65. Jacob Burckhardt

Died on August 8, 1897

A man with the rarest of spiritual gifts passed away these days. Jacob Burckhardt, the incomparable performer of the Renaissance, died on August 8. He was to us what few writers can be to us. For few possess the power to resurrect an age before our souls with such grandeur as Burckhardt was able to do in his work "The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy" (1860). Anyone who has absorbed this book in the way it deserves according to its value must count it among the most important means of his education. The intellectual forces of the Renaissance are portrayed in simple, broad lines, and the great figures are described vividly and with profound insight. When you immerse yourself in Burckhardt's book, you live in the ideas, in the feelings of that mighty time. No feeling, no thought, no excess seems incomprehensible when you have followed the explanations of this brilliant man. He recreates in the best sense of the word what excited the Renaissance, what it lived out in deeds. He describes with dramatic power. He knows what moves the time, what moves the people of the time in their innermost being. People who know Burckhardt as a teacher assure us that he was captivating in his oral presentations, that he was able to bring past times to life in a marvelous way before his listeners. Anyone who delves into his writings will readily believe and understand this. What can be said of so many historians, it is basically the spirit of their masters in which the times are reflected: it has no application to Burckhardt. He knows how to awaken the spirit of the times in its very own form.

The tremendous effect Burckhardt was able to exert on receptive minds is best demonstrated by the effect he had on Friedrich Nietzsche. The times in which the great individuals flourished: they were Nietzsche's spiritual home. And no one knew how to lead him to them better than Burckhardt. He acknowledged with words of the greatest enthusiasm how Nietzsche came to life in the great historian's expositions, how he found in him the spiritual air that he most liked to breathe. Nietzsche counted the fact that he found Jacob Burckhardt in Basel when he came to the city as a young professor and was able to befriend him as one of the good gifts granted to him by fate. And the way in which Burckhardt approached the young genius speaks for the great trait in his personality. From the very beginning, he had the right sense of the intellectual power that was working its way to the surface in the young philosopher. Even then, he understood him like few others. It always speaks for the greatness of a mind when it is able to immediately recognize another great man as such.