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

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 295-323

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.295-296

In all Cultures, Reformation has the same meaning the bringing back of the religion to the purity of its original idea as this manifested itself in the great centuries of the beginning. In no Culture is this movement missing, whether we know about it, as in the case of Egypt, or not, as in that of China. It means, further, that the city and with it the city-spirit are gradually freeing themselves from the soul of the country-side, setting up in opposition to the latter's all-power and reconsidering the feelings and thoughts of the primitive pre-urban time with reference to its present self. It was Destiny and not intellectual necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Faustian worlds, to the budding-off of new religions at this point. We know to-day that, under Charles V, Luther was within an ace of becoming the reformer of the whole undivided Church. For Luther, like all reformers in all Cultures, was not the first, but the last of a grand succession which led from the great ascetics of the open land to the city-priest.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.297

However widely the Reformations of the various Cultures may differ amongst themselves, the purpose is the same for all to bring the faith, which had strayed all too far into the world-as-history and time-secularism "Zeitlichkeit" back into the realm o f Nature, clean waking-consciousness, and pure causecontrolled and cause-pervaded Space; out of the world of economics ("wealth") into that of science ("poverty"), out of patrician and cavalier society (which was also that of Renaissance and Humanism) into that of spirituals and ascetics; and lastly (as significant as it is impossible) out of the political ambitions of vestmented human thoroughbreds into the realm of holy Causality that is not of this world.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.299

The Reformation abolished the whole bright and consoling side of the Gothic myth the cult of Mary, the veneration of the saints, the relics, the pilgrimages, the mass. But the myth of devildom and witchcraft remained, for it was the embodiment and cause of the inner torture, and now that torture at last rose to its supreme horror. Baptism was, for Luther at least, an exorcism, the veritable sacrament of devil-banning. There grew up a large, purely Protestant literature about the Devil. Out of the Gothic wealth of colour, there remained black; of its arts, music, in particular organ-music. But in the place of the mythic light-world, whose helpful nearness the faith of the common people could not, after all, forgo, there rose again out of longburied depths an element of ancient German myth. It came so stealthily that even to-day its true significance is not yet realized. The expressions "folktale" and "popular custom" are inadequate: it is a true Myth that inheres in the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies, house-sprites, and sweeping clouds of the disembodied, and a true Cult that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjurings
that are still practised with a pious awe.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.300

Intellectual creativeness of the Late period begins, not with, but after, the Reformation. Its most typical creation is free science. Even for Luther learning was still essential ly the "handmaid of theology," and Calvin had the freethinking doctor Servet burnt. The thought of the Springtimes Faustian like Egyptian, Vedic, and Orphic had felt its vocation to be the justification of faith by criticism. If criticism did not succeed, the critical method must be wrong. Knowledge was faith justified, not faith controverted. Now, however, the critical powers of the city intellect have become so great that it is no longer content to affirm, but must test. [...] Within Baroque philosophy, Western natural-science stands by itself. No other Culture possesses anything like it, and assuredly it must have been from its beginnings, not a "handmaid of theology," but the servant of the technical Will-to-Power, oriented to that end both mathematically and experimentally from its very foundations a practical mechanics. And as it is firstly technique and only secondly theory, it must be as old as Faustian man himself. Accordingly, we find technical works of an astounding energy of combination even by 1000.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.301

Pure contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment for ever, but not so the Faustian symbol of the machine, which urged us to mechanical constructions even in the twelfth century and made "Perpetuum mobile" the Prometheus-idea of the Western intellect. For us the first thing is ever the working hypothesis the very kind of thought-product that is meaningless to other Cultures. It is an astounding fact (to which, however, we must accustom ourselves) that the idea of immediately exploiting in practice any knowledge of natural relations that may be acquired is alien to every sort of mankind except the Faustian (and those who, like Japanese, Jews, and Russians, have to-day come under the intellectual spell of its Civilization). The very notion of the working hypothesis implicitly contains a dynamic lay-out of the universe.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.302

Just as the Classical mind felt Prometheus's defiance of the gods as "hybris," so our Baroque felt the machine as diabolical. 1 The spirit of Hell had betrayed to man the secret of mastering the world-mechanism and even of himself enacting the part of God. And hence it is that all purely priestly natures, that live wholly in the world of the spirit and expect nothing of "this world" and notably the idealist philosophers, the Classicists, the Humanists, and even Nietzsche have for technique nothing but silent hostility. Every Late philosophy contains this critical protest against the uncritical intuitiveness of the Spring. But this criticism of the intellect that is sure of its own superiority affects also faith itself and evokes the one great creation in the field of religion that is the peculiarity of the Late period every Late period namely, Puritanism. Puritanism manifests itself in the army of Cromwell and his Independents, iron, Bible-firm, psalm-singing as they rode into battle; in the ranks of the Pythagoreans, who in the bitter earnest of their gospel of duty wrecked gay Sybaris and branded it for ever as the city without morals; in the armies of the early Caliphs, which subdued not only states, but souls.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.303

We have to emancipate ourselves from the surfaces of history and, especially, to thrust aside the artificial fences in which the methodology of Western sciences has paddocked it before we can see that Pythagoras, Mohammed, and Cromwell embody one and the same movement in three Cultures. Pythagoras was not a philosopher. According to all statements of the Pre-Socratics, he was a saint, prophet and founder of a fanatically religious society that forced its truths upon the people around it by every political and military means. The destruction of Sybaris by Croton an event which, we may be sure, has survived in historical memory only because it was the climax of a wild re ligious war was an explosion of the same hate that saw in Charles I and his gay Cavaliers not merely doctrinal error, but also worldly disposition as something that must be destroyed root and branch. A myth purified and conceptually fortified, combined with rigorous ethical precepts, imbued the Pythagoreans with the conviction that they would attain salvation before all other men.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.303-304

Islam was no more a religion of the desert in particular than Zwingli's faith was a religion of the high mountains in particular. It is incident, and no more, that the Puritan movement for which the Magian world was ripe proceeded from a man of Mecca and not from a Monophysite or a Jew. For in the northern Arabian desert there were the Christian states of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, and in the Sabaean South there were religious wars waged between Christians and Jews that involved the world of states from Assuan to the Sassanid Empire. [...] Mecca was a little island of ancient Arabian paganism in the midst of a world of Jews and Christians, a mere relic that had long been mined by the ideas of the great Magian religions. The little of this paganism that filtered into the Koran was later explained away by the Commentary of the Sunna and its Syro-Mesopotamian intellect. At most Islam was a new religion only to the same extent as Lutheranism was one. Actually, it was the prolongation of the great early religions. Equally, its expansion was not (as is even now imagined) a "migration of peoples" proceeding from the Arabian Peninsula, but an onslaught of enthusiastic believers, which like an avalanche bore along with it Christians, Jews, and Mazdaists and set them at once in its front rank as fanatical Moslems. It was Berbers from the homeland of St. Augustine who conquered Spain, and Persians from Irak who drove on to the Oxus. The enemy of yesterday became the front-rank comrade of tomorrow.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.305

But in Puritanism there is hidden already the seed of Rationalism, and after a few enthusiastic generations have passed, this bursts forth everywhere and makes itself supreme. This is the step from Cromwell to Hume. Not cities in general, not even the great cities, but a few particular cities now become the theatre of intellectual history Socratic Athens, Abbassid Baghdad, eighteenthcentury London and Paris. "Enlightenment" is the cliche of that time. The sun bursts forth but what is it that clears off the heavens of the critical consciousness to make way for that sun?

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.306-307

Confucius belongs to the Chinese "eighteenth century" through and through. Lao-tse (who despised him) stands at a midpoint in the Taoist movement, which manifested traits of Protestantism, Puritanism, and Pietism in turn, and both finally propagated a practical world-tone based upon a wholly mechanistic world-view. The word "tao" underwent in the Late period of China just the same continuous alteration of its fundamental content, and in the same mechanistic direction, as the word "Logos" in the history of Classical thought from Heraclitus to Posidonius, and as the word "Force" between Galileo's day and ours. That which once had been grandly moulded myth and cult is called, in this "religionof educated people," Nature and Virtue but this Nature is a reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge. Confucius and Buddha, Socrates and Rousseau are at one in this.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.308-309

Two centuries after Puritanism the mechanistic conception of the world stands at its zenith. It is the effective religion of the time. Even those who still thought themselves to be religious in the old sense, to be "believers in God," were only mistaking the world in which their waking-consciousness was mirr oring itself. Religious truths were always in their understanding mechanistic truths, and in general it was only the habit of traditional words that imparted a colour-wash of myth to a Nature that was in reality regarded scientifically. Culture is ever synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban country-side, is carried through in the cities of art and intellect, and closes with a finale of materialism in the world-cities. But even the last chords arc strictly in the key of the whole. There are Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, Western materialisms, and each is nothing but the original stock of myth-shapes, cleared of the elements of experience and contemplative vision and viewed mechanistically.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.309

Unique and self-contained, again, is the Faustian materialism, in the narrower sense of the word. In it the technical outlook upon the world reached fulfilment. The whole world a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed, capable down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate it this is what distinguishes our particular "return to Nature" from all others. [...] But the grand intellectual myth of Energy and Mass is at the same time a vast working hypothesis. It draws the picture of nature in such a way that men can use it.The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution, development, progress, and put into the centre of the system; the Will is an albumen-process; and all these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism, Positivism, and what not are elevated into the fitness-moral which is the beacon of American business men, British politicians, and German progress-Philistines alike and turns out, in the last analysis, to be nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justification by faith.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.310-311

This next phase I call the Second Religiousness. It appears in all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which time-periods cease to mean anything. (So far as the Western Civilization is concerned, therefore, we are still many generations short of that point.) The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism, which is the final political constitution of Late Civilizations; it becomes visible, therefore, in the Augustan Age of the Classical and about the time of Shi-hwang-ti's time in China. In both phenomena the creative young strength of the Early Culture is lacking. But both have their greatness nevertheless. That of the Second Religiousness consists in a deep piety that fills the waking-consciousness the piety that impressed Herodotus in the (Late) Egyptians and impresses West-Europeans in China, India, and Islam and that of Caesarism consists in its unchained might of colossal facts. But neither in the creations of this piety nor in the form of the Roman Imperium is there anything primary and spontaneous. Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds itself it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalism's fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase. [...] But it is not the religious pastimes of educated and literature-soaked cliques, still less is it the intellect, that gives rise to the Second Religiousness. Its source is the naive belief that arises, unremarked but spontaneous, among the masses that there is some sort of mystic constitution of actuality (as to which formal proofs are presently regarded as barren and tiresome wordjugglery), and an equally na'ive heart-need reverently responding to the myth with a cult.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.314

In the end Second Religiousness issues in the fellah-religions. Here the opposition between cosmopolitan and provincial piety has vanished again, as completely as that between primitive and higher Culture. What this means the conception of the fellah people, discussed in an earlier chapter, tells us. Religion becomes entirely historyless; where formerly decades constituted an epoch, now whole centuries pass unimportantly, and the ups and downs of superficial changes only serve to show the unalterable finality of the inner state.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.315

The religion of Jewry, too, is a fellah-religion since the time of Jehuda ben Halevi who (like his Islamic teacher, Al Ghazali) regarded scientific philosophy with an unqualified scepticism, and in the Kuzari (1140) refused to it any role save that of handmaid of the orthodox theology.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.316

The Jewish Consensus, like the Persian, Islamic, and Byzantine, now advances to an urban and intellectual awareness, and thenceforward it is master of the forms of city-economics and city-science.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.317

But an entirely new situation was created when, from about the year 1000, the Western portion of the Consensus found itself suddenly in the field of the young Western Culture. The Jews, like the Parsees, the Byzantines, and the Moslems, had become by then civilized and cosmopolitan, whereas the German-Roman world liv ed in the townless land, and the settlements that had just come (or were coming) into existence around monasteries and market-places were still many generations short of possessing souls of their own. While the Jews were already almost fellaheen, the Western peoples were still almost primitives. The Jew could not comprehend the Gothic inwardness, the castle, the Cathedral; nor the Christian the Jew's superior, almost cynical, intelligence and his finished expertness in "money-thinking." There was mutual hate and contempt, due not to race-distinction, but to difference of phase.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.323

To-day this Magian nation, with its ghetto and its religion, itself is in danger of disappearing not because the metaphysics of the two Cultures come closer to one another (for that is impossible), but because the intellectualized upper stratum of each side is ceasing to be metaphysical at all. It has lost every kind of inward cohesion, and what remains is simply a cohesion for practical questions. The lead that this nation has enjoyed from its long habituation to thinking in business terms becomes ever less and less (vis-à-vis the American, it has already almost gone), and with the loss of it will go the last potent means of keeping up a Consensus that has fallen regionally into parts. In the moment when the civilized methods of the European-American world-cities shall have arrived at full maturity, the destiny ofJewry at least of the Jewry in our midst (that of Russia is another problem) will be accomplished. Islam has soil under it. It has practically absorbed the Persian, Jewish, Nestorian, and Monophysite Consensus into itself. [...] But the West-European-American part of the Jewish Consensus, which has drawn to itself and bound to its destiny most of the other parts of Jewry, has now fallen into the machinery of a young Civilization. Detached from any land-footing since, centuries ago, it saved its life by shutting itself off in the ghe tto, it is fragmented and faced with dissolution. But that is a Destiny, not in the Faustian Culture, but of the Magian.