The New Review April 1943

Think e. g. of the late Greek tyrants the bloody dictators of the dying Roman republic the Roman military emperors of the 3rd century the end of the Hohenstaufen Empire of Cesare Borgia and the other tyrants of the Italian Renaissance the Jacobine terror and Napoleon and you have a sufficient set of striking parallels to our presenday dictators. [...] But parallel to these monuments of the state cult goes a progressing religious disintegration : the secret doctrines and abstruse animal services of late Egypt the Roman ethic rationalism of the Stoics and Epicureians the cynic atheism of Lukian and Apuleius the mysteries of Isis Mithras the necromancy of Apollnius of Tyana and of the Neo-Platonics the speculations of the Gnostics to be f [...] In the Middle Ages the rationalism of the aristocratic court poets as well as of certain scholastic philosophers the atheism of Fredrick II of Sicily Manfred and Ezzelino the mysticism of the Temple Knights the Cathari and Kabbalists ; in the Renaissance the paganization of Christianity to a cultus of the Optimo Jove (Godfather) Apollo (Christ) and Diana (the Virgin) by the literati of Leo [...] And finally the violent reaction of the state trying to make religion an instrument of its totalitarian aspirations in an age of unrest and confusion : The persecutions of the Christians by the deified emperors in the 3rd century A. D. the burning.of heretics and the massacring of the Jews with the support and to the profit of the rulers in the Middle Ages (especially by the atheistic Frederick [...] Our art has thrown off the old traditional forms not in a spirit of disrespect for the past but in the consciousness that it must again build up from the original function of the forms the harmony of proportions the appropriateness of the material the demands of the purpose.