Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/205/en

The Migration Period north of the Alps had resulted in the decay and destruction of all cities founded by the Romans: the new form of settlement, emerging from the Christianised soul-attitude of 'ora et labora', became the village. Only later, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, in connection with nobles' seats, monasteries, and central trading places, endowed with special privileges, did individual village communities become towns. The beginning was made by the establishment of a chapel as a centre and the clearing of a piece of wild nature around it, followed by the building of a Romanesque basilica and the settlement of farmsteads oriented towards it, as well as the surrounding, outwardly bounded land. To the degree that the centre, the church, with its tower and nave, rose up and took shape in artistic, sculptural form, to that same degree the once-rampant wild nature of the village bounds was shaped and structured into cultivated nature. This development of progressive artistic harmonisation and ennobling reached its high point with the advent of the Gothic. In the Romanesque, what gradually revealed and internalised itself in human beings in humility and devotion as the deepest being of Christianity appears in germinal features in the artistic image. The Grail impulse, which emerged from the stream of esoteric Christianity in the eighth and ninth centuries, permeated the souls of human beings and awakened in them to a high degree the power of internalisation. In the Gothic, an unprecedented artistic formative power blossoms from this intimacy of soul life. The tower strives yet further, filigree-like, into the heights; the long, high, multi-aisled, expansive nave with transept and choir envelops a vast interior space, flooded with coloured light that streams in through the biblical scenes and the figures of the saints in the glass windows as if from a higher world. How must the peasant have experienced himself in this, he who dwelt in a simple, earth-hugging abode at the foot of the mighty structure? Outwardly, his gaze was met by nature shaped by the work of his hands in its forms and colours; stepping into the interior of the high building, he perceived forms and colours of a completely different kind. In high artistic form, an image of his own spiritual-soulish experience, felt in the heart, was offered to his perception.