Problems of the Arabian Culture (C): Pythagoras, Mohammed, Cromwell

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 Totem⁠⁴⁶⁴—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. Fate⁠⁴⁶⁶ 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 prayer⁠⁴⁶⁸ 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-signs⁠⁴⁷⁰ 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.

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 incomprehensible⁠⁴⁸¹—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?

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, chthonian⁠⁴⁸⁸ 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-King⁠⁴⁹³ 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-humour⁠⁵⁰⁰ 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. 291St. 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 Orvieto⁠⁵⁰⁸ 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 personality⁠⁵¹²; 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

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.

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 Grosseteste⁠⁵²¹ 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 Marib⁠⁵²⁶ 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 literature⁠⁵²⁸ 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 later⁠⁵²⁹—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 307“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 Jainism⁠⁵³⁵—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.

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 Religiousness⁠⁵⁴²—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 Pseudomorphosis⁠⁵⁴³—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 Psellus⁠⁵⁴⁶ 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.

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 500⁠⁵⁵³ 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 nation⁠⁵⁵⁶—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 Prague⁠⁵⁶¹)—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 Hellenism⁠⁵⁶⁷—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.