[368] MUST be vague, because the next period is always conceived and developed, and finally born, in the lap of the preceding period, so that here is a tremendous amount of overlapping. If you make such divisions mechanical, they are absurd and nonsense. If you make them and understand them as a historian should, even if he uses the usual terms "Renaissance," "Baroque," "18th century," or whatever, they all have the same character that never completely fit, they can never cover the whole reality of a period, but they are symbols representing the [way] in which we, the historians (or we who remember [?]), ENCOUNTER a period. Now the same is true of the periodization of which I am speaking here. From the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century, we have a period which is completely determined, in all its special characteristics, by man controlling nature and society in the power of the logos^a. In order to make

this clearer, let us compare it for a moment with other periods. The immediately preceding periods, from 900 to about 1500, we can call the Middle Age. These Middle Ages^b have an entirely different principle. They have the principle of nature and society shaped on the basis of the sacramental presence of the ultimate, in the Church^c and its sacramental activities. This was changed slowly but broke through in the Renaissance^d-- the opposite to it. We can compare it also with another period, which we can call the Byzantine^e period. I showed you pictures of this great period in which religious art, perhaps, flourishes more than in any other of the Western periods, namely the translucency of the spiritual to the material--in philosophy, in life, in everything. Or we can compare it with the period in which Neoplatonism^f and Christianity^g fought