Nature and history are for us two diametrically opposed possibilities of organization, knowledge, interpretation, and evaluation of the reality around us. Since the Renaissance, the world can no longer be thought of as a structured and coherent whole, and its meaning always remains partial. The world bears within it a duality which nothing can surmount: Nature and mind represent the two poles of a reality which Jean Mair described as early as the end of the fifteenth century as non facientia unum. The being of Nature consists henceforth in being an object of representation, of scientific knowledge, and of technical exploitation. The being of man consists in placing himself as subject opposite the world, which is conceived as an object essentially foreign to man, “mute” in what concerns his ultimate destination. Up to that time, man knew himself by referring to an “objective,” undiscussed world; existence could be constantly shaken by the deepest terrors, but it was not problematical : man knew his natural place in a world ordered by a sovereign reason. Now with the destruction of the theophanic universe, it was not only man's place in the world which became problematical but the very idea of the universe; the experience of the living totality of the world was progressively drained of its substance. The new “situation of man in the world” is that of a being savagely freed of everything, profoundly isolated in the midst of an infinitely open world in which the global has less and less meaning and in which it is no longer a question of participating in being but of doing and of having. Rimbaud's remark, “We are not in the world,” began to be true; incapable of finding his support in the universe, placing all his pride in seeking his truth within himself, man then turned to history to ask of it those answers which the former wisdom, the former Weltweisheit, or revelation could no longer give him. In the “ocean of Cartesian doubt” Vico saw history as the only firmum et mansurum to which man could lay claim. As the work of a freedom progressively creating its own content for itself, as a return to itself of the mind lost or “alienated” in matter, history was becoming the only humanly possible way of conceiving the “natural” place of man in the world, the sole encompassing (τɛρι∊χoν) totality still capable of serving as a horizon for his triumphant self-certainty, the only world still conceivable after the suppression of transcendency and the loss of presence. According to Marx’ profound observation, history had the mission, “once the thither side of truth had vanished, to establish the truth of the hither side.” To the “dead” or “hidden” God and to “mute” or inaudible Nature, man opposed this derisory fragment of time which he had succeeded in making his and from which he hoped to derive at once the truth of his being and the norm of his action.

The word “revolution” has acquired, of recent years, a very broad meaning. It has been applied to any innovation entailing substantial economic and social change. For example, the term “neolithic revolution” is currently used to designate the transition from a hunting and gathering the fruits of the soil type of economy to the relatively sedentary life of the agriculturist. The acquisition of metal—copper, bronze, and, later, iron—also gave rise to all kinds of technical as well as social transformations. The patient researches of archeologists enable us to assess the impact of this “revolution of metal” which so profoundly altered the life of our ancestors. We have a general notion of the social changes that resulted from it, thanks to our knowledge of such things as the layout of villages or cities and the details of funeral accoutrements. Here again ethnology comes to the aid of archeology.

In a very penetrating paper on “The Concept of Jewish Culture,” presented to the World Congress of Sociologists held in Zurich in 1950, Professor Henrik F. Infield pointed out that “some people born in one culture may find attractive the offerings of another culture.” Men born into some European cultures have for centuries experienced a special attraction not only toward tropical cultures but also toward tropical existence, life, and nature, with tropical women subsumed in nature and culture.

Goethe resisted all attempts on the part of his critics and admirers to draw oversimplified and final messages from Faust—an understandable reaction, since why should anyone bother with the dramatic trappings if the meaning can be summed up in a few abstract statements? He told Eckermann that people constantly came to him asking the meaning of Faust—as if he knew! It was not in his line, he said, to try to embody anything abstract. Goethe's thought process is dialectical, and for almost every one of his aphorisms which seems to illustrate one side of a matter there is another illuminating the opposite side. Goethe carried this tendency so far, in fact, that he once remarked to Eckermann that his Philemon and Baucis had nothing to do with the traditional couple. He added, almost in the same breath, that the persons and the situation were nevertheless similar. Before examining the meaning of Goethe's verse in detail, a brief summary of the action taking place in the fifth act of the second part of Faust is necessary:

A Wanderer returns to a land, now Faust's kingdom, where he had been ship wrecked long ago and had found shelter in the home of Philemon and Baucis. He learns from the old couple, who are still alive, that their house on the hill now stands in the shadow of Faust's castle. Faust wants them to move to the lowlands, which he has reclaimed from the sea with the aid of Mephistopheles, but they have so far refused to obey him. Faust's animosity toward the old couple is then depicted. In the end he assigns to Mephistopheles the task of eviction. Philemon and Baucis resist. They are killed, the Wanderer is dispatched along with them, and the house is burned down. Faust's blindness and death soon follow, but not before he attempts a final project, the construction of a canal.

The cultivated Westerner has such a strict conception of the nature and the ends of artistic creation that even the hypothesis of a collective creative act seems aberrant to him. In a word, our official music is the property of an informed milieu or an elite. It is transmitted by writing; and, if this writing becomes more and more detailed and elaborate as one approaches the present, that is because it has the task of conserving intact (one might say forever) the thought of the creator, whose “personality,” as Schumann has already remarked, is the supreme good.

Our epoch, fertile in inventions in the most diverse fields, has in recent years seen several discoveries which hold extraordinary interest for history in general and for the history of religions in particular. Around 1930 seven volumes of Manichean writings were discovered at Fayum; in 1941, a few miles outside Cairo, near Tura, unpublished works of Origen and his disciple Didymus the Blind were found; the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls occurred around 1945, and in Egypt, at roughly this same time, an equally fortuitous find was made of a considerable body of Coptic manuscripts dating perhaps from the third century a.d. Although these last have not been entirely deciphered, they are considered by specialists to be prodigiously rich; such a find, says one, “does not merely enrich or renew our previous knowledge of the literature, the genealogy, or the history of Gnosticism : it revolutionizes this knowledge, and opens to research in the field a path absolutely distinct from all those which criticism has previously followed.”

Charles Kerényi began his research before 1927. In that year he achieved brilliant renown, thanks to a suggestive and wonderfully comprehensive book on the Greco-oriental novel that is replete with ideas. He wrote it from the illuminating standpoint of the history of religions. Following the author of the classical Psyche, and with innumerable contributions of his own, he once again gave proof of that delicate sense of the religious subconscious which could have subsisted, more or less somnolent, in the composite spirit of the Mediterraneans of yesterday and today. We are eternally indebted to the curious, folkloric inquiries which have transported us to their time, introducing us to an ancient religiosity, secret, and perhaps unconscious. The Hellenistic or Greco-Roman novels, forerunners of some of our most modern literature, drew substance at will from eternal, human belief. In stoically scrutinizing their content—one might even say balderdash—we tend therefore to forgive them much because of the richness of their soil, infused as it was with popular legends which carry with them a highly tonic and savory mixture of old rites, discarded superstitions, half-extinguished cults. Where, for example, can one seek a better statement on the notion of the pure and the impure, which still preoccupies us so much today? Or on the sensitivity of those who, in quest of virtue, went off whenever necessary and with great ado to meet the assembled gods?