Medievalism is an idealism forced upon the world of Appearance. It is a mystical conclusion by the Teuton will, drawn from the logical element of Latin, and the naturalistic element of Semitic, cultures. It is most powerful in the lands where the Teuton is strongest: Germany and England. In France, where the blend was fairest between Frank and Gallo-Roman, it is most balanced and most perfect. In Italy, medievalism is never great. And in a land whose conclusive elements are Semitic or harmonize with the Semitic, it is impossible. Such a land was Spain. The ethnic Iberian base of Spain is more African in nature than European; more aboriginally close to Semite than to German. Arab culture was always naturalistic. Judaism and Mohammedanism are pragmatic systems on different levels, yet both based upon empirical experience and natural law. In medieval Catholicism, the natural laws and the experience of the world are deformed by a mystic idealizing will. In Semitism, the ideal sense is made to converge with natural law: the mystic will is regarded as possessing its true form in the activity of nature. Semitism in its several shades, or a spirit close to it, impeded Spain from becoming wholly medieval. It was culturally too strong to accept the neo-platonic House of the medieval God. But Semitism is politically weak. Medievalism, repugning the natural body of the world, creates an ideal Organism--a Church--which becomes politically real. Semitism, accepting Nature as God’s organic body, has no impulse to erect political substitutes for the wholeness of existence. Politically, it tends toward fragmentation: even as in art it remains lyrical and forms no such organic structures as the Gothic cathedral or the Dantean epic. This political weakness of the Spanish Semite impeded Spain from becoming wholly Semitic. Spain for centuries was in a state of continuous flux and of osmosis between the medieval north and the Semitic south. When at length there came a final issue the north won. Ferdinand and Isabel turned toward Europe. A revised medievalism, equipped with methods of the Renaissance, became the goal of the Spanish will. And at a time when it was already dead in Europe. This is the year 1500. The Holy Roman Empire is in full liquidation. Luther and Calvin are rising. Copernicus is at work. America has been discovered. Now Spain pours her ideal energy and her blood into the tragic task of becoming medieval. Godefroi, Saint Louis, Parzival, Saint Francis and Aquinas have been dethroned and denied in the countries of their birth. They become the patterns and movers of Castile.