the population into the three classes of status policticus, ecclesiasticus, and œconomicus (that is, urban), but as the outlook was that of the city and no longer that of the castle and the village, officials and judges belonged to the first-named class, men of learning to the second — and the peasant was forgotten. This is the key to the opposition of the Renaissance and Reformation, which was an opposition of class and not a difference in world-feeling like that of Renaissance and Gothic. Castle-taste and cloister-soul moved into town, and remained there, as before, in opposition — as in Florence the Medici to Savonarola, and as in old Greece the noble families of the cities — with their Homer now finally written down — to the last Orphics — these, too, writers. The Renaissance artists and Humanists are the legitimate successors of the Troubadours and Minnesingers, and just as there is a line from Arnold of Brescia to Luther, so there is a line from Bertrand de Born and Peire Cardinal, through Petrarch, to Ariosto. The castle has become the town-house, the knight the patrician. The whole movement adhered to palaces, as courts; it limits itself to those fields of expression that affect and interest polite society; it is bright and gay, like Homer, because it is courtly — an atmosphere where problems were bad taste, where Dante and Michelangelo cannot but have felt themselves out of place — and it spread over the Alps to the courts of the North, not as a new world-outlook, but as a new taste. The "Northern" Renaissance of the mercantile and capital cities consisted simply in the fact that the bon ton of the Italian patriciate replaced that of the French chivalry.
But the last reformers, too, the Luthers and Savonarolas, were urban monks, and this differentiates them profoundly from the Joachims and the Bernards. Their intellectual and urban askesis is the stepping-stone from the hermitages of quiet valleys to the scholar's study of the Baroque. The mystic experience of Luther which gave birth to his doctrine of justification is the experience,
