Transcendentalism in Beowulf and Antigone As time passed through the various eras, from the Ancient to the Renaissance, a trend began to form in literature. The ancient periods, reflected in the writings of the Taoists and the Greeks, were fundamentally a time of transcendentalism. The gods of this era were treated almost as if they were friends of the people or advisors; the gods controlled their destiny and the uncontrollable, but people were still very individualistic. As time passed, a trend led Europe towards a period of theism, in which the god or gods are treated as father figures; the gods controlled the lives of all their peoples just as parents control their children, even, as Martin Luther stated, with an attitude of fear. Through the periods of Ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Europe, a cycle forms from a completely transcendentalist attitude to a completely theistic attitude, and back again. Some of the early literary scholars who recovered over the years came from the ancient period, especially from the East and Greece. These people believed strongly in the will and power of the self, emphasizing the transcendental qualities of life; they encouraged people to look within themselves for the answer rather than in the state or in God. Two works from this period representative of this attitude are the poems of Lao Tzu, a Taoist, and Antigone, a play by Sophocles. In Lao Tzu's poem 47, "There is no need to rush outside," Lao Tzu writes, "...stay / At the center of your being; / For the more you leave it, the less you learn" (Davis, 832). By encouraging others to study the world from the "center of their being", he clearly shows his interest in learning from... middle of paper... dualistic ideas, which seem to coincide perfectly with the times of each era. As today's literature becomes increasingly romantic and we arguably approach the end of an era, we must ask: does the cycle continue? The Renaissance was followed by an almost purgatorial movement of spiritual reform. In America, these cycles seem to have accelerated into a perceptible oscillating phenomenon: individualism in the 1960s, theistic spirituality in the 1980s, and another transcendentalist movement in the 1990s, each shift bringing the two ideas closer together. Perhaps one day in the near future, these ideas will become similar enough in nature to be somehow combined to form a more moderate philosophy in society. Works Cited Davis, Paul, et al., comp. Western literature in a global context. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995