i THE TEMPLE OF WISDOM 57 



keep me in her charge : . . . But wisdom in the highest 

 sense, in its essence as the thought of God, is incommuni- 

 cable, incomprehensible, apart from all things. Wisdom 

 has three phases or aspects or * mansions ' first, the 

 mind of God the eternal, then the visible world itself 

 which is the first-born, and third, the mind of man 

 which is the second-born of the highest, the true 

 wisdom unattainable by man. Here among men 

 wisdom has built herself a house of reason and of 

 thought (which comes after the world), in which we see 

 the shadow of the first, the archetypal and ideal house 

 (which is before the world), and the image of the second, 

 the sensible and natural house, which is the world. 

 The seven columns of the house or temple are the 

 seven Arts Grammar, Rhetoric (with poetry), Logic, 

 Mathematics, Physics, Ethics, and Metaphysics, and 

 the temple was built first among the Egyptians and 

 Assyrians, viz. in the Chaldeans, then among the 

 Persians, with the Magi and Zoroaster, third the 

 Indians with their Gymnosophists ; . . . seventhly, in 

 our time, among the Germans." So far has Bruno come 

 from taking the Germans as mere beer-bibbers, as he 

 had written of them in England. 1 " Since the empire 

 (of wisdom) devolved upon you there have risen 

 amongst you new arts and great minds, the like of 

 which no other nations can shew." In the category 

 of German temple -builders are Albertus Magnus, 

 Nicolas of Cusa, Copernicus, Palingenius, Paracelsus ; 

 " among humanists many, apt imitators of the Attic and 

 Ausonian muses, and among them one greater than the 

 rest who more than imitates, rather rivals, the ancient 

 muses " (Erasmus). It is not unnatural that, in his own 

 Wittenberg, Luther should be praised, as among the Luther. 



1 Vide Sfaccio, Lag. 516. n, and 553. 21 ff. 



