AustLit

'Historians of ideas and literary critics with an historical bent have common interests in the oscillations of thought patterns. The great German savant Ernst Troeltsch, former Professor in Philosophy and Civilization at Berlin (1915-1923), got things going at the beginning of last century when he described the Renaissance and the Reformation as typischten in the alternating movements of Western cultural and intellectual propensities. “The dual origin of our European world”, he affirmed, lies in “the world of Prophetic and Christian religion” and “the spiritual culture of [Graeco-Roman] Antiquity”. The peculiar tension between these two trajectories amounts to “an original opposition ... which recurs in ever new forms and with every emergence of great new life-problems remains unbridged”. Even if through time the opposition is not thoroughgoing – for the “threads” of Biblical stricture and pagan permission often “intermingle” – still, “Christian ‘Ascesis’ ever anew builds her kingdom of the supersensible” and ranks all else beneath it, while “ever and again arise in [contrary] self-assertion the needs and impulses of nature” and pagan energies “more artistic than moral”.' (Introduction)