The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

epilogue
important inventions. Vasco da Gama, backed by his patron, Prince Henry,
The Navigator, continued the explorations begun by Marco Polo and found, by
circumnavigating Africa, the sea way to India. In the midst of this triumphant
activity stands the discovery of America.
The year 1492, in which Columbus sailed west to discover a new route
to India and reached, instead, the Bahama Islands in the Caribbean Sea, was
the same year in which Leonardo da Vinci began to paint his Last Supper in
a monastery in Milano. These two events were as different from each other as
day from night. Yet they were prompted by the same underlying impulse which
inspired all the great activities of the fifteenth century, an impulse growing out
of a conflict in the human soul and common to every one.
Leonardo’s desire, underlying all his achievements in art and science, was to
attain the ideal of the uomo universale—the universal genius, as the Italians of the
Renaissance termed the ideal—through the union of science, art and religion.
Inspired by the same yearning for universality, Columbus discovered the islands
near this continent [North America]. When later explorations opened up the
continent itself, thither came fugitives from religious persecution in search of
that complete liberty of thought which the Reformation had inspired.
The civilization of the Renaissance was not a mere revival of the classical
heritage, nor a rediscovery of the picture of man which was derived from the
consciousness of the ancients. The Renaissance ushered in the age of modern
man. A new consciousness of mankind began with these centuries which were
marked by the rise of the Renaissance. Like the head of the Roman Janus with
the double face looking at the past and the future, the Renaissance reviewed
the glory of Hellas and Rome and at the same time strove for the consciousness
of modern man. Before the beginning of our technical age of world economy,
determined by natural science and the industrial revolution, mankind was
destined to repeat once more in short cycles of evolution the form and content
of the classical heritage. Thus the four centuries from the discovery of America
to the end of the nineteenth century may be regarded as an age of continual
renaissance.
In England there was a renaissance movement similar to that of classicism
at Versailles, just as there was the era of Weimar in Germany; one can also trace