to being so lost succeeds in finding itself.”  Emphatically a true Spaniard, Molinos, and truly Spanish is this paradoxical expression of quietism or rather of nihilism—­for he himself elsewhere speaks of annihilation—­and not less Spanish, nay, perhaps even more Spanish, were the Jesuits who attacked him, upholding the prerogatives of the All against the claims of Nothingness.  For religion is not the longing for self-annihilation, but for self-completion, it is the longing not for death but for life.  “The eternal religion of the inward essence of man ... the individual dream of the heart, is the worship of his own being, the adoration of life,” as the tortured soul of Flaubert was intimately aware (Par les champs et par les greves, vii.).

When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance, the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took concrete form in the knightly ideal with its codes of love and honour.  But it was a paganism Christianized, baptized.  “Woman—­la donna—­was the divinity enshrined within those savage breasts.  Whosoever will investigate the memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full force and purity; the Universe is woman.  And so it was in Germany, in France, in Provence, in Spain, in Italy, at the beginning of the modern age.  History was cast in this mould; Trojans and Romans were conceived as knights-errant, and so too were Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan and Saladin....  In this universal fraternity mingle angels, saints, miracles and paradise, strangely blended with the fantasy and voluptuousness of the Oriental world, and all baptized in the name of Chivalry.”  Thus, in his Storia della Letteratura italiana, ii., writes Francesco de Sanctis, and in an earlier passage he informs us that for that breed of men “in paradise itself the lover’s delight was to look upon his lady—­Madonna—­and that he had no desire to go thither if he might not go in his lady’s company.”  What, in fact, was Chivalry—­which Cervantes, intending to kill it, afterwards purified and Christianized in Don Quixote—­but a real though distorted religion, a hybrid between paganism and Christianity, whose gospel perhaps was the legend of Tristan and Iseult?  And did not even the Christianity of the mystics—­those knights-errant of the spirit—­possibly reach its culminating-point in the worship of the divine woman, the Virgin Mary?  What else was the Mariolatry of a St. Bonaventura, the troubadour of Mary?  And this sentiment found its inspiration in love of the fountain of life, of that which saves us from death.

But as the Renaissance advanced men turned from the religion of woman to the religion of science; desire, the foundation of which was curiosity, ended in curiosity, in eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of good and evil.  Europe flocked to the University of Bologna in search of learning.  Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism.  Men sought to discover the mystery of the world and of life.  But it was really in order to save life, which they had also sought to save in the worship of woman.  Human consciousness sought to penetrate the Universal Consciousness, but its real object, whether it was aware of it or not, was to save itself.