HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Hellenist and Cultural Pessimist
of seriousness, sickness or sorrow. By concentrating
exclusively on the joyous side of human nature, it
roused in man a desire for a change of some kind, a
desire for clouds, storms and suffering. St. Francis,
the Christian, fulfilled this desire. He taught poverty
and pain, neglect of the senses and negation of the
body. In him, humanity, rebounding violently
from paganism, reached the extreme of spiritualism.
But it could not remain there permanently.
The pendulum had to swing back. The Renaissance
was, in part, a return toward the pagan spirit
— the Renaissance but not the Reformation, for
there was nothing of the Greek in Luther. Indeed,
not until the nineteenth century did the most brilliant
champion of a revived paganism appear in the
figure of Heine. This German poet divided the
whole world into Hellenes and barbarians. He reproached
the Christian extreme most bitterly for its
melancholy abstinence from the joys of the senses.
He extolled the pagan extreme most rapturously
for its devotion to unfettered pleasure. Ultimately,
however, he himself best illustrated the bankruptcy
of the religion of pleasure. Stricken with incurable
disease, he called out from his mattress-grave:
"What does it profit me that my health is dmnk
at banquets out of gold cups and in most exquisite
[85]