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Title: The decline of the West, Volume 2
Perspectives of world-history
Author: Oswald Spengler
Translator: Charles Francis Atkinson
Release date: June 22, 2026 [eBook #78914]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78914
Credits: Sean (@parchmentglow)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DECLINE OF THE WEST, VOLUME 2 ***
THE DECLINE
OF THE WEST
[DER UNTERGANG DES
ABENDLANDES]
BY
OSWALD SPENGLER
VOLUME ONE
FORM AND ACTUALITY
[GESTALT UND WIRKLICHKEIT]
VOLUME TWO
PERSPECTIVES OF
WORLD-HISTORY
[WELTHISTORISCHE PERSPEKTIVEN]
THE DECLINE
OF THE WEST
PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY
BY
OSWALD SPENGLER
_AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
WITH NOTES BY_
CHARLES FRANCIS ATKINSON
VOLUME TWO
MCMXXVIII: ALFRED A KNOPF: NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT 1928 BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
_Originally published as
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
Welthistorische Perspektiven_
_Copyright 1922 by
C. H. Becksche, Verlagsbuchhandlung,
München_
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
In the annotations to this volume I have followed the same course
as in the first--namely, that of giving primary references to the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ as being the most considerable work of the
kind that is really widely distributed in both the English-speaking
fields, though occasionally special encyclopaedias or other works
are referred to. Owing to the more definitely historical character
of this volume, as compared with its predecessor, and particularly
its stressing of a history that scarcely figures as yet in a regular
education--the “Magian”--such references are necessarily more numerous.
Even so, more might perhaps have been inserted with advantage. The
Translator’s notes have no pretension to be critical in themselves,
though here and there an argument is pointed with an additional
example, or an obvious criticism anticipated. In each domain they will
no doubt be resented by an expert, but the same expert will, it is
hoped, find them useful for domains not his own.
In the first volume of the English version, references to the second
were necessarily given according to the pagination of the German. A
comparative table of English and German page numbers has therefore
been inserted. A list of corrigenda to Vol. I is also issued with this
volume.
C. F. A.
_London, July 1928_
TABLE OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH PAGES
German English German English
VOL. II VOL. II VOL. II VOL. II
11 9 166 138
13 10 180 149
16 13 182 151
18 14 207 173
19 15 212 176
20 16 227 189
25 23 231 192
27 25 238 196
31 27 240 199
33 29 241 200
34 30 243 202
36 32 244 203
38 33 253 209
41 35 269 220
42 36 275 225
51 43 293 240
58 48 294 241
68 60 296 242
80 68 298 243
101 87 304 248
104 89 305 249
109 92 306 249
110 93 307 250
116 98 314 255
117 99 315 256
122 103 316 257
135 115 318 258
137 116 323 265
138 118 324 265
142 120 327 268
159 133 328 268
German English German English
VOL. II VOL. II VOL. II VOL. II
334 273 403 327
342 279 421 340
343 280 427 345
345 281 441 355
346 282 482 388
350 286 488 392
354 288 521 416
357 291 529 422
358 292 539 430
359 293 562 449
360 293 577 460
362 295 589 471
363 296 603 481
365 297 607 484
368 299 610 486
369 300 616 490
370 301 618 492
373 303 624 499
376 306 625 500
378 307 626 501
382 310 627 501
385 313 631 504
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II
Translator’s Note v
References from Volume I vii
Chapter I. Origin and Landscape. (A) The Cosmic and The Microcosm 1
Plant and animal, p. 3. Being and waking-being, p. 6. Feeling,
understanding, thinking, p. 9. The motion problem, p. 14.
Mass-soul, p. 18.
Chapter II. Origin and Landscape. (B) The Group of the Higher
Cultures 21
History-picture and nature-picture, p. 23. Human and world history,
p. 28. Two ages: primitive and high Cultures, p. 33. Survey of
the high Cultures, p. 39. Historyless mankind, p. 48.
Chapter III. Origin and Landscape. (C) The Relations between the
Cultures 53
“Influence,” p. 55. Roman law, p. 60. Magian law, p. 67. Western
law, p. 75.
Chapter IV. Cities and Peoples. (A) The Soul of the City 85
Mycenæ and Crete, p. 87. The peasant, p. 89. World-history is
urban history, p. 90. Figure of the city, p. 92. City and
intellect, p. 96. Spirit of the world-city, p. 99. Sterility and
disintegration, p. 103.
Chapter V. Cities and Peoples. (B) Peoples, Races, Tongues 111
Streams of being and linkages of waking-being, p. 114.
Expression-language and communication-language, p. 115. Totem
and Taboo, p. 116. Speech and speaking, p. 117. The house as
race-expression, p. 120. Castle and cathedral, p. 122. Race, p.
124. Blood and soil, p. 127. Speech, p. 131. Means and meaning,
p. 134. Word, grammar, p. 137. Language-history, p. 145. Script,
p. 149. Morphology of the Culture-languages, p. 152.
Chapter VI. Cities and Peoples. (C) Primitives, Culture-Peoples,
Fellaheen 157
People-names, languages, races, p. 159. Migrations, p. 161. People
and soul, p. 165. The Persians, p. 166. Morphology of peoples, p.
169. People and nation, p. 170. Classical, Arabian, and Western
nations, p. 173.
Chapter VII. Problems of the Arabian Culture. (A) Historic
Pseudomorphoses 187
“Pseudomorphosis,” p. 189. Actium, p. 191. Russia, p. 192. Arabian
chivalry, p. 196. Syncretism, p. 200. Jews, Chaldeans, Persians
of the pre-Culture, p. 204. Mission, p. 209. Jesus, p. 212.
Paul, p. 220. John, Marcion, p. 225. The pagan and Christian
cult-churches, p. 228.
Chapter VIII. Problems of the Arabian Culture. (B) The
Magian Soul 231
Dualism of the World-cavern, p. 233. Time-feeling (era,
world-history, grace), p. 238. Consensus, p. 242. The “Word” as
substance, the Koran, p. 244. Secret Torah, commentary, p. 246.
The group of the Magian religions, p. 248. The Christological
controversy, p. 255. Being as extension (mission), p. 258.
Chapter IX. Problems of the Arabian Culture. (C) Pythagoras,
Mohammed, Cromwell 263
Essence of religion, p. 265. Myth and cult, p. 268. Moral as
sacrifice, p. 271. Morphology of religious history, p. 275. The
pre-Culture: Franks, Russians, p. 277. Egyptian early period, p.
279. Classical, p. 281. China, p. 285. Gothic (Mary and Devil,
baptism and contrition), p. 288. Reformation, p. 295. Science, p.
300. Rationalism, p. 305. “Second Religiousness,” p. 310. Roman
and Chinese emperor-worship, p. 313. Jewry, p. 315.
Chapter X. The State. (A) The Problem of the Estates: Nobility and
Priesthood 325
Man and woman, p. 327. Stock and estate, p. 329. Peasantry and
society, p. 331. Estate, caste, calling, p. 332. Nobility and
priesthood as symbols of Time and Space, p. 335. Training and
shaping, customary-ethic and moral, p. 340. Property, power, and
booty, p. 343. Priest and savant, p. 345. Economics and science,
money and intellect, p. 347. History of the estates, early
period, p. 348. The Third Estate, City-Freedom, _Bourgeoisie_,
p. 354.
Chapter XI. The State. (B) State and History 359
Movement and thing-moved; Being “in form,” p. 361. Right and might,
p. 363. Estate and State, p. 366. The feudal State, p. 371. From
feudal union to Estate-State, p. 375. Polis and Dynasty, p. 376.
The Absolute State, Fronde, and Tyrannis, p. 385. Wallenstein,
p. 389. Cabinet politics, p. 391. From First Tyrannis to Second,
p. 394. The bourgeois revolution, p. 398. Intellect and money,
p. 400. Formless powers (Napoleonism), p. 404. Emancipation
of money, p. 410. “Constitution,” p. 412. From Napoleonism to
Cæsarism (period of the “Contending States”), p. 416. The great
wars, p. 419. Age of the Romans, p. 422. From Caliphate to
Sultanate, p. 423. Egypt, p. 427. The present, p. 428. Cæsarism,
p. 431.
Chapter XII. The State. (C) Philosophy of Politics 437
Life is politics, p. 439. The political instinct, p. 441. The
statesman, p. 442. Creation of tradition, p. 444. Physiognomic
(diplomatic) pulse, p. 445. Estate and party, p. 448. The
_bourgeoisie_ as primary party (liberalism), p. 449. From Estate,
through party, to the magnate’s following, p. 452. Theory, from
Rousseau to Marx, p. 453. Intellect and money (democracy), p.
455. The press, p. 460. Self-annihilation of democracy through
money, p. 464.
Chapter XIII. The Form-world of Economic Life. (A) Money 467
National economics, p. 469. Political and economic sides of life,
p. 471. Productive and acquisitive economy (agriculture and
trade), p. 473. Politics and trade (power and spoil), p. 475.
Primitive economy, and economic style of the high Cultures,
p. 476. Estate and economic class, p. 477. The cityless land,
thinking in goods, p. 480. The city, thinking in money, p.
481. World-economics, mobilization of goods by money, p. 484.
The Classical idea of money, the coin, p. 486. The slave as
money, p. 487. Faustian thinking in money, the book-value, p.
489. Double-entry book-keeping, p. 490. The coin in the West,
p. 490. Money and work, p. 492. Capitalism, p. 493. Economic
organization, p. 494. Extinction of money-thought; Diocletian;
the economic thought of the Russian, p. 495.
Chapter XIV. The Form-world of Economic Life. (B) The Machine 497
Spirit of technics, p. 499. Primitive technics and style of
the high Cultures, p. 500. Classical technics, p. 501. The
will-to-power over nature, the inventor, p. 501. Intoxication of
modern discovery, p. 502. The man as slave of the machine, p.
504. Entrepreneurs, workers, engineers, p. 504. Struggle between
money and industry, p. 505. Last battle of money and politics,
victory of the blood, p. 507.
Index TO FOLLOW 507
CHAPTER I
ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE
(A)
THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM
I[1]
Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close
in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in
upon you--a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind
dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows,
this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays
with them. Only the little gnat is free--he dances still in the evening
light, he moves whither he will.
A plant is nothing on its own account. It forms a part of the landscape
in which a chance made it take root. The twilight, the chill, the
closing of every flower--these are not cause and effect, not danger and
willed answer to danger. They are a single process of nature, which is
accomplishing itself near, with, and in the plant. The individual is
not free to look out for itself, will for itself, or choose for itself.
An animal, on the contrary, can choose. It is emancipated from the
servitude of all the rest of the world. This midget swarm that dances
on and on, that solitary bird still flying through the evening, the
fox approaching furtively the nest--these are _little worlds of their
own within another great world_. An animalcule in a drop of water, too
tiny to be perceived by the human eye, though it lasts but a second and
has but a corner of this drop as its field--nevertheless is _free and
independent in the face of the universe_. The giant oak, upon one of
whose leaves the droplet hangs, is not.
Servitude and freedom--this is in last and deepest analysis the
differentia by which we distinguish vegetable and animal existence. Yet
only the plant is wholly and entirely what it is; in the being of the
animal there is something dual. A vegetable is only a vegetable; an
animal is a vegetable and something more besides. A herd that huddles
together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings
weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into
his God--all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom
into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into
individuality and loneliness.
The seeds of a flowering plant show, under the microscope, two
sheath-leaves which form and protect the young plant that is presently
to turn towards the light, with its organs of the life-cycle and of
reproduction, and in addition a third, which contains the future root
and tells us that the plant is destined irrevocably to become once
again part of a landscape. In the higher animals, on the contrary,
we observe that the fertilized egg forms, in the first hours of its
individualized existence, an outer sheath by which the inner containers
of the cyclic and reproductive components--i.e., the plant element in
the animal body--are enclosed and shut off from the mother body and
_all the rest of the world_. This outer sheath symbolizes the essential
character of animal existence and distinguishes the two kinds in which
the Living has appeared on this earth.
There are noble names for them, found and bequeathed by the Classical
world. The plant is something _cosmic_, and the animal is additionally
_a microcosm in relation to a macrocosm_. When, and not until, the unit
has thus separated itself from the All and can define its position with
respect to the All, it becomes thereby a microcosm. Even the planets
in their great cycles are in servitude, and it is only these tiny
worlds that move freely relative to a great one which appears in their
consciousness as their world-around (environment). Only through this
individualism of the microcosm does that which the light offers to its
eyes--our eyes--acquire meaning as “body,” and even to planets we are
from some inner motive reluctant to concede the property of bodiliness.
All that is cosmic bears the hall-mark of _periodicity_; it has “beat”
(rhythm, tact). All that is microcosmic possesses _polarity_; it
possesses “tension.”
We speak of tense alertness and tense thought, but all wakeful states
are in their essence tensions. Sense and object, I and thou, cause
and effect, thing and property--each of these is a tension between
discretes, and when the state pregnantly called “_détente_” appears,
then at once fatigue, and presently sleep, set in for the microcosmic
side of life. A human being asleep, discharged of all tensions, is
leading only a plantlike existence.
Cosmic beat, on the other hand, is everything that can be paraphrased
in terms like direction, time, rhythm, destiny, longing--from the
hoof-beats of a team of thoroughbreds and the deep tread of proud
marching soldiers to the silent fellowship of two lovers, the sensed
tact that makes the dignity of a social assembly, and that keen quick
judgment of a “judge of men” which I have already, earlier in this
work,[2] called physiognomic tact.
This beat of cosmic cycles goes on notwithstanding the freedom of
microcosmic movement in space, and from time to time breaks down the
tension of the waking individual’s being into the _one_ grand felt
harmony. If we have ever followed the flight of a bird in the high
air--how, always in the same way, it rises, turns, glides, loses itself
in the distance--we must have felt the plantlike certainty of the
“it” and the “we” in this ensemble of motion, which needs no bridge
of reason to unite your sense of it with mine. This is the meaning
of war-dances and love-dances amongst men and beasts. In this wise a
regiment mounting to the assault under fire is forged into a unity, in
this wise does the crowd collect at some exciting occasion and become a
body, capable of thinking and acting pitifully, blindly, and strangely
for a moment ere it falls apart again. In such cases the microcosmic
wall is obliterated. _It_ jostles and threatens, _it_ pushes and pulls,
_it_ flees, swerves, and sways. Limbs intertwine, feet rush, _one_ cry
comes from every mouth, _one_ destiny overlies all. Out of a sum of
little single worlds comes suddenly a complete whole.
The perception of cosmic beat we call “feel (_Fühlen_),” that of
microcosmic tensions “feeling (_Empfinden_).” The ambiguity of the
word “_Sinnlichkeit_” has obscured this clear difference between the
general and plantlike side and the specifically animal side of life. If
we say for the one race- or sex-life, and for the other sense-life, a
deep connexion reveals itself between them. The former ever bears the
mark of periodicity, beat, even to the extent of harmony with the great
cycles of the stars, of relation between female nature and the moon,
of this life generally to night, spring, warmth. The latter consists
in tensions, polarities of light and object illuminated, of cognition
and that which is cognized, of wound and the weapon that has caused it.
Each of these sides of life has, in the more highly developed genera,
taken shape in special organs, and the higher the development, the
clearer the emphasis on each side. We possess _two cyclic organs of
the cosmic existence_, the blood system and the sex-organ, _and two
differentiating organs of microcosmic mobility_, senses and nerves.
We have to assume that in its origin the _whole_ body has been both a
cyclic and a tactual organ.
The blood is for us the symbol of the living. Its course proceeds
without pause, from generation to death, from the mother body in
and out of the body of the child, in the waking state and in sleep,
never-ending. The blood of the ancestors flows through the chain of the
generations and binds them in a great linkage of destiny, beat, and
time. Originally this was accomplished only by a process of division,
redivision, and ever new division of the cycles, until finally a
specific organ of sexual generation appeared and made _one moment_ into
a symbol of duration. And how thereafter creatures begat and conceived,
how the plantlike in them drove them to reproduce themselves for the
maintenance beyond themselves of the eternal cycle, how the _one_
great pulse-beat operates through all the detached souls, filling,
driving, checking, and often destroying--that is the deepest of all
life’s secrets, the secret that all religious mysteries and all great
poems seek to penetrate, the secret whose tragedy stirred Goethe in his
“_Selige Sehnsucht_” and “_Wahlverwandtschaften_,” where the child has
to die because, brought into existence out of discordant cycles of the
blood, it is the fruit of a cosmic sin.
To these cosmic organs the microcosm as such adds (in the degree to
which it possesses freedom of movement _vis-à-vis_ the macrocosm) the
organ “sense,” which is originally touch-sense and nothing else.
Even now, at our own high level of development, we use the word
“touch” quite generally of contacts by eye, by ear, and even by the
understanding, for it is the simplest expression of the mobility of a
living creature that needs constantly to be establishing its relation
to its world-around. But to “establish” here means to fix _place_, and
thus all senses, however sophisticated and remote from the primitive
they may seem, are essentially _positive senses_; there are no others.
Sensation of all kinds distinguishes proper and alien. And for the
positional definition of the alien with respect to the proper the scent
of the hound serves just as much as the hearing of the stag and the eye
of the eagle. Colour, brightness, tones, odours, all conceivable modes
of sensation, imply detachment, distance, extension.
Like the cosmic cycle of the blood, the differentiating activity
of sense is originally a unity. The active sense is always an
understanding sense also. In these simple relations seeking and finding
are one--that which we most appositely call “touch.” It is only later,
in a stage wherein considerable demands are made upon developed senses,
that sensation and understanding of sensation cease to be identical
and the latter begins to detach itself more and more clearly from the
former. In the outer sheath the critical organ separates itself from
the sense-organ (as the sex-organ does from that of blood-circulation).
But our use of words like “keen,” “sensitive,” “insight,” “poking
our nose,” and “flair,” not to mention the terminology of logic, all
taken from the visual world, shows well enough that we regard all
understanding as derived from sensation, and that even in the case of
man the two still work hand in hand.
We see a dog lying indifferent and then in a moment tense, listening,
and scenting--what he merely senses he is seeking to understand as
well. He is able, too, to reflect--that is a state in which the
understanding is almost alone at work and playing upon mat sensations.
The older languages very clearly expressed this graduation, sharply
distinguishing each degree as an activity of a specific kind by means
of a specific label--e.g., hear, listen, listen for (_lauschen_);
smell, scent, sniff; see, spy, observe. In such series as these
the reason-content becomes more and more important relative to the
sensation-content.
Finally, however, a supreme sense develops among the rest. A
something in the All, which for ever remains inaccessible to our
will-to-understand, evokes for itself a bodily organ. The eye comes
into existence--and in and with the eye, as its opposite pole, light.
Abstract thinking about light may lead (and has led) to an ideal
light representable by an ensemble picture of waves and rays, but the
significance of this development in actuality was that thenceforward
life was embraced and taken in _through the light-world of the eye_.
This is the supreme marvel that makes everything human what it is.
Only with this light-world of the eye do distances come into being as
colours and brightnesses; only in this world are night and day and
things and motions visible in the extension of illumined space, and the
universe of infinitely remote stars circling above the earth, and that
light-horizon of the individual life which stretches so far beyond the
environs of the body.
In the world of this light--not the light which science has deduced
indirectly by the aid of mental concepts, themselves derived from
visions (“theory” in the Greek sense)--it comes to pass that seeing,
human herds wander upon the face of this little earth-star, and that
circumstances of light--the full southern flood over Egypt and Mexico,
the greyness of the north--contribute to the determination of their
entire life. It is for his _eye_ that man develops the magic of his
architecture, wherein the constructional elements given by touch are
restated in relations generated by light. Religion, art, thought, have
all arisen for light’s sake, and all differentiations reduce to the
one point of whether it is the bodily eye or the mind’s eye that is
addressed.
And with this there emerges in all clarity yet another distinction,
which is normally obscured by the use of the ambiguous word
“consciousness (_Bewusstsein_).” I distinguish _being_ or “being there”
(_Dasein_) from _waking-being_ or waking-consciousness (_Wachsein_).[3]
Being possesses beat and direction, while waking-consciousness
is tension and extension. In being a destiny rules, while
waking-consciousness distinguishes causes and effects. The prime
question is for the one “when and wherefore?” for the other “where and
how?”
A plant leads an existence that is without waking-consciousness. In
sleep all creatures become plants, the tension of polarity to the
world-around is extinguished, and the beat of life goes on. A plant
knows only a relation to the when and the wherefore. The upthrust of
the first green shoots out of the wintry earth, the swelling of the
buds, the whole mighty process of blooming, scent, colour glory, and
ripening--all this is desire to fulfil a destiny, constant yearning
towards a “when?”
“Where?” on the other hand can have no meaning for a plant existence.
It is the question with which awakening man daily orients himself
afresh with respect to the world. For it is only the pulse-beat
of Being that endures throughout the generations, whereas
waking-consciousness begins anew for each microcosm. And herein lies
the distinction between procreation and birth, the first being a pledge
of duration, the second a beginning. A plant, therefore, is bred, but
it is not born. It “is there,” but no awakening, no birthday, expands a
sense-world around it.
II
With this we are brought face to face with man. In man’s
waking-consciousness nothing disturbs the now pure lordship of the eye.
The sounds of the night, the wind, the panting of beasts, the odour of
flowers, all stimulate in him _a “whither” and a “whence” in the world
of light_. Of the world of scent, in which even our closest comrade the
dog still co-ordinates his visual impressions, we have no conception
whatever. We know nothing of the world of the butterfly, whose
crystalline eye projects no synthetic picture, or of those animals
which, while certainly not destitute of senses, are blind. _The only
space that remains to us is visual space_, and in it places have been
found for the relics of other sense-worlds (such as sounds, scents,
heat and cold) as _properties and effects of light-things_--it is a
seen fire that warmth comes from, it is a seen rose in illumined space
that gives off the scent and we speak of a certain tone as violin-tone.
As to the stars, our conscious relations with them are limited to
seeing them--over our heads they shine, describing their visible
path.[4] But of these sense-worlds there is no doubt that animals and
even primitive men still have sensations that are wholly different
from ours; some of these sensations we are able to figure to ourselves
indirectly by the aid of scientific hypotheses, but the rest now escape
us altogether.
This impoverishment of the sensual implies, however, an immeasurable
deepening. Human waking-consciousness is no longer a mere tension
between body and environment. It is now life _in_ a self-contained
light-world. The body moves _in_ the space that is seen. The
depth-experience[5] is a mighty out-thrust _into the visible distance_
from a light-centre[6]--the point which we call “I.” “I” is a
light-concept. From this point onward the life of an “I” becomes
essentially a life in the sun, and night is akin to death. And out of
it, too, there arises a new feeling of fear which absorbs all others
within itself--_fear before the invisible_, fear of that which one
hears or feels, suspects, or observes in its effects without seeing.
Animals indeed experience fear in other forms, but man finds these
forms puzzling, and even uneasiness in the presence of stillness to
which primitive men and children are subject (and which they seek
to dispel by noise and loud talking) is disappearing in the higher
types of mankind. It is fear of the invisible that is the essence
and hall-mark of human religiousness. Gods are surmised, imagined,
envisaged light-actualities, and the idea of an “invisible” god is the
highest expression of human transcendence. Where the bounds of the
light-world are, there lies the beyond, and salvation is emancipation
from the spell of the light-world and its facts.
In precisely this resides the ineffable charm and the very real power
of emancipation that music possesses for us men. For music is the only
art whose means lie outside the light-world that has so long become
coextensive with our total world, and music alone, therefore, can take
us right out of this world, break up the steely tyranny of light, and
let us fondly imagine that we are on the verge of reaching the soul’s
final secret--an illusion due to the fact that our waking consciousness
is now so dominated by one sense only, so thoroughly adapted to the
eye-world, that it is incapable of forming, out of the impressions it
receives, a world of the ear.[7]
Man’s thought, then, is visual thought, our concepts are derived from
vision, and the whole fabric of our logic is a light-world in the
imagination.
This narrowing and consequent deepening, which has led to all our
sense-impressions being adapted to and ordered with those of sight,
has led also to the replacement of the innumerable methods of
thought-communication known to animals by the one single medium of
language, which is a bridge _in the light-world_ between two persons
present to one another’s bodily or imaginative eyes. The other modes of
speaking of which vestiges remain at all have long been absorbed into
language in the form of mimicry, gesture, or emphasis. The difference
between purely human speech and general animal utterance is that words
and word-linkages constitute a domain of inward light-ideas, which has
been built up under the sovereignty of the eyes. Every word-meaning
has a light-value, even in the case of words like “melody,” “taste,”
“cold,” or of perfectly abstract designations.
Even among the higher animals, the habit of reciprocal understanding
by means of a sense-link has brought about a marked difference between
_mere_ sensation and _understanding_ sensation. If we distinguish
in this wise _sense-impressions_ and _sense-judgments_ (e.g.,
scent-judgment, taste-judgment, or aural-judgment), we find that
very often, even in ants and bees, let alone birds of prey, horses,
and dogs, the centre of gravity has palpably shifted towards the
judgment side of waking-being. But it is only under the influence
of language that there is set up within the waking-consciousness a
definite _opposition_ between sensation and understanding, a tension
that in animals is quite unthinkable and even in man can hardly have
been at first anything more than a rarely actualized possibility. The
development of language, then, brought along with it a determination
of fundamental significance--_the emancipation of understanding from
sensation_.
More and more often there appears, in lieu of the simple comprehension
of the gross intake, a comprehension of the significances of the
component sense-impressions, which have hardly been noticed as such
before.[8] Finally these impressions themselves are discarded and
replaced by the felt connotations of familiar word-sounds. The word,
originally the name of a visual thing, changes imperceptibly into the
label of a mental thing, the “concept.” We are far from being able
to fix exact meanings to such names--that we can do only with wholly
new names. We never use a word twice with identical connotation,
and no one ever understands exactly as another does. But mutual
comprehension is possible, in spite of this, because of the common
world-outlook that has been induced in both, with and by the use of
a common language; in an ambiance common to the lives and activities
of both, mere word-sounds suffice to evoke cognate ideas. It is this
mode of comprehending by means of sounds at once derived and detached
(abstract) from actual seeing which, however rarely we can find it
definitely evidenced at the primitive level, does in fact sharply
separate the generic-animal kind of waking-consciousness from the
purely human kind which supervenes. Just so, at an earlier stage, the
appearance of waking-consciousness as such fixed a frontier between the
general plantlike and the specifically animal existence.
_Understanding detached from sensation is called thought._ Thought has
introduced a permanent disunity into the human waking-consciousness.
From early times it has rated understanding and sensibility as “higher”
and “lower” soul-power. It has created the fateful opposition between
the light-world of the eye, described as a figment and an illusion,
and the world-imagined (“_vorgestellte_,” “set before” oneself),
in which the concepts, with their faint but ineffaceable tinge of
light-coloration, live and do business. And henceforth for man, so long
as he “thinks,” this is the true world, the world-in-itself. At the
outset the ego was waking-being as such (in so far, that is, as, having
sight, it felt itself as the centre of a light-world); now it becomes
“spirit”--namely, pure understanding, which “cognizes” itself as such
and very soon comes to regard not only the world _around_ itself, but
even the remaining component of life, its own body, as qualitatively
_below itself_. This is evidenced not only in the upright carriage of
man, but in the thoroughly intellectualized formation of his head, in
which the eyes, the brow, and the temples become more and more the
vehicles of expression.[9]
Clearly, then, thought, when it became independent, discovered a
new mode of activity for itself. To the practical thought which is
directed upon the constitution of the light-things in the world-around,
with reference to this or that practical end, there is added the
theoretical, penetrating, subtilizing thought which sets itself to
establish the constitution of these things “in themselves,” the
_natura rerum_. From that which is seen, the light is abstracted,
the depth-experience of the eye intensifies itself in a grand and
unmistakable course of development into a depth-experience within the
tinted realm of word-connotations. Man begins to believe that it is
not impossible for his inner eye to see right through into the things
that actually are. Concept follows upon concept, and at last there is
a mighty thought-architecture made up of buildings that stand out with
full clarity under the inner light.
The development of theoretical thought within the human
waking-consciousness gives rise to a kind of activity that makes
inevitable a fresh conflict--that between Being (existence) and
Waking-Being (waking-consciousness). The animal microcosm, in which
existence and consciousness are joined in a self-evident unity of
living, knows of consciousness _only as the servant_ of existence. The
animal “lives” simply and does not reflect upon life. Owing, however,
to the unconditional monarchy of the eye, life is presented as the life
of a visible entity in the light; understanding, then, when it becomes
interlocked with speech, promptly forms a _concept_ of thought and with
it a _counter-concept_[10] of life, and in the end it distinguishes
life as it is from that which might be. Instead of straight,
uncomplicated living, we have the antithesis represented in the phrase
“thought and action.” That which is not possible at all in the beasts
becomes in every man not merely a possibility, but a fact and in the
end an alternative. The entire history of mature humanity with all its
phenomena has been formed by it, and the higher the form that a Culture
takes, the more fully this opposition dominates the significant moments
of its conscious being.
The plantlike-cosmic, Being heavy with Destiny, blood, sex, possess an
immemorial mastery and keep it. They _are_ life. The other only serves
life. But this other wills, not to serve, but to rule; moreover, it
believes that it does rule, for one of the most determined claims put
forward by the human spirit is its claim to possess power over the
body, over “nature.” But the question is: Is not this very belief a
service to life? Why does our thought think just so? Perhaps because
the cosmic, the “it,” wills that it shall? Thought shows off its power
when it calls the body a notion, when it establishes the pitifulness
of the body and commands the voices of the blood to be silent. But in
truth the blood rules, in that silently it commands the activity of
thought to begin and to cease. There, too, is a distinction between
speech and life--Being can do without consciousness and the life of
understanding, but not vice versa. Thought rules, after all, in spite
of all, only in the “realm of thought.”
III
It only amounts to a verbal difference whether we say that thought is a
creation of man, or higher mankind a creation of thought. But thought
itself persistently credits itself with much too high a rank in the
ensemble of life, and through its ignorance of, or indifference to,
the fact that there are other modes of ascertainment besides itself,
forfeits its opportunity of surveying the whole without prejudice. In
truth, all professors of thought--and in every Culture they have been
almost the only authorized spokesmen--have taken it as self-evident
that cold abstract thought is _the_ way of approach to “last things.”
Moreover, they have assumed, also as self-evident, that the “truth”
which they reach on this line of advance is the same as the truth which
they have set before themselves as an aim, and not, as it really is,
a sort of imaginary picture which takes the place of the unknowable
secrets.
For, although man is a thinking being, it is very far from the fact
that his being consists in thinking. This is a difference that the born
subtilizer fails to grasp. The aim of thought is called “truth,” and
truths are “established”--i.e., brought out of the living impalpability
of the light-world into the form of concepts and assigned permanently
to places in a system, which means a kind of intellectual space. Truths
are absolute and eternal--i.e., they have nothing more to do with life.
But for an animal, not truths, but only facts exist. Here is the
difference between practical and theoretical understanding. Facts and
truths[11] differ as time and space, destiny and causality. A fact
addresses itself to the whole waking-consciousness, for the service
of being, and not to that side of the waking-consciousness which
imagines it can detach itself from being. Actual life, history, knows
only facts; life experience and knowledge of men deal only in facts.
The active man who does and wills and fights, daily measuring himself
against the power of facts, looks down upon mere truths as unimportant.
The real statesman knows only political facts, not political truths.
Pilate’s famous question is that of every man of fact.
It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted
science with the problem of the _value_ of truth and knowledge--cheap
and even blasphemous though this seems to the born thinker and savant,
who regards his whole _raison d’être_ as impugned by it. Descartes
meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting.
It is one thing, however, to pose problems and quite another to believe
in solutions of them. The plant lives and knows not that it lives. The
animal lives and knows that it lives. Man is astounded by his life and
asks questions about it. But even man cannot give an answer to his own
questions, he can only _believe_ in the correctness of his answer,
and in that respect there is no difference between Aristotle and the
meanest savage.
Whence comes it, then, that secrets must be unravelled and questions
answered? Is it not from that fear which looks out of even a child’s
eyes, that terrible dowry of human waking-consciousness which compels
the understanding, free now from sensation and brooding on images, to
probe into every deep for solutions that mean release? Can a desperate
faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?
“Shuddering awe is mankind’s noblest part.” He to whom that gift has
been denied by fate must seek to discover secrets, to attack, dissect,
and destroy the awe-inspiring, and to extract a booty of knowledge
therefrom. The will-to-system is a will to kill something living, to
“establish,” stabilize, stiffen it, to bind it in the train of logic.
The intellect has _conquered_ when it has completed the business of
making rigid.
This distinction that is usually drawn between “reason” (_Vernunft_)
and “understanding” (_Verstand_) is really that between the divination
and flair belonging to our plant side, which merely _makes use_ of the
language of eye and word, and the understanding proper, belonging to
our animal side, which is _deduced from_ language. “Reason” in this
sense is that which calls ideas into life, “understanding” that which
finds truths. Truths are lifeless and can be imparted (_mitgeteilt_);
ideas belong to the living self of the author and can only be
sympathetically evoked (_mitgefühlt_). Understanding is essentially
critical, reason essentially creative.[12] The latter begets the object
of its activity, the former starts from it. In fact, understanding
criticism is first practised and developed in association with ordinary
sensations--it is in sensation-judgments that the child learns to
comprehend and to differentiate. Then, abstracted from this connexion
and henceforward busied with itself, criticism needs a substitute for
the sensation-activity that had previously served as its object. And
this cannot be given it but by an _already existing_ mode of thought,
and it is upon this that criticism now works. This, only this, and not
something building freely on nothingness, is Thought.
For quite early, before he has begun to think abstractly, primitive
man forms for himself a religious world-picture, and this is the
object upon which the understanding begins to operate critically.
Always science has grown up on a religion and under all the spiritual
prepossessions of that religion, and always it signifies nothing more
or less than an abstract melioration of these doctrines, considered
as false because less abstract. Always it carries along the kernel
of a religion in its ensemble of principles, problem-enunciations,
and methods. Every new truth that the understanding finds is nothing
but a critical judgment upon some other that was already there. The
polarity between old and new knowledge involves the consequence
that in the world of the understanding there is only the relatively
correct--namely, judgments of greater convincingness than other
judgments. Critical knowledge rests upon the belief that the
understanding of to-day is better than that of yesterday. And that
which forces us to this belief, is again, life.
Can criticism then, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it
merely pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former.
But the more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long
as we hope, we call the secret a problem.
Thus, for mankind aware, there is a double problem, that of
Waking-Being and that of Being; or of Space and of Time; or of the
world-as-nature[13] and the world as history; or of pulse and tension.
The waking consciousness seeks to understand not only itself, but in
addition something that is akin to itself. Though an inner voice may
tell one that here all possibilities of knowledge are left behind,
yet, in spite of it, fear overpersuades--everyone--and one goes on
with the search, preferring even the pretence of a solution to the
alternative of looking into nothingness.
IV
Waking-consciousness consists of sensation and understanding, and
their common essence is a continuous self-adjustment in relation to
the macrocosm. To that extent waking-consciousness is identical with
ascertainment (_Feststellen_), whether we consider the touch of an
infusorian, or human thinking of the highest order. Feeling, now,
for touch with itself in this wise, the waking-consciousness first
encounters the epistemological problem. What do we mean by cognition,
or by the knowledge of cognition? And what is the relation between the
original meanings of these terms and their later formulations in words?
Waking and sleep alternate, like day and night, according to the course
of the stars, and so, too, cognition alternates with dreams. How do
these two differ?
Waking-consciousness, however--whether it be that of sensation or that
of understanding--is synonymous with the existence of oppositions,
such as that between cognition and the object cognized, or thing and
property, or object and event. Wherein consists the essence of these
oppositions? And so arises the second problem, that of _causality_.
When we give the names “cause” and “effect” to a pair of sensuous
elements, or “premiss” and “consequence” to a pair of intellectual
elements, we are fixing between them a relation of power and rank--when
one is there, the other must be there also. In these relations,
observe, time does not figure at all. We are concerned not with facts
of destiny, but with causal truths, not with a “When?” but with a
law-fixed dependence. Beyond doubt this is the understanding’s most
promising line of activity. Mankind perhaps owes to discoveries of
this order his happiest moments; and thus he proceeds, from these
oppositions in the near and present things of everyday life that strike
him immediately, forward in an endless series of conclusions to the
first and final causes in the structure of nature that he calls God and
the meaning of the world. He assembles, orders, and reviews his system,
his dogma of law-governed connexions, and he finds in it a refuge from
the unforeseen. He who can demonstrate, fears no longer. But wherein
consists the essence of causality? Does it lie in knowing, in the
known, or in a unity of both?
The world of tensions is necessarily in itself stiff and dead--namely,
“eternal truth,” something beyond all time, something that is a
state. The actual world of waking-consciousness, however, is full
of changes. This does not astonish an animal in the least, but it
leaves the thought of the thinker powerless, for rest and movement,
duration and change, become and becoming,[14] are oppositions denoting
something that in its very nature “passeth all understanding” and
_must_ therefore (from the point of view of the understanding) contain
an absurdity. For is that a fact at all which proves to be incapable
of distillation from the sense-world in the form of a truth? On the
other hand, though the world is cognized as timeless, a time element
nevertheless adheres to it--tensions appear as beat, and direction
associates itself with extension. And so all that is problematical for
the understanding consciousness somehow gathers itself together in one
last and gravest problem, _the problem of motion_. And on that problem
free and abstract thought breaks down, and we begin to discern that the
microcosmic is after all as dependent as ever upon the cosmic, just as
the individualness of a being from its first moment is constituted not
by a body, but by the sheath of a body. Life can exist without thought,
but thought is only one mode of life. High as may be the objectives
that thought sets before itself, in actuality life makes use of thought
for _its_ ends and gives it a living objective quite apart from the
solution of abstract problems. For thought the solutions of problems
are correct or erroneous--for life they are valuable or valueless, and
if the will-to-know breaks down on the motion problem, it may well be
because life’s purpose has at that point been achieved. In spite of
this, and indeed because of this, the motion problem remains the centre
of gravity of all higher thought. All mythology and all natural science
has arisen out of man’s wonder in the presence of the mystery of motion.
The problem of motion touches, at once and immediately, the secrets
of existence, which are alien to the waking-consciousness and yet
inexorably press upon it. In posing motion as a problem we affirm
our will to comprehend the incomprehensible, the when and wherefore,
Destiny, blood, all that our intuitive processes touch in our depths.
Born to see, we strive to set it before our eyes in the light, so that
we may in the literal sense grasp it, assure ourselves of it as of
something tangible.
For this is the decisive fact, of which the observer is
unconscious--his whole effort of seeking is aimed not at life, but
at the seeing of life, and not at death, but at the seeing of death.
We try to grasp the cosmic as it appears in the macrocosm to the
microcosm, _as the life of a body in the light-world_ between birth
and death, generation and dissolution, and with that differentiation
of body and soul that follows of deepest necessity from our ability to
experience[15] the inward-proper as a sensuous alien.
That we do not merely live but _know_ about “living” is a consequence
of our bodily existence in the light. But the beast knows only life,
not death. Were we pure plantlike beings, we should die unconscious of
dying, for to feel death and to die would be identical. But animals,
even though they hear the death-cry, see the dead body, and scent
putrefaction, behold death without comprehending it. Only when
understanding has become, through language, detached from visual
awareness and pure, does death appear to man as the great enigma of the
light-world about him.
Then, and only then, life becomes the short span of time between birth
and death, and it is in relation to death that that other great mystery
of generation arises also. Only then does the diffuse animal fear
of everything become the definite human fear of death. It is _this_
that makes the love of man and woman, the love of mother and child,
the tree of the generations, the family, the people, and so at last
world-history itself the infinitely deep facts and problems of destiny
that they are. To death, as the common lot of every human being born
into the light, adhere the ideas of guilt and punishment, of existence
as a penance, of a new life beyond the world of this light, and of a
salvation that makes an end of the death-fear. In the knowledge of
death is originated that world-outlook which we possess as being men
and not beasts.
V
There are born destiny-men and causality-men. A whole world
separates the purely living man--peasant and warrior, statesman
and general, man of the world and man of business, everyone who
wills to prosper, to rule, to fight, and to dare, the organizer or
entrepreneur, the adventurer or bravo or gambler--from the man who
is destined either by the power of his mind or the defect of his
blood to be an “intellectual”--the saint, priest, savant, idealist,
or ideologue. Being and waking-being, pulse and tension, motives
and ideas, cyclic organs and touch-organs--there has rarely been a
man of any significance in whom the one side or the other has not
markedly predominated. All that motives and urges, the eye for men
and situations, the belief in his star which every born man of action
possesses and which is something wholly different from belief in the
correctness of a standpoint, the voices of the blood that speak in
moments of decision, and the immovably quiet conviction that justifies
any aim and any means--all these are denied to the critical, meditative
man. Even the footfall of the fact-man sounds different from, sounds
more planted than, that of the thinker, in whom the pure microcosmic
can acquire no firm relation with earth.
Destiny has made the man so or so--subtle and fact-shy, or active and
contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole
man, whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without
(and even against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries
to master actuality as well as its own world, for then we get all those
ethico-politico-social reform-projects which demonstrate, unanswerably,
how things ought to be and how to set about making them so--theories
that without exception rest upon the hypothesis that all men are as
rich in ideas and as poor in motives as the author is (or thinks he
is). Such theories, even when they have taken the field armed with the
full authority of a religion or the prestige of a famous name, have
not in one single instance effected the slightest alteration in life.
They have merely caused us to _think_ otherwise than before about life.
And this, precisely, is the doom of the “late” ages of a Culture, the
ages of much writing and much reading--that they should perpetually
confuse the opposition of life and thought with the opposition between
thought-about-life and thought-about-thought. All world-improvers,
priests, and philosophers are unanimous in holding that life is a fit
object for the nicest meditation, but the life of the world goes its
own way and cares not in the least what is said about it. And even
when a community succeeds in living “according to rule,” all that it
achieves is, at best, a note on itself in some future history of the
world--if there is space left after the proper and only important
subject-matter has been dealt with.
For, in the last resort, only the active man, the man of destiny, lives
in the _actual_ world, the world of political, military, and economic
decisions, in which concepts and systems do not figure or count. Here a
shrewd blow is more than a shrewd conclusion, and there is sense in the
contempt with which statesmen and soldiers of all times have regarded
the “ink-slinger” and the “bookworm” who think that world-history
exists for the sake of the intellect or science or even art. Let us
say it frankly and without ambiguity: the understanding divorced from
sensation is only one, and not the decisive, side of life. A history
of Western thought may not contain the name of Napoleon, but in the
history of actuality Archimedes, for all his scientific discoveries,
was possibly less effective than that soldier who killed him at the
storming of Syracuse.
Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is
at the head and not in the train of great events. They misunderstand
completely the rôle played, for example, by the political Sophists in
Athens or by Voltaire and Rousseau in France. Often enough a statesman
does not “know” what he is doing, but that does not prevent him from
following with confidence just the one path that leads to success;
the political doctrinaire, on the contrary, always knows what should
be done, and yet his activity, once it ceases to be limited to paper,
is the least successful and therefore the least valuable in history.
These intrusions happen only too frequently in times of uncertainty,
like that of the Attic enlightenment, or the French or the German
revolutions, when the ideologue of word or pen is eager to be busy with
the actual history of the people instead of with systems. He mistakes
his place. He belongs with his principles and programs to no history
but the history of a literature. Real history passes judgment on him
not by controverting the theorist, but by leaving him and all his
thoughts to himself. A Plato or a Rousseau--not to mention the smaller
intellects--could build up abstract political structures, but for
Alexander, Scipio, Cæsar, and Napoleon, with their schemes and battles
and settlements, they were entirely without importance. The thinker
could discuss destiny if he liked; it was enough for these men to be
destiny.
Under all the plurality of microcosmic beings, we are perpetually
meeting with the formation of _inspired mass-units_, beings of
a higher order, which, whether they develop slowly or come into
existence in a moment, contain all the feelings and passions of the
individual, enigmatic in their inward character and inaccessible to
reasoning--though the connoisseur can see into and reckon upon their
reactions well enough. Here too we distinguish the generic animal
unities which are sensed, the unities profoundly dependent upon Being
and Destiny--like the way of an eagle in the air or the way of the
stormers on the breach--from the purely human associations which depend
upon the understanding and cohere on the basis of like opinions, like
purposes, or like knowledge. Unity of cosmic pulse one has without
willing to have it; unity of common ground is acquired at will. One
can join or resign from an intellectual association as one pleases,
for only one’s waking-consciousness is involved. But to a cosmic unity
one is _committed_, and committed with one’s entire being. Crowds
of this order of unity are seized by storms of enthusiasm or, as
readily, of panic. They are noisy and ecstatic at Eleusis or Lourdes,
or heroically firm like the Spartans of Thermopylæ and the last Goths
in the battle of Vesuvius.[16] They form themselves to the music of
chorales, marches, and dances, and are sensitive like human and animal
thoroughbreds to the effects of bright colours, decoration, costume,
and uniform.
These inspired aggregates are born and die. Intellectual associations
are mere sums in the mathematical sense, varying by addition
and subtraction, unless and until (as sometimes happens) a mere
coincidence of opinion strikes so impressively as to reach the blood
and so, suddenly, to create out of the sum a Being. In any political
turning-point words may become fates and opinions passions. A chance
crowd is herded together in the street and has _one_ consciousness,
_one_ sensation, _one_ language--until the short-lived soul flickers
out and everyone goes his way again. This happened every day in the
Paris of 1789, whenever the cry of “_A la lanterne!_” fell upon the ear.
These souls have their special psychology,[17] and the knowledge of
this psychology is for the public man an essential. A single soul
is the mark of every genuine order or class, be it the chivalry and
military orders of the Crusades, the Roman Senate or the Jacobin club,
polite society under Louis XIV or the Prussian country “_Adel_,”
peasantry or guilds, the masses of the big city or the folk of the
secluded valley, the peoples and tribes of the migrations or the
adherents of Mohammed and generally, of any new-founded religion
or sect, the French of the Revolution or the Germans of the Wars
of Liberation. The mightiest beings of this kind that we know are
the higher Cultures, which are born in great spiritual upheavals,
and in a thousand years of existence weld all aggregates of lower
degree--nations, classes, towns, generations--into one unit.
All grand events of history are carried by beings of the cosmic order,
by peoples, parties, armies, and classes, while the history of the
intellect runs its course in loose associations and circles, schools,
levels of education, “tendencies” and “isms.” And here again it is a
question of destiny whether such aggregates at the decisive moments
of highest effectiveness find a leader or are driven blindly on,
whether the chance headmen are men of the first order or men of no
real significance tossed up, like Robespierre or Pompey, by the surge
of events. It is the hall-mark of the statesman that he has a sure and
penetrating eye for these mass-souls that form and dissolve on the tide
of the times, their strength and their duration, their direction and
purpose. And even so, it is a question of Incident[18] whether he is
one who _can_ master them or one who is swept away by them.
CHAPTER II
ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE
(B)
THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES
I
Now, man--no matter whether it is for life or for thought that he is
born into the world--so long as he is acting or is thinking, is awake
and therefore _in focus_--i.e., adjusted to the one significance that
for the moment his light-world holds for him. Everyone knows that it is
almost sharply painful to switch off suddenly in the middle of, say, an
experiment in physics, in order to think about some event of the day.
I have said earlier that the innumerable settings that take turns in
man’s waking consciousness fall into two distinct groups--the worlds of
destiny and pulsation, and the worlds of causes and tensions. The two
pictures I have called _world-as-history_ and _world-as-nature_. In the
first, life makes use of critical understanding. It has the eye under
command, the felt pulsation becomes the inwardly imagined wave-train,
and the shattering spiritual experience becomes pictured as the epochal
peak. In the second, thought itself rules, and its causal criticism
turns life into a rigorous process, the living content of a fact into
an abstract truth, and tension into formula.
How is this possible? Each is an eye-picture, but in the one the seer
is giving himself up to the never-to-be-repeated facts, and in the
other he is striving to catch truths for an ever-valid system. In the
history-picture, that in which knowledge is simply an _auxiliary_,
the cosmic makes use of the microcosmic. In the picture which we
call memory and recollection, things are present to us as bathed in
an inner light and swept by the pulsation of our existence. But the
chronological element[19] tells us that history, as soon as it becomes
_thought_ history, is no longer immune from the basic conditions of
all waking-consciousness. In the nature- (or science-) picture it is
the ever-present subjective that is alien and illusive, but in the
history-picture it is the equally ineliminable objective, Number, that
leads into error.
When we are working in the domain of Nature (science), our settings
and self-adjustments should be and can be up to a certain point
impersonal--one “forgets oneself”--but every man, class, nation, or
family sees the picture of history _in relation to itself_. The mark
of Nature is an extension that is inclusive of everything, but History
is that which comes up out of the darkness of the past, presents
itself to the _seer_, and from him sweeps onward into the future. He,
as the present, is always its middle point, and it is quite impossible
for him to order the facts with any meaning if he ignores their
direction--which is an element proper to life and not to thought.
Every time, every land, every living aggregate has its own historical
horizon, and it is the mark of the genuine historical thinker that he
actualizes the picture of history that his time demands.
Thus Nature and History are distinguishable like pure and impure
criticism--meaning by “criticism” the opposite of lived experience.
Natural science _is_ criticism and nothing else. But in History,
criticism can do no more than scientifically prepare the field over
which the historian’s eye is to sweep. _History is that ranging
glance itself_, whatever the direction in which it ranges. He who
possesses such an eye can understand every fact and every situation
“historically.” Nature is a system, and systems can be learnt.
The process of _historical_ self-adjustment begins for everyone with
the earliest impressions of childhood. Children’s eyes are keen, and
the facts of the nearest environment, the life of the family and the
house and the street, are sensed and felt right down to the core, long
before the city and its population come into their visual field, and
while the words “people,” “country,” “state,” are still quite destitute
of tangible meaning to them. Just so, and so thoroughly, primitive man
knows all that is presented to his narrow field of view as history,
as living--and above all Life itself, the drama of birth and death,
sickness and eld; the history of passionate war and passionate love, as
experienced in himself or observed in others; the fate of relatives,
of the clan, of the village, their actions and their motives; tales
of long enmity, of fights, victory, and revenge. The life-horizon
widens, and shows not lives, but Life coming and going. The pageant
is not now of villages and clans, but of remote races and countries;
not of years, but of centuries. The history that is actually lived
with and participated in never reaches over more than a grandfather’s
span--neither for ancient Germans and present-day Negroes, nor for
Pericles and Wallenstein. Here the horizon of living ends, and a new
plane begins wherein the picture is based upon hearsay and historical
tradition, a plane in which direct sympathies are adapted to a
mind-picture that is both distinct and, from long use, stable. The
picture so developed shows very different amplitudes for the men of the
different Cultures. For us Westerners it is with this secondary picture
that genuine history begins, for we live under the aspect of eternity,
whereas for the Greeks and Romans it is just then that history ceases.
For Thucydides[20] the events of the Persian Wars, for Cæsar those of
the Punic Wars, were already devoid of living import.
And beyond this plane again, other historic unit-pictures rise to the
view--pictures of the destinies of the plant world and the animal
world, the landscape, the stars--which at the last fuse with the last
pictures of natural science into mythic images of the creation and the
end of the world.
The nature- (science-) picture of the child and the primitive develops
out of the petty technique of every day, which perpetually forces both
of them to turn away from the fearful contemplation of wide nature to
the critique of the facts and situations of their near environment.
Like the young animal, the child discovers its first truths through
play. Examining the toy, cutting open the doll, turning the mirror
round to see what is behind it, the feeling of triumph in having
established something as correct for good and all--no nature-research
whatsoever has got beyond this. Primitive man applies this critical
experience, as he acquires it, to his arms and tools, to the materials
for his clothing, food, and housing--i.e., to things _in so far as they
are dead_. He applies it to animals as well when suddenly they cease
to have meaning for him as living beings whose movements he watches
and divines as pursuer or pursued, and are apprehended mechanically
instead of vitally, as aggregates of flesh and bone for which he has a
definite use--exactly as he is conscious of an event, now as the act
of a dæmon and a moment afterwards as a sequence of cause and effect.
The mature man of the Culture transposes in exactly the same way, every
day and every hour. Here, too, is a “nature”-horizon, and beyond it
lies the secondary plane formed of our impressions of rain, lightning,
and tempest, summer and winter, moon-phases and star-courses. But at
that plane religiousness, trembling with fear and awe, forces upon man
criteria of a far higher kind. Just as in the history-picture he sounds
the ultimate facts of life, so here he seeks to establish the ultimate
truths of nature. What lies beyond any attainable frontier of knowledge
he calls God, and all that lies within that frontier he strives to
comprehend--as action, creation, and manifestation of God--causally.
Every group of scientifically established elements, therefore, has a
dual tendency, inherent and unchanged since primitive ages. The one
tendency urges forwards the completest possible system of _technical_
knowledge, for the service of practical, economical, and warlike
ends, which many kinds of animals have developed to a high degree of
perfection, and which from them leads, through primitive man and his
acquaintance with fire and metals, directly to the machine-technics
of our Faustian Culture. The other tendency took shape only with the
separation of strictly human thought from physical vision by means
of language, and the aim of its effort has been an equally complete
_theoretical_ knowledge, which we call in the earlier phases of the
Culture _religious_, and in the later _scientific_. Fire is for the
warrior a weapon, for the craftsman part of his equipment, for the
priest a sign from God, and for the scientist a problem. But in all
these aspects alike it is proper to the “natural,” the scientific,
mode of waking-consciousness. In the world-as-history we do not find
fire as such, but the conflagration of Carthage and the flames of the
faggots heaped around John Hus and Giordano Bruno.
II
I repeat, every being livingly experiences every other being and its
destiny _only in relation to itself_. A flock of pigeons is regarded
by the farmer on whose fields it settles quite otherwise than by the
nature-lover in the street or the hawk in the air. The peasant sees
in his son the future and the heritage, but what the neighbour sees
in him is a peasant, what the officer sees is a soldier, what the
visitor sees is a native. Napoleon experienced men and things very
differently as Emperor and as lieutenant. Put a man in a new situation,
make the revolutionary a minister, the soldier a general, and at once
history and the key men of history become for him something other than
what they were. Talleyrand saw through the men of his time because
he belonged with them, but had he been suddenly plumped down in the
company of Crassus, Cæsar, Catiline, and Cicero, his understanding of
their measures and views would have been either null or erroneous.
There is no history-in-itself. The history of a family is taken
differently by each member of it, that of a country differently by each
party, that of the age by each nation. The German looks upon the World
War otherwise than the Englishman, the workman upon economic history
otherwise than the employer, and the historian of the West has a quite
other world-history before his eyes than that of the great Arabian and
Chinese historians. The history of an era could be handled objectively
only if it were very distant in time, and the historian were radically
disinterested; and we find that our best historians cannot judge of or
describe even the Peloponnesian Wars and Actium without being in some
measure influenced by present interests.
It is not incompatible with, rather it is essential to, a profound
knowledge of men that the appraiser should see through glasses of
his own colour. This knowledge, indeed, is exactly the component
that we discern to be wanting in those generalizations that distort
or altogether ignore that all-important fact, the uniqueness of the
constituent event in history[21]--the worst example of this being
the “materialistic” conception of history, about which we have said
almost all there is to say when we have described it as physiognomic
barrenness. But both in spite of this and on account of this[22] there
is for every man, _because_ he belongs to a class and a time and a
nation and a Culture, a typical picture of history as it ought to
appear in relation to himself, and equally there are typical pictures
specific to the time or class or Culture, _qua_ time or class or
Culture. The supreme generalization possible to each Culture as a
major being is a primary and, for it, symbolical image of its own
world-as-history, and all self-attunements of the individual--or of
the group livingly effective as individual--are with reference to
that image. Whenever we describe another person’s ideas as profound
or superficial, original or trivial, mistaken or obsolete, we are
unwittingly judging them with reference to a picture which springs up
to answer for the value at the moment of a continuous function of our
time and our personality.[23]
Obviously, then, every man of the Faustian Culture possesses his own
picture of history and, besides, innumerable other pictures from his
youth upwards, which fluctuate and alter ceaselessly in response to
the experiences of the day and the year. And how different, again,
are the typical history-images of men and different eras and classes,
the world of Otto the Great and that of Gregory VII, that of a Doge
of Venice and that of a poor pilgrim! In what different worlds lived
Lorenzo de’ Medici, Wallenstein, Cromwell, Marat, and Bismarck, a serf
of the Gothic age, a savant of the Baroque, the army officer of the
Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War, and the Wars of Liberation
respectively! Or, to consider our own times alone, a Frisian peasant
whose life of actuality is limited to his own countryside and its folk,
a high merchant of Hamburg, and a professor of physics! And yet to all
of these, irrespective of individual age, status, and period, there is
a common basis that differentiates the ensemble of these figures, their
prime-image, from that of every other Culture.
But, over and above this, there is a distinction of another kind which
separates the Classical and the Indian history-pictures from those of
the Chinese, the Arabian, and, most of all, the Western Cultures--the
_narrow horizon_ of the two first-named. Whatever the Greeks may (and
indeed must) have known of ancient Egyptian history, they never allowed
it to penetrate into their peculiar history-picture, which for the
majority was limited to the field of events that could be related by
the oldest surviving participant, and which even for the finer minds
stopped at the Trojan War, a frontier beyond which they would not
concede that there had been historical life at all.[24]
The Arabian Culture,[25] on the other hand, very early dared the
astounding gesture--we see it in the historical thought alike of the
Jews and of the Persians from Cyrus’s time--of connecting the legend of
creation to the present by means of a genuine chronology; the Persians
indeed comprised the future as well in the sweep of the gesture, and
predated the last judgment and the coming of the Messiah. This exact
and very narrow definition of human history--the Persian reckoning
allows twelve millennia from first to last, the Jewish counts less
than six up to the present--is a necessary expression of the Magian
world-feeling and fundamentally distinguishes the Judæo-Persian
creation-sagas from those of the Babylonian Culture, from which so many
of their external traits are derived.
Different, again, are the primary feelings which give historical
thought in the Chinese and the Egyptian Cultures its characteristically
wide and unbounded horizons, represented by chronologically stated
sequences of dynasties which stretch over millennia and finally
dissolve into a grey remoteness.
The Faustian picture of world-history, again, prepared in advance by
the existence of a Christian chronology,[26] came into being suddenly,
with an immense extension and deepening of the Magian picture which
the Western Church had taken over, an extension and deepening that
was to give Joachim of Floris[27] in the high Gothic the basis of his
wonderful interpretation of all world-destinies as a sequence of three
æons under the aspects of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Parallel with this there was an immense widening of the geographical
horizon, which even in Gothic times (thanks to Vikings and Crusaders)
came to extend from Iceland to the remotest ends of Asia;[28] and from
1500 onwards, the developed man of the Baroque is able to do what none
of his peers in the other Cultures could do and--for the first time in
human history--to regard the whole surface of the planet as its field.
Thanks to compass and telescope, the savant of that mature age could
for the first time not merely posit the sphericity of the earth as a
matter of theory, but actually feel that he was living upon a sphere in
space. The land-horizon is no more. So, too, time-horizons melt in the
double endlessness of the calendar before and after Christ. And to-day,
under the influence of this picture, which comprises the whole planet
and will eventually embrace all the high Cultures, the old Gothic
division of history into “ancient,” “mediæval,” and modern, long become
trite and empty, is visibly dissolving.[29]
In all other Cultures the aspects of world-history and of man-history
coincide. The beginning of the world is the beginning of man, and the
end of man is the end of the world. But the Faustian infinity-craving
for the first time separated the two notions during the Baroque, and
now it has made human history, for all its immense and still unknown
span, _a mere episode in world-history_, while the Earth--of which
other Cultures had seen not even the whole, but only superficial
fractions as “the world”--has become a little star amongst millions of
solar systems.
The extension of the historical world-picture makes it even more
necessary in this Culture than in any other to distinguish between
the everyday self-attunements of ordinary people and that extreme
self-attunement of which only the highest minds are capable, and
which even in them holds only for moments. The difference between the
historical view-field of Themistocles and that of an Attic husbandman
is probably very small, but this difference is already immense as
between Henry VI and a hind of his day,[30] and as the Faustian
Culture mounts up and up, the power of self-focusing attains to such
heights and depths that the circle of adepts grows ever smaller and
smaller. In fact, there is formed a sort of pyramid of possibilities,
in which individuals are graded according to their endowments; every
individual, according to his constitution, stands at the level which
he is capable at his best focus of holding. But it follows from this
that between Western men there are limitations to the possibilities
of reciprocal understanding of historical life-problems, limitations
that do not apply to other Cultures, at any rate in such fateful rigour
as they do to ours. Can a workman to-day really understand a peasant?
Or a diplomat a craftsman? The historico-geographical horizon that
determines for each of them the questions worth asking and the form
in which these are asked is so different from the horizons of the
others that what they can exchange is not a communication, but passing
remarks. It is, of course, the mark of the real appraiser of man that
he understands how “the other man” is adjusted and regulates his
intercourse with him accordingly (as we all do in talking to children),
but the art of appraising in this sense some man of the past (say
Henry the Lion or Dante), of living oneself into his history-picture
so thoroughly that his thoughts, feelings, and decisions take on a
character of self-evidence, is, owing to the vast difference between
the one’s and the other’s waking consciousness, so rare that up to the
eighteenth century it was not even seen that the historian ought to
attempt it. Only since 1800 has it become a desideratum for the writing
of history, and it is one very seldom satisfied at that.
The typically Faustian separation of human history, as such, from the
far wider history of the world has had the result that since the end of
the Baroque our world-picture has contained several horizons disposed
one behind the other in as many planes. For the exploration of these,
individual sciences, more or less overtly historical in character, have
taken shape. Astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, one after the
other follow up the destinies of the star-world, the earth’s crust,
life, and man, and only then do we come to the “world”-history--as it
is still called even to-day--of the higher Cultures, to which, again,
are attached the histories of the several cultural elements, family
history, and lastly (that highly developed speciality of the West)
biography.
Each of these planes demands a particular self-focusing, and the
moment the special focus becomes sharp the narrower and the broader
planes cease to be live Being and become mere given facts. If we
are investigating the battle of the Teutoburger Wald, the growing
up of this forest in the plant-world of the North German plain is
presupposed. If, on the other hand, we are examining into the history
of the German tree-world, the geological stratification of the earth is
the presupposition, though it is just a fact whose particular destiny
need not be further followed out in this connexion. If, again, our
question is the origin of the Cretaceous, the existence of the Earth
itself as a planet in the solar system is a datum, not a problem. Or,
to express it otherwise, that there is an Earth in the star-world, that
the phenomenon “life” occurs in the Earth, that within this “life”
there is the form “man,” that within the history of man there exists
the organic form of the Culture, is in each case an incident in the
picture of the next higher plane.
In Goethe, from his Strassburg period to his first Weimar residence,
the inclination to attune himself to “world”-history was very
strong--as evidenced in his Cæsar, Mohammed, Socrates, Wandering
Jew, and Egmont sketches. And after that painful renunciation of the
prospect of high political achievement[31]--the pain which calls to us
in _Tasso_ even through the sober resignedness of its final form--this
precisely was the attunement that he chose to cut out of his life; and
thereafter he limits himself, almost fiercely, to the picture-planes of
plant-history, animal-history, and earth-history (his “living nature”)
on the one hand and to biography on the other.
All these “pictures,” developed in the same man, have the same
structure. Even the history of plants and animals, even that of the
earth’s crust or that of the stars, is a _fable convenue_ and mirrors
in outward actuality the inward tendency of the ego’s being. The
student of the animal world or of stratification is a man, living in a
period and having a nationality and a social status, and it is no more
possible to eliminate his subjective standpoint from his treatment of
these things than it would be to obtain a perfectly abstract account
of the French Revolution or the World War. The celebrated theories of
Kant, Laplace, Cuvier, Lyell, Darwin, have also a politico-economic
tinting, and their very power and impressiveness for the lay public
show that the mode of outlook upon all these historical planes proceeds
from a single source. And what is accomplishing itself to-day is the
final achievement of which Faustian history-thinking is capable--the
organic linking and disposition of these historical planes in a
single vast world-history of uniform physiognomic that shall enable
our glance to range from the life of the individual man without a
break to the first and last destinies of the universe. The nineteenth
century--in mechanistic (i.e., unhistorical) form--enunciated the
problem. It is one of the preordained tasks of the twentieth to solve
it.
III
The picture that we possess of the history of the Earth’s crust and of
life is at present still dominated by the ideas which civilized[32]
English thought has developed, since the Age of Enlightenment, out of
the English habit of life--Lyell’s “phlegmatic” theory of the formation
of the geological strata, and Darwin’s of the origin of species, are
actually but derivatives of the development of England herself. In
place of the incalculable catastrophes and metamorphoses such as von
Buch and Cuvier[33] admitted, they put a methodical evolution over
very long periods of time and recognize as causes only _scientifically
calculable_ and indeed _mechanical utility-causes_.
This “English” type of causality is not only shallow, but also far
too narrow. It limits possible causal connexions, in the first
place, to those which work out their _entire_ course on the earth’s
surface; but this immediately excludes all great cosmic relations
between earthly life-phenomena and the events of the solar system and
the stellar universe, and assumes the impossible postulate that the
exterior face of the earth-ball is a completely insulated region of
natural phenomena. And, secondly, it assumes that connexions which
are not comprehensible by the means at present available to the human
consciousness--namely, sensation refined by instruments and thought
precised by theory--do not even exist.
It will be the characteristic task of the twentieth century, as
compared with the nineteenth, to get rid of this system of superficial
causality, whose roots reach back into the rationalism of the Baroque
period, and to put in its place a pure physiognomic. We are sceptics in
regard to any and every mode of thought which “explains” causally. We
let things speak for themselves, and confine ourselves to sensing the
Destiny immanent in them and contemplating the form-manifestations that
we shall never penetrate. The extreme to which we can attain is the
discovery of causeless, purposeless, purely existent forms underlying
the changeful picture of nature. For the nineteenth century the word
“evolution” meant progress in the sense of increasing fitness of life
to purposes. For Leibniz--whose _Protogæa_ (1691), a work full of
significant thought, outlines, on the basis of studies made in the Harz
silver-mines, a picture of the world’s infancy that is Goethian through
and through--and for Goethe himself it meant fulfilment in the sense
of increasing connotation of the form. The two concepts, Goethe’s
form-fulfilment and Darwin’s evolution, are in as complete opposition
as destiny to causality, and (be it added) as German to English
thought, and German to English history.
There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished
by palæontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can
only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different
stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely “transitional” types,
no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable
and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not
developed themselves on the fitness principle, but _appear suddenly
and at once in their definitive shape_; that do not thereafter evolve
towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear,
while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in
ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of
living beings which _exist aboriginally and exist still, without
transition types_, in the grouping of to-day. We see how, amongst
fish, the Selachians, with their simple form, appear first in the
foreground of history and then slowly fade out again, while the
Teleostians slowly bring a more perfected fish-type to predominance.
The same applies to the plant-world of the ferns and horsetails, of
which only the last species now linger in the fully developed kingdom
of the flowering plants. But the assumption of utility-causes or other
visible causes for these phenomena has no support of actuality.[34] It
is a Destiny that evoked into the world life as life, the ever-sharper
opposition between plant and animal, each single type, each genus,
and each species. And along with this existence there is given also a
definite _energy_ of the form--by virtue of which in the course of its
self-fulfilment it keeps itself pure or, on the contrary, becomes dull
and unclear or evasively splits into numerous varieties--and finally a
_life-duration of this form_, which (unless, again, incident intervenes
to shorten it) leads naturally to a senility of the species and finally
to its disappearance.
As for mankind, discoveries of the Diluvial age indicate more and
more pointedly that the man-forms existing then correspond to those
living now; there is not the slightest trace of evolution towards a
race of greater utilitarian “fitness.” And the continued failure to
find man in the Tertiary discoveries indicates more and more clearly
that the human life-form, like every other, originates in a sudden
mutation (_Wandlung_) of which the “whence,” “how,” and “why” remain an
impenetrable secret. If, indeed, there were evolution in the English
sense of the word, there could be neither defined earth-strata nor
specific animal-classes, but only a single geological mass and a chaos
of living singular forms which we may suppose to have been left over
from the struggle for existence. But all that we see about us impels
us to the conviction that again and again profound and very sudden
changes take place in the being of plants and animals, changes which
are of a cosmic kind and nowise restricted to the earth’s surface,
which are beyond the ken of human sense and understanding in respect
of causes, if not indeed in all respects.[35] So, too, we observe
that swift and deep changes assert themselves in the history of the
great Cultures, without assignable causes, influences, or purposes of
any kind. The Gothic and the Pyramid styles come into full being as
suddenly as do the Chinese imperialism of Shi-hwang-ti and the Roman of
Augustus, as Hellenism and Buddhism and Islam. It is exactly the same
with the events in the individual life of every person who counts at
all, and he who is ignorant of this knows nothing of men and still less
of children. Every being, active or contemplative, strides on to its
fulfilment by _epochs_ and we have to assume just such epochs in the
history of solar systems and the world of the fixed stars. The origins
of the earth, of life, of the free-moving animal _are_ such epochs,
and, therefore, mysteries that we can do no more than accept.[36]
IV
That which we know of man divides clearly into two great ages of his
being. The first is, as far as our view is concerned, limited on the
one side by that profound fugue of planetary Destiny which we call the
beginning of the Ice Age--and about which we can (within the picture of
world-history) say no more than _that_ a cosmic change took place--and
on the other by the beginnings of high cultures on Nile and Euphrates,
with which the whole meaning of human existence became suddenly
different. We discover everywhere the sharp frontier of Tertiary and
Diluvial, and on the hither side of it we see man as a completely
formed type, familiar with custom, myth, wit, ornament, and technique
and endowed with a bodily structure that has not materially altered up
to the present day.
We will consider the first age as that of the primitive Culture.
The only field in which this Culture endured throughout the second
age (though certainly in a very “late” form) and is found alive and
fairly intact to-day is north-west Africa. It is the great merit of
Leo Frobenius[37] that he recognized this quite clearly, beginning
with the assumption that in this field a _whole world_ of primitive
life (and not merely a greater or less number of primitive tribes)
remained remote from the influences of the high Cultures. The
ethnologist-psychologist, on the contrary, delights in collecting,
from all over the five continents, fragments of peoples who really
have nothing in common but the negative fact of living a subordinate
existence in the middle of one or another of the high Cultures, without
participation in its inner life. The result is a congeries of tribes,
some stationary, some inferior, and some decadent, whose respective
modes of expression, moreover, are indiscriminately lumped together.
But the primitive Culture is not fragmentary, but something _strong and
integral_, something highly vital and effectual. Only, this Culture is
so different from everything that we men of a higher Culture possess in
the way of spiritual potentialities that we may question whether even
those people which have carried the first age very deep into the second
are good evidence, in their present modes of being and waking-being,
for the condition of the old time.
For some thousands of years now the waking-consciousness of man has had
the impression of constant mutual touch between the tribes and peoples
as an obvious everyday fact. But in dealing with the first age we must
not forget that in it man, cohering in a very few small groups, is
completely lost in the immensity of the landscape, the ruling element
therein being the mighty masses of the great animal-herds. The rarity
of our finds sufficiently proves this. At the time of Aurignacian Man
there were perhaps a dozen hordes, each a few hundred strong, wandering
in the whole area of France, and such hordes must have regarded it
as a deeply impressive and puzzling event when (if ever) they became
aware that fellow men existed. Can we imagine even in the least degree
what it was to live in a world almost empty of men--we for whom all
nature has long since become a background for the human multitude? How
man’s world-consciousness must have changed when, besides the forests
and the herds of beasts, other men “just like himself” began to be
met with, more and more frequently, in the country-side. The increase
of man’s numbers--this, too, doubtless took place very suddenly--made
experience of “fellow men” habitual, and replaced the impression of
astonishment by the feelings of pleasure or hostility, and these
again evoked a whole new world of experiences and of involuntary and
inevitable relations. It was for the history of the human soul perhaps
the deepest and most pregnant of all events. It was in relation to
alien life-forms that man first became conscious of his own, and now
the interior organization of the clan was enriched by a wealth of
intertribal forms of relation, which thereafter completely dominated
primitive life and thought. For it was then that, out of very simple
modes of sensuous understanding, the rudiments of verbal language (and,
therefore, of abstract thought) came into being, amongst them the
particularly fortunate few, which--though we can form no idea of their
structure--we may assume as the origins of the later Indogermanic and
Semitic language-groups.
Then, out of this general primitive Culture of a humanity linked by
intertribal relations, there shot up suddenly (about 3000 B.C.[38])
the Culture of Egypt and Babylonia. Probably for a millennium before
that date both these fields had been nursing something that differed
radically from every primitive Culture in kind and in intent, something
having an inward unity common to all its forms of expression and
directional in all its life. To me it seems highly probable that, if
not indeed all over the earth’s surface, at any rate in man’s essence
a change was accomplished at that time; and if so, then any primitive
Culture worthy of the name that is still found living later, ever
dwindling, in the midst of higher Cultures, should itself be something
different from the Culture of the first Age. But, with reference to
primitive Culture of any sort, that which I call the pre-Culture (and
which can be shown to occur as a uniform process in the beginning of
every high Culture) is something different in kind, something entirely
new.
In all primitive existence the “it,” the Cosmic, is at work with such
immediacy of force that all microcosmic utterances, whether in myth,
custom, technique, or ornament, obey only the pressures of the very
instant. For us, there are no ascertainable rules for the duration,
tempo, and course of development of these utterances. We observe, say,
an ornamental form-language--not to be called a style[39]--ruling
over the population of a wide area, spreading, changing, and at last
dying out. Alongside this, and perhaps with quite different fields of
extension, we may find modes of fashioning and using weapons, tribal
organizations, religious practices, each developing in a special way
of its own, with epochal points of its own, beginnings and ends of
its own, completely influenced by other form-domains. When in some
prehistoric stratum we have identified an accurately known type of
pottery, we cannot safely argue from it to the customs and religion
of the population to which it belonged. And if by chance the same
area does hold for a particular form of marriage and, say, a certain
type of tattooing, this never signifies a common basic idea such as
is indicated, for example, by the discovery of gunpowder and that of
perspective in painting. No necessary connexions come to light between
ornament and organization by age-classes, or between the cult of a god
and the kind of agriculture practised. Development in these cases means
always some development of one or another individual aspect or trait of
the primitive Culture, never of that Culture itself. This, as I have
said before, is essentially chaotic; the primitive Culture is neither
an organism nor a sum of organisms.
But with the type of the higher Culture this “it” gives way to a strong
and undiffused _tendency_. Within the primitive Culture tribes and
clans are the only quickened beings--other than the individual men of
course. _Here, however, the Culture itself is such a being._ Everything
primitive is a sum--a sum of the expression-forms of primitive
groupings. The high Culture, on the contrary, is the waking-being of
a single huge organism which makes not only custom, myths, technique,
and art, but the very peoples and classes incorporated in itself the
vessels of one single form-language and one single history. The oldest
speech that we know of belongs to the primitive Culture, and has
lawless destinies of its own which cannot be deduced from those of,
say, Ornament or Marriage. But the history of script belongs integrally
with the expression-history of the several higher Cultures. That the
Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, and Mexican each formed a special
script in its pre-Cultural age--that the Indian and the Classical on
the other hand did not do so, but took over (and very late) the highly
developed writing of a neighbouring Civilization--that in the Arabian,
again, every new religion and sect immediately formed its particular
script--all these are facts that stand in a deeply intimate relation to
the generic form-history of these Cultures and its inner significance.
To these two ages our knowledge of man is restricted, and they
certainly do not suffice to justify conclusions of any sort about
possible or certain new eras or about their “when” and “how”--quite
apart from the fact that in any case the cosmic connexions that govern
the history of man as a genus are entirely inaccessible to our measures.
My kind of thought and observation is limited to the physiognomy
of the actual. At the point when the experience of the “judge of
men” _vis-à-vis_ his environment, and that of the “man of action”
_vis-à-vis_ his facts, become ineffective, there also this insight
finds its limit. The existence of these two ages is a _fact of
historical experience_; more, our experiencing of the primitive Culture
consists not only in surveying, in its relics, a self-contained and
closed-off thing, but also in reacting to its deeper meaning by virtue
of an inward relation to it which persists in us. But the second
age opens to us another and quite different kind of experience. It
was an incident, the sense of which cannot now be scrutinized, that
the type of the higher Culture appeared suddenly in the field of
human history. Quite possibly, indeed, it was some sudden event in
the domain of earth-history that brought forth a new and different
form into phenomenal existence. But the fact that we have before us
eight such Cultures, all of the same build, the same development, and
the same duration, justifies us in _looking at them comparatively_,
and therefore justifies our treating them as comparable, studying
them comparatively, and obtaining from our study a knowledge which
we can extend backwards over lost periods and forwards over the
future--provided always that a Destiny of a different order does not
replace this form-world, suddenly and basically, by another. Our
licence to proceed thus comes from general experience of organic being.
As in the history of the Raptores or the Coniferæ we cannot prophesy
whether and when a new species will arise, so in that of Cultural
history we cannot say whether and when a new Culture shall be. But from
the moment when a new being is conceived in the womb, or a seed sinks
into the earth, we do know _the inner form of this new life-course_;
and we know that the quiet course of its development and fulfilment may
be disturbed by the pressure of external powers, but never altered.
This experience teaches, further, that the Civilization which at this
present time has gripped the earth’s whole surface is not a third age,
but a stage--a necessary stage--of the Western Culture, distinguished
from its analogues only by the forcefulness of its extension-tendency.
Here experience ends, and all speculation on what new forms will govern
the life of future mankind (or, for that matter, whether there will
be any such new forms) all building of majestic card-houses on the
foundation of “it should be, it shall be” is mere trifling--far too
futile, it seems to me, to justify one single life of any value being
expended on it.
The group of the high Cultures is not, as a group, an organic
unit. That they have happened in just this number, at just these
places and times, is, for the human eye, an incident without deeper
intelligibility. The ordering of the individual Cultures, on the
contrary, has stood out so distinctly that the historical technique of
the Chinese, the Magian, and the Western worlds--often, indeed, the
mere common consent of the educated in these Cultures--has been able to
fashion a set of names upon which it would be impossible to improve.[40]
Historical thought, therefore, has the double task of dealing
comparatively with _the individual life-courses of the Cultures_, and
of examining the incidental and irregular relations of the Cultures
amongst themselves in respect of their meaning. The necessity of the
first of these tasks, obvious enough, has yet been overlooked hitherto.
The second has been handled, but only by the lazy and shallow method
of imposing causality over the whole tangle and laying it out tidily
along the “course” of a hypothetical “world”-history, thereby making
it impossible to discover either the psychology of these difficult,
but richly suggestive, relations or to discover that of the inner
life of any particular Culture. In truth, the condition for solving
the first problem is that the second has been solved already. The
relations are very different, even under the simple aspect of time and
space. The Crusades brought a Springtime face to face with an old and
ripe Civilization; in the Cretan-Mycenæan world seed-time and golden
autumn are seen together. A Civilization may stream over from immense
remoteness, as the Indian streamed into the Arabian from the East, or
lie senile and stifling over an infancy, as the Classical lay upon its
other side. But there are differences, too, of kind and strength; the
Western Culture seeks out relations, the Egyptian tries to avoid them;
the former is beaten by them again and again in tragic crises, while
the Classical gets all it can out of them, without suffering. But all
these tendencies have their roots in the spirituality of the Culture
itself--and sometimes they tell us more of this Culture than does its
own language, which often hides more than it communicates.
V
A glance over the group of the Cultures discloses task after task. The
nineteenth century, in which historical research was guided by natural
science, and historical thought by the ideas of the Baroque, has simply
brought us to a pinnacle whence we see the new world at our feet. Shall
we ever take possession of that new world?
Even to-day uniform treatment of these grand life-courses is immensely
difficult, because the more remote fields have not been seriously
worked up at all. Once more, it is the lordly outlook of the West
European--he will only notice that which approaches him from one or
another antiquity by the proper and respectful route of a Middle Age,
and that which goes its own ways will get but little of his attention.
Thus, of the things of the Chinese and the Indian worlds, certain
kinds are now beginning to be tackled--art, religion, philosophy--but
the political history is dealt with, if at all, “chattily.” It does
not occur to anyone to treat the great constitutional problems of
Chinese history--the Hohenstaufen-destiny of the Li-Wang (842), the
first Congress of Princes (659), the struggle of principle between
the imperialism (Lien-heng) of the “Roman” state of Tsin and the
League-of-Nations idea (Ho-tsung) between 500 and 300, the rise of the
Chinese Augustus, Hwang-ti (221)--with anything of the thoroughness
that Mommsen devoted to the principate of Augustus. India, again;
however completely the Indians themselves have forgotten their
state-history, we have after all more available material for Buddha’s
time than we have for history of the Classical ninth and eighth
centuries, and yet even to-day we act as though “the” Indian had lived
entirely in his philosophy, just as the Athenians (so our classicists
would have us believe) spent their lives in beauty-philosophizing on
the banks of the Ilissus. But even Egyptian politics receive little
reflective attention. The later Egyptian historian concealed under the
name “Hyksos period” the same crisis which the Chinese treat of under
the name “Period of the Contending States”--here, too, is something
never yet investigated. And interest in the Arabian world has reached
to the frontier of the Classical tongues and no further. With what
endless assiduity we have described the constitution of Diocletian,
and assembled material for the entirely unimportant administrative
history of the provinces of Asia Minor--because it is written in Greek.
But the Sassanid state, the precedent and in every respect the model
of Diocletian’s, comes into the picture only occasionally, and then
as Rome’s _opponent_ in war. What about _its own_ administrative and
juristic history? What is the poor sum-total of material that we have
assembled for the law and economics of Egypt, India, and China[41] in
comparison with the work that has been done on Greek and Roman law.
About 3000[42] after a long “Merovingian” period, which is still
distinctly perceptible in Egypt, the two oldest Cultures began, in
exceedingly limited areas on the lower Nile and the lower Euphrates.
In these cases the distinctions between early and late periods have
long ago been labelled as Old and Middle Kingdom, Sumer and Akkad. The
outcome of the Egyptian feudal period marked by the establishment of
a hereditary nobility and the decline (from Dynasty VI) of the older
Kingship, presents so astounding a similarity with the course of events
in the Chinese springtime from I-Wang (934-909) and that in the Western
from the Emperor Henry IV (1056-1106) that a unified comparative study
of all three might well be risked. At the beginning of the Babylonian
“Baroque” we see the figure of the great Sargon (2500), who pushed
out to the Mediterranean coast, conquered Cyprus, and styled himself,
like Justinian I and Charles V, “lord of the four parts of the earth.”
And in due course, about 1800 on the Nile and rather earlier in
Sumer-Akkad, we perceive the beginnings of the first Civilizations. Of
these the Asiatic displayed immense expansive power. The “achievements
of the Babylonian Civilization” (as the books say), many things and
notions connected with measuring, numbering, and accounting, travelled
probably as far as the North and the Yellow Seas. Many a Babylonian
trademark upon a tool may have come to be honoured, out there in the
Germanic wild, as a magic symbol, and so may have originated some
“Early-German” ornament. But meantime the Babylonian realm itself
passed from hand to hand. Kassites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Medes,
Persians, Macedonians--all of these small[43] warrior-hosts under
energetic leaders--successively replaced one another in the capital
city without any serious resistance on the part of its people.
It is a first example--soon paralleled in Egypt--of the Roman Empire
style. Under the Kassites rulers were set up and displaced by
prætorians; the Assyrians, like the later soldier-emperors of Rome
(after Commodus), maintained the old constitutional forms; the Persian
Cyrus and the Ostrogoth Theodoric regarded themselves as managers of
the Empire, and the warrior bands, Mede and Lombard, as master-peoples
in alien surroundings. But these are constitutional rather than factual
distinctions; in intent and purpose the legions of Septimius Severus,
the African, did not differ from the Visigoths of Alaric, and by the
battle of Adrianople[44] “Romans” and “barbarians” have become almost
indistinguishable.
After 1500 three new Cultures begin--first, the Indian, in the upper
Punjab; then, a hundred years later, the Chinese on the middle
Hwang-Ho; and then, about 1100, the Classical, on the Ægean Sea.
The Chinese historians speak of the three great dynasties of Hsia,
Shang, and Chóu in much the same way as Napoleon regarded himself as
a fourth dynasty following the Merovingians, the Carolingians, and
the Capetians--in reality, the third coexisted with the Culture right
through its course in each case. When in 441 B.C. the titular Emperor
of the Chóu dynasty became a state pensioner of the “Eastern Duke” and
when in A.D. 1793 “Louis Capet” was executed, the Culture in each case
passed into the Civilization. There are some bronzes of very great
antiquity preserved from late Chang times, which stand towards the
later art in exactly the same relation as Mycenæan to Early Classical
pottery and Carolingian to Romanesque art. In the Vedic, Homeric, and
Chinese springtimes, with their “_Pfalzen_” and “_Burgen_,” their
knighthood and feudal rulership, can be seen the whole image of our
Gothic, and the “period of the Great Protectors” (Ming-Chu, 685-691)
corresponds precisely to the time of Cromwell, Wallenstein, and
Richelieu and to the First Tyrannis of the Greek world.
The period 480-230 is called by the Chinese historians the “Period
of the Contending States”; it culminated in a century of unbroken
warfare between mass-armies with frightful social upheavals, and
out of it came the “Roman” state of Tsin as founder of a Chinese
Imperium. This phase Egypt experienced between 1780 and 1580, of which
the last century was the “Hyksos” time. The Classical experienced
it from Chæronea (338), and, at the high pitch of horror, from the
Gracchi (133) to Actium (31 B.C.). And it is the destiny of the
West-European-American world for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
During this period the centre of gravity changes--as from Attica to
Latium, so from the Hwang-ho (at Ho-nan-fu) to the Yang-tse (modern
province of Hu-pei). The Si-Kiang was as vague for the Chinese savants
of those days as the Elbe for the Alexandrian geographer, and of the
existence of India they had as yet no notion.
As on the other side of the globe there arose the principes of the
Julian-Claudian house, so here in China there arose the mighty figure
of Wang-Cheng, who led Tsin through the decisive struggle to sole
supremacy and in 221 assumed the title of Shi (literally equivalent
to “Augustus”) and the Cæsar-name Hwang-ti. He founded the “_Pax
Serica_,” as we may call it, carried out a grand social reform in the
exhausted Empire, and--as promptly as Rome[45]--began to build his
“_Limes_,” the famous Great Wall, for which in 214 he annexed a part
of Mongolia. He was the first, too, to subdue the barbarians south
of the Yang-tse, in a series of large-scale campaigns followed and
confirmed by military roads, castles, and colonies. But “Roman,” too,
was his family history--a Tacitean drama with Lui-Shi (Chancellor
and stepfather of the Emperor) and Li-Szu, the great statesman (the
Agrippa of his day, and unifier of the Chinese script), playing parts,
and one that quickly closed in Neronic horrors. Followed then the
two Han dynasties (Western, 206 B.C.-A.D. 23; Eastern, A.D. 25-220),
under which the frontiers extended more and more, while in the capital
eunuch-ministers, generals, and soldiery made and unmade the rulers
at their pleasure. At certain rare moments, as under Wu-ti (140-86)
and Ming-ti (58-76), the Chinese-Confucian, the Indian-Buddhist, and
the Classical-Stoic world-forces approached one another so closely in
the region of the Caspian that they might easily have come into actual
touch.[46]
Chance decreed that the heavy attacks of the Huns should break
themselves in vain upon the Chinese “Limes,” which at each crisis
found a strong emperor to defend it. The decisive repulse of the Huns
took place in 124-119 under the Chinese Trajan, Wu-ti; and it was he,
too, who finally incorporated Southern China in the Empire, with the
object of obtaining a route into India, and built a grand embattled
road to the Tarim. And so the Huns turned westward, and in due course
they appear, impelling a swarm of Germanic tribes, in face of the
Limes of the Roman world. This time they succeeded. The Roman Imperium
collapsed, and thus two only of the three empires continued, and still
continue, as desirable spoil for a succession of different powers.
To-day it is the “red-haired barbarian” of the West who is playing
before the highly civilized eyes of Brahman and Mandarin the rôle
once played by Mogul and Manchu, playing it neither better nor worse
than they, and certain like them to be superseded in due course by
other actors. But in the colonization-field of foundering Rome, on the
other hand, the future Western Culture was ripening underground in the
north-west, while in the east the Arabian Culture had flowered already.
The Arabian Culture[47] is a discovery. Its unity was suspected by late
Arabians, but it has so entirely escaped Western historical research
that not even a satisfactory name can be found for it. Conformably
to the dominant languages, the seed-time and the spring might be
called the Aramaic and the later time the Arabian, but there is no
really effectual name. In this field the Cultures were close to one
another, and the extension of the corresponding Civilizations led to
much overlaying. The pre-Cultural period of the Arabian, which we can
follow out in Persian and Jewish history, lay completely within the
area of the old Babylonian world, but the springtime was under the
mighty spell of the Classical Civilization, which invaded from the West
with all the power of a just-attained maturity, and the Egyptian and
Indian Civilizations also made themselves distinctly felt. And then
in turn the Arabian spirit--under Late Classical disguises for the
most part--cast its spell over the nascent Culture of the West. The
Arabian Civilization stratified over a still surviving Classical in
the popular soul of south Spain, Provence, and Sicily, and became the
model upon which the Gothic soul educated itself. The proper landscape
of this Culture is remarkably extended and singularly fragmented. Let
one put oneself at Palmyra or Ctesiphon, and, musing, look outwards
all round. In the north is Osrhoene; Edessa became the Florence of the
Arabian spring. To the west are Syria and Palestine--the home of the
New Testament and of the Jewish Mishna, with Alexandria as a standing
outpost. To the east Mazdaism experienced a mighty regeneration,
which corresponded to the birth of Jesus in Jewry and about which the
fragmentary state of Avesta literature enables us to say only _that_ it
happened.[48] Here, too, were born the Talmud and the religion of Mani.
Deep in the south, the future home of Islam, an age of chivalry was
able to develop as fully as in the realm of the Sassanids; even to-day
there survive, unexplored, the ruins of castles and strongholds whence
the decisive wars were waged between the Christian state of Axum and
the Jewish state of the Himyarites on the two shores of the Red Sea,
with Roman and Persian diplomacy poking the fire. In the extreme north
was Byzantium, that strange mixture of sere, civilized, Classical,
with vernal and chevaleresque which is manifested above all in the
bewildering history of the Byzantine army system. Into this world Islam
at last--and far too late--brought a consciousness of unity, and this
accounts for the self-evident character of its victorious progress
and the almost unresisting adhesion of Christians, Jews, and Persians
alike. Out of Islam in due course arose the Arabian Civilization which
was at the peak of its intellectual completeness when the barbarians
from the West broke in for a moment, marching on Jerusalem. How, we
may ask ourselves, did this inroad appear in the eyes of cultivated
Arabians of the time? Somewhat like Bolshevism, perhaps? For the
statecraft of the Arabian World the political relations of “Frankistan”
were something on a lower plane. Even in our Thirty Years’ War--from
that point of view a drama of the “Far West”--when an English envoy[49]
strove to stir up the Porte against the house of Habsburg, the
statesman who handled policy over a field stretching from Morocco to
India, evidently judged that the little predatory states on the horizon
were of no real interest. And even when Napoleon landed in Egypt, there
were still many without an inkling of the future.
Meantime yet another new Culture developed in Mexico. This lay so
remote from the rest that no word even passed between them. All the
more astonishing, therefore, is the similarity of its development to
that of the Classical. No doubt the archæologist standing before a
teocalli would be horrified to think of his Doric temple in such a
connexion; yet it was a thoroughly Classical trait--feebleness of the
will-to-power in the matter of technics--that kept the Aztecs ill armed
and so made possible their catastrophe.
For, as it happens, this is the one example of a Culture ended by
violent death. It was not starved, suppressed, or thwarted, but
murdered in the full glory of its unfolding, destroyed like a sunflower
whose head is struck off by one passing. All these states--including a
world-power and more than one federation--with an extent and resources
far superior to those of the Greek and Roman states of Hannibal’s day;
with a comprehensive policy, a carefully ordered financial system, and
a highly developed legislation; with administrative ideas and economic
tradition such as the ministers of Charles V could never have imagined;
with a wealth of literature in several languages, an intellectually
brilliant and polite society in great cities to which the West could
not show one single parallel--all this was not broken down in some
desperate war, but washed out by a handful of bandits in a few years,
and so entirely that the relics of the population retained not even
a memory of it all. Of the giant city Tenochtitlan[50] not a stone
remains above ground. The cluster of great Mayan cities in the virgin
forests of Yucatan succumbed swiftly to the attack of vegetation, and
we do not know the old name of any one of them. Of the literature three
books survive, but no one can read them.
The most appalling feature of the tragedy was that it was not in the
least a necessity of the Western Culture that it should happen. It was
a private affair of adventurers, and at the time no one in Germany,
France, or England had any idea of what was taking place. This instance
shows, as no other shows, that _the history of humanity has no meaning
whatever_ and that deep significances reside only in the life-courses
of the separate Cultures. Their inter-relations are unimportant
and accidental. In this case the accident was so cruelly banal, so
supremely absurd, that it would not be tolerated in the wildest farce.
A few cannon and handguns began and ended the drama.[51]
A sure knowledge of even the most general history of this world is
now for ever impossible. Events as important as our Crusades and
Reformation have vanished without leaving a trace. Only in recent years
has research managed to settle the outline, at any rate, of the later
course of development, and with the help of these data comparative
morphology may attempt to widen and deepen the picture by means of
those of other Cultures.[52] On this basis the epochal points of this
Culture lie about two hundred years later than those of the Arabian and
seven hundred years before those of our own. There was a pre-Cultural
period which, as in China and Egypt, developed script and calendar, but
of this we now know nothing. The time-reckoning began with an initial
date which lies far behind the birth of Christ, but it is impossible
now to fix it with certainty relative to that event.[53] In any case,
it shows an extraordinarily strongly developed history-sense in Mexican
mankind.
The springtime of the “Hellenic” Maya states is evidenced by the
dated relief-pillars of the old cities of Copan (in the south),
Tikal, and somewhat later Chichen Itza (in the north), Naranjo, and
Seibal[54]--about 160-450. At the end of this period Chichen Itza was
a model of architecture that was followed for centuries. The full glory
of Palenque and Piedras Negras (in the west) may correspond to our Late
Gothic and Renaissance (450-600 = European 1250-1400?). In the Baroque
or Late period Champutun appears as the centre of style-formation, and
now the “Italic” Nahua peoples of the high plateau of Anahuac began to
come under the cultural influence. Artistically and spiritually these
peoples were mere recipients, but in their political instincts they
were far superior to the Maya (about 600-960, = Classical 750-400 =
Western 1400-1750?). And now Maya entered on the “Hellenistic” phase.
About 960 Uxmal was founded, soon to be a cosmopolis of the first rank,
an Alexandria or Baghdad, founded like these on the threshold of the
Civilization. With it we find a series of brilliant cities like Labna,
Mayapan, Chacmultun, and a revived Chichen Itza. These places mark
the culminating point of a grandiose architecture, which thereafter
produced no new style, but applies the old motives with taste and
discrimination to mighty masses. Politically this is the age of the
celebrated League of Mayapan, an alliance of three leading states,
which appears to have maintained the position successfully--if somewhat
artificially and arbitrarily--in spite of great wars and repeated
revolutions (960-1165 = Classical 350-150 = Western 1800-2000).
The end of this period was marked by a great revolution, and with it
the definitive intervention of the (“Roman”) Nahua powers in the Maya
affair. With their aid Hunac Ceel brought about a general overthrow
and destroyed Mayapan (about 1190 = Classical 150). The sequel was
typical of the history of the over-ripened Civilization in which
different peoples contend for military lordship. The great Maya cities
sink into the same bland contentment as Roman Athens and Alexandria,
but out on the horizon of the Nahua lands was developing the last of
these peoples, the Aztecs--young, vigorous, barbaric, and filled with
an insatiable will-to-power. In 1325 (= the Age of Augustus) they
founded Tenochtitlan, which soon became the paramount and capital city
of the whole Mexican world. About 1400 military expansion began on the
grand scale. Conquered regions were secured by military colonies and a
network of military roads, and a superior diplomacy kept the dependent
states in check and separated. Imperial Tenochtitlan grew enormous
and housed a cosmopolitan population speaking every tongue of this
world-empire.[55] The Nahua provinces were politically and militarily
secure, the southward thrust was developing rapidly, and a hand was
about to be laid on the Maya states; there is no telling what the
course of the next centuries would have been. And suddenly--the end.
At that date the West was at a level which the Maya had already
overpassed by 700; nothing short of the age of Frederick the Great
would have been ripe enough to comprehend the politics of the Mayapan
League, and what the Aztecs of A.D. 1500 were organizing lies for us
well in the future. But that which distinguished Faustian man, even
then, from the man of any other Culture was his irrepressible urge
into distance. It was this, in the last resort, that killed and even
annihilated the Mexican and Peruvian Culture--the unparalleled drive
that was ready for service in any and every domain. Certainly the Ionic
style was imitated in Carthage and in Persepolis, and Hellenistic taste
in the Gandara art of India found admirers. Future investigation will
probably find some Chinese in the primitive German wood-architecture.
The Mosque style ruled from Farther India to North Russia, to West
Africa, and to Spain. But all that amounts to nothing as compared
with the expansion-power of the Western Soul. The true style-history
of that soul, it need hardly be said, accomplished itself only on
the mother soil, but its resultant effects knew no bounds. On the
spot where Tenochtitlan had stood, the Spaniards erected a Baroque
cathedral adorned with masterpieces of Spanish painting and plastic.
Already at that date the Portuguese had got to work in Hither India
and Late-Baroque architects from Spain and Italy in the heart of
Poland and Russia. The English Rococo, and especially Empire, made for
themselves a broad province in the Plantation States of North America,
whose wonderful rooms and furniture are far less well known in Germany
than they ought to be. Classicism was at work already in Canada and at
the Cape, and presently there were no limits at all. It was just the
same in every other domain of form; the relation between this forceful
young Civilization and the still remaining old ones--is that it covers
them, all alike, with ever-thickening layers of West-European-American
life-forms under which, slowly, the ancient native form disappears.
VI
In the presence of this picture of the world of man--which is destined
to displace the older one of “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” that is still
firmly established even in the best minds--it will become possible,
too, to give a new answer (and for our Civilization, I think, a final
answer) to the old question: What is History?
Ranke, in the preface of his _World History_ says: “History only
begins when the monuments become intelligible, and trustworthy written
evidences are available.” This is the answer of a collector and
arranger of data; obviously, it confuses that which has happened with
that which happened within the field of view open at the particular
time to the particular student. Mardonius was defeated at Platæa--has
this ceased to be history if two thousand years later it has somehow
dropped out of the ken of the historians? For a fact to be a fact, must
it be mentioned in books?
The weightiest historian since Ranke, Eduard Meyer,[56] says: “Historic
is that which is, or has been, effective.... Only through historical
treatment does the individual process, lifted by history from among the
infinite mass of contemporary processes, become the historical event.”
The remark is thoroughly in the manner and spirit of Hegel. Firstly,
its starting-point is the fact and not any accidental knowledge or
ignorance of the fact, and if there is any mode of picturing history
which necessarily imposes such a starting-point, it is that presented
in these pages, since it compels us to assume the existence of facts of
the first order in majestic sequences, even when we do not (and never
will) know them in the scientific sense. We have to learn to handle
the unknown in the most comprehensive way. Secondly, truths exist for
the mind, facts only in relation to life. Historical treatment--in
my terminology, _physiognomic fact_--is decided by the _blood_, the
gift of judging men broadened out into past and future, the innate
flair for persons and situations, for the event, for that which had
to be, must have been. It does _not_ consist in bare scientific
criticism and knowing of data. The scientific mode of experience is,
for every true historian, something additional or subordinate. It
addresses to the waking-consciousness, by the way of understanding and
imparting, laborious and repetitive proof of that which _one moment_ of
illumination has already, and instantly, demonstrated to Being.
Just because the force of our Faustian being has by now worked up
about us a circumcircle of inner experiences such as no other men and
no other time could acquire--just because for us the remotest events
become increasingly significant and disclose relationships that no
one else, not even the closest contemporaries of these events, could
perceive--much has now become history (i.e., life in tune with our
life) that centuries ago was not history. Tacitus probably “knew”
the data concerning Tiberius Gracchus’s revolution, but for him it
no longer meant anything effectively, whereas for us it is full
of meaning. The history of the Monophysites and their relation to
Mohammed’s _milieu_ signify nothing whatever to the Islamic believer,
but for _us_ it is recognizably the story of English Puritanism in
another setting. For the world-view of a Civilization which has
made the whole earth its stage, nothing is in the last resort quite
unhistorical. The scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern history, as
understood by the nineteenth century, contained only a selection of the
more obvious relations. But the influence that old Chinese and Mexican
history are beginning to exercise on us to-day is of a subtler and more
intellectual kind. There we are sounding the last necessities of life
itself. We are learning out of another life-course to know ourselves
what we are, what we must be, what we shall be. It is the great school
of our future. We who have history still, are making history still,
find here on the extreme frontiers of historical humanity what history
_is_.
A battle between two Negro tribes in the Sudan, or between the Cherusci
and Chatti of Cæsar’s time, or--what is substantially the same--between
ant-communities, is merely a drama of “living Nature.” But when the
Cherusci beat the Romans, as in the year 9,[57] or the Aztecs the
Tlascalans, it is _history_. Here the “when” is of importance and
each decade, or even year, matters, for here one is dealing with the
march of a grand life-course, in which every decision takes rank as an
epoch. Here there is an object towards which every happening impels, a
being that strives to fulfil its predestination, a tempo, an organic
duration--and not the disorderly ups and downs of Scythians, Gauls,
or Caribs, of which the particular detail is as unimportant as that
of doings in a colony of beavers or a steppe-herd of gazelles. These
are _zoölogical happenings_ and have their place in an altogether
different orientation of our outlook, that in which we are concerned
not with the destiny of individual peoples or herds, but with that of
“man,” or “the” gazelle, or “the” ants, _as species_. Primitive man has
history only in the biological sense, and all prehistoric study boils
down to the investigation of this sense. The increasing familiarity
of men with fire, stone tools, and the mechanical laws which make
weapons effective, characterizes only the development of the type and
of its latent possibilities. The objects for which one tribe employed
these weapons against another tribe are of no importance in this plane
of history. Stone Age and Baroque are age-grades in the existence of
respectively a genus and a Culture--i.e., two organisms belonging to
two fundamentally different settings. And here I would protest against
two assumptions that have so far vitiated all historical thought: the
assertion of an ultimate aim of mankind as a whole and the denial
of there being ultimate aims at all. The life _has_ an aim. It is
the fulfilment of that which was ordained at its conception. But the
individual belongs by birth to the particular high Culture on the
one hand and to the type Man on the other--there is no third unit of
being for him. His destiny must lie either in the zoölogical or in the
world-historical field. “Historical” man, as I understand the word
and as all great historians have meant it to be taken, is the man of
a Culture that is in full march towards self-fulfilment. Before this,
after this, outside this, man is _historyless_; and the destinies of
the people to which he belongs matter as little as the Earth’s destiny
matters when the plane of attention is the astronomical and not the
geological.
From this there follows a fact of the most decisive importance, and
one that has never before been established: that man is not only
historyless before the birth of the Culture, but again becomes so as
soon as a Civilization has worked itself out fully to the definitive
form which betokens the end of the living development of the Culture
and the exhaustion of the last potentialities of its significant
existence. That which we see in the Egyptian Civilization after Seti
I (1300) and in the Chinese, the Indian, the Arabian to this day
is--notwithstanding all the cleverness of the religious, philosophical
and, especially, political forms in which it is wrapped--just the old
zoölogical up-and-down of the primitive age again. Whether the lords
sitting in Babylon were wild war-hordes like the Kassites or refined
inheritors like the Persians, when, for how long, and with what
success they kept their seats, signified nothing from the standpoint
of Babylon. The comfort of the population was affected by such things,
naturally, but they made no difference either way to the fact that the
soul of this world was extinct and its events, therefore, void of any
deep meaning. A new dynasty, native or foreign, in Egypt, a revolution
or a conquest in China, a new Germanic people in the Roman Empire, were
elements in the history of the landscape like a change in the fauna or
the migration of a flock of birds.
In the history, the genuine history, of higher men the stake fought
for and the basis of the animal struggle to prevail is ever--even when
driver and driven are completely unconscious of the symbolic force of
their doings, purposes, and fortunes--the actualization of something
that is essentially spiritual, the translation of an idea into a
living historical form. This applies equally to the struggle of big
style-tendencies in art (Gothic and Renaissance), of philosophy (Stoics
and Epicureans), of political ideals (Oligarchy and Tyrannis), and of
economic forms (Capitalism and Socialism). But the post-history is
void of all this. All that remains is the struggle for mere power, for
animal advantage _per se_. Whereas previously power, even when to all
appearance destitute of any inspiration, was always serving the Idea
somehow or other, in the late Civilization even the most convincing
illusion of an idea is only the mask for purely zoölogical strivings.
The distinction between Indian philosophy before and after Buddha
is that the former is a grand movement towards attaining the aim of
Indian thought by and in the Indian soul, and the latter the perpetual
turning-up of new facets of a now crystallized and undevelopable
thought-stock. The solutions are there, for good, though the fashions
of expressing them change. The same is true of Chinese painting before
and after the Han dynasties--whether we know it or not--and of Egyptian
architecture before and after the beginning of the New Empire. So
also with technics. The West’s discoveries of the steam-engine and
of electricity are accepted by the Chinese to-day in just the same
way--and with just the same religious awe--as bronze and the plough
were accepted four thousand years ago, and fire in a still remoter
age. Both, spiritually, differ _in toto_ from the discoveries which
the Chinese made for themselves in the Chóu period and which in each
instance signified an epoch in their inner history.[58] Before and
after that time, centuries play a vastly less important rôle than
decades and even years within the Culture, _for the spans of time are
gradually returning to the biological order_. This it is that confers
upon these very Late conditions--which to the people living in them
seem almost self-evident--that character of changeless pageantry
which the genuine Culture-man--e.g., Herodotus in Egypt and the
Western successors of Marco Polo in China--has found so astonishing
in comparison with his own vigorous pulse of development. It is the
changelessness of non-history.
Is not Classical history at an end with Actium and the _Pax Romana?_
There are no more of those great decisions which concentrate the
inner meaning of a whole Culture. Unreason, biology, is beginning
to dominate, and it is becoming a matter of indifference for the
world--though not for the actions of the private individual--whether an
event turns out thus or thus. All great political questions are solved,
as they are solved sooner or later in every Civilization, inasmuch
as questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked. Yet
a little while, and man will cease to understand what problems were
really involved in the earlier catastrophes; what is not livingly
experienced of oneself cannot be livingly experienced of another. When
the later Egyptians speak of the Hyksos time, or the later Chinese of
the corresponding period of the “Contending States,” they are judging
the outward picture according to the criteria of their own ways of
life, in which there are no riddles more. They see in these things
merely struggles for power, and they do not see that those desperate
wars, external and internal, wars in which men stirred up the alien
against their own kin, were fought for an idea. To-day we understand
what was taking place, in fearful alternations of tension and
discharge, round the murder of Tiberius Gracchus and that of Clodius.
In 1700 we could not have done so, and in 2200 we shall again be
unable to do so. It is just the same with that of Chian, a Napoleonic
figure, in whom later Egyptian historians could discover nothing more
characterized than a “Hyksos king.” Had it not been for the coming of
the Germans, Roman historians a thousand years later might have put
the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, and Cicero together as a dynasty which was
overthrown by Cæsar.
Compare the death of Tiberius Gracchus with the death of Nero, when
Rome received the news of Galba’s rising, or the victory of Sulla
over the Marian party with that of Septimius Severus over Pescennius
Niger. If in these later cases the event had gone otherwise, would
the course of the Imperial Age have been altered in any way? The
distinction so carefully drawn by Mommsen and Eduard Meyer[59] between
the “principate” of Pompey and Augustus and the “monarchy” of Cæsar
misses the mark completely. At that stage, the point is merely a
constitutional one, though fifty years before it would still have
signified an opposition between ideas. When Vindex and Galba in 68
set out to restore “the Republic,” they were gambling on a notion in
days when notions having genuine symbolic force had ceased to be, and
the only question was who should have the plain material power. The
struggle for the Cæsar-title became steadily more and more negroid, and
might have gone on century after century in increasingly primitive and,
therefore, “eternal” forms.
These populations no longer possessed a soul. Consequently they could
no longer have a history proper to themselves. At best they might
acquire some significance as an object in the history of an alien
Culture, and whatever deeper meaning this relation possessed would
be derived entirely from the will of the alien Life. Any effective
historical happening that does take place on the soil of an old
Civilization acquires its consistency as a course of events from
elsewhere and never from any part played in it by the man of that
soil. And so once again we find ourselves regarding the phenomenon
of “world-history” under the two aspects--life-courses of the great
Cultures and relations between them.
CHAPTER III
ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE
(C)
THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES
I
Although consideration of the Cultures themselves should logically
precede that of the relations between them, modern historical
thought generally reverses the order. The less it really knows
of the life-courses which together make up a seeming unity of
world-happenings, the more zealously it searches for life in the
web of relations, and the less it understands even of these. What a
wealth of psychology there is in the probings, rejections, choices,
transvaluations, errors, penetrations, and welcomings!--and not only
between Cultures which immediately touch one another, wonder at one
another, fight one another, but also as between a living Culture and
the form-world of a dead one whose remains still stand visible in
the landscape. And how narrow and poor, on the other hand, are the
conceptions which the historians label “influence,” “continuity,” and
“permanent effects”!
This is pure nineteenth century. What is sought is just a chain of
causes and effects. Everything follows and nothing is prime. Since
every young Culture superficially shows form-elements of older
Cultures, these elements are supposed to have had continuing effect
(_fortgewirkt_), and when a set of such effects has been strung
together, the historian regards it with satisfaction as a sound piece
of work.
At bottom, this mode of treatment rests upon that idea which inspired
the great Gothics long ago, the idea of a significant singleness in
the history of all mankind. They saw how, on earth, men and peoples
changed, but ideas stayed, and the powerful impressiveness of the
picture has not worn itself out even to-day. Originally it was seen as
a plan that God was working out by means of the human instrument. And
it could still be regarded as such at a far later stage, in fact so
long as the spell of the “ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme lasted and
its parade of permanence prevented us from noting that actuality was
ever changing. But meantime our outlook also has altered and become
cooler and wider. Our knowledge has long overpassed the limits of
this chart, and those who are still trying to sail by it are beating
about in vain. It is not products that “influence,” but creators that
absorb. Being has been confused with waking-being, life with the means
by which it expresses itself. The critical thought, or even simple
waking-consciousness, sees everywhere theoretical units subjected to
motion. That is truly dynamic and Faustian, for in no other Culture
have men imagined history thus. The Greek, with his thoroughly
corporeal understanding of the world, would never have traced “effects”
of pure expression-units like “Attic drama” or “Egyptian art.”
Originally what happens is that a name is given to a _system of
expression-forms_ conjuring up in our minds a particular complex of
relations. But this does not last long, and soon one is suppositing
{sic} under the name a being, and under the relation an effect. When
we speak to-day of Greek philosophy, or Buddhism, or Scholasticism,
we mean something that is somehow living, a power-unit that has
grown and grown until it is mighty enough to take possession of men,
to subject their waking-consciousness and even their being, and in
the end to force them into an active conformity, which prolongs the
direction followed by its own “life.” It is a whole mythology, and,
significantly, it is only men of the Western Culture--the only mankind
that lives with and in this picture is the Western--whose myth contains
plenty of dæmons of this sort--“electricity” and “positional energy,”
for example.
In reality these systems only exist in the human waking-consciousness,
and they exist as modes of activity. Religion, science, art, are
_activities of waking-consciousness_ that are based on a being. Faith,
meditation, creation, and whatever of visible activity is required
as outcome of these invisibles--as sacrifice, prayer, the physical
experiment, the carving of a statue, the statement of an experience
in communicable words--are activities of the waking-consciousness and
nothing else. Other men see only the visible and hear only words. In
so doing they experience something in themselves, but they cannot give
any account of the relation between this experience and that which the
creator lived in himself. We see a form, but we do not know what in the
other’s soul begat that form; we can only have some belief about the
matter, and we believe by putting in our own soul. However definitely
and distinctly a religion may express itself in words, they are words,
and the hearer puts his own sense into them. However impressive the
artist’s notes or colours, the beholder sees and hears in them only
himself, and if he cannot do so, the work is for him meaningless. (The
extremely rare and highly modern gift, possessed by a few intensely
historical men, of “putting oneself in the other’s place” need not be
considered in this connexion.) The German whom Boniface converted did
not transfer himself into the missionary’s soul. It was a springtide
quiver that passed in those days through the whole young world of the
North, and what it meant was that each man found suddenly in conversion
a language wherein to express his own religiousness. Just so the eyes
of a child light up when we tell it the name of the object in its hand.
It is not, then, microcosmic units that move, but cosmic entities that
pick amongst them and appropriate them. Were it otherwise--were these
systems very beings that could exercise an activity (for “influence” is
an organic activity)--the picture of history would be quite other than
what it is. Consider how every maturing man and every living Culture
is continuously bathed in innumerable potential influences. Out of all
these, only some few are _admitted_ as such--the great majority are
not. Is choice concerned with the works, or with the men?
The historian who is intent upon establishing causal series counts
only the influences that are present, and the other side of the
reckoning--those that are not--does not appear. With the psychology of
the “positive” influences is associated that of the “negative.” This
is a domain into which no one has yet ventured, but here, if anywhere,
there are fruits to be reaped, and it must be tackled unless the answer
to the whole question is to be left indeterminate; for if we try to
evade it, we are driven into illusory visions of world-historical
happening as a continuous process in which everything is properly
accounted for. Two Cultures may touch between man and man, or the man
of one Culture may be confronted by the dead form-world of another as
presented in its communicable relics. In both cases the agent is the
man himself. The closed-off act of A can be vivified by B only out of
his own being, and _eo ipso_ it becomes B’s, his inward property, his
work, and part of himself. There was no movement of “Buddhism” from
India to China, but an acceptance of part of the Indian Buddhists’
store of images by Chinese of a certain spiritual tendency, who
fashioned out a _new_ mode of religious expression having meaning for
Chinese, and only Chinese, Buddhists. What matters in all such cases
is not the original meanings of the forms, but the forms themselves,
as disclosing to the active sensibility and understanding of the
observer potential modes of his own creativeness. Connotations are not
transferable. Men of two different kinds are parted, each in his own
spiritual loneliness, by an impassable gulf. Even though Indians and
Chinese in those days both felt as Buddhists, they were spiritually as
far apart as ever. The same words, the same rites, the same symbol--but
two different souls, each going its own way.
Searching through all Cultures, then, one will always find that
the continuation of earlier creations into a later Culture is only
apparent, and that in fact the younger _being_ has set up a few (very
few) relations to the older _being_, always without regard to the
original meanings of that which it makes its own. What becomes, then,
of the “permanent conquests” of philosophy and science? We are told
again and again how much of Greek philosophy still lives on to-day,
but this is only a figure of speech without real content, for first
Magian and then Faustian humanity, each with the deep wisdom of its
unimpaired instincts, rejected that philosophy, or passed unregarding
by it, or retained its formulæ under radically new interpretations.
The naïve credulity of erudite enthusiasm deceives itself here--Greek
philosophic notions would make a long catalogue, and the further it is
taken, the more vanishingly small becomes the proportion of the alleged
survivals. Our custom is simply to overlook as incidental “errors”
such conceptions as Democritus’s theory of atomic images,[60] the very
corporeal world of Plato’s “ideas,” and the fifty-two hollow spheres
of Aristotle’s universe, as though we could presume to know what the
dead meant better than they knew themselves! These things are truths
and essential--only, not for us. The sum total of the Greek philosophy
that we possess, actually and not merely superficially, is practically
nil. Let us be honest and take the old philosophers at their word;
not one proposition of Heraclitus or Democritus or Plato is true for
us unless and until we have accommodated it to ourselves. And how
much, after all, have we taken over of the methods, the concepts, the
intentions, and the means of Greek science, let alone its basically
incomprehensible terms? The Renaissance, men say, was completely under
the “influence” of Classical art. But what about the form of the
Doric temple, the Ionic column, the relation of column to architrave,
the choice of colour, the treatment of background and perspective in
painting, the principles of figure-grouping, vase-painting, mosaic,
encaustic, the structural element in statuary, the proportions of
Lysippus? Why did all this exercise no “influence?”
_Because that which one_ (here, the Renaissance artist) _wills to
express is in him a priori_. Of the stock of dead forms that he had in
front of him, he really saw only the few that he wanted to see, and
saw them as he wanted them--namely, in line with his own intention
and not with the intention of the original creator, for no living art
ever seriously considers that. Try to follow, element by element, the
“influence” of Egyptian plastic upon early Greek, and you will find
in the end that there is none at all, but that the Greek will-to-form
took out of the older art-stock some few characteristics that it would
in any case have discovered in some shape for itself. All round the
Classical landscape there were working, or had worked, Egyptians,
Cretans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, and Phœnicians,
and the works of these peoples--their buildings, ornaments, art-works,
cults, state-forms, scripts, and sciences--were known to the Greeks
in profusion. But how much out of all this mass did the Classical
soul extract as its own means of expression? I repeat, it is only the
relations that are _accepted_ that we observe. But what of those that
were _not_ accepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in the former
category the pyramid, pylon, and obelisk of Egypt, or hieroglyphic, or
cuneiform? What of the stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was
_not_ accepted by Gothic art and thought in Spain and Sicily? It is
impossible to overpraise the wisdom (quite unconscious) that governed
the choice and the unhesitating transvaluation of what was chosen.
Every relation that was accepted was not only an exception, but also a
misunderstanding, and the inner force of a Being is never so clearly
evidenced as it is in this _art of deliberate misunderstanding_. The
more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the
more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it. Only consider the
praises addressed by the West to Plato! From Bernard of Chartres and
Marsilius Ficinus to Goethe and Schelling! And the more humble our
acceptance of an alien religion, the more certain it is that that
religion has already assumed the form of the new soul. Truly, someone
ought to have written the history of the “three Aristotles”--Greek,
Arabian, and Gothic--who had not one concept or thought in common.
Or the history of the transformation of Magian Christianity into
Faustian! We are told in sermon and book that this religion extended
from the old Church into and over the Western field without change of
essence. Actually, Magian man evolved out of the deepest depths of his
dualistic world-consciousness a language of his own religious awareness
that we call “the” Christian religion. So much of this experience
as was communicable--words, formulæ, rites--was accepted by the man
of the Late-Classical Civilization as a means of expression for his
religious need; then it passed from man to man, even to the Germans of
the Western pre-Culture, in words always the same and in sense always
altering. Men would never have dared to _improve upon_ the original
meanings of the holy words--it was simply that they did not know these
meanings. If this be doubted, let the doubter study “the” idea of
Grace, as it appears under the dualistic interpretation of Augustine
affecting a substance in man, and under the dynamic interpretation of
Calvin, affecting a will in man. Or that Magian idea, which we can
hardly grasp at all, of the consensus (Arabic _ijma_)[61] wherein, as
a consequence of the presence in each man of a _pneuma_ emanating from
the divine _pneuma_, the unanimous opinion of the elect is held to be
immediate divine Truth. It was this that gave the decisions of the
early Church Councils their authoritative character, and it underlies
the scientific methods that rule in the world of Islam to this day.
And it was because Western men did not understand this that the Church
Councils of later Gothic times amounted, for him, to nothing more than
a kind of parliament for limiting the spiritual mobility of the Papacy.
This idea of what a Council meant prevailed even in the fifteenth
century--think of Constance and Basel, Savonarola and Luther--and
in the end it disappeared, as futile and meaningless, before the
conception of Papal Infallibility. Or, again, the idea, universal
in the Early Arabian world, of the resurrection of the flesh, which
again presupposed that of divine and human _pneuma_. Classical man
assumed that the soul, as the form and meaning of the body, was somehow
co-created herewith, and Greek thought scarcely mentions it. Silence
on a matter of such gravity may be due to one or the other of two
reasons--the idea’s not being there at all, or being so self-evident
as not to emerge into consciousness as a problem. With Arabian man it
was the latter. But just as self-evident for him was the notion that
his _pneuma_ was an emanation from God that had taken up residence in
his body. Necessarily, therefore, there had to be something from which
the human soul should rise again on the Day of Judgment, and hence
resurrection was thought of as ἔκ νεκρῶν, “out of the corpses.” This,
in its deeper meaning, is utterly incomprehensible for the West. The
words of Holy Scripture were not indeed doubted, but unconsciously
another meaning was substituted by the finer minds amongst Catholics;
this other meaning, unmistakable already in Luther and to-day quite
general, is the conception of immortality as the continued existence to
all eternity of the soul as a centre of force. Were Paul or Augustine
to become acquainted with our ideas of Christianity, they would
reject all our dogmas, all our books, and all our concepts as utterly
erroneous and heretical.
As the strongest example of a system that to all appearance has
travelled unaltered through two millennia, and yet actually has passed
through three whole courses of evolution in three Cultures, with
completely different meanings in each, we may take _Roman law_.
II
_Law_, in the Classical world, _is law made by citizens for citizens_
and presupposes that the state-form is that of the Polis. It was this
basic form of public life that led--and self-evidently--to the notion
of the person as identical with the man who, added to others like him,
made up the body (σῶμα)[62] of the State. From this formal fact of
Classical world-feeling grew up the whole structure of Classical law.
_“Persona” then is a specifically Classical notion, possessing meaning
and valency only in the Classical Culture._ The individual person is
a body which belongs to the stock of the Polis. It is with reference
to him that the law of the Polis is ordered, downwards into the law
of Things--with, as a marginal case, the slave who was body, but not
person--and upward into the law of Gods--with, as a marginal case, the
hero who from being person had attained godhead and the legal right
to a cult, like Lysander and Alexander in the Greek cities and _Divus
Julius_ and his successors in Rome. This tendency, becoming more and
more definite in the development of Classical jurisprudence, explains
also the notion of _capitis deminutio media_, which is so alien to our
Western ideas; for we can imagine a person (in our sense of the word)
as deprived of certain rights and even of all rights, but the Classical
man under this punishment _ceased to be a person_ although living on
as a body. And the specifically Classical idea of the thing, _res_, is
only intelligible in contrast to and as the object of _persona_.
As Classical religion was State religion through and through, there
is no distinction made as to the fount of law; real law and divine
law were made, like personal law, by the citizen, and the relations
of things and of gods to persons were precise and definite. Now, it
was a fact of decisive significance for the Classical jurisprudence
that it was always the product of immediate public experience--and,
moreover, not the professional experience of the jurists, but the
practical everyday experience of men who counted in political and
economic life generally. The man who followed the public career
in Rome had necessarily to be jurist, general, administrator, and
financial manager. When he gave judgment as prætor, he had behind him
a wide experience of many fields other than law. A judicial _class_,
professionally (let alone theoretically) specialized in law as its sole
activity, was entirely unknown to the Classical. The whole outlook
of the later jurisprudence was determined by this fact. The Romans
were here neither systematists nor historians nor theorists, but just
splendidly practical. Their jurisprudence is an _empirical science
of individual cases_, a refined technique, and not in the least a
structure of abstractions.[63]
It would give an incorrect idea to oppose Greek and Roman law to
one another as quantities of the same order. Roman law in its whole
development is an individual city law, one amongst hundreds of such,
and Greek law as a unity never existed at all. Although Greek-speaking
cities very often had similar laws, this did not alter the fact that
the law of each was its own and no other’s. Never did the idea of
a general Doric, still less a general Hellenic, legislation arise.
Such notions were wholly alien to Classical thought. The _jus
civile_ applied only to Quirites--foreigners, slaves and the whole
world outside the city[64] simply did not count in the eyes of the
law, whereas even the _Sachsenspiegel_[65] evidences already our
own deep-felt idea that there can only really be one law. Until far
into Imperial times the strict distinction was maintained between
the _jus civile_ of citizens and the _jus gentium_ for “other
people” who came within the cognizance of Rome’s jurisdiction as
sojourners.[66] (It need hardly be added that this “law of nations”
has no sort of resemblance to that which we call by the same name.)
It was only because Rome as a unit-city attained--as under other
conditions Alexandria might have attained--to “Imperium” over the
Classical world that Roman law became pre-eminent, not because of its
intrinsic superiority, but firstly through Rome’s political success
and afterwards because of Rome’s monopoly of practical experience on
the large scale. The formation of a general Classical jurisprudence of
Hellenistic cast--if we are entitled to call by that name an affinity
of spirit in a large number of separate legal systems--falls in a
period when Rome was still politically a third-rate power. And when
Roman law began to assume bigger forms, this was only one aspect of
the fact that Roman intellect had subjugated Hellenism. The work of
forming later Classical law passed from Hellenism to Rome--i.e., from
a sum of city-states, which one and all had been impressively made
aware of their individual impotence, to one single city whose whole
activity was in the end devoted to the upholding and exploitation of
an effective primacy. Thus it came about that Hellenism never formed
a jurisprudence in the Greek tongue. When the Classical world entered
upon a stage in which it was ripe for this science (the latest of all),
there was but _one_ lawgiving city that counted in the matter.
In reality, insufficient regard has been paid to the fact that Greek
and Roman law are not parallel in time but successive. Roman law is
the younger and presupposes the long experience of the elder;[67] it
was built up, in fact, late and, with this exemplar before it, very
swiftly. It is not without significance that the flowering-time of the
Stoic philosophy, which deeply affected juridical ideas, followed that
of Greek, but preceded that of Roman, law.
III
This jurisprudence, however, was built up by the mind of an intensely
ahistorical species of man. Classical law, consequently, is law _of
the day and even the moment_; it was in its very idea occasional
legislation for particular cases, and when the case was settled, it
ceased to be law. To extend its validity over subsequent cases would
have been in contradiction to the Classical sense of the present.
The Roman prætor, at the beginning of his year of office, issued an
edict in which he set forth the rules that he intended to follow,
but his successor next year was in nowise bound to them. And even
this limitation of a year on the validity of the rules did not mean
that this was actually the duration of the rules. On the contrary
(particularly after the _Lex Æbutia_) the prætor formulated in each
individual case the concrete rule of law for the judges[68] to whom he
remitted the matter for judgment, which had to be according to this
rule and no other. That is, the prætor produced, and indeed generated,
a _present_ law without duration.[69]
Similar in appearance, but so profoundly different in meaning as to
leave no doubt as to the great gap which is set between Classical and
Western Law, is that inspired and truly Germanic notion of English
jurisprudence, the creative power of the judge who “declares” the law.
His business is to apply a law which in principle possesses eternal
validity. Even the application of the existing body of laws he can
regulate, according to the situations disclosed in the course of the
case, by means of his “rules” (which have nothing in common with the
prætor’s). And if he should conclude in the presence of a particular
set of facts that current law is defective in respect of these, he
can _fill the gap at once_, and thus in the very middle of a trial
create new law, which (if concurred in by the judicial body in the
due forms) _becomes thereafter part and parcel of the permanent stock
of law_. This is what makes it so completely un-Classical. In the old
jurisprudence, the gradual formation of a stock of rules was due purely
to the fact that public life followed a substantially homogeneous
course throughout a particular period, and produced again and again the
same situations to be dealt with--rules _not_ deliberately invested
with validity for the future, but more or less recreated again and
again as empirical rulings _ad hoc_. The sum of these rulings--not a
system, but a collection--came to constitute “the law” as we find it in
the later legislation by prætor’s edict, each successive prætor having
found it practically convenient to take over substantial portions of
his predecessor’s work.
Experience, then, means for the ancient lawgiver something different
from what it means to us. It means, not the comprehensive outlook over
a consistent mass of law that contains implicitly every possible case,
associated with practical skill in applying it, but the experimental
knowledge that certain jural situations are for ever recurring, so that
one can save oneself the trouble of forming new law on every occasion.
The genuine Classical form for the slow accretion of legal material
is an almost automatic summation of individual νομοί _leges, edicta_,
as we find it in the heyday of the Roman prætor. All the so-called
legislations of Solon, Charondas, and the Twelve Tables are nothing
but occasional collections of such edicts as had been found to be
useful. The Law of Gortyn,[70] which is more or less contemporary with
the Twelve, is a supplement to some older collection. A newly-founded
city would promptly provide itself with such a collection, and in
the process a certain amount of dilettantism would slip in (cf. the
lawmakers satirized by Aristophanes in _The Birds_). But there is never
system in them, still less any intention of establishing enduring law
thereby.
In the West it is conspicuously the other way about. The tendency is
from the first to bring the entire living body of law into a general
code, ordered for ever and exhaustively complete, containing in advance
the decision of every conceivable future problem.[71] All Western law
bears the stamp of the future, all Classical the stamp of the moment.
IV
But this, it may be said, is contradicted by the fact that there
actually were Classical law-works compiled by professional jurists
for permanent use. Undoubtedly so. But we must remember that we are
completely ignorant of Early Classical law (1100-700) and it is pretty
certain that the customary law of the country-side and the nascent
town was never noted down as that of the Gothic age was set forth
in the _Sachsenspiegel_ or that of the Early Arabian in the _Syrian
Law-book_.[72] The earliest stratification that we can now detect
consists of the collections (from 700 B.C.) ascribed to mythical or
semi-mythical personages like Lycurgus, Zaleucus, Charondas, and
Dracon,[73] and certain Roman kings.[74] That these existed the form
of the saga shows, but of their real authors, the actual process of
their codification, and their original contents even the Greeks of the
Persian War period were ignorant.
A second stratification, corresponding to Justinian’s code and to the
“Reception” of Roman Law in Germany, is connected with the names of
Solon (600), Pittacus (550), and others. Here the laws have already
attained to a structure and are inspired by the city; they are
described as “politeiai,” “nomoi,” in contrast to old “thesmai” and
“rhetrai.”[75] In reality, therefore, we only know the history of
_late_ Classical law. Now, why these sudden codifications? A mere look
at these names shows that at bottom they were not processes of putting
down the results of pure experience, but _decisions of political power
problems_.
It is a grave error to suppose that a law that surveys all things
evenly and without being influenced by political and economic
interests can exist at all. Such a state of things can be pictured,
and is always being pictured, by those who suppose that the imagining
of political possibilities is a political activity. But nothing
alters the fact that such a law, born of abstractions, does not
exist in real history. Always the law contains in abstract form the
world-picture of its author, and every historical world-picture
contains a political-economic _tendency_ dependent, not upon what
this man or that thinks, but upon what is practically intended by the
class which in fact commands the power and, with it, the legislation.
Every law is established by a class in the name of the generality.
Anatole France once said that “our law in majestic equality forbids
the rich no less than the poor to steal bread and to beg in the
street.”[76] A one-sided justice no doubt. But equally the other
side will always try to win sole authority for laws derived from
_its_ outlook upon life. These legislative codes are one and all
political acts, and party-political acts at that--in the case of
Solon a democratic constitution (πολιτεία) combined with private laws
(νομοί) of the same stamp, in that of Dracon and the Decemvirs[77]
an oligarchic constitution fortified by private law. It was left
to Western historians, accustomed to their own durable law, to
undervalue the importance of this connexion; Classical man was under
no misapprehension as to what really happened in these cases. The
product of the Decemvirs was in Rome the last code of purely patrician
character. Tacitus calls it the end of right law (“_finis æqui juris_,”
_Annals_, III, 27). For, just as the fall of the Decemvirs was followed
very significantly by the rise of another Ten, the Tribunes, so
immediately the _jus_ of the Twelve Tables and the constitution on
which it was founded began to be attacked by the undermining process
of the _lex rogata_ (people’s law), which set itself with Roman
constancy to do what Solon had achieved in one act in the case of
Dracon’s work, the πατρίος πολιτεία which was the law-ideal of the
Attic oligarchy. Thenceforward Dracon and Solon were the “slogans”
in the long battle between Oligarchy and Demos, which in Rome meant
Senate and Tribunate. The Spartan constitution associated with the
name “Lycurgus” not only stood for the ideal of Dracon and the Twelve
Tables, but concreted it. We can see, parallel with the closely related
course of events in Rome, the tendency of the two Spartan kings to
evolve from the condition of Tarquinian tyrants to that of tribunes of
the Gracchan kind; the fall of the last Tarquins or the institution
of the Decemvirs--a _coup d’état_ of one kind or another against the
tribunician tendency[78]--corresponds more or less to the fall of
Cleomenes (488) and of Pausanias (470); and the revolution of Agis III
and Cleomenes III (about 240) aligns itself with the political activity
of C. Flaminius, which began only a few years later. But never in
Sparta were the kings able to achieve any thorough-going success over
the senatorial element represented by the Ephors.
In the period of these struggles, Rome had become a megalopolis of the
late-Classical type. The rustic instincts were more and more pushed
back by the intelligence of the city.[79] Consequently from about 350
we find side by side with the _lex rogata_ of the people the _lex
data_, the administrative law, of the prætor. With this the Twelve
Tables idea drops out of the contest and it is the prætor’s edict that
becomes the football of the party battle.
It did not take long for the prætor to become the centre of both
legislation and judicial practice. And presently, corresponding to the
political extension of the city’s power, the jurisdiction of the prætor
and the field of his _jus civile_--the law of the citizens--begin
to diminish in significance and the peregrin prætor with his _jus
gentium_--the law of the alien--steps into the foreground. And when
finally the whole population of the Classical world, save the small
part possessing Roman citizenship, was comprised in the field of this
alien law, the _jus peregrinum_ of the city of Rome became practically
an imperial law. All other cities--and even Alpine tribes and migrant
Bedouin clans were _civitates_ from the administrative point of
view--retained their local laws only as supplements, not alternatives,
to the peregrin law of Rome.
It marked the close of Classical law-making, therefore, when Hadrian
(about A.D. 130) introduced the _Edictum perpetuum_, which gave final
form to the well-established corpus of the annual pronouncements of the
prætors and forbade further modifications thereof. It was still, as
before, the prætor’s duty to publish the “law of his year,” but, even
though this law had no greater degree of validity than corresponded to
his administrative powers and was not the law of the Empire, he was
obliged thenceforth to stick to the established text.[80] It is the
very symbol of the petrified “Late” Civilization.[81]
With the Hellenistic age began jurisprudence, the _science_ of law,
the systematic comprehension of the law which men actually apply.
Since legal thought presupposes a substance of political and economic
relations, in the same way as mathematical thought presupposes physical
and technical elements of knowledge,[82] Rome very soon became _the
home of Classical jurisprudence_. Similarly in the Mexican world it
was the conquering Aztecs whose academies (e.g., Tezcuco) made law
the chief subject of study. Classical jurisprudence was the Roman’s
science, and his only one. At the very moment when the creative
mathematic closes off with Archimedes, juristic literature begins
with Ælius’s _Tripertita_, a commentary on the Twelve (198 B.C.).[83]
The first systematic private law was written by M. Scævola about
100. The genuine maturity of Classical law is in the two centuries
200-0--although we to-day, with quaint perversity, apply the time to a
period which was really that of Early Arabian law. And from the relics
of these two literatures we can measure the greatness of the gap that
separates the thought of two Cultures. The Romans treat only of cases
and their classification; they never analyse a basic idea such as,
for instance, judicial error. They distinguish carefully the sorts of
contracts, but they have no conception of Contract as an idea, or of
any theories as to invalidity or unsoundness. “Taking everything into
account,” says Lenel,[84] “it is clear that the Romans cannot possibly
be regarded as exemplars of scientific method.”
The last phase is that of the schools of the Sabiniani and Proculiani
(Augustus to about 160 A.D.). They are scientific schools like the
philosophical schools in Athens, and in them, possibly, the expiring
stages of the conflict between the senatorial and the tribunician
(Cæsarian) conceptions of law were fought, for amongst the best of
the Sabiniani were two descendants of Cæsar’s slayers and one of the
Proculiani was picked upon by Trajan as his potential successor. While
the method was to all intents and purposes settled and concluded, the
practical fusion of the citizen’s statute-law (_jus civile_) and the
prætor’s edict (_jus honorarium_) was carried out here.
The last landmark of Classical jurisprudence, so far as we know, was
the _Institutes_ of Gaius (about 161).
_Classical law is a law of bodies._ In the general stock composing
the world it distinguishes bodily Persons and bodily Things and, like
a sort of Euclidean mathematic of public life, establishes ratios
between them. The affinity between mathematical and legal thought is
very close. The intention, in both, is to take the prima facie data, to
separate out the sensuous-incidental, and to find the intellectually
basic principle--the _pure_ form of the object, the _pure_ type of
the situation, the _pure_ connexity of cause and effect. Life, in
the Classical, presents itself to the critical waking-consciousness
of the Classical man in a form penetrated with Euclidean character,
and the image that is generated in the legal mind is one of bodies,
of positional relations between bodies, and of reciprocal effects of
bodies by contact and reaction--just as with Democritus’s atoms. It is
juristic statics.[85]
V
The first creation of “Arabian” law was _the concept of the incorporeal
person_.
Here is an element entirely absent in Classical law,[86] and appearing
quite suddenly in the “Classical” jurists (who were all Aramæans),
which cannot be estimated at its full value, or in its symbolic
importance as an index of the new world-feeling, unless we realize the
full extent of the field that this Arabian law covered.
The new landscape embraces Syria and northern Mesopotamia, southern
Arabia and Byzantium. In all these regions a new law was coming into
being, an oral or written customary law of the same “early” type
as that met with in the _Sachsenspiegel_. Wonderfully, the _law of
individual cities_ which is so self-evident on Classical ground is
here silently transmuted into a _law of creed-communities_. It is
Magian, magic, through and through. Always _one_ Pneuma, _one_ like
spirit, _one_ identical knowledge and comprehension of whole and
sole truth, welds the believers of the same religion into a unit
of will and action, _into one juristic person_. A juristic person
is thus a collective entity which has intentions, resolutions, and
responsibilities as an entity. In Christianity we see the idea already
actual and effective in the primitive community at Jerusalem,[87] and
presently it soars to the conception of a triune Godhead of three
Persons.[88]
Before Constantine, even, the Late Classical law of imperial decrees
(_constitutiones, placita_) though the Roman form of city law was
strictly kept, was genuinely a law for the _believers of the “Syncretic
Church,”_[89] that mass of cults perfused by one single religiousness.
In Rome itself, it is true, law was conceived of by a large part of
the population as city-state law, but this feeling became weaker and
weaker with every step towards the East. The fusion of the faithful
into a single _jural community_ was effected in express form by the
Emperor-cult, which was religious law through and through. In relation
to this law Jews and Christians[90] were infidels who ensconced
themselves with their own laws in another field of law. When in 212
the Aramæan Caracalla, by the _Constitutio Antoniana_, gave Roman
citizenship to all inhabitants except _dediticii_ peregrins,[91] the
form of his act was purely Classical, and no doubt there were plenty of
people who understood it in the Classical spirit--i.e., as literally
an incorporation of the citizens of every other city in the city of
Rome. But the Emperor himself conceived it quite otherwise. It made
everyone subject to the “Ruler of the Faithful,” the head of the
cult-religion venerated as _Divus_. With Constantine came the great
change; he turned Imperial Caliph law on to the creed-community of
Christianity in lieu of that of Syncretism, and thereby _constituted
the Christian Nation_. The labels “devout” and “unbeliever” changed
places. From Constantine onwards the quiet transformation of “Roman”
law into _orthodox Christian law_ proceeded more and more decisively,
and it was as such that converted Asiatics and Germans received and
adopted it. Thus a perfectly new law came into being in old forms.
According to the old marriage-law it was impossible for a Roman burgher
to marry the daughter of, say, a Capuan burgher if legal community,
_connubium_, was not in force between the two cities.[92] But now the
question was whether a Christian or a Jew--irrespective of whether he
was Roman, Syrian, or Moor--could legally marry an infidel. For in the
Magian law-world there was no _connubium_ between those of different
faiths. There was not the slightest difficulty about an Irishman
in Constantinople marrying a Negress if both were Christians, but
how could a Monophysite Christian marry a Nestorian maiden who was
his neighbour in their Syrian village? Racially they were probably
indistinguishable, but they belonged to legally different nations.
This Arabian concept of nationality is a new and wholly decisive
fact. The frontiers between “home” and “abroad” lay in the Apollinian
world between every two towns, and in the Magian between every two
creed-communities. What the “enemy,” the peregrin, was to the Roman,
the Pagan was to the Christian, the Amhaarez to the Jew. What the
acquisition of Roman citizenship meant for the Gaul or the Greek in
Cæsar’s time, Christian baptism meant for him now--entry into the
leading nation of the leading Culture.[93] The Persians of the Sassanid
period no longer conceived of themselves, as their predecessors of
Achæmenid times had done, as a unit by virtue of origin and speech, but
as a unit of Mazdaist believers, _vis-à-vis_ unbelievers, irrespective
of the fact that the latter might be of pure Persian origin (as
indeed the bulk of the Nestorians were). So also with the Jews, and
later the Mandæans and Manichæans, and later again the Monophysite
and the Nestorian Christians--each body felt itself a nation, a legal
community, a juristic person in a new sense.
Thus there arises a group of Early Arabian laws, differentiated
according to religions as decisively as Classical laws are
differentiated according to cities. In the realm of the Sassanids
schools arose for the teaching the Zoroastrian law proper to them; the
Jews, who formed an exceedingly large portion of the population from
Armenia to Sabæa, created their proper law in the Talmud, which was
completed and closed some few years before the _Corpus Juris_. Each one
of these Churches had its peculiar jurisdiction, independent of the
geographical frontiers of the moment--as in the East to-day--and the
judge representing the ground-lord judged only cases between parties
of different faiths. The self-jurisdiction of the Jews within the
Empire had never been contested by anyone, but the Nestorians and the
Monophysites also began, very soon after their separation, to create
and to apply laws of their own, and thus by a negative process--i.e.,
by the gradual withdrawal of all heterodox communities--Roman imperial
law came to be the law of the Christians who confessed the same creed
as the Emperor. Hence the importance of the Roman-Syrian law-book,
which has been preserved in several languages. It was probably[94]
pre-Constantinian and written in the chancery of the Patriarch of
Antioch; it is quite unmistakably Early Arabian law in Late Classical
form, and, as its many translations indicate, it owed its currency to
the opposition to the orthodox Imperial Church. It was without doubt
the basis of Monophysite law, and it reigned till the coming of Islam
over a field far larger than that of the _Corpus Juris_.
The question arises, what in such a tapestry of laws could have been
the real practical value of the part of them which was written in
Latin? The law historians, with all the one-sidedness of the expert,
have hitherto looked at this part alone and therefore have not yet
realized that there is a problem here at all. Their texts were “Law”
unqualified, the law that descended from Rome to us, and they were
concerned only to investigate the history of these texts and not their
real significance in the lives of the Eastern peoples. What in reality
we have here is the highly civilized law of an aged Culture forced upon
the springtime of a young one.[95] It came over as learned literature,
and in the train of political developments which were quite other than
they would have been had Alexander or Cæsar lived longer or had Antony
won at Actium. We must look at Early Arabian law from the standpoint
of Ctesiphon and not from that of Rome. The law of the distant West
had long before reached inward fulfilment--could it be here more
than a mere literature? What part did it play, if any, in the active
law-study, law-making, and law-practice of this landscape? And, indeed
we must further ask how much of Roman--or for that matter of Classical
generally--is contained in this literature itself.[96]
The history of this Latin-written law belongs after 160 to the Arabian
East, and it says a great deal that it can be traced in exactly
parallel courses into the history of Jewish, Christian, and Persian
literature.[97] The “Classical” jurists (160-220), Papinian, Ulpian,
and Paul, were Aramæans, and Ulpian described himself with pride as a
Phœnician from Tyre. They came, therefore, from the same population as
the Tannaim who perfected the Mishnah shortly after 200, and most of
the Christian Apologists (Tertullian 160-223). Contemporary with them
is the fixation of canon and text for the New Testament by Christian,
for the Hebrew Old Testament by Jewish,[98] and for the Avesta by
Persian, scholars. It is the high Scholasticism of the Arabian
Springtime. The digests and commentaries of these jurists stand towards
the petrified legal store of the Classical in exactly the same relation
as the Mishnah to the Torah of Moses (and as, much later, the Hadith
to the Koran)--they are “Halakhoth”[99]--a new customary law grasped
in the forms of an authoritative and traditional law-material. The
casuistic method is everywhere the same. The Babylonian Jews possessed
a well-developed civil law which was taught in the academies of Sura
and Pumbeditha. Everywhere a class of law-men formed itself--the
_prudentes_ of the Christians, the rabbis of the Jews, later the ulemas
(in Persian, mollahs) of the Islamic nation--who enunciated opinions,
_responsa_ (Arabic, _Fetwa_). If the Ulema was acknowledged by the
State, he was called “Mufti” (Byzantine, _ex auctoritate principis_).
Everywhere the forms are exactly the same.
About 200 the Apologists pass into the Fathers proper, the Tannaim
into the Amoraim, the great casuists of juridical law (_jus_) into the
exegetes and codifiers of constitutional law (_lex_). The constitutions
of the Emperors, from 200 the sole source of new “Roman” law, are
again a new “Halakhah” laid down over that in the jurists’ writings,
and therefore correspond exactly to the Gemara, which rapidly evolved
as an outlier of the Mishnah. The new tendencies reached fulfilment
simultaneously in the _Corpus Juris_ and the Talmud.
The opposition between _jus_ and _lex_ in Arabian-Latin usage comes
to expression very clearly in the work of Justinian. Institutes and
Digests are _jus_; they have essentially the significance of canonical
texts. Constitutions and Novels are _leges_, new law in the form
of elucidations. The canonical books of the New Testament and the
traditions of the Fathers are related to one another in the same way.
As to the Oriental character of the thousands of constitutions, no
one now has any doubts. It is pure customary law of the Arabian world
that the living pressure of evolution forced under the texts of
the learned.[100] The innumerable decrees of the Christian rulers
of Byzantium, of the Persian of Ctesiphon, of the Jewish (the
Resh-Galuta[101]) in Babylonia, and finally of the Caliphs of Islam
have all exactly the same significance.
But what significance had the _other_ part of pseudo-Classical, the
old jurists’, law? Here it is not enough to explain texts, and we
must know what was the relation between texts, jurisprudence, and
court decisions. It can happen that one and the same law-book is, in
the waking-consciousness of two groups of peoples, equivalent to two
fundamentally different works.
It was not long before it became the habit, not to apply the old laws
of the city of Rome to the fact-material of the given case, but to
quote the jurists’ texts like the Bible.[102] What does this signify?
For our Romanists it is a sign of decadence, but looked at from the
view-point of the Arabian world, it is just the reverse--a proof that
Arabian man did eventually succeed in making an alien and imposed
literature inwardly his own, in the form admissible for his own
world-feeling. With this the completeness of the opposition between the
Classical and the Arabian world-feeling becomes manifest.
VI
Whereas the Classical law was made by burghers on the basis of
practical experience, the Arabian came from God, who manifested
it through the intellect of chosen and enlightened men. The Roman
distinction between _jus_ and _fas_ (such as it was, for the content
even of _fas_ had proceeded from human reflection) became meaningless.
The law, of whatever kind, spiritual or secular, came into being, as
stated in the first words of Justinian’s Digests, _Deo auctore_. The
authoritativeness of Classical laws rests upon their success, that of
the Arabian on the majesty of the name that they bear.[103] But it
matters very considerably indeed in a man’s feelings whether he regards
law as an expression of some fellow man’s will or as an element of the
divine dispensation. In the one case he either sees for himself that
the law is right or else yields to force, but in the other he devoutly
acknowledges (“_Islam_” = to commit, devote). The Oriental does not ask
to see either the practical object of the law that is applied to him or
the logical grounds of its judgments. The relation of the cadi to the
people, therefore, has nothing in common with that of the prætor to the
citizens. The latter bases his decisions upon an insight trained and
tested in high positions, the former upon a spirit that is effective
and immanent in him and speaks through his mouth. But it follows from
this that their respective relations to written law--the prætor’s
to his edict, the cadi’s to the jurists’ texts--must be entirely
different. It is a quintessence of concentrated experience that the
prætor makes his own, but the texts are a sort of oracle that the cadi
esoterically questions. It does not matter in the least to the cadi
what a passage originally meant or why it was framed. He consults the
words--_even the letters_--and he does so not at all for their everyday
meanings, but for the _magic_ relations in which they must stand
towards the case before him. We know this relation of the “spirit” to
the “letter” from the Gnosis, from the early-Christian, Jewish, and
Persian apocalyptic and mystical literature, from the Neopythagorean
philosophy, from the Kabbalah; and there is not the slightest doubt
that the Latin codices were used in exactly the same way in the minor
judicial practice of the Aramæan world. The conviction that the letters
contain secret meanings, penetrated with the Spirit of God, finds
imaginative expression in the fact (mentioned above) that all religions
of the Arabian world formed scripts of their own, in which the holy
books had to be written and which maintained themselves with astounding
tenacity as badges of the respective “nations” even after changes of
language.[104]
But even in law the basis of determining the truth by a majority
of texts is the fact of the consensus of the spiritual elect, the
_ijma_.[105] This theory Islamic science worked out to its logical
conclusions. We seek to find the truth, each for himself, by personal
pondering, but the Arabian savant feels for and ascertains the general
conviction of his associates, which cannot err because the mind of God
and the mind of the community are the same. If _consensus_ is found,
truth is established. “_Ijma_” is the key of all Early Christian,
Jewish, and Persian Councils, but it is the key, too, of the famous
Law of Citations of Valentinian III (426), which the law-men have
universally ridiculed without in the least understanding its spiritual
foundations. The law limits the number of great jurists whose texts
were allowed to be cited to five, and thus set up a canon--in the same
sense as the Old and New Testaments, both of which also were summations
of texts which might be cited as canonical. If opinions differed, the
law of Valentinian laid it down that a majority should prevail, or if
the texts were equally divided, the authority of Papinian.[106] The
interpolation method, used on a large scale by Tribonian for the Digest
of Justinian, is a product of this same outlook. A canonical text is
in its very idea true and incapable of improvement. But the actual
needs of the spirit alter, and so there grew up a technique of secret
modifications which outwardly kept up the fiction of inalterability and
which is employed very freely indeed in all religious writings of the
Arabian world, the Bible included.
After Mark Antony, Justinian is the most fateful personality of the
Arabian world. Like his “contemporary” Charles V he ruined everything
for which he was invoked. Just as in the West the Faustian dream of a
resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire runs through all the political
romanticism that darkened the sense of fact during and beyond the age
of Napoleon--and even that of the princely fools of 1848--so also
Justinian was possessed with a Quixotic urgency to recover the entire
Imperium. It was always upon distant Rome instead of upon his proper
world, the Eastern, that his eyes were fixed. Even before he ascended
the throne, he was already in negotiation with the Pope of Rome, who
was still subordinate to the great Patriarch of Christendom and not yet
generally recognized even as _primus inter pares_. It was at the Pope’s
instance that the dual-nature symbol was introduced at Chalcedon,[107]
a step which lost the Monophysite countries wholly and for ever. The
consequence of Actium was that Christianity in its first two decisive
and formative centuries was pulled over into the West, into Classical
territories, where the higher intellectual stratum held aloof. Then
the Early Christian spirit rose afresh with the Monophysites and
Nestorians. But Justinian thrust this revival back upon itself, and the
result was that in the realms of Eastern Christianity the reformist
movement, when in due course it appeared, was not a Puritanism but the
_new religion_ of Islam. And in the same way, at the very moment when
the Eastern customary law had become ripe for codification, he framed a
Latin codex which, for language reasons in the East and for political
reasons in the West, was condemned from the first to remain a literary
product.
The work itself, like the corresponding codes of Dracon and Solon, came
into being at the threshold of a “Late” period, and with political
intentions. In the West, where the fiction of a continuing _Imperium
Romanum_ produced the utterly meaningless campaigns of Belisarius
and Narses, Latin codes had been put together (about A.D. 500) by
Visigoths, Burgundians and Ostrogoths for subjugated Romans, and so
Byzantium must needs get out a genuine Roman code in opposition. In the
East the Jewish nation has already settled its code, the Talmud, while,
for the immense numbers of people who were subject to the Emperor’s
law, a code proper for the Emperor’s own nation, the Christian, had
become a necessity.
For the _Corpus Juris_ with its topsy-turviness and its technical
faults is, in spite of everything, an Arabic--in other words, a
_religious_--creation, as evidenced in the Christian tendency
of many interpolations;[108] in the fact that the constitutions
relative to ecclesiastical law, which had been put at the end even
in the Theodosian codex, were now placed at the beginning; and very
markedly in the preambles of many of the Novels. Yet the book is not
a beginning, but an end. Latin, which had long become valueless, now
disappears completely from legal life (even the Novels are mostly in
Greek), and with it the work so misguidedly written in that language.
But the history of the law pursues the way that the Syrian-Roman
law-book had indicated to it, and in the eighth century arrives
at works in the mode of our eighteenth, such as the Ecloga of the
Emperor Leo[109] and the Corpus of the great Persian jurist Archbishop
Jesubocht.[110] In that time, too, came the greatest figure of Islamic
jurisprudence, Abu Hanifah.
VII
The law-history of the West begins in total independence of Justinian’s
creation. At that time it was in complete oblivion, so thoroughly
unimportant, in fact, that of its main element, the Pandects (Digest),
there was but one manuscript, which by accident (an unfortunate one)
was discovered about 1050.
The pre-Cultural phase, from about A.D. 500, had thrown up a series
of Germanic tribal codes--the Visigothic, Ostrogothic, Burgundian,
Frankish, and Lombard--which correspond to those of the Arabian
pre-Culture that survives for us only in the Jewish[111] Deuteronomy
(_c._ 621, more or less our Deuteronomy xii-xxvi) and Priestly History
(_c._ 450, now represented by the second, third, and fourth books
of the Pentateuch). Both are concerned with the values of basic
significance for a primitive existence--family and chattels--and both
make use, crudely, yet shrewdly, of an old and civilized law--the
Jews (and no doubt the Persians and others) working upon the late
Babylonian,[112] and the Germans upon some few relics of Urbs Roma.
The political life of the Gothic springtime, with its peasant, feudal,
and simple burgher laws, leads very soon to particular development
in three great branches of law which have remained distinct to this
day--and there has been no unifying comparative history of law in the
West to probe the deep meaning of this development.
The most important by far, owing to the political destinies in which it
was involved, was the Norman law, which was borrowed from the Frankish.
After the Conquest of England in 1066, this drove out the native Saxon,
and since that day in England “the law of the great men has become the
law of the whole people.” Its purely German spirit has developed it,
without a catastrophe, from a feudal régime of unparalleled stringency
into the institutions of the present day which have become law in
Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and the United States. Even
apart from the extent of its power, it is the most instructive in
West Europe. Its development, unlike that of the rest, did _not_ lie
in the hands of theoretical jurists. The study of Roman law at Oxford
was not allowed to touch practice; and at Merton in 1236 the higher
nobility expressly rejected it. The Bench itself continued to develop
the old law-material by means of creative precedents, and it was these
practical decisions (“Reports”) that formed the basis of law-books such
as that of Bracton.[113] Since then, and to this day, a statute law,
kept living and progressive by the court decisions, and a common law,
which always vividly underlies the legislation, exist side by side,
without its ever becoming necessary for the representatives of the
people to make single large efforts at codification.
In the South, the law of the German-Roman codices above mentioned
prevailed--in southern France the Visigothic (called the _droit écrit_
in contrast to the Frankish _droit coutumier_ of the north), and in
Italy the Lombard (which was the most important of them, was almost
purely Germanic, and held its own till well into the Renaissance).
Pavia became a study-centre for German law and produced about 1070 the
“_Expositio_,” by far the greatest achievement of juridical science in
the age, and immediately after it a code, the “_Lombarda_.”[114] The
legal evolution of the entire South was broken off by Napoleon’s _Code
Civil_, which took its place. But this in turn has become in all Latin
lands and far beyond them the basis for further creative work--and
hence, after the English, it is the most important.
In Germany, the movement that set in so powerfully with the Gothic
tribal laws (_Sachsenspiegel_, 1230; _Schwabenspiegel_, 1274) frittered
itself away to nullity. A host of petty civic and territorial rights
went on springing up until indignation with the facts induced an
unreal political romanticism in dreamers and enthusiasts, the Emperor
Maximilian among them, and law came under attack with the rest. The
Diet of Worms in 1495 framed its “_Kammergerichtsordnung_”[115] after
an Italian model. Now there was not only the “Holy Roman Empire” on
German ground, but “Roman law” as German common-law. The old German
procedures were exchanged for Italian. The judges had to study their
law beyond the Alps, and obtained their experience not from the ambient
life, but from a logic-chopping philology. In this country alone are to
be found, later, the ideologues for whom the _Corpus Juris_ is an ark
to be defended against the profanation of realities.
What, in fact, was it that under the high-sounding name passed into
the intellectual keeping of a handful of Gothic men? About 1100, at
the University of Bologna, a German, Irnerius, had made that unique
manuscript of the Pandects the object of a veritable Scholasticism.
He transferred the Lombard method to the new text, “the truth of
which, as a _ratio scripta_, was believed in as implicitly as the
Bible and Aristotle.”[116] Truth!--but the Gothic understanding,
tied to the Gothic life-content, was incapable even of distantly
guessing at the spirit of these texts, for the principles fixed in
them were the principles of a civilized and megalopolitan life.
This school of the glossators, like Scholasticism in general, stood
under the spell of concept-realism; as they held the genuine real,
the substance of the world, to be not in things, but in universal
concepts, so they maintained that the law was to be found not in custom
and usage as displayed in the despised[117] _Lombarda_, but in the
manipulation of abstract notions. Their interest in the book was purely
dialectical[118]--never was it in their minds to apply their work to
life. It was only after 1300, and then slowly, that their anti-Lombard
glosses and summæ made their way into the cities of the Renaissance.
The jurists of the Late Gothic, above all Bartolus, had fused canon
and Germanic law into one whole with a definitely practical intention,
and into it they brought ideas of actuality--here, as in Dracon’s code
and the Imperial Edicts from Theodosius to Justinian, the actuality
of a Culture that is on the threshold of its “Late” stage. It was
_the creation of Bartolus that became effective_ in Spain and Germany
as “Roman law”; only in France did the jurists of the Baroque, after
Cujacius and Donellus, get back from the Scholastic to the Byzantine
text.
But Bologna witnessed, besides Irnerius’s achievement in abstraction,
an event of quite other and decisive import--the famous Decretum
of Gratian, written about 1140.[119] This created the Western
_science of spiritual law_. For by bringing the old-Catholic,
Magian, church-law,[120] founded in the Early-Arabian sacrament of
baptism,[121] into a system, it provided the very form that the
new-Catholic, Faustian Christianity needed for the jural expression of
its own being, which reached back to the prime sacrament of an altar
and a consecrated priesthood. With the _Liber extra_ of 1234 the main
body of the _Corpus Juris Canonici_ is complete. What the Empire had
failed to accomplish--the creation, out of the immense undeveloped
profusion of tribal laws, of a general Western “_Corpus Juris
Germanici_”--the Papacy achieved. There came into existence a complete
private law, with sanctions and processes, produced with German method
out of the ecclesiastical and secular law-material of the Gothic. This
is the law called “Roman” which presently, after Bartolus, was infused
into all study of the texts of Justinian themselves. And it shows us,
in the domain of jurisprudence as elsewhere, that great dissidence,
inherent in the Faustian, which produced the gigantic conflict between
the Papacy and the Empire. The destruction between _fas_ and _jus_,
impossible in the Arabian world, was inevitable in the Western. They
are two expressions of a will-to-power over the infinite, but the will
behind “temporal” legislation is rooted in custom and lays hands on
the generations of the future, while that of “spiritual” originates in
mystical certainty and pronounces a timeless and eternal law.[122] This
battle between equally matched opponents has never yet been ended, and
it is visible even to-day in our law of marriage, with its opposition
of the ecclesiastical and the civil wedding.
With the dawn of the Baroque, life, having by that time assumed urban
and money-economic forms, begins to demand a law like that of the
Classical city-states after Solon. The purpose of the prevailing law
was now perfectly clear. But it was a fateful legacy from the Gothic
that the creation of “the law inborn in us” was looked upon as the
privilege of a learned class, and this privilege no one succeeded in
shaking.
Urban rationalism turned, as in the case of the Sophists and the
Stoics, to busy itself with the “law of nature,” from its foundation
by Oldendorp and Bodinus to its destruction by Hegel. In England the
great Coke successfully defended Germanic self-developing practical law
against the last attempts of the Tudors to introduce Pandect law. But
on the Continent the systems of the learned evolved in _Roman_ forms
right down to the state codes of Germany and the schemes of the _Ancien
Régime_ in France on which the Code Napoléon was based. And therefore
Blackstone’s _Commentaries on the Laws of England_ (1765) is the one
purely Germanic Code, and it appeared when the Faustian Culture had
already reached the threshold of its Civilization.
VIII
With this I reach the objective and look around me. I see three
law-histories, connected merely by the elements of verbal and
syntactical form, taken over by one from another, voluntarily or
perforce, but never revealing to the new user the nature of the alien
being which underlay them. Two of these histories are complete. The
third is that in which we ourselves are standing--standing, too, at a
decisive point where we embark in our turn upon the big constructive
task that Rome and Islam, each for itself and in its season, have
accomplished before us.
What has “Roman” law been for us hitherto? What has it spoilt? What can
it be for us in the future?
All through our legal history runs, as basic motive, the conflict
between book and life. The Western book is not an oracle or magician’s
text with Magian under-sense, but _a piece of preserved history_. It
is compressed Past that wants to become Future, through us who read it
and in whom its content lives anew. Faustian man does not aim, like
Classical man, at bringing his life to a self-contained perfection,
but at carrying on a life that emerged long before him and will draw
to its end long after him. For Gothic man--so far as he reflected
about himself at all--the question was not whether he should look for
linkages of his being and history, but in what direction to look for
them. He required a past in order to find meaning and depth in the
present. On the spiritual side the past which presented itself to him
was ancient Israel; on the mundane it was ancient Rome, whose relics
he saw all about him. What was revered was revered not because it was
great, but because it was old and distant. If these men had known
Egypt, they would hardly have noticed Rome, and the language of our
Culture would have developed differently.
As it was a Culture of books and readers, Classical texts were
“received” in any and every field as Roman law was “received” in
Germany, and their further development assumed the form of a slow and
unwilling self-emancipation. “Reception” of Aristotle, of Euclid, of
the _Corpus Juris_, means in this Culture (in the Magian East it was
different) discovering a ready-made vessel for our own thought a great
deal too soon, with the result of making a historically built kind of
man into a slave of concepts. The alien life-feeling, of course, did
not and could not enter into his thought, but it was a hindrance to his
own life-feeling’s development of an unconstrained speech of its own.
Now, legal thought is forced to attach itself to something
tangible--there must be something before it can abstract its
concepts; it must have something from which to abstract. And it was
the misfortune of Western jurisprudence that, instead of quarrying
in strong, firm custom of social and economic life, it abstracted
prematurely and in a hurry from Latin writings. The Western jurist
became a philologist, and practical experience of life was replaced by
scholarly experience in the purely logical separation and disposition
of legal concepts on self-contained foundations.
Owing to this, we have been completely cut off from touch with the
fact that _private law is meant to represent the social and economic
existence of its period_. Neither the Code Napoléon nor the Prussian
Landrecht, neither Grotius nor Mommsen, was definitely conscious
of this fact. Neither in the training of the legal profession nor
in its literature do we detect the slightest inkling of this--the
genuine--“source” of valid law.
And consequently we possess a private law that rests on the shadowy
foundations of _the Late Classical economy_. The intense embitterment
which, in these beginnings of our Civilization’s economy, opposes the
name of Capitalism to the name of Socialism comes very largely from the
fact that scholarly jurisprudence, and under its influence educated
thought generally, have tied up such all-important notions as person,
thing, and property to the conditions and the dispositions of Classical
life. The book puts itself between the facts and the perception
of them. The learned--meaning thereby the book-learned--weigh up
everything to this day in scales that are essentially Classical. The
man who is merely active and not trained to judgment feels himself
misunderstood. He sees the contradiction between the life of the times
and the law’s outlook upon it, and calls for the heads of those who--to
gain their private ends, as he thinks--have promoted this opposition.
Again the question is: By whom and for whom is Western law made? The
Roman prætor was a landowner, a military officer, a man experienced in
administrative and financial questions; and it was just this experience
that was held to qualify him for the inseparable functions of expounder
and maker of the law. The peregrin prætor developed his aliens’ law
as a law of commercial intercourse adapted to the Late Classical
megalopolis--without plan, without tendency, out of the cases that came
before him and nothing else.
But the Faustian will-to-duration demands a book, something valid “for
evermore,”[123] a system that is intended to provide in advance for
every possible case, and this book, a work of learning, necessarily
called for a scholarly class of jurists and judges--the doctors of the
faculties, the old German legal families, and the French “_noblesse de
robe_.” The English judges, who number hardly over a hundred,[124] are
drawn indeed from an upper class of advocates (the “barristers”), but
they actually rank above many members of the Government.
A scholar-class is alien to the world, and despises experience that
does not originate in thought. Inevitably conflict arises between the
“state of knowledge” as the scholar will accept it and the flowing
custom of practical life. That manuscript of the Pandect of Irnerius
became, and for centuries remained, the “world” in which learned
jurists lived. Even in England, where there are no law faculties (in
the European sense), it was exclusively the legal profession that
controlled further growth, so that even here the development of legal
ideas diverged from the development of general life.
Thus what we have hitherto called juristic science is in fact either
the philology of law-language, or the scholarship of law-ideas. It is
now the only science that still continues to deduce the meaning of
life from “eternally valid” principles. “The German jurisprudence of
to-day,” says Sohm,[125] “represents very largely indeed an inheritance
from mediæval Scholasticism. We have not yet begun to consider in deep
earnest the bearing of the basic values of the _actual_ life about us
upon legal theory. We do not even yet know what these values are.”
Here, then, is the task that German thought of the future has to
perform. From the practical life of the present it has to develop the
deepest principles of that life and elevate them into basic law-ideas.
If our great arts lie behind us, our great jurisprudence is yet to come.
For the work of the nineteenth century--however creative that century
believed itself to be--was merely preparatory. _It freed us from the
book of Justinian, but not from the concepts._ The ideologues of Roman
law among scholars no longer count, but scholarship of the old cast
remains. It is another kind of jurisprudence that is needed now to free
us from the schematism of these concepts. Philological expertness must
give place to social and economic.
A glance at German civil and penal law will make the position clear.
They are systems ringed with a chaplet of minor laws--it was impossible
to embody the material of these in the main law. Conceptually, and
therefore syntactically, that which could not be understood in terms
of the Classical scheme separates itself from that which can be so
understood.
How was it that in 1900 the theft of electric power--after grotesque
discussions as to whether the matter in dispute was a corporeal
thing[126]--had to be dealt with under an _ad hoc_ statute? Why was
it impossible to work the substance of patent law into the ensemble
of the law about things? Why was copyright law unable conceptually to
differentiate the intellectual creation, its communicable form the
manuscript, and the objective product in print? Why, in contradiction
with the law of things, had the artistic and the material property
in a picture to be distinguished by separating acquisition of the
original from acquisition of the right to reproduce it? Why is the
misappropriation of a business idea or a scheme of organization
unpunishable, and theft of the piece of paper on which it is set forth
punishable? Because even to-day we are dominated by the Classical
idea of the material thing.[127] We _live_ otherwise. Our instinctive
experience is subject to _functional_ concepts, such as working
power, inventiveness, enterprise, such as intellectual and bodily,
artistic and organizing, energies and capacities and talents. In our
physics (of which the theory, advanced though it is, is but a copy
of our present mode of life) the old idea of a body has in principle
ceased to exist--as in this very instance of electrical power. Why is
our law conceptually helpless in the presence of the great facts of
modern economics? Because _persons, too_, are known to it _only as
bodies_.[128]
If the Western jurisprudence took over ancient words, yet only the most
superficial elements of the ancient meanings still adhered to them. The
consistency of the text disclosed only the _logical_ use of the words,
not the life that underlay them. No practice can reawaken the silent
metaphysic of old jural ideas. No laws in the world make this last and
deepest element explicit, because--just because--it is self-evident. In
all of them the essential is tacitly presupposed; in application it is
not only the formula but also, and primarily, the inexpressible element
beneath it that the people inwardly understands and can practise.
Every law is, to the extent that it would be impossible to exaggerate,
customary law. Let the statute define the words; it is life that
explains them.
If, however, a scholars’ law-language of alien origin and alien scheme
tries to bind the native and proper law, the ideas remain void and the
life remains dumb. Law becomes, not a tool, but a burden, and actuality
marches on, not with, but apart from legal history.
And thus it is that the law-material that our Civilization needs fits
only in externals, or even not at all, with the Classical scheme of the
law-books, and for the purposes of our proper jurisprudence and our
educated thought generally is still formless and therefore unavailable.
Are persons and things, in the sense of present-day legislation,
law-_concepts_ at all? No! They merely serve to draw the ordinary
distinction, the zoölogical distinction, so to say, between man and the
rest. But of old the whole metaphysic of Classical being adhered to
the notion of “_persona_.” The distinction between man and deity, the
essence of the Polis, of the hero, of the slave, the Cosmos of stuff
and form, the life-ideal of Ataraxia, were the self-evident premisses,
and these premisses have for us completely perished. In our thought
the word “property” is tied up with the Classical _static_ definition,
and consequently, in every application to the dynamism of our way
of living it falsifies. We leave such definitions to the world-shy
abstract professors of ethics, jurists, and philosophers and to the
unintelligent debate of political doctrinaires--and this although the
_whole_ understanding of the economic history of this day _rests upon
the metaphysic of this one notion_.
It must be emphasized then--and with all rigour--that Classical law
was a law of _bodies_, while ours is a law of _functions_. The Romans
created a juristic statics; our task is juristic dynamics. For us
persons are not bodies, but units of force and will; and things are not
bodies, but aims, means, and creations of these units. The Classical
relation between bodies was positional, but the relation between
forces is called action. For a Roman the slave was a thing which
produced new things. A writer like Cicero could never have conceived of
“intellectual property,” let alone property in a practical notion or in
the potentialities of talent; for us, on the contrary, the organizer
or inventor or promoter is _a generative force which works upon other,
executive, forces_, by giving direction, aim, and means to their
action.[129] Both belong to economic life, not as possessors of things,
but as carriers of energies.
The future will be called upon to transpose our entire legal thought
into alignment with our higher physics and mathematics. Our whole
social, economic, and technical life is waiting to be understood, at
long last, in this wise. We shall need a century and more of keenest
and deepest thought to arrive at the goal. And the prerequisite is a
wholly new kind of preparatory training in the jurist. It demands:
1. An immediate, extended, and practical experience in the economic
life of the present.
2. An exact knowledge of the legal history of the West, with
constant comparison of German, English, and “Roman” development.
3. Knowledge of Classical jurisprudence, not as a model for
principles of present-day validity, but as a brilliant example of
how a law can develop strong and pure out of the _practical life_
of its time.
Roman law has ceased to be our source for principles of eternal
validity. But the relation between Roman existence and Roman law-ideas
gives it a renewed value for us. We can learn from it how we have to
build up _our_ law out of _our_ experiences.
CHAPTER IV
CITIES AND PEOPLES
(A)
THE SOUL OF THE CITY
About the middle of the second millennium before Christ, two worlds lay
over against one another on the Ægean Sea. The one, darkly groping,
big with hopes, drowsy with the intoxication of deeds and sufferings,
ripening quietly towards its future, was the Mycenæan. The other, gay
and satisfied, snugly ensconced in the treasures of an ancient Culture,
elegant, light, with all its great problems far behind it, was the
Minoan of Crete.
We shall never really comprehend this phenomenon, which in these days
is becoming the centre of research-interest, unless we appreciate the
abyss of opposition that separates the two souls. The man of those days
must have felt it deeply, but hardly “cognised” it. I see it before
me: the humility of the inhabitant of Tiryns and Mycenæ before the
unattainable _esprit_ of life in Cnossus, the contempt of the well-bred
of Cnossus for the petty chiefs and their followers, and withal a
secret feeling of superiority in the healthy barbarians, like that of
the German soldier in the presence of the elderly Roman dignitary.
How are we in a position to know this? There are several such moments
in which the men of two Cultures have looked into one another’s eyes.
We know more than one “Inter-Culture” in which some of the most
significant tendencies of the human soul have disclosed themselves.
As it was (we may confidently say) between Cnossus and Mycenæ, so it
was between the Byzantine court and the German chieftains who, like
Otto II, married into it--undisguised wonder on the part of the knights
and counts, answered by the contemptuous astonishment of a refined,
somewhat pale and tired Civilization at that bearish morning vigour of
the German lands which Scheffel has described in _Ekkehard_.[130]
In Charlemagne the mixture of a primitive human spirituality, on the
threshold of its awakening, with a superposed Late intellectuality,
becomes manifest. Certain characteristics of his rulership would
lead us to name him the Caliph of Frankistan, but on his other side
he is but the chief of a Germanic tribe; and it is the mingling of
the two that makes him symbolic, in the same way as the form of
the Aachen palace-chapel--no longer mosque, not yet cathedral. The
Germanic-Western pre-Culture meanwhile is moving on, but slowly and
underground, for that sudden illumination which we most ineptly call
the Carolingian Renaissance is a ray from Baghdad. It must not be
overlooked that the period of Charles the Great is an episode of the
surface, ending, as accidentals do end, without issue. After 900, after
a new deep depression, there begins something really new, something
having the telling force of a Destiny and the depth that promises
duration. But in 800 it was the sun of the Arabian Civilization passing
on from the world-cities of the East to the countryside of the West.
Even so the sunshine of Hellenism had spread to the distant Indus.[131]
That which stands on the hills of Tiryns and Mycenæ is _Pfalz_ and
_Burg_ of root-Germanic type. The palaces of Crete--which are not
kings’ castles, but huge cult-buildings for a crowd of priests and
priestesses--are equipped with megalopolitan--nay, Late-Roman--luxury.
At the foot of those hills were crowded the huts of yeoman and vassals,
but in Crete (Gournia, Hagia Triada) the excavation of towns and villas
has shown that the requirements were those of high civilization,
and the building-technique that of a long experience, accustomed to
catering for the most pampered taste in furniture and wall-decoration,
and familiar with lighting, water-circulation, staircases, and
suchlike problems.[132] In the one, the plan of the house is a strict
life-symbol; in the other, the expression of a refined utilitarianism.
Compare the Kamares vases and the frescoes of smooth stucco with
everything that is genuinely Mycenæan--they are, through and through,
the product of an industrial art, clever and empty, and not of any
grand and deep art of heavy, clumsy, but forceful symbolism like that
which in Mycenæ was ripening towards the geometric style. It is, in a
word, not a style but a taste.[133] In Mycenæ was housed a primitive
race which chose its sites according to soil-value and facilities for
defence, whereas the Minoan population settled in business foci, as may
be observed very clearly in the case of Philakopi on Melos which was
established for the export trade in obsidian. A Mycenæan palace is a
promise, a Minoan something that is ending. But it was just the same in
the West about 800--the Frankish and Visigothic farms and manor-houses
stretched from the Loire to the Ebro, while south of them lay the
Moorish castles, villas, and mosques of Cordova and Granada.
It is surely no accident that the peak of this Minoan luxury coincides
with the period of the great Egyptian revolution, and particularly the
Hyksos time (1780-1580 B.C.).[134] The Egyptian craftsmen may well
have fled in those days to the peaceful islands and even as far as
the strongholds of the mainland, as in a later instance the Byzantine
scholars fled to Italy. For it is axiomatic that the Minoan Culture is
a part of the Egyptian, and we should be able to realize this more
fully were it not that the part of Egypt’s art-store which would have
been decisive in this connexion--viz.: what was produced in the Western
Delta--has perished from damp. We only know the Egyptian Culture in so
far as it flourished on the dry soil of the south, but it has long been
admitted as certain that the centre of gravity of its evolution lay
elsewhere.
It is not possible to draw a strict frontier between the late Minoan
and the young Mycenæan art. Throughout the Egyptian-Cretan world we
can observe a highly modern fad for these alien and primitive things,
and vice versa the war-band kings of the mainland strongholds stole
or bought Cretan _objets d’art_ wherever and however they could come
by them, admiring and imitating--even as the style of the Migrations,
once supposed to be, and prized as, proto-German, borrows the whole
of its form-language from the East.[135] They had their palaces
and tombs built and decorated by captive or invited craftsmen. The
“Treasure-house” (Tomb) of Atreus in Mycenæ, therefore, is exactly
analogous to the tomb of Theoderich at Ravenna.
In this regard Byzantium itself is a marvel. Here layer after layer
has to be carefully separated. In 326 Constantine, rebuilding on the
ruins of the great city destroyed by Septimus Severus, created a _Late
Classical cosmopolis_ of the first rank, into which presently streamed
hoary Apollinism from the West and youthful Magism from the East. And
long afterwards again, in 1096, it is a _Late Magian_ cosmopolis,
confronted in its last autumn days with spring in the shape of Godfrey
of Bouillon’s crusaders, whom that clever royal lady Anna Comnena[136]
portrays with contempt. As the easternmost of the Classical West, this
city bewitched the Goths; then, a millennium later, as the northernmost
of the Arabian world, it enchanted the Russians. And the amazing Vasili
Blazheny in Moscow (1554), the herald of the Russian pre-Culture,
stands “between styles,” just as, two thousand years before, Solomon’s
Temple had stood between Babylon the Cosmopolis and early Christianity.
II
Primeval man is a _ranging_ animal, a being whose waking-consciousness
restlessly feels its way through life, all microcosm, under no
servitude of place or home, keen and anxious in its senses, ever alert
to drive off some element of hostile Nature. A deep transformation
sets in first with agriculture--for that is something _artificial_,
with which hunter and shepherd have no touch. He who digs and ploughs
is seeking not to plunder, but to _alter_ Nature. To plant implies,
not to take something, but to produce something. _But with this, man
himself becomes plant_--namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that
he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a
new earth-boundness of being, a new feeling, pronounces itself. Hostile
Nature becomes the friend; earth becomes _Mother_ Earth. Between
sowing and begetting, harvest and death, the child and the grain, a
profound affinity is set up. A new devoutness addresses itself in
chthonian cults to the fruitful earth that grows up along with man.
And as completed expression of this life-feeling, we find everywhere
the _symbolic shape of the farmhouse_, which in the disposition of
the rooms and in every line of external form tells us about the blood
of its inhabitants. The peasant’s dwelling is the great symbol of
settledness. It is itself plant, thrusts its roots deep into its “own”
soil.[137] It is _property_ in the most sacred sense of the word. The
kindly spirits of hearth and door, floor and chamber--Vesta, Janus,
Lares and Penates--are as firmly fixed in it as the man himself.
This is the condition precedent of every Culture, which itself in
turn grows up out of a mother-landscape and renews and intensifies
the intimacy of man and soil. What his cottage is to the peasant,
that the town is to the Culture-man. As each individual house has
its kindly spirits, so each town has its tutelary god or saint. The
town, too, is a plantlike being, as far removed as a peasantry is from
nomadism and the purely microcosmic. Hence the development of a high
form-language is linked always to a landscape. Neither an art nor a
religion can alter the site of its growth; only in the Civilization
with its giant cities do we come again to despise and disengage
ourselves from these roots. Man as civilized, as _intellectual nomad_,
is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free _intellectually_
as hunter and herdsman were free sensually. “_Ubi bene, ibi patria_”
is valid _before_ as well as _after_ a Culture. In the not-yet-spring
of the Migrations it was a Germanic yearning--virginal, yet already
maternal--that searched the South for a home in which to nest its
future Culture. To-day, at the end of this Culture, the rootless
intellect ranges over all landscapes and all possibilities of thought.
But between these limits lies the time in which a man held a bit of
soil to be something _worth dying for_.
It is a conclusive fact--yet one hitherto never appreciated--that
all great Cultures are town-Cultures. Higher man of the Second
Age is a town-tied animal. Here is the real criterion of
“world-history” that differentiates it with utter sharpness from man’s
history--_world-history is the history of civic man_. Peoples, states,
politics, religion, all arts, and all sciences rest upon _one_ prime
phenomenon of human being, the town. As all thinkers of all Cultures
themselves live in the town (even though they may reside bodily in the
country), they are perfectly unaware of what a bizarre thing a town is.
To feel this we have to put ourselves unreservedly in the place of the
wonder-struck primitive who for the first time sees this mass of stone
and wood set in the landscape, with its stone-enclosed streets and its
stone-paved squares--a domicile, truly, of strange form and strangely
teeming with men!
But the real miracle is the birth of the _soul_ of a town. A mass-soul
of a wholly new kind--whose last foundations will remain hidden from
us for ever--suddenly buds off from the general spirituality of its
Culture. As soon as it is awake, it forms for itself a visible body.
Out of the rustic group of farms and cottages, each of which has its
own history, arises a _totality_. And the whole lives, breathes, grows,
and acquires a face and an inner form and history. Thenceforward, in
addition to the individual house, the temple, the cathedral, and the
palace, the town-figure itself becomes a unit objectively expressing
the form-language and style-history that accompanies the Culture
throughout its life-course.
It goes without saying that what distinguishes a town from a village is
not size, but the presence of a soul. Not only in primitive conditions,
such as those of central Africa, but in Late conditions too--China,
India, and industrialized Europe and America--we find very large
settlements that are nevertheless not to be called cities. They are
centres of landscape; they do not inwardly form worlds in themselves.
They have no soul. Every primitive population lives wholly as peasant
and son of the soil--the being “City” does not exist for it. That which
in externals develops from the village is not the city, but the market,
a mere meeting-point of rural life-interests. Here there can be no
question of a separate existence. The inhabitant of a market may be a
craftsman or a tradesman, but he lives and thinks as a peasant. We have
to go back and sense accurately what it means when out of a primitive
Egyptian or Chinese or Germanic village--a little spot in a wide
land--a city comes into being. It is quite possibly not differentiated
in any outward feature, but spiritually it is _a place from which
the countryside is henceforth regarded, felt, and experienced as
“environs,”_ as something different and subordinate. From now on
there are two lives, that of the inside and that of the outside, and
the peasant understands this just as clearly as the townsman. The
village smith and the smith in the city, the village headman and the
burgomaster, live in two different worlds. The man of the land and the
man of the city are different essences. First of all they feel the
difference, then they are dominated by it, and at last they cease to
understand each other at all. To-day a Brandenburg peasant is closer
to a Sicilian peasant than he is to a Berliner. From the moment of
this specific attunement, the City comes into being, and it is this
attunement which underlies, as something that goes without saying, the
entire waking-consciousness of every Culture.
Every springtime of a Culture is _ipso facto_ the springtime of a new
city-type and civism. The men of the pre-Culture are filled with a
deep uneasiness in the presence of these types, with which they cannot
get into any inward relation. On the Rhine and the Danube the Germans
frequently, as at Strassburg, settled down at the gates of Roman cities
that remained uninhabited.[138] In Crete the conquerors built, on the
ruins of the burnt-out cities like Gournia and Cnossus--villages. The
Orders of the Western pre-Culture, the Benedictines, and particularly
the Cluniacs and Premonstratensians, settled like the knights on
free land; it was the Franciscans and Dominicans who began to build
in the Early Gothic city. There the new soul had just awakened. But
even there a tender melancholy still adheres to the architecture,
as to Franciscan art as a whole--an almost mystical fear of the
individual in presence of the new and bright and conscious, which as
yet was only dully accepted by the generality. Man hardly yet dared to
cease to be peasant; the first to live with the ripe and considered
alertness of genuine megalopolitans are the Jesuits. It is a sign that
the countryside is still unconditionally supreme, and does not yet
recognize the city, when the ruler shifts his court every spring from
palace to palace. In the Egyptian Old Kingdom the thickly-populated
centre of the administration was at the “White Wall” (Memphis), but the
residences of the Pharaohs changed incessantly as in Sumerian Babylon
and the Carolingian Empire.[139] The Early Chinese rulers of the Chóu
dynasty had their court as a rule at Lo-Yang (the present Ho-nan-fu)
from about 1160, but it was not until 770--corresponding to our
sixteenth century--that the locality was promoted to be the permanent
royal residence.[140]
Never has the feeling of earth-boundness, of the plantwise-cosmic,
expressed itself so powerfully as it did in the architecture of the
petty early towns, which consisted of hardly more than a few streets
about a market-place or a castle or a place of worship. Here, if
anywhere, it is manifest that every grand style is itself plantlike.
The Doric column, the Egyptian pyramid, the Gothic cathedral,
_grow out of_ the ground, earnest, big with destiny, Being without
waking-consciousness. The Ionic column, the buildings of the Middle
Kingdom and those of the Baroque, calmly aware and conscious of
themselves, free and sure, _stand on_ the ground. There, separated
from the power of the land--cut off from it, even, by the pavement
underfoot--Being becomes more and more languid, sensation and reason
more and more powerful. Man becomes intellect, “free” like the
nomads, whom he comes to resemble, but narrower and colder than they.
“Intellect,” “_Geist_,” “_esprit_,” is the specific urban form of the
understanding waking-consciousness. All art, all religion and science,
become slowly intellectualized, alien to the land, incomprehensible to
the peasant of the soil. With the Civilization sets in the climacteric.
The immemorially old roots of Being are dried up in the stone-masses
of its cities. And the free intellect--fateful word!--appears like a
flame, mounts splendid into the air, and pitiably dies.
III
The new Soul of the City speaks a new language, which soon comes to
be tantamount to the language of the Culture itself. The open land
with its village-mankind is wounded; it no longer understands that
language, it is nonplussed and dumb. All genuine style-history is
played out in the cities. It is exclusively the city’s destiny and the
life-experience of urban men that speaks to the eye in the logic of
visible forms. The very earliest Gothic was still a growth of the soil
and laid hold of the farmhouse with its inhabitants and its contents.
But the Renaissance style flourished only in the Renaissance _city_,
the Baroque only in the Baroque _city_--not to mention the wholly
megalopolitan Corinthian column or Rococo. There was perhaps some quiet
infiltration from these into the landscape; but the land itself was no
longer capable of the smallest creative effort--only of dumb aversion.
The peasant and his dwelling remained in all essentials Gothic, and
Gothic it is to this day. The Hellenic _countryside_ preserved the
geometric style, the Egyptian village the cast of the Old Kingdom.
It is, above all, the expression of the city’s “visage” that has
a history. The play of this facial expression, indeed, is almost
the spiritual history of the Culture itself. First we have the
little proto-cities of the Gothic and other Early Cultures, which
almost efface themselves in the landscape, which are still genuine
peasant-houses crowded under the shadow of a stronghold or a
sanctuary, and without inward change become town-houses merely in
the sense that they have neighbour-houses instead of fields and
meadows around them. The peoples of the Early Culture gradually
became town-peoples, and accordingly there are not only specifically
Chinese, Indian, Apollinian, and Faustian town-forms, but, moreover,
Armenian and Syrian, Ionian and Etruscan, German and French and English
town-physiognomies. There is a city of Phidias, a city of Rembrandt,
a city of Luther. These designations, and the mere names of Granada,
Venice, and Nürnberg conjure up at once quite definite images, for all
that the Culture produces in religion, art, and knowledge has been
produced in such cities. While it was still the spirit of knights’
castles and rural monasteries that evoked the Crusades, the Reformation
is urban and belongs to narrow streets and steep-gabled houses. The
great Epic, which speaks and sings of the blood, belongs to _Pfalz_
and _Burg_, but the Drama, in which _awakened_ life tests itself, is
city-poetry, and the great Novel, the survey of all things human by the
_emancipated_ intellect, presupposes the world-city. Apart from really
genuine folk-song, the only lyrism is of the city. Apart from the
“eternal” peasant-art, there is only urban painting and architecture,
with a swift and soon-ended history.
And these stone visages that have incorporated in their light-world
the humanness of the citizen himself and, like him, are all eye and
intellect--how distinct the language of form that they talk, how
different from the rustic drawl of the landscape! The silhouette of
the great city, its roofs and chimneys, the towers and domes on the
horizon! What a language is imparted to us through _one_ look at
Nürnberg or Florence, Damascus or Moscow, Peking or Benares. What
do we know of the Classical cities, seeing that we do not know the
lines that they presented under the Southern noon, under clouds in the
morning, in the starry night? The courses of the streets, straight or
crooked, broad or narrow; the houses, low or tall, bright or dark,
that in all Western cities turn their façades, _their faces_, and in
all Eastern cities turn their backs, blank wall and railing, towards
the street; the spirit of squares and corners, impasses and prospects,
fountains and monuments, churches or temples or mosques, amphitheatres
and railway stations, bazaars and town-halls! The suburbs, too, of
neat garden-villas or of jumbled blocks of flats, rubbish-heaps and
allotments; the fashionable quarter and the slum area, the Subura of
Classical Rome and the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Paris, ancient Baiæ
and modern Nice, the little town-picture like Bruges and Rothenburg
and the sea of houses like Babylon, Tenochtitlan, Rome, and London!
All this has history and _is_ history. One major political event--and
the visage of the town falls into different folds. Napoleon gave to
Bourbon Paris, Bismarck gave to worthy little Berlin, a new mien. But
the Country stands by, uninfluenced, suspicious and irritated.
In the earliest time the _landscape-figure alone_ dominates man’s eyes.
It gives form to his soul and vibrates in tune therewith. Feelings
and woodland rustlings beat together; the meadows and the copses
adapt themselves to its shape, to its course, even to its dress.
The village, with its quiet hillocky roofs, its evening smoke, its
wells, its hedges, and its beasts, lies completely fused and embedded
in the landscape. The country town _confirms_ the country, is an
intensification of the picture of the country. It is the Late city
that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its
silhouette, _denies_ all Nature. It wants to be something different
from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque
cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related
with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis,
the _city-as-world_, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets
about _annihilating_ the country picture. The town that once upon a
time humbly accommodated itself to that picture now insists that it
shall be the same as itself. _Extra muros_, chaussées and woods and
pastures become a park, mountains become tourists’ view-points; and
_intra muros_ arises an imitation Nature, fountains in lieu of springs,
flower-beds, formal pools, and clipped hedges in lieu of meadows and
ponds and bushes. In a village the thatched roof is still hill-like and
the street is of the same nature as the baulk of earth between fields.
But here the picture is of deep, long gorges between high, stony houses
filled with coloured dust and strange uproar, and men dwell in these
houses, the like of which no nature-being has ever conceived. Costumes,
even faces, are adjusted to a background of stone. By day there is a
street traffic of strange colours and tones, and by night a new light
that outshines the moon. And the yokel stands helpless on the pavement,
understanding nothing and understood by nobody, tolerated as a useful
type in farce and provider of this world’s daily bread.
It follows, however--and this is the most essential point of any--that
we cannot comprehend political and economic history at all unless we
realize that the city, with its gradual detachment from and final
bankrupting of the country, is the determinative form to which the
course and sense of higher history generally conforms. _World history
is city history._
An obvious case in point is, of course, the Classical world, in
which the Euclidean feeling of existence connected the city-idea
with its need of minimizing extension and thus, with ever-increasing
emphasis, identified the State with the stone body of the individual
Polis. But, quite apart from this instance, we find in every Culture
(and very soon) the type of the _capital city_. This, as its name
pointedly indicates, is that city whose spirit, with its methods,
aims, and decisions of policy and economics, dominates the land. The
land with its people is for this controlling spirit a tool and an
object. The land does not understand what is going on, and is not
even asked. In all countries of all Late Cultures, the great parties,
the revolutions, the Cæsarisms, the democracies, the parliaments,
are the form in which the spirit of the capital tells the country
what it is expected to desire and, if called upon, to die for. The
Classical forum, the Western press, are, essentially, intellectual
engines of the ruling City. Any country-dweller who really understands
the meaning of politics in such periods, and feels himself on their
level, moves into the City, not perhaps in the body, but certainly in
the spirit.[141] The sentiment and public opinion of the peasant’s
country-side--so far as it can be said to exist--is prescribed and
guided by the print and speech of the city. Egypt is Thebes, the _orbis
terrarum_ is Rome, Islam is Baghdad, France is Paris. The history of
every springtime phase is played out in the many small centres of many
separate districts. The Egyptian nomes, the Greek peoples of Homer, the
Gothic counties and free cities, were the makers of history of old.
But gradually Policy gathers itself up into a very few capitals, and
everything else retains but a shadow of political existence. Even in
the Classical world, the atomizing tendency towards city-states did not
hold out against the major movement. As early as the Peloponnesian War
it was only Athens and Sparta that were really handling policy, the
remaining cities of the Ægean being merely elements within the hegemony
of the one or the other; of policies of _their own_ there is no longer
any question. Finally it is the Forum of the City of Rome alone that
is the scene of Classical history. Cæsar might campaign in Gaul, his
slayers in Macedonia, Antony in Egypt, but, whatever happened in these
fields, _it was from their relation to Rome that events acquired
meaning_.
IV
All effectual history begins with the primary classes, nobility and
priesthood, forming themselves and elevating themselves above the
peasantry as such. The opposition of greater and lesser nobility,
between king and vassal, between worldly and spiritual power, is the
basic form of all primitive politics, Homeric, Chinese, or Gothic,
until with the coming of the City, the burgher, the _Tiers État_,
history changes its style. But it is exclusively in these classes as
such, in their class-consciousness, that the whole meaning of history
inheres. _The peasant is historyless._ The village stands outside
world-history, and all evolution from the “Trojan” to the Mithridatic
War, from the Saxon emperors to the World War of 1914, passes by these
little points on the landscape, occasionally destroying them and
wasting their blood, but never in the least touching their inwardness.
The peasant is the eternal man, independent of every Culture that
ensconces itself in the cities. He precedes it, he outlives it, a dumb
creature propagating himself from generation to generation, limited
to soil-bound callings and aptitudes, a mystical soul, a dry, shrewd
understanding that sticks to practical matters, the origin and the
ever-flowing source of the blood that makes world-history in the cities.
Whatever the Culture up there in the city conceives in the way
of state-forms, economic customs, articles of faith, implements,
knowledge, art, he receives mistrustfully and hesitatingly; though
in the end he may accept these things, never is he altered in kind
thereby. Thus the West-European peasant outwardly took in all the
dogmas of the Councils from the great Lateran to that of Trent, just
as he took in the products of mechanical engineering and those of the
French Revolution--but he remains what he was, what he already was
in Charlemagne’s day. The present-day piety of the peasant is older
than Christianity; his gods are more ancient than those of any higher
religion. Remove from him the pressure of the great cities and he
will revert to the state of nature without feeling that he is losing
anything. His real ethic, his real metaphysic, which no scholar of
the city has yet thought it worth while to discover, lie outside all
religious and spiritual history, have in fact no history at all.
The city is intellect. The Megalopolis is “free” intellect. It is
in resistance to the “feudal” powers of blood and tradition that
the burgherdom or bourgeoisie, the intellectual class, begins to be
conscious of its own separate existence. It upsets thrones and limits
old rights in the name of reason and above all in the name of “the
People,” which henceforward means exclusively the people of the city.
Democracy is the political form in which the townsman’s outlook upon
the world is demanded of the peasantry also. The urban intellect
reforms the great religion of the springtime and sets up by the side
of the old religion of noble and priest, the new religion of the Tiers
État, _liberal science_. The city assumes the lead and control of
economic history in replacing the primitive values of the land, which
are for ever inseparable from the life and thought of the rustic, by
the _absolute idea of money_ as distinct from goods. The immemorial
country word for exchange of goods is “barter”; even when one of the
things exchanged is precious metal, the underlying idea of the process
is not yet _monetary_--i.e., it does not involve the abstraction of
value from things and its fixation in metallic or fictitious quantities
intended to _measure_ things qua “commodities.” Caravan expeditions
and Viking voyages in the springtime are made between land-settlements
and imply barter or booty, whereas in the Late period they are made
between cities and mean “money.” This is the distinction between the
Normans before and the Hansa and Venetians after the Crusades,[142]
and between the seafarers of Mycenæan times and those of the later
colonization period in Greece. The City means not only intellect, but
also money.[143]
Presently there arrived an epoch when the development of the city
had reached such a point of power that it had no longer to defend
itself against country and chivalry, but on the contrary had become a
despotism against which the land and its basic orders of society were
fighting a hopeless defensive battle--in the spiritual domain against
nationalism, in the political against democracy, in the economic
against money. At this period the number of cities that really counted
as historically dominant had already become very small. And with this
there arose the profound distinction--which was above all a spiritual
distinction--between the great city and the little city or town. The
latter, very significantly called the country-town, was a part of the
no longer co-efficient countryside. It was not that the difference
between townsman and rustic had become lessened in such towns, but
that this difference had become negligible as compared with the new
difference between them and the great city. The sly-shrewdness of
the country and the intelligence of the megalopolis are two forms of
waking-consciousness between which reciprocal understanding is scarcely
possible. Here again it is evident that what counts is not the number
of inhabitants, but the spirit. It is evident, moreover, that in all
great cities nooks remained in which relics of an almost rural mankind
lived in their byeways much as if they were on the land, and the people
on the two sides of the street were almost in the relation of two
villages. In fact, a pyramid of mounting civism, of decreasing number
and increasing field of view, leads up from such quasi-rural elements,
in ever-narrowing layers, to the small number of genuine megalopolitans
at the top, who are at home wherever their spiritual postulates are
satisfied.
With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no
longer merely _serves_ for the understanding of economic intercourse,
but _subjects_ the exchange of goods to _its own_ evolution. It
values things, no longer as between each other, but _with reference
to itself_. Its relation to the soil and to the man of the soil has
so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the leading
cities--the “money-markets”--it is ignored. Money has now become a
power, and, moreover, a power that is wholly intellectual and merely
figured in the metal it uses, a power the reality of which resides
in the waking-consciousness of the upper stratum of an economically
active population, a power that makes those concerned with it just as
dependent upon itself as the peasant was dependent upon the soil. There
is monetary thought, just as there is mathematical or juristic.
But the earth is actual and natural, and money is abstract and
artificial, a mere “category”--like “virtue” in the imagination of the
Age of Enlightenment. And therefore every primary, pre-civic economy
is dependent upon and held in bondage by the cosmic powers, the
soil, the climate, the type of man, whereas money, as the pure form
of economic intercourse within the waking-consciousness, is no more
limited in potential scope by actuality than are the quantities of the
mathematical and the logical world. Just as no view of facts hinders
us from constructing as many non-Euclidean geometries as we please,
so in the developed megalopolitan economics there is no longer any
inherent objection to increasing “money” or to thinking, so to say, in
other money-dimensions. This has nothing to do with the availability
of gold or with any values in actuality at all. There is no standard
and no sort of goods in which the value of the talent in the Persian
Wars can be compared with its value in the Egyptian booty of Pompey.
Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity
of waking-consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is
the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization,
which is always an unconditional _dictatorship of money_, though taking
different forms in different Cultures. But this is the reason, too,
for the want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its
power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian’s time,
it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the
primary values of the soil return anew to take its place.
Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely
emancipated intellect, the world-city, the centre in which the course
of a world-history ends by winding itself up. A handful of gigantic
places in each Civilization disfranchises and disvalues the entire
motherland of its own Culture under the contemptuous name of “the
provinces.” The “provinces” are now everything whatsoever--land, town,
_and_ city--except these two or three points. There are no longer
noblesse and bourgeoisie, freemen and slaves, Hellenes and Barbarians,
believers and unbelievers, _but only cosmopolitans and provincials_.
All other contrasts pale before this one, which dominates all events,
all habits of life, all views of the world.
The earliest of all world-cities were Babylon and the Thebes of the
New Empire--the Minoan world of Crete, for all its splendour, belonged
to the Egyptian “provinces.” In the Classical the first example is
Alexandria, which reduced old Greece at one stroke to the provincial
level, and which even Rome, even the resettled Carthage, even
Byzantium, could not suppress. In India the giant cities of Ujjaina,
Kanauj, and above all Pataliputra were renowned even in China and Java,
and everyone knows the fairy-tale reputation of Baghdad and Granada in
the West. In the Mexican world, it seems, Uxmal (founded in 950) was
the first world-city of the Maya realms, which, however, with the rise
of the Toltec world-cities Tezcuco and Tenochtitlan sank to the level
of the provinces.
It should not be forgotten that the word “province” first appears
as a constitutional designation given by the Romans to Sicily; the
subjugation of Sicily, in fact, is the first example of a once
pre-eminent Culture-landscape sinking so far as to be purely and
simply an object. Syracuse, the first real great-city of the Classical
world, had flourished when Rome was still an unimportant country town,
but thenceforward, _vis-à-vis_ Rome, it becomes a provincial city.
In just the same way Habsburg Madrid and Papal Rome, leading cities
in the Europe of the seventeenth century, were from the outset of
the eighteenth depressed to the provincial level by the world-cities
of Paris and London. And the rise of New York to the position of
world-city during the Civil War of 1861-5 may perhaps prove to have
been the most pregnant event of the nineteenth century.
V
The stone Colossus “Cosmopolis” stands at the end of the life’s course
of every great Culture. The Culture-man whom the land has spiritually
formed is seized and possessed by his own creation, the City, and is
made into its creature, its executive organ, and finally its victim.
This stony mass is the _absolute_ city. Its image, as it appears with
all its grandiose beauty in the light-world of the human eye, contains
the whole noble death-symbolism of the definitive thing-become. The
spirit-pervaded stone of Gothic buildings, after a millennium of
style-evolution, has become the soulless material of this dæmonic
stone-desert.
These final cities are _wholly_ intellect. Their houses are no longer,
as those of the Ionic and the Baroque were, derivatives of the old
peasant’s house, whence the Culture took its spring into history.
They are, generally speaking, no longer houses in which Vesta and
Janus, Lares and Penates, have any sort of footing, but mere premises
which have been fashioned, not by blood but by requirements, not by
feeling but by the spirit of commercial enterprise. So long as the
hearth has a pious meaning as the actual and genuine centre of a
family, the old relation to the land is not wholly extinct. But when
_that_, too, follows the rest into oblivion, and the mass of tenants
and bed-occupiers in the sea of houses leads a vagrant existence from
shelter to shelter like the hunters and pastors of the “pre-” time,
then the intellectual nomad is completely developed. This city is a
world, is _the_ world. Only as a whole, as a human dwelling-place, has
it meaning, the houses being merely the stones of which it is assembled.
Now the old mature cities with their Gothic nucleus of cathedral,
town-halls, and high-gabled streets, with their old walls, towers,
and gates, ringed about by the Baroque growth of brighter and more
elegant patricians’ houses, palaces, and hall-churches, begin to
overflow in all directions in formless masses, to eat into the
decaying country-side with their multiplied barrack-tenements and
utility buildings, and to destroy the noble aspect of the old time by
clearances and rebuildings. Looking down from one of the old towers
upon the sea of houses, we perceive in this petrification of a historic
being the exact epoch that marks the end of organic growth and the
beginning of an inorganic and therefore unrestrained process of massing
without limit. And now, too, appears that artificial, mathematical,
utterly land-alien product of a pure intellectual satisfaction in the
appropriate, the city of the city-architect. In all Civilizations
alike, these cities aim at the chessboard form, which is the symbol of
soullessness. Regular rectangle-blocks astounded Herodotus in Babylon
and Cortez in Tenochtitlan. In the Classical world the series of
“abstract” cities begins with Thurii, which was “planned” by Hippodamus
of Miletus in 441. Priene, whose chessboard scheme entirely ignores the
ups and downs of the site, Rhodes, and Alexandria follow, and become
in turn models for innumerable provincial cities of the Imperial Age.
The Islamic architects laid out Baghdad from 762, and the giant city of
Samarra a century later, according to plan.[144] In the West-European
and American world the lay-out of Washington in 1791 is the first big
example.[145] There can be no doubt that the world-cities of the
Han period in China and the Maurya dynasty in India possessed this
same geometrical pattern. Even now the world-cities of the Western
Civilization are far from having reached the peak of their development.
I see, long after A.D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million
inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings
that will dwarf the biggest of to-day’s and notions of traffic and
communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of
madness.[146]
Even in this final shape of his being, the Classical man’s form-ideal
remains the corporeal point. Whereas the giant cities of our present
confess our irresistible tendency towards the infinite--our suburbs
and garden cities, invading the wide country-side, our vast and
comprehensive network of roads, and within the thickly built areas
a controlled fast traffic on, below, and above straight, broad
streets--the genuine Classical world-city ever strove, not to expand,
but to thicken--the streets narrow and cramped, impossible for fast
traffic (although this was fully developed on the great Roman roads),
entire unwillingness to live in suburbs or even to make suburbs
possible.[147] Even at that stage the city must needs be a body, thick
and round, σῶμα in the strictest sense. The synœcism that in the early
Classical had gradually drawn the land-folk into the cities, and so
created the type of the Polis, repeated itself at the last in absurd
form; everyone wanted to live in the middle of the city, in its densest
nucleus, for otherwise he could not feel himself to be the urban man
that he was. All these cities are only _cités_, inner towns. The new
synœcism formed, instead of suburban zones, _the world of the upper
floors_. In the year 74 Rome, in spite of its immense population, had
the ridiculously small perimeter of nineteen and a half kilometres
[twelve miles].[148] Consequently these city-bodies extended in general
not in breadth, but more and more upward. The block-tenements of Rome
such as the famous Insula Feliculæ, rose, with a street breadth of only
three to five metres [ten to seventeen feet][149] to heights that have
never been seen in Western Europe and are seen in only a few cities
in America. Near the Capitol, the roofs already reached to the level
of the hill-saddle.[150] But always the splendid mass-cities harbour
lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and mansards,
the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man--in
Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London
and Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced
to living in one of these wretched upper-floor tenements of Rome.
But no wretchedness, no compulsion, not even a clear vision of the
madness of this development, avails to neutralize the attractive force
of these dæmonic creations. The wheel of Destiny rolls on to its end;
the birth of the City entails its death. Beginning and end, a peasant
cottage and a tenement-block are related to one another as soul and
intellect, as blood and stone. But “Time” is no abstract phrase, but a
name for the actuality of Irreversibility. Here there is only forward,
never back. Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and
nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country
dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams
of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited
waste of country. Once the full sinful beauty of this last marvel of
all history has captured a victim, it never lets him go. Primitive folk
can loose themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual
nomad never. Homesickness for the great city is keener than any
other nostalgia. Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but
even the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner die
upon the pavement than go “back” to the land. Even disgust at this
pretentiousness, weariness of the thousand-hued glitter, the _tædium
vitæ_ that in the end overcomes many, does not set them free. They take
the City with them into the mountains or on the sea. They have lost the
country within themselves and will never regain it outside.
What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but
this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever
decreasing, while the tensions of his waking-consciousness become
more and more dangerous. It must be remembered that in a microcosm
the animal, waking side supervenes upon the vegetable side, that of
being, and not vice versa. Beat and tension, blood and intellect,
Destiny and Causality are to one another as the country-side in bloom
is to the city of stone, as something existing _per se_ to something
existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it
is the transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but
tension. The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilizations, is
dominated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension. Intelligence
is only the capacity for understanding at high tension, and in every
Culture these heads are the types of its final men--one has only to
compare them with the peasant heads, when such happen to emerge in
the swirl of the great city’s street-life. The advance, too, from
peasant wisdom--“slimness,” mother wit, instinct, based as in other
animals upon the sensed beat of life--through the city-spirit to the
cosmopolitan intelligence--the very word with its sharp ring betraying
the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation--can be described
as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained
augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality.
Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by exercise in
thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejune. The intelligent visage is
similar in all races--what is recessive in them is, precisely, race.
The weaker the feeling for the necessity and self-evidence of Being,
the more the habit of “elucidation” grows, the more the fear in the
waking-consciousness comes to be stilled by causal methods. Hence the
assimilation of knowledge with demonstrability, and the substitution
of scientific theory, the causal myth, for the religious. Hence,
too, money-in-the-abstract as the pure causality of economic life,
in contrast to rustic barter, which is pulsation and not a system of
tensions.
Tension, when it has become intellectual, knows no form of recreation
but that which is specific to the world-city--namely, _détente_,
relaxation, distraction. Genuine play, _joie de vivre_, pleasure,
inebriation, are products of the cosmic beat and as such no longer
comprehensible in their essence. But the relief of hard, intensive
brain-work by its opposite--conscious and practised fooling--of
intellectual tension by the bodily tension of sport, of bodily
tension by the sensual straining after “pleasure” and the spiritual
straining after the “excitements” of betting and competitions, of the
pure logic of the day’s work by a consciously enjoyed mysticism--all
this is common to the world-cities of all the Civilizations. Cinema,
Expressionism, Theosophy, boxing contests, nigger dances, poker, and
racing--one can find it all in Rome. Indeed, the connoisseur might
extend his researches to the Indian, Chinese, and Arabian world-cities
as well. To name but one example, if one reads the Kama-sutram one
understands how it was that Buddhism _also_ appealed to men’s tastes,
and then the bullfighting scenes in the Palace of Cnossus will be
looked at with quite different eyes. A cult, no doubt, underlay
them, but there was a savour over it all, as over Rome’s fashionable
Isis-cult in the neighbourhood of the Circus Maximus.
And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking-Being
sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of
history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground
and now steps forward to make an end of the drama--the _sterility of
civilized man_. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain
matter of Causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to
grasp it); it is to be understood as an essentially _metaphysical_
turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer _wants_
to live--he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an
aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence
that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true
peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family
and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The
continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a
duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no
longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children
have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the
peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.
Let the reader try to merge himself in the soul of the peasant. He
has sat on his glebe from primeval times,[151] or has fastened his
clutch in it, to adhere to it with his blood. He is rooted in it as the
descendant of his forbears and as the forbear of future descendants.
_His_ house, _his_ property, means, here, not the temporary connexion
of person and thing for a brief span of years, but an enduring and
inward union of _eternal_ land and _eternal_ blood. It is only from
this mystical conviction of settlement that the great epochs of
the cycle--procreation, birth, and death--derive that metaphysical
element of wonder which condenses in the symbolism of custom and
religion that all land-bound people possess. For the “last men” all
this is past and gone. Intelligence and sterility are allied in old
families, old peoples, and old Cultures, not merely because in each
microcosm the overstrained and fettered animal-element is eating up
the plant element, but also because the waking-consciousness assumes
that being is normally regulated by causality. That which the man
of intelligence, most significantly and characteristically, labels
as “natural impulse” or “life-force,” he not only knows, but also
values, causally, giving it the place amongst his other needs that
his judgment assigns to it. When the ordinary thought of a highly
cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question
of _pro’s_ and _con’s_, the great turning-point has come. For Nature
knows nothing of _pro_ and _con_. Everywhere, wherever life is actual,
reigns an inward organic logic, an “it,” a drive, that is utterly
independent of waking-being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not
even observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples
is a _natural phenomenon_, which is not even thought about, still
less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to
be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become
questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of
births. In the Classical world the practice was deplored by Polybius
as the ruin of Greece, and yet even at his date it had long been
established in the great cities; in subsequent Roman times it became
appallingly general. At first explained by the economic misery of the
times, very soon it ceased to explain itself at all. And at that point,
too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a
man’s choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as
amongst peasants and primitives, but his own “companion for life,”
becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the
“higher spiritual affinity” in which both parties are “free”--free,
that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood
to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say “that
unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to
her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself,
she cannot emancipate herself.”[152] The primary woman, the peasant
woman, is _mother_. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned
from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen
woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature
from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has
soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual
understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children
is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or
the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen
heroine’s who “belongs to herself”--they all belong to themselves and
they are all unfruitful. The same fact, in conjunction with the same
arguments, is to be found in the Alexandrian, in the Roman, and, as a
matter of course, in every other civilized society--and conspicuously
in that in which Buddha grew up. And in Hellenism and in the nineteenth
century, as in the times of Lao-Tzu and the Charvaka doctrine,[153]
there is an ethic for childless intelligences, and a literature about
the inner conflicts of Nora and Nana. The “quiverful,” which was
still an honourable enough spectacle in the days of Werther, becomes
something rather provincial. The father of many children is for the
great city a subject for caricature; Ibsen did not fail to note it, and
presented it in his _Love’s Comedy_.
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for
centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man
vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the
provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has
incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile.
At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of
its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the _Fellah
type_.
If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing
to do with history, it is the familiar “decline” of the Classical,
which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic
migrants.[154] The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich
and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its
emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the
Cæsarism of no other Civilization can show. And yet the population
dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children
laws of Augustus--amongst them the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_,
which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus’s
legions--the wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of
soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted country-side, the
immense food-charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor
parents--nothing availed to check the process. Italy, then North Africa
and Gaul, and finally Spain, which under the early Cæsars had been one
of the most densely populated parts of the Empire, become empty and
desolate. The famous saying of Pliny--so often and so significantly
quoted to-day in connexion with national economics--“_Latifundia
perdidere Italiam, jam, vero et provincias_,”[155] inverts the order
of the process; the large estates would never have got to this point
if the peasantry had not already been sucked into the towns and, if
not openly, at any rate inwardly, surrendered their soil. The terrible
truth came out at last in the edict of Pertinax, A.D. 193, by which
anyone in Italy or the provinces was permitted to take possession of
untended land, and if he brought it under cultivation, to hold it
as his legal property. The historical student has only to turn his
attention seriously to other Civilizations to find the same phenomenon
everywhere. Depopulation can be distinctly traced in the background
of the Egyptian New Empire, especially from the XIX dynasty onwards.
Street widths like those to Amenophis IV at Tell-el-Amarna--of fifty
yards--would have been unthinkable with the denser population of
the old days. The onset of the “Sea-peoples,” too, was only barely
repulsed--their chances of obtaining possession of the realm were
certainly not less promising than those of the Germans of the fourth
century _vis-à-vis_ the Roman world. And finally the incessant
infiltration of Libyans into the Delta culminated when one of their
leaders seized the power, in 945 B.C.--precisely as Odoacer seized
it in A.D. 476. But the same tendency can be felt in the history of
political Buddhism after the Cæsar Asoka.[156] If the Maya population
literally vanished within a very short time after the Spanish conquest,
and their great empty cities were reabsorbed by the jungle, this
does not prove merely the brutality of the conqueror--which in this
regard would have been helpless before the self-renewing power of a
young and fruitful Culture-mankind--but an extinction from within
that no doubt had long been in progress. And if we turn to our own
civilization, we find that the old families of the French noblesse were
not, in the great majority of cases, eradicated in the Revolution,
but have died out since 1815, and their sterility has spread to
the bourgeoisie and, since 1870, to the peasantry which that very
Revolution almost re-created. In England, and still more in the United
States--particularly in the east, the very states where the stock is
best and oldest--the process of “race suicide” denounced by Roosevelt
set in long ago on the largest scale.
Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the
provincial cities at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn
at the end of the evolution, stand empty, harbouring in their stone
masses a small population of fellaheen who shelter in them as the men
of the Stone Age sheltered in caves and pile-dwellings.[157] Samarra
was abandoned by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital, was
an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese
traveller Hsinan-tang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the great
Maya cities must have been in that condition even in Cortez’s time. In
a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward[158] we read of
old, renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empty,
crumbling shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and
the amphitheatre is a sown field,[159] dotted with emergent statues and
herms. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a
village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable.
This, then, is the conclusion of the city’s history; growing from
primitive barter-centre to Culture-city and at last to world-city,
it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs
of its majestic evolution, and then the last flower of that growth
to the spirit of Civilization--and so, doomed, moves on to final
self-destruction.
VI
If the Early period is characterized by the birth of the City out of
the country, and the Late by the battle between city and country, the
period of Civilization is that of the victory of city over country,
whereby it frees itself from the grip of the ground, but to its own
ultimate ruin. Rootless, dead to the cosmic, irrevocably committed
to stone and to intellectualism, it develops a form-language that
reproduces every trait of its essence--not the language of a becoming
and growth, but that of a becomeness and completion, capable of
alteration certainly, but not of evolution. Not now Destiny, but
Causality, not now living Direction, but Extension, rules. It follows
from this that whereas every form-language of a Culture, together with
the history of its evolution, adheres to the original spot, civilized
forms are at home anywhere and capable, therefore, of unlimited
extension as soon as they appear. It is quite true that the Hanse Towns
in their north-Russian staples built Gothically, and the Spaniards in
South America in the Baroque style, but that even the smallest chapter
of Gothic style-_history_ should _evolve_ outside the limits of West
Europe was impossible, as impossible as that Attic or English drama,
or the art of fugue, or the Lutheran or the Orphic religion should be
propagated, or even inwardly assimilated, by men of alien Cultures.
But the essence of Alexandrinism and of our Romanticism is something
which belongs to all urban men without distinction. Romanticism marks
the beginning of that which Goethe, with his wide vision, called
world-literature--the literature of the leading world-_city_, against
which a provincial literature, native to the soil but negligible,
struggles everywhere with difficulty to maintain itself. The state of
Venice, or that of Frederick the Great, or the English Parliament (as
an effective reality), cannot be reproduced, but “modern constitutions”
can be “introduced” into any African or Asiatic state as Classical
Poleis could be set up amongst Numidians and ancient Britons. In
Egypt the writing that came into common use was not the hieroglyphic,
but the letter-script, which was without doubt a technical discovery
of the Civilization Age.[160] And so in general--it is not true
Culture-languages like the Greek of Sophocles or the German of Luther,
but world-languages like the Greek Koine and Arabic and Babylonian and
English, the outcome of daily practical usage in a world-city, which
are capable of being acquired by anybody and everybody. Consequently,
in all Civilizations the “modern” cities assume a more and more uniform
type. Go where we may, there are Berlin, London, and New York for us,
just as the Roman traveller would find his columnar architecture,
his fora with their statuary, and his temples in Palmyra or Trier or
Timgad or the Hellenistic cities that extended out to the Indus and
the Aral. But that which was thus disseminated was no longer a style,
but a taste, not genuine custom but mannerism, not national costume
but the fashion. This, of course, makes it possible for remote peoples
not only to accept the “permanent” gains of a Civilization, but even
to re-radiate them in an independent form. Such regions of “moonlight”
civilization are south China and especially Japan (which were first
Sinized at the close of the Han period, about A.D. 220); Java as a
relay of the Brahman Civilization; and Carthage, which obtained its
forms from Babylon.
All these are forms of a waking-consciousness now acute to excess,
mitigated or limited by no cosmic force, purely intellectual and
extensive, but on that very account capable of so powerful an output
that their last flickering rays reach out and superpose effects over
almost the whole earth. Fragments of the forms of Chinese Civilization
are probably to be found in Scandinavian wood-architecture, Babylonian
measures probably in the South Seas, Classical coins in South Africa,
Egyptian and Indian influences probably in the land of the Incas.
But while this process of extension was overpassing all frontiers,
the development of inner form of the Civilization was fulfilling
itself with impressive consistency. Three stages are clearly to be
distinguished--the release from the Culture, the production of the
thoroughbred Civilization-form, and the final hardening. For us this
development has now set in, and, as I see it, it is Germany that is
destined, as the last nation of the West, to crown the mighty edifice.
In this stage all questions of the life--the Apollinian, Magian, or
Faustian life--have been thought upon to the limit, and brought to a
final clear condition of knowledge and not-knowledge. For or about
ideas men fight no more. The last idea--that of the Civilization
itself--is formulated in outline, and technics and economics are, as
_problems_, enunciated and prepared for handling. But this is only
the beginning of a vast task; the postulates have to be unfolded and
these forms applied to the whole existence of the earth. Only when
this has been accomplished and the Civilization has become definitely
established not only in shape, but in mass, does the hardening of
the form set in. Style, in the Cultures, has been the _rhythm of
the process of self-implementing_. But the Civilized style (if we
may use the word at all) arises as the _expression of the state of
completeness_. It attains--in Egypt and China especially--to a splendid
perfection, and imparts this perfection to all the utterances of a life
that is now inwardly unalterable, to its ceremonial and mien as to the
superfine and studied forms of its art-practice. Of history, in the
sense of an urge towards a form-ideal, there can now be no question,
but there is an unfailing and easy superficial adaptiveness which again
and again manages to coax fresh little art-problems and solutions
out of the now basically stable language. Of this kind is the whole
“history” of Chinese-Japanese painting (as we know it) and of Indian
architecture. And just as the real history of the Gothic style differs
from this pseudo-history, so the Knight of the Crusades differs from
the Chinese Mandarin--_the becoming state from the finished_. The one
_is_ history; the other has long ago overcome history. “Long ago,” I
say; for the history of these Civilizations is merely apparent, like
their great cities, which constantly change in face, but never become
other than what they are. In these cities there is no Soul. They are
land in petrified form.
What is it that perishes here? And what that survives? It is a mere
incident that German peoples, under pressure from the Huns, take
possession of the Roman landscape and so prevent the Classical from
prolonging itself in a “Chinese” end-state. The movement of the
“Sea-peoples” (similar to the Germanic, even down to the details) which
set in against the Egyptian Civilization from 1400 B.C. succeeded
only as regards the Cretan island-realm--their mighty expeditions
against the Libyan and Phœnician coasts, with the accompaniment of
Viking fleets, failed, as those of the Huns failed against China. And
thus the Classical is our one example of a Civilization broken off
in the moment of full splendour. Yet the Germans only destroyed the
upper layer of the forms and replaced it by the life of their own
pre-Culture. The “eternal” layer was never reached. It remains, hidden
and completely shrouded by a new form-language, in the underground
of the whole following history, and to this day in southern France,
southern Italy, and northern Spain tangible relics of it endure. In
these countries the popular Catholicism is tinged from beneath with a
Late Classical colouring, that sets it off quite distinctly from the
Church Catholicism of the West-European layer above it. South Italian
Church-festivals disclose Classical (and even pre-Classical) cults, and
generally in this field there are to be found deities (saints) in whose
worship the Classical constitution is visible behind the Catholic names.
Here, however, another element comes into the picture, an element with
a significance of its own. We stand before the problem of Race.
CHAPTER V
CITIES AND PEOPLES
(B)
PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES
I
Throughout the nineteenth century the scientific picture of history
was vitiated by a notion that was either derived from, or at any rate
brought to a point by, Romanticism--the idea of the “People” in the
moral-enthusiastic sense of the word. If, here and there, in earlier
time a new religion, a new ornamentation, a new architecture, or a
new script appeared, the question that it raised presented itself to
the investigator thus--What was the name of the _people_ who produced
the phenomenon? This enunciation of the problem is peculiar to the
Western spirit and the present-day cast of that spirit; but it is so
false at every point that the picture that it evokes of the course of
events must necessarily be erroneous. “The people” as the absolute
basic form in which men are historically effective, the original home,
the original settlement, the migrations of “the” peoples--all this is
a reflection of the vibrant idea expressed in the “_Nation_” of 1789,
of the “_Volk_” of 1813, both of which, in last analysis, are derived
from the self-assuredness of England and Puritanism. But the very
intensity of passion that the idea contains has protected it only too
well from criticism. Even acute investigators have unwittingly made it
cover a multitude of utterly dissimilar things, with the result that
“peoples” have developed into definite and supposedly well-understood
unit-quantities by which all history is _made_. For us, to-day,
world-history means--what it cannot be asserted to mean self-evidently,
or to mean for, e.g., the Greeks and the Chinese--the history of
Peoples. Everything else, Culture, speech, wit, religion, is created by
the peoples. The State is the form of a people.
The purpose of this chapter is to demolish this romantic conception.
What has inhabited the earth since the Ice Age is man, not “peoples.”
In the first instance, their Destiny is determined by the fact that the
bodily succession of parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms
natural groups, which disclose a definite tendency to take root in a
landscape. Even nomadic tribes confine their movements within a limited
field. Thereby the cosmic-plantlike side of life, of Being, is invested
with a character of duration. This I call _race_. Tribes, septs, clans,
families--all these are designations for the fact of a blood which
circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or a wide landscape.
But these human beings possess also the microcosmic-animal side of
life, in waking-consciousness and receptivity and reason. And the
form in which the waking-consciousness of one man gets into relation
with that of another I call _language_, which begins by being a mere
unconscious living expression that is received as a sensation, but
gradually develops into a conscious _technique of communication_ that
depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching to signs.
In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every
language[161] the efficient form of _one_ great waking-consciousness
that connects many individual beings. And we shall never reach the
ultimate discoveries about either unless they are treated together and
constantly brought into comparison with one another.
But, further, we shall never understand man’s higher history if we
ignore the fact that man, as constituent of a race and as possessor
of a language, as derivative of a blood-unit and as member of an
understanding-unit, has different Destinies, that of his being and that
of his waking-being. That is, the origin, development, and duration of
his race side and the origin, development, and duration of his language
side are _completely independent of one another_. Race is _something
cosmic and psychic_ (_Seelenhaft_), periodic in some obscure way, and
in its inner nature partly conditioned by major astronomical relations.
Languages, on the other hand, are causal forms, and operate through the
polarity of their means. We speak of race-instincts and of the spirit
of a language. But they are two distinct _worlds_. To Race belong the
deepest meanings of the words “time” and “yearning”; to language those
of the words “space” and “fear.” But all this has been hidden from us,
hitherto, by the overlying idea of “peoples.”
There are, then, _currents of being_ and _linkages of waking-being_.
The former have physiognomy, the latter are based on system. Race,
as seen in the picture of the world-around, is the aggregate of all
bodily characters so far as these exist for the sense-perceptions of
conscious creatures. Here we have to remember that a body develops
and fulfils from childhood to old age the specific inner form that
was assigned to it at the moment of its conception, while at the
same time that which the body is (considered apart from its form) is
perpetually being renewed. Consequently nothing of the body actually
remains in the man except the living meaning of his existence, and of
this all that we know is so much as presents itself in the world of
waking-consciousness. Man of the higher sort is limited, as to the
impression of race that he can receive, almost wholly to what appears
in the light-world of his eye, so that for him race is essentially
a sum of _visible_ characters. But even for him there are not
inconsiderable relics of the power to observe non-optical characters
such as smell, the cries of animals, and, above all, the modalities
of human speech. In the other higher animals, on the contrary, the
capacity to receive the impression of race is decidedly _not_ dominated
by sight. Scent is stronger, and, besides, the animals have modes of
sensation that entirely elude human understanding. It is, however, only
men and animals that can _receive the impression of race_, and not
the plants, and yet these too _have_ race, as every nurseryman knows.
It is, to me, a sight of deep pathos to see how the spring flowers,
craving to fertilize and be fertilized, cannot for all their bright
splendour attract one another, or even see one another, but must have
recourse to animals, for whom alone these colours and these scents
exist.
“Language” I call the entire free activity of the waking microcosm
in so far as it brings something to expression _for others_. Plants
have no waking-being, no capacity of being moved, and therefore no
language. The waking-consciousness of animal existences, on the
contrary, is through and through a speaking, whether individual
acts are intended to tell or not, and even if the conscious or the
unconscious purpose of the doing lies in a quite other direction. A
peacock is indubitably speaking when he spreads his tail, but a kitten
playing with a cotton-reel also speaks to us, unconsciously, through
the quaint charm of its movements. Everyone knows the difference there
is in one’s movements according as one is conscious or unconscious of
being observed; one suddenly begins to speak, consciously, in all one’s
actions.
This, however, leads at once to the very significant distinction
between two genera of language--the language which is only an
_expression for the world_, an inward necessity springing from the
longing inherent in all life to actualize itself before witnesses,
to display its own presence to itself, and the language that is
meant to be _understood by definite beings_. There are, therefore,
_expression-languages_ and _communication-languages_. The former assume
only a state of waking-being, the latter a connexion of waking-beings.
To understand means to respond to the stimulus of a signal with
one’s own feeling of its significance. To understand one another, to
hold “conversation,” to speak to a “thou,” supposes, therefore, a
sense of meanings in the other that corresponds to that in oneself.
Expression-language before witnesses merely proves the presence of an
“I,” but communication-language postulates a “thou.” The “I” is that
which speaks, and the “thou” that which is meant to understand the
speech of the “I.” For primitives a tree, a stone, or a cloud can be a
“thou.” Every deity is a “thou.” In fairy-tales there is nothing that
cannot hold converse with men, and we need only look at our own selves
in moments of furious irritation or of poetic excitement to realize
that anything can become a “thou” for us even to-day. And it is by some
“thou” that we first came to the knowledge of an “I.” “I,” therefore,
is a designation for the fact that a bridge exists to some other being.
It is impossible, however, to delimit an exact frontier
between religious and artistic expression-languages and pure
communication-languages. This is true also (and indeed specially)
of the higher Cultures with the separate development of their
form-domains. For, on the one hand, no one can speak without putting
into his mode of speech some significant trait of emphasis that has
nothing to do with the needs of communication as such; and, on the
other hand, we all know the drama in which the poet wants to “say”
something that he could have said equally well or better in an
exhortation, and the painting whose contents are meant to instruct,
warn, or improve--the picture-series in any Greek Orthodox church,
which conforms to a strict canon and has the avowed purpose of making
the truths of religion clear to a beholder to whom the book says
nothing; or Hogarth’s substitute for sermons; or, for that matter,
even prayer, the direct address to God, which also can be replaced by
the performance before one’s eyes of cult-ritual that speaks to one
intelligibly. The theoretical controversy concerning the purpose of art
rests upon the postulate that an artistic expression-language should in
no wise be a communication-language, and the phenomenon of priesthood
is based upon the persuasion that the priest alone knows the language
in which man can communicate with God.
All currents of Being bear a historical, and all linkages of
Waking-Being a religious, stamp. What we know to be inherent in every
genuine religious or artistic form-language, and particularly in the
history of every script (for writing is verbal language for the eye),
holds good without doubt for the origin of human articulate speech
in general--indeed the prime words (of the structure of which we now
know nothing whatever) must also certainly have had a cult-colouring.
But there is a corresponding linkage on the other side between Race
and everything that we call life (as struggle for power), History (as
Destiny), or, to-day, politics. It is perhaps too fantastic to argue
something of political instinct in the search of a climbing plant for
points of attachment that shall enable it to encircle, overpower, and
choke the tree in order finally to rear itself high in the air above
the tree-top--or something of religious world-feeling in the song of
the mounting lark. But it is certain that from such things as these the
utterances of being and of waking-being, of pulse and tension, form an
uninterrupted series up to the perfected political and religious forms
of every modern Civilization.
And here at last is the key to those two strange words which were
discovered by the ethnologists in two entirely different parts of the
world in rather limited applications, but have since been quietly
moving up into the foreground of research--“_totem_” and “_taboo_.”
The more enigmatic and indefinable these words became, the more it was
felt that in them we were touching upon an ultimate life-basis which
was not that of merely primitive man. And now, as the result of the
above inquiry, we have clear meanings for both before us. Totem and
Taboo describe the ultimate meanings of Being and Waking-Being, Destiny
and Causality, Race and Language, Time and Space, yearning and fear,
pulse and tension, politics and religion. The Totem side of life is
plantlike and inheres in all being, while the Taboo side is animal
and presupposes the free movement of a being in a world. Our Totem
organs are those of the blood-circulation and of reproduction, our
Taboo organs those of the senses and the nerves. All that is of Totem
has physiognomy, all that is of Taboo has system. In the Totemistic
resides the common feeling of beings that belong to the same stream
of existence. It cannot be acquired and cannot be got rid of; it is a
fact, _the_ fact of all facts. That which is of Taboo, on the other
hand, is the characteristic of linkages of waking-consciousness, it is
learnable and acquirable, and on that very account guarded as a secret
by cult-communities, philosophers’ schools, and artists’ guilds--each
of which possesses a sort of cryptic language of its own.[162]
But Being can be thought of without waking-consciousness, whereas
the reverse is not the case--i.e., there are race-beings without
language, but no languages without race. All that is of race,
therefore, possesses its proper expression, independent of any
kind of waking-consciousness and common to plant and animal. This
expression--not to be confounded with the expression-_language_ which
consists in an _active alteration_ of the expression--is not meant
for witnesses, but is simply there; it is physiognomy. Not that it
stops at the plant; in every living language, too (and how significant
the word “living”!) we can detect, besides the Taboo side that is
learnable, an entirely untransferable quality of race that the old
vessels of the language cannot pass on to alien successors; it lies in
melody, rhythm, stress; in colour, ring, and tempo of the expression;
in idiom, in accompanying gesture. On this account it is necessary to
distinguish between language and speaking, the first being in itself
a dead stock of signs, and the second the activity that operates with
the signs.[163] When we cease to be able to hear and see directly how a
language is spoken, thenceforward it is only its ossature and not its
flesh that we can know. This is so with Sumerian, Gothic, Sanskrit,
and all other languages that we have merely deciphered from texts and
inscriptions, and we are right in calling these languages dead, for
the human communities that were formed by them have vanished. We know
the Egyptian tongue, but not the tongues of the Egyptians. Of Augustan
Latin we know approximately the sound-values of the letters and the
meaning of the words, but we do not know how the oration of Cicero
sounded from the rostra and still less how Hesiod and Sappho spoke
their verses, or what a conversation in the Athenian market-place was
really like. If in the Gothic age Latin came into actual speech again,
it was as a new language; this Gothic Latin did not take long to pass
from the formation of rhythms and sounds characteristic of itself (but
which our imagination to-day cannot recapture, any more than those of
old Latin) to encroachments upon the word-meanings and the syntax as
well. But the anti-Gothic Latin of the Humanists, too, which was meant
to be Ciceronian, was anything but a revival. The whole significance of
the race-element in language can be measured by comparing the German of
Nietzsche and of Mommsen, the French of Diderot and of Napoleon, and
observing that in idiom Voltaire and Lessing are much closer together
than Lessing and Hölderlin.
It is the same with the most telling of all the expression-languages,
art. The Taboo side--namely, the stock of forms, the rules of
convention, and style in so far as it means an armoury of established
expedients (like vocabulary and syntax in verbal language)--stands
for the language itself, which can be learned. And it is learned
and transmitted in the tradition of the great schools of painting,
the cottage-building tradition, and generally in the strict
craft-discipline which every genuine art possesses as a matter of
course and which in all ages has been meant to give the sure command
of the idiom that at a particular time is quite definitely living
idiom of that time. For in this domain, too, there are living and dead
languages. The form-language of an art can only be called living, when
the artist corps as a whole employs it like a mother tongue, which one
uses without even thinking about its structure. In this sense Gothic
in the sixteenth century and Rococo in 1800 were both dead languages.
Contrast the unqualified sureness with which architects and musicians
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries expressed themselves
with the hesitations of Beethoven, the painfully acquired, almost
self-taught, _philological_ art of Schinkel and Schadow,[164] the
manglings of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Neo-Gothics, and the baffled
experimentalism of present-day artists.
In an artistic form-language, as presented to us by its products, the
voice of the Totem side, the race, makes itself heard, and not less
so in individual artists than in whole generations of artists. The
creators of the Doric temples of South Italy and Sicily, and those
of the brick Gothic of North Germany were emphatically race-men, and
so too the German musicians from Heinrich Schütz to Johann Sebastian
Bach. To the Totem side belong the influences of the cosmic cycles--the
importance of which in the structure of art-history has hardly been
suspected, let alone established--and the creative times of spring and
love-stirrings which (apart altogether from the executive sureness in
imparting form) determine the force of the forms and the depth of the
conceptions. The formalists are explained by depth of world-fear or by
defect of “race,” and the great formless ones by plethora of blood or
defect of discipline. We comprehend that there is a difference between
the history of artists and that of styles, and that the language of an
art may be carried from country to country, but mastery in speaking it,
never.
A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant
takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we
can, without absurdity, work backwards from a race to its “home,” but
it is much more important to realize that the race adheres permanently
to this home with some of its most essential characters of body and
soul. If in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the
race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and
their successive generations are born in ever-changing landscapes; but
the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant-nature in them,
and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by the
extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and
Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither
_as_ Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there _as_
Americans. It has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has
made its mark upon them--generation by generation they become more and
more like the people they eradicated. Gould and Baxter have shown that
Whites of all races, Indians, and Negroes have come to the same average
in size of body and time of maturity--and that so rapidly that Irish
immigrants, arriving young and developing very slowly, come under this
power of the landscape within the same generation. Boas has shown that
the American-born children of long-headed Sicilian and short-headed
German Jews at once conform to the same head-type. This is not a
special case, but a general phenomenon, and it should serve to make us
very cautious in dealing with those migrations of history about which
we know nothing more than some names of vagrant tribes and relics of
languages (e.g., Danai, Etruscans, Pelasgi, Achæans, and Dorians). As
to the race of these “peoples” we can conclude nothing whatever. That
which flowed into the lands of southern Europe under the diverse names
of Goths, Lombards, and Vandals was without doubt a race in itself. But
already by Renaissance times it had completely grown itself into the
root characters of the Provençal, Castilian, and Tuscan soil.
Not so with language. The home of a language means merely the
accidental place of its formation, and this has no relation to its
inner form. Languages migrate in that they spread by carriage from
tribe to tribe. Above all, they are capable of being, and are,
exchanged--indeed, in studying the early history of races we need not,
and should not, feel the slightest hesitation about postulating such
speech-changes. It is, I repeat, the form-content and not the speaking
of a language that is taken over, and it is taken over (as primitives
are for ever taking over ornament-motives) in order to be used with
perfect sureness as elements of their own form-language. In early times
the fact that a people has shown itself the stronger, or the feeling
that its language possesses superior efficacy, is enough to induce
others to give up their own language and--with genuinely religious
awe--to take its language to themselves. Follow out the speech-changes
of the Normans, whom we find in Normandy, England, Sicily, and
Constantinople with different languages in each place, and ever ready
to exchange one for another. Piety towards the mother tongue--the very
term testifies to deep ethical forces, and accounts for the bitterness
of our ever-recurring language-battles--is a trait of the _Late_
Western soul, almost unknowable for the men of other Cultures and
entirely so for the primitive. Unfortunately, our historians not only
are sensible of this, but tacitly extend it as a postulate over their
entire field, which leads to a multitude of fallacious conclusions
as to the bearing of linguistic discoveries upon the fortunes of
“peoples”--think of the reconstruction of the “Dorian migration,”
argued from the distribution of later Greek dialects. It is impossible,
therefore, to draw conclusions as to the fortunes of the race side
of peoples from mere place-names, personal names, inscriptions, and
dialects. Never do we know _a priori_, whether a folkname stands for
a language-body, or a race-part, or both, or neither--besides which,
folk-names themselves, and even land-names, have, as such, Destinies of
their own.
II
Of all expressions of race, the purest is the House. From the moment
when man, becoming sedentary, ceases to be content with mere shelter
and builds himself a dwelling, this expression makes its appearance
and marks off, within the race “man” (which is the element of the
_biological_ world-picture[165]) the human races of world-history
proper, which are streams of being of far greater spiritual
significance. The prime form of the house is everywhere a product of
feeling and of growth, never at all of knowledge. Like the shell of the
nautilus, the hive of the bee, the nest of the bird, it has an innate
self-evidentness, and every trait of original custom and form of being,
of marriage, of family life, and of tribal order is reflected in the
place and in the room-organization of parterre, hall, wigwam, atrium,
court, chamber, and gynæceum. One need only compare the lay-out of the
old Saxon and that of the Roman house to feel that the soul of the men
and the soul of the house were in each case identical.
This domain art-history ought never to have laid its hands on. It was
an error to treat the building of the dwelling-house as a branch of the
art of architecture. It is a form that arises in the obscure courses
of being and not for the eye that looks for forms in the light; no
room-scheme of the boor’s hovel was ever thought out by an architect as
the scheme of a cathedral was thought out. This significant frontier
line has escaped the observation of art-research--although Dehio[166]
in one place remarks that the old German wooden house has nothing to do
with the later great architecture, which arose quite independently--and
the result has been a perpetual perplexity in method, of which the
art-savant is sensible enough, but which he cannot understand. His
science gathers, indiscriminately in all the “pre-” and “primitive”
periods, all sorts of gear, arms, pottery, fabrics, funerary monuments,
and houses, and considers them from the point of view of form as well
as that of decoration; and, proceeding thus, it is not until he comes
to the _organic_ history of painting, sculpture, and architecture
(i.e., the self-contained and differentiated arts) that he finds
himself on firm ground. But, unknowing, he has stepped over a frontier
between two worlds, that of soul-_expression_ and that of visual
expression-_language_. The house, and like it the completely unstudied
basic (i.e., customary) forms of pots, weapons, clothing, and gear,
belong to the Totem side. They characterize, not a taste, but a way of
fighting, of dwelling, of working. Every primitive seat is the offset
of a racial mode of body-posing, every jar-handle an extension of the
supple arm. Domestic painting and dressmaking, the garment as ornament,
the decoration of weapons and implements, belong, on the contrary, to
the Taboo side of life, and indeed for primitive man the patterns and
motives on these things possess even magical properties.[167] We all
know the Germanic sword-blades of the Migrations with their Oriental
ornamentation, and the Mycenæan strongholds with their Minoan artistry.
It is the distinction between blood and sense, race and speech,
_politics and religion_.
There is, in fact, as yet no world-history of the House and its Races,
and to give us such a history should be one of the most urgent tasks
of the researcher. But we must work with means quite other than those
of art-history. The peasant dwelling is, as compared with the tempo of
all _art_-history, something constant and “eternal” like the peasant
himself. It stands outside the Culture and therefore outside the higher
history of man; it recognizes neither the temporal nor the spacial
limits of this history and it maintains itself, unaltered ideally,
throughout all the changes of architecture, which it witnesses, but in
which it does not participate. The round hut of ancient Italy is still
found in Imperial times.[168] The form of the Roman rectangular house,
the existence-mark of a second race, is found in Pompeii and even in
the Imperial palaces. Every sort of ornament and style was borrowed
from the Orient, but no Roman would ever think of imitating the Syrian
house,[169] any more than the Hellenistic city-architect tampered with
the megaron form of Mycenæ and Tiryns and the old Greek peasant-house
described by Galen. The Saxon and Franconian peasant-house kept its
essential nucleus unimpaired right from the country farm, through the
burgher-house of the old Free Cities, up to the patrician buildings
of the eighteenth century, while Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and
Empire styles glided over it one after the other, clothing it from
cellar to garret with _their_ essences, but never perverting the Soul
of the House. And the same is true of the furniture-forms, in which
we have to distinguish carefully the psychological from the artistic
treatment. In particular, the evolution of the Northern seat-furniture
is, right up to the club arm-chair, a piece of race-history and not
of what is called style-history. Every other character can deceive us
as to the fortunes of race--the Etruscan names amongst the “Sea-folk”
defeated by Rameses III, the enigmatic inscription of Lemnos, the
wall-paintings in the tombs of Etruria, afford no sure evidences of the
bodily connexion of these men. Although towards the end of the Stone
Age a telling ornamentation arose and continued in the vast region
east of the Carpathians, it is perfectly possible that race superseded
race there. If we possessed in western Europe only pottery remains
for the centuries between Trojan and Chlodwig, we should not have the
least inkling of the event that we know as the “great Migrations.”
But the presence of an oval house in the Ægean region[170] and of
another and very striking example of it in Rhodesia,[171] and the
much-discussed concordance of the Saxon peasant-house with that of the
Libyan Kabyle disclose a piece of race-history. Ornaments spread when
a people incorporates them in its form-language, but a house-type is
only transplanted along with its race. The disappearance of an ornament
means no more than a change of language, _but when a house-type
vanishes it means that race is extinguished_.
It follows that art-history, besides taking care to begin properly with
the Culture, must not neglect even in its course to separate the race
side carefully from the language proper. At the outset of a Culture
two well-defined forms of a higher order rise up over the peasant
village, as expressions of being and language of waking-being. They
are the _castle_ and the _cathedral_.[172] In them the distinction
between Totem and Taboo, longing and fear, blood and intellect, rises
to a grand symbolism. The ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chinese, the
Classical, the South-Arabian, and the Western castle stands, as the
home of continuing generations, very near to the peasant cottage,
and both, as copies of the realities of living, breeding, and dying,
lie outside all art-history. The history of the German _Burgen_ is a
piece of race-history throughout. On them both, early ornament does
indeed venture to spread itself, beautifying here the beams, there
the door, and there again the staircase, but it can be so, or so, at
choice, or omitted altogether, for there is no inward bond between the
structure and the ornament. The cathedral, on the other hand, is not
ornamented, but _is itself ornament_. Its history is coincident with
that of the Gothic style, and the same is true of the Doric temple and
all other Early Culture buildings. So complete is the congruence, in
the Western and every other Culture whose art we know at all, that it
has never occurred to anyone to be astonished at the fact that strict
architecture (which is simply the highest form of pure ornament) is
entirely confined to religious building. All the beauty of architecture
that there is in Gelnhausen, Goslar, and the Wartburg has been _taken
over_ from cathedral art; it is decoration and not essence. A castle or
a sword or a pitcher can do without this decoration altogether without
losing its meaning or even its form.[173] But in a Cathedral, or an
Egyptian pyramid-temple, such a distinction between essence and art is
simply inconceivable.
We distinguish, then, the building that _has a style_ and the building
_in which_ men have a style. Whereas in monastery and cathedral it is
the stone that possesses form and communicates it to the men who are in
its service, in farmhouse and feudal stronghold it is the full strength
of the countryman’s and the knight’s life that forms the building forth
from itself. Here the man and not the stone comes first, and here, too,
there is an ornamentation; it is an ornament which is proper to man and
consists in the strict nature and stable form _of manners and customs_.
We might call this living, as distinct from rigid, style. But, just
as the power of this living form lays hands on the priesthood also,
creating in Gothic and in Vedic times the type of the knightly priest,
so the Romanesque-Gothic _sacred_ form-language seizes upon everything
pertaining to this secular life--costume, arms, rooms, implements, and
so forth--and stylizes their surface. But art-history must not let
itself lose its bearings in this alien world--it is only the surface.
In the early cities it is the same; nothing new supervenes. Amongst
the race-made houses, which now form streets, there are scattered
the handful of cult-buildings that _have_ style. And, as having it,
they are the seats of art-history and the sources whence its forms
radiate out on to squares, façades, and house-rooms. Even though the
castle develops into the urban palace and patrician residence, and the
_palatium_ and the men’s hall, into guild-house and town-hall, one
and all they receive and carry a style, they do not _have_ it. True,
at the stage of real burgherdom the metaphysical creativeness of the
early religion has been lost. It develops the ornament further, _but
not the building as ornament_, and from this point art-history splits
up into the histories of the separate arts. The picture, the statue,
the house, become particular objects to which the style is to be
applied. Even the church itself is now such a house. A Gothic cathedral
_is_ ornament, but a Baroque hall-church is a building clothed with
ornament. The process begun in the Ionic style and the sixteenth
century is completed in the Corinthian and Rococo, wherein the house
and its ornament are separated for good and all, so completely
that even the master-works amongst eighteenth-century churches and
monasteries cannot mislead us--we know that all this art of theirs is
secular, is adornment. With Empire the style transforms itself into
a “taste,” and with the end of this mode architecture turns into a
craft-art. And that is the end of the ornamental expression-language,
and of art-history with it. But the peasant-house, with its unaltered
race-form, lives on.
III
The practical importance of the house as race-expression begins to
be appreciated as and when one realizes the immense difficulty of
approaching the kernel of race. I do not refer to its inner essence,
its soul--as to that, feeling speaks to us clearly enough and we all
know a man of race, a “thoroughbred,” when we see one. But what are
the hall-marks for our sense, and above all for our eye, by which we
recognize and distinguish races? This is a matter that belongs to the
domain of Physiognomic just as surely as the classification of tongues
belongs to that of Systematic. But how immense and how varied the
material that would be required! How much of it is irretrievably lost
by destruction, and how much more by corruption! In the most favourable
cases, what we have of prehistoric men is their skeletons, and how much
does a skeleton _not_ tell us! Very nearly everything. Prehistoric
research in its naïve zeal is ready to deduce the incredible from
a jaw-bone or an arm-bone. But think of one of those mass-graves
of the War in northern France, in which we _know_ that men of all
races, white and coloured, peasants and townsmen, youths and men lie
together. If the future had no collateral evidence as to their nature,
it would certainly not be enlightened by anthropological research.
In other words, immense dramas of race can pass over a land without
the investigator of its grave-skeletons obtaining the least hint of
the fact. It is the _living_ body that carries nine-tenths of the
expression--not the articulation of the parts, but their articulate
motions; not the bone of the face, but its mien. And, for that matter,
how much potentially interpretable race-expression is actually observed
even by the keenest-sensed contemporary? How much we _fail_ to see and
to hear! What is it for which--unlike many species of beasts--we lack a
sense-organ?
The science of the Darwinian age met this question with an easy
assurance. How superficial, how glib, how mechanistic the conception
with which it worked! In the first place, this conception groups an
aggregate of such grossly palpable characters as are observable in the
anatomy of the discoveries--that is, characters that even a corpse
displays. As to observing the body qua living thing, there is no
question of it. Secondly, it investigates only those signs which very
little perspicacity is needed to detect, and investigates them only in
so far as they are measurable and countable. The microscope and not
the pulse-sense determines. When language is used as a differentia, it
is to classify races, not according to their _way of speaking_, but
according to the grammatical _structure of the speech_, which is just
anatomy and system of another sort. No one as yet has perceived that
the investigation of these _speech-races_ is one of the most important
tasks that research can possibly set itself. In the actuality of daily
experience we all know perfectly well that the way of speaking is one
of the most distinctive traits in present-day man--examples are legion;
each of us knows any number of them. In Alexandria the same Greek was
spoken in the most dissimilar race-modes, as we can see even to-day
from the script of the texts. In North America the native-born speak
exactly alike, whether in English, in German, or for that matter in
Indian. What in the speech of East-European Jews is a race-trait of the
land, and present therefore in Russian also, and what is a race-trait
of the blood common to all Jews, independent of their habitat and their
hosts, in their speaking of any of the European “mother”-tongues? What
in detail are the relations of the sound-formations, the accentuations,
the placing of words?
But science has completely failed to note that race is not the
same for rooted plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the
microcosmic side of life a fresh group of characters appears, and that
for the animal world it is decisive. Nor again has it perceived that
a completely different significance must be attached to “races” when
the word denotes subdivisions _within the integral race “Man.”_ With
its talk of adaptation and of inheritance it sets up a soulless causal
concatenation of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that
here the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are
expressing themselves--secrets that cannot be inspected and measured,
but only livingly experienced and felt from eye to eye.
Nor are the scientists at one as to the relative rank of these
superficial characters amongst themselves. Blumenbach classified the
races of man according to skull-forms, Friedrich Müller (as a true
German) by hair and language-structure, Topinard (as a true Frenchman)
by skin-colour and shape of nose, and Huxley (as a true Englishman) by,
so to say, sport characteristics. This last is undoubtedly in itself a
very suitable criterion, but any judge of horses would tell him that
breed-characteristics cannot be hit off by scientific terminology.
These “descriptions” of races are without exception as worthless as
the descriptions of “wanted” men on which policemen exercise their
theoretical knowledge of men.
Obviously, the _chaotic_ in the total expression of the human body
is not in the least realized. Quite apart from smell (which for the
Chinese, for example, is a most characteristic mark of race) and sound
(the sound of speech, song, and, above all, laughter, which enables
us accurately to sense deep differences inaccessible to scientific
method) the profusion of images before the eye is so embarrassingly
rich in details, either actually visible or sensible to the inner
vision, that the possibility of marshalling them under a few aspects
is simply unthinkable. And all these sides to the picture, all these
traits composing it, are independent of one another and have each
their individual history. There are cases in which the bony structure
(and particularly the skull-form) completely alter without the
expression of the fleshy parts--i.e., the face--becoming different.
The brothers and sisters of the same family may all present almost
every differentia posited by Blumenbach, Müller, and Huxley, and yet
the identity of their living race-expression may be patent to anyone
who looks at them. Still more frequent is similarity of bodily build
accompanied by thorough diversity of living expression--I need only
mention the immeasurable difference between genuine peasant-stock,
like the Frisians or the Bretons, and genuine city-stock.[174]
But besides the energy of the blood--which coins the same living
features (“family” traits) over and over again for centuries--and
the power of the soil--evidenced in its stamp of man--there is that
mysterious cosmic force of the syntony of close human connexions.
What is called the “_Versehen_” of a pregnant woman[175] is only a
particular and not very important instance of the workings of a very
deep and powerful formative principle inherent in all that is of the
race side. It is a matter of common observation that elderly married
people become strangely like one another, although probably Science
with its measuring instruments would “prove” the exact opposite. It
is impossible to exaggerate the formative power of this living pulse,
this strong inward feeling for the perfection of one’s own type. The
feeling for race-beauty--so opposite to the conscious taste of ripe
urbans for intellectual-individual traits of beauty--is immensely
strong in primitive men, and for that very reason never emerges into
their consciousness. But such a feeling is race-forming. It undoubtedly
moulded the warrior- and hero-type of a nomad tribe more and more
definitely on _one bodily ideal_, so that it would have been quite
unambiguous to speak of the race-figure of Romans or Ostrogoths. The
same is true of any ancient nobility--filled with a strong and deep
sense of its own unity, it achieves the formation of a bodily ideal.
Comradeship breeds races. French _noblesse_ and Prussian _Landadel_
are genuine race-denotations. But it is just this, too, that has bred
the types of the European Jew, with his immense race-energy and his
thousand years of ghetto life; and it always will forge a population
into a race whenever it has stood for long together spiritually firm
and united in the presence of its Destiny. Where a race-ideal exists,
as it does, supremely, in the Early period of the Culture--the Vedic,
the Homeric, the knightly times of the Hohenstaufen--the yearning of
a ruling class towards this ideal, its will to be just _so_ and not
otherwise, operates (quite independently of the choosing of wives)
towards actualizing this ideal and eventually achieves it. Further,
there is a statistical aspect of the matter which has received far less
attention than it should. For every human being alive to-day there
were a million ancestors even in A.D. 1300 and ten million in A.D.
1000. This means that every German now living, without exception, is a
blood-relative of every European of the age of the Crusades and that
the relationship becomes a hundred and a thousand times more intensely
close as we narrow the limits of its field, so that within twenty
generations or less the population of a land grows together into _one
single family_; and this, together with the choice and voice of the
blood that courses through the generations, ever driving congeners
into one another’s arms, dissolving and breaking marriages, evading or
forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to innumerable procreations that
in utter unconsciousness fulfil the _will of the race_.
Primarily, this applies to the vegetal race-traits, the “physiognomy
of position,” as apart from movement of the mobile--i.e., everything
which does _not_ differ in the living and in the dead animal-body
and cannot but express itself even in stiffened members. There is
undoubtedly something cognate in the growth of an ilex or a Lombardy
poplar and that of a man--“thickset,” “slim,” “drooping,” and so forth.
Similarly, the outline of the back of a dromedary, or the striping of
a tiger- or zebra-skin is a vegetal race-mark. And so, too, are the
motion-actions of nature _upon and with a creature_--a birch-tree or a
delicately built child, which both sway in the wind, an oak with its
splintered crown, the steady circles or frightened flutterings of birds
in the storm, all belong to the plant side of race. But on which side
of the line do such characters stand when _blood and soil contend for
the inner form of the “transplanted” species_, human or animal? And how
much of the constitution of the soul, the social code, the house, is of
this kind?
It is quite another picture that presents itself when we attune
ourselves to receive the impressions of the purely animal. The
difference between plantwise being and animalwise waking-being (to
recall what has been said earlier) is such that we are here concerned,
not simply with waking-being itself and its language, but with the
combination of cosmic and microcosmic to form a freely moving body,
a microcosm _vis-à-vis_ a macrocosm, whose independent life-activity
possesses an expression peculiar to itself, which makes use in part of
the organs of waking-consciousness and which--as the corals show--is
mostly lost again with the cessation of mobility.
If the race-expression of the plant consists predominantly in
the physiognomy of position, the animal-expression resides in _a
physiognomy of movement_--namely, in the form as having motion,
in the motion itself, and in the set of the limbs as figuring the
motion. Of this race-expression not very much is revealed in the
sleeping animal, and far less still in the dead animal, whose parts
the scientist explores; we have practically nothing to learn now
about the skeleton of the vertebrate. Hence it is that in vertebrates
the limbs are more expressive than the bones. Hence it is that the
limb-masses are the true seat of expressiveness in contrast to the
ribs and skull-bones--the jaw being an exception in that its structure
discloses the character of the animal’s food, whereas the plant’s
nutrition is a mere _process of nature_. Hence it is, again, that the
insect’s skeleton, which clothes its body, is fuller of expression
than the bird’s, which is clothed by its body. It is pre-eminently
the organs of the outer sheath that more and more forcefully gather
the race-expression to themselves--the eye, not as a thing of form
and colour, but as _glance_ and expressive _visage_; the mouth, which
becomes through the usage of speech the expression of understanding;
and the head (not the skull), with its lineaments formed by the
flesh, which has become the very throne of the non-vegetable side
of life. Consider how, on the one hand, we breed orchids and roses
and, on the other, we breed horses and dogs--and would like human
beings to be bred, too. But it is not, I repeat, the mathematical
form of the visible parts, but exclusively the expression of the
movement, that displays this physiognomy. When we seize at a glance
the race-expression of a motionless man, it is because our experienced
eye sees the appropriate motion already potentially in the limbs.
The real race-appearance of a bison, a trout, a golden eagle, is not
to be reproduced by any reckoning of the creature’s plane or solid
dimensions; and the deep attractiveness that they possess for the
creative artist comes precisely from the fact that the secret of race
can reveal itself in the picture _by way of the soul_ and not by any
mere imitation of the visible. One has to see and, seeing, to feel
how the immense energy of this life concentrates upon head and neck,
how it speaks in the bloodshot eye, in the short compact horn, in the
“aquiline” beak and profile of the bird of prey--to mention one or two
only of the innumerable points that cannot be communicated by words and
are only expressible, by me for you, in the language of an art.
But with such hall-marks as those quoted, characterizing the noblest
sorts of animals, we come very near to the concept of race which
enables us to perceive within the type “mankind” differences of a
higher sort than either the vegetable or the animal--differences that
are spiritual rather, and _eo ipso_ less accessible to scientific
methods. The coarse characters of the skeletal structure have ceased
to possess independent importance. Already Retzius (d. 1860) had put
an end to the belief of Blumenbach that race and skull-formation are
coincident, and J. Ranke summarizes his tenets in these words:[176]
“What in point of variety of skull-formation is displayed by mankind
in general is displayed also on the smaller scale by every tribe
(_Volksstamm_) and even by many fair-sized communities--a union of
the different skull-forms with the extremes led up to through finely
graduated intermediate forms.” No one would deny that it is reasonable
to seek for ideal basic forms, but the researcher ought not to
lose sight of the fact that these are ideals and that, for all the
objectivity of his measurements, it is his taste that really fixes his
limits and his classification. Much more important than any attempts
to discover an ordering principle is the fact that within the unit
“humanity” all these forms occur and have occurred from the earliest
ice-times, that they have never markedly varied, and that they are
found indiscriminately even within the same families. The one certain
result of science is that observed by Ranke, that when skull-forms are
arranged serially with respect to transitions, certain averages emerge
which are characteristic not of “race,” but of the land.
In reality, the race-expression of a human head can associate itself
with any conceivable skull-form, the decisive element being not the
bone, but the flesh, the look, the play of feature. Since the days of
Romanticism we have spoken of an “Indogermanic” race. But is there such
a thing as an Aryan or a Semitic skull? Can we distinguish Celtic and
Frankish skulls, or even Boer and Kaffir? And if not, what may not the
earth have witnessed in the way of history unknown to us, for which
not the slightest evidences, but only bones, remain! How unimportant
these are for that which we call race in higher mankind can be shown
by a drastic experiment. Take a set of men with every conceivable
race-difference, and, while mentally picturing “race,” observe them in
an X-ray apparatus. The result is simply comic. As soon as light is let
through it, “race” vanishes suddenly and completely.
It cannot be too often repeated, moreover, that the little that is
really illustrative in skeletal structure is a growth of the landscape
and never a function of the blood. Elliot Smith in Egypt and von
Luschen in Crete have examined an immense material yielded by graves
ranging from the Stone Age to the present day. From the “Sea-peoples”
of the middle of the second millennium B.C. to the Arabs and the Turks
one human stream after another has passed over this region, but the
average bone-structure has remained unaltered. It would be true, in
a measure, to say that “race” has travelled as flesh over the fixed
skeleton-form of the land.[177] The Alpine region to-day contains
“peoples” of the most diverse origins--Teuton, Latin, Slav--and we
need only glance backward to discover Etruscans and Huns there also.
Tribe follows tribe. But the skeletal structure in the mankind of the
region in general is ever the same, and only on the edges, towards
the plains, does it gradually disappear in favour of other forms,
which are themselves likewise fixed. As to race, therefore, and the
race-wanderings of primitive men, the famous finds of prehistoric
bones, Neanderthal to Aurignacian, prove nothing. Apart from some
conclusions from the jaw-bone as to the kinds of food eaten, they
merely indicate the basic land-form that is found there to this day.
Once more, it is the mysterious power of the soil, demonstrable at once
in every living being as soon as we discover a criterion independent of
the heavy hand of the Darwinian age. The Romans brought the vine from
the South to the Rhine, and there it has certainly not visibly--i.e.,
botanically--changed. But in this instance “race” can be determined in
other ways. There is a soil-born difference not merely between Southern
and Northern, between Rhine and Moselle wines, but even between the
products of every different site on every different hill-side; and the
same holds good for every other high-grade vegetable “race,” such as
tea and tobacco. Aroma, a genuine growth of the country-side, is one
of the hall-marks (all the more significant because they cannot be
measured) of true race. But noble races of men are differentiated in
just the same intellectual way as noble wines. There is a like element,
only sensible to the finest perceptions, a faint aroma in every form,
that underneath all higher Culture connects the Etruscans and the
Renaissance in Tuscany,[178] and the Sumerians, the Persians of 500
B.C., and the Persians of Islam on the Tigris.
None of this is accessible to a science that measures and weighs.
It exists for the feelings--with a plain certainty and at the first
glance--but not for the savant’s treatment. And the conclusion to which
I come is that Race, like Time and Destiny, is a decisive element in
every question of life, something which everyone knows clearly and
definitely so long as he does not try to set himself to comprehend it
by way of rational--i.e., soulless--dissection and ordering. Race,
Time, and Destiny belong together. But the moment scientific thought
approaches them, the word “Time” acquires the significance of a
dimension, the word “Destiny” that of causal connexion, while Race,
for which even at that stage of scientific _askesis_ we still retain a
very sure feeling, becomes an incomprehensible chaos of unconnected and
heterogeneous characters that (under headings of land, period, culture,
stock) interpenetrate without end and without law. Some adhere toughly
and permanently to a stock and are transmissible; others glide over a
population like mere cloud-shadows; and many are, as it were, dæmons
of the land, which possess everyone who inhabits it for as long as he
stays in it. Some expel one another, some seek one another. A strict
classification of races--the ambition of all ethnology--is impossible.
The attempt is foredoomed from the start, as it contradicts this very
essence of the racial, and every systematic lay-out always has been
and will be, inevitably, a falsification and misapprehension of the
nature of its subject. Race, in contrast to speech, is unsystematic
through and through. In the last resort every individual man and every
individual moment of his existence have their own race. And therefore
the only mode of approach to the Totem side is, not classification, but
physiognomic fact.
IV
He who would penetrate into the essence of language should begin
by putting aside all the philologist’s apparatus and observe how a
hunter speaks to his dog. The dog follows the outstretched finger. He
listens, tense, to the sound of the word, but shakes his head--this
kind of man-speech he does not understand. Then he makes one or two
sentences to indicate _his_ idea; he stands still and barks, which
in his language is a sentence containing the question: “Is that what
Master means?” Then, still in dog language, he expresses his pleasure
at finding that he was right. In just the same way two men who do not
really possess a single word in common seek to understand one another.
When a country parson explains something to a peasant-woman, he looks
at her keenly, and, unconsciously, he puts into his look the essence
that she would certainly never be able to understand from a parsonic
mode of expression. The locutions of to-day, without exception, are
capable of comprehension only in association with other modes of
speech--adequate by themselves they are not, and never have been.
If the dog, now, wants something, he wags his tail; impatient of
Master’s stupidity in not understanding this perfectly distinct and
expressive speech, he adds a vocal expression--he barks--and finally an
expression of attitude--he mimes or makes signs. Here the man is the
obtuse one who has not yet learned to talk.
Finally something very remarkable happens. When the dog has exhausted
every other device to comprehend the various speeches of his master,
he suddenly plants himself squarely, and his eye bores into the eye of
the human. Something deeply mysterious is happening here--the immediate
contact of Ego and Tu. The look emancipates from the limitations of
waking-consciousness. Being understands itself without signs. Here the
dog has become a “judge” of men, looking his opposite straight in the
eye and grasping, behind the speech, the speaker.
Languages of these kinds we habitually use without being conscious of
the fact. The infant speaks long before it has learned its first word,
and the grown-up talks with it without even thinking of the ordinary
meanings of the words he or she is using--that is, the sound-forms in
this case subserve a language that is quite other than that of words.
Such languages also have their groups and dialects; they, too, can be
learned, mastered, and misunderstood, and they are so indispensable to
us that verbal language would mutiny if we were to attempt to make it
do all the work without assistance from tone- and gesture-language.
Even our script, which is verbal language for the eye, would be almost
incomprehensible but for the aid that it gets from gesture-language in
the form of punctuation.
It is the fundamental mistake of linguistic science that it confuses
language in general with human word-language--and that not merely
theoretically, but habitually in the practical conduct of all its
investigations. As a result, it has remained immensely ignorant of the
vast profusion of speech-modes of different kinds that are in common
use amongst beasts and men. The domain of speech, taken as a whole,
is far wider, and verbal speech, with its incapacity to stand alone
(an incapacity not wholly shaken off, even now) has really a much more
modest part in it, than its students have observed. As to the “origin
of human speech,” the very phrase implies a wrong enunciation of the
problem. Verbal speech--for that is what is meant--never had origins
at all in the sense here postulated. It is not primary, and it is not
unitary. The vast importance to which it has attained, since a certain
stage in man’s history, must not deceive us as to its position in the
history of free-moving entity. An investigation into speech certainly
ought not to begin with man.
But the idea of a beginning for animal language, too, is erroneous.
Speaking is so closely bound up with the living being of the animal (in
contradiction to the mere being of the plant) that not even unicellular
creatures devoid of all sense-organs can be conceived of as speechless.
To be a microcosm in the macrocosm is one and the same thing as having
a power to communicate oneself to another. To speak of a beginning
of speech in animal history is meaningless. For that microcosmic
existences are _in plurality_ is a matter of simple self-evidence. To
speculate on other possibilities is mere waste of time. Granted that
Darwinian fancies about an original generation and first pairs of
ancestors belong with the Victorian rearguard and should be left there,
still the fact remains that swarms also are awake and aware, inwardly
and livingly sensible, of a “we,” and reaching out to one another for
linkages of waking-consciousness.
Waking-being is activity in the extended; and, further, is willed
activity. This is the distinction between the movements of a microcosm
and the mechanical mobility of the plant, the animal, or the man in the
plant-state--i.e., asleep. Consider the animal activity of nutrition,
procreation, defence, attack--one side of it regularly consists in
getting into touch with the macrocosm by means of the senses, whether
it be the undifferentiated sensitivity of the unicellular creature or
the vision of a highly developed eye that is in question. Here there is
a definite _will to receive impression_; this we call orientation. But,
besides, there exists from the beginning a _will to produce impression
in the other_--what we call expression--and with that, at once, we have
_speaking as an activity of the animal waking-consciousness_. Since
then nothing fundamentally new has supervened. The world-languages of
high Civilizations are nothing but exceedingly refined expositions of
potentialities that were all implicitly contained in the fact of willed
impressions of unicellular creatures upon one another.
But the foundations of this fact lie in the primary feeling of fear.
The waking-consciousness makes a cleft in the cosmic, projects a space
between particulars, and alienates them. To feel oneself alone is
one’s first impression in the daily awakening, and hence the primitive
impulse to crowd together in the midst of this alien world, to assure
oneself sensibly of the proximity of the other, to seek a conscious
connexion with him. The “thou” is deliverance from the fear of the
being-alone. _The discovery of the Thou_, the sense of another self
resolved organically and spiritually out of the world of the alien,
is the grand moment in the early history of the animal. Thereupon
animals _are_. One has only to look long and carefully into the tiny
world of a water-droplet under the microscope to be convinced that the
discovery of the Thou, and _with it that of the I_ has been taking
place here in its simplest imaginable form. These tiny creatures know
not only the Other, but also the Others; they possess not merely
waking-consciousness but also relations of waking-consciousness,
and therewith not only expression, but the elements of an
expression-_speech_.
It is well to recall here the distinction between the two great
speech-groups. Expression-speech treats the Other as witness, and aims
purely at effects upon him, while communication-speech regards him as
a collocutor and expects him to answer. To understand means to receive
impressions with one’s own feeling of their significance, and it is on
this that the effect of the highest form of human expression-speech,
art, depends.[179] To come to an understanding, to hold a conversation,
postulates that the Other’s feeling of significances is the same
as one’s own. The elementary unit of an expression-speech before
witnesses is called the Motive. Command of the motive is the basis of
all expression-technique. On the other hand, the impression produced
for the purpose of an understanding is called the Sign, and is the
elementary unit of all communication-technique--including, therefore,
at the highest level, human speech.
Of the extensiveness of both these speech-worlds in the
waking-consciousness of man we to-day can scarcely form an idea.
Expression-speech, which appears in the earliest times with all the
religious seriousness of the Taboo, includes not only weighty and
strict ornament--which in the beginning coincides completely with
the idea of art and makes every stiff, inert thing into a vehicle
of the expression--but also the solemn ceremonial--whose web of
formulæ spreads over the whole of public life, and even over that
of the family[180]--and the language of costume, which is contained
in clothing, tattooing, and personal adornment, all of which have a
_uniform_ significance. The investigators of the nineteenth century
vainly attempted to trace the origin of clothing to the feeling of
shame or to utilitarian motives. It is in fact intelligible only as
the means of an expression-speech, and as such it is developed to a
grandiose level in all the high Civilizations, including our own of
to-day. We need only think of the dominant part played by the “mode” in
our whole public life and doings, the regulation attire for important
occasions, the nuances of wear for this and that social function, the
wedding-dress, mourning; of the military uniform, the priest’s robes,
orders and decorations, mitre and tonsure, periwig and queue, powder,
rings, styles of hairdressing; of all the significant displays and
concealments of person, the costume of the mandarin and the senator,
the odalisque and the nun; of the court-state of Nero, Saladin and
Montezuma--not to mention the details of peasant costumes, the language
of flowers, colours, and precious stones. As for the language of
religion, it is superfluous to mention it, for all this _is_ religion.
The communication-languages, in which every kind of sense-impression
that it is possible to conceive more or less participates, have
gradually evolved (so far as the peoples of the higher Cultures are
concerned) three outstanding signs--picture, sound, and gesture, which
in the script-speech of the Western Civilization have crystallized into
a unit of letter, word, and punctuation mark.
In the course of this long evolution there comes about at the last the
_detachment of speaking from speech_. Of all processes in the history
of language, none has a wider bearing than this. Originally all motives
and signs are unquestionably the product of the moment and meant
only for a single individual act of the active waking-consciousness.
Their actual and their felt and willed significances are one and the
same. But this is no longer so when a _definite stock of signs offers
itself_ for the living act of giving the sign, for with that not only
is the activity differentiated from its means, but the means are
differentiated _from their significance_. The unity of the two not
only ceases to be a matter of self-evidence, it ceases even to be a
possibility. The feeling of significance is a living feeling and,
like everything else belonging with Time and Destiny, it is uniquely
occurring and non-recurring. No sign, however well known and habitually
used, is ever repeated with exactly the same connotation; and hence it
is that originally no sign ever recurred in the same form. The domain
of the rigid sign is unconditionally one of things-become of the pure
extended; it is _not an organism, but a system_, which possesses its
own _causal_ logic and brings the irreconcilable opposition of space
and time, intellect and mood, also into the waking connexions of two
beings.
This fixed stock of signs and motives, with its ostensibly fixed
meanings, must be acquired by learning and practice if one wishes
to belong to the community of waking-consciousness with which it
is associated. _The necessary concomitant of speech divorced from
speaking is the notion of the school._ This is fully developed in the
higher animals; and in every self-contained religion, every art, every
society, it is presupposed as the background of the believer, the
artist, the “well-brought-up” human being. And from this point each
community has its sharply defined frontier; to be a member one must
know its language--i.e., its articles of faith, its ethics, its rules.
In counterpoint and Catholicism alike, bliss is not to be compassed
by mere feeling and goodwill. Culture means a hitherto unimagined
intensification of the depth and strictness of the form-language in
every department; for each individual belonging to it, it consists--as
his _personal_ Culture, religious, ethical, social, artistic--in
a lifelong process of education and training _for_ this life. And
consequently in all great arts, in the great Churches, mysteries and
orders, there is reached such a command of form as astonishes the
human being himself, and ends by breaking itself under the stress of
its own exigences--whereupon, in every Culture alike, there is set
up (expressly or tacitly) the slogan of a “return to nature.” This
_maestria_ extends also to verbal language. Side by side with the
social polish of the period of the Tyrannis or of the troubadours,
with the fugues of Bach and the vase-paintings of Exekias,[181] we
have the art of Attic oratory and that of French conversation, both
presupposing, like any other art, a strict and carefully matured
convention and a long and exacting training of the individual.
Metaphysically the significance of this separating-off of a
set language can hardly be over-estimated. The daily practice
of intercourse in settled forms, and the command of the entire
waking-consciousness through such forms--of which there is no longer
a sensed process of formation _ad hoc_, but which are just simply
there, and require understanding in the strictest sense of the
word--lead to an ever-sharper distinction between understanding and
feeling within the waking-consciousness. An incipient language is
felt understandingly; the practice of speaking requires one, first,
to feel the _known_ speech-medium and, secondly, to understand the
intention put into it on _this_ occasion. Consequently the kernel
of all schooling lies in the acquisition of elements of knowledge.
Every Church proclaims unhesitatingly that not feeling but knowledge
leads into its ways of salvation; all true artistry rests on the sure
knowledge of forms that the individual has not to discover, but to
learn. “Understanding” is knowledge conceived of as a being. It is that
which is completely alien to blood, race, time; from the opposition
of rigid speech to coursing blood and developing history come the
_negative_ ideals of the absolute, the eternal, the universally
valid--the ideals of Church and School.
But just this, in the last analysis, makes languages incomplete and
leads to the eternal contradiction between what is in fact spoken and
what was willed or meant by the speaking. We might indeed say that
lies came into the world with the separation of speech from speaking.
The signs are fixed, but not so their meaning--from the outset we feel
that this is so, then we know it, and finally we turn our knowledge
to account. It is an old, old, experience that when one wills to
say something, the words “fail” one (_versagen_, mis-say); that one
does not “express oneself aright” and in fact says something other
than what was meant; that one may speak accurately and be understood
inaccurately. And so finally we get to the art--which is widespread
even amongst animals (e.g., cats)--of “using words to conceal
thoughts.” One says not everything, one says something quite different,
one speaks formally about nothing, one talks briskly to cover the fact
that one has said something. Or one imitates the speech of another. The
red-backed shrike (_Lanius collurio_) imitates the strophes of small
song-birds in order to lure them. This is a well-known hunter’s dodge,
but here again established motives and signs are precedent for it,
just as much as they are a condition for the faking in antiques or the
forgery of a signature. And all these traits, met with in attitude and
mien as in handwriting and verbal utterance, reappear in the language
of every religion, every art, every society--we need only refer to the
ideas expressed by the words “hypocrite,” “orthodox,” “heretic,” the
English “cant,” the secondary senses of “diplomat,” “Jesuit,” “actor,”
the masks and warinesses of polite society, and the painting of to-day,
in which nothing is honest more and which in every gallery offers the
eye untruth in every imaginable form.
In a language that one stammers, one cannot be a diplomat. But in
the real command of a language there is the danger that the relation
between the means and the meaning may be made into a new means. There
arises an intellectual art of _playing_ with expression, practised by
the Alexandrines and the Romantics--by Theocritus and Brentano in
lyric poetry, by Reger in music, by Kierkegaard in religion.
_Finally, speech and truth exclude one another._[182] And in fact this
is just what brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical
“judge of men,” who is all race and knows how to take the being that
is speaking. To look a man keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker
behind the stump speech or the philosophical discourse, to know behind
the prayer the heart, and behind the common good-tone the more intimate
levels of social importance--and that instantaneously, immediately,
and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes everything
cosmic--that is what is lacking to the real Taboo-man, for whom _one_
language at any rate carries conviction. A priest who is also a
diplomat cannot be genuinely a priest. An ethical philosopher of the
Kant stamp is never a “judge of men.”
The man who lies in his verbal utterances betrays himself, without
observing it, in his demeanour. One who uses demeanour to dissimulate
with betrays himself in his tone. It is precisely because rigid speech
separates means and intent that it never carries it off with the keen
appraiser. The adept reads between the lines and understands a man
as soon as he sees his walk or his handwriting. The deeper and more
intimate a spiritual communion, the more readily it dispenses with
signs and linkages through waking-consciousness. A real comradeship
makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent
altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got
beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening
in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a
word’s being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and
feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony. From such a state
of reciprocal understanding something or other reaches back, far
beyond the collective existence of the higher animal-world, deep in
the primeval history of free-moving life. Here deliverance from the
waking-consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.
V
Of all the signs that have come to be fixed, none has led to greater
consequences than that which in its present state we call “word.”
It belongs, no doubt, to the purely human history of speech, but
nevertheless the idea, or at any rate the conventional idea, of an
“origin” of verbal language is as meaningless and barren as that of a
zero-point for speech generally. A precise beginning is inconceivable
for the latter because it is compresent with and contained in the
essence of the microcosm, and for the former because it presupposes
many fully developed kinds of communication-speech and constitutes
only one element--though in the end the dominant element--of a slow and
quiet evolution. It is a fundamental error in all theories (however
diametrically opposed to each other) like those of Wundt and of
Jespersen[183] that they investigate speaking in words as if it were
something new and self-contained, which inevitably leads them into a
radically false psychology. In reality verbal language is a very late
phenomenon, not a young shoot, but the last blossom borne by one of the
ramifications of the parent stem of all vocal speeches.
In actuality a pure word-speech does not exist. No one speaks
without employing, in addition to the set vocabulary, quite other
modes of speech, such as emphasis, rhythm, and facial play, which
are much more primary than the language of the word, and with
which, moreover, it has become completely intertwined. It is highly
necessary, therefore, to avoid regarding the ensemble of present-day
word-languages, with its extreme structural intricacy, as an inner
unity with a homogeneous history. Every word-language known to us has
very different sides, and each of these sides has its own Destiny
within the history of the whole. There is not one sense-perception
that would be wholly irrelevant to an adequate history of the use
of words. Further, we must distinguish very strictly between vocal
and verbal languages; the former is familiar even to the simpler
genera of animals, the latter is in certain characters--individual
characters, it is true, but all the more significant for that--a
radically different thing. For every animal voice-language, further,
expression-motives (a roar of anger) and communication-signs (a cry
of warning) can be clearly distinguished, and doubtless the same may
be said of the earliest words. But was it, then, as an expression-
or as a communication-language that verbal language _arose_? Was it
in quite primitive conditions, independent, more or less, of any and
every visual language such as picture and gesture? To such questions
we have no answer, since we have no inkling of what the pre-forms of
the “word,” properly so called, were. Naïve indeed is the philology
which uses what we of to-day call “primitive” languages (in reality,
incomplete pictures of very _late_ language-conditions) as premisses
for conclusions as to the origin of words and the Word. The word is
in them an already established, highly developed, and self-evident
means--i.e., precisely what anything “originally” is _not_.
There can be no doubt that the sign which made it possible for the
future word-language to detach itself from the general vocal speech of
the animal world was that which I call “name”--a vocal image serving
to denote a Something in the world-around, which was felt as a being,
and by the act of naming became a numen.[184] It is unnecessary to
speculate as to how the first names came to be--no human speech
accessible to us at this time of day gives us the least _point d’appui_
here. But, contrary to the view of modern research, I consider that
the decisive turn came not from a change of the throat-formation or
from a peculiarity of sound-formation or from any other physiological
factor--if any such changes ever took place at all, it would be the
race side that they would affect--not even an increased capacity for
self-expression by existing means, like, say, the transition from
word to sentence (H. Paul[185]), but _a profound spiritual change_.
With the Name comes a new world-outlook. And if speech in general is
the child of fear, of the unfathomable terror that wells up when the
waking-consciousness is presented with the facts, that impels all
creatures together in the longing to prove each other’s reality and
proximity--then the first word, the Name, is a mighty leap upward.
The Name grazes the _meaning_ of consciousness and the _source_ of
fear alike. The world is not merely existent, a secret is felt in
it. Above and apart from the more ordinary objects of expression-
and communication-language, man names _that which is enigmatic_. It
is the beast that knows no enigmas. Man cannot think too solemnly,
reverently, of this first name-giving. It was not well always to speak
the name, it should be kept secret, a dangerous power dwelt in it.
_With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the
beast to the metaphysical of man._ It was the greatest turning-point
in the history of the human soul. Our epistemology is accustomed to
set speech and thought side by side, and it is quite right, if we take
into consideration only the languages that are still accessible at the
present day. But I believe that we can go much deeper than this and say
that with the Name religion in the proper sense, _definite_ religion in
the midst of formless quasi-religious awe, came into being. Religion in
this sense means religious _thought_. It is the new conception of the
creative understanding emancipated from sensation. We say, in a very
significant idiom, that we “reflect on,” “think _over_,” something.
With the understanding of things-named the formation of a _higher_
world, _above_ all sensational existence, is begun--“higher” both
according to obvious symbolism and in reference to the position of the
head which man guesses (often with painful distinctness) to be the home
of his thoughts. It gives to the primary feeling of fear both an object
and a glimpse of liberation. On this religious first thought all the
philosophical, scholarly, scientific thought of later times has been
and remains dependent for its very deepest foundations.
These first names we have to think of as quite separate and
individual elements in the stock of signs of a highly developed
sound- and gesture-language, the richness of which we can no longer
imagine, since these other means have come to be subordinate to
the word-languages, and their further developments have been in
dependent connexion therewith.[186] One thing, however, was assured
when the name inaugurated the transformation and spiritualization of
communication-technique--the pre-eminence of the eye over the other
sense-organs. Man’s awakeness and awareness was in an illuminated
space, his depth-experience[187] was a radiation outward towards
light-sources and light-resistances, and he conceived of his ego as a
middle point in the light. “Visible” or “invisible” was the alternative
which governed the state of understanding in which the first names
arose. Were the first _numina_, perhaps, things of the light-world that
were felt, heard, observed in their effects, _but not seen_? No doubt
the group of names, like everything else that marks a turning-point
in the course of world-happenings, must have developed both rapidly
and powerfully. The entire light-world, in which everything possesses
the properties of position and duration in space, was--in the midst
of what tensions of cause and effect, thing and property, object and
subject!--very soon listed with innumerable names, and so anchored in
the memory, for what we now call “memory” is the capacity of storing
for the understanding, by means of the name, _the named_. Over the
realm of understood visuals (_Sehdinge_) supervenes a more intellectual
realm of namings, which shares with it the logical property of being
purely extensive, disposed in polarity, and ruled by the causal
principle. All word-types like cases and pronouns and prepositions
(which arise, of course, much later) have a causal or local meaning in
respect of named units; adjectives, and verbs also, have frequently
come into existence in pairs of opposites; often (as in the E’we
languages of West Africa investigated by Westermann) the same word is
pronounced low or high to denote for example great and small, far and
near, passive and active.[188] Later these relics of gesture-language
pass completely into the word-form,[189] as we see clearly, for
example, in the Greek μακρός and μικρός and the _u_-sounds of Egyptian
designations of suffering. It is the form of thinking in opposites
which, starting from these antithetical word-pairs, constitutes the
foundation of all inorganic logic, and turns every scientific discovery
of truths into a movement of conceptual contraries, of which the
most universal instance is that of an old view and a new one being
contrasted as “error” and “truth.”
The second great turning-point was the use of _grammar_. Besides
the name there was now the sentence, besides the verbal designation
the verbal relation, and thereupon reflection--which is a thinking
in word-relations that follows from the perception of things for
which word-labels exist--became the decisive characteristic of man’s
waking-consciousness. The question whether the communication-languages
already contained effective “sentences” before the appearance of the
genuine “name” is a difficult one. The sentence, in the _present_
acceptation of the word, has indeed developed within these languages
according to its own conditions and with its own phases, but
nevertheless it postulates the _prior_ existence of the name. Sentences
as conceptual relations become possible only with the intellectual
change that accompanied their birth. And we must assume further
that within the highly developed wordless languages one character
or trait after another, in the course of continuous practical use,
was transformed into verbal form and as such fell into its place in
an increasingly solid structure, the prime form of our present-day
languages. Thus the inner build of all verbal languages rests upon
foundations of far older construction, and for its further development
is _not_ dependent upon the stock of words and its destiny.
It is in fact just the reverse. For with syntax the original group
of individual _names_ was transformed into a system of words, whose
character was given, not by their proper, but by their grammatical
significance. The name made its appearance as something novel and
entirely self-contained. But word-species arose as elements of the
sentence, and thereafter the contents of waking-consciousness streamed
in overflowing profusion into this world of words, demanding to be
labelled and represented in it, until finally even “all” became, in one
shape or another, a word and available for the thought-process.
Thenceforward the sentence is the decisive element--we speak in
sentences and not words. Attempts to define the two have been frequent,
but never successful. According to F. N. Finck, word-formation is an
analytical and sentence-formation a synthetical activity of the mind,
the first preceding the second. It is demonstrable that the same
actuality received as impression is variously understood, and words,
therefore, are definable from very different points of view.[190] But
according to the usual definition, a sentence is the verbal expression
of a _thought_, a symbol (says H. Paul) for the connexion of several
_ideas_ in the soul of the speaker. It seems to me quite impossible
to settle the nature of the sentence from its contents. The fact is
simply that we call the relatively largest mechanical units employed
“sentences” and the relatively smallest “words.” Over this range
extends the validity of grammatical _laws_. But as soon as we pass
from theory to practice, we see that language as currently used is
no longer such a mechanism; it obeys not laws, but _pulse_. Thus a
race-character is involved, _a priori_, in the way in which the matter
to be communicated is set in sentences. Sentences are not the same
for Tacitus and Napoleon as for Cicero and Nietzsche. The Englishman
orders his material syntactically in a different way from the German.
Not the ideas and thoughts, but the thinking, the kind of life, _the
blood_, determine in the primitive, Classical, Chinese, and Western
speech-communities the type of the sentence-unit, and with it the
_mechanical_ relation of the word to the sentence. The boundary between
grammar and syntax should be placed at the point where the mechanical
of speech ceases and the organic of speaking begins--usages, custom,
the _physiognomy_ of the way that a man employs to express himself. The
other boundary lies where the mechanical structure of the word passes
into the organic factors of sound-formation and expression. Even the
children of immigrants can often be recognized by the way in which the
English “_th_” is pronounced--a race-trait of the land. Only that which
lies between these limits is the “language,” properly so called, which
has system, is a technical instrument, and can be invented, improved,
changed, and worn out; enunciation and expression, on the contrary,
adhere to the _race_. We recognize a person known to us, without seeing
him, by his pronunciation, and not only that, but we can recognize a
member of an alien race even if he speaks perfectly correct German.
The great sound-modifications, like the Old High German in Carolingian
times and the Middle High German in the Late Gothic, have territorial
frontiers and affect only the speaking of the language, not the inner
form of sentence and word.
Words, I have just said, are the relatively smallest mechanical units
in the sentence. There is probably nothing that is so characteristic
of the thinking of a human species as the way in which these units
are acquired by it. For the Bantu Negro a thing that he sees belongs
first of all to a very large number of categories of comprehension.
Correspondingly the word for it consists of a kernel or root and a
number of monosyllabic prefixes. When he speaks of a woman in a field,
his word is something like this: “living, one, big, old, female,
outside, _human_”; this makes seven syllables, but it denotes a single,
clear-headed, and to us quite alien act of comprehension.[191] There
are languages in which the word is almost coextensive with the sentence.
The gradual replacement of bodily or sonic by grammatical gestures
is thus the decisive factor in the formation of sentences, but it
has never been completed. There are no purely verbal languages.
The activity of speaking, in words, as it emerges more and more
precise, consists in this, that through word-sounds we awaken
significance-feelings, which in turn through the sound of the
word-connexions evoke further relation-feelings. Our schooling in
speech trains us to understand in this abbreviated and indicative form
not only light-things and light-relations, but also thought-things and
thought-relations. Words are only named, not used definitively, and
the hearer has to feel what the speaker means. This and this alone
amounts to speech, and hence mien and tone play a much greater part
than is generally admitted in the understanding of modern speech.
Substantive signs may conceivably exist for many of the animals even,
but verb-signs never.
The last grand event in this history, which brings the formation of
verbal speech more or less to a close, is the coming of the verb.
This assumes at the outset a very high order of abstraction. For
substantives are words whereby things sense-defined in illuminated
space[192] become evocable also in after-thought, while verbs describe
_types_ of change, which are not seen, but are extracted from the
unendingly protean light-world, by noting the special characters of
the individual cases, and generating concepts from them. “Falling
stone” is originally a unit impression, but we first separate movement
and thing moved and then isolate falling as one _kind_ of movement
from innumerable other sorts and shades thereof--sinking, tottering,
stumbling, slipping. We do not “see” the distinction, we “know” it. The
difference between fleeing and running, or between flying and being
wafted, altogether transcends the visual impression they produce and is
only apprehensible by a word-trained consciousness. But now, with this
verb-thinking, even life itself has become accessible to reflection.
Out of the living impress made on the waking-consciousness, out of the
ambiance of the becoming (which gesture-speech, being merely imitative,
leaves unquestioned and unprobed) that which is life itself--namely,
singularity of occurrence--is unconsciously eliminated, and the rest,
as effect of a cause (the wind wafts, lightning flashes, the peasant
ploughs), is put, under purely extensive descriptions, into suitable
places in the sign-system. One has to bury oneself completely in the
solid definiteness of subject and predicate, active and passive,
present and perfect, to perceive how entirely the understanding here
masters the senses and unsouls actuality. In substantives one can still
regard the mental thing (the idea) as a copy of the visual thing, but
in the verb _something inorganic has been put in place of something
organic_. The fact that we live--namely, that we at this instant
perceive something--becomes eventually a _property_ of the something
perceived. In terms of word-thought, the perceived endures--“is.” Thus,
finally, are formed the categories of thought, graded according to what
is and what is not natural to it; thus Time appears as a dimension,
Destiny as a cause, the living as chemical or psychical mechanism. It
is in this wise that the style of mathematical, judicial, and dogmatic
thought arises.
And in this wise, too, arises that disunity which seems to us
inseparable from the essence of man, but is really only the expression
of the dominance of word-language in his waking-consciousness.
This instrument of communication between Ego and Tu has, by reason
of its perfection, fashioned out of the animal understanding of
sensation, a thinking-in-words which stands proxy for sensation.
Subtle thinking--“splitting hairs,” as it is called--is conversing
with oneself in word-significances. It is the activity that no kind of
language but the language of words can subserve, and it becomes, with
the perfection of the language, distinctive of the life-habit of whole
classes of human beings. The divorce of speech, rigid and devitalized,
from speaking, which makes it impossible to include the whole truth in
a verbal utterance, has particularly far-reaching consequences in the
sign-system of words. Abstract thinking consists in the use of a finite
word-framework into which it is sought to squeeze the whole infinite
content of life. Concepts kill Being and falsify Waking-Being. Long ago
in the springtime of language-history, while understanding had still to
struggle in order to hold its own with sensation, this mechanization
was without importance for life. But now, from a being who occasionally
thought, man has become a thinking being, and it is the ideal of every
thought-system to subject life, once and for all, to the domination of
intellect. This is achieved in theory by according validity only to the
known and branding the actual as a sham and a delusion. It is achieved
in practice by forcing the voices of the blood to be silent in the
presence of universal ethical principles.[193]
Both, logic and ethics alike, are systems of absolute and eternal
truths for the intellect, and correspondingly untruths for history.
However completely the inner eye may triumph over the outer in the
domain of thought, in the realm of facts the belief in eternal truths
is a petty and absurd stage-play that exists only in the heads of
individuals. A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for
no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always
brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned _a priori_
by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean--apart,
again, from the case of technics, in which the concepts are instruments
and not aims in themselves. And this _ignorabimus_ is in conformity
also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of
life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxims of daily
use underneath which life flows, as it has always flowed, onward. Race,
in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all
the great names, it has been thinkers--who are personalities--and not
systems--which are mutable--that have taken effect upon life.
VI
So far, then, the inner history of word-languages shows three stages.
In the first there appears, within highly developed but wordless
communication-languages, the first names--units in a new sort of
understanding. The world awakens _as a secret_, and religious thought
begins. In the second stage, a complete communication-speech is
gradually transformed into grammatical values. The gesture becomes the
sentence, and the sentence transforms the names into words. Further,
the sentence becomes the great school of understanding _vis-à-vis_
sensation, and an increasingly subtle significance-feeling for abstract
relations within the mechanism of the sentence evokes an immense
profusion of inflexions, which attach themselves especially to the
substantive and the verb, the space-word and the time-word. This is the
blossoming time of grammar, the period of which we may probably (though
under all reserves) take as the two millennia preceding the birth of
the Egyptian and Babylonian Culture. The third stage is marked by a
rapid decay of inflexions and a simultaneous replacement of grammar by
syntax. The intellectualization of man’s waking-consciousness has now
proceeded so far that he no longer needs the sense-props of inflexion
and, discarding the old luxuriance of word-forms, communicates freely
and surely by means of the faintest nuances of idiom (particles,
position of words, rhythm). By dint of speaking in words, the
understanding has attained supremacy over the waking-consciousness,
and to-day it is in process of liberating itself from the restrictions
of sensible-verbal machinery and working towards pure mechanics of the
intellect. Minds and not senses are making the contact.
In this third stage of linguistic history, which as such takes place
in the biological plane[194] and therefore belongs to _man as a type_,
the history of the higher Cultures now intervenes with an entirely
new speech, the speech of the distance--writing--an invention of such
inward forcefulness that again there is a sudden decisive turn in the
destinies of the word-languages.
The written language of Egypt is already by 3000 in a state of
rapid grammatical decomposition; likewise the Sumerian literary
languages called _eme-sal_ (women’s language). The written language
of China--which _vis-à-vis_ the vernaculars of the Chinese world has
long formed a language apart--is, even in the oldest known texts,
so entirely inflexionless that only recent research has established
that it ever had inflexions at all.[195] The Indogermanic system is
known to us only in a state of complete break-down. Of the Case in Old
Vedic (about 1500 B.C.) the Classical languages a thousand years later
retained only fragments.[196] From Alexander the Great’s time the dual
disappeared from the declension of ordinary Hellenistic Greek, and the
passive vanished from the conjugation entirely. The Western languages,
although of the most miscellaneous provenance imaginable--the Germanic
from primitive and the Romanic from highly civilized stock--modify
in the same direction, the Romanic cases having become reduced to
one, and the English, after the Reformation, to zero. Ordinary German
definitely shed the genitive at the beginning of the nineteenth century
and is now in process of abolishing the dative. Only after trying to
translate a piece of difficult and pregnant prose--say of Tacitus or
Mommsen--“back”[197] into some very ancient language rich in inflexions
does one realize how meantime the technique of signs has vaporized
into a technique of thoughts, which now only needs to employ the
signs--abbreviated, but replete with meaning--merely as the counters
in a game that only the initiates of the particular speech-communion
understand. This is why to a west-European, the sacred Chinese texts
must always be in the fullest sense a sealed book; but the same holds
good also for the primary words of every other Culture-language--the
Greek λογός and ἀρχή, the Sanskrit _Atman_ and _Braman_--indications of
the world-outlook of their respective Cultures that no one not bred in
the Culture can comprehend.
The external history of languages is as good as lost to us in just
its most important parts. Its springtime lies deep in the primitive
era, in which (to repeat what has been said earlier), we have to
imagine “humanity” in the form of scattered and quite small troops,
lost in the wide spaces of the earth. A spiritual change came when
reciprocal contacts became habitual (and eventually natural) to them,
but correspondingly there can be no doubt that this contact was first
sought for and then regulated, or fended off, by means of speech, and
that it was the impression of an earth filled with men that first
brought the waking-consciousness to the point of tense intelligent
shrewdness, forcing verbal language under pressure to the surface.
So that, perhaps, the birth of grammar is connected with the race
hall-mark of the grand Number.
Since then, no other grammatical system has ever come into existence,
but only novel derivatives of what was already there. Of these
_authentic_ primitive languages and their structure and sound we know
nothing. As far as our backward look takes us, we see only complete and
developed linguistic systems, used by everyone, learned by every child,
as something perfectly natural. And we find it more than difficult to
imagine that once upon a time things may have been different, that
perhaps a shudder of fear accompanied the hearing of such strange and
enigmatic language--an awe like that which in historic times has been
and still is excited by script. And yet we have to reckon with the
possibility that at one time, in a world of wordless communication,
verbal language constituted an aristocratic privilege, a jealously
preserved class-secret. We have a thousand examples--the diplomats with
their French, the scholars with their Latin, the priests with their
Sanskrit--to suggest that there may have been such a tendency. It is
part of the thoroughbred’s pride to be able to speak to one another
in a way that outsiders cannot understand--a language for everybody
is a vernacular. To be “on conversational terms with” someone is a
privilege or a pretension. So, too, the use of literary language in
talking with educated people, and contempt for dialect, mark the true
bourgeois pride. It is only we who live in a Civilization wherein it is
just as normal for children to learn to write as to learn to walk--in
all earlier Cultures it was a rare accomplishment, to which few could
aspire. And I am convinced that it was just so once with verbal
language.
The tempo of linguistic history is immensely rapid; here a mere century
signifies a great deal. I may refer again to the gesture-language of
the North Indians,[198] which became necessary because the rapidity
of changes in the tribal dialects made intertribal understanding
impossible otherwise. Compare, too, the Latin of the recently
discovered Forum inscription[199] (about 500) with the Latin of Plautus
(about 200) and this again with the Latin of Cicero (about 50). If we
assume that the oldest Vedic texts have preserved the linguistic state
of 1200 B.C., then even that of 2000 may have differed from it far more
completely than any Indogermanic philologists working by _a posteriori_
methods can even surmise.[200] But _allegro_ changes to _lento_ in the
moment when script, the language of duration, intervenes and ties down
and immobilizes the systems at entirely different age-levels. This is
what makes this evolution so opaque to research; all that we possess is
remains of written languages. Of the Egyptian and Babylonian linguistic
world we do possess originals from as far back as 3000, but the oldest
Indogermanic relics are _copies_, of which the linguistic state is much
younger than the contents.
Very various, under all these determinants, have been the destinies
of the different grammars and vocabularies. The first attaches to
the intellect, the second to things and places. Only grammatical
systems are subject to natural inward change. The use of words, on the
contrary, psychologically presupposes that, although the expression
may change, inner mechanical structure is maintained (and all the more
firmly) as being the basis on which denomination essentially rests.
_The great linguistic families are purely grammatical families._ The
words in them are more or less homeless and wander from one to another.
It is a fundamental error in philological (especially Indogermanic)
research that grammar and vocabulary are treated as a unit. All
specialist vocabularies--the jargon of hunter, soldier, sportsman,
seaman, savant--are in reality _only stocks of words_, and can be
used within any and every grammatical system. The semi-Classical
vocabulary of chemistry, the French of diplomacy, and the English of
the racecourse have become naturalized in all modern languages alike.
We may talk of “alien” words, but the same could have been said at
some time or other of most of the “roots,” so-called, in all the old
languages. All names adhere to the things that they denote, and share
their history. In Greek the names for metals are of alien provenance;
words like ταῦρος, χιτῶν, οἶνος are Semitic. Indian numerals are
found in the Hittite texts of Boghaz Keüi,[201] and the contexts
in which they occur are technical expressions which came into the
country with horse-breeding. Latin administrative terms invaded the
Greek East,[202] German invaded Petrine Russia in multitudes, Arabic
words permeate the vocabulary of Western mathematics, chemistry, and
astronomy. The Normans, themselves Germanic, inundated English with
French words. Banking, in German-speaking regions, is full of Italian
expressions,[203] and similarly and to a far greater extent masses of
designations relating to agriculture and cattle-breeding, to metals and
weapons, and in general to all transactions of handicraft, barter, and
intertribal law, must have migrated from one language to another, just
as geographical nomenclature always passed into the proper vocabulary
of the dominant language, with the result that Greek contains numerous
Carian and German Celtic place-names. It is no exaggeration to say that
the more widely an Indogermanic word is distributed, the _younger_ it
is, the more likely it is to be an “alien” word. It is precisely the
very oldest names that are hoarded as private possessions. Latin and
Greek have only quite young words in common. Or do “telephone,” “gas,”
“automobile,” belong to the word-stock of the “primitive” people?
Suppose, for the sake of argument that three-fourths of the Aryan
“primitive” words came from the Egyptian or the Babylonian vocabularies
of the third millennium; we should not find a trace of the fact in
Sanskrit after a thousand years of unwritten development, for even in
German thousands of Latin loan-words have long ago become completely
unrecognizable. The ending “-ette” in “Henriette” is Etruscan--how
many genuine Aryan and genuine Semitic endings, notwithstanding their
thoroughly alien origin, defy us to prove them intruders? What is
the explanation of the astounding similarity of many words in the
Australian and the Indogermanic languages?
The Indogermanic system is certainly the youngest, and therefore the
most intellectual. The languages derived from it rule the earth to-day,
but did it really exist at all in 2000 as a specific grammatical
edifice? As is well known, a single initial form for Aryan, Semitic,
and Hamitic is nowadays assumed as probable. The oldest Indian
texts preserve the linguistic conditions of (probably) before 1200,
the oldest Greek those of (probably) 700. But Indian personal and
divine names occur in Syria and Palestine,[204] simultaneously with
the horse, at a much later date, the bearers of these names being
apparently first soldiers of fortune and afterwards potentates.[205]
May it be that about 1600 these land-Vikings, these first _Reiter_--men
grown up inseparable from their horses, the terrifying originals of the
Centaur-legend--established themselves more or less everywhere in the
Northern plains as adventurer-chiefs, bringing with them the speech
and divinities of the Indian feudal age? And the same with the Aryan
aristocratic ideals of breed and conduct. According to what has been
said above on race, this would explain the race-ideal of Aryan-speaking
regions without any necessity for “migrations” of a “primitive” folk.
After all, it was in this way that the knightly Crusaders founded their
states in the East--and in exactly the same locality as the heroes with
Mitanni names had done so twenty-five hundred years before.
Or was this system of about 3000 merely an unimportant dialect of a
language that is lost? The Romanic language-family about A.D. 1600
dominated all the seas. About 400 B.C. the “original” language on the
Tiber possessed a domain of little more than a thousand square miles.
It is certain that the geographical picture of the grammatical families
at about 4000 was still very variegated. The Semitic-Hamitic-Aryan
group (_if_ it ever did form a unit) can hardly have been of much
importance at that time. We stumble at every turn upon the relics of
old speech-families--Etruscan, Basque, Sumerian, Ligurian, the ancient
tongues of Asia Minor, and others--that in their day must have belonged
to very extensive systems. In the archives of Boghaz-Keüi eight new
languages have so far been identified, all of them in use about the
year 1000. With the then prevailing tempo of modification, Aryan may in
2000 have formed a unit with languages that we should never dream of
associating with it.
VII
Writing is an entirely new kind of language, and implies a complete
change in the relations of man’s waking-consciousness, in that it
_liberates it from the tyranny of the present_. Picture-languages which
portray objects are far older, older probably than any words; but here
the picture is no longer an immediate denotation of some sight-object,
but primarily the sign of a word--i.e., something already abstract from
sensation. It is the first and only example of a language that demands,
without itself providing, the necessary preparatory training.
Script, therefore, presupposes a fully developed grammar, since the
activity of writing and reading is infinitely more abstract than that
of speaking and hearing. Reading consists in scanning a script-image
_with a feeling of the significances of corresponding word-sounds_;
what script contains is not signs for things, but signs for other
signs. The grammatical sense must be enlarged by instantaneous
comprehension.
The word is a possession of man generally, whereas writing belongs
exclusively to Culture-men. In contrast to verbal language it is
conditioned, not merely partially, but entirely, by the political and
religious Destinies of world-history. All scripts come into being
in the _individual_ Cultures and are to be reckoned amongst their
profoundest symbols. But hitherto a comprehensive history of script
has never been produced, and a psychology of its forms and their
modifications has never even been attempted. _Writing is the grand
symbol of the Far_, meaning not only extension-distance, but also,
and above all, duration and future and the will-to-eternity. Speaking
and listening take place only in proximity and the present,[206] but
through script one speaks to men whom one has never seen, who may not
even have been born yet; the voice of a man is heard centuries after
he has passed away. It is one of the first distinguishing marks of
the _historical_ endowment. But for that very reason nothing is more
characteristic of a Culture than its inward relation to writing. If
we know as little as we do about Indogermanic, it is because the two
earliest Cultures whose people made use of this system--the Indian and
the Classical--were so _a-historic_ in disposition that they not only
formed no script of their own, but even fought off alien scripts until
well into the Late period of their course. Actually, the whole art of
Classical prose is designed immediately for the ear. One read it as
if one were speaking, whereas we, by comparison, speak everything as
though we were reading it--with the result that in the eternal seesaw
between script-image and word-sound we have never attained to a prose
style that is perfect in the Attic sense. In the Arabian Culture, on
the other hand, each religion developed its own script and kept it even
through changes of verbal language; the duration of the sacred books
and teachings and the script as symbol of duration belong together.
The oldest evidences of alphabetical script are found in southern
Arabia in the Minæan and Sabæan scripts--differentiated, without
doubt, according to sect--which probably go back to the tenth century
before Christ.[207] The Jews, Mandæans, and Manichæans in Babylonia
spoke Eastern Aramaic, but all of them had scripts of their own. From
the Abbassid period onward Arabic ruled, but Christians and Jews
wrote it in their own characters.[208] Islam spread the Arabic script
universally amongst its adherents, irrespective of whether their spoken
language was Semitic, Mongolian, Aryan, or a Negro tongue.[209] The
growth of the writing habit brings with it, everywhere and inevitably,
the distinction between the written and the colloquial languages. The
written language brings the symbolism of duration to bear upon its own
grammatical condition, which itself yields only slowly and reluctantly
to the progressive modifications of the colloquial language--the
latter, therefore, always representing at any given moment a younger
condition. There is not one Hellenic κοινή, but two,[210] and the
immense distance between the written and the living Latin of Imperial
times is sufficiently evidenced in the structure of the early Romance
languages.[211] The older a Civilization becomes, the more abrupt
is the distinction, until we have the gap that to-day separates
written Chinese from Kuan-Chua, the spoken language of educated North
Chinese--a matter no longer of two dialects but of two reciprocally
alien languages.
Here, it should be observed, we have direct expression of the fact that
writing is above everything a matter of status, and more particularly
an ancient privilege of priesthood. The peasantry is without history
_and therefore without writing_. But, even apart from this, there is
in Race an unmistakable antipathy to script. It is, I think, a fact
of the highest importance to graphology that the more the writer has
race (breed), the more cavalierly he treats the ornamental structure
of the letters, and the more ready he is to replace this by personal
line-pictures. Only the Taboo-man evidences a certain respect for
the proper forms of the letters and ever, if unconsciously, tries to
reproduce them. It is the distinction between the man of action, who
makes history, and the scholar, who merely puts it down on paper,
“eternalizes” it. In all Cultures the script is in the keeping of
the priesthood, in which class we have to count also the poet and
the scholars. The nobility despises writing; it has people to write
for it. From the remotest times this activity has had something
intellectual-sacerdotal about it. Timeless truths came to be such,
not at all through speech, but only when there came to be script for
them. It is the opposition of castle and cathedral over again: which
shall endure, deed or truth? The archivist’s “sources” preserve facts,
the holy scripture, truths. What chronicles and documents mean in
the first-named, exegesis and library mean in the second. And thus
there is something besides cult-architecture that is not decorated
with ornament, but _is_ ornament[212]--the _book_. The art-history
of all Cultural springtimes ought to begin with the script, and the
cursive script even before the monumental. Here we can observe the
essence of the Gothic style, or of the Magian, at its purest. No other
ornament possesses the inwardness of a letter-shape or a manuscript
page; nowhere else is arabesque as perfect as it is in the Koran
texts on the walls of a mosque. And, then, the great art of initials,
the architecture of the marginal picture, the plastic of the covers!
In a Koran in the Kufi script every page has the effect of a piece
of tapestry. A Gothic book of the Gospels is, as it were, a little
cathedral. As for Classical art, it is very significant that the one
thing that it did not beautify with its touch was the script and the
book-roll--an exception founded in its steady hatred of that which
endures, the contempt for a technique which insists on being more
than a technique. Neither in Hellas nor in India do we find an art of
monumental inscription as in Egypt. It does not seem to have occurred
to anybody that a sheet of handwriting of Plato was a relic, or that a
fine edition of the dramas of Sophocles ought to be treasured up in the
Acropolis.
As the city lifted up its head over the countryside, as the burgher
joined the noble and the priest and the urban spirit aspired to
supremacy, writing, from being a herald of nobles’ fame and of eternal
truths, became a means of commercial and scientific intercourse. The
Indian and the Classical Cultures rejected the pretension and met the
working requirement by importation from abroad; it was as a humble tool
of everyday use that alphabetical script slowly won their acceptance.
With this event rank, as contemporaneous and like in significance,
the introduction into China of the phonetic script about 800, and the
discovery of book-printing in the West in the fifteenth century; the
symbol of duration and distance was reinforced in the highest degree
by making it accessible to the large number. Finally the Civilizations
took the last step and brought their scripts into utilitarian form.
As we have seen, the discovery of alphabetical script in the Egyptian
Civilization, about 2000, was a purely technical innovation. In the
same way Li Si, Chancellor to the Chinese Augustus, introduced the
Chinese standard script in 227. And lastly, amongst ourselves--though
as yet few of us have appreciated the real significance of the fact--a
new kind of writing has appeared. That Egyptian alphabetic script is in
no wise a final and perfected thing is proved by the discovery of its
fellow, our _stenography_, which means no mere shortening of writing,
but _the overcoming of the alphabetic script by a new and highly
abstract mode of communication_. It is not impossible, indeed, that in
the course of the next centuries script-forms of the shorthand kind may
displace letters completely.
VIII
May the attempt be made, thus early, to write a morphology of the
Culture-languages? Certainly, science has not as yet even discovered
that there is such a task. Culture-languages are languages of
_historical_ men. Their Destiny accomplishes itself not in biological
spaces of time, but in step with the organic evolution of strictly
limited lifetimes. _Culture languages are historical languages_, which
means, primarily, that there is no historical event and no political
institution that will not have been determined in part by the spirit
of the language employed in it and, conversely, that will not have
its influence upon the spiritual form of that language. The build
of the Latin sentence is yet another consequence of Rome’s battles,
which in giving her conquests compelled the nation as a whole to think
administratively; German prose bears traces even to-day of the Thirty
Years’ War in its want of established norms, and early Christian dogma
would have acquired a different shape if the oldest Scriptures, instead
of being one and all written in Greek, and been set down in Syriac form
like those of the Mandæans. But secondarily it means that world-history
is dependent--to a degree that students have hitherto scarcely
imagined--_upon the existence of script as the essentially historical
means of communication_. The State (in the higher sense of the word)
presupposes intercourse by writing; the style of all politics is
determined absolutely by the significance that the politico-historical
thought of the nation attaches in each instance to charters and
archives, to signatures, to the products of the publicist; the battle
of legislation is a fight for or against a written law; constitutions
replace material force by the composition of paragraphs and elevate a
piece of writing to the dignity of a weapon. Speech belongs with the
present, and writing with duration, but equally, oral understanding
pairs with practical experience, and writing with theoretical thought.
The bulk of the inner political history of all Late periods can be
traced back to this opposition. The ever-varying facts resist the
“letter,” while _truths demand it_--that is the world-historical
opposition of two parties that in one form or another is met with in
the great crises of all Cultures. The one lives in actuality, the other
flourishes a text in its face; all great revolutions presuppose a
literature.
The group of Western Culture-languages appeared in the tenth century.
The available bodies of language--namely, the Germanic and Romance
dialects (monkish Latin included)--were developed into script-languages
under a single spiritual influence. It is _impossible_ that there
should not be a common character in the development of German,
English, Italian, French, and Spanish from 900 to 1900, as also in
the history of the Hellenic and Italic (Etruscan included) between
1100 and the Empire. But what is it that, irrespective of the area
of extension of language-families or races, acquires specific unity
from the landscape-limit of the Culture alone? What modifications have
Hellenistic and Latin in common after 300--in pronunciation and idiom,
metrically, grammatically, and stylistically? What is present in German
and Italian after 1000, but not in Italian and Rumanian? These and
similar questions have never yet been systematically investigated.
Every Culture at its awakening finds itself in the presence
of _peasant-languages_, speeches of the cityless countryside,
“everlasting,” and almost unconcerned with the great events of history,
which have gone on through late Culture and Civilization as unwritten
dialects and slowly undergone imperceptible changes. On the top of
this now the language of the two primary Estates raises itself as the
first manifestation of a waking relation that _has_ Culture, that _is_
Culture. Here, in the ring of nobility and priesthood, languages become
Culture-languages, and, more particularly, _talk belongs with the
castle, and speech to the cathedral_. And thus on the very threshold
of evolution the plantlike separates itself from the animal, the
destiny of the living from the destiny of the dead, that of the organic
side from that of the mechanical side of understanding. For the Totem
side affirms and the Taboo side denies, blood and Time. Everywhere we
meet, and very early indeed, rigid cult-languages whose sanctity is
guaranteed by their inalterability, systems long dead, or alien to
life and artificially fettered, which have the strict vocabulary that
the formulation of eternal truths requires. Old Vedic stiffened as a
religious language, and with it Sanskrit as a savant-language. The
Egyptian of the Old Kingdom was perpetuated as priests’ language, so
that in the New Empire sacred formulæ were no more understandable than
the _Carmen Saliare_ and the hymn of the Fratres Arvales in Augustan
times.[213] In the Arabian pre-Cultural period Babylonian, Hebrew, and
Avestan simultaneously went out of use as workaday languages--probably
in the second century before Christ--indeed on that very account Jews
and Persians used them in their Scriptures as in opposition to Aramaic
and Pehlevi. The same significance attached to Gothic Latin for the
Church, Humanists’ Latin for the learning of the Baroque, Church
Slavonic in Russia, and no doubt Sumerian in Babylonia.
In contrast with this, the nursery of talk is in the early castles
and palaces of assize. Here the _living_ Culture-languages have been
formed. Talk is the custom of speech, its manners--“good form” in
the intonation and idiom, fine tact in choice of words and mode of
expression. All these things are a mark of _race_; they are learned not
in the monastery cell or the scholar’s study, but in polite intercourse
and from living examples. In noble society, and as a hall-mark of
nobility, the language of Homer,[214] as also the old French of the
Crusades and the Middle High German of the Hohenstaufen, were erected
out of the ordinary talk of the country-side. When we speak of the
great epic poets, the Skalds, the Troubadours, as creators of language,
we must not forget that they began by being trained for their task, _in
language as in other things_, by moving in noble circles. The great art
by which the Culture finds its tongue is the achievement of a race and
not that of a craft.
The clerical language on the other hand starts from concepts and
conclusions. It labours to improve the dialectical capacities of the
words and sentence-forms to the maximum. There sets in, consequently,
an ever-increasing differentiation of scholastic and courtly, of
the idiom of intellectual from that of social intercourse. Beyond
all divisions of language-families there is a component common to
the expression of Plotinus and Thomas Aquinas, of Veda and Mishna.
Here we have the starting-point of all the ripe scholar-languages of
the West--which, German and English and French alike, bear to this
day the unmistakable signs of their origin in scholars’ Latin--and,
therefore, the starting point of all the apparatus of technical
expression and logical sentence-form. This opposition between the
modes of understanding of “Society” and of Science renews itself again
and again till far into the Late period. The centre of gravity in
the history of French was decisively on the side of race; i.e., of
talk. At the Court of Versailles, in the salons of Paris, the _esprit
précieux_ of the Arthurian romances evolves into the “conversation,”
the classical art of talk, whose dictature the whole West acknowledges.
The fact that Ionic-Attic, too, was fashioned entirely in the halls
of the tyrants and in symposia created great difficulties for Greek
philosophy: for later on, it was almost impossible to discuss the
syllogism in the language of Alcibiades. On the other hand, German
prose, in the decisive phase of Baroque, had no central point on which
it could rise to excellence, and so even to-day it oscillates in point
of style between French and Latin--courtly and scholarly--according as
the author’s intuition is to express himself well or accurately. Our
Classical writers, thanks to their linguistic origin in office or study
and their stay as tutors in the castles and the little courts, arrived
indeed at personal styles, and others are able to imitate these styles,
but a specifically German prose, standard for all, they were unable to
create.
To these two class-languages the rise of the city added a third, the
language of the bourgeoisie, which is the true script-speech, reasoned
and utilitarian, prose in the strictest sense of the word. It swings
gently between the expression-modes of elegant society and of learning,
in the one direction thinking for ever of new turns and words _à la
mode_, in the other keeping sturdy hold on its existing stock of ideas.
But in its inner essence it is of a _mercantile_ nature. It feels
itself frankly as a class badge _vis-à-vis_ the historyless-changeless
phrasing of the “people” which Luther and others employed, to the great
scandal of their superficial contemporaries. With the final victory
of the city the urban speech absorbs into itself that of elegance and
that of learning. There arises in the upper strata of megalopolitan
populations the uniform, keenly intelligent, practical κοινή, the
child and symbol of its Civilization, equally averse from dialect
and poetry--something perfectly mechanical, precise, cold, leaving
as little as possible to gesture. These final homeless and rootless
languages can be learned by every trader and porter--Hellenistic in
Carthage and on the Oxus, Chinese in Java, English in Shanghai--and
for their comprehension talk has no importance or meaning. And if we
inquire what really created these languages, we find not the spirit of
a race or of a religion, but the spirit of economics.
CHAPTER VI
CITIES AND PEOPLES
(C)
PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN
I
Now at last it is possible to approach--if with extreme precaution--the
conception “people,” and to bring order into that chaos of people-forms
that the historical research of the present day has only succeeded in
making worse confounded than before. There is no word that has been
used more freely and more utterly uncritically, yet none that calls
for a stricter critique, than this. Very careful historians, even,
after going to much trouble to clear their theoretical basis (up to a
point) slide back thereafter into treating peoples, race-parts, and
speech-communities as completely equivalent. If they find the name of a
people, it counts without more ado as the designation of a language as
well. If they discover an inscription of three words, they believe they
have established a racial connexion. If a few “roots” correspond, the
curtain rises at once on a primitive people with a primitive habitat
in the background. And the modern nationalist spirit has only enhanced
this “thinking in terms of peoples.”
But is it the Hellenes, the Dorians, or the Spartans that are a people?
If the Romans were a people, what are we to say about the Latins? And
what kind of a unit within the population of Italy at _c._ 400 do we
mean by the name “Etruscan?” Has not their “nationality,” like that
of Basques and Thracians, been made actually to depend upon the build
of their language? What ethnic idea underlies the words “American,”
“Swiss,” “Jew,” “Boer”? Blood, speech, faith, State, landscape--what in
all these is determinative in the formation of a people? In general,
relationships of blood and language are determined only by way of
scholarship, and the ordinary individual is perfectly unconscious
of them. “Indogermanic” is purely and simply a scientific, more
particularly a philological, concept. The attempt of Alexander the
Great to fuse Greeks and Persians together was a complete failure, and
we have recently had experience of the real strength of Anglo-German
community of feeling. But “people” is a linkage of which one is
_conscious_. In ordinary usage, one designates as one’s “people”--and
with feeling--that community, out of the many to which one belongs,
which inwardly stands nearest to one.[215] And then he extends the
use of this concept, which is really quite particular and derived
from personal experience, to collectivities of the most varied kinds.
For Cæsar the Arverni were a “_civitas_”; for us the Chinese are a
“nation.” On this basis, it was the Athenians and not the Greeks who
constituted a nation, and in fact there were only a few individuals
who, like Isocrates, felt themselves _primarily_ as Hellenes. On this
basis, one of two brothers may call himself a Swiss and the other,
with equal right, a German. These are not philosophical concepts, but
historical facts. A people is an aggregate of men which feels itself
a unit. The Spartiates[216] felt themselves a people in _this_ sense;
the “Dorians” of 1100, too, probably, but those of 400 certainly not.
The Crusaders became genuinely a people in taking the oath of Clermont;
the Mormons in their expulsion from Missouri, in 1839;[217] the
Mamertines[218] by their need of winning for themselves a stronghold
of refuge.[219] Was the formative principle very different with the
Jacobins and Hyksos? How many peoples may have originated in a chief’s
following or a band of fugitives? Such a group can change race, like
the Osmanli, who appeared in Asia Minor as Mongols; or language, like
the Sicilian Normans; or name, like Achæans and Danaoi. So long as the
common feeling is there, the people as such is there.
We have to distinguish the destiny of a people from its name. The
latter is often the only thing about which information remains to us;
but can we fairly conclude from a name anything about the history, the
descent, the language, or even merely the identity of those who bore
it? Here again the historical researcher is to blame, in that, whatever
his theory may have been, he has in practice treated the relation
between name and bearer as simply as he would treat, say, the personal
names of to-day. Have we any conception of the number of unexplored
possibilities in this field? To begin with, the very act of name-giving
is of enormous importance in early associations. For with a name the
human group consciously sets itself up with a sort of sacral dignity.
But, here, cult- and war-names may exist side by side; others the land
or the heritage may provide; the tribal name may be exchanged for that
of an eponymous hero, as with the Osmanli;[220] lastly, an unlimited
number of alien names can be applied along the frontiers of a group
without more than a part of the community ever hearing them at all.
If only such names as these be handed down, it becomes practically
inevitable that conclusions about the bearers of them will be wrong.
The indubitably sacral names of Franks, Alemanni, and Saxons have
superseded a host of names of the period of the Varus battle--but if
we did not happen to know this, we should long ago have been convinced
that an expulsion or annihilation of old tribes by new intruders had
taken place here. The names “Romans” and “Quirites,” “Spartans” and
“Lacedæmonians,” “Carthaginian” and “Punic” have endured side by
side--here again there was a risk of supposing two peoples instead of
one. In what relation the names “Pelasgi,” “Achæans,” “Danai,” stand to
one another we shall never learn, and had we nothing more than these
names, the scholar would long ago have assigned to each a separate
people, complete with language and racial affinities. Has it not been
attempted to draw from the regional designation “Doric” conclusions
as to the course of the Dorian migration? How often may a people have
adopted a land-name and taken it along with them? This is the case
with the modern Prussians, but also with the modern Parsees, Jews, and
Turks, while the opposite is the case in Burgundy and Normandy. The
name “Hellenes” arose about 650, and, therefore, cannot be connected
with any movement of population. Lorraine (Lothringen) received the
name of a perfectly unimportant prince, and that, in connexion with
the decision of a heritage and not a folk-migration. Paris called
the Germans Allemands in 1814, Prussians in 1870, Boches in 1914--in
other circumstances three distinct peoples might have been supposed to
be covered by these names. The West-European is called in the East a
Frank, the Jew a Spaniole--the fact is readily explained by historical
circumstances, but what would a philologist have produced from the
_words alone_?
It is not to be imagined at what results the scholars of A.D. 3000
might arrive if they worked by present-day methods on names, linguistic
remains, and the notion of original homes and migration. For example,
the Teutonic Knights about 1300 drove out the heathen “Prussians,” and
in 1870 these people suddenly appear on their wanderings at the gates
of Paris! The Romans, pressed by the Goths, emigrate from the Tiber to
the lower Danube! Or a part of them perhaps settled in Poland, where
Latin was spoken? Charlemagne on the Weser defeated the Saxons, who
thereupon emigrated to the neighbourhood of Dresden, their places being
taken by the Hanoverians, whose original settlement, according to the
dynasty-name, was on the Thames! The historian who writes down the
history of names instead of that of peoples, forgets that names, too,
have their destinies. So also languages, which, with their migrations,
modifications, victories, and defeats, are inconclusive even as to the
existence of peoples associated with them. This is the basic error of
Indo-Germanic research in particular. If in historic times the names
“Pfalz” and “Calabria” have moved about, if Hebrew has been driven
from Palestine to Warsaw, and Persian from the Tigris to India, what
conclusions can be drawn from the history of the Etruscan name and
the alleged “Tyrsenian” inscription at Lemnos?[221] Or did the French
and the Haytian Negroes, as shown by their common language, once
form a single primitive people? In the region between Budapest and
Constantinople to-day two Mongolian, one Semitic, two Classical, and
three Slavonic languages are spoken, and these speech-communities all
feel themselves essentially as peoples.[222] If we were to build up
a migration-story here, the error of the method would be manifested
in some singular results. “Doric” is a dialect designation--that we
know, and that is all we know. No doubt some few dialects of this group
spread rapidly, but that is no proof of the spread or even of the
existence of a human stock belonging with it.[223]
II
Thus we come to the pet idea of modern historical thought. If a
historian meets a people that has achieved something, he feels that he
owes it to these people to answer the question: Whence did it come? It
is a matter of dignity for a people to have come from somewhere and to
have an original home. The notion that it is at home in the place where
we find it is almost an insulting assumption. Wandering is a cherished
saga-motive of primitive mankind, but its employment in serious
research also has become a sheer mania. _Whether_ the Chinese invaded
China or the Egyptians Egypt no one inquires, the question being always
_when_ and _whence_ they did so. It would be less of an effort to
originate the Semites in Scandinavia or the Aryans in Canaan than to
abandon the notion of an original home.
Now, the fact that all early populations were highly mobile is
unquestionable. In it, for example, lies the secret of the Libyan
problem. The Libyans or their predecessors spoke Hamitic, but, as shown
even by old Egyptian reliefs, they were all blond and blue-eyed and,
therefore, doubtless of North-European provenance.[224] In Asia Minor
at least three migration-strata since 1300 have been determined, which
are related probably to the attacks of the “Sea-peoples” in Egypt,
and something similar has been shown in the Mexican Culture. But as
to the nature of these movements we know nothing at all. In any case,
there can be no question of migrations such as modern historians like
to picture--movements of close-pressed peoples traversing the lands
in great masses, pushing and being pushed till finally they come to
rest somewhere or other. It is not the alterations in themselves,
but the conceptions we have formed about them, that have spoilt our
outlook upon the nature of the peoples. Peoples in the modern sense
of the word do not wander, and that which of old _did_ wander needs
to be very carefully examined before it is labelled, as the label
will not always stand for the same thing. The motive, too, that is
everlastingly assigned to these migrations is colourless and worthy of
the century that invented it--material necessity. Hunger would normally
lead to efforts of quite a different sort, and it has certainly been
only the last of the motives that drove men of race out of their
nests--although it is understandable that it would very frequently make
itself felt when such bands suddenly encountered a military obstacle.
It was doubtless, in this simple and strong kind of man, the primary
microcosmic urgency to move in free space which sprang up out of the
depths of his soul as love of adventure, daring, liking for power
and booty; as a blazing desire, to us almost incomprehensible, for
deeds, for joy of carnage, for the death of the hero. Often, too, no
doubt, domestic strife or fear of the revenge of the stronger, was
the motive, but again a strong and manly one. Motives like these are
infectious--the “man who stays at home” is a coward. Was it common
bodily hunger, again, that induced the Crusades, or the expeditions
of Cortez and Pizarro, or in our time the ventures of “wild west”
pioneers? Where, in history, we find the little handful invading
wide lands, it is ever the voices of the blood, the longing for high
destinies, that drive them.
Further, we have to consider the position in the country traversed by
the invaders. Its characteristics are always modified more or less,
but the modifications are due not merely to the influence of the
immigrants, but more and more to the nature of the settled population,
which in the end becomes numerically overwhelming.
Obviously, in spaces almost empty of men it is easy for the weaker
simply to evade the onslaught, and as a rule he was able to do so.
But in later and denser conditions, the inroad spelt dispossession
for the weaker, who must either defend himself successfully or else
win new lands for old. Already there is the out-thrust into space. No
tribe lives without constant contacts on all sides and a mistrustful
readiness to stand to arms. The hard necessity of war breeds men.
Peoples grow by, and against, other peoples to inward greatness.
Weapons become weapons against men and not beasts. And finally we
have the only migration-form that counts in historic times--warrior
bands sweep through thoroughly populated countries, whose inhabitants
remain, undisturbed and upstanding, as an essential part of the spoils
of victory. And then, the victors being in a minority, completely new
situations arise. Peoples of strong inward form spread themselves
on top of much larger but formless populations, and the further
transformations of peoples, languages, and races depend upon very
complicated factors of detail. Since the decisive investigations of
Beloch[225] and Delbrück[226] we know that all migrant peoples--and the
Persians of Cyrus, the Mamertines and the Crusaders, the Ostrogoths and
the “Sea-peoples” of the Egyptian inscriptions were all peoples in this
sense--were, in comparison with the inhabitants of the regions they
occupied, very small in numbers, just a few thousand warriors, superior
to the natives only in respect of their determination to _be_ a Destiny
and not to submit to one. It was not inhabitable, but inhabited, land
of which they took possession, and thus the relation between the two
peoples became a question of status, the migration turned into the
campaign, and the process of settling down became a political process.
And here again, in presence of the fact that at a historic distance
of time the successes of a small war-band, with the consequent spread
of the victor’s names and language, may all too easily be taken for a
“migration of peoples,” it is necessary to repeat our question, what,
in fact, the men, things, and factors are that _can_ migrate.
Here are some of the answers--the name of a district or that of a
collectivity (or of a hero, adopted by his followers), in that it
spreads, becomes extinct here and is taken by or given to a totally
different population there: in that it may pass from land to people and
travel with the latter or vice versa--the language of the conqueror or
that of the conquered, or even a third language, adopted for reciprocal
understanding--the war-band of a chief which subdues whole countries
and propagates itself through captive women, or some accidental group
of heterogeneous adventurers, or a tribe with its women and children,
like the Philistines of 1200, who quite in the Germanic fashion trekked
with their ox-wagons along the Phœnician coast to Egypt.[227] In
such conditions, we may again ask, can conclusions be drawn from the
destinies of names and languages as to those of peoples and races?
There is only one possible answer, a decided negative.
Amongst the “Sea-peoples” that repeatedly attacked Egypt in the
thirteenth century appear the _names_ of Danai and Achæans--but
in Homer both are almost mythical designations--the _name_ of the
Lukka--which adhered later to Lycia, though the inhabitants of that
country called themselves Tramilæ--and the _names_ of the Etruscans,
the Sards, the Siculi--but this in no wise proved that these “Tursha”
spoke the later Etruscan, nor that there was the slightest physical
connexion with the like-named inhabitants of Italy or anything else
entitling us to speak of “one and the same people.” Assuming that the
Lemnos inscription is Etruscan, and Etruscan an Indogermanic language,
much could be deduced therefrom in the domain of linguistic history,
but in that of racial history nothing whatever. Rome was an Etruscan
city, but is not the fact completely without bearing upon the _soul_
of the Roman people? Are the Romans Indogermanic because they happen
to speak a Latin dialect? The ethnologists recognize a Mediterranean
Race and an Alpine Race, and north and south of these an astonishing
physical resemblance between North-Germans and Libyans; but the
philologists know that the Basques are in virtue of their speech a
“pre-Indogermanic”--Iberian--population. The two views are mutually
exclusive. Were the builders of Mycenæ and Tiryns “Hellenes”?--it would
be as pertinent to ask were the Ostrogoths Germans. I confess that I do
not comprehend why such questions are formulated at all.
For me, the “people” is a _unit of the soul_. The great events of
history were not really achieved by peoples; _they themselves created
the peoples_. Every act alters the soul of the doer. Even when the
event is preceded by some grouping around or under a famous name, the
fact that there is a people and not merely a band behind the prestige
of that name is not a condition, but a result of the event. It was
the fortunes of their migrations that made the Ostrogoths and the
Osmanli what they afterwards were. The “Americans” did _not_ immigrate
from Europe; the name of the Florentine geographer Amerigo Vespucci
designates to-day not only a continent, but also a people in the true
sense of the word, whose specific character was born in the spiritual
upheavals of 1775 and, above all, 1861-5.
This is the one and only connotation of the word “people.” Neither
unity of speech nor physical descent is decisive. That which
distinguishes the people from the population, raises it up out of
the population, and will one day let it find its level again in the
population is always the inwardly lived experience of the “we.” The
deeper this feeling is, the stronger is the _vis viva_ of the people.
There are energetic and tame, ephemeral and indestructible, forms of
peoples. They can change speech, name, race, and land, but so long as
their soul lasts, they can gather to themselves and transform human
material of any and every provenance. The Roman name in Hannibal’s day
meant a people, in Trajan’s time nothing more than a population.
Of course, it is often quite justifiable to align peoples with races,
but “race” in this connexion must not be interpreted in the present-day
Darwinian sense of the word. It cannot be accepted, surely, that a
people was ever held together by the mere unity of physical origin,
or, if it were, could maintain that unity even for ten generations.
It cannot be too often reiterated that this physiological provenance
has no existence except for science--never for folk-consciousness--and
that no people was ever yet stirred to enthusiasm for _this_ ideal of
blood-purity. In race there is nothing material, but something cosmic
and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence
of the march of historical Being. It is inco-ordination of this
(wholly metaphysical) beat that produces race-hatred, which is just
as strong between Germans and Frenchmen as it is between Germans and
Jews, and it is resonance on this beat that makes the true love--so
akin to hate--between man and wife. He who has not race knows nothing
of this perilous love. If a part of the human multitude that now
speaks Indogermanic languages, cherishes a certain race-ideal, what
is evidenced thereby is not the existence of the prototype-people so
dear to the scholar, but the metaphysical force and power of the ideal.
It is highly significant that this ideal is expressed, never in the
whole population, but mainly in its warrior-element and pre-eminently
in its genuine nobility--that is, in men who live entirely in a world
of facts, under the spell of historical becoming, destiny-men who will
and dare--and it was precisely in the early times (another significant
point) that a born alien of quality and dignity could without
particular difficulty gain admittance to the ruling class, and wives
in particular were chosen for their “breed” and not their descent.
Correspondingly, the impress of race-traits is weakest (as may be
observed even to-day) in the true priestly and scholarly natures,[228]
even though these often do stand in close blood-relationship to the
others. A strong spirit trains up the body into a product of art.
The Romans formed, in the midst of the confused and even heteroclite
tribes of Italy, a race of the firmest and strictest inward unity
that was neither Etruscan nor Latin nor merely “Classical,” but quite
specifically Roman.[229] Nowhere is the force that cements a people
set before us more plainly than in Roman busts of the late Republican
period.
I will cite yet another example, than which none more clearly exhibits
the errors that these scholars’ notions of people, language, and
race inevitably entail, and in which lies the ultimate, perhaps
the determining reason why the Arabian Culture has never yet been
recognized as an organism. It is that of the Persians. Persian is an
Aryan language, hence “the Persians” are an “Indogermanic people,”
and hence Persian history and religion are the affair of “Iranian”
philology.
To begin with, is Persian a language of equal rank with the Indian,
derived from a common ancestor, _or is it merely an Indian dialect?_
Seven centuries of linguistic development, scriptless and therefore
very rapid, lie between the Old Vedic of the Indian texts and the
Behistun Inscription[230] of Darius. It is almost as great a gap as
that between the Latin of Tacitus and the French of the Strassburg Oath
of 842.[231] Now the Tell-el-Amarna letters and the archives of Boghaz
Keüi tell us many “Aryan” names of persons and gods of the middle of
the second millennium B.C.--that is, the Vedic Age of Chivalry. It is
Palestine and Syria that furnish these names. Nevertheless, Eduard
Meyer observes[232] that they are Indian and not Persian, and the same
holds good for the numerals that have now been discovered.[233] There
is not a unit of Persians, or of any other “people” in the sense of our
historical writers. They were Indian heroes, who rode westward and with
their precious weapon the warhorse and their own ardent energy made
themselves felt as a power far and wide in the ageing Babylonian Empire.
About 600 there appears in the middle of this world Persis, a little
district with a politically united population of peasant barbarians.
Herodotus says that of its tribes only three were of genuine Persian
nationality. Had the language of these knights of old lived on in
the hills, and is “Persians” really a land-name that passed to a
people? The Medes, who were very similar, bear only the name of a land
where an upper warrior-stratum had learned through great political
successes to feel itself as a unit. In the Assyrian archives of Sargon
and his successors (about 700) are found, along with the non-Aryan
place-names, numerous “Aryan” names of persons, all leading figures,
but Tiglath-Pileser IV (745-727) calls the people black-haired.[234] It
can only have been later that the “Persian people” of Cyrus and Darius
was formed, out of men of varied provenance, but forged to a strong
inner unity of lived experience. But when, scarce two centuries later,
the Macedonians put an end to their lordship--was it that the Persians
in this form were _no longer in existence_? (Was there still a Lombard
people at all in Italy in A.D. 900?) It is certain that the very wide
diffusion of the empire-language of Persia, and the distribution of
the few thousands of adult males from Persia over the immense system
of military and administrative business, must long ago have led to the
dissolution of the Persian nation and set up in its place, as carriers
of the Persian name in upper-class conscious of itself as a _political_
unit, of whose members very few could have claimed descent from the
invaders from Persia.[235] There is, indeed, not even a country that
can be considered as the theatre of Persian history. The events of
the period from Darius to Alexander took place partly in northern
Mesopotamia (that is, in the midst of an Aramaic-speaking population),
partly lower down in old Sinear, anywhere but in Persis, where the
handsome buildings begun by Xerxes were never carried out. The
Parthians of the succeeding Achæmenid period were a Mongol tribe which
had adopted a Persian dialect and in the midst of this people sought to
embody the Persian national feeling in themselves.
Here the Persian religion emerges as a problem no less difficult
than those of race and language.[236] scholarship has associated it
with these as though the association were self-evident, and has,
therefore, treated it always with reference to India. But the religion
of these land-Vikings was not related to, it was identical with the
Vedic, as shown by the divine pairs Mitra-Varuna and Indra-Nasatya
of the Boghaz Keüi texts. And within this religion which held up its
head in the middle of the Babylonian world Zarathustra now appeared,
from out of the lower ranks of the people, as reformer. It is known
that he was not a Persian. That which he created (as I hope to show)
was a transfer of _Vedic_ religion into the forms of the _Aramæan_
world-contemplation, in which already there were the faint beginnings
of the Magian religiousness. The _dævas_, the gods of the old Indian
beliefs, grew to be the demons of the Semitic and the jinn of the
Arabian. Yahweh and Beelzebub are related to one another precisely as
Ahuramazda and Ahriman in this peasant-religion, which was essentially
Aramæan and, therefore, founded in an ethical-dualistic world-feeling.
Eduard Meyer[237] has correctly established the difference between
the Indian and the Iranian view of the world, but, owing to his
erroneous premisses, has not recognized its origin. _Zarathustra is
a travelling-companion of the prophets of Israel_, who like him, and
at the same time, transformed the old (Mosaic-Canaanitish) beliefs of
the people. It is significant that the whole eschatology is a common
possession of the Persian and Jewish religions, and that the Avesta
texts were originally written in Aramaic (in Parthian times) and only
afterwards translated into Pehlevi.[238]
But already in Parthian times there occurred amongst both Persians
and Jews that profoundly intimate change which makes no longer tribal
attachment but orthodoxy the hall-mark of nationality.[239] A Jew who
went over to the Mazda faith _became thereby a Persian_; a Persian who
became a Christian belonged to the Nestorian “people.” The very dense
population of northern Mesopotamia--the motherland of the Arabian
Culture--is partly of Jewish and partly of Persian nationality in
this sense of the word, which is not at all concerned with race and
very little with language. Even before the birth of Christ, “Infidel”
designates the non-Persian as it designates the non-Jew.
This nation is the “Persian people” of the Sassanid empire, and,
connected with the fact, we find that Pehlevi and Hebrew die out
simultaneously, Aramaic becoming the mother tongue of both communities.
If we speak in terms of Aryans and Semites, the Persians in the
time of the Tell-el-Amarna Correspondence were Aryans, but no
“people”: in that of Darius a people, but without race: in Sassanid
times a community of believers, but of Semitic origin. There is no
proto-Persian “people” branched off from the Aryan, nor a general
history of the Persians, and for the three special histories, which are
held together only by certain linguistic relations, there is not even a
common historical theatre.
III
With this are laid, at last, the foundations for a _morphology of
peoples_. Directly its essence is seen, we see also an inward order
in the historical stream of the peoples. They are neither linguistic
nor political nor zoölogical, but spiritual, units. And this leads at
once to the further distinction between _peoples before, within, and
after a Culture_. It is a fact that has been profoundly felt in all
ages that Culture-peoples are _more distinct_ in character than the
rest. Their predecessors I will call primitive peoples. These are the
fugitive and heterogeneous associations that form and dissolve without
ascertainable rule, till at last, in the presentiment of a still unborn
Culture (as, for example, in the pre-Homeric, the pre-Christian, and
the Germanic periods), phase by phase, becoming ever more definite in
type, they assemble the human material of a population into groups,
though all the time little or no alteration has been occurring in the
stamp of man. Such a superposition of phases leads from the Cimbri and
Teutones through the Marcomanni and Goths to the Franks, Lombards,
and Saxons. Instances of primitive peoples are the Jews and Persians
of the Seleucid age, the “Sea-peoples,” the Egyptian Nomes of Menes’s
time.[240] And that which follows a Culture we may call--from its
best-known example, the Egyptians of post-Roman times--fellah-peoples.
In the tenth century of our era the Faustian soul suddenly awoke
and manifested itself in innumerable shapes. Amongst these, side
by side with the architecture and the ornament, there appears a
distinctly characterized form of “people.” Out of the people-shapes
of the Carolingian Empire--the Saxons, Swabians, Franks, Visigoths,
Lombards--arise suddenly the German, the French, the Spaniards, the
Italians. Hitherto (consciously and deliberately or not) historical
research has uniformly regarded these Culture-peoples as something in
being, as primaries, and have treated the Culture itself as secondary,
as their product. The creative units of history, accordingly, were
simply the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, and so on.
As the Greek Culture was the work of the Hellenes, they must have
been in existence as such far earlier; therefore they must have been
immigrants. Any other idea of creator and creation seemed inconceivable.
I regard it, therefore, as a discovery of decisive importance that
the facts here set forth lead to the reverse conclusion. It will be
established in all rigour that the great Cultures are entities,
primary or original, that arise out of the deepest foundations of
spirituality, and that the peoples under the spell of a Culture are,
alike in their inward form and in their whole manifestation, its
products and not its authors. These shapes in which humanity is seized
and moulded possess style and style-history no less than kinds of art
and modes of thought. The people of Athens is a symbol not less than
the Doric temple, the Englishman not less than modern physics. There
are peoples of Apollinian, Magian, Faustian cast. The Arabian Culture
was _not_ created by “the Arabs”--quite the contrary; for the Magian
Culture begins in the time of Christ, and the Arabian people represents
its last great creation of that kind, a community bonded by Islam as
the Jewish and Persian communities before it had been bonded by their
religions. World-history is the history of the great Cultures, and
peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of
these Cultures fulfil their Destinies.
In each of these Cultures, Mexican and Chinese, Indian and Egyptian,
there is--whether our science is aware of it or not--_a group of
great peoples of identical style_, which arises at the beginning of
the springtime, forming states and carrying history, and throughout
the course of its evolution bears its fundamental form onward to the
goal. They are in the highest degree unlike amongst themselves--it is
scarcely possible to conceive of a sharper contrast than that between
Athenians and Spartans, Germans and Frenchmen, Tsin and Tsu--and
all military history shows national hatred as the loftiest method
of inducting historic decisions. But the moment that a people alien
to the Culture makes an appearance in the field of history, there
awakens everywhere an overpowering feeling of spiritual relationship,
and the notion of the barbarian--meaning the man who inwardly does
_not_ belong to the Culture--is as clear-cut in the peoples of the
Egyptian settlements and the Chinese world of states as it is in the
Classical. The energy of the form is so high that it grasps and recasts
neighbouring peoples, witness the Carthaginians of Roman times with
their half-Classical style, and the Russians who have figured as a
people of Western style from Catherine the Great to the fall of Petrine
Tsardom.
Peoples in the style of their Culture we will call _Nations_, the word
itself distinguishing them from the forms that precede and that follow
them. It is not merely a strong feeling of “we” that forges the inward
unity of its most significant of all major associations; _underlying
the nation there is an Idea_. This stream of a collective being
possesses a very deep relation to Destiny, to Time, and to History,
a relation that is different in each instance and one, too, that
determines the relation of the human material to race, language, land,
state, and religion. As the styles of the Old Chinese and the Classical
peoples differ, so also the styles of their histories.
Life as experienced by primitive and by fellaheen peoples is just
the zoölogical up-and-down, a planless happening without goal or
cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last
analysis, devoid of significance. The only historical peoples, the
peoples whose existence _is world-history_, are the nations. Let us be
perfectly clear as to what is meant by this. The Ostrogoths suffered
a great destiny, and therefore, inwardly, they have no history. Their
battles and settlements were not necessary and therefore were episodic;
their end was insignificant. In 1500 B.C. that which lived about Mycenæ
and Tiryns was not _as yet_ a nation, and that which lived in Minoan
Crete was _no longer_ a nation. Tiberius was the last ruler who tried
to lead a Roman nation further on the road of history, who sought to
_retrieve_ it for history. By Marcus Aurelius there was only a Romanic
population to be defended--a field for occurrences, but no longer for
history. How many free pre-generations of Mede or Achæan or Hun folk
there were, in what sort of social groups their predecessors and their
descendants lived, cannot be determined and depends upon no rule. But
of a nation the life-period _is_ determinate, and so are the pace and
the rhythm in which its history moves to fulfilment. From the beginning
of the Chóu period to the rulership of Shih-Hwang-ti, from the events
on which the Troy legend was founded to Augustus, and from Thinite
times to the XVIII Dynasty, the numbers of generations are more or less
the same. The “Late” period of the Culture, from Solon to Alexander,
from Luther to Napoleon, embraces no more than about ten generations.
Within such limits the destiny of the genuine Culture-people, and with
it that of world-history in general, reach fulfilment. The Romans, the
Arabs, the Prussians, are late-born nations. How many generations of
Fabii and Junii had already come and gone _as Romans_ by the time Cannæ
was fought?
Further, nations are _the true city-building peoples_. In the
strongholds they arose, with the cities they ripen to the full height
of their world-consciousness, and in the world-cities they dissolve.
Every town-formation that has character has also _national_ character.
The village, which is wholly a thing of race, does not yet possess it;
the megalopolis possesses it no longer. Of this essential, which so
characteristically colours the nation’s public life that its slightest
manifestation identifies it, we cannot exaggerate--we can scarcely
imagine--the force, the self-sufficingness, and the _loneliness_.
If between the souls of two Cultures the screen is impenetrable, if
no Western may ever hope completely to understand the Indian or the
Chinese, this is equally so, even more so, as between well-developed
nations. Nations understand one another as little as individuals do
so. Each understands merely a self-created picture of the other,
and individuals with the insight to penetrate deeper are few and
far between. _Vis-à-vis_ the Egyptians, all the Classical peoples
necessarily felt themselves as relatives in one whole, but as between
themselves they never understood each other. What sharper contrast is
there than that between the Athenian and the Spartan spirit? German,
French, and English modes of philosophical thinking are distinct, not
merely in Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz, but already in the age of
Scholasticism;[241] and even now, in modern physics and chemistry, the
scientific method, the choice and type of experiments and hypotheses,
their inter-relations, and their relative importance for the course and
aim of the investigation are markedly different in every nation. German
and French piety, English and Spanish social ethics, German and English
habits of life, stand so far apart that for the average man, and,
therefore, for the public opinion of his community, the real inwardness
of every foreign nation remains a deep secret and a source of continual
and pregnant error. In the Roman Empire men began generally to
understand one another, but this was precisely because there had ceased
to be anything worth understanding in the Classical city. With the
advent of mutual comprehension this particular humanity ceased to live
in nations, _and ipso facto ceased to be historic_.[242]
Owing to the very depth of these experiences, it is not possible for
a whole people to be _uniformly and throughout_ a Culture-people,
a nation. Amongst primitives each individual man has the same
feeling of group-obligations, but the awakening of a nation into
self-consciousness invariably takes place in gradations--that is,
pre-eminently in the particular class that is strongest of soul and
holds the others spellbound by a power derived from what it has
experienced. _Every nation is represented in history by a minority._ At
the beginning of the springtime it is the nobility,[243] which in that
period of its first appearance is the fine flowering of the people, the
vessel in which the national character--unconscious, but felt all the
more strongly in its cosmic pulse--receives its destined Style. The
“we” is the knightly class, in the Egyptian feudal period of 2700 not
less than in the Indian and the Chinese of 1200. The Homeric heroes
_are_ the Danai; the Norman barons _are_ England. Centuries later,
Saint-Simon--the embodiment, it is true, of an older France--used to
say that “all France” was assembled in the King’s ante-room, and there
was a time in which Rome and the Senate were actually identical. With
the advent of the town the burgher becomes the vessel of nationality,
and (as we should expect from the growth of intellectuality) of a
national _consciousness_ that it gets from the nobility and carries
through to its fulfilment. Always it is particular circles, graduated
in fine shades, that _in the name of_ the people live, feel, act, and
know how to die, but these circles become larger and larger. In the
eighteenth century arose the Western _concept_ of the Nation which
sets up (and on occasion energetically insists upon) the claim to
be championed by everybody without exception; but in reality, as we
know, the _émigrés_ were just as convinced as the Jacobins that they
were _the_ people, _the_ representatives of the French nation. A
Culture-people which is coincident with “all” does not exist--this is
possible only in primitive and fellaheen peoples, only in a mere joint
being without depth or historical dignity. So long as a people is a
nation and works out the Destiny of a nation, there is in it a minority
which in the name of all represents and fulfils its history.
IV
The Classical nations, in accordance with the static-Euclidean soul of
their Culture, were corporeal units of the smallest imaginable size.
It was not Hellenes or Ionians that were nations, but in each city the
Demos, a union of adult men, legally and _by the same token nationally_
defined between the type of the hero as upper limit and the slave as
lower.[244] Synœcism, that mysterious process of early periods in which
the inhabitants of a countryside give up their villages and assemble
themselves as a town, marks the moment at which, having arrived at
self-consciousness, the Classical nation constitutes itself as such. We
can still trace the way in which this form of the nation steadily makes
good from Homeric times[245] to the epoch of the great colonizations.
It responds exactly to the Classical prime-symbol: each folk was a
body, visible and surveyable, a σῶμα, the express negation of the idea
of geographical space.
It is of no importance to Classical history whether or not the
Etruscans in Italy were identical physically or linguistically with
the bearers of this name amongst the “Sea-peoples,” or what the
relation was between the pre-Homeric units of the Pelasgi or Danai
and the later bearers of the Doric or the Hellenic name. If, about
1100, there are Doric and Etruscan primitive peoples (as is probable),
nevertheless _a Doric or an Etruscan nation never existed_. In
Tuscany as in the Peloponnese there were only City-states, _national
points_ which in the period of colonization _could only multiply,
never expand_. The Etruscan wars of Rome were always waged against
one or more cities,[246] and the nations that the Persians and the
Carthaginians confronted were of this same type. To speak of “the
Greeks and the Romans” as the eighteenth century did (and as we
still do) is completely erroneous. A Greek “nation” in our sense is
a misconception--the Greeks themselves never knew such an idea at
all. The name of “Hellenes,” which arose about 500, did not denote
a people, but the aggregate of Classical Culture-men, the _sum_ of
their nations,[247] in contradistinction to the “Barbarian” world.
And the Romans, a true urban people, could not conceive of their
Empire otherwise than in the form of innumerable nation-points,
the _civitates_ into which, juridically as in other respects, they
dissolved all the primitive peoples of their Imperium.[248] When
national feeling in _this_ shape is extinguished, there is an end to
Classical history.
It will be the task--one of the heaviest tasks of historians--to trace,
generation by generation, the quiet fading-out of the Classical nations
in the eastern Mediterranean during the “Late Classical” age, and the
ever stronger inflow of a new nation-spirit, the Magian.
A nation of the Magian type is the community of co-believers, the group
of all who know the right way to salvation and are inwardly linked
to one another by the _ijma_[249] of this belief. Men belonged to a
Classical nation by virtue of the possession of citizenship, but to
a Magian nation by virtue of a sacramental act--circumcision for the
Jews, specific forms of baptism for the Mandæans or the Christians. An
unbeliever was for a Magian folk what an alien was for a Classical--no
intercourse with him, no _connubium_--and this national separation
went so far that in Palestine a Jewish-Aramaic and a Christian-Aramaic
dialect formed themselves side by side.[250] The Faustian nation,
though necessarily bound up with a particular religiousness, is not
so with a particular confession; the Classical nation is by type
non-exclusive in its relations to different cults; but _the Magian
nation comprises neither more nor less than is covered by the idea of
one or another of the Magian Churches_. Inwardly the Classical nation
is linked with the city, and the Western with a landscape, but the
Arabian knows neither fatherland nor mother tongue. Outwardly its
specific world-outlook is only expressed by the distinctive script
which each such nation develops as soon as it is born. But for that
very reason the inwardness and hidden force--the magic, in fact--of a
Magian nation-feeling impresses us Faustians, who notice the absence of
the home-idea, as something entirely enigmatic and uncanny. This tacit,
self-secure cohesion (that of the Jews, for example, in the homes of
the Western peoples) is what entered “Roman Law” (called by a Classical
label _but worked out by Aramæans_) as the concept of the “juridical
person,”[251] which is nothing but the Magian notion of a community.
Post-exilic Judaism was a juridical person long before anyone had
discovered the concept itself.
The primitives who preceded this evolution were predominantly tribal
associations, among them the South-Arabian Minæans,[252] who appear
about the beginning of the first millennium, and whose name vanishes
in the first century before Christ; the Aramaic-speaking Chaldeans,
who, likewise about 1000 B.C., sprang up as clan-groups and from
659 to 539 ruled the Babylonian world; the Israelites before the
Exile;[253] and the Persians of Cyrus.[254] So strongly already the
populations felt this form that the priesthoods which developed
here, there, and everywhere after the time of Alexander received the
names of foundered or fictitious tribes. Amongst the Jews and the
South-Arabian Sabæans they were called Levites; amongst the Medes
and Persians, Magi (after an extinct Indian tribe); and amongst the
adherents of the new Babylonian religion Chaldeans (also after a
disintegrated clan-grouping).[255] But here, as in all other Cultures,
the energy of the national _consensus_ completely overrode the old
tribal arrangements of the primitives. Just as the _Populus Romanus_
unquestionably contained folk-elements of very varied provenance,
and as the nation of the French took in Salian Franks and Romanic
and Old Celtic natives alike, so the Magian nation also ceased to
regard origin as a distinguishing mark. The process, of course, was an
exceedingly long one. The tribe still counts for much with the Jews
of the Maccabæan period and even with the Arabs of the first Caliphs;
but for the inwardly ripened Culture-peoples of this world, such as
the Jews of the Talmudic period, it no longer possessed any meaning.
He who belongs to the Faith belongs to the Nation--it would have been
blasphemy even to admit any other distinction. In early Christian times
the Prince of Adiabene[256] went over to Judaism with his people in a
body, and they were all _ipso facto_ incorporated in the Jewish nation.
The same applies to the nobility of Armenia and even the Caucasian
tribes (which at that period must have Judaized on a large scale) and,
in the opposite direction, to the Beduins of Arabia, right down to the
extreme south, and beyond them again to African tribes as far afield as
Lake Chad.[257] Here evidently is a national common feeling proof even
against such race-distinctions as these. It is stated that even to-day
Jews can amongst themselves distinguish very different races at the
first glance, and that in the ghettos of eastern Europe the “tribes”
(in the Old Testament sense) are clearly recognized. But none of this
constitutes a difference of _nation_. According to von Erckert[258] the
West-European Jew-type is universally distributed within the non-Jewish
Caucasian peoples, whereas according to Weissenberg[259] it does not
occur at all amongst the long-headed Jews of southern Arabia, where the
Sabæan tomb-sculptures show a human type that might almost claim to be
Roman or Germanic and is the ancestor of these Jews who were converted
by missionary effort at least by the birth of Christ.
But this resolution of the tribal primitives into the Magian nations of
Persians, Jews, Mandæans, Christians, and the rest must have occurred
quite generally and on an immense scale. I have already drawn attention
to the decisive fact that long before the beginning of our era the
Persians represented simply a religious community, and it is certain
that their numbers were indefinitely increased by accessions to the
Mazdaist faith. The Babylonian religion vanished at that time--which
means that its adherents became in part Jews and in part Persians--but
emerging from it there is a _new_ religion, inwardly alien to both
Jewish and Persian, an astral religion, which bears the name of the
Chaldees and whose adherents constituted a genuine Aramaic-speaking
nation. From this Aramæan population of Chaldean-Jewish-Persian
nationality came, firstly the Babylonian Talmud, the Gnosis, and the
religion of Mani, and secondly, in Islamic times, Sufism and the Shia.
Moreover, as seen from Edessa, the inhabitants of the Classical
world, they also, appear as nations in the Magian style. “The Greeks”
in the Eastern idiom means the aggregate of all who adhered to the
Syncretic cults and were bound together by the _ijma_ of the Late
Classical religiousness. The Hellenistic city-nations are no longer
in the picture, which shows only _one_ community of believers, the
“worshippers of the mysteries,” who under the names of Helios,
Jupiter, Mithras, θεός ὕψιστος, worshipped a kind of Yahweh or Allah.
Throughout the East, Greekness is a definite _religious_ notion, and
for that matter one completely concordant with the facts as they
then were. The feeling of the Polis is almost extinct, and a Magian
nation needs neither home nor community of origin. Even the Hellenism
of the Seleucid Empire, which made converts in Turkestan and on the
Indus, was related in inward form to Persian and post-exilic Judaism.
Later, the Aramæan Porphyry, the pupil of Plotinus, attempted to
organize this Greekness as a cult-Church on the model of the Christian
and the Persian, and the Emperor Julian raised it to the dignity of
being the State Church--an act not merely religious, but also and
above all national. When a Jew sacrificed to Sol or to Apollo, he
thereby became a Greek. So, for example Ammonius Saccas (d. 242), the
teacher of Plotinus and probably also of Origen, went over “from the
Christians to the Greeks”; so also Porphyry, born Malchus and (like
the “Roman” jurist Ulpian)[260] a Phœnician of Tyre.[261] In these
cases we see jurists and State officials taking Latin, and philosophers
Greek, names--and for the philological spirit of modern and religious
research, this is quite historical enough to justify these men’s being
regarded as Roman and Greek in the Classical city-national sense!
But how many of the great Alexandrines may have been Greeks only in
the Magian sense of the term? In point of birth were not Plotinus and
Diophantus[262] perhaps Jews or Chaldeans?
Now, the Christians also felt themselves from the outset as a nation
of the Magian cast, and, moreover, the others, Greeks (“heathen”)
and Jews alike, regarded them as such. Quite logically the latter
considered their secession from Judaism as high treason, and the
former their missionary infiltration into the Classical cities as an
invasion and conquest, while the Christians, on their side, designated
people of other faiths as τὰ ἔθνη.[263] When the Monophysites and
the Nestorians separated themselves from the Orthodox, new nations
came into being as well as new Churches. The Nestorians since 1450
have been governed by the Mar Shimun,[264] who was at once prince and
patriarch of his people and, _vis-à-vis_ the Sultan, occupied exactly
the same position as, long before, the Jewish Resh Galutha had occupied
in the Persian Empire.[265] This nation-consciousness, derived from
particular and defined world-feeling and therefore self-evident with
an _a priori_ sureness, cannot be ignored if we are to understand the
later persecutions of the Christians. The Magian State is inseparably
bound up with the concept of orthodoxy. Caliphate, nation, and Church
form an intimate unit. It was as _states_ that Adiabene went over to
Judaism, Osrhoene about 200 (so soon!) from Greekdom to Christendom,
Armenia in the sixth century from the Greek to the Monophysite Church.
Each of these events expresses the fact that the State was identical
with the orthodox community as a juridical person.[266] If Christians
lived in the Islamic State, Nestorians in the Persian, Jews in the
Byzantine, they did not and could not as unbelievers belong to it, and
consequently were thrown back upon their own jurisdictions.[267] If by
reason of their numbers or their missionary spirit they became a threat
to the continuance of the identity of state and creed-community,
persecution became a national duty. It was on this account that first
the “orthodox” (or “Greek”) and then the Nestorian Christians suffered
in the Persian Empire. Diocletian also, who as “Caliph”[268] (_Dominus
et Deus_) had linked the Imperium with the pagan cult-Churches and saw
himself in all sincerity as Commander of _these_ Faithful, could not
evade the duty of suppressing the second Church. Constantine changed
the “true” Church _and in that act changed the nationality_ of the
Byzantine Empire. From that point on, the Greek name slowly passed over
to the Christian nation, and specifically to that Christian nation
which the Emperor as Head of the Faithful recognized and allowed to
sit in the Great Councils. Hence the uncertain lines of the picture
of Byzantine history--in 290 the organization that of a Classical
Imperium, but the substance already a Magian national state; in 312
a change of nationality without change of name. Under this name of
“Greeks,” first Paganism as a nation fought the Christians, and then
Christianity as a nation fought Islam. And in the latter fight, Islam
itself being a nation also (the Arabian), nationality stamped itself
more and more deeply upon events. Hence the present-day Greeks are
a creation of the Magian Culture, developed first by the Christian
Church, then by the sacred language of this Church, and finally by the
name of this Church. Islam brought with it from the home of Mohammed
the Arab name as the badge of its nationality. It is a mistake to
equate these “Arabs” with the Beduin tribes of the desert. What created
the new nation, with its passionate and strongly characteristic soul,
was the _consensus_ of the new faith. Its unity is no more derived
from race and home than that of the Christian, Jewish, or Persian, and
therefore it did not “migrate”; rather it owes its immense expansion to
the incorporation within itself of the greater part of the early Magian
nations. With the end of the first millennium of our era these nations
one and all pass over into the form of fellah-peoples, and it is as
fellaheen that the Christian peoples of the Balkans under Turkish rule,
the Parsees in India, and the Jews in Western Europe have lived ever
since.[269]
In the West, nations of Faustian style emerge, more and more
distinctly, from the time of Otto the Great (936-973), and in them the
primitive peoples of the Carolingian period are swiftly dissolved.[270]
Already by A.D. 1000 the men who “mattered most” were everywhere
beginning to sense themselves as Germans, Italians, Spaniards,
Frenchmen; whereas hardly six generations earlier their ancestors had
been to the depths of their souls Franks, Lombards, and Visigoths.
The people-form of this Culture is founded, like its Gothic
architecture and its Infinitesimal Calculus upon a tendency to
the Infinite, in the spatial as well as the temporal sense. The
nation-feeling comprises, to begin with, a geographical horizon that,
considering the period and its means of communication, can only be
called vast, and is not paralleled in any other Culture. The fatherland
as _extent_, as a region whose boundaries the individual has scarcely,
if ever, seen and which nevertheless he will defend and die for, is
something that in its symbolic depth and force men of other Cultures
can never comprehend. The Magian nation does not as such possess an
earthly home; the Classical possesses it only as a point-focus. The
actuality that, even in Gothic times, united men from the banks of the
Adige with men in the Order-castles of Lithuania in an association of
feeling would have been inconceivable even in ancient China and ancient
Egypt, and stands in the sharpest opposition to the actuality of Rome
and Athens, where every member of the Demos had the rest constantly in
sight.
Still stronger is the sensitivity to distance _in time_. Before the
fatherland-idea (which is a _consequence_ of the existence of the
nation) emerged at all, this passion evolved another idea to which the
Faustian nations owe that existence--the _dynastic_ idea. Faustian
peoples are historical peoples, communities that feel themselves bound
together not by place or consensus, but by history; and the eminent
symbol and vessel of the common Destiny is the ruling “house.” For
Egyptian and for Chinese mankind the dynasty is a symbol of quite
other meaning. Here what it signifies, as a will and an activity, _is
Time_. All that we have been, all that we would be, is manifested in
the being of the one generation; and our sense of this is much too
profound to be upset by the worthlessness of a regent. What matters is
not the person, but the idea, and it is for the sake of the idea that
thousands have so often marched to their deaths with conviction in a
genealogical quarrel. Classical history was for Classical eyes only a
chain of incidents leading from moment to moment; Magian history was
for its members the progressive actualization in and through mankind
of a world-plan laid down by God and accomplished between a creation
and a cataclysm; but Faustian history is in our eyes a single grand
willing of conscious logic, in the accomplishment of which nations are
led and represented by their rulers. It is a trait of race. Rational
foundations it has not and cannot have--it has simply been felt so,
and because it has been felt so, the companion-trust of the Germanic
migration-time developed on into the feudal troth of the Gothic,
the loyalty of the Baroque, and the merely seemingly undynastic
patriotism of the nineteenth century. We must not misjudge the depth
and dignity of this feeling because there is an endless catalogue
of perjured vassals and peoples[271] and an eternal comedy in the
cringing of courtiers and the abjectness of the vulgar. All great
symbols are spiritual and can be comprehended only in their highest
forms. The private life of a pope bears no relation to the idea of
the Papacy. Henry the Lion’s very defection[272] shows how fully in a
time of nation-forming a real ruler feels the destiny of “his” people
incorporated in himself. He represents that destiny in the face of
history, and at times it costs him his honour to do so.
All nations of the West are of dynastic origins. In the Romanesque
and even in Early Gothic architecture the soul of the Carolingian
primitives still quivers through. There is no French or German Gothic,
but Salian, Rhenish, and Suabian, as there is Visigothic (northern
Spain, southern France) and Lombard and Saxon Romanesque. But over it
all there spreads soon the minority, composed of men of race, that
feels membership in a nation as a great historical vocation. From
it proceed the Crusades, and in them there truly were French and
German chivalries. It is the hall-mark of Faustian peoples that they
are conscious of the direction of their history. But this direction
attaches to the sequence of the generations, and so the nature of the
race-ideal is _genealogical_ through and through--Darwinism, even,
with its theories of descent and inheritance is a sort of caricature
of Gothic heraldry--and the world-as-history, when every individual
lives in the plane of it, contains not only the tree of the individual
family, ruling or other, but also the tree of the people as the basic
form of all its happenings.[273] It needs very exact observation to
perceive that this Faustian-genealogical principle, with its eminently
historical notions of “_Ebenbürtigkeit_” (equivalence by virtue of
birth) and of purity of blood, is just as alien to the Egyptians and
Chinese, for all their historical disposition, as it is to the Roman
nobility and the Byzantine Empire. On the other hand, neither our
peasantry nor the patriciate of the cities is conceivable without
it. The scientific conception of the people, which I have dissected
above, is derived essentially from the genealogical sense of the
Gothic period. The notion that the peoples have their trees has made
the Italians proud to be the heirs of Rome, and the Germans proud to
recall their Teuton forefathers, and that is something quite different
from the Classical belief in timeless descent from heroes and gods.
And eventually, when after 1789 the notion of mother tongue came to be
fitted on to the dynastic principle, the once merely scientific fancy
of a primitive Indogermanic people transformed itself into a deeply
felt genealogy of “the Aryan race,” and in the process the word “race”
became almost a designation for Destiny.
But the “races” of the West are not the creators of the great nations,
but _their result_. Not one of them had yet come into existence in
Carolingian times. It was the class-ideal of chivalry that worked
creatively in different ways upon Germany, England, France, and Spain
and impressed upon an immense area that which within the individual
nations is felt and experienced as race. On this rest (as I have said
before) the nations--so _historical_, so alien to the Classical--of
equivalence by birth (_peer_-age, _Ebenbürtigkeit_) and blood-purity.
It was because the blood of the ruling family incorporated the destiny,
the being, of the whole nation, that the state-system of the Baroque
was of genealogical structure and that most of the grand crises assumed
the form of wars of dynastic succession. Even the catastrophic ruin
of Napoleon, which settled the world’s political organization for a
century, took its shape from the fact than an adventurer dared to drive
out with his blood that of the old dynasties, and that his attack upon
a symbol made it historically a sacred duty to resist him. For all
these peoples were the _consequence_ of dynastic destinies. That there
is a Portuguese people, and a Portuguese Brazil in the midst of Spanish
America, is the result of the marriage of Count Henry of Burgundy in
1095. That there are Swiss and Hollanders is the result of a reaction
against the House of Habsburg. That Lorraine is the name of a land and
not of a people is a consequence of the childlessness of Lothar II.
It was the Kaiser-idea that welded the disjunct primitives of
Charlemagne’s time into the German nation. Germany and Empire are
inseparable ideas. The fall of the Hohenstaufens meant the replacement
of one great dynasty by a handful of small and tiny ones; and the
German nation of Gothic style was inwardly shattered even before
the beginning of the Baroque--that is, at the very time when the
nation-idea was being raised to higher levels of intellect in
leader-cities like Paris, Madrid, London, and Vienna. The Thirty Years’
War, so conventional history says, destroyed Germany in its flower. Not
so; the fact that it could occur at all in this wretched form simply
confirmed and showed up a long-completed decadence--it was the final
consequence of the fall of the Hohenstaufens. There could hardly be a
more convincing proof that Faustian nations are dynastic units. But
then again, the Salians and the Hohenstaufens created also--at least in
idea--an Italian nation out of Romans, Lombards, and Normans. Only the
Empire made it possible for them to stretch a hand back to the age of
Rome. Even though alien power evoked the hostility of the townsmen, and
split the two primary orders, the nobles to the Emperor, the priests
to the Pope; even though in these conflicts of Guelph and Ghibelline
the nobility soon lost its importance and the Papacy rose through the
anti-dynastic cities to political supremacy; even though at the last
there was but a tangle of predatory states whose “Renaissance”-politics
opposed the soaring world-policy of the Gothic Empire, as Milan of
old had defied the will of Frederick Barbarossa--yet the ideal of
_Una Italia_, the ideal for which Dante sacrificed the peace of his
life, was a pure dynastic creation of the great Germany emperors. The
Renaissance, whose historical horizon was that of the urban patriciate,
led the nation as far out of the path of self-fulfilment as it is
possible to imagine. All through the Baroque and Rococo the land was
depressed to the state of being a mere pawn in the power-politics
of alien houses. And not until after 1800 did Romanticism arise and
reawaken the Gothic feeling with an intensity that made of it a
political power.
The French people was forged out of Franks and Visigoths by its kings.
It learned to feel itself as a whole for the first time at Bouvines
in 1214.[274] Still more significant is the creation of the House of
Habsburg, which, out of a population linked neither by speech nor
folk-feeling nor tradition caused to arise the Austrian nation, which
proved its nationhood in defending Maria Theresa and in resisting
Napoleon--its first tests, and its last. The political history of the
Baroque age is in essentials the history of the Houses of Bourbon and
Habsburg. The rise of the House of Wettin in place of that of Welf is
the reason why “Saxony” was on the Weser in 800, and is on the Elbe
to-day. Dynastic events, and finally the intervention of Napoleon,
brought it about that half of Bavaria has shared in the history of
Austria and that the Bavarian State consists for the most part of
Franconia and Suabia.
The latest nation of the West is the Prussian, a creation of the
Hohenzollerns as the Roman was the last creation of the Classical
Polis-feeling, and the Arabian the last product of a religious
_consensus_. At Fehbellin[275] the young nation gained its recognition;
at Rossbach[276] it won for Germany. It was Goethe who with his
infallible eye for historic turning-points described the then new
“Minna von Barnhelm” as the first German poetry of specifically
national content. It is one more example, and a deeply significant
one, to show how dynastically the Western nations defined themselves,
that Germany thus at one stroke re-discovered her poetic language.
The collapse of the Hohenstaufen rule had been accompanied by that of
Germany’s Gothic literature also. What did emerge here and there in the
following centuries--the golden age of all the Western literatures--was
undeserving of the name. But with the victories of Frederick the Great
a new poesy began. “From Lessing to Hebbel” means the same as “from
Rossbach to Sedan.” The attempts that were made to restore the lost
connexion by consciously leaning upon, first the French, and then
Shakespeare, upon the Volkslied, and finally (in Romanticism) upon the
poetry of the age of chivalry, produced at least the unique phenomenon
of an art-history which, though it never really attained one aim, was
constituted, for the greater part, of flashes of genius.
The end of the eighteenth century witnessed the accomplishment of that
remarkable turn with which national consciousness sought to emancipate
itself from the dynastic principle. To all appearance this had happened
in England long before. In this connexion Magna Charta (1215) will
occur to most readers, but some will not have failed to observe
that on the contrary, the very recognition of the nation involved
in the recognition of its representatives gave the dynastic feeling
a fresh-enforced depth and refinement to which the peoples of the
Continent remained almost utter strangers. If the modern Englishman is
(without appearing so) the most conservative human being in the world,
and if in consequence his political management solves its problems
so much by wordless harmony of national pulse instead of express
discussion, and therefore has been the most successful up to now, the
underlying cause is the _early emancipation of the dynastic feeling_
from its expression in monarchical power.
The French Revolution, on the contrary, was in this regard only a
victory of Rationalism. It set free not so much the nation as the
concept of the nation. The dynastic has penetrated into the blood
of the Western races, and on that very account it is a vexation
to their intellect. For a dynasty represents history, it is the
history-become-flesh of a land, and intellect is timeless and
unhistorical. The ideas of the Revolution were all “eternal” and
“true.” Universal human rights, freedom, and equality are literature
and abstraction and not facts. Call all this republican if you will, in
reality it was one more case of a minority striving in the name of all
to introduce the new ideal into the world of fact. It became a power,
but at the cost of the ideal, and all it did was to replace the old
felt adherence by the reasoned patriotism of the nineteenth century;
by a civilized nationalism, only possible in our Culture, which in
France itself and even to-day is unconsciously dynastic; and by the
concept of the _fatherland as dynastic unit_ which emerged first in the
Spanish and Prussian uprisings against Napoleon and then in the German
and Italian wars of _dynastic_ unification. Out of the opposition of
race and speech, blood and intellect, a new and specifically Western
ideal arose to confront the genealogical ideal--that of the mother
tongue. Enthusiasts there were in both countries who thought to replace
the unifying force of the Emperor- and King-idea by the linking of
republic and poetry--something of the “return to nature” in this, but
a return of history to nature. In place of the wars of succession came
language-struggles, in which one nation sought to force its language
and therewith its nationality upon the fragments of another. But no one
will fail to observe that even the rationalistic conception of a nation
as a linguistic unit can at best ignore, never abolish, the dynastic
feeling, any more than a Hellenistic Greek could inwardly overcome
his Polis-consciousness or a modern Jew the national _ijma_. The
mother tongue does not arise out of nothing, but is itself a product of
dynastic history. Without the Capetian line there would have been no
French language, but a Romance-Frankish in the north and a Provençal
in the south. The Italian written-language is to be credited to the
German Emperors and above all to Frederick II. The modern nations
are primarily the populations of an old dynastic history. Yet in the
nineteenth century the second concept of the nation as a unit of
written language has annihilated the Austrian, and probably created the
American. Thenceforward there have been in all countries two parties
representing the nation in two opposed aspects, as dynastic-historical
unit and as intellectual unit--the race party and the language
party--but these are reflections that evoke too soon problems of
politics that must await a later chapter.
V
At first, when the land was still without cities, it was the nobility
that represented, in the highest sense of the word, the nation. The
peasantry, “everlasting” and historyless, was a people _before_ the
dawn of the Culture, and in very fundamental characters it continued
to be the primitive people, surviving when the form of the nation had
passed away again. “The nation,” like every other grand symbol of the
Culture, is intimately the cherished possession of a few; those who
have it are born to it as men are born to art or philosophy, and the
distinctions of creator, critic, and layman, or something like them,
hold for it also--alike in a classical Polis, a Jewish consensus, and a
Western people. When a nation rises up ardent to fight for its freedom
and honour, it is always a minority that really fires the multitude.
The people “awakens”--it is more than a figure of speech, for only thus
and then does the waking-consciousness of the whole become manifested.
All these individuals whose “we”-feeling yesterday went content with
a horizon of family and job and perhaps home-town are suddenly to-day
men of nothing less than the People. Their thought and feeling, their
Ego, and therewith the “it” in them have been transformed to the very
depths. It has become _historic_. And then even the unhistorical
peasant becomes a member of the nation, and a day dawns for him in
which he experiences history and not merely lets it pass him by.
But in the world-cities, besides a minority which has history and
livingly experiences, feels, and seeks to lead the nation, there arises
another minority of timeless a-historic, literary men, men not of
destiny, but of reasons and causes, men who are inwardly detached from
the pulse of blood and being, wide-awake thinking consciousnesses,
that can no longer find any “reasonable” connotation for the
nation-idea. Cosmopolitanism is a mere waking-conscious association of
intelligentsias. In it there is hatred of Destiny, and above all of
history as the expression of Destiny. Everything national belongs to
race--so much so that it is incapable of finding language for itself,
clumsy in all that demands thought, and shiftless to the point of
fatalism. _Cosmopolitanism is literature_ and remains literature, very
strong in reasons, very weak in defending them otherwise than with more
reasons, in defending them with the blood.
All the more, then, this minority of far superior intellect chooses the
intellectual weapon, and all the more is it able to do so as the world
cities are pure intellect, rootless, and by very hypothesis the common
property of the civilization. The born world-citizens, world-pacifists,
and world-reconcilers--alike in the China of the “Contending States,”
in Buddhist India, in the Hellenistic age, and in the Western world
to-day--are the _spiritual leaders of fellaheen_. _“Panem et circenses”
is only another formula for pacifism._ In the history of all Cultures
there is an anti-national element, whether we have evidences of it or
not. Pure self-directed thinking was ever alien to life, and therefore
alien to history, unwarlike, raceless. Consider our Humanism and
Classicism, the Sophists of Athens, Buddha and Lao-tze--not to mention
the passionate contempt of all nationalisms displayed by the great
champions of the ecclesiastical and the philosophical world-view.
However the cases differ amongst themselves otherwise, they are alike
in this, that the world-feeling of race; the political (and therefore
national) instinct for fact (“my country, right or wrong!”); the
resolve to be the subject and not the object of evolution (for one or
the other it has to be)--in a word, the _will_-to-power--has to retreat
and make room for a tendency of which the standard-bearers are most
often men without original impulse, but all the more set upon their
logic; men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen
who believe that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might
of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason. It begins with the
everlastingly fearful who withdraw themselves out of actuality into
cells and study-chambers and spiritual communities, and proclaim the
nullity of the world’s doings, and it ends in every Culture with the
apostles of world-peace. Every people has such (historically speaking)
waste-products. Even their heads constitute physiognomically a group
by themselves. In the “history of intellect” they stand high--and many
illustrious names are numbered amongst them--but regarded from the
point of view of actual history, they are inefficients.
The Destiny of a nation plunged in the events of its world depends
upon how far its race-quality is successful in making these events
historically ineffective against it. It could perhaps be demonstrated
even now that in the Chinese world of states the realm of Tsin won
through (250 B.C.) because it alone had kept itself free from Taoist
sentiments. Be this as it may, the Roman people prevailed over the rest
of the Classical world because it was able to insulate its conduct of
policy from the fellah-instincts of Hellenism.
A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result
of world-improving theories is consistently a _formless and therefore
historyless mass_. All world-improvers and world-citizens stand
for fellaheen ideals, whether they know it or not. _Their success
means the historical abdication of the nation in favour, not of
everlasting peace, but of another nation._ World-peace is always a
one-sided resolve. The _Pax Romana_ had for the later soldier-emperors
and Germanic band-kings only the one practical significance that
it made a formless population of a hundred millions a mere object
for the will-to-power of small warrior-groups. This peace cost the
peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannæ seem vanishingly
small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds pass from
one conqueror’s hands to another’s, and it is their own blood that
pays for the contest. That is their--peace. When in 1401 the Mongols
conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls
of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended
itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction
of the nations puts a fellaheen-world above history, civilized at
last and _for ever_. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state
of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and
brief angers that for all the bloodshed--world-peace never diminishes
that--alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves; now
they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment
of others--that is the difference. A resolute leader who collects ten
thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole
world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum
conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.
“_Lever doodt als Sklav_ (better dead than slave)” is an old Frisian
peasant-saying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late
Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how
much that choice costs it.
CHAPTER VII
PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE
(A)
HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES
I
In a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and
cracks occur, water filters in, and the crystals are gradually washed
out so that in due course only their hollow mould remains. Then come
volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten masses pour in,
stiffen, and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to
do so in their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that
they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose
inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind
presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists
call this phenomenon _Pseudomorphosis_.
By the term “historical pseudomorphosis” I propose to designate those
cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land
that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and
fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even
to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from
the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings
stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own
creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that
grows to be monstrous.
This is the case of the Arabian Culture. Its pre-history lies entirely
within the ambit of the ancient Babylonian Civilization,[277] which
for two thousand years had been the prey of successive conquerors. Its
“Merovingian period” is marked by the dictatorship of a small[278]
Persian clan, primitive as the Ostrogoths, whose domination of two
hundred years, scarcely challenged, was founded on the infinite
weariness of a fellah-world. But from 300 B.C. onwards there begins
and spreads a great awakening in the young Aramaic-speaking[279]
peoples between Sinai and the Zagros range. As at the epoch of the
Trojan War and at that of the Saxon emperors, a new relation of
man to God, a wholly new world-feeling, penetrated all the current
religions, whether these bore the name of Ahuramazda, Baal, or Yahweh,
impelling everywhere to a great effort of creation. But precisely at
this juncture there came the Macedonians--so appositely that some
inner connexion is not altogether impossible, for the Persian power
had rested on spiritual postulates, and it was precisely these that
had disappeared. To Babylon these Macedonians appeared as yet another
swarm of adventurers like the rest. They laid down a thin sheet of
Classical Civilization over the lands as far as Turkestan and India.
The kingdoms of the Diadochi might indeed have become, insensibly,
states of pre-Arabian spirit--the Seleucid Empire, which actually
coincided geographically with the region of Aramaic speech, was in fact
such a state by 200 B.C. But from the battle of Pydna[280] onwards
it was, in its western part, more and more embodied in the Classical
Imperium and so subjected to the powerful workings of a spirit which
had its centre of gravity in a distant region. And thus was prepared
the Pseudomorphosis.
The Magian Culture, geographically and historically, is the midmost
of the group of higher Cultures--the only one which, in point both
of space and of time, was in touch with practically all others. The
structure of its history as a whole in our world-picture depends,
therefore, entirely on our recognizing the true inner form which the
outer moulds distorted. Unhappily, that is just what we do not yet
know, thanks to theological and philological prepossessions, and
even more to the modern tendency of over-specialization which has
unreasonably subdivided Western research into a number of separate
branches--each distinguished from the others not merely by its
materials and its methods, but by its very way of thinking--and so
prevented the big problems from being even seen. In this instance the
consequences of specialization have been graver perhaps than in any
other. The historians proper stayed within the domain of Classical
philology and made the Classical language-frontier their eastern
horizon; hence they entirely failed to perceive the deep unity of
development on both sides of their frontier, which spiritually had no
existence. The result is a perspective of “Ancient,” “Mediæval,” and
“Modern” history, ordered and defined by the use of the Greek and Latin
languages. For the experts of the old languages, with their “texts,”
Axum, Saba, and even the realm of the Sassanids were unattackable,
and the consequence is that in “history” these scarcely exist at all.
The literature-researcher (he also a philologist) confuses the spirit
of the language with the spirit of the work. Products of the Aramæan
region, if they happen to be written in Greek or even merely preserved
in Greek, he embodies in his “Late Greek literature” and proceeds to
classify as a special period of that literature. The cognate texts
in other languages are outside his department and have been brought
into other groups of literature in the same artificial way. And yet
here was the strongest of all proofs that the history of a literature
never coincides with the history of a language.[281] Here, in reality,
was a self-contained ensemble of Magian national literature, single
in spirit, but written in several languages--the Classical amongst
others. For a nation of Magian type has no mother tongue. There are
Talmudic, Manichæan, Nestorian, Jewish, or even Neopythagorean national
literatures, but _not_ Hellenistic or Hebrew.
Theological research, in its turn, broke up its domain into
subdivisions according to the different West-European confessions,
and so the “philological” frontier between West and East came into
force, and still is in force, for Christian theology also. The Persian
world fell to the student of Iranian philology, and as the Avesta
texts were disseminated, though not composed, in an Aryan dialect,
their immense problem[282] came to be regarded as a minor branch of
the Indologist’s work and so disappeared absolutely from the field
of vision of Christian theology. And lastly the history of Talmudic
Judaism, since Hebrew philology became bound up in one specialism with
Old Testament research, not only never obtained separate treatment, but
has been _completely forgotten_ by all the major histories of religions
with which I am acquainted, although these find room for every Indian
sect (since folk-lore, too, ranks as a specialism) and every primitive
Negro religion to boot. Such is the preparation of scholarship for the
greatest task that historical research has to face to-day.
II
The Roman world of the Imperial period had a good idea of its own
state. The later writers are full of complaints concerning the
depopulation and spiritual emptiness of Africa, Spain, Gaul, and, above
all, the mother countries Italy and Greece. But those provinces which
belong to the Magian world are consistently excepted in these mournful
surveys. Syria in particular is densely peopled and, like Parthian
Mesopotamia, flourishes in blood and spirit.
The preponderance of the young East, palpable to all, had sooner
or later to find political expression also. Viewing the scene from
this standpoint, we see behind the epic and pageant of Marius and
Sulla, Cæsar and Pompey, Antony and Octavian, this East striving ever
more intensely to free itself from the historically dying West, the
fellah-world waking up. The transfer of the capital to Byzantium was a
great symbol. Diocletian had selected Nicodemia; Cesar had had thoughts
of Alexandria or Troy. A better choice than any would have been
Antioch. But the act came too late by three centuries, and these had
been the decisive period of the Magian Springtime.
The Pseudomorphosis began with Actium; there _it should have been
Antony who won_. It was not the struggle of Rome and Greece that came
there to an issue--that struggle had been fought out at Cannæ and Zama,
where it was the tragic fate of Hannibal to stand as champion not for
his own land, but for Hellenism. At Actium it was the unborn Arabian
Culture that was opposed to iron-grey Classical Civilization; the
issue lay between Principate and Caliphate. Antony’s victory would have
freed the Magian soul; his defeat drew over its lands the hard sheet of
Roman _Imperium_. A comparable event in the history of the West is the
battle between Tours and Poitiers, A.D. 732. Had the Arabs won it and
made “Frankistan” into a caliphate of the North-east, Arabic speech,
religion, and customs would have become familiar to the ruling classes,
giant cities like Granada and Kairawan would have arisen on the Loire
and the Rhine, the Gothic feeling would have been forced to find
expression in the long-stiffened forms of Mosque and Arabesque, and
instead of the German mysticism we should have had a sort of Sufism.
That the equivalent of these things actually happened to the Arabian
world was due to the fact that the Syro-Persian peoples produced no
Charles Martel to battle along with Mithradates or Brutus and Cassius
or Antony (or for that matter without them) against Rome.
A second pseudomorphosis is presented to our eyes to-day in Russia. The
Russian hero-tales of the Bylini culminated in the epic cycle of Prince
Vladimir of Kiev (_c._ A.D. 1000), with his Round Table, and in the
popular hero Ilya Muromyets.[283] The whole immense difference between
the Russian and the Faustian soul is already revealed in the contrast
of these with the “contemporary” Arthur, Ermanarich, and Nibelungen
sagas of the Migration-period in the form of the _Hildebrandslied_
and the _Waltharilied_.[284] The Russian “Merovingian” period begins
with the overthrow of the Tatar domination by Ivan III (1480) and
passes, by the last princes of the House of Rurik and the first of the
Romanovs, to Peter the Great (1689-1725). It corresponds exactly to
the period between Clovis (481-511) and the battle of Testry (687),
which effectively gave the Carolingians their supremacy. I advise all
readers to read the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours (to 591)
in parallel with the corresponding parts of Karamzin’s patriarchal
narrative, especially those dealing with Ivan the Terrible, and with
Boris Godunov and Vassili Shuiski.[285] There could hardly be a closer
parallel. This Muscovite period of the great Boyar families and
Patriarchs, in which a constant element is the resistance of an Old
Russia party to the friends of Western Culture, is followed, from the
founding of Petersburg in 1703, by the pseudomorphosis which forced the
primitive Russian soul into the alien mould, first of full Baroque,
then of the Enlightenment, and then of the nineteenth century. The
fate-figure in Russian history is Peter the Great, with whom we may
compare the Charlemagne who deliberately and with all his might strove
to impose the very thing which Charles Martel had just prevented, the
rule of the Moorish-Byzantine spirit. The possibility was there of
treating the Russian world in the manner of a Carolingian or that of
Seleucid--that is, of choosing between Old Russian and “Western” ways,
and the Romanovs chose the latter. The Seleucids liked to see Hellenes
and not Aramæans about them. The primitive tsarism of Moscow is the
only form which is even to-day appropriate to the Russian world, but
in Petersburg it was distorted to the dynastic form of western Europe.
The pull of the sacred South--of Byzantium and Jerusalem--strong in
every Orthodox soul, was twisted by the worldly diplomacy which set
its face to the West. The burning of Moscow, that mighty symbolic act
of a primitive people, that expression of Maccabæan hatred of the
foreigner and heretic, was followed by the entry of Alexander I into
Paris, the Holy Alliance, and the concert of the Great Powers of the
West. And thus a nationality whose destiny should have been to live
without a history for some generations still was forced into a false
and artificial history that the soul of Old Russia was simply incapable
of understanding. Late-period arts and sciences, enlightenment, social
ethics, the materialism of world-cities, were introduced, although
in this pre-cultural time religion was the only language in which
man understood himself and the world. In the townless land with its
primitive peasantry, cities of alien type fixed themselves like
ulcers--false, unnatural, unconvincing. “Petersburg,” says Dostoyevski,
“is the most abstract and artificial city in the world.” Born in it
though he was, he had the feeling that one day it might vanish with
the morning mist. Just so ghostly, so incredible, were the Hellenistic
artifact-cities scattered in the Aramaic peasant-lands. Jesus in his
Galilee knew this. St. Peter must have felt it when he set eyes on
Imperial Rome.
After this everything that arose around it was felt by the true Russdom
as lies and poison. A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe,
and “Europe” was all that was not Russia, including Athens and Rome,
just as for the Magian world in its time Old Egypt and Babylon had
been antique, pagan, devilish. “The first condition of emancipation
for the Russian soul,” wrote Aksakov in 1863 to Dostoyevski, “is that
it should hate Petersburg with all its might and all its soul.” Moscow
is holy, Petersburg Satanic. A widespread popular legend presents
Peter the Great as Antichrist. Just so the Aramaic Pseudomorphosis
cries out in all the Apocalypses from Daniel and Enoch in Maccabæan
times to John, Baruch, and Ezra IV after the destruction of Jerusalem,
against Antiochus the Antichrist, against Rome the Whore of Babylon,
against the cities of the West with their refinement and their
splendour, against the whole Classical Culture. All its works are
untrue and unclean; the polite society, the clever artistry, the
classes, the alien state with its civilized diplomacy, justice, and
administration. The contrast between Russian and Western, Jew-Christian
and Late-Classical nihilisms is extreme--the one kind is hatred of the
alien that is poisoning the unborn Culture in the womb of the land, the
other a surfeited disgust of one’s own proper overgrowths. Depths of
religious feeling, flashes of revelation, shuddering fear of the great
awakening, metaphysical dreaming and yearning, belong to the beginning,
as the pain of spiritual clarity belongs to the end of a history. In
these pseudomorphoses they are mingled. Says Dostoyevski: “Everyone in
street and market-place now speculates about the nature of Faith.” So
might it have been said of Edessa or Jerusalem. Those young Russians
of the days before 1914--dirty, pale, exalted, moping in corners, ever
absorbed in metaphysics, seeing all things with an eye of faith even
when the ostensible topic is the franchise, chemistry, or women’s
education--are the Jews and early Christians of the Hellenistic cities,
whom the Romans regarded with a mixture of surly amusement and secret
fear. In Tsarist Russia there was no bourgeoisie and, in general, no
true class-system, but merely, as in the Frankish dominions, lord and
peasant. There were no Russian towns. Moscow consisted of a fortified
residency (the Kreml) round which was spread a gigantic market. The
imitation city that grew up and ringed it in, like every other city on
the soil of Mother Russia, is there for the satisfaction and utilities
of the Court, the administration, the traders, but that which lives in
it is, on the top, an embodiment of fiction, an Intelligentsia bent on
discovering problems and conflicts, and below, an uprooted peasantry,
with all the metaphysical gloom, anxiety, and misery of their own
Dostoyevski, perpetually homesick for the open land and bitterly hating
the stony grey world into which Antichrist has tempted them. Moscow had
no proper soul. The spirit of the upper classes was Western, and the
lower had brought in with them the soul of the countryside. Between the
two worlds there was no reciprocal comprehension, no communication,
no charity. To understand the two spokesmen and victims of the
pseudomorphosis, it is enough that Dostoyevski is the peasant, and
Tolstoi the man of Western society. The one could never in his soul get
away from the land; the other, in spite of his desperate efforts, could
never get near it.
_Tolstoi is the former Russia, Dostoyevski the coming Russia._ The
inner Tolstoi is tied to the West. He is the great spokesman of
Petrinism even when he is denying it. The West is never without a
negative--the guillotine, too, was a true daughter of Versailles--and
rage as he might against Europe, Tolstoi could never shake it off.
Hating it, he hates himself and so becomes the father of Bolshevism.
The utter powerlessness of this spirit, and “its” 1917 revolution,
stands confessed in his posthumously published _A Light Shines in the
Darkness_. This hatred Dostoyevski does not know. His passionate power
of living is comprehensive enough to embrace all things Western as
well--“I have two fatherlands, Russia and Europe.” He has passed beyond
both Petrinism and revolution, and from _his_ future he looks back over
them as from afar. His soul is apocalyptic, yearning, desperate, but of
this future _certain_. “I will go to Europe,” says Ivan Karamazov to
his brother, Alyosha; “I know well enough that I shall be going only to
a churchyard, but I know too that that churchyard is dear, very dear
to me. Beloved dead lie buried there, every stone over them tells of a
life so ardently lived, so passionate a belief in its own achievements,
its own truth, its own battle, its own knowledge, that I know--even
now I know--I shall fall down and kiss these stones and weep over
them.” Tolstoi, on the contrary, is essentially a great understanding,
“enlightened” and “socially minded.” All that he sees about him takes
the Late-period, megalopolitan, and Western form of a _problem_,
whereas Dostoyevski does not even know what a problem is. Tolstoi is
an event within and of Western Civilization. He stands midway between
Peter and Bolshevism, and neither he nor these managed to get within
sight of Russian earth. The thing they are fighting against reappears,
recognizable, in the very form in which they fight. Their kind of
opposition is not apocalyptic but intellectual. Tolstoi’s hatred of
property is an economist’s, his hatred of society a social reformer’s,
his hatred of the State a political theorist’s. Hence his immense
effect upon the West--he belongs, in one respect as in another, to the
band of Marx, Ibsen, and Zola.
Dostoyevski, on the contrary, belongs to no band, unless it be the band
of the Apostles of primitive Christianity. His “Dæmons” were denounced
by the Russian Intelligentsia as reactionaries. But he himself was
quite unconscious of such conflicts--“conservative” and “revolutionary”
were terms of the West that left him indifferent. Such a soul as his
can look beyond everything that we call social, for the things of
this world seem to it so unimportant as not to be worth improving. No
genuine religion aims at improving the world of facts, and Dostoyevski,
like every primitive Russian, is fundamentally unaware of that world
and lives in a second, metaphysical world beyond. What has the agony of
a soul to do with Communism? A religion that has got as far as taking
social problems in hand has ceased to be a religion. But the reality in
which Dostoyevski lives, even during this life, is a religious creation
directly present to him. His Alyosha has defied all literary criticism,
even Russian. His life of Christ, had he written it--as he always
intended to do--would have been a genuine gospel like the Gospels of
primitive Christianity, which stand completely outside Classical and
Jewish literary forms. Tolstoi, on the other hand, is a master of the
Western novel--_Anna Karenina_ distances every rival--and even in his
peasant’s garb remains a man of polite society.
Here we have beginning and end clashing together. Dostoyevski is a
saint, Tolstoi only a revolutionary. From Tolstoi, the true successor
of Peter, and from him only, proceeds Bolshevism, which is not the
contrary, but the final issue of Petrinism, the last dishonouring of
the metaphysical by the social, and _ipso facto_ a new form of the
Pseudomorphosis. If the building of Petersburg was the first act
of Antichrist, the self-destruction of the society formed of that
Petersburg is the second, and so the peasant soul must feel it. For the
Bolshevists are not the nation, or even a part of it, but the lowest
stratum of this Petrine society, alien and western like the other
strata, yet not recognized by these and consequently filled with the
hate of the downtrodden. It is all megalopolitan and “Civilized”--the
social politics, the Intelligentsia, the literature that first in
the romantic and then in the economic jargon champions freedoms and
reforms, before an audience that itself belongs to the society. The
real Russian is a disciple of Dostoyevski. Although he may not have
read Dostoyevski or anyone else, nay, perhaps _because_ he cannot read,
he is himself Dostoyevski in substance; and if the Bolshevists, who
see in Christ a mere social revolutionist like themselves, were not
intellectually so narrowed, it would be in Dostoyevski that they would
recognize their prime enemy. What gave this revolution its momentum
was not the intelligentsia’s hatred. It was the people itself, which,
_without hatred_, urged only by the need of throwing off a disease,
destroyed the old Westernism in one effort of upheaval, and will send
the new after it in another. For what this townless people yearns for
is its own life-form, its own religion, its own history. Tolstoi’s
Christianity was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant
Marx. But to Dostoyevski’s Christianity the next thousand years will
belong.
III
Outside the Pseudomorphosis, and the more vigorously in proportion
as the Classical influence is weaker over the country, there spring
up all the forms of a genuine feudal age. Scholasticism, mysticism,
feudal fealty, minstrelsy, the crusade spirit, all existed in the first
centuries of the Arabian Culture and will be found in it as soon as
we know how to look for them. The legion existed in name even after
Septimius Severus, but in the East, legions look for all the world like
ducal retinues. Officials are nominated, but what nomination amounts
to in reality is the investiture of a count with his fief. While in
the West the Cæsar-title fell into the hands of chieftains, the East
transformed itself into an early Caliphate amazingly like the feudal
state of mature Gothic. In the Sassanid Empire,[286] in Hauran,[287]
in southern Arabia, there dawned a pure feudal period. The exploits of
a king of Saba,[288] Shamir Juharish, are immortalized like those of
a Roland or an Arthur, in the Arabic saga which tells of his advance
through Persia as far as China.[289] The Kingdom of Ma’in[290] existed
side by side with the realm of Israel during the millennium before
Christ, and its remains (which suggest comparisons with Mycenæ and
Tiryns) extend deeply into Africa.[291] But now the feudal age flowered
throughout Arabia and even in the mountains of Abyssinia.[292] In Axum
there arose during early Christian times mighty castles and kings’
tombs with the largest monoliths in the world.[293] Behind the kings
stands a feudal nobility of counts (_kail_) and wardens (_kabir_),
vassals of often questionable loyalty whose great possessions more
and more narrowed the power of the king and his household. The
endless Christian-Jewish wars between south Arabia and the kingdom
of Axum[294] have essentially the character of chivalry-warfare,
frequently degenerating into baronial feuds based on the castles. In
Saba ruled the Hamdanids--who later became Christian. Behind them stood
the Christian realm of Axum, in alliance with Rome, which about A.D.
300 stretched from the White Nile to the Somali coast and the Persian
Gulf, and in 525 overthrew the Jewish-Himaryites.[295] In 542 there
was a diet of princes at Marib[296] to which both the Roman and the
Sassanid Empires sent ambassadors. Even to-day the country is full
of innumerable relics of mighty castles, which in Islamic times were
popularly attributed to supernatural builders. The stronghold of Gomdan
is a work of twenty tiers.[297]
In the Sassanid Empire ruled the Dikhans, or local lords, while the
brilliant court of these early-Eastern “Hohenstaufen” was in every
respect a model for that of the Byzantines who followed Diocletian.
Even much later the Abbassids in their new capital of Baghdad could
think of nothing better than to imitate, on a grand scale, the
Sassanid ideal of court life. In northern Arabia, at the courts of
the Ghassanids[298] and at those of the Lakhmids,[299] there sprang up
a genuine troubadour and _Minne_ poetry; and knightly poets, in the
days of the Early Fathers, fought out their duels with “word, lance,
and sword.” One of them was the Jew Samuel, lord of the castle of Al
Alblaq, who stood a famous siege by the King of Hira for the sake of
five precious suits of armour.[300] In relation to this lyric poetry,
the Late-Arabic which flourished, especially in Spain, from 800 stands
as Uhland and Eichendorff stand to Walter von der Vogelweide.
For this young world of the first centuries of our era our antiquarians
and theologians have had no eyes. Busied as they are with the state
of Late Republican and Imperial Rome, the conditions of the Middle
East seem to them merely primitive and void of all significance. But
the Parthian bands that again and again rode at the legions of Rome
were a chivalry exalted by Mazdaism; in their armies there was the
spirit of crusade. So, too, might it have been with Christianity if
it had not been wholly bound under the power of the pseudomorphosis.
The spirit was there--Tertullian spoke of the “_militia Christi_,”
and the sacrament was the soldier’s oath of fidelity.[301] But it was
only later that Christ became the hero for whom his vassals went out
against the heathen; for the time being, the hither side of the Roman
frontier knew not Christian lords and knights, but only Roman legates;
not the castle, but the _castra_; not tournaments, but executions. Yet
in spite of all this it was not, strictly speaking, a Parthian war, but
a true crusade of Jewry that blazed out in 115 when Trajan marched into
the East, and it was as a reprisal for the destruction of Jerusalem
that the whole infidel (“Greek”) population of Cyprus--traditionally
240,000 souls--was massacred.[302] Nisibis, defended by Jews, made an
illustrious resistance. Warlike Adiabene (the upper Tigris plain) was
a Jewish state. In all the Parthian and Persian wars against Rome the
gentry and peasantry, the feudal levy, of Jewish Mesopotamia fought in
the front line.
Byzantium, even, was not able entirely to evade the influence of the
Arabian feudal age, and, under a crust of Late Classical administrative
forms, the fief system (especially in the interior of Asia Minor)
came into existence. There there were powerful families whose loyalty
was doubtful and whose ambition was to possess the Imperial throne.
“Originally tied to the capital, which they were not allowed to leave
without the Emperor’s permission, this nobility settled down later on
its broad estates in the provinces. From the fourth century onwards
this provincial nobility was _de facto_ an ‘Estate of the realm,’
and in course of time it claimed a certain independence of Imperial
control.”[303]
The “Roman Army” in the East, meanwhile, was transformed in less than
two centuries from an army of modern type to one of the feudal order.
The Roman legion disappeared in the reorganization of the age of
Severus,[304] about A.D. 200. While in the West the army degenerated
into hordes, in the East there arose, in the fourth century a genuine,
if belated, knighthood--a fact that Mommsen long ago pointed out,
without, however, seeing the significance of it.[305] The young noble
received a thorough education in single combat, horsemanship, use
of bow and lance. About A.D. 260 the Emperor Gallienus--the friend
of Plotinus and the builder of the Porta Nigra of Trier, one of the
most striking and most unfortunate figures of the period of the
soldier-emperors--formed, from Germans and Moors, a new type of mounted
force, the personal military suite.[306] A significant light is thrown
upon the changes by the fact that the old city-gods give way, in the
religion of the army, to the German gods of personal heroism, under
the labels of Mars and Hercules.[307] Diocletian’s _palatini_ are not
a substitute for the prætorians abolished by Septimius Severus, but
a small, well-disciplined knight-army, while the _comitatenses_, the
general levy, are organized in “_numeri_” or companies. The tactics
are those of every Early period, with its pride of personal courage.
The attack takes the Germanic form of the so-called “boar’s head”--the
deep mass technically called the _Gevierthaufe_.[308] Under Justinian
we find, fully developed, a system corresponding precisely to the
_Landsknecht_ system of Charles V, in which condottieri[309] of the
Frundsberg type[310] raise professional forces on a territorial basis.
The expedition of Narses is described by Procopius[311] just as one
might describe the great recruiting-operations of Wallenstein.
But there appeared also in these early centuries a brilliant
Scholasticism and Mysticism of Magian type, domesticated in the
renowned schools of the Aramæan region--the Persian schools of
Ctesiphon, Resaina, Gundisapora, the Jewish of Sura, Nehardea,
Kinnesrin.[312] These are flourishing headquarters of astronomy,
philosophy, chemistry, medicine. But towards the west these grand
manifestations, too, become falsified by the Pseudomorphosis. The
characteristically Magian elements of this knowledge assume at
Alexandria the forms of Greek philosophy and at Beyrout those of
Roman jurisprudence; they are committed to writing in the Classical
languages, squeezed into alien and long-petrified literary forms,
and perverted by the hoary logic of a Civilization of quite other
structure. It is in this, and not in the Islamic, time that Arabian
science began. Yet, as our philologists only unearthed what had been
put in Late Classical dress at Alexandria and Antioch, and had not an
inkling either of the immense wealth of the Arabian spring or of the
real pivots of its researches and ideas, there arose the preposterous
notion that the Arabs were spiritual epigoni of the Classical. In
reality, practically everything that was produced on the “other”
side--from Edessa’s point of view--of the philologist’s frontier,
though seeming to the Western eye an offspring of a “Late Classical”
spirit, is nothing but a reflection of Early Arabian inwardness. And
so we come to consider what the Pseudomorphosis did for the Arabian
religion.
IV
The Classical religion lived in its vast number of _separate cults_,
which in this form were natural and self-evident to Apollinian man,
essentially inaccessible to any alien. As soon as cults of this kind
arise, we have a Classical Culture, and when their essence changes, in
later Roman times, then the soul of this Culture is at an end. Outside
the Classical landscape they have never been genuine and living.
The divinity is always _bound to and bounded by one locality_, in
conformity with the static and Euclidean world-feeling. Correspondingly
the relation of man to the divinity takes the shape of a local cult, in
which the significances lie in the _form_ of its ritual procedure and
not in a dogma underlying them. Just as the population was scattered
geographically in innumerable _points_, so spiritually its religion
was subdivided into these petty cults, each of which was entirely
independent of the rest. _Only their number, and not their scope, was
capable of increase._ Within the Classical religion multiplication
was the only form of growth, and missionary effort of any sort was
excluded, for men could practise these cults without _belonging_ to
them. There were no communities of fellow believers. Though the later
thought of Athens reached somewhat more general ideas of God and his
service, it was philosophy and not religion that it achieved; it
appealed to only a few thinkers and had not the slightest effect on the
feeling of the nation--that is, the Polis.
In the sharpest contrast to this stands the visible form of the Magian
religion--the Church, the brotherhood of the faithful, which has no
home and knows no earthly frontier, which believes the words of Jesus,
“when two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in
the midst of them.” It is self-evident that every such believer must
believe that only one good and true God can be, and that the gods of
the others are evil and false.[313] The relation between this God
and man rests, not in expression or profession, but in the secret
force, the magic, of certain symbolic performances, which if they are
to be effective must be exactly known in form and significance and
practised accordingly. The knowledge of this significance belongs to
the Church--in fact, it is the Church itself, qua community of the
instructed. And, therefore, the centre of gravity of every Magian
religion lies not in a cult, but in a doctrine, in _the creed_.
As long as the Classical remained spiritually strong, pseudomorphosis
of all the Churches of the East into the style of the West continued.
This is a most important aspect of Syncretism. The Persian religion
enters in the shape of the Mithras cult, the Chaldean-Syrian element as
the cults of the star-gods and Baals (Jupiter Dolichenus, Sabazius, Sol
Invictus, Atargatis), the Jewish religion in the form of a Yahweh-cult
(for no other name can be applied to the Egyptian communities of the
Ptolemaic period[314]), and primitive Early-Christianity too--as the
Pauline Epistles and the Catacombs of Rome clearly show--took substance
as a Jesus-cult. And however loudly each of these various religions
(which from about Hadrian’s time drove the genuine old Classical
deities completely into the background) might proclaim itself as
the revelation of the one true faith--Isis styled herself _deorum
dearumque facies uniformis_--in reality they carry, one and all, marks
of the Classical separatism--that is, they multiply to infinity; every
community stands for itself and is local; all the temples, catacombs,
Mithræa, house chapels, are holy places to which (in feeling, even
though not in formal expression) the deity is considered to be
attached.[315] Nevertheless, there is Magian feeling even in this
piety. Classical cults are _practised_, and one may practise as many
of them as one pleases, but of these newer, _a man belongs to one and
one alone_. In the old, propaganda is unthinkable; in the new it goes
without saying, and the purport of religious exercises tends more and
more to the doctrinal side.
From the second century onwards, with the fading of the Apollinian
and the flowering of the Magian soul, the relations are reversed. The
consequences of the Pseudomorphosis continue, _but it is now cults
of the West which tend to become a new Church of the East_--that is,
from the sum of separate cults there evolves a community of those
who believe in these gods and their rituals--and so there arises, by
processes like those of the Early Persian and the Early Judaic, a
Magian Greek nationality. Out of the rigorously established forms of
detail-procedure in sacrifices and mysteries grows a sort of dogma
concerning the inner significance of these acts. The cults can now
represent each other, and men no longer practise or perform them in
the old way, but become “adherents” of them. And the little god _of_
the place becomes--without the gravity of the change being noticed by
anyone--the great God really present in the place.
Carefully as Syncretism has been examined in recent years, the clue to
its development--the transformation of Eastern Churches into Western
cults, and then the reverse process of transformation of Western cults
into Eastern Churches--has been missed.[316] Yet without this key
it is quite impossible to understand the religious history of Early
Christianity. The battle that in Rome was between Christ and Mithras
as cult-deities took the form, east of Antioch, of a contest between
the Persian and the Christian Churches. But the heaviest battle that
Christianity had to fight, after it came itself under the influence
of the Pseudomorphosis and began to develop spiritually with its face
to the West, was not that against the true Classical deities. With
these it was never face to face, for the public city-cults had long
been inwardly dead and possessed no hold whatever on men’s souls. The
formidable enemy was Paganism, or Hellenism, emerging as _a powerful
new Church_ and born of the selfsame spirit as Christianity itself. In
the end there were in the east of the Roman Empire not one cult-Church,
but two, and if one of these comprised exclusively the followers of
Christ, the other, too, was made up of communities which, under a
thousand different labels, consciously worshipped one and the same
divine principle.
Much has been written on the Classical toleration. The nature of
a religion may perhaps be most clearly seen in the limits of its
tolerance, and there were such limits in Classical religions as in
others. It was, indeed, one essential character of these religions
that they were numerous, and another that they were religions of
pure performance; for them, therefore, the question of toleration,
as the word is usually understood, did not arise. But respect for
the cult-formalities as such was postulated and required, and many
a philosopher, even many an unwitting stranger, who infringed this
law by word or deed, was made to realize the limits of Classical
toleration. The reciprocal persecutions of the Magian Churches are
something different from this; there it was the duty of the henotheist
to his own faith that forbade him to recognize false tenets. Classical
_cults_ would have tolerated the Jesus-cult as one of their own number.
But the _cult-Church_ was bound to attack the Jesus-Church. All the
great persecutions of Christians (corresponding therein exactly to
the later persecutions of Paganism) came, not from the “Roman” State,
but from this cult-Church, and they were only political inasmuch as
the cult-Church was both nation and fatherland. It will be observed
that the mask of Cæsar-worship covered _two_ religious usages. In
the Classical cities of the West, Rome above all, the special cult
of the _Divus_ arose as a last expression of that Euclidean feeling
which required that there should be legal and therefore sacral means
of communication between the body-unit man and the body-unit God.
In the East, on the other hand, the product was a creed of Cæsar
as Saviour, God-man, Messiah of all Syncretists, which this Church
brought to expression in a supremely national form. The sacrifice for
the Emperor was the most important _sacrament_ of the Church--exactly
corresponding to the baptism of the Christians--and it is easy,
therefore, to understand the symbolic significance in the days of
persecution of the command and the refusal to do these acts. _All_
these Churches had their sacraments: holy meals like the Haoma-drinking
of the Persians,[317] the Passover of the Jews, the Lord’s Supper of
the Christians, similar rites for Attis and Mithras, and baptismal
ceremonies amongst the Mandæans, the Christians, and the worshippers of
Isis and Cybele. Indeed, the individual cults of the Pagan Church might
be regarded almost as sects and orders--a view which would lead to a
much better understanding of their reciprocal propaganda.
All true Classical mysteries, such as those of Eleusis and those
founded by the Pythagoreans in the South-Italian cities about 500
B.C., had been place-bound,[318] and had consisted in some symbolical
act or process. Within the field of the Pseudomorphosis these freed
themselves from their localities; they could be performed wherever
initiates were gathered, and had now as their object the Magian ecstasy
and the ascetic change of life. The visitors to the holy place had
transformed themselves into practising Orders. The community of the
Neopythagoreans, formed about 50 B.C. and closely related to the
Jewish Essenes, is anything but a Classical “school of philosophy”;
it is a pure monastic order, and it is not the only such order in
the Syncretic movement that anticipated the ideals of the Christian
hermits and the Mohammedan dervishes. These Pagan Churches had their
anchorites, saints, prophets, miraculous conversions, scriptures, and
revelations.[319] In the significance of images there came about a very
remarkable transformation, which still awaits research. The greatest of
Plotinus’s followers, Iamblichus, finally, about A.D. 300, evolved a
mighty system of orthodox theology, ordered hierarchy, and rigid ritual
for the Pagan Church, and his disciple Julian devoted, and finally
sacrificed, his life to the attempt to establish this Church for all
eternity.[320] He sought even to create cloisters for meditating men
and women and to introduce ecclesiastical penance. This great work was
supported by a great enthusiasm which rose to the height of martyrdom
and endured long after the Emperor’s death. Inscriptions exist which
can hardly be translated but by the formula: “There is but one god and
Julian is his Prophet.”[321] Ten years more, and this Church would have
become a historic, permanent fact. In the end not only its power, but
also in important details its very form and content were inherited by
Christianity. It is often stated that the Roman Church adapted itself
to the structure of the Roman State; this is not quite correct. The
latter structure was itself by hypothesis a Church. There was a period
when the two were in touch--Constantine the Great acted simultaneously
as convener of the Council of Nicæa and as Pontifex Maximus, and his
sons, zealous Christians as they were, made him _Divus_ and paid to
him the prescribed rites. St. Augustine dared to assert that the true
religion had existed before the coming of Christianity in the form of
the Classical.[322]
V
For the understanding of Judaism as a whole between Cyrus and
Titus it is necessary constantly to bear in mind three facts, of
which scholarship is quite aware, but which, owing to philological
and theological _parti pris_, it refuses to admit as factors in
its discussions. First, the Jews are a “nation without a land,” a
_consensus_, and in the midst, moreover, of a world of pure nations of
the same type. Secondly, Jerusalem is indeed a Mecca, a holy centre,
but it is neither the home nor the spiritual focus of the people.
Lastly, the Jews are a peculiar phenomenon in world-history only so
long as we insist on treating them as such.
It is true that the post-exilic Jews, in contradistinction to
the pre-exilic Israelites are--as Hugo Winckler was the first to
recognize--a people of quite new type. But they are not the only
representatives of the type. The Aramæan world began in those days to
arrange itself in a great number of such peoples, including Persians
and Chaldeans,[323] all living in the same district, yet in stringent
aloofness from each other, and even then practising the truly Arabian
way of life that we call the ghetto.
The first heralds of the new soul were the _prophetic religions_,
with their magnificent inwardness, which began to arise about 700
B.C. and challenged the primeval practices of the people and their
rulers. They, too, are an essentially Aramæan phenomenon. The more
I ponder Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah on the one hand, Zarathustra on
the other, the more closely related they appear to me to be. What
seems to separate them is not their new beliefs, but the objects of
their attack. The first battled with that savage old-Israel religion,
which in fact is a whole bundle of religious elements[324]--belief in
holy stones and trees, innumerable place-gods (Dan, Bethel, Hebron,
Shechem, Beersheba, Gilgal), a single Yahweh (or Elohim), whose name
covers a multitude of most heterogeneous numina, ancestor-worship and
human sacrifices, dervish-dancing and sacral prostitution--intermixed
with indistinct traditions of Moses and Abraham and many customs and
sagas of the Late Babylonian world, now after long establishment in
Canaan degenerated and hardened into peasant forms. The second combated
the old Vedic beliefs of heroes and Vikings, similarly coarsened,
no doubt, and certainly needing to be recalled to actuality, time
and again, by glorifications of the sacred cattle and of the care
thereof. Zarathustra lived about 600 B.C., often in want, persecuted
and misunderstood, and met his end as an old man in war against the
unbelievers[325]--a worthy contemporary of the unfortunate Jeremiah,
who for his prophesying was hated by his countrymen, imprisoned by his
king, and after the catastrophe carried off by the fugitives to Egypt
and there put to death. And it is my belief that this great epoch
brought forth yet a third prophet-religion, the Chaldean.
This, with its penetrating astronomy and its ever-amazing
inwardness, was, I venture to guess, evolved at that time and by
creative personalities of the Isaiah stature from relics of the old
Babylonian religion.[326] About 1000, the Chaldeans were a group of
Aramaic-speaking tribes like the Israelites, and lived in the south of
Sinear--the mother tongue of Jesus is still sometimes called Chaldean.
In Seleucid times the name was applied to a widespread religious
community, and especially to its priests. The Chaldean religion was
an astral religion, which before Hammurabi the Babylonian was _not_.
It is the deepest of all interpretations of the Magian universe, the
World-Cavern[327] and Kismet working therein, and consequently it
remained the fundamental of Islamic and Jewish speculation to their
very latest phases. It was by it, and not by the Babylonian Culture,
that after the seventh century there was formed an astronomy worthy
to be called an exact science--that is, a priestly technique of
observation of marvellous acuteness.[328] It replaced the Babylonian
moon-week by the planet-week. Ishtar, the most popular figure of the
old religion, the goddess of life and fruitfulness, now became a
planet, and Tammuz, the ever-dying and ever-revived god of vegetation,
a fixed star. Finally, the henotheistic feeling announced itself; for
Nebuchadnezzar the Great Marduk[329] was the one true god, the god of
mercy, and Nebo, the old god of Borsippa, was his son and envoy to
mankind. For a century (625-539) Chaldean kings were world-rulers,
but they were also the heralds of the new religion. When temples were
being built, they themselves carried bricks. The accession-prayer
of Nebuchadnezzar, the contemporary of Jeremiah, to Marduk is still
extant, and in depth and purity it is in nowise surpassed by the
finest passages of Israelite prophecy. The Chaldean penitential
psalms, closely related in rhythm and inner structure to those of the
Jews, know the sin of which man is unconscious and the suffering that
contrite avowal before the incensed god can avert. It is the same trust
in the mercy of the Deity that finds a truly Christian expression in
the inscriptions of the Bel temple of Palmyra.[330]
The kernel of the prophetic teachings is already Magian. There is
_one_ god--be he called Yahweh, Ahuramazda or Marduk-Baal--who is the
principle of good, and all other deities are either impotent or evil.
To this doctrine there attached itself the hope of a Messiah, very
clear in Isaiah, but also bursting out everywhere during the next
centuries, under pressure of an inner necessity. It is the basic idea
of Magian religion, for it contains implicitly the conception of the
world-historical struggle between Good and Evil, with the power of Evil
prevailing in the middle period, and the Good finally triumphant on the
Day of Judgment. This moralization of history is common to Persians,
Chaldees, and Jews. But with its coming, the idea of the localized
people _ipso facto_ vanished and the genesis of Magian nations without
earthly homes and boundaries was at hand. The idea of the Chosen People
emerged.[331] But it is easy to understand that men of strong blood,
and in particular the great families, found these too spiritual ideas
repugnant to their natures and harked back to the stout old tribal
faiths. According to Cumont’s researches the religion of the Persian
kings was polytheistic and did not possess the Haoma sacrament--that
is, it was not wholly Zoroastrian. The same is true of most of the
kings of Israel, and in all probability also of the last Chaldean
Nabu-Nabid (Nabonidus), whose overthrow by Cyrus and his own subjects
was in fact made possible by his rejection of the Marduk faith. And it
was in the Captivity that circumcision and the (Chaldean) Sabbath were
first acquired, as rites, by the Jews.
The Babylonian exile, however, did set up an important difference
between the Jews and the Persians, in respect, not of the ultimate
truths of conscious piety, but of all the facts of actuality and
consequently men’s inward attitude to these facts. It was the Yahweh
believers who _were permitted_ to go home and the adherents of
Ahuramazda who _allowed_ them to do so. Of two small tribes that two
hundred years before had probably possessed equal numbers of fighting
men, the one had taken possession of a world--while Darius crossed the
Danube in the north, his power extended in the south through eastern
Arabia to the island of Sokotra on the Somali coast[332]--and the other
had become an entirely unimportant pawn of alien policy.
This is what made one religion so lordly, the other so humble.
Let the student read, in contrast to Jeremiah, the great Behistun
inscription[333] of Darius--what a splendid pride of the King in his
victorious god! And how despairing are the arguments with which the
Israelite prophets sought to preserve intact the image of their god.
Here, in exile, with every Jewish eye turned by the Persian victory
to the Zoroastrian doctrine, the pure Judaic prophecy (Amos, Hosea,
Isaiah, Jeremiah) passes into _Apocalypse_ (Deutero-Isaiah,[334]
Ezekiel, Zechariah). All the new visions of the Son of Man, of Satan,
of archangels, of the seven heavens, of the last judgment, are _Persian
presentations of the common world-feeling_. In Isaiah xli appears Cyrus
himself, hailed as Messiah. Did the great composer of Deutero-Isaiah
draw his enlightenment from a Zoroastrian disciple? Is it possible
that the Persians released the Jews out of a feeling of the inward
relationship of their two teachings? It is certain at any rate that
both shared one popular idea as to last things, and felt and expressed
a common hatred of the old Babylonian and Classical religions, of
unbelievers generally, which they did not feel towards one another.
We must not, however, forget to look at the “return from captivity”
also from the point of view of Babylon. The great mass, strong in
race-force, was in reality far removed from these ideas, or regarded
them as mere visions and dreams; and the solid peasantry, the artisans,
and no doubt the nascent land-aristocracy quietly remained in its
holdings _under a prince of their own_, the Resh Galutha, whose
capital was Nehardea.[335] Those who returned “home” were the small
minority, the stubborn, the zealots. They numbered with their wives and
children forty thousand, a figure which cannot be one-tenth or even
one-twentieth of the total, and anyone who confuses these settlers
and their destiny with Jewry as a whole[336] must necessarily fail
to read the inner meaning of all following events. The _little world
of Judaism lived a spiritually separate life_, and the nation as a
whole, while regarding this life with respect, certainly did not share
in it. In the East apocalyptic literature, the heiress of prophecy,
blossomed richly. It was a genuine native poetry of the people, of
which we still have the masterpiece, the Book of Job--a work in
character Islamic and decidedly un-Jewish[337]--while a multitude of
its other tales and sagas, such as Judith, Tobit, Achikar,[338] are
spread as motives over all the literatures of the “Arabian” world. In
Judea only the Law flourished; the Talmudic spirit appears first in
Ezekiel (chs. xl, et seq.) and after 450 is made flesh in the scribes
(Sopherim) headed by Ezra. From 300 B.C. to A.D. 200 the Tannaim
(“Teachers”) expounded the Torah and developed the Mishnah. Neither
the coming of Jesus nor the destruction of the Temple interrupted
this abstract scholarship. Jerusalem became for the rigid believer
a Mecca, and his Koran was a Code of laws to which was gradually
added a whole primitive history compounded of Chaldeo-Persian motives
reset according to Pharisaic ideas.[339] But in this atmosphere there
was no room for a worldly art, poetry, or learning. All that the
Talmud contains of astronomical, medical, and juristic knowledge is
exclusively of Mesopotamian origin.[340] It is probable, too, that it
was in Mesopotamia, and _before_ the end of the Captivity, that there
began that Chaldean-Persian-Jewish formation of sects which developed
into the formation of great religions at the beginning of the Magian
Culture, and reached its climax in the teaching of Mani. “The Law and
the Prophets”--_these two nouns practically define the difference
between Judea and Mesopotamia_. In the late Persian and in every other
Magian theology both tendencies are united; it is only in the case
here considered that they were separated in space. The decisions of
Jerusalem were recognized everywhere, but it is a question how widely
they were obeyed. Even as near as Galilee the Pharisees were the object
of suspicion, while in Babylonia no Rabbi could be consecrated. For the
great Gamaliel, Paul’s teacher, it was a title to fame that his rulings
were followed by the Jews “even abroad.” How independent was the life
of the Jews in Egypt is shown by the recently discovered documents
of Elephantine and Assuan.[341] About 170, Onias asked the King for
permission to build a temple “according to the measurements of the
Temple in Jerusalem,” on the ground that the numerous non-conforming
temples that existed were the cause of eternal bickerings amongst the
communities.
One other subject must be considered. Jewry, like Persia, had since the
Exile increased enormously beyond the old small clan-limits; this was
owing to conversions and secessions--_the only form of conquest open
to a landless nation and, therefore, natural and obvious to the Magian
religions_. In the north it very early drove, through the Jew State of
Adiabene, to the Caucasus; in the south (probably along the Persian
Gulf) it penetrated to Saba; in the west it was dominant in Alexandria,
Cyrene, and Cyprus. The administration of Egypt and the policy of the
Parthian Empire were largely in Jewish hands.
But this movement _came out of Mesopotamia alone_, and the spirit in
it was the Apocalyptic and not the Talmudic. Jerusalem was occupied in
creating yet more legal barriers against the unbeliever. It was not
enough even to abandon the practice of making converts. A Pharisee
permitted himself to summon the universally beloved King Hyrcanus
(135-106) to lay down the office of High Priest because his mother
had once been in the power of the infidels.[342] This is the same
narrowness which in the primitive Christian brotherhood of Judea took
the form of opposing the preaching of the Gospel to the heathen. In
the East it would simply never have occurred to anyone to draw such
barriers, which were contrary to the whole idea of the Magian nation.
But in that very fact was based _the spiritual superiority_ of the wide
East. The Synedrion in Jerusalem might possess unchallenged religious
authority, but politically, and therefore historically, the power of
the Resh Galutha was a very different matter. Christian and Jewish
research alike have failed to perceive these things. So far as I am
aware, no one has noticed the important fact that the persecution of
Antiochus Epiphanes was directed not against “Jewry” but against Judea.
And this brings us to another fact, of still greater importance.
The destruction of Jerusalem hits only a very small part of the nation,
one moreover that was spiritually and politically by far the least
important. It is not true that the Jewish people has lived “in the
Dispersion” since that day, for it had lived for centuries (and so too
had the Persian and others) in a form which was independent of country.
On the other hand, we realize equally little the impression made by
this war upon the real Jewry which Judea thought of and treated as an
adjunct. The victory of the heathen and the ruin of the Sanctuary was
felt in the inmost soul,[343] and in the crusade of 115[344] a bitter
revenge was taken for it; but the ideal outraged and vindicated was the
ideal of Jewry and not that of Judaism. Zionism then, as in Cyrus’s
day and in ours, was a reality only for a quite small and spiritually
narrow minority. If the calamity had been really felt in the sense of
a “loss of home” (as we figure it to ourselves with the Western mind),
a hundred opportunities after Marcus Aurelius’s time could have been
seized to win the city back. But that would have contradicted the
Magian sense of the nation, whose ideal organic form was the synagogue,
the pure _consensus_--like the early Catholic “visible Church” and like
Islam--and it was precisely the annihilation of Judea and the clan
spirit of Judea that _for the first time completely actualized this
ideal_.
For Vespasian’s War, directed against Judea, was a liberation of
Jewry. In the first place, it ended both the claim of the people of
this petty district to be the genuine nation, and the pretensions
of their bald spirituality to equivalence with the soul-life of the
whole. The research, the scholasticism, and the mysticism of the
Oriental academies entered into possession of their rights; so, for
instance, the judge Karna--the contemporary, more or less, of Ulpian
and Papinian--formulated at the academy of Nehardea the first code
of civil law.[345] In the second place, it rescued this religion
from the dangers of that pseudomorphosis to which Christianity in
that same period was succumbing. Since 200 B.C. there had existed a
half-Hellenistic Jewish literature. The “Preacher” (Ecclesiastes,
Koheleth) contains Pyrrhonic ideas.[346] The Wisdom of Solomon, 2
Maccabees, Theodotion, the Aristeas Letter, etc., follow; there are
things like the Menander collection of Maxims, as to which it is
impossible to say whether they ought to be regarded as Jewish or as
Greek. There were, about 160, high priests who were so Hellenistic in
spirit that they combated the Jewish religion, and later there were
rulers like Hyrcanus and Herod who did the same by political methods.
This danger came to an end instantly and for good in A.D. 70.
In the time of Jesus there were in Jerusalem three tendencies which
can be described as generally Aramæan, represented respectively by the
Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Although the connotations
of these names varied, and although both in Christian and in Jewish
research most diverse views are held about them, it may at any rate be
said that the first of these tendencies is found in greatest purity
in Judaism, the second in Chaldeanism, the third in Hellenism.[347]
Essene is the rise of the cult (almost the Order) of Mithras in
the east of Asia Minor. The Sadducees, although in Jerusalem they
appear as a small and distinguished group--Josephus compares them
with the Epicureans--are thoroughly Aramæan in their apocalyptic and
eschatological views, in virtue of a certain element which makes
them, so to say, the Dostoyevskis of this Early period. They stand
to the Pharisees in the relation of mysticism to scholasticism, of
John to Paul, of Bundahish to Vendidad[348] in the Persian world.
The Apocalyptic is popular, and many of its traits are spiritually
common property throughout the Aramæan world; the Talmudic and Avestan
Pharisaism is exclusive and tries to rule out every other religion with
uncompromising rigour.
The Essenes appear in Jerusalem as a monastic order like the
Neopythagoreans. They possessed secret texts.[349] In the broad sense
they are representative of the Pseudomorphosis, and in consequence
they disappear from Jewry completely after A.D. 70, while precisely in
this period Christian literature was becoming purely Greek--not in the
least of the causes of this being that the Hellenized Western Jews left
Judaism to retreat into its East, and gradually adopted Christianity.
But also Apocalyptic, which is an expression-form of townless and
town-fearing mankind, soon came to an end within the Synagogue, after a
last wonderful reaction to the stimulus of the great catastrophe.[350]
When it had become evident that the teaching of Jesus would lead
not to a reform of Judaism, but to a new religion, and when, about
A.D. 100, the daily imprecation-formula against the Jew-Christians
was introduced, Apocalyptic for the short remainder of its existence
resided in the young Church.
VI
The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above
all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. In all
the great creations of those years there is nothing which can be set
beside it. Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of
Mithras, Attis, and Osiris must have seemed to any man reading or
listening to the still recent story of Jesus’s sufferings--the last
journey to Jerusalem, the last anxious supper, the hours of despair in
Gethsemane, and the death on the cross.
Here was no matter of philosophy. Jesus’s utterances, which stayed
in the memory of many of the devoted, even in old age, are those of
a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world. They are not
sociological observations, problems, debatings. Like a quiet island
of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of
Gennesareth in the midst of the age of the great Tiberius, far from all
world-history and innocent of all the doings of actuality, while round
them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples,
their refined Western society, their noisy mob-diversions, their Roman
cohorts, their Greek philosophy. When the friends and disciples of the
sufferer had grown grey and his brother was president of their group in
Jerusalem, they put together, from the sayings and narratives generally
current in their small communities, a biography so arresting in its
inward appeal that it evolved a presentation-form of its own, of which
neither the Classical nor the Arabian Culture has any example--the
Gospel. Christianity is the one religion in the history of the world in
which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem
and the central point of the whole creation.
A strange excitement, like that which the Germanic world experienced
about A.D. 1000, ran in those days through the whole Aramæan land.
The Magian soul was awakened. That element which lay in the prophetic
religions like a presentiment, and expressed itself in Alexander’s
time in metaphysical outlines, came now to the state of fulfilment.
And this fulfilment awakened, in indescribable strength, the primitive
feeling of Fear. The birth of the Ego, and of the world-anxiety with
which it is identical, is one of the final secrets of humanity and of
mobile life generally. In front of the Microcosm there stands up a
Macrocosm wide and overpowering, an abyss of alien, dazzling existence
and activity that frightens the small lonely ego back into itself.
Even in the blackest hours of life no adult experiences fear like the
fear which sometimes overpowers a child in the crisis of awakening.
Over the dawn of the new Culture likewise lay this deathly anxiety. In
this early morning of Magian world-feeling, timorous and hesitant and
ignorant of itself, young eyes saw the end of the world at hand--it
is the first thought in which every Culture to this day has come to
knowledge of itself. All but the shallower souls trembled before
revelations, miracles, glimpses into the very fundament of things. Men
now lived and thought only in apocalyptic images. Actuality became
appearance. Strange and terrifying visions were told mysteriously by
one to another, read out from fantastic veiled texts, and seized at
once with an immediate inward certainty. These writings travelled from
community to community, village to village, and it is quite impossible
to assign them to any one particular religion.[351] Their colouring
is Persian, Chaldean, Jewish, but they have absorbed all that was
circulating in men’s minds. Whereas the canonical books are national,
the apocalyptic literature is international in the literal sense of the
word. It is there, and no one seems to have composed it. Its content
is fluid--to-day it reads thus and to-morrow otherwise. But this
does not mean that it is a “poetry”--it is not.[352] These creations
resemble the terrible figures of the Romanesque cathedral-porches
in France, which also are not “art,” but fear turned into stone.
Everyone knows those angels and devils, the ascent to heaven and
descent to hell of divine Essence, the Second Adam, the Envoy of God,
the Redeemer of the last days, the Son of Man, the eternal city, and
the last judgment.[353] In the alien cities and the high positions
of strict Judaic and Persian priesthoods the different doctrines
might be tangibly defined and argued about, but below in the mass of
the people there was practically no specific religion, but a general
Magian religiousness which filled all souls and attached itself to
glimpses and visions of every conceivable origin. The Last Day was
at hand. Men expected it and knew that on that day “He” of whom all
these revelations spoke would appear. Prophets arose. More and more
new communities and groups gathered, believing themselves to have
found either a better understanding of the traditional religion, or
the true religion itself. In this time of amazing, ever-increasing
tension, and in the very years around Jesus’s birth-year, there arose,
besides endless communities and sects, another redemption-religion, the
Mandæan, as to which we know nothing of founder or origins. In spite
of its hatred of the Judaism of Jerusalem and its definite preference
for the Persian idea of redemption, the Mandæan religion seems to have
stood very close to the popular beliefs of Syrian Jewry. One after
another, pieces of its wonderful documents are becoming available, and
they consistently show us a “Him,” a Son of Man, a Redeemer who is sent
down into the depths, who himself must be redeemed and is the goal of
man’s expectations. In the Book of John, the Father high upraised in
the House of Fulfilment, bathed in light, says to his only begotten
Son: “My Son, be to me an ambassador; go into the world of darkness,
where no ray of light is.” And the Son calls up to him: “Father, in
what have I sinned that thou hast sent me into the darkness?” And
finally: “Without sin did I ascend and there was no sin and defect in
me.”[354]
All the characters of the great prophetic religions and of the whole
store of profound glimpses and visions later collected into apocalypses
are seen here as foundations. Of Classical thought and feeling not
a breath reached this Magian underworld. No doubt the beginnings of
the new religion are lost irrevocably. But _one_ historical figure of
Mandæanism stands forth with startling distinctness, as tragic in his
purpose and his downfall as Jesus himself--John the Baptist.[355] He,
almost emancipated from Judaism, and filled with as mighty a hatred
of the Jerusalem spirit as that of primitive Russia for Petersburg,
preached the end of the world and the coming of the Barnasha, the Son
of Man, _who is no longer the longed-for national Messiah of the Jews_,
but the bringer of the world-conflagration.[356] To him came Jesus and
was his disciple.[357] He was thirty years old when the awakening came
over him. Thenceforth the apocalyptic, and in particular the Mandæan,
thought-world filled his whole being. The other world of historical
actuality lying round him was to him as something sham, alien, void of
significance. That “He” would now come and make an end of this unreal
reality was his magnificent certainty, and like his master John, he
stepped forth as its herald. Even now we can see, in the oldest Gospels
that were embodied into the New Testament, gleams of this period in
which he was, in his consciousness, nothing but a prophet.[358]
But there was a moment in his life when an inkling, and then high
certainty, came over him--“Thou art thyself It!” It was a secret that
he at first hardly admitted to himself, and only later imparted to his
nearest friends and companions, who thereafter shared with him, in all
stillness, the blessed mission, till finally they dared to reveal the
truths before all the world by the momentous journey to Jerusalem. If
there is anything at all that clouds the complete purity and honour of
his thought, it is that doubt as to whether he has deceived himself
which from time to time seizes him, and of which, later, his disciples
told quite frankly. He comes to his home. The village crowds to him,
recognizes the former carpenter who left his work, is angered. The
family--mother and all the brothers and sisters--are ashamed of him
and would have arrested him. And with all these familiar eyes upon him
he was confused and felt the magic power depart from him (Mark vi).
In Gethsemane doubts of his mission[359] mingled themselves in the
terrible fear of coming things, and even on the cross men heard the
anguished cry that God had forsaken him.
Even in these last hours he lived entirely in the form of his own
apocalyptic world, which alone was ever real to him. What to the Roman
sentries standing below him was reality was for him an object of
helpless wonder, an illusion that might at any moment without warning
vanish into nothingness. He possessed the pure and unadulterated soul
of the townless land. The life of the cities and their spirit were to
him utterly alien. Did he really see the semi-Classical Jerusalem, into
which he rode as the Son of Man, and understand its historical nature?
This is what thrills us in the last days--and the collision of facts
with truths, of two worlds that will never understand one another, and
his entire incomprehension of what was happening about him.
So he went, proclaiming his message without reservation, through his
country. But this country was Palestine. He was born in the Classical
Empire and lived under the eyes of the Judaism of Jerusalem, and when
his soul, fresh from the awful revelation of its mission, looked
about, it was confronted by the actuality of the Roman State and that
of Pharisaism. His repugnance for the stiff and selfish ideal of the
latter, which he shared with all Mandæanism and doubtless with the
peasant Jewry of the wide East, is the hall-mark of all his discourses
from first to last. It angered him that this wilderness of cold-hearted
formulæ was reputed to be the only way to salvation. Still, thus far
it was only another kind of piety that his conviction was asserting
against Rabbinical logic. Thus far it is only the Law versus the
Prophets.
But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, then _the world of facts and
the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable
hostility_. It is a scene appallingly distinct and overwhelming in
its symbolism, such as the world’s history had never before and has
never since looked at. The discord that lies at the root of all mobile
life from its beginning, in virtue of its very _being_, of its having
both existence _and_ awareness, took here the highest form that can
possibly be conceived of human tragedy. In the famous question of the
Roman Procurator: “What is truth?”--the one word that is race-pure
in the whole Greek Testament--lies _the entire meaning of history_,
the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and war
and blood, the all-powerfulness of success and the pride of eminent
fitness. Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus answers
this question by that other which is decisive in all things of
religion--_What is actuality?_ For Pilate actuality was all; for him
nothing. Were it anything, indeed, pure religiousness could never stand
up against history and the powers of history, or sit in judgment on
active life; or if it does, it ceases to be religion and is subjected
itself to the spirit of history.
_My kingdom is not of this world._ This is the final word which admits
of no gloss and on which each must check the course wherein birth and
nature have set him. A being that makes use of a waking-consciousness,
or a waking-consciousness which subjects being to itself; pulsation
or tension, blood or intellect, history or nature, politics or
religion--here it is one or the other, there is no honest way
of compromise. A statesman can be deeply religious, a pious man
can die for his country--but they must, both, know on which side
they are really standing. The born politician despises the inward
thought-processes of the ideologue and ethical philosopher in a world
of fact--and rightly. For the believer, all ambition and succession of
the historical world are sinful and without lasting value--he, too,
is right. A ruler who wishes to improve religion in the direction
of political, practical purposes is a fool. A sociologist-preacher
who tries to bring truth, righteousness, peace, and forgiveness into
the world of actuality is a fool also. No faith yet has altered the
world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between
directional Time and timeless Eternity, between the _course_ of history
and the _existence_ of a divine world-order, in the structure of which
the word “providence” or “dispensation” denotes the form of causality.
_This is the final meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pilate
confronted one another._ In the one world, the historical, the Roman
caused the Galilean to be crucified--that was his Destiny. In the other
world, Rome was cast for perdition and the Cross became the pledge of
Redemption--that was the “will of God.”[360]
_Religion is metaphysic and nothing else--“Credo quia absurdum”_--and
this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof
(which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but _lived and experienced_
metaphysic--that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural
as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true.
Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no
moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to
be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century
Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus
is a blasphemy. His occasional utterances of a social kind, so far as
they are authentic and not merely attributed sayings, tend merely to
edification. They contain nothing whatever of new doctrine, and they
include proverbs of the sort then in general currency. His _teaching_
was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last
Things with whose images he was constantly filled, the dawn of the New
Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the last judgment, a new heaven
and a new earth.[361] Any other conception of religion was never in
Jesus, nor in any truly deep-feeling period of history. _Religion is,
first and last, metaphysic_, other-worldliness (_Jenseitigkeit_),
awareness in a world of which the evidence of the senses merely lights
the foreground. It is life in and with the supersensible. And where the
capacity for this awareness, or even the capacity for believing in its
existence, is wanting, real religion is at an end. “My kingdom is _not_
of this world,” and only he who can look into the depths that this
flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them. It is
the Late, city periods that, no longer capable of seeing into depths,
have turned the remnants of religiousness upon the external world and
replaced religion by humanities, and metaphysic by moralization and
social ethics.
In Jesus we have the direct opposite. “Give unto Cæsar the things that
are Cæsar’s” means: “Fit yourselves to the powers of the fact-world, be
patient, suffer, and ask it not whether they are ‘just.’” What alone
matters is the salvation of the soul. “Consider the lilies” means:
“Give no heed to riches _and poverty_, for both fetter the soul to
cares of this world.” “Man cannot serve both God and Mammon”--by Mammon
is meant the _whole_ of actuality. It is shallow, and it is cowardly,
to argue away the grand significance of this demand. Between working
for the increase of one’s own riches, and working for the social ease
of everyone, he would have felt no difference whatever. When wealth
affrighted him, when the primitive community in Jerusalem--which was
a strict Order and not a socialist club--rejected ownership, it was
the most direct opposite of “social” sentiment that moved them. Their
conviction was, not that the visible state of things was all, but that
it was nothing: that it rested not on appreciation of comfort in this
world, but on unreserved contempt of it. Something, it is true, must
always exist to be set against and to nullify worldly fortune, and so
we come back to the contrast of Tolstoi and Dostoyevski. Tolstoi, the
townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social reformer, and in
his metaphysical impotence--like the whole civilized West, which can
only think about _distributing_, never _renouncing_--elevated primitive
Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoyevski, who was
poor, but in certain hours almost a saint, never thought about social
ameliorations--of what profit would it have been to a man’s _soul_ to
abolish _property_?
VII
Amongst Jesus’s friends and disciples, stunned as they were by the
appalling outcome of the journey to Jerusalem, there spread after a
few days the news of his resurrection and reappearance. The impression
of this news on such souls and in such a time can never be more than
partially echoed in the sensibilities of a Late mankind. It meant the
actual fulfilment of all the Apocalyptic of that Magian Springtime--the
end of the present æon marked by the ascension of the redeemed
Redeemer, the second Adam, the Saoshyant, Enosh, Barnasha, or whatever
other name man attached to “Him,” into the light-realm of the Father.
And therewith the foretold future, the new world-æon, “the Kingdom
of Heaven,” became immediately present. They felt themselves at the
decisive point in the history of redemption.
This certainty completely transformed the world-outlook of the little
circles. “His” teachings, as they had flowed from his mild and noble
nature--his inner feeling of the relation between God and man and of
the high meaning of the times, and were exhaustively comprised in
and defined by the word “love”--fell into the background, and their
place was taken by the _teaching of Him_. As the Arisen he became for
his disciples a new figure, in and of the Apocalyptic, and (what was
more) its most important and final figure. But therewith their image
of the future took form as an image of memory. Now, this was something
of quite decisive importance, unheard-of in the world of Magian
thought--the transference of an actuality, lived and experienced, on to
the plane of the high story itself. The Jews (amongst them the young
Paul) and the Mandæans (amongst them the disciples of John the Baptist)
fought against it with passion and made of Jesus a “False Messiah” such
as had been spoken of in the earliest Persian texts.[362] For them “He”
was still to come from afar; for the little community “He” had already
been--had they not seen him and lived with him? We have to enter into
this conception unreservedly if we are to appreciate the enormous
superiority it had in those times. Instead of an uncertain glimpse into
the distance,[363] a compelling present; instead of fearful waiting for
a liberating certainty, instead of a saga, a lived and shared human
destiny--truly they were “glad tidings” that were proclaimed.
But to whom? Even in the first days the question arose which decided
the whole Destiny of the new revelation. Jesus and his friends were
Jews by birth, but they did not belong to the land of Judea. Here in
Jerusalem men looked for the Messiah of their old sacred books, a
Messiah who was to appear for the “Jewish people,” in the old tribal
sense, and only for them. But all the rest of the Aramæan world waited
upon the Saviour of the _world_, the Redeemer and Son of Man, the
figure of all apocalyptic literature, whether written out in Jewish,
Persian, Chaldean, or Mandæan terms.[364] In the one view the death
and resurrection of Jesus were merely local events; in the other they
betokened a world-change. For, while everywhere else the Jews were a
Magian nation without home or unity of birth, Jerusalem held firmly
to the tribal idea. The conflict was not one between “preaching to
the Jews” and “preaching to the Gentiles”--it went far deeper. The
word “mission” had essentially here a twofold meaning. In the Judaic
view there was essentially no need for recruiting--quite the reverse,
as it was a contradiction to the Messiah-idea. The words “tribe” and
“mission” are reciprocally exclusive. The members of the Chosen People,
and in particular the priesthood, had merely to convince _themselves_
that their longing was now fulfilled. But to the Magian nation, based
on _consensus_ or community of feeling, what the Resurrection conveyed
was a full and definitive truth, and consensus in the matter of this
truth gave the _principle of the true nation_, which must necessarily
expand till it had taken in all older and conceptually incomplete
principles. “A Shepherd and his sheep” was the formula of the new
world-nation. The nation of the Redeemer was identical with mankind.
When, therefore, we survey the early history of this Culture, we see
that the controversy in the Apostles’ Council[365] had been already
decided, five hundred years before, by facts. Post-exilic Jewry (with
the sole exception of self-contained Judea) had, like the Persians,
Chaldeans, and others, recruited widely amongst the heathen, from
Turkestan to inner Africa, regardless of home and origin. As to this
there is now no controversy. It never at any time entered the heads of
this community to be anything but what it really was. It was itself
already the result of _a national existence in dispersion_. In utter
contrast to the old-Jewish texts--which were a carefully preserved
treasure, and of which the right interpretation, the Halakha, was
reserved by the Rabbis to themselves--the apocalyptic literature
was written so that it could reach all the souls to be wakened, and
interpreted so that it might strike home in everyone.
It is easy to see which of these conceptions was that of Jesus’s
oldest friends, for they established themselves as a community of the
Last Days in Jerusalem and frequented the Temple. For these simple
folk--amongst them his brothers, who erstwhile had openly rejected him,
and his mother, who now believed in her executed Son[366]--the power of
the Judaic tradition was even stronger than the spirit of Apocalypse.
In their object of convincing the Jews they failed (although at first
even Pharisees came over to them) and so they remained as one of the
numerous sects within Judaism, and their product, the “Confession of
Peter,” may fairly be characterized as an express assertion that they
themselves were the true Jewry and the Synedrion the false.[367]
The final destiny of this circle[368] was to fall into oblivion when,
as very soon happened, the whole world of Magian thought and feeling
responded to the new apocalyptic teaching. Amongst the later disciples
of Jesus were many who were definitely and purely Magian, and wholly
free from the Pharisaic spirit. Long before Paul, they had tacitly
settled the mission question. Not to preach, for them, was not to live
at all, and presently they had assembled, everywhere from the Tigris
to the Tiber, small circles in which the figure of Jesus, in every
conceivable presentation, merged with the mass of prior visions.[369]
Out of this, a new discord arose, as between mission to the heathen and
mission to the Jews, and this was far more important than the conflict
between Judea and the world on issues already decided. Jesus had lived
in Galilee. Was his teaching to look west or east? Was it to be a
Jesus-cult or an Order of the Saviour? Was it to seek intimacy with the
Persian or with the Syncretic Church, both of which were in process of
formation?
This was the question decided by Paul--the first great personality
in the new movement, and the first who had the sense not only of
truths, but of facts. As a young rabbi from the West, and a pupil
of one of the most famous of the Tannaim, he had persecuted the
Christians qua Jewish sectaries. Then, after an awakening of the sort
that often happened in those days, he turned to the numerous small
cult-communities of the West and forged out of them a Church of _his
own_ modelling: so that thenceforward, the Pagan and the Christian
cult-Churches evolved in parallel, and with constant reciprocal action,
up to Iamblichus and Athanasius (about A.D. 330). In the presence of
this great ideal, Paul had for the Jesus-communities of Jerusalem a
scarcely veiled contempt. There is nothing in the New Testament more
express and exact than the beginning of the Epistle to the Galatians;
his activity is a self-assumed task; he has taught how it pleased him
and he has built how it pleased him. Finally, after fourteen years, he
goes to Jerusalem in order, by force of his superior mentality, his
success, and his effective independence of the old comrades of Jesus,
to compel them there to agree that his, Paul’s, creation contained the
true doctrine. Peter and his people, alien to actualities, failed to
seize and appreciate the far-reaching significance of the discussion.
And from that moment the primitive community was superfluous.
Paul was a rabbi in intellect and an apocalyptic in feeling. He
recognized Judaism, but as a _preliminary_ development. And thus there
came to be two Magian religions with the same Scriptures (namely,
the Old Testament), but a double Halakha, the one setting towards
the Talmud--developed by the Tannaim at Jerusalem from 300 B.C.
onwards--and the other, founded by Paul and completed by the Fathers,
in the direction of the Gospel. But, further, Paul drew together the
whole fullness of Apocalypse and salvation-yearning then circulating
in these fields[370] into a salvation-_certainty_, the certainty
immediately revealed to him and to him _alone_ near Damascus. “_Jesus
is the Redeemer and Paul is his Prophet_”--this is the whole content
of his message. The analogy with Mohammed could scarcely be closer.
They differed neither in the nature of the awakening, nor in prophetic
self-assuredness, nor in the consequent assertion of sole authority and
unconditional truth for their respective expositions.
With Paul, urban man and his “intelligence” come on the scene. The
others, though they might know Jerusalem or Antioch, never grasped the
essence of these cities. They lived soil-bound, rural, wholly soul and
feeling. But now there appeared a spirit that had grown up in the great
cities of Classical cast, that could only live in cities, that neither
understood nor respected the peasant’s countryside. An understanding
was possible with Philo, but with Peter never. Paul was the first by
whom the Resurrection-experience was _seen as a problem_; the ecstatic
awe of the young countryman changed in his brain into a conflict of
spiritual principles. For what a contrast!--the struggle of Gethsemane,
and the hour of Damascus: Child and Man, soul-anguish and intellectual
decision, self-devotion to death and resolve to change sides! Paul
had begun by seeing in the new Jewish sect a danger to the Pharisaism
of Jerusalem; now, suddenly, he comprehended that the Nazarenes “were
right”--a phrase that is inconceivable on the lips of Jesus--and took
up their cause against Judaism, thereby setting up as an _intellectual
quantity_ that which had previously consisted in the knowledge of an
experience. An intellectual quantity--but in making his cause into
this he unwittingly drove it close to the other intellectual powers,
_the cities of the West_. In the ambiance of pure Apocalyptic there
is no “intellect.” For the old comrades it was simply not possible to
understand him in the least--and mournfully and doubtfully they must
have looked at him while he was addressing them. Their living image
of Jesus (whom Paul had never seen) paled in this bright, hard light
of concepts and propositions. Thenceforward the holy memory faded
into a Scholastic system. But Paul had a perfectly exact feeling for
the true home of his ideas. His missionary journeys were all directed
westward, and the East he ignored. _He never left the domain of the
Classical city._ Why did he go to Rome, to Corinth, and not to Edessa
or Ctesiphon? And why was it that he worked _only in the cities, and
never from village to village?_
That things developed thus was due to Paul _alone_. In the face of his
practical energy the feelings of all the rest counted for nothing, and
so the young Church took the urban and Western tendency decisively,
so decisively that later it could describe the remaining heathen as
“_pagani_,” country-folk. Thus arose an immense danger that only youth
and vernal force enabled the growing Church to repel; the fellah-world
of the Classical cities grasped at it with both hands, and the marks
of that grasp are visible to-day. But--how remote already from the
essence of Jesus, whose entire life had been bound to country and
the country-folk! The Pseudomorphosis in which he was born he had
simply not noticed; his soul contained not the smallest trace of
its influence--and now, a generation after him, probably within the
lifetime of his mother, that which had grown up out of his death had
already become a centre of formative purpose for that Pseudomorphosis.
The Classical City was soon the only theatre of ritual and dogmatic
evolution. Eastward the community extended only furtively and
unobtrusively.[371] About A.D. 100 there were already Christians beyond
the Tigris, but as far as the development of the Church was concerned
they and their beliefs might almost have been non-existent.
It was a second creation, then, that came out of Paul’s immediate
entourage, and it was this creation that, essentially, defined the
form of the new Church. The personality and the story of Jesus cried
aloud to be put into poetic form, and yet it is due to one man alone,
Mark, that Gospels came into existence at all.[372] What Paul and
Mark had before them was a firm tradition in the community, _the_
“Gospel,” a continued and propagated hearsay, supported by formless and
insignificant notes in Aramaic and Greek, but in no way set out. In
any case, of course, serious documents would have come into existence
some time or another, but their natural form as products of the spirit
of those who had _lived_ with Jesus (and of the spirit of the East
generally) would have been a canonical collection of his sayings,
amplified, conclusively defined, and provided with an exegesis by the
Councils and pivoting upon the Second Advent. But any tentatives in
this direction were completely broken off by the Gospel of Mark, which
was written down about A.D. 65, at the same time as the last Pauline
Epistles, and, like them, in Greek. The writer had no suspicion,
perhaps, of the significance of his little work, but it made him one
of the supremely important personalities not only of Christianity, but
of the Arabian Culture generally. All older attempts vanished, leaving
writings in Gospel-form as the sole sources concerning Jesus. (So much
so that “_Evangelium_,” from signifying the content of glad tidings,
came to mean the form itself.) The work was the outcome of the wishes
of Pauline, literate, circles that had never heard any one of Jesus’s
companions discourse about him. It is _an apocalyptic life-picture from
a distance_; lived experience is replaced by narrative, and narrative
so plain and straightforward that the apocalyptic tendency passes quite
unperceived.[373] And yet Apocalyptic is its condition precedent. It
is not the words of Jesus, but the doctrine of Jesus in the Pauline
form, that constitutes the substance of Mark. The first Christian book
emanates from the Pauline creation. But very soon the latter itself
becomes unthinkable without the book and its successors.
For presently there arose something which Paul, the born schoolman,
had never intended, but which nevertheless had been made inevitable by
the tendency of his work--the _cult-church of Christian nationality_.
While the Syncretic creed-community, in proportion as it attained
to consciousness of itself, drew the innumerable old city-cults and
the new Magian together and by means of a supreme cult endowed the
structure with henotheistic form, the Jesus-cult of the oldest Western
communities was so long dissected and enriched that it also came to
consist of just such another mass of cults.[374] Around the birth of
Jesus, of which the Disciples knew nothing, grew up a story of his
childhood. In the Mark Gospel it has not yet come into existence.
Already in the old Persian apocalyptic, indeed, the Saoshyant as
Saviour of the Last Day was said to be born of a virgin. But the new
western myth was of quite other significance and had incalculable
consequences. For within the Pseudomorphosis-region there arose
presently beside Jesus a figure to which he was Son, which transcended
his figure--that of the Mother of God. She, like her Son, was a simple
human destiny of such arresting and attractive force that she towered
above all the hundred and one Virgins and Mothers of Syncretism--Isis,
Tanit, Cybele, Demeter--and all the mysteries of birth and pain, and
finally drew them into herself. For Irenæus she is the Eve of a new
mankind. Origen champions her continued virginity. By giving birth to
Redeemer-God it is _she_ really who has redeemed the world. Mary the
“Theotokos” (she who bare God) was the great stumbling-block for the
Christians outside the Classical frontier, and it was the doctrinal
developments of this idea that led Monophysites and Nestorians to break
away and re-establish the pure Jesus-religion.[375] But the Faustian
Culture, again, when it awoke and needed a symbol whereby to express
its primary feeling for Infinity in time and to manifest its sense of
the succession of generations, _set up the “Mater Dolorosa” and not the
suffering Redeemer_ as the pivot of the German-Catholic Christianity of
the Gothic age; and for whole centuries of bright fruitful inwardness
this woman-figure was the very synthesis of Faustian world-feeling and
the object of all art, poetry, and piety. Even to-day in the ritual and
the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church, and above all in the thoughts
of its people, Jesus takes second place after the Madonna.[376]
Along with the Mary-cult there arose the innumerable cults of the
saints, which certainly exceeded in number those of the antique
place-gods; when the Pagan Church finally expired, the Christian had
been able to absorb the whole store of local cults in the form of the
veneration of saints.
Paul and Mark were decisive in yet another matter of inestimably
wide import. It was a result of Paul’s mission that, contrary to all
the initial probabilities, Greek became the language of the Church
and--following the lead of the first Gospel--of a sacred _Greek_
literature. Let the reader consider what this meant, in one way and
another. The Jesus Church was artificially separated from its spiritual
origins and attached to an alien and scholarly element. Touch with the
folk-spirit of the Aramæan motherland was lost. Thenceforward both
the cult-Churches possessed the same language, the same conceptual
traditions, the same book-literature from the same schools. The far
less sophisticated Aramaic literatures of the East--the truly Magian,
written and thought in the language of Jesus and his companions--were
cut off from cooperating in the life of the Church. They could not
be read, they dropped out of sight, and finally they were forgotten
altogether. After all, notwithstanding that the Persian Scriptures were
set down in Avestan and the Jewish in Hebrew, the language of their
authors and exegetes; the language of the whole Apocalyptic from which
the teachings of Jesus, and secondarily the teachings about Jesus,
sprang; the language, lastly, of the scholars of all the Mesopotamian
universities--was Aramaic. All this vanished from the field of view, to
be replaced by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom were taken up, worked
upon in common, and misunderstood in common by the Schoolmen of the two
cult-Churches.
A final step in this direction was attempted by a man who was
the equal of Paul in organizing talent and greatly his superior
in intellectual creativeness, but who was inferior to him in the
feeling for possibilities and actualities, and consequently failed to
achieve his grandly conceived schemes--Marcion.[377] He saw in Paul’s
creation and its consequences only the basis on which to found the
true religion of salvation. He was sensible of the absurdity of two
religions that were unreservedly at war with one another possessing
the same Holy Writ--namely, the _Jewish_ canon. To us to-day it seems
almost inconceivable that this should have been, but in fact it was
so, for a century--but we have to remember what a sacred text meant
in every kind of Magian religiousness. In these texts Marcion saw the
real “conspiracy against the truth” and the most urgent danger for
the doctrines intended by Jesus and, in his view, not yet actualized.
Paul the prophet had declared the Old Testament as fulfilled and
concluded--Marcion the founder pronounced it defeated and cancelled. He
strove to cut out everything Jewish, down to the last detail. From end
to end he was fighting nothing but Judaism. Like every true founder,
like every religiously creative period, like Zarathustra, the prophets
of Israel, like the Homeric Greeks, and like the Germans converted to
Christianity, he transformed the old gods into defeated powers.[378]
Jehovah as the Creator-God, the Demiurge, is the “Just” _and therefore
the Evil_: Jesus as the incarnation of the Saviour-God in this evil
creation is the “alien”--that is, the good Principle.[379] The
foundation of Magian, and in particular Persian, feeling is perfectly
unmistakable here. Marcion came from Sinope, the old capital of that
Mithradatic Empire whose religion is indicated in the very name of its
kings. Here of old, too, the Mithras cult had originated.
But to the new doctrine properly belonged new Scriptures. The “Law
and Prophets” which had hitherto been canonical for the whole of
Christendom was the _Bible of the Jewish God_, and in fact it had
just been given final shape as such by the Synedrion at Jabna.
Thus, it was a Devil’s book that the Christian had in his hands,
and Marcion, therefore, now set up against it the Bible of the
Redeemer-God--likewise an assemblage and ordering of writings that had
hitherto been current in the community[380] as simple edification-books
without canonical claims. In place of the Torah he puts the--_one and
true_--Gospel, which he builds up uniformly out of various separate,
and, in his view, corrupted and falsified, Gospels. In place of the
Israelite prophets he sets up the Epistles of the _one prophet of
Jesus_, who was Paul.
Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament. But for
that reason it is impossible to ignore the mysterious personage,
closely related to him, who not long before had written the Gospel
“according to John.” The intention of this writer was neither to
amplify nor to supersede the Gospels proper; what he did--and, unlike
Mark, consciously did--was to create something quite new, _the first
sacred book_ of Christianity, the Koran of the new religion.[381] The
book proves that this religion was already conceived of as something
complete and enduring. The idea of the immediately impending end of
the world, with which Jesus was filled through and through and which
even Paul and Mark in a measure shared, lies far behind “John” and
Marcion. Apocalyptic is at an end, and Mysticism is beginning. Their
content is not the teaching of Jesus, nor even the Pauline teaching
about Jesus, but the enigma of the universe, the World-Cavern. There
is here no question of a Gospel; not the figure of the Redeemer, but
the principle of the Logos, is the meaning and the means of happening.
The childhood story is rejected again; a god is not “born,” he is
“there,” and wanders in human form over the earth. And this god is a
Trinity--God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. This sacred book
of earliest Christianity contains, for the first time, the Magian
problem of “Substance,” which dominated the following centuries to
the exclusion of everything else and finally led to the religion’s
splitting up into three churches. And--what is significant in more
respects than one--the solution of that problem to which “John” stands
closest is that which the Nestorian East stood for as the true one. It
is, in virtue of the Logos idea (Greek though the word happens to be)
the “easternmost” of the Gospels, and presents Jesus, emphatically not
as the bringer of the final and total revelation, but as the second
envoy, who is to be _followed by a third_ (the Comforter, Paraclete, of
John xiv, 16, 26; xv, 26). This is the astounding doctrine that Jesus
himself proclaims, and the decisive note of this enigmatic book. Here
is unveiled, quite suddenly, the faith of the Magian East. If the Logos
does not go, the Paraclete[382] cannot come (John xvi, 7), but between
them lies the last Æon, the rule of Ahriman (xiv, 30). The Church of
the Pseudomorphosis, ruled by Pauline intellect, fought long against
the John Gospel and gave it recognition only when the offensive, darkly
hinted doctrine had been covered over by a Pauline interpretation.
The real state of affairs is disclosed in the Montanist movement
(Asia Minor, 160) which harked back to oral tradition and proclaimed
in Montanus the manifested Paraclete and the end of the world. Its
popularity was immense. Tertullian went over to it at Carthage in 207.
About 245 Mani,[383] who was intimately in touch with the currents of
Eastern Christianity,[384] cast out the Pauline, human Jesus as a demon
and confessed the Johannine Logos as the true Jesus, but announced
himself as the Paraclete of the fourth Gospel. In Carthage, Augustine
became a Manichæan, and it is a highly suggestive fact that both
movements finally fused with Marcionism.
To return to Marcion himself, it was he who carried through the idea
of “John” and created a Christian Bible. And then, verging on old
age, when the communities of the extreme west recoiled from him in
horror,[385] he set out to build the masterly structure of his own
Redeemer-Church.[386] From 156 to 190 this was a power, and it was only
in the following century that the older Church succeeded in degrading
the Marcionites to the rank of heretics. Even so, in the broad East and
as far out as Turkestan, it was still important at a much later date,
and it ended, in a way deeply significant of its essential feeling, by
fusing with the Manichæans.[387]
Nevertheless, though in the fullness of his conscious superiority
he had underestimated the _vis inertiæ_ of existing conditions,
his grand effort was not in vain. He was, like Paul before him and
Athanasius after him, the deliverer of Christianity at a moment when
it threatened to break up, and the grandeur of his idea is in no
wise diminished by the fact that union came about in opposition to,
instead of through, him. The early Catholic Church--that is, the
_Church of the Pseudomorphosis_--arose in its greatness only about
190, and then it was in self-defence against the Church of Marcion
and with the aid of an organization taken from that Church. Further,
it replaced Marcion’s Bible by another of similar structure--Gospels
and apostolic Epistles--which it then proceeded to combine with the
Law and the Prophets in one unit. And finally, this act of linking
the two Testaments having in itself settled the Church’s attitude
towards Judaism, it proceeded to combat Marcion’s third creation, his
Redeemer-doctrine, by making a start with a theology of its own on the
basis of _his_ enunciation of the problem.
This development, however, took place on Classical soil, and,
therefore, even the Church that arose in opposition to Marcion and his
anti-Judaism was looked upon by Talmudic Jewry (whose centre of gravity
lay entirely in Mesopotamia and its universities) as a mere piece of
Hellenistic paganism. The destruction of Jerusalem was a conclusive
event that in the world of fact no spiritual power could nullify. Such
is the intimacy of inward relationship between waking-consciousness,
religion, and speech that the complete severance after 70 of the Greek
Pseudomorphosis and the Aramaic (that is, the truly Arabian) region
was bound to result in the formation of two distinct domains of Magian
religious development. On the Western margin of the young Culture the
Pagan cult-Church, the Jesus-Church (removed thither by Paul), and the
Greek-speaking Judaism of the Philo stamp were in point of language and
literature so interlocked that the last-named fell into Christianity
even in the first century, and Christianity and Hellenism combined to
form a _common_ early philosophy. In the Aramaic-speaking world from
the Orontes to the Tigris, on the other hand, Judaism and Persism
interacted constantly and intimately, each creating in this period
its own strict theology and scholastic in the Talmud and the Avesta;
and from the fourth century both these theologies exercised _the most
potent influence upon the Aramaic-speaking Christendom that resisted
the Pseudomorphosis_, so that finally it broke away in the form of the
Nestorian Church.
Here in the East the difference, inherent in every human
waking-consciousness, between sense-understanding and
word-understanding--and, therefore between eye and letter--led up to
purely Arabian methods of mysticism and scholasticism. The apocalyptic
certainty, “Gnosis” in the first-century sense, that Jesus intended to
confer,[388] the divining contemplation and emotion, is that of the
Israelite prophets, the Gathas, Sufism, and we have it recognizable
still in Spinoza, in the Polish Messiah Baal Shem[389] and in Mirza
Ali Mohammed, the enthusiast-founder of Bahaism, who was executed in
Teheran in 1850. The other way, “Paradosis,” is the characteristically
Talmudic method of word-exegesis, of which Paul was a master;[390] it
pervades all later Avestan works, the Nestorian dialectic,[391] the
entire theology of Islam alike.
On the other side, the Pseudomorphosis is single and whole both in its
Magian believing acceptance (Pistis) and its metaphysical introversion
(Gnosis).[392] The Magian belief in its Westerly shape was formulated
for the Christians by Irenæus and, above all, by Tertullian, whose
famous aphorism “_Credo quia absurdum_” is the very summation of this
certainty in belief. The Pagan counterpart is Plotinus in his Enneads
and even more so Porphyry in his treatise _On the Return of the Soul to
God_.[393] But for the great schoolmen of the Pagan Church too, there
were Father (Nus), Son, and the middle Being, just as already for Philo
the Logos had been first-born Son and second God. Doctrines concerning
ecstasy, angels and demons, and the dual substance of soul were freely
current amongst them, and we see in Plotinus and Origen, both pupils
of the same master, that the scholasticism of the Pseudomorphosis
consisted in the development of Magian concepts and thoughts, by
systematic transvaluation of the texts of Plato and Aristotle.
The characteristic _central idea of the whole thought of the
Pseudomorphosis is the Logos_,[394] in use and development its faithful
image. There is no possibility here of any “Greek,” in the sense of
Classical, influence; there was not a man alive in those days whose
spiritual disposition could have accommodated the smallest trace of
the Logos of Heraclitus and the Stoa. But, equally, the theologies
that lived side by side in Alexandria were never able to develop in
full purity the Logos-notion as they meant it, whereas both in Persian
and Chaldean imaginings--as Spirit or Word of God--and in Jewish
doctrine--as Ruach and Memra--it played a decisive part. What the
Logos-teaching in the West did was to develop a Classical formula,
by way of Philo and the John Gospel (the enduring effect of which on
the West was its mark upon the schoolmen) not only into an element
of Christian mysticism, but, eventually, into a dogma.[395] This
was inevitable. This dogma which _both_ the Western Churches held,
corresponded, on the side of knowledge, to that which, on the side of
faith, was represented _both by_ the syncretic cults and the cults of
Mary and the Saints. And against the whole thing, dogma and cult, the
feeling of the East revolted from the 4th century on.
For the eye the history of these thoughts and feelings is repeated
in the history of Magian architecture.[396] _The basic form of the
Pseudomorphosis is the Basilica_, which was known to the Jews of the
West and to the Hellenistic sects of the Chaldeans even before the time
of Christ. As the Logos of the John Gospel is a Magian fundamental in
Classical shape, so the Basilica is a Magian room whose inner walls
correspond to the outer surfaces of the old Classical temple, the
cult-building introverted. The architectural form of the pure East is
the _cupola building, the Mosque_, which without doubt existed long
before the oldest Christian Churches in the temples of the Persians
and Chaldeans, the synagogues of Mesopotamia, and probably the temples
of Saba as well. The attempts to reconcile East and West in the
Church Councils of the Byzantine period were finally symbolized in
the mixed form of the domed basilica. For this item of the history of
ecclesiastical architecture is really another expression of the great
change that set in with Athanasius and Constantine, the last great
champions of Christianity. The one created the firm western dogma
and also Monasticism, into whose hands dogma gradually passed from
those of the ageing schools. The other founded the State of Christian
nationality, to which likewise the name of “Greek” passed in the end.
And of this transition the domed basilica is the symbol.
CHAPTER VIII
PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE
(B)
THE MAGIAN SOUL
I
The world, as spread out for the Magian waking-consciousness, possesses
a kind of extension that may be called cavern-like,[397] though it is
difficult for Western man to pick upon any word in his vocabulary that
can convey anything more than a hint of the meaning of Magian “space.”
For “space” has essentially unlike meanings for the perceptions of
the two Cultures. The world-as-cavern is just as different from the
world-as-extent of the passionate, far-thrusting Faustian as it is from
the Classical world-as-sum-of-bodily-things. The Copernican system, in
which the earth, as it were, loses itself, must necessarily seem crazy
and frivolous to Arabian thought. The Church of the West was perfectly
right when it resisted an idea so incompatible with the world-feeling
of Jesus, and the Chaldean _cavern-astronomy_, which was wholly natural
and convincing for Persians, Jews, peoples of the Pseudomorphosis, and
Islam, became accessible to the few genuine Greeks who knew of it at
all only after a process of transvaluing its basic notions of space.
The tension between Macrocosm and Microcosm (which is identical
with the waking-consciousness) leads, in the world-picture of every
Culture, to further oppositions of symbolic importance. All a man’s
sensations or understanding, faith or knowledge, receive their shape
from a primary opposition which makes them not only activities of the
individual, but also expressions of the totality. In the Classical
the opposition that universally dominates the waking-consciousness is
the opposition of matter and form; in the West it is that of force
and mass. In the former the tension loses itself in the small and
particular, and in the latter it discharges itself in the character of
work. In the World-Cavern, on the other hand, it persists in traversing
and swaying to and fro in unsure strugglings, and so becomes that
“Semitic” primary-dualism which, ever the same under its thousand
forms, fills the Magian world. The light shines through the cavern and
battles against the darkness (John i, 5). Both are Magian substances.
Up and down, heaven and earth become powers that have entity and
contend with one another. But these polarities in the most primary
sensations mingle with those of the refined and critical understanding,
like good and evil, God and Satan. Death, for the author of the
John Gospel as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a
Something, a death-force, that contends with a life-force for the
possession of man.
But still more important than all this is the opposition of Spirit
and Soul (Hebrew _Ruach_ and _nephesh_, Persian _ahu_ and _urvan_,
Mandæan _monuhmed_ and _gyan_, Greek _pneuma_ and _psyche_) which
first comes out in the basic feeling of the prophetic religions, then
pervades the whole of Apocalyptic, and finally forms and guides the
world-contemplations of the awakened Culture--Philo, Paul and Plotinus,
Gnostics and Mandæans, Augustine and the Avesta, Islam and the
Kabbalah. _Ruach_ means originally “wind” and _nephesh_ “breath.”[398]
The _nephesh_ is always in one way or another related to the bodily
and earthly, to the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is
the “upward.” The _ruach_ belongs to the divine, to the above, to
the light. Its effects in man when it descends are the heroism of a
Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlightenment of the judge
(the Solomon passing judgment,[399]) and all kinds of divination
and ecstasy. It is poured out.[400] From Isaiah xi, 2, the Messiah
becomes the incarnation of the _ruach_. Philo and the Islamic theology
divide mankind into born Psychics and born Pneumatics (the “elect,”
a concept thoroughly proper to the world-cavern and Kismet). All the
sons of Jacob are pneumatics. For Paul (1 Cor. xv) the meaning of
the Resurrection lies in the opposition of a psychic and a pneumatic
body, which alike for him and Philo and the author of the Baruch
apocalypse coincides with the opposition of heaven and earth, light and
darkness.[401] For Paul, the Saviour is the heavenly Pneuma.[402] In
the John Gospel he fuses as Logos with the Light; in Neoplatonism he
appears as _Nus_ or, in the Classical terminology, the All-One opposed
to _Physis_.[403] Paul and Philo, with their “Classical” (that is,
western) conceptual criteria, equated soul and body with good and bad
respectively, Augustine, as a Manichæan[404] with Persian-Eastern bases
of distinction, lumps soul and body together as the naturally bad, in
contrast to God as the sole Good, and finds in this opposition the
source of his doctrine of Grace, which developed also, in the same form
(though quite independently of him) in Islam.
But souls are at bottom discrete entities, whereas the Pneuma is
one and ever the same. The man _possesses_ a soul, but he only
_participates_ in the spirit of the Light and the Good; the divine
descends into him, thus binding all the individuals of the Below
together with the one in the Above. This primary feeling, which
dominates the beliefs and opinions of all Magian men, is something
perfectly singular, and not only characterizes their world-view, but
marks off the essence and kernel of their religiousness in all its
forms from that of every other kind of man. This Culture, as has been
shown, was characteristically the Culture of the middle. It could have
borrowed forms and ideas from most of the others, and the fact that
it did not do so, that in the face of all pressure and temptation
it remained so profoundly mistress of its own inward form, attests
an unbridgeable gulf of difference. Of all the wealth of Babylonian
and Egyptian religion it admitted hardly more than a few names; the
Classical and the Indian Cultures, or rather the Civilizations heir to
them--Hellenism and Buddhism--distorted its expression to the point of
pseudomorphosis, but its essence they never touched. All religions of
the Magian Culture, from the creations of Isaiah and Zarathustra to
Islam, constitute a complete inward unit of world-feeling; and, just as
in the Avestan beliefs there is not to be found one trait of Brahmanism
nor in early Christianity one breath of Classical feeling, but merely
names and figures and outward forms, so also not a trace of this
Jesus-religion could be absorbed by the Germanic-Catholic Christianity
of the West, even though the stock of tenets and observances was taken
over in its entirety.
Whereas the Faustian man is an “I” that in the last resort draws its
own conclusions about the Infinite; whereas the Apollinian man, as one
_soma_ among many, represents only himself; the Magian man, with his
spiritual kind of being, is only a _part of a pneumatic “We”_ that,
descending from above, is one and the same in all believers. As body
and soul he belongs to himself alone, but something else, something
alien and higher, dwells in him, making him with all his glimpses
and convictions just a member of a consensus which, as the emanation
of God, excludes error, but excludes also all possibility of the
self-asserting Ego. Truth is for him something other than for us. All
our epistemological methods, resting upon the _individual_ judgment,
are for him madness and infatuation, and its scientific results a
work of the Evil One, who has confused and deceived the spirit as to
its true dispositions and purposes. Herein lies the ultimate, for us
unapproachable, secret of Magian thought in its cavern-world--the
impossibility of a thinking, believing, and knowing Ego is the
presupposition inherent in all the fundamentals of all these religions.
While Classical man stood before his gods as one body before another;
whereas the Faustian willing “I” in its wide world feels itself
confronted by deity, also Faustian, also willing, effective everywhere;
the Magian deity is the indefinite, enigmatic Power on high that pours
out its Wrath or its Grace, descends itself into the dark or raises
the soul into the light as it sees fit. The idea of individual wills
is simply meaningless, for “will” and “thought” in man are not prime,
but already effects of the deity upon him. Out of this unshakable
root-feeling, which is merely re-expressed, never essentially altered,
by any conversions, illumination or subtilizing in the world--there
emerges of necessity the idea of the Divine Mediator, of one who
transforms this state from a torment into a bliss. All Magian religions
are by this idea bound together, and separated from those of all other
Cultures.
The Logos-idea in its broadest sense, an abstraction of the Magian
light-sensation of the Cavern, is the exact correlative of this
sensation in Magian thought. It meant that from the unattainable
Godhead its Spirit, its “Word,” is released as carrier of the light
and bringer of the good, and enters into relation with human being to
uplift, pervade, and redeem it. This distinctness of three substances,
which does not contradict their oneness in religious thought, was
known already to the prophetic religions. Ahuramazda’s light-gleaming
soul is the Word (Yasht 13, 31), and in one of the earliest Gathas his
Holy Spirit (_spenta mainyu_) converses with the Evil Spirit (_angra
mainyu_, Yasna 45, 2). The same idea penetrates the whole of the old
Jewish literature. The thought which the Chaldeans built up on the
separation of God and His Word and the opposition of Marduk and Nabu,
which breaks forth with power in the whole Aramæan Apocalyptic remained
permanently active and creative; by Philo and John, Marcion and Mani,
it entered into the Talmudic teachings and thence into the Kabbalistic
books Yesirah and Sohar, into the Church Councils and the works of
the Fathers, into the later Avesta, and finally into Islam, in which
a Mohammed gradually became the Logos and, as the mystically respent,
_living_ Mohammed of the popular religion, fused into the figure of
Christ.[405] This conception is for Magian man so self-evident that
it was able to break through even the strictly monotheistic structure
of the original Islam and to appear with Allah as the Word of God
(_kalimah_), the Holy Spirit (_ruh_), and the “light of Mohammed.”
For, for the popular religion, the first light that comes forth from
the world-creation is that of Mohammed, in the shape of a peacock[406]
“formed of white pearls” and walled about by veilings. But the peacock
is the Envoy of God and the prime soul[407] as early as the Mandæans,
and it is the emblem of immortality on Early Christian sarcophagi. The
light-diffusing pearl that illumines the dark house of the body is the
Spirit entered into man, and thought of as substance, for the Mandæans
as in the Acts of Thomas.[408] The Jezidi[409] reverence the Logos as
peacock and light; next to the Druses they have preserved most purely
the old Persian conception of the substantial Trinity.
Thus again and again we find the Logos-idea getting back to the
light-sensation from which the Magian understanding derived it. _The
world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling._[410]
Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him.
There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings,
and beings, secret letters, Solomon’s Seal, the Philosophers’ Stone.
And over all this is poured the quivering cavern-light that the
spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up. If this profusion of
figures astonishes the reader, let him remember that Jesus lived in it,
and Jesus’s teachings are only to be understood from it. Apocalyptic
is only a vision of fable intensified to an extreme of tragic power.
Already in the Book of Enoch we have the crystal palace of God, the
mountains of precious stone, and the imprisonment of the apostate
stars. Fantastic, too, are the whole overpowering idea-world of the
Mandæans, that of the Gnostics and the Manichæans, the system of
Origen, and the figures of the Persian “Bundahish”; and when the time
of the great visions was over, these ideas passed into a legend-poesy
and into the innumerable religious romances of which we have Christian
specimens in the gospels concerning Jesus’s childhood, the Acts of
Thomas and the anti-Pauline Pseudo-Clementines. One such story is
that of Abraham’s having minted the thirty pieces of silver of Judas.
Another is the tale of the “treasure-cave” in which, deep under the
hill of Golgotha, are stored the golden treasure of paradise and the
bones of Adam.[411] Dante’s poetic material was after all poetic, but
this was sheer actuality, the only world in which these people lived
continuously. Such sensations are unapproachably remote from men who
live in and with a dynamical world-picture. If we would obtain some
inkling of how alien to us all the inner life of Jesus is--a painful
realization for the Christian of the West, who would be glad indeed if
he could make that inner life the point of contact for his own inward
piety--if we would discover why nowadays only a pious Moslem has the
capacity livingly to experience it, we should sink ourselves in this
wonder-element of a world-image that was Jesus’s world-image. And then,
and only then, shall we perceive how little Faustian Christianity has
taken over from the wealth of the Church of the Pseudomorphosis--of its
world-feeling nothing, of its inward form little, and of its concepts
and figures much.
II
The When, for the Magian Soul, issues from the Where. Here too, is no
Apollinian clinging to pointlike Present, nor Faustian thrust and drive
towards an infinitely distant goal. Here Being has a different pulse,
and consequently Waking-being has another sense of time, which is the
counter-concept to Magian space. The prime thing that the humanity of
this Culture, from poor slaves and porters to the prophets and the
caliphs themselves, feels as the Kismet above him is not a limitless
flight of the ages that never lets a lost moment recur, but a Beginning
and an End of “This Day,” which is irrevocably ordained and in which
the human existence takes the place assigned to it from creation
itself. Not only world-space, but world-time also is cavern-like. Hence
comes the thoroughly Magian certainty that _everything has “a” time_,
from the origins of the Saviour, whose hour stood written in ancient
texts, to the smallest detail of the everyday, in which Faustian hurry
would be meaningless and unimaginable. Here, too, is the basis of the
Early Magian (and in particular the Chaldean) astrology, which likewise
presupposes that all things are written down in the stars and that the
scientifically calculable course of the planets authorized conclusions
as to the course of earthly things.[412] The Classical oracle answered
the only question that could perturb Apollinian man--the form, the
“How?” of coming things. But the question of the Cavern is “When?”
The whole of Apocalyptic, the spiritual life of Jesus, the agony of
Gethsemane, and the grand movement that arose out of his death are
unintelligible if we have not grasped this primary question of Magian
being and the presuppositions lying behind it. It is an infallible
sign of the extinction of the Classical Soul that astrology in its
westward advance drove the oracle step by step before it. Nowhere is
the stage of transition more clearly visible than in Tacitus, whose
entire history is dominated by the confusion and dislocation of his
world-picture. First of all, as a true Roman, he brings in the power
of the old city-deities; then, as an intelligent cosmopolitan, he
regards this very belief in their intervention as a superstition; and
finally, as a Stoic (by that time the spiritual outlook of the Stoa
had become _Magian_), he speaks of the power of the seven planets that
rule the fortunes of men. And thus it comes about that in the following
centuries Time itself as vessel of fate--namely, the Vault of Time,
limited each way and therefore capable of being grasped as an entity by
the inner eye--is by Persian mysticism set above the light of God as
Zrvan, and rules the world-conflict of Good and Evil. Zrvanism was the
State religion of Persia in 438-457.
Fundamentally, too, it is this belief that all stands written in the
stars, that makes the Arabian Culture characteristically that of
“eras”--that is, of time-reckonings that begin at some event felt
as a peculiarly significant act of Providence. The first and most
important is the generic Aramæan era, which begins about 300 B.C. with
the growth of apocalyptic tension and is the “Seleucid era.” It was
followed by many others, amongst them the Sabæan (about 115 B.C.), the
starting-point of which is not exactly known to us; that of Diocletian;
the Jewish era, beginning with the Creation, which was introduced by
the Synedrion in 346;[413] the Persian, from the accession of the last
Sassanid Jezdegerd in 632; and the Hijra, by which at last the Seleucid
was displaced in Syria and Mesopotamia. Outside this land-field there
is mere imitation for practical ends, like Varro’s “_ab urbe condita_”;
that of the Marcionites, beginning with Marcion’s breach with the
Church in 144; and that of the Christians, introduced shortly after 500
and beginning with the birth of Jesus.
World-history is the picture of the living world into which man sees
himself woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives
to comprehend from out of his world-feeling. The historical picture
of Classical man concentrates itself upon the pure Present. Its
content is no true Becoming, but a foreground Being with a conclusive
background of timeless myth, rationalized as “the Golden Age.” This
Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups and downs, good
and ill fortune, a blind “thereabouts,” an eternal alteration, yet
ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or “Time.”
The cavern-feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history
consisting in a beginning and an end to the world _that is also the
beginning and the end of man_--acts of God of mighty magic--and between
these turns, spellbound to the limits of the Cavern and the ordained
period, the battle of light and darkness, of the angels and Jazatas
with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his Soul, and his Spirit
are involved. The present Cavern God can destroy and replace by a
new creation. The Persian-Chaldean apocalyptic offers to the gaze a
whole series of such æons, and Jesus, along with his time, stood in
expectation of the end of the existing one.[414] The consequence of
this is a historic outlook like that which is natural to Islam even
to-day--the view over a given time. “The world-view of the people falls
naturally into three major parts--world-beginning, world-development,
and world-catastrophe. For the Moslem who feels so deeply ethically,
the chief essentials in world-development are the salvation-story and
the ethical way of life, knit into one as the ‘life’ of man. This
debouches into the world-catastrophe, which contains the sanction of
the moral history of humanity.”[415]
But, further, for the Magian human-existence, the issue of the feeling
of _this_ sort of Time and the view of _this_ sort of space is a quite
peculiar type of piety, which likewise we may put under the sign of
the Cavern--a _will-less_ resignation, to which the spiritual “I” is
unknown, and which feels the spiritual “We” that has entered into
the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine Light. The
Arab word for this is Islam (= submission) but this Islam was equally
Jesus’s normal mode of feeling and that of every other personality
of religious genius that appeared in this Culture. Classical piety
is something perfectly different,[416] while, as for that of our own
Culture, if we could mentally abstract from the piety of St. Theresa
and Luther and Pascal their Ego--that Ego which wills to maintain
itself against, to submit to, or even to be extinguished by the Divine
Infinite--there would be nothing left. The Faustian prime-sacrament
of Contrition presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome
itself. But it is precisely the _impossibility of an Ego as a free
power_ in the face of the divine that constitutes “Islam.” Every
attempt to meet the operations of God with a personal purpose or even a
personal opinion is “_masiga_,”--that is, not an evil willing, but an
evidence that the powers of darkness and evil have taken possession of
a man and expelled the divine from him. The Magian waking-consciousness
is merely the _theatre_ of a battle between these two powers and not,
so to say, a power in itself. Moreover, in this kind of world-happening
there is no place for individual causes and effects, let alone any
universally effective dynamic concatenation thereof, and consequently
there is no _necessary_ connexion between sin and punishment, no
_claim_ to reward, no old-Israelitish “righteousness.” Things of this
order the true piety of this Culture regards as far beneath it. The
laws of nature are not something settled for ever that God can alter
only by the method of miracle--they are (so to put it) the ordinary
state of an autocratic divine will, not possessing in themselves
anything of the logical necessity that they have for Faustian souls.
In the entire world-cavern there is but _one_ Cause, which lies
_immediately_ behind all visible workings, and this is the Godhead,
which, as itself, acts without causes. Even to speculate upon causes in
connexion with God is sinful.
From this basic feeling proceeds the Magian idea of Grace. This
underlies all sacraments of this Culture (especially the Magian
proto-sacrament of Baptism) and forms a contrast of the deepest
intensity with the Faustian idea of Contrition. Contrition presupposes
the will of an Ego, but Grace knows of no such thing. It was
Augustine’s high achievement to develop this essentially Islamic
thought with an inexorable logic, and with a penetration so thorough
that since Pelagius the Faustian Soul has tried by any and every route
to circumvent this certainty--which for _it_ constitutes an imminent
danger of self-destruction--and in using Augustinian propositions to
express its own proper consciousness of God has ever misunderstood and
transvalued them. Actually, Augustine was the last great thinker of
Early Arabian Scholasticism, anything but a Western intellect.[417]
Not only was he at times a Manichæan, but he remained so even as a
Christian in some important characteristics, and his closest relations
are to be found amongst the Persian theologians of the later Avesta,
with their doctrines of the Store of Grace of the Holy and of absolute
guilt. For him grace is the substantial inflowing of something divine
into the human Pneuma, itself also substantial.[418] The Godhead
radiates it; man receives it, but does not acquire it. From Augustine,
as from Spinoza so many centuries later,[419] the notion of force is
absent, and for both the problem of freedom refers not to the Ego and
its Will, but to the part of the universal Pneuma that is infused into
a man and its relation to the rest of him. Magian waking-being is the
_theatre_ of a conflict between the two world-substances of light
and darkness. The Early Faustian thinkers such as Duns Scotus and
William of Occam, on the contrary, see a contest inherent in dynamic
waking-consciousness _itself_, a contest of the two forces of the
Ego--namely, will and reason,[420] and so imperceptibly the question
posed by Augustine changes into another, which he himself would have
been incapable of understanding--are willing and thinking free forces,
or are they not? Answer this question as we may, one thing at any rate
is certain, that the individual ego has _to wage_ this war and not to
suffer it. The Faustian Grace refers to the success of the Will and not
to the species of a substance. Says the Westminster Confession of the
Presbyterians (1646): “The rest of Mankind, God was pleased, according
to the unsearchable Counsel of his own Will, whereby he extendeth, or
withholdeth Mercy, as he pleaseth, for the Glory of his Sovereign Power
over his Creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to Dishonour and
Wrath, for their Sin, to the Praise of his glorious Justice.” The other
conception, that the idea of Grace excludes every individual will and
every cause but the One, that it is sinful even to question why man
suffers, finds an expression in one of the most powerful poems known to
world-history, a poem that came into being in the midst of the Arabian
pre-Culture and is in inward grandeur unparalleled by any product of
that Culture itself--the Book of Job.[421] It is not Job, but his
friends who look for a sin as the cause of his troubles. They--like the
bulk of mankind in this and every other Culture, present-day readers
and critics of the work, therefore, included--lack the metaphysical
depth to get near the ultimate meaning of suffering within the
world-cavern. Only the Hero himself fights through the fulfilment, to
pure Islam, and he becomes thereby the only possible figure of tragedy
that Magian feeling can set up by the side of our Faust.[422]
III
The waking-consciousness of every Culture allows of two ways of
inwardness, that in which contemplative feeling spreads into
understanding, and that in which the reverse takes place. The Magian
contemplation is called by Spinoza “intellectual love of God,” and by
his Sufist contemporaries in Asia “extinction in God” (_mahw_); it may
be intensified to the Magian ecstasy that was vouchsafed to Plotinus
several times, and to his pupil Porphyry once in old age. The other
side, the rabbinical dialectic, appears in Spinoza as geometrical
method and in the Arabian-Jewish “Late” philosophy in general as
Kalaam. Both, however, rest upon the fact that there in Magian there
is no individual-ego, but a single Pneuma present simultaneously in
each and all of the elect, which is likewise Truth. It cannot be too
strongly emphasized that the resultant root-idea of the _ijma_ is much
more than a concept or notion, that it can be a lived experience of
even overwhelming force, and that all community of the Magian kind
rests upon it and, as doing so, is removed from community in any other
Culture. “The mystic Community of Islam extends from the here into the
beyond; it reaches beyond the grave, in that it comprises the dead
Moslems of earlier generations, nay, even the righteous of the times
before Islam. The Moslem feels himself bound up in one unity with them
all. They help him, and he, too, can in turn increase their beatitude
by the application of his own merit.”[423] The same, precisely, was
what the Christians and the Syncretists of the Pseudomorphosis meant
when they used the words _Polis_ and _Civitas_--these words, which had
formerly implied a sum of bodies, now denoted a consensus of fellow
believers. Augustine’s famous _Civitas Dei_ was neither a Classical
Polis nor a Western Church, but a unity of believers, blessed,
and angels, exactly as were the communes of Mithras, of Islam, of
Manichæism, and of Persia. As the community was based upon consensus,
it was in spiritual things infallible. “My people,” said Mohammed,
“can never agree in an error,” and the same is premised in Augustine’s
State of God. With him there was not and could not be any question of
an infallible Papal ego or of any other sort of authority to settle
dogmatic truths; that would completely destroy the Magian concept of
the Consensus. And the same applied in this Culture generally--not only
to dogma, but also to law[424] and to the State. The Islamic community,
like that of Porphyry and that of Augustine, embraces the _whole_ of
the world-cavern, the here and the beyond, the orthodox and the good
angels and spirits, and within this community the State only formed a
_smaller unit of the visible side_, a unit, therefore, of which the
operations were governed by the major whole. In the Magian world,
consequently, the separation of politics and religion is theoretically
impossible and nonsensical, whereas in the Faustian Culture the battle
of Church and State is inherent in the very conceptions--logical,
necessary, unending. In the Magian, civil and ecclesiastical law are
simply identical. Side by side with the Emperor of Constantinople stood
the Patriarch, by the Shah was the Zarathustratema, by the Exilarch
the Gaon, by the Caliph the Sheikh-ul-Islam, at once superiors and
subjects. There is not in this the slightest affinity to the Gothic
relation of Emperor and Pope; equally, all such ideas were alien to
the Classical world. In the constitution of Diocletian this Magian
embedding of the State in the community of the faithful was for the
first time actualized, and by Constantine it was carried into full
effect. It has been shown already that State, Church, and Nation formed
a spiritual unit--namely, that part of the orthodox consensus which
manifested itself in the living man. And hence for the Emperor, as
ruler of the Faithful--that is, of that portion of the Magian community
which God had entrusted to him--it was a self-evident duty to conduct
the Councils so as to bring about the consensus of the elect.
IV
But besides the consensus there is another sort of revelation of
Truth--namely, the “Word of God,” in a perfectly definite and purely
Magian sense of the phrase, which is equally remote from Classical
and from Western thought, and has, in consequence, been the source
of innumerable misunderstandings. The sacred book in which it has
become visibly evident, in which it has been captured by the spell of
a sacred script, is part of the stock of every Magian religion.[425]
In this conception three Magian notions are interwoven each of which,
even by itself, presents extreme difficulties for us, while their
simultaneous separateness and oneness is simply inaccessible to our
religious thought, often though that thought has managed to persuade
itself to the contrary. These ideas are: God, the Spirit of God,
the Word of God. That which is written in the prologue of the John
Gospel--“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God”--had long before come to perfectly natural
expression as something self-evident in the Persian ideas of Spenta
Mainyu,[426] and Vohu Mano,[427] and in corresponding Jewish and
Chaldean conceptions. And it was the kernel for which the conflicts of
the fourth and fifth centuries concerning the substance of Christ were
fought. But, for Magian thought, truth is itself a substance,[428] and
lie (or error) second substance--again the same dualism that opposes
light and darkness, life and death, good and evil. As substance, truth
is identical now with God, now with the Spirit of God, now with the
Word. Only in the light of this can we comprehend sayings like “I am
the truth and the life” and “My word is the truth,” sayings to be
understood, as they were meant, with reference to substance. Only so,
too, can we realize with what eyes the religious man of this Culture
looked upon his sacred book: in it the invisible truth has entered
into a visible kind of existence, or, in the words of John i, 14: “The
Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” According to the Yasna the
Avesta was sent down from heaven, and according to the Talmud Moses
received the Torah volume by volume from God. A Magian revelation is a
mystical process in which the eternal and unformed word of God--or the
Godhead as Word--enters into a man in order to assume through him the
manifest, sensible form of sounds and especially of letters. _“Koran”
means “reading.”_ Mohammed in a vision saw in the heaven treasured
rolls of scripture that he (although he had never learned how to read)
was able to decipher “in the name of the Lord.”[429] This is a form of
revelation that in the Magian Culture is the rule and in other Cultures
is not even the exception,[430] but it was only from the time of Cyrus
that it began to take shape. The old Israelitish prophets, and no doubt
Zarathustra also, see and hear in ecstasy things that afterwards they
spread abroad. The Deuteronomic code (621) was given out as having
been “found in the Temple,” which meant that it was to be taken as
the wisdom of the Father. The first (and a very deliberate) example
of a “Koran” is the book of Ezekiel, which the author received in a
thought-out vision from God and “swallowed” (iii, 1-3). Here, expressed
in the crudest imaginable form, is the basis on which later the idea
and shape of all apocalyptic writing was founded. But by degrees this
_substantial_ form of reception came to be one of the requisites for
any book to be canonical. It was in post-Exilic times that the idea
arose of the Tables of the Law received by Moses on Sinai; later
such an origin came to be assumed for the whole Torah, and about the
Maccabæan period for the bulk of the Old Testament. From the Council
of Jabna (about 90 B.C.) the whole word was regarded as inspired and
delivered in the most literal sense. But the same evolution took place
in the Persian religion up to the sanctification of the Avesta in the
third century, and the same idea of a literal delivery appears in the
second vision of Hermas, in the Apocalypses, and in the Chaldean and
Gnostic and Mandæan writings; lastly, it underlies, as a tacit natural
basis, all the ideas that the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Neo-Platonists
formed of the writings of their old masters. “Canon” is the technical
expression for the totality of writings that are accepted by a religion
as delivered. It was as canons in this sense that the Hermetic
collection and the corpus of Chaldean oracles came into being from
200--the latter a sacred book of the Neoplatonists which alone was
admitted by Proclus, the “Father” of this Church, to stand with Plato’s
_Timæus_.
Originally, the young Jesus-religion, like Jesus himself, recognized
the Jewish canon. The first Gospels set up no sort of claim to be the
Word made visible. _The John Gospel is the first Christian writing
of which the evident purpose is that of a Koran_, and its unknown
author is the originator of the idea that there could be and must be
a Christian Koran. The grave and difficult decision whether the new
religion should break with that which Jesus had believed in clothed
itself of deep necessity in the question whether the Jewish scriptures
might still be regarded as incarnations of the one truth. The answer of
the John Gospel was tacitly, and that of Marcion openly, no, but that
of the Fathers was, quite illogically, yes.
It followed from this metaphysical conception of the essence of a
sacred book that the expressions “God speaks” and “the Scripture says”
were, in a manner wholly alien to our thought, completely identical.
To us it is suggestive of the Arabian Nights that God himself should
be spellbound in these words and letters and could be unsealed and
compelled to reveal the truth by the adepts of this magic. Exegesis
no less than inspiration and delivery is a process of mystical
under-meaning (Mark i, 22). Hence the reverence--in diametrical
opposition to the Classical feeling--with which these precious
manuscripts were cared for, their ornamentation by every means known
to the young Magian art, and the appearance again and again of new
scripts which, in the eyes of their users, alone possessed the power of
capturing the truth sent down.
But such a Koran is by its very nature unconditionally right, and
therefore unalterable and incapable of improvement.[431] There arose,
in consequence, the habit of secret interpretations meant to bring
the text into harmony with the convictions of the time. A masterpiece
of this kind is Justinian’s Digests, but the same applies not only to
every book of the Bible, but also (we need not doubt) to the Gathas
of the Avesta and even to the then current manuscripts of Plato,
Aristotle, and other authorities of the Pagan theology. More important
still is the assumption, traceable in every Magian religion, of a
secret revelation, or a secret meaning of the Scriptures, preserved
not by being written down, but in the memory of adepts and propagated
orally. According to Jewish notions, Moses received at Sinai not
only the written, but _also a secret oral Torah_,[432] which it was
forbidden to commit to writing. “God foresaw,” says the Talmud, “that
one day a time would come when the Heathen would possess themselves of
the Torah and would say to Israel: ‘We, too, are sons of God.’ Then
will the Lord say: ‘Only he who knows my secrets is my son.’ And what
are the secrets of God? The oral teachings.”[433] The Talmud, then, in
the form in which it is generally accessible, contains only a part of
the religious material, and it is the same with Christian texts of the
early period. It has often been observed[434] that Mark speaks of the
Visitation and of the Resurrection only in hints, and that John only
touches upon the doctrine of the Paraclete and omits the institution
of the Lord’s Supper entirely. The initiates understood what was
meant, and the unbeliever ought not to know it. Later there was a
whole “secret discipline” which bound Christians to observe silence in
the presence of unbelievers concerning the baptismal confession and
other matters. With the Chaldeans, Neopythagoreans, Cynics, Gnostics,
and especially the sects from Jewish to Islamic, this tendency went
to such lengths that the greater part of their secret doctrines is
unknown to us. Concerning the Word thus preserved only in the minds
there was a _consensus of silence_, the more so as each believer was
certain that the other “knew.” We ourselves, as it is upon the most
important things that we are most emphatic and forthright, run the
risk of misinterpreting Magian doctrines through taking the part that
was expressed for the whole that existed, and the profane literal
meaning of words for their real significance. Gothic Christianity had
no secrets and hence it doubly mistrusted the Talmud, which it rightly
regarded as being only the foreground of Jewish doctrine.
Pure Magian, too, is the Kabbalah, which out of numbers, letter-forms,
points, and strokes, unfolds secret significances, and therefore cannot
but be as old as the Word itself that was sent down as Substance. The
secret dogma of the creation of the world out of the two-and-twenty
letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and that of the throne-chariot of
Ezekiel’s Vision, are already traceable in Maccabæan times. Closely
related to this is the allegorical exegesis of the sacred texts. All
the tractates of the Mishnah, all the Fathers, all the Alexandrian
philosophers are full of it; in Alexandria the whole Classical
mythology and even Plato were treated in this way and brought into
analogy (Moses = Musæus) with the Jewish prophets.
The only strictly _scientific_ method that an unalterable Koran leaves
open for progressive opinion is that of commentary. As by hypothesis
the “word” of an authority cannot be improved upon, the only resource
is reinterpretation. No one in Alexandria would ever have asserted
that Plato was in “error”; instead, he was glossed upon. It was done
in the strictly constructed forms of the Halakha, and the fixation of
this exegesis in writing takes the commentary shape that dominates
all religious, philosophical, and savant literatures of this Culture.
Following the procedure of the Gnostics, the Fathers compiled written
commentaries upon the Bible, and similarly the Pehlevi commentary
of the Zend appeared by the side of the Avesta, and the Midrash by
the side of the Jewish canon. But the “Roman” jurists of about A.D.
200 and the “Late Classical” philosophers--that is, the Schoolmen of
the growing cult-Church--went just the same way; the Apocalypse of
this Church, commented over and over again after Posidonius, was the
_Timæus_ of Plato. The Mishnah is one vast commentary upon the Torah.
And when the oldest exegetes had become themselves authorities and
their writings Korans, commentaries were written upon commentaries, as
by Simplicius, the last Platonist, in the West, by the Amoraim, who
added the Gemara to the Mishnah in the East, and by the jurists who
compiled the Imperial Constitutions into the Digests at Byzantium.
This method, which fictitiously refers back every saying to an
immediate inspired delivery, was brought to its keenest edge in
the Talmudic and the Islamic theologies. A new Halakha or a Hadith
is only valid when it can be referred through an unbroken chain of
guarantors back to Moses or Mohammed.[435] The solemn formula for this
in Jerusalem was “Let it come over me! So have I heard it from my
teacher.”[436] In the Zend the citation of the chain of warranty is the
rule, and Irenæus justifies his theology by the fact that a chain goes
back from him through Polycarp to the primitive Community. Into the
Early Christian literature this Halakha-form entered so self-evidently
that no one remarked it for what it was. Apart altogether from the
constant references to the Law and the Prophets, it appears in the
superscription of the four Gospels (“_according to_” Mark), each of
which had thus to present its warrant if authority was to be claimed
for the words of the Lord that it presented.[437] This established
the chain back to the Truth that was incarnate in Jesus, and it is
impossible to exaggerate the intense reality of this in the world-idea
of an Augustine or a Jerome. This is the basis of the practice,
which spread even more widely from the time of Alexander onwards, of
providing religious and philosophical writings with names,[438] like
Enoch, Solomon, Ezra, Hermes, Pythagoras--guarantors and vessels of
divine wisdom, in whom, therefore, the Word had been made Flesh of
old. We still possess a number of Apocalypses bearing the name of
Baruch, who was then compared with Zarathustra, and we can scarcely
form an idea of what in the way of literature circulated under the
names of Aristotle and Pythagoras. The “Theology of Aristotle” was
one of the most influential works of Neoplatonism. And, lastly,
this the metaphysical presupposition for the style and the deeper
meaning of _citation_, which was employed by Fathers, Rabbis, “Greek”
philosophers, and “Roman” jurists, and eventuated on the one hand in
the Law of Valentinian III,[439] and on the other in the elimination
from the Jewish and Christian canons of apocryphal writings--a
fundamental notion, which differentiated the literary stock according
to difference of _substance_.
V
With such researches to build upon, it will become possible in the
future to write a history of the _Magian group of religions_. It forms
an inseparable unit of spirit and evolution, and let no one imagine
that any individual one of them can be really comprehended without
reference to the rest. Their birth, unfolding, and inward confirmation
occupy the period 0-500. It corresponds exactly to the rise of the
Western religion from the Cluniac movement to the Reformation. A
mutual give-and-take, a confusingly rich blossoming, ripening,
transformation--overlayings, migrations, adaptations, rejections--fill
these centuries, without any sort of dependence of one system upon
the others being demonstrable. But only the forms and the structures
change; in the depths it is one and the same spirituality, and in all
the languages of this world of religions it is always itself that it
brings to expression.
In the wide realm of old-Babylonian fellahdom young peoples lived.
There everything was making ready. The first premonitions of the future
awoke about 700 B.C. in the prophetic religions of the Persians, Jews,
and Chaldeans. An image of creation of the same kind that later was to
be the preface of the Torah showed itself in clear outlines, and with
that an orientation, a direction, a goal of desire, was set. Something
was descried in the far future, indefinitely and darkly still, but with
a profound certainty that it would come. From that time on men lived
with the vision of this, with the feeling of a mission.
The second wave swelled up steeply in the Apocalyptic currents after
300. Here it was the Magian waking-consciousness that arose and built
itself a metaphysic of Last Things, based already upon the prime-symbol
of the coming Culture, the Cavern. Ideas of an awful End of the World,
of the Last Judgment, of Resurrection, Paradise, and Hell, and with
them the grand thought of a process of salvation in which earth’s
destiny and man’s were one, burst forth everywhere--we cannot say what
land or people it was that created them--mantled in wondrous scenes and
figures and names. The Messiah-figure presents itself, complete at one
stroke. Satan’s temptation of the Saviour[440] is told as a tale. But
simultaneously there welled up a deep and ever-increasing fear before
this certainty of an implacable--and imminent--limit of all happening,
before the moment in which there would be only Past. Magian Time, the
“hour,” directedness under the Cavern, imparted a new pulse to life and
a new import to the word “Destiny.” Man’s attitude before the Deity
suddenly became completely different. In the dedicatory inscription of
the great basilica of Palmyra (which was long thought to be Christian)
Baal was called the good, the compassionate, the mild; and this feeling
penetrated, with the worship of Rahman, right to southern Arabia.
It fills the psalms of the Chaldeans and the teachings _about_ the
God-sent Zarathustra that took the place of his teachings. And it
stirred the Jewry of Maccabæan time--most of the psalms were written
then--and all the other communities, long forgotten now, that lay
between the Classical and the Indian worlds.
The third upheaval came in the time of Cæsar and brought to birth the
great religions of Salvation. And with this the Culture rose to bright
day, and what followed continuously throughout one or two centuries was
an intensity of religious experience, both unsurpassable and at long
last unbearable. Such a tension bordering upon the breaking point the
Gothic, the Vedic, and every other Culture-soul has known, once and
once only, in its young morning.
Now arose in the Persian, the Mandæan, the Jewish, the Christian,
circles of belief, and in that of the Western Pseudomorphosis as
well--just as in the Indian, the Classical, and the Western ages
of Chivalry--the Grand Myth. In this Arabian Culture religious and
national heroism are no more distinctly separable than nation,
church, and state, or sacred and secular law. The prophet merges with
the fighter, and the story of a great Sufferer rises to the rank of
a national epic. The powers of light and darkness, fabulous beings,
angels and devils, Satan and the good spirits wrestle together; all
nature is a battle-ground from the beginning of the world to its
annihilation. Down below in the world of mankind are enacted the
adventures and sufferings of the heralds, the heroes, and the martyrs
of religion. Every nation, in the sense of the word attaching to this
Culture, possessed its heroic saga. In the East the life of the Persian
prophet inspired an epic poetry of grand outlines. At his birth the
Zarathustra-laughter pealed through the heavens, and all nature echoed
it. In the West the suffering of Jesus, ever broadening and developing,
became _the veritable epic of the Christian nation_, and by its side
there grew up a chain of legends of his childhood which in the end
fructified a whole genre of poetry. The figure of the Mother of God
and the deeds of the Apostles became, like the stories of the Western
Crusade-heroes, the centre of extended romances (Acts of Thomas,
Pseudo-Clementines) which in the second century sprang up everywhere
from the Nile to the Tigris. In the Jewish Haggada and in the Targums
is brought together a rich measure of legends about Saul, David, the
Patriarchs, and the great Tannaim, like Schuda and Akiba,[441] and the
insatiable fancy of the age seized also upon what it could reach of the
Late-Classical cult-legends and founder-stories (lives of Pythagoras,
Hermes, Apollonius of Tyana).
With the end of the second century the sounds of this exaltation
die away. The flowering of epic poetry is past, and the mystical
penetration and dogmatic analysis of the religious material begin. The
doctrines of the new Churches are brought into theological systems.
Heroism yields to Scholastism, poetry to thought, the seer and seeker
to the priest. The early Scholasticism which ends about 200 (as the
Western about 1200) comprises the whole Gnosis--in the very broadest
sense, the great Contemplation--the author of the John Gospel,
Valentinus, Bardesanes, and Marcion, the Apologists and the early
Fathers, up to Irenæus and Tertullian, the last Tannaim up to Rabbi
Jehuda, the completer of the Mishna, the Neopythagoreans and Hermetics
of Alexandria. All this corresponds with, in the West, the School of
Chartres, Anselm, Joachim of Floris, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugo de St.
Victor. Full Scholasticism begins with Neoplatonism, with Clement and
Origen, the first Amoraim, and the creators of the newer Avesta under
Ardeshir (226-241) and Sapor I, the Mazdaist high-priest Tanvasar
above all. Simultaneously a higher religiousness begins to separate
from the peasant’s piety of the countryside, which still lingered in
the apocalyptic disposition, and thenceforth maintained itself almost
unaltered under various names right into the fellahdom of the Turkish
age, while in the urban and more intellectual upper world the Persian,
Jewish, and Christian community was absorbed by that of Islam.
Slowly and steadily now the great Churches moved to fulfilment. It
had been decided--the most important religious result of the second
century--that the outcome of the teaching of Jesus was not to be
a transformation of Judaism, but a new Church, which took its way
westward while Judaism, without loss of inward strength, turned itself
to the East. To the third century belong the great mental structures of
theology. A _modus vivendi_ with historical actuality had been reached,
the end of the world had receded into the distance, and a new dogmatic
grew up to explain the new world-picture. The arrival of mature
Scholasticism presupposes faith in the duration of the doctrines that
it sets itself to establish.
Viewing the results of their efforts, we find that the Aramæan
motherland developed its forms in three directions. In the East, out
of the Zoroastrian religion of Achæmenid times and the remains of
its sacred literature, there formed itself the Mazdaist Church, with
a strict hierarchy and laborious ritual, with sacraments, mass, and
confession (_patet_). As mentioned above, Tanvasar made a beginning
with the collection and ordering of the _new_ Avesta; under Sapor I
(as contemporaneously in the Talmud) the profane texts of medicine,
law, and astronomy were added; and the rounding-off was the work of
the Church magnate Mahraspand under Sapor II (309-379). The immediate
accretion of a commentary in Pehlevi was only what was to be expected
in the Magian Culture. The new Avesta, like the Jewish and the
Christian Bibles, was a canon of separate writings, and we learn
that amongst the Nasks (originally twenty-one) now lost there was a
gospel of Zarathustra, the conversion-story of Vishtaspa, a Genesis, a
law-book, and a genealogical book with trees from the Creation to the
Persian kings, while the Vendidad, which Geldner calls the Leviticus of
the Persians, was--most significantly--preserved complete.
A new religious founder appeared in 242, in the reign of Sapor I. This
was Mani, who, rejecting “redeemerless” Judaism and Hellenism, knit
together the whole mass of Magian religions in one of the most powerful
theological creations of all times--for which in 276 the Mazdaist
priesthood crucified him. Equipped by his father (who quite late in
life abandoned his family to enter a Mandæan order) with all the
knowledge of the period, he unified the basic ideas of the Chaldeans
and Persians with those of Johannine, Eastern, Christianity--a task
which had been attempted before in the Christian-Persian Gnosis of
Bardesanes, but without any idea of founding a new church.[442] He
conceived of the mystical figures of the Johannine Logos (for him
identical with the Persian Vohu Mano), the Zarathustra of the Avesta
legends, and the Buddha of the late texts as divine Emanations, and
himself he proclaimed to be the Paraclete of the John Gospel and
the Saoshyant of the Persians. As we now know, thanks to the Turfan
discoveries which included parts of Mani’s works (till then completely
lost), the Church-language of the Mazdaists, Manichæans, and Nestorians
was--independently of the current languages--Pehlevi.
In the West the two cult-Churches developed (in Greek[443]) a theology
that was not only cognate with this, but to a great extent identical
with it. In the time of Mani began the theological fusion of the
Aramæan-Chaldean sun-religion and the Aramæan-Persian Mithras cult into
one system, whose first great “Father” was Iamblichus (_c._ 300)--the
contemporary of Athanasius, but also of Diocletian, the Emperor who in
295 made Mithras the God of a henotheistic State-religion. Spiritually,
at any rate, its priests were in nowise distinguishable from those of
Christianity. Proclus (he, too, a true “Father”) received in dreams
elucidations of a difficult text-passage; to him the _Timæus_ and the
Chaldean oracles were canonical, and he would gladly have seen all
other writings of the philosophers destroyed. His hymns, tokens of
the lacerations of a true eremite, implore Helios and other helpers
to protect him against evil spirits. Hierocles wrote a moral breviary
for the believers of the Neopythagorean community, which it needs a
keen eye to distinguish from Christian work. Bishop Synesius was a
prince-prelate of Neoplatonism before becoming one of Christianity--and
the change did not involve an act of conversion; he kept his theology
and only altered its names. It was possible for the Neoplatonist
Asclepiades to write a great work on the likeness of all theologies. We
possess Pagan gospels and hagiologies as well as Christian. Apollonius
wrote the life of Pythagoras, Marinus that of Proclus, Damascius that
of Isidore; and there is not the slightest difference between these
works, which begin and end with prayers, and the Christian Acts of the
Martyrs. Porphyry describes faith, love, hope, and truth as the four
divine elements.
Between these Churches of the East and the West we see, looking south
from Edessa, the Talmudic Church (the “Synagogue”) with Aramaic
as its written language. Against these great and firm foundations
Jewish-Christians (such as Ebionites and Elkazites), Mandæans, and
likewise Chaldeans (unless we regard Manichæism as a reconstruction
of that religion) were unable to hold their own. Breaking down into
numberless sects, they either faded out in the shadow of the great
Churches or were absorbed in their structure as the last Marcionites
and Montanists were absorbed into Manichæism. By about 300, outside the
Pagan, Christian, Persian, Jewish, and Manichæan Churches no important
Magian religions remained in being.
VI
Along with this ripe Scholasticism, there set in also, from 200,
the effort to identify the _visible_ community, as its organization
became ever stricter, with the organism of the State. This followed of
necessity from the world-feeling of Magian man, and in turn it led to
the transformation of the rulers into caliphs--lords of a creed-society
far more than of domains--to the idea of orthodoxy as the premiss of
real citizenship; to the duty of persecuting false religions (the
“Holy War” of Islam is as old as the Culture itself, and the first
centuries were full of it); and to a special régime within the State
of unbelievers--just tolerated and under laws and governance of their
own[444] (for the law God had given was not for heretics)--and, with
it, the ghetto manner of living.
First, Osrhoene, in the centre of the Aramæan landscape, adopted
Christianity as the State religion about 200. Then Mazdaism assumed the
same position in the Sassanid Empire (226) while under Aurelian (d.
275) and above all Diocletian (295) Syncretism as a compound of the
Divus, Sol, and Mithras cults became the state religion of the Roman
Imperium. Constantine in 312, King Trdat of Armenia about 321, and
King Mirian of Georgia a few years later, went over to Christianity.
In the far South, Saba must already have become Christian in the
third century, Axum in the fourth; on the other hand, simultaneously
with these, the Himaryite State became Jewish, and there was one more
effort, that of Julian, to bring back the Pagan Church to supremacy.
In opposition to this--likewise in all the religions of this
Culture--we find the spread of Monasticism, with its radical aversion
from State, history, and actuality in general. For after all the
conflict of being and waking-being--that is, of politics and religion,
of history and nature--could not be completely mastered by the form
of the Magian Church and its identification with State and nation.
Race breaks forth into life in these mind-creations and overpowers the
divine, precisely because the latter has absorbed the worldly into
itself. But here there was no conflict of Church and State as in the
Gothic age, and consequently the split in the nation was between the
worldly-pious and the ascetics. A Magian religion relates exclusively
to the divine spark, the Pneuma, in the man, that which he shares
with the invisible community of the faithful and blessed spirits. The
rest of the man belongs to Evil and Darkness. But in the man it is
the divine that must rule, overcoming, suppressing, destroying the
other. In this Culture the askete is not only the veritable priest--the
secular priest, as to-day in Russia, is never really respected, and
mostly he is allowed to marry--but, what is more, he is the true man
of piety. Outside monasticism it was simply not possible to fulfil
the demands of religion, and consequently communities of repentance,
monasteries, and convents assume quite early a position that, for
metaphysical reasons, they could never have had in India or China--let
alone in the West, where the Orders were working and fighting--that
is, dynamic--units.[445] Consequently, we must not regard the people
of the Magian world as divided into the “world” and the “cloister” as
two definitely separate modes of life, with equal possibilities of
fulfilling all the demands of religion. Every pious person _was_ a monk
in some sort.[446] Between world and cloister there was no opposition,
but only a difference of _degree_. Magian churches and orders are
homogeneous communities which are only to be distinguished from one
another by extent. The community of Peter was an Order, that of Paul a
Church, while the Mithras religion is at once almost too wide for the
one designation and too narrow for the other.
_Every Magian Church is itself an Order_ and it was only in respect
of human weakness that there were stages and grades of askesis, and
these not ordered, but only permitted, as among the Marcionites
and the Manichæans (_electi, auditores_). And, in truth, a Magian
nation is nothing but the sum, _the order of all the orders_, which,
constituted in smaller and smaller, stricter and stricter groups, come
out finally in the eremites, dervishes, and stylites, in whom nothing
more is of the world, whose waking-consciousness now belongs only
to the Pneuma. Setting aside the prophetic religions--out of which,
and between which, the excitation of Apocalypse generated numerous
order-like communities--the two cult-Churches of the West produced
unnumbered monks, friars, and orders, distinguishable from one another
in the end only by the name of the Deity upon whom they called. All
observed fasting, prayer, celibacy, poverty. It is very doubtful which
of the two Churches in 300 was the more ascetic in its tendency. The
Neoplatonist monk Sarapion went into the desert in order to devote
himself entirely to studying the hymns of Orpheus. Damascius, guided
by a dream, withdrew into a noisome cave in order to pray continuously
to Cybele.[447] The schools of philosophy were nothing but ascetic
orders; the Neopythagoreans stood close to the Jewish Essenes; the
Mithras cult, a true order, admitted only men to its communion and
its fraternities; the Emperor Julian had the intention of endowing
pagan monasteries. The Mandæan religion seems to have been a group
of order-communities of varying rigour; amongst them was that of
John the Baptist. Christian monasticism did not begin with Pachomius
(320); he was merely the builder of the first cloister. The movement
began with the original community in Jerusalem itself. The Gospel of
Matthew and almost all “Acts of the Apostles” testify to rigorously
ascetic sentiment.[448] The Persian and Nestorian Churches developed
the monastic idea further, and finally Islam assimilated it to the
full. To this day Oriental piety is dominated by the Moslem Orders and
Brotherhoods. And Jewry followed the same line of evolution, from the
Karæi[449] (Qaraites) of the eighth century to the Polish Hasidim of
the eighteenth.[450]
Christianity, which even in the second century was hardly more than an
extended Order, and whose public influence was out of all proportion
to the number of its adherents, grew suddenly vast about the year
250. This is the epochal moment in which the last city-cults of the
Classical effaced themselves before, _not Christianity, but the
new-born Pagan Church_. The records of the Fratres Arvales in Rome
break off in 241, and the last cult-inscriptions at Olympia are of
265. At the same time, the cumulation of the most diverse priestly
characters in one man became customary,[451] implying that these usages
were felt no longer as specific, but as usages of one single religion.
And this religion set out to _convert_, spreading itself far and wide
over the lands of the Hellenistic-Roman stock. The Christian religion,
on the other hand, was alone in spreading (_c._ 300) over the great
Arabian field. And for that very reason it was inevitable that inner
contradiction should now be set up in it. Due, not now to the spiritual
dispositions of particular men, but to the spirit of the particular
landscapes, these contradictions led to the break-up of Christianity
into several religions--and for ever.
The _controversy concerning the nature of Christ_ was the issue on
which this conflict came up for decision. The matter in dispute was
just those problems of substance which in the same form and with
the same tendency fill the thoughts of all other Magian theologies.
Neoplatonic Scholasticism, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and above all Proclus
treated it in a Western formulation, by modes of thought closely akin
to Philo’s and even to Paul’s. The relation between the Primary One,
Nus, Logos, the Father, and the Mediator was considered with reference
to the substantial. Was the process thereof one of emanation, of
partition, or of pervasion? Was one contained in the other, are they
identical, or mutually exclusive? Was the Triad at the same time a
Monad? In the East a different constitution of the problem is evidenced
already in the premisses of the John Gospel and the Bardesanian Gnosis:
the relation of Ahuramazda to the Holy Spirit (Spenta Mainyu) and
the nature of Vohu Mano gave plenty of occupation to the Avestan
“fathers”; and it was just at the time of the decisive Councils of
Ephesus and Chalcedon that we find the temporary triumph of Zrvanism
(438-457), with its primacy of the divine world-course (Zrvan as
historic Time) over the divine substances marking a peak of dogmatic
battle. Later, Islam took up the whole subject over again and sought to
solve it in relation to the nature (_Wesenheit_) of Mohammed and the
Koran. The problem had been there, ever since a Magian mankind had come
into being--very much as the specifically Western will-problem, our
counterpart to the substance-problem, was posed in the beginnings of
Faustian thought. There is no need to look for these problems; they are
there as soon as the Culture thinks, they are the fundamental form of
its thought, and come to the front, uncalled-for and sometimes not even
perceived, in all its studies.
But the three Christian solutions predetermined by the three landscapes
of East, West, and South were all present from the first, implicit
already in the main tendencies of Gnosticism, which we may indicate by
the names of Bardesanes, Basilides, and Valentinus. Their meeting-point
was Edessa, where the streets rang with the battle-cries of the
Nestorians against the victors of Ephesus and, anon, with the εἷς θεός
shout of the Monophysites, demanding that Bishop Ibas should be thrown
to the wild beasts of the circus.
The great question was formulated by Athanasius, whose intellectual
origins lay in the Pseudomorphosis and who had many affinities with
his Pagan contemporary Iamblichus. Against Arius, who saw in Christ
a demigod, merely _like_ in substance to the Father, he maintained
that Father and Son were of _the same_ substance (θεότης) which
in Christ had assumed a human σῶμα. “The Word became Flesh”--this
formula of the West depends upon visible facts of the cult-Churches,
and the understanding of the Word upon constant contemplation of the
picturable. Here in the iconodule West, where in these very times
Iamblichus wrote his book concerning God-statues in which the divine
was substantially present and worked miracles,[452] the abstraction of
the Triunity was always effectively accompanied by the sensuous-human
relation of Mother and Son, and it is the latter which it is impossible
to eliminate from the thought-processes of Athanasius.
With the recognition of the homoousia of Father and Son the real
problem was for the first time posed--namely, the attitude of the
Magian dualism to the historical phenomenon of the Son himself. In the
world-cavern there was divine and human substance, in man a part in
divine Pneuma and the individual soul somehow related to the “flesh.”
But what of Christ?
It was a decisive factor--one of the results of Actium--that the
contest was fought out in the Greek tongue and in the territory of the
Pseudomorphosis--that is, under the full influence of the “Caliph”
of the Western Church. Constantine had even been the convener and
president of the Council of Nicæa, where the doctrine of Athanasius
carried the day. In the East, with its Aramaic speech and thought,
these doings were (as we know from the letters of Aphrahat) hardly
followed at all; there men saw no cause to quarrel about what, so far
as they were concerned, had long ago been settled. The breach between
East and West, a consequence of the Council of Ephesus (431) separated
two Christian _nations_, that of the “Persian Church” and that of
the Greek Church, but this was no more than the manifestation of a
difference, inherent from the first, between _modes of thought_ proper
to the two different landscapes. Nestorius and the whole East saw in
Christ the Second Adam, the Divine Envoy of the last æon. Mary had
borne a _man_-child in whose human and created substance (_physis_)
the godly, uncreated element _dwelt_. The West, on the contrary, saw
in Mary the Mother of a _God_: the divine and the human substance
formed in his body (_persona_, in the Classical idiom[453]) a unity,
named by Cyril ἕνωσις.[454] When the Council of Ephesus had recognized
the mother of God, her who gave birth to God, the city of Diana’s old
renown burst into a truly Classical orgy of celebration.[455]
But long ere this the Syrian Apollinaris[456] had heralded the
“Southern” idea of the matter--that in the living Christ there was not
merely a substance, but a single substance. The divine had transmuted
itself into, not mingled itself with, a human substance (no κρᾶσις,
as Gregory Nazianzen maintained in opposition; significantly enough,
the best way of expressing the Monophysite idea is through concepts of
Spinoza--the _one_ substance in another mode). The Monophysites called
the Christ of the Council of Chalcedon (451, where the West once more
prevailed) “the idol with the two faces.” They not only fell away
from the Church, they broke out in fierce risings in Palestine and
Egypt; and when in Justinian’s time the troops of Persia--that is, of
Mazdaism--penetrated to the Nile, they were hailed by the Monophysites
as liberators.
The fundamental meaning of this desperate conflict which raged
for a century--not over scholarly concepts, but over the soul of
a landscape that sought to be set free _in its people_--was the
_reversal of the work of Paul_. If we can transport ourselves into
the inmost soul of the two new-born nations, making no reservations
and ignoring all minor points of dogmatics, then we see how the
direction of Christianity towards the Greek West and its intellectual
affinity with the Pagan Church culminated in the position that the
Ruler of the West was the Head of Christianity in general. In the
mind of Constantine it was self-evident that the Pauline foundation
_within_ the Pseudomorphosis was synonymous with Christianity. The
Jewish Christians of Petrine tendency were to him a heretical sect,
and the Eastern Christians of “Johannine” type he never even noticed.
When the spirit of the Pseudomorphosis had, in the three determining
councils of Nicæa, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, put _its_ seal upon dogma,
once and for all, the real Arabian world rose up with the force of
nature and set up a barrier against it. With the end of the Arabian
Springtime, Christianity fell apart for good into three religions,
which can be symbolized by the names of Paul, Peter, and John, and of
which none can henceforth claim to be regarded by the historically and
doctrinally unprejudiced eye as _the_ true and proper Christianity.
These three religions are at the same time three nations, living in
the old race-areas of Greeks, Jews, and Persians, and the tongues that
they used were the Church-languages borrowed from them--namely, Greek,
Aramaic, and Pehlevi.
VII
The Eastern Church, since the Council of Nicæa, had organized itself
with an episcopal constitution, at the head of which stood the
Katholikos of Ctesiphon, and with councils, liturgy, and law of its
own. In 486 the Nestorian doctrine was accepted as binding, and the tie
with Constantinople was thus broken. From that point on, Mazdaists,
Manichæans, and Nestorians have a common destiny, of which the seed was
sown in the Gnosis of Bardesanes. In the Monophysite Churches of the
South, the spirit of the primitive Community emerged again and spread
itself further; with its uncompromising monotheism and its hatred of
images its closest affinity was with Talmudic Judaism, and its old
battle-cry of εἷς θεός had already marked it to be, with that Judaism,
the starting-point of Islam (“Allah il Allah”). The Western Church
continued to be bound up with the fate of the Roman Empire--that is,
the cult-Church became the State. Gradually it absorbed into itself the
adherents of the Pagan Church, and thenceforth its importance lay not
so much in itself--for Islam almost annihilated it--but in the accident
that it was _from it_ that the young peoples of the Western Culture
received the Christian system as the basis for a new creation,[457]
receiving it, moreover, in the Latin guise of the extreme West--which
for the Greek Church itself was unmeaning, since Rome was now a Greek
city, and the Latin language was far more truly at home in Africa and
Gaul.
The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being
that consists in extension, had been from the beginning active in
extending itself. All these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully,
and successfully, missionary Churches. But it was not until men had
at last ceased to think of the end of the world as imminent, and
dogma appropriate to prolonged existence in this World’s Cavern had
been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their standpoint
towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture
took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all
others and found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no
means its only example. Of these mighty facts Western theologians and
historians give an entirely false picture. All that their gaze, riveted
upon the Mediterranean lands, observes is the Western direction that
fits in with their “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” schema, and even within
these limits, accepting the ostensible unity of Christianity, they
regard it as passing at a certain period from a Greek into a Latin
form, whereby the Greek residue is lost sight of altogether.
But even before Christianity--and this is a fact of which the immense
significance has never been observed, which has not even been correctly
interpreted as _mission_ effort--the Pagan Church had won for the
Syncretic Cult the greater part of the population of North Africa,
Spain, Gaul, Britain, and the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Of the
Druidism that Cæsar had found in Gaul, little remained extant by
the time of Constantine. The assimilation of indigenous local gods
under the names of the great Magian divinities of the Cult-Church
(and especially Mithras-Sol-Jupiter) from the second century on, was
essentially a process of conquest, and the same is true of the later
emperor-worship.[458] The missionary efforts of Christianity here would
have been less successful than they were if the other cult-Church--its
near relative--had not preceded it. But the latter’s propaganda was by
no means limited to barbarian fields; even in the fifth century the
missionary Asclepiodotus converted Aphrodisias, a Carian city, from
Christianity to Paganism.
The Jews, as has been shown already, directed missionary effort on a
large scale towards the East and the South. Through southern Arabia
they drove into the heart of Africa, possibly even before the birth
of Christ, while on the side of the East their presence in China is
demonstrable, even in the second century. To the north the realm
of the Khazars[459] and its capital, Astrakhan, later went over to
Judaism. From this area came the Mongols of Jewish religion who
advanced into the heart of Germany and were defeated, along with the
Hungarians, in the battle of the Lechfeld in 955. Jewish scholars of
the Spanish-Moorish universities petitioned the Byzantine Emperor (in
A.D. 1000) for safe-conduct for an embassy that was to ask the Khazars
whether they were the Lost Tribes of Israel.
From the Tigris, Mazdaists and Manichæans penetrated the empires on
either hand, Roman and Chinese, to their utmost frontiers. Persian,
as the Mithras cult, invaded Britain; Manichæism had by 400 become
a danger to Greek Christianity, and there were Manichæan sects in
southern France as late as the Crusades[460]; but the two religions
drove eastwards as well, along the Great Wall of China (where the great
polyglot inscription of Kara Balgassun testifies to the introduction of
the Manichæan faith in the Oigur realm) and even to Shantung. Persian
fire-temples arose in the interior of China, and from 700 Persian
expressions are found in Chinese astrological writings.
The three Christian Churches everywhere followed up the blazed trails.
When the Western Church converted the Frankish King Chlodwig in 496,
the missionaries of the Eastern Church had already reached Ceylon and
the westernmost Chinese garrisons of the Great Wall, and those of
the Southern were in the Empire of Axum. At the same time as, after
Boniface (718), Germany became converted, the Nestorian missionaries
were within an ace of winning China itself. They had entered Shantung
in 638. The Emperor Gao-dsung (651-84) permitted churches to be built
in all provinces of the Empire, in 750 Christianity was preached in
the Imperial palace itself, and in 781, according to the Aramaic and
Chinese inscriptions upon a memorial column in Singafu which has been
preserved, “all China was covered with the palaces of Concord.” But it
is in the highest degree significant that the Confucians, who cannot
be called inexpert in religious matters, regarded the Nestorians,
Mazdaists, and Manichæans as adherents of a single “Persian”
religion,[461] just as the population of the Western Roman provinces
were unable to discriminate between Mithras and Christ.
Islam, therefore, is to be regarded as the Puritanism of the whole
group of Early Magian religions, emerging as a religion only formally
new, and in the domain of the Southern Church and Talmudic Judaism. It
is this deeper significance, and not merely the force of its warlike
onslaught, that gives the key to its fabulous successes. Although
on political grounds it practised an astounding toleration--John
Damascenus, the last great dogmatist of the Greek Church, was, under
the name of Al Manzor, treasurer to the Caliph--Judaism, Mazdaism,
and the Southern and Eastern churches of Christianity were swiftly
and almost completely dissolved in it. The Katholikos of Seleucia,
Jesujabh III, complains that tens of thousands of Christians went
over to it as soon as it came on the scene, and in North Africa--the
home of Augustine--the entire population fell away to Islam at once.
Mohammed died in 632. In 641 the whole domain of the Monophysites and
the Nestorians (and, therefore, of the Talmud and the Avesta) were in
the possession of Islam. In 717 it stood before Constantinople, and
the Greek Church was in peril of extinction. Already in 628 a relative
of the prophet had brought presents to the Chinese Emperor Tai-dsung
and obtained leave to institute a mission. From 700 there were mosques
in Shantung, and in 720 Damascus sent instructions to the Arabs long
established in southern France to conquer the realm of the Franks. Two
centuries later, when in the West a new religious world was arising out
of the remains of the old Western Church, Islam was in the Sudan and in
Java.
For all this, Islam is significant only as a piece of _outward_
religious history. The inner history of the Magian religion ends
with Justinian’s time, as truly as that of the Faustian ends with
Charles V and the Council of Trent. Any book on religious history
shows “_the_” Christian religion as having had _two ages of grand
thought-movements_--0-500 in the East and 1000-1500 in the West.[462]
_But these are two springtimes of two Cultures_, and in them
are comprised also the non-Christian forms which belong to each
religious development. The closing of the University of Athens by
Justinian in 529 was not, as is always stated, the end of Classical
philosophy--there had been no Classical philosophy for centuries.
What he did, forty years before the birth of Mohammed, was to end
the theology of the Pagan Church by closing this school and--as
the historians forget to add--_to end the Christian theology also_
by closing those of Antioch and Alexandria. Dogma was complete,
finished--just as it was in the West with the Council of Trent
(1564) and the Confession of Augsburg (1540), for with the city and
intellectualism religious creative force comes to an end. So also
in Jewry and in Persia, the Talmud was concluded about 500, and
when Chosroës Nushirvan in 529 bloodily suppressed the Reformation
of Mazdak--which was not unlike our Anabaptism in its rejection of
marriage and worldly property, and had been supported by King Kobad
I as counteracting the power of Church and nobility--Avestan dogma
similarly passed into fixity.
CHAPTER IX
PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE
(C)
PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL
I[463]
Religion may be described as the Waking-Being of a living creature
in the moments when it overcomes, masters, denies, and even destroys
Being. Race-life 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.
All religion is turned to light. The extended itself becomes religious
as a world of the eye comprehended from the ego as centre of light.
Hearing and touch are adjusted to what is seen and the _Invisible_,
whose workings are sensed, becomes the sum of the dæmonic. All
that we designate by the words “deity,” “revelation,” “salvation,”
“dispensation,” is in one way and another an element of illumined
actuality. Death, for man, is something that he sees, and knows by
seeing, and in relation to death birth is _the other_ secret. They are
the two visible limits of the sensible cosmic that is incarnate in a
live body in lighted space.
There are two sorts of deeper fear--one is fear (known even to the
animals) _in presence of_ microcosmic freedom in space, before space
itself and its powers, before death; the other is fear _for_ the cosmic
current of being, for life, for directional time. The first awakens a
dark feeling that freedom in the extended is just a new and deeper sort
of dependence than that which rules the vegetable world, and it leads
the individual being, sensible of its weakness, to seek the propinquity
and alliance of others. Anxiety produces speech, and our sort of speech
is religion--every religion. Out of the fear of Space arise the numina
of the _world-as-nature_ and the _cults of gods_; out of the fear
for time arise the numina of _life_, of sex and breed, of the State,
centring on _ancestor-worship_. That is the difference between Taboo
and Totem[464]--for the totemistic, too, always appears in religious
form, out of holy awe of that which passeth all understanding and is
for ever alien.
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
waking-consciousness; 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.
These are modes of slipping out of awareness by the aid of being, the
cosmic, the “it,” _the escape out of space into time_. But higher
than all these stands the genuinely religious overcoming of fear _by
means of the understanding itself_. The tension between microcosm and
macrocosm becomes something that we can love, something in which we
can wholly immerse ourselves.[465] We call this _faith_, and it is the
beginning of all man’s intellectual life.
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.
When something is “actual” for us, we see it and think it in causal
(_ursächlich_) form, just as we feel and know ourselves and our
activities as things originating, causes (_Ursache_). The assignment
of causes is, however, different from case to case, not only in the
religious, but also generally in the inorganic logic of man. A fact
is thought of at one moment as having such-and-such, at another
moment as having something else, as its cause. 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.
The significance of the thought is not thereby nullified, for during
a continuous spell of waking-consciousness we “understand” always in
the form of single acts of which each has its own causal inception.
The viewing of the entire world-as-nature in relation to the
individual consciousness as a single causally-ordered concatenation
is something perfectly unrealizable by our thought, inasmuch as our
thinking proceeds always by unit acts. It remains a belief. It is
indeed Faith itself, for it is the basis of religious understanding of
the world, which, wherever something is observed, postulates numina
as a necessity of thought--ephemeral numina for incidental events
which are not again thought of, and enduring numina as place-definite
indwellers (of springs, trees, stones, hills, stars, and so forth)
or as universals (like the gods of Heaven, of War, of Wisdom) which
can be present anywhere. These numina are limited only in virtue of
the individualness of each separate act of thought. That which to-day
is a property of the god is to-morrow itself the god. Others are
now a plurality, now a unity, now a vague Ent. There are invisibles
(shapes) and incomprehensibles (principles), which, to those to whom
it is vouchsafed, may become phenomenal or comprehensible. Fate[466]
in the Classical (εἰμαρμένη) and in the Indian (_rta_) is something
which stands as origin-thing (_Ur-Sache_) above the picturable
divinities; Magian Destiny, on the contrary, is the operation of the
one and formless supreme God. Religious thought ever lets itself
graduate values and rank within the causal succession, and leads up to
supreme beings or principles, as very first and “governing” causes;
“dispensation” is the word used for the most comprehensive of all
systems based upon valuation. Science, on the contrary, is a mode of
understanding which fundamentally abhors distinctions of rank amongst
causes; what it finds is not dispensation, but law.
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).
We name a causal linkage within the world-as-nature, as to which we
are convinced that no further reflection can alter it--Truth. Truths
are established, and they are timeless--“absolute” means detached
from Destiny and history, but detached also from the facts of our own
living and dying--and they are an inward liberation, consolation,
and salvation, in that they disvalue and overcome the incalculable
happenings of the world of facts. Or, as it mirrors itself in the mind,
men may go, but truth remains.
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, some 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-dæmons; 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. 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_,[467] 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. _Both may be born of either fear or
love._ There is a mythology of fear, like the Mosaic and the primitive
generally, and a mythology of love, like that of early Christianity
and Gothic mysticism. Similarly there is a technique of defensive,
and another technique of postulant, magic, and this, no doubt the
most fundamental, distinction between sacrifice and prayer[468]
distinguishes also primitive and mature mankind. 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. The secrets
of Taboo and Totem are beheld in god-faiths and soul-faiths, and
calculated in theoretical physics and biology. “Technique” presupposes
the intellectual gift of binding and conjuring. The theorist is the
critical seer, the technician is the priest, the discoverer is the
prophet.
The means, however, in which the whole force of intellect concentrates
itself is the _form_ of the actual, which is abstracted from vision by
speech, and of which not every waking-consciousness can discern the
quintessence--the conceptual circumscription, the communicable law,
name, number. Hence every conjuration of the deity is based on the
knowledge of its real name and the use of rites and sacraments, known
and available only to the initiated, of which the form must be exact
and the words correct. This applies not merely to primitive magic, but
just as much to our physical (and particularly our medical) technique.
It is for this reason that mathematics have a character of sanctity and
are regularly the product of a religious milieu (Pythagoras, Descartes,
Pascal); that there is a mysticism of sacred numbers (3, 7, 12) in
every religion,[469] and that Ornament (of which cult-architecture is
the highest form) is essentially number felt as shape. It is rigid,
compelling forms, expression-motives and communication-signs[470]
that the microcosm employs in the world of waking-consciousness to
get into touch with the macrocosm. In sacerdotal technique they are
called precepts, and in scientific, laws--but both are really name and
number, and primitive man would discover no difference between the
magic wherewith the priests of his villages command the dæmons and that
wherewith the civilized technician commands his machines.
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. Even though one’s
researches or accumulation of knowledge may culminate in sudden
illumination or conclusive calculation, yet all one’s own sense and
comprehension would be meaningless unless there were set up along
with it an inward certainty of a “something” which as other and alien
_is_--and is, moreover, exactly under the ascertained shape--in the
concatenation of cause and effect. 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. He needs
in his intellectual boring of belief a _final_ something attainable
by thought, an end of dissection that leaves no remainder of mystery.
The corners and pockets of his world of contemplation must all be
illuminated--nothing less will give him his release.
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.[471]
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. As theoretical knowledge frees itself from confiding
acceptance, it is marching to self-destruction, after which what
remains is simply and solely technical experience.
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. _De omnibus dubitandum_
is a proposition that is incapable of being actualized. 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.[472] 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 naïveté 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; the
natural science of the Baroque is one continuous dissection of the
religious world-picture of the Gothic.
The aim of faith and science, fear and curiosity, is not to experience
life, but to know the world-as-nature. Of world-as-history they are the
express negation. But the secret of waking-consciousness is a twofold
one; two fear-born, causally ordered pictures arise for the inner
eye--the “outer world” and as its counter-image the “inner world.” In
both are true problems, and the waking-consciousness is not only a
look-out, but is very busy within its own domains as well. The Numen
out there is called God; in here Soul. By the critical understanding
the deities of the believer’s vision are transmuted in thought into
mechanical magnitudes referable to its world, but their essence and
kernel remain the same--Classical matter and form, Magian light and
darkness, Faustian force and mass--and its mode is ever the same
dissection of the primitive soul-belief, and its end is ever the
same, a _predetermined_ result. The physics of the within is called
systematic psychology and it discovers in man, if it is Classical
science, thing-like soul-_parts_ (νοῦς, θυμός, ἐπιθυμία); if Magian,
soul-substance (ruach, nephesh); if Faustian, soul-_forces_ (thinking,
feeling, willing). These are the shapes that religious meditation, in
fear and in love, then follows up in the causal relations of guilt,
sin, pardon, conscience, reward, and punishment.
Being is a mystery that, as soon as faith and science turn their
attention to it, illudes them into fateful error. Instead of the cosmic
itself being reached (which is completely outside the possibilities
of the active waking-consciousness) the sensible mobility of body in
the field of the eye, and the conceptual image of a mechanical-causal
chain abstracted therefrom, are subjected to analysis. But real life
_is led_, not cognised. _Only the Timeless is true._ Truths lie
beyond history and life, and vice versa life is something beyond all
causes, effects, and truths. Criticism in both cases, critique of
waking-consciousness and critique of being, are contrary to happening
and alien to life. But in the first case the application of a critique
is entirely justified by the critical intention and the inner logic
of the object that is referred to; in the second case it is not. It
follows that the distinction between faith and knowledge, or fear and
curiosity, or revelation and criticism, is not, after all, the ultimate
distinction. Knowledge is only a late form of belief. But _belief and
life_, love springing from the secret fear of the world, and love
springing from the secret hate of the sexes, knowledge of inorganic and
sense of organic logic, Causes and Destinies--_this_ is the deepest
opposition of all. And here we distinguish men, not according to what
their modes of thinking are--religious or critical--nor according
to the objects of their thought, but according to whether they are
thinkers (no matter about what) _or doers_.
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. He reads in the
stars and in the sacred books; in his power lies, timeless and immune
from all accident, the _causal_ relation of sin and propitiation,
repentance and absolutions, sacrifice and grace. His chain of sacred
origins and results makes him himself a vessel of mysterious power and,
therefore, a cause of new effects, in which one must have faith before
one may have them imparted.
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_. It is, wherever true and strong, a relation
that has the full import of _ritual act and practice_; it is (to use
Loyola’s phrase) “_exercitium spirituale_,” performed before the
deity,[473] who is to be softened and conjured thereby. “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.
Moral is a conscious and planned causality of the conduct, apart from
all particulars of actual life and character, something eternal and
universally valid, not only without time, but hostile to time and for
that very reason “true.” Even if mankind did not exist, moral would
be true and valid--this is no mere conceit, but an expression of the
ethical inorganic logic of the world conceived as system that has
actually been used. Never would the philosopher concede that it could
have a historical evolution and fulfilment. Space denies Time; true
moral is absolute, eternally complete and the same. In the depths of it
there is ever a negation of life, a refraining and renunciation carried
to the point of askesis and death itself. 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
enemy--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. Conception and death define the life of the body in
space, and the fact that it is the _body_ that is in question makes
the former sin and the latter punishment. Σῶμα σῆμα (the Classical
body a grave!) was the confession of the Orphic religion. Æschylus
and Pindar comprehended Being as a reproach, and the saints of all
Cultures feel it as an impiety that has to be killed off by askesis or
(what is nearly related thereto) orgiastic squandering. 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.
The whole world--meaning the world-as-history--is infamous. It fights
instead of renouncing; it does not possess the idea of sacrifice.
It prevails over truth by means of facts. As it follows impulse, it
baffles thought about cause and effect. And therefore the highest
sacrifice that intellectual man can offer is to make a personal present
of it to the powers of nature. _Every moral action is a piece of this
sacrifice_, and an ethical life-course is an unbroken chain of such
sacrifices. Above all, the offering of sympathy, com-passion {sic}, in
which the inwardly strong gives up his superiority to the powerless.
The compassionate man kills something within himself. But we must not
confuse this sympathy in the grand religious sense with the vague
sentimentality of the everyday man, who cannot command himself, still
less with the _race-feeling of chivalry_ that is not a moral of reasons
and rules at all, but an upstanding and self-evident _custom_ bred of
the unconscious pulsations of a keyed-up life. 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. The castle character does not ask
about precepts and reasons. In fact, it does not ask questions at all.
Its code lies in the blood--which is pulse--and its fear is not of
punishment or requital, but of contempt and especially self-contempt.
It is not selfless; on the contrary, it springs from the very fullness
of a strong self. But Compassion likewise demands inward greatness
of soul, and so it is those selfsame Springtimes that produce the
most saintly servants of pity, the Francis of Assisi, the Bernard of
Clairvaux, in whom renunciation was a pervading fragrance, to whom
self-offering was bliss, whose _caritas_ was ethereal, bloodless,
timeless, historyless, in whom fear of the universe had dissolved
itself into pure, flawless love, a summit of causal moral of which Late
periods are simply no longer capable.
To constrain one’s blood, one must have blood. Consequently it is
only in knightly warrior-times that we find a monasticism of the
great style, and the highest symbol for the complete victory of
Space over Time is the warrior become ascetic--not the born dreamer
and weakling, who belongs by nature to the cloister, nor again the
scholar, who works at a moral system in the study. Putting cant aside,
that which is called moral to-day--a proper affection for one’s
nearest, or the exercise of worthy inclinations, or the practice of
_caritas_ with an _arrière-pensée_ of acquiring political power by
that means--is not honour-moral, or even a low grade of it, according
to Springtime standards. To repeat: there is grand moral only with
reference to death, and its sources are a fear, pervading the whole
waking-consciousness, of metaphysical causes and consequences, a love
that overcomes life, a consciousness that one is under the inexorable
magic of a causal system of sacred laws and purposes, which are
honoured as truths and which one must either wholly belong to or wholly
renounce. Constant tension, self-watching, self-testing, accompany the
exercise of this moral, which is an art, and in the presence of which
the world-as-history sinks to nothingness. Let a man be either a hero
or a saint. In between lies, not wisdom, but banality.
II
If there were truths independent of the currents of being, there could
be no history of truths. If there were one single eternally right
religion, religious history would be an inconceivable idea. But,
however highly developed the microcosmic side of an individual’s life
may be, it is nevertheless something stretched like a membrane over
the developing life, perfused by the pulsing blood, ever betraying
the hidden drive of cosmic directedness. Race dominates and forms all
apprehension. It is the destiny of each moment of awareness to be a
cast of Time’s net over Space.
Not that “eternal truths” do not exist. Every man possesses
them--plenty of them--to the extent that he exists and exercises the
understanding faculty in a world of thoughts, in the connected ensemble
of which they are, in and for the instant of thought, unalterable
fixtures--ironbound as cause-effect combinations in hoops of premisses
and conclusions. Nothing in this disposition can become displaced, he
believes. But in reality it is just _one_ surge of life that is lifting
his waking self and its world together. Its unity remains integral,
but _as_ a unit, a whole, _a fact_, it has a history. Absolute and
relative are to one another as transverse and longitudinal sections of
a succession of generations, the latter ignoring Space, and the former
Time. The systematic thinker stays in the causal order of a moment;
only the physiognomist who reviews the sequence of positions realizes
the constant alteration of that which “is” true.
_Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis_ holds good for the eternal
truths also, as soon as we follow their course in the stream of
history, and watch them move on as elements in the world-picture of the
generations that live and die. For each man, during the short space of
his existence, the _one_ religion is eternal and true which Destiny,
through the time and place of his birth, has ordained for him. With it
he feels, out of it he forms, the views and convictions of his days. To
its words and forms he holds fast, although what he means by them is
constantly changing. In the world-as-nature there are eternal truths;
in the world-as-history there is an eternally changing trueness.
_A morphology of religious history_, therefore, is a task that the
Faustian spirit alone could ever formulate, and one that it is
only now, at this present stage of its development, fit to deal
with. The problem is enunciated, and we must dare the effort of
getting completely away from our own convictions and seeing before
us everything indifferently as equally alien. And how hard it is!
He who undertakes the task must possess the strength not merely to
imagine himself in an illusory detachment from the truths of his
world-understanding--illusory even to one for whom truths are just a
set of concepts and methods--but actually to penetrate his own system
physiognomically to its very last cells. And even then is it possible,
in a single language, which structurally and spiritually carries the
whole metaphysical content of its own Culture, to capture transmissible
ideas of the truths of other-tongued men?
There is, to begin with, over the thousands of years of the first
age,[474] the colourless throng of primitive populations, which stand
fearfully agape in the presence of the chaotic environment, whose
enigmas continually weigh upon them, for no man amongst them is able
logically to master it. Lucky in comparison with them is the animal,
who is awake and yet not thinking. An animal knows fear only from case
to case, whereas early man trembles before the whole world. Everything
inside and outside him is dark and unresolved. The everyday and the
dæmonic are tangled together without clue and without rule. The day is
filled with a frightened and painful religiousness, in which it is rare
to find even the suggestion of a religion of confidence--for from this
elementary form of the world-fear no way leads to the understanding
love. Every stone on which a man stumbles, every tool that he takes in
his hand, every insect buzzing past him, food, house, weather, all can
be dæmonic; but the man believes in the powers that lurk in them only
so long as he is frightened or so long _as he uses them_--there are
quite enough of them even so. But one can love something only if one
believes in its _continued_ existence. Love presupposes the thought of
a world-order that has acquired stability. Western research has been at
great pains, not only to set in order individual observations gathered
from all parts of the world, but to arrange them according to assumed
gradations that “lead up” from animism (or other beginnings, as you
please) to the beliefs that it holds itself. Unfortunately, it is one
particular religion that has provided the values of the scheme, and
Chinese or Greeks would have built it quite differently. In reality
no such gradation, leading a general human evolution up to one goal,
exists. 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 does not “progress”; nor is it a fixed sum
of particulars from which this one and that one ought to be (though
usually they are) picked out for comparison irrespective of time, land,
and people. In reality they form a _world of organic religions_, which,
all over the world, possessed (and, where they linger, still possess)
proper and very significant modes of originating, growing, expanding,
and fading out, and a well-established specific character in point
of structure, style, tempo, and duration. The religions of the high
Cultures are not developed from these, but different. They lie clearer
and more intellectual in the light, they know what understanding love
means, they have problems and ideas, theories and techniques, of strict
intellect, but the religious symbolism of everyday light they know no
more. The primitive religiousness penetrates everything; the later and
individualized religions are self-contained form-worlds of their own.
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? Or why
is it that the Mycenæan prelude of the Classical is filled from one
end to the other with imaginings of beast-formed deities?[475] They
are not the gods of the warriors up in the megaron of the Mycenæan
castle, where soul- and ancestor-worship was practised with a high
and noble piety evidenced still in the monuments, but the gods of
down below, the powers believed in in the peasant’s hut. The great
menlike gods of the Apollinian religion, which must have arisen
about 1100 out of a mighty religious upheaval, bear traces of their
dark past on all sides. Hardly one of these figures is without some
cognomen, attribute, or telltale transformation-myth indicative of
its origin. To Homer Hera is invariably the cow-eyed; Zeus appears
as a bull, and the Poseidon of the Thelpusan legend as a horse.
Apollo comes to be the name for countless primitive numina; now he
was wolf (Lycæus) like the Roman Mars, now dolphin (Delphinius), and
now serpent (the Pythian Apollo of Delphi). A serpent, too, is the
form of Zeus Meilichios on Attic grave-reliefs and of Asclepios, and
of the Furies even in Æschylus;[476] and the sacred snake kept on the
Acropolis was interpreted as Erichthonios. In Arcadia the horse-headed
figure of Demeter in the temple of Phigalia was still to be seen
by Pausanias; the Arcadian Artemis-Callisto appears as a she-bear,
but in Athens too the priestesses of Artemis Brauronia were called
“_arktoi_” (bears).[477] Dionysus--now a bull, now a stag--and Pan
retained a certain beast-element to the end. Psyche (like the Egyptian
corporal-soul, _bai_) is the soul-bird. And upon all this supervened
the innumerable semi-animal figures like sirens and centaurs that
completely fill up the Early Classical nature-picture.[478]
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? Leaving out of
account some few clerics of, say, Byzantine education, what did one
actually think and imagine about these ceremonies and dogmas. Bishop
Gregory of Tours, who, we must remember, represents the highest
intellectual outlook of his generation, once lauded the powder rubbed
from a saint’s tombstone in these words: “O divine purgative, superior
to all doctors’ recipes, which cleanses the belly like scammony and
washes away all stains from our conscience!” For him the death of
Jesus was a crime which filled him with indignation, but no more; the
Resurrection, on the contrary, which hovered before him vaguely, he
felt deep down as an athletic _tour de force_ that stamped the Messiah
as the grand wizard and so legitimated him as the true Saviour. Of any
mystic meaning in the story of the Passion he has not an inkling.[479]
In Russia the conclusions of the “Synod of a Hundred Chapters,” of
1551, evidence a wholly primitive order of belief. Shaving of the
beard and wrong handling of the cross both figure here as deadly
sins--they were affronts to the dæmons. The “Synod of Antichrist,”
of 1667, led to the vast secession of the Raskol movement, because
thenceforward the sign of the cross was to be made with three fingers
instead of two, and the name “Jesus” was to be pronounced “Yissus”
instead of “Issus”--whereby, for the strict believer, the power of
this magic over the dæmons would be lost.[480] But this effect of
fear is, after all, not the only one nor even the most potent. Why
is it that the Merovingian period shows not the slightest trace of
that glowing inwardness and longing to sink into the metaphysical
that suffuses the Magian seed-time of Apocalyptic and the closely
analogous period of the Holy Synod (1721-1917) in Russia? What was
it that from Peter the Great’s time on led all those martyr-sects of
the Raskolniki to celibacy, poverty, pilgrimage, self-mutilation, and
asceticism in its most fearful forms, and in the seventeenth century
had driven thousands, in religious frenzy, to throw themselves _en
masse_ into the flames? The doctrines of the Chlysti, with their
“Russian Christs” (of whom seven are counted so far); the Dukhobors
with their Book of Life, which they use as their Bible and hold to
contain psalms of Jesus orally transmitted; the Skoptsi with their
ghastly mutilation-precepts--manifestations, one and all, of something
without which Tolstoi, Nihilism, and the political revolutions are
incomprehensible[481]--how is it that in comparison the Frankish period
seems so dull and shallow? Is it that only Aramæans and Russians
possess religious genius--and, if so, what have we to expect of the
Russia that is to come, now that (just in the decisive centuries) the
obstacle of scholarly orthodoxy has been destroyed?
III
Primitive religions have something homeless about them, like the clouds
and the wind. The mass-souls of the proto-peoples have accidentally
and fugitively condensed into _one_ being, and accidental, therefore,
is and remains the “where”--which is an “anywhere”--of the linkages
of waking-consciousness arising from the fear and defensiveness that
spread over them. Whether they stay or move on, whether they alter or
not, is immaterial so far as concerns their inward significance.
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.
It begins, in every case, like a great cry. The dull confusedness of
terror and defence suddenly passes into a pure awakening of inwardness
that blossoms up, wholly plantwise, from mother earth, and sees and
comprehends the depth of the light-world with _one_ outlook. Wherever
introspectiveness exists as a living sense, this change is felt and
welcomed as an inward rebirth. In this moment--never earlier, and
never (at least with the same deep intensity) later--it traverses the
chosen spirits of the time like a grand light, which dissolves all fear
in blissful love and lets the invisible appear, all suddenly, in a
metaphysical radiance.
Every Culture actualizes here its prime symbol. Each has its own sort
of love--we may call it heavenly or metaphysical as we choose--with
which it contemplates, comprehends, and takes into itself its godhead,
and which remains to every other Culture inaccessible or unmeaning.
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.
In the Vth Dynasty of Egypt (2680-2540), which followed that of the
great pyramid-builders, the cult of the Horus-falcon, whose _ka_
dwelt in the reigning monarch, faded. The old local cults and even
the profound Thot religion of Hermopolis fell into the background.
The sun-religion of Re appears. Out from his palace westward every
king erects a Re-sanctuary by his tomb-temple, the latter a symbol
of a life directional from birth to sarcophagus-chamber, the former
a symbol of grand and eternal nature. Time and Space, being and
waking-being, Destiny and sacred Causality are set face to face in
this mighty twin-creation as in no other architecture in the world. To
both a covered way leads up; that to the Re is accompanied by reliefs
figuring the power of the sun-god over the plant and animal worlds and
the changings of seasons. No god-image, no temple, but only an altar of
alabaster adorns the mighty terrace on which at day-break, high above
the land, the Pharaoh advances out of the darkness to greet the great
god who is rising up in the East.[482]
This youthful inwardness proceeds always out of a townless
country-side, out of villages, hovels, sanctuaries, solitary cloisters,
and hermitages. Here is formed the community of high awareness, of
the spiritual elect, which inwardly is separated by a whole world
from the great being-currents of the heroic and the knightly. The
two prime estates, priesthood and nobility--contemplation in the
cathedral and deeds before the castles, askesis and _Minne_, ecstasy
and high-bred custom--begin their special histories from this point.
Though the Caliph was also worldly ruler of the faithful, though the
Pharaoh sacrificed in both holy places, though the German King built
his family vault under the cathedral, nothing gets rid of the abyssal
opposition of Time and Space that is reflected in the contrast of
these two social orders. Religious history and political history, the
histories of truths and facts, stand opposed and irreconcilable. Their
opposition begins in cathedral and castle, it propagates itself in the
ever-growing towns as the opposition of wisdom and business, and in the
last stages of historical capacity it closes as a wrestle of intellect
and power.
But both these movements take place on the _heights_ of humanity.
Peasantdom remains historyless under it all, comprehending politics as
little as it understands dogmatics. Out of the strong young religion of
saintly groups, scholasticism and mysticism develop in the early towns;
reformation, philosophy, and worldly learning in the increasing tumult
of streets and squares; enlightenment and irreligion in the stone
masses of the late megalopolis. The beliefs of the peasant outside
remain “eternal” and always the same. The Egyptian hind understood
nothing of this Re. He heard the name, but while a grand chapter of
religious history was passing over his head in the cities, he went on
worshipping the old Thinite beast-gods, until with the XXVIth Dynasty
and its fellah-religion they regained supremacy. The Italian peasant
prayed in Augustus’s time just as he had done long before Homer and as
he does to-day. Names and dogmas of big religions, blossoming and dying
in turn, have penetrated to him from the towns and have altered the
sounds of his words--but the meaning remains ever the same. The French
peasant lives still in the Merovingian Age. Freya or Mary, Druids or
Dominicans, Rome or Geneva--nothing touches the innermost kernel of his
beliefs.
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 provinces. 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. How many of
those who lived with Socrates, Augustine, and Pascal understood them?
In religion as otherwise the human pyramid rises with increasing
sharpness, till at the end of the Culture it is complete--thereafter,
bit by bit, to crumble.
About 3000 in Egypt and Babylon two great religions began their
life-courses. 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 former
meaning--are now only incarnations or servants of the one Re. Even the
particular religion of Hermopolis, with its cosmology, was adapted to
the grand system, and a theological negotiation brought even the Ptah
of Memphis into harmony with dogma as an abstract prime-principle of
creation.[483] 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; the dogma was essentially
complete, and its subsequent treatment by rational processes took down
more of the structure than it improved. Philosophy began. In respect of
dogma, the Middle Kingdom was as unimportant as the Baroque.
From 1500 three new religious histories begin--first the Vedic in
the Punjab, then the Early Chinese in the Hwang-ho, and lastly the
Classical on the north of the Ægean Sea. Distinctly as the Classical
man’s world-picture and his prime symbol of the unit body is presented
to us, it is difficult even to guess the details of the great Early
Classical religion. For this lacuna we have to thank the Homeric
poems, which hinder rather than help us in comprehending it. The new
notion of godhead that was the special ideal of this Culture is the
human-formed body in the light, the hero as mediator between man and
god--so much, at any rate, the Iliad evidences. This body might be
light-transfigured by Apollo or disjected to the winds by Dionysus, but
in every case it was the basic form of Being. The σῶμα as ideal of the
extended, the cosmos as sum of these unit bodies, “Being” and “the one”
as the extended-in-itself and “Logos”[484] as the order thereof in the
light--all this came up before the eyes of priest-men, grandly visible
and having the full force of a new religion.
But the Homeric poetry is purely aristocratic. Of the two worlds--that
of the noble and that of the priest, that of Taboo and that of Totem,
that of heroism and that of sanctity--only the one is here living. It
not only does not understand, but actually despises, the other. As in
the Edda, so in Homer, it is the greatest glory of an immortal to know
the way and code of nobility. The thinkers of the Classical Baroque,
from Xenophanes to Plato, regarded these scenes of god-life as impudent
and trivial, and they were right; they felt exactly as the theology
and philosophy of the later West felt about the Germanic hero-sagas
and even about Gottfried of Strassburg, Wolfram, and Walther. If the
Homeric epics did not vanish as the hero-songs collected by Charlemagne
vanished, it was only because there was no fully formed Classical
priesthood, with the result that the Classical cities, when they
arose, were intellectually dominated by a knightly and not a religious
literature. The original doctrines of this religion, which out of
opposition to Homer linked themselves with the (probably) still older
name of Orpheus, were never written down.
All the same, they existed. Who knows what and how much is hidden
behind the figures of Calchas and Tiresias? A mighty upheaval there
must have been at the beginning of this Culture, as at that of
others--an upheaval extending from the Ægean Sea as far as Etruria--but
the Iliad shows as few signs of it as the lays of the Nibelungs and
of Roland show of the inwardness and mysticism of Joachim of Floris,
St. Francis, and the Crusades, or of the inner fire of that _Dies Iræ_
of Thomas of Celano, which would probably have excited mirth at a
thirteenth-century court of love. Great personalities there must have
been to give a mystical-metaphysical form to the new world-outlook, but
we know nothing of them and it is only the gay, bright, easy side of
it that passed into the song of knightly halls. Was the “Trojan War” a
feud, or was it also a Crusade? What is the meaning of Helen? Even the
Fall of Jerusalem has been looked at from a worldly point of view as
well as from a spiritual.
In the nobles’ poetry of Homer, Dionysus and Demeter, as priests’
gods, are unhonoured.[485] But even in Hesiod, the herdsman of Ascra,
the enthusiast-searcher inspired by his folk-beliefs, the ideas of
the great early time are not to be found pure, any more than in Jakob
Böhme the cobbler.[486] That is the second difficulty. _The great
early religions, too, were the possession of a class_, and neither
accessible to nor understandable by the generality; the mysticism of
earliest Gothic, too, was confined to small elect circles, sealed by
Latin and the difficulty of its concepts and figures, and neither
nobility nor peasantry had any distinct idea of its existence. And
excavation, therefore, important as it is in respect of the Classical
country-faiths, can tell us as little about the Early Classical
_religion_ as a village church can tell us about Abelard or Bonaventura.
But Æschylus and Pindar, at any rate, were under the spell of a great
priestly tradition, and before them there were the Pythagoreans, who
made the Demeter-cult their centre (thereby indicating where the
kernel of that mythology is to be sought), and earlier still were
the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic reformation of the seventh
century; and, finally, there are the fragments of Pherecydes and
Epimenides, who were not the first _but the last_ dogmatists of a
theology in reality ancient. The idea that impiety was a heritable
sin, visited upon the children and the children’s children, was known
to Hesiod and Solon, as well as the doctrine (Apollinian also) of
“Hybris.”[487] Plato, however, as an Orphic opponent of the Homeric
conception of life, sets forth very ancient doctrines of hell and
the judgment of the dead in his _Phædo_. We know the tremendous
formula of Orphism, the Nay of the mysteries that answered the Yea
of the agon, which arose, certainly by 1100 at latest, as a protest
of Waking-Consciousness against Being--σῶμα σῆμα, that splendid
Classical body a grave! Here man is no longer _feeling_ himself as a
thing of breeding, strength, and movement; he _knows_ himself and is
terrified by what he knows. Here begins the Classical askesis, which
by strictest rites and expiations, even by voluntary suicide, seeks
deliverance from this Euclidean body-being. It is an entirely erroneous
interpretation of the Pre-Socratics to suppose that it was from the
view-point of enlightenment that they spoke against Homer. It was as
_ascetics_ that they did so. These “contemporaries” of Descartes and
Leibniz were brought up in the strict traditions of the old great
Orphism, which were as faithfully preserved in the almost claustral
meditation-schools--old and famous holy places--as Gothic Scholasticism
was treasured in the wholly intellectual universities of the Baroque.
From the self-immolation of Empedocles the line runs straight forward
to the suicide of the Roman Stoic, and straight back to “Orpheus.”
Out of these last surviving traces, however, an outline of the Early
Classical religion emerges bright and distinct. Just as all Gothic
inwardness directed itself upon Mary, Queen of Heaven and Virgin
and Mother, so in that moment of the Classical World there arose a
garland of myths, images, and figures around Demeter, the bearing
mother, around Gaia and Persephone, and also Dionysus the begetter,
chthonian[488] and phallic cults, festivals and mysteries of birth and
death. All this, too, was characteristically Classical, conceived under
the aspect of present corporeality. The Apollinian religion venerated
body, the Orphic rejected it, that of Demeter celebrated the moments
of fertilization and birth, in which body acquired being. There was a
mysticism that reverently honoured the secret of life, in doctrine,
symbol, and mime, but side by side with it there was orgiasm too, for
the squandering of the body is as deeply and closely akin to asceticism
as sacred prostitution is to celibacy--both, all, are negations of
time. It is the reverse of the Apollinian “halt!” that checks on the
threshold of Hybris; detachment is not kept, but flung away. He who has
experienced these things in his soul has “from being a mortal become
a god.” In those days there must have been great saints and seers who
towered as far above the figures of Heraclitus and Empedocles as the
latter above the itinerant teachers of Cynicism and Stoicism--things
of this order do not happen namelessly and impersonally. As the
songs of Achilles and Odysseus were dying down everywhere, a grand,
strict doctrine arose at the famous old cult-places, a mysticism and
scholasticism with developed educational methods and a secret oral
tradition, as in India. But all that is buried, and the relics of the
later times barely suffice to prove that it once existed.
By putting the knightly poetry and folk-cults quite aside, then, we can
even now determine something more of this (_the_) Classical religion.
But in doing so there is a third pitfall to be avoided--the opposing
of Greek religion to Roman religion. For in reality there was no such
opposition.
Rome is only _one_ of innumerable city-states that arose during the
great epoch of colonization. It was built by Etruscans. From the
religious point of view it was re-created under the Etruscan dynasty of
the sixth century, and it is possible indeed that the Capitoline group
of deities, Jupiter, Juno, Minerva--which at that time replaced the
ancient trinity, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, of the “Numa” religion--was
in some way connected with the family cult of the Tarquins, in which
case Minerva, as goddess of the city, is unmistakably a copy of Athene
Polias.[489] The cults of this single city are properly comparable only
with those of _individual_ Greek-speaking cities of the same degree of
maturity, say Sparta or Thebes, which were in nowise more colourful.
The little that in these latter discloses itself as generally Hellenic
will also prove to be generally Italian. And as for the claim that the
“Roman” religion is distinguished from that of the Greek city-states by
the absence of myth--what is the basis of our knowledge on the point?
We should know nothing at all of the great god-sagas of the Springtime
if we had only the festival-calendar and the public cults of the Greek
city-states to go upon, just as we should learn nothing of Jesus’s
piety from the proceedings of the Council of Ephesus or of that of St.
Francis from a church constitution of the Reformation. Menelaus and
Helen were for the Laconian state-cult tree-deities and nothing more.
The Classical myth derives from a period when the Poleis with their
festivals and sacral constitutions were not yet in existence, when
there was not only no Rome, but no Athens. With the religious duties
and notions of the cities--which were eminently rational--it has no
connexion at all. Indeed, myth and cult are even less in touch with one
another in the Classical Culture than in others. The myth, moreover, is
in no way a creation of the Hellenic culture-field as a whole--it is
not “Greek”--but originated (like the stories of Jesus’s childhood and
the Grail legend) in this and that group, quite local, under pressure
of deep inward stirrings. For instance, the idea of Olympus arose in
Thessaly and thence, as a common property of _all_ educated persons,
spread out to Cyprus and to Etruria, thus, of course, involving Rome.
Etruscan painting presupposes it as a thing of common knowledge, and
therefore the Tarquins and their court must have been familiar with
it. We may attach any implications we please to “belief” (whatever that
may mean) in this myth; the point is that they will be as valid for
Romans of the period of the Kings as for the inhabitants of Tegea or
Corcyra.
That the pictures of Greek and Roman mythology that modern research has
developed are quite different from this is the result not of the facts,
but of the _methods_. In the case of Rome (Mommsen) the festal calendar
and the State cults, in that of Greece the poetic literature, were
taken as the starting-points. Apply the “Latin” method which has led up
to Wissowa’s picture to the Greek cities, and the result is a wholly
similar picture, as, for example, in Nilsson’s _Griechische Festen_.
When this is taken into consideration, the Classical religion is seen
to be a whole possessing an inner unity. The grand god-legends of the
eleventh century, which have the dew of Spring upon them, and in their
tragic holiness remind us of Gethsemane, Balder’s death, and Francis,
are the purest essence of “theoria,” contemplation, a world-picture
before the inner eye, and born of the common inward awakening of a
group of chosen souls from the world of chivalry.[490] But the much
later city-religions are wholly _technique_, formal worship, and as
such represent only one side (and a different side) of piety. They
are as far from the great myth as they are from the folk-belief. They
are concerned neither with metaphysic nor with ethic, but only with
the fulfilment of sacral acts. And, finally, the choice of cults by
the several cities very often originated, not, like the myth, from a
single world-view, but from the accidental ancestor- and family-cults
of great houses, which (precisely as in the Gothic) made their sacred
figures the tutelary deities of the city and at the same time reserved
to themselves the rights of celebrating and worshipping them. In Rome,
for example, the Lupercalia in honour of the field-god Faunus were a
privilege of the Quinctii and Fabii.
The Chinese religion, of which the great “Gothic” period lies between
1300 and 1100 and covers the rise of the Chóu 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 régime_ 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. What
should we know about Gothic piety if all its works had undergone the
censorship of Puritans and Retioralists like Locke, Rousseau, and
Wolff! And yet we treat the Confucian _close_ of Chinese inwardness
as its beginning--if, indeed, we do not go farther and describe the
syncretism of Han times as “the” religion of China.[491]
We know nowadays that, contrary to the usual assumption, there was
a powerful old-Chinese priesthood.[492] We know that in the text of
the Shu-Ching, relics of the ancient hero-sagas and god-myths were
worked over rationalistically, and were thus able to survive, and
similarly the Hou-li, Ngi-li, and Shi-King[493] would still reveal a
good deal more if only they were attacked with the conviction that
there was in them something far deeper than Confucius and his like
were capable of comprehending. We hear of chthonian and phallic cults
in early Chóu times; of orgiastic rites in which the service of the
gods was accompanied by ecstatic mass-dances; of mimic representations
and dialogues between god and priestess, out of which probably (as
in Greece) the Chinese drama evolved.[494] And we obtain an inkling
finally of why the luxuriant growth of early Chinese god-figures
and myths was necessarily swallowed up in an emperor-mythology. For
not only all saga-emperors, but also most of the figures of the
Hia and Shang dynasties before 1400 are--all dates and chronicles
notwithstanding--nothing but nature transformed into history. The
origins of such a process lie deep in the possibilities of every young
Culture.[495] Ancestor-worship ever seeks to gain power over the
nature-dæmons. All Homeric heroes, and Minos and Theseus and Romulus,
are gods become kings. In the _Heliand_,[496] Christ is about to
become so. Mary is the crowned Queen of Heaven. It is the supreme (and
perfectly unconscious) mode which enables men of breeding to venerate
something--that is, for them, what is great must have breeding, race,
must be mighty and lordly, the ancestor of whole families. A strong
priesthood is able to make short work of this mythology of Time, but it
won through partially in the Classical and completely in China--exactly
in proportion to the disappearance of the priestly element. The old
gods are now emperors, princes, ministers, and retainers; natural
events have become acts of rulers, and onsets of peoples social
enterprises. Nothing could have suited the Confucians better. Here was
a myth which could absorb social-ethical tendencies to an indefinite
extent, and all that was necessary was to expunge the traces of the
original nature-myth.
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.[497] But, further, there are
innumerable multitudes of souls of both kinds outside man. Troops of
spirits fill the air and the water and the earth--all is peopled and
moved by _kweis_ and _sens_. The life of nature and that of man are
in reality made out of the play of such units. Wisdom, will, force,
and virtue depend on their relationship. Asceticism and orgiasm;
the knightly custom of _hiao_, which requires the noble to revenge
an impiety towards an ancestor even after centuries, and commands
him never to survive defeat;[498] and the reasoning moral of the
_yen_, which, according to the judgment of rationalism, followed from
knowledge--all proceed from conceptions of the forces and possibilities
of the _kwei_ and the _sen_.
All this is concentrated in the basic word “_tao_.” The conflict
between the _yang_ and the _yin_ in man is the _tao_ of his life; the
warp and woof of the spirit-swarms outside him are the _tao_ of Nature.
The world possesses _tao_ inasmuch as it possesses beat, rhythm, and
periodicity. It possesses _li_, tension, inasmuch as man knows it and
abstracts from it fixed relationships for future use. Time, Destiny,
Direction, Race, History--all this, contemplated with the great
world-embracing vision of the early Chóu times, lies in this one word.
The path of the Pharaoh through the dark alley to his shrine is related
to it, and so is the Faustian passion of the third dimension, but _tao_
is nevertheless far removed from any idea of the technical conquest of
Nature. The Chinese park avoids energetic perspective. It lays horizon
behind horizon and, instead of pointing to a goal, tempts to wander.
The Chinese “cathedral” of the early time, the Pi-Yung, with its paths
that lead through gates and thickets, stairs and bridges and courts,
has never the inexorable march of Egypt or the drive into depth of the
Gothic.
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.
The mythic world that thereupon formed itself around this young soul,
an integer of force, will, and direction seen under the symbol of
Infinity, a stupendous action-into-distance, chasms of terror and of
bliss suddenly opening up--it was all, for the elect of this early
religiousness, something so entirely natural that they could not even
detach themselves sufficiently to “know” it as a unit. They lived in
it. To us, on the contrary, who are separated from these ancestors by
thirty generations, this world seems so alien and overpowering that we
always seek to grasp it in detail, and so misunderstand its wholeness
and undividedness.
The father-godhead men felt as Force itself, eternal, grand, and
ever-present activity, sacred causality, which could scarcely assume
any form comprehensible by human eyes. But the whole longing of the
young breed, the whole desire of this strongly coursing blood, to
bow itself in humility before the _meaning of the blood_ found its
expression in the figure of the Virgin and Mother Mary, whose crowning
in the heavens was one of the earliest motives of the Gothic art. She
is a light-figure, in white, blue, and gold, surrounded by the heavenly
hosts. She leans over the new-born Child; she fells the sword in her
heart; she stands at the foot of the cross; she holds the corpse of
the dead Son. From the turn of the tenth century on, Petrus Damiani
and Bernard of Clairvaux developed her cult; there arose the Ave Maria
and the angelic greeting and later, among the Dominicans, the crown
of roses. Countless legends gathered round her figure.[499] She is
the guardian of the Church’s store of Grace, the Great Intercessor.
Among the Franciscans arose the festival of the Visitation, amongst
the English Benedictines (even before 1100) that of the Immaculate
Conception, which elevated her completely above mortal humanity into
the world of light.
But this world of purity, light, and utter beauty of soul would
have been unimaginable without the counter-idea, inseparable from
it, an idea that constitutes one of the maxima of Gothic, one of
its unfathomable creations--one that the present day forgets, and
_deliberately_ forgets. While she there sits enthroned, smiling in
her beauty and tenderness, there lies in the background another world
that throughout nature and throughout mankind weaves and breeds
ill, pierces, destroys, seduces--namely, the realm of the Devil. It
penetrates the whole of Creation, it lies ambushed everywhere. All
around is an army of goblins, night-spirits, witches, werewolves, all
in human shape. No man knows whether or not his neighbour has signed
himself away to the Evil One. No one can say of an unfolding child
that it is not already a devil’s temptress. An appalling fear, such
as is perhaps only paralleled in the early spring of Egypt, weighs
upon man. Every moment he may stumble into the abyss. There were black
magic, and devils’ masses and witches’ sabbaths, night feasts on
mountain-tops, magic draughts and charm-formulæ. The Prince of Hell,
with his relatives--mother and grandmother, for as his very existence
denies and scorns the sacrament of marriage, he may not have wife or
child--his fallen angels and his uncanny henchmen, is one of the most
tremendous creations in all religious history. The Germanic Loki is
hardly more than a preliminary hint of him. Their grotesque figures,
with horns, claws, and horses’ hoofs, were already fully formed in
the mystery plays of the eleventh century; everywhere the artist’s
fancy abounded in them, and, right up to Dürer and Grünewald, Gothic
painting is unthinkable without them. The Devil is sly, malignant,
malicious, but yet in the end the powers of light dupe him. He and
his brood, bad-tempered, coarse, fiendishly inventive, are of a
monstrous imaginativeness, incarnations of hellish laughter opposed
to the illumined smile of the Queen of Heaven, but incarnations, too,
of Faustian world-humour[500] opposed to the panic of the sinner’s
contrition.
It is not possible to exaggerate either the grandeur of this forceful,
insistent picture or the depth of sincerity with which it was believed
in. The Mary-myths and the Devil-myth formed themselves side by side,
neither possible without the other. Disbelief in either of them was
deadly sin. There was a Mary-cult of prayer, and a Devil-cult of
spells and exorcisms. Man walked continuously on the thin crust of
the bottomless pit. Life in this world is a ceaseless and desperate
contest with the Devil, into which every individual plunges as a
member of the Church Militant, to do battle for himself and to win his
knight’s spurs. The Church Triumphant of angels and saints in their
glory looks down from on high, and heavenly Grace is the warrior’s
shield in the battle. Mary is the protectress to whose bosom he can fly
to be comforted, and the high lady who awards the prizes of valour.
Both worlds have their legends, their art, their scholasticism, and
their mysticism--for the Devil, too, can work miracles. Characteristic
of this alone among the religious Springtimes is the symbolism of
_colour_--to the Madonna belong white and blue, to the Devil black,
sulphur-yellow, and red. The saints and angels float in the æther, but
the devils leap and crouch and the witches rustle through the night. It
is the two together, light and night, which fill Gothic art with its
indescribable inwardness--that, and not any “artistic” fancifulness.
Every man knew the world to be peopled with angel and devil troops. The
light-encircled angels of Fra Angelico and the early Rhenish masters,
and the grimacing things on the portals of the great cathedrals,
_really_ filled the air. Men saw them, felt their presence everywhere.
To-day we simply no longer know what a myth is; for it is no mere
æsthetically pleasing mode of representing something to oneself, but
a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every corner of the
waking-consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being. These
creatures were about one all the time. They were glimpsed without
being seen. They were believed in with a faith that felt the very
thought of proof as a desecration. What we call myth nowadays, our
littérateur’s and connoisseur’s taste for Gothic colour, is nothing but
Alexandrinism. In the old days men did not “enjoy” it--behind it stood
Death.[501]
For the Devil gained possession of human souls and seduced them into
heresy, lechery, and black arts. It was war that was waged against
him on earth,[502] and waged with fire and sword upon those who had
given themselves up to him. It is easy enough for us to-day to think
ourselves out of such notions, but if we eliminate this appalling
reality from Gothic, all that remains is mere romanticism. It was not
only the love-glowing hymns to Mary, but the cries of countless pyres
as well that rose up to heaven. Hard by the Cathedral were the gallows
and the wheel. Every man lived in those days in the consciousness of
an immense danger, and it was hell, not the hangman, that he feared.
Unnumbered thousands of witches genuinely imagined themselves to be
so; they denounced themselves, prayed for absolution, and in pure love
of truth confessed their night rides and bargains with the Evil One.
Inquisitors, in tears and compassion for the fallen wretches, doomed
them to the rack in order to save their souls. That is the Gothic myth,
out of which came the cathedral, the crusader, the deep and spiritual
painting, the mysticism. In its shadow flowered that profound Gothic
blissfulness of which to-day we cannot even form an idea.
In Carolingian times, all this was still strange and far. Charlemagne
in the first Saxon Capitulary (787) put a ban on the ancient Germanic
belief in werewolves and night-gangers (_strigæ_), and as late as
1120 it was condemned as an error in the decree of Burkard of Worms.
But twenty years later it was only in a dilute form that the anathema
reappeared in the _Decretum Gratiani_. Cæsarius of Heisterbach,
already, was familiar with the whole devil-legend and in the _Legenda
Aurea_ it is just as actual and as effective as the Mary-legends. In
1233, when the Cathedrals of Mainz and Speyer were being vaulted,
appeared the bull _Vox in Rama_, by which the belief in Devil and witch
was made canonical. St. Francis’s “Hymn to the Sun” had not long been
written, and the Franciscans were kneeling in intimate prayer before
Mary and spreading her cult afar, when the Dominicans armed themselves
for battle with the Devil by setting up the Inquisition. Heavenly love
found its focus in the Mary-image, and _eo ipso_ earthly love became
akin to the Devil. Woman is Sin--so the great ascetics felt, as their
fellows of the Classical, of China, and of India had felt. The Devil
rules only through woman. The witch is the propagator of deadly sin.
It was Thomas Aquinas who evolved the repulsive theory of Incubus and
Succuba. Inward mystics like Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus,
developed a full metaphysic of the devilish.
The Renaissance had ever the strong faith of the Gothic at the back
of its world-outlook. When Vasari eulogized Cimabue and Giotto for
returning to Nature as their teacher, it was this Gothic nature that
he had in mind, a nature influenced in every nook by the encircling
troops of angels and devils that stood there, ever threatening, in
the light. “Imitation” of Nature meant imitation of its soul, not
of its surface. Let us be rid at last of the fable of a renewal of
Classical “Antiquity.” Renaissance, _Rinascita_, meant then the Gothic
uplift from A.D. 1000 onward,[503] the new _Faustian_ world-feeling,
the new personal experience of _the Ego in the Infinite_. For some
individual spirits, no doubt, it meant a sentimental enthusiasm for
the Classical (or what was thought to be the Classical), but that
was a manifestation of taste, nothing more.[504] The Classical myth
was entertainment-material, an allegorical play, through the thin
veil of which men saw, no less definitely than before, the old Gothic
actuality. When Savonarola stood up, the antique trappings vanished
from the surface of Florentine life in an instant. It was all for the
church that the Florentines laboured, and with conviction. Raphael
was the most deeply intimate of all Madonna-painters. A firm belief
in the realm of Satan, and in deliverance from it through the saints,
lay at the root of all this art and literature; and every one of
them, painters, architects, and humanists--however often the names of
Cicero and Virgil, Venus and Apollo were on their lips--looked upon
the burning of witches as something entirely natural and wore amulets
against the devil. The writings of Marsilius Ficinus are full of
learned disquisitions on devils and witches. Francesco della Mirandola
wrote (in elegant Latin) his dialogue “The Witch” in order to warn the
fine intellects of his circle against a danger.[505] When Leonardo da
Vinci, at the summit of the Renaissance, was working upon his “Anna
Selbdritt,”[506] the “Witches’ Hammer” was being written in Rome (1487)
in the finest Humanistic Latin. It was _these_ that constitute the real
myth of the Renaissance, and without them we shall never understand the
glorious and truly Gothic force of this anti-Gothic movement.[507] Men
who did not feel the Devil very near at hand could not have created the
_Divina Commedia_ or the frescoes of Orvieto[508] or the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel.
It was the tremendous background of this myth that awakened in the
Faustian soul a feeling of what it was. An Ego lost in Infinity, an
Ego that was all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity
of greater forces;[509] that was all will, but a will full of fear
for its freedom. Never has the problem of Free-will been meditated
upon more deeply or more painfully. Other Cultures have simply not
known it. But precisely because here Magian resignation was totally
impossible--because that which thought was not an “it” or particle
of an all-soul, but an individual, fighting Ego, seeking to maintain
itself--every limitation upon freedom was felt as a chain that had to
be dragged along through life, and life in turn was felt as a living
death. And if so--why? For _what_?
The result of this in-looking was that immense sense of guilt which
runs throughout these centuries like one long, desperate lament. The
cathedrals rose ever more supplicatingly to heaven, the Gothic vaulting
became a joining of hands in prayer, and little comfort of light
shone through the high windows into the night of the long naves. The
choking parallel-sequences of the church chants, the Latin hymns, tell
of bruised knees and flagellations in the nocturnal cell. For Magian
man the world-cavern had been close and the heaven impending, but for
Gothic man heaven was infinitely far. No hand seemed to reach down from
these spaces, and all about the lone Ego the mocking Devil’s world lay
in leaguer. And, therefore, the great longing of Mysticism was to lose
created form (as Heinrich Seuse said), to be rid of self and all things
(Meister Eckart), to abandon selfness (_Theologie deutsch_).[510] And
out of these longings there grew up an unending dogged subtilizing on
notions which were ever more and more finely dissected to get at the
“why,” and finally a universal cry for Grace--not the Magian Grace
coming down as substance, but the Faustian Grace that unbinds the Will.
_To be able to will freely_ is, at the very bottom, the one gift
that the Faustian soul asks of heaven. The seven sacraments of the
Gothic, felt as one by Peter Lombard, elevated into dogma by the
Lateran Council of 1215, and grounded in mystical foundations by
Thomas Aquinas, mean this and only this. They accompany the unit soul
from birth to death and protect it against the diabolical powers that
seek to nest themselves in its will. For to sell oneself to the Devil
means to deliver up _one’s will_ to him. The Church Militant on earth
is the visible community of those who are enabled, by enjoyment of
the sacraments, to will. This certainty of free being is held to be
guaranteed in the altar-sacrament, which accordingly suffers a complete
change of meaning. The miracle of the holy transformation which takes
place daily under the hands of the priest--the consecrated Host in the
high altar of the cathedral, wherein the believer sensed the presence
of him who of old sacrificed himself to secure for his own the _freedom
to will_--called forth a sigh of relief of such depth and sincerity as
we moderns can hardly imagine. It was in thanksgiving, therefore, that
the chief feast of the Catholic Church, Corpus Christi, was founded in
1264.[511]
But more important still--and by far--was the essentially Faustian
prime-sacrament of Contrition. This ranks with the Mary-myth and the
Devil-myth as the third great creation of the Gothic. And, indeed,
it is from this third that the other two derive depth and meaning;
it discloses the last secrets of this Culture’s soul, and so sets it
apart from all other Cultures. The effect of the Magian baptism was
to incorporate a man in the great _consensus_--the _one_ great “it”
of the divine spirit took up its abode in him as in the others, and
thereafter resignation to all that should happen became his duty. But
in the Faustian contrition the _idea of personality_ was implicit. It
is not true that the Renaissance discovered personality[512]; what
it did was to bring personality up to a brilliant surface, whereby
it suddenly became visible to everyone. Its birth is in Gothic; it
is the most intimate and peculiar property of Gothic; it is one
and the same with Gothic soul. For this contrition is something
that each one accomplishes for himself alone. He alone can search
his own conscience. He alone stands rueful in the presence of the
Infinite. He alone can and must in confession understand and put
into words his own past. And even the absolution that frees his Ego
for new responsible action is personal to himself. Baptism is wholly
impersonal--one receives it because one is _a_ man, not because one
is _this_ man--but the idea of contrition presupposes that the value
of every act depends uniquely upon the man who does it. This is what
differentiates the Western drama from the Classical, the Chinese, and
the Indian. This is what directs our legislation more and more with
reference to the doer rather than to the deed, and bases our primary
ethical conceptions on individual doing and not typical behaviour.
Faustian responsibility instead of Magian resignedness, the individual
instead of the _consensus_; relief from, instead of submissiveness
under, burdens--that is the difference between the most active and the
most passive of all sacraments, and at the back of it again lies the
difference between the world-cavern and infinity-dynamics. Baptism is
something done upon one, Contrition something done by oneself within
oneself. And, moreover, this conscientious searching of one’s own past
is both the earliest evidence of, and the finest training for, the
_historical sense_ of Faustian mankind. There is no other Culture in
which the personal life of the living man, the conscientious tracing of
each feature, has been so important, for this alone has required the
accounts to be rendered in words. If historical research and biography
are characteristic of the spirit of the West from its beginnings;
if both in the last resort are self-examination and confession; if
our lives are led with an assuredness and conscious reference to
the historic background that nowhere else has been even imagined as
possible or tolerable; if, lastly, we habitually look at history
in terms of millennia, not rhapsodically or decoratively as in the
Classical World and in China, but directionally and with the almost
sacramental formula “_Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner_” ever in
our minds--we have this sacrament of the Gothic Church, this continual
unburdening of the Ego by _historical_ test and justification to thank
for it. Every confession is an autobiography. This peculiar liberation
of the will is to us so necessary that the refusal of absolution drives
to despair, even to destruction. Only he who senses the bliss of such
an inward acquittal can comprehend the old name of the _sacramentum
resurgentium_, the sacrament of those who are risen again.[513]
When in this heaviest of decisions the soul is left to its own
resources, something unresolved remains hanging over it like a
perpetual cloud. It may be said, therefore, that perhaps no institution
in any religion has brought so much happiness into the world as this.
The whole inwardness and heavenly love of the Gothic rests upon the
certainty of full absolution through the power invested in the priest.
In the insecurity that ensued from the decline of this sacrament, both
Gothic joy of life and the Mary-world of the light faded out. Only
the Devil’s world, with its grim all-presentness, remained. And then,
in place of the blissfulness irrecoverably lost, came the Protestant,
and especially Puritan, heroism, which could fight on, even hopeless,
in a lost position. “Auricular confession,” said Goethe once, “ought
never to have been taken from mankind.” Over the lands in which it had
died out, a heavy earnestness spread itself. Ethic and costume, art
and thought, took on the night-colour of the only myth that remained
outstanding. Nothing is less sunlit than the doctrines of Kant. “Every
man his own priest” is a conviction to which men could win through,
but only as to that part of priesthood that involves duties, _not as
to that which possesses powers_. No man confesses himself with the
inward certainty of absolution. And as the need of the soul to be
relieved of its past and to be redirected remained urgent as ever, all
the higher forms of communication were transmuted, and in Protestant
countries music and painting, letter-writing and memoirs, from being
modes of description became modes of self-denunciation, penance, and
unbounded confession. Even in Catholic regions too--in Paris above
all--art as psychology set in as doubt in the sacrament of Contrition
and Absolution grew. Outlook on the world was lost in ceaseless
mine-warfare within the self. In lieu of the Infinite, contemporaries
and descendants were called in to be priests and judges. Personal art,
in the sense that distinguishes Goethe from Dante, and Rembrandt from
Michelangelo, was a substitute for the sacrament of confession. It was,
also, the sign that this Culture was already in the condition of a Late
period.[514]
IV
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. Reformation is _Gothic_, the
accomplishment and the testament thereof. Luther’s chorale “_Ein’
feste Burg_” does _not_ belong to the spiritual lyrism of the Baroque.
There rumbles in it still the splendid Latin of the _Dies iræ_. It
is the Church Militant’s last mighty Satan-song.[515] Luther, like
every reformer that had arisen since the year 1000, fought the Church
not because it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little.
The great stream flows on from Cluny: through Arnold of Brescia, who
preached return to Apostolic simplicity and was burned in 1155; through
Joachim of Floris, who was the first to use the world “_reformare_;”
the spirituals of the Franciscan Order; Jacopone da Todi, revolutionary
and singer of the _Stabat Mater_, the knight whom the death of a
young wife turned into an ascetic and who tried to overthrow Boniface
VIII for governing the Church too slackly; through Wyclif and Hus
and Savonarola; to Luther, Karlstadt, Zwingli, Calvin, and--Loyola.
The intention of these men, one and all, was not to overcome the
Christianity of the Gothic, but to bring it to inward fulfilment. So
also with Marcion, Athanasius, the Monophysites, and the Nestorians,
who sought in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon to purify the faith
and lead it back to its origins.[516] But so also the Orphics of the
Classical seventh century were the last and not the first of a series
that must have begun even before 1000 B.C. So with the establishment of
the Re religion in Egypt at the close of the Old Kingdom, the Egyptian
Gothic. It is an ending, not a new beginning, that these signify. Just
so, again, a reform-fulfilment happened in the Vedic religion about the
tenth century and was followed by the setting-in of late Brahmanism.
And in the ninth century a corresponding epochal point must have
occurred in the religious history of China.
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 of
Nature, clean waking-consciousness, and pure cause-controlled 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.
In those times the West--and the situation was the same in the other
Cultures--divided the _Corpus Christianorum_ of the population into the
three classes of _status policticus, ecclesiasticus, and œconomicus_
(that is, urban), but as the outlook was that of the city and no longer
that of the castle and the village, officials and judges belonged to
the first-named class, men of learning to the second--and the peasant
was forgotten. This is the key to the opposition of the Renaissance
and Reformation, which was an opposition of class and not a difference
in world-feeling like that of Renaissance and Gothic. Castle-taste
and cloister-soul moved into town, and remained there, as before,
in opposition--as in Florence the Medici to Savonarola, and as in
old Greece the noble families of the cities--with their Homer now
finally written down--to the last Orphics--these, too, writers. The
Renaissance artists and Humanists are the legitimate successors of the
Troubadours and Minnesingers, and just as there is a line from Arnold
of Brescia to Luther, so there is a line from Bertrand de Born and
Peire Cardinal, through Petrarch, to Ariosto. The castle has become
the town-house, the knight the patrician. The whole movement adhered
to palaces, as courts; it limits itself to those fields of expression
that affect and interest polite society; it is bright and gay, like
Homer, because it is courtly--an atmosphere where problems were bad
taste, where Dante and Michelangelo cannot but have felt themselves out
of place--and it spread over the Alps to the courts of the North, not
as a new world-outlook, but as a new taste. The “Northern” Renaissance
of the mercantile and capital cities consisted simply in the fact that
the _bon ton_ of the Italian patriciate replaced that of the French
chivalry.
But the last reformers, too, the Luthers and Savonarolas, were
_urban_ monks, and this differentiates them profoundly from the
Joachims and the Bernards. Their intellectual and urban askesis is the
stepping-stone from the hermitages of quiet valleys to the scholar’s
study of the Baroque. The mystic experience of Luther which gave birth
to his doctrine of justification is the experience, not of a St.
Bernard in the presence of woods and hills and clouds and stars, but
of a man who looks through narrow windows on the streets and house
walls and gables. Broad God-perfused nature is remote, outside the city
wall; and the free intellect, detached from the soil, is inside it.
Within the urban, stonewalled waking-consciousness sense and reason
part company and become enemies, and the city-mysticism of the last
reformers is thus a mysticism of pure reason through and through, and
not one of the eye--an illumination of concepts, in presence of which
the brightly coloured figures of the old myth fade into paleness.
Necessarily, therefore, it was, in its real depths, a thing of the few.
Nothing was left of that sensible content that formerly had offered
even to the poorest something to grip. The mighty act of Luther was
a purely intellectual decision. Not for nothing has he been regarded
as the last great Schoolman of the line of Occam.[517] He completely
liberated the Faustian personality--the intermediate person of the
priest, which had formerly stood between it and the Infinite, was
removed. And now it was wholly alone, self-oriented, its own priest and
its own judge. But the common people could only feel, not understand,
the element of liberation in it all. They welcomed, enthusiastically,
indeed, the tearing-up of visible duties, but they did not come to
realize that these had been replaced by intellectual duties that were
still stricter. Francis of Assisi had given much and taken little, but
the urban Reformation took much and, as far as the majority of people
were concerned, gave little.
The holy Causality of the Contrition-sacrament Luther replaced by the
mystic experience of inward absolution “by faith alone.” He came very
near to Bernard of Clairvaux in this concept of contrition as lifelong,
as a continuous intellectual askesis in contrast to the askesis of
outward and visible works. Both of them understood absolution as
a divine miracle: in so far as the man changes himself, it is God
changing him. But what no purely intellectual mysticism can replace
is the “Tu” outside, in free nature. The one and the other preached:
“Thou must believe that God has forgiven thee,” but for Bernard belief
was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge, whereas
for Luther it sank to doubt and desperate insistence. This little
“I,” detached from the cosmos, nailed up in an individual being and
(in the most terrific sense of the word) alone, needed the proximity
of a powerful “Thou,” and the weaker the intellect, the more urgent
the need. Herein lies the ultimate meaning of the Western priest, who
from 1215 was elevated above the rest of mankind by the sacrament of
ordination and its _character indelebilis_: he was a hand with which
even the poorest wretch could grasp God. This _visible_ link with the
Infinite, Protestantism destroyed. Strong souls could and did win it
back for themselves, but for the weaker it was gradually lost. Bernard,
although for him the inward miracle was successful of itself, would
not deprive others of the gentler way, for the very illumination of
his soul showed him the Mary-world of living nature, all-pervading,
ever near, and ever helpful. Luther, who knew himself only and not
men, set postulated heroism in place of actual weakness. For him life
was desperate battle against the Devil, and that battle he called upon
everyone to fight. And everyone who fought it fought alone.
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.[518]
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.[519] 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 long-buried 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. In Germany, at any rate, the Saga took the
place, unperceived, of the Mary-myth: Mary was now called Frau Holde,
and where once the saints had stood, appeared the faithful Eckart.
In the English people what arose was something that has long been
designated “Bible-fetishism.”
What Luther lacked--and it is an eternal fatality for Germany--was the
eye for facts and the power of practical organization. He did not bring
his doctrines to a clear system, nor did he lead the great movement
and choose its aim. The one and the other were the work of his great
successor Calvin. While the Lutheran movement advanced leaderless in
central Europe, he viewed his rule in Geneva as the starting-point of a
systematic subjection of the world under a Protestantism unfalteringly
thought out to its logical conclusion. Therefore he, and he alone,
became a world-power; therefore it was the decisive struggle between
the spirit of Calvin and the spirit of Loyola that dominated, from
the Spanish Armada on, the world-politics of the Baroque and the
struggle for sea-supremacy. While in mid-Europe Reformation and
Counter-Reformation struggled for some small imperial city or a few
poor Swiss cantons, Canada, the mouth of the Ganges, the Cape, the
Mississippi, were the scenes of great decisions fought to an issue by
France and Spain, England and Holland. And in these decisions the two
grand organizers of the Late religion of the West were ever present,
ever opposed.
V
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 essentially 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. The
stock of believed probables, and especially that part of it which was
received by the understanding and not the heart, was the first obvious
target for dissecting activities. This distinguishes the Springtime
Scholasticism from the actuality-philosophy of the Baroque--as it
distinguishes Neoplatonist from Islamic, Vedic from Brahmanic, Orphic
from Pre-Socratic, thought. The (shall we say) profane Causality of
human life, the world-around, the process and meaning of cognition,
become a problem. The Egyptian philosophy of the Middle Kingdom
measured up the value of life in _this_ sense; and akin to it, in all
probability, was the late pre-Confucian philosophy of China from 800 to
500 B.C. Only the book ascribed to Kwan-tse (d. 645) remains to give us
some dim idea of this philosophy, but the indications, slight though
they be, are that epistemological and biological problems occupied the
centre of the one genuine philosophy of China, now utterly lost.
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.[520] As early as the thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste[521]
was treating space as a function of light. Petrus Peregrinus in 1289
wrote the best experimentally based treatise on magnetism that
appeared before Gilbert (1600). And Roger Bacon, the disciple of
both, developed a natural-scientific theory of knowledge to serve
as basis for his technical investigations.[522] But boldness in the
discovery of dynamic interlinkages went further still. The Copernican
system was hinted at in a manuscript of 1322 and a few decades later
was mathematically developed by the Paris Occamists, Buridan, Albert
of Saxony, and Oresme.[523] Let us not deceive ourselves as to the
fundamental motive-power of these explorations. 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. Theoria, contemplative vision of actuality,
was for those subtly inquiring monks only secondary, and, being itself
the outcome of the technical passion, it presently led them, quite
imperceptibly, to the typically Faustian conception of God as the
Grand Master of the machine, who could accomplish everything that
they themselves in their impotence only dared to wish. Insensibly
the world of God became, century by century, more and more like the
_Perpetuum mobile_. And, imperceptibly also, as the scanning of nature
became sharper and sharper in the school of experiment and technique,
and the Gothic myth became more and more shadowy, the concepts of
monkish working hypotheses developed, from Galileo onwards, into the
critically illuminated numina of modern science, the collisions and
the fields, gravitation, the velocity of light, and the “electricity”
which in our electrodynamic world-picture has absorbed into itself
the other forms of energy and thereby attained to a sort of physical
monotheism. They are the concepts that are set up behind the formulæ,
to endow them with a mythic visibility for the inner eye. The numbers
themselves are technical elements, levers and screws, overhearings of
the world’s secrets. The Classical Nature-thought--and that of others
also--required no numbers, for it strove for no powers. The _pure_
mathematic of Pythagoras and Plato had no relation whatever to the
nature-views of Democritus and Aristotle.
Just as the Classical mind felt Prometheus’s defiance of the gods
as “hybris,” so our Baroque felt the machine as diabolical.[524]
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. Milton’s _Paradise Lost_, many surahs
of the Koran, the little that we know of Pythagorean teachings--all
come to the same thing. They are enthusiasms of a sober spirit, cold
intensities, dry mysticism, pedantic ecstasy. And yet, even so, a wild
piety flickers up once more in them. All the transcendent inwardness
that the City can produce after attaining to unconditional mastery
over the soul of the Land is here concentrated, with a sort of terror
lest it should prove unreal and evanescent, and is correspondingly
impatient, pitiless, and unforgiving. Puritanism--not in the West
only, but in all Cultures--lacks the smile that had illumined the
religion of the Spring--every Spring--the moments of profound joy in
life, the humour of life. Nothing of the quiet blissfulness that in
the Magian Springtime flashes up so often in the stories of Jesus’s
childhood, or in Gregory Nazianzen, is to be found in the Koran,
nothing in the palpable blitheness of St. Francis’s songs in Milton.
Deadly earnest broods over the Jansenist mind of Port Royal, over the
meetings of the black-clothed Roundheads, by whom Shakespeare’s “Merry
England”--_Sybaris over again_--was annihilated in a few years. Now for
the first time the battle against the Devil, whose bodily nearness they
all felt, was fought with a dark and bitter fury. In the seventeenth
century more than a million witches were burnt--alike in the Protestant
North, the Catholic South, and even the communities in America and
India. Joyless and sour are the duty-doctrines of Islam (_fikh_), with
its hard intellectuality, and the Westminster Catechisms of 1643, and
the Jansenist ethics (Jansen’s _Augustinus_, 1640) as well--for in the
realm of Loyola, too, there was of inward necessity a Puritan movement.
Religion is livingly experienced metaphysic, but the company of the
“godly,” as the Independents called themselves, and the Pythagoreans,
and the disciples of Mohammed, all alike experienced it, not with the
senses, but primarily as a concept. Parshva, who about 600 B.C. founded
the sect of the “Unfettered”[525] on the Ganges, taught, like the
other Puritans of his time, that salvation came, not from sacrifices
and rights, but only from knowledge of the identity of Atman and
Brahman. In all Puritan poetry the place of the old Gothic visions is
taken by an unbridled, yet withal jejune, spirit of allegory. In the
waking-consciousness of these ascetics the concept is the only real
power. Pascal’s wrestlings were about concepts and not, like Meister
Eckart’s, about shapes. Witches were burnt because they were proved,
and not because they were seen in the air o’ nights; the Protestant
jurists employed the witches’ hammer of the Dominicans because it was
built on concepts. The Madonnas of the early Gothic had appeared to
their suppliants, but those of Bernini no man ever saw. They exist
because they are proved--and there came to be a positive enthusiasm for
existence of this sort. Milton, Cromwell’s great secretary of state,
clothed concepts with shapes, and Bunyan brings a whole mythology of
concepts into ethical-allegorical activity. From that it is but a step
to Kant, in whose conceptual ethics the Devil assumes his final shape
as the Radically Evil.
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 religious 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. The gold tablets found in Thurii and
Petelia, which were put into the hand of the dead initiate, carried the
assurance of the god: “Happy and blessed one, thou shalt be no more a
mortal, but a god.” It is the same certainty that the Koran gave to
all believers who fought in the holy war against the infidel--“The
monasticism of Islam is the religious war,” says a hadith of the
Prophet--the same which filled Cromwell’s Ironsides when they scattered
the King’s “Philistines” and “Amalekites” at Marston Moor and Naseby.
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 Sabæan South there
were religious wars waged between Christians and Jews that involved
the world of states from Assuan to the Sassanid Empire. The Congress
of Princes at Marib[526] was attended by hardly a single pagan, and
shortly after this date South Arabia came under Persian--that is,
Mazdaist--government. 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.[527] 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 to-morrow. Most of the “Arabs” who in 717
attacked Constantinople for the first time, had been born Christians.
About 650 Byzantine literature[528] quite suddenly vanished, and the
deeper meaning of the fact has so far never been noticed--it was just
that the Arabian literature took up the tale. The soul of the Magian
Culture found at last its true expression in Islam, and therewith
became truly the “Arabian,” free thenceforth from all bondage to
the Pseudomorphosis. The Iconoclastic movement, led by Islam, but
long prepared by Monophysites and Jews, advanced to and even beyond
Byzantium, where the Syrian Leo III (717-41) raised this Puritan
movement of Islamic-Christian sects--the Paulicians about 650 and the
Bogomils later[529]--to predominance.
The great figures of Mohammed’s entourage, such as Abu Bekr and
Omar, are the near relatives of the Pyms and Hampdens of the English
Revolution, and we should see this relationship to be nearer still if
we knew more than we do about the Hanifs, the Arabian Puritans before
and about the Prophet. All of them had won out of Predestination
the guarantee that they were God’s elect. The grand Old Testament
exaltation of Parliament and the camps of Independency--which
left behind it, in many an English family, even to the nineteenth
century,[530] the belief that the English are the descendants of the
ten Lost Tribes of Israel, a nation of saints predestined to govern
the world--dominated also the emigration to America which began with
the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620. It formed that which may be called the
American religion of to-day, and bred and fostered the trait which
gives the Englishman even now his particular political insouciance,
an assurance that is essentially religious and has its roots in
predestination. The Pythagoreans themselves, too (an unheard-of thing
in the religious history of the Classical world) assumed political
power for the furtherance of religious ends and sought to advance their
puritanism from Polis to Polis. Everywhere else unit cults reigned in
unit states, each of which left the other unconcernedly to its own
religious duties; here and here only do we find a community of saints,
and their practical energy as far surpassed that of the old Orphics as
fighting Independency surpassed the spirit of the Reformation wars.
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, eighteenth-century London
and Paris.[531] “Enlightenment” is the cliché 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?
Rationalism signifies the belief in the data of critical understanding
(that is, of the “reason”) _alone_. In the Springtime men could
say “_Credo quia absurdum_,” because they were certain that the
comprehensible and the incomprehensible were _both_ necessary
constituents of the world--the nature which Giotto painted, in which
the Mystics immersed themselves, and into which reason can penetrate,
but only so far as the deity permits it to penetrate. But now a
secret jealousy breeds the notion of the Irrational--that which, as
incomprehensible, is _therefore_ valueless. It may be scorned openly
as superstition, or privily as metaphysic. Only critically-established
understanding possesses value. And secrets are merely evidences
of ignorance. The new _secretless_ religion is in its highest
potentialities called wisdom (σοφία), its priests philosophers, and
its adherents “educated” people. According to Aristotle, the old
religion is indispensable only to the uneducated,[532] and his view
is Confucius’s and Gotama Buddha’s, Lessing’s and Voltaire’s. Men go
away from Culture “back to nature,” but this nature is not something
livingly experienced, but something proved, something born of, and
accessible only to, the intellect--a Nature that has no existence at
all for a peasantry, a Nature by which one is not in the least overawed
but merely put into a condition of sensibility. Natural religion,
rational religion, Deism--all this is not lived metaphysics, but a
comprehended mechanics, called by Confucius the “Laws of Heaven” and
by Hellenism τύχη. Formerly philosophy was the handmaid of transcendent
religiousness, but now comes sensibility, and philosophy must therefore
become scientific as epistemology and critique of nature and critique
of values. No doubt there was a feeling that this philosophy was, even
so, nothing but a diluted dogmatism, for the idea that pure knowledge
was _possible_ itself involved a belief. Systems were woven out of
phenomenally guaranteed beginnings, but in the long run the result was
merely to say “Force” instead of “God,” and “Conservation of Energy”
instead of “Eternity.” Under all Classical rationalism is to be found
Olympus, under all Western the dogma of the sacraments. And so our
Western philosophy swings to and fro between religion and technical
science, and is defined thus, or thus, according as the author of the
definition is a man with some relic of priesthood still in him, or is a
pure expert and technician of thought.
“_Weltanschauung_” is the characteristic expression for an enlightened
waking-consciousness that, under the guidance of the critical
understanding, looks about it in a godless light-world and, when
sense-perceptions are found not to square with sound human reason,
treats sense as a “lying jade.” That which was once myth--the actualest
of the actual--is now subjected to the methods of what is called
Euhemerism. The learned Euhemerus, about 300 B.C., “explained” the
Classical divinities to the public that they had formerly served so
well, and the process occurs under one form or another in every “age
of enlightenment.” We have our Euhemeristic interpretations of Hell
as a guilty conscience, the Devil as evil desire, and God as the
beauty of nature, and it is the same tendency that declares itself
when Attic tomb-inscriptions of about 400 invoke, not the city-goddess
Athene, but a goddess “Demos”--a near relation, by the way, of the
Jacobins’ Goddess of Reason--and where the δαιμονίον for Socrates,
νοῦς for other philosophers, take the place of Zeus. Confucius says
“heaven” instead of “Shang-ti,” which means that he believes only
in laws of nature. The “collection” and “ordering” of the canonical
writings of China by the Confucians was a colossal act of Euhemerism,
in which actually almost all the old religious works were literally
destroyed and the residue subjected to rationalist falsification. Had
it been possible, the enlighteners of our eighteenth century would no
doubt have served the Gothic heritage in the same way.[533] 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 “religion
of educated people,” _Nature_ and _Virtue_--but this Nature is a
reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge.[534] Confucius and
Buddha, Socrates and Rousseau are at one in this. Confucius contains
little of prayer or of meditation upon the life after death, and
nothing at all of revelation. To busy oneself overmuch with sacrifices
and rites stamps one as uneducated and unreasoning. Gotama Buddha and
his contemporary Mahavira, the founder of Jainism[535]--both of whom
came from the political world of the lower Ganges, east of the old
Brahmanic Culture-field--recognized, as everyone knows, neither the
idea of God nor myth and cult. Of the real teaching of Buddha little
can now be ascertained--for it all appears in the colours of the later
fellah-religion baptized by his name--but one of the unquestionably
authentic ideas concerning “conditioned arising”[536] is the derivation
of suffering _from ignorance_--ignorance, namely, of the “Four Noble
Truths.” This is true rationalism. Nirvana, for them, is a purely
intellectual release and corresponds exactly with the “Autarkeia” and
“Eudaimonia” of the Stoics. It is that condition of the understanding
and waking-consciousness for which Being no longer is.
The great ideal of the educated of such periods is the Sage. The sage
goes back to Nature--to Ferney or Ermenonville, to Attic gardens
or Indian groves--which is the most intellectual way of being a
megalopolitan. The sage is the man of the Golden Mean. His askesis
consists in a judicious depreciation of the world in favour of
meditation. The wisdom of the enlightenment never interferes with
comfort. Moral with the great Myth to back it is always a sacrifice,
a cult, even to extremes of asceticism, even to death; but Virtue
with Wisdom at its back is a sort of secret enjoyment, a superfine
intellectual egoism. And so the ethical teacher who is outside real
religion becomes the Philistine. Buddha, Confucius, Rousseau, are
arch-Philistines, for all the nobility of their ordered ideas, and the
pedantry of the Socratic life-wisdom is insurmountable.
Along with this (shall we call it) scholasticism of sane reason, there
must of inner necessity be a rationalistic mysticism of the educated.
The Western Enlightenment is of English origin and Puritan parentage.
The rationalism of the Continent comes wholly from Locke. In opposition
to it there arose in Germany the Pietists (Herrnhut, 1700, Spener and
Francke, and in Württemberg Oetinger) and in England the Methodists
(Wesley “awakened” by Herrnhut, 1738). It was Luther and Calvin over
again--the English at once organized themselves for a world-movement
and the Germans lost themselves in mid-European conventicles. The
Pietists of Islam are to be found in _Sufism_, which is not of
“Persian” but of common Aramæan origin and in the eighth century spread
all over the Arabian world. Pietists or Methodists, too, are the Indian
lay preachers, who shortly before Buddha’s time were teaching release
from the cycle of life (_sansara_) through immersion in the identity
of Atman and Brahman. But Pietists or Methodists, too, are Lao-tse
and his disciples and--notwithstanding their rationalism--the Cynic
mendicants and itinerant preachers and the Stoic tutors, domestic
chaplains, and confessors of early Hellenism.[537] And Pietism may
ascend even to the peak of rationalist vision, of which Swedenborg is
the great example, which created for Stoics and Sufists whole worlds
of fancy, and by which Buddhism was prepared for its reconstruction
as Mahayana. The expansion of Buddhism and that of Taoism in their
original significations are closely analogous to the Methodist
expansion in America, and it is no accident that they both reached
their full maturity in those regions (lower Ganges and south of the
Yang-tse-kiang) which had cradled the respective Cultures.
VI
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 mirroring 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 are 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.
Confucianism as reasoned out by Yang-Chu concluded in this sense.
The system of Lakayata was the prolongation of the contempt for a
de-souled world which had been the common characteristic of Gotama
Buddha, Mahavira, and the contemporary Pietists, and which they in turn
had derived from Sankhya atheism. Socrates is alike the heir of the
Sophists and the ancestor of the Cynic itinerants and of Pyrrhonian
skepsis. All are manifestations of the superiority of the megalopolitan
intellect that has done with the irrational for good and all and
despises any waking-consciousness that still knows or acknowledges
mysteries. Gothic men shrank at every step before the fathomless, more
awe-inspiring still as presented in dogmatic truths. But to-day even
the Catholic has arrived at the point of feeling these dogmas as a
successful systematic exposition of the riddle of the universe. The
miracle is regarded as a physical occurrence of a higher order, and
an English bishop professes his belief in the possibility of electric
power and the power of prayer both originating in one homogeneous
nature-system.[538] The belief is belief in force and matter, even if
the words used be “God” and “world,” “Providence” and “man.”
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. That “Knowledge is Virtue” Confucius also believed,
and Buddha, and Socrates, but “Knowledge is Power” is a phrase that
possesses meaning only within the European-American Civilization.
“Return to nature” here means the elimination of all forces that
stand between the practical intelligence and nature--everywhere
else materialism has contented itself with establishing (by way of
contemplation or logic, as the case may be) supposedly simple units
whose causal play accounts for everything without any residue of
secrets, the supernatural being put down to want of knowledge. 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.
Materialism would not be complete without the need of now and again
easing the intellectual tension, by giving way to moods of myth,
by performing rites of some sort, or by enjoying with an inward
light-heartedness the charms of the irrational, the unnatural, the
repulsive, and even, if need be, the merely silly. This tendency, which
is visible enough, even to us, in the times of Meng-tse (372-289) and
in those of the first Buddhist brotherhoods, is present also (and with
the same significance) in Hellenism, of which indeed it is a leading
characteristic. About 312 poetical scholars of the Callimachus type in
Alexandria invented the Serapis-cult and provided it with an elaborate
legend. The Isis-cult in Republican Rome was something very different
both from the emperor-worship that succeeded it and from the deeply
earnest Isis-religion of Egypt; it was a religious pastime of high
society, which at times provoked public ridicule and at times led to
public scandal and the closing of the cult-centres.[539] The Chaldean
astrology was in those days a _fashion_,[540] very far removed from
the genuine Classical belief in oracles and from the Magian faith in
the might of the hour. It was “relaxation,” a “let’s pretend.” And,
over and above this, there were the numberless charlatans and fake
prophets who toured the towns and sought with their pretentious rites
to persuade the half-educated into a renewed interest in religion.
Correspondingly, we have in the European-American world of to-day
the occultist and theosophist fraud, the American Christian Science,
the untrue Buddhism of drawing-rooms, the religious arts-and-crafts
business (brisker in Germany than even in England) that caters for
groups and cults of Gothic or Late Classical or Taoist sentiment.
Everywhere it is just a toying with myths that no one really believes,
a tasting of cults that it is hoped might fill the inner void. The real
belief is always the belief in atoms and numbers, but it requires this
highbrow hocus-pocus to make it bearable in the long run. Materialism
is shallow and honest, mock-religion shallow and dishonest. But the
fact that the latter is possible at all foreshadows a new and genuine
spirit of seeking that declares itself, first quietly, but soon
emphatically and openly, in the civilized waking-consciousness.
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 Cæsarism, 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 Cæsarism 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.
Every “Age of Enlightenment” proceeds from an unlimited optimism of
the reason--always associated with the type of the megalopolitan--to
an equally unqualified scepticism. The sovereign waking-consciousness,
cut off by walls and artificialities from living nature and the
land about it and under it, cognises nothing outside itself. It
applies criticism to its imaginary world, which it has cleared of
everyday sense-experience, and continues to do so till it has found
the last and subtlest result, the form of the form--itself: namely,
nothing. With this the possibilities of physics as a critical mode
of world-understanding are exhausted, and the hunger for metaphysics
presents itself afresh. 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 naïve
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
word-jugglery), and an equally naïve heart-need reverently responding
to the myth with a cult. The forms of neither can be foreseen, still
less chosen--they appear of themselves, and as far as we are ourselves
concerned, we are as yet far distant from them.[541] But already the
opinions of Comte and Spencer, the Materialism and the Monism and the
Darwinism, which stirred the best minds of the nineteenth century to
such passion, have become the world-view proper to country cousins.
The Classical philosophy had exhausted its ground by about 250 B.C.
From that time on, “knowledge” was no longer a continually tested
and augmented stock, but a belief therein, due basically to force of
habit, but still able to convince, thanks to an old and well-tried
methodology. In the time of Socrates there had been Rationalism as the
religion of educated men, with, above it, the scholar-philosophy and,
below it, the “superstition” of the masses. Now, philosophy developed
towards an intellectual, and the popular syncretism towards a tangible,
religiousness. The tendency was the same in both, and myth-belief
and piety spread, not downwards, but upwards. Philosophy had much to
receive and little to give. The Stoa had begun in the materialism of
the Sophists and Cynics, and had explained the whole mythology on
allegorical lines, but the prayer to Zeus at table--one of the most
beautiful relics of the Classical Second Religiousness[542]--dates
from as early as Cleanthes (d. 232). In Sulla’s time there was an
upper-class Stoicism that was religious through and through, and a
popular syncretism which combined Phrygian, Syrian, and Egyptian
cults with numberless Classical mysteries that had become almost
forgotten--corresponding exactly to the development of Buddha’s
enlightened wisdom into Hinayana for the learned and Mahayana for the
masses, and to the relation between learned Confucianism and Taoism as
the vessel of Chinese syncretism which it soon became.
Contemporary with the “Positivist” Meng-tse (372-289) there suddenly
began a powerful movement towards alchemy, astrology, and occultism.
It has long been a favourite topic of dispute whether this was
something new or a recrudescence of old Chinese myth-feeling--but
a glance at Hellenism supplies the answer. This syncretism appears
“simultaneously” in the Classical, in India and China, and in popular
Islam. It starts always on rationalist doctrines--the Stoa, Lao-tse,
Buddha--and carries these through with peasant and springtime and
exotic motives of every conceivable sort. From about 200 B.C. the
Classical Syncretism--which must not be confused with that of the
later Magian Pseudomorphosis[543]--raked in motives from Orphism, from
Egypt, from Syria; from 67 B.C. the Chinese brought in Indian Buddhism
in the popular Mahayana form, and the potency of the holy writings
as charms, and the Buddha-figures as fetishes, was thought to be all
the greater for their alien origin. The original doctrine of Lao-tse
disappeared very quickly. At the beginning of Han times (_c._ A.D. 200)
the troops of the Sen had ceased to be “moral representations” and
become kindly beings. The wind-, cloud-, thunder-, and rain-gods came
back. Crowds of cults which purported to drive out the evil spirits
by the aid of the gods acquired a footing. It was in that time that
there arose--doubtless out of some basic principle of pre-Confucian
philosophy--the myth of Pan-ku, the prime principle from which the
series of mythical emperors descended. As we know, the Logos-idea
followed a similar line of development.[544]
The theory and practice of the conduct of life that Buddha taught were
the outcome of world-weariness and intellectual disgusts, and were
wholly unrelated to religious questions. And yet at the very beginning
of the Indian “Imperial” period (250 B.C.) he himself had already
become a seated god-figure; and the Nirvana-theories, comprehensible
only to the learned, were giving place more and more to solid and
tangible doctrines of heaven, hell, and salvation, which were probably
borrowed, as in other syncretisms, from an alien source--namely,
Persian Apocalyptic. Already in Asoka’s time there were eighteen
Buddhist sects. The salvation-doctrine of Mahayana found its first
great herald in the poet-scholar Asvagosha (_c._ 50 B.C.) and its
fulfilment proper in Naganjuna (_c._ A.D. 150). But side by side with
such teaching, the whole mass of proto-Indian mythology came back
into circulation. The Vishnu- and Shiva-religions were already in 300
B.C. in definite shape, and, moreover, in syncretic form, so that the
Krishna and the Rama legends were now transferred to Vishnu. We have
the same spectacle in the Egyptian New Empire, where Amen of Thebes
formed the centre of a vast syncretism, and again in the Arabian
world of the Abbassids, where the folk-religion, with its images of
Purgatory, Hell, Last Judgment, the heavenly Kaaba, Logos-Mohammed,
fairies, saints, and spooks drove pristine Islam entirely into the
background.[545]
There are still in such times a few high intellects like Nero’s tutor
Seneca and his antitype Psellus[546] the philosopher, royal tutor and
politician of Byzantium’s Cæsarism-phase; like Marcus Aurelius the
Stoic and Asoka the Buddhist, who were themselves the Cæsars;[547]
like the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton), whose deeply significant
experiment was treated as heresy and brought to naught by the powerful
Amen-priesthood--a risk that Asoka, too, had, no doubt, to face from
the Brahmins.
But Cæsarism itself, in the Chinese as in the Roman Empire, gave birth
to an emperor-cult, and thereby concentrated Syncretism. It is an
absurd notion that the veneration of the Chinese for the living emperor
is a relic of ancient religion. During the whole course of the Chinese
Culture there were no emperors at all. The rulers of the States were
called Wang (that is, kings), and scarcely a century before the final
victory of the Chinese Augustus Meng-tse wrote--in the vein of our
nineteenth century--“The people is the most important element in the
country; next come the useful gods of the soil and the crops, and least
in importance comes the ruler.” The mythology of the pristine emperors
was without doubt put together by Confucius and his contemporaries,
its constitutional and social-ethical form was dictated by their
rationalist aims, and from this myth the first Chinese Cæsar borrowed
both title and cult-idea. The elevation of men to divinity is the
full-cycle return to the springtime in which gods were converted into
heroes--exactly like these very emperors and the figures of Homer--and
it is a distinguishing trait of almost all religions of this second
degree. Confucius himself was deified in A.D. 57, with an official
cult, and Buddha had been so long before. Al Ghazali (_c._ 1050), who
helped to bring about the “Second Religiousness” of the Islamic world,
is now, in the popular belief, a divine being and is beloved as a saint
and helper. In the philosophy-schools of the Classical there was a
cult of Plato, and of Epicurus, and Alexander’s claim to descent from
Heracles and Cæsar’s to descent from Venus lead directly to the cult of
the _Divus_, in which immemorial Orphic imaginings and family religions
crop up afresh, just as the cult of Hwang-ti contains traits of the
most ancient mythology of China.
But with the coming of the emperor-cults there begins at once, in each
of the two, an attempt to bring the Second Religiousness into fixed
organizations, which, however named--sects, orders, Churches--are
always stiff re-constructions of what had been living forms of the
Springtime, and bear the same relation to these as “caste” bears to
“status.”
There are signs of the tendency even in the Augustan reforms, with
their artificial revival of long-dead city-cults, such as the
rites of the Fratres Arvales, but it is only with the Hellenistic
mystery-religions, or even with Mithraism,[548] that community or
Church organization proper begins, and its development is broken off
in the ensuing downfall of the Classical. The corresponding feature
in Egypt is the theocratic state set up by the priest-kings of Thebes
in the eleventh century. The Chinese analogue is the Tao churches of
the Han period and especially that founded by Chang-lu, which gave
rise to the fearful insurrection of the Yellow Turbans (recalling the
religious provincial rebellions of the Roman Empire), which devastated
whole regions and brought about the fall of the Han dynasty.[549] And
the very counterpart of these ascetic Churches of Taoism, with their
rigidity and wild mythology, is to be found in the late Byzantine
monk-states such as Studion and the autonomous group of monasteries on
Athos, founded in 1100, which are as suggestive of Buddhism as anything
could well be.
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,[550] 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. It matters
nothing that “Chufucianism” appeared in China (1200) as a variant of
the Confucian state-doctrine, when it appeared, and whether or not
it succeeded. Equally, it signifies nothing that Indian Buddhism,
long become a polytheistic religion of the people, went down before
Neo-Brahmanism (whose great divine, Sankhara, lived about 800), nor
is it of importance to know the date at which the latter passed over
into the Hinduism of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. There always are and
always will be a handful of superlatively intellectual, thoughtful,
and perfectly self-sufficing people, like the Brahmins in India, the
Mandarins in China, and the Egyptian priests who amazed Herodotus.
But the fellah-religion itself is once more primitive through and
through--the animal-cults of the Egyptian XXVIth dynasty; the composite
of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism that constitutes the state
religion of China; the Islam of the present-day East. The religion of
the Aztecs was very likely another case in point, for, as Cortez found
it, it seems remote indeed from the intensely intellectualized religion
of the Mayas.
VII
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 rôle save that of handmaid of the
orthodox theology. This corresponds exactly to the transition from
Middle Stoicism to the later form of the Imperial period, and to the
extinction of Chinese speculation under the Western Han Dynasty. Still
more significant is the figure of Moses Maimonides,[551] who in 1175
collected the entire dogmatic material of Judaism, as something fixed
and complete, in a great work of the type of the Chinese _Li-ki_,
entirely regardless of whether the particular items still retained
any meaning or not.[552] Neither in this period nor in any other is
Judaism unique in religious history, though from the view-point that
the Western Culture has taken up on its own ground, it may seem so. Nor
is it peculiar to Jewry that, unperceived by those who bear it, its
name is for ever changing in meaning, for the same has happened, step
by step, in the Persian story.
In their “Merovingian” period--approximately the last five centuries
before the birth of Christ--both Jewry and Persia evolve from tribal
groups into nations of Magian cast, without land, without unity of
origin, and (even so soon) with the characteristic ghetto mode of life
that endures unchanged to-day for the Jews of Brooklyn and the Parsees
of Bombay alike.
In the Springtime (first five centuries of the Christian era) this
landless Consensus spread geographically from Spain to Shantung. This
was the Jewish Age of Chivalry and its “Gothic” blossoming-time of
religious creative-force. The later Apocalyptic, the Mishnah, and also
primitive Christianity (which was not cast off till after Trajan’s and
Hadrian’s time) are creations of this nation. It is well known that in
those days the Jews were peasants, artisans, and dwellers in little
towns, and “big business” was in the hands of Egyptians, Greeks, and
Romans--that is, members of the Classical world.
About 500[553] begins the Jewish Baroque, which Western observers are
accustomed to regard, very one-sidedly, as part of the picture of
Spain’s age of glory. 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. Tarragona, Toledo, and Granada are predominantly Jewish
cities. Jews constitute an essential element in Moorish high society.
Their finished forms, their _esprit_, their knightliness, amazed the
Gothic nobility of the Crusades, which tried to imitate them; but the
diplomacy also, and the war-management and the administration of the
Moorish cities would all have been unthinkable without the Jewish
aristocracy, which was every whit as thoroughbred as the Islamic.
As once in Arabia there had been a Jewish _Minnesang_, so now here
there was a high literature of enlightened science. It was under the
guidance of the Rabbi Isaac Hassan, and by the hand of Jewish and
Islamic as well as Christian savants, that Alfonso X’s new work on
the planets was prepared (_c._ 1250);[554] in other words, it was an
achievement of Magian and not of Faustian world-thought.[555] But
Spain and Morocco after all contained but a very small fraction of
the Jewish Consensus, and even this Consensus itself had not merely a
worldly but also (and predominantly) a spiritual significance. In it,
too, there occurred a Puritan movement, which rejected the Talmud and
tried to get back to the pure Torah. The community of the Qaraites,
preceded by many a forerunner, arose about 760 in northern Syria, the
selfsame area which gave birth a century earlier to the Paulician
iconoclasts and a century later to the Sufism of Islam--three Magian
tendencies whose inner relationship is unmistakable. The Qaraites, like
the Puritans of all other Cultures, were combated by both orthodoxy
and enlightenment. Rabbinical counterblasts appeared from Cordova
and Fez to southern Arabia and Persia. But in that period appeared
also--an outcome of “Jewish Sufism,” and suggestive in places of
Swedenborg--the _chef-d’œuvre_ of rational mysticism, the Yesirah,
germane in its Kabbalistic root-ideas to Byzantine image-symbolism
and the contemporary magic of Greek “second-degree Christianity,” and
equally so to the folk-religion of Islam.
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 lived 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_. Into all the
hamlets and country towns the Jewish Consensus built its essentially
megalopolitan--proletarian--ghettos. The _Judengasse_ is a thousand
years in advance of the Gothic town. Just so, in Jesus’s days,
the Roman towns stood in the midst of the villages on the Lake of
Genesareth.
But these young nations were, besides, bound up with the soil and the
idea of a fatherland, and the landless “Consensus,” which was cemented,
not by deliberate organization, but by a wholly unconscious, wholly
metaphysical impulse--an expression of the Magian world-feeling in its
simplest and directest form--appeared to them as something uncanny
and incomprehensible. It was in this period that the legend of the
Wandering Jew arose. It meant a good deal for a Scottish monk to visit
a Lombard monastery, and nostalgia soon took him home again, but when
a rabbi of Mainz--in 1000 the seat of the most important Talmudic
seminary of the West--or of Salerno betook himself to Cairo or Merv
or Basra, he was at home in every ghetto. In this tacit cohesion lay
the very idea of the Magian nation[556]--although the contemporary
West was unaware of the fact, it was for the Jews, as for the Greeks
of the period and the Parsees and Islam, State and Church and people
all in one. This State had its own jurisprudence and (what Christians
never perceived) its own public life,[557] and despised the surrounding
world of the host-peoples as a sort of outland; and it was a veritable
treason-trial that expelled Spinoza and Uriel Acosta--an event of which
these host-peoples could not possibly grasp the under meaning. And in
1799 the leading thinker among the Eastern Hasidim, Senior Salman, was
handed over by the rabbinical opposition to the Petersburg Government
as though to a foreign state.
Jewry of the West-European group had entirely lost the relation to
the open land which had still existed in the Moorish period of Spain.
There were no more peasants. The smallest ghetto was a fragment,
however miserable, of megalopolis, and its inhabitants (like those
of hardened India and China) split into castes--the Rabbi is the
Brahmin or Mandarin of the ghetto--and a coolie-mass characterized
by civilized, cold, superior intelligence and an undeviating eye to
business. But this phenomenon, again, is not unique if our historical
sense takes in the wider horizon, for _all_ Magian nations have been in
this condition since the Crusade period. The Parsee in India possesses
exactly the same business-power as the Jews in the European-American
world and the Armenians and Greeks in southern Europe. The same
phenomenon occurs in every other Civilization, when it pushes into a
younger _milieu_--witness the Chinese in California (where they are the
targets of a true Anti-Semitism of western America), in Java, and in
Singapore; that of the Indian trader in East Africa; and that of _the
Romans in the Early Arabian World_. In the last instance, indeed, the
conditions were the exact reverse of those of to-day, for the “Jews” of
those days were the Romans, and the Armæan felt for them an apocalyptic
hatred that is very closely akin to our West-European Anti-Semitism.
The outbreak of 88, in which, at a sign from Mithridates, a hundred
thousand Roman business-people were murdered by the exasperated
population of Asia Minor, was a veritable _pogrom_.
Over and above these oppositions there was that of race, which
passed from contempt into hate in proportion as the Western Culture
itself caught up with the Civilization and the “difference of
age,” expressed in the way of life and the increasing primacy of
intelligence, became smaller. But all this has nothing to do with the
silly catchwords “Aryan” and “Semite” that have been borrowed from
philology. The “Aryan” Persians and Armenians are in our eyes entirely
indistinguishable from the Jews, and even in South Europe and the
Balkans there is almost no bodily difference between the Christian
and Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish nation is, like every other nation
of the Arabian Culture, the result of an immense _mission_, and up to
well within the Crusades it was changed and changed again by accessions
and secessions _en masse_.[558] One part of Eastern Jewry conforms
in bodily respects to the Christian inhabitants of the Caucasus,
another to the South-Russian Tatars, and a large portion of Western
Jewry to the North African Moors. What has mattered in the West more
than any other distinction is the difference _between the race-ideal
of the Gothic springtime_,[559] which has bred its human type, and
that of the Sephardic Jew, which first formed itself in the ghettos
of the West and was likewise the product of a particular spiritual
breeding and training under exceedingly hard external conditions--to
which, doubtless, we must add the effectual spell of the land and
people about him, and his metaphysical defensive reaction to that
spell, especially after the loss of the Arabic language had made this
part of the nation a self-contained world. This feeling of being
“different” is the more potent on both sides, the more breed the
individual possesses. It is _want_ of race, and nothing else, that
makes intellectuals--philosophers, doctrinaires, Utopists--incapable
of understanding the depth of this metaphysical hatred, which is the
beat-difference of two currents of being manifested as an unbearable
dissonance, a hatred that may become tragic for both, the same hatred
as has dominated the Indian Culture in setting the Indian of race
against the Sudra. During the Gothic age this difference is deep and
religious, and the object of hatred is the Consensus as religion;
only with the beginning of the Western Civilization does it become
materialist, and begin to attack Jewry on its intellectual and business
sides, on which the West suddenly finds itself confronted by an even
challenger.
But the deepest element of separation and bitterness has been one of
which the full tragedy has been least understood. While Western man,
from the days of the Saxon emperors to the present, has (in the most
significant sense of the words) _lived_ his history, and lived it with
a consciousness of it that no other Culture can parallel, the Jewish
Consensus ceased to have a history at all.[560] Its problems were
solved, its inner form was complete, conclusive, and unalterable. For
it, as for Islam, the Greek Church, and the Parsees, centuries ceased
to mean anything, and consequently no one belonging inwardly to the
Consensus can even begin to comprehend the passion with which Faustians
livingly experience the short crowded epochs in which their history
and destiny take decisive turns--the beginning of the Crusades, the
Reformation, the French Revolution, the German Wars of Liberation,
and each and every turning-point in the existence of the several
peoples. All this, for the Jew, lies thirty generations back. Outside
him history on the grand style flowed on and past. Epochs succeeded
to epochs, every century witnessed fundamental human changes, but in
the ghetto and in the souls of its denizens all stood still. And even
when he regarded himself as a member of the people amongst whom he
sojourned and took part in their good and evil fortune--as happened in
so many countries in 1914--he lived these experiences, not really as
something _his own_, but as a partisan, a supporter; he judged them
as an interested spectator, and hence it is just the deepest meanings
of the struggle that must ever remain hidden from him. A Jewish
cavalry-general fought in the Thirty Years’ War (he lies buried in the
old Jewish cemetery at Prague[561])--but what did the ideas of Luther
or Loyola mean to him? What did the Byzantines--near relatives of the
Jews--comprehend of the Crusades? Such things are among the tragic
necessities of the higher history that consists in the life-courses
of individual Cultures, and often have they repeated themselves. The
Romans, then an ageing people, cannot possibly have understood what
was at issue for the Jews in the trial of Jesus or the rising of
Barcochebas.[562] The European-American world has displayed a complete
incomprehension of the fellah-revolutions of Turkey (1908) and China
(1911); the inner life and thought of these peoples, and consequently,
even their notions of state and sovereignty (the Caliph in the one, the
Son of Heaven in the other) being of an utterly different cast and,
therefore, a sealed book, the course of events could neither be weighed
up, nor even reckoned upon in advance. The member of an alien Culture
can be a spectator, and therefore also a descriptive historian of the
past, but he can never be a statesman, a man who feels the future
working in him. If he does not possess the material power to enable
him to act in the cadre of his own Culture, ignoring or manipulating
those of the alien (which, of course, may occur, as with the Romans
in the young East or Disraeli in England), he stands helpless in the
midst of events. The Roman and the Greek always mentally projected the
life-conditions of his Polis into the alien event; the modern European
always regards alien Destinies in terms of constitution, parliament,
and democracy, although the application of such ideas to other Cultures
is ridiculous and meaningless; and the Jew of the Consensus follows
the history of the present (which is nothing but that of the Faustian
Civilization spread over continents and oceans) with the fundamental
feelings of Magian mankind, even when he himself is firmly convinced of
the Western character of his thought.
As every Magian Consensus is non-territorial and geographically
unlimited, it involuntarily sees in all conflicts concerning the
_Faustian_ ideas of fatherland, mother tongue, ruling house, monarchy,
constitution, a return from forms that are thoroughly alien (therefore
burdensome and meaningless) to him towards forms matching with his own
nature. Hence the word “international,” whether it be coupled with
socialism, pacificism, or capitalism, can excite him to enthusiasm,
but what he hears in that word is _the essence of his landless and
boundless Consensus_. While for the European-American democracy
constitutional struggles and revolutions mean an evolution towards the
Civilized ideal, for him they mean (as he almost never consciously
realizes) the breaking-down of all that is of other build than himself.
Even when the force of the Consensus in him is broken and the life
of his host-people exercises an outward attraction upon him to the
point of an induced patriotism, yet the party that he supports is
always that of which the aims are most nearly comparable with the
Magian essence. Hence in Germany he is a democrat and in England
(like the Parsee in India) an imperialist. It is exactly the same
misunderstanding as when West Europeans regard Young Turks and Chinese
reformers as kindred spirits--that is, as “constitutionalists.” If
there is inward relationship, a man affirms even where he destroys; if
inward alienness, his effect is negative even where his desire is to be
constructive. What the Western Culture has destroyed, by reform-efforts
of its own type where it has had power, hardly bears thinking of; and
Jewry has been equally destructive where it has intervened. The sense
of the inevitableness of this reciprocal misunderstanding leads to the
appalling hatred that settles deep in the blood and, fastening upon
visible marks like race, mode of life, profession, speech, leads both
sides to waste, ruin, and bloody excesses wherever these conditions
occur.[563]
This applies also, and above all, to the religiousness of the Faustian
world, which feels itself to be threatened, hated, and undermined by
an alien metaphysic in its midst. From the reforms of Hugh of Cluny
and St. Bernard and the Lateran Council of 1215 to Luther, Calvin, and
Puritanism and thence to the Age of Enlightenment, what a tide flowed
through our waking-consciousness, when for the Jewish religion history
had long ceased altogether! Within the West-European Consensus we see
Joseph Qaro in his _Schulehan Arukh_ (1565) restating the Maimonides
material in another form, and this could equally well have been
done in 1400 or 1800, or for that matter not at all. In the fixity
of modern Islam of Byzantine Christianity since the Crusades (and,
equally, of the life of Late China and of Late Egypt) all is formal
and rolled even, not only the food-prohibitions, the prayer-runes, the
phylacteries, but also the Talmudic casuistry, which is fundamentally
the same as that applied for centuries to the Vendidad in Bombay and
the Koran in Cairo. The mysticism, too, of Jewry (which is _pure
Sufism_) has remained, like that of Islam, unaltered since the
Crusades; and in the last centuries it has produced three more saints
in the sense of Oriental Sufism--though to recognize them as such we
have to see through a colour-wash of Western thought-forms. Spinoza,
with his thinking in substances instead of forces and his thoroughly
Magian dualism, is entirely comparable with the last stragglers of
Islamic philosophy such as Murtada and Shirazi. He makes use of the
notions of his Western Baroque armoury, living himself into mode of
imagination of that _milieu_ so thoroughly as to deceive even himself,
but below the surface movements of his soul he remains the unchanged
descendant of Maimonides and Avicenna and Talmudic “_more geometrico_”
methodology. In Baal Shem, the founder of the Hasidim sect (born in
Volhynia about 1698), a true Messiah arose. His wanderings through
the world of the Polish ghettos teaching and performing miracles are
comparable only with the story of primitive Christianity;[564] here
was a movement that had its sources in ancient currents of Magian,
Kabbalistic mysticism, that gripped a large part of Eastern Jewry and
was undoubtedly a potent fact in the religious history of the Arabian
Culture; and yet, running its course as it did in the midst of an alien
mankind, it passed practically unnoticed by it. The peaceful battle
that Baal Shem waged for God-immanent against the Talmudic pharisees
of his time, his Christlike figure, the wealth of legends that were
rapidly woven about his person and the persons of his disciples--all
this is of the pure Magian spirit, and at bottom as alien to us of
the West as primitive Christianity itself. The thought-processes of
Hasidist writings are to non-Jews practically unintelligible, and so
also is the ritual. In the excitement of the service some fall into
convulsions and others begin to dance like the dervishes of Islam.[565]
The original teaching of Baal Shem was developed by one of the
disciples in Zaddikism, and this too, which was a belief in successive
divine embassies of saints (Zaddiks), whose mere proximity brought
salvation, has obvious kinship with Islamic Mahdism and still more with
the Shiite doctrine of the imams in whom the “Light of the Prophet”
takes up its abode. Another disciple, Solomon Maimon--of whom a
remarkable autobiography exists--stepped from Baal Shem to Kant (whose
abstract kind of thought has always possessed an immense attraction for
Talmudic intellects). The third is Otto Weininger, whose moral dualism
is a purely Magian conception and whose death in a spiritual struggle
of essentially Magian experience is one of the noblest spectacles ever
presented by a Late religiousness.[566] Something of the sort Russians
may be able to experience, but neither the Classical nor the Faustian
soul is capable of it.
In the “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century the Western Culture
in turn becomes megalopolitan and intellectual, and so, suddenly,
accessible to the intelligentsia of the Consensus. And the latter, thus
dumped into the middle of an epoch corresponding, for them, to the
remote past of a long-expired Sephardic life-current, were inevitably
stirred by echo-feelings, but these echoes were of the _critical and
negative side only_, and the tragically unnatural outcome was that
a cohesion already historically complete and incapable of organic
progress was swept into the big movement of the host-peoples, which
it shook, loosened, displaced, and vitiated to its depths. For, for
the Faustian spirit, the Enlightenment was a step forward along its
own road--a step over débris, no doubt, but still affirmative at
bottom--whereas for Jewry it was destruction and nothing else, the
demolition of an alien structure that it did not understand. And
this is why we so often see the spectacle--paralleled by the case
of the Parsees in India, of the Chinese and Japanese in a Christian
_milieu_, and by modern Americans in China--of enlightenment, pushed
to the point of cynicism and unqualified atheism, opposing an alien
religion, while the fellah-practices of its own folk go on wholly
unaffected. There are Socialists who superficially--and yet quite
sincerely--combat every sort of religion, and yet in their own case
follow the food-prohibitions and routine prayers and phylacteries
with an anxious exactitude. More frequent actually is inward lapse
from the Consensus qua creed--the spectacle that is presented to us
by the Indian student who, after an English university-training in
Locke and Mill, acquires the same cynical contempt for Indian and
Western faiths alike and must himself be crushed under the ruins of
both. Since the Napoleonic era the old-civilized Consensus has mingled
unwelcome with the new-civilized Western “society” of the cities and
has taken their economic and scientific methods into use with the cool
superiority of age. A few generations later, the Japanese, also a very
old intellect, did the same, and probably with still greater success.
Yet another example is afforded by the Carthaginians, a rear-guard of
the Babylonian Civilization, who, already highly developed when the
Classical Culture was still in the Etrusco-Doric infancy, ended by
surrendering to Late Hellenism[567]--petrified in an end-state in all
that concerned religion and art, but far superior to the Greeks and
Romans as men of business, and hated accordingly.
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 of Jewry--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.[568] The
relic of the Byzantine nation, the modern Greeks, also occupy their
own land. The relic of the Parsees in India dwells in the midst of
the stiffened forms of a yet older and more fellahized Civilization
and is thereby secured in its footing. 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
ghetto, it is fragmented and faced with dissolution. But that is a
Destiny, not _in_ the Faustian Culture, but of the Magian.
CHAPTER X
THE STATE
(A)
THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES--NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD
I[569]
A fathomless secret of the cosmic flowings that we call Life is their
separation into two sexes. Already in the earth-bound existence-streams
of the plant world they are trying to part from one another, as
the symbol of the flower tells us--into a something that _is_ this
existence and a something that keeps it going. Animals are free, little
worlds in a big world--the cosmic--closed off as microcosms and set
up against the macrocosm. And, more and more decisively as the animal
kingdom unfolds its history, the dual direction of dual being, of the
masculine and the feminine, manifests itself.
The feminine stands closer to the Cosmic. It is rooted deeper in the
earth and it is immediately involved in the grand cyclic rhythms
of Nature. The masculine is freer, more animal, more mobile--as to
sensation and understanding as well as otherwise--more awake and more
tense.
The male livingly experiences Destiny, and he _comprehends_ Causality,
the causal logic of the Become. The female, on the contrary, _is
herself_ Destiny and Time and the organic logic of the Becoming, and
for that very reason the principle of Causality is for ever alien to
her. Whenever Man has tried to give Destiny any tangible form, he
has felt it as of feminine form, and he has called it Moirai, Parcæ,
Norns. The supreme deity is never itself Destiny, but always either its
representative or its master--just as man represents or controls woman.
Primevally, too, woman is the seeress, and not because she knows the
future, but because she _is_ the future. The priest merely interprets
the oracle; the woman is the oracle itself, and it is Time that speaks
through her.
The man _makes_ History, the woman _is_ History. Here, strangely
clear yet enigmatic still, we have a dual significance of all living
happenings--on the one hand we sense cosmic flow as such, and on
the other hand the chain and train of successive individuals brings
us back to the microcosms themselves as the recipients, containers,
and preservers of the flowing. It is this “second” history that is
characteristically masculine--political, social, more conscious, freer,
and more agitated than the other. It reaches back deep into the animal
world, and receives highest symbolic and world-historical expression
in the life-courses of the great Cultures. Feminine, on the contrary,
is the primary, the eternal, the maternal, the plantlike (for the
plant ever has something female in it), _the cultureless history of
the generation-sequence_, which never alters, but uniformly and stilly
passes through the being of all animal and human species, through all
the short-lived individual Cultures. In retrospect, it is synonymous
with Life itself. This history, too, is not without its battles and
its tragedies. Woman in childbed wins through to her victory. The
Aztecs--the Romans of the Mexican Culture--honoured the woman in labour
as a battling warrior, and if she died, she was interred with the same
formulæ as the fallen hero. Policy for Woman is eternally the conquest
of the Man, through whom she can become mother of children, through
whom she can become History and Destiny and Future. The target of her
profound shyness, her tactical finesse, is ever the father of her son.
The man, on the contrary, whose centre of gravity lies essentially in
the other kind of History, wants that son as _his_ son, as inheritor
and carrier of his blood and historical tradition.
Here, in man and in woman, _the two kinds of History_ are fighting for
power. Woman is strong and wholly what she is, and she experiences
the Man and the Sons only in relation to herself and her ordained
rôle. In the masculine being, on the contrary, there is a certain
contradiction; he is this man, and he is something else besides, which
woman neither understands nor admits, which she feels as robbery
and violence upon that which to her is holiest. This secret and
fundamental war of the sexes has gone on ever since there were sexes,
and will continue--silent, bitter, unforgiving, pitiless--while they
continue. In it, too, there are policies, battles, alliances, treaties,
treasons. Race-feeling of love and hate, which originate in depths of
world-yearning and primary instincts of directedness, prevail between
the sexes--and with a still more uncanny potency than in the other
History that takes place between man and man. There are love-lyrics
and war-lyrics, love-dances and weapon-dances, there are two kinds of
tragedy--_Othello_ and _Macbeth_. But nothing in the political world
even begins to compare with the abysses of a Clytæmnestra’s or a
Kriemhild’s vengeance.
And so woman despises that other History--man’s politics--which she
never comprehends, and of which all that she sees is that it takes her
sons from her. What for her is a triumphant battle that annihilates
the victories of a thousand childbeds? Man’s history sacrifices
woman’s history to itself, and no doubt there is a female heroism too,
that proudly brings the sons to the sacrifice (Catherine Sforza on
the walls of Imola), but nevertheless there was and is and ever will
be a secret politic of the woman--of the female of the animal world
even--that seeks to draw away her male from his kind of history and
to weave him body and soul into her own plantlike history of generic
succession--that is, into herself. And yet all that is accomplished in
the man-history is accomplished under the battle-cries of hearth and
home, wives and children, race and the like, and its very object is
the covering and upholding of this history of birth and death. The
conflict of man and man is ever on account of the blood, of woman.
_Woman, as Time, is that for which there is history at all._
The woman with race in her feels this even when she does not know it.
She is Destiny, she plays Destiny. The play begins with the fight of
men for the possession of her--Helen, and the tragedy of Carmen, and
Catherine II, and the story of Napoleon and Désirée Clary, who in the
end took Bernadotte over to the side of his enemies--and it is not a
human play only, for this fight begins down in the animal world and
fills the history of whole species. And it culminates in her swaying,
as mother or wife or mistress, the Destiny of empires--Hallgerd in the
Njal saga, the Frankish queen Brunhilde, Marozia who gave the Holy See
to men of her choice. The man climbs up in _his_ history until he has
the future of a country in his hands--and then woman comes and forces
him to his knees. Peoples and states may go down in ruin over it, but
she in _her_ history has conquered. This, in the last analysis, is
always the aim of political ambition in a woman of race.[570]
Thus history has two meanings, neither to be blasphemed. It is cosmic
or politic, it _is_ being or it _preserves_ being. There are two
sorts of Destiny, two sorts of war, two sorts of tragedy--_public
and private_. Nothing can eliminate this duality from the world.
It is radical, founded in the essence of the animal that is both
microcosm and participant in the cosmic. It appears at all significant
conjunctures in the form of a conflict of duties, which exists only
for the man, not for the woman, and in the course of a higher Culture
it is never overcome, but only deepened. There are public life and
private life, public law and private law, communal cults and domestic
cults. As Estate,[571] Being is “in form” for the one history; as race,
breed, it is in flow as _itself_ the other history. This is the old
German distinction between the “sword side” and the “spindle side” of
blood-relationships. The double significance of directional Time finds
its highest expression in the ideas of _the State_ and _the Family_.
The ordering of the family is in living material what the form of the
house is in dead.[572] A change in the structure and import of family
life, and the plan of the house changes also. To the Classical mode
of housing corresponds the agnate family of Classical style. This
is ever more sharply defined in Hellenic city-law than in the later
Roman.[573] It refers entirely to the Estate as present in a Euclidean
here-and-now, just as the Polis is conceived as an aggregate of bodies
availably present. Blood-relationship, therefore, is neither necessary
nor sufficient for it; it ceases at the limit of _patria potestas_,
of the “house.” The mother as such is not agnatically related to the
offspring of her own body; only in so far as, like them, she is subject
to the _patria potestas_ of her living husband is she the agnatic
sister of her children.[574] To the “Consensus,” on the other hand,
corresponds the Magian cognate family (Hebrew, “_Mishpasha_”) which
is representatively extended by both the paternal _and_ the maternal
blood-relationships, and possesses a “spirit,” a little consensus, of
its own, but no special head.[575] It is significant of the extinction
of the Classical soul and the unfolding of the Magian that the “Roman”
law of Imperial times gradually passes from _agnatio_ to _cognatio_.
Justinian’s 118th and 127th novels reforming the law of inheritance
affirm the victory of the Magian family-idea.[576]
On the other side, we see masses of individual beings streaming past,
growing and passing, but _making_ history. The purer, deeper, stronger,
more taken-for-granted the common beat of these sequent generations is,
the more blood, the more race they have. Out of the infinite they rise,
every one with its soul,[577] bands that feel themselves in the common
wave-beat of their being, as a whole--not mind-communities like orders,
craft-guilds, or schools of learning, which are linked by common
truths, but blood-confederates in the mêlée of fighting life.
There are streams of being which are “in form” in the same sense
in which the term is used in sports. A field of steeplechasers is
“in form” when the legs swing surely over the fences, and the hoofs
beat firmly and rhythmically on the flat. When wrestlers, fencers,
ball-players are “in form,” the riskiest acts and moves come off easily
and naturally. An art-period is in form when its tradition is second
nature, as counterpoint was to Bach. An army is in form when it is like
the army of Napoleon at Austerlitz and the army of Moltke at Sedan.
Practically everything that has been achieved in world-history, in
war and in that continuation of war by intellectual means[578] that
we call politics; in all successful diplomacy, tactics, strategy; in
the competition of states or social classes or parties; has been the
product of living unities that found themselves “in form.”
The word for race- or breed-education is “training” (_Zucht_,
_Züchtung_), as against the shaping (_Bildung_) which creates
communities of waking-consciousness on a basis of uniform teachings or
beliefs. Books, for example, are shaping agents, while the constant
felt pulse and harmony of _milieu_ into which one feels oneself,
_lives_ oneself--like a novice or a page of early Gothic times--are
training influences. The “good form” and ceremonies of a given society
are sense-presentations of the beat of a given species of Being, and
to master them one must _have_ the beat of them. Hence women, as
more instinctive and nearer to cosmic rhythms, adapt themselves more
readily than men to the forms of a new _milieu_. Women from the bottom
strata move in elegant society with entire certainty after a few
years--and sink again as quickly. But men alter slowly, because they
are more awake and aware. The proletarian man never becomes wholly an
aristocrat, the aristocrat never wholly a proletarian--only in the sons
does the beat of the new _milieu_ make its appearance.
The profounder the form, the stricter and more repellent it is. To the
outsider, therefore, it appears to be a slavery; the member, on the
contrary, has a perfect and easy command of it. The Prince de Ligne
was, no less than Mozart, master of the form and not its slave; and the
same holds good of _every_ born aristocrat, statesman, and captain.
In all high Cultures, therefore, there is a _peasantry_, which is
breed, stock, in the broad sense (and thus to a certain extent nature
herself), and a _society_ which is assertively and emphatically “in
form.” It is a set of classes or Estates, and no doubt artificial
and transitory. But the history of these classes and estates is
_world-history at highest potential_. It is only in relation to it that
the peasant is seen as historyless. The whole broad and grand history
of these six millennia has accomplished itself in the life-courses of
the high Cultures, _because_ these Cultures themselves placed their
creative foci in Estates possessing breed and training, and so in the
course of fulfilment became trained and bred. A Culture is Soul that
has arrived at self-expression in sensible forms, but these forms are
living and evolving.[579] Their matrix is in the intensified Being of
individuals or groups--that is, in that which I have just called Being
“in form.” And when, and not until, this Being is sufficiently formed
to that high rightness, it becomes representative of a representable
Culture.[580]
This Culture is not only a grand thing, but wholly unlike any other
thing in the organic world. It is the one point at which man lifts
himself above the powers of Nature and becomes himself a Creator.
Even as to race, breed, he is Nature’s creature--he _is_ bred. But,
as Estate, he breeds himself just as he breeds the noble kinds of
animal-plant with which he surrounds himself--and that process, too, is
in the deepest and most final sense “Culture.” Culture and class[581]
are interchangeable expressions; they arise together and they vanish
together. The breeding of select types of wines or fruit or flowers,
the breeding of blood horses, _is_ Culture, and the culture, in exactly
the same sense, of the human élite arises as the expression of a Being
that has brought itself into high “form.”
For that very reason, there is found in every Culture a sharp sense
of whether this or that man belongs thereto or not. The Classical
notion of the Barbarian, the Arabian of the Unbeliever (Amhaarez,
Giaour), the Indian of the Sudra--however differently the lines of
cleavage were arrived at--are alike in that the words do not primarily
express contempt or hatred, but establish that there are differences
in pulse of Being which set an impassable barrier against all contacts
on the deeper levels. This perfectly clear and unambiguous idea has
been obscured by the Indian concept of a “fourth caste,” which caste,
as we know now, has never existed at all.[582] The Code of Manu,
with its celebrated regulations for the treatment of the Sudra, is
the outcome of the fully developed state of fellahdom in his India,
and--irrespective of practical actualities under either existing or
even obtainable legislation--described the misty idea of Brahmanism
by the negative mode of dealing with its opposite, very much as the
Late Classical philosophy used the notion of the working Banausos. The
one has led us into misunderstanding caste as a specifically Indian
phenomenon, the other to a basically false idea of the attitude of
Classical man towards work.
In all such cases what really confronts us is the _residue_ which does
not count for the inward life of the Culture and its symbolism, and
is in principle left out of every really significant classification,
somewhat as the “outcast” is ignored in the far East. The Gothic
expression “_corpus christianum_” indicates explicitly in its very
terms that the Jewish Consensus does not belong to it. In the Arabian
Culture the other-believer is merely tolerated within the respective
domains of the Jewish, the Persian, the Christian, and, above all, the
Islamic, nations, and contemptuously left to his own administration and
his own jurisdiction. In the Classical World it was not only barbarians
that were “outcasts”--so also in a measure were slaves, and especially
the relics of the autochthonous population like the Penestæ in Thessaly
and the Helots of Sparta, whom their masters treated in a way that
reminds us of the conduct of the Normans in Anglo-Saxon England and
the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East. The Code of Manu preserves,
as designations of Sudra classes, the names of ancient peoples of the
“Colonial” region of the Lower Ganges. (As Magadha is amongst them,
Buddha himself may have been a Sudra, like the “Cæsar” Asoka, whose
grandfather Chandragupta was of the most humble origin.) Others are
names of callings, and this again reminds us that also in the West and
elsewhere certain callings were outcast--the beggars, for example (who
in Homer are a class), smiths, singers, and the professional poor, who
have been bred literally _en masse_ by the _caritas_ of the Church and
the benevolence of laymen in the Early Gothic.
But, in sum, “caste” is a word that has been at least as much abused as
it has been used. There were no castes in the Old and Middle Kingdoms
of Egypt, nor in India before Buddha, nor in China before Han times. It
is only in very Late conditions that they appear, and then we find them
in all Cultures. From the XXIst Dynasty onwards (_c._ 1100 B.C.) Egypt
was in the hands, now of the Theban priest-caste, now of the Libyan
warrior-caste; and thereafter the hardening process went on steadily
till the time of Herodotus--whose view of the conditions of his day
as characteristically Egyptian is just as inaccurate as our view of
those prevailing in India. _The distinction between Estate and Caste is
that between earliest Culture and latest Civilization._ In the rise of
the prime Estates--noble and priest--the Culture is unfolding itself,
while the castes are the expression of its definitive fellah-state.
The Estate is the most living of all, Culture launched on the path of
fulfilment, “the form that living must itself unfold.”[583] The caste
is absolute finished-ness, the phase in which development has been
succeeded by immutable fixation.
But the great Estates are something quite different from
_occupation-groups_ like those of artisans, officials, artists, which
are professionally held together by technical tradition and the spirit
of their work. They are, in fact, _emblems in flesh and blood_, whose
entire being, as phenomenon, as attitude, and as mode of thought,
possesses symbolic meaning. Within every Culture, moreover--while
peasantry is a piece of pure nature and growth and, therefore, a
completely _impersonal_ manifestation--nobility and priesthood are
the results of high breeding and forming and therefore express a
_thoroughly personal Culture_, which, by the height of its form,
rejects not merely barbarians, but presently also all who are not of
their status, as a _residue_--regarded by the nobility as the “people”
and by clergy as the “laity.” And this _style of personality_ is
the material that, when the fellah-age arrives, petrifies into the
type of a caste, which thereafter endures unaltered for centuries.
As in the living Culture race and estate are in antithesis as the
impersonal and the personal, in fellah-times _the mass and the caste_,
the coolie and the Brahmin, _are in antithesis as the formless and
the formal_. The living form has become formula, still possessing
style, but possessing it as stylistic rigidity. This petrified style
of the caste is of an extreme subtlety, dignity, and intellectuality,
and feels itself infinitely superior to the developing mankind of a
Culture--we can hardly form an idea of the lofty height from which the
Mandarin or the Brahmin looks down upon European thoughts and actions,
or how fundamentally the Egyptian priest must have despised a visiting
Pythagoras or Plato. It moves impassive through time with the Byzantine
dignity of a soul that has left all its problems and enigmas far behind
it.
II
In the Carolingian pre-Culture men distinguished _Knechte_, _Freie_,
and _Edle_. This is a primitive differentiation based merely on the
facts of external life. But in Early Gothic times it runs:
God hath shapen lives three,
Boor and knight and priest they be.[584]
Here we have status-differences of a high Culture that has just
awakened. And the stole and the sword stand together in face of the
plough in strongest assertiveness as estates _vis-à-vis_ the rest,
the Non-Estate, that which, like themselves, is fact, but, unlike
themselves, fact without deeper significance. The separation, inward
and felt, is so destined, so potent, that no understanding can ignore
it. Hatred wells up out of the villages, contempt flashes back from the
castles. Neither possession nor power nor calling produced this abyss
between the “lives.” Logical justification for it there is none. It is
metaphysical nature.
Later, with the cities, but younger than they, _burgherdom,
bourgeoisie_, arises as the “Third Estate.” The burgher, too, now
looks with contempt upon the countryside, which lies about him dull,
unaltered, and patient, and in contrast to which he feels himself more
awake and freer and therefore further advanced on the road of the
Culture. He despises also the primary estates, “squire and parson,” as
something lying intellectually below him and historically behind him.
Yet, as compared with these two, the burgher is, as the boor was, a
residue, a non-estate. In the minds of the “privileged” the peasant
hardly now counts at all--the burgher counts, but as an opposite and a
background. He is the foil against which the others become conscious
of their own significance and of the fact that this significance is
something lying outside all practical considerations. When we find that
in all Cultures the same occurs in exactly the same form, and that,
however different the symbolism of one Culture from that of another,
their history fulfils itself everywhere in and by opposition of these
groups--impulsive peasant wars in the Springtime, intellectually-based
_civil_ wars in the later period--then it is evident that the meaning
of the facts must be looked for in the deepest foundations of Life
itself.
It is an _idea_ that lies at the base of these two prime Estates, and
only these. It gives them the potent feeling of a rank derived from
a divine investiture and therefore beyond all criticism--a standing
which imposes self-respect and self-consciousness, but the sternest
self-discipline as well (and death itself if need be), as a duty and
imbues both with the historical superiority, the soul-magic, that does
not draw upon power but actually generates it. Those who--inwardly,
and not merely nominally--belong to these Estates are _actually_
something other than the residue; their lives, in contrast to those of
burgher and peasant, are sustained in every part by a symbolic dignity.
These lives do not exist in order to be merely lived, but to have
meaning. It is the two sides of all freely moving life that come to
expression in these Estates; _the one is wholly being, the other wholly
waking-consciousness_.
Every nobility is a living symbol of _Time_, every priesthood of
_Space_. Destiny and sacred Causality, History and Nature, the When
and the Where, race and language, sex-life and feeling-life--all
these attain in them to the highest possible expression. The noble
lives in a world of facts, the priest in one of truths; the one
has shrewdness, the other knowledge; the one is a doer, the other
a thinker. Aristocratic world-feeling is essentially pulse-sense;
priestly world-feeling proceeds entirely by tensions. Between the
time of Charlemagne and that of Conrad II something formed itself in
the time-stream that cannot be elucidated, but has to be felt if we
are to understand the dawn of the new Culture. There had long been
noblemen and ecclesiastics, but then first--and not for long--there
were nobility and clergy, in the grand sense of the words and the full
force of their symbolic significance.[585] So mighty is this onset of
a symbolism that at first all other distinctions, such as those of
country, people, and language, fall into the background. In all the
lands from Ireland to Calabria the Gothic hierarchy was a single great
community; the Early Classical chivalry before Troy, or the Early
Gothic before Jerusalem, seems to us as of _one_ great family. The old
Egyptian nomes and the feudal states of the first Chóu times appear, in
comparison with such Estates as these (and _because_ of the comparison)
just as colourless as Burgundy and Lorraine in the Hohenstaufen period.
There is a cosmopolitan condition both at the beginning and at the end
of every Culture, but in the first case it exists because the symbolic
might of aristocratic-hierarchic forms still towers above those of
nationality, and in the second because the formless mass sinks below
them.
The two Estates in principle exclude one another. The prime opposition
of cosmic and microcosmic, which pervades all being that moves
freely in space, underlies this dual existence also. Each is possible
and necessary only through the other. The Homeric world maintained
a conspiracy of hostile silence towards the Orphic, and in turn
(as we see from the Pre-Socratics) the former became an object of
anger and contempt for the latter. In Gothic times the reforming
spirits set themselves with a sacred enthusiasm across the path of
the Renaissance-natures. State and Church have never really come to
equilibrium, and in the conflict of Empire and Papacy their opposition
rose to an intensity only possible for Faustian man.
Of the two, moreover, it is the nobility that is the true Estate, the
sum of blood and race, being-stream in the fullest imaginable form.
And therefore nobility is a higher peasantry. Even in 1250 the West
had a widespread proverb: “One who ploughs in the forenoon jousts
in the afternoon,” and it was quite usual for a knight to marry the
daughter of a peasant. In contrast to the cathedral, the castle was a
development, by way of the country noble’s house of Frankish times,
from the peasant-dwelling. In the Icelandic sagas peasants’ crofts are
besieged and stormed like castles. Nobility and peasantry are plantlike
and instinctive, deep-rooted in the ancestral land, propagating
themselves in the family tree, breeding and bred. In comparison with
them the priesthood is essentially the counter-estate, the estate of
negation, of non-race, of detachment from earth--of free, timeless,
and historyless waking-consciousness. In every peasant village, in
every peasant family from the Stone Age to the peaks of the Culture,
world-history plays itself out in little. Substitute for peoples
families, and for lands farms--still the ultimate meaning of their
strivings is the same--the maintenance of the blood, the succession of
the generations, the cosmic, woman, power. _Macbeth_ and _King Lear_
might perfectly well have been thought out as village tragedies--and
the fact is a proof of their tragic truth. In all Cultures nobility
and peasantry appear in forms of _family descent_, and language itself
connects them with the sexes, through which life propagates itself,
has history, and is history. And as woman _is_ history, the inward
rank of peasant and noble families is determined by how much of race
their women have in them, how far they _are_ Destiny. And, therefore,
there is deep meaning in the fact that the purer and more race-pervaded
world-history is, the more the stream of its public life passes into
and adapts itself to the private lives of individual great families.
This, of course, is the basis of the dynastic principle, and not only
that, but the basis of the idea of world-historical personality. The
existence of entire states comes to depend on a few private destinies,
vastly magnified. The history of Athens in the fifth century is in
the main that of the Alcmæonidæ, the history of Rome is that of a few
families of the type of the Fabii or the Claudii. The history of states
in the Baroque is, broadly speaking, that of the operations of Habsburg
and Bourbon family-politics, and its crises take form as marriages
and wars of succession. The history of Napoleon’s second marriage
comprises also the burning of Moscow and the battle of Leipzig. The
history of the Papacy is, right into the eighteenth century, that of
a few noble families which competed for the tiara in order to found
princely family-fortunes. This is true equally of Byzantine dignitaries
and English premiers (witness the Cecils) and even, in numerous
instances, of great revolution-leaders.
Of all this the priesthood (and philosophy so far as it is priesthood)
is the direct negative. The Estate of pure waking-consciousness and
eternal truths combats time and race and sex in every sense. Man
as peasant or noble turns towards, man as priest turns away from,
woman. Aristocracy runs the danger of dissipating and losing the
broad being-stream of public life in the petty channels of its minor
ancestors and relatives. The true priest, on the other hand, refuses in
principle to recognize private life, sex, family, the “house.” For the
man of race death begins to be real and appalling only when it is death
without heirs--Icelandic sagas no less than Chinese ancestor-worship
teach us this. He does not entirely die who lives on in sons and
nephews. But for the true priest _media vita in morte sumus_; what
he shall bequeath is intellectual, and rejected woman bears no part
in it. The phenomenal forms of this second Estate that occur again
and again are celibacy, cloister, battlings with sex-impulse fought
to the extreme of self-emasculation, and a contempt for motherhood
which expresses itself in orgiasm and hallowed prostitution, and not
less in the intellectual devaluation of sexual life down to the level
of Kant’s vile definition of marriage.[586] Throughout the Classical
world it was the rule that in the sacred precinct, the Temenos, no
one must be born or die. The timeless must not come into contact with
time. It is possible for the priest to have an intellectual recognition
of the great moments of generation and birth, and to honour them
sacramentally, but experience them he may not.
For while nobility _is_ something, priesthood _signifies_ something,
and this alone would be enough to tell us that it is the opposite
of all that is Destiny and Race and Estate. The castle, with its
chambers and towers, walls and moats, tells of a strong-flowing life,
but the cathedral, with its vaulting and pillars and choir, is,
through and through, Meaning--that is to say, Ornament--and every
venerable priesthood has developed itself up to that marvellous
gravity and beauty of bearing in which every item, from facial
expression and voice-inflection to costume and walk, is ornament,
from which private life and even inward life have been eliminated as
unessential--whereas that which a ripe aristocracy (such as that of
eighteenth-century France) displays and parades is a finished living.
It was Gothic thought that developed out of the priest-concept the
_character indelebilis_, which makes the idea indestructible and
wholly independent of the worthiness of its bearer’s life in the
world-as-history--but every priesthood, and consequently also all
philosophy (in the sense of the schools), contain it implicitly. If a
priest has race, he leads an outward existence like peasant, knight,
or prince. The Pope and cardinals of the Gothic period were feudal
princes, leaders of armies, fond of the chase, connoisseurs and adepts
in family politics. Among the Brahmins of the pre-Buddha “Baroque”
were great landowners, well-groomed abbés, courtiers, spendthrifts,
gourmets.[587] But it was the early period that had learned to
distinguish the idea from the person--a notion diametrically opposed to
the essence of nobility--and not until the Age of Enlightenment did the
priest come to be judged, as priest, by his private life, and then not
because that age had acquired sharper eyes, but because it had lost the
idea.
The noble is the _man as history_, the priest is _the man as nature_.
History of the high kind is always the expression and effect of the
being of a noble society; and the criterion for the relative importance
of its different events is always the pulse of this stream of being.
That is why the battle of Cannæ matters much and the battles of
Late Roman emperors matter not at all. The coming of a Springtime
consistently coincides with the birth of a primary nobility, in whose
sentiments the prince is merely “_primus inter pares_” and an object of
mistrust. For not only does a strong race not need the big individual,
but his existence is a reflection upon its worth; hence vassal-wars are
pre-eminently the form in which the history of Early periods fulfils
itself, and thenceforth the nobility has the fate of the Culture in
hand. With a creative force that is all the more impressive because
it is silent, Being is brought into form and “condition.” The pulse
in the blood is heightened and confirmed, _and for good_. For what
this creative rise to living form is to the Spring--every Spring--the
_might of tradition_ is for the Late--every Late--period--namely,
the old firm discipline, the life-beat, so sure that it outlives the
extinction of all the old families and continually draws under its
spell new men and new being-streams out of the deep. Beyond a shadow
of doubt, all the history of Late periods, in respect of form and
beat and tempo, is inherent (and irrevocably so) in the very earliest
generations. Its successes are neither more nor less than the strength
of the tradition in the blood. In politics, as in all other great and
mature arts, success presupposes a being in high condition, a great
stock of pristine experiences unconsciously and unquestioningly stored
up as instincts and impulses. There is no other sort of political
_maestria_ but this. The big individual is only something better than
an incident, only master of the future, in that he is effective (or
is made effective), is Destiny (or has Destiny), in and through this
form. This is what distinguishes necessary from superfluous art and
therefore, also, _historically necessary from unnecessary politics_. It
matters little if many of the big men come up out of the “people” (that
is, the aggregate of the traditionless) into the governing stratum, or
even if they are the only ones left to occupy it--the great tide of
tradition takes charge of them, all unwitting, forms their intellectual
and practical conduct, and rules their methods. And this tradition is
nothing but the pulse of ancient and long-extinguished lines.
But Civilization, the real “return to Nature,” is the extinction of
nobility--not as physical stock (which would not matter), but as living
tradition--and the supplanting of destiny-pulse by causal intelligence.
With this, nobility becomes no more than a prefix. And, for that very
reason, Civilized history is superficial history, directed disjointedly
to obvious aims, and so become formless in the cosmic, dependent on
the accident of great individuals, destitute of inward sureness, line,
and meaning. With Cæsarism history relapses back into the historyless,
the old beat of primitive life, with endless and meaningless battles
for material power, such as those of the Roman soldier-emperors of
the third century and the corresponding “Sixteen States” of China
(265-420), which differ only in unessentials from the events of
beast-life in a jungle.
III
It follows from this that true history is _not_ “cultural” in the
sense of anti-political, as the philosophers and doctrinaires of all
commencing Civilizations assert. On the contrary, it is breed history,
war history, diplomatic history, the history of being-streams in the
form of man and woman, family, people, estate, state, reciprocally
defensive and offensive in the wave-beat of grand facts. _Politics
in the highest sense is life, and life is politics._ Every man
is willy-nilly a member of this battle-drama, as subject or as
object--there is no third alternative. The kingdom of the spirit is
_not_ of this world. True, but it presupposes it, as waking-being
presupposes being. It is only possible as a consistent _saying_ of
“no” to the actuality that nevertheless exists and, indeed, must exist
before it can be renounced. Race can dispense with language, but the
very speaking of a language is an expression of antecedent race,[588]
as are religions and arts and styles of thought and everything else
that happens in the history of the spirit--and that there _is_ such
a history is shown by the power that blood possesses over feeling
and reason. For all these are active waking-consciousness “in form,”
expressive, in their evolution and symbolism and passion, of the blood
(again the blood) that courses through these forms in the waking-being
of generation after generation. A hero does not need to know anything
at all of this second world--he is life through and through--but a
saint can only by the severest asceticism beat down the life that is
in him and gain solitary communion with his spirit--and his strength
for this again comes from life itself. The hero despises death and the
saint life, but in the contrast between the heroism of great ascetics
and martyrs and the piety of most (which is of the kind described in
Revelation iii, 16[589]) we discover that greatness, even in religion,
presupposes Race, that life must be strong indeed to be worthy of such
wrestlers. The rest is mere philosophy.
For this very reason nobility in the world-historical sense is much
more than comfortable Late periods consider it; it is not a sum of
titles and privileges and ceremonies, but an inward possession, hard
to acquire, hard to retain--worth, indeed, for those who understand,
the sacrifice of a whole life. An old family betokens not simply a
set of ancestors (we all have ancestors), but ancestors who lived
through whole generations on the heights of history; who not merely had
Destiny, but were Destiny; in whose blood the form of happening was
bred up to its perfection by the experience of centuries. As history
in the grand sense begins with the Culture, it was mere panache for a
Colonna to trace back his ancestry into Late Roman times. But it was
not meaningless for the grandee of Late Byzantium to derive himself
from Constantine, nor is it so for an American of to-day to trace his
ancestry to a _Mayflower_ immigrant of 1620. In actual fact Classical
nobility begins with the Trojan period and not the Mycenæan, and the
Western with the Gothic and not the Franks and Goths--in England with
the Normans and not the Saxons. Only from these real starting-points
is there History, and, therefore, only from then can there be an
original aristocracy, as distinct from nobles and heroes. That which
in the first chapter of this volume[590] called cosmic beat or pulse
receives in this aristocracy its fulfilment. For all that in riper
times we call diplomatic and social “tact”--which includes strategic
and business flair, the collector’s eye for precious things, and the
subtle insight of the judge of men--and generally all that which one
has and does not learn; which arouses the impotent envy of the rest who
cannot participate; which as “form” directs the course of events; is
nothing but a particular case of the same cosmic and dreamlike sureness
that is visibly expressed in the circlings of a flock of birds or the
controlled movements of a thoroughbred horse.
The priest _circumscribes_ the world-as-nature and deepens his picture
of it by _thinking_ into it. The noble _lives_ in the world-as-history
and deepens it by altering its picture. Both evolve towards the great
tradition, but the evolution of the one comes of shaping and that of
the other from training. This is a fundamental difference between the
two Estates, and consequently only one of them is truly an Estate, and
the other only _appears_ to be such because of the completeness of
the contrast. The field of effect of breed and training is the blood,
and they pass on, therefore, from the fathers to the sons. Shaping
(_Bildung_), on the other hand, presupposes talents, and consequently
a true and strong priesthood is always a sum of individual gifts--a
community of waking-consciousness--having no relation to origin in the
race sense; and thus, in this respect as in others, it is a negation
of Time and History. Intellectual affinity and blood-affinity--ponder
and probe into the depths of these contrasted expressions! Heritable
priesthood is a contradiction in terms. It existed indeed, in a sense,
in Vedic India, but the basis of that existence was the fact that there
was a second nobility, which reserved the privilege of priesthood to
the gifted members of its own circle.[591] And elsewhere celibacy
made an end even of this much infringement of principle. The “priest
in the man”--whether the man be noble or not--stands for a focus of
sacred Causality in the world. The priestly power is itself of a causal
nature, brought about by higher causes and itself in turn an efficient
cause. The priest is the _middleman_ in the timeless extended that
is stretched taut between the waking-consciousness and the ultimate
secret; and, therefore, the importance of the clergy in each Culture
is determined by its prime-symbol. The Classical soul denies Space and
therefore needs no middleman for dealings with it, and so the Classical
priesthood disappears in its very beginnings. Faustian man stands face
to face with the Infinite, nothing _a priori_ shields him from the
crushing force of this aspect, and so the Gothic priesthood elevated
itself to the heights of the Papal idea.
As two world-outlooks, two modes of blood-flow in the veins and
of thought in the daily being and doing, are interwoven, there
arise in the end (in every Culture) two sorts of moral, of which
each looks down upon the other--namely, noble custom, and priestly
askesis, reciprocally censured as worldly and as servile. It has
been shown already[592] how the one proceeds from the castle and the
other from the cloister and the minster, the one from full being in
the flood of History and the other, aloof therefrom, out of pure
waking-consciousness in the ambiance of a God-pervaded nature. The
force with which these primary impressions act upon men is something
that later periods will be unable even to imagine. The secular and
the spiritual class-feeling are starting on their upward career, and
cutting out for themselves an ethical _class-ideal_ which is accessible
only to the right people, and even to them only by way of long and
strict schooling. The _great_ being-stream _feels_ itself as a unit as
against the residue of dull, pulseless, and aimless blood. The _great_
mind-community _knows_ itself as a unit as against the residue of
uninitiated. These units are the band of heroes and the community of
saints.
It will always remain the great merit of Nietzsche that he was the
first to recognize the dual nature of all moral.[593] His designations
of “master-” and “slave-” moral were inexact, and his presentation
of “Christianity” placed it much too definitely on the one side of
the dividing line, but at the basis of all his opinions this lies
strong and clear, that _good and bad are aristocratic, and good and
evil priestly, distinctions_. Good and bad, which are Totemistic
distinctions among primitive groups of men and tribes, describe, not
dispositions, but men, and describe them comprehensively in respect
of their living-being. The good are the powerful, the rich, the
fortunate. Good means strong, brave, thoroughbred, in the idiom of
every Springtime. Bad, cheap, wretched, common, in the original sense,
are the powerless, propertyless, unfortunate, cowardly, negligible--the
“sons of nobody” as ancient Egypt said.[594] Good and evil, Taboo
concepts, assign value to a man according to his perceptions and
reason--that is, his waking disposition and his _conscious_ actions. To
offend against love-ethic in the race sense is ungentle, to sin against
the Church’s love-command is wicked. The noble habit is the perfectly
unconscious result of a long and continuous training. It is learned in
intercourse and not from books. It is a felt rhythm, and not a notion.
But the other moral is enunciated, ordered on the basis of cause and
consequence, and therefore learnable and expressive of a _conviction_.
The one is historical through and through, and recognizes
rank-distinctions and privileges as actual and axiomatic. Honour is
always class-honour--there is no such thing as an “honour of humanity.”
The duel is not an obligation of unfree persons. Every man, be he
Bedouin or Samurai or Corsican, peasant or workman, judge or bandit,
has his own binding notions of honour, loyalty, courage, revenge, that
do not apply to other kinds of life. Every life _has_ custom-ethic--it
is unthinkable without it. Children have it already in their play;
they know at once, of themselves, what is fitting. No one has laid
down these rules, but they exist. They arise, quite unconsciously, out
of the “we” that has formed itself out of the uniform pulse of the
group. Here, too, each being is “in form.” Every crowd that, under one
or another stimulus, has collected in the street has for the moment
its own ethic, and anyone who does not absorb it and stand for it as
self-evident--to say “follow it” would presume more rationality in the
action than there is--is a poor, mean creature, an outsider. Uneducated
people and children possess an astonishingly fine reactivity to this.
Children, however, are also required to learn the Catechism, and in it
they hear about the good and evil that are laid down--and are any thing
rather than self-evident. Custom-ethic is not that which is _true_, but
that which is _there_; it is a thing of birth and growth, feeling and
organic logic. Moral, in contrast to this, is never actuality (for,
if it were, all the world would be saintly), but an eternal demand
hanging over the consciousness--and, _ex hypothesi_, over that of all
men alike, irrespective of all differences of actual life and history.
And, therefore, all moral is negative and all custom-ethic affirmative.
In the latter “devoid of honour” is the worst, in the former “devoid of
sin” is the highest, that can be said of anyone.
The basic concept of all living custom-ethic is honour. Everything
else--loyalty, modesty, bravery, chivalry, self-control,
resolution--is comprised in it. And honour is a matter of the blood and
not of the reason. One does not reflect on a point of honour--that is
already dishonour. To lose honour means to be annulled so far as Life
and Time and History are concerned. The honour of one’s class, one’s
family, of man and woman, of one’s people and one’s country, the honour
of peasant and soldier and even bandit--honour means that the life in
a person is something that has worth, historical dignity, delicacy,
nobility. It belongs to directional Time, as sin belongs to timeless
Space. To have honour in one’s body means about the same as to have
race. The opposite sort are the Thersites-natures, the mud-souled, the
riff-raff, the “kick-me-but-let-me-live’s.” To submit to insult, to
forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy--all these are signs of
a life become worthless and superfluous. But this is not at all the
same thing as priestly moral, for that moral does not cleave to life at
any cost of degradation, but rather rejects and abstains from life as
such, and therefore incidentally from honour. As has been said already,
every moral action is, at the very bottom, a piece of askesis and a
killing of being. And _eo ipso_ it stands outside the field of life and
the world of history.
IV
Here it is necessary to anticipate somewhat, and to consider whence
it is that world-history (especially in the Late periods of the
grand Cultures and the beginnings of the Civilizations) derives its
rich variety of colour and the profound symbolism of its events. The
primary Estates, nobility and clergy, are the purest expressions of
the two sides of life, but they are not the only ones. In very early
times--often, indeed, foreshadowed in the Primitive Age itself--yet
other being-streams and waking-linkages break forth, in which the
symbolism of Time and Space comes to living expression, and which, when
(and not until) combined with these two, make up the whole fullness of
what we call _social organization_ or _society_.
While Priesthood is microcosmic and animal-like, Nobility is cosmic and
plantlike (hence its profound connexion with the land). It is itself a
plant, strongly rooted in the soil, established on the soil--in this,
as in so many other respects, a supreme peasantry. It is from this kind
of cosmic boundness that the idea of _property_ arises, which to the
microcosm as such, freely moving in space, is wholly alien. Property
is a primary feeling and not a concept; it belongs to Time and History
and Destiny, and not to Space and Causality. It cannot be logically
based, but it is there.[595] “Having” begins with the plant, and
propagates itself in the history of higher mankinds just to the precise
extent that history contains plant-character and race. Hence property
in the most genuine sense is always ground-property, and the impulse
to convert other acquisitions into ground and soil is an evidence of
sound stock. The plant _possesses_ the ground in which it roots. It is
its property,[596] which it defends to the utmost, with the desperate
force of its whole being, against alien seeds, against overshadowing
neighbour plants, against all nature. So, too, a bird defends the nest
in which it is hatching. The bitterness fights over property occur--not
in the Late periods of great Cultures, between rich and poor, and
about movable goods--but here in the beginnings of the plant-world.
When, in a wood, one feels all about one the silent, merciless battle
for the soil that goes on day and night, one is appalled by the depth
of an impulse that is almost identical with life itself. Here is a
yearlong, tenacious, embittered wrestle, a hopeless resistance of the
weak against the strong, that goes on to the point that the victor
too is broken--such as is only paralleled in the most primitive of
mankind when an old peasant-family is expelled from the clod, _from
the nest_, or a family of noble stock is uprooted or, more truly, cut
off from its roots, by money.[597] The far more conspicuous conflicts
in the later cities have quite another meaning, for here--in communism
of all kinds--it is not the experience of possessing, but the idea of
property purely as material means that is fought for. The negation of
property is never race-impulse, but the doctrinaire protest of the
purely intellectual, urban, uprooted, anti-vegetal waking-consciousness
of saints, philosophers, and idealists. The same reason actuates the
monk of the hermitage and the scientific Socialist--be his name Moh-ti,
Zeno, or Marx--to reject the plantlike; the same feeling impels men of
race to defend it. Here, as ever, fact and truth are opposed. “Property
is theft” is the ultra-materialistic form of the old thought: “What
shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own
soul?” When the priest gives up property, he is giving up something
dangerous and alien; when a noble does so, he is giving up himself.
This brings us to a duality of the property-idea feeling--_Having
as power_ and _Having as spoil_. Both, in primitive men of race,
lie immediately together. Every Bedouin or Viking intends both. The
sea-hero is always a sea-robber also; every war is concerned with
possessions and, above all, possessions in land. But a step, and the
knight becomes the robber-knight, the adventurer becomes conqueror and
king, like Rurik the Norman in Russia and many an Achæan and Etruscan
pirate in Homeric times. In all heroic poetry we find, side by side
with the strong and natural satisfaction of winning battles and power
and women, and the unbridled outbursts of joy and grief, anger, and
love, the immense delight of “having.” When Odysseus lands at home, the
first thing he does is to count the treasures in his boat, and when,
in the Icelandic Saga, the peasants Hjalmar and Ölvarod perceive each
that the other has no goods in his ship, they abandon their duel at
once--he who fights from pride and for honour is a fool for his pains.
In the Indian hero-epic, eagerness for battle means eagerness for
cattle, and the “colonizing” Greeks of the tenth century were primarily
corsairs like the Normans. On the high seas an alien ship is _a priori_
good prize. But out of the feuds of South-Arabian and Persian Knights
of A.D. 200, and the “private wars” of the Provençal barons of A.D.
1200--which were hardly more than cattle-raids--there developed at the
end of the feudal period the war proper, the great war with acquisition
of land and people as its object. All this, in the end, brings the
aristocratic Culture to the “top of its form,” while, correspondingly,
priests and philosophers despise it.
As the Culture rises to its height, these two primary urges trend
widely apart, and hostility develops between them. _The history of this
hostility is almost the same thing as world-history. From the feeling
of power come conquest and politics and law; from that of spoil, trade
and economy and money._ Law is the property of the powerful. Their law
is the law of all. Money is the strongest weapon of the acquiring: with
it he subdues the world. Economics likes and intends a state that is
weak and subservient to it. Politics demands that economic life shall
adapt itself to and within the State--Adam Smith and Friedrich List,
Capitalism and Socialism. All Cultures exhibit at the outset a war-
and a trade-nobility, then a land- and a money-nobility, and finally
a military and an economic war-management and a ceaseless struggle of
money against law.
Equally, on the other hand, _priesthood_ and _learning_ separate out.
Both are directed towards, not the factual, but the true; both belong
to the Taboo side of life and to Space. Fear before death is the
source, not merely of all religion, but of all philosophy and natural
science as well. Now, however, there develops a profane Causality
in contrast to the sacred. “Profane” is the new counter-concept to
“religious,” which so far had tolerated learning only as a handmaiden.
The whole of Late criticism, its spirit, its method, its aims, are
profane--and the Late theology, even, is no exception to the rule.
But invariably, nevertheless, the learning of all Cultures moves
in the forms of the preceding priesthood--thus showing that it is
merely a product of the contradiction itself, and how dependent it is
and remains, in every particular, upon the primary image. Classical
science, therefore, lives in cult-communities of the Orphic style,
such as the school of Miletus, the Pythagorean society, the medical
schools of Croton and Cos, the Attic schools of the Academy, the
Peripatos, and the Stoa, every one of whose leaders belongs to the
type of the sacrificial priest and seer, and even the Roman legal
schools of the Sabiniani and Proculiani. The sacred book, the Canon
is, scientifically as in other respects, Arabian--the scientific
canon of Ptolemy (Almagest), the medical of Ibn Sina (Avicenna),
and the philosophical corpus designated “Aristotle,” but so largely
spurious--so also the (mostly unwritten) laws and methods of
quotation:[598] the Commentary as the form of thought-development;
the universities as cloisters (Medrashim) which provided teachers and
students with cell, food, and clothing; and tendencies in scholarship
taking form as brotherhoods. The learned world of the West possesses
unmistakably the form of the Catholic Church, and more particularly so
in Protestant regions. The connecting link between the learned orders
of the Gothic period and the order-like schools of the nineteenth
century--the schools of Hegel, of Kant, of historical jurisprudence,
and not a few of the English university colleges--is formed by the
Maurists and Bollandists[599] of France, who from 1650 on mastered
and largely created the ancillary “science” of history. In all the
specialist sciences (medicine and lecture-room philosophy included)
there are fully developed hierarchies leading up to school-popes,
grades, and dignities (the doctor’s degree as an ordination),
sacraments and councils. The uninitiate is rigorously treated as the
“layman,” and the idea of a generalized priesthood residing in the
believers themselves, which is manifested in “popular” science--for
example, Darwinism--is passionately combated. The language of learning
was originally Latin, but to-day all sorts of special languages
have formed themselves which (in the domain of radioactivity, for
example, or that of the law of contract) are unintelligible save to
those who have received the higher initiation. There are founders of
sects, such as many of Kant’s and Hegel’s disciples were; there are
missionaries to the unbelievers, like the Monists. There are heretics,
like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, there is the weapon of the ban, and
there is the Index in the form of the Conspiracy of Silence. There are
ethical truths (for example, in Law the division of the objects into
persons and things) and dogmas (like that of energy and mass, or the
theory of inheritance), a ritual in the citation of orthodox writings,
and even a scientific sort of beatification.[600]
More, the savant-type of the West (which in the nineteenth century
reached its zenith, corresponding to the nadir of true priesthood) has
brought to high perfection the study as the cell of a profane monachism
that has its unconscious vows--of Poverty, in the shape of honourable
disdain for fat living and wealth; and unfeigned contempt for the
commercial professional and for all exploitation of scientific results
for gain; of Chastity, which has evolved a veritable celibacy of
science, with Kant as exemplar and culmination; and of Obedience, even
to the point of sacrificing oneself to the standpoint of the School.
Further, and lastly, there is a sort of estrangement from the world
which is the profane echo of the Gothic flight from it, and leads to an
almost complete disregard of the life in public and the forms of good
society--little “breeding,” much too much “shaping.” Nobility, even
in its later ramifications--the judge, the squire, the officer--still
retains the old root-strong natural satisfaction in carrying on the
stock, in possessions and honour, but the scientist counts these things
as little beside the possession of a pure scientific conscience and the
carrying on of a method or a view unimpaired by the commercialism of
the world. The fact that the savant to-day has ceased to be remote from
the world, and puts his science at the service of (not seldom, indeed,
most shrewdly applies it to) technics and money-making, is a sign that
the pure type is entering upon its decline and that the great age of
intellectual optimism that is livingly expressed in him belongs already
to the past.
In sum, we see that the Estates have a natural build which in its
evolution and action forms the basic structure of every Culture’s
life-course. No specific decision made it; revolutions only alter
it when they are forms of the evolution and not results of some
private will. It never, in its full cosmic significance, enters
the consciousness of men as doers and thinkers, because it lies
too deep in human being to be other than a self-evident datum. It
is merely from the surface that men take the catchwords and causes
over which they fight on that side of history which theory regards
as horizontally layered, but which in actuality is an aggregate of
inseparable interpenetrations. First, nobility and priesthood arise
out of the open landscape, and figure the pure symbolism of Being and
Waking-Being, Time and Space. Then out of the one under the aspect
of booty, and out of the other under the aspect of research, there
develop doubled types of lower symbolic force, which in the urban Late
periods rise to prepotency in the shapes of _economy_ and _science_.
In these two being-streams the ideas of Destiny and Causality are
thought out to their limit, unrelentingly and anti-traditionally.
Forces emerge which are separated by a deadly enmity from the old
class-ideals of heroism and saintliness--these forces are _money and
intellect_, and they are related to those ideals as the city to the
country. Henceforward property is called riches, and world-outlook
knowledge--a desanctified Destiny and a profane Causality. But science
is in contradiction with Nobility too, for this does not prove or
investigate, but _is_. “_De omnibus dubitandum_” is the attitude of a
burgher and not of an aristocrat, while at the same time it contradicts
the basic feeling of priesthood, for which the proper rôle of critique
is that of a handmaid. Economy, too, finds an enemy here, in the shape
of the ascetic moral which rejects money-getting, just as the genuine
land-based nobility despises it. Even the old merchant-nobility has in
many cases perished (e.g., Hanse Towns, Venice, Genoa), because with
its traditions it could not and would not fall in with the business
outlook of the big city. And, with all this, economy and science are
themselves at enmity; once more, in the conflicts of money-getting and
knowledge, _between counting-house and study_, business liberalism and
doctrinaire liberalism, we meet the old great oppositions of action and
contemplation, castle and cathedral. In one form or in another this
order of things emerges in the structure of every Culture--hence the
possibility of a comparative morphology in the social as in the other
aspects of history.
Wholly outside the category of the true Estates are the calling-classes
of the craftsmen, officials, artists, and labourers, whose organization
in guilds (e.g., of smiths in China, of scribes in Egypt, and of
singers in the Classical world) dates from pristine antiquity, and
who because of their professional segregation (which sometimes goes
as far as to cut off their _connubium_ with others) actually develop
into genuine tribes, as, for instance, the Falasha[601] of Abyssinia
and some of the Sudra classes named in Manu’s code. Their separation
is due merely to their technical accomplishments and therefore not
to their being vessels of the symbolism of Time and Space. Their
tradition, likewise, is limited to their techniques and does not refer
to a customary-ethic or a moral _of their own_, such as is always
found in economy and science as such. As derived from a nobility,
judges and officers are classes, whereas officials are a profession;
as derived from priesthood, scholars are a class, while artists are
a profession. Sense of honour, conscience, adhere in one case to the
status, in the other to the achievement. There is something, slight
though it may be, of symbolism in every category on the one side,
and none in any category on the other. And consequently something of
strangeness, irregularity, often disgrace, clings to them--consider,
for example, executioners, actors, and strolling singers, or the
Classical estimation of the artist. Their classes or guilds separate
from general society, or seek the protection of other orders of society
(or individual patrons and Mæcenases), but fit themselves in with that
society they cannot, and their inability to do so finds expression in
the guild-wars of the old cities and in uncouthness of every sort in
the instincts and manners of artists.
V
A history of estates or classes, ignoring in principle that of
profession-classes, is therefore a presentation of the metaphysical
element in higher mankind, so far as this rises to grand symbolism in
species of onflowing life, species in and along which the history of
the Cultures moves to fulfilment.
At the very beginning, the sharply defined type of the peasant is
something new. In Carolingian times, and under the Tsarist system of
the “Mir” in Russia,[602] there were freemen and hinds cultivating
the soil, _but no peasantry_. Only when there emerges the feeling
of being different from the two symbolic “lives”--Freidank’s
_Bescheidenheit_[603] comes into our minds--does this life become
an Estate, the _nourishing_ estate in the fullest sense of the
word, the root of the great plant Culture, which has driven its
fibres deep into Mother Earth and darkly, industriously, draws all
juices into itself and sends them to the upper parts, where trunks
and branches tower up in the light of history. It serves the great
lives not merely by the nourishment that it wins out of the soil
for them, but also with that other harvest of mother earth--its own
blood; for blood flowed up for centuries from the villages into
the high places, received there the high forms, and maintained the
high lives. The relation is called (from the noble’s point of view)
_vassalage_, and we find it arising--whatever the superficial causes
may be in each case--in the West between 1000 and 1400 and in the
other Cultures at the “contemporary” periods. The Helotry of Sparta
belongs with it, and equally so the old Roman _clientela_, from
which after 471 the _rural_ Plebs--that is, a free yeomanry--grew
up.[604] Astonishing indeed is the force of this striving towards
symbolic form in the Pseudomorphosis of the Late Roman East, where
the caste system of the principate founded by Augustus (with its
division into senatorial and equestrian officialdom) evolved backwards
until, about 300, it had returned, wherever the Magian world-feeling
prevailed, to a condition parallel to that of the Gothic in 1300--the
condition, in fact, of the Sassanid Empire of its own time.[605] Out
of the officialdom of a highly Civilized administration came a minor
nobility of decurions, village knights, and town politicians, who were
responsible to the sovereign in body and goods for all outgoings--a
feudalism formed backwards--and gradually made their positions
heritable, just as happened under the Egyptian Vth dynasty and the
first Chóu centuries[606] and the Europe of the Crusades. Military
status, of officers and soldiers alike, became hereditary in the same
way,[607] and service as a feudal obligation, and all the rest of
what Diocletian presently reduced to formal law. The individual was
firmly bound to the status (_corpori adnexus_), and the principle
was extended as compulsory guild-membership to all trades, as in the
Gothic or in old Egypt. But, above all, there necessarily arose from
the ruins of the Late Classical slave-economy of “Latifundia”[608] the
colonate of hereditary small farmers, while the great estates became
administrative districts and the lord was made responsible for its
taxes and its recruit-quota.[609] Between 250 and 300 the “colonus”
became legally bound to the soil (_adscriptus glebæ_). And with that
the differentiation of feudal lord and vassal _as class and class_[610]
was reached.
Every new Culture has potentially its nobility and its priesthood.
The apparent exceptions to this are due merely to the absence to
tangible tradition. We know to-day that a real priesthood existed in
ancient China[611] and we may assume as self-evident that there was
a priest-estate in the beginnings of Orphism in the eleventh century
B.C.--the more confidently as we have plain indications of it in the
epic figures of Calchas and Tiresias. Similarly the development of the
feudal constitution in Egypt presupposes a primitive nobility as early
as the IIIrd Dynasty.[612] But the form in which, and the force with
which, these Estates first realized themselves and then took charge
of the course of history--shaped it, carried it, and even represented
it in their own destinies--depend upon the Prime-symbol on which each
individual Culture, with its entire form-language, is based.
The nobility, wholly plantlike, proceeds everywhere from the land,
which is its primary property and with which it is fast bound. It
possesses everywhere the basic form of the family, the gens (in which,
therefore, the “other” gender of history, the feminine, is expressed
also), and it manifests itself through the will-to-duration--duration,
namely, of the blood--as the great symbol of Time and History. It
will appear that the early officialdom of the vassal state, based
on personal trustworthiness, everywhere--in China and Egypt, in
the Classical and the Western World--[613] goes through the same
development, first creating quasi-feudal court offices and dignities,
then seeking hereditary connexion with the soil, and so finally
becoming the origin of noble family-lines.
The Faustian will-to-infinity comes to expression in the _genealogical
principle_, which--strange as it may seem--is peculiar to this Culture.
And in this Culture, moreover, it intimately permeates and moulds all
the historical forms, and supremely those of the states themselves.
The historical sense that insists upon getting to know the destinies
of its own blood backwards through the centuries and seeing _archival_
proofs of dates and provenances up to the first ancestors; the
careful ordering of the genealogical tree, which is potent enough to
make present possession and inheritance dependent upon the fortunes
of a single marriage contracted perhaps five hundred years ago; the
conceptions of _pure blood_, birth-equivalence, _mésalliance_--all this
is will-to-direction in time, will towards Time’s remote distances.
There is no second example of it, save perhaps in the Egyptian
nobility, and there the comparable forms that were attained were far
weaker.
Nobility of the Classical style, on the contrary, relates to the
present estate of the agnatic family, and from it straight to a
_mythical_ origin, which does not imply the historical sense in
the least, but only a craving, sublimely regardless of historic
probability, for splendid backgrounds to the here and now of the
living. Only thus can we explain the otherwise baffling naïveté with
which an individual saw behind his grandfather Theseus and Heracles in
one plane, and fashioned himself a family tree (or several, perhaps,
as Alexander did), and the light-heartedness with which respectable
Roman families would forge the names of reputed ancestors into the
old consular lists. At the funeral of a Roman noble the wax masks of
great forefathers were introduced into the cortège, but it was only
for the number and sound of the famous names and not in the least on
account of any genealogical connexion with the present. This trait
appears throughout the Classical nobility, which like the Gothic
formed, structurally and spiritually, one inward unit from Etruria to
Asia Minor. On it rested the power that, even at the beginning of the
Late period, was still in the possession of order-like family-groupings
throughout the cities (phylæ, phratriæ, tribus, and what not) which
maintained a purely present membership and unity by means of sacral
forms--for example, the three Doric and the four Ionic phylæ, and
the three Etruscan tribes that appear in the earlier Roman history
as Tities, Ramnes, and Luceres. In the Vedas the “father-” and the
“mother-”souls had claims to soul-rites only in respect of three nearer
and three further generations,[614] after which the past claimed them;
and nowhere do we find the Classical cult of souls reaching any further
back than the Indian. It is the very reverse of the ancestor-worship
of the Chinese and the Egyptians, which was by hypothesis without end,
and therefore maintained the family in a definite ordering even beyond
bodily death. In China there still lives to-day a duke, Kong, who is
the descendant of Confucius and equally the descendant of Lao-tse, of
Chang-lu, and others. It is not a question of a many-branched tree, but
of carrying the line, the _tao_ of being, straight on--if necessary,
frankly by adoption (the adopted member, pledged to the ancestor-cult,
is thereby spiritually incorporated in the family) or other expedients.
An unbridled joy of life streams through the flourishing centuries of
this estate, _the_ Estate _par excellence_, which is direction and
destiny and race through and through. Love, because woman _is_ history,
and war because fighting _makes_ history, are the acknowledged foci
of its thoughts and feelings. The Northern skald-poetry and the
Southern _Minnesang_ correspond to the old love-songs of the Chinese
age of chivalry in the Shi-King,[615] which were sung in the Pi-Yung,
the places of noble training (_hiao_). And the ceremonial public
archery-displays, like the Early Classical agon, and the Gothic and the
Persian-Byzantine[616] tourney, were manifestations of the life on its
Homeric side.
In opposition to this side stands the _Orphic_--the expression
of the space-experience of a Culture through the style of its
priesthood. It was in accord with the Euclidean character of Classical
extension--which needed no intermediaries for intercourse with near
and corporeal gods--that in this case priesthood, from beginnings as
an estate, rapidly degenerated into city-officialdom. Similarly, it
was expressive of the Chinese _tao_ that the place of the original
hereditary priesthood came to be taken by professional classes of
praying men, scribes, and oracle-priests, who could accompany the
religious performances of the authorities and heads of families
with the prescribed rites. It was in conformity, again, with the
Indian world-feeling that lost itself in measureless infinity that
the priest-class there became a second nobility, which with immense
power, intruding upon every sort of life, planted itself between the
people and its wilderness of gods. It is an expression, lastly, of the
“cavern” feeling that the priest of true Magian cast is the monk and
the hermit, and becomes more and more so, while the secular clergy
steadily loses in symbolic significance.
In contrast to all these there is the Faustian priesthood, which, still
without any profound import or dignity in 900, rose up thereafter to
that sublime rôle of intermediary which placed it in principle between
humanity (_all_ humanity) and a macrocosm strained to all imaginable
expanse by the Faustian passion of the third dimension. Excluded from
history by celibacy and from time by its _character indelebilis_, it
culminated in the Papacy, which represented the highest symbol of God’s
dynamic Space that it was possible to conceive; even the Protestant
idea of a generalized priesthood has not destroyed it, but merely
decentralized it from one point and one person into the heart of each
individual believer.
The contradiction between being and waking-being that exists in every
microcosm necessarily drives the two Estates against one another.
Time seeks to absorb and subordinate Space, Space Time. Spiritual
and worldly power are magnitudes so different in structure and
tendency that any reconciliation, or even understanding, between them
seems impossible. But this conflict has not in all Cultures come to
world-historical expression. In China it promoted the _tao_ idea
that primacy should reside securely in an aristocracy. In India the
conception of Space as infinite-indefinite required a primacy of the
priesthood. In the Arabian Culture the Magian world-feeling involved
in principle the inclusion of the worldly visible society of believers
as a constituent in the grand consensus, and therefore the unity of
spiritual and temporal polity, law, and sovereignty. Not that there
was not friction between the two estates; far from it; in the Sassanid
Empire there were bloody feuds between the country aristocracy of the
Dikhans and the party of the Magi--even in some instances murders
of sovereigns--and in Byzantium the whole fifth century is full
of the struggles between the Imperial power and the clergy, which
from an ever-present background to the Monophysite and Nestorian
controversies.[617] But the basic interconnexion of the two orders was
not in dispute.
In the Classical world, which abhorred the infinite in every sense,
Time was reduced to the present and Extension to tangible unit-bodies;
as the result, the grand symbolic estates became so voided of meaning
that, as compared with the city-state, which expressed the Classical
prime-symbol in the strongest imaginable form, they did not count as
independent forces at all. In the history of Egyptian mankind, on the
other hand, which is the history of striving with equal force towards
distances of time and of space, the struggle of the two estates and
their symbolisms is constantly recognizable right into the period of
complete fellahdom. For the transition from the IVth to the Vth Dynasty
is accompanied also by a visible triumph of the priestly over the
knightly world-feeling; the Pharaoh, from being the body and vessel of
the supreme deity, becomes its servant, and the Re sanctuary overpowers
the tomb-temple of the ruler both in architectural and in suggestive
force. The New Empire witnessed, immediately after its great Cæsars,
the political autocracy of the Amen priesthood, Thebes, and then again
the revolution of the “heretic” king Amenophis IV (Akhenaton)--in
which one feels unmistakably a political as well as a religious
side--and so on until after interminable conflicts between warrior- and
priestly-castes, the Egyptian world ended in foreign domination.
In the Faustian Culture this battle between two high symbols of equal
force has been waged in somewhat the same spirit, but with far greater
passion still than in the Egyptian--so that, from the early Gothic
onward, only armistice, never peace, has seemed possible between State
and Church. But in this conflict the handicap against waking-being
tells--it would shake off its dependence upon being, but it cannot.
The mind needs the blood, but the blood does not need the mind. War
belongs to the world of time and history--_intellectual battle is only
a fight with reasons, only disputation_--and, therefore a _militant_
Church must step from the world of truths into the world of facts--from
the world of Jesus into that of Pilate. And so it becomes an element
in race-history and subject to the formative powers of the _political_
side of life. From early Feudalism to modern Democracy it fights with
sword and cannon, poison and dagger, bribery and treason, all the
weapons of party conflict in use at the time. It sacrifices articles
of belief to worldly advantages, and allies itself with heretics and
unbelievers against orthodox powers. The Papacy _as an idea_ has a
history of its own, but this bears no relation to the position of the
popes in the sixth and seventh centuries as Byzantine viceroys of
Syrian and Greek provenance; or to their later evolution into powerful
landowners, with crowds of subject peasants; or to the Patrimonium
Petri of the early Gothic--a sort of duchy in the possession of great
families of the Campagna (Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Frangipani),
which alternately set up the popes, until finally the general Western
feudalism prevailed here also, and the Holy See came to be an object of
investiture within the families of the Roman baronage, so that each new
pope, like a German or a French king, had to confirm the rights of his
vassals. In 1032 the Counts of Tusculum nominated a twelve-year-old boy
as pope. In those days eight hundred castle-towers stood up in the city
area of Rome amongst and upon the Classical ruins. In 1045 three popes
entrenched themselves in the Vatican, the Lateran, and Santa Maria
Maggiore respectively, and were defended by their noble supporters.
Now supervened the city with its own soul, first emancipating itself
from the soul of the countryside, then setting up as an equal to it,
and finally seeking to suppress and extinguish it. But this evolution
accomplished itself in _kinds of life_, and it also, therefore, is part
of the history of the estates. The _city-life_ as such emerges--through
the inhabitants of these small settlements acquiring a common soul,
and becoming conscious that the life within is something different
from the life outside--and at once the spell of _personal freedom_
begins to operate and to attract within the walls life-streams of
more and more new kinds. There sets in a sort of passion for becoming
urban and for propagating urban life. It is this, and not material
considerations, that produced the fever of the colonization period in
the Classical world, which is still recognizable to us in its last
offshoots, and which it is not quite exact to speak of as colonization
at all. For it was a creative enthusiasm in the man of the city that
from the tenth century B.C. (and “contemporaneously” in other Cultures)
drew generation after generation under the spell of a new life, with
which there emerges for the first time in human history the idea of
_freedom_. This idea is not of political (still less of abstract)
origin, but is something bringing to expression the fact that within
the city walls plantlike attachment to a soil has ceased, and that the
threads that run through the whole life of the countryside have been
snapped. And consequently the freedom-idea ever contains a negative;
it looses, redeems, defends, always frees a man _from_ something.
Of _this_ freedom the city is the expression; the city-spirit is
understanding become free, and everything in the way of intellectual,
social, and national movements that bursts forth in Late periods under
the name of Freedom leads back to an origin _in this one prime fact of
detachment from the land_.
But the city is older than the “citizen.” It attracts first the
calling-classes, which as such are outside the symbolic estates, and,
when urban, take form as guilds. Then it draws in the primary estates
themselves; the minor nobility moves its castles, the Franciscans their
cloisters, within the contour. As yet, not much is inwardly altered.
Not only Papal Rome, but all Italian cities of this time are filled
with the fortified towers of the families, who issued thence to fight
out their feuds in the streets. In a well-known fourteenth-century
picture of Siena these towers stand up like factory chimneys round the
market-place.[618] As for the Florentine palace of the Renaissance,
if, in respect of the bright life within, it is the successor of
Provençal courts, it is equally, with its “rusticated” façade, an
offshoot of the Gothic castles that the French and German knights were
still building on their hills. It was, in fact, only slowly that the
new life separated out. Between 1250 and 1450, throughout the West,
the immigrant families concentrated, _vis-à-vis_ the guilds, into the
patriciate, and in so doing detached themselves, spiritually as in
other respects, from the country nobility. It was exactly the same in
early China, Egypt, and the Byzantine Empire, and it is only in the
light of this that we become able to understand the older Classical
city-leagues (such as the Etruscan and, it may be, even the Latin) and
the sacral connexions of colonial daughter-cities with their mother
city. It was not the Polis as such, so far, that was the backbone
of events, but the patriciate of phylæ and phratriæ within it. _The
original Polis is identical with the nobility_, as Rome was up to 471,
and Sparta and the Etruscan cities throughout. Synœcism grew out of it,
and the city-state was formed by it. But here, as in other Cultures,
the difference between country- and city-nobility was at first quite
unimportant as compared with the strong and deep distinction between
the nobility (in general) and the residue.
The burgher proper emerges when the fundamental distinction between
town and country has brought the “families and the guilds,” in spite
of their otherwise implacable hostility to one another, to a sense
of unity _vis-à-vis_ the old nobility, the feudal system generally,
and the feudal position of the Church. The notion of the “Third
Estate” (to use the catchword of 1789) is essentially only a unit of
_contradiction_, incapable of definition by positive content, and
having neither customary-ethic of its own--for the higher bourgeois
society took after the nobility, and the urban piety after the older
priesthood--nor symbolism of its own--for the idea that life was not
for the service of practical aims, but for the consistent expression
of a symbolism of Time and Space, and could claim true dignity only
to the extent that it was the worthy vessel of these, was necessarily
repugnant to the urban reason as such. This reason, which dominates the
entire political literature of the Late period, asserts a new grouping
of estates as from the rise of cities--at first only in theory, but
finally, when rationalism becomes omnipotent, in practice, even the
bloody practice of revolutions. Nobility and clergy, so far as they are
still extant, appear rather markedly as _privileged_ classes, the tacit
significance of the emphasis being that their claim to prescriptive
rights on the ground of historical status is (from the point of view
of timeless rational or “natural” law) obsolete nonsense. They now
have their centre in the _capital city_ (this also a Late-period idea)
and now, and now only, develop aristocratic forms to that imposing
combination of hauteur and elegance that we see, for example, in the
portraits of Reynolds and Lawrence. In opposition to them stand the
intellectual powers of the now supreme city, _economy and science_,
which in conjunction with the mass of artisans, functionaries, and
labourers feel themselves as a party, diverse in its constituents, but
invariably solid at the call to battle for freedom--that is, for urban
independence of the great old-time symbols and the rights that flowed
from them. As components of the Third Estate, which counts by heads
and not by rank, they are all, in all Late periods of all Cultures,
“liberal” in one way or another--namely, free from the inward powers
of non-urban life. Economy is freed to make money, science freed to
criticize. And so in all the great decisions we perceive the intellect
with its books and its meetings having the word (“Democracy”), and
money obtaining the advantages (“Plutocracy”)--and it is never ideas,
but always capital, that wins. But this again is just the opposition of
truths and facts, in the form in which it develops from the city-life.
Moreover, by way of protest against the ancient symbols of the
soil-bound life, the city opposes to the aristocracy of birth the
notion of an aristocracy of money and an aristocracy of intellect--the
one not very explicit as a claim, but all the more effective as a fact;
the other a truth, but nothing more than that and, as a spectacle for
the eye, not very convincing. In every Late period there grows on to
the ancient nobility--that in which some big bit of history (say,
Crusades, or Norman conquest) has become stored as form and beat, but
which often has inwardly decayed at the great courts--a genuine second
crop. Thus in the fourth century B.C. the entry of great plebeian
families as _conscripti_ into the Roman Senate of _patres_ produced
within the senatorial order an aristocracy of “_nobiles_”--a nobility
holding lands, but entitled by office. In just the same way a nobility
of nepotism arose in Papal Rome; in 1650 there were scarcely fifty
families of more than three centuries’ status. In the Southern States
of the American Union there grew up, from Baroque times onward, that
planter-aristocracy which was annihilated by the money-powers of the
North in the Civil War of 1861-5. The old merchant-nobility of the type
of the Fugger, Welser, and Medici and the great Venetian and Genoese
houses--to this type, too, must be assigned practically the whole of
the patriciate of the Hellenic colonial cities of 800--had always
something of aristocracy in them,[619] race, tradition, high standards,
and the nature-impulse to re-establish connexion with the soil by
acquiring lands (although the old family house in town was no bad
substitute). But the new money-aristocracy of deals and speculations
rapidly acquired a taste for polite forms and at last forced its way
into the birth-nobility--in Rome, as Equites, from the first Punic War,
in France under Louis XIV[620]--which it disintegrated and corrupted,
while the intellectual aristocracy of the Enlightenment, for its part,
overwhelmed it with scorn. The Confucians took the old Chinese idea
of _Shi_ from the ethic of nobility and put it into the virtue of
intellect, and made the Pi-Yung, from a centre of knightly battle-play,
into an “intellectual wrestling-school,” a gymnasium--quite in the
spirit of our eighteenth century.
With the close of the Late period of every Culture the history of its
estates also comes to a more or less violent end. The mere desire
to live in rootless freedom prevails over the great imperative
Culture-symbols, which a mankind now wholly dominated by the city no
longer comprehends or tolerates. Finance sheds every trace of feeling
for earth-bound immovable values, and scientific criticism every
residue of piety. Another such victory also, in a measure, is the
liberation of the peasant, which consists in relieving him from the
pressure of servage, but hands him over to the power of money, which
now proceeds to turn the land into movable property--which happened
in our case in the eighteenth century; in Byzantium about 740 under
the Nomos Georgikos of the legislator Leo III[621] (after which the
colonate slowly disappeared); in Rome along with the founding of the
Plebeian order in 471. In Sparta the simultaneous attempt of Pausanias
to emancipate the Helots failed.
_This Plebs is the Third Estate in the form in which it is
constitutionally recognised as a unit_; its representatives are the
Tribunes, not officials, but trusted persons armed with a guaranteed
immunity. The reform of 471,[622] which _inter alia_ replaced the
old three Etruscan tribes by four urban tribes or wards (a highly
suggestive fact in itself), has been variously regarded as a pure
emancipation of peasantry[623] or as an organization of the trading
class.[624] But the Plebs, as Third Estate, as residue, is only
susceptible of negative definition--as meaning everyone who does
not belong to the land-nobility or is not the incumbent of a great
priestly office. The picture is as variegated as that of the French
“_Tiers État_” of 1789. Only the protest holds it together. In it are
traders, craftsmen, day-labourers, clerks. The gens of the Claudii
contained patrician _and_ plebeian families--that is, great landlords
and prosperous yeomen (for example, the Claudii Marcelli). The Plebs
in the Classical city-state is what a combination of peasant and
burgher is in a Baroque state of the West, when it protests in an
assembled states-general against the autocracy of a prince. Outside
politics--that is, socially--the plebs, as a unit distinguished from
nobility and priesthood, has no existence, but falls apart at once into
special callings that are perfectly distinct in interests. It is a
_Party_, and what it stands for as such is freedom in the urban sense
of the word. The fact emerges still more distinctly from the success
which the Roman land-nobility won immediately afterwards, in adding
sixteen country tribes, designated by family names and unchallengeably
controlled by themselves, to the four urban tribes that stood for
bourgeoisie proper--namely, money and mind. Not until the great social
conflict during the Samnite wars (contemporary with Alexander, and
corresponding exactly to the French Revolution), which ended with the
Lex Hortensia of 287, was the status-idea legally abolished and the
history of the symbolic Estates closed. _The Plebs became the Populus
Romanus_ in the same way as in 1789 the “_Tiers État_” constituted
itself the Nation. From this point on, in every Culture, it is
something fundamentally different that happens under the label of
social conflict.
The nobility of every Springtime had been _the_ Estate in the most
primary sense, history become flesh, race at highest potential. The
priesthood was its _counter-estate_, saying no wherever nobility said
yes and thus displaying the other side of life in a grand symbol.
The Third Estate, without proper inward unity, was the non-estate--the
protest, in estate-form, against the existence of estates; not against
this or that estate, but against the symbolic view of life in general.
It rejects all differences not justified by reason or practically
useful. And yet it does mean something itself, and means it very
distinctly--_the city-life as estate_ in contradistinction to that of
the country, _freedom as a condition_ in contrast to attachment. But,
looked at from within its own field, it is by no means the unclassified
residue that it appears in the eyes of the primary estates. The
bourgeoisie has definite limits; it belongs to the Culture; it
embraces, in the best sense, all who adhere to it, and under the name
of people, _populus, demos_, rallies nobility and priesthood, money and
mind, craftsman and wage-earner, as constituents of itself.
This is the idea that Civilization finds prevailing when it comes
on the scene, and this is what it destroys by its notion of the
Fourth Estate, _the Mass_, which rejects the Culture and its matured
forms, lock, stock, and barrel. It is the absolute of formlessness,
persecuting with its hate every sort of form, every distinction of
rank, the orderliness of property, the orderliness of knowledge. It
is the new nomadism of the Cosmopolis,[625] for which slaves and
barbarians in the Classical world, Sudras in the Indian, and in
general anything and everything that is merely human, provide an
undifferentiated floating something that falls apart the moment it is
born, that recognizes no past and possesses no future. Thus the Fourth
Estate becomes the expression of the passing of a history over into the
historyless. The mass is the end, the radical nullity.
CHAPTER XI
THE STATE
(B)
STATE AND HISTORY
I
Within the world-as-history, in which we are so livingly woven that
our perception and our reason constantly obey our feelings, the
cosmic flowings appear as that which we call actuality, real life,
being-streams in bodily form. Their common badge is Direction. But
they can be grasped differently according as it is the _movement_ or
_the thing moved_ that is looked at. The former aspect we call history
and the latter family or stock or estate or people, but the one is
only possible and existent through the other. History exists only as
the history of something. If we are referring to the history of the
great Cultures, then nation is the thing moved. State, _status_, means
condition, and we obtain our impression of the State when, as a Being
in moved Form flows past us, we fix in our eyes the Form as such, as
something extended and timelessly standing fast, and entirely ignore
direction and Destiny. State is history regarded as at the halt,
history the State regarded as on the move. The State of actuality is
the physiognomy of a historical unit of being; only the planned State
of the theorist is a system.
A movement _has_ form, and that which is moved is “_in form_,” or, to
use another sporting expression, when it is “going all out” it is in
perfect condition. This is equally true for a racehorse or a wrestler
and for an army or a people. The form abstracted from the life-stream
of a people is the “condition” of that people with respect to its
wrestle in and with history. But only the smallest part of this can be
got at and identified by means of the reason. No real constitution,
when taken by itself and brought down to paper as a system, is
complete. The unwritten, the indescribable, the usual, the felt, the
self-evident, so outweigh everything else that--though theorists never
see it--the description of a state or its constitutional archives
cannot give us even the silhouette of that which underlies the
living actuality of a state as its essential form; an existence-unit
of history is spoilt when we seriously subject its movement to the
constraint of a written constitution.
The individual class or family is the smallest, the nation the largest
unit in the stream of history.[626] Primitive peoples are subject to
a movement that is not historical in the higher sense--the movement
may be a jog-trot or may be a charge, but it has no organic character
and no profound importance. Nevertheless, these primitive peoples are
in motion through and through, to such an extent, indeed, as to seem
perfectly formless to the hasty observer. Fellaheen, on the contrary,
are the rigid objects of a movement that comes from outside and
impinges on them unmeaningly and fortuitously. The former includes
the “State” of the Mycenæan period; that of the Thinite period;
that of the Shang dynasty in China up to, say, the migration to Yin
(1400); the Frankish realm of Charlemagne; the Visigothic Kingdom to
Eurich; and Petrine Russia--state-forms often ample and efficient, but
still destitute of symbolism and necessity. To the latter belong the
Roman, Chinese, and other Imperia, whose form has ceased to have any
expressive content whatever.
But between primitive and fellah lies the history of the great Culture.
A people in the style of a Culture--a historical people, that is--is
called a Nation.[627] A nation, as a living and battling thing,
possesses a State not merely as a condition of movement, but also
(above all) _as an idea_. The State in the simplest sense of the term
may be as old as free-moving life itself. Swarms and herds of even very
lowly animal genera may have “constitutions” of some sort--and those of
the ants, of the bees, of many fish, or migrating birds, of beavers,
have reached an astounding degree of perfection--but the State of the
grand style is as old as and no older than its two prime Estates,
nobility and priesthood. These emerge _with_ the Culture, they vanish
into it, their Destinies are to a high degree identical. Culture is the
being of nations in State-form.
A people is _as_ State, a kindred is _as_ family, “in form”--that is,
as we have seen, the difference between political and cosmic history,
public and private life, _res publica_ and _res privata_. And both,
moreover, are symbols of care.[628] The woman _is_ world-history. By
conceiving and giving birth she cares for the perpetuation of the
blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of
cosmic life. Under this aspect, the life of man and woman is “in form”
as marriage. The man, however, _makes_ history, which is an unending
battle for the preservation of that other life. Maternal care is
supplemented and paralleled by paternal. The man with weapon in hand is
the other grand emblem of the will-to-duration. A people “in condition”
is originally a band warriorhood, a deep and intimately felt community
of men fit for arms. State is the affair of man, it is Care for the
preservation of the whole (including the spiritual self-preservation
called honour and self-respect), the thwarting of attacks, the
foreseeing of dangers, and, above all, the positive aggressiveness
which is natural and self-evident to every life that has begun to soar.
If all life were _one_ uniform being-stream, the words “people,”
“state,” “war,” “policy,” “constitution,” would never have been heard
of. But the eternal forceful _variety_ of life, which the creative
power of the Culture elevates to the highest intensities, is a fact,
and historically we have no choice but to accept it as such, with
all that flows therefrom. Plant-life is only plant-life in relation
to animal life; nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition
one another. _A people is only really such in relation to other
peoples_, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and
ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defence, hostility and war.
War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the
stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.
A people shapes history inasmuch as it is “in condition” for the task
of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history--which gets
it into this “condition,” in which alone it becomes creative--and
an outward history, which _consists_ in this creation. Peoples as
State, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the
world-as-history there is nothing beyond them. They _are_ Destiny.
_Res publica_, the public life, the “sword side” of human
being-currents, is in actuality invisible. The alien sees merely the
men and not their inner connexion, for indeed this resides very deep
in the stream of life, and even there is felt rather than understood.
Similarly, we do not in actuality see the family, but only certain
persons, whose cohesion in a perfectly definite sense we know and grasp
by way of our own inward experience. But for each such mental picture
there exists a group of constituent persons who are bound together as
a life-unit by a like constitution of outer and inner being. This form
in the flow of existence is called _customary ethic_ (_Sitte_) when it
arises of itself in the beat and march and is unconscious before it is
conscious; and _law_ (_Recht_) when it is _deliberately stated_ and put
forth for _acceptance_.
Law--irrespective of whether its authority derives from the feelings
and impulse (unwritten law, customary law, English “equity”) or has
been abstracted by reflection, probed, and brought into system as
Statute Law (_Gesetz_)--is the _willed_ form of Being. The jural
facts that it embraces are of the two kinds, though both possess
time-symbolism--Care in two modes, prevision and provision--but,
from the very difference in the proportions of consciousness that
they respectively contain, it follows that throughout real history
there must be two laws in opposition--the law of the fathers, of
tradition, the inherited, grown, and well-tried law, sacrosanct
because immemorially old, derived from the experience of the blood
and therefore dependable; and the thought and planned law of reason,
nature, and broad humanity, the product of reflection and therefore
first cousin to mathematics, a law that may not be very workable,
but is at any rate “just.” It is in these two orders of law that
the opposition between land-life and city-life, life-experience and
study-experience, ripens till it bursts out in that revolutionary
embitterment in which men take a law instead of being given it, and
break a law that will not yield.
A law that has been laid down by a community expresses a _duty_ for
every member, but it is no proof of every member’s _power_. On the
contrary, it is a question of Destiny, who makes the law and for whom
it is made. There are subjects and there are objects in the _making_ of
laws, although everyone is an object as to the validity thereof--and
this holds good without distinction for the inner law of families,
guilds, estates, and states. But for the State, which is the highest
law-subject existing in historical actuality, there is, besides, an
external law that it imposes upon aliens by hostilities. Ordinary civil
law is a case of the first kind, a peace treaty of the second. But in
all cases the law of the stronger is the law of the weaker also. To
“have the right” is an expression of power. This is a historical fact
that every moment confirms, but it is not acknowledged in the realm
of truth, which is not of this world. In their conceptions of right,
therefore, as in other things, being and waking-being, Destiny and
Causality, stand implacably opposed. To the priestly and idealistic
moral of good and evil belongs the _moral distinction of right and
wrong_, but in the race-moral of good and bad the distinction is
between those who give and those who receive the law. An abstract idea
of justice pervades the minds and writings of all whose spirit is noble
and strong and whose blood is weak, pervades all religions and all
philosophies--but the fact-world of history knows only the _success_
which turns the law of the stronger into the law of all. Over ideals it
marches without pity, and if ever a man or a people renounces its power
of the moment in order to remain righteous--then, certainly, his or its
theoretical fame is assured in the second world of thought and truth,
but assured also is the coming of a moment in which it will succumb to
another life-power that has better understood realities.
So long as a historical power is so superior to its constituent
units--as the State or the estate so often is to families and
calling-classes, or the head of the family to its children--a just law
_between_ the weaker is possible as a gift from the all-powerful hand
of the disinterested. But Estates seldom, and states almost never,
feel a power of this magnitude over themselves, and consequently
between them the law of the stronger acts with immediate force--as
is seen in a victor’s treaty, unilateral in terms and still more so
in interpretation and observance. That is the difference between
the _internal_ and the _external_ rights of historical life-units.
In the first the will of an arbiter to be impartial and just can be
effective--although we are apt to deceive ourselves badly as to the
degree of effective impartiality even in the best codes of history,
even in those which call themselves “civil” or “_bürgerlich_,” for the
very adjective indicates that _an estate_ has possessed the superior
force to impose them on everyone.[629] Internal laws are the result of
strict logical-causal thought centring upon truths, but for that very
reason their validity is ever dependent upon the material power of
their author, be this Estate or State. A revolution that annihilates
this power annihilates also these laws--they remain true, but they
are no longer actual. External laws on the other hand, such as all
peace treaties, are essentially never true and always actual--indeed
appallingly so. They set up no pretension whatever of being just--it
is quite enough that they are valid. Out of them speaks _Life_, which
possesses no causal and moral logic, but is organically all the more
consistent and consequent for the lack of it. Its will is to possess
validity _itself_; it feels with an inward certainty what is required
to that end and, seeing that, knows what is law for itself and _has
to be made_ law for others. This logic is seen in every family, and
particularly in old true-born peasant families as soon as authority is
shattered and someone other than the head tries to determine “what is.”
It appears in every state, as soon as one party therein dominates the
position. Every feudal age is filled with the contests between lords
and vassals over the “right to rights.” In the Classical world this
conflict ended almost everywhere with the unconditional victory of the
First Estate, which deprived the kingship of its legislative powers and
made it an object of its own law-making--as the origin and significance
of the Archons in Athens and the Ephors in Sparta prove beyond doubt.
But the same happened in the Western field too--for a moment in France
(institution of the States-General, 1302), and for good in England,
where in 1215 the Norman baronage and the higher clergy imposed Magna
Charta and thus sowed the seed that was to ripen into the effective
sovereignty of Parliament. Hence it was that the old Norman law of the
Estates here remained permanently valid. In Germany, on the contrary,
the weak Imperial power, hard-pressed by the claims of the great
feudatories, called in the “Roman” law of Justinian (that is, the law
of the unlimited central power) to aid it against the early German
land-laws.[630]
The Draconian Constitution, the πατρίος πολιτεία of the Oligarchs,
was dictated by the nobility like the strictly patrician law of
the Twelve Tables in Rome;[631] but by then the Late period of the
Culture was well under way and the power of the city and of money were
already fully developed, so that laws directed against these powers
necessarily gave way very promptly to laws of the Third Estate (Solon,
the Tribunate). Yet these, too, were estate-founded laws not less than
their predecessors. The struggle between the two primary estates for
the right of law-making has filled the entire history of the West, from
the early Gothic conflict of secular and canon law for supremacy, to
the controversy (not ended even to-day) concerning civil marriage.[632]
And, for that matter, what are the constitutional conflicts that have
occurred since the end of the eighteenth century but the acquisition
by the _Tiers État_ (which, according to Sieyès’s famous remark in
1789, “was nothing, but could be all”) of the right to legislate
bindingly upon all, producing a law that is just as much burghers
law as ever Gothic was nobles’ law. The nakedest form in which right
appears as the expression of might is (as I have already observed) in
interstate treaty-making, in peace treaties, and in that Law of Nations
of which already Mirabeau could say it is the law of the strong of
which the observance is imposed upon the weak. A large part of the
decisions of world-history is contained in laws of this kind. They are
the constitution under which militant history progresses, so long as it
does not revert to the original form of the armed conflict--original,
and also basic; for every treaty that is valid and is meant to have
real effects is an intellectual continuation thereof. If policy is war
by other means,[633] the “right to give the law” is the spoil of the
successful party.
II
It is clear, then, that on the heights of history two such life-forms,
Estate and State, contend for supremacy, both being-streams of great
inward form and symbolic force, each resolved to make its own destiny
the Destiny of the whole. _That_--if we try to understand the matter
in its depths and unreservedly put aside our everyday conceptions
of people, economy, society, and politics--_is the meaning of the
opposition between the social and the political conduct of events_.
Social and political ideas do not begin to be differentiated till a
great Culture has dawned, or even till feudalism is declining and
the lord-vassal relation represents the social, and the king-people
relation the political, side. But the social powers of the early time
(nobility and priesthood) not less actively than those of the later
(money and mind)--and the vocational groups of the craftsmen and
officials and workers, too, as they were rising to their power in the
growing cities--sought, each for itself, to subordinate the State-ideal
to its own Estate-ideal, or more usually to its estate interests. And
so there arose, at all planes from that of the national unit to that of
the individual consciousness, a fight over the respective limits and
claims of each--the result of which, in extreme cases, is that the one
element succeeds so completely as to make the other its tool.[634]
In all cases, however, it is the State that determines the _external_
position, and therefore the historical relations between peoples
are always of _a political and not a social nature_. In domestic
politics, on the contrary, the situation is so dominated by
class-oppositions that at first sight social and political tactics
appear inseparable, and indeed, in the thought of people who (as, for
example, a bourgeoisie) equate their own class-ideal with historical
actuality--and consequently cannot think in external politics at
all--identical. In the external battle the State seeks alliances
with other States, in the internal it is always in alliance with one
or another Estate--the sixth-century Tyrannis, for instance, rested
upon the combination of the State-idea with the interests of the
Third Estate _vis-à-vis_ the ancient noble oligarchy, and the French
Revolution became inevitable from the moment that the _Tiers_--that
is, intellect and money--left its friend the Crown in the lurch and
joined the two other Estates (from the Assembly of Notables, 1787).
We are thoroughly right therefore in feeling a distinction between
State-history and class-history,[635] between political (horizontal)
and social (vertical) history, war and revolution.[636] But it is a
grave error of modern doctrinaires to regard the spirit of domestic
history as that of history in general. _World-history is, and always
will be, State-history._ The inner constitution of a nation aims always
at being “_in condition_” for the outer fight (diplomatic, military,
or economic) and anyone who treats a nation’s constitution as an aim
and ideal in itself is merely ruining the nation’s body. But, from the
other point of view, it falls to the inner-political pulse-sense of a
ruling stratum (whether belonging to the First or to the Fourth Estate)
so to manage the internal class-oppositions that the focus and ideas
of the nation are not tied up in party conflict, nor treason to the
country thought of as an ace of trumps.
And here it becomes manifest that _the State and the first Estate_
are cognate down to the roots--akin, not merely by reason of their
symbolism of Time and Care, their common relation to race and the
facts of genealogical succession, to the family and to the primary
impulses of all peasantry (on which in the last analysis every State
and every nobility is supported)--not merely in their relation to
the soil, the clan-domain (be this heritable estate or fatherland),
which even in nations of the Magian style is lowered in significance
only because there the dignity of orthodoxy so completely surpasses
everything else--but above all in high practice amidst all the facts
of the historical world, in the unforced unity of pulse and impulse,
diplomacy, judgment of men, the art of command and masculine will to
keep and extend power, which even in earliest times differentiated a
nobility and a people out of the one and the same war-gathering; and,
lastly, in the feeling for honour and bravery. Hence, right up to the
latest phases, that State stands firmest in which the nobility or the
tradition shaped by the nobility is wholly at the service of the common
cause--as it was in Sparta as compared with Athens, in Rome _vis-à-vis_
Carthage, in Tsin as against the _tao_-coloured state of Tsu.
The distinction is that a nobility self-contained as a class--or for
that matter _any_ Estate--experiences the residue of the nation only
with reference to itself, and only desires to exercise power in that
sense, whereas the very principle of the State is that it cares for
all, and cares for the nobility as such only in relation to the major
care. But a genuine old nobility _assimilates itself_ to the State,
and cares for all as though for a property. This care, in fact, is one
of its grandest duties and one of which it is most deeply conscious;
it feels it, indeed, an innate _privilege_, and regards service in the
army and the administration as its special vocation.
It is, however, a distinction of quite another kind that holds as
between the State-idea and the idea of any one of the other Estates.
All these are inwardly alien to the State as such, and the State-ideals
that they fashion out of their own lives have not grown up out of the
spirit and the political forces of actual history--hence, indeed, the
conscious emphasis with which they are labelled as social. And while in
Early times the situation is simply that historical facts oppose the
Church-community in its efforts to actualize _religious_ ideals, in
Late periods both the _business_ ideal of the free economic life, and
the _Utopian_ ideal of the enthusiast who would actualize this or that
abstraction, also come into the field.
But in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts--no
truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no
final aim, but only facts, and anyone who does not realize this should
write books on politics--let him not try to _make_ politics. In the
real world there are no states built according to ideals, but only
states that have _grown_, and these are nothing but living peoples
“in form.” No doubt it is “the form impressed that living doth itself
unfold,” but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a
_being_, wholly instinctive and involuntary; and as to the unfolding,
if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction
inherent in the blood; if by the idealist, that dictated by his own
convictions--in other words, the way to nullity.
But the destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not
merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or
structure, _but that of their inner authority_, which cannot in the
long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief--of
friend _and_ foe--in their effectiveness. The decisive problems lie,
not in the working-out of constitutions, but in the organization of
a sound working government; not in the distribution of political
rights according to “just” principles (which at bottom are simply the
idea that a _class_ forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the
efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play
of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears
the winning-post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius
into syntony; not, lastly, in any world-alien moral, but in the
steadiness, sureness, and superiority of political leadership. The
more self-evident all these things are, the less is said or argued
about them; the more fully matured the State, the higher the standing,
the historical capacity, and therefore the Destiny of the Nation.
State-majesty, sovereignty, is a life-symbol of the first order. It
distinguishes _subjects and objects_[637] in political events not
only in inner, but also (which is far more important) in external,
history. Strength of leadership, which comes to expression in the
clear separation of these two factors, is the unmistakable sign of
the life-force in a political unity--so much so that the shattering
of existing authority (for example, by the supporters of an opposed
constitutional ideal) almost always results not in this new party’s
making itself the subject of domestic policy, but in the whole nation’s
becoming the object of alien policy--and not seldom for ever.
For this reason, in every healthy State the letter of the written
constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the
living constitution, the “form” (to use again the sporting term), which
has developed of itself out of the experience of Time, the situation,
and, above all, the race-properties of the Nation. The more powerfully
the _natural_ form of the body politic has built itself up, the more
surely it works in unforeseen situations; indeed, in the limit, it
does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister
or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has
no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman
politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of
view of constitutional law, no existence whatever.[638] The leader’s
responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of
statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of
history.
The fact, therefore, express and unequivocal, is that
class-States--that is, States in which particular classes rule--are
the _only_ States. This must not be confused with the class-States
to which the individual is merely _attached_ in view of belonging to
an estate, as in the case of the older Polis, the Norman States of
England and Sicily, the France of the Constitution of 1791, and Soviet
Russia to-day. The true class-State is an expression of the general
historical experience that it is always a single social stratum
which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading.
It is always a definite minority that represents the world-historical
tendency of a State; and, within that again, it is a more or less
self-contained minority that in virtue of its aptitudes (and often
enough against the spirit of the Constitution) actually holds the
reins. And, if we ignore, as exceptions proving the rule, revolutionary
interregna and Cæsarian conditions, in which individuals and fortuitous
groupings maintain their power merely by material means (and often
without any aptitude for ruling), it is always the minority _within an
Estate_ that rules by tradition. In by far the greater number of cases
this minority is one within the nobility--for example, the “gentry”
which governed the Parliamentary style of England, the _nobiles_ at the
helm of Roman politics in Punic War times, the merchant-aristocracy
of Venice, the Jesuit-trained (nobles who conducted the diplomacy of
the Papal Curia in the Baroque).[639] Similarly, we find the political
aptitude in self-contained groups within the religious Estate--not only
in the Roman Catholic Church, but also in Egypt and India and still
more in Byzantium and Sassanid Persia. In the Third Estate--though
this seldom produces it, not being in itself a life-unit--there are
cases such as those of third-century Rome, where a stratum of the
plebs contains men trained in commerce, and France since 1789, where
an element of the bourgeoisie has been trained in law; in these cases,
it is ensured by a closed circle of persons possessing homogeneous
practical gifts, which constantly recruits itself and preserves in its
midst the whole sum of unwritten political tradition and experience.
That is the organization of _actual_ states in contradistinction to
those conceived on paper and in the minds of pedants. There is no best,
or true, or right State that could possibly be actualized according to
plan. Every State that emerges in history exists as it is but once and
for a moment; the next moment it has, unperceived, become different,
whatever the rigidity of its legal-constitutional crust. Therefore,
words like “republic,” “absolutism,” “democracy,” mean something
different in every instance, and what turns them into catchwords is
their use as definite concepts by philosophers and ideologues. A
history of States is physiognomic and not systematic. Its business is
not to show how “humanity” advances to the conquest of its eternal
rights, to freedom and equality, to the evolving of a super-wise and
super-just State, but to describe the political units that really exist
in the fact-world, how they grow and flourish and fade, and how they
are really nothing but actual life “in form.” Let us make the attempt
on this basis.
III
History in the high style begins in every Culture with the feudal
State, which is not a State in the coming sense of the word, but
an ordering of the common life with reference to an _Estate_. The
noblest fruit of the soil, its race in the proudest sense, here
builds itself up in a rank-order from the simple knighthood to the
_primus inter pares_, the feudal Overlord amongst his Peers. This
sets in simultaneously with the architecture of the great cathedrals
and the Pyramids--the stone and the blood elevated into symbols, the
one _meaning_, the other _being_. The idea of feudalism, which has
dominated all Springtimes, is the transition from the primitive, purely
practical and factual, relationship of potentate to those who obey him
(whether they have chosen him or have been subdued by him) into the
_private-law_ (and, therefore, deeply symbolical) relation of the lord
to the vassal. This relation rests entirely upon the ethic of nobility,
honour, and loyalty, and conjures up the cruellest conflicts between
duty to one’s lord and duty to one’s own family. The decadence of Henry
the Lion[640] is a tragic example of it.
The “State” exists here only to the extent of the limits of the feudal
tie, and it expands its domain by the entry of alien vassals therein.
Service to, and agency for, the ruler--originally personal and limited
in time--very soon became the permanent fief which, if it escheated,
_had_ to be reassigned (already by 1000 the principle of the West was
“No land without a lord”), and from that presently passed to the stage
of being hereditary (law of Emperor Conrad II, 28th May 1037). Thereby
the formerly immediate subjects of the ruler were mediatized, and
henceforth they were only his subjects as being subjects of a vassal of
his. Nothing but the strong social interbonding of the Estate ensured
the cohesion of what must be called, even under these conditions, the
State.
The idea of power and booty are seen here in classic union. When, in
1066, William and his Norman chivalry conquered England, the whole
land was made King’s property and fee, and it remains so in name
to this day. Here is a true Viking delight in “having,” the care
of an Odysseus who begins by counting his treasure.[641] From this
booty-sense of shrewd conquerors there came, quite suddenly, the
famous exchequer-practice and officialdom of the early Cultures. It
is well to distinguish these officials from the incumbents of the
great confidential offices which had arisen out of the older personal
agency;[642] they were _clerici_ or clerks, and not _ministeriales_ or
ministers--“servants,” but in a prouder sense now. The financial and
clerical officialdom is an expression of Care, and it develops in exact
proportion with the development of the dynastic idea. Thus in Egypt
it reached an astonishingly high level at the very beginning of the
Old Kingdom.[643] The early Chinese official-State described in the
_Tshou-li_ is so comprehensive and complicated that the authenticity
of the book has been doubted,[644] but in spirit and tendency it
corresponds exactly with that of Diocletian, which enabled a feudal
order to arise out of an immense fiscal machinery.[645] In the early
Classical world it is markedly absent. “_Carpe diem_” was the motto of
Classical economics from the first to last, and in this domain as in
others Improvidence, the _autarkeia_ of the Stoics, was elevated into a
principle. Even the best calculators were no exception--thus Eubulus in
Athens, 330 B.C., managed business with an eye to surpluses, but only
to distribute them, when gained, amongst the citizens.
The extreme contrast to Eubulus’s finance is afforded by the canny
Vikings of the early West, who by the financial administration of their
Norman states laid the foundations of the Faustian economics that
extend to-day over the whole world. It is from the chequered table in
the Norman counting-house of Robert the Devil (1028-35) that we have
the name of the English “Exchequer” and hence the word “cheque.” Here
also originated the words “control,” “quittance,” “record.”[646] Here
it was that after 1066 England was organized as booty, with ruthless
reduction of the Anglo-Saxons, to serfdom, and here too originated the
Norman State of Sicily--for it was not upon nothing that Frederick II
of Hohenstaufen later built; his most personal work, the constitutions
of Melfi (1231) he did not create, but only (by methods borrowed
from the money-economics of high Arabian Civilization) polished and
perfected. From this centre the methodic and descriptive technique of
finance spread into the business world of Lombardy and so into all the
trading cities and administrations of the West.
But in Feudalism build-up and breakdown lie close together. When
the primary estates were still in full bloom and vigour, the future
nations, and with them the germ of the State-idea proper, were stirring
into life. The opposition between temporal and spiritual power and that
between crown and vassals was cut across again and again by oppositions
of nationhood--German-French even from Otto the Great’s times;
German-Italian, which rent Italy between the Guelphs and Ghibellines
and destroyed the German Empire; French-English, which brought about
the English dominion over western France. Still, all this was far less
important than the great decisions within the feudal order itself,
where the idea of nationality was unknown. England was broken up into
60,251 fiefs, catalogued in the Domesday Book of 1084 (consulted
even to-day upon occasion), and the strictly organized central power
required allegiance to itself even from the sub-tenants of the peers,
but all the same it was less than a hundred and fifty years later that
Magna Charta was forced through (1215), and actual power transferred
from the King to the Parliament of the vassals--made up of great
barons and ecclesiastics in the Upper house, gentry and patricians
in the Lower--which thenceforward became the support and champion of
_national_ development. In France the baronage, in conjunction with
the clergy and the towns, forced the calling of the States-General
in 1302; the General Privilege of Saragossa in 1283 made Aragon into
a quasi-republic of nobles ruled by its Cortes, and in Germany a few
decades earlier a group of great vassals made the election of the
German Kingship dependent upon themselves as Electors.
The mightiest expression that the feudal idea found for itself--not
merely in the West, but in any Culture--came out in the struggle
between Empire and Papacy, both of which dreamed of a consummation in
which the entire world was to become an immense feudal system, and so
intimately enwove themselves into the dream that, with the decay of
feudalism, both together fell from their heights in lamentable ruin.
The idea of a Ruler whose writ should run throughout the whole
historical world, whose Destiny should be that of all mankind, has
taken visible shape in, so far, three instances--firstly, in the
conception of the Pharaoh as Horus;[647] secondly, in the great Chinese
imagining of the Ruler of the Middle, whose domain is _tien-hia_,
everything lying below the heavens;[648] and, thirdly, in early Gothic
times. In 962 Otto the Great, answering to the deep mystical sense and
yearning for historical and spatial infinity that was sweeping through
the world of those days, conceived the idea of the “Holy Roman Empire,
German by nation.” But even earlier, Pope Nicolas I (860), still
completely involved in Augustinian--that is, Magian--lines of thought,
had dreamed of a Papal democracy which was to stand above the princes
of this world, and from 1059 Gregory VII with all the prime force of
his Faustian nature set out to actualize a papal world-dominion under
the forms of a universal feudalism, with kings as vassals. The Papacy
itself, indeed, under its domestic aspect, constituted the small feudal
State of the Campagna, whose noble families controlled the election
of popes, and which very rapidly converted the college of cardinals
(to which the duty was entrusted from 1059 on) into a sort of noble
oligarchy. But under the broader aspect of external policy Gregory
VII actually _obtained_ feudal supremacy over the Norman states of
England and Sicily, both of which were created with his support, and
actually awarded the Imperial crown as Otto the Great had awarded the
tiara. But a little later Henry VI of Hohenstaufen succeeded in the
opposite sense; even Richard Cœur-de-Lion swore the vassal’s oath to
him for England, and the universal Empire was on the point of becoming
a fact when the greatest of all popes, Innocent III (1198-1216) made
the papal overlordship of the world real for a short time. England
became a Papal fief in 1213; Aragon and Leon and Portugal, Denmark
and Poland and Hungary, Armenia and the recently founded Latin Empire
in Byzantium followed. But with Innocent’s death disintegration set
in within the Church itself, and the great spiritual dignitaries,
whom their investitures turned into vassals of the Pope as overlord,
soon followed the lay vassals’ example and set about limiting him by
means of representative institutions for their order.[649] The notion
that a General Council stood higher than a pope was not of religious
origin, but arose primarily out of the feudal principle. Its tendency
corresponded precisely to that which the English magnates had made good
in Magna Charta. In the councils of Constance (1414) and Basel (1431)
the last attempts were made to turn the Church, under its temporal
aspect, into a clerical feudalism, in which an oligarchy of cardinals
would have become the representative of the whole Clerical Estate of
the West and taken the place hitherto held by the Roman nobility.
But by that time the feudal idea had long taken second place to that
of the State, and so the Roman barons won the victory. The field of
candidature for the Papacy was limited to the narrowest environs of
Rome, and unlimited power over the organizations of the Church was
_ipso facto_ secured to the centre. As for the Empire, it had long ago
become a venerated shadow, like the Egyptian and the Chinese.
In comparison with the immense dynamism of these decisions, the
building-up of feudalism in the Classical world was slow, static,
almost noiseless, so that it is hardly recognizable save from the
traces of transition. In the Homeric epos as we have it now, every
locality possesses its Basileus, who, it is fairly evident, was once
a great vassal--we can see in the figure of Agamemnon the conditions
in which the ruler of a wide region took the field with the train
of his peers. But in the Greek world the dissolution of the feudal
world was associated with the formation of the _city_-state, the
political “point.” In consequence, the hereditary court-offices,
the _archai_ and _timai_, the _prytaneis_, the Archons, and perhaps
the original Prætor,[650] were all urban in nature; and the great
families therefore developed, not separately in their counties, as in
Egypt, China, and the West, but in the closest touch with the city,
where they obtained possession of the rights of the King, one after
the other, until nothing was left to the ruling house but that which
could not be touched because of the gods--namely, the title attaching
to its sacrificial function (hence the _rex sacrorum_). In the later
parts of the Homeric epic (_c._ 800) it is the nobles who invite the
king to take his seat, and even unseat him. The Odyssey really knows
the kingship only as part of the saga--the actual Ithaca that it shows
us is a city dominated by oligarchs.[651] The Spartiates, like the
Roman partriciate of the Comitia Curiata, are the product of a feudal
relation.[652] In the _phiditiæ_[653] there are evident remains of
the old open table of the noble, but the power of the king has sunk
to the shadowy dignity of the _rex sacrorum_ of Rome, or the “kings”
of Sparta, who were liable to be imprisoned or removed at any time by
the Ephors. The essential similarity of these conditions forces us to
presume that in Rome the Tarquinian Tyrannis of 500 was preceded by a
period of oligarchical dominance, and this view is supported by the
unquestionably genuine tradition of the _Interrex_, a person appointed
by the council of the nobles (the Senate) from amongst its own members
to act until it should please them to elect a king again.
Here, as elsewhere, there comes a time in which feudalism is falling
into decay, but the coming State is not yet completed, the nation not
yet “in form.” This is the fearful crisis that emerges everywhere
in the shape of the Interregnum, and forms the boundary _between
the feudal union and the class-State_. In Egypt feudalism was fully
developed by about the middle of the Vth Dynasty. The Pharaoh Asosi
gave away his domains literally piece by piece to the vassals, and,
further, the rich fiefs of the priesthood were (exactly as in the
West) free of taxation and gradually became the permanent property
(“mortmain,” as we should say) of the great temples.[654] With the
Vth Dynasty (_c._ 2530 B.C.) the “Hohenstaufen” age comes to an end.
Under the shadow-kingship of the short-lived VIth Dynasty the princes
(_rpati_) and counts (_hetio_) become independent; the high offices are
all hereditary and the tomb-inscriptions show us more and more proud
stress upon ancient lineage. That which later Egyptian historians have
hidden under the reputed VIIth and VIIIth dynasties[655] is really
half a century of anarchy and lawless conflicts between princes for
each other’s domains or for the Pharaoh-title. In China, even I-Wang
(934-909) was obliged by his vassals to give out all conquered lands,
and to do so to sub-tenants nominated by them. In 842 Li-Wang was
forced, with his heir, to flee, and the administration of the Empire
was carried on by two individual princes. In this interregnum began the
fall of the House of Chóu and the decline of the Imperial name into an
honourable but meaningless title. It is the corresponding picture to
that of the Interregnum in Germany, which began in 1254 and brought the
Imperial power to its nadir of 1400 under Wenceslaus, simultaneously
with the Renaissance-style of the _condottieri_ and the complete decay
of the Papal power. After the death of Boniface VIII, who in 1302 had
once again asserted the feudal power of the Papacy in the Bull _Unam
sanctam_ and had consequently been arrested by the representatives
of France, the Papacy experienced a century of banishment, anarchy,
and impotence, while in the following century the Norman nobility of
England for the most part perished in the contest of the houses of York
and Lancaster for the throne.
IV
What this fall of Papacy and Empire meant was the victory of State
over Estate. At the root of the feudal system there had been the
feeling that the purpose of existence was that a “life” should be led
in the light of what it meant. History was exhaustively comprised
in the destinies of noble blood. But now the feeling sprang up that
there was _something else_ besides, something to which even nobility
was subordinate, and which it shared with all other classes (whether
of status or of vocation), something intangible, an idea. Events
came to be viewed, no longer from a frankly private-law standpoint,
but under a “public”-law aspect. The State might (and almost without
exception did) remain aristocratic to its core; its outward appearance
might be scarcely altered by the transition from the feudal group to
the Class-State; the idea that those outside the Estates possessed
rights as well as duties might be still unknown; _but_ the feeling
had become different, and the consciousness that Life existed to be
lived on the heights of history had given way to the other sentiment,
that it contained a _task_. The difference becomes very distinct when
we contrast the policy of Rainald van Dassel (d. 1167)--one of the
greatest German statesmen of all periods--with that of the Emperor
Charles IV (d. 1378), and consider in parallel therewith the transition
in Classical feeling from the “Themis” of the knightly age to the
“Dike” of the growing Polis.[656] Themis involves only a claim, Dike
implies a task as well.
The State-idea in its sturdy youth is always--and self-evidently,
with a naturalness rooted deep in animality itself--bound up with the
conception of an individual ruler. The same holds good, with the same
self-evidence, for every roused crowd in every decisive situation--as
every riotous assembly and every moment of sudden danger demonstrates
afresh.[657] Such crowds are units of feeling, but blind. They are
“in form” for the onrush of events only when they are in the hands of
the leader, who suddenly appears in their midst, is set at the head
in a moment by that very unity of feeling, and finds an unconditional
obedience. This process repeats itself in the formation of the great
life-units that we call peoples and States, only more slowly and with
surer meaning. In the high Cultures it is sometimes set aside or set
back in favour of other modes of being “in form,” for the sake of a
great symbol and artificially; but even then under the mask of these
forms we practically always find _de facto_ an individual rulership,
whether it be that of a King’s adviser or a party leader; and in every
revolutionary upheaval the original state of things reappears.
With this cosmic fact is bound up one of the most intimately inward
traits of all directional life, the _inherited will_, which presents
itself with the force of a natural phenomenon in every strong race
and compellingly urges even the momentary leader (often quite
unconsciously) to uphold his rank for the duration of his personal
existence or, beyond it, for that of his blood streaming on through
children and grandchildren. The same deep and plantlike trait inspires
every real following, which feels in the continuance of the blood
of leadership both a surety for and a symbol of the continuance of
its own. It is precisely in revolutions that this primitive instinct
comes out, full and strong and regardless of all principles. Precisely
because of it the France of 1800 saw not only Napoleon, but also
his hereditary position, as the true fulfilment of the Revolution.
Theorists who, like Marx and Rousseau, start from conceptual ideals
instead of from blood-facts have never grasped this immense force that
dwells in the historical world, and have in consequence labelled its
manifested effects as damnable and reactionary. But they are there,
and with a force so insistent that even the symbolism of the high
Cultures can only override them temporarily and artificially, as is
shown in the engrossing of elective officers by particular families in
the Classical, and the nepotism of the Baroque popes in our own case.
Behind the fact that leadership is very often freely resigned, and
the saying that “merit should rule,” there is practically always the
rivalry of magnates, who have no objection in principle to hereditary
rulership, but prevent it in practice because each one of them secretly
claims it for his own blood. This state of active, creative jealousy is
the foundation on which the forms of Classical oligarchy are built up.
The combination of both elements produces the idea of Dynasty. This
is so deeply rooted in the Cosmic and so closely interwoven into the
factual web of historical life that the State-ideas of each and all the
Cultures are _modifications of this one principle_, from the passionate
affirmative of the Faustian to the resolute negative of the Classical
Soul. The ripening of the State-idea of a Culture is associated with
the city and even the adolescence of the city. Nations, historical
peoples, are town-building peoples.[658] The _capital_ takes the place
of the castle and the palace as the centre of high history, and in it
the feeling of the exercise of power, Themis, transforms itself into
that of government, Dike. Here feudal unity is inwardly overcome by
national, even in the consciousness of the First Estate itself, and
here the bare fact of rulership elevates itself into the symbol of
_Sovereignty_.
And so, with the sinking of feudalism, Faustian history becomes
dynastic history. From little centres where princely families have
their seats (whence they “spring,” as the phrase goes, reminding us
of plant and property), the shaping of nations proceeds--nations
of strictly aristocratic constitution, but yet so that the State
conditions the being of the Estate. The genealogical principle already
ruling in the feudal nobility and the yeoman families, the expression
of the feeling for expanse and the will-to-history, has become so
powerful that the appearance of nations transcending the strong
unities of language and landscape is dependent upon the destinies
of ruling houses. Marriages and deaths sever or unite the blood of
whole populations.[659] Where a Lotharingian and a Burgundian dynasty
failed to take shape, there also nations already embryonic failed to
develop. The doom that overhung the Hohenstaufen involved more than the
imperial crown. For Germany and Italy it meant for centuries a deep
unsatisfied longing for a united German-Italian nation, while the House
of Habsburg, on the contrary, enabled, not a German, but an Austrian
nation to develop.
In the Magian world, with its cavern-feeling, the dynastic principle
was quite otherwise constituted. The Classical princeps, the legitimate
successor of tyrants and tribunes, was the embodiment of the Demos.
As Janus was the door and Vesta the hearth, so Cæsar was the people.
He was the last creation of Orphic religiousness. The “Dominus et
Deus,” on the contrary, was Magian, a Shah participating in the divine
Fire (the _hvareno_ of the Mazdaist empire of the Sassanids, which
becomes the aureole in Pagan and Christian Byzantium), which radiates
about him and makes him _pius, felix, invictus_ (the last-named, from
Commodus’s reign, his official title).[660] In Byzantium in the third
century of our era the ruler-type underwent the same transition as
was implied in the taking-down of Augustus’s civil-service state to
build Diocletian’s feudalism. “The new creation begun by Aurelian and
Probus and built up on the ruins by Diocletian and Constantine was
about as alien to the Classical world and the principate as the empire
of Charlemagne.”[661] The Magian ruler governed the visible portion of
the general Consensus of the orthodox, which was Church, State, and
Nation in one,[662] as Augustine described it in his _Civitas Dei_. The
Western ruler is by the grace of God monarch in the _historical_ world;
his people is subordinated to him because God has invested him with it.
But in matters of faith he is himself a subordinate--to God’s Vicar
on earth, or to his own conscience, as the case may be. That is the
separation of State authority and Church authority, the great Faustian
conflict between Time and Space. When, in 800, the Pope crowned the
Emperor, he _chose_ a new ruler for himself in order that he himself
might thrive. Whereas the Emperor in Byzantium was, according to
Magian world-feeling, his spiritual as well as his secular superior,
an Emperor in the Frank lands was his _servant_ in spiritual matters,
besides being (perhaps) his arm in secular affairs. As an idea, the
Papacy could arise only by separation from the Caliphate, for the Pope
is _included_ in the Caliph.
For this very reason, however, the choice of the Magian ruler cannot
be bound down to a genealogical succession-law. It issues from the
consensus of the ruling blood-kindred, out of whom the Holy Ghost
speaks and designates the Chosen One. When Theodosius died, in 550, a
relative, the nun Pulcheria, formally gave her hand to the old senator
Marcianus, thereby incorporating this statesman in the family and
securing the throne to him and continuance to the “dynasty”;[663] and
this act, like many similar occurrences in the Sassanid and Abbassid
houses, was taken as the outcome of a hint from above.
In China, the Emperor-idea of the early Chóu period, which was strictly
bound up with feudalism, soon became a dream, which, rapidly and with
increasing distinctness, came to reflect a whole preceding world
in the form of three dynasties of Emperors and myth-Emperors more
ancient still.[664] But, for the dynasties of the system of states
that thereupon grew up (in which the title King, _Wang_, came at last
into perfectly general use) strict rules came into force for royal
successions, legitimacy--a notion quite alien to the early time--became
a power to conjure with,[665] and extinction of lines, adoptions and
_mésalliances_ led, as in the Baroque of the West, to innumerable wars
of succession.[666] Some principle of legitimacy, too, surely underlay
the remarkable fact that the rulers of the Egyptian XIIth dynasty,
with whom the late period of the Culture ended, had their sons crowned
during their own lifetime.[667] The inward relationship between these
three dynastic ideas is yet another proof that Being in these three
Cultures was akin.
It requires a close insight into the political form-language of the
Classical world to perceive that here also the course of things was
exactly the same, and that it comprised not only the transition from
feudal union to class-State, but even the dynastic principle as well.
Classical being, indeed, said no to everything that might draw it
into distances either of space or of time, and even in the fact-world
of history ringed itself with creations that had something of the
defensive in them. But all this narrowing and curtailing presupposes
the thing against which it is striving to maintain itself. The
Dionysiac squandering, and the Orphic negation, of the Classical body
contained in the very _form_ of their protest the Apollinian ideal of
perfect bodily being.
Individual rulership and the will to transmit to heirs were
unmistakably taken for granted in the oldest kingship.[668] But they
had become questionable even by 800, as the rôle of Telemachus in the
older parts of the Odyssey indicates. The royal title was frequently
borne by great vassals and the most conspicuous of the nobles. In
Sparta and in Lycia there were two of them, and in the Phæacian city
of the epic and in many actual cities there were more. Next comes the
splitting-off of offices from dignities. Lastly, the kingship itself
becomes an office which the nobility confers (though at first, perhaps,
only upon members of the old royal family); thus in Sparta the Ephors,
as representing the First Estate, were in no wise limited in their
choice by rule; and in Corinth from about 750 the royal clan of the
Bacchiadæ abolished hereditary succession, and on each occasion set up
a _prytaneus_ with royal rank from within their own body. The great
offices, which likewise were hereditary at first, came to be for one
life only, then were limited to a term, and lastly became annual, and,
further, were so arranged that there were more holders than offices,
and the leadership was exercised by each in turn--the custom which,
as is well known, led to the disaster of Cannæ. These annual offices,
from the Etruscan annual dictature[669] to the Doric ephorate (which
is found in Heraclea and Messene as well as Sparta) are firmly bound
up with the essence of the Polis, and they reach their full structure
about 650. Exactly at the corresponding date of the Western class-State
(end of the fifteenth century), the hereditary power of dynasties was
being secured by the Emperor Maximilian and his marriage-politics
(against the claims of the Electors), by Ferdinand of Aragon, Henry VII
of England, and Louis XI of France.[670]
But with the increasing emphasis upon the Classical here and now, the
priesthood, which had the beginnings of an Estate in it, became _pari
passu_ a mere aggregate of city officials. The capital, so to call it,
of the Homeric kingship, instead of being the centre for the radiation
of State influence in all directions into the distance, contracted
its magic circle until State and city became identical. Thereby, of
course, the nobility was fused with the patriciate, and if even in the
Gothic the representation of the young cities (for example, the English
Commons or the French States-General) was exclusively by patricians,
how much more so in the powerful city-state of the Classical! Not
indeed in idea, _but in fact_, it was a pure kingless aristocratic
State. The strictly Apollinian “form” of the growing Polis is called
_oligarchy_.
And thus, at the close of the early periods of both these Cultures, we
see two principles parallel and contrasted, the Faustian-genealogical
and the Apollinian-oligarchic; two kinds of constitutional law, of
Dike. The one is supported by an unmeasured sense of expanse, reaches
back deep into the past with form-tradition, thinks forward with the
same intense will-to-endure into the remotest future; but in the
present, too, works for political effectiveness over broad expanses by
well-considered dynastic marriages and by the truly Faustian, dynamic,
and contrapuntal politics that we call _diplomacy_. The other, wholly
corporeal and statuesque, is self-limited by its policy of _autarkeia_
to the nearest and the most immediate present, and at every point
stoutly denies that which Western being affirms.
Both the dynastic state and the city-state presuppose the city itself.
But there is this difference, that a seat of government in the West,
though it may be (and frequently is) far from being the greatest city
of the land, is a force-centre in a field of political tensions such
that every occurrence, in however remote a corner, vibrates generally
throughout the whole--whereas in the Classical, life huddles closer
and closer until it reaches the grotesque phenomenon of Synœcism--the
very acme of the Euclidean will-to-form in the political world. It
is impossible to imagine the State unless and until the nation sits
physically concentrated in one heap, as one _body_; it must be _seen_,
and even seen “at a glance.” And while the Faustian tendency is more
and more to diminish the number of dynastic centres--so that even
Maximilian I could see looming in the distance a dynastically secure
universal monarchy of his house--the Classical world fell apart into
innumerable petty points, which, almost as soon as they came into
existence, started to do that which for Classical mankind was almost
a necessity of thought and the purest expression of _autarkeia_--to
destroy one another.[671]
Synœcism with its consequence, the creation of the Polis-type proper,
was exclusively the work of _aristocracy_. It was they that established
the Classical city-state, and for themselves alone; it was the
drawing-together of country nobility and patriciate that brought it
into form. The vocational classes were already on the spot, and the
peasantry ceased to count from the class point of view. And by the
concentration of noble power at one point the kingship of the feudal
period was shattered.
With these glimpses into Greece to go upon, we may venture, though
under all reserves of course, to outline the history of primitive
Rome. The Roman synœcism--the assembling of widely scattered noble
families--is identical with the “founding” of the city, an Etruscan
undertaking of the beginning of the seventh century.[672] Facing
the royal stronghold of the Capitol, there had long been two other
settlements on the Palatine and the Quirinal. To the first of these
belonged the ancient goddess Diva Rumina[673] and the Etruscan Ruma
clan;[674] the god of the second was Quirinus Pater. From these comes
the dual name of Romans and “Quirites,” and the dual priesthoods
of the Salii and Luperci, which adhered to the two hills. Now, as
the three blood-tribes named Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres are in all
probability common to all Etruscan localities,[675] they must have
existed in both of those which concern us here; and thus are explained,
on the one hand, the number _six_ of centuries of equites, of military
tribunes, of aristocratic Vestals, and, on the other, the number
_two_ of the prætors (or consuls) who were, quite early, attached
to the King as representatives of the nobles and gradually deprived
him of all influence. Already by 600 the constitution of Rome must
have been a strong oligarchy of “Patres” with a shadow-kingship[676]
as figure-head. Thus both the older theory of an expulsion of the
kings, and the newer of a slow disintegration of the royal power, can
stand side by side after all, the former as referring to the fall of
the Tarquinian Tyrannis, which (as everywhere else in the Classical
world--Pisistratus in Athens, for example) had set itself up in
opposition to the oligarchy about the middle of the sixth century;
the latter as referring to the slow disintegration of the feudal power
of the (may we say) Homeric kingship by the aristocratic city-state,
_before_ the “foundation,” so-called--the crisis, probably, in which
the prætors emerged, as the Archons and Ephors emerged elsewhere.
This Polis was no less strictly aristocratic than the Western
class-State, with its nobility, clergy, and higher burgesses. The
residue of the people belonging to it was merely its _object_, but--in
the West the object of its political _care_, and in the Classical the
object of its political _carelessness_. For here “_Carpe diem_” was the
motto of the oligarchy as well as of others. It proclaims itself aloud
in the poems of Theognis and the Song of Hybrias the Cretan. It made
Classical finance till right into its latest phases--from the piracy
practised by Polycrates upon his own people to the proscriptions of the
Roman Triumvirs--into a more or less hand-to-mouth seizing of resources
for the moment. In jurisprudence it emerges with unparalleled logic in
the limitation of Roman edict-law to the term of office of the one-year
prætor.[677] And, lastly, it is seen in the ever-growing practice of
filling military, legal, and administrative offices (particularly
the _more_ important of them) by lot--a kind of homage to Tyche, the
goddess of the Moment.
This was the Classical world’s manner of being politically “in form”
and, correspondingly, of thinking and feeling. There are no exceptions.
The Etruscans were as much under its domination as the Dorians and
the Macedonians.[678] When Alexander and his successors dotted the
Orient far and wide with their Hellenistic cities, they did so
without conscious choice, for they could not imagine any other form
of political organization. Antioch was to be Syria, and Alexandria
Egypt. The latter, under the Ptolemies and later under the Cæsars,
was, not indeed legally, but certainly in practice, a Polis on a vast
scale--for the country outside, long reverted to townless fellahdom
and managed by immemorial precedents, stood at its gates like an alien
frontier.[679] The Roman Imperium was nothing but the last and greatest
Classical city-state standing on foundations of a colossal synœcism.
Under Marcus Aurelius the rhetor Aristides could say with perfect
justification that it had “brought together this world in the name of
one city: wheresoever a man may be born in it, it is at its centre that
he dwells.” Even the conquered populations of the Empire--the wandering
desert-tribes, the upland-valley communities of the Alps--were
constituted as _civitates_. Livy thinks invariably in the forms of
the city-state, and for Tacitus provincial history simply does not
exist. When, in 49, Pompey, withdrawing before Cæsar, gave up Rome as
militarily unimportant and betook himself to the East to create there
a firm base of operations, he was doomed. Giving up the city, he had,
in the eyes of the ruling classes, given up the State. To them Rome was
all.[680]
These city-states were in principle inextensible. Their number could
increase, but not their ambit. The notion that the transformation of
the Roman _clientela_ into a voting _plebs_, and the creation of the
country tribes, meant a breach in the Polis-idea is incorrect. It was
in Rome as in Attica--the whole life of the State remained as before
limited to one point, which was the Agora, the Forum. However far away
those to whom citizenship was granted might live--in Hannibal’s day
it might be anywhere in Italy, and later anywhere in the world--the
_exercise_ of his political right depended upon _personal presence_
in the Forum. Hence the majority of the citizens were, not legally,
but practically without influence in political business.[681] What
citizenship meant for them, therefore, was simply the duty of military
service and the enjoyment of the city’s domestic law.[682] But even
for the citizen coming to Rome, political power was limited by a
second and _artificial_ synœcism which came into existence after, and
as the result of, enfranchisement of the peasant, and can only be
understood as an unconscious effort to maintain the idea of the Polis
strictly unimpaired; the new citizens were inscribed, regardless of
their numbers, in a very few tribes (eight, under the Lex Julia), and
were always, therefore, in a minority in the Comitia relatively to the
citizens of the older franchise.
And naturally so, for this _civitas_ was regarded through and through
as one body, a σῶμα. That which did not belong to it was out of
its law, _hostis_. The gods and the heroes stood above, the slave
(not quite to be called human, according to Aristotle) below, this
aggregate of persons.[683] But the individual was a ζῶον πολιτικόν
in a sense that would be regarded by us, who think and live in our
expanse-feeling, as an utter slavery; he existed _only_ by reason of
his membership of an individual Polis. Owing to this Euclidean feeling,
the nobility as a self-contained body was at first synonymous with
the Polis--to such an extent, indeed, that even in the Twelve Tables
marriage between patricians and plebeians was forbidden and the Spartan
Ephors began their term of office, according to ancient custom, with
a declaration of war against the Helots. The relation was reversed
whenever in consequence of a revolution the non-noble became _the_
Demos--but its meaning remained. As in inward, so also in outward
relationships, the _body_ politic was the foundation of all events
throughout Classical history. The cities, hundreds of them, lay in wait
for each other, each as self-gathered, politically and economically,
as it was possible to make it, ready to bite, letting fly on the
smallest excuse, and having as its war-aim, not the extension of its
own state, but the extinction of the other side’s. Wars ended with the
destruction of the enemy’s city and the killing or enslavement of his
citizens, just as revolutions ended with the massacre or expulsion of
the losers and the confiscation of their property by the victorious
party. The natural interstate condition of the West is a close network
of diplomatic relations, which may be broken through by wars; but the
Classical law of nations assumes war as a normal condition, interrupted
from time to time by peace treaties, and a declaration of war merely
re-established the natural state of policy. Only so do the forty- and
fifty-year peace treaties, _spondai_ (such as the famous one of Nicias
in 421), become intelligible, as temporary guarantee-treaties.
These two State-forms, with the styles of policy appropriate to each,
are assured by the close of the Early period. The State-idea has
triumphed over the feudal union, but it is the Estates that carry that
idea, and the nation has political existence only as their sum.
V
With the beginning of the Late period there is a decisive turn, where
city and country are in equilibrium and the powers proper to the city,
money and brains, have become so strong that they feel themselves, as
non-estate, an equal match for the old Estates. It is the moment when
the State-idea finally rises superior to the Estates and begins to set
up _in their place_ the concept of the Nation.
The State has fought and won to its rights along a line of advance
from feudal union to the aristocratic State. In the latter the Estates
exist only with reference to the State, instead of vice versa, but, on
the other hand, the disposition of things is such that the Government
only meets the governed nation when and in so far as the nation is
class-ordered. Everyone belongs to the nation, but only an élite to the
classes, and these alone count politically.
But the nearer the State approaches its pure form, and the more it
becomes _absolute_--that is, independent of any other form-ideal--the
more heavily the concept of the nation tells against that of class,
and there comes a moment when the nation is governed _as such_,
and distinctions of “standing” become purely social. Against this
evolution--which is one of the necessities of the Culture, inevitable,
irrevocable--the old noble and priestly classes make one more effort
of resistance. For them, now, _everything_ is at stake--the heroic and
the saintly, the old law, rank, blood--and, from their point of view,
against what?
In the West this struggle of the old Estates against the State-power
took the form of the _Fronde_. In the Classical world, where there
was no dynasty to represent the future and the aristocracy alone
had political existence, we find that a dynastic or quasi-dynastic
embodiment of the State-idea actually _formed itself_, and, supported
by the non-privileged part of the nation, raised this latter for the
first time to power. That was the mission of the _Tyrannis_.
In this change from the class-State to the absolute State, which
allowed no measures of validity but its own, the dynasties of the
West--and those of Egypt and of China likewise--called the non-estate
to their aid, _thereby recognizing it as a political quantity_. Herein
lies the real importance of the struggle against the Fronde, in which,
initially, the powers of the greater cities could not but see advantage
to themselves, for here the ruler was standing forth in the name of the
State, the care of all, and he was fighting the nobility because it
wanted to uphold the _Estate_ as a political magnitude.
In the Polis, on the contrary, where the State consisted exclusively
in the form and embodied no hereditary head, the necessity of bringing
out the unclassed on behalf of the State-idea produced the Tyrannis,
in which a family or a faction of the nobility itself assumed the
dynastic rôle, without which action on the part of the Third Estate
would have been impossible. Late Classical historians were too remote
from this process to seize its meaning, and dealt with it merely in
terms of externals of private life. In reality, the Tyrannis was _the
State_, and oligarchy opposed it under the banner of class. It rested,
therefore, upon the support of peasants and burghers--in Athens (_c._
580) the Diakrii and Paralii parties. Therefore, again, it backed the
Dionysiac and Orphic cults against the Apollinian; thus in Attica
Pisistratus forced the worship of Dionysus[684] on the peasantry,
in Sicyon Clisthenes forbade the recital of the Homeric poems,[685]
and in Rome it was almost certainly in the time of the Tarquins that
the trinity Demeter (Ceres)-Dionysus-Kore was introduced.[686] Its
temple was dedicated in 483 by Spurius Cassius, the same who perished
later in an attempt to reintroduce the Tyrannis. The Ceres temple
was the sanctuary of the Plebs, and its managers, the ædiles, were
their trusted spokesmen before the tribunate was ever heard of.[687]
The Tyrants, like the princes of the Western Baroque, were liberals
in a broad sense of the word that ceased to be possible for them in
the subsequent stage of bourgeois dominance. But the Classical also
began at that time to pass round the word that “money makes the man
(χρήματ’ ἀνήρ).”[688] The sixth-century Tyrannis brought the Polis-idea
to its conclusions and created the constitutional concept of the
Citizen, the _Polites_, the _Civis_, the sum of these, irrespective of
their class-provenance, forming the _soma_ of the city-state. When,
therefore, the oligarchy contrived to win after all--thanks once more
to the Classical craving for the present, and the consequent fear and
hatred evoked by the quasi-will-to-duration of the dynasts--the concept
of the citizen was there, firmly established, and the non-patrician had
learned to regard _himself_ as an estate _vis-à-vis_ a “rest.” He had
become a political party--the word “democracy” (in its specifically
Classical sense) now acquired a really serious content--and what he
set himself to do was, no longer to come to the aid of the State, but
_to be himself the State_ as the nobility had been before. He began to
count--money and heads, for the money-census and the general franchise
are alike bourgeois weapons--whereas an aristocracy does not count,
but values, and votes not by heads, but by classes. As the absolute
State came out of Fronde and First Tyrannis, so it perished in French
Revolution and Second Tyrannis. In this second conflict, which is
already one of defence, the dynasty returns to the side of the nobility
in order to guard the State-idea against a new class-rule, that of the
bourgeois.
In Egypt, too, the period between Fronde and Revolution is hall-marked.
It is the Middle Kingdom. The XIIth Dynasty (2000-1788)--in particular
Amenemhet I and Sesostris I--had established the absolute State
in severe conflicts with the baronage. The first of these rulers,
as a famous poem of the time relates, barely escaped from a court
conspiracy, and the biography of Sinuhet[689] shows us that after
his death, which was kept secret for a time, rebellion threatened.
The third was murdered by palace officials. We learn from the
inscriptions in the family grave of the earl Chmenotep[690] that the
cities had become rich and almost independent, and warred with each
other. Certainly they cannot have been smaller at that time than the
Greek cities at the time of the Persian Wars. It was on them and on
a certain number of loyal magnates that the dynasty rested.[691]
Finally, Sesostris III (1887-1850) succeeded in completely abolishing
feudal nobility. Thenceforward there was only a court-nobility and a
single, admirably ordered bureau-State;[692] but already some lamented
that people of standing were reduced to misery and that the “sons of
nobodies” enjoyed rank and consideration.[693] Democracy was beginning
and the great social evolution of the Hyksos period was brewing.
The corresponding place in China is that of the Ming-Chu (or Pa,
685-591). These were Protectors of princely origin, who exercised
an unconstitutional, but none the less real, power over a world of
states weltering in anarchy, and called congresses of princes for
the restoration of order and the recognition of stable political
principles, even summoning the “Ruler of the Middle” himself (now
become totally unimportant) out of the house of Chóu. The first was
Hwang of Tsi (d. 645), who called the Diet of 659 and of whom Confucius
wrote that he had rescued China from a reversion to barbarism. Their
name Ming-dshu became later, like the word “tyrant,” a term of obloquy,
because later men were unwilling to see in the phenomenon anything
but a power unauthorized by law--but it is beyond all question that
these great diplomatists were an element working with a devoted care
for the State and the historical future against the old Estates, and
supported by the young classes of mind and money. It is a high Culture
that speaks to us in the little that we so far know about them from
Chinese sources. Some were writers; others selected philosophers to be
their ministers. It is a matter of indifference whether we mentally
parallel them with Richelieu or with Wallenstein or with Periander--in
any case it is with them that the “people” first emerges as a political
quantity.[694] It is the outlook and high diplomacy of genuine
Baroque--the absolute State sets itself up in principle as the opponent
of the aristocratic State, and wins through.
In this lies the close parallelism of these events with the Fronde
of Western Europe. In France the Crown after 1614 ceased to summon
the State-General, this body having shown itself to be too strong
for the united forces of State and bourgeoisie. In England Charles I
similarly tried to govern without Parliament after 1628. In Germany,
at the same time, the Thirty Years’ War broke out. The magnitude of
its religious significance is apt to overshadow for us the other issue
involved, and it must not be forgotten that it was also an effort to
bring to a decision the struggle between imperial power and the Fronde
of the _great_ electors, and that between the individual princes and
the lesser Frondes of their local estate-assemblies. But the centre
of world-politics then lay in _Spain_. There, in conjunction with the
high courtesies generally, the diplomatic style of the Baroque had
evolved in the cabinet of Philip II; and the dynastic principle--which
embodied the absolute State _vis-à-vis_ the Cortes--had attained to its
highest development in the course of the long struggle with the House
of Bourbon. The attempt to align England also in the Spanish system had
failed under Philip II, when Queen Mary, his wife, was disappointed of
an heir already expected and announced. But now, under Philip IV, the
idea of a universal monarchy spanning the oceans revived--no longer
the mystic dream-monarchy of the early Gothic, the “Holy Roman Empire,
German by nation,” but the tangible ideal of a world-dominion in
Habsburg hands, which was to centre in Madrid and to have the solid
possession of India and America and the already sensible power of
money as its foundations. It was at this time, too, that the Stuarts
were tempted to secure their endangered position by marrying the heir
of the English and Scottish thrones to a Spanish Infanta; but in the
end Madrid preferred to link itself with its own collateral line in
Vienna, and so James I readdressed his marriage-alliance proposals to
the opposition party of the Bourbons. The futile complications of this
family policy contributed more than anything else to bind the Puritan
movement and the English Fronde into one great Revolution.
In these great decisions the actual occupants of the thrones were--as
in “contemporary” China--only secondary figures compared with great
individual statesmen, in whose hands the fate of the West rested for
whole decades. Olivarez in Madrid and the Spanish Ambassador Oñate
in Vienna were then the most powerful personages in Europe. Their
opponents were Wallenstein, standing for the Empire-idea in Germany,
and Richelieu, standing for the absolute State in France--and these
were succeeded a little later by Mazarin in France, Cromwell in
England, Oldenbarneveldt in Holland, Oxenstierna in Sweden. Not until
the Great Elector of Brandenburg do we meet again a monarch having
political importance of his own.
Wallenstein, unconsciously, began where the Hohenstaufen had stopped.
Since the death of Frederick II, in 1250, the power of the Estates
of the Empire had become unlimited, and it was against them, and as
champion of an absolute emperor’s state, that he fought during the
first tenure of command. Had he been a greater diplomatist, had he
been clearer and above all more resolute (for actually he was timid in
the presence of decisive turnings), and had he, in particular, taken
the trouble as Richelieu did to bring the person of the monarch under
his influence--then probably it would have been all up with princedom
within the Empire. He saw in these princes rebels, to be unseated
and dispossessed of their lands; at the peak of his power (end of
1629), when militarily he held Germany in the hollow of his hand, he
said aloud in conversation that the Emperor ought to be master in the
Empire as the Kings of France and Spain were masters of their own. His
army, which was “self-supporting” and by reason of its numbers also
independent of the Estates, was the first instance in German history
of an Imperial army of European significance; in comparison with
it Tilly’s army of the Fronde (for that was what the League really
was) counted for little. When Wallenstein, in 1628, leaguered before
Stralsund, visualizing a Habsburg sea-power in the Baltic wherewith
to take the Bourbon system in the rear--and just then Richelieu was
besieging La Rochelle, with better fortune--hostilities between himself
and the League had become almost unavoidable. He absented himself
from the Diet of Regensburg in 1630, saying that its seat “would
presently be in Paris.” This was the most serious political error
of his life, for in his absence the Frondist Electors defeated the
Emperor by threatening to displace him in favour of Louis XIII, and
forced him to dismiss his general. And with that, though it did not
realize the consequence of the step, the central power in Germany gave
away its army. Henceforth Richelieu supported the greater Fronde in
Germany with the object of breaking the Spanish power there, while on
the other side Olivarez, and Wallenstein as soon as he regained his
power, allied themselves with the French aristocrats, who thereupon
took the offensive under the Queen-mother and Gaston of Orléans. But
the Imperial power had missed its grand chance. The Cardinal won in
both games. In 1632 he executed the last of the Montmorencys[695]
and brought the Catholic Electors of Germany into open alliance with
France. And thenceforward Wallenstein, becoming unsure of his own final
purposes, learned more and more against the Spanish idea, thinking
that he could keep the Empire-idea clear of it, and so _ipso facto_
approached nearer and nearer to the standpoint of the Estates--like
Marshal Turenne in the French Fronde a few years later. _This was the
decisive turn in later German history._ With Wallenstein’s secession
the absolute emperor-state became impossible, and his murder in 1634
did not remedy matters, for the Emperor had no substitute to take his
place.
And yet it was just then that the conjuncture was favourable once more.
For in 1640 the decisive conflict between Crown and estates broke
out simultaneously in Spain, France, and England. In almost every
Spanish province the Cortes rose against Olivarez; Portugal, and with
it India and Africa, fell away for ever, and it took years to regain
even Catalonia and Naples. In England--just as in the Thirty Years’
War--the constitutional conflict between the Crown and the gentry
who dominated the Commons was carefully separated from the religious
side of the Revolution, deep as was the interpenetration of the two.
But the growing resistance that Cromwell encountered in the lower
class in particular--which drove him, all unwillingly, into military
dictatorship--and the later popularity of the restored monarchy
show the extent to which, over and above all religious differences,
aristocratic interest had been concerned in bringing about the fall of
the dynasty.
At the very time of Charles I’s trial and execution an insurrection in
Paris was forcing the French Court to flee. Men shouted for a republic
and built barricades. Had Cardinal de Retz been more of a Cromwell,
victory of the Estates over Mazarin would have been at least a
possibility. But the issue of this grand general crisis of the West was
determined by the weight and the destinies of a few personalities, and
took shape in such a way that it was in England _alone_ that the Fronde
(represented by Parliament) subjected the State and the kingship to its
control--confirming this control, in the “glorious Revolution” of 1688,
so permanently that even to-day essential parts of the old Norman State
continue established. In France and Spain the kingship won unqualified
victory. In Germany the Peace of Westphalia placed the Fronde of the
greater princes in an English relation towards the Emperor and in the
French relation towards the lesser Fronde of the local princes. In
the Empire as such, the Estates ruled; in its provinces, the Dynasty.
Thenceforth the Imperial dignity, like the English kingship, was a
name, surrounded by relics of Spanish stateliness dating from the early
Baroque; while the individual princes, like the leading families of
the English aristocracy, succumbed to the model of Paris and their
duodecimo absolutism was, politically and socially, bound in the
Versailles style. So, in this field and in that, the decision fell in
favour of the Bourbons and against the Habsburgs, a decision already
visible to all men in the Peace of the Pyrenees of 1659.
With this epochal turn the State, which as a possibility is inherent
in every Culture, was actualized and attained to such a height of
“condition” as could neither be surpassed nor for long maintained.
Already there is a quiet breath of autumn in the air when Frederick
the Great is entertaining at Sans Souci. These are the years too, in
which the great special arts attain to their last, most refined, and
most intellectual maturity--side by side with the fine orators of the
Athenian Agora there are Zeuxis and Praxiteles, side by side with the
filigree of Cabinet-diplomacy the music of Bach and Mozart.
This cabinet-politics has itself become a high art, an artistic
satisfaction to all who have a finger in it, marvellous in its
subtlety and elegance, courtly, refined, working mysteriously at great
distances--for already Russia, the North American colonies, even
the Indian states are put into play in order by the mere weight of
surprising combinations to bring about decisions at quite other points
on the globe. It is a game with strict rules, a game of intercepted
letters and secret confidants, of alliances and congresses within a
system of governments which even then was called (with deep meaning)
the “concert” of the powers--full of _noblesse_ and _esprit_, to use
the phrases of the period, a mode of keeping history “in form” never
and nowhere else imagined, or even imaginable.
In the Western world, whose sphere of influence is already almost the
sphere itself, the period of the absolutist State covers scarcely a
century and a half--from 1660, when Bourbon triumphed over Habsburg in
the Peace of the Pyrenees and the Stuarts returned to England, to the
Coalition Wars directed against the French Revolution, in which London
triumphed over Paris, or, if one prefers it so, over that Congress of
Vienna in which the old diplomacy, that of blood and not money, gave
the world its grand farewell performance. Corresponding periods are
the Age of Pericles between the First and the Second Tyrannis, and the
Tshun-tsiu, “Spring and Autumn,” as the Chinese call the time, between
the Protectors and the “Contending States.”
In this last phase of dignified politics with forms traditional but
not popular, familiar but not smiled at, the culminating points are
marked by the extinction of the two Habsburg lines in quick succession
and the diplomatic and warlike events that throng in 1700-10 round the
Spanish, and in 1740-60 round the Austrian succession.[696] It is the
climax also of the genealogical principle. _Bella gerant alii; tu,
felix Austria, nube!_ was indeed “an extension of war by other means.”
The phrase indeed was coined long before (in connexion with Maximilian
I), but it was not until now that it reached its fullest effects.
Fronde Wars pass over into Succession Wars, decided upon in cabinets
and fought out chivalrously by small armies and according to strict
conventions.[697] What was contended for was the heritage of half the
world which the marriage-politics of early Baroque had brought together
in Habsburg hands. The State is still “well up to form”; the nobility
has become a loyal aristocracy of court and service, carrying on the
wars of the Crown and organizing its administration. Side by side with
the France of Louis XIV, there presently arose in Prussia a masterpiece
of State organization. From the conflicts of the Great Elector with
his Estates (1660) to the death of Frederick the Great (who received
Mirabeau in audience three years before the Fall of the Bastille)
Prussia’s road is the same as France’s, and the outcome in each case is
a State which was in every point the opposite of the English order.
For the situation was otherwise in the Empire and in England. There
the Frondes had won, and the nations were governed, not absolutely,
but aristocratically. But between England and the Empire, again, there
was the immense difference that England, as an island, could largely
dispense with governmental watchfulness, and that her peers in the
Upper House and her gentry in the Lower founded their actions on the
self-evidentness of England’s greatness;[698] whereas in the Empire
the upper stratum of the land-princes--with the Diet at Regensburg as
their Upper House--were chiefly concerned with educating into distinct
“peoples” the fragments of the nation that had accidentally fallen to
their respective hands, and with marking off their scattered bits of
fatherland as strictly as possible from other “peoples’” bits. In place
of the world-horizon that there had been in Gothic days, provincial
horizon was cultivated by thought and deed. The idea of the Nation
itself was abandoned to the realm of dreams--that _other_ world which
is not of race but of language, not of Destiny but of Causality. And in
it arose the idea, and finally the fact, of the “people” as conceived
by poets and thinkers, who founded themselves a republic in the clouds
of verse and logic and at last came to believe that politics consisted
in idealistic writing and reading and speaking, and not in deed and
resolve--so that even to-day real deeds and resolves are confused with
mere expressions of inclination.
In England the victory of the gentry and the Declaration of Rights
(1689) in reality put an end to the State. Parliament put William III
on his throne, just as later it prevented George I and George II from
vacating theirs, in the interest of its class. The word “State,” which
had been current as early as the Tudors, fell into disuse--it has
become impossible to translate into English either Louis XIV’s “_L’état
c’est moi_” or Frederick the Great’s “_Ich bin der erste Diener meiner
Staates_.” On the other hand, the word “society” established itself
as the expression of the fact that the nation was “in form” under
the class- and not under the state-régime; the same word that with a
significant misunderstanding Rousseau and the Continental rationalists
generally took over to express the hatred of the Third Estate for
authority.[699] But in England authority as “the Government” was
clear-cut and well understood. From George I onwards its centre was the
Cabinet, a body which constitutionally did not exist at all[700] and
factually was an executive committee of the faction of the nobility
in command for the time being. Absolutism existed, but it was the
absolutism of a class-delegation. The idea of “_lèse-majeste_” was
transferred to Parliament, as the immunity of the Roman kings passed
to the tribunes. The genealogical principle is there, too, but it
is expressed in the family relations within the higher nobility and
the influence of the same upon the parliamentary situation. Even in
1902 Lord Salisbury acted as a Cecil in proposing his nephew Balfour
as his successor as against Joseph Chamberlain. The noble factions
of Tory and Whig separated themselves more and more distinctly, very
often, indeed, within the same family, according to whether the
“power-” outweighed the “booty-” outlook--that is, according as land
was valued above money[701]--or vice versa, a contrast that even in
the eighteenth century was expressed within the higher bourgeoisie by
the words “respectable” and “fashionable,” standing for two opposed
conceptions of the gentleman. The State’s care for all is frankly
replaced by class-interest. It is for this that the individual claims
his freedom--that is what “freedom” means in English--but the insular
existence and the build of “society” have created such relations that
in the last resort everyone _who belongs to it_ (which is a matter of
moment in a status-dictatorship) finds his interests represented by
those of one or the other noble party.
This steadiness of last, deepest, and ripest form, which springs
from the historical feeling of Western mankind, was denied to the
Classical. Tyrannis vanished. Strict oligarchy vanished. The Demos
which the politics of the sixth century had created as the sum of all
men belonging to the Polis burst into factions and spasmodic shocks
of noble _versus_ non-noble, and conflicts began within states, _and
between states_, in which each party tried to exterminate the other
lest it should itself be exterminated. When in 511--that is, still in
the age of the Tyrants--Sybaris was annihilated by the Pythagoreans,
the event, the first of its kind, shocked the entire Classical world;
even in distant Miletus mourning was worn. But now the elimination
of a Polis or a party was so usual that a regular form and choice
of methods--corresponding to the typical peace-treaties of Western
Baroque--arose for the disposal of the vanquished--for example, the
inhabitants might be massacred or sold into slavery, the houses
razed or divided as spoil. The will to absolutism is there--after
the Persian Wars it is universal, in Rome and Sparta no less than in
Athens--but the _willed_ narrowness of the Polis, the point-politic,
and the _willed_ brevity of office-holding and immediacy of schemes
made it impossible ever to reach a firm decision as to who should be
“the State.”[702] The high craft of diplomacy, which in the West was
practised by cabinets inspired by a tradition, was here handicapped by
an amateurism founded not on any accidental inadequacy of persons--the
men were available--but solely in the political form itself. The course
of this form from the First to the Second Tyrannis is unmistakable
and corresponds to the same evolution in all other Late periods; but
the specifically Classical style of it appears in the disorder and
subjection to incidentals which naturally and inevitably followed from
a life that could not and would not dissociate itself from the moment.
The most important example of this is the evolution of Rome during the
fifth century--a period over which hitherto historians have wrangled,
precisely because they have tried to find in it a consistency that can
no more have existed there than anywhere else in the Classical State.
A further source of misunderstanding is that the conditions of that
development have been regarded as something quite primitive, whereas
in fact even the city of the Tarquins must have already been in a very
advanced state, and primitive Rome lay much further back. The relations
of the fifth century are on a small scale in comparison with those of
Cæsar’s age, but they were not antiquated. Because written tradition
is defective (as it was everywhere save in Athens), the literary
movement which followed the Punic Wars set itself to fill the blanks
with poetry and in particular (as was to be expected in the Hellenistic
age) with the evocation of an idyllic past, as, for example, in the
story of Cincinnatus. And modern scholarship, though it has ceased to
believe these legends, has nevertheless remained under the influence
of the taste that inspired their invention, and continues to look at
the conditions of the time through its eyes--the more readily as Greek
and Roman history are treated as two separate worlds, and the evil
practice of identifying the beginning of history with the beginning of
sure documentation is followed as usual. In truth, the conditions of
500 B.C. are anything but Homeric. The trace of its walls shows that
Rome under the Tarquins was, with Capua, the greatest city in Italy
and bigger than the Athens of Themistocles.[703] A city that concludes
commercial treaties with Carthage is no peasant commune. And it follows
that the population in the four city tribes of 471 must have been very
numerous, probably greater than the whole total of the sixteen country
tribes scattered insignificantly in space.
The great success of the landowning nobility in overthrowing a
Tyrannis that was almost certainly very popular, and establishing
unrestricted senatorial rule, was nullified again by a series of
violent events about 471--the replacement of the family tribes by
four great city-wards, the representation of these by tribunes (who
were sacrosanct--i.e., who enjoyed a _royal_ privilege that no single
official of the aristocratic administration possessed) and lastly the
liberation of the small peasantry from the _clientela_ of the nobility.
The Tribunate was the happiest inspiration, not only of this period,
but of the Classical Polis generally. It was _the Tyrannis raised
to the position of an integral part of the Constitution_, and set
in parallel, moreover, with the old oligarchical offices, all of
which continued in being. This meant that the social revolution also
was carried out in _legal forms_, so that what was elsewhere a wild
discharge in shock and countershock became here a forum-contest,
limited as a rule to debate and vote. There was no need to evoke
the tyrant, for he was there already. The Tribune possessed rights
inherent in position, not rights arising out of an office, and with his
immunity he could carry out revolutionary acts that would have been
inconceivable without street-fighting in any other Polis. This creation
was an incident, but no other of its creations helped Rome to rise as
this did. In Rome alone the transition from the First to the Second
Tyrannis, and the further development therefrom till beyond the days
of Zama, was accomplished, not indeed without shocks, but at any rate
without catastrophe. The Tribune was the link between the Tarquins and
Cæsar. With the Lex Hortensia of 287 he became all-powerful, _he is
the Second Tyrannis in constitutional “form.”_ In the second century,
tribunes caused consuls and censors to be arrested. The Gracchi were
tribunes, Cæsar assumed the perpetual tribunate, and in the principate
of Augustus the tribunician dignity was the essential element of his
position, the only one in virtue of which he possessed sovereign rights.
The crisis of 471 was not unique but generically Classical. Its
target was the oligarchy, which even now, within the Demos created
by the Tyrannis, strove to be the impulsive force in affairs. It
was no longer, as in Hesiod’s day, the oligarchy as estate _versus_
non-estate, but the _oligarchic party against a second party_--both in
the cadre of the absolute state, which as such was not brought into
the controversy. In Athens, 487 B.C., the archons were overthrown and
their rights transferred to the college of strategi.[704] In 461 the
Areopagus, the Athenian equivalent of the Senate, was overthrown. In
Sicily (where relations with Rome were close) the democracy triumphed
at Acragas (Agrigentum) in 471, at Syracuse in 465, at Rhegium and
Messana in 461. In Sparta the kings Cleomenes (488) and Pausanias (470)
tried in turn, without success, to free the Helots--in Roman terms,
the Clientela--and thereby to acquire for the kingship, _vis-à-vis_
the oligarchic Ephors, the importance of the tribunate in Rome. The
missing element in this case, which was present (though overlooked
by our scholars) in that of Rome, was the population-strength of the
mercantile city that gives such movements both weight and leadership;
it was on this that even the great Helot rising of 464 broke down (an
event which probably inspired the Roman legends of a secession of the
Plebs to the Mons Sacer).
In a Polis, the country nobility and the patriciate fuse (that is the
object of synœcism, as we have seen), but not so the burgher and the
peasant. So far as concerns their struggle with the oligarchy these
are a single party--namely, the democratic--but otherwise they are
_two_. This is what comes to expression in the next crisis. In this
(_c._ 450) the Roman patriciate sought to re-establish its power _as a
party_--for so we must interpret the introduction of the Decemvirs and
the abolition of the Tribunate; the legislation of the Twelve Tables by
which the plebs, which had recently attained political existence, was
denied “Connubium” and “Commercium”; and above all the creation of the
small country tribes in which the influence of the old families (not
legally but in fact) predominated and which (in the Comitia Tributa
now set up alongside the old Centuriata) enjoyed the unchallengeable
majority of 16 to 4. This, of course, meant the disfranchisement of the
townspeople by the peasantry, and there can be no doubt that it was a
move of the Patrician party to make effective in one common blow the
common antipathy of the countryside and themselves towards the money
economics of the city.
The counterstroke came quickly; it is recognizable in the number _ten_
of the tribunes who appear after the withdrawal of the Decemvirs,[705]
but there were other events too that cannot but have belonged with
it--the attempt of Sp. Mælius to set up a Tyrannis (439), the
setting-up of Consular Tribunes by the army in place of the civil
officials (438), and the Lex Canuleia (445) which made an end of the
prohibition of connubium between patricians and plebeians.
There can be no doubt, of course, that there were factions within both
the patrician and the plebeian parties which would have liked to upset
this fundamental trait of the Roman Polis, the opposition of Senate
and Tribunate, by abolishing the one or the other; but the form turned
out to be so right that it was never seriously challenged. With the
enforcement by the Army of plebeian eligibility to the highest offices
(399) the contest took a quite different turn. The fifth century
may be summed up, under the aspect of internal politics, as that of
the struggle for lawful Tyrannis; thenceforward the polarity of the
constitution was admitted, and the parties contended no longer for
the abolition, but for the capture, of the great offices. This was
the substance of the revolution that took place in the period of the
Samnite Wars. From 287 the Plebes had the entrée to _all_ offices, and
the proposals of the tribunes, when approved by them, automatically
became law; on the other hand, it was thenceforward always practicable
for the Senate by corruption or otherwise to induce some one tribune to
exercise his veto and thus to deprive the institution of its power. It
was in the _struggle of two competent authorities_ that the juristic
subtlety of the Romans was developed. Elsewhere decisions were usually
by way of fist and bludgeon--the technical word is “Cheirocracy”--but
in this “best” period of Roman constitutional law, the fourth century,
the habit was formed of using the weapons of thesis and interpretation,
a mode of contest in which the slightest points of legal wording could
be decisive.
But Rome was unique in all Classical history in this equilibrium of
Senate and Tribunate. Everywhere else it was a matter not of swaying
balance, but of sheer alternatives, namely Oligarchy _or_ Ochlocracy.
The absolute Polis and the Nation which was identical with it were
accepted as given premisses, but of the inward forms none possessed
stability. The victory of one party meant the abolition of all the
institutions of the other, and people became accustomed to regard
nothing as either venerable enough or useful enough to be exempt
from the chances of the day’s battle. Sparta’s “form,” so to say,
was senatorial, Athens’s tribunician, and by the beginning of the
Peloponnesian War, in 431, the idea that forms must be alternative was
so firmly fixed that only radical solutions were henceforth possible.
With this, the future was set for Rome. It was the one state in which
political passions had persons only, and no longer institutions,
as their target; the only one which was firmly in “form.” _Senatus
Populusque Romanus_--that is, _Senate and Tribunate_--was the form of
forged bronze that no party would henceforward batter, whereas all the
rest, with the narrowness of their individual power-horizons in the
world of Classical states, were only able to prove once more the fact
that domestic politics exist simply in order that foreign politics may
be possible.
VI
At this point, when the Culture is beginning to turn itself into the
Civilization, the non-Estate intervenes in affairs decisively--and
for the first time--as an independent force. Under the Tyrannis and
the Fronde, the State has invoked its aid against the Estates proper,
and it has for the first time learned to feel itself a power. Now it
employs its strength _for itself_, and does so as a class standing for
its freedom against the rest. It sees in the absolute State, in the
Crown, in rooted institutions, the natural allies of the old Estates
and the true and last representatives of symbolic tradition. This is
the difference between the First and the Second Tyrannis, between
Fronde and Bourgeois Revolution, between Cromwell and Robespierre.
The State, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by
urban reason as a burden. So, in the same phase, the great forms of the
Baroque arts begin to be felt as restrictive and become Classicist or
Romanticist--that is, sickly or unformed; German literature from 1770
is one long revolt of strong individual personalities against strict
poetry. The idea of the whole nation being “in training” or “in form”
for anything becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly
is no longer in condition. This holds good in morals, in arts, and
in modes of thought, but most of all in politics. Every bourgeois
revolution has as its scene the great city, and as its hall-mark the
incomprehension of old symbols, which it replaces by tangible interests
and the craving (or even the mere wish) of enthusiastic thinkers and
world-improvers to see their conceptions actualized. Nothing now has
value but that which can be justified by reason. But, deprived thus
of the exaltation of a form that is essentially symbolical and works
metaphysically, the national life loses the power of keeping its head
up in the being-streams of history. Follow the desperate attempts of
the French Government--the handful of capable and farsighted men under
the mediocre Louis XVI--to keep their country in “condition” when,
after the death of Vergennes in 1787, the whole gravity of the external
situation had become manifest. With the death of this diplomatist
France disappeared for years from the political combinations of Europe;
at the same time the great reform that the Crown had carried through
against all resistances--above all, the general administrative reform
of that year, based on the freest self-management--remained completely
ineffective, because in view of the pliancy of the State, the question
of the moment for the Estates became, suddenly, the question of
power.[706] As a century before and a century afterwards, European war
was drawing visibly nearer with an inexorable necessity, but no one now
took any notice of the external situation. The nobility as an Estate
had rarely, but the bourgeoisie as an Estate had never, thought in
terms of foreign policy and world-history. Whether the State in its new
form would be able to hold its own at all amongst the other States, no
one asked. All that mattered was whether it secured men’s “rights.”
But the bourgeoisie, the class of urban “freedom,” strong as its
class-feeling remained for generations (in West Europe even beyond
1848), was at no time wholly master of its actions. For, first of all,
it became manifest in every critical situation that its unity was a
_negative_ unity, only really existent in moments of opposition to
something, anything, else--“Tiers État” and “Opposition” are almost
synonymous--and that when something constructive of its own had to be
done, the interests of the various groups pulled all ways. To be free
from something--that, all wanted. But the intellectual desired the
State as an actualization of “justice” against the force of historical
facts; or the “rights of man”; or freedom of criticism as against the
dominant religion. And Money wanted a free path to business success.
There were a good many who desired rest and renunciation of historical
greatness, or wished this and that tradition and its embodiments, on
which physically or spiritually they lived, to be spared. But there
was another element, now and henceforth, that had not existed in the
conflicts of the Fronde (the English Civil War included) or the first
Tyrannis, but this time stood for a power--namely, that which is found
in all Civilizations under different contemptuous labels--dregs,
_canaille_, mob, _Pöbel_--but with the same tremendous connotation. In
the great cities, which alone now spoke the decisive words--the open
land can at most accept or reject _faits accomplis_, as our eighteenth
century proves[707]--a mass of rootless fragments of population stands
outside all social linkages. These do not feel themselves as attached
either to an Estate or to a vocational class, nor even to the real
working-class, although they are obliged to work. Elements drawn
from all classes and conditions belong to it instinctively--uprooted
peasantry, literates, ruined business men, and above all (as the age of
Catiline shows with terrifying clarity) derailed nobles. Their power
is far in excess of their numbers, for they are always on the spot,
always on hand at the big decisions, ready for anything, devoid of
all respect for orderliness, even the orderliness of a revolutionary
party. It is from them that events acquire the destructive force
which distinguishes the French Revolution from the English, and the
Second Tyrannis from the First. The bourgeoisie looks at these masses
with real uneasiness, defensively, and seeks to separate itself from
them--it was to a defensive act of this category, the 13th Vendémiaire,
that Napoleon owed his rise.[708] But in the pressure of facts
the separating frontier cannot be drawn; wherever the bourgeoisie
throws into the scale against the older orders its feeble weight of
aggressiveness--feeble in relative numbers and feeble because its inner
cohesion is risked at every moment--this mass has forced itself into
their ranks, pushed to the front, imparted most of the drive that wins
the victory, and very often managed to secure the conquered position
for itself--not seldom with the continued idealistic support of the
educated who are intellectually captivated, or the material backing of
the money powers, which seek to divert the danger from themselves on to
the nobility and the clergy.
There is another aspect, too, under which this epoch has its
importance--in it for the first time abstract truths seek to intervene
in the world of facts. The capital cities have become so great, and
urban man so superior and influential over the waking-consciousness of
the whole Culture (_this influence is what we call Public Opinion_)
that the powers of the blood and the tradition inherent in the blood
are shaken in their hitherto unassailable position. For it must be
remembered that the Baroque State and the absolute Polis in their final
development of form are thoroughly living expressions of a _breed_,
and that history, so far as it accomplishes itself in these forms,
possesses the full pulse of that breed. Any theory of the State that
may be fashioned here is one that is deduced from the facts, that
bows to the greatness of the facts. The idea of the State had finally
mastered the blood of the first Estate, and put it wholly and without
reserve at the State’s service. “Absolute” means that the great
being-stream is _as a unit_ in form, possesses _one_ kind of pulse and
instinct, whether the manifestations of that pulse be diplomatic or
strategic flair, dignity of moral and manners, or fastidious taste in
arts and thoughts.
As the contradictory to this grand fact, now, Rationalism appears and
spreads, that which has been described above[709] as the _community of
waking-consciousness in the educated_, whose religion is criticism and
whose numina are not deities but concepts. Now begins the influence of
books and general theories upon politics--in the China of Lao-tse as
in the Athens of the Sophists and the Europe of Montesquieu--and the
public opinion formed by them plants itself in the path of diplomacy
as a political magnitude of quite a new sort. It would be absurd to
suppose that Pisistratus or Richelieu or even Cromwell determined their
actions under the influence of abstract systems, but after the victory
of “Enlightenment” that is what actually happens.
Nevertheless the historical rôle of the great concepts of the
Civilization is very different from the complexion that they presented
in the minds of the ideologues who conceived them. The effect of
a truth is always quite different from its tendency. In the world
of facts, truths are simply _means_, effective in so far as they
dominate spirits and therefore determine actions. Their historical
position is determined not by whether they are deep, correct, or
even merely logical, but by whether they _tell_. We see this in the
phrase “catchword,” “_Schlagwort_.” What certain symbols, livingly
experienced, are for the Springtime religions--the Holy Sepulchre for
the Crusader, the Substance of Christ for the times of the Council
of Nicæa--that two or three inspiriting word-sounds are for every
Civilized revolution. It is only the catchwords that are facts--the
residue of the philosophical or sociological system whence they come
does not matter to history. But, _as_ catchwords, they are for about
two centuries powers of the first rank, stronger even than the pulse
of the blood, which in the petrifying world of the outspread cities is
beginning to be dulled.
But--the critical spirit is only one of the two tendencies which
emerge out of the chaotic mass of the Non-Estate. Along with abstract
concepts abstract Money,--money divorced from the prime values of the
land--along with the study the counting-house, appear as political
forces. The two are inwardly cognate and inseparable--the old
opposition between priest and noble continued, acute as ever, in the
bourgeois atmosphere and the city framework.[710] Of the two, moreover,
it is the Money that, as pure fact, shows itself unconditionally
superior to the ideal truths, which so far as the fact-world is
concerned exist (as I have just said) only as catchwords, as means.
If by “democracy” we mean the form which the Third Estate as such
wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that
democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of
wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the
tragic comedy of the world-improvers’ and freedom-teachers’ desperate
fight against money that they are _ipso facto_ assisting money to be
effective. Respect for the big number--expressed in the principles of
equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage--is just as
much a class-ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and
more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but
in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation
of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press
brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again
is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in
which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the
ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate
with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in
effective motion only by money. It was the Equites, the big-money
party, which made Tiberius Gracchus’s popular movement possible at
all; and as soon as that part of the reforms that was advantageous
to themselves had been successfully legalized, they withdrew and
the movement collapsed. Cæsar and Crassus financed the Catilinarian
movement, and so directed it against the Senatorial party instead of
against property. In England politicians of eminence laid it down
as early as 1700 that “on ’Change one deals in votes as well as in
stocks, and the price of a vote is as well known as the price of an
acre of land.”[711] When the news of Waterloo reached Paris, the price
of French government stock rose[712]--the Jacobins had destroyed the
old obligations of the blood and so had emancipated money; now it
stepped forward as lord of the land.[713] There is no proletarian,
not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interest
of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time
permitted by money--and that, without the idealist amongst its leaders
having the slightest suspicion of the fact.[714] Intellect rejects,
money directs--so it runs in every last act of a Culture-drama, when
the megalopolis has become master over the rest. And, in the limit,
intellect has no cause of complaint. For, after all, it _has_ won
its victory--namely, in its own realm of truths, the realm of books
and ideals that is not of this world. Its conceptions have become
venerabilia of the beginning Civilization. But Money wins, through
these very concepts, in _its_ realm, which is _only_ of this world.
In the Western world of States, it was in England that both sides
of Third-Estate politics, the ideal and the real, graduated. Here
alone it was possible for the Third Estate to avoid the necessity of
marching against an absolute State in order to destroy it and set up
its own dominion on the ruins. For here it could grow up into the
strong form of the First Estate, where it found a fully developed
form of interest-politics, and from whose methods it could borrow for
its own purposes a traditional tactic such as it could hardly wish to
improve upon. Here was the home of Parliamentarism, genuine and quite
inimitable, which had insular position instead of the state as its
starting-point, and the habits of the First and not the Third Estate
as its background. Further, there was the circumstance that this form
had grown up in the full bloom of Baroque and, therefore, had Music
in it. The Parliamentary style was completely identical with that of
cabinet-diplomacy;[715] and in this _anti-democratic_ origin lay the
secret of its successes.
But it was on British soil, too, that the rationalistic catchwords had,
one and all, sprung up, and their relation to the principles of the
Manchester School was intimate--Hume was the teacher of Adam Smith.
“Liberty” self-evidently meant intellectual _and_ trade freedom. An
opposition between fact-politics and enthusiasm for abstract truths
was as impossible in the England of George III as it was inevitable
in the France of Louis XVI. Later, Edmund Burke could retort upon
Mirabeau that “we demand our liberties, not as rights of man, but as
rights of Englishmen.” France received her revolutionary ideas without
exception from England, as she had received the style of her absolute
monarchy from Spain. To both she imparted a brilliant and irresistible
shape that was taken as a model far and wide over the Continent, but
of the practical employment of either she had no idea. The successful
utilization of the bourgeois catchwords[716] in politics presupposes
the shrewd eye of a ruling class for the intellectual constitution of
the stratum which intends to attain power, but will not be capable
of wielding it when attained. Hence in England it was successful.
But it was in England too that money was most unhesitatingly used in
politics--not the bribery of individual high personages which had been
customary in the Spanish or Venetian style, but the “nursing” of the
democratic forces themselves. In eighteenth-century England, first the
Parliamentary elections and then the decisions of the elected Commons
were systematically managed by money;[717] England, too, discovered
the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press
serves him who owns it. It does not spread “free” opinion--it generates
it.
Both _together_ constitute liberalism (in the broad sense); that
is, freedom from the restrictions of the soil-bound life, be these
privileges, forms, or feelings--freedom of the intellect for every
kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But
both, too, unhesitatingly aim at the domination of a _class_, a
domination which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the State. Mind
and money, being both inorganic, want the State, not as a matured
form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a
purpose. Thus the difference between these forces and those of Frondism
is fundamental, for the latter’s reaction had been a defence of the
old Gothic against the intrusive Baroque way of living and being “in
form,”--and now both these are on the defensive together and almost
indistinguishable. Only in England (it must be emphasized again and
again) the Fronde had disarmed, not only the State in open battle, but
also the Third Estate by its inward superiority, and so attained to
the one kind of first-class form that democracy is capable of working
up to, a form neither planned nor aped, but naturally matured, the
expression of an old breed and an unbroken sure tact that can adapt
itself to the use of every new means that the changes of Time put
into its hands. Thus it came about that the English Parliament, while
taking part in the Succession-Wars of the Absolute States, handled them
as economic wars with business aims. The mistrust felt for high form
by the inwardly formless Non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and
always it is ready to rescue its freedom--_from_ all form--by means
of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and is, therefore,
hostile to all that has grown up, which, moreover, in virtue of its
mechanizing tendency, is acceptable to the taste both of intellect and
of money--consider, for example, the structure of the state-machine of
France which Robespierre began and Napoleon completed. Dictatorship
in the interests of a class-ideal appealed to Rousseau, Saint-Simon,
Rodbertus, and Lassalle as it had to the Classical ideologues of
the fourth century--Xenophon in the Cyropædia and Isocrates in the
Nicocles.[718]
But the well-known saying of Robespierre that “the Government of the
Revolution is the despotism of freedom against tyranny” expresses
more than this. It lets out the deep fear that shakes every multitude
which, in the presence of grave conjunctures, feels itself “not up
to form.” A regiment that is shaken in its discipline will readily
concede to accidental leaders of the moment powers of an extent and a
kind which the legitimate command could never acquire, and which _if_
legitimate would be utterly intolerable. But this, on a larger scale,
is the position of every commencing Civilization. Nothing reveals
more tellingly the decline of political form than that upspringing
of formless powers which we may conveniently designate, from its
most conspicuous example, _Napoleonism_. How completely the being of
Richelieu or of Wallenstein was involved in the unshakable antecedents
of their period! And how instinct with form, under all its outer
unform, was the English Revolution! Here, just the reverse; the Fronde
fights _about_ the form, the absolute State _in_ the form, but the
bourgeoisie _against_ the form. The mere abolition of an order that had
become obsolete was no novelty--Cromwell and the heads of the First
Tyrannis had done that. But, that behind the ruins of the visible there
is no longer the substance of an invisible form; that Robespierre
and Napoleon find nothing either around or in them to provide the
_self-evident_ basis essential to any new creation; that for a
government of high tradition and experience they have no choice but to
substitute an accidental régime, whose future no longer rests secure on
the qualities of a slowly and thoroughly trained minority, but depends
entirely on the chance of the adequate successor turning up--such are
the distinguishing marks of this turning of the times, and hence comes
the immense superiority that is enjoyed for generations still by those
states which manage to retain a tradition longer than others.
The First Tyrannis had completed the Polis with the aid of the
non-noble; the latter now destroyed it with the aid of the Second
Tyrannis. As an idea, it perishes in the bourgeois revolutions of
the fourth century, for all that it may persist as an arrangement or
a habit or an instrument of the momentary powers that be. Classical
man never ceased, in fact, to think and live politically in its form.
But never more was it for the multitude a symbol to be respected and
venerated, any more than the Divine Right of Kings was venerated in the
West after Napoleon had almost succeeded in making his own dynasty “the
oldest in Europe.”
Further, in these revolutions too, as ever in Classical history,
there were only local and temporary solutions--nothing resembling
the splendid sweep of the French Revolution from the Bastille to
Waterloo--and the scenes in them were more atrocious still, for the
reason that in this Culture, with its basically Euclidean feeling,
the only possible way seemed to be that of physical collision of
party against party, and the only possible end for the loser, not
functional incorporation in the victor’s system as in the West, but
destruction root and branch. At Corcyra (427) and Argos (370) the
possessing classes were slaughtered _en masse_; in Leontini (422) they
were expelled from the city by the lower classes, which carried on
affairs for a while with slaves until, in fear of an avenging return,
they evacuated altogether and migrated to Syracuse. The refugees from
hundreds of these revolutions inundated the cities, recruited the
mercenary armies of the Second Tyrannis, and infested the routes by
land and sea. The readmission of such exiled fractions is a standing
feature in the peace-terms offered by the Diadochi and later by
the Romans. But the Second Tyrannis itself secured its positions
by acts of this kind. Dionysius I (407-367) secured his hegemony
over Syracuse--the city in whose higher society, along with that of
Athens, centred the ripest culture of Hellas, the city where Æschylus
had produced his Persian trilogy in 470--by wholesale executions of
educated people and confiscations of their property; this he followed
up by entirely rebuilding the population, in the upper levels by
granting large properties to his adherents, and in the lower by
raising masses of slaves to the citizenship and distributing amongst
them (as was not uncommon) the wives and daughters of the victims.[719]
After the characteristically Classical fashion, the type of these
revolutions was such as to produce always an increase of number, never
of extent. Multitudes of them happened, but each proceeded purely
for itself and at one point of its own, and it is only the fact that
they were contemporary with one another that gives them the character
of a collective phenomenon, which marks an epoch. Similarly with
Napoleonism; here again, a formless regimen for the first time raised
itself above the framework of the State, yet without being able to
attain to complete inward detachment therefrom. It supported itself
on the Army, which, _vis-à-vis_ the nation that had lost its “form,”
began to feel itself as an independent power. That is the brief road
from Robespierre to Bonaparte--with the fall of the Jacobins the centre
of gravity passed from the administration to the ambitious generals.
How deeply this new tendency implanted itself in the West may be seen
from the example of Bernadotte and Wellington, and even more from the
story of Frederick William III’s “call to my People” in 1813--in this
case the continuance of the dynasty would have been challenged by the
military had not the King stiffened himself to break with Napoleon.[720]
This anti-constitutionality of the Second Tyrannis declared itself
also in the position taken by Alcibiades and Lysander in the armed
forces of their respective cities during the latter stages of the
Peloponnesian War, a position incompatible with the basic form of the
Polis. The first-named, destitute as an exile of official position,
and against the will of the home authorities, exercised from 411 the
_de facto_ command of the Athenian Navy; the second, though not even
a Spartiate, felt himself entirely independent at the head of an army
devoted to his person. In the year 408 the contest of the two powers
for the supremacy over the Ægean world took the form of a contest
between these two individuals.[721] Shortly after this, Dionysius
of Syracuse built up the first large-scale professional army and
introduced engines of war (artillery)[722]--a new form which served as
a model for the Diadochi and Rome also. Thereafter the spirit of the
army was a political power on its own account, and it became a serious
question how far the State was master, and how far tool, of its army.
The fact that the government of Rome was exclusively in the hands of
a military committee[723] from 390 to 367[724] reveals pretty clearly
that the army had a policy of its own. It is well known that Alexander,
the Romanticist of the Second Tyrannis, fell more and more under the
influence of his generals, who not only compelled the retreat from
India but also disposed of his inheritance amongst themselves as a
matter of course.
This is essentially Napoleonism, and so is the extension of _personal_
rule over regions united by ties neither national nor jural, but
merely military and administrative. But extension was just what was
essentially incompatible with the Polis. The Classical State is the one
State that was incapable of any organic widening, and the conquests of
the Second Tyrannis therefore resolved themselves into a _juxtaposition
of two political units_, the Polis and the subjugated territory, the
cohesion of which was initially accidental and perpetually in danger.
Thus arose that strange picture of the Hellenistic-Roman world, the
true significance of which is not even yet recognized--_a circle of
border-regions_, and within them a congeries of Poleis to which, small
as they were, the conception of the State proper, the _res publica_,
continued to be bound as exclusively as ever. In this middle (indeed,
so far as concerned each individual, hegemony was in one point) was the
theatre of all real politics. The “_orbis terrarum_”--a significant
expression--was merely a means or object to it. The Roman notions of
“_imperium_”--dictatorial powers of administration outside the city
moat (which were automatically extinguished when its holder entered the
Pomœrium)--and of “_provincia_” as the opposite of “_res publica_,”
express the common Classical instinct, which knew only the city’s
body as the State and political subject, and the “outside” only in
relation to it, as object to it. Dionysius made his city of Syracuse
into a fortress surrounded by a “scrap-heap of states,” and extended
his field of power thence, over Upper Italy and the Dalmatian coast,
into the northern Adriatic, where he possessed Ancona and Hatria at
the mouth of the Po. Philip of Macedon, following the example of his
teacher Jason of Pheræ (murdered in 370), adopted the reverse plan,
placing his centre of gravity in the periphery (that is, practically
in the army) and thence exercising a hegemony over the Hellenic world
of States. Thus Macedonia came to extend to the Danube, and after
Alexander’s death there were added to this outer circle the empires of
the Seleucids and the Ptolemies--each governed from a Polis (Antioch,
Alexandria), but through the intermediary of existing native machinery,
which, be it said, was at its lowest better than any Classical
administration of it could have been. Rome herself in the same period
(_c._ 326-265) built up her Middle-Italian territory as a _border
state_, secured in all directions by a system of colonies, allies, and
settlements with Latin right. Then, from 237, we find Hamilcar Barca
winning for Carthage, a city old established in the Classical way of
life, an empire in Spain; C. Flaminius (225) conquering the Po Valley
for Rome; and finally Cæsar making his Gallic empire. These were the
foundations upon which rested, first, the Napoleonic struggles of
the Diadochi in the East, then those of Scipio and Hannibal in the
West--the limits of the Polis outgrown in both cases--and lastly the
Cæsarian struggles of the Triumvirs, who supported themselves on the
total of _all_ the border states and used their means, in order to
be--“the first in Rome.”
VII
In Rome the strong and happily conceived form of the State that was
reached about 340 kept the social revolution within constitutional
limits. A Napoleonic figure like Appius Claudius the Censor of 310, who
built the first aqueduct and the Appian Way, and ruled in Rome almost
as a tyrant, very soon failed when he tried to eliminate the peasantry
by means of the great-city masses and so to impart the one-sided
Athenian direction to politics--for that was his aim in taking up the
sons of slaves into the Senate, in reorganizing the Centuries on a
money instead of a land-assessment basis,[725] and in distributing
freedmen and landless men amongst the country tribes, so that they
might outvote the rustics (as they were always able to do, since the
latter rarely attended). But his successors in the censorship lost
no time in reversing this, and relegated the landless to the great
city-tribes again. The non-estate itself, well led by a minority of
distinguished families, saw its aim (as has been said before) not in
the destruction, but in the acquisition, of the senatorial organs of
administration. In the end, it forced its way into all offices (even,
by the Lex Ogulnia, of 300, into the politically important priesthoods
of the Pontifices and Augurs), and by the outbreak of 287 it secured
force of law for _plebiscita_ even without the Senate’s approval.
The practical result of this freedom-movement was precisely the reverse
of that which ideologues would have expected--there were no idealogues
in Rome. The greatness of its success robbed the non-estate of its
object and thereby deprived it of its driving force, for positively,
when not “in opposition,” it was null. After 287 the state-form existed
for the purpose of being politically _used_, and used, too, in a
world in which only the states of the great fringe--Rome, Carthage,
Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt--really counted. It had ceased to be in any
danger of becoming the passive of “peoples’-rights” activities. And
it was precisely this security that formed the basis on which the one
people that had remained “in form” rose to its grandeur.
On the one hand, it had developed within the Plebs, formless and long
weakened in its race-impulses by the mass-intake of freedmen,[726]
an upper stratum distinguished by great practical aptitudes, rank,
and wealth, which joined forces with a corresponding stratum within
the patriciate. Hence there came into existence a very narrow circle
of men of the strongest race-quality, dignified life, and broad
political outlook, in whom the whole stock of experience in governing
and generalship and negotiation was concentrated and transmitted; who
regarded the direction of the State as the one profession worthy of
their status, considered themselves as inheritors of a privilege to
exercise it, and educated their children solely in the art of ruling
and the convictions of a measurelessly proud tradition. This nobility,
which as such had no constitutional existence, found its constitutional
engine in the Senate, which had originally been a body representing the
interests of the patricians (that is, the “Homeric” aristocracy), but
in which from the middle of the fourth century ex-consuls--men who had
both ruled and commanded--sat as life-members, forming a close group of
eminent talents that dominated the assembly and, through it, the State.
Even by 279 the Senate appeared to Cineas, the ambassador of Pyrrhus,
like a council of kings, and finally its kernel was a small group of
leading men, holding the titles “_princeps_” and “_clarissimus_,”
men in every respect--rank, power, and public dignity--the peers
of those who reigned over the empires of the Diadochi.[727] There
came into being a government such as no megalopolis in any other
Culture whatsoever has possessed, and a tradition to which it would
be impossible to find parallels save perhaps in the Venice and the
Papal Curia of the Baroque, and there under a wholly different set
of conditions. Here were no theories such as had been the ruin of
Athens, none of the provincialism that had made Sparta in the long
run contemptible, but simply a praxis in the grand style. If “Rome”
is a perfectly unique and marvellous phenomenon in world-history, it
is due, not to the Roman “people,” which in itself, like any other,
was raw material without form, but to this class which brought Rome
into condition and kept her so, willy-nilly--with the result that this
particular stream of being, which in 350 was still without importance
save to middle Italy, gradually drew into its bed the entire history of
the Classical, and made the last great period of that history a _Roman_
period.
It was the very perfection of political _flair_ that was displayed
by this small circle (which possessed no sort of public rights) in
managing the democratic forms created by the Revolution--forms that
here as elsewhere derive all value from the use that is made of them.
The only factor in them that if mishandled would have been dangerous
in an instant--namely, the interpenetration of two mutually exclusive
powers--was handled so superbly _and so quietly_ that it was always
the higher experience that gave the note, while the people remained
throughout convinced that decisions were made by, and in the sense
desired by, itself. _To be popular, and yet historically successful in
the highest degree_--here is the secret of this policy, and for that
matter the only possibility of policy existing at all in such times, an
art in which the Roman régime has remained unequalled to this day.
Nevertheless, on the other side of the picture, the result of the
Revolution was the _emancipation of Money_. Thenceforward money was
master in the Comitia Centuriata. That which called itself “_populus_”
there became more and more a tool in the hands of big money, and it
required all the tactical superiority of the ruling circles to maintain
a counterpoise in the Plebs, and to keep effective a representation
of the yeomanry, under the leadership of the noble families, in the
thirty-one country tribes from which the great city mass continued
to be excluded. Hence the drastic energy with which the arrangements
made by Appius Claudius were revoked. The natural alliance between
high finance and the mass, though we see it actually at work later
(under the Gracchi and Marius) for the destruction of the tradition of
the blood,[728] was at any rate made impossible for many generations.
Bourgeoisie and yeomanry, money and landowning, maintained a reciprocal
equilibrium of separate organisms, and were held together and made
efficient by the State-idea (of which the nobility was the incarnation)
until this inward form fell to pieces, and the two tendencies broke
apart in enmity. The First Punic War was a traders’ war and directed
against the agrarian interest, and, therefore, the consul Appius
Claudius (a descendant of the great Censor) laid the decision of the
matter in 284 before the Comitia Centuriata. The conquest of the Po
plain, on the other hand, was in the interests of the peasantry and
it was, therefore, in the Comita Tributa that it was carried by the
Tribune C. Flaminius--the first genuinely Cæsarian type in Roman
history, builder of the Via Flaminia and the Circus Flaminius. But when
in pursuance of his policy he (as Censor in 220) forbade the Senators
to engage in trade, and also at the same time made the old noble
centuries accessible to plebeians, he was practically benefiting only
the new financial nobility of the First Punic War period, and thus
(entirely in spite of himself) he became the creator of _high finance
organized as an Estate_--that is, that of the Equites, who a century
later put an end to the great age of the nobility. Henceforth, when
Hannibal (before whom Flaminius had fallen on the field of battle) had
been disposed of, money steadily became, even for the government as
such, the “_ultima ratio_” in the accomplishment of its policy--the
last true State-policy that the Classical world was to know.
When the Scipios and their circle had ceased to be the governing
influence, nothing remained but the private policies of individuals,
who followed their own interests without scruple, and looked upon
the “_orbis terrarum_” as passive booty. The historian Polybius (who
belonged to that circle) regarded Flaminius as a mere demagogue and
traced to him all the misfortunes of the Gracchan period. He was
wholly in error as to Flaminius’s intentions, but he was right as
to his effect. Flaminius--like the elder Cato, who with the blind
zeal of the agrarian overthrew the great Scipio on account of his
world-policy--achieved the reverse of what he intended. Money stepped
into the place of blood-leadership, and money took less than three
generations to exterminate the yeomanry.
If it was an improbable piece of good luck in the destinies of the
Classical peoples that Rome was the only city-state to survive the
Revolution with an unimpaired constitution, it was, on the contrary,
almost a miracle that in our West--with its genealogical forms
deep-rooted in the idea of duration--violent revolution broke out at
all, even in one place--namely, Paris. It was not the strength, but
the weakness of French Absolutism which brought the English ideas,
in combination with the power of money, to the point of an explosion
which gave living form to the catchwords of the “Enlightenment,”
which bound together virtue and terror, freedom and despotism, and
which echoed still even in the minor catastrophes of 1830 and 1848
and the more recent Socialistic longing for catastrophe.[729] In
England itself, when the aristocracy ruled more absolutely than ever
in France, there was certainly a small circle round Fox and Sheridan
which was enthusiastic for the ideas of the Revolution--all of which
were of English provenance--and men talked of universal suffrage and
Parliamentary reform.[730] But that was quite enough to induce both
parties, under the leadership of a Whig (the younger Pitt), to take the
sharpest measures to defeat any and every attempt to interfere in the
slightest degree with the aristocratic régime for the benefit of the
bourgeoisie. The English nobility let loose the twenty-year war against
France, and mobilized all the monarchs of Europe to bring about in the
end, not the fall of Napoleon, but the fall of the Revolution--the
Revolution that had had the naïve daring to introduce the opinions
of private English thinkers into practical politics, and so to give
a position to the Tiers État of which the consequences were all the
better foreseen in the English lobbies for having been overlooked in
the Paris salons.[731]
What was called “Opposition” in England was--the attitude of one
aristocratic party while the other was running the Government. It
did not mean there, as it meant all over the Continent, professional
criticism of the work which it was someone else’s profession to do,
but the practical endeavour to force the activity of Government
into a form in which the opposition was ready and fit at any moment
to take it over. But this Opposition was at once--and in complete
ignorance of its social presuppositions--taken as a model for that
which the educated in France and elsewhere aimed at creating, namely,
a class-domination of the Tiers État under the eyes of a dynasty, no
very clear idea being formed as to the latter’s future. The English
dispositions were, from Montesquieu onwards, lauded with enthusiastic
misunderstanding--although these Continental countries, not being
islands, lacked the first condition precedent for an “English”
evolution. Only in one point was England really a model. When the
bourgeoisie had got so far as to turn the absolute state back again
into an Estate-state, they found over there a picture which in fact had
never been other than it was. True, it was the aristocracy alone who
ruled in it--but at least it was not the Crown.
The result of the turn, and the basic form of the Continental States
at the beginning of the Civilization, is “Constitutional Monarchy,”
the extremest possibility of which appears as what we call nowadays
a Republic. It is necessary to get clear, once and for all, of the
mumblings of the doctrinaires who think in timeless and therefore
unreal concepts and for whom “Republic” is a form-in-itself. The
republican ideal of the nineteenth century has no more resemblance to
the Classical _res publica_, or even to Venice or the original Swiss
cantons, than the English constitution to a “constitution” in the
Continental sense. That which _we_ call republic is a _negation_, which
of inward necessity postulates that the thing denied is an ever-present
possibility. It is non-monarchy in forms borrowed from the monarchy.
The genealogical feeling is immensely strong in Western mankind; it
strains its conscience so far as to pretend that Dynasty determines
its political conduct even when Dynasty no longer exists at all. The
historical is embodied therein, and unhistorically we cannot live.
It makes a great difference whether, as in the case of the Classical
world, the dynastic principle conveys absolutely nothing to the inner
feelings of a man, or, as in the case of the West, it is real enough to
need six generations of educated people to fight it down in themselves.
Feeling is the secret enemy of all constitutions that are plans and not
growths; they are in last analysis nothing but defensive measures born
of fear and mistrust. The urban conception of freedom--freedom _from_
something--narrows itself to a merely anti-dynastic significance, and
republican enthusiasm lives only on this feeling.
Such a negation inevitably involves a preponderance of theory. While
Dynasty and its close congener Diplomacy conserve the old tradition and
pulse, Constitutions contain an overweight of systems, bookishness,
and framed concepts--such as is entirely unthinkable in England, where
nothing negative and defensive adheres to the form of government. It is
not for nothing that the Faustian is _par excellence_ the reading and
writing Culture. The printed book is an emblem of temporal, the Press
of spatial, infinity. In contrast with the immense power and tyranny
of these symbols, even the Chinese Civilization seems almost empty of
writing. In Constitutions, literature is put into the field against
knowledge of men and things, language against race, abstract right
against successful tradition--regardless of whether a nation involved
in the tide of events is still capable of work and “maintaining its
form.” Mirabeau was quite alone and unsuccessful in combating the
Assembly, which “confused politics with fiction.” Not only the three
doctrinaire constitutions of the age--the French of 1791, the German
of 1848 and 1919--but practically all such attempts shut their eyes to
the great Destiny in the fact-world and imagine that that is the same
as defeating it. In lieu of unforeseen happenings, the incidents of
strong personality and imperious circumstances, it is Causality that
is to rule--timeless, just, unvarying, rational cohesion of cause and
effect. It is symptomatic that no written constitution knows of money
as a political force. It is pure theory that they contain, one and all.
This rift in the essence of constitutional monarchy is irremediable.
Here actual and conceptual, work and critique, are frontally
opposed, and it is their mutual attrition that constitutes what the
average educated man calls internal politics. Apart from the cases
of Prussia-Germany and Austria--where constitutions did come into
existence at first,[732] but in the presence of the older political
traditions were never very influential--it was only in England that
the practice of government kept itself homogeneous. Here, race held
its own against principle. Men had more than an inkling that real
politics, politics aiming at historical success, is a matter of
training and not of shaping. This was no aristocratic prejudice, but
a cosmic fact that emerges much more distinctly in the experience
of any English racehorse-trainer than in all the philosophical
systems in the world. Shaping can refine training, but not replace
it. And thus the higher society of England, Eton and Balliol, became
training-grounds where politicians were worked up with a consistent
sureness the like of which is only to be found in the training of the
Prussian officer-corps--trained, that is, as connoisseurs and masters
of the underlying pulse of things (not excluding the hidden course of
opinions and ideas). Thus prepared, they were able, in the great flood
of bourgeois-revolutionary principles that swept over the years after
1832, to preserve and control the being-stream which they directed.
They possessed “training,” the suppleness and collectedness of the
rider who, with a good horse under him, feels victory coming nearer
and nearer. They allowed the great principles to move the mass because
they knew well that it is money that is the “wherewithal” by which
motion is imparted to these great principles, and they substituted,
for the brutal methods of the eighteenth century, methods more refined
and not less effective--one of the simpler of these being to threaten
their opponents with the cost of a new election. The doctrinaire
constitutions of the Continent saw only the one side of the fact
democracy. Here, where there was no constitution, but men were in
“condition,” it was seen as a whole.
A vague feeling of all this was never quite lost on the Continent.
For the absolute State of the Baroque there had been a perfectly
clear form, but for “constitutional monarchy” there were only
unsteady compromises, and Conservative and Liberal parties were
distinguished--not, as in England after Canning, by the possession
of different but well-tested modes of government, applied
turn-and-turn-about to the actual work of governing--but according
to the direction in which they respectively desired to alter the
constitution--namely, towards tradition or towards theory. Should the
Parliament serve the Dynasty, or vice versa?--that was the bone of
contention, and in disputing over it it was forgotten that _foreign_
policy was the final aim. The “Spanish” and the misnamed “English”
sides of a constitution would not and could not grow together, and
thus it befell that during the nineteenth century the diplomatic
service outwards and the Parliamentary activity inwards developed in
two divergent directions. Each became in fundamental feeling alien to,
and contemptuous of, the other. Life fretted itself to soreness in a
form that it had not developed out of itself. After Thermidor, France
succumbed to the rule of the Bourse, mitigated from time to time by the
setting up of a military dictature (1800, 1851, 1871, 1918). Bismarck’s
creation was in fundamentals of a dynastic nature, with a parliamentary
component of decidedly subordinate importance, and in it the inner
friction was so strong as to monopolize the available political energy,
and finally, after 1916, to exhaust the organism itself. The Army had
its own history, with a great tradition going back to Frederick William
I,[733] and so also had the administration. In them was the source
of Socialism as one kind of true political “training,” diametrically
opposed to the English[734] but, like it, a full expression of strong
race-quality. The officer and the official were trained high. But
the necessity of breeding up a corresponding political type was not
recognized. Higher policy was handled “administratively” and minor
policy was hopeless squabbling. And so army and administration finally
became aims in themselves, after Bismarck’s disappearance had removed
the one man who even without a supply of real politicians to back him
(this tradition alone could have produced) was big enough to treat both
as tools of policy. When the issue of the World War removed the upper
layers, nothing remained but parties educated for opposition only,
and these brought the activity of Government down to a level hitherto
unknown in any Civilization.
But to-day Parliamentarism is in full decay. It was a _continuation of
the Bourgeois Revolution by other means_, the revolution of the Third
Estate of 1789 brought into legal form and joined with its opponent
the Dynasty as one governmental unit. Every modern election, in fact,
is a civil war carried on by ballot-box and every sort of spoken and
written stimulus, and every great party-leader is a sort of Napoleon.
In this form, meant to remain infinitely valid, which is peculiar to
the Western Culture and would be nonsensical and impossible in any
other, we discern once more our characteristic tendency to infinity,
historical foresight[735] and forethought, and _will to order the
distant future_, in this case according to bourgeois standards of the
present.
All the same, Parliamentarism is not a summit as the absolute Polis
and the Baroque State were summits, but a brief transition--namely,
between the Late-Culture period with its mature forms and the age of
great individuals in a formless world. It contains, like the houses and
furniture of the first half of the nineteenth century, a residue of
good Baroque. The parliamentary habit is English Rococo--but, no longer
un-self-conscious and in the blood, but superficial-initiative and at
the mercy of goodwill. Only in the brief periods of first enthusiasms
has it an appearance of depth and duration, and then only because
in the flush of victory respect for one’s newly-won status makes it
incumbent to adopt the high manners of the defeated class. To preserve
the form, even when it contradicts the advantage, is the convention
which makes parliamentarism _possible_. But when this convention comes
to be fully observed, _the very fact that it is so means that the
essence of parliamentarism has already been evaporated_. The Non-Estate
falls apart again into its natural interest-groups, and the passion of
stubborn and victorious defence is over. And as soon as the form ceases
to possess the attractiveness of a young ideal that will summon men to
the barricades, unparliamentary methods of attaining an object without
(and even in spite of) the ballot-box will make their appearance--such
as money, economic pressure, and, above all, the strike. Neither
the megalopolitan masses nor the strong individuals have any real
respect for this form without depth or past, and when the discovery
is made that it is _only_ a form, it has already become a mark and
shadow. With the beginning of the twentieth century Parliamentarism
(even English) is tending rapidly towards taking up itself the rôle
that it once assigned to the kingship. It is becoming an impressive
spectacle for the multitude of the Orthodox, while the centre of
gravity of big policy, already _de jure_ transferred from the Crown to
the people’s representatives, is passing _de facto_ from the latter
to unofficial groups and the will of unofficial personages. The World
War almost completed this development. There is no way back to the old
parliamentarism from the domination of Lloyd George and the Napoleonism
of the French militarists. And for America, hitherto lying apart and
self-contained, rather a region than a State, the parallelism of
President and Congress which she derived from a theory of Montesquieu
has, with her entry into world politics, become untenable, and must in
times of real danger make way for formless powers such as those with
which Mexico and South America have long been familiar.
VIII
With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in which we find
ourselves to-day. It is the _transition from Napoleonism to
Cæsarism_, a general phase of evolution, which occupies at least two
centuries and can be shown to exist in all the Cultures. The Chinese
call it Shan-Kwo, the “period of the Contending States” (480-230,
corresponding to the Classical 300-50).[736] At the beginning are
reckoned seven great powers, which, first planlessly, but later with
clearer and clearer purpose, tend to the inevitable final result of
this close succession of vast wars and revolutions. A century later
there are still five. In 441 the ruler of the Chóu dynasty became a
state-pensioner of the “Eastern Duke,” and the remains of territory
that he possessed ceased accordingly to figure in later history.
Simultaneously began in the unphilosophical north-west[737] the swift
rise of the “Roman” state of Tsin, which extended its influence
westward and southward over Tibet and Yunnan and enclosed the other
states in a great arc. The focus of the opposition was in the kingdom
of Tsu in the Taoist south,[738] whence the Chinese Civilization
pressed slowly outwards into the still little-known lands south of
the great river. Here we have in fact the opposition of Rome and
the Hellenistic--on the one side, hard, clear will-to-power; on the
other, the tendency to dreaming and world-improvement. In 368-320
(corresponding to the Second Punic War) the contest intensified itself
into an uninterrupted struggle of the whole Chinese world, fought with
mass armies, for which the population was strained to the extreme
limit. “The allies, whose lands were ten times as great as those of
Tsin, in vain rolled up a million men--Tsin had ever reserves in hand
still. From first to last a million men fell,” writes Sze-ma-tsien.
Su-tsin, who began by being Chancellor of Tsin, but later became a
supporter of the League of Nations (_hoh-tsung_) idea and went over to
the Opposition, worked up two great coalitions (333 and 321), which,
however, collapsed from inward disunity at the first battles. His great
adversary, the Chancellor Chang-I, resolutely Imperialist, was in 311
on the point of bringing the Chinese world to voluntary subjection when
a change of occupancy of the throne caused his combination to miscarry.
In 294 began the campaigns of Pe-Ki.[739] It was in the prestige of his
victories that the King of Tsin took the mystic Emperor-title of the
legendary age,[740] which openly expressed the claim to world-rule, and
was at once imitated by the ruler of Tsi in the east.[741] With this
began the second maximum phase of the decisive struggles. The number
of independent states grew steadily less. In 255 even the home state
of Confucius, Lu, vanished, and in 249 the Chóu dynasty came to an end.
In 246 the mighty Wang-Cheng became, at the age of thirteen, Emperor
of Tsin, and in 241, with the aid of his Chancellor Lui-Shi (the
Chinese Mæcenas[742]), he fought out to victory the last bout that the
last opponent, the Empire of Tsu, ventured to challenge. In 221, sole
ruler in actual fact, he assumed the title Shi (Augustus). This is the
beginning of the Imperial age in China.
No era confronts its mankind so distinctly with the alternative of
_great form_ or _great individual powers_ as this “Period of the
Contending States.” In the degree in which the nations cease to be
politically in “condition,” in that degree possibilities open up for
the energetic private person who means to be politically creative,
who will have power at any price, and who as a phenomenon of force
becomes the Destiny of an entire people or Culture. Events have become
unpredictable on the basis of form. Instead of the given tradition that
can dispense with genius (because it is itself cosmic force at highest
capacity), we have now the accident of great fact-men. The accident of
their rise brings a weak people (for example, the Macedonians), to the
peak of events overnight, and the accident of their death (for example,
Cæsar’s) can immediately plunge a world from personally secured order
into chaos.
This indeed had been manifested earlier in critical times of
transition. The epoch of the Fronde, the Ming-shu, the First Tyrannis,
when men were not in form, but fought about form, has always thrown
up a number of great figures who grew too big for definition and
limitation in terms of office. The change from Culture to Civilization,
with its typical Napoleonism, does so too. But with this, which is
the preface to unredeemed historical formlessness, dawns the real
day of the great individual. For us this period attained almost to
its climax in the World War; in the Classical World it began with
Hannibal, who challenged Rome in the name of Hellenism (to which
inwardly he belonged), but went under because the Hellenistic East, in
true Classical fashion, apprehended the meaning of the hour too late,
or not at all. With his downfall began that proud sequence that runs
from the Scipios through Æmilius Paullus, Flamininus, the Catos, the
Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla to Pompey, Cæsar, and Augustus. In China,
correspondingly, during the period of the “Contending States,” a like
chain of statesmen and generals centred on Tsin as the Classical
figures centred on Rome. In accordance with the complete want of
understanding of the political side of Chinese history that prevails,
these men are usually described as Sophists.[743] They were so, but
only in the same sense as leading Romans of the same period were
Stoics--that is, as having been educated in the philosophy and rhetoric
of the Greek East. All were finished orators and all from time to time
wrote on philosophy, Cæsar and Brutus no less than Cato and Cicero,
but they did so not as professional philosophers, but because _otium
cum dignitate_ was the habit of cultivated gentlemen. In business
hours they were masters of fact, whether on battle-field or in high
politics, and precisely the same is true of the Chancellors Chang-I and
Su-tsin;[744] the dreaded diplomatist Fan-Sui who overthrew Pe-Ki, the
general; Wei-Yang the legislator of Tsin; Lui-Shi, the first Emperor’s
Mæcenas, and others.
The Culture had bound up all its forces in strict form. Now they were
released, and “Nature”--that is, the cosmic--broke forth immediate.
The change from the absolute State to the battling Society of nations
that marks the beginning of every Civilization may mean for idealists
and ideologues what they like--in the world of facts it means the
transition from government in the style and pulse of a strict tradition
to the _sic volo, sic jubeo_ of the unbridled personal régime. The
maximum of symbolic and _super_-personal form coincides with that of
the Late period of the Culture--in China about 600, in the Classical
about 450, for ourselves about 1700. The minimum in the Classical
lies in the time of Sulla and Pompey, and for us will be reached (and
possibly passed) in the next hundred years. Great interstate and
internal conflicts, revolutions of a fearful kind, interpenetrate
increasingly, but the questions at issue in all of them without
exception are (consciously and frankly or not) questions of unofficial,
and eventually purely personal, power. It is historically of no
importance what they themselves aimed at theoretically, and we need not
know the catchwords under which the Chinese and Arabian revolutions of
this stage broke out, nor even whether there were such catchwords. None
of the innumerable revolutions of this era--which more and more become
blind outbreaks of uprooted megalopolitan masses--has ever attained, or
ever had the possibility of attaining, an aim. What stands is only the
_historical fact_ of an accelerated demolition of ancient forms that
leaves the path clear for Cæsarism.
But the same is true also of the wars, in which the armies and their
tactical methods become more and more the creation, not of the epoch,
but of uncontrolled individual captains, who in many cases discovered
their genius very late and by accident. While in 300 there were _Roman_
armies, in 100 there were the armies of Marius and Sulla and Cæsar;
and Octavian’s army, which was composed of Cæsar’s veterans, led its
general much more than it was led by him. But with this the methods
of war, its means, and its aims assumed raw-natural and ferocious
forms,[745] very different from those prevailing before. Their duels
were not eighteenth-century Trianon duels, encounters in knightly
forms with fixed rules to determine when a man might declare himself
exhausted, what maximum of force might be employed, and what conditions
the chivalry permitted a victor to impose. They were ring-battles of
infuriated men with fists and teeth, fought to the bodily collapse of
one and exploited without reserve or restraint by the victor. The first
great example of this “return to Nature” is afforded by the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, which, instead of artificial
manœuvres with small bodies, practised the mass-onset without regard
to losses and thereby shattered to atoms the refined strategy of
the Rococo. To bring the whole muscular force of a nation on to the
battlefields by the universal-service system was an idea utterly alien
to the age of Frederick the Great.[746]
Similarly, in every Culture, the technique of war hesitatingly
followed the advance of craftsmanship, until at the beginning of
the Civilization it suddenly takes the lead, presses all mechanical
possibilities of the time relentlessly into its service, and under
pressure of military necessity even opens up new domains hitherto
unexploited--but at the same time renders largely ineffectual the
personal heroism of the thoroughbred, the ethos of the noble, and the
subtle intellect of the Late Culture. In the Classical world, where the
Polis made mass-armies essentially impossible--for relatively to the
general smallness of Classical forms, tactical included, the numbers
of Cannæ, Philippi, and Actium were enormous and exceptional--the
second Tyrannis (Dionysius of Syracuse leading) introduced mechanical
technique into warfare, and on a large scale.[747] Then for the first
time it became possible to carry out sieges like those of Rhodes (305),
Syracuse (213), Carthage (146), and Alesia (52), in which also the
increasing importance of rapidity, even for Classical strategy, became
evident. It was in line with this tendency that the Roman legion, the
characteristic structure of which developed only in the Hellenistic
age, worked like a machine as compared with the Athenian and Spartan
militias of the fifth century. In China, correspondingly, iron was
worked up for cutting and thrusting weapons from 474, light cavalry
of the Mongolian model displaced the heavy war-chariot, and fortress
warfare suddenly acquired outstanding importance.[748] The fundamental
craving of Civilized mankind for speed, mobility, and mass-effects
finally combined, in the world of Europe and America, with the Faustian
will to domination over Nature and produced dynamic methods of war
that even to Frederick the Great would have seemed like lunacy, but
to us of to-day, in close proximity to our technics of transportation
and industry, are perfectly natural. Napoleon horsed his artillery
and thereby made it highly mobile (just as he broke up the mass army
of the Revolution into a system of self-contained and easily moved
corps), and already at Wagram and Borodino it had augmented its purely
physical effectiveness to the point of what we should call rapid-fire
and drum fire.[749] The second stage is--most significantly--marked by
the American Civil War of 1861-5--which even in the numbers of troops
it involved far surpassed the order of magnitude of the Napoleonic
Wars[750] and in which for the first time the railway was used for
large troop-movements, the telegraph-network for messages, and a steam
fleet, keeping the sea for months on end, for blockade, and in which
armoured ships, the torpedo, rifled weapons, and monster artillery
of extraordinary range were discovered.[751][752] The third stage is
that of the World War, preluded by the Russo-Japanese conflict;[753]
here submarine and aircraft were set to work, speed of invention
became a new arm in itself, and the extent (though most certainly
not the intensity) of the means used attained a maximum. But to this
expenditure of force there corresponds everywhere the ruthlessness
of the decisions. At the very outset of the Chinese Shan-Kwo period
we find the utter annihilation of the State of Wu--an act which in
the preceding Chun-tsiu period chivalry would have made impossible.
Even in the peace of Campo Formio Napoleon outraged the _convenances_
of the eighteenth century, and after Austerlitz he introduced the
practice of exploiting military success without regard to any but
material restrictions. The last step still possible is being taken in
the peace treaty of the Versailles type, which deliberately avoids
finality and settlement, and keeps open the possibility of setting up
new conditions at every change in the situation. The same evolution
is seen in the chain of the three Punic Wars. The idea of wiping out
one of the leading great powers of the world--which eventually became
familiar to everyone through Cato’s deliberately dry insistence on his
“_Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam_”--never crossed the mind of
the victor of Zama and, for all the wild war-ethics of the Classical
Poleis, it would have seemed to Lysander, as he stood victorious in
Athens, an impiety towards every god.
The Period of the Contending States begins for the Classical world with
the battle of Ipsus (301) which established the trinity of Eastern
great powers, and the Roman victory over the Etruscans and Samnites at
Sentinum (295), which created a mid-Italian great power by the side of
Carthage. Then, however, the characteristic Classical preference for
things near and in the present resulted in eyes’ being shut while Rome
won, first the Italian south in the Pyrrhic adventure, then the sea in
the first Punic War, and then the Celtic north through C. Flaminius.
The significance even of Hannibal (probably the only man of his time
who clearly saw the trend of events) was ignored by all, the Romans
themselves not excepted. It was at _Zama_, and not merely later at
Magnesia and Pydna, that the Hellenistic Eastern powers were defeated.
All in vain the great Scipio, truly anxious in the presence of the
destiny to which a Polis overloaded with the tasks of a world-dominion
was marching, sought thereafter to avoid all conquest. In vain his
entourage forced through the Macedonian War, against the will of every
party, merely in order that the East could thenceforth be ignored as
harmless. Imperialism is so necessary a product of any Civilization
that when a people refuses to assume the rôle of master, it is seized
and pushed into it. The Roman Empire was _not_ conquered--the “_orbis
terrarum_” condensed itself into that form and forced the Romans to
give it their name. It is all very Classical. While the Chinese states
defended even the mere remnants of their independence with the last
bitterness, Rome after 146 only took upon herself to transform the
Eastern land-masses into provinces because there was no other resource
against anarchy left. And even this much resulted in the inward form
of Rome--the last which had remained upright--melting in the Gracchan
disorders. And (what is unparalleled elsewhere) it was not between
states that the final rounds of the battle for Imperium were fought,
but between the parties of a city--the form of the Polis allowed of
no other outcome. Of old it had been Sparta _versus_ Athens, now it
was Optimate _versus_ Popular Party. In the Gracchan revolution,
which was already (134) heralded by a first Servile War, the younger
Scipio was secretly murdered and C. Gracchus openly slain--the first
who as Princeps and the first who as Tribune were political centres
in themselves amidst a world become formless. When, in 104, the urban
masses of Rome for the first time lawlessly and tumultuously invested
a private person, Marius, with Imperium, the deeper importance of
the drama then enacted is comparable with that of the assumption of
the mythic Emperor-title by the ruler of Tsin in 288. The inevitable
product of the age, Cæsarism, suddenly outlines itself on the horizon.
The heir of the Tribune was Marius, who like him linked mob and high
finance and in 87 murdered off the old aristocracy in masses. The heir
of the Princeps was Sulla, who in 82 annihilated the class of the great
merchants by his proscriptions. Thereafter the final decisions press
on rapidly, as in China after the emergence of Wang Cheng. Pompey
the Princeps and Cæsar the Tribune--tribune not in office, but in
attitude--were still party-leaders, but nevertheless, already at Lucca,
they were arranging with Crassus and each other for the first partition
of the world amongst themselves. When the heirs of Cæsar fought his
murderers at Philippi, both had ceased to be more than groups. By
Actium the issue was between individuals, and Cæsarism will out, even
in such a process as this.
In the corresponding evolution within the Arabian world it is, of
course, the Magian Consensus that takes the place of the bodily
Polis as the basic form in and through which the facts accomplish
themselves; and this form, as we have seen, excluded any separation
of political and religious tendencies to such an extent that even the
urban bourgeois urge towards freedom (marking, here as elsewhere,
the beginning of the Period of Contending States) presents itself in
orthodox disguise, and so has hitherto almost escaped notice.[754]
It appeared as a will to break loose from the Caliphate, which the
Sassanids, and Diocletian following them, had created in the forms of
the feudal state. From the times of Justinian and Chosroës Nushirvan
this had had to meet the onset of Frondeurs--led by the heads of the
Greek and Mazdaist Churches, the nobility, both Persian-Mazdaist (above
all Irak) and Greek (particularly the Asiatic), and the high chivalry
of Armenia, which was divided into two parts by the difference of
religion. The absolutism almost attained in the seventh century was
then suddenly destroyed by the attack of Islam. In its _political_
beginnings Islam was strictly aristocratic; the handful of Arabian
families[755] who everywhere kept the leading in their hands, very soon
formed in the conquered territories a new higher nobility of strong
breed and immense self-sufficingness which thrust the dynasty down
to the same level as its English “contemporaries” thrust theirs. The
Civil War between Othman and Ali (656-661) was the expression of a true
Fronde, and its movements were all in the interests of two clans and
their respective adherents. The Islamic Whigs and Tories of the eighth
century, like the English of the eighteenth, _alone_ practised high
politics, and their coteries and family quarrels are more important to
the history of the time than any events in the reigning house of the
Ommaiyads (661-750).
But with the fall of the gay and enlightened dynasty that has resided
in Damascus--that is, West-Aramæan and Monophysite Syria--the natural
centre of gravity of the Arabian Culture reappeared; it was the
East-Aramæan region. Once the basis of Sassanid and now of Abbassid
power, but always--irrespective of whether its shaping was Persian or
Arabian, or its religion Mazdaist, Nestorian, or Islamic--it expressed
one and the same grand line of development and was the exemplar for
Syria as for Byzantium alike. From Kufa the movement started which led
to the downfall of the Ommaiyads and their _ancien régime_, and the
character of this movement--of which the whole extent has never to this
day been observed--was that _of a social revolution directed against
the primary orders of society and the aristocratic tradition_.[756] It
began among the Mavali, the small bourgeoisie in the East, and directed
itself with bitter hostility against the Arabs, not _qua_ champions of
Islam but _qua_ new nobility. The recently converted Mavali, almost all
former Mazdaists, took Islam more seriously than the Arabs themselves,
who represented also a class-ideal. Even in the army of Ali the wholly
democratic and Puritan Qaraites had split off,[757] and in their ranks
we see for the first time the combination of fanatic sectarianism and
Jacobinism. Here and now there emerged not only the Shiite tendency,
but also the first impulses towards the Communistic Karramiyya
movement, which can be traced to Mazdak[758] and later produced the
vast outbreaks under Babek. The Abbassids were anything but favourites
with the insurgents of Kufa, and it was only owing to their great
diplomatic skill that they were first allowed a footing as officers and
then--almost like Napoleon--were able to enter into the heritage of a
Revolution that had spread over the whole East. After their victory
they built Baghdad--a resurrected Ctesiphon, symbol of the downfall
of feudal Arabism--and this first world-city of the new Civilization
became from 800 to 1050 the theatre of the events which led from
Napoleonism to Cæsarism, _from the Caliphate to the Sultanate_, which,
in Baghdad no less than in Byzantium, is the Magian type of power
without form--here also the only kind of power still possible.
We have to recognize quite clearly, then, that in the Arabian world
as elsewhere democracy was a class-ideal--the outlook of townsmen
and the expression of their will to be free from the old linkages
with land, be it a desert or plough-land. The “no” which answered the
Caliph-tradition could disguise itself in very numerous forms, and
neither free-thought nor constitutionalism in our sense was necessary
to it. _Magian mind and Magian money are “free” in quite a different
way._ The Byzantine monkhood was liberal to the point of turbulence,
not only against court and nobility, but also against the higher
ecclesiastical powers, which had developed a hierarchy (corresponding
to the Gothic) even before the Council of Nicæa. The consensus of the
Faithful, the “people” in the most daring sense, was looked upon as
willed by God (“Nature,” Rousseau would have said), as _equal_ and
free from all powers of the blood. The celebrated scene in which the
Abbot Theodore of Studion adjured the Emperor Leo V to obey (813) is
a Storming of the Bastille in Magian forms.[759] Not long afterwards
there began the revolt of the Paulicians, very pious and in social
matters wholly radical,[760] who set up a state of their own beyond
the Taurus, ravaged all Asia Minor, defeated one Imperial levy after
another, and were not subjugated till 874. This corresponds in every
way to the communistic-religious movement of the Karramiyya, which
extended from the Tigris to Merv and whose leader Babek succumbed only
after a twenty years’ struggle (817-837);[761] and the other like
outbreak of the Carmathians[762] in the West (890-904), whose liaisons
reached from Arabia into all the Syrian cities and who propagated
rebellion as far as the Persian coast. But, besides these, there were
still other disguises of the political party-battle. When now we are
told that the Byzantine army was Iconoclast and that the military party
was consequently opposed by an Iconodule monkish party, we begin to
see the passions of the century of the image-controversy (740-840)
in quite a new light, and to understand that the end of the crisis
(843)--the final defeat of the Iconoclasts and _simultaneously_ of the
free-church monkish policy--signifies a Restoration in the 1815 sense
of the word.[763] And, lastly, this period is the time of the fearful
slave-rebellion in Irak--the kernel of the Abbassids’ realm--which
throws sudden light upon a series of other social upheavals. Ali, the
Spartacus of Islam, founded in 869, south of Baghdad, a veritable Negro
state out of the masses of runaways, built himself a capital, Muktara,
and extended his power far in the directions of Arabia and Persia
alike, where he gained the support of whole tribes. In 871 Basra, the
first great port of the Islamic world, inhabited by nearly a million
souls, was taken, deluged in massacre, and burnt. Not till 883 was this
slave-state destroyed.
Thus slowly the Sassanid-Byzantine forms were hollowed out, and in the
place of the ancient traditions of the higher officialdom and nobility
there arose the inconsequent and wholly personal power of incidental
geniuses--_the Sultanate_. For this is the specifically Arabian form,
and it appears simultaneously in Byzantium and Baghdad and takes its
steady course from the Napoleonic beginnings about 800 to the completed
Cæsarism of the Seljuk Turks about 1050. This form is purely Magian,
belongs only to that Culture, and is incomprehensible without the most
fundamental axioms of its soul. The Caliphate, a synthesis of political
(not to say cosmic) beat and style, was not abolished--for the Caliph
as the representative of God recognized by the Consensus of the elect
is sacred--but he was deprived of all powers that Cæsarism needed to
possess, just as Pompey and Augustus in fact, and Sulla and Cæsar in
fact and in name, abstracted these powers from the old constitutional
forms of Rome. In the end there remained to the Caliph about as much
power as the Senate and the Comitias had under Tiberius. The whole
richness of being in high form--in law, costume, ethic--that had once
been a symbol, was now mere trappings covering a formless and purely
factual régime.
So we find by the side of Michael III (842-867) Bardas, and by
Constantine VII (912-959) Romanos--the latter even formally
Co-Emperor.[764] In 867 the ex-groom Basileios, a Napoleonic figure,
overthrew Bardas and founded the sword-dynasty of the Armenians (to
1081), in which generals instead of Emperors mostly ruled--force-men
like Romanos, Nicephorus, and Bardas Phocas. The greatest amongst them
was John Tzimisces (969-976) in Armenian Kiur Zan. In Baghdad it was
the _Turks_ who played the Armenian rôle; in 842 the Caliph Vathek
invested one of their leaders for the first time with the title of
Sultan. From 862 the Turkish prætorians held the ruler in tutelage,
and in 945 Achmed, the founder of the Sultan-dynasty of the Buyids,
formally restricted the Abbassid Caliph to his religious dignities.
And then there set in, in both the world-cities, an unrestrained
competition between the mighty provincial families for possession
of the supreme power. In the case of the Christian we find, indeed,
Basileios II and others challenging the great latifundia lords, but
this does not in the least mean social purposes in the legislator.
It was an act of self-defence on the part of the momentary potentate
against possible heirs, and closely analogous, therefore, to the
proscriptions of Sulla and the Triumvirs. Half Asia Minor belonged to
the Dukas, Phocas, and Skleros connexions; the Chancellor Basileios,
who could keep an army on pay out of his own fabulous resources, has
long ago been compared with Crassus.[765] But the imperial age proper
begins only with the Seljuk Turks.[766] Their leader Togrulbek won Irak
in 1043 and Armenia in 1049, and in 1055 forced the Caliph to grant him
the _hereditary_ Sultanate. His son Alp Arslan conquered Syria and, by
the victory of Manzikert, gained eastern Asia Minor. The remnant of the
Byzantine Empire thenceforward possessed no importance to, or influence
on, the further destinies of the Turkish Islamic Imperium.
This is the phase, too, which in Egypt is concealed under the name
of the “Hyksos.” Between the XIIth and the XVIIIth Dynasties lay two
centuries,[767] which began with the collapse of the _ancien régime_
which had culminated with Sesostris III,[768] and ended with the
beginning of the New Empire. The numbering of the dynasties itself
suffices to disclose something catastrophic. In the lists of kings the
names appear successive or parallel, usurpers of obscurest origin,
generals, people with strange titles, often reigning only a few days.
With the very first king of the XIIIth Dynasty the high-Nile records
at Semne break off, and with his successor the archives at Kahun come
to an end. It is the time out of which the Leiden Papyrus portrays
the great social revolution.[769] The fall of the Government and the
victory of the mass is followed by outbreaks of the army and the rise
of ambitious soldiers. In Egypt from about 1680 appears the name of
the “Hyksos,”[770] a designation with which the historians of the New
Empire, who no longer understood or wished to understand the meaning
of the epoch, covered up the shame of these years. These Hyksos, there
can be no doubt whatever, played the part that the Armenians played in
Byzantium; and in the Classical world too, the destinies of the Cimbri
and Teutones, would have gone the same way had they defeated Marius and
his legions of city _canaille_; they would have filled the armies of
the Triumvirs again and again, and in the end probably set up barbarian
chieftains in their place--for the case of Jugurtha shows the lengths
to which foreigners dared to go with the Rome of those days. The
provenance or constitution of the intruders does not matter--they might
be body-guards, insurgent slaves, Jacobins, or purely alien tribes.
What does matter is what they were for the Egyptian world in that
century of theirs. In the end they set up a state in the Western Delta
and built a capital, Auaris, for it.[771] One of their leaders, Khyan
by name, who styled himself, not Pharaoh, but “Embracer of the Country”
and “prince of the young men” (names as essentially revolutionary as
the _Consul sine collega_ or _dictator prepetuus_ of Cæsar’s time) a
man probably of the stamp of John Tzimisces, ruled over all Egypt and
spread his renown as far as Crete and the Euphrates. But after him
began a fight of all the districts for the Imperium, and out of that
fight Amasis and the Theban dynasty eventually emerged victorious.
For us this time of Contending States began with Napoleon and his
violent-arbitrary government by order. His head was the first in our
world to make effective the notion of a military and at the same
time popular world-domination--something altogether different from
the Empire of Charles V and even the British Colonial Empire of his
own day. If the nineteenth century has been relatively poor in great
wars--and revolutions--and has overcome its worst crises diplomatically
by means of congresses, this has been due precisely to the continuous
and terrific war-preparedness which has made disputants, fearful at the
eleventh hour of the consequences, postpone the definitive decision
again and again, and led to the substitution of chess-moves for war.
For this is the century of gigantic permanent armies and universal
compulsory service. We ourselves are too near to it to see it under
this terrifying aspect. In all world-history there is no parallel.
Ever since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and latterly millions,
of men have stood ready to march, and mighty fleets renewed every ten
years have filled the harbours. It is a war without war, a war of
overbidding in equipment and preparedness, a war of figures and tempo
and technics, and the diplomatic dealings have been not of court with
court, but of headquarters with headquarters. The longer the discharge
was delayed, the more huge became the means and the more intolerable
the tension. This is the Faustian, the dynamic, form of “the Contending
States” during the first century of that period, but it ended with the
explosion of the World War. For the demand of these four years has been
altogether too much for the principle of universal service--child of
the French Revolution, revolutionary through and through, as it is in
this form--and for all tactical methods evolved from it.[772] The place
of the permanent armies as we know them will gradually be taken by
professional forces of volunteer war-keen soldiers; and from millions
we shall revert to hundreds of thousands. But _ipso facto_ this second
century will be one of _actually_ Contending States. _These_ armies
are not substitutes for war--they are _for_ war, and they want war.
Within two generations it will be they whose will prevails over that
of all the comfortables put together. In these wars of theirs for the
heritage of the whole world, continents will be staked, India, China,
South Africa, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played
and counterplayed. The great cosmopolitan foci of power will dispose at
their pleasure of smaller states--their territory, their economy and
their men alike--all that is now merely province, passive object, means
to end, and its destinies are without importance to the great march of
things. We ourselves, in a very few years, have learned to take little
or no notice of events that before the War would have horrified the
world; who to-day seriously thinks about the millions that perish in
Russia?
Again and again between these catastrophes of blood and terror the cry
rises up for reconciliation of the peoples and for peace on earth.
It is but the background and the echo of the grand happening, but,
as such, so necessary that we have to assume its existence even if,
as in Hyksos Egypt, in Baghdad and Byzantium, no tradition tells of
it. Esteem as we may the wish towards all this, we must have the
courage to face facts as they are--that is the hall-mark of men of
race-quality and it is by the being of these men that _alone_ history
is. Life if it would be great, is hard; it lets choose _only_ between
victory and ruin, not between war and peace, and to the victory belong
the sacrifices of victory. For that which shuffles querulously and
jealously by the side of the events is only literature,--written or
thought or lived literature--mere truths that lose themselves in the
moving crush of facts. History has never deigned to take notice of
these propositions. In the Chinese world Hiang-Sui tried, as early as
535, to found a peace league. In the period of the Contending States,
imperialism (_Lien-heng_) was opposed by the League of Nations idea
(_Hoh-tsung_),[773] particularly in the southern regions, but it was
foredoomed like every half-measure that steps into the path of a whole,
and it had vanished even before the victory of the North. But both
tendencies alike rejected the political taste of the Taoists, who, in
those fearful centuries, elected for intellectual self-disarmament,
thereby reducing themselves to the level of mere material to be
used up by others and for others in the grand decisions. Even Roman
politics--deliberately improvident as the Classical spirit was in all
other respects--at least made one attempt to bring the whole world
into one system of equal co-ordinated forces which should do away with
all necessity for further wars--that is, when at the fall of Hannibal
Rome forwent the chance of incorporating the East. But reluctance was
useless; the party of the younger Scipio went over to frank Imperialism
in order to make an end of chaos, although its clear-sighted
leader foresaw therein the doom of his city, which possessed (and
in a high degree) the native Classical incapacity for organizing
anything whatever. The way from Alexander to Cæsar is unambiguous
and unavoidable, and the strongest nation of any and every Culture,
consciously or unconsciously, willing or unwilling, has had to tread it.
From the rigour of these facts there is no refuge. The Hague Conference
of 1907 was the prelude of the World War; the Washington Conference of
1921 will have been that of other wars. The history of these times is
no longer an intellectual match of wits in elegant forms for pluses
and minuses, from which either side can withdraw when it pleases. The
alternatives now are to stand fast or to go under--there is no middle
course. The only moral that the logic of things permits to us now
is that of the climber on the face of the crag--a moment’s weakness
and all is over. To-day all “philosophy” is nothing but an inward
abdication and resignation, or a craven hope of escaping realities by
means of mysticisms. It was just the same in Roman times. Tacitus tells
us[774] how the famous Musonius Rufus tried, by exhortations on the
blessings of peace and the evils of war, to influence the legions that
in 70 stood before the gates of Rome, and barely escaped alive from
their blows. The military commander Avidius Cassius called the Emperor
Marcus Aurelius a “philosophical old woman.”
In these conditions so much of old and great traditions as remains, so
much of historical “fitness” and experience as has got into the blood
of the twentieth-century nations, acquires an unequalled potency. For
us _creative_ piety, or (to use a more fundamental term) the pulse
that has come down to us from first origins, adheres only to forms
that are older than the Revolution and Napoleon,[775] forms which grew
and were not made. Every remnant of them, however tiny, that has kept
itself alive in the being of any self-contained minority whatever will
before long rise to incalculable values and bring about historical
effects which no one yet imagines to be possible. The traditions of an
old monarchy, of an old aristocracy, of an old polite society, in so
much as they are still healthy enough to keep clear of professional or
professorial politics, in so far as they possess honour, abnegation,
discipline, the genuine sense of a great mission (_race-quality_, that
is, and training), sense of duty and sacrifice--can become a centre
which holds together the being-stream of an entire people and enables
it to outlast this time and make its landfall in the future. To be “in
condition” is everything. It falls to us to live in the most trying
times known to the history of a great Culture. The last race to keep
its form, the last living tradition, the last leaders who have both at
their back, will pass through and onward, victors.
X {sic}
By the term “Cæsarism” I mean that kind of government which,
irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in
its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter
that Augustus in Rome, and Hwang-ti in China, Amasis in Egypt and Alp
Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The
spirit of these forms was dead,[776] and so all institutions, however
carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and
weight. Real importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised
by the Cæsar, or by anybody else capable of exercising it in his place.
It is the _récidive_ of a form-fulfilled world into primitivism, into
the cosmic-historyless. Biological stretches of time once more take the
place vacated by historical periods.[777]
At the beginning, where the Civilization is developing to full bloom
(to-day), there stands the miracle of the Cosmopolis, the great
petrifact, a symbol of the formless--vast, splendid, spreading in
insolence. It draws within itself the being-streams of the now impotent
countryside, human masses that are wafted as dunes from one to another
or flow like loose sand into the chinks of the stone. Here money and
intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs. It is the
most artificial, the cleverest phenomenon manifested in the light-world
of human eyes--uncanny, “too good to be true,” standing already almost
beyond the possibilities of cosmic formation.
Presently, however, the idea-less facts come forward again, naked
and gigantic. The eternal-cosmic pulse has finally overcome the
intellectual tensions of a few centuries. In the form of democracy,
money has won. There has been a period in which politics were almost
its preserve. But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the
Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that
penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming--the Cæsar-men. Before
them the money collapses. _The Imperial Age, in every Culture alike,
signifies the end of the politics of mind and money_. The powers of the
blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. “Race”
springs forth, pure and irresistible--the strongest win and the residue
is their spoil. They seize the management of the world, and the realm
of books and problems petrifies or vanishes from memory. From now
on, new destinies in the style of the pre-Culture time are possible
afresh, and visible to the consciousness without cloaks of causality.
There is no inward difference more between the lives of Septimius
Severus and Gallienus and those of Alaric and Odoacer. Rameses,
Trajan, Wu-ti belong together in a uniform up-and-down of historyless
time-stretches.[778]
Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political
problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers
that be. In the period of Contending States, torrents of blood had
reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths
of Democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of
rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights
are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to
make use of them. A hundred years more, and even the historians will
no longer understand the old controversies. Already by Cæsar’s time
reputable people had almost ceased to take part in the elections.[779]
It embittered the life of the great Tiberius that the most capable
men of his time held aloof from politics, and Nero could not even
by threats compel the Equites to come to Rome in order to exercise
their rights. This is the end of the great politics. The conflict of
intelligences that had served as substitute for war must give place to
war itself in its most primitive form.
It is, therefore, a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the
period to presume, as Mommsen did,[780] a deep design of subdivision
in the “dyarchy” fashioned by Augustus, with its partition of powers
between Princeps and Senate. A century earlier this constitution would
have been a real thing, but that would in itself suffice to make it
impossible for such an idea to have entered the heads of the present
force-men. Now it meant nothing but the attempt of a weak personality
to deceive itself as to inexorable facts by mantling them in empty
forms. Cæsar saw things as they were and was guided in the exercise of
his rulership by definite and unsentimental practical considerations.
The legislation of his last months was concerned wholly with
transitional provisions, none of which were intended to be permanent.
This precisely is what has generally been overlooked. He was far too
deep a judge of things to anticipate development or to settle its
definitive forms at this moment, with the Parthian War impending. But
Augustus, like Pompey before him, was not the master of his following,
but thoroughly dependent upon it and its views of things. The form
of the Principate was not at all his discovery, but the doctrinaire
execution of an obsolete party-ideal that Cicero--another weakling--had
formulated.[781] When, on the 13th January 27, Augustus gave back
the state-power to the “Senate and People” of Rome--a scene all the
more meaningless because of its sincerity--he kept the Tribunate for
himself. In fact, this was the one element of the polity that could
manifest itself in actuality. The Tribune was the legitimate successor
of the Tyrant,[782] and as long ago as 122 B.C. Caius Gracchus had put
into the title a connotation limited no longer by the legal bounds
of the office, but only by the personal talents of the incumbent.
From him it is a direct line through Marius and Cæsar to the young
Nero, who set himself to defeat the political purposes of his mother
Agrippina. The Princeps,[783] on the other hand, was thenceforth only a
costume, a rank--very likely a fact in society, certainly not a fact in
politics. And this, precisely, was the conception invested with light
and glamour by the theory of Cicero, and _already_--and by him of all
people--associated with the Divus-idea.[784] The “co-operation” of the
Senate and People, on the contrary, was an antiquated ceremonial, with
about as much life in it as the rites of the Fratres Arvales--also
restored by Augustus. The great parties of the Gracchan age had long
become retinues--Cæsarians and Pompeians--and finally there only
remained on the one side the formless omnipotence, the plain brutal
“fact,” the Cæsar--or whoever managed to get the Cæsar under his
influence--and on the other side the handful of narrow ideologues who
concealed dissatisfaction under philosophy and thenceforward sought
to advance their ideals by conspiracy. What these Stoics were in
Rome, the Confucians were in China--and, seen thus, the episode of
the “Burning of the Books,” decreed by the Chinese Augustus in 212,
begins to be intelligible through the reproach of immense vandalism
that the minds of later literates fastened upon it. But, after all,
these Stoic enthusiasts for an ideal that had become impossible
had killed Cæsar:[785] to the Divus-cult they opposed a Cato- and
Brutus-cult; the philosophers in the Senate (which by then was only a
noble club) never wearied of lamenting the downfall of “freedom” and
fomenting conspiracies such as Piso’s in 65. Had this been the state
of things at Nero’s death, it would have been Sulla over again; and
that is why Nero put to death the Stoic Thrasea Pætus, why Vespasian
executed Helvidius Priscus, and why copies of the history of Cremutius
Cordus, which lauded Brutus as the last of the Romans, were collected
and burnt in Rome. These were acts of defensive State necessity
_vis-à-vis_ blind ideology--acts such as those we know of Cromwell
and Robespierre--and it was in exactly the same position that the
Chinese Cæsars found themselves _vis-à-vis_ the school of Confucius,
which had formerly worked out their ideal of a state-constitution
and now had no notion of enduring the actuality. This great Burning
of the Books was nothing but the destruction of one part of the
politico-philosophical literature and the abolition of propaganda and
secret organizations.[786] This defensive lasted in both Imperia for a
century, and then even reminiscences of party-political passions faded
out and the two philosophies became the ruling world-outlook of the
Imperial age in its maturity.[787] But the world was now the theatre of
_tragic family-histories_ into which state-histories were dissolved;
the Julian-Claudian house destroyed Roman history, and the house of
Shi-hwang-ti (even from 206 B.C.) destroyed Chinese, and we darkly
discern something of the same kind in the destinies of the Egyptian
Queen Hatshepsut and her brothers (1501-1447). It is the last step to
the definitive. With world-peace--_the peace of high policies_--the
“sword side”[788] of being retreats and the “spindle side” rules again;
henceforth there are only _private_ histories, private destinies,
private ambitions, from top to bottom, from the miserable troubles of
fellaheen to the dreary feuds of Cæsars for the private possession of
the world. The wars of the age of world-peace are private wars, more
fearful than any State wars because they are formless.
For world-peace--which has often existed in fact--involves the private
renunciation of war on the part of the immense majority, but along with
this it involves an unavowed readiness to submit to being the booty of
others who do _not_ renounce it. It begins with the State-destroying
wish for universal reconciliation, and it ends in nobody’s moving a
finger so long as misfortune only touches his neighbour. Already under
Marcus Aurelius each city and each land-patch was thinking of itself,
and the activities of the ruler were his private affair as other
men’s were theirs. The remoter peoples were as indifferent to him
and his troops and his aims as they were to the projects of Germanic
war-bands. On this _spiritual_ premiss a second Vikingism develops. The
state of being “in form” passes from nations to bands and retinues of
adventurers, self-styled Cæsars, seceding generals, barbarian kings,
and what not--in whose eyes the population becomes in the end merely
a part of the landscape. There is a deep relation between the heroes
of the Mycenæan primitive age and the soldier-emperors of Rome, and
between, say, Menes and Rameses II. In our Germanic world the spirits
of Alaric and Theodoric will come again--there is a first hint of them
in Cecil Rhodes--and the alien executioners of the Russian preface,
from Jenghiz Khan to Trotski (with the episode of Petrine Tsarism
between them) are, when all is said and done, very little different
from most of the pretenders of the Latin-American republics, whose
private struggles have long since put an end to the form-rich age of
the Spanish Baroque.
With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary
to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb
and enduring. The timeless village and the “eternal” peasant[789]
reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth--a busy,
not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors
passingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities,
empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless
mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty
thrifts and petty fortunes, and endure. Masses are trampled on in the
conflicts of the conquerors who contend for the power and the spoil
of this world, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive
fertility and suffer on. And while in high places there is eternal
alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with
that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all
doubts for ever.[790] There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of
God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual--and
there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering
which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has
never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being
reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as
the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of
land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at
it or we may lament it--but it is there.
CHAPTER XII
THE STATE
(C)
PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS
I
To Politics as an idea we have given more thought than has been good
for us, since, correspondingly, we have understood all the less about
the observation of Politics as a reality. The great statesmen are
accustomed to act immediately and on the basis of a sure flair for
facts. This is so self-evident, to them, that it simply never enters
their heads to reflect upon the basic general principles of their
action--supposing indeed that such exist. In all ages they have known
what they had to do, and any theory of this knowledge has been foreign
to both their capacities and their tastes. But the professional
thinkers who have turned their attention to the _faits accomplis_
of men have been so remote, inwardly, from these actions that they
have just spun for themselves a web of abstractions--for preference,
abstraction-myths like justice, virtue, freedom--and then applied them
as criteria to past and, especially, future historical happening.
Thus in the end they have forgotten that concepts are only concepts,
and brought themselves to the conclusion that there is a political
science whereby we can form the course of the world according to an
ideal recipe. As nothing of the kind has ever or anywhere happened,
political doing has come to be considered as so trivial in comparison
with abstract thinking that they debate in their books whether there is
a “genius of action” at all.
Here, on the contrary, the attempt will be made to give, instead of
an ideological system, a _physiognomy_ of politics as it has actually
been practised in the course of general history, and not as it might
or ought to have been practised. The problem was, and is, to penetrate
to the final meaning of great events, to “see” them, to feel and
to transcribe the symbolically important in them. The projects of
world-improvers and the actuality of History have nothing to do with
one another.[791]
The being-streams of humanity are called History when we regard them
as movement, and family, estate, people, nation, when we regard them
as the object moved.[792] Politics is the way in which this fluent
Being maintains itself, _grows_, triumphs over other life-streams.
_All living is politics_, in every trait of instinct, in the inmost
marrow.[793] That which we nowadays like to call life-energy
(vitality), the “it” in us that at all costs strives forward and
upward, the blind cosmic drive to validity and power that at the
same time remains plantwise and racewise, bound up with the earth,
the “home”-land; the directedness, the need to actualize--it is this
that appears in every higher mankind, as its political life, seeking
naturally and inevitably the great decisions that determine whether it
shall be, or shall suffer, a Destiny. For it grows or _it dies out_;
there is no third possibility.
For this reason the nobility, as expression of a strong race-quality,
is the truly political Order, and training and not shaping is the truly
political sort of education. Every great politician, a centre of forces
in the stream of happening, has something of the noble in his feeling
of self-vocation and inward obligation. On the other hand, all that is
microcosmic and “intellect” is unpolitical, and so there is a something
of priestliness in all program-politics and ideology. The best
diplomats are the children; in their play, or when they want something,
a cosmic “it” that is bound up in the individual being breaks out
immediately and with the sure tread of the sleep-walker. They do not
learn, but unlearn, this art of early years as they grow older--hence
the rarity in the world of adults of the Statesman.
It is only in and between these being-streams that fill the field of
the high Culture that high policy exists. They are only possible,
therefore, in the plural. A people _is_, really, only in relation to
peoples.[794] But the natural, “race,” relation between them is for
that very reason a relation of war--this is a fact that no truths
avail to alter. War is the primary politics of _everything_ that
lives, and so much so that in the deeps battle and life are one, and
being and will-to-battle expire together. Old Germanic words for
this, like “_orrusta_” and “_orlog_,” mean seriousness and destiny in
contrast to jest and play--and the contrast is one of intensity, not
of qualitative difference. And even though all high politics tries
to be a substitution of more intellectual weapons for the sword and
though it is the ambition of the statesman at the culminations of
all the Cultures to feel able to dispense with war, yet the primary
relationship between diplomacy and the war-art endures. The character
of battle is common to both, and the tactics and stratagems, and the
necessity of material forces in the background to give weight to the
operations. The aim, too, remains the same--namely, the growth of one’s
own life-unit (class or nation) at the cost of the other’s. And every
attempt to eliminate the “race” element only leads to its transfer
to other ground; instead of the conflict of states we have that of
parties, or that of areas, or (if there also the will to growth is
extinct) that of the adventurers’ retinues, to whose doings the rest of
the population unresistingly adjusts itself.
In every war between life-powers the question at issue is which is
to govern the whole. It is always a life, never a system, law, or
program that gives the beat in the stream of happening.[795] To be the
centre of action and effective focus of a multitude,[796] to make the
inward form of one’s own personality into that of whole peoples and
periods, to be history’s commanding officer, with the aim of bringing
one’s own people or family or purposes to the top of events--that is
the scarce-conscious but irresistible impulse in every individual
being that has a historical vocation in it. There is only _personal_
history, and consequently only _personal_ politics. The struggle of,
not principles but men, not ideals but race-qualities, for executive
power is the alpha and omega. Even revolutions are no exception, for
the “sovereignty of the people” only expresses the fact that the ruling
power has assumed the title of people’s leader instead of that of king.
The method of governing is scarcely altered thereby, and the position
of the governed not at all. And even world-peace, in every case where
it has existed, has been nothing but the slavery of an entire humanity
under the regimen imposed by a few strong natures determined to rule.
The conception of executive power implies that the life-unit--even in
the case of the animals--is subdivided into subjects and objects of
government. This is so self-evident that no mass-unit has ever for a
moment, even in the severest crises (such as 1789), lost the sense of
this inner structure of itself. Only the incumbent vanishes, not the
office, and if a people does actually, in the tide of events, lose
all leadership and float on haphazard, it only means that control has
passed to outside hands, that it has become _in its entirety_ the mere
object.
Politically gifted _peoples_ do not exist. Those which are supposed
to be so are simply peoples that are firmly in the hands of a ruling
minority and in consequence feel themselves to be in good form. The
English as a people are just as unthinking, narrow, and unpractical in
political matters as any other nation, but they possess--for all their
liking for public debate--a _tradition of confidence_. The difference
is simply that the Englishman is the object of a regimen of very old
and successful habits, in which he acquiesces because experience has
shown him their advantage. From an acquiescence that has the outward
appearance of agreement, it is only one step to the conviction that
this government depends upon his will, although paradoxically it is
the government that, for technical reasons of its own, unceasingly
hammers the notion into his head. The ruling class in England has
developed its aims and methods quite independently of the “people,”
and it works with and within an unwritten constitution of which the
refinements--which have arisen from practice and are wholly innocent of
theory--are to the uninitiated as opaque as they are unintelligible.
But the courage of a troop depends on its confidence in the leadership,
and confidence means involuntary abstention from criticism. It is the
officer who makes cowards into heroes, or heroes into cowards, and
this holds good equally for armies, peoples, classes, and parties.
_Political talent in a people_ is nothing but confidence in its
leading. But that confidence has to be acquired; it will ripen only in
its own good time, and success will stabilize it and make it into a
tradition. What appears as a lack of the feeling of certainty in the
ruled is really lack of leadership-talent in the ruling classes, which
generates that sort of uninstinctive and meddlesome criticism which by
its very existence shows that a people has got “out of condition.”
II
How is politics _done?_ The born statesman is above all a valuer--a
valuer of men, situations, and things. He has the “eye” which
unhesitatingly and inflexibly embraces the round of possibilities.
The judge of horses takes in an animal with one glance and knows what
prospects it will have in a race. To do the correct thing without
“knowing” it, to have the hands that imperceptibly tighten or ease the
bit--his talent is the very opposite to that of the man of theory. The
secret pulse of all being is one and the same in him and in the things
of history. They sense one another, they exist for one another. The
fact-man is immune from the risk of practising sentimental or program
politics. He does not believe in the big words. Pilate’s question is
constantly on his lips--truths? The born statesman stands beyond true
and false. He does not confuse the logic of events with the logic of
systems. “Truths” or “errors”--which here amount to the same--only
concern him as intellectual currents, and in respect of _workings_. He
surveys their potency, durability, and direction, and duly books them
in his calculations for the destiny of the power that he directs. He
has convictions, certainly, that are dear to him, but he has them as a
private person; no real politician ever felt himself tied to them when
in action. “The doer is always conscienceless; no one has a conscience
except the spectator,” said Goethe, and it is equally true of Sulla
and Robespierre as it is of Bismarck and Pitt. The great Popes and
the English party-leaders, so long as they had still to strive for
the mastery of things, acted on the same principles as the conquerors
and upstarts of all ages. Take the dealings of Innocent III, who very
nearly succeeded in creating a world-dominion of the Church, and deduce
therefrom the catechism of success; it will be found to be in the
extremest contradiction with all religious moral. Yet without it there
could have been no bearable existence for any Church, not to mention
English Colonies, American fortunes, victorious revolutions, or, for
that matter, states or parties or peoples in general. It is _life_, not
the individual, that is conscienceless.
The essential, therefore, is to understand the time _for_ which one
is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces,
who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward
on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the
surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day--he is not
of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his.
Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for
some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the
Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the
reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility
of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no
difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation
over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to
a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate
history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic
logic as character.
But the true statesman must also be, in a large sense of the word,
an educator--not the representative of a moral or a doctrine, but
an exemplar in doing.[797] It is a patent fact that a religion has
never yet altered the style of an existence. It penetrated the
waking-consciousness, the _intellectual_ man, it threw new light on
another world, it created an immense happiness by way of humanity,
resignation, and patience unto death, but over the forces of life
it possessed no power. In the sphere of the living only the great
personality--the “it,” the race, the cosmic force bound up in that
personality--has been creative (not shaping, but breeding and training)
and has effectively modified the type of entire classes and peoples.
It is not “the” truth or “the” good or “the” upright, but “the” Roman
or “the” Puritan or “the” Prussian that is a fact. The sum of honour
and duty, discipline, resolution, is a thing not learned from books,
but _awakened_ in the stream of being by a living exemplar; and that
is why Frederick William I was one of those educators, great for all
time, whose personal race-forming conduct does not vanish in the course
of the generations. The genuine statesman is distinguished from the
“mere politician”--the player who plays for the pleasure of the game,
the _arriviste_ on the heights of history, the seeker after wealth and
rank--as also from the schoolmaster of an ideal, by the fact that he
dares to demand sacrifices--_and_ obtains them, because his feeling
that he is necessary to the time and the nation is shared by thousands,
transforms them to the core, and renders them capable of deeds to which
otherwise they could never have risen.[798]
Highest of all, however, is not action, but the _ability to command_.
It is this that takes the individual up out of himself and makes him
the centre of a world of action. There is one kind of commanding that
makes obedience a proud, free, and noble habit. That kind Napoleon,
for example, did _not_ possess. A residue of subaltern outlook in him
prevented him from training men to be men and not bureau-personnel,
and led him to govern through edicts instead of through personalities;
as he did not understand this subtlest tact of command and, therefore,
was obliged to do everything really decisive himself, he slowly
collapsed from inability to reconcile the demands of his position with
the limit of human capabilities. But one who, like Cæsar or Frederick
the Great, possesses this last and highest gift of complete humanity
feels--on a battle-evening when operations are sweeping to the willed
conclusion, and the victory is turning out to be conclusive of the
campaign; or when the last signature is written that rounds off a
historical epoch--a wondrous sense of power that the man of truths
can never know. There are moments--and they indicate the maxima of
cosmic flowings--when the individual feels himself to be identical with
Destiny, the centre of the world, and his own personality seems to him
almost as a covering in which the history of the future is about to
clothe itself.
The first problem is to make oneself somebody; the second--less
obvious, but harder and greater in its ultimate effects--_to create
a tradition_, to bring on others so that one’s work may be continued
with one’s own pulse and spirit, to release a current of like activity
that does not need the original leader to maintain it in form. And here
the statesman rises to something that in the Classical world would
doubtless have been called divinity. He becomes the creator of a new
life, the _spirit_-ancestor of a young race. He himself, as a unit,
vanishes from the stream after a few years. But a minority called into
being by him takes up his course and maintains it indefinitely. This
cosmic something, this soul of a ruling stratum, an individual _can_
generate and leave as a heritage, and throughout history it is this
that has produced the durable effects. The great statesman is rare.
Whether he comes, or wins through, too soon or too late, incident
determines. Great individuals often destroy more than they have built
up--by the gap that their death makes in the flow of happening. But
_the creation of tradition means the elimination of the incident_. A
tradition breeds a high average, with which the future can reckon--no
Cæsar, but a Senate, no Napoleon, but an incomparable officer-corps.
A strong tradition attracts talents from all quarters, and out of
small gifts produces great results. The schools of painting of Italy
and Holland are proof of this, no less than the Prussian army and the
diplomacy of the Roman Curia. It was the great flaw in Bismarck, as
compared with Frederick William I, that he could achieve, but could not
form a tradition; that he did not parallel Moltke’s officer-corps by
a corresponding race of politicians who would identify themselves in
feeling with his State and its new tasks, would constantly take up good
men from below and so provide for the continuance of the Bismarckian
action-pulse for ever. If this creation of a tradition does not come
off, then instead of a homogeneous ruling stratum we have a congeries
of heads that are helpless when confronted by the unforeseen. If it
does, we have a _Sovereign People_ in the one sense of the phrase that
is worthy of a people and possible in the world of fact--a highly
trained, self-replenishing minority with sure and slowly ripened
traditions, which attracts every talent into the charmed circle and
uses it to the full, and _ipso facto_ keeps itself in harmony with the
remainder of the nation that it rules. Such a minority slowly develops
into a true “breed,” even when it had begun merely as a party, and the
sureness of its decisions comes to be that of blood, not of reason. But
this means that what happens in it happens “of itself” and does not
need the Genius. _Great politics_, so to put it, _takes the place of
the great politician_.
What, then, _is_ politics? It is the art of the possible--an old
saying, and almost an all-inclusive saying. The gardener can obtain
a plant from the seed, or he can improve its stock. He can bring to
bloom, or let languish, the dispositions hidden in it, its growths
and colour, its flower and fruit. On his eye for possibilities--and,
therefore, necessities--depends its fulfilment, its strength, its whole
Destiny. But the basic form and direction of its being, the stages and
tempo and direction thereof, are _not_ in his power. It must accomplish
them or it decays, and the same is true of the immense plant that we
call a “Culture” and the being-streams of human families that are bound
up in its form-world. The great statesman is the gardener of a people.
Every doer is born in a time and for a time, and thereby the ambit of
_his_ attainable achievement is fixed. For his grandfather, for his
grandson, the data, and therefore the task and the object, are not the
same. The circle is further narrowed by the limits of his personality,
the properties of his people, the situation, and the men with whom
he has to work. It is the hall-mark of the high politician that he
is rarely caught out in a misappreciation of this limit, and equally
rarely overlooks anything realizable within it. With this--one cannot
too often repeat, especially to Germans--goes a sure discrimination
between what “ought” to be and what _will_ be. The basic forms of the
state and of political life, the direction and the degree of their
evolution, are given values unalterably dependent on the given time.
They are the track of political success and not its goal. On the
other hand the worshippers of political ideals create out of nothing.
Their intellectual freedom is astounding, but their castles of the
mind, built of airy concepts like wisdom and righteousness, liberty
and equality, are in the end all the same; they are built from the
top storey downwards. The master of fact, for his part, is content to
direct imperceptibly that which he sees and accepts as plain reality.
This does not seem very much, yet it is the very starting-point of
freedom, in a grand sense of the word. The knack lies in the little
things, the last careful touch of the helm, the fine sensing of the
most delicate oscillations of collective and individual souls. The
art of the statesman consists not only in a clear idea of the main
lines drawn undeviably before him, _but also_ in the sure handling of
the single occurrences and the single persons, encountered along those
lines, which can turn an impending disaster into a decisive success.
The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.
An adept in the game can, like Talleyrand, go to Vienna as ambassador
of the vanquished party and make himself master of the victor. At the
Lucca meeting, Cæsar, whose position was wellnigh desperate, not only
made Pompey’s power serviceable to his own ends, but undermined it
at the same time, and without his opponent’s becoming aware of the
fact. But the domain of the possible has dangerous edges, and if the
finished tact of the great Baroque diplomatists almost always managed
to keep clear, it is the very privilege of the ideologues to be always
stumbling over it. There have been turns in history in which the
statescraftman has let himself drift with the current awhile, in order
not to lose the leadership. Every situation has its elastic limit, and
in the estimation of that limit not the smallest error is permissible.
A revolution that reaches explosion-point is always a proof of lack of
the political pulse in the governors _and_ in their opponents.
Further, the necessary must be done _opportunely_--namely, while it
is a present wherewith the governing power can buy confidence in
itself, whereas if it has to be conceded as a sacrifice, it discloses
a weakness and excites contempt. Political forms are living forms
whose changes inexorably follow a definite direction, and to attempt
to prevent this course or to divert it towards some ideal is to
confess oneself “out of condition.” The Roman nobility possessed this
congruence of pulse, the Spartan did not. In the period of mounting
democracy we find again and again (as in France before 1789 and Germany
before 1918) the arrival of a fatal moment when it is too late for
the necessary reform to be given as a free gift; _then_ that which
should be refused with the sternest energy is given as a _sacrifice_,
and so becomes the sign of dissolution. But those who fail to detect
the first necessity in good time will all the more certainly fail to
misunderstand the second situation. Even a journey to Canossa can be
made too soon or too late--the timing may settle the future of whole
peoples, whether they shall be Destiny for others, or themselves the
objects of another’s Destiny. But the declining democracy also repeats
the same error of trying to hold what was the ideal of yesterday. This
is the danger of our twentieth century. On the path towards Cæsarism
there is ever a Cato to be found.
The influence that a statesman--even one in an exceptionally strong
position--possesses over the _methods_ of politics is very small, and
it is one of the characteristics of the high-grade statesman that he
does not deceive himself on this matter. His task is to work in and
with the historical form that he finds in existence; it is only the
theorist who enthusiastically searches for more ideal forms. But to
be politically “in form” means necessarily, amongst other things, an
unconditional _command of the most modern means_. There is no choice
about it. The means and methods are premisses pertaining to the time
and belong to the inner form of the time--and one who grasps at the
inapposite, who permits his taste or his feelings to overpower the
pulse in him, loses at once his grip of realities. The danger of an
aristocracy is that of being conservative in its means, the danger of
a democracy is the confusion of formula and form. The means of the
present are, and will be for many years, parliamentary--elections and
the press. He may think what he pleases about them, he may respect
them or despise them, but he _must command them_. Bach and Mozart
_commanded_ the musical means of their times. This is the hall-mark
of mastery in any and every field, and statecraft is no exception.
Now, the publicly visible outer form thereof is not the essential but
merely the disguise, and consequently it may be altered, rationalized,
and brought down to constitutional texts--without its actualities
being necessarily affected in the slightest--and hence the ambitions
of all revolutionaries expend themselves in playing the game of
rights, principles, and franchises on the surface of history. But the
statesman knows that the extension of a franchise is quite unimportant
in comparison with the technique--Athenian or Roman, Jacobin or
American or present-day German--of _operating_ the votes. How the
English constitution reads is a matter of small import compared with
the fact that it is managed by a small stratum of high families, so
that an Edward VII is simply a minister of his Ministry. And as for the
modern Press, the sentimentalist may beam with contentment when it is
constitutionally “free”--but the realist merely asks at whose disposal
it is.
Politics, lastly, is the form in which is accomplished the history of
a nation within a plurality of nations. The great art is to maintain
one’s own nation inwardly “in form” for events outside; this is the
natural relation of home and foreign politics, holding not only for
Peoples and States and Estates, but for living units of every kind,
down to the simplest animal swarms and down into the individual bodies.
And, as between the two, _the first exists exclusively for the second
and not vice versa_. The true democrat is accustomed to treat home
politics as an end in itself; the rank and file of diplomats think
solely of foreign affairs; but just because of this the individual
successes of either “cut no ice.” No doubt, the political master
exhibits his powers most obviously in the tactics of home reform; in
his economic and social activities; in his cleverness in maintaining
the public form of the whole, the “rights and liberties,” both in tune
with the tastes of the period and _at the same time_ effective; and
in the education of the feelings without which it is impossible for a
people to be “in condition”--namely, trust, respect for the leading,
consciousness of power, contentment, and (when necessary) enthusiasm.
But the value of all this depends upon its relation to this basic fact
of higher history--that a people is not alone in the world, and that
its future will be decided by its force-relationships towards other
peoples and powers and not by its mere internal ordering. And, since
the ordinary man is not so long-sighted, it is the ruling minority that
must possess this quality on behalf of the rest, and not unless there
is such a minority does the statesman find the instrument wherewith he
can carry his purposes into effect.[799]
III
In the early politics of all Cultures the governing powers are
pre-established and unquestioned. The whole being is strictly in
patriarchal and symbolic form. The connexions with the mother soil are
so strong, the feudal tie, and even its successor the aristocratic
state, so self-evident to the life held in their spell, that politics
in a Homeric or Gothic age is limited to plain action within the cadre
of the given forms. In so far as these forms change, they do so more
or less spontaneously, and the idea that it is a _task_ of politics to
bring about the changes never definitely emerges into anyone’s mind,
even if a kingdom be overthrown or a nobility reduced to subjection.
There is only class-politics, Imperial- or Papal- or vassal-politics.
Blood and race speak in actions undertaken instinctively or
half-consciously--even the priest behaves, _qua_ politician, as the
man of race. The “problems” of the State are not yet awakened. The
sovereignty, the primary orders, the entire early form-world, are
God-given, and it is on them as premisses, not about them as objects
of dispute, that the organic minorities fight their battles. These
minorities we call _Factions_.
It is of the essence of the Faction that it is wholly inaccessible
to the idea that the order of things can be changed to a plan. Its
object is to win for itself status, power, or possessions within this
order--like all growing things in a growing world. There are groups in
which relationships of houses, honour and loyalty, bonds of union of
almost mythic inwardness, play a part, and from which abstract ideas
are totally excluded. Such were the factions of the Homeric and Gothic
periods, Telemachus and the suitors in Ithaca, the Blues and Greens
under Justinian, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Houses of Lancaster
and York, the Protestants,[800] the Huguenots, and even later the
motive forces of Fronde and First Tyrannis. Machiavelli’s book rests
entirely on this spirit.
The change sets in as soon as, with the great city, the Non-Estate, the
bourgeoisie, takes over the leading rôle.[801] Now it is the reverse,
the political _form_ becomes the object of conflict, the problem.
Heretofore it was ripened, now it must needs be shaped. Politics
becomes awake, not merely comprehended, but reduced to comprehensible
ideas. The powers of intellect and money set themselves up against
blood and tradition. In place of the organic we have the organized; _in
place of the Estate, the Party_. A party is not a growth of race, but
an aggregate of heads, and therefore as superior to the old estates
in intellect as it is poorer in instinct. It is the mortal enemy of
naturally matured class-ordering, the mere existence of which is in
contradiction with its essence. Consequently, the notion of party
is always bound up with the unreservedly negative, disruptive, and
socially levelling notion of _equality_. Noble ideals are no longer
recognized, but only vocational interests.[802] It is the same with the
freedom-idea, which is likewise a negative.[803] _Parties are a purely
urban phenomenon._ With the emancipation of the city from the country,
everywhere (whether we happen to know it evidentially or not) Estate
politics gives way to party politics--in Egypt at the end of the Middle
Kingdom, in China with the Contending States, in Baghdad and Byzantium
with the Abbassid period. In the capitals of the West the parties form
in the parliamentary style, in the city-states of the Classical they
are forum-parties, and we recognize parties of the Magian style in the
Mavali and the monks of Theodore of Studion.[804]
But always it is the Non-Estate, the unit of protest against
the essence of Estate, whose leading minority--“educated” and
“well-to-do”--comes forward as a party with a program, consisting of
aims that are not felt but defined, and of the rejection of everything
that cannot be rationally grasped. _At bottom, therefore, there is
only one party_, that of the bourgeoisie, the liberal, and it is
perfectly conscious of its position as such. It looks on itself as
coextensive with “the people.” Its opponents (above all, the genuine
Estates--namely, “squire and parson”) are enemies and traitors to “the
people,” and its opinions are the “voice of the people”--which is
inoculated by all the expedients of party-political nursing, oratory in
the Forum, press in the West, until these opinions do fairly represent
it.
The prime Estates are nobility and priesthood. The prime Party is that
of money and mind, the liberal, the megalopolitan. Herein lies the
profound justification, in _all_ Cultures, of the ideas of Aristocracy
and Democracy. Aristocracy despises the mind of the cities, Democracy
despises the boor and hates the countryside.[805] It is the difference
between Estate politics and party politics, class-consciousness
and party inclination, race and intellect, growth and construction.
Aristocracy in the completed Culture, and Democracy in the incipient
cosmopolitan Civilization, stand opposed till both are submerged in
Cæsarism. As surely as the nobility is _the_ Estate (and the Tiers État
never manages to get itself into real form in this fashion), so surely
the nobility fails to feel as a party, though it may organize itself as
one.
It has in fact no choice but to do so. All modern constitutions
repudiate the Estates and are built on the Party as self-evidently
the basic form of politics. The nineteenth century--correspondingly,
therefore, the third century B.C.--is the heyday of party politics.
Its democratic character compels the formation counter-parties, and
whereas formerly, as late even as the eighteenth century, the “Tiers”
constituted itself in imitation of the nobility as an Estate, now
there arises the _defensive_ figure of the Conservative party, copied
from the Liberal,[806] dominated completely by the latter’s forms,
bourgeois-ized without being bourgeois, and obliged to fight with
rules and methods that liberalism has laid down. It has the choice of
handling these means better than its adversary[807] or of perishing;
but it is of the intimate structure of an Estate that it does not
understand the situation and challenges the form instead of the foe,
and is thus involved in that use of extreme methods which we see
dominating the inner politics of whole states in the early phases of
every Civilization, and delivering them helpless into the hands of the
enemy. The compulsion that there is upon every party to be bourgeois,
at any rate in appearance, turns to sheer caricature when below the
bourgeoisie of education and possessions the Residue also organizes
itself as a party. Marxism, for example, is in theory a negation
of bourgeoisie, but as a party it is in attitude and leadership
essentially middle-class. There is a continuous conflict between its
will--which necessarily steps outside the bounds of party politics
and therefore of constitutionalism (both being exclusively liberal
phenomena), and can in honesty only be called civil war--and the
appearances which it feels obliged, in justice to itself, to keep up.
But for Marxism, again, these appearances are indispensable, at this
particular period, if durable success is to be attained. A noble party
in a parliament is inwardly just as spurious as a proletarian. Only the
bourgeoisie is in its natural place there.
In Rome, from the introduction of the Tribunes, in 471, to the
recognition of their legislative omnipotence, in the revolution of
287,[808] patricians and plebeians had fought their fight essentially
as Estates, classes. But thereafter these opposite terms possessed
hardly more than genealogical significance, and there developed instead
parties, to which the terms liberal and conservative respectively
may quite reasonably be applied--namely, the Populus,[809] supreme
in the forum, and the nobility, with its fulcrum in the Senate. The
latter had transformed itself (about 287) from a family council of
the old clans into a state council of the administrative aristocracy.
The associations of the Populus are with the property-graded Comitia
Centuriata and the big-money group of the Equites, those of the
nobility with the yeomanry that was influential in the Comitia Tributa.
Think on the one hand of the Gracchi and Marius, and on the other of
C. Flaminius, and a little penetration will disclose the complete
change in the position of the Consuls and the Tribunes. They are no
longer the chosen trustees of the first and third Estates, with lines
of conduct determined by that fact, but they represent party, and on
occasion change it. There were “liberal” consuls like the Elder Cato
and “conservative” Tribunes like the Octavius who opposed Ti. Gracchus.
Both parties put up candidates at elections, and used every sort of
demagogic operation to get them in--and when money had failed to win an
election, it got to work afterwards with (increasing) success upon the
person elected.
In England Tories and Whigs constituted themselves, from the beginning
of the nineteenth century, as parties, both becoming in form bourgeois
and both taking up the liberal program literally, whereby public
opinion as usual was completely convinced and set at rest.[810] This
was a master-stroke, delivered at the correct moment, and prevented the
formation of a party hostile to the Estate-principle such as arose in
France in 1789. The members of the lower House, hitherto emissaries of
the ruling stratum, became popular representatives, but still continued
to depend financially upon it. The leading remained in the same hands,
and the opposition of the parties, which from 1830 assumed the titles
of Liberal and Conservative almost as a matter of course, was always
one of pluses and minuses, never of blank alternatives. In these same
years the literary freedom-movement of “young Germany” changed into a
party-movement, and in America under Andrew Jackson the National-Whig
and Democratic parties organized themselves as opposites, and open
recognition was given to the principle that elections were a business,
and state offices from top to bottom the “spoils of the victors.”[811]
But the form of the governing minority _develops steadily from that of
the Estate, through that of the Party, towards that of the Individual’s
following_. The outward sign of the end of Democracy and its transition
into Cæsarism is not, for example, the disappearance of the party of
the Tiers État, the Liberal, but the disappearance of party itself
as a form. The sentiments, the popular aim, the abstract ideals that
characterize all genuine party politics, dissolve and are supplanted by
_private_ politics, the unchecked will-to-power of the race-strong few.
An Estate has instincts, a party has a program, but a following has a
master. That was the course of events from Patricians and Plebeians,
through Optimates and Populares, to Pompeians and Cæsarians. The period
of real party government covers scarcely two centuries, and in our own
case is, since the World War, well on the decline. That the entire mass
of the electorate, actuated by a common impulse, should send up men who
are capable of managing their affairs--which is the naïve assumption
in all constitutions--is a possibility only in the first rush, and
presupposes that not even the rudiments of organization by definite
groups exists. So it was in France in 1789 and in 1848. An assembly has
only to _be_, and tactical units will form at once within it, whose
cohesion depends upon the will to _maintain_ the dominant position once
won, and which, so far from regarding themselves as the mouthpieces of
their constituents, set about making all the expedients of agitation
amenable to their influence and usable for their purposes. A tendency
that has organized itself in the people, has already _ipso facto_
become the _tool_ of the organization, and continues steadily along the
same path until the organization also becomes in turn the tool of the
leader. The will-to-power is stronger than any theory. In the beginning
the leading and the apparatus come into existence for the sake of the
program. Then they are held on to defensively by their incumbents for
the sake of power and booty--as is already universally the case to-day,
for thousands in every country live on the party and the offices and
functions that it distributes. Lastly the program vanishes from memory,
and the organization works for its own sake alone.
With the elder Scipio or Quinctius Flamininus comradeship on campaign
is still the implication when we speak of their “friends.” But the
younger Scipio went further and his “Cohors Amicorum” was no doubt the
first example of an organized following whose activity extended to
the law-courts and the elections.[812] In the same way the old purely
_patriarchal and aristocratic relation of loyalty_ between patron and
client evolved into a community of interest based on very material
foundations, and even before Cæsar there were written compacts between
candidates and electors with specific provisions as to payment and
performances. On the other side, just as in present-day America,[813]
clubs and election committees were formed, which so controlled or
frightened the mass of the electors of their wards as to be able to do
election business with the great leaders, the pre-Cæsars, as one power
with another. Far from this being the shipwreck of democracy, it is its
very meaning and necessary issue, and the lamentations of unworldly
idealists over this destruction of their hopes only show their blind
ignorance of the inexorable duality of truths and facts and of the
intimate linkage of intellect and money.
Politico-social theory is only one of the bases of party politics, but
it is a necessary one. The proud series that runs from Rousseau to Marx
has its antitype in the line of the Classical Sophists up to Plato and
Zeno. In the case of China the characteristics of the corresponding
doctrines have still to be extracted from Confucian and Taoist
literature; it suffices to name the Socialist Moh-ti. In the Byzantine
and Arabian literature of the Abbassid period--in which radicalism,
like everything else, is orthodox-religious in constitution--they
hold a large place, and they were driving forces in all the crises of
the ninth century. That they existed in Egypt and in India also is
proved by the spirit of events in the Hyksos time and in Buddha’s.
Literary form is not essential to them--they are just as effectively
disseminated by word of mouth, by sermon and propaganda in sects and
associations, which indeed is the standard method at the close of the
Puritan movements (Islam and Anglo-American Christianity amongst them).
Whether these doctrines are “true” or “false” is--we must reiterate
and emphasize--a question without meaning for political history.
The refutation of, say, Marxism belongs to the realm of academic
dissertation and public debates, in which everyone is always right
and his opponent always wrong. But whether they are _effective_--from
when, and for how long, the belief that actuality can be ameliorated
by a system of concepts is a real force that politics must reckon
with--that does matter. We of to-day find ourselves in a period of
boundless confidence in the omnipotence of reason. Great general
ideas of freedom, justice, humanity, progress are sacrosanct. The
great theories are gospels. Their power to convince does not rest
upon logical premisses, for the mass of a party possesses neither the
critical energy nor the detachment seriously to test them, but upon the
sacramental hypostasis in their keywords. At the same time, the spell
is limited to the populations of the great cities and the period of
Rationalism as the “educated man’s religion.”[814] On a peasantry it
has no hold, and even on the city masses its effect lasts only for a
certain time. But _for_ that time it has all the irresistibleness of
a new revelation. They are converted to it, hang fervently upon the
words and the preachers thereof, go to martyrdom on barricades and
battle-field and gallows; their gaze is set upon a political and social
other-world, and dry sober criticism seems base, impious, worthy of
death.
But for this very reason documents like the _Contrat Social_ and the
_Communist Manifesto_ are engines of highest power in the hands of
forceful men who have come to the top in party life and know how to
form and to use the convictions of the dominated masses.[815]
The power that these abstract ideals possess, however, scarcely extends
in time beyond the two centuries that belong to party politics, and
their end comes not from refutation, but from boredom--which has killed
Rousseau long since and will shortly kill Marx. Men finally give up,
not this or that theory, but the belief in theory of any kind and with
it the sentimental optimism of an eighteenth century that imagined
that unsatisfactory actualities could be improved by the application
of concepts. When Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries defined
and blended the various kinds of Classical constitution so as to obtain
a wise and beautiful resultant, all the world listened, and Plato
himself tried to transform Syracuse in accordance with an ideological
recipe--and sent the city downhill to its ruin.[816] It appears to me
equally certain that it was philosophical experimentation of this kind
that put the Chinese southern states out of condition and delivered
them up to the imperialism of Tsin.[817] The Jacobin fanatics of
liberty and equality delivered France, from the Directory onward, into
the hands of Army and Bourse for ever, and every Socialistic outbreak
only blazes new paths for Capitalism. But when Cicero wrote his _De
re publica_ for Pompey, and Sallust his two comminations for Cæsar,
nobody any longer paid attention. In Tiberius Gracchus we may discover
perhaps an influence derived from the Stoic enthusiast Blossius, who
later committed suicide after having similarly brought Aristonicus
of Pergamum to ruin;[818] but in the first century B.C. theories had
become a threadbare school-exercise, and thenceforward power and power
alone mattered.
For us, too--let there be no mistake about it--the age of theory is
drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism
all arose between about 1750 and 1850. That of Marx is already half
a century old, and it has had no successor. Inwardly it means, with
its materialist view of history, that Nationalism has reached its
extreme logical conclusion; it is therefore an end-term. But, as
belief in Rousseau’s Rights of Man lost its force from (say) 1848, so
belief in Marx lost its force from the World War. When one contrasts
the devotion unto death that Rousseau’s ideas found in the French
Revolution with the attitude of the Socialists of 1918, who had to keep
up before and in their adherents a conviction that they themselves
no longer possessed--for the sake, not of the idea, but of the power
that depended on it--one discerns also the stretches of the road
ahead, where what still remains of program is doomed to fall by the
way as being henceforth a mere handicap in the struggle for power.
Belief in program was the mark and the _glory_ of our grandfathers--in
our grandsons it will be a proof of provincialism. In its place is
developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from
tortured conscience and spiritual hunger, whose task will be to found
a new Hither-side that looks for secrets instead of steel-bright
concepts and in the end will find them in the deeps of the “Second
Religiousness.”[819]
IV
This is the one side, the verbal side, of the great fact Democracy.
It remains now to consider the other, the decisive side, that of
race.[820] Democracy would have remained in minds and on paper
had there not been amongst its champions true master-natures for
whom--unconscious though they may be, and often have been, of the
fact--the people is nothing but an object and the ideal nothing but a
means. All, even the most irresponsible, methods of demagogy--which
inwardly is exactly the same as the diplomacy of the _ancien régime_,
but designed for application to masses instead of to princes and
ambassadors, to wild opinions and sentiments and will-outbursts
instead of to choice spirits, an orchestra of brass instead of old
chamber-music--have been worked out by honest but practical democrats,
and it was from them that the parties of tradition learnt them.
It is characteristic, however, of the course of democracy, that the
authors of popular constitutions have never had any idea of the actual
workings of their schemes--neither the authors of the “Servian”
Constitution in Rome nor the National Assembly in Paris. Since these
forms of theirs are not, like feudalism, the result of growth, but of
thought (and based, moreover, not on deep knowledge of men and things,
but on abstract ideas of right and justice), a gulf opens between the
intellectual side of the laws and--the practical habits that silently
form under the pressure of them, and either adapt them to, or fend them
off from, the rhythm of actual life. Only experience has ever taught
the lesson, and only at the end of the whole development has it been
assimilated, that the rights of the people and the influence of the
people are two different things. The more nearly universal a franchise
is, the _less_ becomes the power of the electorate.
In the beginning of a democracy the field belongs to intellect alone.
History has nothing nobler and purer to show than the night session
of the 4th August 1789 and the Tennis-Court Oath, or the assembly in
the Frankfurt Paulskirche on the 18th May 1848--when men, with power
in their very hands, debated general truths so long that the forces
of actuality were able to rally and thrust the dreamers aside. But,
meantime, that other democratic quantity lost no time in making its
appearance and reminding men of the fact that one can make use of
constitutional rights only when one has money.[821] That a franchise
should work even approximately as the idealist supposes it to work
presumes the absence of any organized leadership operating on the
electors (in _its_ interest) to the extent that its available money
permits. As soon as such leadership does appear, the vote ceases to
possess anything more than the significance of a censure applied by
the multitude to the individual organizations, over whose structure
it possesses in the end not the slightest positive influence. So also
with the ideal thesis of Western constitutions, the fundamental right
of the mass to choose its own representatives--it remains pure theory,
for in actuality every developed organization recruits itself.[822]
Finally the feeling emerges that the universal franchise contains no
effective rights at all, not even that of choosing between parties.
For the powerful figures that have grown up on their soil control,
through money, all the intellectual machinery of speech and script, and
are able, on the one hand, to guide the individual’s opinions as they
please _above_ the parties, and, on the other, through their patronage,
influence, and legislation, to create a firm body of whole-hearted
supporters (the “Caucus”) which excludes the rest and induces in it a
vote-apathy which at the last it cannot shake off even for the great
crises.
In appearance, there are vast differences between the Western,
parliamentary, democracy and the democracies of the Egyptian, Chinese,
and Arabian Civilizations, to which the idea of a universal popular
franchise is wholly alien. But in reality, for us in this age of ours,
the mass is “in form” as an _electorate_ in exactly the same sense as
it used to be “in form” as a collectivity of obedience--namely, as an
_object for a subject_--as it was “in form” in Baghdad as the sects,
and in Byzantium in its monks, and elsewhere again as a dominant army
or a secret society or a “state within a state.” Freedom is, as always,
purely _negative_.[823] It consists in the repudiation of tradition,
dynasty, Caliphate; but the executive power passes, at once and
undiminished, from these institutions to new forces--party leaders,
dictators, presidents, prophets, and their adherents--towards which
the multitude continues to be unconditionally the passive object.[824]
“Popular self-determination” is a courteous figure of speech--in
reality, under a universal-inorganic franchise, election has soon
ceased to possess its original meaning. The more radical the political
elimination of the matured old order of Estates and callings, the
more formless and feckless the electoral mass, the more completely
is it delivered into the hands of the new powers, the party leaders,
who dictate their will to the people through all the machinery of
intellectual compulsion; fence with each other for primacy by methods
which in the end the multitude can neither perceive nor comprehend;
and treat public opinion merely as a weapon to be forged and used for
blows at each other. But this very process, viewed from another angle,
is seen as an irresistible tendency driving every democracy further and
further on the road to suicide.[825]
The fundamental rights of a Classical people (demos, populus) extended
to the holding of the highest state and judicial offices.[826] For
the exercise of these the people was “in form” in its Forum, where
the Euclidean point-mass was corporeally assembled, and there it was
the object of an influencing process in the Classical style; namely,
by bodily, near, and sensuous means--by a rhetoric that worked upon
every ear _and eye_; by devices many of which to us would be repellent
and almost intolerable, such as rehearsed sob-effects and the rending
of garments;[827] by shameless flattery of the audience, fantastic
lies about opponents; by the employment of brilliant phrases and
resounding cadenzas (of which there came to be a perfect repertory
for this place and purpose) by games and presents; by threats and
blows; but, above all, by money. We have its beginnings in the Athens
of 400,[828] and its appalling culmination in the Rome of Cæsar
and Cicero. As everywhere, the elections, from being nominations
of class-representatives, have become the battle-ground of party
candidates, an arena ready for the intervention of money, and, from
Zama onwards, of ever bigger and bigger money. “The greater became the
wealth which was capable of concentration in the hands of individuals,
the more the fight for political power developed into a question of
money.”[829] It is unnecessary to say more. And yet, in a deeper
sense, it would be wrong to speak of corruption. It is not a matter of
degeneracy, it is the democratic ethos itself that is foredoomed of
necessity to take such forms when it reaches maturity. In the reforms
of the Censor Appius Claudius (310), who was beyond doubt a true
Hellenist and constitutional ideologue of the type of Madame Roland’s
circle, there was certainly no question but that of the franchise as
such, and not at all of the arts of gerrymandering--but the effect was
simply to prepare the way for those arts. Not in the scheme as such,
but from the first applications of it, race-quality emerged, and very
rapidly it forced its way to complete dominance. And, after all, in a
dictatorship of money it is hardly fair to describe the employment of
money as a sign of decadence.
The career of office in Rome from the time when its course took form
as a series of elections, required so large a capital that every
politician was the debtor of his entire entourage. Especially was
this so in the case of the ædileship, in which the incumbent had
to outbid his predecessors in the magnificance {sic} of his public
games, in order later to have the votes of the spectators. (Sulla
failed in his first attempt on the prætorship precisely because he
had not previously been ædile.) Then again, to flatter the crowd of
loafers it was necessary to show oneself in the Forum daily with a
brilliant following. A law forbade the maintenance of paid retainers,
but the acquisition of persons in high society by lending them money,
recommending them for official and commercial employments, and covering
their litigation expenses, in return for their company in the Forum
and their attendance at the daily levee, was more expensive still.
Pompey was _patronus_ to half the world. From the peasant of Picenum
to the kings of the Orient, he represented and protected them all,
and this was his political capital which he could stake against the
non-interest-bearing loans of Crassus and the “gilding”[830] of every
ambitious fellow by the conqueror of Gaul. Dinners were offered to the
electors of whole wards,[831] or free seats for the gladiatorial shows,
or even (as in the case of Milo) actual cash, delivered at home--out of
respect, Cicero says, for traditional morals. Election-capital rose to
American dimensions, sometimes hundreds of millions of sesterces; vast
as was the stock of cash available in Rome, the elections of 54 locked
up so much of it that the rate of interest rose from four to eight per
cent. Cæsar paid out so much as ædile that Crassus had to underwrite
him for twenty millions before his creditors would allow him to depart
to his province, and in his candidature for the office of Pontifex
Maximus he so overstrained his credit that failure would have ruined
him, and his opponent Catulus could seriously offer to buy him off.
But the conquest and exploitation of Gaul--this also an undertaking
motived by finance--made him the richest man in the world. In truth,
Pharsalus was won there in advance.[832] For it was for _power_ that
Cæsar amassed these milliards, like Cecil Rhodes, and not because he
delighted in wealth like Verres or even like Crassus, who was first and
foremost a financier and only secondarily a politician. Cæsar grasped
the fact that on the soil of a democracy constitutional rights signify
nothing without money and everything with it. When Pompey was still
dreaming that he could evoke legions by stamping on the ground, Cæsar
had long since condensed the dream to reality with his money. It must
be clearly understood, however, that he did not introduce these methods
but found them in existence, that he made himself master of them but
never identified himself with them. For practically a century parties
grouped on principles had been dissolving into personal followings
grouped upon men who pursued private political aims and were expert in
handling the political weapons of their time.
Amongst these means, besides money, was influence upon the courts.
Since Classical assemblies voted, but did not debate, the trial before
the rostra was _a form of party battle_ and the school of schools for
political persuasiveness. The young politician began his career by
indicting and if possible annihilating some great personage,[833] as
the nineteen-year-old Crassus annihilated the renowned Papirius Carbo,
the friend of the Gracchi, who had later gone over to the Optimates.
This was why Cato was tried no less than forty-four times, though
acquitted in every case. The legal side of the question was entirely
subordinate in these affairs.[834] The decisive factors were the party
affinities of the judges, the number of patrons, and the size of the
crowd of backers--the number of the witnesses was really only paraded
in order to bring the financial and political power of the plaintiff
into the limelight. The intention in all Cicero’s oratory against
Verres was to convince the judges, under the veil of fine ethical
passion, that the condemnation of the accused was _in the interests of
their order_. Given the general outlook of the Classical, the courts
self-evidently existed to serve private and party interests. Democratic
complainants in Athens were accustomed at the end of their speeches to
remind the jurymen from the people that they would forfeit their fees
by acquitting the wealthy defendant.[835] The tremendous power of the
Roman Senate consisted mainly in their occupancy of every seat of the
judicial (jurors’) bench, which placed the destinies of every citizen
at their mercy; hence the far-reachingness of the Gracchan law of 122
which handed over the judicature to the Equites and delivered over the
nobility--that is, the official class--to the financial world.[836]
In 83 Sulla, simultaneously with his proscription of the financial
magnates, restored the judicature to the Senate, _as political weapon_,
of course, and the final duel of the potentates finds one more
expression in the ceaseless changing of the judges selected.
Now, whereas the Classical, and supremely the Forum of Rome, drew
the mass of the people together as a visible body in order to compel
it to make that use of its rights which was desired of it, the
“contemporary” English-American politics have created _through the
press_ a force-field of world-wide intellectual and financial tensions
in which every individual unconsciously takes up the place allotted
to him, so that he must think, will, and act as a ruling personality
somewhere or other in the distance thinks fit. This is dynamics against
statics, Faustian against Apollinian world-feeling, the passion of the
third dimension against the pure sensible present. Man does not speak
to man;[837] the press and its associate, the electrical news-service,
keep the waking-consciousness of whole peoples and continents under
a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes,
feelings, day by day and year by year, so that every Ego becomes a mere
function of a monstrous intellectual Something. Money does not pass,
politically, from one hand to the other. It does not turn itself into
cards and wine. It is turned into _force_, and its quantity determines
the intensity of its working influence.
Gunpowder and printing belong together--both discovered at the
culmination of the Gothic, both arising out of Germanic technical
thought--as _the two_ grand means of Faustian distance-tactics.
The Reformation in the beginning of the Late period witnessed the
first flysheets and the first field-guns, the French Revolution in
the beginning of the Civilization witnessed the first tempest of
pamphlets of the autumn of 1788 and the first mass-fire of artillery at
Valmy. But with this the printed word, produced in vast quantity and
distributed over enormous areas, became an uncanny weapon in the hands
of him who knew how to use it. In France it was still in 1788 a matter
of expressing private convictions, but England was already past that,
and deliberately seeking to produce impressions on the reader. The war
of articles, flysheets, spurious memoirs, that was waged from London on
French soil against Napoleon is the first great example. The scattered
sheets of the Age of Enlightenment transformed themselves into “the
Press”--a term of most significant anonymity. Now the _press campaign_
appears as the prolongation--or the preparation--of war by other means,
and in the course of the nineteenth century the strategy of outpost
fights, feints, surprises, assaults, is developed to such a degree that
a war may be lost ere the first shot is fired--because the Press has
won it meantime.
To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual
artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment
that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The
will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished
off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is
actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has
ever existed. The liberal bourgeois mind is _proud_ of the abolition
of censorship, the last restraint, while the dictator of the
press--Northcliffe!--keeps the slave-gang of his readers under the
whip of his leading articles, telegrams, and pictures. _Democracy has
by its newspaper completely expelled the book from the mental life of
the people._ The book-world, with its profusion of standpoints that
compelled thought to select and criticize, is now a real possession
only for a few. The people reads the _one_ paper, “its” paper, which
forces itself through the front doors by millions daily, spellbinds the
intellect from morning to night, drives the book into oblivion by its
more engaging layout, and if one or another specimen of a book does
emerge into visibility, forestalls and eliminates its possible effects
by “reviewing” it.
What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and
hears. A forlorn little drop may settle somewhere and collect grounds
on which to determine “the truth”--but what it obtains is just _its_
truth. The other, the public truth of the moment, which alone matters
for effects and successes in the fact-world, is to-day a product
of the Press. What the Press wills, is true. Its commanders evoke,
transform, interchange truths. Three weeks of press work, and the
truth is acknowledged by everybody.[838] Its bases are irrefutable
for just so long as money is available to maintain them intact. The
Classical rhetoric, too, was designed for effect and not content--as
Shakespeare brilliantly demonstrates in Antony’s funeral oration--but
it did limit itself to the bodily audience and the moment. What the
dynamism of our Press wants is _permanent_ effectiveness. It must
keep men’s minds continuously under its influence. Its arguments are
overthrown as soon as the advantage of financial power passes over to
the counter-arguments and brings these still oftener to men’s eyes and
ears. At that moment the needle of public opinion swings round to the
stronger pole. Everybody convinces himself at once of the new truth,
and regards himself awakened out of error.
With the political press is bound up the need of universal
school-education, which in the Classical world was completely lacking.
In this demand there is an element--quite unconscious--of desiring
to shepherd the masses, as the object of party politics, into the
newspaper’s power-area. The idealist of the early democracy regarded
popular education, without _arrière pensée_, as enlightenment pure
and simple, and even to-day one finds here and there weak heads that
become enthusiastic on the Freedom of the Press--but it is precisely
this that smooths the path for the coming Cæsars of the world-press.
Those who have learnt to read succumb to their power, and the visionary
self-determination of Late democracy issues in a thorough-going
determination of the people by the powers whom the printed word obeys.
In the contests of to-day tactics consists in depriving the opponent
of this weapon. In the unsophisticated infancy of its power the
newspaper suffered from official censorship which the champions of
tradition wielded in self-defence, and the bourgeoisie cried out that
the freedom of the spirit was in danger. Now the multitude placidly
goes its way; it has definitively won for itself this freedom. But in
the background, unseen, the new forces are fighting one another by
buying the press. Without the reader’s observing it, the paper, _and
himself with it_, changes masters.[839] Here also money triumphs and
forces the free spirits into its service. No tamer has his animals
more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will
storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated,
terrifying and breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and it will
become quiet and go home. The Press to-day is an army with carefully
organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers
as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and
war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader
neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is
used, nor even the rôle that he is to play. A more appalling caricature
of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare
to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only
a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as _his_
liberty.
And the other side of this belated freedom--it is permitted to everyone
to say what he pleases, _but_ the Press is free to take notice of
what he says or not. It can condemn any “truth” to death simply by
not undertaking its communication to the world--a terrible censorship
of silence, which is all the more potent in that the masses of
newspaper readers are absolutely unaware that it exists.[840] Here,
as ever in the birth-pangs of Cæsarism, emerges a trait of the buried
springtime.[841] The arc of happening is about to close on itself. Just
as in the concrete and steel buildings the expression-will of early
Gothic once more bursts forth, but cold, controlled, and Civilized,
so the iron will of the Gothic Church to power over souls reappears
as--the “freedom of democracy.” The age of the “book” is flanked on
either hand by that of the sermon and that of the newspaper. Books
are a personal expression, sermon and newspaper obey an impersonal
_purpose_. The years of Scholasticism afford the only example
in world-history of an intellectual discipline that was applied
universally and permitted no writing, no speech, no thought to come
forth that contradicted the _willed_ unity. This is spiritual dynamics.
Classical, Indian, or Chinese mankind would have been horrified at this
spectacle. But the same things recur, and as a _necessary_ result of
the European-American liberalism--“the despotism of freedom against
tyranny,” as Robespierre put it. In lieu of stake and faggots there
is the great silence. The dictature of party leaders supports itself
upon that of the Press. The competitors strive by means of money to
detach readers--nay, peoples--_en masse_ from the hostile allegiance
and to bring them under their own mind-training. And all that they
learn in this mind-training, is what it is considered that they should
know--a higher will puts together the picture of their world for them.
There is no need now, as there was for Baroque princes, to impose
military-service liability on the subject--one whips their souls with
articles, telegrams, and pictures (Northcliffe!) until they _clamour_
for weapons and force their leaders into a conflict to which they
_willed_ to be forced.
This is the end of Democracy. If in the world of truths it is _proof_
that decides all, in that of facts it is _success_. Success means that
one being triumphs over the others. Life has won through, and the
dreams of the world-improvers have turned out to be but the tools of
_master-natures_. In the Late Democracy, _race_ bursts forth and either
makes ideals its slaves or throws them scornfully into the pit. It
was so, too, in Egyptian Thebes, in Rome, in China--but in no other
Civilization has the will-to-power manifested itself in so inexorable
a form as in this of ours. The thought, and consequently the action,
of the mass are kept under iron pressure--for which reason, and for
which reason only, men are permitted to be readers and voters--that
is, in a dual slavery--while the parties become the obedient retinues
of a few, and the shadow of coming Cæsarism already touches them. As
the English kingship became in the nineteenth century, so parliaments
will become in the twentieth, a solemn and empty pageantry. As
then sceptre and crown, so now peoples’ rights are paraded for the
multitude, and all the more punctiliously the less they really
signify--it was for this reason that the _cautious_ Augustus never let
pass an opportunity of emphasizing old and venerated customs of Roman
freedom. But the power is migrating even to-day, and correspondingly
elections are degenerating for us into the farce that they were in
Rome. Money organizes the process in the interests of those who
possess it,[842] and election affairs become a preconcerted game that
is staged as popular self-determination. If election was originally
_revolution in legitimate forms_,[843] it has exhausted those forms,
and what takes place is that mankind “elects” its Destiny again by the
primitive methods of bloody violence when the politics of money become
intolerable.
Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has
destroyed intellect. But, just _because_ the illusion that actuality
can allow itself to be improved by the ideas of any Zeno or Marx has
fled away; because men have learned that in the realm of reality
one power-will _can be overthrown only by another_ (for that is the
great human experience of Contending States periods); there wakes
at last a deep yearning for all old and worthy tradition that still
lingers alive. Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope
for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour
and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And
now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which
the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the
depths. Everything in the order of dynastic tradition and old nobility
that has saved itself up for the future, everything that there is of
high money-disdaining ethic, everything that is intrinsically sound
enough to be, in Frederick the Great’s words, the _servant_--the
hard-working, self-sacrificing, caring _servant_--of the State, all
that I have described elsewhere in one word as Socialism in contrast
to Capitalism[844]--all this becomes suddenly the focus of immense
life-forces. Cæsarism _grows_ on the soil of Democracy, but its roots
thread deeply into the underground of blood tradition. The Classical
Cæsar derived his power from the Tribunate, and his dignity and
therewith his permanency from his being the Princeps. Here too the soul
of old Gothic wakens anew. The spirit of the knightly orders overpowers
plunderous Vikingism. The mighty ones of the future may possess the
earth as their private property--for the great political form of the
Culture is irremediably in ruin--but it matters not, for, formless and
limitless as their power may be, it has a task. And this task is the
unwearying care for this world as it is, which is the very opposite of
the interestedness of the money-power age, and demands high honour and
conscientiousness. But for this very reason there now sets in the final
battle between Democracy and Cæsarism, between the leading forces of
dictatorial money-economics and the _purely political_ will-to-order
of the Cæsars. And in order to understand this _final battle between
Economics and Politics_, in which the latter _reconquers_ its realm, we
must now turn our glance upon the physiognomy of economic history.
CHAPTER XIII
THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE
(A)
MONEY
I
The standpoint from which to comprehend the economic history of great
Cultures is not to be looked for on economic ground. Economic thought
and action are a side of life that acquires a false appearance when
regarded as a self-contained _kind_ of life. Least of all is the secure
standpoint to be had on the basis of the present-day world-economics,
which for the last 150 years has been mounting fantastically,
perilously, and in the end almost desperately--an economics, moreover,
that is exclusively Western-dynamic, anything but common-human.
That which we call national economy to-day is built up on premisses
that are openly and specifically English. The industry of machines,
which is unknown to all other Cultures, stands in the centre as though
it were a matter of course and, without men being conscious of the
fact, completely dominates the formulation of ideas and the deduction
of so-called laws. Credit-money, in the special form imparted to it
by the relations of world-trade and export-industry in a peasantless
England, serves as the foundation whereupon to define words like
capital, value, price, property--and the definitions are then
transferred without more ado to other Culture-stages and life-cycles.
The insular position of England has determined a conception of
politics, and of its relation to economics, that rules in all economic
theories. The creators of this economic _picture_ were David Hume[845]
and Adam Smith.[846] Everything that has since been written about them
or against them always presupposes the critical structure and methods
of their systems. This is as true of Carey and List as it is of Fourier
and Lassalle. As for Smith’s greatest adversary, Marx, it matters
little how loudly one protests against English capitalism when one is
thoroughly imbued with its images; the protest is itself a recognition,
and its only aim is, through a new kind of accounting, to confer upon
objects the advantage of being subjects.
From Adam Smith to Marx it is nothing but self-analysis of the economic
thinking of a single Culture on a particular development-level.
Rationalistic through and through, it starts from Material and its
conditions, needs, and motives, instead of from the _Soul_--of
generations, Estates, and peoples--and its creative power. It looks
upon men as constituent parts of situations, and knows nothing of
the big personality and history-shaping will, of individuals or of
groups, the will that sees in the facts of economics not ends but
means. It takes economic life to be something that can be accounted for
without remainder by visible causes and effects, something of which
the structure is quite mechanical and completely self-contained and
even, finally, something that stands in some sort of causal relation
to religion and politics--these again being considered as individual
self-contained domains. As this outlook is the systematic and not the
historical, the timeless and universal validity of its concepts and
rules is an article of faith, and its ambition is to establish the
one and only correct method of applying “the” science of management.
And accordingly, wherever its truths have come into contact with the
facts, it has experienced a complete fiasco--as was the case with the
prophecies of bourgeois theorists concerning the World War,[847] and
with those of proletarian theorists on the induction of the Soviet
economy.
Up to now, therefore, there has been no national economy, in the
sense of a morphology of the economic _side_ of life and more
particularly of that side in the life of the high Cultures, with their
formations--concordant as to stage, tempo, and duration--of economic
styles. Economics has no system, but a physiognomy. To fathom the
secret of its inner form, its _soul_, demands the physiognomic flair.
To succeed in it it is necessary to be a “judge” of it as one is a
“judge” of men or of horses, and requires even less “knowledge” than
that which a horseman needs to have of zoölogy. But this faculty
of “judgment” can be awakened, and the way to awaken it is through
the sympathetic outlook on history which gives a shrewd idea of
the race-instincts, which are at work in the economic as in other
constituents of active existence, symbolically shaping the external
position--the economic “stuff,” the need--in harmony with their own
inner character. _All economic life is the expression of a soul-life._
This is a new, a German, outlook upon economics, an outlook from beyond
all Capitalism and Socialism--both of which were products of the jejune
rationality of the eighteenth century, and aimed at nothing but a
material analysis and subsequent synthesis of the economic surface. All
that has been taught hitherto is no more than preparatory. Economic
thought, like legal,[848] stands now on the verge of its true and
proper development, which (for us, as for the Hellenistic-Roman age)
sets in only where art and philosophy have irrevocably passed away.
The attempt which follows is meant only as a flying survey of the
possibilities here available.
Economics and politics are sides of the _one_ livingly flowing current
of being, and not of the waking-consciousness, the intellect.[849] In
each of them is manifested the pulse of the cosmic flowings that are
occluded in the sequent generations of individual existences. They may
be said, not to _have_ history, but to _be_ history. Irreversible Time,
the When, rules in them. They belong, both of them, to race and not,
as religion and science belong, to language with its spatial-causal
tensions; they regard facts, not truths. There are economic _Destinies_
as there are political, whereas in scientific doctrines, as in
religious, there is _timeless connexion of cause and effect_.
Life, therefore, has a political and an economic kind of “condition”
of fitness for history. They overlie, they support, they oppose each
other, but the political is unconditionally the first. Life’s will is
to preserve itself and to prevail, or, rather, to make itself stronger
in order that it may prevail. But in the economic state of fitness the
being-streams are fit as _self_-regarding, whereas in a political they
are fit as _other_-regarding. And this holds good all along the series,
from the simplest unicellular plant to swarms and to peoples of the
highest free mobility in space. Nourishment and winning-through--the
difference of dignity between the two sides of life is recognizable
in their relation to death. There is no contrast so profound as that
between _hunger-death and hero-death_. Economically life is in the
widest sense threatened, dishonoured, and _debased_ by hunger--with
which is to be included stunting of possibilities, straitened
circumstances, darkness, and pressure not less than starvation in the
literal sense. Whole peoples have lost the tense force of their race
through the gnawing wretchedness of their living. Here men die _of_
something and not _for_ something. Politics sacrifices men for an idea,
they fall for an idea; but economy merely wastes them away. _War is the
creator, hunger the destroyer, of all great things._ In war life is
elevated by death, often to that point of irresistible force whose mere
existence guarantees victory, but in the economic life hunger awakens
the ugly, vulgar, and wholly unmetaphysical sort of fearfulness for
one’s life under which the higher form-world of a Culture miserably
collapses and the naked struggle for existence of the human beasts
begins.
The double sense of all history that is manifested in man and woman
has been discussed in an earlier chapter.[850] There is a private
history which _represents_ “life in space” as a procreation-series
of the generations, and a public history that _defends and secures
it_ as a political “in-form”-ness--the “spindle side” and the “sword
side” of being. They find expression in the ideas of Family and of
State, but also in the primary form of the house[851] wherein the good
spirits of the marriage-bed--the Genius and the Juno of every old
Roman dwelling--were protected by that of the door, the Janus. To this
private history of the family the economic now attached itself. The
duration of a flourishing life is inseparable from its strength; its
secret of begetting and conceiving is seen at its purest in the being
of breed-strong peasant stock that is rooted, healthy and fruitful,
in its soil. And as in the form of the body the organ of sex is bound
up with that of the circulation,[852] so the middle of the house in
_another_ sense is formed by the sacred hearths, the Vesta.
For this very reason the significance of economic history is something
quite different from that of political. In the latter the foreground
is taken up by the great individual destinies, which fulfil themselves
indeed in the binding forms of their epoch, but are nevertheless,
each in itself, strictly personal. The concern of the former, and of
family history, is the course of development of the form-_language_;
everything once-occurring and personal is an unimportant
private-destiny, and only the basic form common to the million cases
matters. But even so economics is only a foundation, for Being that
is in any way meaningful. What really signifies is not _that_ an
individual or a people is “in condition,” well nourished and fruitful,
but _for what_ he or it is so; and the higher man climbs historically,
the more conspicuously his political and religious will to inward
symbolism and force of expression towers above everything in the way
of form and depth that the economic life as such possesses. It is only
with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins
to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and
insistently--this is the time when the banal assertion that “hunger and
love” are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself;
when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a
matter of “happiness of the greatest number,” of comfort and ease, of
“_panem et circenses_”; and when, in the place of grand politics, we
have economic politics as an end in itself.
Since economics belongs to the race side of life, it possesses, like
politics, a customary ethic and not a moral--yet again the distinction
of nobility and priesthood, facts and truths. A vocation-class, like an
Estate, possesses a _matter-of-course_ feeling for (not good and evil,
but) good and bad. Not to have this feeling is to be void of honour,
law. For those engaged _in_ the economic life, too, honour stands as
central criterion, with its tact and fine flair for what is “the right
thing”--something quite separate from the sin-idea underlying the
religious contemplation _of_ the world. There exist, not only a very
definite vocational honour amongst merchants, craftsmen, and peasants,
but equally definite gradations downward for the shopkeeper, the
exporter, the banker, the contractor, and even, as we all know, for
thieves and beggars, in so far as two or three of them feel themselves
as fellow practitioners. No one has stated or written out these
customary-ethics, but they exist, and, like class-ethics everywhere
and always, they are binding only within the circle of membership.
Along with the noble virtues of loyalty and courage, chivalry and
comradeship, which are found in every vocational society, there appear
clean-cut notions of the ethical value of industry, of success, of
work, and an astonishing sense of distinction and apartness. This sort
of thing a man _has_--and without knowing much about it, for custom is
evidenced to consciousness only when it is infringed--while, on the
contrary, the prohibitions of religion which are timeless, universally
valid, but never realizable ideals, must be, learned before a man can
know or attempt to follow them.
Religious-ascetic fundamentals such as “selfless,” “sinless,” are
without meaning in the economic life. For the true saint economics in
itself is sinful,[853] and not merely taking of interest or pleasure
in riches or the envy of the poor. The saying concerning the “lilies
of the field” is for deeply religious (and philosophical) natures
unreservedly true. The whole weight of their being lies outside
economics and politics and all other facts of “this world.” We see it
in Jesus’s times and St. Bernard’s and in the Russian soul of to-day;
we see it too in the way of life of a Diogenes and a Kant. For its sake
men choose voluntary poverty and itinerancy and hide themselves in
cells and studies. Economic activity is _never_ found in a religion or
a philosophy, always only in the political organism of a _church_ or
the social organism of a theorizing fellowship; it is ever a compromise
with “this world” and an index of the presence of a will-to-power.[854]
II
That which may be called the economic life of the plant is accomplished
on and in it without its being itself anything but the theatre and
will-less object of a natural process.[855] This element underlies the
economy of the human body also, still unalterably vegetal and dreamy,
pursuing its will-less (in this respect almost alien) existence in
the shape of the circulatory organs. But when we come to the animal
body freely mobile in space, being is not alone--it is accompanied
by waking-being, the comprehending apprehension, and, therefore, the
compulsion to _provide by independent_ thought for the preservation of
life. Here begins life-anxiety, leading to touch and scent, sight and
hearing with ever-sharper senses; and presently to movements in space
for the purpose of searching, gathering, pursuing, tricking, stealing,
which develop in many species of animals (such as beavers, ants, bees,
numerous birds and beasts of prey) into a rudimentary economy-technique
which presupposes a process of reflection and, therefore, a certain
emancipation of understanding from sensation. Man is genuinely man
inasmuch as his understanding has freed itself from sensation and, as
thought, intervened creatively in the relations between microcosm and
macrocosm.[856] Quite animal still is the trickery of woman towards
man, and equally so the peasant’s shrewdness in obtaining small
advantages--both differing in no wise from the slyness of the fox, both
consisting in the ability to see into the secret of the victim at _one
glance_. But on the top of this there supervenes, now, the economic
_thought_ that sows a field, tames animals, changes and appreciates
and exchanges things, and finds a thousand ways and means of better
preserving life and transforming a dependence upon the environment
into a mastery over it. That is the underlayer of all Cultures. Race
makes use of an economic thought that can become so powerful as to
detach itself from given purposes, build up castles of abstraction, and
finally lose itself in Utopian expanses.
All higher economic life develops itself on and over a peasantry.
Peasantry, _per se_, does not presuppose any basis but itself.[857]
It is, so to say, race-in-itself, plantlike and historyless,[858]
producing and using wholly for itself, with an outlook on the world
that sweepingly regards every other economic existence as incidental
and contemptible. To this _producing_ kind of economy there is
presently opposed an _acquisitive_ kind, which makes use of the former
as an object--as a source of nourishment, tribute, or plunder. Politics
and trade are in their beginnings quite inseparable, both being
masterful, personal, warlike, both with a hunger for power and booty
that produces quite another outlook upon the world--an outlook not from
an angle into it, but from above down on its tempting disorder, an
outlook which is pretty candidly expressed in the choice of the lion
and the bear, the hawk and the falcon, as armorial badges. Primitive
war is always also booty-war, and primitive trade intimately related to
plunder and piracy. The Icelandic sagas narrate how, often, the Vikings
would agree with a town population for a market-peace of a fortnight,
after which weapons were drawn and booty-making started.
Politics and trade in developed form--the art of achieving material
successes over an opponent by means of intellectual superiority--are
both a replacement of war by other means. Every kind of diplomacy is
of a business nature, every business of a diplomatic, and both are
based upon penetrative judgment of men and physiognomic tact. The
adventure-spirit in great seafarers like the Phœnicians, Etruscans,
Normans, Venetians, Hanseatics, the spirit of shrewd banking-lords like
the Fugger and the Medici and of mighty financiers like Crassus and the
mining and trust magnates of our own day, must possess the strategic
talent of the _general_ if its operations are to succeed. Pride in the
clan-house, the paternal heritage, the family tradition, develops and
counts in the economic sphere as in the political; the great fortunes
are like the kingdoms and have their history,[859] and Polycrates and
Solon, Lorenzo de’ Medici and Jürgen Wullenweber are far from being the
only examples of political ambitions developing out of commercial.
But the genuine prince and statesman wants to rule, and the genuine
merchant only wants to be wealthy, and here the acquisitive economy
divides to pursue aim and means separately.[860] One may aim at booty
for the sake of power, or at power for the sake of booty. The great
ruler, too, the Hwang-ti, the Tiberius, the Frederick II--has the will
to wealth, the will to be “rich in land and subjects,” but it is with
and under a sense of high responsibilities. A man may lay hands on the
treasurers of the whole world with a good conscience, not to say as
a matter of course: he may lead a life of radiant splendour or even
dissipation--if only he feels himself (Napoleon, Cecil Rhodes, the
Roman Senate of the third century) to be the engine of a mission. When
he feels so, the idea of private property can scarcely be said to exist
so far as he is concerned.
He who is out for purely economic advantages--as the Carthaginians
were in Roman times and, in a far greater degree still, the Americans
in ours--is correspondingly incapable of purely political _thinking_.
In the decisions of high politics he is ever deceived and made a
tool of, as the case of Wilson shows--especially when the absence of
statesmanlike instinct leaves a chair vacant for moral sentiments.
This is why the great economic groupings of the present day (for
example, employers’ and employees’ unions) pile one political failure
on another, unless indeed they find a real political politician as
leader, and he--makes use of them. Economic and political thinking, in
spite of a high degree of consonance of form, are in direction (and
therefore in all tactical details) basically different. Great business
successes[861] awaken an unbridled sense of _public_ power--in the very
word “capital” one catches an unmistakable undertone of this. But it
is only in a few individuals that the colour and direction of their
willing and their criteria of situations of things undergo change.
Only when a man has really ceased to feel his enterprise as “his own
business,” and its aim as the simple amassing of property, does it
become possible for the captain of industry to become the statesman,
the Cecil Rhodes. But, conversely, the men of the political world are
exposed to the danger of their will and thought for historical tasks
degenerating into mere provision for their private life-upkeep; then a
nobility can become a robber-order, and we see emerging the familiar
types of princes and ministers, demagogues and revolution-heroes,
whose zeal exhausts itself in lazy comfortableness and the piling-up
of immense riches--there is little to choose in this respect between
Versailles and the Jacobin Club, business bosses and trade-union
leaders, Russian governors and Bolshevists. And in the maturity of
democracy the politics of those who have “got there” is identical, not
merely with business, but with speculative business of the dirtiest
great-city sort.
All this, however, is the very manifestation of the hidden course
of a high Culture. In the beginning appear the primary orders,
nobility and priesthood, with their symbolism of Time and Space. The
political life, like the religious experience, has its fixed place,
its ordained adepts, and its allotted aims for facts and truths alike,
in a well-ordered society,[862] and down below, the economic life
moves unconscious along a sure path. Then the stream of being becomes
entangled in the stone structures of the town, and intellect and money
thenceforward take over its historical guidance. The heroic and the
saintly with their youthful symbolic force become rarer, and withdraw
into narrower and narrower circles. Cool bourgeois clarity takes their
place. At bottom, the concluding of a system and the concluding of
a deal call for one and the same kind of professional intelligence.
Scarcely differentiated now by any measure of symbolic force, political
and economic life, religious and scientific experience make each
other’s acquaintance, jostle one another, commingle. In the frictions
of the city the stream of being loses its strict rich form. Elementary
economic factors come to the surface and interplay with the remains of
form-imbued politics, just as sovereign science at the same time adds
religion to its stock of objects. Over a life of economics political
self-satisfaction spreads a critical-edifying world-sentiment. But
out of it all emerge, in place of the decayed Estates, the individual
life-courses, big with true political or religious force, that are to
become destiny for the whole.
And thus we begin to discern the morphology of economic history. First
there is a _primitive economy_ of “man,” which--like that of plants and
animals--follows a biological[863] time-scale in the development of its
forms. It completely dominates the primitive age, and it continues to
move on, infinitely slowly and confusedly, underneath and between the
high Cultures. Animals and plants are brought into it and transformed
by taming and breeding, selection and sowing; fire and metals are
exploited, and the properties of inorganic nature made by technical
processes serviceable for the conduct of life. All this is perfused
with political-religious ethic and meaning, without its being possible
distinctly to separate Totem and Taboo, hunger, soul-fear, sex-love,
art, war, sacrificial rites, belief, and experience.
Wholly different from this, both in idea and in evolution, and sharply
marked off in tempo and duration, are the _economic histories of the
high Cultures_, each of which has its own economic style. To feudalism
belongs the economy of the townless countryside. With the State ruled
radially from cities appears the urban economy of money, and this
rises, with the oncoming of the Civilization, into the dictature of
money, simultaneously with the victory of world-city democracy. Every
Culture has its own independently developed form-world. Bodily money of
the Apollinian style (that is, the stamped coin) is as antithetical to
relational money of the Faustian-dynamic style (that is, the booking
of credit-units) as the Polis is to the State of Charles V. But the
economic life, just like the social, forms itself pyramidally.[864]
In the rustic underground a thoroughly primitive condition maintains
itself almost unaffected by the Culture. The Late urban economy, which
is already the activity of a resolute minority, looks down with steady
contempt upon the pristine land-economy that continues all around it,
while the latter in turn glares sulkily at the intellectualized style
that prevails within the walls. Finally the cosmopolis brings in a
Civilized world-economy, which radiates from very small nuclei within a
few centres, and subjects the rest to itself as a provincial economy,
while in the remoter landscapes thoroughly primitive (“patriarchal”)
custom often prevails still. With the growth of the cities the way of
life becomes ever more artificial, subtle and complex. The great-city
worker of Cæsar’s Rome, of Haroun-al-Raschid’s Baghdad, and of the
present-day Berlin feels as self-evidently necessary much that the
richest yeoman deep in the country regards as silly luxury, but this
self-evident standard is hard to reach and hard to maintain. In
every Culture the quantum of work grows bigger and bigger till at
the beginning of every Civilization we find an intensity of economic
life, of which the tensions are even excessive and dangerous, and
which it is impossible to maintain for a long period. In the end a
rigid, permanent-set condition is reached, a strange hotch-potch of
refined-intellectual and crude-primitive factors, such as the Greeks
found in Egypt and we have found in modern India and China--unless, of
course, the crust is being disintegrated from below by the pressure of
a young Culture, like the Classical in Diocletian’s time.
Relatively to this economic movement, men are economically “in form” as
an economic _class_, just as they are in form for world-history as a
political Estate. Each individual has an economic position _within the
economic order_ just as he has a grade of some sort in the _society_.
Now, both these kinds of allegiances make claims upon the feelings,
thoughts, and relations all at once. A life insists on being, and on
meaning something as well, and the confusion of our ideas is made
worse confounded by the fact that, to-day, as in Hellenistic times,
political parties, in their desire to ameliorate the _upkeep_-standards
of certain economic groups, have elevated these groups to the dignity
of a political Estate, as Marx, for instance, elevated the class of
factory-workers.
Confusion--for the first and genuine Estate is nobility. From it
the officer and the judge and all concerned in the highest duties
of government and administration are direct derivatives. They are
Estate-like formations that _mean_ something. So, too, the body of
scholars and scientists belongs to the priesthood[865] and has a very
sharply definite kind of class-exclusiveness. But the grand symbolism
of the Estates goes out with castle and cathedral. The _Tiers_,
already, is the Non-Estate, the remainder, a miscellaneous and manifold
congeries, which means very little as such save in the moments of
political protest, so that the importance it creates _for itself_ is
a party importance. The individual is conscious of himself not _as_ a
bourgeois, but _because_ he is a “liberal” and thus part and parcel
of a great thing, not indeed as representing it in his person, but as
_adhering_ to it from conviction. In consequence of this weakness of
its social “form,” the economic “form” of the bourgeoisie becomes all
the more relatively conspicuous in its callings, guilds and unions. In
the cities, at any rate, a man is primarily designated according to the
way in which he makes his living.
Economically, the first (and anciently almost the only) mode of
life is that of the peasant,[866] which is pure _production_, and
therefore the pre-condition of every other mode. Even the primary
Estates, too, in early times, base their way of life entirely upon
hunting, stock-keeping, and agricultural landowning, and even in Late
periods land is regarded by nobles and priests as the only truly
honourable kind of property. In opposition to it stands trade, the
mode of the acquisitive _middleman_ or intervener,[867] powerful
out of all proportion to its numbers, already indispensable even in
quite early conditions--a refined parasitism, completely unproductive
and, therefore, land-alien and far-ranging, “free,” and unhampered
spiritually, too, by the ethic and the practice of the countryside, a
life sustaining itself on another life. Between the two, now, a third
kind of economy, the _preparatory_ economy of technics, grows up in
numberless crafts, industries, and callings, which creatively apply
reflections upon nature and whose honour and conscience are bound up
in achievement.[868] Its oldest guild, which reaches back into the
sheer primitive and fills the picture of this primitive with its dark
sagas and rites and notions, is the guild of the smiths, who--as the
result of their proud aloofness from the peasantry and the fear that
hangs about them, and leads to their being venerated and banned by
turns--have often become true tribes with a race of their own, as in
the case of the Abyssinian Falasha or “Black Jews.”[869]
In these three economics of production, preparation, and distribution,
as in everything else belonging to politics and life at large, there
are _the subjects and objects of leading_--in this case, whole groups
that dispose, decide, organize, discover; and other whole groups whose
function is simply to execute. The grading may be hard and definite
or it may be scarcely perceptible,[870] promotion may be impossible
or unimpeded, the relative dignity of the task may be almost equal
throughout a long scale of slow transitions or different beyond
comparison. Tradition and law, talent and possessions, population
numbers, cultural level, and economic situation may effectively
override this basic antithesis of subjects and objects--but it exists,
it is as much a premiss as life itself, and it is unalterable.
Nevertheless, economically _there is no worker-class_; that is an
invention of theorists who have fixed their eyes on the position
of factory-workers in England--an industrial, peasantless land in
a transitional phase--and then extended the resultant scheme so
confidently over all the Cultures and all the ages that the politicians
have taken it up and used it as a means of building themselves parties.
In actuality there is an almost uncountable number of purely serving
activities in workshop and counting-houses, office and cargo-deck,
roads, mine-shafts, fields, and meadows. This counting-up, portering,
running of errands, hammering, serving, and minding often enough
lacks that element which elevates life above mere upkeep and invests
work with the dignity and the delight attaching, for example, to the
status-duties of the officer and the savant, or the personal triumphs
of the engineer, the manager, and the merchant--but, even apart
from that, all these things are quite incapable of being compared
amongst themselves. The brain or brawn of the work, its situation in
village or in megalopolis, the duration and intensity of the doing of
it, bring it to pass that farm-labourers, bank clerks, and tailors’
hands live in perfectly different economic worlds, and it is only, I
repeat, the party politics of quite Late phases that lures them by
means of catchwords into a protest-combination, with the intention
of making use of its aggregate mass. The classical slave, on the
contrary, is such chiefly in terms of constitutional law--that is, so
far as the body-Polis was concerned, he simply did not exist[871]--but
economically he might be land-worker or craftsman, or even director or
wholesale merchant with a huge capital (_peculium_), with palaces and
country villas and a host of subordinates--freemen included. And what
he could become, over and above this, in late Roman times will appear
in the sequel.
III
With the oncoming of Spring there begins in every Culture an economic
life of settled form.[872] The life of the population is entirely that
of the peasant on the open land. The experience of the town has not
yet come. All that elevates itself from amongst the villages, castles,
palaces, monasteries, temple-closes, is not a city, but a _market_,
a mere meeting-point of yeomen’s interests, which also acquired, and
at once, a certain religious and political meaning, but certainly
cannot be said to have had a special life of its own. The inhabitants,
even though they might be artisans or traders, would still _feel_ as
peasants, and even in one way or another work as such.
That which separates out from a life in which everyone is alike
producer and consumer is _goods_, and traffic in goods is the mark
of all early intercourse, whether the object be brought from the far
distance or merely shifted about within the limits of the village or
even the farm. A piece of goods is that which adheres by some quiet
threads of its essence to the life that has produced it or the life
that uses it. A peasant drives “his” cow to market, a woman puts away
“her” finery in the cupboard. We say that a man is endowed with this
world’s “goods”; the word “pos_session_” takes us back right into the
plantlike origin of property, into which this particular being--no
other--has grown, from the roots up.[873] Exchange in these periods
is a process whereby goods pass from one circle of life into another.
They are valued with reference to life, according to a sliding-scale of
_felt_ relation to the moment. There is neither a conception of value
nor a kind or amount of goods that constitutes a general measure--for
gold and coin are goods too, whose rarity and indestructibility causes
them to be highly prized.[874]
Into the rhythm and course of this barter the dealer only comes as
an intervener.[875] In the market the acquisitive and the creative
economics encounter one another, but even at places where fleets and
caravans unload, trade only appears as the _organ_ of countryside
traffic.[876] It is the “eternal” form of economy, and is even to-day
seen in the immemorially ancient figure of the pedlar of the country
districts remote from towns, and in out-of-the-way suburban lanes where
small barter-circles form naturally, and in the private economy of
savants, officials, and in general everyone not actively part of the
daily economic life of the great city.
With the soul of the town a quite other kind of life awakens.[877] As
soon as the market has become the town, it is not longer a question of
mere centres for goods-streams traversing a purely peasant landscape,
but of a second world within the walls, for which the merely producing
life “out there” is nothing but object and means, and out of which
another stream begins to circle. The decisive point is this--the true
urban man is _not_ a producer in the prime terrene sense. He has not
the inward linkage with soil or with the goods that pass through his
hands. He does not live with these, but looks at them from outside and
appraises them in relation to his own life-upkeep.
With this goods become wares, exchange turnover, _and in place of
thinking in goods we have thinking in money_.
With this a purely extensional something, a form of limit-defining,
is abstracted from the visible objects of economics just as
mathematical thought abstracts something from the mechanistically
conceived environment. Abstract money corresponds exactly to abstract
number.[878] Both are entirely inorganic. The economic picture is
reduced exclusively to quantities, whereas the important point about
“goods” had been their quality. For the early-period peasant “his” cow
is, first of all, just what it is, a unit being, and only secondarily
an object of exchange; but for the economic outlook of the true
townsman the only thing that exists is an abstract money-value which
at the moment happens to be in the shape of a cow that can always
be transformed into that of, say, a bank-note. Even so the genuine
engineer sees in a famous waterfall not a unique natural spectacle, but
just a calculable quantum of unexploited energy.
It is an error of all modern money-theories that they start from the
value-token or even the material of the payment-medium instead of from
the form of economic thought.[879] In reality, money, like number and
law, is a _category of thought_. There is a monetary, just as there
is a juristic and a mathematical and a technical, thinking of the
world-around. From the sense-experience of a house we obtain quite
different abstracts, according as we are mentally appraising it from
the point of view of a merchant, a judge, or an engineer, and with
reference to a balance-sheet, a lawsuit, or a danger of collapse. Next
of kin to thinking in money, however, is mathematics. To think in terms
of business is to calculate. The money-value is a numerical value
measured by a unit of reckoning.[880] This exact “value-in-itself,”
like number-in-itself, the man of the town, the man without roots, is
the first to imagine; for peasants there are only ephemeral felt values
in relation to now this and now that object of exchange. What he does
not use, or does not want to possess, has “no value” for him. Only in
the economy-picture of the real townsman are there objective values and
kinds of values which have an existence apart from his private needs,
as thought-elements of a generalized validity, although in actuality
every individual has his proper system of values and his proper stock
of the most varied kinds of value, and feels the ruling prices of the
market as “cheap” or “dear” with reference to these.[881]
Whereas the earlier mankind _compares_ goods, and does so not by
means of the reason only, the later _reckons_ the values of wares,
and does so by rigid unqualitative measures. Now gold is no longer
measured against the cow, but the cow against the gold, and the
result is expressed by an abstract number, the price. Whether and how
this measure of value finds symbolic expression in a value-sign--as
the written, spoken, or represented number-sign is, in a sense,
number--depends on the economic style of the particular Culture, each
of which produces a different sort of money. The common condition
for the appearance of this is the existence of an urban population
that thinks economically in terms of it, and it is its particular
character that settles whether the value-token shall serve also
as payment-medium; thus the Classical coin and _probably_ the
Babylonian silver did so serve, whereas the Egyptian _deben_ (raw
copper weighed out in pounds) was a measure of exchange, but neither
token nor payment-medium. The Western and the “contemporary” Chinese
bank-note,[882] again, is a medium, but not a measure. In fact we are
accustomed to deceive ourselves thoroughly as to the rôle played by
coins of precious metal in _our_ sort of economy; they are just wares
fashioned in imitation of the Classical custom, and hence, measured
against book-values of credit money, they have a “price.”
The outcome of this way of thinking is that the old _possession_,
bound up with life and the soil, gives way to the _fortune_, which is
essentially mobile and qualitatively undefined: it does not _consist
in_ goods, but it is _laid out in_ them. Considered by itself, it is a
purely numerical quantum of money-value.[883]
As the seat of this thinking, the city becomes the money-market, the
centre of values, and a stream of money-values begins to infuse,
intellectualize, and command the stream of goods. _And with this the
trader, from being an organ of economic life, becomes its master._
Thinking in money is always, in one way or another, trade or business
thinking. It presupposes the productive economy of the land, and,
therefore, is always primarily acquisitive, for there is no third
course. The very words “acquisition,” “gain,” “speculation,” point to
a profit tricked off from the goods _en route_ to the consumer--an
_intellectual plunder_--and for that reason are inapplicable to the
early peasantry. Only by attuning ourselves exactly to the spirit and
economic outlook of the true townsman can we realize what they mean.
He works not for needs, but for sales, for “money.” The business view
gradually infuses itself into every kind of activity. The countryman,
inwardly bound up with traffic in goods, was at once giver and taker,
and even the trader of the primitive market was hardly an exception to
this rule. But with money-traffic there appears between producer and
consumer, as though between two separate worlds, the third party, the
_middleman_, whose thought is dominated _a priori_ by the business side
of life. He forces the producer to offer, and the consumer to inquire
of him. He elevates mediation to a monopoly and thereafter to economic
primacy, and forces the other two to be “in form” in _his_ interest, to
prepare the wares according to _his_ reckonings, and to cheapen them
under the pressure of _his_ offers.
He who commands this mode of thinking is the master of money.[884]
In all the Cultures evolution takes this road. Lysias informs us in
his oration against the corn-merchants that the speculators at the
Piræus frequently spread reports of the wreck of a grain-fleet or of
the outbreak of war, in order to produce a panic. In Hellenistic-Roman
times it was a widespread practice to arrange for land to go out of
cultivation, or for imports to be held in bond, in order to force up
prices. In the Egyptian New Empire wheat-corners in the American style
were made possible by a bill-discounting that is fully comparable
with the banking operations of the West.[885] Cleomenes, Alexander
the Great’s administrator for Egypt, was able by book transactions
to get the whole corn-supply into his own hands, thereby producing a
famine far and wide in Greece and raking in immense gains for himself.
To think economically on any terms but these is simply to become a
mere pawn in the money-operations of the great city. This style of
thought soon gets hold of the waking-consciousness of the entire
urban population and, therefore, of everyone who plays any serious
part in the conduct of economic history. “Peasant” and “burgher”
stand not only for the difference of country and city, but for that
of possessions and money as well. The splendid Culture of Homeric and
Provençal princely courts was something that waxed and waned with
the men themselves--we can often, even to-day, see it in the life of
old families in their country-seats--but the more refined culture of
the bourgeoisie, its “comfort,” is something coming from outside,
something that can be paid for.[886] All highly developed economy is
urban economy. World-economy itself, the characteristic economy of all
Civilizations, ought properly to be called world-city-economy. The
destinies even of this world-economy are now decided in a few places,
the “money-markets” of the world[887]--in Babylon, Thebes, and Rome,
in Byzantium and Baghdad, in London, New York, Berlin, and Paris. The
residue is a starveling provincial economy that runs on in its narrow
circles without being conscious of its utter dependence. Finally,
money is the form of intellectual energy in which the ruler-will, the
political and social, technical and mental, creative power, the craving
for a full-sized life, are concentrated. Shaw is entirely right when
he says: “The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in
our civilization ... the two things [money and life] are inseparable:
money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it
_is_ life....”[888] What is here described as Civilization, then, is
the stage of a Culture at which tradition and personality have lost
their immediate effectiveness, and every idea, to be actualized, has to
be put into terms of money. At the beginning a man was wealthy because
he was powerful--now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect
reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the
completed equating of money with political power.
Through the economic history of every Culture there runs a desperate
conflict waged by the soil-rooted tradition of a race, by its _soul_,
against the spirit of money. The peasant-wars of the beginning of a
Late period (in the Classical, 700-500; in the Western, 1450-1650; in
the Egyptian, end of Old Kingdom) are the first reaction of the blood
against the money that is stretching forth its hand from the waxing
cities over the soil.[889] Stein’s warning that “he who mobilizes
the soil dissolves it into dust” points to a danger common to _all_
Cultures; if money is unable to attack possession, it insinuates itself
into the thoughts of the noble and peasant possessors, until the
inherited possession that has grown with the family’s growth begins
to seem like resources merely “put into” land and soil and, so far as
their essence is concerned, mobile.[890] Money aims at mobilizing _all_
things. World-economy is the actualized economy of values that are
completely detached in thought from the land, and made fluid.[891] The
Classical money-thinking, from Hannibal’s day, transformed whole cities
into coin and whole populations into slaves and thereby converted both
into money that could be brought from everywhere to Rome, and used
outwards from Rome as a power.
The Faustian money-thinking “opens up” whole continents, the
water-power of gigantic river-basins, the muscular power of the
peoples of broad regions, the coal measures, the virgin forests, the
laws of Nature, and transforms them all into financial energy, which is
laid out in one way or in another--in the shape of press, or elections,
or budgets, or armies--for the realization of masters’ plans. Ever new
values are abstracted from whatever world-stock is still, from the
business point of view, unclaimed, “the slumbering spirits of gold,” as
John Gabriel Borkman says; and what the things themselves are, apart
from this, is of no economic significance at all.
IV
As every Culture has its own mode of thinking in money, so also it has
its proper money-symbol through which it brings to visible expression
its principle of valuation in the economic field. This something, a
sense-actualizing of the thought, is in importance fully the equal
of the spoken, written, or drawn figures and other symbols of the
mathematic. Here lies a deep and fruitful domain of inquiry, so far
almost unexplored. Not even the basic notions have been correctly
enunciated, and it is therefore quite impossible to-day to translate
intelligibly the money-idea that underlay the barter and the bill
business of Egypt, the banking of Babylonia, the book-keeping of
China, and the capitalism of the Jews, Parsees, Greeks, and Arabs from
Haroun-al-Raschid’s day. All that is possible is to set forth the
essential opposition of Apollinian and Faustian money--the one, _money
as magnitude_, and the other, _money as function_.[892]
Economically, as in other ways, Classical man saw his world-around as
a sum of bodies that changed their place, travelled, drove or hit or
annihilated one another, as in Democritus’s description of Nature. Man
was a body among bodies, and the Polis as sum thereof a body of higher
order. All the needs of life consisted in corporeal quantities, and
money, too, therefore represented such a body, in the same way as an
Apollo-statue represented a god. About 650, simultaneously with the
stone body of the Doric temple and the free statue true-modelled in
the round, appeared the _coin_, a metal weight of beautiful impressed
form. Value as a magnitude had long existed--in fact as long as this
Culture itself. In Homer, a talent is a little aggregate of gold, in
bullion and decorative objects, of a definite total weight. The Shield
of Achilles represents “two talents” of gold, and even as late as Roman
times it was usual to specify silver and gold vessels by weight.[893]
The discovery of the Classically formed money-body, however, is so
extraordinary that we have not even yet grasped it in its deep and
purely Classical significance. We regard it as one of the “achievements
of humanity,” and so we strike these coinages everywhere, just as we
put statues in our streets and squares. So much and no more it is
within our power to do; we can imitate the shape, but we cannot impart
the same economic significance thereto. The coin _as money_ is a purely
Classical phenomenon--only possible in an environment conceived wholly
on Euclidean ideas, but there creatively dominant over all economic
life. Notions like income, resources, debt, capital, meant in the
Classical cities something quite different from what they mean to us.
They meant, not economic energy radiating from a point, but a sum of
valuable objects in hand. Wealth was always a mobile _cash-supply_,
which was altered by addition and subtraction of valuable objects and
had nothing at all to do with possessions in land--for in Classical
thinking the two were completely separate. Credit consisted in the
lending of cash in the expectation that the loan would be repaid in
cash. Catiline was poor because, in spite of his wide estates,[894] he
could find nobody to lend him the cash that he needed for his political
aims; and the immense debts of Roman politicians[895] had for their
ultimate security, not their equivalent in land, but the definite
prospect of a province to be plundered of its movable assets.[896]
In the light of this, and only in the light of this, we begin to
understand certain phenomena such as the mass-execution of the wealthy
under the Second Tyrannis, and the Roman proscriptions (with the object
of seizing a large part of the cash current in the community), and the
melting down of the Delphian temple-treasure by the Phocians in the
Sacred War, of the art-treasures of Corinth by Mummius, and of the last
votive offerings in Rome by Cæsar, in Greece by Sulla, in Asia Minor
by Brutus and Cassius, without regard to artistic value when the noble
stuffs and metals and ivory were needed.[897] The captured statues and
the vessels borne in the triumphs were, in the eyes of the spectators,
sheer cash, and Mommsen[898] could attempt to determine the site of
Varus’s disaster by the places in which coin-hoards were unearthed--for
the Roman veteran carried his whole property in precious metal on his
person. Classical wealth does not consist in having possessions, but
piling money; a Classical money-market was not a centre of credit like
the bourses of our world and of ancient Thebes, but a city in which an
important part of the world’s cash was actually collected. It may be
taken that in Cæsar’s time much more than half of the Classical world’s
gold was in Rome.
But when, from about Hannibal’s time, this world advanced into the
state of unlimited plutocracy, the naturally limited mass of precious
metals and materially valuable works of art in its sphere of control
became hopelessly inadequate to cover needs, and a veritable craving
set in for new bodies capable of being used as money. Then it was
that men’s eyes fell upon the slave, who was another sort of body,
but a thing and not a person[899] and capable, therefore, of being
thought of as money. From that point Classical slavery became unique
of its kind in all economic history. The properties of the coin were
extended to apply to living objects, and the stock of men in the
regions “opened up” to the plunderings of proconsuls and tax-farmers
became as interesting as the stock of metal. A curious sort of double
valuation developed. The slave had a market price, although ground
and soil had not. He served for the accumulation of great uninvested
fortunes, and hence the enormous slave-masses of the Roman period,
which are entirely inexplicable by any other sort of necessity. So
long as man needed only as many slaves as he could gainfully employ,
their number was small and easily covered by the prisoners of war and
judgment-debtors.[900] It was in the sixth century that Chios made a
beginning with the importation of bought slaves (Argyronetes). The
difference between these and the far more numerous paid labourers was
originally of a political and legal, not an economic kind. As the
Classical economy was static and not dynamic, and was ignorant of the
systematic opening-up of energy-sources, the slaves of the Roman age
did not exist to be exploited in work, but were employed--more or
less--so that the greatest possible number of them could be maintained.
Specially presentable slaves possessing particular qualifications
of one sort or another were preferred, because for equal cost of
maintenance they represented a better asset; they were loaned as cash
was loaned; and they were allowed to have businesses on their account,
so that they could become rich;[901] free labour was undersold--all
this so as to cover at any rate the upkeep of this capital.[902] The
bulk of them cannot have been employed at all. They answered their
purpose by simply existing, as a stock of money in hand which was not
bound up to a natural limit like the stock of metal available in those
days. And through that very fact the need of slaves grew and grew
indefinitely and led, not only to wars that were undertaken simply
for slave-getting, but to slave-hunting by private entrepreneurs all
along the Mediterranean coasts (which Rome winked at) and to a new
way of making the proconsuls’ fortunes, which consisted in bleeding
the population of a region and then selling it into slavery for debt.
The market of Delos must have dealt with ten thousand slaves a day.
When Cæsar went to Britain, the disappointment caused in Rome by
the money-poverty of the Britons was compensated by the prospect of
rich booty in slaves. When, for example, Corinth was destroyed, the
melting-down of the statues for coinage and the auctioning of the
inhabitants at the slave-mart were, for Classical minds, one and the
same operation--the transformation of corporeal objects into money.
In extremest contrast to this stands the symbol of Faustian
money--money as Function, the value of which lies in its effect and
not its mere existence. The specific style of this economic thinking
appears already in the way in which the Normans of A.D. 1000 organized
their spoils of men and land into an economic force.[903] Compare the
pure book-valuation of these ducal officials (commemorated in our words
“cheque,” “account,” and “checking”)[904] with the “contemporary”
gold talent of the Iliad, one meets at the very outset of the Culture
the rudiments of its modern credit-system, which is the outcome of
confidence in the force and durability of its economic mode, and
with which the idea of money in our sense is almost identical. These
financial methods, transplanted to the Roman Kingdom of Sicily by Roger
II, were developed by the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (about
1230) into a powerful system far surpassing the original in dynamism
and making him the “first capitalist power of the world”;[905] and
while this fraternization of mathematical thinking-power and royal
will-to-power made its way from Normandy into France and was applied
on the grand scale to the exploitation of conquered England (to this
day English soil is nominally royal demesne) its Sicilian side was
imitated by the Italian city-republics, and (as their ruling patricians
soon took the methods of the civic economy into use for their private
book-keeping,) spread over the commercial thought and practice of the
whole Western world. Little later, the Sicilian methods were adopted
by the Order of the Teutonic Knights and by the dynasty of Aragon,
and it is probably to these origins that we should assign the model
accountancy of Spain in the days of Philip II, and of Prussia in those
of Frederick William I.
The decisive event, however, was the invention--“contemporary” with
that of the Classical coin about 650--of double-entry book-keeping
by Fra Luca Pacioli in 1494. Goethe calls this in _Wilhelm Meister_
“one of the finest discoveries of the human intellect,” and indeed
its author may without hesitation be ranked with his contemporaries
Columbus and Copernicus. To the Normans we owe our modes of reckoning
and to the Lombards our book-keeping. These, be it observed, were the
same two Germanic stocks which created the two most suggestive juristic
works of the early Gothic,[906] and whose longing into distant seas
gave the impulses for the two discoveries of America. “Double-entry
book-keeping is born of the same spirit as the system of Galileo and
Newton.... With the same means as these, it orders the phenomenon into
an elegant system, and it may be called the first Cosmos built up on
the basis of a mechanistic thought. Double-entry book-keeping discloses
to us the Cosmos of the economic world by the same method as later the
Cosmos of the stellar universe was unveiled by the great investigation
of natural philosophy.... Double-entry book-keeping rests on the basic
principle, logically carried out, of comprehending all phenomena purely
as quantities.”[907]
_Double-entry book-keeping is a pure Analysis of the space of values,
referred to a co-ordinate system, of which the origin is the “Firm.”_
The coinage of the Classical world had only permitted of arithmetical
compilations with value-_magnitudes_. Here, as ever, Pythagoras and
Descartes stand opposed. It is legitimate for us to talk of the
“integration” of an undertaking, and the graphic curve is the same
optical auxiliary to economics as it is to science. The Classical
economy-world was ordered, like the cosmos of Democritus, according to
_stuff and form_. A stuff, in the form of a coin, carries the economic
movement and presses against the demand-unit of equal value-quantity
at the place of use. _Our_ economy-world is ordered by _force and
mass_. A field of money-tensions lies in space and assigns to every
object, irrespective of its specific kind, a positive or negative
effect-value,[908] which is represented by a book-entry. “_Quod non est
in libris, non est in mundo._” But the symbol of the functional money
thus imagined, that which _alone_ may be compared with the Classical
coin, is not the actual book-entry, nor yet the share-voucher, cheque,
or note, _but the act by which the function is fulfilled in writing_,
and the rôle of the value-paper is merely to be the _generalized
historical evidence_ of this act.
Yet side by side with this the West, in its unquestioning admiration
of the Classical, has gone on striking coins, not merely as tokens of
sovereignty, but in the belief that this evidenced money was money
corresponding in reality to the economics in thought. In just the
same way, even within the Gothic age, we took over Roman law with its
equating of things to bodily magnitudes, and the Euclidean mathematic,
which was built upon the concept of number as magnitude. And so it
befell that the evolution of these three intellectual form-worlds of
ours proceeded, not like the Faustian music in a pure and flowerlike
unfolding, but in the shape of a _progressive emancipation from the
notion of magnitude_. The mathematic had already achieved this by the
close of the Baroque age.[909] The jurisprudence, on the other hand,
has not yet even recognized its coming task,[910] but this century is
going to set it, and to demand that which for Roman jurists was the
self-evident basis of law, namely, the inward congruence of economic
and legal thought and an equal practical familiarity with both. The
conception of money that was symbolized in the coin agreed precisely
with the Classical thing-law, but with us there is nothing remotely
like such an agreement. Our whole life is disposed dynamically,
not statically and Stoically; therefore our essentials are forces
and performances, relations and capacities--organizing talents and
intuitive intellects, credit, ideas, methods, energy-sources--and not
mere existence of corporeal things. The “Romanist” thing-thought of
our jurists, and the theory of money that consciously or unconsciously
starts from the coin, are equally alien to our life. The vast metallic
hoard to which, in imitation of the Classical, we were continually
adding till the World War came, has indeed made a rôle for itself off
the main road, but with the inner form, tasks, and aims of modern
economy it has _nothing_ to do; and if as the result of the war it
were to disappear from currency altogether, nothing would be altered
thereby.[911]
Unhappily, the modern national economics were founded in the age of
Classicism. Just as statues and vases and stiff dramas alone counted
as true art, so also finely stamped coins alone counted as true money.
What Josiah Wedgwood (1758) aimed at with his delicately toned reliefs
and cups, that also, at bottom, Adam Smith aimed at in his theory of
value--namely, the pure present of tangible magnitudes. For it is
entirely consonant with the illusion that money and pieces of money
are the same, to measure the value of a thing against the magnitude of
a quantity of work. Here work is no longer an _effecting_ in a world
of effects, a working which can differ infinitely from case to case as
to inward worth and intensity and range, which propagates itself in
wider and wider circles and like an electric field may be measured but
not marked off--but the _result_ of the effecting, considered entirely
materially, _that which is worked-up_, a tangible thing showing nothing
noteworthy about it except just its extent.
In reality, the economy of the European-American Civilization is built
up on work of a kind in which distinctions go entirely according to
the inner quality--more so than ever in China or Egypt, let alone the
Classical World. It is not for nothing that we live in a world of
economic dynamism, where the works of the individual are not additive
in the Euclidean way, but functionally related to one another. The
purely executive work (which alone Marx takes into account) is in
reality nothing but the function of an inventive, ordering, and
organizing work; it is from this that the other derives its meaning,
relative value, and even possibility of being done at all. The whole
world-economy since the discovery of the steam-engine has been the
creation of a quite small number of superior heads, without whose
high-grade work everything else would never have come into being. But
this achievement is of creative thinking, not a quantum,[912] and its
value is not to be weighed against a certain number of coins. Rather
it _is_ itself money--Faustian money, namely, which is not minted,
but _thought of as an efficient centre_ coming up out of a life--and
it is the inward quality of that life which elevates the thought to
the significance of a fact. _Thinking in money generates money_--that
is the secret of the world-economy. When an organizing magnate writes
down a million on paper, that million exists, for the personality as
an economic centre vouches for a corresponding heightening of the
economic energy of his field. This, and nothing else, is the meaning
of the word “Credit” for us. But all the gold pieces in the world
would not suffice to invest the actions of the manual worker with a
meaning, and therefore a value, if the famous “expropriation of the
expropriators” were to eliminate the superior capacities from their
creations; were this to happen, these would become soulless, will-less,
empty shells. Thus, in fact, Marx is just as much a Classical, just
as truly a product of the Romanist law-thought as Adam Smith; he sees
only the completed magnitude, not the function, and he would like
to separate the means of production from those whose minds, by the
discovery of methods, the organization of efficient industries, and the
acquisition of outlet-markets, alone turn a mass of bricks and steel
into a factory, and who, if their forces find no field of play, do not
occur.[913]
If anyone seeks to enunciate a theory of modern work, let him begin
by thinking of this basic trait of all life. There are subjects and
objects in every kind of life as lived, and the more important, the
more rich in form, the life is, the clearer the distinction between
them. As every stream of Being consists of a minority of leaders
and a huge majority of led, so _every sort of economy consists in
leader-work and executive work_. The frog’s perspective of Marx and
the social-ethical ideologues shows only the aggregate of last small
things, but these only exist at all in virtue of the first things, and
the spirit of this world of work can be grasped only through a grasp of
its highest possibilities. The inventor of the steam-engine and not its
stoker is the determinant. The _thought_ is what matters.
And, similarly, thinking in money has subjects and objects: those who
by force of their personality generate and guide money, and those
who are maintained by money. Money of the Faustian brand is the
_force_ distilled from economy-dynamics of the Faustian brand, and it
appertains to the destiny of the individual (on the economic side of
his life-destiny) that he is inwardly constituted to represent a part
of this force, or that he is, on the contrary, nothing but mass to it.
V
The word “Capital” signifies the centre of this thought--not the
aggregate of values, but that which _keeps them in movement as such_.
Capitalism comes into existence only with the world-city existence of
a Civilization, and it is confined to the very small ring of those
who represent this existence by their persons and intelligence; its
opposite is the provincial economy. It was the unconditional supremacy
achieved by the coin in Classical life (including the political
side of that life) that generated the static capital, the ἀφορμή or
starting-point, that by its existence drew to itself, in a sort of
magnetic attraction, things and again things _en masse_. It was the
supremacy of book-values, whose abstract system was quickly detached
from personality by double-entry book-keeping and worked forward by
virtue of its own inward dynamism, that produced the modern capital
that spans the whole earth with its field of force.[914]
Under the influence of its own sort of capital the economic life of the
Classical world took the form of a gold-stream that flowed from the
provinces to Rome and back, and was ever seeking new areas whose stock
of worked-up gold had not yet been “opened up.” Brutus and Cassius
carried the gold of Asia Minor on long mule-trains to the battle-field
of Philippi--one can imagine what sort of an economic operation the
plunder of a camp after a battle must have been--and even C. Gracchus,
almost a century earlier, alluded to the amphoræ that went out from
Rome to the provinces full of wine and came back full of gold. This
hunt for the gold possessions of alien peoples corresponds exactly to
the present-day hunt for coal, which in its deeper meaning is not a
thing, but a store of energy.
But, equally, the Classical craving for the near and present could
not but match the Polis-ideal with an _economic ideal of Autarkeia_,
an economic atomization corresponding to the political. Each of these
tiny life-units desired to have an economic stream wholly of its own,
wholly self-contained, circling independently of all others and _within
the radius of visibility_. The polar opposite of this is the Western
notion of the _Firm_, which is thought of as an entirely impersonal
and incorporeal centre of force, from which activity streams out in
all directions to an indefinite distance, and which the proprietor by
his ability to think in money does not _represent_, but _possesses and
directs_--that is, has in his power--like a little cosmos. The duality
of firm and proprietor would have been utterly unimaginable for the
Classical mind.[915]
Consequently, as the Western Culture presents a maximum, so the
Classical shows a minimum, of _organization_. For this was completely
absent even as an idea from Classical man. His finance was one of
provisional expedients made rule and habit. The wealthy burgher of
Athens and Rome could be burdened with the equipment of war-ships.
The political power of the Roman ædile (and his debts) rested on the
fact that he not only produced the games and the streets and the
buildings, but paid for them too--of course, he could recoup himself
later by plundering his province. Sources of income were thought of
only when the need of income presented itself, and then drawn upon,
without any regard for the future, as the moment required--even at
the cost of entirely destroying them. Plunder of the treasures of
one’s own temples, sea-piracy against one’s own city, confiscation
of the wealth of one’s own fellow-citizens were everyday methods of
finance. If surpluses were available, they were distributed to the
citizens--a proceeding to which plenty of people besides Eubulus of
Athens owed their popularity.[916] Budgets were as unknown as any
other part of financial policy. The “economic management” of Roman
provinces was a system of robbery, public and private, practised by
senators and financiers without the slightest consideration as to
whether the exported values could be replaced. Never did Classical
man think of systematically intensifying his economic life, but ever
looked to the result of the moment, the tangible quantum of cash.
Imperial Rome would have gone down in ruin had it not been fortunate
enough to possess in old Egypt a Civilization that had for a thousand
years thought of _nothing_ but the organization of its economy. The
Roman neither comprehended nor was capable of copying this style of
life,[917] but the accident that Egypt provided the political possessor
of this fellah-world with an inexhaustible source of gold rendered it
unnecessary for him to make a _settled habit_ of proscription at home;
the last of these financial operations in massacre-form was that of 43,
shortly before the incorporation of Egypt.[918] The amassed gold of
Asia Minor that Brutus and Cassius were then bringing up, which meant
an army and the dominion of the world, made it necessary to put to the
ban some two thousand of the richest inhabitants of Italy, whose heads
were brought to the Forum in sacks for the offered rewards. It was no
longer possible to spare even relatives, children, and grey-heads, or
people who had never concerned themselves with politics. It was enough
that they possessed a stock of cash and that the yield would otherwise
have been too small.
But with the extinction of the Classical world-feeling in the early
Imperial age, this mode of thinking in money disappeared also.
_Coins again became wares_--because men were again living the
peasant life[919]--and this explains the immense outflow of gold
into the farther East after Hadrian’s reign, which has hitherto
been unaccountable. And as economic life in forms of gold-streams
was extinguished in the upheaval of a young Culture, so also the
slave ceased to be money, and the ebb of the gold was paralleled by
that mass-emancipation of the slaves which numerous Imperial laws,
from Augustus’s reign onwards, tried in vain to check--till under
Diocletian, in whose famous maximum tariff[920] money-economy was no
longer the standpoint, the type of the Classical slave had ceased to
exist.
CHAPTER XIV
THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE
(B)
THE MACHINE
I
Technique is as old as free-moving life itself. Only the plant--so far
as we can see into Nature--is the mere theatre of technical processes.
The animal, in that it moves, has a technique of movement so that it
may nourish and protect itself.
The original relation between a waking-microcosm and its
macrocosm--“Nature”--consists in a touch through the senses[921] which
rises from mere _sense-impressions_ to sense-_judgment_, so that
already it works critically (that is, separatingly) or, what comes to
the same thing, _causal-analytically_.[922] The stock of what has been
determined then is enlarged into a system, as complete as may be, of
the most primary experiences--identifying marks[923]--a spontaneous
method by which one is enabled to feel at home in one’s world; in the
case of many animals this has led to an amazing richness of experience
that no human science has transcended. But the primary waking-being is
always an _active_ one, remote from mere theory of all sorts, and thus
it is in the minor technique of everyday life, and upon things _in so
far as they are dead_,[924] that these experiences are involuntarily
acquired. This is the difference between Cult and Myth,[925] for
at this level there is no boundary line between religion and the
profane--all waking-consciousness _is_ religion.
The decisive turn in the history of the higher life occurs when the
_determination_ of Nature (in order to be guided by it) changes
into a _fixation_--that is, a purposed alteration of Nature.
With this, technique becomes more or less sovereign and the
instinctive prime-experience changes into a definitely “conscious”
prime-_knowing_. Thought has emancipated itself from sensation.
It is the _language of words_ that brings about this epochal
change. The liberation of speech from speaking[926] gives rise to
a stock of signs for communication-speech which are much more than
identification-marks--they are _names_ bound up with a sense of
meaning, whereby man has the secret of numina (deities, nature-forces)
in his power, and _number_ (formulæ, simple laws), whereby the inner
form of the actual is abstracted form the accidental-sensuous.[927]
With that, the system of identification-marks develops into a
theory, a _picture_ which detaches itself from the technique of the
day[928]--whether this be a day of high-level Civilized technics or
a day of simplest beginnings--by way of _abstraction_, as a piece of
waking-consciousness uncommitted to activity. One “knows” what one
wants, but much must have happened for one to have that knowledge, and
we must make no mistake as to its character. By numerical experience
man is enabled to switch the secret on and off, but he has not
discovered it. The figure of the modern sorcerer--a switchboard with
levers and labels at which the workman calls mighty effects into play
by the pressure of a finger without possessing the slightest notion of
their essence--is only the symbol of human technique in general. The
picture of the light-world around us--in so far as we have developed
it critically, analytically, as theory, as picture--is nothing but a
switchboard of the kind, on which particular things are so labelled
that by (so to say) pressing the appropriate button particular
effects follow with certainty. The secret itself remains none the
less oppressive on that account.[929] But through this technique the
waking-consciousness does, all the same, intervene masterfully in the
fact-world. Life _makes use_ of thought as an “open sesame,” and at
the peak of many a Civilization, in its great cities, there arrives
finally the moment when technical critique becomes tired of being
life’s servant and makes itself tyrant. The Western Culture is even now
experiencing an orgy of this unbridled thought, and on a tragic scale.
Man has listened-in to the march of Nature and made notes of its
indices. He begins to imitate it by means and methods that utilize the
laws of the cosmic pulse. He is emboldened to play the part of God,
and it is easy to understand how the earliest preparers and experts
of these artificial things--for it was here that art came to be, _as
counter-concept to nature_--and how in particular the guardians of
the smith’s art, appeared to those around them as something uncanny
and were regarded with awe or horror as the case might be. The stock
of such discoveries grew and grew. Often they were made and forgotten
and made again, were imitated, shunned, improved. But in the end
they constituted for whole continents a store of _self-evident_
means--fire, metal-working, instruments, arms, ploughs, boats, houses,
animal-taming, and husbandry. Above all, the metals, to whose site
in the earth primitive man is led by some uncannily mystical trait
in him. Immemoriably old trade-routes lead to ore-deposits that are
kept secret, through the life of the settled countryside and over
frequented seas, and along these, later, travel cults and ornaments
and persistent legends of islands of tin and lands of gold. The
primary trade of all is the metal trade, and with it the economics
of production and of work are joined intrusively by a third--alien,
venturesome, free-ranging over the lands.
On this foundation, now, arises the technique of the higher Cultures,
expressive in quality and colour and passion of the whole soul of
these major entities. It need hardly be said that Classical man, who
felt himself and his environment alike Euclidean, set himself _a
priori_ in hostile opposition to the very idea of technique. If by
“Classical” technique we mean something that (along with the rest that
we comprehend in the adjective) rose with determined effort above
the universal dead perfection of the Mycenæan age, then there was no
Classical technique.[930] Its triremes were glorified row-boats, its
catapults and onagers mere substitutes for arms and fists--not to be
named in the same breath with the war-engines of Assyria and China--and
as for Hero and his like, it was flukes and not discoveries that they
achieved. They lacked the inner weight, the fatedness of their moment,
the deep necessity. Here and there men played with data (and why not?)
that probably came from the East, but no one devoted serious attention
to them and, above all, no one made a real effort to introduce them
into the ensemble-picture of life.
Very different is the Faustian technics, which with all its passion of
the third dimension, and from earliest Gothic days, thrusts itself upon
Nature, with the firm resolve to _be its master_. Here, and only here,
is the connexion of insight and utilization a matter of course.[931]
Theory is working hypothesis[932] from the outset. The Classical
investigator “contemplated” like Aristotle’s deity, the Arabian sought
as alchemist for magical means (such as the Philosophers’ Stone)
whereby to possess himself of Nature’s treasures _without effort_,[933]
but the Western strives to _direct_ the world according to his will.
The Faustian inventor and discoverer is a unique type. The primitive
force of his will, the brilliance of his visions, the steely energy of
his practical ponderings, must appear queer and incomprehensible to
anyone at the standpoint of another Culture, but for us they are in
the blood. Our whole Culture has a discoverer’s soul. To _dis_-cover
that which is not seen, to draw it into the light-world of the inner
eye so as to master it--that was its stubborn passion from the first
days on. All its great inventions slowly ripened in the deeps, to
emerge at last with the necessity of a Destiny. All of them were very
nearly approached by the high-hearted, happy research of the early
Gothic monks.[934] Here, if anywhere, the religious origins of all
technical thought are manifested.[935] These meditative discoverers
in their cells, who with prayers and fastings _wrung_ God’s secret
out of him, felt that they were _serving_ God thereby. Here is the
Faust-figure, the grand symbol of a true discovering Culture. The
_Scientia experimentalis_, as Roger Bacon was the first to call
nature-research, the _insistent_ questioning of Nature with levers
and screws, began that of which the issue lies under our eyes as a
countryside sprouting factory-chimneys and conveyor-towers. But for all
of them, too, there was the truly Faustian danger of the Devil’s having
a hand in the game,[936] the risk that he was leading them in spirit to
that mountain on which he promises all the power of the earth. This is
the significance of the _perpetuum mobile_ dreamed of by those strange
Dominicans like Petrus Peregrinus, which would wrest the almightiness
from God. Again and again they succumbed to this ambition; they forced
this secret out of God in order themselves to be God. They listened
for the laws of the cosmic pulse in order to overpower it. And so they
created the _idea of the machine_ as a small cosmos obeying the will
of man alone. But with that they overpassed the slender border-line
whereat the reverent piety of others saw the beginning of sin, and on
it, from Roger Bacon to Giordano Bruno, they came to grief. Ever and
ever again, true belief has regarded the machine as of the Devil.
The passion of discovery declares itself as early as the Gothic
architecture--compare with this the deliberate form-poverty of the
Doric!--and is manifest throughout our music. Book-printing appeared,
and the long-range weapon.[937] On the heels of Columbus and Copernicus
come the telescope, the microscope, the chemical elements, and lastly
the immense technological corpus of the early Baroque.
Then followed, however, simultaneously with Rationalism, the discovery
of the steam-engine, which upset everything and transformed economic
life from the foundations up. Till then nature had rendered services,
but now she was tied to the yoke as _a slave_, and her work was as
though in contempt measured by a standard of horse-power. We advanced
from the muscle-force of the Negro, which was set to work in organized
routines, to the organic reserves of the Earth’s crust, where the
life-forces of millennia lay stored as coal; and to-day we cast
our eyes on inorganic nature, where water-forces are already being
brought in to supplement coal. As the horse-powers run to millions and
milliards, the numbers of the population increase and increase, on a
scale that no other Culture ever thought possible. This growth is a
_product of the Machine_, which insists on being used and directed, and
to that end centuples the forces of each individual. For the sake of
the machine, human life becomes precious. _Work_ becomes the great word
of ethical thinking; in the eighteenth century it loses its derogatory
implication in all languages. The machine works and forces the man to
co-operate. The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that
the earth trembles under it.
And what now develops, in the space of hardly a century, is a drama
of such greatness that the men of a future Culture, with other soul
and other passions, will hardly be able to resist the conviction that
“in those days” nature herself was tottering. The politics stride over
cities and peoples; even the economics, deeply as they bite into the
destinies of the plant and animal worlds, merely touch the fringe of
life and efface themselves. But this technique will leave traces of its
heyday behind it when all else is lost and forgotten. For this Faustian
passion has altered the Face of the Earth.
This is the outward- and upward-straining life-feeling--true
descendant, therefore, of the Gothic--as expressed in Goethe’s Faust
monologue when the steam-engine was yet young. The intoxicated soul
wills to fly above space and Time. An ineffable longing tempts him
to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth,
rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body, and circle in
the universe of space amongst the stars. That which the glowing and
soaring inwardness of St. Bernard sought at the beginning, that which
Grünewald and Rembrandt conceived in their backgrounds, and Beethoven
in the trans-earthly tones of his last quartets, comes back now in
the intellectual intoxication of the inventions that crowd one upon
another. Hence the fantastic traffic that crosses the continents in a
few days, that puts itself across oceans in floating cities, that bores
through mountains, rushes about in subterranean labyrinths, uses the
steam-engine till its last possibilities have been exhausted, and then
passes on to the gas-engine, and finally raises itself above the roads
and railways and flies in the air; hence it is that the spoken word is
sent in one moment over all the oceans; hence comes the ambition to
break all records and beat all dimensions, to build giant halls for
giant machines, vast ships and bridge-spans, buildings that deliriously
scrape the clouds, fabulous forces pressed together to a focus to obey
the hand of a child, stamping and quivering and droning works of steel
and glass in which tiny man moves as unlimited monarch and, at the
last, feels nature as beneath him.
And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more
ascetic, mystic, esoteric. They weave the earth over with an infinite
web of subtle forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become
ever more and more immaterial, ever less noisy. The wheels, rollers,
and levers are vocal no more. All that matters withdraws itself into
the interior. Man has felt the machine to be devilish, and rightly.
It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It
delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of
foreseeing omniscience is set in motion, silent and irresistible.
II
Never save here has a microcosm felt itself superior to its macrocosm,
but here the little life-units have by the sheer force of their
intellect made the unliving dependent upon themselves. It is a triumph,
so far as we can see, unparalleled. Only this our Culture has achieved
it, and perhaps only for a few centuries.
But for that very reason Faustian man has become _the slave of his
creation_. His number, and the arrangement of life as he lives it,
have been driven by the machine on to a path where there is no
standing still and no turning back. The peasant, the hand-worker,
even the merchant, appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with
the _three great figures that the Machine has bred and trained up
in the cause of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer,
and the factory-worker_. Out of a quite small branch of manual
work--namely, the preparation-economy--there has grown up (_in this
one Culture alone_) a mighty tree that casts its shadow over all the
other vocations--namely, _the economy of the machine-industry_.[938]
It forces the entrepreneur not less than the workman to obedience.
_Both_ become slaves, and not masters, of the machine, that now for
the first time develops its devilish and occult power. But although
the Socialistic theory of the present day has insisted upon looking
only at the latter’s contribution and has claimed the word “work” for
him alone, it has all become possible only through the sovereign and
decisive achievement of the former. The famous phrase concerning the
“strong arm” that bids every wheel cease from running is a piece of
wrong-headedness. To stop them--yes! but it does not need a worker
to do that. To keep them running--no! The centre of this artificial
and complicated realm of the Machine is the organizer and manager.
The mind, not the hand, holds it together. But, for that very reason,
to preserve the ever endangered structure, _one_ figure is even
more important than all the energy of enterprising master-men that
make cities to grow out of the ground and alter the picture of the
landscape; it is a figure that is apt to be forgotten in this conflict
of politics--the _engineer_, the priest of the machine, the man who
knows it. Not merely the importance, but the very existence of the
industry depends upon the existence of the hundred thousand talented,
rigorously schooled brains that command the technique and develop
it onward and onward. The quiet engineer it is who is the machine’s
master and destiny. His thought is as possibility what the machine
is as actuality. There have been fears, thoroughly materialistic
fears, of the exhaustion of the coal-fields. But so long as there are
worthy technical path-finders, dangers of this sort have no existence.
When, and only when, the crop of recruits for this army fails--this
army whose thought-work forms one inward unit with the work of the
machine--the industry must flicker out in spite of all that managerial
energy and the workers can do. Suppose that, in future generations,
the most gifted minds were to find their soul’s health more important
than all the powers of this world; suppose that, under the influence of
the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of rationalism
to-day, the very élite of intellect that is now concerned with the
machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its _Satanism_
(it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux)--then
nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of
intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.
The Western industry has diverted the ancient traditions of the other
Cultures. The streams of economic life move towards the seats of King
Coal and the great regions of raw material. Nature becomes exhausted,
the globe sacrificed to Faustian thinking in energies. The _working_
earth is the Faustian aspect of her, the aspect contemplated by the
Faust of Part II, the supreme transfiguration of enterprising work--and
contemplating, he dies. Nothing is so utterly antipodal to the
motionless satiate being of the Classical Empire. It is the engineer
who is remotest from the Classical law-thought, and he will see to it
that his economy has _its own_ law, wherein forces and efficiencies
will take the place of Person and Thing.
III
But titanic, too, is the onslaught of money upon this intellectual
force. Industry, too, is earth-bound like the yeoman. It has its
station, and its materials stream up out of the earth. Only high
finance is _wholly_ free, wholly intangible. Since 1789 the banks, and
with them the bourses, have developed themselves on the credit-needs
of an industry growing ever more enormous, as a power on their own
account, and they will (as money wills in every Civilization) to be
the only power. The ancient wrestle between the productive and the
acquisitive economies intensifies now into a silent gigantomachy of
intellects, fought out in the lists of the world-cities. This battle is
the despairing struggle of technical thought to maintain its liberty
against money-thought.[939]
The dictature of money marches on, tending to its material peak, in
the Faustian Civilization as in every other. And now something happens
that is intelligible only to one who has penetrated to the essence
of money. If it were anything tangible, then its existence would be
for ever--but, as it is a form of thought, _it fades out as soon
as it has thought its economic world to finality_, and has no more
material upon which to feed. It thrust into the life of the yeoman’s
countryside and set the earth a-moving; its thought transformed every
sort of handicraft; to-day it presses victoriously upon industry to
make the productive work of entrepreneur and engineer and labourer
alike its spoil. The machine with its human retinue, the real queen of
this century, is in danger of succumbing to a stronger power. But with
this, money, too, is at the end of its success, and the last conflict
is at hand in which the Civilization receives its conclusive form--the
conflict _between_ money and blood.
The coming of Cæsarism breaks the dictature of money and its political
weapon democracy. After a long triumph of world-city economy and its
interests over political creative force, the political side of life
manifests itself after all as the stronger of the two. The sword
is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the
plunderer-will. If we call these money-powers “Capitalism,”[940] then
we may designate as Socialism the will to call into life a mighty
politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system
of _lofty_ thoughtfulness and duty-sense that keeps the whole in fine
condition for the decisive battle of its history, and this battle is
also the battle of money and law.[941] The _private_ powers of the
economy want free paths for their acquisition of great resources.
No legislation must stand in their way. They want to make the laws
themselves, in their interests, and to that end they make use of the
tool they have made for themselves, democracy, the subsidized party.
Law needs, in order to resist this onslaught, a high tradition and
an ambition of strong families that finds its satisfaction not in
the heaping-up of riches, but in the tasks of true rulership, above
and beyond all money-advantage. _A power can be overthrown only by
another power_, not by a principle, and no power that can confront
money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only
by blood. _Life_ is alpha and omega, the cosmic onflow in microcosmic
form. It is _the_ fact of facts within the world-as-history. Before
the irresistible rhythm of the generation-sequence, everything built
up by the waking-consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at
the last. Ever in History it is life and life only--race-quality,
the triumph of the will-to-power--and not the victory of truths,
discoveries, or money that signifies. _World-history is the world
court_, and it has ever decided in favour of the stronger, fuller, and
more self-assured life--decreed to it, namely, the right to exist,
regardless of whether its right would hold before a tribunal of
waking-consciousness. Always it has sacrificed truth and justice to
might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom
truth was more than deeds, and justice than power. And so the drama
of a high Culture--that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts,
battles, cities--closes with the return of the pristine facts of the
blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic
flow. The bright imaginative Waking-Being submerges itself into the
silent service of Being, as the Chinese and Roman empires tell us.
Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement
embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the
incident of Man--a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time,
while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar
histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes.
For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this
moment of its development--the moment when money is celebrating its
last victories, and the Cæsarism that is to succeed approaches with
quiet, firm step--our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is
set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not
worth the living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that,
but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that
historic necessity has set _will_ be accomplished with the individual
or against him.
_Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt._
INDEX
Prepared by David M. Matteson
Abbassids, court life, 197;
Syncretism, 313;
Third Estate and rule, 424
Abraham, Judah’s silver pieces, 237
Absolutism. _See_ Dynastic idea; Politics
Abu Bekr, Puritanism, 304
Abu Hanifah, as jurist, 75
Academy, style, 345
Achikar, as Arabian, 208
Achmed, and Caliph, 426
Acosta, Uriel, expulsion, 317
Acragas, democratic triumph, 396
Actium, battle, importance, 191;
and Cæsarism, 423
Activity, waking-being and willed, 133
Actuality, and abstract thought, 144
Adiabene, Jewish state, 175, 198, 209
Adrianople, battle, effect, 40
Adventism, as type of second religiousness, 311 n.
Æchylus, and being, 272;
and religion, 282
Ælius, _Tripertita_, 66
Agamemnon, as feudal, 374
Agathocles, and Mamertines, 160 n.;
Syracuse massacre, 406 n.
Agis III, revolution, 65
Agriculture, effect on man, 89;
farmhouse as symbol, 90;
modern, as technic, 479 n., 485 n.
Ahuramazda, as deity, 207 n.;
and Spenta Mainyu and Vohu Mano, 244 n.
Akhenaton, religiousness, 313;
revolution, 353
Akiba, legends, 250.
Aksakov, Ivan, on Petersburg, 193
Al Alblaq, castle, 198
Alaric, historyless, 432
Albegensians, Manichæans, 260 n.
Albert of Saxony, as scientist, 301
Albertus Magnus, 291;
philosophy, 172 n.;
and Devil-cult, and technique, 502 n.
Alcibiades, and army, 406
Alcmæonidæ, and Athenian history, 336
Alesia, siege, 421
Alexander the Great, as follower, 88 n.;
political character of empire, 174 n.;
divine descent, 314;
and polis, 383;
control by generals, 407.
_See also_ Macedonians
Alexandria, as world-city, 99;
outbreaks, 198 n.;
as polis, 383
Alfonso X of Castile, work on planets, 316
Al Ghazali, deification, 314;
and science, 315
Ali, war with Othman, 424;
power, 426
Alien, and “proper” in sensation, 6
“All,” as word, 141
Al Maimun, Rationalism, 306 n.
Al Manzor, Christian, 260
Alp Arslan, power, 427
Alphabet. _See_ Writing
Amasis, rise, 428
Amenemhet I, absolutism, 387
Amenhotep (Amenophis) IV, city, 101 n.;
religiousness, 313;
revolution, 353
Amenophis IV. _See_ Amenhotep
American Revolution, effect in France, 411 n.;
cause, loyalists, 411 n.
Americans, as race, Indian influence, 119;
as people, creation of events, 165;
language and nation, 183;
and predestination, 305;
Civil War, 356, 369 n., 421, 488 n.;
fate of government, 416;
basis of reverence for constitution, 430 n.;
no yeomanry, 449 n.;
party and political machine, 450-452;
economics and politics, 475
Ammonius Saccas, conversion, 176
Amoraim, period, 71, 250;
and commentary, 247
Amos, as Arabian prophet, 205
Analysis, and double-entry book-keeping, 490
Anastasius I, demonstration against, 381 n.
Ancestral worship, Chinese, time-mythology, 286, 351
Ancient History, as term, 28
Angelico, Fra, frescoes and the Devil, 292 n.
Animal, essential character, microcosm in macrocosm, 3, 4, 15;
cosmic beat and tension, 4, 5;
cosmic organs, blood, sex, 5;
microcosmic organ, sense, 5, 6, 115;
sense and understanding, 6;
sight as supreme sense, 6;
being and waking-being, 7;
and language, 131-134;
and art, 133 n.;
involuntary technique, 499
Anselm, Saint, Arabian contemporaries, 250
Anti-Semitism, rationale, 317-321
Antioch, as un-Classical, 101 n.;
as capital city, 191;
as polis, 383
Antiochus Epiphanes, persecution, 210
Antony, Mark, Actium, 191, 423;
on Cicero, 433 n.
Aphrahat, epistles, 252 n.
Aphrodisias, Pagan conversion, 259
Apocalyptic, predecessors of Mohammed, 204;
related Arabian, 204-207, 209;
Arabian development, 208, 245;
Jewish law and the prophets, 209;
end of Jewish, 211;
and Arabian awakening, 212;
Jesus’ teaching, 217;
and Resurrection, 218;
Paul’s attitude, 221;
as vision of fable, 237;
basis of writing, 245.
_See also_ Religion
Apocrypha, elimination, 71, 248
Apollinaris, Monophysite, 257
Apollonian cult, and body, 283;
and Tyrannis, 386
Apollonius, as biographer, 252
Apologists, period, 71, 250
Apostles, fictitious authorships, 72 n. _See also_ Gospels
Appius Claudius. _See_ Claudius
Arabian Culture, historic, 27;
problems of study, 38;
as discovery, 42;
relation to other Cultures, midmost, 42, 87, 190, 235;
landscape, 42;
Islam, Civilization and Crusades, 43;
pre-cultural law, 75;
pre-cultural tribal association, 175;
pseudomorphosis, 189, 191;
ignorance of inner form, partial study, 190, 191;
feudalism, 196-200;
Scholasticism and Mysticism, 200, 250;
scientific beginnings, 200 n.;
space-concept, cavern, 233;
time-concept, ordained period, eras, 238-240, 249;
future of nations, 323;
cognate family, 330;
dynastic idea, 330 n., 378, 379;
style of priesthood, 325;
relation of primary estates, 353;
political periods from feudalism to Cæsarism, 423-427;
political theory, 453.
_See also_ Cultures; Islam; Jews; Pseudomorphosis; Religion;
Roman law
Aragon, control by nobility, 373
Aramaic, and Christianity, 225;
as Jewish church-language, 252
Archæans, as name, 161, 164
Archaeology, as Western trait, 79
Archimedes, futility, 17
Architecture, Mexican, 45;
foreign effects of Western, 46;
cultural mixture, 87;
Minoan and Mycenæan houses, 88;
cosmic and microcosmic, 92, 93;
and dwelling-house, 120;
as religious and ornament, 123;
secular buildings and style, 123;
Romanesque soul, 180;
basilica and mosque, 230.
_See also_ Art
Archons, urban, 374;
overthrow, 398
Areopagus, overthrow, 396
Argos, massacre, 405
Aristides, on Roman polis, 383
Aristocracy of intellect, as term, 166 n. _See also_ Nobility
Aristonicus, and Blossius, 454
Aristotle, universe, 58;
and polis, 173 n.;
on Calani, 175 n.;
and commentary, 247 n.;
“Theology,” 248;
and Rationalism, 305;
corpus, 346
Arius, and substance controversy, 256
Armenia, conversion as state, 177, 253;
devil-worshippers, 236 n.;
nobility, 423;
sword-dynasty, 426, 428
Army, Byzantine system, 199;
professional, rise as political power, 406.
_See also_ War
Arnold of Brescia, and reform, 296
Art, late Minoan and early Mycenæan, 87-89;
expression-language and communication-language, 116;
taboo and totem sides, in research, 118, 120, 121;
in animals, 133 n.;
and understanding, 133;
forms, 331 n.;
lack of Classical financial value, destruction, 487;
as counter-concept to native, 500.
_See also_ Architecture; Ornament
Aryan. _See_ Indogermanic
Asceticism. _See_ Monasticism
Asclepiades, work, 252
Asclepiodotus, as Pagan missionary, 259
Asoka, religiousness, 313;
as Sudra, 333
Asosi, as feudal, 375
Assuan documents, 209
Assyrians, as rulers, 40
Astrakan, Judaic conversion, 259
Astrology, and Arabian time-concept, 238;
as late Classical fad, 310
Astronomy, Chaldean, 206
Asvagosha, Mahayana doctrine, 313
Atargatis, cult, 201
Athanasius, and Western dogma, 230;
and substance controversy, 256;
and reform, 296
Athens, and Alcmæonidæ, 336;
_vis-à-vis_: Sparta, 368, Tyrannis, 386;
overthrow of oligarchy, 396, 397
Athos, monasteries as Buddhistic, 314
Atreus, tomb, 89
Auaris, as capital, 428
Augustine, Saint, and Grace, 59, 241;
on Classical religion as true, 204;
Manichæan, 227;
dualism, 234;
community of the elect, 243;
on ruler, 379
Augustus, principate and monarchy, 50, 349;
and dyarchy, 432, 433
Aulard, F. Alphonse, on French Revolution, 399 n.
Aurelian, State religion, 253
Aureole, significance, 378
Aurignacian Man, conditions, 34
Austria, national origin, 182;
annihilation, 183.
_See also_ Holy Roman Empire
Autarkeia, Rationalism, 307
Authority, and authorship, 248 n.
Authorship, and authority, 248 n.
Avicenna, Spinoza as heir, 321
Avidius Cassius, on Marcus Aurelius, 430
Axum, ignored history, 190;
feudalism, 197;
and Himaryites, 197;
stelæ, 234 n.;
State religion, 253
Aztecs, rule, 45;
and jurisprudence, 66;
and woman, 328
Baal cults, in Syncretism, 201
Baal Shem, Gnosis, 228;
as Messiah, 311
Babek, outbreaks, 424, 425
Babylon, as world-city, 99
Babylonian Culture, beginning, achievements, rulers, 39, 40;
and early Jewish law, 75;
and Arabian Culture, 189 n.;
and Chaldean, 205 n., 206 n.;
astrology, 238 n.
Bacchiadæ, and succession, 380
Bach, John Sebastian, Exekias as contemporary, 135 n.
Bacon, Roger, philosophy, 172 n.;
and the Devil, 290 n., 502;
as scientist, 301;
and technique, 502, 502 n.
Baghdad, as Islam, 95;
as world-city, 99, 425;
plan, 100
Balkuwara Palace, 100 n.
Banausos, notion, 332
Bank-note, status, 483
Banking, cultural basis, 493 n.
Bantu language, 142
Baptism, as impersonal, 293;
Luther’s concept, 299
Barcochebas, rising, 319
Bardas, power, 426
Bardas Phocas, power, 426
Bardesanes, period and task, 250, 257;
and substance, 255, 256, 258
Baroque, as microcosmic and urban, 92, 93;
science and Gothic religiousness, 270;
contemporary Jewish period, 316;
political aspect, 391, 405;
fifty-year periods, 392 n.
Barrack-state, 366 n.
Barter, in early Culture, 97, 480, 481
Bartolus, as jurist, 77
Baruch Apocalypse, fictitious, 72 n.;
dualism, 234, 248
Basel, Council of, and feudalism, 374
Basileios I, power, 426
Basileios II, and rule, 426
Basileios, chancellor, power, 427
Basileus, as feudal, 374
Basilica, and mosque, 230
Basilides, and substance, 256
Basques, race, 165
Basra, Ali’s capture, 426
Bavaria, as State, 182
Baxter, Jedediah H., on American race, 119
Bayle, Pierre, on understanding, 13 n.
Beast-deities, Classical, 276;
Mycenæan and Egyptian, 276 n.
Beat, and tension, 4;
and being, 7;
cosmic, in crowd, 18.
_See also_ Being
Beatification, scientific, 346
Become, and understanding, 14, 15. _See also_ Microcosm
Becoming, and understanding, 14, 15. _See also_ Cosmic
Behistun Inscription, 166, 207
Being, as cosmic, and waking-being, 7, 11, 13;
peasant as, 89;
and race, 113;
upward series of utterances, 116;
and totem, 117;
and religion, 265;
and faith, 271;
and moral negations, 272-274;
and truths, 274;
and nobility, 335;
and idea of property, 343;
ultimate triumph, 435, 507;
and economics, 470, 471.
_See also_ Cosmic; History; Politics; Race; Sex; Time;
Waking-being; War
Bel temple, Palmyra, inscriptions, 206
Belhomme, Jacques, and aristocrats, 402 n.
Belisarius, as feudal lord, 350 n.
Beloch, Julius, on migrant minority, 164
Benedictines, as rural, 91
Bernadotte, Jean B. J., and Désirée Clary, 329;
rise, 406
Bernard of Clairvaux, Arabian contemporaries, 250;
on love of God, 266 n.;
and compassion, 273;
and Mary-cult, 288;
and contrition, 298
Bible, fixation of canon, 71, 248;
fictitious authorship, 72 n.;
law of early books, 75;
rise of fetishism, 299.
_See also_ Christianity; New Testament; Old Testament; Sacred
books
Biography, in Western Culture, 29;
and contrition, 294
Biology, and primitive history, 48;
and post-Civilization history, 48
Bismarck, Fürst von, dynastic government, 415;
flaw in leadership, 444
Blackstone, Sir William, Commentaries as Germanic, 78
Blake, William, “tiger” expression, 128 n.
Blood system, cosmic organ, 5
Blossius, influence, 454
Blumenbach, Johann F., race classification, 125
Boar’s-head attack, 199
Boas, Franz, on American race, 119
Boccaccio, Giovanni, and Classicism, 291 n.
Bodin, Jean, and law of nature, 78
Body, in Roman law, 67;
Classical concept and Western law, 81, 82;
and Classical cults, 283;
and polis, 384;
and Classical money concept, 486
Böhme, Jakob, and Western religious beginnings, 282
Boghaz, Keüi, archives, 167
Bogomils, iconoclasm, 304
Bollandists, and orders and schools, 346
Bolshevism, Tolstoi’s relation, as pseudomorphosis, 195;
cultural basis of fury, 321 n.
Bonaventura, Saint, and Devil-cult, 291
Boniface, Saint, as missionary, 56
Boniface VIII, pope, and Jacopone, 296;
_Unam sanctam_, 376
Book, expulsion by newspaper, 461;
as personal expression, 463
Book-keeping, double-entry as Western symbol, 490
Booty, and power, 344, 345, 347, 371, 372, 474
Borchardt, Ludwig, erroneous chronology, 39 n.
Borkman, John G., on resources, 486
Bosch, Hieronymus, paintings and the Devil, 298 n.
Bourbons, and world-history, 182, 336
Bourse, as cultural phenomenon, 484 n.
Boxer Rebellion, cultural basis, 321 n.
Bracton, Henry de, as jurist, 76
Brahmanism, Sankhara and Neo-Brahmanism, 315
Breed. _See_ Race
Brentano, Clemens, “playing” with expression, 137
Breughel, Pieter, and the Devil, 289 n.
Brunhilde, as destiny, 329
Bruno, Giordano, and machine and Devil, 502
Brutus, M. Junius, as ideologue, 433 n.
Buch, Christian L. von, theory, 31
Buddhism, and Indian philosophy, 49;
and landscape, in China, 57, 312, 315;
and sport, 103;
and depopulation, 106;
Rationalism, 305, 307;
expansion, 308;
Hinayana and Mahayana, 312;
and Syncretism, 313;
deification of Buddha, 314;
and Neo-Brahmanism, 315;
and political theory, 453
Bunyan, John, and concepts, 303
Burdach, Konrad, on Renaissance and Gothic, 291 n.
Burghers. _See_ Democracy; Town
Buridan, Jean, as scientist, 301
Burkard of Worms, and Devil-cult, 290
Burke, Edmund, on rights, 403
Burning of the Books, and Cæsarism, 433, 434, 463 n.
Bylini, hero-tales, 192
Byzantine Empire, and inter-Cultures, 89;
cult and nationality, State religion, 176, 178, 230, 243, 253,
258;
capital city as symbol, 191;
and feudalism, army system, 198;
literature and Arabian literature, 304;
and Crusades, 319;
nobility and priesthood, 353;
Sassanid pattern, 378 n.;
class-basis of political associations, 381 n.;
revolution in, 425;
Cæsarism in, 426.
_See also_ Arabian Culture, Pseudomorphosis; Religion
Cæsar, C. Julius, ahistoric, 24;
monarchy and principate, 50;
divine descent, 314;
demagogy, money and power, 402, 457 n., 458, 459;
Gallic conquests, 408;
Triumvirate and Cæsarism, 423;
and forms, 431 n., 432;
killing by ideologues, 433;
tact of command, 444;
at Lucca, 446
Cæsarism, and second religiousness, 310, 386 n.;
and emperor-cult, 313;
transit to, as cultural destiny, 416, 429, 434;
era of great fact-men, 418;
defined, formless strife for personal power, 418, 431, 434;
character of war, 419-422;
ruthless peace, 422;
Classical evolution, 422, 423, 430;
in Arabian Culture, sultanate, 423, 426;
in Egypt, 427;
coming Western, and overthrow of money, 428, 506, 507;
and megalopolitanism and return of race, 431;
as end of great politics, 432, 434;
completed Roman, and ideologues, 432-434;
and passing of Culture, 435;
and private politics, 452, 464;
battle with democracy, 464.
_See also_ Politics
Cæsarius of Heisterbach, and Devil-cult, 290
Calani, as term for philosophers, 175 n.
Calchas, and Classical religious beginnings, 282, 350
Caliphate, deification, 68;
yields to sultanate, 425, 426
Calvin, John, and Grace, 59;
as Gothic, 296;
and world-politics, 299;
and science, 300
Camden, battle, 412 n.
Canada, public-land survey, 101 n.
Cannæ, battle, importance, 191, 338
Canon, fixation, 71, 248;
as term, 245;
Arabian style, 346.
_See also_ Bible
Canon law, development, 77
Capital, Western, as movement of values, 493;
Classical sort, 494.
_See also_ Money
Capital city, domination, 95;
of Byzantine Empire, 191;
and primary estates, 356;
and State-idea, 377;
cultural basis, 381
Capitulations, origin, 177 n.
Caracalla, citizenship edict, and emperor-worship, 68
Care, family and State as symbols, 364;
legal modes, 365;
financial officialdom, 371
Carey, Henry C., and English economics, 469
Carmathians, outbreak, 425
Carolingian Renaissance, character, 87
Carthage, as Babylonian, 108;
in Classical Civilization, 323;
_vis-à-vis_ Rome, 368;
economy and politics, 475.
_See also_ Punic Wars
Caspian Sea, and intercultural relations, 41
Cassius, Spurius, and cult, 386
Caste, meaning, 332, 333
Castle, as totem, racial expression, 122;
and ornament, relation to style, 123;
talk, 153
Catchwords, as term, 401
Cathedral, as taboo and ornament, 122, 123;
speech, 153
Catholic, Western churches as, 223 n., 229
Catilinarian movement, financing, 402
Cato, M. Porcius (Censor), and Scipio, 411;
ruthlessness, 422
Cato, M. Porcius (Uticensis), rise, 409 n.;
courts and politics, 459
Catulus, Q. Lutatius, demagogy, 459
Caucus, as political means, 452 n.
Causality, human (microcosmic) type, 16-19;
and sex, 327.
_See also_ Destiny; Intelligence; Nature; Religion; Space;
Town; Waking-being
Cavern, Arabian symbol, and Chaldean religion, 206, 233, 238
Cecils, and English history, 337
Censorship, past and present, 463
Ceremonial, as expression-language, 134
Chacmultun, and Mexican Culture, 45
Chalcedon, Council of, substance controversy, 257;
and reform, 296
Chaldeans, as rulers, 40;
tribal association, 175;
religion and nation, 176;
cult in Syncretism, 201;
as term, 205 n.;
prophetic religion, 205, 209 n.;
and Babylonia, 205 n., 206 n.;
astronomy, 206;
astrology, 238;
oracles as canon, 245;
disappearance, 252
Chamberlain, Joseph, and political machine, 453 n.
Champutun, and Mexican Culture, 45
Chandragupta, Sundra, 333
Chang-I, Imperialism, 417, 419
Chang-Lu, church, 314
Charlemagne, and cultural mixture, 87;
and Devil-cult, 290
Charles I of England, and absolutism, 388
Charles IV, emperor, policy, 376
Charles Martel, as destiny, 192
Charondas, character of laws, 63, 64
Chartres, Arabian contemporaries of school, 250
Charvaka doctrine, 105
Chaucer, Geoffrey, and “virtue,” 307 n.
Cheirocracy, Classical, 397
Cherusci, importance of victory, 48
Chian, importance, 50;
power, 428
Chichen Itza, and Mexican Culture, 45
Chinese Culture, as historic, 28;
problems of study, 38;
transition to Cæsarism, contending States, 38, 40, 339, 416-419,
454;
date of beginning, 39 n.;
periods, cultural contemporaries, 40-42;
fate, 42;
end of real history, 49;
and Buddhism, 57, 312, 315;
basis of laws, 67 n.;
depopulation, 106;
nations under, 178 n.;
Tsin, 185;
and sacred books, 244 n.;
Manichæans and Nestorians, 260;
beginning of religion, 281, 285;
time mythology, 286;
dualism, tao, 287;
landscape as prime symbol, 287;
second religiousness and Syncretism, 312;
emperor-cult, 313, 379;
fellah State religion, 315;
ancient priest-estate, 350;
ancestry-worship, 351;
tao and priesthood, 352;
relation of primary estates, 352;
world-power idea, 373;
feudalism and interregnum, 375;
dynasty-idea, 379;
Fronde in, 386;
period of protectors, 387;
Cæsarism and ideologues, 434;
status of early coins, 481 n.;
bank notes, 483;
money concept, 486, 489 n.;
and technique, 501 n.
_See also_ Culture
Chinese language, voice-differentiations, 140 n.;
written and spoken, 145, 151;
standard script, 152
Chios, and slaves, 488
Chivalry, Arabian, 198;
and compassion as contemporary, 273
Chlysti, doctrines, 278
Chmenotep, inscriptions, 387
Chosen People, as common Arabian idea, 207
Chosroës Nushirvan, and Mazdak, 261
Chóu dynasty, residence, 92;
fall, 376;
money concept, 489 n.
Christ, as name, 219 n.
Christian Science, as fad, 310
Christianity, Arabian and Western, form and soul, 59, 235, 237, 258;
period of Apologists, 71;
of Fathers, 71;
effect of Justinian, 74;
Corpus Juris Canonici, 77;
and Arabian nations, 177;
nationalism and persecutions, 177;
Arabian, and chivalry, 198;
Jesus-cult and Syncretism, 201, 220, 252;
and Hellenism, 203, 204;
Jesus’ life and biography as central point, 212;
and Arabian apocalyptic literature, 212;
and Turfan manuscripts, 213 n.;
and Mandæanism of John the Baptist, 214;
self-view of Jesus as prophet and Messiah, townlessness, 215;
Jesus and Pilate, symbolism, 216, 473 n.;
Jesus and pure metaphysics, 217;
effect of Resurrection, Messiah, 218;
Arabian cult-nationality and world salvation, 219, 220;
Paul and Church, 220, 221;
Paul and urban intellect, westward trend, 221;
Old Testament and canon, 221, 225, 226, 228, 245;
Mark Gospel, 223;
cults, Mary-cult, 223;
Greek and Latin as languages, 224, 241 n., 252;
John Gospel, Mysticism, Logos and Paraclete, 226;
Marcionism and early Catholic Church, 227;
Arabian West and East division, 228-230;
architectural symbols of division, 230;
Arabian Logos and Jesus’ world-image, 236, 237;
era, 239;
and Judaism, separation, 251, 316;
early Eastern, 251 n.;
Eastern State religions, 253;
monasticism in Arabian, 254;
Arabian expansion, and inner contradiction, 255;
substance controversy and split, 255-258;
Greek, 257;
obligation to other missionarism, 259, 260;
end of Arabian theology, 261;
pre-period of Western, 277;
Western Mary-cult and Devil-cult, 288-292;
Western guilt and free-will, sacraments, 292, 293;
Western contrition, 293-295;
elements and effect of Reformation, 296-300;
present Russian, 495 n.
_See also_ Manichæism; Monophysites; Nestorianism; Puritanism;
Religion; Roman Catholic
Chronology, Arabian spirit, 27;
cultural, 39 n.;
Mexican, 44;
Arabian eras, 239
Chrysostom, John, and conflict of estates, 353 n.
Chthonian cults, 283, 286
Chufucianism, fellah character, 315
Church, and religion, 443 n.
Church and State, Arabian concept, 168, 174-178, 210, 242, 243, 253,
315, 317;
Roman law and established church, 177 n.;
and Arabian monasticism, 254;
lack of equilibrium, 336
Church of England, new transubstantiation controversy, 309 n.
Cicero, M. Tullius, rise, 409 n.;
on elections, 432 n.;
and party, weakling, 433;
and Divus idea, 433;
and killing of Cæsar, 433 n.;
and demagogy, 458;
and Trebatius, 458 n.
Cimabue, Giovanni, as Gothic, 291
Cineas, on Roman Senate, 409
Circus parties, as term, 381 n.
Citation, deeper meaning, 248
Citizenship, Caracalla’s edict on Roman, 68;
Roman, and polis, 383, 384;
Classical idea, 384
Citizenship, Roman, 166 n., 384
City. _See_ Megalopolitanism; Town
City-leagues, Classical, 355
City planning, soulless chessboard form, 100
Civil War, American, defeat of aristocracy, 356, 369 n.;
and military art, 421;
as victory of coal-energy, 488 n.
Civilization, as term, 31 n.;
position of present, 37;
of Mexican Culture, 45;
exhaustion and historylessness, 48-51;
and microcosmic, 92;
and dictatorship of money, 98;
as tension, 102;
rootless forms, world-extension, 107;
inner stages, present Western, 109;
and style, 109;
survivals, 109;
superficial history, 109, 339;
and utilitarian script, 152, 155;
Jewish, in contact with Gothic, 317-319;
Jews in Western, 322;
economics under, 477, 484, 493;
final struggle, money and Cæsarism, 506.
_See also_ Cæsarism; Cultures; Fellahism; Megalopolitanism;
Politics
Clary, Désirée, as destiny, 329
Classes, and history, 96;
economic, 477.
_See also_ Estates
Classical Culture, as ahistoric, and script, 24, 27, 36, 150, 152;
similarity of Mexican, 43;
end of real history, 50;
relation of Renaissance, 58;
Greek laws, 61;
and capital city, 95;
Civilization cities, 101;
Civilization and sterility, 105;
destruction and survivals of Civilization, 109;
nations under, polis basis, 173;
geographically-limited cults, 200;
and revelation, 244 n.;
fate in, 267;
beast character of deities, 276;
obscure religious beginnings, 281-283;
Orphism, Ascetism, 283;
outline of early religion, 283, 284;
Greek and Roman cults, 284;
later city-religions, 285;
personality-concept, 293 n.;
second religiousness and Syncretism, 312;
agnate family, 330;
ancient priest-estate, 350;
style of nobility, 351;
style of priesthood, 352;
position of primary estates, 353;
significance of colonization, 354;
city-leagues, 355;
capital and financial organization, 372, 383, 493-496;
and world-power, 373 n.;
feudalism and polis, 374;
first Tyrannis, 375, 386;
dynasty-ideal and oligarchy, 380, 381;
_carpe diem_, 383;
and war, 385;
inter-Tyrannis period, 394-398;
second Tyrannis, 405-408;
period of Cæsarism, evolution, 418, 422, 423, 430;
military technique of Civilization, 420;
trader-master period, 484;
money as magnitude, 486, 495;
money and land and art value, 487;
slaves as money, 488, 496;
and technique, 501.
_See also_ Cultures; Polis; Pseudomorphosis; Rome
Claudii, and Roman history, 336;
social composition, 357
Claudius I, importance, 50
Claudius, Appius, and sons of freedmen, 166 n.;
and peasantry, 408, 410;
and consul-list, 409 n.;
and Punic War, 410;
reforms and demagogy, 458
Clausewitz, Karl von, inversion of phrase, 330 n.;
as military writer, 419 n.
Clearing-house, electrical analogy, 490 n.
Clement, Saint, period, 250
Cleomenes I, and helots, 396
Cleomenes III, fall, 65;
and Sphærus, 454 n.
Cleomenes, Alexander’s administrator, and speculation, 484
Cleon, as mass-leader, 448 n.
Clergy. _See_ Priesthood
Climate, and man’s history, 39 n.
Clisthenes, and Homer, 386
Clock, as Western symbol, 300 n.
Clodius. _See_ Claudius
Cluniacs, as rural, 92
Cluny, and reform, 296
Coal, and slaves, 488 n.
Code, Civil, position, 76
Code of Manu, on Sudra, 332
Coins, and “Money,” 481 n., 483;
as Classical symbol, 486;
Western attitude, 490
Coke, Sir Edward, and Roman law, 78, 365 n.
Collinet, Paul, on Justinian’s Digests, 70 n.
Colonate, end, 357
Colonization, significance of Classical, 354, 355;
cultural basis, 382 n.
Colonna, and Papacy, 354
Colonus, vassalage, 350
Colosseum, decay, 107 n.
Colour, symbolism in Western religion, 289
Comitia Centuriata, and money, 410;
and Punic War, 410;
supporters, 451
Comitia Tributa, and conquest, 410;
supporters, 451
Commentary on sacred books, authoritative chain, 247, 248
Common law, development, 76, 78
Community. _See_ Consensus
Comnena, Anna, on crusaders, 89
Compass, Chinese invention, 501 n.
Compassion, and being, 273;
and chivalry, 273
Comradeship, and race, 126
Conception, as sin, 272. _See also_ Sex
Condés, feudal force, 350 n.
Confession. _See_ Contrition
“Confession of Peter,” 220
Confucianism, and “Persian” religion, 260;
as end of culture, 286;
Rationalism, 306, 307, 309;
Syncretism, 315;
and nobility, 357;
and Cæsarism, 434
Confucius, deification, 314;
on Hwang, 388
Congress of Princes, 38, 304
_Connubium_, cult basis, 69
Conrad II, emperor, feudal law, 371
Conscription, as phase of Civilization, 420;
as substitute for war, 428;
effect of World War, 429
Consensus, as Arabian principle, 59, 73, 210;
Arabian community of elect, 242;
and Arabian monasticism, 253;
phases of Jewish, 315-317, 320
Constance, Council of, and feudalism, 374
Constantine the Great, and Roman law as Christian, 69;
and Byzantium, 89;
and cult and nationality, 178, 230, 243, 253;
as prince and prelate, 204, 258;
and Nicæa, 257
Constantine VII, and Romanos, 426
Constitutio Antoniana, 68
Constitutions, incomplete system of written, 361;
written and living, 369;
doctrinaire government, 413-415;
foresight, 415 n.;
status of American, 430 n.;
character of German (1919), 457 n.
_See also_ Politics
Consuls, origin of term, 374 n.;
beginning, 382;
and Senate, 409;
as forged ancestors, 409 n.;
and party, 451
Contemplation, cultural basis, 242
Contemporaneity, intercultural, 39-42
Contending States, period in China, 38, 40, 339, 416-419, 454
Contrition, Western sacrament and Arabian submission, and Grace,
240-242;
as supreme Western religious concept, 293, 295;
and happiness, 294;
effect of decline, 294, 298, 299;
as English idea, 294 n.;
and Luther’s faith-concept, 298
Conversion, and Arabian cult-nationality, 219
Copan, and Mexican Culture, 44
Corcyra, massacre, 405
Cordus, Cremutius, history burnt, 434
Corinth, royal succession, 380;
destruction, 489
Corporation, and Arabian juridical person, 174 n.
Corpus Christi, and thanksgiving, 293
Corpus Juris, position in Arabian Culture, 71, 74;
and Western law, 76-78;
and canon law, 77
Corpus Juris Germanici, development, 76-78
Corruption, political so-called, 458
Cortes, beginning, 373
Cortez, Hernando, force in conquest, 44 n.
Cos, style of school, 345
Cosmic, relation of plant and animal to, 3, 4, 15;
beat, feel, 4, 5;
organs, 5;
being, 7;
crowd and beat, 18;
and history, 23, 24;
in architecture, 92;
and sex, 327;
earth and universe, 392 n.
_See also_ Being; Landscape; Microcosm; Plant; Race
Cosmogony, of Genesis, 209 n.
Cosmopolitanism, and intelligentsia, 184. _See also_
Megalopolitanism
Costume, as expression-language, 134
Councils, spirit of Arabian and Western Christian, 59;
and pope, 374
Country, cosmic, 89;
relation to town, 91, 94;
as Gothic, 93;
historyless, 96.
_See also_ Peasantry
Courts, Roman, and politics, 459. _See also_ Jurisprudence;
Roman law
Crassus Dives, M. Licinius, and money, 402;
Triumvirate and Cæsarism, 423;
politics and finance, 458, 459;
and court, 459
Credit-system, Western concept, 489. _See also_ Money
Crete, Minoan art and Mycenæ, 87-89;
and ethnology, 129;
and Mycenæan beast-deities, 276 n.
Criticism, relation to science and history, 24
Cromwell, Oliver, Puritan manifestation, 302;
power, 389;
dictatorship, 390
Cross, and Tree of Knowledge, 180 n.
Croton, Sybaris, 303;
style of school, 345
Crowd and mob, cosmic beat, 18;
and Cultures, 18;
ethic, 342;
fourth estate, 358;
and leaders, 376;
rise of power, 399
Crusades, and Arabian Civilization, 43;
as rural, 97;
and nationalism, 180;
Jewish parallel, 198
Ctesiphon, school, 200;
location, 200 n.
Cujacius, and Roman law, 77
Cult, and dogma, cultural attitude, 200, 201;
technique, and myth, 268, 499.
_See also_ Religion
Cultures, as beings, cosmic beat, 19, 35;
historic and ahistoric, 24, 27;
as basis of history, 26, 27, 44, 46-51;
primitive, character, 33, 34;
mutation, 33, 36;
primitive and pre-Culture, 35, 89;
comparative study, 36-38;
destined course, 37;
future, 37;
problems of study, 37-39;
and landscape study, 39 n., 46;
dating, 39 n.;
contemporary periods, 39-42;
inter-Cultures, 87-89;
and “return to nature,” 135;
and writing, 150;
relation of people, 169, 170;
and nations, 170-173, 362;
narrow circle of understanding, 280;
and religious creativeness, 308;
intercultural dissonance, race and time elements, 317-323;
passing, 435;
economic underlay, 474;
distinct economic styles, 477;
money-symbols, 486.
_See also_ Arabian; Art; Babylonian; Chinese; Civilization;
Classical; Economics; Egyptian; Fellahism; History; Indian;
Landscape; Language; Mexican; Macrocosm; Morphology; Natural
science; Politics; Race; Religion; Russian; Technique; Town;
Western
Cumont, Franz, on old Persian religion, 207
Customs, purpose, 475 n.
Cuvier, Baron Georges, theory, 31
Cynics, Pietism, 308;
and Socrates, 309
Cyprus, massacre, 321 n.
Cyrene, massacre, 198 n.
Damascenus, John, as Al Manzor, 260
Damascius, as biographer, 252;
anchorite, 254
Damiani, Petrus, and Mary-cult, 288
Danai, as name, 161, 164
Daniel, fictitious, 72 n.
Dante Alighieri, and Devil-cult, 292;
and “virtue,” 307 n.
Darius the Great, Behistun Inscription, 166, 207
Darwinism, shallowness, 31;
palæontological reputation, mutation, 32;
and race determination, 124;
and genealogy, 180
Death, man and fear, 15, 16;
relation to light, 265;
as punishment, 272;
and Classical cults, 283;
hunger-death and hero-death, 471
Decemvirs, code, 65;
significance, 396
Dediticii peregrins, as class, 68
Dehio, Georg, on houses and architecture, 121
Deism, as technic, 306
Delbrück, Hans, on ancient armies, 40 n., 199 n.;
on migrant minority, 164
Delos, slave market, 489;
temples as banks, 493 n.
Demeter cult, Homer’s ignoring, 282;
and Pythagoreans, 282;
survival, 282 n.;
and sex, 283;
power, 290 n.
Demeter-Dionysus-Kore cult, in Rome, 386
Democracy (Third Estate), urban, 97;
relation to other estates, 334;
rise as contradiction, 355-358;
Plebs, 357, 408-411;
rise of Classical, 387;
Classical, in inter-Tyrannis period, 394-398;
rise as independent force, 398;
negative unity, 399;
and mob, 399;
nationalism, and unity, 400-402, 485, 506;
in England, 402;
class dictatorship, 403, 404;
and Parliamentarism, 416;
period in Arabian Culture, 424-426;
decay, 433;
and party, 449;
end, 463-465;
social and economic form, 478;
and machine industry, 504 n.
_See also_ Politics
Democritus, atomic theory, 58
Depth-experience, Western, “I” as light-centre, 8;
and nations, 179;
as prime symbol, 288;
and gunpowder and printing, 460;
and technique, 501-504
Descartes, René, and doubt, 12
Destiny, and cosmic beat, 4;
and facts, 12;
human (cosmic) type, 16-19;
and natural science, 31;
in nations, 170;
faith, cultural basis of fate, 266;
and sex, 327, 329;
nobility as, 335, 336, 340;
States as, 363;
in war, 429, 434.
_See also_ Being; Causality; History; Race; Time; Will
Deutero-Isaiah, Persian influence, 208
Devil-cult, development of Western, 288-291;
Renaissance and, 291;
and contrition, 293;
and Protestantism, 299;
Puritanism, 302;
and machine, 502, 504 n., 505.
_See also_ Witchcraft
Diadochi, and Arabian Culture, 190;
struggle, 408
Diakrii, and Tyrannis, 386
Dictatorship, of class, money and Rationalism 403-405. _See
also_ Politics
Diels, Hermann, on Classical technique, 501 n.
Dike, age, 376, 378, 381
Dikhans, aristocracy, 353
Diocletian, distorted importance, 38;
and orthodoxy, 178;
and Nicodemia, 191;
army, 199;
era, 139;
Church and State, 243, 253;
Syncretism, 252;
feudalism, 349, 423;
fiscal machinery, 371, 496;
and economics, 480 n.
Diodorus, on Roman tenements, 102
Dionysiac cult, Homer’s ignoring, 282;
survival, 282 n.;
power, 290 n.;
and Tyrannis, 386
Dionysius I, executions, 405;
and army, 406;
and conquered territory, 407;
war technique, 420
Dionysius the Areopagite, fictitious, 72 n.
Diplomacy, contrapuntal politics, 381;
basis, 440;
and war, 440
Direction, historical, 361
Discovery, and Western history-picture, 28, 46, 501
Dispensation, and valuation, 267
Dispersion, Jewish, as misnomer, 210
Disraeli, Benjamin, Jew and Englishman, 320
Divorce, English reform, 64 n.;
civil and ecclesiastical conflict, 365 n.
Dodington, George B., on party loyalty, 403 n.
Dogma, and cult, cultural attitude, 200-202
Dominicans, as urban, 92;
and Mary-cult, 288;
and Inquisition, 291
Donellus, Hugo, and Roman law, 77
Doomesday-Book, 371 n., 372
Dorians, no nation, 173
Doric, as cosmic, 92;
name and migration, 161, 162
Dostoyevski, Feodor M., on Petersburg, 193;
and Russian soul, 194-196;
and Socialism, 218;
religion, 295 n.;
and money, 495 n.
Dracon, laws, 64, 65;
class law, 365
Drama, as urban, 93;
origin of Chinese, 286
Dreams, and cognition, 14
Druses, and Trinity, 237
Dualism, in Arabian Culture, 233-236, 244;
and substance controversy, 256;
Chinese, 287;
in moral, 341
Dukas, power, 427
Dukhobors, as manifestation, 278
Duns Scotus, Joannes, will and reason, 241;
and Devil-cult, 291
Dyarchy, Augustinian, 432, 433
Dynamics. _See_ Force; Motion; Technique
Dynastic idea, Western, 179-183, 378, 381;
and overthrow of monarchy, language struggles, 183;
Arabian, 330 n., 378, 379, 423, 424;
basis, 336;
relation to priesthood, 337;
and officialdom, 371;
elements, 377, 378;
Chinese and Egyptian, 379;
Classical, and oligarchy, 380, 381;
union with and against non-estate, 386, 387;
European absolutism, 388;
statesmen as leaders, 389;
in Thirty Years’ War, 389;
in Fronde struggles, outcome, 390;
republic as anti-dynastic, 413.
_See also_ Politics
Eastern Empire. _See_ Byzantine Empire
Ebionites, origin, 220 n.;
disappearance, 252
Eckart, Meister, on Mysticism, 292;
and Devil-cult, 303
Economics, and writing, 152, 155;
classes and political estates, 333, 348, 477;
relation to politics, power and booty, 344, 345, 347, 474-476;
and learning, 347;
and estates, 356, 357;
and class-history, 367 n.;
material basis of English concept, 469;
not self-contained, 469;
English premisses of usual concept, 469, 479;
real, as physiognomic, 470;
and politics as sides of being, 470, 471;
“in form” as self-regarding, 471;
hunger-death, 471;
relation to family, 471;
significance of history, form-language, 472;
customary ethic, 472;
and religion, 473;
waking-being in, 473;
producing and acquisitive, 474;
under city life, 476;
morphology, 476-480;
production, preparation, and distribution, 478;
subjects and objects in classes, 479, 493;
no worker-class, 479 n.;
spring time of Culture, traffic in “goods,” and “possession,” 480;
status of dealer then, 481;
early small-scale traffic, 481 n.;
town life and trade, “wares” and money measure, 481-484;
fortune displaces possession, 483;
as urban, under Civilization, 484.
_See also_ Money; Technique; Waking-being
Ecstasy, Arabian, 242, 244, 245
Eddas, and nature and history, 286 n.
Edessa, location, 200 n.;
and substance controversy, 256
Edinburgh, as intellectual centre, 305 n.
Education, universal, as instrument of press, 462
Egyptian Culture, as historic, 28;
problems of study, 38;
Hyksos Period, 38, 41, 428 n., 453;
date of beginning, 39 n.;
basis of law, 67 n.;
Minoan art, 88;
Civilization and depopulation, 106;
and sea-folk, 109, 122, 164;
alphabetical script, 152;
nations under, 178 n.;
beast-deities, 276 n.;
religion and way symbol, 279, 281;
Re religion as Reformation, 296;
Syncretism, 313;
early nobility, 350;
and genealogy, 351;
relation of primary estates, 353;
Pharaoh as Horus, 373;
feudalism and interregnum, 375;
dynastic-idea, 379, 380;
Fronde in, 386;
Middle Kingdom, absolutism, 387;
period of Cæsarism, 427, 435;
money concept, 486, 489 n., 491 n.;
financial organization, 495.
_See also_ Cultures
Elections, as civil war, 415;
decay, electorate as objects, 432, 456, 463;
as political means, suffrage and technique, 447;
size and influence of electorate, 455.
_See also_ Democracy
Electors, rise in Empire, 373;
and Thirty Years’ War, 388, 391
Electricity, clearing-house analogy, 490 n.
Elephantine documents, 209
Eleusinian mysteries, 203
Elkazites, origin, 220 n.;
disappearance, 252
Elxai, sacred book, 220 n.
Empedocles, suicide, 283
Emperor-mythology, Chinese, 286, 379
Emperor-worship, and law of creed-communities, 68;
Western and Eastern aspects, 203;
and Syncretism, 253;
Chinese, 313;
Cicero and, 433
Empire, as Germanic idea, 181. _See also_ Imperialism
Engineer, as master of Western technique, 504, 505
England, development of law, 62, 75, 76, 78;
and dynastic idea, 183;
and Western religious concepts, 294 n.;
politics and predestination, 304;
property law, 371;
Normans and finance, 372;
Magna Charta and control by nobility, rise of Parliament, 373;
Puritan Revolution, 389, 390;
eighteenth-century class absolutism, 392-394;
Parliamentarism and democracy, reform, 402-404, 412, 412 n., 414;
politics, Rationalism and money, 403, 441;
and French Revolution, 411, 412;
cessation of yeomanry, 449 n.;
political flair, 451;
and conception of economics, 469, 479
Enoch, fictitious, 72 n.
Ephesus, Council of, and Christian split, 257;
and reform, 296
Ephors, and succession, 380
Epic, as rural, 93;
Russian hero-tales, 192;
Arabian period, 250.
_See also_ Literature
Epicurus, cult, 314
Epimenides, as dogmatist, 282
Epistemology. _See_ Knowledge
Epoch, as term, 33 n.
Equality, and party, 449
Equities, big-money party, 402;
creation, 411;
decay, 432;
and populus, 451
Equity, and statute law, 363
Eras, as Arabian idea, 239
Erckert, Roderich von, on Jewish type, 175
Erigena, John Scotus, world-concept, 242 n.
Essenes, tendency, 211
Estates, beginning, 280;
as term, 329 n.;
“in form” and cultural history, 330-332;
and residue classes, caste, 332-334;
and occupation classes, 333, 348, 477;
relation to non-estate, 334;
and society, 343;
build and course of Cultures, 347;
primary, and economy and science, 347;
relation to peasantry, vassalage, 348, 349;
end of primary, 357;
primary and existence of State, 362;
and laws, 364;
contest with State, 366;
final effort for rule, 385, 386;
and parties, 449.
_See also_ Democracy; Nobility; Politics; Priesthood
Ethics, and truth, 144;
Jesus and morals, 217;
meaning of religious, 271, 272;
moral defined, negations and being, 272-274;
character of social, 273;
duality of moral, noble and priestly, 341;
custom-ethic, crowd, honour, 342, 343;
in economic life, 348, 472;
dual moral and law, 363.
_See also_ Philosophy; Religion; Truth
Etruscan language, and Roman cults, 154 n.;
as Roman, 395 n.
Etruscans, as name, and people, 164;
no nation, 173
Eubulus of Athens, and finance, 372, 494
Eudaimonia, Rationalism, 307
Eugene IV, pope, insurgent faction, 381 n.
Euhemerism, 306
Evolution. _See_ Darwinism
E’we language, 140
Exchequer, origin of term, 372
Exegesis. _See_ Sacred books
Exekias, vase-painting, 135
Exilarch, position, 208
Expansion, political aspect of Classical conquests, 407. _See
also_ Imperialism
Experience, egoistic basis, 26
Expositio, of German law, 76
Expression, defined, 133
Ezekiel, Persian influence, 208;
and Talmud, 208;
revelation, 245
Ezra, and Talmud, 208
Fabii, and Roman history, 336
Factions, political, 448
Factory-worker, as agent of Western technique, 504
Facts, and truths, 11, 12;
as starting point of history, 47;
and politics, 368
Faith, defined, and intellect, 266, 269, 271;
and life, 271;
Luther’s concept and contrition, 298;
under Rationalism, 308, 309.
_See also_ Religion; Truth
Falasha, as Jews, 176 n.;
as tribe, 348, 479
Family, and State, 329, 336;
cultural basis, 330;
relation of priesthood, 337;
cultural styles of nobility, 350, 351;
“in form” relation, 362;
inward experience, 365;
and economic side of being, 471.
_See also_ Sex
Fan-Sui, character, 419
_Fas_, and _jus_, 72, 78
Fate, cultural attitude, 267. _See also_ Destiny; Religion
Faustian Culture. _See_ Western Culture
Fear, human, relation to invisible, 8, 12;
of death, 15, 16;
and “thou,” 133;
and speech, 133, 139;
and Arabian apocalypse, 212;
and religion, 265
Feeling, and understanding, 136;
language and domination of intellect, 144, 145
Fehbellin, battle, importance, 182
Fellahism, as post-Civilization residue, 105;
as term, 169;
of Arabian nations, 178;
and pacifism, 185, 186;
religious, 314;
rigidity, 362
Ferdinand V of Spain, dynasty-idea, 381
Feudalism, cultural contemporaries, 39, 40;
Arabian, 196-199;
Byzantine, 199;
vassalage, 349;
union of power and booty, fiscal machinery, 371, 372;
rise, idea, 371, 376;
Western national stirrings, 372;
rise of control by Western nobility, 372, 374;
world-power idea, Empire-Papacy contest, 373, 374;
Classical, and polis, 374;
decay, interregnum, 375;
economy, 477
Ficinus, Marcilius, and Devil-cult, 291
Fictitious authorship, significance in Arabian Culture, 72 n.
Fifty-year period, cultural rhythm, 392 n.
Finance, rise of officialdom, 371;
classical attitude, 383. _See also_ Money
Finck, F. N., on word and sentence, 141
Firm, as Western symbol, 490
Flaminius, C., significance, 65;
conquest, 408;
consul-list, 409 n.;
and finance, 410, 411;
and party, 451
Flaminius, T. Quinctius, and political organization, 452
Flavius, Cneius, son of freedman, 166 n.
Force, alteration in concept, 307;
Western dynamic Rationalism, 309.
_See also_ Motion; Technique
Foreign relations, unilateral law, 364-366;
in conflict of estates and State, 367;
importance of inner authority, 369;
as field of high politics, 440, 447;
war as primary relation, 440.
_See also_ Peace; War
Form, being “in form,” 330;
of historical movement, 361;
family and State, 362;
Civilization and loss, Cæsarism, 398, 404, 406, 418, 431;
economic “in form,” 471
Fortune, as displacing possession, 483
Fourier, François, M. C., and English economics, 469
Fourth Estate, significance, 358. _See also_ Crowd
Fox, Charles James, and French Revolution, 412
France, Anatole, on law, 64;
and moral, 272 n.
France, sterility, 106;
national origin, 182;
States-General, 373;
absolutism and Fronde, 388, 390;
impractical politics, 403;
financial and military rule, 415.
_See also_ French Revolution
Francis of Assisi, and compassion, 273
Franciscans, as urban, 92
Francke, August H., Pietism, 308
Franco-German War, German bankers and French loans, 402 n.
Frangipani, and Papacy, 354
Frankish dynasty, notion, 379 n.
Fratres Arvales, end of records, 255;
rites, 314;
formal restoration, 433
Frau Holde, and Mary-cult, 299
Frederick I Barbarossa, and Henry the Lion, 180 n.
Frederick II, emperor, and finance, 372, 489
Frederick the Great of Prussia, and conscription, 420 n.;
tact of command, 444;
economics and politics, 475
Frederick William of Brandenburg, as real ruler, 389
Frederick William I of Prussia, and army, 415;
as politician, 443;
finance, 489
Frederick William III of Prussia, and army, 406
Freedom, rise of idea, significance, 354, 356, 358;
as negation, 456;
and money, 481 n.
French Revolution, and dynastic idea, 183;
political significance, 387;
struggle for internal control, 398;
not economic, 399 n.;
and mob, 400;
English ideas and practices, 403, 411, 412;
as unique, 411;
and set of incidents, 411 n.
Frobenius, Leo, on primitive Culture, 33;
on Arabian “cavern,” 233
Fronde, significance, 386, 404;
European absolutism, 388;
principle in Thirty Years’ War, 389;
struggle elsewhere, outcome, 390, 404;
period in Arabian Culture, 423
Fugger, city nobility, 356;
small-scale traffic, 481 n.
Function, Western money concept, 486, 489
Furniture, race in, 122
Gaia cult, 283
Gaius, Institutes, 67
Galba, unimportance, 50
Gallienus, mounted corps, 199;
historyless, 432
Gamaliel, influence, 209
Gao-dsung, and Nestorians, 260
Gathas, Gnosis, 228
Gelnhausen, cathedral art, 123
Gelon, and Syracuse, 382 n.
Genealogy, and fear, 265;
time-mythology, 286;
as Western-principle, 350;
and Chinese ancestry-worship, 351;
inherited will, 377;
and money, 449 n.
_See also_ Dynastic idea
Genesis, influences, 209 n.
Georgia, State religion, 253
Germanic law, development, 75, 76
Germany, and Roman law, 76, 77;
and Western Civilization, 109;
dynasty and nationalism, 181-183;
politics, army, and administration, 415, 444;
character of constitution of 1919, 457 n.
_See also_ Holy Roman Empire; Prussia
Gesture, as sign of language, punctuation, 134;
and words, 140 n.
Ghassanids, court, poetry, 198
Ghetto, as Jewish mode, 315, 317
Giotto, as Gothic, 291
Gnosis, and Chaldean, 176;
Eastern and Western forms, 228, 229, 250
Godwin, William, and Third Estate, 403 n.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, and cosmic beat, 5;
historical attunement, 30;
form-fulfilment theory, 32, 32 n.;
on parts of a Culture, 37 n.;
on world-literature, 108;
form and untruth, 137 n.;
on German nationalism and poetry, 182;
on freedom, 267;
on confession, 295;
on doer, 442;
on book-keeping, 490
Gold reserve and standard, and credit, 491 n. _See also_ Money
Golden Age, Classical, 239
Gomdan, stronghold, 197
Good, as evaluation, 241 n.
Goods, early traffic, 480
Goslar, cathedral art, 123
Gospels, fictitious authorship, 72 n.;
character, 212;
picture, 217 n.;
Mark, 223;
John, 226, 234, 244, 245, 250;
warrantry, 248
Gothic, as cosmic, 92, 93;
cathedral, 122, 123, 153;
and Baroque science, 270;
Renaissance as return, 291;
and personality, 293;
and Reformation, 296;
result on Jews of contact, 317-319;
and technique, 502, 503
Gould, Benjamin A., on American race, 119
Government. _See_ Politics
Gracchi, importance, 47, 50;
and rural citizens, 384 n.;
financing, 402;
and money, 410, 494;
disorders, 423;
and Tribunate, 433;
and party, 451;
and political theory, 454;
and electorate, 457 n.;
and courts, 460
Grace, plurality of idea, 59;
as Arabian doctrine, 234, 241, 242;
Western concept, 292
Grammar, sentence and word, 141, 145;
and syntax, 142;
lost origin, 146;
and vocabularies as basis of linguistic families, 147;
Indogermanic, 148;
and writing, 149
Granada, as world-city, 99;
Jewish city, 316
Gratian, Decretum, 77, 290
Great Protectors, Chinese period, 40
Great Wall, contemporary, 41
Greek, as language of Christianity, 224, 252, 256;
as Roman language, 395 n.
Greek fire, purpose, 502 n.
Greek Orthodox Church, picture series, 116. _See also_
Christianity
Greeks, no nation, 173;
as adherents of Syncretic cults, 176;
as Christian Church, 177;
modern security as Byzantine relic, 323
Gregory VII, pope, and world-power, 373
Gregory of Tours, history and Karamzin’s narrative, 192;
religiousness, 277
Groot, Jan J. M. de, mistake on Chinese religions, 286 n.
Grosseteste, Robert, philosophy, 8 n., 172 n.;
as scientist, 300
Gudunov {sic}, Boris, period, 192
Guilds, status, and tribal organization, 348
Gundisapora, school, 200;
location, 200 n.
Gunpowder, and printing, 460;
Chinese discovery, 501 n.;
and Greek fire, 502 n.
Habsburgs, and Austrian nation, 182;
and world-history, 336
Hadramaut, Axumite kings, 197 n.
Hadrian, legal edict, 66
Hague Conference, as prelude of war, 430
Halakha, Jewish and Christian, 221
Hallgerd, as destiny, 329
Halo, significance, 378
Halyburton, Thomas, on divine-given torments, 299 n.
Hamdanids, rule, 197
Hamilcar Barca, Spanish conquest, 408
Hammurabi, code, 75 n.
Han dynasties, 41;
fall, 314
Hanifs, Puritanism, 304
Hannibal, and Hellenism, 191, 422;
and border States, 408
Hansa, small-scale traffic, 481 n.
Haoma-drinking, 203, 207
Hasidim, sect, 255, 321
Hatshepsut, and Egyptian history, 434
Hauran, feudalism, 196
Heaven, Arabian and Western, 292;
Western and Russian, 295 n.
Hebrew, fate of spoken and written, 73 n.
Hegel, Georg W. F., and law of nature, 78;
and numbers, 269 n.
Hellenes, as name, 161, 173
Hellenism, as fellah, 185;
and Cannæ and Zama, 191, 422;
Paganism and Christianity, 203, 204;
materialism and myth, 310.
_See also_ Pseudomorphosis
Helots, status, 322, 349;
attempt to emancipate, 357
Henotheism, Arabian, 201. _See also_ Religion
Henry IV, emperor, contemporaries, 39
Henry VI, emperor, and world-power, 374
Henry VII of England, dynasty-idea, 381
Hermes Trismegistus, fictitious, 72 n.
Hermetic Pœmander, 213 n.
Hermetics, collection as canon, 247;
period, 250
Hermopolis, cult, 279, 281
Hero, and technique, 501
Herod, Hellenism, 211
Herodotus, on Persians, 167;
inaccuracy on Egypt, 333
Heroism, and race, 339;
hero-death, 471
Herrnhut, Pietism, 308
Hesiod, and Classical religious beginnings, 282
Hia dynasty, mythology, 286, 379 n.
Hiang-Sui, peace league, 429
Hidalgo, meaning, 342 n.
Hierocles, breviary, 252
Hijra, era, 239
Himaryites, history, 197 n.;
Jewish State religion, 153
Hinayana doctrine, 312
Hippodamus of Miletus, city-plan, 100
History, and cosmic and microcosmic, 23, 24;
adjustment to horizon, cultural aspect, 24, 25;
subjective basis, 26, 29;
cultural history-pictures, 27, 28;
Western Culture and infinite, 28;
irrational culminative division scheme, 28, 37, 55, 190;
Western Culture and individuality in historical attunement,
planes,
29;
future uniform physiognomic, 30;
enlarged possibilities, restoration and prediction, 36;
Cultures and significance, 44;
true definition and treatment, physiognomic fact, 46, 47;
biological sense of primitive, 48;
and final objects, 48;
Cultures and historical man, 48;
exhaustion of Civilization and historylessness, 48-51;
actualization of the spiritual, 49;
intra- and intercultural, 55;
cultural plurality, soul and transfer of form, 55-60;
importance of negative cultural influences, 57-59;
cultural transfer of Christianity as example, 59, 60;
of Roman Law as example, 60-83;
city’s “visage” as, 94;
and classes, 96;
and Civilization, superficial, 109, 339;
and race, 116;
and writing, 150, 153;
relation to people, 165, 169, 170, 181;
and nations, 171;
and faith and science, 271;
and moral, 272;
of truths, 274;
Western sense, influence of contrition, 294;
in intercultural dissonance, 319;
sex war, 328;
cosmic-politic duality, family and State, 329;
“in form” estates and making, 330;
cultural tradition, 338;
being-streams as true, 339;
and State, 361;
as court, high decision, 507.
_See also_ Being; Cultures; Destiny; Landscape; Nature;
Politics; Race; Sex; Time
Hogarth, William, art sermons, 116
Hohenstaufens, results of fall, 181
Hohenzollerns, and Prussia, 182
Holy Roman Empire, significance, 181;
electorate, 373;
world-power and contest with Papacy, 373, 374;
decay, 376;
Thirty Years’ War, Wallenstein, 388-391;
provincial horizons, 392
Holy Synod, 278
Homer, urban language, 125 n.;
indifference to religion, 281;
feudal evidences, 374;
and talent, 486
Ho-nan-fu, as royal residence, 92
Honour, and class, 342;
as basic concept of ethics, 343;
in economic life, 472
Horten, Max, on popular Islam, 237 n.
Horus-hawk cult, end, 279, 373
Hou-li, as religious source, 286
House, Minoan and Mycenæan, 88;
farmhouse as symbol, 90;
megalopolitan, 99;
and architecture, 120;
as expression of race, 120-122;
as totem, history, 121;
and ornament, 121;
and family, 329;
political and economic expression, 471
Hsinan-tang, in India, 107
Hugo de St. Victor, Arabian contemporaries, 250
Huguccio, pun, 77 n.
Humanism, field, 291 n. _See also_ Renaissance
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, on language, 117 n.;
and State, 366 n.;
on politics and literature, 439 n.
Hume, David, and economic thought, 403, 469
Hunac Ceel, rule, 45
Hunger-death, 471
Huns, Chinese repulse and Western attack, 41
Hus, John, and reform, 296
Huxley, Thomas H., race classification, 125
Hwang of Tsi, as protector, 388
Hwang-ti, rise, 38;
as title, 41;
cult, 314;
economics and politics, 475
Hybrias the Cretan, and _carpe diem_, 383
Hybris, doctrine, 282, 301
Hyksos Period, meaning, 38, 41;
preliminaries, 386;
and Cæsarism, 427;
as term, 428 n.;
and political theory, 453
Hypothesis, and usefulness, 144
Hyrcanus, Hellenism, 211
Iamblichus, and Pagan Church, Syncretism, 204, 252;
on divine substance, 256;
and numbers, 269 n.
Ibas, and substance controversy, 256
Ibn Sina, style of canon, 346
Ibsen, Henrik, and marriage, 105
Ice Age, man in, 33
Iconoclasm. _See_ Images
Ilya Muromyets, hero, 192
Images, in Pagan churches, 204;
basis of worship, 256;
Arabian and Greek iconoclasm, 304, 425.
_See also_ Monophysites
Immaculate Conception, as English idea, 294 n.
Immortality, cultural basis, 59. _See also_ Death
Imperialism, Chinese, 38, 41;
Indian, 41 n.;
collapse of Roman, 42;
Calvin-Loyola struggle, 299;
political aspect of Classical conquests, 407;
cultural necessity, 422 n., 424.
_See also_ Politics
Indian Culture, ahistoric, and script, 36, 150, 152;
problems of study, 38;
and Imperialism, 41 n.;
fate in, 267;
beginning of religion, 281;
Rationalism, 307;
style of priesthood, 352;
relation of primary estates, 353;
and world-power, 373 n.
_See also_ Buddhism; Cultures
Indians, and Americans, 119;
gesture language, 140 n., 147
Indogermanic system, alien words, 148;
youth, question of grammar, 148;
effect of ahistoric Cultures, 150;
basis of coherence, 166;
and Persians, 166-169;
and Western genealogical ideal, 181
Industry. _See_ Economics; Technique
Infinity, in Western Culture, 46. _See also_ Depth-experience
Innocent III, pope, and world-power, 374;
as politician, 442
Inquisition, and Devil-cult, 291
Inscriptions, as taboo, 121 n.
Insula Feliculæ, 101
Intelligence, as tension, 102;
language as vehicle of dominance, 144, 145;
and race-traits, 166;
aristocracy, 166 n.;
and cosmopolitanism, 184;
Jesus and, 216-218;
Paul’s introduction with Christianity, 221;
Jewish period, 316;
and primary estates, 356, 357;
and Cæsarism, 433.
_See also_ Causality; Knowledge; Rationalism; Thought; Town;
Understanding; Waking-being
International law, and Roman _jus gentium_, 61. _See also_
Foreign relations
Internationalism, as element of Jewry, 320
Interregnum, cultural period, significance, 375
Interrex, and oligarchy, 375
Inventions, Western, 501. _See also_ Technique
Ionic, as microcosmic, 92
Ipsus, battle, importance, 422
Irak, slave-rebellion, 426, 428 n.
Irenæus, and Western Church, 229;
and commentary, 247;
period, 250
Irnerius, and Roman law, 77
Isaac Hassan (ibn Sid), as scientist, 316
Isaiah, as Arabian prophet, 205
Isidore, biography, 252
Isis cult, origin, 201, 310
Islam, as Puritanism, 74, 302-304;
and nationality, 178;
Logos, 236;
significance as term, 240;
community of elect, 243;
and substance controversy, 256;
Monophysites and starting point, 258;
missionarism, 259, 304;
earlier Arabian religions and success, 260;
as Arabian manifestation, 304;
fellahism, 315;
basis for endurance, 323;
political aristocracy of beginning, 424.
_See also_ Arabian Culture; Mohammed; Religion; Sufism
Isocrates, and class dictatorship, 404
Israelites, tribal association, 175. _See also_ Jews
Italy, union as Germanic dynastic creation, 181;
city-republic finance, 489
Ivan III, and Tartars, 192
Ivan IV, the Terrible, period, 192
I-Wang, contemporaries, 39;
and feudalism, 349 n., 375
Jabna, Council of, on revelation, 245
Jackson, Andrew, and party, 451
Jacopone da Todi, and reform, 296
Jainism, Rationalism, 307
James, Saint, Gospel, 223 n.
James I of England, and marriage-alliance, 389
Jansenists, Puritan manifestation, 302
Japan, cultural status, 49 n., 108, 323, 421 n.
Jason of Pheræ, politics, 407
Jehuda, Rabbi, period, 250
Jehuda ben Halevi, and science, 315
Jeremiah, as Arabian prophet, 205
Jerusalem, relation to Jewry, 204, 208, 210
Jespersen, Otto, on origin of language, 138
Jesubocht, Corpus, 75
Jesuits, as urban, 92. _See also_ Loyola
Jesujabh III, on conversion to Islam, 260
Jesus, and ceremonial, 134 n.;
life and biography, 212;
and John the Baptist, Mandæanism, 214;
connotation of “Nazarene,” 214 n.;
self-view as prophet and Messiah, 215;
townlessness, 215;
before Pilate, faith and fact, 216, 473 n.;
metaphysical world, 217;
effect of Resurrection, 218;
romances of birth and childhood, 224, 237, 250;
world-image, and apocalyptic, 237, 239;
and submission, 240.
_See also_ Christianity; Logos; Substance
Jews, creed basis of law, Talmud, 69;
jurisprudence, 71;
pre-cultural law, 75;
comradeship and race in European, 126, 127;
tribal types, 175;
ignored phases of religious history, 191;
crusade, 198;
Yahweh cult in Syncretism, 201;
Judaism as Arabian prophetic religion, 204-207;
effect of exile, apocalypse and Persian influence, 207;
Judaistic minority, Talmudic development, 208;
Exilarch majority, 208, 210;
law and the prophets as separate, 209;
post-exilic (springtime) increase, spirit, 209, 316;
Judea and Jewry, fall of Jerusalem as liberation, 209-211;
tendencies, rescue from pseudomorphic Hellenism, 210, 211;
end of apocalypse, 211;
Judaism and exclusive Messiah Christian sects, disappearance, 219,
220, 252;
Paul and Judaism, 221;
era, 239;
and revelation, 245;
separation of Christianity, 251;
missionarism, 259;
Mazdak reformation, end of theology, 261;
fellah-religion, 315, 323;
Arabian-type nationality and ghetto, 315, 317;
intellectual (Baroque) period, in Spain, 316;
spiritual character of period, 316;
Civilization period, results of contact with Gothic, 317-319;
race and piety phases of later antagonism, 318-320;
landless consensus and Western patriotism, 320;
fixed alien metaphysic phase, 321;
and Western Civilization, 322;
danger of dissolution, 323;
economic rôle, 481 n.;
and machine-industry, 504 n.
_See also_ Arabian Culture; Religion
Jezidi, and Trinity, 236
Joachim of Floris, world-conception, 28;
Arabian contemporaries, 250;
and reform, 296
Job, Book of, character, 208;
and will, 242
John Gospel, 226;
Mani and, 227, 251 n.;
dualism, 234;
on God and the Word, 244;
as a Koran, 245;
and Old Testament, 245;
period, 250
John the Baptist, Mandæanism, and Jesus, 214;
order-community, 254
John Tzimisces, power, 426
Josephus, on Sadducees, 211
Judah, Abraham and betrayal money, 237
Judaism. _See_ Jews
Judge of men, and speech, 137
Judith, as Arabian, 208
Jugurtha, power, 428
Julian, edict, 66 n.;
and cult nation, 176, 204;
as prophet, 204;
and Syncretism, 253;
and monasticism, 254
Jundaisapur, and Gundisapora, 200 n.
Junian Latins, 68 n.
Jupiter Dolichenus cult, 201
Juridical person, as Arabian concept, 67, 68, 174, 177
Jurisprudence, as late science, 66;
Egyptian and Chinese, 67 n.;
future Western, 80-83, 505. _See also_ Roman law
_Jus_, and _lex_ in Arabian Culture, 71;
and _fas_ in Western Culture, 78
_Jus gentium_, Classical idea, 61;
as imperial law, 66
Justification by faith, and Western Rationalism, 309
Justinian, Arabian jurisprudence, 70 n., 71, 74;
army system, 199;
Digests as interpretation, 246;
and end of theology, 261;
Nika Rebellion, 381 n.;
conflict with nobility, 423
Kabbalah, and secret dogma, 247
Kalaam, and pneuma, 242
Kama-sutram, and sport, 103
Kanauj, as world-city, 99
Kant, Emmanuel, and numbers, 269 n.;
gloom, 295;
and Devil-cult, 303;
and Talmudic intellects, 322;
on marriage, 337;
and celibacy of science, 346
Kara Balgassun, inscription, 260
Karæi, as order, 255;
Puritanism, rise, 316
Karamzin, Nikolai M., narrative, 192
Karlsruhe, plan, 100 n.
Karlstadt, as Gothic, 296
Karna, and civil law, 210
Karo, Joseph, metaphysic, 321
Karramiyya movement, 424, 425
Karun valley, Mandæanism, 214 n.
Kassites, as rulers, 40
Khazars, conversion to Judaism, 259
Khuzistan, Mandæanism, 214 n.
Ki-Sung, dynasties, 379 n.
Kierkegaard, Sören, “playing” with religion, 137
Kinnesrin, school, 200
Kiur Zan, power, 426
Knowledge, waking-being and problem of epistemology, 14;
technical and theoretical, 25;
epistemology and destiny, 267 n.
_See also_ Intelligence
Kobad I, and Mazdak, 261
Koran, as term, 244. _See also_ Islam
Kung-Yang, on Middle Kingdom, 373 n.
Kwan-tse, and pre-Confucian philosophy, 300
Kwei-ku-tse, character, 419 n.
Labna, and Mexican Culture, 45
Labor. _See_ Economics
Laity, _vis-à-vis_ clergy, 333
Lakayata, system, 309
Lakhmids, court, poetry, 198
Lambert, Édouard, on Twelve Tables, 65 n.
Land, and Classical money wealth, 487. _See also_ Peasantry
Landscape, necessity of study in man’s history, 39 n.;
of Arabian Culture, 42;
relation to Culture, 46;
and transfer of forms, 57;
and town, 90;
and race, 113, 119, 129, 130;
and language, 119;
and plant changes, 130;
and religions of Cultures, 278;
as Chinese prime symbol, 287
Language, and emancipation of understanding, 9;
of Civilization, 108;
defined, development, 114, 115;
and race and waking-being, 114, 117;
expression and communication, “I” and “thou,” motive and sign,
115,
133;
cult-colouring of prime words, 116;
and taboo, 116;
and speaking, dead languages, 117, 125;
independence from landscape, mother-tongue fallacy, 119;
essence, wordless, 131, 132;
essential element of relations of microcosm, 132;
phases of expression, extensiveness, 134;
evolution of communication, 134;
speech divorced from speaking, rigid signs as system, 134, 144;
“knowing” the language, complexity, 135;
set language and understanding, 135;
signs and meaning, relation to truth, 136, 137;
“playing” with expression, 137;
spiritual communion and silence, 137;
words, origin, incompleteness, 137, 138, 142;
vocal and verbal, 138;
name and word, 138-141;
opposite word-pairs, 140;
Chinese voice-differentiations, 140 n.;
grammar and sentence, relation to word, 141;
sentences and race, 142;
acquisition of words, 142;
verbs and thought-categories, 143;
abstract thinking and intellect and life, 144;
stages of history, 145;
lost formative history, 146;
as ancient class-secret, 146;
tempo of history, effect of writing, 147;
grammar and vocabulary, linguistic families as grammatical, 147;
alien words, 148;
as to Aryan, 149;
written and colloquial, 150;
morphology of Culture-languages, 152-155;
birth of cultural, popular talk and cult speech, 153-155;
city script-speech, 155;
and people, 161;
Persian, 166;
mother tongue and dynastic idea, 183;
and literary history, 190;
influence on Christianity, 224, 241 n., 252, 256, 258;
of Arabian religions, 252.
_See also_ Literature; Race; Words; Writing
Lao-tse, Taoism, 307;
Pietism, 308
Lao-Tzu, and sterility, 105
Lassalle, Ferdinand, and class dictatorship, 404;
and English economics, 469
Latin, disappearance from legal life, 75;
and Western scholar-languages, 155;
and Christianity, 241 n., 258;
period, 395 n.
Latin-America, and Cæsarism, 435
Law, property as power, 345;
defined, 363;
as instrument of power, internal and external, 365-367.
_See also_ Jurisprudence; Roman law
League of Nations, Chinese attempt, 38, 417, 429
Learning, separation from priesthood, 345;
priesthood and cultural form of profane, 345-347;
and nobility and economics, 347
Le Bon, Gustave, study of the crowd, 18 n.
Lechfeld, battle, 259
Leibniz, Baron von, and evolution, 31
Leiden, Papyrus, on Hyksos Period, 427
Lemnos, inscription, 122
Lenel, Otto, on Roman jurisprudence, 67
Lenin, Nikolai, as mass-leader, 448 n. _See also_ Bolshevism
Leo III, emperor, legislation, 75, 357;
iconoclasm, 304
Leo V, and Theodore of Studion, 425
Leonardo da Vinci, and Gothic, 291
Leonardo Pisano, on accountancy, 489 n.
Leontini, destruction, 405
Lessing, Gotthold E., and German nationalism, 182;
and Rationalism, 305
Letter, as language-picture, 134. _See also_ Writing
Levites, as term for priesthood, 175
_Lex_, and _jus_, Arabian, 71
_Lex Æbutia_, and present law, 62
_Lex Canuleia_, 69 n., 397
Lex Hortensia, 358, 396
Lex Ogulnia, and Plebs, 408
Li-Ki, ritual work, 312 n., 315
Li Si, standard script, 152
Li-Szu, and Wang-Cheng, 41
Li-Wang, problem, 38;
flight, 376
Libyan problem, 162
Lidzbarski, Mark, on Jesus as Mandæan, 214 n.
Lies, and set language, 136, 137
Life. _See_ Being; Death; Sex; Waking-being
Light. _See_ Sight
Limes, Great Wall as, 41
List, Friedrich, relation to property, 345;
and English economics, 469
Literature, rural and urban, 93;
of Culture and Civilization, 107;
German and nationalism, 182;
and cosmopolitanism, 185;
Arabian research, 190;
and language history, 190;
hero-tales, 192;
Arabian Minne, and epic, 198, 250;
Chinese drama, 286;
Byzantine and Arabian, 304
Livy, and polis, 383
Lo-Yang, as royal residence, 92
Locke, John, and Continental Rationalism, 308
Logic, and opposites, 141;
and truth, 144;
and history, 144
Logos, John Gospel, 226;
Pseudomorphic and Arabian, 229;
Jezidi view, 236;
Arabian indwelling of spirit, light-sensation, 236, 237;
alteration in concept, 307.
_See also_ Trinity
Lombarda code, 76
London, as world-city, 99
Lorraine, as name, 161, 181
Louis XI of France, dynasty-idea, 381
Love, and cosmic beat, 166;
and religion, faith 265, 266;
and stability, 275;
cultural religious, 279;
and nobility, 351
Loyalists, American, 412 n.
Loyola, Ignatius, on moral, 272;
as Gothic, 296;
and world-politics, 299;
Puritanism, 302
Lü-pu-Wei, Syncretism, 312 n.
Lü-Shi Chun-tsiu, 312 n.
Lucca, Cæsar’s politics, 446
Luceres, tribe, 351, 382
Lui-Shi, and Wang-Cheng, 41;
as statesman, 418, 419;
tutor, 419 n.
Lukka, as name, 164
Luschen, Felix von, ethnological research, 129
Luther, Martin, as Gothic, 296;
as urban monk and schoolman, 297, 298;
and Devil-cult, 299;
lack of practicality, 299;
and science, 300
Lycurgus, laws, 64, 65
Lyell, Sir Charles, theory as English, 31
Lysander, and army, 406;
as victor, 422
Lysias, on speculators, 484
Macedonians, as rulers, 40;
schools and nationalism, 162 n.;
and Arabian Culture, 189.
_See also_ Alexander the Great
Machiavellism, and factions, 448
Machine. _See_ Technique
Macrocosm, animal’s microcosmic relation, 3, 4, 15;
man’s self-adjustment, 14.
_See also_ Cultures; History; Microcosm; Morphology; Nature;
Waking-being
Madrid, as provincial city, 99
Mælius, Sp., movement, 397
Magi, as term for priesthood, 175
Magian Culture. _See_ Arabian Culture
Magic, technique, 268, 271
Magna Charta, and control by nobility, 373
Magnesia, battle, 422
Magnitude, Classical money-concept, 486-489
Mahavira, Rationalism, 307
Mahayana, doctrine, 312, 313
Mahraspand, Mazdaism, 251
Maimon, Solomon, and Kant, 322
Maimonides, Moses, world, 241 n.;
collection of dogmas, 315;
and Spinoza, 321
Ma’in, Kingdom of, feudalism, 196;
geography, 196 n.
Mamertines, as people, 160
Man, lordship of sight, visual thought, 7-9;
language and understanding, theoretical thought, 9, 10;
and fear of death, 15, 16;
destiny and causality types, 16-19;
refutation of Darwinism, 32;
two great ages, 33;
in primitive Culture, 33, 34;
effect of agriculture, 89.
_See also_ Animal; Being; Microcosm; Sex; Waking-being
Management, American development, 82 n. _See also_ Technique
Manchester School, and Rationalism, 403
Mandæanism, as redemption-religion, 213;
John the Baptist and Jesus, 214;
survival, 214 n.;
disappearance, 252;
order-communities, 254
Maniakes, Turk, 427 n.
Manichæism, and Chaldean, 176;
origins, 209, 251;
Logos and Paraclete, 227, 251 n.;
development, 251;
missionarism, 260;
Albegensians, 260 n.
Mannheim, plan, 100 n.
Manufacturer, as economic class, 478
Manzikert, battle, 427
Mar Shimun, prince-patriarch, 177
Marcianus, and dynasty, 379
Marcion, Bible and Church, 225-228, 245;
period, 250;
and reform, 296
Marcionites, era, 239
Marcus Aurelius, as episode, 171;
religiousness, 313;
and peace, 430;
Cæsarism and Stoicism, 434 n.
Marduk, as deity, 206
Marib, Congress of Princes, 197, 304
Marinus, as biographer, 252
Marius, C., and money, 410;
and Cæsarism, 423;
and party, 451
Mark Gospel, 223
Market, status, 91, 480
Marozia, as destiny, 339
Marriage, law, control over it, 78, 365;
Civilization type, 105;
defined, 344 n.;
“in form” relation, 362
Marx, Karl, and Marxism, and property, 344;
and party, 450;
and effective theory, 454;
end of influence, 454, 45 5;
and English economics, 469;
and economic classes, 478;
and value, 482 n.;
and work, 492;
in Russia, 495 n.;
on machine-industry as bourgeois, 504 n.
_See also_ Socialism
Mary of England, and absolutism, 388
Mary-cult, Arabian development, 224;
victory at Ephesus, 257;
Western development, 288;
and contrition, 293;
effect of Reformation, 299
Materialism. _See_ Rationalism
Mathematics, and religion, 268
Matthew Gospel, Judaic character, 220 n.
Maule, Sir William H., and divorce laws, 64 n.
Maurists, and orders and schools, 346
Maurya and Sunga dynasty, and Imperialism, 41 n.
Mavali, and revolution, 424
Maximilian I, emperor, and law, 76;
dynasty-idea, 380
Mayan Culture. _See_ Mexican Culture
Mayapan, and Mexican Culture, 45
Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal, power, 389;
and Fronde, 390
Mazdaism, and chivalry, 198;
development, 251;
as State religion, 253;
missionarism, 260;
absorption, 260
Mazdak, reformation, 261;
and Karramiyya movement, 424
Mechanics. _See_ Technique
Medes, as rulers, 40;
as people, 167
Mediæval History, as term, 28
Medici, city nobility, 356;
economics and politics, 475;
small-scale traffic, 481 n.
Medicine, as priesthood, 478 n.
Medinet Habet, relief, 164 n.
Mediterranean region, influence of climatic change, 39 n.
Medrashim, style, 346
Megalopolitanism, and nomadism, 90;
and country, 94;
development, and provinces, 98, 99;
absolute intellect, 99;
city planning, 100;
future Western, 101;
Classical inner-town, 101;
final phase, death, 102, 107;
tension, 102;
sport, 103;
and sterility, 103-105;
and uniform type, 108;
and language, 155;
and cosmopolitanism, 184;
phase in Jewry, 317, 318;
and Fourth Estate and mob, 358, 399;
and public opinion, 400;
and Cæsarism, 431;
and economics, 484.
_See also_ Town
Megasthenes, on Calani, 175 n.
Mehlis, C., on Libyan problem, 162
Melfi, constitutions, 372
Memory, and the named, 140
Meng Tse, materialism and myth, 310, 312
Mercenaries, and Cæsarism, 428
Messana, democratic triumph, 396
Messiah, as common Arabian idea, 206;
of Mandæanism, 214;
attitude of Jesus, 215;
effect of Resurrection, 218
Metals, primacy, 500. _See also_ Smith
Metaphysics. _See_ Philosophy; Religion
Methodism, Pietism, practicality, 308
Mewes, Rudolf, on weather and war, 392 n.
Mexican Culture, development, 43;
violent death, 43;
reconstruction of history, 44, 45;
Civilization and Aztecs, 45;
jurisprudence, 66;
depopulation, 106, 107;
religious beginnings, 288;
fellah-religion, 315
Mexico City. _See_ Tenochtitlan
Meyer, Edward, on Persian host, 40 n., 167;
on history, 47, 50;
error on Egyptian nobility, 350 n.;
correct Egyptian chronology, 427 n.;
mistake on Roman Cæsarism, 432 n.
Michael III, emperor, and Bardas, 426
Michelangelo, and Devil-cult, 292
Microcosm, animal as, in macrocosm, 3-5, 15;
sense as organ, 6, 7;
waking-being, 7;
and cosmic beat, crowd, 18;
and history and nature, 23, 24;
and megalopolitanism, 90;
language as essential element, 132;
and sex, 327;
and Western technique, 504.
_See also_ Animal; Cosmic; Waking-being
Middle Kingdom, Chinese, and world-power, 373
Middle Kingdom, Egyptian, significance, 387
Middleman, as economic class, 478;
as economic master, 483, 484;
as agent of Western technique, 504.
_See also_ Economics; Money
Migrations, and peoples, 162-165;
small bands, 163, 167
Miletus, style of school, 345
Mill, John Stuart, and Pascal, 273
Milton, John, and concepts, 303
Minæans, tribal association, 174
Ming-Chu, period, 40, 387
Ming-ti, as ruler, 41
Minnesänger, Arabian, 198
Minoan art, and Mycenæ, 87-89;
as Egyptian, 88
Mir, status, 348
Mirabeau, Comte de, on law of nations, 366
Mirandola, Francesco della, and Devil-cult, 291
Mirian of Georgia, State religion, 253
Mirza Ali Mohammed, Gnosis, 228
Mishnah, completion, 71;
development, 208;
as commentary, 247;
origin, 316
Missionarism, Arabian, 259;
Islam, 304;
Pythagorean, 307;
Jewish, 318
Mithraism, as military order, 198, 254;
in Syncretism, 201, 253;
and Essenes, 211;
liturgy, 213 n.;
provenance, 314 n.
Mithridates, cultural basis of wars, 318, 321 n.
Mitteis, Ludwig, on Constantine’s legislation, 70 n.
Mob. _See_ Crowd
Modern History, as term, 28
Mohammed, predecessors as prophet, 204;
Paul’s analogy, 221;
as Logos, 236;
and consensus, 243;
revelation, 244.
_See also_ Islam
Moh-ti, and property, 344;
and military technique, 421 n.;
and politics, 453
Mollahs, law-men, 71
Moltke, Count Hellmuth von, leadership, 444
Mommsen, Theodor, false history, 50;
on political character of Roman Empire, 174 n.;
misunderstanding of Cæsarism, 432;
and Varus’ defeat, 487
Monarchy. _See_ Dynastic idea; Politics
Monasticism (Asceticism), Western rural and urban, 91, 297;
in Paganism, 204;
character and development of Arabian, 254;
Orphic, 283;
and orgiasm, 283;
sage, 307
Money, as urban, abstract, 97, 58;
and idea of property, 357;
rise as political force, and Rationalism, 401, 402;
in English politics, 403;
and class dictatorship, 404;
in Roman politics, 410, 411, 457-459;
Cæsarism and overthrow, 431, 433 n., 464, 506, 507;
and genealogy, 449 n.;
and democracy, 456;
in Western politics, and press, 460, 462;
and end of democracy, 463;
early status of coin as goods, 481;
beginning of concept as category, 481-484;
value-token and payment-medium, 483;
trader as master, 483, 484;
as power of Civilization, 485;
struggle against, 485;
and mobility, 485;
money-mass and value, 485 n.;
cultural symbols, 486;
Classical magnitude concept, 486, 495;
irrelation with Classical land value, 487;
Classical slaves as, 488, 496;
Western function-concept, book-keeping, 489, 490;
Western Culture and metallic, 490, 491;
and work, quantity and quality, 491-493;
capital, cultural basis, 493;
financial organization, cultural basis, 494;
Russian attitude, 495 n.;
struggle with technique, 505;
and Socialism, 506 n.
_See also_ Economics
Monophysites, importance, 47;
creed basis of law, 70;
as nation, 177;
and Mary-cult, 224;
origin, 257;
and starting-point of Islam, 258;
missionarism, 260;
and reform, 296
Monotheism, relation to Arabian Culture, 201 n.
Montanist movement, 227
Morale. _See_ Ethics; Spirit; Truth
Mormons, as people, 160
Morphology, of Culture languages, 152-155;
of peoples, 169;
of religious history, 275;
of social history, 348;
of economic history, 470, 476-480
Mortgages, Classical land, 487 n.
Mortmain, and established church, 177 n.;
in Egypt, 375
Moscow, character, 194
Mosque, and basilica, 230
Mother tongue, fallacy, 120;
and dynastic-idea, 183.
_See also_ Language
Motherhood, “versehen,” 126. _See also_ Demeter; Mary-cult; Sex
Motion, as problem of thought, 14-16;
Western concept and military art, 421;
money and mobility, 485.
_See also_ Technique
Motive, and language, 133
Müller, Frederick, race classification, 125
“Mufti,” 71
Muktara, as capital, 426
Multiplication table, dynamics, 66 n.
Murtada, philosophy, 321
Music, basis of charm, 8;
in English Parliamentarism, 403
Musonius Rufus, and peace, 430
Mutation theory, and Darwinism, 32;
and Cultures, 33, 36
Mutawakil, palace, 100 n.
Mycenæ, and Crete, 87-89;
and beast-formed deities, 276
Mysteries, Classical, 203. _See also_ Religion
Mysticism, Sufism, 176, 228, 242;
Arabian period, 200, 250;
John Gospel and Christian, 226;
longing of Western, 292;
of Rationalism and Pietism, 308;
Yesirah, 316;
fixed Jewish, 321
Myth, as theory, and cult, 268, 499;
relation to Greek, 284, 286;
time mythology, 286;
of Western springtime, 288-290;
modern ignorance of it, 290;
and Protestantism, 299
Naasenes, Book of, 213 n., 251 n.
Nabu-Nabid, overthrow, 207
Naganjuna, Mahayana doctrine, 313
Nahua, in Mexican Culture, 45
Names, and words, 138-141;
and spiritual change, religion, 139;
and the enigmatic, 139;
and sentence, 141;
and things, 148;
and people, 160;
and technique, 499
Napoleon I and Napoleonism, and dynastic-idea, 181;
and Désirée Clary, 329;
State-machine, formlessness, 404, 405;
army and personal rule, 407;
and military mobility, 421;
ruthlessness as victor, 422;
and Cæsarism, 428;
as destiny, 439 n.;
and tact of command, 444;
economics and politics, 475
Naranjo, and Mexican Culture, 44
Narses, expedition, 200
Nation, as term, 170, 362;
destiny, 170;
and city-building, 171;
separation, 171;
representation of minority, 172, 180, 183, 184;
character of Classical, 173;
of Arabian, 174-178;
of Western, 178-184;
of Chinese and Egyptian, 178 n.;
language basis, continued dynastic feeling, 183;
nobility as representative, 184;
cosmopolitanism, intelligentsia, and pacifism, 184;
peace and fellahism, 185, 186;
rise of idea, 385.
_See also_ Politics; Race
Nationality, Arabian creed basis, 69, 168, 210, 253, 254, 315, 317;
Arabian cult, and world Christianity, 219
Natural science, religious basis, 13;
English type of causality, 31;
physiognomic, 31;
reputation of Darwinism, 32;
beginning of Arabian, 200 n.;
dispensation and law, 267;
Western Culture and practical mechanics, 300;
theoretical basis in other Cultures, 301;
as diabolical, 302;
Jewish, 316;
scientists as priests, 478.
_See also_ Art; Nature; Technique
Nature, and cosmic and microcosmic, 23, 24;
adjustment to, cultural development and horizon, 25;
technical and theoretical knowledge, 25;
and peasant, 89;
of Rationalism, 305-308.
_See also_ Causality; History; Natural science
Nazarene, connotation, 214 n.
Nebo, as deity, 206
Nebuchadnezzar, henotheism, prayer, 206
Nehardea, school, 200, 210;
as capital of Exilarch, 208
Neo-Brahmanism, 315
Neo-Platonists, dualism, 234;
and revelation, 245;
period, 250;
as order, 254
Neo-Pythagoreans, community, 204, 254;
and revelation, 245;
period, 250
Nephesh, connotation, 234;
soul stones, 234 n.
Nero, and elections, 432;
and ideologues, 434
Nestorianism, creed basis of law, 70;
as nation, 177;
and Mary-cult, 224, 257;
formative influences, 228;
church language, 252;
second-century beginnings, 252 n.;
missionarism, 260;
and reform, 296
New Testament, Marcion as creator, 226, 227;
Marcion and Catholic, 228.
_See also_ Bible; Christianity; Gospels
New York, as world-city, 99
Newspaper. _See_ Press
Ngi-li, as religious source, 286
Nicæa, Council of, Constantine and, 257;
substance controversy, 257, 276
Nicephorus, power, 426
Nicholas I, pope, and world-power, 373
Nicholas of Cusa, as Western, 316 n.
Nicholas of Oresme, as scientist, 301
Nicias, treaty, 385
Nicodemia, as capital, 191
Nietzsche, Friedrich W., and value of truth, 12;
and technique, 302;
on duality of moral, 341
Nika Rebellion, 381 n.
Nirvana, rationalistic concept, 307
Nishapur, and Gundisapora, 200 n.
Nisibis, Jewish defence, 198;
location, 200 n.
Nobility, primary estate, 97;
as State, 172, 180, 183, 367;
beginning as estate, 280;
relation to other estates, 334, 335;
symbolic significance, being, destiny, 335-337, 340;
and family, 336;
big individuals and tradition, 338;
dependence of politics on, 339, 440;
and “training,” 340;
moral, 341;
and idea of property, 343;
and learning, 347;
common cultural land-bound estate, 350;
cultural styles, 350, 351;
foci of feelings, 351, 352;
conflict with priesthood, 352-354;
Classical, and polis, 355;
city movement, effect, new type, 355-357;
and Third Estate, 356;
State rule by minority, 370;
and absolutist State, 400;
development of Roman political, 409-411;
and political Islam, 424;
and party-form, 450.
_See also_ Estates; Feudalism; Oligarchy; Politics
Nomadism, pre-cultural and megalopolitanism, 89, 90
Normans, development of law, 75;
and finance, concept of money, 372, 489
Northcliffe, Viscount, and demagogy, 461, 463
Novel, as megalopolitan, 93
Novels, Justinians, 71
Number, and grammar, 146;
and religion, 268;
abstract, and abstract money, 481, 482;
and technique, 499
Numina, naming, 139
Objects and subjects, 369;
in politics, 441;
in economics, 479, 493
Occamists, and Copernican system, 301
Occupations, status of classes, and primary estates, 333, 348. _See
also_ Economics
Odoacer, historyless, 432
Oetinger, Friedrich C., Pietism, 308
Officialdom, common cultural development, 350;
rise of financial, 371;
Classical tenure and choice, 380, 383
Oigur realm, Manichæism, 260
Old Kingdom, as Gothic, 296;
money concept, 489 n.
Old Testament, and Christian canon, 221, 225, 226, 228, 245. _See
also_ Bible
“Old Women,” as phrase, 329 n.
Oldenbarneveldt, Jan van, power, 389
Oldendorp, Johann, and law of nature, 78
Oligarchy, early Roman, 375, 382;
and polis, 380-382;
and Reformation, 386 n.;
Classical democratic contentions, 394-398.
_See also_ Nobility
Olivarez, Count, power, 389
Oman, Charles W. C., on Byzantine army system, 199 n.
Omar, Puritanism, 304
Ommaiyads, overthrow, 424
Oñate, Conde de, power, 389
Onias, and the “Law,” 209
Opposites, word pairs and logic, 140
Oresme. _See_ Nicholas of Oresme
Orientation, defined, 133
Origen, Scholasticism, 229;
period, 250
Ornament, as taboo, 121;
cathedral as, 123;
and secular buildings, 123;
as expression-language, 134;
script as, 151;
and number, 268;
priesthood as, 337
Orphism, and Classical religious beginnings, 282;
asceticism, 283;
and reform, 296;
and Tyrannis, 386
Orvieto, frescoes, 292
Orsini, and Papacy, 354
Orthodoxy, and Arabian State, 177
Osrhoene, conversion, 177, 253
Ostrogoths, as episode, 171
Othman, war with Ali, 424
Otto I, and world-power, 373
Otto II, and Byzantium, 87
Outsiders, dediticii peregrins, 68 n.
Oxenstierna, Count Axel, power, 389
Pa Period, 387
Pachomius, and monasticism, 254
Pacioli, Luca, book-keeping, 490
Pætus, Thrasea, death, 434
Paganism, struggle with Christianity, 202. _See also_ Hellenism;
Pseudomorphosis; Syncretic Church
Paine, Thomas, and Third Estate, 403 n.
Painting, modern as dishonest, 136
Pais, Ettore, on Twelve Tables, 65 n.
Palæontology, refutation of Darwinism, 32
Palenque, and Mexican Culture, 45
Paley, William, and Third Estate, 403 n.
Palmyra, inscriptions, 206
Pan Ku, myth, 312
Papacy, pope and councils, 59;
as English idea, 294 n.;
family history, 337;
and dynamic space, 352;
idea and facts, 354;
control of Curia, 370;
world-power and contest with Empire, 373, 374;
clerical nobility and pope, 374;
decay, 376.
_See also_ Roman Catholic Church
Paper, Chinese invention, 501 n.
Papias, on Jesus’ teachings, 217 n.
Papinian, position as jurist, 71, 73
Papirius Carbo, and Crassius, 459
Paraclete, doctrine, 227. _See also_ Trinity
Paradosis, in Arabian creeds, 228
Paralii, and Tyrannis, 386
Paris, as France, 95;
as world-city, 99
Parliamentarism, character, 412-415;
as transition, 415, 416;
as seasonable political means, 446.
_See also_ Democracy; England
Parsees, and ghetto, 315;
security, 323
Parshva, Puritanism, 303
Parthians, and Persians, 167;
chivalry, 198;
wars as Jewish, 198
Party, place in politics, 449;
identity with Third Estate, 449;
nobility and forms, 450;
displacement by private politics, machine, 452, 454, 464.
_See also_ Politics
Pascal, Blaise, and Mill, 273;
and Devil-cult, 303
Pataliputra, as world-city, 99;
abandoned, 107
Patriotism, Western fatherland concept, 179, 183;
Jewish attitude, 320
Patrol-state, 366 n.
Paul, Hermann, on sentence, 141
Paul, Saint, position as jurist, 71;
and Christian Church, 220, 221;
Mohammed’s analogy, 221;
system and westward trend of Christianity, 221;
and Mark Gospel, 223;
and cults, 223;
and Greek, 224;
dualism, 234;
substance controversy as reversal of work, 258
Paulicians, iconoclasm, 304
Paullus, L. Æmilius, Pydna, 190 n.
Pausanias, and helots, 357, 396
Pavia, and legal study, 76
Pe-Ki, as general, 417;
overthrow, 419
Peace, Chinese League of Nations attempt, 38, 417, 429;
and fellahism, 185, 186;
Classical attitude, 385;
ruthless, of Cæsarism, 422;
as unhistorical, 429, 434;
as submission, 434, 441
Peacock, as Arabian symbol, 236
Peasantry, as plant, 89;
historyless, cosmic, 96;
and religion, 280;
relation to primary estates, vassalage, 348, 349;
reappearance at end of Culture, 435;
lack in England and America, 449 n.;
as economic class, 478.
_See also_ Being; Country
Pehlevi, as church-language, 252
Pelasgi, as name, 161
Pelham, Sir Henry, money in politics, 403 n.
Penestæ, status, 332
People, false idea, 113, 159;
as conscious linkage, 159;
and name, 160, 161;
and language, 161;
and provenance, and migration, 162-165;
and race, 165;
as soul unit, and events, 165, 169, 170;
Romans and Russians as example, 166-169;
morphology, 169;
creation of Western, 169;
as product of Culture, 169, 170;
characteristics of nations, 170, 171;
of West as result of events, 181;
_vis-à-vis_ nobility, 333;
rise of ideal concept, 393.
_See also_ Race
Pergamum, revolt of Aristonicus, 454
Pericles, age, 391
Peripatos, style, 345
Persecution, contrast of Classical and Arabian, 203
Persephone, cult, 283
Perseus, defeat, 190 n.
Persians, chronology, 27;
as rulers, 40;
language and people, 166;
problem of origin of religion, 168, 191;
cult and nationality, 168;
religion and Jewish, 207;
and revelation, 245;
end of theology, 261;
Arabian-type nation, ghetto, 315.
_See also_ Arabian Culture; Mazdaism; Zarathustra
Person, Classical notion, 60;
Arabian concept of incorporeal, 67, 68, 174, 177;
Classical concept and Western law, 81, 82
Personality, and contrition, 293;
Classical concept, 293 n.
_See also_ Destiny; Will
Peruvian Culture, destruction, 46
Peter, Saint, Gospel, 213 n., 223 n.;
Paul’s supersession, 221
Peter the Great, Petersburg plan, 101 n.;
and Russian pseudomorphosis, 192
Peter Lombard, and sacraments, 292
Petersburg, plan, 101 n.;
artificiality, 193
Petrie, W. M. Flinders, error on Egyptian chronology, 427 n.
Petrus Peregrinus, as scientist, 300;
and technique, 502
Phallic cults, 283, 286
Pharaoh, religious position, 279 n.;
and world-power, 373
Pharisees, tendency, 211
Pherecydes, as dogmatist, 282
Philip of Macedon, politics, 407
Philip II of Spain, and absolutism, 388
Philip IV of Spain, and world-power, 388
Philippi, battle, and Cæsarism, 423
Philistines, migration, 164
Philistinism, and Rationalism, 307
Philo, and Christianity, 229;
dualism, 234
Philology, Arabian, and research, 191. _See also_ Language
Philosophy, Buddhism and Indian, 49;
Western Culture and Classical, 57;
systematic, and untruth, 137 n.;
Jesus and metaphysics, 216, 217, 473 n.;
Western swing, 306;
and economics, 473.
_See also_ Ethics; Religion
Phocas, power, 427
Phœnicians, economic rôle, 481 n.
Physical geography. _See_ Landscape
Physiognomy, and race, 117. _See also_ Destiny
Pi-Yung, as symbol, 287;
and Shi-King, 352;
change, 357
Picture, and expression-language, 116;
as sign of language, letter, 134
Piedras Negras, and Mexican Culture, 45
Pietism, cultural manifestations, 308
Pilate, and Jesus, fact and faith, 216, 473 n.
Pindar, and being, 272;
and religion, 282
Pisistratus, and oligarchy, 382;
and peasantry, 386
Piso, conspiracy, 434
Pistis-Sophia, 213 n.
Pitt, William, and French Revolution, 412
Pittacus, laws, 64
Plant, essential character, cosmic, 3, 4;
being, 7;
and race, 115;
effect of transplanting, 130;
economic life, 473;
and technique, 499
Plantagenets, early, 182 n.
Plato, “ideas,” 58;
and polis, 173 n.;
and commentary, 247 n.;
and Orphism, 282;
cult, 314;
theory and Syracuse, 454
Play, cosmic, and microcosmic sport, 103. _See also_ Sport
Plebs, political rise and status, 349, 357, 408;
and political nobility, 409-411;
and populus, 451 n.
Pliny, on depopulation, 106
Plotinus, Scholasticism, 229;
ecstasy, 242
Pneuma, as Arabian principle, 57;
and law of creed-communities, 68;
as truth, 242.
_See also_ Dualism
Poetry, Arabian Minne, 198. _See also_ Literature
Polis, as Classical nation, 173;
and nobility, oligarchy, 355, 381;
official tenure and choice, 380, 383;
synœcism and aristocracy, 381, 382;
_civitas_ and _hostis_, 384;
normal war, 385;
Tyrannis and non-estate against estates, 386;
and democracy, 387;
burgher and peasant, 396;
destruction as idea, 405;
and subjugated territory, 407;
and Imperialism, 423;
and Classical finance, 494.
_See also_ Politics
Politics, and race, 116;
and intercourse by writing, 153;
and social ethics, 273;
English, and predestination, 304;
State and family, 329, 336;
estates as term, 329 n.;
“in form” estates, 330, 331;
as war, 330, 366, 440, 474;
estates and history of Cultures, 331;
estates and residue classes, 331-334;
Third Estate and non-estate, interrelation, 334;
nobility and priesthood, symbolic significance, 335, 339, 340;
great families, basis of dynastic principle, 336;
priesthood as opposite, 337;
big individuals and tradition, 338;
as life, dependence on nobility, 339, 440;
moral, 341;
custom-ethic and honour, 342, 343;
relation to economics, power and booty, 344, 345, 474-476;
State and historical stream, 361;
nations defined, primary estates and State, 362, 366;
and care and opposition, war as creator of State, 362;
State as inward connection, custom-ethic and law, 363;
orders of internal law, 363;
power and law, internal and external, 363-366;
barrack-state, 366 n.;
State control of external position, paramountcy, 367;
State and nobility as cognate, 367;
alienship of other estates, 368;
factual control and truths, 368;
importance of leadership, subjects and objects, 368, 369, 441,
456;
estate rule and minority within class, 369, 370;
interregnum between feudalism and State, 375;
rise of State idea, 376;
individual ruler, inherited will and dynasty-idea, 376-378;
Classical oligarchy, 380;
rise of nation-idea, 385;
estates against monarchy and non-estate, 385-387;
non-estate as opposite estate, 387;
Chinese and Egyptian absolutism, 387;
Western Fronde, 388-391, 404;
Western absolutist period, cabinet-politics, 391-394, 400;
Classical oligarchic-democratic-alternative period, 394-398;
of Civilization, non-estate as independent force, 400-402;
Rationalism and money as forces, opposition and dependence,
400-401, 455, 456;
Third Estate in England, 402, 403;
rational-money, class dictatorship, anti-form, 403, 404;
character of Second Tyrannis, 405-408;
army as power, 406;
polis and conquered territory, 407;
Roman State of this period, 408-411;
doctrinaire Parliamentarism, 412-415;
its decay, 415, 416;
Fronde period in Arabian Culture, 423;
Third Estate and revolution in Arabian Culture, 424;
pre-Civilization relics and future Western, 430;
theory and reality, 439;
personal, 441;
popular talent and leadership, 441;
men and measures, 441 n.;
conscienceless “doing,” 442;
seasonableness, command of means, 443, 446;
exemplariness in doing, 443;
tact of command, 444;
tradition of command, 444;
art of the possible, 445;
opportuneness, 446;
foreign and domestic, 447;
early cultural, factions, 448;
urban, and parties, 448, party and estates, 449-451;
displacement of party by private, machine, 452, 454, 464;
place and influence of theory, 453-455;
Roman demagogy, elections and courts, 457-460;
Western demagogy, press, 460-463;
battle between democracy and Cæsarism, 463, 464;
hero-death, 471;
and religion, 473 n.;
and financial credit, 491 n.
_See also_ Cæsarism; Church and State; Dynastic idea; Estates;
Feudalism; Foreign relations; History; Polis; Sex
Polybius, on sterility, 104;
on Flaminius, 411
Polycrates, and finance, 383;
economics and politics, 475
Pompey the Great, adventurer, 19;
principate and monarchy, 50;
and Rome, 383;
Triumvirate and Cæsarism, 413;
at Lucca, 446;
demagogy, 458, 459
Pompey, Sextus, and Cæsarism, 428 n.
Pompon, François, technique, 128 n. {sic}
Population, megalopolitanism and sterility, 103-105;
machine and increase, 502
Porcelain, Chinese invention, 501 n.
Porphyry, and Greek Church, 176;
Scholasticism, 229;
ecstasy, 242;
community of elect, 243;
on divine elements, 252
Poitiers, importance of Saracen defeat, 192
Portraiture, physiognomic studies, 126 n.
Portugal, separation from Spain, 390
Possession, concept, 480;
and fortune, 483;
Classical land and money, 487
Poverty, Western learning and vow, 346. _See also_ Monasticism
Power and booty, 344, 345, 347, 371, 372, 474
Prætors, urban, 374;
beginning, 382
Precedent, lack in Roman law, 62;
in Arabian law, 72
Predestination, and English politics, 304. _See also_ Will
Premonstratensians, as rural, 92
Press, and free opinion, 405;
and spatial infinity, 413;
as political means, 447;
power in Western demagogy, 460;
and gunpowder and war, 460;
expulsion of book by newspaper, 461;
dictum as public truth, 461;
education as instrument of power, 462;
syndication, as army, 462;
censorship of silence, 463
Pre-Socratics, asceticism, 283
Pretinax, edict on untended land, 106
Priene, plan, 100
Priesthood, primary class, 97;
beginning as estate, and nobility, 280;
and time mythology, 286;
Western and contrition-concept, 294, 294 n., 298;
relation to other estates, 334, 335;
symbolic significance, waking-being, causality, 335-338, 340;
relation to family and dynasty, 337;
as ornament, idea and person, 337, 338;
and life, 339;
as result of shaping, 340;
and heredity, 341;
moral, 341;
and property, 344;
and learning, style influence, 345-347, 478;
common cultural estate, 350;
cultural styles, 352;
conflict with nobility, 352-354;
city movement, effect, 355, 356;
Western law-making, 365;
Classical, as city officials, 381
Priestley, Joseph, and Third Estate, 403 n.
Primitive man, Ice Age, 33, 34;
and religion, 275.
_See also_ Man; Peasantry
Principate, in Pseudomorphosis, 349;
Sulla as heir, 423;
Augustus’ dyarchy as nullity, 432
Printing, symbolism, 413;
Chinese invention, 501 n.
_See also_ Press
Priscus, Helvidius, death, 434
Private law, first systematic, 66;
Western, and Roman law, 77, 79
Proclus, on Chaldean oracles, 245;
as Syncretic Father, 252;
biography, 252;
and substance controversy, hymn, 257 n.
Procopius, on Narses expedition, 200
Proculiani, legal school, style, 67, 346
Profane, as concept, 345
Proper, and “alien” in sensation, 6
Property, Classical concept and Western law, 82;
farmhouse as, 90;
origin of idea, groundness, 343;
power and booty, divergence, 344, 345, 347, 371, 372, 474;
effect of money, 357;
English law, 371.
_See also_ Economics; Money; Roman law
Prophetic religions. _See_ Apocalyptic
Protestantism. _See_ Puritanism; Reformation
Provinces, and megalopolitanism, 98, 99
Prudentes, law-men, 71
Prussia, as Hohenzollern creation, 182;
political rise, 392;
origin of finance, 489.
_See also_ Germany
Psalms, period, 249
Psellus, Michal Constantine, religiousness, 313
Pseudo-Clementines, romances, 237
Pseudomorphosis, Justinian, Christianity, and Corpus Juris, 74;
as historical term, 189;
of Arabian Culture, 189, 190;
effect of Actium, 191;
Charles Martel and Western avoidance, 192;
Russia, 192;
falsification of Arabian manifestations, 200;
aspects of Syncretism, 201-204;
Jewish rescue from, 210, 211;
Catholic Church and Marcionism, 227;
and substance controversy, 256-258;
feudalism, 349;
economics, 480 n.
_See also_ Religion; Roman law; Syncretic Church
Psychology, of the crowd, 18;
cultural basis, 271
Ptah of Memphis, and dogma, 281
Public opinion, rise, status, 400;
and press, 405
Pulcheria, and dynasty, 379
Pumbeditha, academy, 71
Punctuation, as language gesture, 134
Punic Wars, economics in, 410;
evolution of ruthlessness, 422
Purgatory of learning, 346 n.
Puritan Revolution, as Fronde, 389, 390
Puritanism, Islam as, 302-304;
basis, common cultural manifestation, 302-305;
and concepts, 303;
Pythagoreans, 303;
predestination and politics, 304;
and Rationalism, 305;
Jewish, 316;
and Fronde and Tyrannis, 386 n.;
and English Fronde, 389, 390
Pydna, battle, importance, 190, 409 n., 422
Pyramids, as cosmic, 92
Pyrrhonian skepsis, and Socrates, 309
Pythagoras, fictitious, 72 n.;
and commentary, 247 n.;
biography, 252
Pythagoreans, mysteries, 203;
and cult, 282;
Puritanism, 302, 303;
missionarism, 305;
style, 345;
Sybaris, 394
Qaro, Joseph, as expositor, 321
Qaraites, Puritanism, rise, 255, 316
Quirinus Pater, god, 382
Quirites, origin of name, 382
Rabbi, law-man, 71
Race, false idea of people, 113, 165;
and landscape, no migration, 113, 119, 129;
defined, 113;
and development of language, being and waking-being, 113, 114;
sensation, 114;
in plants, 115;
and history and politics, 116;
and totem, 116;
not classification but physiognomic fact, 117, 130;
American, 119;
house as expression, 120-122;
castle as expression, 122;
superficial and divergent mechanistic conception, 124, 125, 129;
hall-marks, inadequacy of skeletonic determination, 124, 128-130,
175;
chaotic “living” elements in determination, 126, 127;
race-feeling as race-forming, 126;
statistics and ancestry, 127;
importance of movement-expression, 128;
spiritual differences, 128;
and sentences, 142;
and writing, 151;
and Culture-language, 153, 154;
cosmic beat and race hatred, 165, 166, 318;
and intellect, 166;
absolutist State as expression, 400;
Cæsarism and return to power, 431.
_See also_ Being; Language; Nation; People; Politics
Radio, and light, 9 n.;
as megalopolitan, 95 n.;
and distance, 150 n.;
and political tactics, 460
Rainald van Dassel, policy, 376
Rameses III, and sea-folks, 122, 164 n.;
historyless, 432
Ramnes, tribe, 351, 382
Ranke, J. Johannes, on skull forms, 128, 129
Ranke, Leopold von, on history, 46
Raskol movement, 278
Rationalism, and Puritanism, 305;
basis, cultural manifestations, 305, 308, 309;
sage, 307;
Mysticism and Pietism, 308;
dynamic character of Western, 309;
mock-religion, 310;
fading-out, 310;
rise in politics, 400;
and money, 401, 402;
in England, 403;
and class dictatorship, 403, 404;
and constitutions, 413;
and effective political theory, 453, 454
Ravenna, Theoderich’s tomb, 89
Re cult, 279, 281;
as Reformation, 296
Reading, defined, 149
Reason, content, 6;
and understanding, 13
Reflection, and grammar, 141, 143
Reformation, as general cultural movement, 295-297;
Western, as Gothic, 296;
and Renaissance, background, 297;
narrow circle of understanding, 298;
and Devil-cult, 299;
Calvin and world-politics, 299;
relation to intellectual creation, 300;
and oligarchy, 386 n.
Reger, Max, “playing” with music, 137
Reitzenstein, Richard, on Jesus as Mandæan, 214 n.
Religion, fear of the invisible, 8;
as basis of science, 13;
and causality, 14;
and theoretical knowledge, 25;
Arabian consensus, 59;
Arabian cults and scripts, 73, 150, 227 n.;
expression-language and communication-language, 116, 134;
and language-linkage, 116;
and knowledge, 136;
names and religious thought, 139;
and rigid language, 154, 155;
Persian, 168;
and Arabian nationality, 168, 174-178, 210, 242, 243, 253, 315,
317;
Arabian, and research, 191;
geographical cults of Classical, 200;
Arabian fourth period, Mysticism and Scholasticism, 200, 250;
Arabian henotheism, 201;
Arabian dogmatic, 201;
Arabian prophetic, Messianism, 204-207, 209;
awakening of Arabian, 208, 249;
second or apocalyptic period, 208, 212, 249;
as lived metaphysics, 217;
distinct Arabian domains, 228;
Arabian dualism, spirit and soul, 233-236;
inward unity of Arabian, 235, 248;
Arabian Logos and light-sensation, 236, 237;
Arabian time-concept, 238, 249;
Arabian submission, Grace, 240;
Arabian community of the elect, 242, 243, 253;
Arabian sacred books and revelation, 243-246;
infallible word and interpretation, secret revelation, 245-247;
third Arabian period, religions of salvation, grand myths, 249;
three directions of Arabian forms, 251-253;
Arabian monasticism, 254;
Arabian missionarism, 259;
end of Arabian inner history, 261;
and being and waking-being, fear and love, 265, 499;
and light, 265;
intellect and faith, 266, 269-271;
cultural basis of fate, 267;
theory and technique, myth and cult, 268, 271;
God and soul, cultural basis of understanding of numina, 270;
faith and life, 271, 443;
works and moral, 271, 272;
moral and negations on being, 272-274;
and social ethics, 273;
cultural basis of truth, 274;
morphology of history, 275;
primitive organic religiousness, 275, 276, 278;
“pre”-periods of Cultures, 276-278;
of Cultures and landscape, 278;
beginning in Cultures, 279;
cultural character and prime symbols, 279;
Egyptian, 279, 281;
beginning of priesthood estate, 280;
peasant, 280;
narrow circle of cultural understanding, 280, 282;
obscurity of Classical beginning, 281-283;
outline of Classical beginning, 283, 284, 290 n.;
Classical unity, Greek and Roman cults, 284, 285;
later Classical, 285;
Chinese beginning, 285-287;
Chinese tao, 287;
newness of Western, depth-experience as symbol, 288, 294 n.;
reformation as general cultural movement, 295-297;
and Western practical mechanics, 300-302;
Puritanism, 302-305, 316;
Rationalism, 305-308;
Pietism, 308;
cultural basis of mechanistic conception, 308, 309;
Rationalism and myth fads, 310;
second religiousness, 310-314;
historyless fellah, 314;
phase in anti-Semitism, 321, 322;
phase of Fronde and Tyrannis, 386;
and church, 443 n.;
and economics, 473;
and technique, 502.
_See also_ Causality; Christianity; Church and State; Death;
Jews; Philosophy; Priesthood; Pseudomorphosis; Puritanism;
Reformation; Sacred books; Soul; Spirit; Creeds and sects by
name
Renaissance, history-picture, 28 n.;
relation to Classical Culture, 58;
style as urban, 93, 297;
and Italian nationalism, 182;
as Gothic, 291;
and personality, 293;
and Reformation, 297
Republic, Western, as negation, 413. _See also_ Democracy;
Parliamentarism
Resaina, school, 200
Resh-Galutha, 72;
position, 177, 208, 210
Resurrection, as Arabian principle, 59;
effect on Christianity, 218
Retz, Cardinal de, Fronde, 390
Retzius, Anders A., and skull-forms, 128
Revelation, Arabian concept, 243-246;
secret, 246
Revolution, period, 387;
Classical occurrence, 394, 405;
French, as unique manifestation, 411;
Parliamentarism as continuance, 415;
Arabian period, 424.
_See also_ Democracy; Politics
Rhegium, democratic triumph, 396
Rhodes, Cecil, actuality of leadership, 369;
significance, 435;
money and power, 459, 473, 475
Rhodes, plan, 100;
siege, 421
Rhodesia, oval house, 122
Richard I of England, imperial vassal, 374
Richelieu, Cardinal de, power, 389, 390
Robert the Devil, and finance, 372
Robespierre, Maximilian, adventurer, 19;
State-machine, 404, 405;
as mass-leader, 448 n.
Rodbertus, Johann K., and class dictatorship, 404
Roe, Sir Thomas, Turkish mission, 43 n.
Roger II of Sicily, finance, 489
Roman Catholic Church, Classical survivals in popular, 110;
and style of Western learning, 346;
changed basis of politics, 451 n.
_See also_ Christianity; Papacy
Roman law, basis in Classical world, _persona_ and _res_,
60;
and divine law, 60;
as product of practical experience, no legal class, 61;
and Greek law, _jus civile_ and _jus gentium_, city law,
61, 62;
lack of precedent, English contrast, 62, 63;
“collection” not “system,” 63;
lack of early stratification, 64;
codes as party politics, 64;
_jus gentium_ as imperial, 66;
Hadrian’s edict and petrification, 66;
development of jurisprudence, 66;
period of maturity, 66;
lack of basic ideas, 67;
schools, 67;
law of bodies, statics, 67;
and Arabian juridical person, 67, 68, 174, 177;
and Arabian creed-communities, emperor-worship, 68, 69;
Constantine and orthodox Christian law, 69, 70;
position of Arabian-Latin law, 70-72;
divine origin and Arabian written law, precedent and consensus,
72-74;
framing and position of Corpus Juris, religious creation, 74;
independent development of Western law-history, 75;
development of Norman-English law, 75, 76, 78;
Germanic law in Southern Europe, 76;
Maximilian’s code, 76;
character in Germany and Spain, 76, 77;
Corpus Juris Canonici, 77;
Western conflict of _fas_ and _jus_, 78;
effect on Western culture, book and life, 78-80;
Classical bodies and Western functions, 80-82;
Western emancipation as future task, 83, 491, 505;
and established church, 177 n.;
and family, 330;
Western estates and, 365
Romanesque, soul, 180
Romanos, power, 426
Romans, origin of name, 382
Romanticism, and world-literature, 108;
and idea of people, 113;
and apocalyptic, 236, 237, 250
Rome, collapse of empire, 42;
historyful and historyless, 50;
as capital city, 95;
as provincial city, 99;
Classical block-tenements, 101;
suburbs of modern city, 101 n.;
decay of city, 107;
city as Etruscan, 164;
people of city, 166;
political character, 173, 174;
reason for rise, cultural necessity, 185, 422;
cults and Greek cults, 284;
family history, 336;
first settlements and tribes, 351, 382;
Plebs as Third Estate, 357, 408;
_vis-à-vis_ Carthage, 368;
early oligarchy, 375;
aristocratic control, attitude toward residue, 375, 382;
empire as polis, 383;
polis and citizenship, 383, 384;
fifth-century relations, 394-398;
status of Tribunate, 395, 415 n.;
Senate and Tribunate, opposition as “form,” 397;
period of military control, 407;
and border states, 407;
control by political nobility, Senate as engine, 409-411;
money in politics, demagogy, 410, 411, 457-459;
evolution and completion of Cæsarism, 422, 423, 430, 432-434;
political factions and parties, 450;
courts and politics, 459;
finance, 487, 494, 495
Roosevelt, Theodore, on race suicide, 106
Rossbach, battle, importance, 182
Rothschilds, founding of fortune, 402 n.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, Rationalism, 307;
and class dictatorship, 404;
end of influence, 454
Ruach, connotation, 234
Rubens, Peter Paul, “tigress” expression, 128 n.
Ruma clan, 382
Rumina, goddess, 382
Russian Culture, pseudomorphosis, and Western Culture, 192-194;
and towns, 194;
Dostoyevski and Tolstoi as types, 194-196;
position of Bolshevism, 195;
regular and secular clergy, 254;
pre-cultural religiousness, 278;
soul-character, 295 n.;
unreal classes, 335 n.;
mir, 348;
and money, 495 n.;
present Christianity, 495 n.;
culture and machine, 504 n.
Russo-Japanese War, and military art, 421
Saba, ignored history, 190;
feudalism, 196-198;
geography, 196 n.;
religion, 209, 253;
chronology, 239
Sabazius, cult, 201
Sabbath, Chaldean and Jewish, 207
Sabiniani, legal school, style, 67, 346
_Sachsenspiegel_, 64, 76
Sacraments, Pagan, 203;
Western concept, and free will, 293;
effect of Reformation, 298.
_See also_ Contrition
Sacred books, Arabian nation, revelation, 243-246;
cultural attitude, 244 n.;
infallibility, interpretation, secret revelation, 245-247;
allegorical exegesis, 247;
commentary and authoritative chain, 249, 250.
_See also_ Bible
Sadducees, tendency, 211
Sage, as ideal, 307
Sahara, extension, 39 n.
Saint-Simon, Comte de, and class dictatorship, 404
Saint-Simon, Duc de, on nobility and nation, 172;
on new nobility, 357 n.
Salisbury, Marquess of, and family, 393
Salman, trial, 317
Samarra, plan, 100;
area, 101 n.;
abandoned, 107
Samuel, lord of Al Alblaq, 198
San Gimigniano, fortified towers, 355 n.
Sankhara, Neo-Brahmanism, 315
Sapor I, and Mazdaism, 251
Saracens, Charles Martel’s victory, 192. _See also_ Islam
Saragossa, General Privilege, 373
Sarapion, anchorite, 254
Sards, as name, 164
Sargon, contemporaries, 39
Sassanids, study neglected, 38, 190;
feudalism, 196-198, 423;
Mazdaic State religion, 253;
nobility and priesthood, 353;
as model for Byzantine ceremonial, 378 n.
Savelli, and Papacy, 354
Saviour, as title, 219 n.
Savonarola, Girolamo, and Renaissance, 291;
and reform, urbanism, 296, 297
Saxony, dynastic influence, 182
Scævola, Q. Mucius, private-law, 66
Scent, man’s relation, 7, 115. _See also_ Sense
Schadow, Johann Gottfried, art, 118
Schiele, Friedrich M., on Sadducees and Essenes, 211 n.
Schinkel, Hans F., art, 118
Scholasticism, Arabian and Pseudomorphic, 71, 200, 228, 229, 250;
of Rationalism, 305-308;
intellectual discipline, 463
Schuda, legends, 250
_Schwabenspiegel_, 76
Science. _See_ Intelligence, Natural science
Scipio, P. Cornelius (Africanus Major), and border States, 408;
and Cato, 411;
and Imperialism, 422;
and political organization, 452
Scipio, P Cornelius (Africanus Minor), murder, 423;
and Imperialism, 430;
and political organization, 452
Scots, and divine-given torments, 299 n.
Script. _See_ Writing
Sea-folk, and Egypt, 107, 122, 129, 164
Second religiousness, in Mexican Culture, 45 n.;
period and character, 310;
Syncretism, 311-313;
emperor-cult and fixed organizations, 314;
and Cæsarism, 386 n.;
Western, 455
Seibal, and Mexican Culture, 44
Seleucid Empire, as Arabian, 190;
era, 239
Senate, Roman, and Tribunate, 397, 398;
and political nobility, 409;
Augustus’ dyarchy as nullity, 432;
and courts, 460;
economics and politics, 475
Senatus Populusque Romanus, as Senate and Tribunate, 398;
formal restoration, 433
Seneca, L. Annæus, religiousness, 313
Sensation-content, 6
Sense, as microcosmic organ, and understanding, 5, 69;
human and animal, 114, 115;
and relation of microcosm to macrocosm, 499.
_See also_ Sight
Sentence, origin, and word, 141;
and race, 142;
verbs, 143.
_See also_ Language
Sentinum, battle, importance, 422
Sepoy Mutiny, cultural basis, 321 n.
Septimus Severus, historyless, 432
Serapis-cult, origin, 310
Sertorius, Quintus, and Cæsarism, 428 n.
Sesostris I, absolutism, 387
Sesostris III, absolutism, 387
Sethe, Kurt, on Egyptian script, 108 n.
Seuse, Heinrich, on Mysticism, 292
Sex, cosmic organ, 5;
Civilization and sterility, 103-105;
“versehen,” 126;
conception as sin, 272;
and Classical cults, 283;
orgiasm and asceticism, 283;
elements of duality, war, 327, 328;
and “form,” 331;
and State, 362.
_See also_ Being; Family; Monasticism
Sforza, Catherine, heroism, 328
Shak-el-Arab, Mandæanism, 214 n.
Shamir Juharish, feudalism, 196
Shan-Kur {sic} Period, 416
Shang dynasty, mythology, 286, 379 n.
Shantung, Manichæans, Nestorians, and Islam, 260, 261
Shaping, and training, 331, 340
Shaw, George Bernard, on free woman, 105;
Undershaft as type, 475 n.;
on money and life, 484
Sheridan, Richard B. B., and French Revolution, 412
Shi, as title, 41, 418
Shi-hwang-ti, and second religiousness, 310;
and Chinese history, 434
Shi-King, as religious source, 286;
love songs, 352
Shia, and Chaldean, 176
Shiites, Logos-idea, 236 n.;
beginning, 424
Shirazi, philosophy, 321
Shneor Zalman ben Baruch. _See_ Salman
Shu-Ching, as religious source, 286
Shuiski, Vassili, period, 192
Sibylline books, character of Classical, 244 n.
Sicily, Norman state, 372, 489;
democratic triumph, 396;
and Maniakes, 427 n.
Siculi, as name, 164
Siena, fortified towers, 355
Sight, as supreme sense, 6;
bodily and mental, 7;
and waking-being, 7;
lordship in man, 7-9;
invisible and fear, 8;
and race, 114, 128;
and words, 140;
and verbs, 143;
Arabian light-sensation, “cavern” and Logos, 233, 236, 237;
light and religion, 265.
_See also_ Sense
Sign, and language, 134;
and script, 149
Signorelli, Luca, frescoes and the Devil, 292 n.
Simplicius, and commentary, 247
Sinuhet, biography, 387
Skeleton, and race, 124, 128-130, 175;
and landscape, 130
Skleros, power, 427
Skoptsi, as manifestation, 278
Skull. _See_ Skeleton
Slavery, Roman freedmen and citizenship, 166 n.;
Classical and money, end, 349 n., 480, 488, 496;
Irak rebellion, 426;
attitude of Plebs, 451 n.;
technique, 479 n., 503;
Western status, 488 n.
Sleep, as vegetable, 7
Smith, Adam, relation to property, 345;
and Hume, 403;
and economic thought, 469;
theory of value, 491
Smith, Elliot, ethnological research, 129
Smiths, guild and tribe, 479
Socialism, money and movement, 402;
effect on Capitalism, 454, 464 n., 506 n.;
and Cæsarism, 506.
_See also_ Marx
Society, origin, 343
Sociology, Jesus’ indifference, 217
Socrates, Rationalism, 307;
as spiritual heir and ancestry, 309
Sohm, Rudolf, on German jurisprudence, 80
Sol Invictus, cult, 201;
and Syncretism, 253
Solomon, fictitious, 72 n.;
Psalms, 213 n.
Solon, Egyptian influence, 62 n.;
character of law, 63-65;
and impiety, 282;
economics and politics, 475
Sombart, Werner, on book-keeping, 490
Sophists, and Socrates, 309;
and Chinese Cæsarism, 418
Sorel, Albert, and French Revolution, 399 n.
Soul, cultural and intercultural forms, 56;
cultural significance, 59;
of town, 90;
and language, 137;
and people, 165;
and spirit in Arabian dualism, indwelling, 234-236;
Western and Russian, 295 n.
_See_ Religion; Spirit; Will
Sound, as sign of language, word, 134
Space, extension and waking-being, 7;
and truths, 12;
Arabian concept, 233;
and time and religion, 265.
_See also_ Time
Spain, physical changes, 39 n.;
and Roman law, 77;
Jewish Culture, 316;
period of absolutism, 388;
Fronde conflict, 390;
origins of accountancy, 489
Sparta, helots, 332, 349, 357;
_vis-à-vis_ Athens, 368;
royal succession, 380;
oligarchic-democratic struggle, 396, 397
Spartacus, and Cæsarism, 428 n.
Spartiates, as feudal, 375
Speaking, and language, 117, 125
Speculators, as cultural phenomenon, 484
Spence, Lewis, on Mexican chronology, 44 n.
Spener, Philipp J., Pietism, 308
Spenta Mainyu, Persian Holy Spirit, 244
Sphærus, influence, 454 n.
Spinden, Herbert J., researches in Mexican Culture, 44 n.
Spinoza, Baruch, Gnosis, 228;
Arabian metaphysic, 241, 321;
on contemplation, 242;
expulsion, 317
Spirit, Arabian pneuma, 57;
and soul in Arabian dualism, indwelling, 234-236.
_See also_ Body; Religion; Soul; Waking-being
Sport, and Civilization, 103
Stanley, Arthur P., on Islam and Christianity, 304 n.
State. _See_ Politics
States-General, calling, 373;
overthrow, 388
Statics, Roman law, 67
Steam-engine, effect, 502
Stein, Lorenz von, on money, 485
Stenography, character, 152
Sterility, and Civilization, 103-105
Stoicism, and jurisprudence, 62;
Rationalism, 307;
Pietism, 308;
and second religiousness, 312;
style of school, 345;
improvidence, 372;
and Cæsarism, ideologues and conspiracy, 433, 434;
political influence, 454
Streets, cultural attitude, 94
Stuarts, and Roman law, 365 n.;
and dynasty, 388, 389
Studion, monk-state, 314
Style, Western, external effects, 46;
intercultural, 87-89;
as urban, 92;
and Civilization, 108, 109;
rigid and living, surface mixture, 123;
priesthood and, of learning, 345
Su-tsin, career, 417;
character, 419
Subjects and objects, 369;
in politics, 441;
in economics, 479, 493
Submission, as Arabian concept, 240
Substance, Arabian religious concept, 244;
controversy and Christian split, 255-258.
_See also_ Trinity
Succession Wars, character, 392
Sudra, as caste, 332;
and tribes, 348
Sufism, and Chaldean, 176;
Gnosis, 228;
and contemplation, 242;
Pietism, 308;
and Jewish Mysticism, 321.
_See also_ Islam; Mysticism
Sulla, L. Cornelius, and princeps, 423;
and demagogy, 458;
and courts, 460
Sultanate, rise over caliphate, 425, 426
Sumer, and Arabian Culture, 189 n.
Sun-tse, on war, 417 n., 419 n.;
character, 419 n.;
anecdote, 420 n.
Sura, academy, 71, 200
Swedenborg, Emanuel, Pietism, 308;
and Yesirah, 316
Sybaris, destruction, 303, 394
Symbolism, farmhouse, 90;
peacock, 236;
cultural religious prime symbols, 279, 287, 288;
colour, 289;
clock, 300 n.;
Wandering Jew, 317;
printing, 413;
Classical coin, 486
Syncretic Church, and emperor-worship, 68;
as name, 68 n.;
cults and “Greeks,” 176;
Arabian churches in Classical style, 201;
reversal, Classical cults as Eastern Church, 102;
Paganism and Christianity, sacraments and other elements, 203,
204;
Jewish rescue, from, 210;
Jesus sects, 220 n.;
development, parallelism, 252;
State religion, 253;
monasticism, 254;
westward expansion, 255;
missionarism, 259;
end of theology, 261.
_See also_ Pseudomorphosis; Religion
Syncretism, in second religiousness, 311-313. _See also_
preceding title
Synesius, as Neo-Platonist, 252
Synod of a Hundred Chapters, 278
Synod of Antichrist, 278
Synœcism, Classical, 173, 355, 381, 382;
Roman, 383
Syntax, and grammar, 142;
period, 145
Syracuse, as provincial city, 99;
as megalopolis, 382 n.;
democratic triumph, 396;
colonization, 405;
class proscriptions, 405, 406 n.;
siege, 421;
and Plato’s theory, 454
Syrian Law-book, importance, 64, 70
Sze-ma-tsien, on Contending States, 417;
as compiler, 418 n.;
biographies, 454 n.
Taboo, relation to waking-being and language, 116, 154;
dependence on totem, 117, 265;
in art, 118;
and cathedral, 122;
and script, 151;
space-fear, 265;
and technique, 268, 271;
moral, and negations, 272, 342.
_See also_ Totem
Tacitus, Cornelius, on Decemvirs’ code, 65;
philosophical confusion, 238;
and polis, 383;
on Musonius Rufus, 430;
and Cæsarism, 434 n.
Tai-dsung, and Islam, 261
Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles de, as politician, 446
Talmud, as creed law, 69;
and Chaldean, 176;
development, influences, 208, 209
Tammany Hall, as type, 452 n.
Tannaim, class, 71
Tanvasar, and new Avesta, 250, 251
Taoism, and Pacifism, 185;
principle, 287;
alteration in concept, 307;
expansion, 308;
Syncretism, 312, 315;
of Han period, 314;
and priesthood, 352;
and Cæsarism, 434 n.
Tarquins, fall, 65
Tarragona, Jewish city, 316
Tartars, Russian release, 192
Taxes, purpose, 475 n.
Tchun-tsin-fan-lu, 454 n.
Technique, and truth, 144 n.;
and theory in religion, 268, 271;
and Classical city-religions, 285;
and Western science, 300, 302;
and Rationalism, 306;
development of military, 420-422;
influence on Western economic thought, 469;
machines and Western slavery, 488 n.;
and plant, 499;
of animal movement, involuntary, 499;
conscious-knowing, 499;
tyrannical theory, 500;
development out of nature, 500;
under Classical Culture, 500;
Western passion, Gothic, 501;
effect of steam-engine, 502;
religious origin, and Devil, 502, 504, 504 n., 505;
Western and infinity, conquest of nature, 503, 504;
machine-industry as master of Western Civilization, 504;
its agents, 504;
machine-industry as Western bourgeois, 504 n.;
other cultures and machine, 504 n.;
engineer as priest, 505;
struggle with money, 505
Telemachus, and dynasty, 380
Telescope, Chinese invention, 501 n.
Tell-el-Amarna letters, 166
Ten Thousand, as polis, 160 n.
Tenochtitlan, destruction, 44;
founding, character, 45, 99
Tension, and beat, 4;
and waking-being, 7;
and Civilization and intelligence, 102.
_See also_ Waking-being
Tertullian, Montanist, 227;
and Western Church, 229;
period, 250
Teutoburger Wald, Varus’ defeat, 48 n.
Teutonic Knights, finance, 489
Tezcuco, as world-city, 99
Thebes, as Egypt, 95;
as world-city, 99;
rise of dynasty, 428
Themis, and Dike, 376, 378
Theocritus, “playing” with expression, 137
Theoderich, tomb, 89
Theodore of Studion, and Leo V, 425;
as party leader, 449
Theognis, and _carpe diem_, 383
Theory, development, dominance, 10, 500;
and technique in religion, 268, 271;
cultural attitude toward scientific, 301;
correctness and technical value, 500 n.
Thing, legal Classical notion, 60
Third Estate. _See_ Democracy
Thirty Years’ War, as consequence, 181;
political aspect, 388, 391;
Wallenstein’s idea and fall, 389
Thomas, Saint, Gospel, 213 n.;
Acts, romances, 236, 251 n.
Thomas Aquinas, philosophy, 172 n.;
and Devil-cult, 291;
and sacraments, 293
Thought, defined, development of theoretical, 10;
and life, facts and truths, 11-13;
compulsion, 12;
causality-men, place in life, 16-19.
_See also_ Waking-being
Thucydides, ahistoric, 24
Thurii, plan, 100
Tiberius, as historyful, 171;
economics and politics, 432, 475
Tikal, and Mexican Culture, 44
Tilly, Count of, and Wallenstein, 389
Time, and facts, 12;
and dynastic-idea, 179;
Arabian concept, ordained period, 238-240, 249;
and space and religion, 265;
and truth, 271;
mythology, 286.
_See also_ Being; Destiny; History; Space
Tiresias, and Classical religious beginnings, 282, 350
Tities, tribe, 351, 382
Tobit, as Arabian, 208
Togrulbek, power, 427
Toledo, Jewish city, 316
Toleration, Classical and Arabian attitude, 203
Tolstoi, Leo, Western soul, 194-196;
conception of Jesus, 218
Topinard, Paul, race classification, 125
Totem, relation to being and race, 116;
in art, 118;
and dwelling-house, 121;
and castle, 122;
in language, 154;
time-fear and taboo, 265;
moral, 342.
_See also_ Taboo
Touch, as primary sense, 6. _See also_ Sense
Tournament, as manifestation of nobility, 352
Tours, importance of Saracen defeat, 192
Town, and Culture, 90;
soul, 90;
relation to country, 91;
cultural type, 91;
and market, 91, 480;
and style, 92;
“visage” as cultural, 93;
relation to landscape, 94;
city history as world-history, 95, 96;
domination of capital city, cultural basis, 95, 381;
and intellect, 96;
great and little, spiritual distinction, 97;
and monetary idea, and dictatorship, 97, 98;
Civilization and overflow, 100;
and writing, 152;
script speech, 155;
and nations, 171;
Russia and, 194;
and Renaissance-Reformation movement, 297;
and science, 300;
and Puritanism, 302;
and Rationalism, 305;
consciousness and personal freedom, 354, 356, 358;
burgher estate, 355;
movement of primary estates to, 355, 356;
and State-idea, 377;
relation of politics and economics, capitalism, 476, 477, 493;
effect on trade, 481, 484.
_See also_ Causality; Megalopolitanism; Polis; Politics
Trade, and politics, 474;
as substitute for war, 474.
_See also_ Economics
Tradition, place in cultural history, 338;
prevision law, 363;
of political leadership, 444
Training, and shaping, 331, 340
Trajan, historyless, 432
Tramilæ, as name, 164
Transubstantiation, new English controversy, 309 n.
Trdat of Armenia, State and Church, 253
Trebatius Testa, C., and Cicero, 458 n.
Tree of Knowledge, and cross, 180 n.
Tribes, Arabian pre-cultural associations, solution, 173, 176;
as names for priesthoods, 175;
occupational, 348, 479
Tribonian, as jurist, 73
Tribunate, and Plebs, 357;
beginning, status, as lawful Tyrannis, 394-398, 433;
consular, 397;
and Senate, survival, 397, 398, 433;
blind incident, 415 n.;
Marius as heir, 423;
and party, 451
Trinity, and Arabian pneuma, 68, 244. _See also_ Logos; Substance
Triumvirates, and border States, 408;
and Cæsarism, 423;
first, 454
Troeltsch, Ernst, on Augustine as Classical, 241 n.
Trojan War, as beginning of history, 27;
feud or crusade, 282
Troubadours, Arabian, 198;
relation to Renaissance, 297
Truth, and facts, 11, 12, 47;
cultural basis, 58;
and speech, 137, 144;
abstract and living, 147;
Arabian pneuma, 242;
Arabian sacred book, 243;
experience, 268;
and time, 271;
and current of being, history, 274;
and politics, 368;
influence of press, 461.
_See also_ Ethics; Faith
_Tshou-li_, on officialdom, 372
Tshun-tsin, period, 391
Tsi, in period of Contending States, 417
Tsin, imperialistic State, 38, 41;
and Taoism, 185;
and Tsu, 368;
rise in period of Contending States, 416-419
Tsu, and Tsin, 368;
in period of Contending States, 417, 418, 454
Tung Chung-Shu, on Middle Kingdom, 373 n.
Turfan manuscripts, 213 n., 252
Turgot, Anne R. J., overthrow, 411 n.
Turks, and Cæsarism, 426, 427
Tursha, as name, 164
Twelve Tables, character, 63, 65;
importance, 65 n.;
commentary, 66;
class law, 365;
significance, overthrow, 396
Tyche, and lot-choice of officials, 383
Tyrannis, first, preceding oligarchy, 375;
fall of Tarquinian, 382;
significance, 386;
and Tribunate, struggle for lawful, 394-398;
character of second, 405-408.
_See also_ Politics
Ujjaina, as world-city, 99
Ulemas, law-men, 71
Ulpian, as jurist, 71
_Unam sanctam_ bull, 376
Understanding, and sensation, 6;
language and emancipation, thought, 9, 10;
and reason, 13;
meaning, 133, 136;
as causal, 266;
and faith, 266, 269-271
United States. _See_ Americans
Ur, tombs, 35 n.
Uxmal, and Mexican Culture, 45;
as world-city, 99
Valentinian III, Law of Citations, 73, 248
Valentinus, period, 250;
and substance, 256
Value, early lack of concept, 480;
money and value-in-itself, 482;
theories as subjective, 482 n.;
money and standard, 485 n.;
irrelation of Classical land and money, 487;
Classical attitude toward art, 487;
Western concept of work, 491-493.
_See also_ Economics
Varro, M. Terentius, era, 239
Varus, P. Quintilius, defeat, site, 48, 487
Vasari, Giorgio, and return to nature, 291
Vase-painting, Exekias, 135
Vasili Blazheny, style, 89
Vassalage, rise and significance, 349;
change to money basis, 357.
_See also_ Feudalism; Slavery
Vegetable. _See_ Plant
Venice, and money-outlook, 97 n.;
small-scale traffic, 481 n.
Verbs, place in language development, 143
Vergennes, Comte de, as end of period, 398
Verres, Caius, wealth as object, 459
Vespasian, war on Judea, 210;
and ideologues, 434
Vesta, and economics, 472
Village, and town, 91
Vindex, unimportance, 50
Virtue, change in concept, 307
Vladimir of Kiev, epic cycle, 192
Vohu Mano, as Word of God, 244
Voltaire, and Rationalism, 305
Vries, Hugo de, mutation theory, 32 n.
Waking-being, as microcosmic, and being, 7, 11, 13;
visual thought, 7-9;
language and thought, 9, 10, 114;
life and thought, facts and truths, 11-13, 16;
adjustment to macrocosm, 14, 24;
and causality, 14;
and problem of motion, death, 14-16;
and intercultural history, 56;
and money, 98;
upward series of utterances, 116;
and taboo, 117;
willed activity, 133;
and reflection, 141;
cultural oppositions, 233;
and religion, 265, 499;
and priesthood, 335;
and economics, 473;
and sense, 499;
ultimate fall, 507.
_See also_ Being; Causality; Economics; Intelligence;
Language; Microcosm; Religion; Space; Town
Wallenstein, Albrecht von, idea, power and fall, 389
Wandering Jew, symbolism, 317
Wang, as title, 379
Wang-Cheng, rule, 41, 418, 423
War, and politics and economics, 330, 366, 440, 474;
and nobility, 351;
as great creator, 362;
as normal Classical condition, 385;
character of Baroque, 392;
Pe-Ki as general, 417 n.;
Sun-tse as authority, 417 n., 419 n.;
change in character under Civilization, 419-422;
nineteenth-century substitute, 428;
expected Western period, 429;
as cultural necessity, 429, 434;
relation to press, 460;
and hunger, 471.
_See also_ Army; Peace
Wartburg, cathedral art, 123
Washington, plan, 100 n.
Washington Conference, as prelude of war, 430
Wealth. _See_ Economics; Money
Wedgwood, Josiah, ware, 491
Wei-Yang, character, 419
Weill, Raymond, on Hyksos, 428 n.
Weininger, Otto, Arabian metaphysic, 322
Weissenberg, Samuel, on Jewish type, 175
Wellington, Duke of, rise, 406
Welser, city nobility, 356
Wenceslaus, as emperor, 376
Wesley, John, practical Pietism, 308
Westermann, Diedrich, language investigation, 140
Western Culture, as historic, 28;
and human and universal history, 28;
individuality in historical attunement, 29, 30;
future historical achievement, 30, 46, 47, 55;
landscape and outside effect, 46;
transfer of Christianity to, 59, 235, 237, 258;
independent legal development, 75, 76;
Roman law in, 76-78;
effect of Roman law, 78-83;
and antique, 79;
future jurisprudence, 80-83, 505;
future cities, 101;
present stage of Civilization, 109;
and mother tongue, 120;
and script, 150;
and people, 169;
nations under, dynastic-idea, 179-181, 378, 381;
races, nations, and dynasties, 181-183;
dynastic-idea and overthrow of monarchy, language-idea, 183;
Charles Martel and avoidance of pseudomorphosis, 192;
and Russia, 192;
newness of religion, depth-experience as symbol, 288, 294 n.;
Mary-cult and Devil-cult, 290-294;
guilt and free-will, sacraments, 292, 293;
contrition, 293-295;
personality-concept, 293;
Calvin-Loyola opposition and world-politics, 299;
and practical mechanics, 300;
dynamic character of Rationalism, 309;
probable character of second religiousness, 311 n.;
religion and style of learning, 346;
style of nobility, genealogical principle, 350;
style of priesthood, 352;
relation of primary estates, 353;
capital city, 381;
reading and writing, 413;
money as function, 489-493;
capital and financial organization, 493, 494;
future, 507.
_See also_ Baroque; Cultures; Gothic; Politics; Technique
Westminster Confession, on Grace, 242
Westphalia, Peace of, effect on nobility, 391
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, on patriarchal kingdom, 380 n.
Will, Arabian attitude, submission, 235, 240;
Arabian Grace, 241, 242;
Western free-will and sacraments, 292, 293;
Russian attitude, 295 n.
William I of England, and property, 371
William of Occam, will and reason, 241
Wilson, Woodrow, as tool, 475
Winchester, Eng., as royal residence, 92 n.
Winckler, Hugo, on post-exilic Jews, 205
Witchcraft, Western cult, 291;
persecution, 302
Woman. _See_ Sex
Words, cult-colouring of prime, 116;
as language sound, 134;
as to origin, 137, 138;
and names, 138-141;
and modern gesture, 140 n.;
and sentence, 141;
acquisition, 142;
vocabularies and grammar, 147;
alien provenance, 148;
and conscious technique, 499.
_See also_ Language
Work, quantity and quality in Western concept of value, 491-493
Works, religious technique and moral, 272. _See also_ Faith
World-city. _See_ Megalopolitanism
World War, and passage to Cæsarism, 418;
effect on universal military service, 429;
and military art, 421;
and Marxism, 455;
guilt question, 461 n.;
Allied press propaganda, 462 n., 463
Worms, Diet of, code, 76
Writing, cultural relation, 36, 146, 150;
Arabian religions and scripts, 73, 150, 227 n.;
Egyptian, 108;
grammatical decomposition, 145, 146;
technique of signs and thoughts, 146;
and linguistic history, 147;
and “present” training, 149;
dependence on grammar, 149;
and reading, 149;
and extension and duration, 150;
and historical endowment, 150;
and colloquial language, 150;
relation to race, as taboo, ornament, 151;
city and utilitarian, standardization, 152, 155;
stenography, 152;
dependence of world history on, 153.
_See also_ Language
Wu, State, annihilation, 422
Wu-ti, as ruler, 41
Wullenweber, Jürgen, economics and politics, 475
Wundt, Wilhelm M., an origin of language, 138
Wyclif, John, and reform, 296
Xenophon, and class dictatorship, 404
Yahweh cult, 201
Yang-Chu, materialism, 309
Yellow Turbans, insurrection, 314
Yeomanry, lack in England and United States, 449 n. _See also_
Peasantry
Yesirah, rational Mysticism, 316
Yiddish, character, 150 n.
Yorck von Wartenburg, Graf, and Napoleon, 406 n.
Zaddikism, 322
Zaleucus, laws, 64
Zama, battle, and Hellenism, 191, 422
Zarathustra, basis of religious reform, 168;
Jewish contemporaries, 205.
_See also_ Mazdaism; Zend Avesta
Zechariah, Persian influence, 208
Zend Avesta, commentary, 247;
new, Mazdaism, 251
Zeno, and property, 344
Zimmern, Heinrich, on Jesus as Mandæan, 214 n.
Zionism, character, 210
Zoroaster. _See_ Zarathustra
Zrvanism, rise, 256
Zwingli, Ulrich, as Gothic, 296
[FOOTNOTES]
[1] In what follows I have drawn upon a metaphysical work that I hope
shortly to be able to publish.
[2] For instance, Vol. I, p. 154.--_Tr._
[3] See Vol. I, p. 54.--_Tr._
[4] Even scientific astronomy, when applied to everyday work, states
the movements of the heavenly bodies in terms referred to our
perception of them.--_Tr._
[5] See Vol. I, p. 172.--_Tr._
[6] A very similar notion of the light-world diffused from the
light-centre forms the cardinal point of the philosophy of Robert
Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1175-1273).--_Tr._
[7] The coming of radio broadcasting has in no way altered, but has
rather confirmed, the validity of this. The listener either translates
his aural impressions into those of the light-world or else yields even
more readily than usual to the “illusion” here discussed.--_Tr._
[8] The original reads: “_An Stelle des völlig einheitlichen
verstehenden Empfindens erscheint oft und öfter ein Verstehen der
Bedeutung von kaum noch beachteten Sinneseindrücken._”--_Tr._
[9] Hence we call that which we observe in the faces of men who have
not the habit of thought “animal”--admiringly or contemptuously as the
case may be.
[10] See Vol. I, p. 126.--_Tr._
[11] See Vol. I, p. 102.--_Tr._
[12] Hence Bayle’s profound observation that the understanding is
capable only of discovering errors.
[13] See Vol. I, p. 94.--_Tr._
[14] See Vol. I, pp. 53, et seq.--_Tr._
[15] Original: “_aus dem Erlebnis._”--_Tr._
[16] A.D. 553 (Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, ch. xliii).--_Tr._
[17] G. Le Bon’s _Psychologie des Foules_ (which has been translated
into English under the title _The Crowd_) is the pioneer work on this
subject, and though unduly coloured perhaps by the author’s personal
prepossessions, still retains its interest and value.--_Tr._
[18] See Vol. I., pp. 139, et seq.--_Tr._
[19] Meaning here names, dates, numbers--the chronology in the usual
extensive sense, and not the intensive or deep sense. See Vol. I, pp.
97, 153 (foot-note).--_Tr._
[20] He affirmed, on the first page of his history (about 400 B.C.),
that before his time nothing of significance had happened (οὐ μεγάλα
νομίζω γενέσθαι οὔτε κατὰ τοὺς πολέμους οὔτε ἐς τα ἄλλα. Thucydides, I,
1.)
[21] Original: “_Alles Bedeutende, nämlich das Einmalige der
Geschichte._”--_Tr._
[22] I suppose the meaning of these words to be that generalization and
flair are not really opposed, but interdependent.--_Tr._
[23] Original: _(“So geschieht dies stets ...) im Hinblick auf das_ im
Augenblick geforderte _Bild als der beständigen Funktion der Zeit und
des Menschen.”_--_Tr._
[24] Even at the level of the Trojan War the timeless mythological
figures of gods and demigods are still involved, intimately and in
detail, in the human story. See, on the whole question of the Greek
attitude towards time and history, Vol. I, p. 9 and _passim_.--_Tr._
[25] See Chapter VIII below.--_Tr._
[26] Introduced in Rome in 522 during the Ostrogoth domination, not
until Charlemagne’s times did it make headway in the Germanic lands.
Then, however, its spread was rapid.
[27] See Vol. I, p. 19.--_Tr._
[28] On the other hand--and very significantly--the field of the
history-picture livingly experienced in the consciousness of the
sincere Renaissance classicist markedly contracted.
[29] See Vol. I, p. 16.--_Tr._
[30] The Emperor Henry VI reigned 1190-7.--_Tr._
[31] During his Italian sojourn of 1786-8 Goethe made up his mind
to resign his political offices at Weimar, retaining merely a
non-executive seat on the Council and definitely devoting himself to
art and science. This resolution he carried into effect on his return
to Weimar in 1788; _Tasso_ finally appeared in 1790.--_Tr._
[32] For the special sense in which the word “Civilization” is used
throughout this work see Vol. I, p. 31. Briefly, the Civilization is
the outcome of the Culture of which it is in one sense the final phase,
but in another the distinct and unlike sequel.--_Tr._
[33] Christian Leopold von Buch, 1774-1853; Cuvier, 1769-1832.--_Tr._
[34] The first proof that the basic forms of plants and animals did
not evolve, but were suddenly there, was given by H. de Vries in his
_Mutation Theory_ (1886). In the language of Goethe, we see how the
“impressed form” [See Vol. I, p. 157.--_Tr._] works itself out in the
individual samples, but not how the die was cut for _the whole genus_.
[35] With this it becomes unnecessary to postulate vast periods of
time for the original states of man, and we can regard the interval
between the oldest man-type hitherto discovered and the beginning of
the Egyptian Culture as a span, greater indeed, but certainly not
unthinkably greater, than the 5,000 years of recognized cultural
history.
[36] It is perhaps not unnecessary to remark that the word “epoch” is
used throughout this book in its proper sense of “turning point” or
“moment of change” and _not_ in the loose sense of “period” which it
has acquired.--_Tr._
[37] _Und Afrika Sprach_ (1912); _Paideuma, Umrisse einer Kultur- und
Seelenlehre_ (1920). Frobenius distinguishes three ages.
[38] This work appeared before the discovery of the Sumerian (or
Pre-Sumerian) tombs of Ur.--_Tr._
[39] See Vol. I, p. 108.--_Tr._
[40] Goethe, in his little essay “_Geistesepochen_,” has characterized
the four parts of a Culture--its preliminary, early, late, and
civilized stages--with such a depth of insight that even to-day there
is nothing to add. See the tables at the end of Vol. I, which agree
with this exactly.
[41] Another blank is the history of the countryside or landscape
(i.e., of the soil, with its plant-mantle and its weathering) in which
man’s history has been staged for five thousand years. And yet man has
so painfully wrested himself from the history of the landscape, and
withal is so held to it still by myriad fibres, that without it life,
soul, and thought are inconceivable.
So far as concerns the South-European field, from the end of the Ice
Age, a hitherto rank luxuriance gradually gave place in the plant-world
to poverty. In the course of the successive Egyptian, Classical,
Arabian, and Western Cultures, a climatic change developed all around
the Mediterranean, which resulted in the peasant’s being compelled to
fight no longer _against_ the plant-world, but _for_ it--first against
the primeval forest and then against the desert. In Hannibal’s time
the Sahara lay very far indeed to the south of Carthage, but to-day
it already penetrates to northern Spain and Italy. Where was it in
the days of the pyramid-builders, who depicted sylvan and hunting
scenes in their reliefs? When the Spaniards expelled the Moriscos,
their countryside of woods and ploughland, already only artificially
maintained, lost its character altogether, and the towns became oases
in the waste. In the Roman period such a result could not have ensued.
[42] The new method of comparative morphology affords us a safe test
of the datings which have been arrived at by other means for the
beginnings of past Cultures. The same kind of argument which would
prevent us, even in the absence of positive information, from dating
Goethe’s birth more than a century earlier than the “_Urfaust_,”
or supposing the career of Alexander the Great to have been that
of an elderly man, enables us to demonstrate, from the individual
characteristics of their political life and the spirit of their art,
thought, and religion, that the Egyptian Culture dawned somewhere
about 3000 and the Chinese about 1400. The calculations of French
investigators and more recently of Borchardt (_Die Annalen und
die zeitliche Festlegung des Alten Reiches_, 1919) are as unsound
intrinsically as those of Chinese historians for the legendary Hsia and
Shang dynasties. Equally, it is impossible that the Egyptian calendar
should have been introduced in 4241 B.C. As in every chronology we
have to allow that evolution has been accompanied by radical calendar
changes, the attempt to fix the exact starting-date _a posteriori_ is
objectless.
[43] Eduard Meyer (_Gesch. d. Altertums_, III, 97) estimates the
Persians, probably too highly, at half a million as against the fifty
millions of the Babylonian Empire. The numerical relation between the
Germanic peoples and legions of the third-century Roman emperors and
the Roman population as a whole, and that of the Ptolemaic and Roman
armies to that of the Egyptian people, was of much the same order.
[H. Delbrück, in his well-known _Gesch. der Kriegskunst_ (1908), Vol.
I, Part I, chapter i, and elsewhere, deals in considerable detail with
the strengths of ancient armies.--_Tr._]
[44] A.D. 378. See C. W. C. Oman, _History of the Art of War: Middle
Ages_ (1898), ch. i; H. Delbrück, _Gesch. der Kriegskunst_, Vol. II,
book I, ch. x, and book II.--_Tr._
[45] In the case of Rome, the idea of a fixed frontier against
the barbarian emerged soon after the defeat of Varus, and the
fortifications of the Limes were laid down before the close of the
first century of our era.--_Tr._
[46] For at that time imperialistic tendencies found expression even in
India, in the Maurya and Sunga dynasty; these, however, could only be
confused and ineffective, Indian nature being what it was.
[47] Chapters vii-ix below.
[48] On the history of the Avesta see _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., articles
“Zend-Avesta” and “Zoroaster.”--_Tr._
[49] Sir Thomas Roe, 1620. A similar mission went to Turkey on the
part of Frederick and the Bohemian nobles to ask for assistance and to
justify to the Turk their action in deposing the Habsburg King. The
answer they received was what might be expected of a great imperialist
power asked to intervene in the affairs of lesser neighbours--namely,
material guarantees of the reality of the movement it was asked to
support and pledges that no settlement would be made without its
agreement.--_Tr._
[50] Mexico City, or, better, the agglomeration of towns and villages
in the valley of Mexico.--_Tr._
[51] According to Prescott, Cortez’s force on landing had thirteen hand
firearms and fourteen cannon, great and small, altogether. The whole of
these were lost in the first defeat at Mexico. Later a pure accident
gave Cortez the contents of a supply-ship from Europe. In a military
sense horses contributed to the Spanish victories nearly if not quite
as much as firearms, but these, too, were in small numbers, sixteen at
the outset.--_Tr._
[52] The following attempt is based upon the data of two American
works--L. Spence, _The Civilization of Ancient Mexico_ (Cambridge,
1912); and H. J. Spinden, _Maya Art: Its Subject matter and Historical
Development_ (Cambridge, 1913)--which independently of one another
attempt to work out the chronology and which reach a certain measure of
agreement.
[53] Since the publication of the German original, Spinden’s further
researches (_Ancient Civilizations of Mexico_) have placed the
historical zero date at 613 B.C. (and the cosmological zero of
back-reckoning at 3373 B.C.). This historical zero seems to lie deep in
the pre-Cultural period, if later events have the dates given in the
text. But compare Author’s note on p. 39.--_Tr._
[54] These are the names of near-by villages serving as labels; the
true names are lost.
[55] And was there an element of _panem et circenses_ in the
mass-sacrifice of captives? May it be that the acceptance of the
Spaniard as the expected manifestation of the god Quetzalcoatl
(“_redeunt Saturnia regna_”), and the serious disputations on matters
of religion that took place between Montezuma and the Christians, were
presages of the phase which Spengler calls the “Second Religiousness”
(see below, p. 310) of the Civilization?--_Tr._
[56] “_Zur Theorie und Methodik der Geschichte_” (_Kleine Schriften_,
1910), which is by far the best piece of historical philosophy ever
written by an opponent of all philosophy.
[57] Varus’s disaster in the Teutoburger Wald.--_Tr._
[58] The Japanese belonged formerly to the Chinese Civilization and
again belong to a Civilization--the Western--to-day. A Japanese Culture
in the genuine sense there has never been. Japanese Americanism must,
therefore, be judged otherwise than as an outgrowth of what never was
there.
[59] _Cæsars Monarchie und das Principat des Pompejus_ (1918) pp. 501,
et seq.
[60] I.e., that sensation consists in the absorption of small particles
radiated by the object.--_Tr._
[61] See Ch. VIII below.--_Tr._
[62] See R. Hirzel, _Die Person_ (1914), p. 7.
[63] L. Wenger, _Das Recht der Griechen und Römer_ (1914), p. 170; R.
v. Mayr, _Römische Rechtsgeschichte_, II, 1, p. 87.
[64] A curious sidelight on this appears in the provisions of the
savage law against recalcitrant debtors, who (after certain delays and
formalities) could be put to death and even hewn in pieces by their
creditors, or--“sold as slaves beyond the Tiber.”--_Tr._
[65] A thirteenth-century collection by Eike von Repgow of German
customs and customary law (ed. K. G. Homeyer, 1861).--_Tr._
[66] And were judged by a different authority, the peregrin
prætor.--_Tr._
[67] The “dependence” of Classical law upon Egyptian is, as it chances,
still traceable. Solon the wholesale merchant introduced into his Attic
legislation provisions concerning debt-slavery, contract, work-shyness,
and unemployment taken from Egypt. Diodorus, I, 77, 79, 94.
[68] The process is clearly explained in Goudy’s article “Roman Law,”
_Ency. Brit._, XI ed. Very roughly, the prætor corresponded to the
judge, and the judges to the jury, of modern English law, but such a
parallel must not be pressed far.--_Tr._
[69] L. Wenger, _Recht der Griechen und Römer_, pp. 166, et seq.
[70] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. XII, p. 502. Fragments of the
older collection referred to were found in the vicinity.--_Tr._
[71] In English legal theory the judge does not _make law_ by a new
decision, but _“declares” the law_--i.e., makes explicit what has
been implicit in the law from the first, though the occasion for its
manifestation has not hitherto arisen.--_Tr._
[72] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol XXVI, p. 315.--_Tr._
[73] See Beloch, _Griechische Geschichte_, I, 1, p. 350.
[74] The background of this is Etruscan law, the primitive form of the
Roman. Rome was an Etruscan city.
[75] Busolt, _Griechische Staatskunde_, p. 528.
[76] Compare the famous ironical judgment of Mr. Justice Maule which
led to the reform of the divorce laws in England (1857): “... It is
true that the course which you should legally have taken would have
cost you many hundreds of pounds, whereas probably you have not as many
pence. _But the Law knows no distinction between rich and poor._”--_Tr._
[77] What is important to us, therefore, in the Law of the Twelve
Tables is not the supposed contents (of which scarcely an authentic
clause survived even in Cicero’s day), but the political act of
codification itself, the tendency of which corresponded to that of
the overthrow of the Tarquinian Tyrannis by senatorial Oligarchy--a
success which, now endangered, it was sought to stabilize for the
future. The text which schoolboys learned in detail in Cæsar’s time
must have had the same destiny as the consular lists of the old time,
in which had been interpolated names upon names of families whose
wealth and influence was of much later origin. In recent years Pais
and Lambert have disputed the whole story of the Twelve Tables, and so
far as concerns the authenticity of the reputed text, they may well be
right--not so, however, as regards the course of political events in
the years about 450.
[78] Only half a century separates the traditional dates of these
events (509, 451), in spite of the wealth of traditional history
afterwards attached to the period. The “coup,” in the case of the
Decemvirs, was the capture by the patricians of a machine set up for
the redress of plebeian grievances.--_Tr._
[79] Cf. Ch. IV below.
[80] Sohm, _Institutionen_ (14) p. 101. [This is the edict of “Julian”
(Salvius Julianus, urban prætor). Romanists are not agreed as to how
far, if at all, it included material derived from the decisions of the
peregrin prætor. See Professor Goudy’s article “Roman Law,” _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed., p. 563.--_Tr._]
[81] Lenel, _Das Edictum perpetuum_ (1907); L. Wenger, p. 168.
[82] Even the multiplication table of the children assumes the elements
of dynamics in counting.
[83] V. Mayr, II, 1, p. 85; Sohm, p. 105.
[84] _Enzyklopädie der Rechtswissensch._, I, 357.
[85] Egyptian law of the Hyksos period, and Chinese of the Period of
Contending States, in contrast to the Classical and the Indian law of
the Dharmasutras, must have been built up on basic ideas quite other
than the idea of the corporeality of persons and things. It would be
a grand emancipation from the load of Roman “antiquities” if German
research were to succeed in establishing these.
[86] Sohm, p. 220.
[87] Acts XV. Herein lies the germ of the idea of a Church law.
[88] For Islam as a “juristic person” see M. Horten, _Die religiöse
Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen Islam_ (1917), p. xxiv.
[89] See Ch. VII below. We can venture to make the label so positive
because the adherents of all the Late Classical cults were bound
together in devout consensus, just as the primitive Christian
communities were.
[90] The Persian Church came into the Classical field only in the
Classical form of Mithraism, which was assimilable in the ensemble of
Syncretism.
[91] It is difficult to describe this class in a few words. Roughly,
they (and the “Junian Latins,” so called, who were excepted with
them) represented a stratum of Roman society, largely composed
of “undesirables,” which was only just not servile. In the older
legislation they were necessarily lumped with the outer world as
peregrins, but when Caracalla made this outer world “Roman,” there were
obvious reasons against bringing these people into the fold as well. In
somewhat the same way the word “outsider” is used in colloquial English
with the dual meaning of a foreigner or non-member, and a socially
undesirable person.--_Tr._
[92] In the Twelve Tables _connubium_ was disallowed even between
the patrician and plebian citizens of Rome itself. [The hold of
the patricians on this privilege, however, was already exceedingly
precarious, and it vanished a few years later in the _lex
Canuleia_.--_Tr._]
[93] Cf. Ch. VI below.
[94] Lenel, I, 380.
[95] Here, as in every line of the history of the “Pseudomorphosis,” we
are reminded of Christ’s parable of new wine and old bottles (Matt. ix,
17), an expression not of mere abstract shrewdness, as it seems to us
now, but of intense living force and even passion. It is only one short
verse, not obligatory in its context, but leaping out of depths.--_Tr._
[96] As long ago as 1891 Mitteis (_Reichsrecht und Volksrecht_, p.
13) drew attention to the Oriental vein in Constantine’s legislation.
Collinet (_Études historiques sur le droit de Justinien I_, 1912),
chiefly on the basis of German researches, throws an immense amount
back on Hellenistic law; but how much, after all, of this “Hellenistic”
was really Greek and not merely written in Greek? The results of
interpolation-research have proved truly devastating for the “Classical
spirit” in Justinian’s Digests.
[97] See Ch. VII below.
[98] Coupled with the destruction of all other documents.
[99] Fromer, _Der Talmud_ (1920), p. 190. [The English student will
find a fairly full account of the main groups of Jewish literature in
the article “Hebrew Literature” and cognate articles in the _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[100] Mitteis (_Röm. Privatrecht bis auf die Zeit Dioklezians_ (1908),
preface) remarks how, “while the ancient law-forms were retained, the
law itself nevertheless became something quite different.”
[101] Head of the exilic Jews under Persian overlordship.--_Tr._
[102] Mayr, IV, pp. 45, et seq.
[103] Hence the fictitious names of authors on innumerable books
in every Arabian literature--Dionysius the Areopagite, Pythagoras,
Hermes Trismegistus, Hippocrates, Enoch, Baruch, Daniel, Solomon, the
Apostle-names attached to the numerous gospels and apocalypses.
[104] For example, Hebrew was supplanted by Aramaic for all ordinary
purposes as early as the Maccabees--and to such an extent that in the
synagogues the Scriptures had to be translated for the people--but has
held its ground as a religious vehicle, and above all as a script,
even to this day. (The present use of a _spoken_ Hebrew represents a
revival in more recent times, after the wider dispersion of the early
Middle Ages had broken the connexion with the Aramaic lands.) In the
Persian field the older Zend survived alongside the newer Pehlevi. In
Egypt somewhat similar influences were contemporaneously determining
the evolution of popular Demotic and official Greek into the Coptic
language with Greek characters.--_Tr._
[105] M. Horten, _D. rel. Gedankenwelt d. Volkes im heut. Islam_, p.
xvi. Cf. Chapter VII below.
[106] Mayr, IV, 45, et seq. [_Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p.
570.--_Tr._]
[107] 471. See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Chalcedon, Council of,”
and references therein.--_Tr._
[108] Wenger, p. 180.
[109] Krumbacher, _Byzantinische Literatur-Geschichte_, p. 606.
[110] Sachau, _Syrische Rechtsbücher_, Vol. III.
[111] Bertholet, _Kulturgeschichte Israels_, pp. 200, et seq.
[112] We get a hint of this in the famous code of Hammurabi, though
unfortunately we cannot tell in what relation this single work stood,
in point of intrinsic importance, to the general level of contemporary
jurisprudence in the Babylonian world.
[113] See Professor Maitland’s article “English Law” in _Ency. Brit._,
XI ed., Vol. IX.--_Tr._
[114] Sohm, _Inst._, p. 156.
[115] See J. Janssen, _Hist. German People at the End of the Middle
Ages_, English translation, Book IV, Ch. I-II.--_Tr._
[116] Lend, I, p. 395.
[117] The punning contrast of Lombard _faex_ (excrement) and Roman
_lex_ is Huguccio’s (1200).
[118] W. Goetz, _Arch. für Kulturgeschichte_, 10, 28, et seq.
[119] See the article “Canon Law” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[120] See Sohm’s last work, _Das altkatholische Kirchenrecht und das
Dekret Gratians_ (1918).
[121] See Ch. VII below.
[122] See Ch. X below.
[123] The permanently valid element in English law is the constant
_form_ of an incessant _development_ by the courts.
[124] If the higher courts alone are meant, the number is well below
fifty for England and Wales. Scots law is independent of English and
has its own jurisprudence.--_Tr._
[125] _Inst._, p. 170.
[126] Similar problems are now (1927) arising in connexion with radio
broadcasting.--_Tr._
[127] _Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch_, § 90.
[128] As evidenced in terms of French law like “_Société anonyme_,”
“_raison sociale_,” “_personne juridique_.”--_Tr._
[129] Note, in this connexion, the remarkable development in modern
American industry of a professional managerial class, distinct from the
capitalist, the technician, and the “worker.”--_Tr._
[130] Published 1857. English translation, 1872.--_Tr._
[131] Without Alexander, and even before him, for Alexander neither
kindled nor spread that light; he did not lead, but followed its path
to the East.
[132] See G. Glotz’s recent work _La Civilisation égéenne_, 1923
(English translation, 1927).--_Tr._
[133] This is now recognized by art-research; cf. Salis, _Die Kunst der
Griechen_ (1919), pp. 3, et seq.; H. Th. Bosser, _Alt-Kreta_ (1921),
introduction.
[134] D. Fimmen, _Die kretisch-mykenische Kultur_ (1921), p. 210.
[135] Dehio, _Gesch. d. deutsch. Kunst_ (1919), pp. 16, et seq.
[136] Dieterich, _Byzant. Charakterköpfe_, pp. 136, et seq.
[137] Even admitting within itself the animals of its fields.--_Tr._
[138] Dehio, _Gesch. d. deutschen Kunst_ (1919), pp. 13, et seq.
[139] Eduard Meyer, _Gesch. d. Altertums_, I, p. 188.
[140] The English parallel is Winchester.--_Tr._
[141] The phenomenon is perhaps too well known in our days to need
exemplification. But it is worth while recalling that the usual form of
disgrace for a minister or courtier of the seventeenth or eighteenth
century was to be commanded to “retire to his estates,” and that a
student expelled from the universities is said to be “rusticated.”
Since this volume was written, a remarkable proof of the reality of
this spiritual indrawing by the Megalopolis has been given by the
swift spread of radio broadcasting over the West-European and American
world. For the country-dweller, radio reception means intimate touch
with the news, the thought, and the entertainment of the great city,
and relieves the _grievance_ of “isolation” that the older country-folk
would never have felt as a grievance at all.--_Tr._
[142] In the case of the Venetians the money-outlook was already
potent during the earlier Crusades. But the fact that their financial
exploitation of the great religious adventure was regarded as
scandalous indicates sufficiently that the rural world of the West was
not yet face to face with the money-idea.--_Tr._
[143] See Ch. XIII below.
[144] Samarra exhibits, like the Imperial Fora of Rome and the ruins
of Luxor, truly American proportions. The city stretches for 33
km. [20 miles] along the Tigris. The Balkuwara Palace, which the
Caliph Mutawakil built for one of his sons, forms a square of 1250
m. [say, three-quarters of a mile] on each side. One of the giant
mosques measures in plan 260 × 180 m. [858 × 594 ft.]. Schwarz, _Die
Abbasidenresidenz Samarra_ (1910); Herzfeld, _Ausgrabungen von Samarra_
(1912). [Pataliputra, in the days of Chandragupta and Asoka, measured
_intra muros_ 10 miles × 2 miles (equal to Manhattan Island or London
along the Thames from Greenwich to Richmond).--_Tr._]
[145] Karlsruhe, with its fan-scheme, and Mannheim, with its
rectangles, are earlier than Washington. But both are small places.
The one is a sort of extension of the prince’s Rococo park and centred
on his _point de vue_; the other, though its block-numbering, unique
in Europe, seems to relate it to the American city, was really planned
as a self-contained military capital, rectangular only within its oval
enceinte, whereas the American rectangles are meant to be added to. The
layout of Petersburg by Peter the Great (which has been adhered to to
this day and is still incompletely filled in in detail) is a much more
forcible example of the arbitrary planning of a megalopolis. Though
outside the “European” world, it is of it, for it was the visible
symbol of Peter’s will to force Europe upon Russia. It is contemporary
with Mannheim and Karlsruhe (early eighteenth century), but its creator
conceived of it as a city _of the future_.--_Tr._
[146] In the case of Canada, not merely great regions, but the
_whole country_ has been picketed out in equal rectangles for future
development.--_Tr._
[147] It has been left to the _Western_ Civilization of present-day
Rome to build the garden suburbs that the Classical Civilization could
have built.--_Tr._
[148] Friedländer, _Sittengeschichte Roms_, I, p. 5. Compare this with
Samarra, which had nothing like this population. The “Late Classical
city on Arabian soil was un-Classical in this respect as in others. The
garden suburb of Antioch was renowned throughout the East.”
[149] The city which the Egyptian “Julian the Apostate,” Amenophis IV
(Akhenaton) built himself in Tell-el-Amarna had streets up to 45 m.
[149 ft.] wide.
[150] Pöhlmann, _Aus Altertum und Gegenwart_ (1910), pp. 211, et seq.
[151] Some years ago a French peasant was brought to notice whose
family had occupied its glebe since the ninth century.--_Tr._
[152] Shaw, _The Quintessence of Ibsen_.
[153] An ancient Hindu materialism.--_Tr._
[154] For what follows see Eduard Meyer, _Kl. Schriften_ (1910), pp.
145, et seq.
[155] _Hist. Nat._, XVIII, 7.--_Tr._
[156] We know of measures to promote increase of population in China
in the third century B.C., precisely the Augustan Age of Chinese
evolution. See Rosthorn, _Das soziale Leben der Chinesen_ (1919), p. 6.
[157] The _amphitheatres_ of Nîmes and Arles were filled up by mean
townlets that used the outer wall as their fortifications.--_Tr._
[158] Strabo, Pausanias, Dio Chrysostom, Avienus, etc. See E. Meyer,
_Kl. Schriften_, pp. 164, et seq.
[159] The Colosseum of Rome itself in due course fell into this decay
and we read in the guide-books that “its flora were once famous”--420
wild species lived in its ruins. If this could happen in Rome, we need
not be surprised at the quick, almost catastrophic, conquest of the
Maya cities by tropical vegetation.--_Tr._
[160] According to the researches of K. Sethe. Cf. Robert Eisler, _Die
kenitischen Weihinschriften der Hyksoszeit_, etc. (1919).
[161] Henceforward, and indeed throughout this work, the word
“language” is not to be regarded as limited to spoken and written
language. As the above definition indicates, it includes all modes of
intelligible conscious-expression--“affective language” in the widest
sense.--_Tr._
[162] Obviously, Totemistic facts, so far as they come under the
observation of the waking-consciousness, obtain a significance of the
Taboo kind also; much in man’s sexual life, for example, is performed
with a profound sense of fear, because his will-to-understand is
baffled by it.
[163] W. von Humboldt (_Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
Sprachbaues_) was the first to emphasize the fact that a language is
not a thing, but an activity. “If we would be quite precise, we can
certainly say _there is no such thing as ‘language,’_ just as there
is no such thing as ‘intellect’; but man does speak, and does act
intellectually.”
[164] Hans Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), architect of the Opera
House, the Altes Museum, and the Königswache of Berlin. Gottfried
Schadow (1764-1850), sculptor (statues of Frederick II, Zieten,
etc.; Quadriga of Brandenburger Tor), a classicist _malgré lui_
(not to be confused with two other artists of the same name,
quasi-contemporaries).--_Tr._
[165] See p. 29 above.
[166] _Gesch. d. Deutsch. Kunst_ (1919), pp. 14, et seq.
[167] This practice of inscription survives till deep into the
Civilization. Even in 1914 the guns of the German Army, true products
of the advanced machine-shop though they were, carried a Latin threat
to the foe. From the magic rune of the blade it is a step to the motto
on the shield, and then to the motto alone as unity-charm of the
regiment or the Order.--_Tr._
[168] W. Altmann, _Die ital. Rundbauten_ (1906).
[169] A striking case in point is the Roman military camp. See Vol. I
(English edition), p. 185, foot-note.--_Tr._
[170] Bulle, _Orchomenos_, pp. 26, et seq.; Noack, _Ovalhaus und
Palast in Kreta_, pp. 53, et seq. The house-plans still traceable in
Latin times in the Ægean and Asia Minor may perhaps allow us to order
our notions of human conditions in the pre-Classical period; but the
linguistic remains, never.
[171] _Medieval Rhodesia_ (London, 1906).
[172] Cf. Ch. X.
[173] Though magic or prestige may of course be involved in their
ornamentation, these are supervening and not radical virtues.--_Tr._
[174] In this connexion it ought to be someone’s business to undertake
physiognomic studies upon the massy, thoroughly peasantish, Roman
busts; the portraits of Early Gothic; those of the Renaissance, already
visibly urban; and, most of all, the polite English portraiture from
the late-eighteenth century onward. The great galleries of “ancestors”
contain an endless wealth of material.
[175] The sudden fear of some animal or object seen, believed to result
in her child’s bearing the mark of it. Cf. Jacob and the speckled
cattle (Genesis xxx, 37). The attitude of biologists to this question
is not negative, but non-committal.--_Tr._
[176] J. Ranke, _Der Mensch_ (1912), II, p. 205.
[177] This suggestive sentence should, of course, be read with its
reservation. The cranial evidences of Crete are highly illustrative in
this connexion; they would not indeed be trusted by a modern historian
without weighty collateral evidence, but here this evidence exists.
Up to the latter part of Middle Minoan, the “long” head predominated
heavily, not only from the outset, but increasingly as the Culture
rose, until it included two-thirds of the whole, intermediates forming
a quarter and “short” heads a mere handful. But from about the time
of the catastrophic fall of Late Minoan II, the long heads fall to
a startlingly low figure, while intermediates account for half,
and short heads for more than a third. It marks the end of Minoan
Civilization and the coming of the Achæans. But just as the Minoan
skull held its own throughout the Minoan Age, so now, after its fall,
the short head maintained itself, as stated in the text, through
all subsequent vicissitudes, from the “Sea-peoples” through Roman,
Arab, and Turk, to this day. Thus the Cretan landscape has had two
skull-types successively; but the change from one to the other occurred
in connexion with an immense cataclysm, nothing less than the collapse
of a Civilization. The rough deduction that seems to emerge from this
case is that a great Culture holds its skull, no doubt in the course of
its striving towards ideal physical type of its own (see p. 127), but
that where that major organism does not exist, the skull endures as the
land endures and the peasant endures. This applies also to the Alpine
region, which has received the deposit of migrations, but has never
been the centre of a high Culture.--_Tr._
[178] Cf. D. Randall-MacIver, _The Etruscans_ (1928), Ch. I.--_Tr._
[179] Art is fully developed in the animals. So far as man can get
at it by way of analogy, it consists for them in rhythmic movement
(“dance”) and sound-formation (“song”). But this is by no means the
limit of artistic impression _on_ the animal itself.
[180] Jesus says to the Seventy whom he is sending out on mission: “And
salute no man on the way” (Luke x, 4). The ceremonial of greeting on
the high-road is so complicated that people in a hurry have to omit it.
A. Bertholet, _Kulturgeschichte Israels_ (1919), p. 162.
[181] Exekias--represented in the British Museum by his “Achilles
and Penthesilea” (_Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Ceramics,”
Plate I)--stands at the end of Black Figure as the master of
the possibilities of refinement in it--on the verge of the
style-change to Red Figure, yet apart from it. Sebastian Bach is his
“contemporary.”--_Tr._
[182] “All forms, even those that are most felt, contain an element of
untruth” (Goethe). In systematic philosophy the intent of the thinker
coincides neither with the written words nor with the understanding
of his readers, as it consists in his thinking meanings into words
in the course of using the words themselves (_da es ein Denken in
Wortbedeutungen ist, im Verlauf der Darstellung mit sich selbst_).
[183] Jespersen deduces language from poesy, dance, and particularly
courtship. _Progress in Language_ (1894), p. 357.
[184] See Vol. I, p. 80.--_Tr._
[185] Sentence-like complexes of sound are known also to the dog.
When the Australian dingo reverted from domestication to the wild
state, he reverted also from the house-dog’s bark to the wolf’s
howl--a phenomenon that indicates a transition to very much simpler
sound-signs, but has nothing to do with “words.”
[186] The gesture-languages of to-day (Delbrück, _Grundfragen d.
Sprachforsch._, pp. 49, et seq., with reference to the work of Jorio
on the gestures of the Neapolitans) without exception presuppose
word-language and are completely dependent upon its intellectual
systematism. Examples: the mimicry of the actor, and the language
which the American Indians have formed for themselves for the purpose
of mutually understanding one another in spite of extreme differences
and fluidity in the verbal languages of the various tribes. Wundt
(_Völkerpsychologie_, I, p. 212) quotes the following to show how
complicated sentences can be handled in this language: “White soldiers,
led by an officer of high rank, but little intelligence, took the
Mescalero Indians prisoners.”
[187] See Vol. I, p. 172.--_Tr._
[188] The case of voice-differentiations of the same word in Chinese is
not analogous. It arose only out of scholars’ work in the later phases
of the Chinese Civilization as understood in this work. And it is a
mechanical expedient and not a structural character--i.e., it lacks the
_polarity_ mentioned in the text. Voice-management distinguishes, not
“great” from “small,” but “pig” from “God,” “bamboo” from “to dwell.”
English students will find a clear and understandable account of this
and other Chinese differential devices in Karlgren’s little book:
_Sound and Symbol in Chinese_ (English translation, 1923).--_Tr._
[189] Possibly connected with this is the _emphatic antithesis_
characterizing many of our proverbs and everyday idioms--e.g., “up hill
and down dale” (“_par monts et vaux_,” “_bergauf bergab_”), meaning
hardly more than “everywhere.”--_Tr._
[190] _Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus_, 1910.
[191] See the article “Bantu Languages,” by Sir H. H. Johnston, _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[192] Even calling something “invisible” is a definition of it under
the light-aspect.
[193] Only technics are entirely true, for here the words are merely
the key to actuality, and the sentences are continually modified
until they are, not “truth,” but actuality. A hypothesis claims, not
rightness, but usefulness.
[194] See pp. 29, et seq.
[195] The English reader may refer to Karlgren’s _Sound and Symbol in
Chinese_, already mentioned, for details.--_Tr._
[196] See the article “Indo-European Languages,” _Ency. Brit._, XI
ed.--_Tr._
[197] Translation, it must be remembered, is normally from older into
younger linguistic conditions.
[198] See p. 140 above.--_Tr._
[199] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. XVI, p. 251b.--_Tr._
[200] See the articles “Sanskrit” and “Indo-European Languages,” _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[201] P. Jensen, _Sitz. Preuss. Akademie_ (1919), pp. 367, et seq.
[202] L. Hahn, _Rom und Romanismus im griech-röm. Osten_ (1906).
[203] See the article “Book-keeping” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[204] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. des Alt._, I, §§ 455, 465.
[205] See below.
[206] Radio broadcasting does not controvert this. Its characteristic
quality is not (as is often supposed) dissemination to vast numbers
irrespective of physical distance, but a special intimacy of address to
the listening individual.--_Tr._
[207] See the article “Semitic Language,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[208] Similarly the modern Jews of the Dispersion write Yiddish, which
is a modified German, in Hebrew characters.--_Tr._
[209] See Lidzbarski, _Sitz. Berl. Akad._ (1916), p. 1218. There is
plentiful material in M. Miese, _Die Gesetze der Schriftgeschichte_
(1919).
[210] P. Kretschmer, in Gercke-Norden, _Einl. i. d.
Altertumswissenschaft_, I, p. 551.
[211] See the articles “Romance Languages” and “Latin Language,” _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[212] Cf. p. 122.
[213] For this reason I am one of those who believe that, even quite
late, Etruscan still played a very important part in the colleges of
the Roman priesthood.
[214] Precisely for this reason it has to be recognized that the
Homeric poems, which were first fixed in the colonization period,
can only give us an urban literary language and not the courtly
conversation-language in which they were originally declaimed.
[215] So much so that the workers of the great cities call themselves
_the_ People, thereby excluding the bourgeoisie, with which no
community feeling conjoins them. The bourgeoisie of 1789 did exactly
the same.
[216] The dominant nucleus within the Spartan ensemble.--_Tr._
[217] Ed. Meyer, _Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen_ (1912), pp.
128, et seq. [An extended summary of Mormon history will be found in
the article “Mormons,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[218] Ex-mercenaries of Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse, who seized and
settled in Messina. The questions arising out of this act precipitated
the First Punic War.--_Tr._
[219] A still more celebrated case is the “ambulatory Polis” formed by
Xenophon’s Ten Thousand.--_Tr._
[220] And in numerous Classical instances.--_Tr._
[221] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. IX, p. 860.--_Tr._
[222] In Macedonia, in the nineteenth century, Serbs, Bulgars, and
Greeks all founded schools for the anti-Turkish population. If it
happens that a village has been taught Serb, even the next generation
consists of fanatical Serbs. The present strength of the “nations” is
thus merely a consequence of previous school-policy.
[223] For Beloch’s scepticism concerning the reputed Dorian migration
see his _Griechische Geschichte_, I, 2, Section VIII. [A brief account
of the question, by J. L. Myres, is in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article
“Dorians.”--_Tr._]
[224] C. Mehlis, _Die Berberfrage_ (_Archiv für Anthropologie_ 39, pp.
249, et seq.) where relations between North German and Mauretanian
ceramics, and even resemblances of toponymy (rivers, mountains) are
dealt with. The old pyramid buildings of West Africa are closely
related, on the one hand, to the Nordic dolmens (_Hünengräber_) of
Holstein and, on the other, to the graves of the Old Kingdom (some
illustrations in L. Frobenius, _Der kleinafrikanische Grabbau_, 1916).
[225] _Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt_ (1886).
[226] _Geschichte der Kriegskunst_ (from 1900).
[227] Rameses III, who defeated them, portrayed their expedition in the
relief of Medinet Habet. W. M. Müller, _Asien und Europa_, p. 366.
[228] Which, therefore, have discovered for themselves the nonsensical
designation “aristocracy of intellect” (_Geistesadel_).
[229] Although--or should we say “thus”?--Rome accorded citizenship
to freedmen, who in general were of wholly alien blood, and sons of
ex-slaves were admitted to the Senate even by Appius Claudius the
Censor in 310. One of them, Flavius, had already been curule ædile.
[230] See articles “Persia (history: ancient),” “Behistun,”
“Cuneiform,” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., or indeed almost any work upon
Babylonian and Persian antiquities.--_Tr._
[231] Sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald in both languages.
The manuscript of the oath, however, is later--say, 950.--_Tr._
[232] “_Die ältesten datierten Zeugnisse der iranischen Sprache_”
(_Zeitschr. f. vgl. Sprachf._ 42, p. 26.)
[233] See above, p. 145.
[234] Ed. Meyer, op. cit., pp. 1, et seq.
[235] Compare the absorption of the Norman conquerors into England and
the subsequent development of an English aristocracy.--_Tr._
[236] For what follows, cf. Ch. VII-IX.
[237] _Geschichte des Altertums_, I, § 590, et seq.
[238] Andreas and Wackernagel, _Nachrichten der Göttingischen
Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften_ (1911), p. 1, et seq. [On the subject
generally, see articles by K. Geldner, “Zend-Avesta” and “Zoroaster,”
and by Ed. Meyer, “Parthia,” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[239] See, further, below.
[240] Dynasty I.--_Tr._
[241] Albertus Magnus; St. Thomas Aquinas; Grosseteste, and Roger
Bacon.--_Tr._
[242] Cf. p. 105.
[243] Cf. Ch. X.
[244] See p. 60 above. The slave did not belong to the nation. On this
account the enrolment of non-citizens in the army of a city, which on
occasions of dire crisis was inevitable, was always felt as a profound
blow to the national idea.
[245] Even in the Iliad we can perceive the tendency to the
nation-feeling in the small, and even the smallest, aggregates.
[246] And she had rarely to deal with anything more formidable than a
loose partial confederacy. Often Etruscan cities were in alliance with
Rome against other Etruscan cities.--_Tr._
[247] It is not to be overlooked that both Plato and Aristotle in
their political writings were unable to conceive of the ideal people
otherwise than in the Polis form. But it was equally natural for the
eighteenth-century thinkers to regard “the Ancients” as nations after
the fashion of Shaftesbury and Montesquieu--it is _we_ their successors
who ought not to have stayed on that note.
[248] Mommsen described the Roman Empire as a “universal Empire founded
upon municipal autonomy.” And even Alexander’s empire was originally
conceived, and to a great extent actually organized, in this spirit.
See P. Jouguet, _L’Impérialisme macédonien_ (1926), Ch. IV.--_Tr._
[249] See p. 67.
[250] F. N. Finck, _Die Sprachstämme des Erdkreises_ (1915), pp. 29, et
seq.
[251] About the end of the second century of our era.
[252] See foot-note, p. 197, et seq.--_Tr._
[253] A loose group of Edomite tribes which, with Moabites,
Amalekites, Ishmaelites, and others, thus constituted a fairly uniform
Hebrew-speaking population.
[254] See p. 167.
[255] Aristotle says that “philosophers are called Calani among the
Indians, and Jews among the Syrians.” Exactly the same is stated by
Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador at Pataliputra, of Brahmins and
Jews.--_Tr._
[256] The district south of Lake Van, of which the capital was Arbela,
the old home of the goddess Ishtar.
[257] As evidenced by the Falasha, the black Jews of Abyssinia.
[258] _Arch. f. Anthrop._, Vol. XIX.
[259] _Zeitschr. f. Ethnol._ (1919).
[260] _Digesta_, 50, 15.
[261] Geffcken, _Der Ausgang des griech.-röm. Heidentum_ (1920), p. 57
[English readers may refer to the article “Neoplatonism” and shorter
articles under the personal names, in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[262] See Vol. I, pp. 63, 71.--_Tr._
[263] Which we translate by “Gentiles,” but which literally means “the
nations” or “peoples.”--_Tr._
[264] See the article “Nestorians,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[265] See the articles “Jews” (§ 43), “Exilarch,” and “Gaon,” _Ency.
Brit._, XI. ed. In Europe, too, far into the Dispersion, there are
rabbis recognized by the State as governors of their communities, such
as the famous Rabbi Löw of Prague (1513-1609).--_Tr._
[266] It may not be at all fanciful to connect the Reception of
“Roman” law in Germany and the rise of the doctrine of _cujus regio,
ejus religio_ which played so great a part in the religious wars and
treaties of our sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At any rate,
“practical politics” so-called provides an inadequate motive by itself
to account for the latter. Considering it in contrast to the notion of
Mortmain, and having regard to the intensity of religious belief in
many of the princes who applied it, the idea appears as something much
more positive than a mere formula of compromise.--_Tr._
[267] See p. 70. The “capitulations” under which until recently
Europeans were exempt from the jurisdiction of Turkish courts are
regarded nowadays as a right enforced by more civilized powers to
protect their subjects from the laws of a less civilized state, and
their abolition is a symbol of the rise of the latter to the rank
of a civilized power. But originally it was quite the reverse. The
first “capitulation” was sued for by France in an hour of danger when
Turkish aid was essential to her. See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article
“Capitulations.”--_Tr._
[268] See Vol. I., p. 212.
[269] The author’s meaning may perhaps be precised thus: so much of the
old Magian nations as was not Arabized became fellah peoples, either
outside the Magian sphere (as in Europe and India) or within it, under
the Turkish (Mongol) domination, but even the old Arab-element itself
was largely ripe for the change into the fellah condition when the
Turks came.--_Tr._
[270] I am convinced that the nations of China which sprang up in
members in the middle, Hwang-Ho region at the beginning of the Chóu
dynasty, as also the regional peoples of the Egyptian Old Kingdom
(which had each its own capital and its own religion, and as late as
Roman times fought each other in definitely religious wars), were in
their inward form more closely akin to the peoples of the West than to
those of the Classical and the Arabian worlds. However, research into
such fields has hitherto been conspicuous by its absence.
[271] That the dynasts themselves have contributed heavily to the
catalogue of perjury and bad faith only reinforces the argument.--_Tr._
[272] His desertion of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in the Lombard
war, 1176. The details of the long struggle between Frederick and Henry
will be found in any fairly full history of Europe or in the respective
articles devoted to them in the _Ency. Brit._, XI ed. While Frederick
stood--and with real hopes as well as ideals--for the inclusive
Empire, Henry through all his vicissitudes stood for Germany’s eastern
expansion, the colonization of the Slavonic north-east, and the
development of the Baltic.--_Tr._
[273] In mediæval hymns the cross is symbolically regarded as a tree
bearing Christ as its last and grandest fruit; it is identified,
indeed, with the Tree of Knowledge. (See Yrjo Hirn, _The Sacred
Shrine_.)--_Tr._
[274] And every English schoolboy knows the meaning of the “Early
Plantagenets.”--_Tr._
[275] Against the Swedes, 1675.--_Tr._
[276] Against the French and their German dependent allies, 1757.--_Tr._
[277] See pp. 166, et seq., and 174, et seq.
[278] Less than one per cent of the population.
[279] It is to be noted that the home of the Babylonian Culture, the
ancient Sinear, plays no part of any importance in the coming events.
For the Arabian Culture only the region north of Babylon, not that to
south, comes into question.
[280] The victory of L. Æmilius Paullus over Perseus, 168 B.C.--_Tr._
[281] This has an important bearing also in the histories of the
Western literatures. The German is written in part in Latin, and
English in French.
[282] See Professor Geldner’s article “Zend-Avesta,” _Ency. Brit._, XI
ed.--_Tr._
[283] See Wollner, _Untersuchungen über die Volksepik des Grossrussen_
(1879). [A convenient edition of the Kiev Stories is Mary Gill, _Les
Légendes slaves_ (Paris, 1912).--_Tr._]
[284] The former is dated about 800, the latter about 930.--_Tr._
[285] These two figures--the one an authorized Mayor of the Palace
before he was Tsar, the other a crude usurper--dominate the period of
Russian history called the “Period of Troubles”--i.e., that between the
death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584 and the election of Michael Romanov
in 1613.--_Tr._
[286] Covering, before its later extensions, Persia and Iraq to the
Euphrates.--_Tr._
[287] The region south of Damascus and east of the Sea of
Galilee.--_Tr._
[288] Saba (Sheba) is, roughly, the modern Yemen, though the centre
of gravity of the Sabæan Kingdom may earlier have been in northern
Arabia. See Dr. D. H. Müller’s article “Sabaeans” in _Ency. Brit._, XI
ed.--_Tr._
[289] Schiele, _Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart_, I, 647.
[290] The “Minæan” and the Sabæan kingdoms were the two outstanding
hegemonies of early Arabian history. Ma’in, in southern Arabia, should
not be confused with the Ma’an which lies north-east of the Gulf of
Akaba.--_Tr._
[291] Bent, _The Sacred City of the Ethiopians_ (London 1893), pp. 134,
et seq., deals with the remains of Jeha, the inscriptions of which are
dated by Glaser between the seventh and fifth centuries before Christ.
See D. H. Müller, _Burgen and Schlösser Südarabiens_.
[292] Grimme, _Mohammed_, pp. 26, et seq.
[293] German Axum Expedition record (1913), Vol. II.
[294] An ancient trade-route from Persia crossed the straits of Ormus
and of Bab-el-Mandeb, traversing South Arabia and terminating in
Abyssinia and the Nile region. It is historically more important than
the northern route over the Isthmus of Suez.
[295] So little is known as to these events by British (or any other)
students that a brief record may be useful. The original Himaryites or
Homerites, a people of the south-west angle of Arabia, had displaced
the Sabæans in control of South Arabia in the second century B.C.
The Himaryite hegemony was overthrown by invaders from Axum over the
water about A.D. 300, and the Axumite rulers were, _inter alia_,
kings of Hadramaut--hence the mention in the text of the Persian
Gulf. But a Himaryite opposition continued, and, adopting Judaism
as a counter-religion, it succeeded for a time in throwing off the
Abyssinian rule. Axum, however (aided, as a Christian state, by Rome),
reasserted her dominion in 525 and held it for fifty years, till an
attack of Sassanid Persians displaced them again. Thereafter southern
Arabia fell into the swaying chaos in which the coming of Mohammed
found it.--_Tr._
[296] The capital of Saba.--_Tr._
[297] Grimme, p. 43. Illustrations of these immense ruins of Gomdan,
ibid., p. 81, and reconstructions in the German Axum report.
[298] The country of Ghassan extends east of the Jordan, parallel to
and inland of Palestine and Syria, approximately from Petra to the
middle Euphrates.--_Tr._
[299] The Lakhmids were the ruling dynasty, from the third to the
sixth century after Christ, of the realm of Hira, which ran in a strip
between the Euphrates and the present Nejd coast on the one hand and
the desert of Arabia on the other.--_Tr._
[300] Brockelmann, _Geschichte der arabischen Literatur_, p. 34.
[301] The whole structure of Mithraism (so far as we know it) presents
strong analogies with that of a military order.--_Tr._
[302] As well as it is said 220,000 at Cyrene. At Alexandria, too,
there were _émeutes_ and counter-_émeutes_.--_Tr._
[303] Roth, _Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Byzantinischen Reiches_,
p. 15.
[304] Delbrück, _Geschichte der Kriegskunst_, II, p. 222. [For British
students C. W. C. Oman’s _Art of War: Middle Ages_ will be more readily
available, although Oman treats the subject more as a matter of formal
military organization than does Delbrück. Neither writer deals with
any special features of the change as it worked itself out in the
East, both being concerned almost entirely with its Western aspects
and phases. The origin of the late-Byzantine army system, as military
historians are aware, is an obscure and difficult subject. By what
stages, after the decadence of the legion, was the “_Landsknecht_” army
of Justinian reached? Like other elements of middle-East history in the
epoch of the Arabian Culture, it still awaits the full investigation
that the West has already had.--_Tr._]
[305] _Gesammelte Schriften_, IV, 532.
[306] _Gefolgstreuen_ in German. The choice of an equivalent
mediæval term in English is difficult, since any one that may be
selected carries with it certain implications for students of feudal
origins.--_Tr._
[307] Domaszewski, _Die Religion der römischen Heeres_, p. 49.
[308] The typical form, for instance, of the Swiss in their
independence-battles, and of Western infantry generally in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the transition from hand-arm
to fire-arm warfare.--_Tr._
[309] _Buccellarii_; see Delbrück, op. cit., II, 354.
[310] Georg von Frundsberg (1473-1528). Short article in _Ency. Brit._,
XI ed.--_Tr._
[311] _Gothic War_, IV, 26. [The same holds good for Belisarius’s
armies.--_Tr._]
[312] Nisibis and Edessa in the up-country between Euphrates and Tigris
are represented to-day by Nasibin (Nezib) and Urfa respectively;
just to the west of them, east of the Euphrates above Sura, were the
three Jewish academies, in which Talmudic Judaism took shape after
the Dispersion. Kinnesrin lay just south of Aleppo. Ctesiphon is, of
course, the classical city on the Tigris, still dominant under the
Sassanids, and Resaina lies in the up-country south-west of Nisibis.
Gundisapora is Gunder-Shapur (Jundaisapur), near the site of the old
Elamite capital Susa in Arabistan.--_Tr._
[313] Not “non-existent.” It would be a misconception of the Magian
world-feeling to attach a Faustian-dynamic meaning to the phrase “true
God.” In combating the worship of godlings, the reality of godlings and
dæmons is presupposed. The Israelite prophets never dreamed of denying
the Baals, and similarly Isis and Mithras for the Early Christians,
Jehovah for the Christian Marcion, Jesus for the Manichæans, are
devilish, but perfectly real, powers. _Disbelieving in them_ would have
had no meaning for the Magian soul--what was required was that one
should not _turn to them_. To use an expression now long current, it is
“Henotheism” and not Monotheism.
[314] Schürer, _Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu
Christi_, III, 499; Wendland, _Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur_, p.
192.
[315] Contrast with this the exactly opposite process in Jewry before
the Pseudomorphosis had begun to affect it,--to wit, the battle
against the local “high places” and the concentration of sanctity in
Jerusalem.--_Tr._
[316] With the result that Syncretism is presented as a mere hotchpotch
of every conceivable religion. Nothing is further from the truth. The
process of taking shape moved first from East to West and then from
West to East.
[317] The Haoma plant symbolized the Tree of Life (Gaokerena) like the
Soma plant of Brahmanism.--_Tr._
[318] Hence the expression “profaning” the mysteries, which meant, not
revealing them, but bringing them outside their fane.--_Tr._
[319] J. Geffcken, _Der Ausgang des griechisch-römischen Heidentums_
(1920), pp. 197, et seq.
[320] Geffcken, op. cit., pp. 131, et seq.
[321] Geffcken, op. cit., p. 292, note 149.
[322] “_Res ipsa, quæ nunc religio Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud
antiquos nec defecit ab initio generis humani, quousque Christus
veniret in carnem. Unde vera religio, quæ jam erat coepit appellari
Christiana_” (_Retractationes_, I, 13).
[323] The name Chaldean signifies, before the Persian epoch, a tribe;
later, a religious society. See p. 175 above.
[324] A. Bertholet, _Kulturgeschichte Israels_ (1919), pp. 253, et seq.
[Clear and useful English manuals are G. Moore, _Literature of the Old
Testament_; R. H. Charles, _Between the Old and the New Testaments_.
See also the article “Hebrew Religion” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[325] According to Williams Jackson’s _Zoroaster_ (1901).
[326] Research has treated the Chaldean, like the Talmudic, as a
stepchild. The investigator’s whole attention has been concentrated
on the religion of the Babylonian Culture, and the Chaldean has been
regarded as its dying echo. Such a view inevitably excludes any real
understanding of it. The material is not even separated out, but
is dispersed in all the books on Assyrian-Babylonian religion. (H.
Zimmern, _Die Keilinschriften und das alte Testament_ II; Gunkel,
_Schöpfung and Chaos_; M. Jastrow, C. Bezold, etc.) On the other hand
the subject is assumed by some (e.g., Bousset, _Hauptprobleme der
Gnosis_, 1907) to have been exhausted.
[327] See Vol. I, p. 184.--_Tr._
[328] The fact that Chaldean science was, in comparison with Babylonian
empiricism, a new thing has been clearly recognized by Bezold
(_Astronomie, Himmelsschau und Astrallehre bei den Babyloniern_, 1911,
pp. 17, et seq.). Its data were taken and developed by different
Classical savants according to their own way of reasoning--that is, as
a matter of applied mathematics, and to the exclusion of all feeling
for distance.
[329] See Jastrow’s articles “Babylonian and Assyrian Religion” and
“Marduk” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[330] J. Hehn, _Hymnen und Gebete an Marduk_ (1905).
[331] For Chaldeans and Persians there was no need to trouble here
about proof--they had by their God conquered the world. But the Jews
had only their literature to cling to, and this accordingly turned to
theoretical proof in the absence of positive. In the last analysis,
this unique national treasure owes its origin to the constant need
of reacting against self-depreciation. [For example, the repeated
restatement of the _date_ of the Messiah’s advent in the successive
works of the age of the prophets.--_Tr._]
[332] Glaser, _Die Abessinier in Arabien und in Afrika_ (1895), p. 124.
Glaser is convinced that Abyssinian, Pehlevi, and Persian cuneiform
inscriptions of the highest importance await discovery there.
[333] The inscription and sculptures of Behistun (on an almost
inaccessible cliff in the Zagros range on the Baghdad-Hamadan road)
were reinvestigated by a British Museum expedition in 1904; see _The
Inscription of Darius the Great at Behistun_ (London, 1907). “Thus
saith Darius the King. That what I have done I have done altogether by
the grace of Ahuramazda. Ahuramazda and the other gods that be, brought
aid to me. For this reason did Ahuramazda and the other gods that be
bring aid to me because I was not hostile nor a liar nor a wrongdoer,
neither I nor my family, but according to Rectitude have I ruled” (A.
V. Williams Jackson, _Persia Past and Present_).--_Tr._
[334] Isaiah xl-lxvi. For the critical questions arising on
Deutero-Isaiah see Dr. T. K. Cheyne’s article “Isaiah” in the
_Encyclopedia Biblica_, the same scholar’s summary in _Ency. Brit._, XI
ed., article “Isaiah,” or G. Moore’s summary, _Literature of the Old
Testament_, Ch. XVI.--_Tr._
[335] This “King of the Banishment” (Exilarch) was long a conspicuous
and politically important figure in the Persian Empire. He was only
removed by Islam.
[336] As Christian and Jewish theology both do--the only difference
between these is in their respective interpretations of the later
development of Israelite literature (recast in Judea as the literature
of Judaism), the one inflecting it towards Evangelism, the others
towards Talmudism.
[337] Later it occurred to some Pharisee mind to Judaize it by
interpolating chs. xxxii-xxxvii.
[338] See the articles “Tobit,” etc., in _Jewish Encyclopædia_ and
_Ency. Biblica_.--_Tr._
[339] If the assumption of a Chaldean prophecy corresponding to Isaiah
and Zarathustra be correct, it is to this young, inwardly cognate, and
contemporary astral religion (and not to the Babylonian) that Genesis
owes its amazingly profound cosmogony, just as it owes to the Persian
religion its visions of the end of the world.
[340] S. Funk, _Die Entstehung des Talmuds_ (1919), p. 106.
[341] E. Sachau, _Aramäische Papyros und Ostraka aus Elephantine_
(1911).
[342] Josephus, _Antiq._, 13, 10.
[343] Much as, say, the destruction of the Vatican would be felt by the
Catholic Church.
[344] See p. 198.--_Tr._
[345] Cf. p. 69.
[346] Pyrrho himself had studied under Magian priests. See, for
Pyrrhonism, _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., articles “Scepticism,” “Megarian
School,” “Pyrrho.”--_Tr._
[347] Schiele (_Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart_, III, 812)
reverses the two latter names; this, however, does not affect the
phenomenon in any way.
[348] The Cosmogony and the Law, in the Zoroastrian Scriptures.--_Tr._
[349] Bousset, _Rel. d. Jud._, p. 532.
[350] Baruch, Ezra IV (2 Esdras), the original text of John’s
Revelation.
[351] For instance, the Book of Naasenes (P. Wendland,
_Hellenistisch-römische Kultur_, pp. 177, et seq.); the “Mithras
Liturgy” (ed. A. Dieterich); the Hermetic Pœmander (ed. Reitzenstein),
the Psalms of Solomon, the Gospels of Thomas and Peter, the
Pistis-Sophia, etc. [Information as to these will be found in the
articles “Ophites,” “Mithras,” “Hermes Trismegistus,” “Apocalyptic
Literature,” “Apocryphal Literature,” “Gnosticism,” in the _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[352] Any more than Dostoyevski’s “_Dream of a Ridiculous Person_” is
so.
[353] Our definitive ideas of this early Magian vision-world we
owe to the manuscripts of Turfan, which have reached Berlin since
1903. It was these which at last freed our knowledge and, above
all, our criteria from the deformations due to the preponderance of
Western-Hellenistic material--a preponderance that had been augmented
by Egyptian papyrus finds--and radically transformed all our existing
views. Now at last the pure, almost unknown, East is seen operative
in all the apocalypses, hymns, liturgies, and books of edification of
the Persians, Mandæans, Manichæans, and countless other sects; and
primitive Christianity for the first time really takes its place in
the movement to which it owes its spiritual origins (see H. Lüders,
_Sitzungen der Berliner Akademie_, 1914, and R. Reitzenstein, _Das
iranische Erlösungsmysterium_, 1921).
[354] Lidzbarski, _Das Johannesbuch der Mandäer_, Ch. LXVI. Also
W. Bousset, _Hauptprobleme der Gnosis_ (1907) and Reitzenstein,
_Das Mandäische Buch der Herrn der Grösse_ (1919), an apocalypse
approximately contemporary with the oldest Gospels. On the Messiah
texts, the Descent-into-Hell texts, and the Songs of the Dead see
Lidzbarski, _Mandäische Liturgien_ (1920); also the Book of the
Dead (especially the second and third books of the left Genza) in
Reitzenstein’s _Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium_ (especially pp. 43,
et seq.). [The Mandæan religion survives to-day in the region of the
Shatt-el-Arab and the Karun valley or Khuzistan.--_Tr._]
[355] See Reitzenstein, pp. 124, et seq., and references there quoted.
[356] In the New Testament, of which the final redaction lies entirely
in the sphere of Western-Classical thought, the Mandæan religion and
the sects belonging thereto are no longer understood, and indeed
everything Oriental seems to have dropped out. Acts xviii-xix,
however, discloses a perceptible hostility between the then widespread
John-communities and the Primitive Christians (see Dibelius, _Die
urchristliche Überlieferung von Johannes dem Täufer_). The Mandæans
later rejected Christianity as flatly as they had rejected Judaism.
Jesus was for them a false Messiah. In their Apocalypse of the Lord of
Greatness the apparition of Enosh was also announced.
[357] According to Reitzenstein (_Das Buch von Herrn der Grösse_)
Jesus was condemned at Jerusalem as a John-disciple. According to
Lidzbarski (_Mand. Lit._, 1920, XVI) and Zimmern (_Ztschr. d. D. Morg.
Gesellschaft_, 1920, p. 429), the expression “Jesus the Nazarene” or
“Nasorene,” which was later by the Christian communities referred to
Nazareth (Matthew ii, 23, with a doubtful citation), really indicates
the membership in a Mandæan Order.
[358] E.g., Mark vi; and then the great change, Mark viii, 27, et seq.
There is no religion which has given us more honestly the tale of its
birth.
[359] Similarly in Mark i, 38, et seq., when he arose in the night and
sought a lonely place in order to fortify himself by prayer.
[360] The method of the present work is historical. It therefore
recognizes the anti-historical as well as the historical as _a fact_.
The religious method, on the contrary, necessarily looks upon itself
as the _true_ and the opposite as _false_. This difference is quite
insuperable.
[361] Hence Mark xiii, taken from an older document, is perhaps the
purest example of his usual daily discourse. Paul (1 Thess. iv, 15-17)
quotes another, which is missing in the Gospels. With these, we have
the priceless--but, by commentators dominated by the Gospel tone,
misunderstood--contributions of Papias, who about 100 was still in a
position to collect much oral tradition. The little that we have of his
work suffices amply to show us the apocalyptic character of Jesus’s
daily discourses. It is Mark xiii and not the Sermon on the Mount that
reproduces the real note of them. But as _his_ teaching became modified
into a teaching _of Him_, this material likewise was transformed and
the record of his utterances became the narrative of his manifestation.
In this one respect the picture given by the Gospels is inevitably
false.
[362] Jesus himself was aware of this (Matt. xxiv, 5, 11).
[363] Made more uncertain perhaps by the failure of previous prophecies
that had been so confidently dated--e.g., Jeremiah xxv, 11; xxiv, 5-6;
reinterpreted in Daniel vii, ix; 1 Enoch lxxxiii-xc; and again to be
reinterpreted in 2 Baruch xxxvi-xl and 4 Ezra x-xii.--_Tr._
[364] The designation “Messiah (Christ)” was old-Jewish, those
of “Lord” (κύριος, _divus_) and “Saviour” (σωτήρ, _Asklepios_)
were east-Aramæan in origin. In the course of the pseudomorphosis
“Christ” became the _name_ of Jesus, and “Saviour” the _title_; but
already “Lord” and “Saviour” were titles current in the Hellenistic
Emperor-worship; and in this was implicit the whole destiny of
westward-looking Christianity (compare here Reitzenstein, _Das
iranische Erlösungsmysterium_, p. 132, note).
[365] Acts xv; Gal. ii.
[366] Acts i, 14; cf. Mark vi.
[367] As against Luke, Matthew is the representative of this
conception. His is the only Gospel in which the word “_Ecclesia_” is
used, and it denotes the true Jews, in contradistinction to the masses
that refuse to listen to Jesus. This is not the missionary idea, any
more than Isaiah was a missionary. Community, in this connexion, means
an Order within Judaism. The prescriptions of Matt. xviii, 15-20 are
wholly incompatible with any general dissemination.
[368] It fell apart later into sects, amongst which were the Ebionites
and the Elkazites (the latter having a strange sacred book, the Elxai;
see Bousset, _Hauptprobleme der Gnosis_, p. 154). [See the articles
“Ebionites” and “Sabians” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[369] Such sects were attacked in the Acts of the Apostles and in
all Paul’s Epistles, and indeed there was hardly a Late Classical or
Aramæan religion or philosophy which did not give rise to some sort of
Jesus-sect. The danger was indeed real of the Passion story becoming,
not the nucleus of a new religion, but an integrating element of all
existing ones.
[370] Of this he was fully aware. Many of his deepest intuitions are
unimaginable without Persian and Mandæan influences (e.g., Romans vii,
22-24; 1 Corinthians xv, 26; Ephesians v, 6, et seq., with a quotation
of Persian origin. See Reitzenstein, _Das iran. Erlös.-Myst._, pp. 6,
133, et seq.). But this does not prove familiarity with Persian-Mandæan
literature. The stories were spread in these days as sagas and
folk-tales were amongst us. One heard about them in childhood as things
of daily hearsay, but without being in the least aware of how deeply
one was under their spell.
[371] The early missionary effort in the East has scarcely been
investigated and is still very difficult to establish in detail.
Sachau, _Chronik von Arbela_ (1915) and “_Die Ausbreitung der
Christentums in Asien_” in _Abb. Pr. Akad. d. Wiss._ (1919); Harnack,
_Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums_, II, 117, et seq.
[372] The researchers who argue with such over-learnedness about a
proto-Mark, Source Q, the “Twelve”-source, and so on, overlook the
essential novelty of Mark, which is _the first “Book” of Christendom_,
plan-uniform and entire. Work of this sort is never the natural product
of an evolution, but the merit of an individual man, and it marks, here
if anywhere, a historical turning-point.
[373] Mark is generally _the_ Gospel; after him the partisan writings
(Matthew, Luke) begin; the tone of narrative passes into that of legend
and ends, beyond the Hebrew and John gospels, in Jesus-romances like
the gospels of Peter and James.
[374] If the word “catholic” be used in its oldest sense (_Ignatius
ad Smyrn._, 8)--namely, to signify the _sum_ of the cult-communities,
_both_ the Churches were Catholic. In the East the word had no meaning.
The Nestorian Church was no more a sum than was the Persian: it was a
Magian unit.
[375] A brief survey of the Mary doctrine is given in article “Mary,”
_Ency. Brit._, XI ed. The symbolism involved in the details of the
story of Mary, as told in writing and in art, is very fully gone into
in Yrjo Hirn, _The Sacred Shrine_.--_Tr._
[376] Ed. Meyer, _Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums_ (1921), pp.
77, et seq.
[377] _C._ 85-155. See the recent work of Harnack, _Marcion: Das
Evangelium vom fremden Gott_ (1921). [Harnack’s article “Marcion” in
_Ency. Brit._, XI ed., is dated 1910.--_Tr._]
[378] Harnack, op. cit., pp. 136, et seq.; N. Bonwetsch, _Grundr. d.
Dogmengesch._ (1919), p. 45, et seq.
[379] This is one of the profoundest ideas in all religious history,
and one that must for ever remain inaccessible to the pious average
man. Marcion’s identification of the “Just” with the Evil enables him
in this sense to oppose the Law of the Old Testament to the Evangel of
the New.
[380] About A.D. 150. See Harnack, op. cit., pp. 32, et seq.
[381] For the notions of Koran and Logos, see below. Again as in the
case of Mark, the really important question is, not what the material
before him was, but how this entirely novel idea for such a book, which
anticipated and indeed made possible Marcion’s plan for a Christian
Bible, could arise. The book presupposes a great spiritual movement (in
eastern Asia Minor?) that knew scarcely anything of Jewish Christianity
and was yet remote from the Pauline, westerly thought-world. But of the
region and type of this movement we know nothing whatever.
[382] Vohu Mano, the Spirit of Truth, in the shape of the Saoshyant.
[383] See the article by Harnack and Conybeare “Manichæism,” _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[384] Bardesanes, too, and the system of the “Acts of Thomas” are very
near to him and to “John.” [See the articles “Bardaisan,” “Thomas,” and
“Gnosticism,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[385] Harnack, p. 24. The break with the established Church occurred at
Rome, in 144.
[386] Harnack, pp. 181, et seq.
[387] It had, like each of the other Magian religions, a script of its
own, and this script steadily came to resemble the Manichæan more and
more closely.
[388] Matthew xi, 25, et seq., on which see Eduard Meyer, _Urspr. u.
Anf. d. Christ._, pp. 286, et seq.; here it is the old and Eastern
(i.e., the genuine) form of gnosis that is described.
[389] See further, below, p. 321.
[390] As a drastic instance, Galatians iv, 24-26.
[391] Loofs, _Nestoriana_ (1905), pp. 176, et seq.
[392] The best exposition of the mass of thought common to both
Churches is Windelband’s _Geschichte der Philosophie_ (1900), pp. 177,
et seq.; for the dogmatic history of the Christian Church see Harnack,
_Dogmengeschichte_ (1914), while--unconsciously--Geffcken (_Der Ausgang
des griechisch-römischen Heidentums_, 1920) gives the corresponding
“dogmatic history of the Pagan Church.”
[393] Geffcken, op. cit., p. 69 [article “Neoplatonism” in _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._].
[394] See the following chapter.
[395] Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, p. 165.
[396] See Vol. I, p. 209.
[397] The expression is Leo Frobenius’s (Paideuma, 1920, p. 91). [See
Vol. I, p. 184.--_Tr._]
[398] The soul-stones on Jewish, Sabæan, and Islamic tombs are also
called _nephesh_. They are unmistakable symbols of the “upward.” With
them belong the huge storeyed stelæ of Axum which belong to the first
to third centuries of our era--i.e., the great period of the early
Magian religions. The giant stele, long overthrown, is the largest
monolith known to art-history, larger than any Egyptian obelisk (German
Axum Expedition report, Vol. II, pp. 28, et seq.).
[399] On this rests the whole theory and practice of Magian law (see p.
72 above).
[400] Isaiah xxxii, 15; 4 Ezra xiv, 39; Acts ii.
[401] Reitzenstein, _Das iran. Erlösungsmysterium_, pp. 108, et seq.
[402] Bousset, _Kyrios Christos_, p. 142.
[403] Windelband, _Gesch. d. Phil._ (1900), pp. 189, et seq.;
Windelband-Bonhöffer, _Gesch. d. antiken Phil._ (1912), pp. 328, et
seq.; Geffcken, _Der Ausgang des griech.-röm. Heidentums_ (1920), pp.
51, et seq.
[404] Jodl, _Geschichte der Ethik_, I, p. 58.
[405] M. Horten, _Die religiöse Gedankenwelt der Volkes im heutigen
Islam_ (1917), pp. 381, et seq. By the Shiites the Logos-idea was
transferred to Ali.
[406] Wolff, _Muhammedanische Eschatologie_, 3, 2, et seq.
[407] Mandæan Book of John, Ch. LXXV.
[408] Usener, _Vortr. u. Aufs._, p. 217.
[409] The “devil-worshippers” in Armenia; M. Horten in _Der neue
Orient_ (March 1918). The name arose from the fact that they did not
recognize Satan as a being, and accordingly derived the Evil, by
a very complicated set of ideas, from the Logos itself. Under old
Persian influences the Jews also busied themselves with the same
problem--observe the difference between 2 Samuel xxiv, 1, and 1 Chron.
xxi, 1.
[410] M. Horten, op. cit., p. xxi. This book is the best introduction
to the actually existing popular religion of Islam, which deviates
considerably from the official doctrines.
[411] Baumstark, _Die christl. Literaturen des Orients_, I, p. 64.
[412] Cf. p. 205. The Babylonian view of the heavens had not definitely
distinguished between astronomical and atmospheric elements; e.g., the
covering of the moon by clouds was regarded as a kind of eclipse. For
this soothsaying the momentary _figure_ of the heavens served only
the same purpose as the inspection of the victim’s liver. But the
Chaldeans’ intention was to forecast the _actual_ course of the stars;
here, therefore, astrology presupposed a genuine astronomy.
[413] B. Cohn, “_Die Anfangsepoche der jüd. Kalenders_” (_Sitz. Pr.
Akad._, 1914). The date of the first day of Creation was on this
occasion fixed by calculation from a total eclipse of the sun--of
course with the aid of Chaldean astronomy. [See, in general, the
articles “Chronology,” “Calendar,” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[414] The Persian notion of total time is 12,000 years. The Parsees of
to-day consider A.D. 1920 as the 11,550th.
[415] M. Horten, _Die religiöse Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen
Islam_, p. xxvi.
[416] It shows a great gap in our research that although we possess
a whole library of works on Classical religion and particularly its
gods and cults, we have not one about Classical religiousness and its
history.
[417] “He is in truth the conclusion and completion of the Christian
Classical, its last and greatest thinker, its intellectual practitioner
and tribune. This is the starting-point from which he must be
understood. What later ages have made of him is another affair. His own
real mind, the synthesizer of Classical Culture, ecclesiastical and
episcopal authority, and intimate mysticism, could not possibly have
been handed on by those who, environed by different conditions, have to
deal with different tasks” (E. Troeltsch, _Augustin, die christliche
Antike und das Mittelalter_, 1915, p. 7). His power, like Tertullian’s,
rested also on the fact that his writings were not translated into
Latin, but _thought_ in this language, the _sacred_ language of the
Western Church; it was precisely this that excluded both from the field
of Aramæan thought. Cf. p. 224 above.
[418] “_Inspiratio bonæ voluntatis_” (_De corr. et grat._, 3). His
“good will” and “ill will” are, quite dualistically, a pair of opposite
substances. For Pelagius, on the contrary, will is an _activity_
without moral quality as such; only that which is willed has the
_property_ of being good or evil, and the Grace of God consists in the
“_possibilitas utriusque partis_,” the freedom to will this or that.
Gregory I transmuted Augustinian doctrines into Faustian when he taught
that God rejected individuals because he foreknew their evil will.
[419] All the elements of the Magian metaphysic are to be found in
Spinoza, hard as he tried to replace the Arabian-Jewish conceptual
world of his Spanish masters (and above all Moses Maimonides) by
the Western of early Baroque. The individual human mind is for
him not an ego, but only a mode of the one divine attribute, the
“_cogitatio_”--which is just the Pneuma. He protests against notions
like “God’s Will.” His God is _pure substance_ and in lieu of the
dynamic causality of the Faustian universe he discovers simply the
logic of the divine _cogitatio_. All this is already in Porphyry,
in the Talmud, in Islam; and to Faustian thinkers like Leibniz and
Goethe it is as alien as anything can possibly be. (_Allgem. Gesch. d.
Philos._ in _Kultur der Gegenwart_, I, v, p. 484, Windelband.)
[420] Here, therefore, “good” is an evaluation and not a substance.
[421] The period at which it was written corresponds to our
Carolingian. Whether the latter really brought forth any poetry of like
rank we do not know, but that it may possibly have done so is shown by
creations like the Voluspa, Muspilli, the Heliand, and the universe
conceived by John Scotus Erigena.
[422] See, for example, Bertholet, _Kulturgesch. Israels_, p. 242.
[423] Horten, op. cit., p. xii.
[424] See p. 67 above.
[425] It is almost unnecessary to say that in all religions of the
Germanic West the Bible stands in a quite other relationship to the
faith--namely, in that of a _source_ in the strictly historical sense,
irrespective of whether it is taken as inspired and immune from textual
criticism or not. The relation of Chinese thought to the canonical
books is similar.
[426] The Holy Spirit, different from Ahuramazda and yet one with him,
opposed to the Evil (Angra Mainyu).
[427] Identified by Mani with the Johannine Logos. Compare also Yasht
13, 31. Ahuramazda’s shining soul is the Word.
[428] _Aletheia_ (Truth) is generally employed in this way in the John
Gospel, and _drug_ (= lie) is used for Ahriman in Persian cosmology.
Ahriman is often shown as though a servant of the _drug_.
[429] Sura 96; cf. 80, 11 and 85, 21, where in connexion with another
vision it is said: “This is a noble Koran on a treasured tablet.”
The best commentary on all this is Eduard Meyer’s (_Geschichte der
Mormonen_, pp. 70, et seq.).
[430] Classical man receives, in states of extreme bodily excitation,
the power of unconsciously predicting future events. But these visions
are completely unliterary. The Classical Sibylline books (which have no
connexion with the later Christian works bearing that name) are meant
to be nothing more than a collection of oracles.
[431] See p. 73.
[432] IV Ezra xiv; S. Funk, _Die Entstehung des Talmuds_, p. 17;
Hirsch’s commentary on Exodus xxi, 2.
[433] Funk, op. cit., p. 86.
[434] For example, Ed. Meyer, _Urspr. u. Anf. d. Christ._, p. 95.
[435] In the West, Plato, Aristotle, and above all Pythagoras were
regarded as prophets in this sense. What could be referred back to
them, was valid. For this reason the succession of the heads of the
schools became more and more important, and often more work was done in
establishing--or inventing--them than was done upon the history of the
doctrine itself.
[436] Fromer, _Der Talmud_, p. 190.
[437] We to-day confuse _authorship_ and _authority_. Arabian thought
knew not the idea of “intellectual property.” Such would have been
absurd and sinful, for it is the _one_ divine Pneuma that selects the
individual as vessel and mouthpiece. Only to that extent is he the
“author,” and it does not matter even whether he or another actually
writes down the material. “The Gospel _according to_ Mark” means that
Mark _vouches for_ the truth of this evangel.
[438] On the pseudonyma and anonyma of Biblical apocryphal literature
the English reader will find much of interest in three small books
(already referred to) of the “Home University” series: Moore,
_Literature of the Old Testament_; Charles, _Between the Old and the
New Testaments_; and Bacon, _The Making of the New Testament_.--_Tr._
[439] See p. 73.--_Tr._
[440] Vendidad 19, 1; here it is Zarathustra who is tempted.
[441] M. J. ben Gorion, _Die Sagen der Juden_ (1913).
[442] It is reasonable to suppose that he must through oral tradition
have had a very accurate knowledge of the fundamental doctrines of the
John Gospel. Even Bardesanes (d. 254), and the “Acts of St. Thomas”
that originated in his circle, are very far removed indeed from Pauline
doctrines, an alienation that in Mani rose to downright hostility and
to the historical Jesus’s being described as an evil demon. We obtain
here a glimpse into the essence of the almost subterranean Christianity
of the East, which was ignored by the Greek-writing churches of the
Pseudomorphosis and for that reason has hitherto escaped the attention
of Church history. But Marcion and Montanus also came from eastern
Asia Minor; here originated the Naasene book, basically Persian, but
overlaid first with Judaism and then with Christianity; and further
east, probably in the Matthew monastery of Mosul, Aphrahat wrote, about
340, those strange epistles whose Christianity the Western development
from Irenæus to Athanasius left wholly unaffected. The history of
Nestorian Christianity, in fact, was already beginning in the second
century.
[443] For the later writings of (for example) Tertullian and Augustine
remained wholly without effect save in so far as they were translated.
In Rome itself even, Greek was the true language of the Church.
[444] See p. 177.--_Tr._
[445] The Faustian monk represses his evil will, the Magian the evil
substance in himself. Only the latter is dualistic.
[446] The purity- and food-laws of the Talmud and the Avesta cut far
deeper into everyday life than, for example, the Benedictine rule.
[447] Asmus, “Damaskios” (_Philos. Bibl._, 125 (1911)). Christian
anchoritism is _later_ than pagan: Reitzenstein, “Des Athanasius Werk
über das Leben des Antonius” (_Sitz. Heid. Ak._ (1914), VIII, 12).
[448] Even to the point indicated in Matt. xix, 12, which Origen
followed to the letter.
[449] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Qaraites.” The outlook
of these Protestants so resembled that of the Western Protestants
that their name was used as a term of contempt for the latter by the
Catholics, and not greatly resented. It is significant also that this
movement in Jewry almost coincided in date with the vaster Reformation
of Islam.--_Tr._
[450] The followers of Baal Shem above mentioned (p. 228) not to be
confused with the Hasidim or Assideans of the second century.--_Tr._
[451] Wissowa, _Religion und Kulturs der Römer_, p. 493; Geffcken, pp.
4, 144.
[452] This is the metaphysical basis also of the Christian
image-worship, which presently set in and of the appearance of
wonder-working pictures of Mary and the Saints.
[453] See p. 60.
[454] The Nestorians protested against Mary _Theotokos_ (she who bore
God), opposing to her the concept of Christ the _Theophorus_ (he who
carried God in him). The deep difference between an image-loving and an
image-hating religiousness is here clearly manifested.
[455] Note the “Western” outlook on the substance-questions in the
contemporary writings of Proclus--his double Zeus, his triad of πατήρ,
δύναμις, νοήσις or νοητόν, and so forth (Zeller, _Philosophie der
Griechen_, V, pp. 857, et seq.). Proclus’s beautiful “Hymn to Athene”
is a veritable Ave Maria:
“But when an evil lapse of my being puts me into bondage
(And, ah, I know indeed how I am tossed about by many unholy deeds
that in my blindness I have done),
Be thou gracious to me, thou gentle one, thou blessing of mankind,
And let me not lie upon the earth as prey to fearful punishments,
For I am, and I remain, thy chattel.”
(Hymn VII, Eudociæ Aug. rel. A. Ludwich, 1897.)
[456] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Apollinaris, the
Younger.”--_Tr._
[457] And Russia, too, though hitherto Russia has kept it as a buried
treasure.
[458] The Christian missionary efforts of the West very generally
followed the same method, maintaining the local places of prayer, and
merely substituting crucifixes or relics for the idols. Gregory the
Great even sanctioned the sacrifice of animals in Britain.--_Tr._
[459] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., art. “Khazars.”--_Tr._
[460] The Albigensian movement of the twelfth century.--_Tr._
[461] Hermann, _Chines. Geschichte_ (1912), p. 77.
[462] A third, “contemporary,” movement should follow in the Russian
world in the first half of the coming millennium.
[463] Cf. pp. 3, et seq. and foot-note p. 3.
[464] See p. 116.
[465] “He who loves God with inmost soul, transforms himself into God”
(Bernard of Clairvaux).
[466] For religious _thought_ Destiny is always a causal quantity.
Epistemology knows it, therefore, only as an indistinct word for
causality. Only so long as we _do not_ think upon it do we really know
it.
[467] See p. 25.
[468] The distinction between the two is one of _inner_ form. A
sacrifice made by Socrates is at bottom a prayer; and generally the
Classical sacrifice is to be looked upon as a _prayer in bodily form_.
The ejaculated prayer of the criminal, on the contrary, is a sacrifice
to which fear drives him.
[469] And herein philosophy differs not in the least from soil-sprung
folk-belief. Think of Kant’s category-table with its 3 × 4 units, of
Hegel’s method, of Iamblichus’s triads.
[470] See p. 133.
[471] Cf. p. 24.
[472] And even so the thought has a different disposition according as
it is primitive or cultured; Chinese, Indian, Classical, Magian, or
Western; and even German, English, or French. In the last resort, there
are not even two individuals with exactly the same method.
[473] Anatole France’s story _Le Jongleur de Notre Dame_ is something
deeper than a beautiful fancy.--_Tr._
[474] See p. 33.
[475] Was it that highly civilized Crete, the outpost of Egyptian
modes of thought, afforded a pattern (see p. 87)? But, after all, the
numerous local and tribal gods of the primitive Thinite time (before
3000), which represented the numina of particular beast-_genera_, were
essentially different in meaning. The more powerful the Egyptian deity
of this preliminary period is, the more particular individual spirits
(_ka_) and individual souls (_bai_) he possesses, and these hide and
lurk in the various animals--Bastet in the cat, Sechmet in the lion,
Hathor in the cow, Mut in the vulture (hence the human-formed _ka_ that
figures behind the beast-head in the figures of the gods)--making of
this earliest world-picture a very abortion of monstrous fear, filling
it with powers which rage against man even after his death and which
only the greatest sacrifices avail to placate. The union of the North
and the South lands was represented by the common veneration of the
Horus-falcon, whose first _ka_ resided in the Pharaoh of the time. Cf.
Eduard Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, I, §§ 182, et seq. [See also Moret and
Davy: _Des clans aux empires_ and Moret: _Le Nil et la civilisation
égyptienne_ (available in English translations).--_Tr._]
[476] _Eumenides_, 126.
[477] Moreover, in the full maturity of Athens, every little girl of
the upper classes was consecrated as a bear to this Artemis.--_Tr._
[478] For further information the reader may consult the articles
“Demeter,” etc., in the _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.; and, for a suggestive
introduction in the fewest possible words, Dr. Jane Harrison’s
pamphlet, _Myths of Greece and Rome_.--_Tr._
[479] Bernoulli, _Die Heiligen der Merowinger_ (1900)--a good account
of this primitive religion.
[480] For an account of Russian sectarian movements see A. P. Stanley,
_Hist. of the Eastern Church_; for a summary, _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.,
Vol. XXIII, p. 886.--_Tr._
[481] Kattenbusch, _Lehrb. d. vgl. Konfessionsk._, I (1892), pp. 234,
et seq.; N. P. Milyukov, _Skizz. russ. Kulturg._ (1901) II, pp. 104, et
seq.
[482] Borchardt, _Reheiligtum des Newoserrê_, I (1905). The Pharaoh is
no longer an incarnation of godhead, and not yet, as the theology of
the Middle Kingdom was to make him, the son of Re; notwithstanding all
earthly greatness, he is small, a servant, as he stands before the god.
[483] Erman, “_Ein Denkmal memphitsiche Theologie_,” _Ber. Berl. Ak._
(1911), pp. 916, et seq.
[484] Not, of course, to be connected in any profound sense with that
which emerged under the name in the Magian Culture.--_Tr._
[485] And because they were the gods of the eternal peasant, they
outlived the Olympians.
[486] Even though Hesiod is two centuries nearer to the source of his
Culture than the German mystic is to that of our own. See the article
“Boehme,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[487] Insolent prosperity tempting Nemesis.--_Tr._
[488] The work of J. J. Bachofen in this field has recently been
assembled in concentrated form under the title _Mythus von Occident und
Orient_ (1926).--_Tr._
[489] Wissowa, _Religion und Kultus der Römer_, p. 41. What has been
said above (p. 191) concerning the Talmudic religion applies also to
the Etruscan religion by which all Italy--i.e., no less than half
of the Classical field--was so deeply influenced. It lies outside
the province of both the conventional “Classical” philologies and in
consequence has been practically ignored, as compared with the Achæan
and Doric religions. In reality (as its tombs, temples, and myths
prove), it forms with them a single unit of spirit and evolution.
[490] It is immaterial whether or not Dionysus was “borrowed” from
Thrace, Apollo from Asia Minor, Aphrodite from Phœnicia. It is the fact
that out of the thousands of alien motives these particular few were
chosen and combined in so splendid a unity that implies the fundamental
newness of the creation--just as does the Mary-cult of the Gothic,
although in that case the whole form-material was taken over from the
East.
[491] As in De Groot’s _Universismus_ (1918), where, in fact, the
systems of Taoists, Confucians, and Buddhists are handled without a
qualm as _the_ religions of China. This amounts to the same as saying
that the Classical religion dates from Caracalla.
[492] Conrady, in Wassiljew, _Die Erschliessung Chinas_ (1909), p. 232;
B. Schindler, _Das Priestertum im alten China_, I (1919).
[493] The Shu-Ching or Canon of History is a collection of ancient
annals, the Shi-King a canonical anthology of rhymed tales made by
Confucius.--_Tr._
[494] Conrady, _China_, p. 516.
[495] Of which an outstanding example is the Edda.--_Tr._
[496] See article “Heliand” in _Ency. Brit._, XI edit., and works there
referred to. A handy edition of the text is included in the “Reclam”
series.--_Tr._
[497] This idea differs essentially from that of the Egyptian duality
of the spiritual _ka_ and the soul-bird _bai_, and still more so from
the Magian duality of soul-substances.
[498] O. Franke, _Studien zur Gesch. des Konfuzianischen Dogmas_
(1920), p. 202.
[499] Reference may again be made to Yrjo Hirn, _The Sacred
Shrine_.--_Tr._
[500] Consider, for example, the fantastic paintings of Hieronymus
Bosch. Breughel’s similar humour, too, is unthinkable without the
tradition of a rank-and-file of evil creatures.--_Tr._
[501] So also in the Classical, the Homeric figures were for educated
people of Hellenistic times nothing but literature, representation,
artistic motive. Even for Plato’s period they were little more than
this. But in 1100 B.C., Demeter and Dionysus were a fearful actuality
before which men collapsed.
[502] The stern object of Roger Bacon’s science; see p. 502,
foot-note.--_Tr._
[503] This is the real conclusion that emerges from Burdach’s
_Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus_ (1918).
[504] In this connexion, it is important to observe that the
education-movement of Humanism took into its field modern Italian,
Hebrew, etc., as well as the Classical knowledge. A Dante professorship
was founded in Florence in 1373. As for the Classical itself, side
by side with all the enthusiasm we find a significant note in
Boccaccio, who thanks Jesus Christ for a victory over unbelief that has
delivered up the _enemy’s camp_ to the victor’s enjoyment. Burkhardt,
_Renaissance_, Vol. I, p. 262 (Reclam edition).--_Tr._
[505] Bezold, _Hist. Zeitschr._, 45, p. 208.
[506] Italian, “Anna Metterza.” The reference is to the St. Anne of the
Louvre and the Royal Academy Diploma Gallery, London.--_Tr._
[507] Cf. Vol. I, p. 232.--_Tr._
[508] Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli.--_Tr._
[509] The sense of such a relativity led to a mathematic (the calculus)
which is literally based on the ignoring of second- and third-order
magnitudes.--_Tr._
[510] See article “Mysticism” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[511] After its confirmation in 1311, the character of this festival as
one of popular joy became still more marked by its association with the
nascent drama (see _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., articles “Corpus Christi,”
“Drama”; and Y. Hirn, op. cit., pp. 144-5).--_Tr._
[512] Or even rediscovered it. For Classical man as a spirit-filled
body is one amongst many quite independent units, while Faustian
man is a centre in the universe, which with its soul embraces _the
whole_. But personality (individuality) means, not something separate
(_einzelnes_), but something single (_einziges_).
[513] Hence it is that this sacrament has conferred a position of
such immense power upon the Western priest. He receives the personal
confession, and speaks personally, in the name of the Infinite, the
absolution, without which life would be unbearable.
The notion of confession as a _duty_, which was finally established
in 1215, first arose in England, whence came also the first
confession-books (Penitentials). In England, too, originated, the idea
of the Immaculate Conception, and even the _idea_ of the Papacy--at
a time when Rome itself thought of it as a question of power and
precedence. It is evidence of the independence of Faustian Christianity
from Magian that its decisive ideas grew up in those remote parts of
its field which lay beyond the Frankish Empire.
[514] The immeasurable difference between the Faustian and the Russian
souls is disclosed in certain word-sounds. The Russian word for heaven
is “_nyebo_,” which contains in its _n_ a negative element. Western
man looks up, the Russian looks horizontally into the broad plain. The
death-impulse, too, of the respective souls is distinguishable, in
that for the West it is the passion of drive all-ways into infinite
space, whereas for Russians it is an expressing and expanding of self
(_Sichentäussern_) till “it” in the man becomes identical with the
boundless plain itself. It is thus that a Russian understands the
words “man” and “brother.” He sees even mankind as a plane. The idea
of a Russian’s being an astronomer! He does not see the stars at all,
he sees only the horizon. Instead of the vault he sees the down-hang
of the heavens--something that somewhere combines with the plain
to form the horizon. For him the Copernican system, be it never so
mathematical, is spiritually contemptible.
While our German “_Schicksal_” rings like a trumpet call, “_Sud’bá_”
is a genuflection. There is no room for the upstanding “I” beneath
this almost flat-roofed heaven. That “_All are responsible for
all_”--the “it” for the “it” in this boundlessly extended plain--is
the metaphysical fundament of all Dostoyevski’s creation. That is why
Ivan Karamasov must name himself murderer although another had done
the murder. The criminal is the “unfortunate,” the “wretch”--it is the
utter negation of Faustian personal responsibility. Russian mysticism
has nothing of that upstriving inwardness of Gothic, of Rembrandt, of
Beethoven, which can swell up to a heaven-storming jubilation--its
god is not the azure depth up above. Mystical Russian love is love of
the plain, the love of brothers under equal pressure all along the
earth, ever along and along; the love of the poor tortured beasts that
wander on it, the love of plants--never of birds and clouds and stars.
The Russian “_volya_,” our “will,” means principally non-compulsion,
freedom not _for_ something but _from_ something, and particularly
freedom from compulsion to personal doing. Free-will is seen as
a condition in which no one else can command “it,” and in which,
therefore, one may give way to one’s own disposition. “_Geist_,”
“_esprit_,” “spirit,” go thus: ↗; the Russian “_duch_” goes thus:
↳. What sort of a Christianity will come forth one day from this
world-feeling?
[515]
_“Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär’
Und wollten uns verschlingen
So fürchten wir uns nimmermehr
Es soll uns doch gelingen.”_
[516] And, as the secession of a reformed Church necessarily transforms
the parent Church, there was a _Magian counter-reformation_ also. In
the _Decretum Gelasii_ (_c._ 500, Rome) even Clement of Alexandria,
Tertullian, and Lactantius, and in the Synod of Byzantium (543) Origen,
were declared heretical.
[517] Boehmer, _Luther im Lichte der neueren Forschung_ (1918), pp. 54,
et seq.
[518] See, for instance, H. T. Buckle, _Hist. Civilization in England_,
Vol. III, ch. iv, for the Scottish outlook, which at times attributed
all this horror, not even to an anti-God, but to God himself.
“Consider, who is the contriver of these torments. There have been some
very exquisite torments contrived by the wit of men ... but all these
fall as far short of the torments ye are to endure as the wisdom of man
falls short of that of God.... Infinite wisdom has contrived that evil”
(_The Great Concern of Salvation_, by T. Halyburton, 1722).--_Tr._
[519] M. Osborn, _Die Teufelsliteratur des 16. Jahrh._ (1893).
[520] Clocks being an outstanding example. See Vol. I, p. 15,
foot-note.--_Tr._
[521] The famous Bishop of Lincoln (1175-1253), scholar and
philosopher, scientist and statesman--the British Oresme.--_Tr._
[522] A clear summary of Grosseteste’s, Pierre de Maricourt’s, and
Roger Bacon’s work and outlook will be found in Ch. ix of E. Gilson’s
short manual, _La Philosophie au Moyen Âge_ (Paris, 1925). _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed., may also be consulted for Roger Bacon, but the article
“Grosseteste” deals almost entirely with the bishop’s political and
ecclesiastical career.--_Tr._
[523] M. Baumgartner, _Gesch. der Philos. des Mittelalters_ (1915), pp.
425, 571, 620, et seq. [Brief account in Ch. xi (3) of Gilson’s manual
above cited.--_Tr._]
[524] See Ch. XIV below.--_Tr._
[525] Nigantha. See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Jains.”--_Tr._
[526] 542. See p. 197.
[527] Mahommedanism must be regarded as an eccentric heretical form of
Eastern Christianity. This in fact was the ancient mode of regarding
Mahommet. He was considered, not in the light of the founder of a new
religion, but rather as one of the chief heresiarchs of the Church.
Among them he is placed by Dante in the “Inferno.” Dean Stanley,
_Eastern Church_ (1861), Lecture VIII.--_Tr._
[528] Krumbacher, _Byzant. Literaturgesch._, p. 12.
[529] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., under these names.--_Tr._
[530] Not to say the twentieth.--_Tr._
[531] To which may be added Edinburgh.--_Tr._
[532] πρὸς τὴν πειθὼ τῶν πολλῶν, _Metaphysics_ XI, 8, p. 1074 (Bekker)
13.--_Tr._ {sic--XII, 1074b 1-5}
[533] Caliphs like Al Maimun (813-33) and the last Ommayads would have
entirely approved of similar measures in Islam. In those times there
was a club in Baghdad in which Christians, Jews, Moslems, and Atheists
debated, and appeals to the authority of Bible or Koran were “out of
order.”
[534] Whereas “_virtù_” in Dante always carries a connotation of
vital force, as also does the older English use of the word; e.g.,
in Chaucer’s “of which vertue engendred is the flour,” (_Canterbury
Tales_, Prol. 4) and in the Bible (Mark v, 30). In Mediæval Latin
“_virtutes_” is used for miracles.--_Tr._
[535] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Jains.”--_Tr._
[536] E.g., “Given eye and visible object, visual consciousness arises;
the conjunction of the three is contact; whereby conditioned, arises
feeling; whereby conditioned, arises perception....” Majjima Nikhaya,
I, 111 (quoted by Mrs. Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_).--_Tr._
[537] Gercke-Norden, _Einleit. in die Altertumswiss._, II, 210.
[538] Compare the renewed controversy as to Transubstantiation in
the English Church, 1926-8, in which a bishop actually proposed that
physical tests could be applied to the altar-miracle.--_Tr._
[539] Which was ordered no less than four times in the decade 58-49.
[540] Horace’s fine lady, Leuconoë.--_Tr._
[541] It is perhaps possible for us to make some guess already as to
these forms, which (it is self-evident) must lead back to certain
elements of Gothic Christianity. But be this as it may, what is quite
certain is that they will not be the product of any literary taste for
Late-Indian or Late-Chinese speculation, but something of the type, for
example, of Adventism and suchlike sects.
[542] Arnim, _Stoic. vet. fragm._, 537.
[543] See p. 202.
[544] The Lü-shi Chun-tsiu of Lü-pu-Wei (d. 237 B.C., Chinese Augustan
Age) is the first monument of this syncretism, of which the final
deposit was the ritual work _Li-ki_ of the Han period (B. Schindler,
_Das Priestertum im alten China_, I, 93).
[545] M. Horten, _Die religiöse Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen
Islam_ (1917).
[546] 1018-78; cf. Dieterich, _Byzant. Charakterköpfe_ (1909), p. 63.
[Or _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Psellus.”--_Tr._]
[547] It was only in old age and after long and heavy warring that both
these Cæsars gave themselves up to a mild and weary piety, and both of
them held aloof from the more definite religions. From the point of
view of dogma, Asoka was no Buddhist; what he did was to understand the
currents and take them under his protection (Hillebrandt, _Altindien_,
p. 143). [Asoka’s life is dealt with in several of the works of Rhys
Davids; for example, Ch. xv of his _Buddhist India_.--_Tr._]
[548] In so far as it is permissible to reckon Mithraism as Classical
at all--for it is really a religion of the Magian Spring.
[549] De Groot, _Universismus_ (1918), p. 134.
[550] P. 169.
[551] See the article “Maimonides” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[552] Fromer, _Der Talmud_, p. 217. The “red cow” and the ritual
of anointing a Jewish king were treated in this work with the same
seriousness as the most important provisions of private law. [See J.
and J. Tharaud, _Petite Histoire des Juifs_, Ch. I (1927).--_Tr._]
[553] See, for the following paragraphs, the articles “Jews,” “Hebrew
Religion,” “Hebrew Literature,” “Kabbalah,” “Qaraites,” etc., in _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[554] Strunz, _Gesch. der Naturwiss. im Mittelalter_, p. 89.
[555] Only with Nicolaus Cusanus was this state of things reversed.
[556] P. 174.
[557] The reader is recommended to study, in the light of all this,
recent literature of the type of Hajim Bloch’s _Golem_ and the works of
the brothers Tharaud.--_Tr._
[558] See pp. 259, et seq.; 174, et seq.
[559] P. 127.
[560] P. 48.
[561] Prague contains a veritable corpus of commentary upon these
pages.--_Tr._
[562] A.D. 132. See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. XV, p. 402, and Vol.
III, p. 395.--_Tr._
[563] Instances--besides that of Mithradates and the Cyprus massacre
(p. 198) quoted above--are the Sepoy Mutiny in India, the Boxer
Rebellion in China, and the Bolshevist fury of Jews, Letts, and other
alien peoples against Tsarist Russia.
[564] P. Levertoff, _Die religiöse Denkweise der Chassidim_ (1918),
pp. 128, et seq.; M. Buber, _Die Legende des Baalschem_ (1907).
[Brief account in J. and J. Tharaud, _Petite histoire des Juifs_, Ch.
vii.--_Tr._]
[565] Levertoff, op. cit., p. 136.
[566] O. Weininger, _Taschenbuch_ (1919), above all pp. 19, et seq.
[567] Their ship-building was in Roman times more Classical than
Phœnician, their state was organized as a Polis, and their educated
people, like Hannibal, were familiar with Greek.
[568] See p. 260, et seq.
[569] Cf. p. 3 and foot-note.
[570] And not until women cease to have race enough to have or to
want children, not until they cease to _be_ history, does it become
possible for them to make or to copy the history of men. Conversely,
it is deeply significant that we are in the habit of calling thinkers,
doctrinaires, and humanity-enthusiasts of anti-political tendency “old
women.” They wish to imitate the other history, the history of woman,
although they--cannot.
[571] No exact equivalent exists in common English for the German word
“_Stand_.” “Aristocracy” is too narrow, as under most aspects the
clergy and under some even the _Tiers_ have to be reckoned in. “Class”
fails because, for logical completeness, it has to be stretched so
as to bring in the qualitatively unclassed as a distinct category.
(A whole social history is contained in the use of these and similar
words at different periods.) The word “Estate” itself is used nowadays
for the “masses” (“Fourth Estate” = “Proletariat”), but this very use,
by Socialists, is an assertion that the masses, as workers, possess a
qualitative peculiarity and condition of their own, and the word thus
continues to connote ideas of differentiation, specific constitution,
and oriented outlook. It may, therefore, be employed here without fear
of misunderstanding or reproach of pedantry.--_Tr._
[572] Cf. pp. 120, et seq.
[573] Mitteis, _Reichsrecht und Volksrecht_ (1891), p. 63.
[574] Sohm, _Institutionen_ (1911), p. 614. [_Ency. Brit._, XI ed.,
Vol. XXIII, pp. 540-1.--_Tr._]
[575] This principle formed the basis of the dynastic-idea of the
Arabian world (Ommayads, Comneni, Sassanids), which is so hard for us
to grasp. When a usurper had seized a throne, he hastened to marry
one or another of the female members of the blood-community and so
prolonged the dynasty; of law-made succession rights there was no
question, nor under this idea could there be. (See also J. Wellhausen,
_Ein Gemeinwesen ohne Obrigkeit_ (1900).)
[576] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p. 574.--_Tr._
[577] See p. 18.
[578] An inversion of Clausewitz’s famous expression that war is a
continuation of policy by other means. (_On War_, I, i, § 24).--_Tr._
[579] Not excluding art, although we are not _conscious_ of them save
through deduction from art-_history_.
[580] Original: “_Sie liegen im gesteigerten Dasein von Einzelnen und
Kreisen, eben in dem, was soeben ‘Dasein in Form’ genannt worden ist,
und durch diese Höhe des Geformtseins erst die Kultur repräsentirt._”
[581] So in the German, but see foot-note p. 329. “_Stand_” would have
expressed the sense better.--_Tr._
[582] R. Fick, _Die soziale Gliederung im nordöstlichen Indien zu
Buddhas Zeit_ (1897), p. 201; K. Hillebrandt, _Alt-Indien_ (1899), p.
82. [Also the article “Brahmanism,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[583] See Vol. I, p. 157.--_Tr._
[584]
_Got hât driu leben geschaffen
Gebûre, ritter, phaffen._
[Note the collective _ge-_ attached to the first-named.--_Tr._]
[585] The ease with which Bolshevism extinguished the four so-called
estates or classes of Petrine Russia--nobles, merchants, small
townspeople, and peasants--shows that these were mere imitations and
administrative conveniences, and destitute of all symbolism--for
symbolism no power on earth can choke. They correspond to the outward
differences of rank and possessions that existed in the Visigothic and
Frankish Kingdoms, and--as glimpses afforded by the earliest parts of
the Iliad show--in Mycenæan times. It is reserved for the future to
develop a true nobility and clergy in Russia.
[586] As a treaty of reciprocal possession by the two parties which is
made effective by the reciprocal use of their sex-properties.
[587] Oldenberg, _Die Lehre der Upanishaden_ (1915), p. 5.
[588] P. 124.
[589] “So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I
will spue thee out of my mouth.”
[590] P. 4, et seq.
[591] The case of Egypt is of course similar.--_Tr._
[592] Pp. 272, et seq.
[593] _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, § 260.
[594] In contrast, the Spanish word “_Hidalgo_” means “son of
somebody.”--_Tr._
[595] Conversely, it can successfully be controverted--and often
has been so in the Chinese and Classical, Indian and Western
philosophies--but it does not get abolished.
[596] The possession of movable things (food, equipment, arms) comes
later, and is of much lower symbolic weight. It occurs widely in the
animal world. The bird’s nest, on the contrary, is a property of
plantlike kind.
[597] Property in this most significant sense--the having grown up with
something--refers therefore less to the particular person than to the
family tree to which he belongs. In every quarrel within a peasant or
even within a princely family, this is the deep and violent element.
The master for the time being holds possession only in the name of the
family line. Hence, too, the terror of death without heirs. _Property
also is a Time-symbol_, and consequently it is closely related to
marriage, which is a firm plantlike intergrowth and mutual possession
of two human beings, so real as to be even reflected in an increasing
facial similarity.
[598] See p. 248.
[599] See these headings in _Ency. Brit._, XI. ed.--_Tr._
[600] After death the teachers of error are excluded from the eternal
bliss of the text-book and cast into the purgatorial fires of
foot-notes, whence, purged by the intercession of the believer, they
ascend into the paradise of the paragraphs.
[601] Black Jews, who are smiths to a man.
[602] The genuinely primitive Mir, contrary to the assertions of
enthusiastic socialists and pan-slavists, dates only from after 1600,
and has been abolished since 1861. Here the soil is _communal_ soil,
and the villagers are as far as possible held fast, in order to ensure
that the tilling of this soil shall cover the demands of taxation.
[603] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. XI, pp. 94, 786, or any histories
of German literature.--_Tr._
[604] See, further, below.
[605] Brentano, _Byzant. Volkswirtschaft_ (1917), p. 15.
[606] Even I-wang (934-909) was obliged to leave conquered territories
to his vassals, who put in counts and reeves of their own choice.
[607] See H. Delbrück, _Gesch. der Kriegskunst_, Vol. II, Book I, Ch.
x; or C. W. C. Oman, _Art of War: Middle Ages_, Ch. i.--_Tr._
[608] The slave in the Classical sense disappears automatically and
completely in these centuries--one of the most significant indications
that the Classical world-feeling, and with it its economic feeling,
were extinct.
[609] Thus, later, under Justinian, Belisarius could furnish seven
thousand cavalry from his own domains for the Gothic War. Very few
German princes could have done so much in Charles V’s time. [The last
of such armies in Western history was the army of the House of Condé in
the seventeenth century. These centuries of ours “correspond” with the
period that set in with Justinian.--_Tr._]
[610] Pöhlmann, _Röm. Kaiserzeit_ (Pflugk-Harttungs _Weltgesch._, I,
pp. 200, et seq.).
[611] See p. 286.
[612] In spite of Ed. Meyer (_Gesch. d. Altertums_, I, § 243).
[613] Our marshal and the Chinese _sse-ma_, chamberlain and _Chen_,
high steward and _ta-tsai_, high bailiff and _nan_, earl and _peh_ (the
Chinese ranks as in Schindler, _Das Priestertum im alten China_, p. 61,
et seq.). Precisely corresponding Egyptian grades in Ed. Meyer, _Gesch.
des Altertums_, I, § 222; Byzantine in the “_Notitia Dignitatum_”
(derived in part from the Sassanid Court). In the Classical city-states
certain official titles of ancient origin suggest court functions
(Colacretæ, Prytanes, Consuls). See further below.
[614] Hardy, _Indische Religionsgesch._, p. 260.
[615] M. Granet, _Coutumes matrimoniales de la Chine antique, T’oung
Pao_ (1912), pp. 517, et seq.
[616] The tournament was an institution in the other, western, half of
the Magian world as well.--_Tr._
[617] The life of John Chrysostom is an instance.
[618] Another example (beloved of artists) stands to this day in the
town of San Gimigniano, which is almost nothing but a group of family
towers ranging up to 150 ft. in height.--_Tr._
[619] Ambrogio Spinola is a case in point.--_Tr._
[620] The memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon give a vivid picture of
this evolution.
[621] P. 75.
[622] Corresponding to our seventeenth century.
[623] K. J. Neumann, _Die Grundherrschaft der römischen Republik_
(1900); Ed. Meyer, _Kl. Schriften_, pp. 351, et seq.
[624] A. Rosenberg, _Studien zur Entstehung der Plebs_, Herm. XLVIII
(1913), pp. 359, et seq.
[625] Pp. 102, et seq.
[626] See pp. 159, et seq.
[627] Pp. 170, et seq.
[628] See Vol. I, pp. 136, et seq.--_Tr._
[629] Hence such codes throw out the privileges of nobility and
clergy and sustain those of money and intellect, and display a frank
preference for movable as against real property.
[630] Pp. 75, et seq. The corresponding attempt of the absolutist
Stuarts to introduce Roman Law into England was defeated chiefly by the
Puritan jurist Coke (d. 1634)--yet another proof that the spirit of
laws is always a party-spirit.
[631] See pp. 65, et seq.
[632] Above all in connexion with divorce, in which the civil and the
ecclesiastical views _both_ hold good, literally side by side.
[633] See p. 330.--_Tr._
[634] Thus come about the much satirized forms of the “patrol-” or
“barrack-state,” as opponents call it with an unintelligent scorn.
Similar points of view appear also in Chinese and Greek constitutional
theories (O. Franke, _Studien zur Geschichte des konfuzianischen
Dogmas_ (1920), pp. 211, et seq.; Pöhlmann, _Geschichte der sozialen
Frage und der Sozialismus in der antiken Welt_ (1912)). On the other
hand, the political tastes of, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who
as a Classicist opposed the individual to the State, belong, not to
political history at all, but to literature. For what he looked at
was, not the capacity of the State to thrive in the real State-world
around it, but its private existence within itself, without regard to
the fact that such an ideal could not endure for an instant in the face
of a neglected outer situation. It is a basic error of the ideologues
that, in concentrating on the private life and referring to it the
whole inner structure of the State, they entirely ignore the latter’s
position in point of outward power, though this in fact completely
conditions its freedom for the inward development. The difference
between the French and the German Revolutions, for example, consists in
the fact that the one commanded the external situation and _therewith_
the internal also, while the other commanded neither and was foredoomed
to farce.
[635] Which is most definitely _not_ identical with economic history
in the sense of the materialist historian. More of this in the next
chapter.
[636] It is to be noted that the author uses the terms “horizontal” and
“vertical” here in the reverse sense to that in which they commonly
figure in present-day _political_ literature, although in _economic_
works the usage is the same as that of the text.--_Tr._
[637] Attention is drawn to this phrase, so as to avoid misconceptions
as to the meaning of “subject” in the sequel.--_Tr._
[638] Compare the position of the aristocratic families of the South in
the history of the United States up to 1850-60.--_Tr._
[639] For in those centuries the high dignities of the Church were
invariably given to the nobility of Europe, who put the political
qualities of the blood at her service. From this school in turn
emanated statesmen like Richelieu, Mazarin, and Talleyrand, to name but
a few.
[640] See p. 180.
[641] I.e., Domesday Book.--_Tr._
[642] See p. 350.
[643] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. a. Altertums_, I, § 244.
[644] Even by Chinese critics. See, however, Schindler, _Das
Priestertum im alten China_, I, pp. 61, et seq.; Conrady, _China_, p.
533.
[645] See pp. 349, et seq.
[646] “_Compotus_,” “_contrarotulus_” (the counter-roll retained for
checking), “_quittancia_,” “_recordatum_.”
[647] See p. 279.
[648] “For the ruler of the Middle there is no foreign land”
(Kung-yang). “The heaven speaks not; it causes its thoughts to be
promulgated by a man” (Tung Chung-shu). His errors affect the whole
cosmos and bring about cataclysms in Nature (O. Franke, _Zur Geschichte
des konfuzianischen Dogmas_ (1920), pp. 212, et seq., 244, et seq.).
Such mystic universalism was completely alien to Indian and Classical
state-notions.
[649] It must not be forgotten that the immense domains of the Church
had become hereditary fiefs of the bishops and archbishops, who were no
more disposed than the lay peers to permit interferences on the part of
the overlord.
[650] After the overthrow of the Tyrannis, _c._ 500, the two regents
of the Roman patriciate bear the title _prætor_ or _judex_. But it
seems to me probable that these go back beyond the Tyrannis and even
the preceding oligarchic period into that of the kingship proper,
and that as court-offices they have the same origin as our _Herzog_,
duke (_præ-itor_); _Heerwart_, in Athens polemarch; and _Graf_, earl
(“_Ding-graf_,” hereditary arbiter, in Athens archon). The name
“_consul_” (from 366) is philologically thoroughly archaic, and
therefore implies no new creation, but the renascence of a title
(king’s adviser?) which oligarchic sentiment had long repudiated.
[651] Beloch, _Griechische Geschichte_, I, 1, pp. 214, et seq.
[652] The Spartiates mustered in the best period of the sixth century
some 4000 warriors, out of a total population of nearly 300,000,
including Periœci and Helots (Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, III, §
264). The Roman families must at that time have been of about the same
strength relatively to the _clientela_ and the Latins.
[653] Men’s messes. See the article Συσσίτια in Smith’s _Dictionary of
Classical Antiquities._--_Tr._
[654] Ed. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alt._, I, § 264.
[655] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, I, § 267, et seq.
[656] See Ehrenberg, _Die Rechtsidee im frühen Griechentum_ (1921), pp.
65, et seq.
[657] P. 18.
[658] Pp. 171, et seq.
[659] P. 181, et seq.
[660] F. Cumont, _Mysterien des Mithra_ (1910), pp. 74, et seq. The
Sassanid government, which about A.D. 300 changed from the feudal
union to the aristocratic State, was in all respects the pattern for
Byzantium in ceremonial, in the knightly character of its Empire, in
administrative management, and above all in the type of its Ruler. Cf.
also A. Christensen, _L’Empire des Sassanides, le peuple, l’état, la
cour_ (Copenhagen, 1907).
[661] Ed. Meyer, _Kl. Shriften_, p. 146.
[662] See p. 243.
[663] Krumbacher, _Byzant. Literaturgesch._, p. 918.
[664] A bright light is thrown upon the formation of this picture by
the fact that the descendants of the repeatedly overthrown dynasties
of Hia and Shang reigned in the states of Ki-Sung throughout the Chóu
period (Schindler, _Das Priestertum im alten China_, I, p. 30). This
shows, firstly, that the picture of the Empire was mirrored back on
some earlier or even perhaps a contemporary eminence of these states;
and, secondly and above all, that here too “dynasty” was not what we
currently mean by the name, but followed some quite different idea of
the family. We may compare the fiction which made the German King, who
was always chosen on Frankish territory and crowned in the sepulchral
chapel of Charlemagne, into a “Frank,” so that if circumstances had
been different, there might have evolved the notion of a Frankish
dynasty running from Charles to Conradin (see Amira, _German. Recht_
in Herm. Paul, _Grundriss_, III, p. 147, note). From the Confucian age
of enlightenment this picture became the basis of a State-theory, and
later still it was turned to account by the Cæsars (p. 313).
[665] O. Franke, _Studien zur Gesch. d. Konfuz. Dogmas_, pp. 247, 251.
[666] An illuminating example is the “personal union” of the Ki and
Tseng states, contested as contrary to law (Franke, op. cit., p. 251).
[667] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, I, § 281.
[668] G. Busolt, _Griech. Staatskunde_ (1920), pp. 319, et seq. U.
von Wilamowitz (_Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen_, 1910, p. 53),
in disputing the existence of the patriarchal kingdom, misunderstands
the immense difference between the conditions of the eighth century,
indicated in the Odyssey, and those of the tenth.
[669] A. Rosenberg, _Der Staat der alten Italiker_, pp. 75, et seq.
[670] Estate or Class was the basis, too, of the two great political
associations in Byzantium, which are quite wrongly described as “Circus
parties.” These Blues and Greens called themselves “Demoi” and had
their regular leaders. The circus was simply like the Palais Royal of
1789, the scene of public manifestations, and behind them were the
class-associations of the Senate. When in 520 Anastasius I gave effect
to the Monophysite tendency, the Greens sang orthodox hymns all day
there, and so forced the Emperor publicly to cry off. The Western
counterpart to this is formed by the Parisian parties under the “three
Henries” (1580), the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Savonarola’s Florence,
and above all the insurgent faction in Rome under Pope Eugene IV. The
suppression of the Nika Rebellion by Justinian in 532 was thus also the
foundation of State-absolutism _vis-à-vis_ the Estates.
[671] This contrast gives rise to a corresponding contrast in idea of
colonization. Whereas, e.g., the Prussian sovereigns invited settlers
to their _land_ (Salzburg Protestants, French Huguenots), Gelon
forcibly transferred the populations of whole cities into Syracuse,
which thus became the first megalopolis of the Classical world (_c._
480).
[672] The Greek lecythi found in graves on the Esquiline date form this
period.
[673] Wissowa, _Religion der Römer_, p. 242.
[674] W. Schulze, _Zur Geschichte lateinischen Eigennamen_, pp. 379, et
seq., 580, et seq.
[675] See p. 351.
[676] This is seen also in the relation of the _Pontifex Maximus_ to
the _Rex Sacrorum_--the latter with the three great Flamens to the
kingship, the Pontifices and the Vestals to the aristocracy.
[677] See p. 62, et seq.
[678] P. 173, et seq.
[679] This is clearly to be seen from Wilcken, _Grundzüge der
Papyruskunde_ (1912), pp. 1, et seq.
[680] Ed. Meyer, _Cæsars Monarchie_ (1918), p. 308.
[681] Plutarch and Appian describe the masses of humanity that moved in
by all the roads of Italy to vote on Tiberius Gracchus’s land-bills.
But this in itself shows that nothing of the sort had ever happened
before; and immediately after his violence upon Octavius, Tiberius
Gracchus saw downfall staring him in the face because the masses had
streamed off home again and were not to be assembled a second time.
In Cicero’s day a Comitia often consisted only in speeches by a few
politicians, without participation by others; but never did it occur
to a Roman to transfer the place of voting to the residence of the
individual voter--nor even to the Italians when they were fighting for
citizenship in 90 B.C. So strong was the feeling of the Polis.
[682] In the Western dynasty-states the domestic law of each is valid
for its _territory_ and applies therefore to all persons present
therein, irrespective of allegiance. In the city-state, on the
contrary, the validity of its domestic law for a person arises from
that person’s possession of citizenship; _civitas_, therefore, means
infinitely more than present-day nationality, for without it a man was
without rights at all--as a “person,” non-existent.
[683] See p. 60.
[684] Gercke-Norden, _Einl. i. d. Alt.-Wiss._, II, p. 202.
[685] Busolt, _Griech. Geschichte_, II, pp. 346, et seq.
[686] Cf. pp. 282 and 305. Fronde and Tyrannis have as intimate
a connexion with Puritanism--the same epochal phase, but in the
religious instead of the political world--as the Reformation with the
aristocratic State, and the “Second Religiousness” with Cæsarism.
[687] G. Wissowa, _Religion der Römer_, pp. 297, et seq.
[688] Beloch, _Griech. Geschichte_, I, 1, p. 354.
[689] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, § 281.
[690] Ibid., §§ 280, et seq.
[691] On the means taken to secure the succession, cf. p. 379.
[692] Ed. Meyer, op. cit., § 286.
[693] Ibid., § 283. A. Erman, _Die Mahnworte eines ägyptischen
Propheten_ (_Sitz. Preuss. Akad._), 1919, pp. 804, et seq.
[694] S. Plath, _Verfassung und Verwaltung Chinas_ (_Abb. Münch. Ak._,
1864), p. 97, O. Franke, _Studien z. Gesch. d. Konfuz. Dogmas_, pp.
255, et seq.
[695] After armed rebellion.--_Tr._
[696] The fifty-year interval of these critical points, which is seen
with special distinctness in the clear historical structure of the
Baroque, but is recognizable also in the sequence of the three Punic
Wars, is yet another hint that the Cosmic flowings in the form of
human lives upon the surface of a minor star are not self-contained
and independent, but stand in deep harmony with the unending movedness
of the universe. In a small but noteworthy book, R. Mewes, _Die
Kriegs- und Geistesperioden im Völkerleben unde Verkündigung des
nächsten Weltkrieges_ (1896), the relation of those war-periods with
weather-periods, sun-spot cycles, and certain conjunctures of the
planets is established, and a great war foretold accordingly for the
period 1910-20. But these and numerous similar connexions that come
within the reach of our senses (cf. pp. 5, et seq.) veil a secret that
we have to respect and not to infringe with causal expositions or
mystical brain-spectres.
[697] See C. von B(inder)-K(rieglstein), _Geist und Stoff im Kriege_
(1896); F. N. Maude, _War and the World’s Life_ (1907), and other works
by the same author; also, in more summary terms, the articles “Army”
and “French Revolutionary Wars” by the present translator in _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[698] “Rule, Britannia” is an eighteenth-century product.--_Tr._
[699] For this, and what follows, see my _Preussentum und Sozialismus_,
pp. 31, et seq.
[700] Mr. Asquith (Lord Oxford) was the first British Prime Minister to
be officially so styled.--_Tr._
[701] “Landed” and “funded” interests (J. Hatschek, _Engl.
Verfassungsgeschichte_, 1913, pp. 589, et seq.). Walpole, the organizer
of the Whig party after 1714, used to describe himself and Townshend
as “the Firm;” and this “firm” with various changes of proprietorship
governed without limitation till 1760.
[702] R. von Pöhlmann, _Griech. Gesch._ (1914), pp. 223-45.
[703] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._ V § 809. If Latin became a literary
language, only very late--after Alexander--the only deduction to be
made from the fact is that under the Tarquins Greek and Etruscan must
have been in general use--which, after all, goes without saying for a
city that was of a size and position to have relations with Carthage;
that waged war in alliance with Cyme and made use of the Treasury of
Massalia at Delphi; whose standard weights and measures were Dorian;
whose mode of warfare was Sicilian; and whose walls contained a large
foreign colony. Livy (IX, 36), following older statements, observes
that about 300 the Roman boy was still brought upon Etruscan culture,
as he was later on Greek. The ancient form “Ulixes” for Odysseus shows
that the Homeric sagas were not only known, but popularly known here
(cf. p. 284). The provisions of the Twelve Tables (_c._ 450) agree with
the more or less contemporary law of Gortyn in Crete (cf. p. 63), not
merely as to substance, but even stylistically--so exactly that the
Roman patricians who drew them up must have been entirely at home with
juristic Greek.
[704] This measure--a usurpation of the administration by the “nation
in arms”--corresponds to the setting-up of Consular Tribunes in Rome in
the military disturbances of 438.
[705] According to B. Niese. Modern investigators are right in the
view that the Decemvirate was at first intended to be temporary; but
the question is--what were the views of the party that backed them
concerning the _new_ constitutional order that was to follow. It was on
that that a crisis had inevitably to come.
[706] A. Wahl, _Vorgeschichte d. franz. Revolution_, II (1907); this
work is the only presentation of the subject from the world-historical
point of view. All Frenchmen, even the most modern, such as Aulard
and Sorel, see things from one or another partisan angle. It is
materialistic nonsense to talk of economic causes for a Revolution like
this. Even the peasantry was better off than in most other countries,
and in any case it was not among them that it began. It was amongst
the _educated_ that the catastrophe started, the educated of _all_
the classes--in the high nobility and the clergy even sooner than in
the higher bourgeoisie, because the course of the first assembly of
Notables (1787) had disclosed the possibility of radically reshaping
the form of government according to class-desires.
[707] Even the highly provincial March Revolution of 1848 in Germany
was a purely urban matter; hence the vanishingly small proportion of
the population involved as participants.
[708] Hence also the exclusive bourgeois character of the National
Guard in France from 1815 to 1851, the period between two phases of
popular Tyrannis. In the _coup d’état_ by which Napoleon III seized the
throne, Paris was filled with regular troops, and the National Guard
was forbidden to assemble on pain of death.--_Tr._
[709] Pp. 97, and 305.
[710] See pp. 348.
[711] J. Hatschek, _Engl. Verfassungsgesch._, p. 588.
[712] On the other side of the Channel, it is well known that the
Rothschild fortune was founded in a dramatic play upon the varying news
from the front in Belgium.
In the second phase of the Franco-German War of 1870-1 the bankers
of Frankfurt took up holdings in the loans floated by the French
Government of National Defence.--_Tr._
[713] But even during the Reign of Terror in the middle of Paris, there
flourished the establishment of Dr. Belhomme, in which members of the
highest aristocracy ate and drank and danced out of all danger for so
long as they could pay (G. Lenôtre, _Das revolutionäre Paris_, p. 409).
[714] The great movement which makes use of the catchwords of Marx has
not delivered the entrepreneur into the power of the worker, but both
into that of the Bourse.
[715] Both the old parties possessed clear lines of tradition back to
1680.
[716] The moral and political “Enlightenment” movement was in England
also a product of the Third Estate (Priestley and Paley, Paine,
Godwin), and for that reason was unable to grasp things with the fine
discrimination of a Shaftesbury.
[717] Pelham, the successor of Walpole, paid to members of the Commons,
through his secretary, £500 to £800 at the end of each session
according to the value of the services rendered by each recipient
to the Government--i.e., the Whig party. The party agent Dodington
described his parliamentary activities in these words: “I never
attended a debate if I could help it, and I never missed a division
that I could possibly take part in. I heard many arguments that
convinced me, but never one that influenced my vote.”
[718] Here it was actually the interest of bourgeois and
“enlightenment” ideals that the personal régime of dictatorship was
thought to favour, for the opposition to these ideas lay in the strict
state-ideal of the Polis, which according to Isocrates was marked with
the curse of inability to die.
[719] Diodorus XIV, 7. The drama was repeated in 317, when Agathocles
the ex-potter let loose his mercenary bands and the mob upon the new
upper classes. After the massacre the “people” of the “purified city”
assembled and conferred the dictature upon the “saviour of true and
genuine freedom” (Deodorus XIX, 6, et seq.). On the whole movement see
Busolt, _Griech. Staatskunde_, pp. 396, et seq., and Pöhlmann, _Gesch.
d. soz. Frage_, I, pp. 416, et seq.
[720] Already that part of the Prussian army which had been in Russia
had declared against Napoleon--and that, though its general, Yorck, was
no liberal, but the old strict type of the Frederician officer.--_Tr._
[721] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, IV, §§ 626, 630.
[722] H. Delbrück, _Gesch. d. Kriegskunst_ (1908), I, p. 142.
[723] Three to six “_tribuni militares consulari protestate_”
instead of the Consuls. Just at this juncture, as the result of the
introduction of pay and longer duration of service with the colours,
there must have come into being a nucleus of true professional
soldiers, who would have the election of centurions in their own hands
and by whom the spirit of the army was determined. It is entirely
erroneous to speak of a peasant-levy at this stage, quite apart from
the fact that the four great city-tribes contributed a considerable
part of the rank and file and a part, too, whose influence was even
greater than its numerical strength. Even in the “good old days”
picture presented to us by Livy and others we can clearly perceive
the influence exerted by the standing formations upon the contests of
parties.
[724] It is perhaps not a mere coincidence that 367 is the year of
Dionysius’s death.
[725] According to K. J. Neumann, this goes back to the great Censor.
[726] According to Roman law, the freed slave at once acquired
citizenship, with some few limitations. As the slave-material came
from all over the Mediterranean region and most of all from the East,
it was a vast rootless mass that collected in the four urban tribes,
alien from all the tendencies of the old Roman blood; and it quickly
destroyed these when, after the Gracchan movement, it had succeeded in
bringing its weight of numbers to bear with effect.
[727] From the end of the fourth century the nobility developed into
a closed circle of families that had, or claimed to have, consuls
among their ancestors. The more strictly this condition was enforced,
the more frequent were the falsifications of the old consul-lists
in order to “legitimize” rising families of strong race and talent.
The first (and truly revolutionary) outburst of forgery occurs in
the epoch of Appius Claudius the Censor, when the curule ædile C.
Flavius, the son of a slave, put the list in order--that was the time
when even royal cognomina were discovered amongst plebeian families.
The second was in the days of the battle of Pydna (168), when the
dominance of the nobility began to assume Cæsarian forms (E. Kornemann,
_Der Priesterkodex in der Regia_, 1912, pp. 56, et seq.). Of the 200
Consulates between 232 and 133, 159 fell to 26 families, and thereafter
blood-quality being exhausted, but the form as such being all the more
studiously preserved in consequence--the rise of _novi homines_ like
Cato and Cicero became a rare phenomenon.
[728] Another instance, among many, is its rôle in preparing the German
crash of 1918.
[729] And even in France, where the judicial class in the parlements
openly scorned the Government, and with impunity tore down royal
proclamations from the walls and put up their own _arrêts_ instead (R.
Holtzmann, _Französ. Verfassungsgesch._, 1910, p. 353); where “orders
were given, but not obeyed, laws enacted, but not executed” (A. Wahl,
_Vorgesch. d. franz. Revolution_, I, 29 and passim); where high finance
could overthrow Turgot and anyone else whose reform-schemes disquieted
it; where the whole educated world, headed by princes and nobles,
prelates and generals, was Anglomaniac and applauded opposition in
any shape or form--even there nothing would have happened but for the
sudden concurrence of a set of incidents--the fashion which set in
amongst French officers of aiding the American republicans in their
struggle with the English King; the diplomatic reverse in Holland (27
Oct. 1787) in the middle of the reforming activity of the Government;
and the perpetual change of ministers under pressure from irresponsible
quarters. In the British Empire, the falling-away of the Colonies was
the result of attempts of high-Tory circles (in collusion with George
III, but in reality of course in their own interests) to strengthen the
Royal power. This party possessed in the Colonies a strong contingent
of royalists, notably in the South: these elements, fighting on the
British side, decided the battle of Camden, and after the final victory
of the rebels mostly emigrated to Canada, which had remained loyal.
[730] In 1793 there were 306 members of the House of Commons who were
elected by 160 persons in all. Old Sarum, the constituency of the elder
Pitt, consisted of one tenement, returning two members.
[731] Afterwards--from 1832--the English nobility itself, through a
series of prudent measures, drew the bourgeoisie into _co-operation_
with it, but under its continued guidance and, above all, in the
framework of tradition, within which consequently the young talent
grew up. Democracy thus actualized itself here so that the Government
remained strictly “in form”--the old aristocratic form--while the
individual was free to practise politics according to his bent. This
transition, in a peasantless society dominated by business interests,
was the most remarkable achievement of inner politics in the nineteenth
century.
[732] Early, that is, in the post-revolutionary era here
considered.--_Tr._
[733] The reassertion of this tradition after the emergency-army of
the Wars of Liberation (1812-15) had dispersed into the body of the
community is a remarkable story, in which military and political
standpoints cannot be separated. See Vidal de la Blache, _La
Régéneration de l’Armée Prusse_ (1910), Ch. vi.--_Tr._
[734] See _Preussentum und Sozialismus_, pp. 40, et seq.
[735] The genesis of the Roman Tribunate was a blind incident,
the happy consequences of which no one really foresaw. Western
Constitutions, on the contrary, have been thoroughly thought out and
their effects precisely calculated--whether the calculation proved to
be correct or incorrect, the care is undeniable.
[736] From the few European works that concern themselves with
questions of ancient Chinese history, it emerges that Chinese
literature contains a very great amount of material bearing on this
period, which corresponds in innumerable parallels to our own present
time. But there is a total lack of any political treatment of it that
can be taken seriously. References: Hübotter, _Aus den Plänen der
Kämpfenden Reiche_ (1912); Piton, “The Six Great Chancellors of Tsin,”
_China Review_, XIII, 202, 255, 365, XIV, 3; Ed. Chavannes, _Mém. hist.
de Se-ma-tsien_ (1895 and following); Pfizmair, _Sitz. Wien Akad._,
XLIII (1863) (“Tsin”), XLIV (“Tsu”); A. Tschepe, _Histoire du royaume
de Ou_ (1896), and _de Tchou_ (1903).
[737] Corresponding more or less to the province of Shen-si.
[738] On the middle Yang-tse-kiang.
[739] Biography 13 of Sze-ma-tsien. So far as the translated evidences
allow us to judge, the preparation and dispositions of these campaigns,
the boldness of the operations by which he drove the enemy on to ground
where he could beat him, and the novel tactical execution of the
separate battles, stamp Pe-Ki as one of the greatest military geniuses
of all time, a figure worthy indeed of adequate treatment by a military
expert. It is from this period that we have the authoritative work of
Sun-tse on War: Giles, _Sun-Tse on the Art of War_ (1910). [Or Capt. E.
R. Calthrop, _The Book of War--Sun and Wu_ (1908).--_Tr._]
[740] See pp. 312, et seq.
[741] Now approximately Shan-tung and Pe-chi-li.
[742] Piton, “Lu-puh-Weih,” _China Rev._ XIII, pp. 365 et seq.
[743] Even if the Chinese authors themselves misunderstood the
expression in the same, or anything like the same, way as their
Western translators, the fact would only prove that the appreciation
of political problems vanished as rapidly in the Chinese Imperial Age
as in fact it did in the Roman--because they were no longer personally
and livingly experienced. The much-admired Sze-ma-tsien is after all a
compiler of the same rank as Plutarch (with whom he corresponds in date
also). The high point of historical comprehension, _which presumes an
equivalent experience in life_, must for China have lain in the period
of the Contending States, as it lies for us in the nineteenth century
and after.
[744] Both, like most of the leading statesmen of the time, were pupils
of Kwei-ku-tse, whose knowledge of men, deep sense of the historically
possible, and command of the diplomatic technique of the age (the “Art
of the vertical and the horizontal”) must have made him one of the most
influential personalities of the period. Another figure of the same
sort of weight after him was the thinker and war-theorist above alluded
to, Sun-tse, who amongst others was the tutor of the Chancellor Lui-Si.
[Sun-Tse’s book of war, as presented in Calthrop’s translation,
is comparable to nothing in Western military literature short of
Clausewitz’s _Vom Kriege_. Clausewitz was a contemporary and product of
the Napoleonic epoch, and the glow of Romanticism has not yet passed
from him; Sun, on the other hand, came “later,” and his atmosphere is
the shrewd factual atmosphere of pre-Cæsarism.--_Tr._]
[745] A story is told of Sun, that when for a jest (or a demonstration
of tactics) opposed forces were made up from the court ladies, one of
the commanders, the sovereign’s favourite wife, was executed by Sun’s
command for disobeying an order.--_Tr._
[746] Frederick’s “conscripts” (_Landeskinder_) were a long-service
element, small in proportion to the population, and of serf status.
Only the relative poverty of Prussia compelled this much of departure
from the then normal procedure of recruiting volunteers, to which the
Prussian army reverted as soon as its treasury could afford to do
so. Maurice de Saxe is the one outstanding soldier of the period who
advocated universal citizen service. But the famous “_Rêveries_” were
written (“in thirteen sleepless nights”) in 1732, before he had held
high command. The military works of Leibniz touch upon the subject,
but he was a practical man as well as a philosopher, and his detailed
proposals are in the spirit of the time. On the contrary, the pure
philosopher Spinoza definitely advocated universal service.--_Tr._
[747] Large, that is, relatively to the general development of
Classical technics in other fields, which was of the slightest--not in
any way outstanding if judged by, say, Assyrian or Egyptian standards.
[748] The book of the Socialist Moh-ti, of this period, treats of
universal love of mankind in its first part, of fortress artillery in
its second--a singular example of contraposition of truths and facts.
Forke in _Ostasiat. Ztschr._, VIII (Hirth number).
[749] A whole literature exists for Napoleon’s “case-shot attack,”
which was closely studied in the years before 1914 with the definite
aim of finding a key to victories that the mechanical developments in
the defensive rifle had made doubtful.--_Tr._
[750] On the side of the North, more than 1½ million men out of barely
20 million inhabitants.
[The total of men of military age in the North was 4,600,000, of whom
2,780,000 actually enlisted. The figure of 1,700,000 is a reduction to
a three-year level--i.e., men who served throughout the war counting
as 1⅓ each and men who served for one year as ⅓ each. The Southern
states put into the field, on the same three-years’ basis, 900,000 out
of 1,065,000 men of military age. (Dodge, _Birds Eye View of our Civil
War_.)--_Tr._]
[751] To which should be added, though on a small scale, the
first serious attempts at submarines, machine-guns, and magazine
rifles.--_Tr._
[752] Amongst the wholly new problems was that of rapidly restoring
railways and bridges; the bridge at Chattanooga, for the heaviest
military trains, 240 metres long and 30 metres high, was built in 4½
days.
[753] Modern Japan belongs to the Western Civilization no less than
“modern” Carthage of the third century to the Classical.
[754] For the politico-social history of the Arabian World there is the
same lack of deep and penetrating research as for the Chinese. Only the
political evolution of the Western margin up to Diocletian, regarded
hitherto as within the Classical pale, is an exception.
[755] It was a few thousands only that accompanied the first conquerors
and spread themselves from Tunis to Turkestan, and these everywhere
constituted themselves a self-contained and close Estate in the
entourage of the new potentates. An “Arabian _Völkerwanderung_” is out
of the question.
[756] J. Wellhausen, _Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz_ (1902), pp.
309, et seq.
[757] Compare the inner divisions of the English Parliamentary army in
and after the Civil Wars.--_Tr._
[758] See p. 261.
[759] K. Dieterich, _Byz. Charakterköpfe_, p. 54: “Since thou wilt have
an answer from us, receive it then! Paul has said some in the Church
are ordained by God to be Apostles, some prophets, but he said nothing
about Emperors--we will not follow though it were an angel that bade
us; how much less if thou!”
[760] Cf. p. 316.
[761] Huart, _Gesch. d. Araber_ (1914), I, p. 299.
[762] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., art. “Carmathians.”--_Tr._
[763] Krumbacher, _Byz. Lit.-Gesch._, p. 969.
[764] For all this see Krumbacher, op. cit., pp. 969-90; C. Neumann,
_Die Weltstellung des Byz. Reiches vor den Kreuzzügen_ (1894), pp. 21,
et seq.
[765] Krumbacher, op. cit., 993.
[766] And perhaps not in Baghdad alone, for the gifted Maniakes, who
was hailed by the army in Sicily as Emperor and fell in 1043 in his
march on Byzantium, must have been a Turk.
[767] 1785-1580. See, for the following, Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._ §§
298, et seq.; Weill, _La Fin du moyen empire égyptien_ (1918). That Ed.
Meyer’s assignment is correct as compared with the 1670 years of Petrie
has long been proved by the thickness of the strata in which objects
have been found and the tempo of the style-evolution (Minoan included).
Here it is demonstrated afresh by comparison with corresponding
sections in the other Cultures.
[768] P. 387.
[769] Erman, “_Mahnworte eines ägypt. Propheten_” (_Sitz. Preuss.
Akad._, 1919, pp. 804, et seq.): “The higher officials are displaced,
the land robbed of its royalty by a few madmen, and the counsellors of
the old state pay their court to upstarts; administration has ceased,
documents are destroyed, all social differences abolished, the courts
fallen into the hands of the mob. The noble classes go hungry and in
rags, their children are battered on the wall, and their mummies torn
from the grave. Mean fellows become rich and swagger in the palaces on
the strength of the herds and ships that they have taken from their
rightful owners. Former slave-girls become insolent and aliens lord
it. Robbery and murder rule, cities are laid waste, public buildings
burned down. The harvest diminishes, no one thinks now of cleanliness,
births are few--and oh, that mankind might cease!” Here is the very
picture of the megalopolitan and Late revolution, as it was enacted
in the Hellenistic (p. 405) and in 1789 and 1871 in Paris. It is the
world-city masses, will-less tools of the ambition of leaders who
demolish every remnant of order, who desire to see in the outer world
the same chaos as reigns within their own selves. Whether these cynical
and hopeless attempts start from alien intruders like the Hyksos or the
Turks, or from slaves as in the case of Spartacus and Ali; whether the
division of property is shouted for as at Syracuse or has a book for
banner like Marxism--all this is superficial. It is wholly immaterial
what slogans scream to the wind while the gates and the skulls are
being beaten in. Destruction is the true and only impulse, and Cæsarism
the only issue. The world-city, the land-devouring demon, has set its
rootless and futureless men in motion; and in destroying they die.
[770] The Papyrus says: the “archer-folk from without”--that is, the
barbarian mercenary troops. To these the native youth attached itself.
[771] Glance also at the Negro-state in Irak and the “contemporary”
attempts of Spartacus, Sertorius, and Sextus Pompey, and we get a fair
idea of the variety of the possibilities. Weill assumes, 1785-1765, the
collapse of the Kingdom, a usurper (a general); 1765-1675, numerous
small potentates, in the Delta wholly independent; 1675-1633, struggle
for unity, especially the rulers of Thebes, with an ever-increasing
retinue of dependent rulers, including the Hyksos; 1633, victory of
the Hyksos and defeat of the Thebans; 1591-1571, final triumph of the
Thebans.
[772] As an inspiriting idea it may be retained; translated into
actuality it will never be again.
[773] Piton, op. cit., p. 521.
[774] _Hist._, III, 1.
[775] Including the constitution of the United States of America. Only
thus can we account for the reverence that the American cherishes for
it, even where he clearly sees its insufficiency.
[776] Cæsar recognized this clearly. “_Nihil esse rem publicam,
appellationem modo sine corpore ac specie_” (Suetonius, _Cæsar_, 77).
[777] See p. 48.
[778] See p. 48.
[779] Cicero, in his _Pro Sestio_, draws attention to the fact that
five people for each tribe attended plebiscites, and these really
belonged to tribes other than that which they were representing. But
these five were present only in order to have themselves bought by the
possessors of the real power. Yet it was hardly fifty years since the
Italians had died in masses for this franchise.
[780] And, strangely, Ed. Meyer also, in his masterpiece _Cæsars
Monarchie_, the one work of statesmanlike quality yet written
about this epoch--and previously in his essay on Augustus (_Kleine
Schriften_, pp. 441, et seq.).
[781] _De Re Publica_, 54 B.C., a monograph intended for Pompey.
[782] P. 395.
[783] See p. 409.
[784] In _Somnium Scipionis_, VI, 26, he is a god who so rules the
State _quam hunc mundum ille princeps deus_.
[785] It was with every justification that, in the presence of the
corpse, Brutus called out the name of Cicero, while Antony, on his
side, denounced him as the intellectual author of the deed. But this
“freedom” meant nothing but the oligarchy of a few families, for the
masses had long ago become tired of their rights. Nor is it in the
least surprising that Money was behind Intellect in the murder, for
the great fortunes of Rome saw in Cæsarism the beginning of the end of
their power.
[786] Taoism, on the other hand, was supported, as preaching the entire
renunciation of politics. Said Shakespeare’s Cæsar:
“Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’nights.”
[787] Tacitus, even, failed to understand. He hated these first Cæsars,
because they defended themselves by every imaginable means against a
stealthy opposition--in _his own_ circles--an opposition that from
Trajan’s time no longer existed. (Yet a little longer, and the Emperor
Marcus Aurelius could himself be a Stoic.--_Tr._)
[788] P. 329.
[789] Pp. 89 and 349.
[790] P. 310.
[791] “Empires perish, but a good verse stands,” said W. von Humboldt
on the field of Waterloo. But, all the same, the personality of
Napoleon preformed the history of the next century. Good verses!--he
should have questioned a peasant by the way-side. They “stand”--for
literary teaching. Plato is eternal--for philologists. But Napoleon
inwardly rules _us_, all of _us_, our states and our armies, our public
opinion, the whole of our political outlook, and the more effectually
the less we are conscious of it.
[792] P. 361.
[793] P. 116 and 339.
[794] P. 363.
[795] This is what is expressed in the English proverb: “Men, not
measures,” which is the very key to the secrets of all political
achievement.
[796] Pp. 18 and 364.
[797] See p. 341.
[798] The same, too, holds good of the Churches, which are different
in kind from the Religion--namely, elements of the world of facts and,
therefore, political and not religious in the type of their leadership.
It was not the Christian evangel, but the Christian martyr, who
conquered the world, and that which gave him his strength was not the
doctrine, but the example, of the Man on the Cross.
[799] It should scarcely need to be emphasized that this is the basic
principle, not of an aristocratic régime, but of government itself.
Cleon, Robespierre, Lenin, every gifted mass-leader, has treated his
office thus. Anyone who genuinely felt himself as the delegate of
the multitude, instead of as the regent of such as do not know what
they want, would not remain master of his house for one day. The only
question is whether the great popular leaders apply their powers for
their own benefit or for that of others; and on that much might be said.
[800] Originally an assembly of nineteen princes and free cities (1529).
[801] See pp. 355, 398, et seq.
[802] Hence it is that on the soil of burgher equality the possession
of money immediately takes the place of genealogical rank.
[803] See p. 354.
[804] Pp. 424, et seq. Compare also Wellhausen, _Die relig.-polit.
Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam_ (1901).
[805] It is an important factor in the democracy of England and America
that in the first the yeomanry had died out and in the second has never
existed. The “farmer” is spiritually a suburban and in practice carries
on his farming as an industry. Instead of villages, there are only
fragments of megalopolis.
[806] And wherever, as in Egypt, India, and the West, there exists a
_political_ opposition between the two primary Estates, there is also a
clerical party--the party, so to speak, of the Church as distinct from
religion and of the priest as distinct from the believer.
[807] And with its content of race-strength it has an excellent chance
of successfully doing so.
[808] P. 409.
[809] _Plebs_ corresponds to the “Tiers” (burghers and yeomen) of
the eighteenth century, _populus_ to the megalopolitan masses of the
nineteenth. The difference manifested itself in their respective
attitudes towards the freed slaves, mostly of non-Italian origin. These
the Plebs, as an order, sought to thrust away into as few tribes as
possible, but in the Populus as a party they very soon came to play the
decisive rôle.
[810] P. 412.
[811] Simultaneously, too, the Roman Catholic Church quietly changed
the basis of its politics from a class to a party, and did so with a
strategic sureness that cannot be too much admired. In the eighteenth
century it had been, as regards the style of its diplomacy, the
allocation of its offices and the spirit of its higher circles,
aristocratic through and through. Think of the type of the abbé, and
of the prince-prelates who became ministers and ambassadors, like
the young Cardinal Rohan. Now, in the true liberal fashion, opinions
took the place of origins, working-power that of taste, and the great
weapons of democracy--press, elections, money--were handled with a
skill that liberalism proper rarely equalled and never surpassed.
[812] For what follows see M. Gelzer, _Die Nobilität d. röm. Republik_
(1912), pp. 43, et seq.; A. Rosenberg, _Untersuchungen zur röm.
Centurienverfassung_(1911), pp. 62, et seq.
[813] The reputation of Tammany Hall in New York is universal, but
the relations approximate to this condition in all countries ruled
by parties. The American Caucus, which first distributes the offices
of State amongst its members and then forces their names upon the
mass-electorate, was introduced into England by Joseph Chamberlain in
his “National Liberal Federation,” and in Germany its advances have
been rapid since 1919.
[814] P. 305.
[815] P. 18, et seq.
[816] For the story of this tragic experiment, see Ed. Meyer, _Gesch.
d. Alt._, § 987, et seq.
[817] See p. 417. The “plans of the Contending States,” the
Tchun-tsiu-fan-lu, and the biographies of Sze-ma-tsien are full of
examples of the pedagogic in interventions of “wisdom” into the
province of politics.
[818] For this “Sun-state” formed of slaves and day-labourers see
Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencycl._, 2, 961. Similarly, the revolutionary King
Cleomenes III of Sparta was likewise under the influence of a Stoic,
Sphærus. One can understand why “philosophers and rhetors”--i.e.,
professional politicians, fantastics and subverters--were expelled
again and again by the Roman Senate.
[819] P. 310.
[820] P. 114.
[821] The early democracy, which in our case reaches up to Lincoln,
Bismarck, and Gladstone, has to learn this by _experience_. The later
democracy, in our case mature parliamentarism, starts out from it; here
truths and facts finally separate out in the form of party ideals and
party funds. It is the money that gives the real parliamentarian his
sense of being freed from the dependence which is implicit in the naïve
idea that the elector has of his delegate.
[822] P. 452.
[823] P. 354.
[824] That the mass all the same _feels_ itself as freed is simply
another outcome of the profound incompatibility between megalopolitan
spirit and mature tradition. Its _acts_, so far from being independent,
are in inward relation with its subjection to money-rule.
[825] The German Constitution of 1919--standing by virtue of its date
on the verge of the _decline_ of democracy--most naïvely admits a
dictature of the party machines, which have attracted all rights into
themselves and are seriously responsible to no one. The notorious
system of proportional election and the Reichslist [see _Ency. Brit._,
1922 Supplement, II, 249.--_Tr._] secures their self-recruitment. In
place of the “people’s” rights, which were axiomatic in the Frankfurt
Constitution of 1848, there is now only the right of parties, which,
harmless as it sounds, really nurses within itself a Cæsarism of the
organizations. It must be allowed, however, that in this respect it
is the most advanced of all the constitutions. Its issue is visible
already. A few quite small alterations and it confers unrestricted
power upon individuals.
[826] And _legislation_, too, was bound up with an office. Even when,
as a formality, acceptance or rejection by an assembly was requisite,
the law in question could be brought in only by an official; for
example, a Tribune. The constitutional demands of the masses, therefore
(which in any case were mostly instigated by the real power-holders),
expressed themselves in the issue of the elections to office, as the
Gracchan period shows.
[827] Even Cæsar, at fifty years of age, was obliged to play this
comedy at the Rubicon for his soldiers because they were used to it
and expected it when anything was asked of them. It corresponds to the
“chest-tones of deep conviction” of our political assemblies.
[828] But the Cleon type must obviously have existed also in
contemporary Sparta, and in Rome at the time of the Consular Tribunes.
[829] Gelzer, _Nobilität_, p. 94; along with Ed. Meyer’s _Cæsar_ this
book gives the best survey of Roman democratic methods.
[830] “_Inaurari_,” to which end Cicero recommended his friend
Trebatius to Cæsar.
[831] “_Tributim ad prandium vocare_,” Cicero, _Pro Murena_, 72.
[832] For from that time sesterces flowed through his hands by the
million. The votive treasures of the Gallic temples which he put up
for sale in Italy sent down the value of gold with a rush. From King
Ptolemy he and Pompey extorted 144,000,000 (and Gabinius another
240,000,000) as the price of recognition. The Consul Æmilius Paullus
(50) was bought for 36,000,000, Curio for 60,000,000. We can guess from
such figures how enviable was the position of his closer associates.
At the triumph of 46 every soldier in an army of well over 100,000 men
received 24,000 sesterces, officers and other leaders much more. Yet at
his death the state treasury was still full enough to secure Antony’s
position.
[833] Gelzer, op. cit., p. 68.
[834] Extortion and corruption were the usual charges. As in those
days these things were identical with politics, and the judges and
plaintiffs had acted precisely in the same way as the defendants,
the art consisted in using the forms of a well-acted ethical
passion to cover a party speech, of which the real import was only
comprehensible to the initiated. This corresponds entirely with the
modern parliamentary usage. The “people” would be very much astonished
to see party opponents, after delivering wild speeches in the chamber
(for the reporters) chatting together in the lobbies, or to be told how
a party passionately champions a proposal after it has made certain
by agreement with the other side that it will not be passed. In Rome,
too, the judgment was not the important thing in these “trials”; it was
enough if a defendant voluntarily left the city and so retired from the
occupancy of, or candidature for, office.
[835] See Pöhlmann, _Griech. Gesch._ (1914), pp. 236, et seq. [Cf.
Aristophanes, _Wasps_.--_Tr._]
[836] Thus it was possible for Rutilius Rufus to be condemned in the
notorious case of 93, because as proconsul he had in accordance with
his duty proceeded against the extortions of the concessionnaire
associations.
[837] Radio broadcasting has now emerged to enable the leader to make
personal conquests of the million, and no one can foretell the changes
in political tactic that may ensue therefrom.--_Tr._
[838] The most striking example of this for future generations will be
the “War-guilt” question, which is the question--_who_ possesses the
power, through control of press and cable in all parts of the world, to
establish in world-opinion that truth which he needs for his political
ends and to maintain it for so long as he needs it? An altogether
different question (which only in Germany is confused with the first)
is the purely scientific one--to _whose_ interest was it that an event
about which there was already a whole literature should occur in the
summer of 1914 in particular?
[839] In preparation for the World War the press of whole countries
was brought financially under the command of London and Paris, and
the peoples belonging to them reduced to an unqualified intellectual
slavery. The more democratic the inner form of a nation is, the more
readily and completely it succumbs to this danger. This is the style
of the twentieth century. To-day a democrat of the old school would
demand, not freedom for the press, but freedom from the press; but
meantime the leaders have changed themselves into parvenus who have to
secure their position _vis-à-vis_ the masses.
[840] The great Burning of the Books in China (p. 433) was innocuous by
comparison.
[841] P. 434.
[842] Herein lies the secret of why all radical (i.e., poor) parties
necessarily become the tools of the money-powers, the Equites, the
Bourse. Theoretically their enemy is capital, but practically they
attack, not the Bourse, but Tradition on behalf of the Bourse. This is
as true of to-day as it was for the Gracchan age, and in all countries.
Fifty per cent of mass-leaders are procurable by money, office, or
opportunities to “come in on the ground-floor,” and with them they
bring their whole party.
[843] P. 415.
[844] See _Preussentum und Sozialismus_, p. 41, et seq.
[845] _Political Discourses_, 1752.
[846] The celebrated _Wealth of Nations_, 1776.
[847] It was the opinion of the expert, almost everywhere, that
the economic consequences of general mobilization would compel the
breaking-up of hostilities within a few weeks.
[848] P. 81.
[849] Pp. 1, et seq., and 335.
[850] P. 327, et seq.
[851] Pp. 95, 120, et seq.
[852] P. 5.
[853] “_Negotium_” (by which is meant every form of gainful activity;
business is _commercium_) “_negat otium neque quærit veram quietem quæ
est deus_,” are the words of the _Decretum Gratiani_ (cf. p. 77).
[854] Pilate’s question settles also the relation of economy to
science. The religious man will always try in vain, catechism in hand,
to improve the instincts of his political environment. But it goes
on its way undisturbed and leaves him to his thoughts. The saint can
only choose between adapting himself to this environment--and then
he becomes a Church politician and conscienceless--and fleeing from
it into a hermitage or even into the Beyond. But the same happens
also--and here not without a comic side to it--in the intellectualism
of the city. The philosopher who has built up an ethical-social system
that is replete with virtue and (of course) the only true one, may
enlighten the economic life as to how it should behave and at what it
should aim. It is even the same spectacle, whether labelled liberal,
anarchistic, or socialistic, or derived from Plato, Proudhon, or Marx.
Here, too, economy carries on undisturbed and leaves the thinker to
choose between withdrawing to pour out on paper his lamentations of
this world, and entering it as an economic politician, in which case he
either makes himself ridiculous, or else promptly throws his theory to
the devil and starts to win himself a leading place.
[855] See pp. 1, et seq.
[856] See p. 6.
[857] Exactly the same is true of wandering bands of hunters and
pastorals. But the economic foundation of the great Culture is always a
mankind that adheres fast to the soil, and nourishes and supports the
higher economic forms.
[858] See p. 331.
[859] Undershaft in Shaw’s _Major Barbara_ is a true ruler-figure of
this realm.
[860] P. 344. As a means for governments it is called finance-economy
(financial policy). Here the whole nation is the object of a levy of
tribute, in the forms of taxes and customs, of which the purpose is not
to make, so to say, the upkeep of its life more comfortable, but to
secure its historical position and to enhance its power.
[861] Using the phrase widely, as including, for instance, the rise of
workmen, journalists, and men of learning to positions of leadership.
[862] P. 331.
[863] P. 31.
[864] See pp. 172 and 280.
[865] Including the medical profession, which indeed is
indistinguishable in primitive times from the priests and magicians.
[866] Herdsmen, fishermen, and hunters included. There is, moreover, a
strange and very profound relation between peasant and miner, evidenced
in ancient sagas and rites. The metals are coaxed out of the shaft as
the corn out of the earth, and the game out of the thicket. And for the
real miner even metal is something that _lives_ and grows.
[867] This is true from the earliest sea-voyaging to the Bourse of the
world-city, and all traffic, whether by river, road, or rail belongs
with it.
[868] With this belong the machine industry, with its purely Western
type of the inventor and engineer, and practically, also, a great part
of the modern agronomy, as, for instance, in America.
[869] Even to-day the mining and metal industries are felt to be
somehow nobler than, for example, the chemical and electrical. They
possess the most ancient patent of nobility in the technical world, and
a relic of cult-mystery lies over them.
[870] That is, up to the limit of servage and slavery, although very
often--as in the present-day East and as in Rome in the case of
“vernæ”--slavery itself may be nothing but a form of compulsory-labour
contract and, apart from that, hardly sensible. The free employee often
lives in far stricter subjection and enjoys far less respect, and his
formal right to “give notice” is in many cases practically valueless to
him.
[British readers will recall in this connexion the “Chinese slavery”
controversy in South Africa in 1904, and the questions of indentured
labour that come to the surface not infrequently in Australian
politics. And in an older generation defenders of slavery as practised
in the sugar islands of the West Indies are still to be found--not to
mention the survivors and tradition-bearers of the “Old South” in the
United States.--_Tr._]
[871] P. 60.
[872] We know this accurately for the Egyptian and the Gothic
beginnings, and in general terms for the Chinese and the Classical;
as for the _economic pseudomorphosis_ of the Arabian (see pp. 189,
et seq., 349) it may be summarized, after Hadrian, as a process
of disintegration of the highly civilized Classical money-economy
culminating in the appearance, under Diocletian, of a Springtime
barter-economy with, in the East, the true Magian element of bargaining
visibly superposed.
[873] P. 343.
[874] Neither the copper pieces of the Italian Villanova-graves of
early Homeric times (Willers, _Gesch. d. röm. Kupferprägung_, p. 18)
nor the early Chinese bronze coins in the form of women’s drapery
(_pu_), bells, rings, or knives (_tsien_, Conrady, _China_, p. 504)
are described as money, but quite distinctly symbols of goods. And the
coins struck by the governments of early Gothic times (in imitation of
the Classical) as signs of sovereignty figured in economic life only as
wares; a piece of gold is worth as much as a cow, _but not vice versa_.
[875] Hence it is that so often he is not an outcome of the fixed and
self-contained life of the countryside, but an alien appearing in it,
an alien having neither importance nor antecedents. This is the rôle
of the Phœnicians in the earliest period of the Classical; of the
Romans in the East in Mithradates’s time; of the Jews, and with them
Byzantines, Persians, and Armenians, in the Gothic West; of the Arabs
in the Sudan; of the Indians in East Africa; and of the West-Europeans
in present-day Russia.
[876] And, consequently, on a very small scale. As foreign trade was in
those days highly adventurous and appealed to the imagination, it was
as a rule immensely exaggerated. The “great” merchants of Venice and
the Hansa about 1300 were hardly the equals of the more distinguished
craftsmen. The turnover of even the Medici or the Fugger about 1400
was equivalent to that of a shop-business in a small town to-day. The
largest merchant vessels, in which usually several traders held part
shares, were much smaller than modern German river-barges, and made
only _one_ considerable voyage each year. The celebrated wool-export
of England, a main element of Hanseatic trade, amounted about 1270 to
hardly as much as the contents of two modern goods-trains (Sombart,
_Der moderne Kapitalismus_, I, pp. 280, et seq.).
[877] P. 91.
[878] Cf. Vol. I, Ch. II.
[879] Marks and dollars are no more “money” than metres and grammes are
“forces.” _Pieces_ of money are real values. It is only our ignorance
of Classical physics that has saved us from confusing gravitation with
a pound-weight--in our mathematics, with its Classical basis, we still
mix number with magnitude, and our imitation of Classical coinage has
brought about the same confusion between money and pieces of money.
[880] Conversely, therefore, we can call the metric system (cm., g.)
a valuation, and in fact all money-measures proceed from the weight
theories of physics.
[881] Similarly all value-theories, however objective they are meant to
be, are developed--and inevitably so--out of a subjective principle.
That of Marx, for example, defines value in the way that promotes the
interest of the manual worker, the effort of the discoverer or the
organizer seeming to him, therefore, valueless. But it would be wrong
to describe this as “erroneous.” All these theories are “right” for
their supporters and “wrong” for their opponents, and it is not reasons
but _life_ that settles whether one is a supporter or an opponent.
[882] The Western introduced (on a very modest scale) by the Bank of
England from the end of the eighteenth century, the Chinese dating from
the period of the Contending States.
[883] And is thought of as “amount,” whereas we speak of the “extent”
of a property in goods.
[884] Even to the modern pirates of the money-market who intervene
amongst the interveners and gamble with money as “wares.”
[885] Preisigke, _Girowesen im griechischen Ægypten_ (1910). These
trading forms of the Ptolemaic period were already in vogue, and at the
same high level, under the XVIIIth Dynasty.
[886] So also with the bourgeois ideal of freedom. In theory and,
therefore, constitutionally, a man may be free _in principle_, but
_actually_, in the economic private-life of the cities, he is made free
only by money.
[887] The name “bourse” can be applied even in other Cultures, if by
that word we mean the thought-organ of a developed money-economy.
[888] Preface to _Major Barbara_ (Constable, London 1909).
[889] P. 343.
[890] The “farmer” is the man whose connexion with the piece of land is
no longer anything more than practical.
[891] The increasing intensity of this thinking appears in the
economic picture as a _growth of the available money-mass_, which is
abstract and imagined and has nothing to do with the visible supply
of gold as a ware. The “stiffening” of the money-market, for example,
is a purely intellectual process played out in the hands of a small
handful of men. The increasing energy of money-thinking consequently
awakens, in every Culture, the feeling that the “value of money is
going down”--enormously so, for example, in the time between Solon and
Alexander--with reference, namely, to the unit of calculation. What
actually happens is that the mercantile units of value have become
artificial and no longer comparable with the primary and livingly
experiential values of the peasant economy. In the end it ceases to
matter in what figures the Attic treasure of the Delian League (454) or
the sums involved in the peace-treaties of 241 and 201, or the booty
of Pompey in 64 are reckoned, and whether we ourselves shall pass in a
few decades from the milliards--still unknown in 1850, but commonplace
to-day--to the billions. There is no common standard for the value of
a talent in 430 and in 30 B.C., for gold, like cattle and corn, has
continually altered not only its own numeration, but its significance
within an ever-advancing urban economy. The only steady element is
the fact that quantity of money--not to be confused with the stock of
tokens and the means of payment--is an _alter ego_ mirroring thought in
money.
[892] Cf. Vol. I, Ch. II.
[893] Friedländer, _Röm. Sittengesch._, IV (1921), p. 301.
[894] Sallust, _Catilina_, 35, 3.
[895] P. 458.
[896] How difficult it was for Classical man to figure to himself the
transformation of a physically indefinable asset like land into bodily
money is shown by the stone posts (ὅροι) on land in Greece, which were
meant to _represent_ the mortgages on it, and by the Roman method of
sale _per æs et libram_, in which a clod of earth was handed over for
a coin in the presence of witnesses. Consequently, trade in goods
(properly so called) never existed, nor anything like, for example, a
current price for arable land. A regular relation between land-value
and money-value was as unthinkable to the Classical mind as such a
relation between artistic value and money-value. Intellectual--i.e.,
incorporeal--products like dramas and frescoes possessed economically
no value at all. For the Classical idea of law, cf. p. 81.
[897] Not very much can have been left of Classical art-treasures even
by Augustus’s time. The refined Athenians themselves thought far too
unhistorically to be moved to spare a chryselephantine statue merely
because it was the work of Phidias. It is worth remembering that the
gold parts of the famous Athene-figure of the Parthenon cella were made
removable and tested for weight from time to time. Economic use of
them, therefore, was provided for from the outset.
[898] _Ges. Schriften_, IV, 200, et seq.
[899] P. 600.
[900] The belief that slaves ever constituted, even in Athens or
Ægina, as much as a third of the population is a complete delusion. On
the contrary, the revolutions of the period after 400 presuppose an
enormous surplus of free paupers.
[901] P. 480.
[902] Herein lies the difference between this slavery and the
sugar-slavery of our own Baroque. The latter represents a threshold
phase of our _machine industry_, an organization of “living” energy,
which began with man-fuel, but presently passed over to coal-fuel; and
slavery came to be considered immoral only when coal had established
itself. Looked at from this angle, the victory of the North in
the American Civil War (1865) meant the economic victory of the
concentrated energy of coal over the simple energy of the muscles.
[903] Pp. 371, et seq. The resemblance with the Egyptian administration
under the Old Kingdom and the Chinese in the earliest Chóu period is
unmistakable.
[904] The _clerici_ of these exchequer offices were the archetype of
the modern bank-clerk. Cf. p. 371.
[905] Hampe, _Deutsche Kaisergeschichte_, p. 246. Leonardo Pisano,
whose _Liber Abaci_ (1202) was authoritative in accountancy till well
beyond the Renaissance, and who introduced, besides the Arabian system
of numerals, negative numbers to indicate debit, was promoted by the
great Hohenstaufen.
[906] P. 75.
[907] Sombart, _Der moderne Kapitalismus_, II, p. 119.
[908] There is a close relation between our picture of the nature of
electricity and the process of the “clearing-house,” in which the
positive and negative money-positions of several firms (centres of
tension) are equated amongst themselves by a purely mental act and the
true position made presentable by a booking. Cf. Vol. I, Ch. XI.
[909] Vol. I, ch. II.
[910] P. 81.
[911] In our Culture the credit of a country rests upon its economic
capacity and the political organization thereof--which imparts
to the operations and bookings of finance the character of real
money-creations--and not on any quantity of gold that may be put
into this or that. It is the Classicist superstition that raises the
gold reserve to the status of an actual measure of credit--actual in
that the level of credit is thereby made dependent, not upon “will,”
but upon “can.” But the current coins are _wares_, which, relatively
to national credit, possess a _price_--the poorer the credit, the
higher the price of gold--so that thenceforth it can only be upheld
against that of _other_ wares. Thus gold is measured like other wares
against the unit of book-reckoning, and not vice versa as the term
“gold standard” suggests. It serves also as means of payment in minor
transactions, as for that matter a postage-stamp does. In old Egypt
(whose money-thought is astoundingly like the Western) there was
nothing resembling the coin even under the New Empire. The written
transfer was entirely sufficient, and the Classical coins that filtered
in from 650 to the founding of Alexandria and the Hellenistic régime
were usually cut to pieces and reckoned by weight as a ware.
[912] That is why it does not exist for our (present) jurisprudence.
[913] All this equally holds good for the case of “workers” taking over
the leadership of the works. Either they are incapable of management,
and the business collapses, or they are capable of something, and then
they themselves become inwardly entrepreneurs and think thenceforward
only of maintaining their power. No theory can eliminate this fact from
the world, for so life _is_.
[914] Thus it is only since 1770 that the banks have become centres of
an economic power which made its first intervention with politics at
the Congress of Vienna. Till then the banker had in the main concerned
himself with bill business. The Chinese, and even the Egyptian, banks
had a different significance, and the Classical banks, even in the Rome
of Cæsar’s day, may best be described as cash-tills. They collected
the yield of taxes in cash, and lent cash against replacement; thus
the temples, with their stock of precious metal in the form of votive
offerings, became “banks.” The temple of Delos, through several
centuries, lent at ten per cent.
[915] The idea of the Firm took shape even in Late Gothic times as
“_ratio_” [hence the modern French phrase “_raison sociale_”--_Tr._] or
“_negotiatio_.” It is impossible to render it exactly in a Classical
language. _Negotium_ meant for the Romans a concrete process, a “deal”
and not a “business.”
[916] Pöhlmann, _griech. Geschichte_ (1914), p. 216, et seq.
[917] Gercke-Norden, _Einl. in der Altertumswissensch._, III, p. 291.
[918] Kromayer, in Hartmann’s _Röm. Gesch._, p. 150.
[919] The “Jews” of those times were the Romans (p. 318), and the
Jews themselves were peasants and artizans and small traders (Pârvan,
_Die Nationalität der Kaufleute im röm. Kaiserreiche_, 1909; also
Mommsen, _Röm. Gesch._, V, p. 471); that is, they followed the very
callings that in the Gothic period became the _object_ of their
merchant activity. Present-day “Europe” is in exactly the same position
_vis-à-vis_ the Russians whose profoundly mystical inner life feels
“thinking in money” _as a sin_. (The Pilgrim in Gorki’s _Night-asylum_,
and Tolstoi’s thought generally; pp. 194, 278.) Here to-day as in the
Syria of Jesus’s time we have two economic worlds juxtaposed (pp. 192,
et seq.): an upper, alien, and civilized world intruded from the West
(the Bolshevism of the first years, totally Western and un-Russian,
is the lees of this infiltration), and a townless barter-life that
goes on deep below, uncalculating and exchanging only for immediate
needs. We have to think of the catchwords of the surface as a voice,
in which the Russian, simple and busied wholly with his soul, hears
resignedly the will of God. Marxism amongst Russians is based on an
inward misunderstanding. They bore with the higher economic life of
Petrinism, but they neither created it nor recognized it. The Russian
does not fight Capital, but he does not _comprehend_ it. Anyone who
understands Dostoyevski will sense in these people a young humanity
_for which as yet no money exists_, but only goods in relation to a
life whose centre of gravity does _not_ lie on the economical side. The
horror of values supervening from nowhere which before the war drove
many to suicide is a misconstrued literary disguise of the fact that,
for a townless barter-thinking, money-getting by means of money is an
impiety, and (from the view-point of the coming Russian religion) a
sin. To-day, with the towns of Tsarism in ruin and the mankind in them
living the village life under the crust (temporarily) of urban-thinking
Bolshevism, he has freed himself from the Western economy. His
apocalyptic hatred--the same that the simple Jew of Jesus’s day bore
to the Roman--is directed against Petersburg, as a city and the seat
of a political power of Western stamp, but also as the centre of
a thinking in Western money that has poisoned and misdirected the
whole life. The Russian of the deeps to-day is bringing into being a
third kind of Christianity, still priestless, and built _on the John
Gospel_--a Christianity that stands much nearer to the Magian than to
the Faustian and, consequently, rests upon a new symbolism of baptism,
and looks neither at Rome nor at Wittenberg, but past Byzantium towards
Jerusalem, with premonitions of coming crusades. This is the _only_
thing that this new Russia really cares about. And it will no doubt let
itself fall once again under the economy of the West, as the primitive
Christian submitted to the Romans and the Gothic Christian to the Jews.
But inwardly it has no part nor lot therein. (Cf. pp. 192, 226, 278,
293, 295.)
[920] See the article “Diocletian, Edict of,” _Ency. Brit._, XI
ed.--_Tr._
[921] P. 6.
[922] Pp. 9 et seq.
[923] P. 25.
[924] P. 25.
[925] P. 268.
[926] P. 134.
[927] Pp. 25, et seq.; 267, et seq.
[928] And not vice versa. Cf. p. 268.
[929] The “correctness” of physical data (i.e., their applicability
never disproved up to date, and therefore ranking as an
_interpretation_) is wholly independent of their technical value. An
undoubtedly wrong, and even self-contradictory, theory may be more
valuable for practical purposes than a “correct” and profound one, and
physical science has long been careful to avoid applying the words
“right” and “wrong” in the popular sense, and to regard their syntheses
as images rather than flat formulæ.
[930] What Diels has managed to assemble in his work _Antike Technik_
amounts to a comprehensive nullity. If we take away from it what
belongs to the older Babylonian Civilization (such as water clocks and
sun-dials) and to the younger Arabian Springtime (such as chemistry or
the wonder-clock of Gaza), there is nothing left but devices, such as
door-locks of a sort, that it would be an insult to attribute to any
other Culture.
[931] The Chinese Culture, too, made almost all these European
discoveries on its own account--including compass, telescope, printing,
gunpowder, paper, porcelain--but the Chinese did not wrest, but
_wheedled_, things out of Nature. No doubt he felt the advantages of
his knowledge and turned it to account, but he did not hurl himself
upon it to exploit it.
[932] P. 301.
[933] It is the same spirit that distinguishes the Jewish, Parsee,
Armenian, Greek, and Arab ideas of business from that of the Western
peoples.
[934] P. 301. Albertus Magnus lived on in legend as the great magician.
Roger Bacon meditated upon steam-engines, steamships, and aircraft. (F.
Strunz, _Gesch. d. Naturwiss. im Mittelalter_, 1910, p. 88.)
[935] P. 268. According to Roger Bacon the “third rôle of science,”
which is not relative to the other sciences, consists in the power that
makes it to search the secrets of nature, to discover past and future,
and to produce so many marvellous results that power is assured to
those who possess it.... The Church should take it into consideration
in order to spare Christian blood in the struggle with the infidel and
above all in preparation for the perils that will menace us in the days
of Antichrist (E. Gilson, _Philosophie au Moyen Âge_, p. 218).--_Tr._
[936] P. 288.
[937] Greek fire was only to terrify and to ignite, but here the tense
force of the gases of explosion are converted into energy of motion.
Anyone who seriously compares the two does not understand the spirit of
the Western technique.
[938] Marx is quite right; it is one of the creations (and what is
more, the proudest creation) of the bourgeoisie. But, spellbound as he
is by the ancient-mediæval-modern scheme, he has failed to note that it
is only the bourgeoisie of this one single Culture that is master of
the destiny of the Machine. So long as it dominates the earth, every
non-European tries and will try to fathom the secret of this terrible
weapon. Nevertheless, inwardly he abhors it, be he Indian or Japanese,
Russian or Arab. It is something fundamental in the essence of the
Magian soul that leads the Jew, as entrepreneur and engineer, to stand
aside from the creation proper of machines and devote himself to the
business side of their production. But so also the Russian looks with
fear and hatred at this tyranny of wheels, cables, and rails, and if he
adapts himself for to-day and to-morrow to the inevitable, yet there
will come a time when he will _blot out the whole thing from his memory
and his environment_, and create about himself a wholly new world, in
which nothing of this Devil’s technique is left.
[939] Compared with this mighty contest between the two handfuls of
steel-hard men of race and of immense intellect--which the simple
citizen neither observes nor comprehends--the battle of mere interests
between the employing class and the workers’ Socialism sinks into
insignificance when regarded from the distant world-historical
view-point. The working-class movement is what its leaders _make_ of
it, and hatred of the owner has long enlisted itself in the service of
the bourse. Practical communism with its “class-war”--to-day a long
obsolete and adulterated phrase--is nothing but the trusty henchman of
big Capital, which knows perfectly well how to make use of it.
[940] In this sense the interest-politics of the workers’ movements
also belong to it, in that their object is not to overcome the
money-values, but to possess them.
[941] P. 345.
Transcriber’s notes
Apparent typographical errors in English were silently corrected, while
non-English text is almost always rendered as printed, with occasional
corrections (especially in citations) when further inquiry was made.
The index contained dozens of incorrectly spelled or variant proper
nouns; where this was noticed, the index spelling was made consistent
with the main text. The index entry was not moved even if the new
spelling would require it.
Any “{sic}” in this text is the transcriber’s.
Italics are shown by _underscores_.
Redundant part-title pages for chapters have been removed. This
accounts for three-page gaps in page numbering (including associated
blank pages) in the formats that display page numbers.
Chapter XI lacks a section numbered IX. This error was not corrected in
later reprints (e.g. Knopf 1965). Chapter IV does not have an explicit
section I.
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