PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (C) PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 1(2)

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 265-295

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.265

Religion may be described as the Waking-Being of a living creature in the moments when it overcomes, masters, denies, and even destroys Being. Racelife and the pulse of its drive dwindle as the eyes gaze into an extended, tense, and light-filled world, and Time yields to Space. The plantlike desire for fulfilment goes out, and from primary depths there wells up the animal fear of the fulfilment, of the ceasing of direction, of death. Not hate and love, but fear and love are the basic feelings of religion. Hate and fear differ as Time and Space, blood and eye, pulse and tension, heroism and saintliness. And love in the race-sense differs from love in the religious sense in the same way.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.266

The higher religion requires tense alertness against the powers of blood and being that ever lurk in the depths ready to recapture their primeval rights over the younger side of life. "Watch and pray, that ye fall not into temptation." Nevertheless, "liberation" is a fundamental word in every religion and an eternal wish of every waking-being. In this general, almost prereligious, sense, it means the desire for freedom from the anxieties and anguishes of wakingconsciousness; for relaxation of the tensions of fear-born thought and search; for the obliteration and removal of the consciousness of the Ego's loneliness in the universe, the rigid conditionedness of nature, the prospect of the immovable boundary of all Being in eld and death. Sleep, too, liberates "Death and his brother Sleep." And holy wine, intoxication, breaks the rigour of the spirit's tension, and dancing, the Dionysus art, and every other form of stupefaction and ecstasy.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.266

Understanding is causal only, whether deductive or inductive, whether derived from sensation or not. It is wholly impossible to distinguish being understood from being-caused both express the same thing. [...] Every kind of thinking has for every one of its domains of application a proper "system." In everyday life a causal connexion in thought is never exactly repeated. Even in modern physics working hypotheses that is, causal systems which partially exclude one another are in use side by side; for instance, the ideas of electrodynamics and those of thermodynamics.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.267

The understanding of causes sets free. Belief in the linkages discovered compels the world-fear to retreat. God is man's refuge from the Destiny which he can feel and livingly experience, but not think on, or figure, or name, and which sinks into abeyance for so long only for so long as the "critical" (literally, the separating) fear-born understanding can establish causes behind causes comprehensibly; that is, in order visible to the outer or inner eye. It is the desperate dilemma of the higher grade of man that his powerful will to understand is in constant contradiction with his being. It has ceased to serve his life, but is unable to rule it, and consequently in all important conjunctures there remains an insoluble element. "One has merely to declare oneself free, and one feels the moment to be conditioned. But if one has the courage to declare oneself conditioned, then one has the feeling of being free" (Goethe).

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.267-268

In the world-around something is established that is, fixed, spellbound. Understanding man has the secret in the hands, whether this be, as of old, sonic potent charm or, as nowadays, a mathematical formula. A feeling of triumph, even to-day, accompanies every experimental step in the realm of Nature which determines something about the purposes and powers of the god of heaven or the storm-spirits of the ground-dasmons; or about the numina of natural science (atom-nuclei, the velocity of light, gravitation); or even about the abstract numina that thought conceives in contemplating its own image (concept, category, reason) and, in determining, fixes it in the prison of an unalterable system of causal relations.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.268

Experience in this inorganic, killing, preserving sense, which is something quite different from life-experience and knowledge of men, takes place in two modes theory and technique, or, in religious language, myth and cult according as the believer's intention is to open up or to confine the secrets of the world-around. Both demand a high development of human understanding. [...] Religiousness is a trait of soul, but religion is a talent. "Theory" demands the gift of vision that few possess to the extent of luminous insight and many possess not at all. It is world-view, "Weltanschauung' in the most primary sense, whether what one sees in that world is the hand and the loom of powers, or (in a colder urban spirit, not fearing or loving, but inquisitive) the theatre of law-conform forces.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.269-270

The first, and perhaps the only, outcome of man's will-to-understanding is faith. "I believe" is the great word against metaphysical fear, and at the same time it is an avowal of love. [...] The highest intellectual possession, therefore, known to man as a being of speech-deduced thought, is the firm and hard-won belief in this something, withdrawn from the courses of time and destiny, which he has separated out by contemplation and labelled by name and number. But what that something is remains in the last analysis obscure. Was it the something of secret logic of the universe that was touched, or only a silhouette? And all the struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious investigation directs itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair. [...] Here belief passes over into the knowledge evoked by mistrust, or, more accurately, becomes belief in that knowledge. For the latter form of the understanding is radically dependent upon the former; it is posterior, more artificial, more questionable. Further, religious theory that is, the contemplation of the believer leads to priestly practice, but scientific theory, on the contrary, liberates itself by contemplation from the technical knowledge of every day life. The firm belief that is bred by illuminations, revelations, sudden deep glimpses, can dispense with critical work. But critical knowledge presupposes the belief that its methods will lead to just that which is desired that is, not to fresh imaginings, but to the "actual." History, however, teaches that doubt as to belief leads to knowledge, and doubt as to knowledge (after a period of critical optimism) back again to belief.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.270

Belief, in its primitive, unclear condition, acknowledges superior sources of wisdom by which things that man's own subtlety could never unravel are more or less manifest such as prophetic words, dreams, oracles, sacred scriptures, the voice of the deity. The critical spirit, on the contrary, wants, and believes itself able, to look into everything for itself. It not only mistrusts alien truths, but even denies their possibility. Truth, for it, is only knowledge that it has proved for itself. But if pure criticism creates its means out of itself solely, it did not long go unperceived that this position assumed the reality of the result. [...] It is apt to be forgotten that critical activity must rest upon a method, and the possibility of obtaining this method in turn by the way of criticism is only apparent. For, in reality, it follows from the momentary disposition of the thought. That is, the results of criticism themselves are determined by the basic method, but this in turn is determined by the stream of being which carries and perfuses the waking-consciousness. The belief in a knowledge that needs no postulates is merely a mark of the immense naivete of rationalist periods. A theory of natural science is nothing but a historically older dogma in another shape. And the only profit from it is that which life obtains, in the shape of a successful technique, to which theory has provided the key. It has already been said that the value of a working hypothesis resides not in its "correctness" but in its usableness. But discoveries of another sort, findings of insight, "Truths" in the optimistic sense, cannot be the outcome of purely scientific understanding, since this always presupposes an existing view upon which its critical, dissecting activity can operate

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.271-272

In the realm of doing the waking-consciousness takes charge only when it becomes technique. Religious knowledge, too, is power man is not only ascertaining causations, but handling them. He who knows the secret relationship between microcosm and macrocosm commands it also, whether the knowledge has come to him by revelation or by eavesdropping. Thus the magician and conjuror is truly the Taboo-man. He compels the deity through sacrifice and prayer; he practises the true rites and sacraments because they are causes of inevitable results, and whosoever knows them, him they must serve. [...] From this starting-point we can understand (what the European-American world of to-day has wellnigh forgotten) the ultimate meaning of religious ethics, Moral. [...] " What shall I do to be saved?" This "what?" is the key to the understanding of all real moral. In its deeps there is ever a "wherefore" and a "why," even in the case of those few sublimate philosophers who have imagined a moral that is "for its own sake" confessing in the very phrase that deep down they feel a "wherefore," even though but a sympathetic few of their own kind can appreciate it. There is only causal moral that is, ethical technique on the background of a convinced metaphysic.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.272

Negation is expressed in its very phrases religious moral contains prohibitions, not precepts. Taboo, even where it ostensibly affirms, is a list of disclaimers. To liberate oneself from the world of fact, to evade the possibilities of Destiny, always to look upon the race in oneself as the lurking ene my nothing but hard system, doctrine, and exercise will give that. No action must be causal or impulsive that is, left to the blood everything must be considered according to motives and results and "carried out" according to orders. Extreme tension of awareness is required lest we fall into sin. First of all things, continence in what pertains to the blood, love, marriage. Love and hate in mankind are cosmic and evil; the love of the sexes is the very polar opposite of timeless love and fear of God, and therefore it is the prime sin, for which Adam was cast forth from paradise and burdened man with the heritage of guilt. [...] Action, the field of history, the deed, heroism, delight in battle and victory and spoil, are evil. For in them the pulse of cosmic being knocks on the door too loudly and disturbingly for contemplativeness and thought.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.273

That which in civilized times is called social ethics has nothing to do with religion, and its presence only goes to show the weakness and emptiness of the religiousness of the day, which has lost that force of metaphysical sureness that is the condition precedent of strong, convinced, and self-denying moral. Think for instance of the difference between Pascal and Mill. Social ethic is nothing but practical politics. It is a very Late product of the same historical world whose Springtime (in all Cultures alike) has witnessed the flowering of an ethic of high courage and knightliness in a strong stock that does not wince under the life of history and fate; an ethic of natural and acquired reactions that polite society to-day would call "the instincts of a gentleman"; an ethic of which vulgarity and not sin is the antithesis. Once again it is the Castle versus the Cathedral.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.275-276

Primitive man's chaotic world-around, born of his discontinuous understanding of separate moments and yet full of impressive meaning, is always something grown-up, self-complete, and closed off, often with chasms and terrors of deep metaphysical premonition. Always it contains a system, and it matters little whether this is partially abstracted from the contemplation of the light-world or remains wholly within it. Such a world-picture docs not "progress"

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.276

All the more enigmatic, therefore, are the "pre-" periods of the grand Cultures, still primitive through and through, and yet more and more distinctly anticipating and pointing in a definite direction. It is just these periods, of some centuries' duration, that ought to have been accurately examined and compared amongst themselves and for themselves. In what shape does the coming phenomenon prepare itself? In the case of the Magian religions the threshold period, as we have seen, produced the type of the Prophetic religion, which led up to the Apocalyptic. How comes it that this particular form is more deeply grounded in the essence of this particular Culture?

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.277

But what are the features, now, of the primitive religion of Merovingian times that foreshadow the mighty uprising of the Gothic that was at hand? That both are ostensibly the same religion, Christianity, proves nothing when we consider the entire difference in their deeps. For (we must be quite clear in our own mind on this) the primitive character of a religion does not lie in its stock of doctrines and usages, but in the specific spirituality of the mankind that adopts them and feels, speaks, and thinks with them. The student has to familiarize himself with the fact that primitive Christianity (more exactly, the early Christianity of the Western Church) has twice subsequently become the expression-vehicle of a primitive piety, and therefore itself a primitive religion namely, in the Celtic-Germanic West between 500 and 900, and in Russia up to this day. Now, how did the world mirror itself to these "converted" minds?

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.278-279

Primitive religions have something homeless about them, like the clouds and the wind. [...] From life of this order the high Cultures are separated by a deep soil-boundness. Here there is a mother-landscape behind all expression-forms, and just as the State, as temple and pyramid and cathedral, must fulfil their history there where their idea originated, so too the great religion of every Springtime is bound by all the roots of its being to the land over which its world-image has risen. Sacral practices and dogmas may be carried far and wide, but their inner evolution stays spellbound in the place of their birth. It is simply an impossibility that the slightest trace of evolution of Classical city-cults should be found in Gaul, or a dogmatic advance of Faustian Christianity in America. Whatever disconnects itself from the land becomes rigid and hard. [...] Every Culture actualizes here its prime symbol. [...] Whether the world be something set under a domed light-cavern, as it was for Jesus and his companions, or just a vanishingly small bit of a star-filled infinity, as Giordano Bruno felt it; whether the Orphics take their bodily god into themselves, or the spirit of Plotinus, soaring in ecstasy, fuses in henosis with the spirit of God, or St. Bernard in his "mystic union" becomes one with the operation of infinite deity the deep urge of the soul is governed always by the prime symbol of the particular Culture and of no other.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.280

But even in the towns one stratum hangs back, historically, relatively to another. Over the primitive religion of the country-side there is another popular religion, that of the small people in the underground of the towns and in the provin ces. The higher a Culture rises Middle Kingdom, Brahman period, Pre-Socratics, Pre-Confucians, Baroque the narrower becomes the circle of those who possess the final truths of their time as reality and not as mere name and sound.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.282

About 3000 in Egypt and Babylon two great religions began their lifecourses. In Egypt the "reformation" period at the end of the Old Kingdom saw solar monotheism firmly founded as the religion of priests and educated persons. All other gods and goddesses whom the peasantry and the humble people continued to worship in their fomer meaning are now only incarnations or servants of the one Re. [...] Exactly as in the times of Justinian
and Charles V, the city-spirit asserted mastery over the soul of the land; the formative power of the Springtime had come to an end

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.285

The Chinese religion, of which the great "Gothic" period lies between 1300 and 1100 and covers the rise of the Chou dynasty, must be treated with extreme care. In presence of the superficial profundity and pedantic enthusiasm of Chinese thinkers of the Confucius and Lao-tse type who were all born in the ancien regime period of their state-world it seems very hazardous to try to determine anything at all as to high mysticism and grand legends in the beginning. Nevertheless, such a mysticism and such legends must once have existed. But it is not from these over-rationalized philosophies of the great cities that we shall learn anything about them as little as Homer can give us in the Classical parallel, though for another reason.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.287

To the Chinese waking-consciousness heaven and earth were halves of the macrocosm, without opposition, each a mirror-image of the other. In this picture there was neither Magian dualism nor Faustian unity of active force. Becoming appears in the unconstrained reciprocal working of two principles, the yang and the yin, which were conceived rather as periodic than as polar. Accordingly, there are two souls in man, the kwei which corresponded with the yin, the earthly, the dark, the cold, and disintegrated with the body; and the sen, which is higher, light, and permanent. [...] All this is concentrated in the basic word "tao."

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.287-288

When Alexander appeared on the Indus, the piety of these three Cultures Chinese, Indian, Classical had long been moulded into the historyless forms of a broad Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. But it was not long before the group of Magian religions arose in the region intermediate between the Classical and the Indian field, and it must have been at about the same time that the religious history of the Maya and Inca, now hopelessly lost to us, began. A thousand years later, when here also all was inwardly fulfilled and done with, there appeared on the unpromising soil of France, sudden and swiftly mounting, Germanic-Catholic Christianity. It was in this case as in every other; whether the whole stock of names and practices came from the East, or whether thousands of particular details were derived from primeval Germanic and Celtic feelings, the Gothic religion is something so new and unheard-of, something of which the final depths are so completely incomprehensible by anyone outside its faith, that to contrive linkages for them on the historical surface is meaningless jugglery.