coming of the Messiah. This exact and very narrow definition of human history — the Persian reckoning allows twelve millennia from first to last, the Jewish counts less than six up to the present — is a necessary expression of the Magian world-feeling and fundamentally distinguishes the Judæo-Persian creation-sagas from those of the Babylonian Culture, from which so many of their external traits are derived.
Different, again, are the primary feelings which give historical thought in the Chinese and the Egyptian Cultures its characteristically wide and unbounded horizons, represented by chronologically stated sequences of dynasties which stretch over millennia and finally dissolve into a grey remoteness.
The Faustian picture of world-history, again, prepared in advance by the existence of a Christian chronology,[1] came into being suddenly, with an immense extension and deepening of the Magian picture which the Western Church had taken over, an extension and deepening that was to give Joachim of Floris[2] in the high Gothic the basis of his wonderful interpretation of all world-destinies as a sequence of three icons under the aspects of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Parallel with this there was an immense widening of the geographical horizon, which even in Gothic times (thanks to Vikings and Crusaders) came to extend from Iceland to the remotest ends of Asia;[3] and from 1500 onwards, the developed man of the Baroque is able to do what none of his peers in the other Cultures could do and — for the first time in human history — to regard the whole surface of the planet as its field. Thanks to compass and telescope, the savant of that mature age could for the first time not merely posit the sphericity of the earth as a matter of theory, but actually feel that he was living upon a sphere in space. The land-horizon is no more. So, too, time-horizons melt in the double endlessness of the calendar before and after Christ. And to-day, under the influence of this picture, which comprises the whole planet and will eventually embrace all the high Cultures, the old Gothic division of history into "ancient," "mediæval," and modern, long become trite and empty, is visibly dissolving.[4]
In all other Cultures the aspects of world-history and of man-history coincide. The beginning of the world is the beginning of man, and the end of man is the end of the world. But the Faustian infinity-craving for the first time separated the two notions during the Baroque, and now it has made human history, for all its immense and still unknown span, a mere episode in world-history, while the Earth — of which other Cultures had seen not even
- ↑ Introduced in Rome in 522. during the Ostrogoth domination, not until Charlemagne's times did it make headway in the Germanic lands. Then, however, its spread was rapid.
- ↑ See Vol. I, p. 19. — Tr.
- ↑ On the other hand — and very significantly — the field of the history-picture livingly experienced in the consciousness of the sincere Renaissance classicist markedly contracted.
- ↑ See Vol. I, p. 16. — Tr.
