Facs
Transcript
other. I repeat the three: the humanistic, the technical, and the introductory.
The background of the first, to which I turn, are three ideas, of which the Renaissance is the classical period of their development; not classical antiquity, but the Renaissance, because in the Renaissance, elements came in which are dependent on the 1500 years of Christian education and development in this period, and which, in the Greek culture, didn’t exist. The three ideas are, first, the idea of the microcosmos. This idea means that every individual man, in his potentialities, mirrors the universe – all levels and dimensions of the universe. They are in him, and he is the mediator from one to the other of these levels. He unites the inorganic, the organic, the animal, and the spiritual levels. All of them are in him. Therefore he has approach to all of them, can control them, and can relate them to each other. Man as the microcosmos represents the universe and is able to develop all the potentialities which are given to him with his [this?] situation. But, and this is the second point, he can and should develop them only as a unique individual. This is not Greek. The concept of the microcosmic individual has come to the Renaissance through its Christian underground, through the Christian idea of the infinite value of the individual person in the mind of God. This infinite value of the individual means, in Christianity, that each human being is open to condemnation and salvation, and is of infinite interest to God who looks at him in what he actually is and in what he essentially is and therefore ought to be. The application of the idea of salvation to every individual soul is a Christian idea.
In the Renaissance and then Romanticism, following, the idea is changed. It is combined with the idea of the microcosmos and means the mirroring of the universe goes on differ- ently in every individual. So every individual is a representative of the richness of the divine potentialities which he or she has and nobody else. And this is the second idea: the unique, unrepeatable, once-for-all character of every individual soul. Therefore the humanistic idea is the