Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/187/en

An eminently Christian impulse underlies the becoming of the European cultural landscapes—namely, the artistic reshaping of wild nature into cultivated nature according to the principle of point and periphery. This is the formative principle of all organism formation, for example, of the cell nucleus and cytoplasm or the embryoblast and trophoblast in embryonic development. This shall be illustrated by the example of the origin of the village and its bounds: if we transport ourselves into the time after the Migration Period and before the first great period of land clearing in the seventh and eighth centuries, vast areas of Europe were forest-swamp landscapes, sparsely populated by people who, for the most part, had not partaken in the ennobling transformation of body and soul as had the members of the pre-Christian high civilizations. Like the primordial power of nature, an untamed force, a tempestuous fortitude, still dwelt within these early peoples—an unformed, combative soul-nature strongly bound to the forces of the blood. The I, however, the human being's kernel of eternity, was, like a bud opening to the sun's ray, receptive to spiritual impulses pointing toward the future. This unformed and yet spirit-open soul-constitution was met by the monk, wandering alone through the elemental wildness of the forest landscapes

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