We still seem to be under the indelible imprint of the views that have taken firm root as a result of the efforts of the Renaissance era, when we generally behave in a completely negative manner towards the medieval literary works, as creations of a wild and unpalatable scholasticism. But what was once explicable and justified can no longer be so after a wonderful reversal of circumstances: at that time people rushed with fiery enthusiasm that surpassed everything to the inexhaustible source of eternally youthful beauty ... It strikes us when we discover the roots of a product of a truly medieval spirit in the classical soil of Hellenism, where it, a product of a truly international cultural life, must have played a significant role in one form or another in the intellectual life of the people before it became Christian. Authors exploited them for the purposes of their still young church and made the material, which occupied the imagination and the thinking of the people in this half-popular, half-scientific direction, available to a dogmatic-ethical tendency. This strange book is the Physiologus, a colorful mixture of fables from the animal world as well as from the area of plants and the valuable or healing stems, which were viewed as types according to the symbolic world view of that time and, be it in a mystical interpretation of Christ, the devil or the Church, be it in an allegorical-moral reference to humans, were equipped with religious accessories. - [Author]

Language: German