build the sun-substance in heaven, San Tommaso guards the terrace. But
inside here is the immemorial shadow.

Again I had to think of the Italian soul, how it is dark, cleaving to
the eternal night. It seems to have become so, at the Renaissance, after
the Renaissance.

In the Middle Ages Christian Europe seems to have been striving, out of
a strong, primitive, animal nature, towards the self-abnegation and the
abstraction of Christ. This brought about by itself a great sense of
completeness. The two halves were joined by the effort towards the one
as yet unrealized. There was a triumphant joy in the Whole.

But the movement all the time was in one direction, towards the
elimination of the flesh. Man wanted more and more to become purely free
and abstract. Pure freedom was in pure abstraction. The Word was
absolute. When man became as the Word, a pure law, then he was free.

But when this conclusion was reached, the movement broke. Already
Botticelli painted Aphrodite, queen of the senses, supreme along with
Mary, Queen of Heaven. And Michelangelo suddenly turned back on the
whole Christian movement, back to the flesh. The flesh was supreme and
god-like, in the oneness of the flesh, in the oneness of our physical
being, we are one with God, with the Father. God the Father created man
in the flesh, in His own image. Michelangelo swung right back to the old
Mosaic position. Christ did not exist. To Michelangelo there was no
salvation in the spirit. There was God the Father, the Begetter, the
Author of all flesh. And there was the inexorable law of the flesh, the
Last Judgement, the fall of the immortal flesh into Hell.