Side by side with the splendid achievement of the German mysticism, the Teutonic race has always been apt to give practical proof of its individualism by endless petty quarrels and by splittings into numerous cliques.  But even before this race began to play a part in history, at the beginning of the third century, the principle of the individual soul was outwardly carried to extremes.  While it was the ideal of the man of antiquity to serve the higher community of the State with body and soul, nascent Christianity cared solely for the salvation of the individual soul, and frequently proved this by quite external evidence, by living a hermit’s life in the desert, for instance.  Children left their parents, husband and wife separated, dignitaries forsook their office to seek solitude and prepare their souls for the world beyond the grave.  The first convents—­the outcome of Christian individualism and asceticism—­were founded; and the anti-social extreme of this individualism acquired such ominous proportions that the Emperor Valens in the year of grace 365, was forced to legislate against the monastic life.

This hatred of the world, which was quite in harmony with the spirit of Christianity, was only overcome by the profounder concepts of German mysticism, for in the primitive dualistic view of the first millenary the renunciation of the world was the only possibility of avoiding sin.  The Emperor Justinian decreed that any man who induced a consecrated nun to marry him should be punished by death.  The thought that personal greatness did not consist in renouncing the world but in living in it and overcoming it, had not yet been conceived.

The delight in the human form, characteristic of antiquity, was extinguished, a crude dualism denied all antique values.  The body must be hated, so that the soul could flourish.  But as the Hellenic period was preceded by vague, unindividualised, material life, so the impersonal, chaotic, spiritual life of the first thousand years of Christianity matured the individual soul.  It found its climax in Dante and Eckhart, the greatest poet of the Neo-Latin race, and the most illumined religious genius of Germany.  These two men, who were contemporaries (Dante died in 1321 and Eckhart in 1329), finally revealed the character of two kindred nations, completing and fructifying each other.  In Dante the great artistic power of the Neo-Latin race appeared for the first time in its full intensity; it took possession of the whole visible universe, and poured new beauty into the traditional myths of Christendom.  Eckhart experienced and recreated the shapeless depths of the soul, the regions of the blending of the soul with God.  With these two men Europe definitely severed herself from antiquity and barbarism, henceforth to follow her own star.