Essays and Aphorisms

by Arthur Schopenhauer

And to judge how it succeeded we have only to compare antiquity with the Middle Ages which followed it, the age of Pericles, say, with the fourteenth century. You would hardly think you were dealing with the same species. In the former the fairest unfolding of humanity, a splendid state structure, wise laws, a carefully balanced legal administration, rationally regulated freedom, all the arts, together with poetry and philosophy, at their peak, creating works which after thousands of years still stand as unequalled models of their kind, almost as the productions of higher beings whom we can never hope to emulate, and at the same time life beautified by the noblest social fellowship such as we see reflected in The Symposium of Xenophon.12 And now look at the latter age, if you are able to. Look at the age when the Church had fettered the minds and forced the bodies of mankind, so that knights and priests might lay all the drudgery of life on their common beasts of burden, the third estate. Here you find force majeure, feudalism and fanaticism in intimate alliance, and in their train hideous ignorance and darkness of mind, and in consequence intolerance, quarrelling over beliefs, religious wars, crusades, persecution of heretics and inquisitions; while social fellowship took the form of a knightly chivalry compounded of brutality and foppishness, with grotesqueries and humbug pedantically reduced to a system, with degrading superstition and apish veneration of women. The anc...

Hellenistic societies superiority over medieval society/contrast with Hellenistic religion and Christianity