On the intellectual plane, the same distrust of man and of nature prompted an agelong opposition to science, to independent metaphysical or religious thinking, and indeed to all forms of free mental activity. The story of Galileo summoned before the seven cardinals at Rome and forced to deny his belief in the heretical doctrine that the earth revolved round the sun is typical of the experiences of almost all venturesome thinkers in the middle age. The application of human intellect to the unravelling of the august mysteries of God was zealously punished as a blasphemy; the only authorized channel of knowledge was revelation. The rational and systematic questioning of nature that has given us modern science was by the true mystical mind held in horror, first because the intelligence is a human and therefore corrupt instrument, and secondly because nature itself is an illusion, a pitfall for unwary feet that falter in their search for heaven. An asceticism which saw in the physical and intellectual activities of the natural man more evil than good, could hardly be expected to look more leniently on his emotional life, which is, perhaps, the most intensely human and natural part of him, and of which the organized expression is art. Ordinary human feelings, exercised spontaneously in the present world, and not as mere offerings to the beyond, seemed to the ascetic as unworthy of a God-fearing man as sensuous pleasures and intellectual quests. And especially abhorrent to him was their free embodiment in art. As religion is the expression of man’s consciousness of the supernatural, so art is the expression of his delight and joy in the natural. Its work is to build, out of primitive sensations, utterances of feeling and monuments of beauty. But these sensations are all ultimately physical. These feelings are the simple, instinctive feelings of humanity, and this beauty is one that is apprehended by no metaphysical faculty, but by ordinary human powers--by the senses, the heart, and the mind. Art is the most radically and inexorably human of all man’s interests. And since the whole bias of asceticism was against the free development or expression of merely human powers, it was inevitable that mysticism, in which the ascetic element is so considerable, should be even more restrictive than helpful in its influence on art. While it did indeed foster the purely devout and adoring element in artistic expression, it discouraged that full appeal to the whole man by which alone art attains its maturity.