MAKROKOSMOS. (2) APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 183-216.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.183

Henceforth we shall designate the soul of the Classical Culture, which chose the sensuously-present individual body as the ideal type of the extended, by the name (familiarized by Nietzsche) of the Apollinian. In opposition to it we have the Faustian soul, whose prime-symbol is pure and limitless space, and whose "body" is the Western Culture that blossomed forth with the birth of the Romanesque style in the loth century in the Northern plain between the Elbe and the Tagus. The nude statue is Apollinian, the art of the fugue Faustian. Apollinian are: mechanical statics, the sensuous cult of the Olympian gods, the politically individual city-states of Greece, the doom of Oedipus and the phallus-symbol. Faustian are: Galileian dynamics, Catholic and Protestant dogmatics, the great dynasties of the Baroque with their cabinet diplomacy, the destiny of Lear and the Madonna-ideal from Dante's Beatrice to the last line of Faust II. The painting that defines the individual body by contours is Apollinian, that which forms'space by means of light and shade is Faustian this is the difference between the fresco of Polygnotus and the oil painting of Rembrandt. The Apollinian existence is that of the Greek who describes his ego as soma and who lacks all idea of an inner development and therefore all real history, inward and outward; the Faustian is an existence which is led with a deep consciousness and introspection of the ego, and a resolutely personal culture evidenced in memoirs, reflections, retrospects and prospects and conscience. And in the time of Augustus, in the countries between Nile and Tigris, Black Sea and South Arabia, there appears aloof but able to speak to us through forms borrowed, adopted and inherited the Magian soul of the Arabian Culture with its algebra, astrology and alchemy, its mosaics and arabesques, its caliphates and mosques, and the sacraments and scriptures of the Persian, Jewish, Christian, "post-Classical" and Manichasan religions.The Classical Culture

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.184-185

The Classical Culture begins, then, with a great renunciation. A rich, pictorial, almost over-ripe art lay ready to its hand. But this could not become the expression of the young soul, and so from about uoo B.C. the harsh, narrow, and to our eyes scanty and barbaric, early-Doric geometrical style appears in opposition to the Minoan.8 For the three centuries which correspond to the flowering of our Gothic, there is no hint of an architecture, and it is only at about 650 B.C., "contemporarily" with Michelangelo's transition into the Baroque, that the Doric and Etruscan temple-type arises. All "Early" art is religious, and this symbolic Negation is not less so than the Egyptian and the Gothic Affirmation. The idea of burning the dead accords with the cult-site but not with the cult-building; and the Early Classical religion which conceals itself from us behind the solemn names of Calchas, Tiresias, Orpheus and (probably) Numa possessed for its rites simply that which is left of an architectural idea when one has subtracted the architecture, viz., the sacred precinct. The original cult-plan is thus the Etruscan templum, a sacred area merely staked off on the ground by the augurs with an impassable boundary and a propitious entrance on the East side. A "templum" was created where a rite was to be performed or where the representative of the state authority, senate or army, happened to be. It existed only for the duration of its use, and the spell was then removed. It was probably only about 700 B.C. that the Classical soul so far mastered itself as to represent this architectural Nothing in the sensible form of a built body.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.185-186

Faustian architecture, on the contrary, begins on the grand scale simultaneously with the first stirrings of a new piety (the Cluniac reform, c. 1000) and a new thought (the Eucharistic controversy between Berengar of Tours and Lanfranc 1050), and proceeds at once to plans of gigantic intention; often enough, as in the case of Speyer, the whole community did not suffice to fill the cathedral, and often again it proved impossible to complete the projected scheme. The passionate language of this architecture is that of the poems too. Far apart as may seem the Christian hymnology of the south and the Eddas of the still heathen north, they are alike in the implicit space-endlessness of prosody, rhythmic syntax and imagery. Read the Dies Ira together with the Voluspa, which is little earlier; there is the same adamantine will to overcome and break all resistances of the visible.Spengler writes that the Classical gods were worshiped as physical bodies/statues but not that the planets were treated like gods. I find it strange since planets (bodies) as gods would fit well into his description of the Classical soul.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.187

The plurality of separate bodies which represents Cosmos for the Classical soul, requires a similar pantheon hence the antique polytheism. The single world-volume, be it conceived as cavern or as space, demands the single god of Magian or Western Christianity. Athene or Apollo might be represented by a statue, but it is and has long been evident to our feeling that the Deity of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation can only be "manifested" in the storm of an organ fugue or the solemn progress of cantata and mass. From the rich manifold of figures in the Edda and contemporary legends of saints to Goethe our myth develops itself in steady opposition to the Classical in the one case a continuous disintegration of the divine that culminated in the early Empire in an impossible multitude of deities, in the other a process of simplification that led to the Deism of the 18th Century.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.187

The Magian hierarchy of heaven angels, saints, persons of the Trinity has grown paler and paler, more and more disembodied, in the sphere of the Western pseudomorphosis, supported though it was by the whole weight of Church authority, and even the Devil the great adversary in the Gothic world-drama has disappeared unnoticed from among the possibilities of the Faustian world-feeling. Luther could still throw the inkpot at him, but he has been passed over in silence by perplexed Protestant theologians long ago. For the solitude of the Faustian soul agrees not at all with a duality of world powers. God himself is the All.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.188-189

The Faustian soul looks for an immortality to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space, and it disembodies the stone in its Gothic thrustsystem (contemporary, we may note, with the "consecutives" in Church music till at last nothing remained visible but the indwelling depth- and height-energy of this self-extension. The Apollinian soul would have its dead burned, would sec them annihilated, and so it remained averse from stone building throughout the early period of its Culture. The Egyptian soul saw itself as moving down a narrow and inexorably-prescribed life-path to come at the end before the judges of the dead ("Book of the Dead," cap. 115). That was its Destiny-idea. The Egyptian's existence is that of the traveller who follows one unchanging direction, and the whole form-language of his Culture is a
translation into the sensible of this one theme. And as we have taken endless space as the prime symbol of the North and body as that of the Classical, so we may take the word way as most intelligibly expressing that of the Egyptians.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.190

There is, however, another Culture that, different as it most fundamentally is from the Egyptian, yet found a closely-related prime symbol. This is the Chinese, with its intensely directional principle of the Tao. But whereas the Egyptian treads to the end a way that is prescribed for him with an inexorable necessity, the Chinaman wanders through his world; consequently, he is conducted to his god or his ancestral tomb not by ravines of stone, between faultless smooth walls, but by friendly Nature herself. Nowhere else has the landscape become so genuinely the material of the architecture.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.191-192

Imitation is born of the secret rhythm of all things cosmic. For the waking being the One appears as discrete and extended; there is a Here and a There, a Proper and an Alien something, a Microcosm and a Macrocosm that are polar to one another in the sense-life, and what the rhythm of imitation does is to bridge this dichotomy. Every religion is an effort of the waking soul to reach the powers of the world-around. And so too is Imitation, which in its most devoted moments is wholly religious, for it consists in an identity of inner activity between the soul and body "here" and the world-around "there" which, vibrating as one, become one. As a bird poises itself in the storm or a float gives to the swaying waves, so our limbs take up an irresistible beat at the sound of march-music. Not less contagious is the imitation of another's bearing and movements, wherein children in particular excel.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.196

In every springtime, consequently, there are two definitely ornamental and non-imitative arts, that of building and that of decoration. In the longing and pregnant centuries before it, elemental expression belongs exclusively to Ornamentation in the narrow sense. The Carolingian period is represented only by its ornament, as its architecture, for want of the Idea, stands between the styles. And similarly, as a matter of art-history, it is immaterial that no buildings of the Mycenaean age have survived. But with the dawn of the great Culture, architecture as ornament comes into being suddenly and with such a force of expression that for a century mere decoration-as-such shrinks away from it in awe. The spaces, surfaces and edges of stone speak alone. The tomb of Chephren is the culmination of mathematical simplicity everywhere right angles, squares and rectangular pillars, nowhere adornment, inscription or desinence and it is only after some generations have passed that Relief ventures to infringe the solemn magic of those spaces and the strain begins to be eased. And the noble Romanesque of Westphalia-Saxony (Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella,
Paderborn), of Southern France and of the Normans (Norwich and Peterborough) managed to render the whole sense of the world with indescribable power and dignity in one line, one capital, one arch. When the form-world of the springtime is at its highest, and not before, the ordained relation is that architecture is lord and ornament is vassal. And the word "ornament" is to be taken here in the widest possible sense. Even conventionally, it covers the Classical unit-motive with its quiet poised symmetry or meander supplement, the spun surface of arabesque and the not dissimilar surface-patterning of Mayan art, and the "Thunder-pattern" and others of the early Chou period which prove once again the landscape basis of the old Chinese architecture without a doubt.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.197-198

At the last, when Civilization sets in, true ornament and, with it, great art as a whole are extinguished. The transition consists in every Culture in Classicism and Romanticism of one sort or another, the former being a sentimental regard for an Ornamentation (rules, laws, types) that has long been archaic and soulless, and the latter a sentimental Imitation, not of life, but of an older Imitation. In the place of architectural style we find architectural taste. Methods of painting and mannerisms of writing, old forms and new, home and foreign, come and go with the fashion. The inward necessity is no longer there, there are no longer "schools," for everyone selects what and where it pleases him to select. Art becomes craft-art (Kunstgewerbe) in all its branches architecture and music, poetry and drama and in the end we have a pictorial and literary stock-in-trade which is destitute of any deeper significance and is employed according to taste. This final or industrial form of Ornament no longer historical, no longer in the condition of "becoming" we have before us not only in the patterns of oriental carpets, Persian and Indian metal work, Chinese porcelain, but also in Egyptian (and Babylonian) art as the Greeks and Romans met it. The Minoan art of Crete is pure craft-art, a northern outlier of Egyptian post-Hyksos taste; and its "contemporary," Hellenistic-Roman art from about the time of Scipio and Hannibal, similarly subserves the habit of comfort and the play of intellect. From the richly-decorated entablature of the Forum of Nerva in Rome to the later provincial ceramics in the West, we can trace the same steady formation of an unalterable craft-art that we find in the Egyptian and the Islamic worlds, and that we have to presume in India after Buddha and in China after Confucius.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.198

Now, Cathedral and Pyramid-temple are different in spite of their deep inward kinship, and it is precisely in these differences that we seize the mighty phenomenon of the Faustian soul, whose depth-impulse refuses to be bound in the prime symbol of a way, and from its earliest beginnings strives to transcend every optical limitation. Can anything be more alien to the Egyptian conception of the State whose tendency we may describe as a noble sobriety - than the political ambitions of the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, who came to grief because they overleapt all political actualities and for whom the recognition of any bounds would have been a betrayal of the idea of their rulership? Here the prime symbol of infinite space, with all its indescribable power, entered the field of active political existence.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.207-208

No one has yet perceived that Arabian art is a single phenomenon. It is an idea that can only take shape when we have ceased to be deceived by the crust which overlaid the young East with post-Classical art-exercises that, whether they were imitation-antique or chose their elements from proper or alien sources at will, were in any case long past all inward life; when we have discovered that Early Christian art, together with every really living element in "late-Roman," is in fact the springtime of the Arabian style; and when we see the epoch of Justinian I as exactly on a par with the Spanish-Venetian Baroque that ruled Europe in the great days of Charles V or Philip II, and the palaces of Byzantium and their magnificent battle-pictures and pageant-scenes the vanished glories that inspired the pens of courtly literati like Procopius on a par with the palaces of early Baroque in Madrid, Vienna and Rome and the great decorative-painting of Rubens and Tintoretto. This Arabian style embraces the entire first millennium of our era. It thus stands at a critical position in the picture of a general history of "Art," and its organic connectedness has been imperceptible under the erroneous conventions thereof.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.211

The architecture of the central-dome, in which the Magian world-feeling achieved its purest expression, extended beyond the limits of the Roman Empire. For the Nestorian Christianity that extended from Armenia even into China it was the only form, as it was also for the Manichseans and the Mazdaists, and it also impressed itself victoriously upon the Basilica of the West when the Pseudomorphosis began to crumble and the last cults of Syncretism to die out. In Southern France where there were Manichasan sects even as late as the Crusades the form of the East was domesticated. Under Justinian, the interpenetration of the two produced the domical basilica of Byzantium and Ravenna. The pure basilica was pushed into the Germanic West, there to be transformed by the energy of the Faustian depth-impulse into the cathedral. The domed basilica, again, spread from Byzantium and Armenia into Russia, where it came by slow degrees to be felt as an element of exterior architecture belonging to a symbolism concentrated in the roof. But in the Arabian world Islam, the heir of Monophysite and Nestorian Christianity and of the Jews and the Persians, carried the development through to the end. When it turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque it only resumed possession of an old property. Islamic domical building followed Mazdaist and Nestorian along the same tracks to Shan-tung and to India. Spengler thought that at least three Cultures resulted from independent development. What if all high cultures can be traced back to one mother culture?

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.213

True, all Cultures (the Egyptian, the Mexican and the Chinese excepted) have grown up under the tutelage of some older Culture. Each of the formworlds shows certain alien traits. Thus, the Faustian soul of the Gothic, already predisposed to reverence by the Arabian origin of Christianity, grasped at the treasures of Late-Arabian art. An unmistakably Southern, one might even say an Arabian, Gothic wove itself over the fagades of the Burgundian and Provencal cathedrals, dominated with a magic of stone the outward language of Strassburg Minster, and fought a silent battle in statues and porches, fabricpatterns, carvings and metalwork and not Jess in the intricate figures of scholastic philosophy and in that intensely Western symbol, the Grail legend with the Nordic prime-feeling of Viking Gothic that rules the interior of the Magdeburg Cathedral, the points of Freiburg Minster and the mysticism of Meister Eckart. More than once the pointed arch threatens to burst its restraining line and to transform itself into the horseshoe arch of Moorish-Norman architecture.