Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/260/en

stands before us, it is nevertheless cast, as it were, in the shadow of a certain tragedy. What had its beginnings in ancient Egypt reaches in classical Greece its highest perfection — the working, that is to say, and the giving of form to dead stone. The Greek succeeds in breathing into stone, purely through form, a kind of life, a semblance of life. He impresses upon the form from without the spirit that fills his inner being with plastic vitality; yet he cannot impress this spirit upon the substance itself, so that it might become a living, form-creating substance in its own right. The human beings of the first, and above all the second, post-Atlantean cultural epoch — the ancient Persian cultural epoch — possessed, by virtue of their spiritual-soul and bodily constitution and under the mystery-guidance of Zarathustra, the capacity to bring forth artistic creations by substantially transforming, through plastic metamorphosis, the soul-nature of domestic animals and the living substance of cultivated plants. But the purely physical-material in stone is dead. Thus the Greek stood before the insolubility of the riddle: how can stone be awakened to life? He could only help stone to a semblance of life through form. This is what makes the greatness and at the same time the tragedy of Greek art. Out of the depths of his soul he created, in his human striving, an art which, outwardly beheld, brings a mystery-past into image, and inwardly becomes the germ of a future hope — namely, to be able to enliven the earthy-material as such. Against the background described, the organism principle reappears in manifoldly transformed gestalt. It begins now, quite germinal-ly, to permeate the entire cultural space of Greece, in social respects as well. The landscapes of Greece themselves bear a divine, an Apollinian character — wholly in contrast to the Egyptian. As though it were the gods who had created for themselves, in the diversity of landscape-characters, an image of their own being. The gaze of the wanderer, roaming across the expanse of the landscape spread before him, soon finds a pole of rest, a temple radiant in beauty and harmony, which benevolently bounds the space of beholding. Thus we encounter the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi in a difficult rocky mountain landscape; different again is the temple consecrated to Athena — it stands on rocky hills and catches the eye already from far off, as the Acropolis in Athens; or we find the temple of Hera in the midst of fertile plains.