But more important still--and by far--was the essentially Faustian

prime-sacrament of Contrition. This ranks with the Mary-myth and the

Devil-myth as the third great creation of the Gothic. And, indeed,

it is from this third that the other two derive depth and meaning;

it discloses the last secrets of this Culture’s soul, and so sets it

apart from all other Cultures. The effect of the Magian baptism was

to incorporate a man in the great _consensus_--the _one_ great “it”

of the divine spirit took up its abode in him as in the others, and

thereafter resignation to all that should happen became his duty. But

in the Faustian contrition the _idea of personality_ was implicit. It

is not true that the Renaissance discovered personality[512]; what

it did was to bring personality up to a brilliant surface, whereby

it suddenly became visible to everyone. Its birth is in Gothic; it

is the most intimate and peculiar property of Gothic; it is one

and the same with Gothic soul. For this contrition is something

that each one accomplishes for himself alone. He alone can search

his own conscience. He alone stands rueful in the presence of the

Infinite. He alone can and must in confession understand and put

into words his own past. And even the absolution that frees his Ego

for new responsible action is personal to himself. Baptism is wholly

impersonal--one receives it because one is _a_ man, not because one

is _this_ man--but the idea of contrition presupposes that the value

of every act depends uniquely upon the man who does it. This is what

differentiates the Western drama from the Classical, the Chinese, and

the Indian. This is what directs our legislation more and more with

reference to the doer rather than to the deed, and bases our primary

ethical conceptions on individual doing and not typical behaviour.

Faustian responsibility instead of Magian resignedness, the individual

instead of the _consensus_; relief from, instead of submissiveness

under, burdens--that is the difference between the most active and the

most passive of all sacraments, and at the back of it again lies the

difference between the world-cavern and infinity-dynamics. Baptism is

something done upon one, Contrition something done by oneself within

oneself. And, moreover, this conscientious searching of one’s own past

is both the earliest evidence of, and the finest training for, the

_historical sense_ of Faustian mankind. There is no other Culture in

which the personal life of the living man, the conscientious tracing of

each feature, has been so important, for this alone has required the

accounts to be rendered in words. If historical research and biography

are characteristic of the spirit of the West from its beginnings;

if both in the last resort are self-examination and confession; if

our lives are led with an assuredness and conscious reference to

the historic background that nowhere else has been even imagined as

possible or tolerable; if, lastly, we habitually look at history

in terms of millennia, not rhapsodically or decoratively as in the

Classical World and in China, but directionally and with the almost

sacramental formula “_Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner_” ever in

our minds--we have this sacrament of the Gothic Church, this continual

unburdening of the Ego by _historical_ test and justification to thank

for it. Every confession is an autobiography. This peculiar liberation

of the will is to us so necessary that the refusal of absolution drives

to despair, even to destruction. Only he who senses the bliss of such

an inward acquittal can comprehend the old name of the _sacramentum

resurgentium_, the sacrament of those who are risen again.[513]

When in this heaviest of decisions the soul is left to its own

resources, something unresolved remains hanging over it like a

perpetual cloud. It may be said, therefore, that perhaps no institution

in any religion has brought so much happiness into the world as this.

The whole inwardness and heavenly love of the Gothic rests upon the

certainty of full absolution through the power invested in the priest.

In the insecurity that ensued from the decline of this sacrament, both

Gothic joy of life and the Mary-world of the light faded out. Only

the Devil’s world, with its grim all-presentness, remained. And then,

in place of the blissfulness irrecoverably lost, came the Protestant,

and especially Puritan, heroism, which could fight on, even hopeless,

in a lost position. “Auricular confession,” said Goethe once, “ought

never to have been taken from mankind.” Over the lands in which it had

died out, a heavy earnestness spread itself. Ethic and costume, art

and thought, took on the night-colour of the only myth that remained

outstanding. Nothing is less sunlit than the doctrines of Kant. “Every

man his own priest” is a conviction to which men could win through,

but only as to that part of priesthood that involves duties, _not as

to that which possesses powers_. No man confesses himself with the

inward certainty of absolution. And as the need of the soul to be

relieved of its past and to be redirected remained urgent as ever, all

the higher forms of communication were transmuted, and in Protestant

countries music and painting, letter-writing and memoirs, from being

modes of description became modes of self-denunciation, penance, and

unbounded confession. Even in Catholic regions too--in Paris above

all--art as psychology set in as doubt in the sacrament of Contrition

and Absolution grew. Outlook on the world was lost in ceaseless

mine-warfare within the self. In lieu of the Infinite, contemporaries

and descendants were called in to be priests and judges. Personal art,

in the sense that distinguishes Goethe from Dante, and Rembrandt from

Michelangelo, was a substitute for the sacrament of confession. It was,

also, the sign that this Culture was already in the condition of a Late

period.[514]

IV

In all Cultures, Reformation has the same meaning--the bringing back

of the religion to the purity of its original idea as this manifested

itself in the great centuries of the beginning. In no Culture is this

movement missing, whether we know about it, as in the case of Egypt, or

not, as in that of China. It means, further, that the city and with it

the city-spirit are gradually freeing themselves from the soul of the

country-side, setting up in opposition to the latter’s all-power and

reconsidering the feelings and thoughts of the primitive pre-urban time

with reference to its present self. It was Destiny and not intellectual

necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Faustian worlds, to

the budding-off of new religions at this point. We know to-day that,

under Charles V, Luther was within an ace of becoming the reformer of

the whole undivided Church.

For Luther, like all reformers in all Cultures, was not the first, but

_the last of a grand succession_ which led from the great ascetics

of the open land to the city-priest. Reformation is _Gothic_, the

accomplishment and the testament thereof. Luther’s chorale “_Ein’

feste Burg_” does _not_ belong to the spiritual lyrism of the Baroque.

There rumbles in it still the splendid Latin of the _Dies iræ_. It

is the Church Militant’s last mighty Satan-song.[515] Luther, like

every reformer that had arisen since the year 1000, fought the Church

not because it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little.

The great stream flows on from Cluny: through Arnold of Brescia, who

preached return to Apostolic simplicity and was burned in 1155; through

Joachim of Floris, who was the first to use the world “_reformare_;”

the spirituals of the Franciscan Order; Jacopone da Todi, revolutionary

and singer of the _Stabat Mater_, the knight whom the death of a

young wife turned into an ascetic and who tried to overthrow Boniface

VIII for governing the Church too slackly; through Wyclif and Hus

and Savonarola; to Luther, Karlstadt, Zwingli, Calvin, and--Loyola.

The intention of these men, one and all, was not to overcome the

Christianity of the Gothic, but to bring it to inward fulfilment. So

also with Marcion, Athanasius, the Monophysites, and the Nestorians,

who sought in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon to purify the faith

and lead it back to its origins.[516] But so also the Orphics of the

Classical seventh century were the last and not the first of a series

that must have begun even before 1000 B.C. So with the establishment of

the Re religion in Egypt at the close of the Old Kingdom, the Egyptian

Gothic. It is an ending, not a new beginning, that these signify. Just

so, again, a reform-fulfilment happened in the Vedic religion about the

tenth century and was followed by the setting-in of late Brahmanism.

And in the ninth century a corresponding epochal point must have

occurred in the religious history of China.

However widely the Reformations of the various Cultures may differ

amongst themselves, the purpose is the same for all--to bring the

faith, which had strayed all too far into the world-as-history

and time-secularism (“_Zeitlichkeit_”), back into the realm of

Nature, clean waking-consciousness, and pure cause-controlled and

cause-pervaded Space; out of the world of economics (“wealth”)

into that of science (“poverty”), out of patrician and cavalier

society (which was also that of Renaissance and Humanism) into

that of spirituals and ascetics; and lastly (as significant as it

is impossible) out of the political ambitions of vestmented human

thoroughbreds into the realm of holy Causality that is not of this

world.

In those times the West--and the situation was the same in the other

Cultures--divided the _Corpus Christianorum_ of the population into the

three classes of _status policticus, ecclesiasticus, and œconomicus_

(that is, urban), but as the outlook was that of the city and no longer

that of the castle and the village, officials and judges belonged to

the first-named class, men of learning to the second--and the peasant

was forgotten. This is the key to the opposition of the Renaissance

and Reformation, which was an opposition of class and not a difference

in world-feeling like that of Renaissance and Gothic. Castle-taste

and cloister-soul moved into town, and remained there, as before,

in opposition--as in Florence the Medici to Savonarola, and as in

old Greece the noble families of the cities--with their Homer now

finally written down--to the last Orphics--these, too, writers. The

Renaissance artists and Humanists are the legitimate successors of the

Troubadours and Minnesingers, and just as there is a line from Arnold

of Brescia to Luther, so there is a line from Bertrand de Born and

Peire Cardinal, through Petrarch, to Ariosto. The castle has become

the town-house, the knight the patrician. The whole movement adhered

to palaces, as courts; it limits itself to those fields of expression

that affect and interest polite society; it is bright and gay, like

Homer, because it is courtly--an atmosphere where problems were bad

taste, where Dante and Michelangelo cannot but have felt themselves out

of place--and it spread over the Alps to the courts of the North, not

as a new world-outlook, but as a new taste. The “Northern” Renaissance

of the mercantile and capital cities consisted simply in the fact that

the _bon ton_ of the Italian patriciate replaced that of the French

chivalry.

But the last reformers, too, the Luthers and Savonarolas, were

_urban_ monks, and this differentiates them profoundly from the

Joachims and the Bernards. Their intellectual and urban askesis is the

stepping-stone from the hermitages of quiet valleys to the scholar’s

study of the Baroque. The mystic experience of Luther which gave birth

to his doctrine of justification is the experience, not of a St.

Bernard in the presence of woods and hills and clouds and stars, but

of a man who looks through narrow windows on the streets and house

walls and gables. Broad God-perfused nature is remote, outside the city

wall; and the free intellect, detached from the soil, is inside it.

Within the urban, stonewalled waking-consciousness sense and reason

part company and become enemies, and the city-mysticism of the last

reformers is thus a mysticism of pure reason through and through, and

not one of the eye--an illumination of concepts, in presence of which

the brightly coloured figures of the old myth fade into paleness.

Necessarily, therefore, it was, in its real depths, a thing of the few.

Nothing was left of that sensible content that formerly had offered

even to the poorest something to grip. The mighty act of Luther was

a purely intellectual decision. Not for nothing has he been regarded

as the last great Schoolman of the line of Occam.[517] He completely

liberated the Faustian personality--the intermediate person of the

priest, which had formerly stood between it and the Infinite, was

removed. And now it was wholly alone, self-oriented, its own priest and

its own judge. But the common people could only feel, not understand,

the element of liberation in it all. They welcomed, enthusiastically,

indeed, the tearing-up of visible duties, but they did not come to

realize that these had been replaced by intellectual duties that were

still stricter. Francis of Assisi had given much and taken little, but

the urban Reformation took much and, as far as the majority of people

were concerned, gave little.

The holy Causality of the Contrition-sacrament Luther replaced by the

mystic experience of inward absolution “by faith alone.” He came very

near to Bernard of Clairvaux in this concept of contrition as lifelong,

as a continuous intellectual askesis in contrast to the askesis of

outward and visible works. Both of them understood absolution as

a divine miracle: in so far as the man changes himself, it is God

changing him. But what no purely intellectual mysticism can replace

is the “Tu” outside, in free nature. The one and the other preached:

“Thou must believe that God has forgiven thee,” but for Bernard belief

was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge, whereas

for Luther it sank to doubt and desperate insistence. This little

“I,” detached from the cosmos, nailed up in an individual being and

(in the most terrific sense of the word) alone, needed the proximity

of a powerful “Thou,” and the weaker the intellect, the more urgent

the need. Herein lies the ultimate meaning of the Western priest, who

from 1215 was elevated above the rest of mankind by the sacrament of

ordination and its _character indelebilis_: he was a hand with which

even the poorest wretch could grasp God. This _visible_ link with the

Infinite, Protestantism destroyed. Strong souls could and did win it

back for themselves, but for the weaker it was gradually lost. Bernard,

although for him the inward miracle was successful of itself, would

not deprive others of the gentler way, for the very illumination of

his soul showed him the Mary-world of living nature, all-pervading,

ever near, and ever helpful. Luther, who knew himself only and not

men, set postulated heroism in place of actual weakness. For him life

was desperate battle against the Devil, and that battle he called upon

everyone to fight. And everyone who fought it fought alone.

The Reformation abolished the whole bright and consoling side of

the Gothic myth--the cult of Mary, the veneration of the saints,

the relics, the pilgrimages, the mass. But the myth of devildom and

witchcraft remained, for it was the embodiment and cause of the inner

torture, and now that torture at last rose to its supreme horror.[518]

Baptism was, for Luther at least, an exorcism, the veritable sacrament

of devil-banning. There grew up a large, purely Protestant literature

about the Devil.[519] Out of the Gothic wealth of colour, there

remained black; of its arts, music, in particular organ-music. But in

the place of the mythic light-world, whose helpful nearness the faith

of the common people could not, after all, forgo, there rose again out

of long-buried depths an element of ancient German myth. It came so

stealthily that even to-day its true significance is not yet realized.

The expressions “folktale” and “popular custom” are inadequate: it is

a true Myth that inheres in the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies,

house-sprites, and sweeping clouds of the disembodied, and a true Cult

that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjurings that are still

practised with a pious awe. In Germany, at any rate, the Saga took the

place, unperceived, of the Mary-myth: Mary was now called Frau Holde,

and where once the saints had stood, appeared the faithful Eckart.

In the English people what arose was something that has long been

designated “Bible-fetishism.”

What Luther lacked--and it is an eternal fatality for Germany--was the

eye for facts and the power of practical organization. He did not bring

his doctrines to a clear system, nor did he lead the great movement

and choose its aim. The one and the other were the work of his great

successor Calvin. While the Lutheran movement advanced leaderless in

central Europe, he viewed his rule in Geneva as the starting-point of a

systematic subjection of the world under a Protestantism unfalteringly

thought out to its logical conclusion. Therefore he, and he alone,

became a world-power; therefore it was the decisive struggle between

the spirit of Calvin and the spirit of Loyola that dominated, from

the Spanish Armada on, the world-politics of the Baroque and the

struggle for sea-supremacy. While in mid-Europe Reformation and

Counter-Reformation struggled for some small imperial city or a few

poor Swiss cantons, Canada, the mouth of the Ganges, the Cape, the

Mississippi, were the scenes of great decisions fought to an issue by

France and Spain, England and Holland. And in these decisions the two

grand organizers of the Late religion of the West were ever present,

ever opposed.

V

Intellectual creativeness of the Late period begins, not with, but

after, the Reformation. Its most typical creation is free science. Even

for Luther learning was still essentially the “handmaid of theology,”

and Calvin had the freethinking doctor Servet burnt. The thought of the

Springtimes--Faustian like Egyptian, Vedic, and Orphic--had felt its

vocation to be the justification of faith by criticism. If criticism

did not succeed, the critical method must be wrong. Knowledge was faith

justified, not faith controverted.

Now, however, the critical powers of the city intellect have become

so great that it is no longer content to affirm, but must test. The

stock of believed probables, and especially that part of it which was

received by the understanding and not the heart, was the first obvious

target for dissecting activities. This distinguishes the Springtime

Scholasticism from the actuality-philosophy of the Baroque--as it

distinguishes Neoplatonist from Islamic, Vedic from Brahmanic, Orphic

from Pre-Socratic, thought. The (shall we say) profane Causality of

human life, the world-around, the process and meaning of cognition,

become a problem. The Egyptian philosophy of the Middle Kingdom

measured up the value of life in _this_ sense; and akin to it, in all

probability, was the late pre-Confucian philosophy of China from 800 to

500 B.C. Only the book ascribed to Kwan-tse (d. 645) remains to give us

some dim idea of this philosophy, but the indications, slight though

they be, are that epistemological and biological problems occupied the

centre of the one genuine philosophy of China, now utterly lost.

Within Baroque philosophy, Western natural-science stands by itself.

No other Culture possesses anything like it, and assuredly it must

have been from its beginnings, not a “handmaid of theology,” but

_the servant of the technical Will-to-Power_, oriented to that end

both mathematically and experimentally--from its very foundations a

practical _mechanics_. And as it is firstly technique and only secondly

theory, it must be as old as Faustian man himself. Accordingly, we

find technical works of an astounding energy of combination even by

1000.[520] As early as the thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste[521]

was treating space as a function of light. Petrus Peregrinus in 1289

wrote the best experimentally based treatise on magnetism that

appeared before Gilbert (1600). And Roger Bacon, the disciple of

both, developed a natural-scientific theory of knowledge to serve

as basis for his technical investigations.[522] But boldness in the

discovery of dynamic interlinkages went further still. The Copernican

system was hinted at in a manuscript of 1322 and a few decades later

was mathematically developed by the Paris Occamists, Buridan, Albert

of Saxony, and Oresme.[523] Let us not deceive ourselves as to the

fundamental motive-power of these explorations. Pure contemplative

philosophy could have dispensed with experiment for ever, but not so

the Faustian symbol of the _machine_, which urged us to mechanical

constructions even in the twelfth century and made “_Perpetuum mobile_”

the Prometheus-idea of the Western intellect. For us the first thing

is ever the _working hypothesis_--the very kind of thought-product

that is meaningless to other Cultures. It is an astounding fact

(to which, however, we must accustom ourselves) that the idea of

immediately exploiting in practice any knowledge of natural relations

that may be acquired is alien to every sort of mankind except the

Faustian (and those who, like Japanese, Jews, and Russians, have

to-day come under the intellectual spell of its Civilization). The

very notion of the working hypothesis implicitly contains a dynamic

lay-out of the universe. Theoria, contemplative vision of actuality,

was for those subtly inquiring monks only secondary, and, being itself

the outcome of the technical passion, it presently led them, quite

imperceptibly, to the typically Faustian conception of God as the

Grand Master of the machine, who could accomplish everything that

they themselves in their impotence only dared to wish. Insensibly

the world of God became, century by century, more and more like the

_Perpetuum mobile_. And, imperceptibly also, as the scanning of nature

became sharper and sharper in the school of experiment and technique,

and the Gothic myth became more and more shadowy, the concepts of

monkish working hypotheses developed, from Galileo onwards, into the

critically illuminated numina of modern science, the collisions and

the fields, gravitation, the velocity of light, and the “electricity”

which in our electrodynamic world-picture has absorbed into itself

the other forms of energy and thereby attained to a sort of physical

monotheism. They are the concepts that are set up behind the formulæ,

to endow them with a mythic visibility for the inner eye. The numbers

themselves are technical elements, levers and screws, overhearings of

the world’s secrets. The Classical Nature-thought--and that of others

also--required no numbers, for it strove for no powers. The _pure_

mathematic of Pythagoras and Plato had no relation whatever to the

nature-views of Democritus and Aristotle.

Just as the Classical mind felt Prometheus’s defiance of the gods

as “hybris,” so our Baroque felt the machine as diabolical.[524]

The spirit of Hell had betrayed to man the secret of mastering the

world-mechanism and even of himself enacting the part of God. And

hence it is that all purely priestly natures, that live wholly in the

world of the spirit and expect nothing of “this world”--and notably

the idealist philosophers, the Classicists, the Humanists, and even

Nietzsche--have for technique nothing but silent hostility.

Every Late philosophy contains this critical protest against the

uncritical intuitiveness of the Spring. But this criticism of the

intellect that is sure of its own superiority affects also faith itself

and evokes the one great creation in the field of religion that is the

peculiarity of the Late period--every Late period--namely, Puritanism.

Puritanism manifests itself in the army of Cromwell and his

Independents, iron, Bible-firm, psalm-singing as they rode into battle;

in the ranks of the Pythagoreans, who in the bitter earnest of their

gospel of duty wrecked gay Sybaris and branded it for ever as the city

without morals; in the armies of the early Caliphs, which subdued

not only states, but souls. Milton’s _Paradise Lost_, many surahs

of the Koran, the little that we know of Pythagorean teachings--all

come to the same thing. They are enthusiasms of a sober spirit, cold

intensities, dry mysticism, pedantic ecstasy. And yet, even so, a wild

piety flickers up once more in them. All the transcendent inwardness

that the City can produce after attaining to unconditional mastery

over the soul of the Land is here concentrated, with a sort of terror

lest it should prove unreal and evanescent, and is correspondingly

impatient, pitiless, and unforgiving. Puritanism--not in the West

only, but in all Cultures--lacks the smile that had illumined the

religion of the Spring--every Spring--the moments of profound joy in

life, the humour of life. Nothing of the quiet blissfulness that in

the Magian Springtime flashes up so often in the stories of Jesus’s

childhood, or in Gregory Nazianzen, is to be found in the Koran,

nothing in the palpable blitheness of St. Francis’s songs in Milton.

Deadly earnest broods over the Jansenist mind of Port Royal, over the

meetings of the black-clothed Roundheads, by whom Shakespeare’s “Merry

England”--_Sybaris over again_--was annihilated in a few years. Now for

the first time the battle against the Devil, whose bodily nearness they

all felt, was fought with a dark and bitter fury. In the seventeenth

century more than a million witches were burnt--alike in the Protestant

North, the Catholic South, and even the communities in America and

India. Joyless and sour are the duty-doctrines of Islam (_fikh_), with

its hard intellectuality, and the Westminster Catechisms of 1643, and

the Jansenist ethics (Jansen’s _Augustinus_, 1640) as well--for in the

realm of Loyola, too, there was of inward necessity a Puritan movement.

Religion is livingly experienced metaphysic, but the company of the

“godly,” as the Independents called themselves, and the Pythagoreans,

and the disciples of Mohammed, all alike experienced it, not with the

senses, but primarily as a concept. Parshva, who about 600 B.C. founded

the sect of the “Unfettered”[525] on the Ganges, taught, like the

other Puritans of his time, that salvation came, not from sacrifices

and rights, but only from knowledge of the identity of Atman and

Brahman. In all Puritan poetry the place of the old Gothic visions is

taken by an unbridled, yet withal jejune, spirit of allegory. In the

waking-consciousness of these ascetics the concept is the only real

power. Pascal’s wrestlings were about concepts and not, like Meister

Eckart’s, about shapes. Witches were burnt because they were proved,

and not because they were seen in the air o’ nights; the Protestant

jurists employed the witches’ hammer of the Dominicans because it was

built on concepts. The Madonnas of the early Gothic had appeared to

their suppliants, but those of Bernini no man ever saw. They exist

because they are proved--and there came to be a positive enthusiasm for

existence of this sort. Milton, Cromwell’s great secretary of state,

clothed concepts with shapes, and Bunyan brings a whole mythology of

concepts into ethical-allegorical activity. From that it is but a step

to Kant, in whose conceptual ethics the Devil assumes his final shape

as the Radically Evil.

We have to emancipate ourselves from the surfaces of history--and,

especially, to thrust aside the artificial fences in which the

methodology of Western sciences has paddocked it--before we can see

that Pythagoras, Mohammed, and Cromwell embody one and the same

movement in three Cultures.

Pythagoras was not a philosopher. According to all statements of the

Pre-Socratics, he was a saint, prophet and founder of a fanatically

religious society that forced its truths upon the people around it

by every political and military means. The destruction of Sybaris by

Croton--an event which, we may be sure, has survived in historical

memory only because it was the climax of a wild religious war--was

an explosion of the same hate that saw in Charles I and his gay

Cavaliers not merely doctrinal error, but also worldly disposition

as something that must be destroyed root and branch. A myth purified

and conceptually fortified, combined with rigorous ethical precepts,

imbued the Pythagoreans with the conviction that they would attain

salvation before all other men. The gold tablets found in Thurii and

Petelia, which were put into the hand of the dead initiate, carried the

assurance of the god: “Happy and blessed one, thou shalt be no more a

mortal, but a god.” It is the same certainty that the Koran gave to

all believers who fought in the holy war against the infidel--“The

monasticism of Islam is the religious war,” says a hadith of the

Prophet--the same which filled Cromwell’s Ironsides when they scattered

the King’s “Philistines” and “Amalekites” at Marston Moor and Naseby.

Islam was no more a religion of the desert in particular than Zwingli’s

faith was a religion of the high mountains in particular. It is

incident, and no more, that the Puritan movement for which the Magian

world was ripe proceeded from a man of Mecca and not from a Monophysite

or a Jew. For in the northern Arabian desert there were the Christian

states of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, and in the Sabæan South there

were religious wars waged between Christians and Jews that involved

the world of states from Assuan to the Sassanid Empire. The Congress

of Princes at Marib[526] was attended by hardly a single pagan, and

shortly after this date South Arabia came under Persian--that is,

Mazdaist--government. Mecca was a little island of ancient Arabian

paganism in the midst of a world of Jews and Christians, a mere relic

that had long been mined by the ideas of the great Magian religions.

The little of this paganism that filtered into the Koran was later

explained away by the Commentary of the Sunna and its Syro-Mesopotamian

intellect. At most Islam was a new religion only to the same extent

as Lutheranism was one.[527] Actually, it was the prolongation of the

great early religions. Equally, its expansion was not (as is even

now imagined) a “migration of peoples” proceeding from the Arabian

Peninsula, but an onslaught of enthusiastic believers, which like an

avalanche bore along with it Christians, Jews, and Mazdaists and set

them at once in its front rank as fanatical Moslems. It was Berbers

from the homeland of St. Augustine who conquered Spain, and Persians

from Irak who drove on to the Oxus. The enemy of yesterday became

the front-rank comrade of to-morrow. Most of the “Arabs” who in 717

attacked Constantinople for the first time, had been born Christians.

About 650 Byzantine literature[528] quite suddenly vanished, and the

deeper meaning of the fact has so far never been noticed--it was just

that the Arabian literature took up the tale. The soul of the Magian

Culture found at last its true expression in Islam, and therewith

became truly the “Arabian,” free thenceforth from all bondage to

the Pseudomorphosis. The Iconoclastic movement, led by Islam, but

long prepared by Monophysites and Jews, advanced to and even beyond

Byzantium, where the Syrian Leo III (717-41) raised this Puritan

movement of Islamic-Christian sects--the Paulicians about 650 and the

Bogomils later[529]--to predominance.

The great figures of Mohammed’s entourage, such as Abu Bekr and

Omar, are the near relatives of the Pyms and Hampdens of the English

Revolution, and we should see this relationship to be nearer still if

we knew more than we do about the Hanifs, the Arabian Puritans before

and about the Prophet. All of them had won out of Predestination

the guarantee that they were God’s elect. The grand Old Testament

exaltation of Parliament and the camps of Independency--which

left behind it, in many an English family, even to the nineteenth

century,[530] the belief that the English are the descendants of the

ten Lost Tribes of Israel, a nation of saints predestined to govern

the world--dominated also the emigration to America which began with

the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620. It formed that which may be called the

American religion of to-day, and bred and fostered the trait which

gives the Englishman even now his particular political insouciance,

an assurance that is essentially religious and has its roots in

predestination. The Pythagoreans themselves, too (an unheard-of thing

in the religious history of the Classical world) assumed political

power for the furtherance of religious ends and sought to advance their

puritanism from Polis to Polis. Everywhere else unit cults reigned in

unit states, each of which left the other unconcernedly to its own

religious duties; here and here only do we find a community of saints,

and their practical energy as far surpassed that of the old Orphics as

fighting Independency surpassed the spirit of the Reformation wars.

But in Puritanism there is hidden already the seed of Rationalism,

and after a few enthusiastic generations have passed, this bursts

forth everywhere and makes itself supreme. This is the step from

Cromwell to Hume. Not cities in general, not even the great cities,

but a few particular cities now become the theatre of intellectual

history--Socratic Athens, Abbassid Baghdad, eighteenth-century London

and Paris.[531] “Enlightenment” is the cliché of that time. The sun

bursts forth--but what is it that clears off the heavens of the

critical consciousness to make way for that sun?

Rationalism signifies the belief in the data of critical understanding

(that is, of the “reason”) _alone_. In the Springtime men could

say “_Credo quia absurdum_,” because they were certain that the

comprehensible and the incomprehensible were _both_ necessary

constituents of the world--the nature which Giotto painted, in which

the Mystics immersed themselves, and into which reason can penetrate,

but only so far as the deity permits it to penetrate. But now a

secret jealousy breeds the notion of the Irrational--that which, as

incomprehensible, is _therefore_ valueless. It may be scorned openly

as superstition, or privily as metaphysic. Only critically-established

understanding possesses value. And secrets are merely evidences

of ignorance. The new _secretless_ religion is in its highest

potentialities called wisdom (σοφία), its priests philosophers, and

its adherents “educated” people. According to Aristotle, the old

religion is indispensable only to the uneducated,[532] and his view

is Confucius’s and Gotama Buddha’s, Lessing’s and Voltaire’s. Men go

away from Culture “back to nature,” but this nature is not something

livingly experienced, but something proved, something born of, and

accessible only to, the intellect--a Nature that has no existence at

all for a peasantry, a Nature by which one is not in the least overawed

but merely put into a condition of sensibility. Natural religion,

rational religion, Deism--all this is not lived metaphysics, but a

comprehended mechanics, called by Confucius the “Laws of Heaven” and

by Hellenism τύχη. Formerly philosophy was the handmaid of transcendent

religiousness, but now comes sensibility, and philosophy must therefore

become scientific as epistemology and critique of nature and critique

of values. No doubt there was a feeling that this philosophy was, even

so, nothing but a diluted dogmatism, for the idea that pure knowledge

was _possible_ itself involved a belief. Systems were woven out of

phenomenally guaranteed beginnings, but in the long run the result was

merely to say “Force” instead of “God,” and “Conservation of Energy”

instead of “Eternity.” Under all Classical rationalism is to be found

Olympus, under all Western the dogma of the sacraments. And so our

Western philosophy swings to and fro between religion and technical

science, and is defined thus, or thus, according as the author of the

definition is a man with some relic of priesthood still in him, or is a

pure expert and technician of thought.

“_Weltanschauung_” is the characteristic expression for an enlightened

waking-consciousness that, under the guidance of the critical

understanding, looks about it in a godless light-world and, when

sense-perceptions are found not to square with sound human reason,

treats sense as a “lying jade.” That which was once myth--the actualest

of the actual--is now subjected to the methods of what is called

Euhemerism. The learned Euhemerus, about 300 B.C., “explained” the

Classical divinities to the public that they had formerly served so

well, and the process occurs under one form or another in every “age

of enlightenment.” We have our Euhemeristic interpretations of Hell

as a guilty conscience, the Devil as evil desire, and God as the

beauty of nature, and it is the same tendency that declares itself

when Attic tomb-inscriptions of about 400 invoke, not the city-goddess

Athene, but a goddess “Demos”--a near relation, by the way, of the

Jacobins’ Goddess of Reason--and where the δαιμονίον for Socrates,

νοῦς for other philosophers, take the place of Zeus. Confucius says

“heaven” instead of “Shang-ti,” which means that he believes only

in laws of nature. The “collection” and “ordering” of the canonical

writings of China by the Confucians was a colossal act of Euhemerism,

in which actually almost all the old religious works were literally

destroyed and the residue subjected to rationalist falsification. Had

it been possible, the enlighteners of our eighteenth century would no

doubt have served the Gothic heritage in the same way.[533] Confucius

belongs to the Chinese “eighteenth century” through and through.

Lao-tse (who despised him) stands at a midpoint in the Taoist movement,

which manifested traits of Protestantism, Puritanism, and Pietism in

turn, and both finally propagated a practical world-tone based upon a

wholly mechanistic world-view. The word “_tao_” underwent in the Late

period of China just the same continuous alteration of its fundamental

content, and in the same mechanistic direction, as the word “Logos” in

the history of Classical thought from Heraclitus to Posidonius, and

as the word “Force” between Galileo’s day and ours. That which once

had been grandly moulded myth and cult is called, in this “religion

of educated people,” _Nature_ and _Virtue_--but this Nature is a

reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge.[534] Confucius and

Buddha, Socrates and Rousseau are at one in this. Confucius contains

little of prayer or of meditation upon the life after death, and

nothing at all of revelation. To busy oneself overmuch with sacrifices

and rites stamps one as uneducated and unreasoning. Gotama Buddha and

his contemporary Mahavira, the founder of Jainism[535]--both of whom

came from the political world of the lower Ganges, east of the old

Brahmanic Culture-field--recognized, as everyone knows, neither the

idea of God nor myth and cult. Of the real teaching of Buddha little

can now be ascertained--for it all appears in the colours of the later

fellah-religion baptized by his name--but one of the unquestionably

authentic ideas concerning “conditioned arising”[536] is the derivation

of suffering _from ignorance_--ignorance, namely, of the “Four Noble

Truths.” This is true rationalism. Nirvana, for them, is a purely

intellectual release and corresponds exactly with the “Autarkeia” and

“Eudaimonia” of the Stoics. It is that condition of the understanding

and waking-consciousness for which Being no longer is.

The great ideal of the educated of such periods is the Sage. The sage

goes back to Nature--to Ferney or Ermenonville, to Attic gardens

or Indian groves--which is the most intellectual way of being a

megalopolitan. The sage is the man of the Golden Mean. His askesis

consists in a judicious depreciation of the world in favour of

meditation. The wisdom of the enlightenment never interferes with

comfort. Moral with the great Myth to back it is always a sacrifice,

a cult, even to extremes of asceticism, even to death; but Virtue

with Wisdom at its back is a sort of secret enjoyment, a superfine

intellectual egoism. And so the ethical teacher who is outside real

religion becomes the Philistine. Buddha, Confucius, Rousseau, are

arch-Philistines, for all the nobility of their ordered ideas, and the

pedantry of the Socratic life-wisdom is insurmountable.

Along with this (shall we call it) scholasticism of sane reason, there

must of inner necessity be a rationalistic mysticism of the educated.

The Western Enlightenment is of English origin and Puritan parentage.

The rationalism of the Continent comes wholly from Locke. In opposition

to it there arose in Germany the Pietists (Herrnhut, 1700, Spener and

Francke, and in Württemberg Oetinger) and in England the Methodists

(Wesley “awakened” by Herrnhut, 1738). It was Luther and Calvin over

again--the English at once organized themselves for a world-movement

and the Germans lost themselves in mid-European conventicles. The

Pietists of Islam are to be found in _Sufism_, which is not of

“Persian” but of common Aramæan origin and in the eighth century spread

all over the Arabian world. Pietists or Methodists, too, are the Indian

lay preachers, who shortly before Buddha’s time were teaching release

from the cycle of life (_sansara_) through immersion in the identity

of Atman and Brahman. But Pietists or Methodists, too, are Lao-tse

and his disciples and--notwithstanding their rationalism--the Cynic

mendicants and itinerant preachers and the Stoic tutors, domestic

chaplains, and confessors of early Hellenism.[537] And Pietism may

ascend even to the peak of rationalist vision, of which Swedenborg is

the great example, which created for Stoics and Sufists whole worlds

of fancy, and by which Buddhism was prepared for its reconstruction

as Mahayana. The expansion of Buddhism and that of Taoism in their

original significations are closely analogous to the Methodist

expansion in America, and it is no accident that they both reached

their full maturity in those regions (lower Ganges and south of the

Yang-tse-kiang) which had cradled the respective Cultures.

VI

Two centuries after Puritanism the mechanistic conception of the world

stands at its zenith. It is the effective religion of the time. Even

those who still thought themselves to be religious in the old sense,

to be “believers in God,” were only mistaking the world in which their

waking-consciousness was mirroring itself. Religious truths were always

in their understanding mechanistic truths, and in general it was only

the habit of traditional words that imparted a colour-wash of myth to

a Nature that was in reality regarded scientifically. Culture is ever

synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with

a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban country-side, is carried

through in the cities of art and intellect, and closes with a finale of

materialism in the world-cities. But even the last chords are strictly

in the key of the whole. There are Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian,

Western materialisms, and each is nothing but the original stock of

myth-shapes, cleared of the elements of experience and contemplative

vision and viewed mechanistically.

Confucianism as reasoned out by Yang-Chu concluded in this sense.

The system of Lakayata was the prolongation of the contempt for a

de-souled world which had been the common characteristic of Gotama

Buddha, Mahavira, and the contemporary Pietists, and which they in turn

had derived from Sankhya atheism. Socrates is alike the heir of the

Sophists and the ancestor of the Cynic itinerants and of Pyrrhonian

skepsis. All are manifestations of the superiority of the megalopolitan

intellect that has done with the irrational for good and all and

despises any waking-consciousness that still knows or acknowledges

mysteries. Gothic men shrank at every step before the fathomless, more

awe-inspiring still as presented in dogmatic truths. But to-day even

the Catholic has arrived at the point of feeling these dogmas as a

successful systematic exposition of the riddle of the universe. The

miracle is regarded as a physical occurrence of a higher order, and

an English bishop professes his belief in the possibility of electric

power and the power of prayer both originating in one homogeneous

nature-system.[538] The belief is belief in force and matter, even if

the words used be “God” and “world,” “Providence” and “man.”

Unique and self-contained, again, is the Faustian materialism, in

the narrower sense of the word. In it the technical outlook upon the

world reached fulfilment. The whole world a dynamic system, exact,

mathematically disposed, capable down to its first causes of being

experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate

it--this is what distinguishes our particular “return to Nature”

from all others. That “Knowledge is Virtue” Confucius also believed,

and Buddha, and Socrates, but “Knowledge is Power” is a phrase that

possesses meaning only within the European-American Civilization.

“Return to nature” here means the elimination of all forces that

stand between the practical intelligence and nature--everywhere

else materialism has contented itself with establishing (by way of

contemplation or logic, as the case may be) supposedly simple units

whose causal play accounts for everything without any residue of

secrets, the supernatural being put down to want of knowledge. But the

grand intellectual myth of Energy and Mass is at the same time a vast

_working hypothesis_. It draws the picture of nature in such a way

that men can _use_ it. The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution,

development, progress, and put into the centre of the system; the Will

is an albumen-process; and all these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism,

Positivism, and what not are elevated into the fitness-moral which is

the beacon of American business men, British politicians, and German

progress-Philistines alike--and turns out, in the last analysis, to be

nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justification by

faith.

Materialism would not be complete without the need of now and again

easing the intellectual tension, by giving way to moods of myth,

by performing rites of some sort, or by enjoying with an inward

light-heartedness the charms of the irrational, the unnatural, the

repulsive, and even, if need be, the merely silly. This tendency, which

is visible enough, even to us, in the times of Meng-tse (372-289) and

in those of the first Buddhist brotherhoods, is present also (and with

the same significance) in Hellenism, of which indeed it is a leading

characteristic. About 312 poetical scholars of the Callimachus type in

Alexandria invented the Serapis-cult and provided it with an elaborate

legend. The Isis-cult in Republican Rome was something very different

both from the emperor-worship that succeeded it and from the deeply

earnest Isis-religion of Egypt; it was a religious pastime of high

society, which at times provoked public ridicule and at times led to

public scandal and the closing of the cult-centres.[539] The Chaldean

astrology was in those days a _fashion_,[540] very far removed from

the genuine Classical belief in oracles and from the Magian faith in

the might of the hour. It was “relaxation,” a “let’s pretend.” And,

over and above this, there were the numberless charlatans and fake

prophets who toured the towns and sought with their pretentious rites

to persuade the half-educated into a renewed interest in religion.

Correspondingly, we have in the European-American world of to-day

the occultist and theosophist fraud, the American Christian Science,

the untrue Buddhism of drawing-rooms, the religious arts-and-crafts

business (brisker in Germany than even in England) that caters for

groups and cults of Gothic or Late Classical or Taoist sentiment.

Everywhere it is just a toying with myths that no one really believes,

a tasting of cults that it is hoped might fill the inner void. The real

belief is always the belief in atoms and numbers, but it requires this

highbrow hocus-pocus to make it bearable in the long run. Materialism

is shallow and honest, mock-religion shallow and dishonest. But the

fact that the latter is possible at all foreshadows a new and genuine

spirit of seeking that declares itself, first quietly, but soon

emphatically and openly, in the civilized waking-consciousness.

This next phase I call the _Second Religiousness_. It appears in

all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as

such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the

non-historical state in which time-periods cease to mean anything. (So

far as the Western Civilization is concerned, therefore, we are still

many generations short of that point.) The Second Religiousness is

the necessary counterpart of Cæsarism, which is the final _political_

constitution of Late Civilizations; it becomes visible, therefore, in

the Augustan Age of the Classical and about the time of Shi-hwang-ti’s

time in China. In both phenomena the creative young strength of the

Early Culture is lacking. But both have their greatness nevertheless.

That of the Second Religiousness consists in a deep piety that fills

the waking-consciousness--the piety that impressed Herodotus in

the (Late) Egyptians and impresses West-Europeans in China, India,

and Islam--and that of Cæsarism consists in its unchained might of

colossal facts. But neither in the creations of this piety nor in the

form of the Roman Imperium is there anything primary and spontaneous.

Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds itself--it is only as if a mist

cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at

first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of

the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young

religiousness--only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts

with Rationalism’s fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the

Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive

religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith,

returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular

syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase.

Every “Age of Enlightenment” proceeds from an unlimited optimism of

the reason--always associated with the type of the megalopolitan--to

an equally unqualified scepticism. The sovereign waking-consciousness,

cut off by walls and artificialities from living nature and the

land about it and under it, cognises nothing outside itself. It

applies criticism to its imaginary world, which it has cleared of

everyday sense-experience, and continues to do so till it has found

the last and subtlest result, the form of the form--itself: namely,

nothing. With this the possibilities of physics as a critical mode

of world-understanding are exhausted, and the hunger for metaphysics

presents itself afresh. But it is not the religious pastimes of

educated and literature-soaked cliques, still less is it the intellect,

that gives rise to the Second Religiousness. Its source is the naïve

belief that arises, unremarked but spontaneous, among the masses

that there is some sort of mystic constitution of actuality (as to

which formal proofs are presently regarded as barren and tiresome

word-jugglery), and an equally naïve heart-need reverently responding

to the myth with a cult. The forms of neither can be foreseen, still

less chosen--they appear of themselves, and as far as we are ourselves

concerned, we are as yet far distant from them.[541] But already the

opinions of Comte and Spencer, the Materialism and the Monism and the

Darwinism, which stirred the best minds of the nineteenth century to

such passion, have become the world-view proper to country cousins.

The Classical philosophy had exhausted its ground by about 250 B.C.

From that time on, “knowledge” was no longer a continually tested

and augmented stock, but a belief therein, due basically to force of

habit, but still able to convince, thanks to an old and well-tried

methodology. In the time of Socrates there had been Rationalism as the

religion of educated men, with, above it, the scholar-philosophy and,

below it, the “superstition” of the masses. Now, philosophy developed

towards an intellectual, and the popular syncretism towards a tangible,

religiousness. The tendency was the same in both, and myth-belief

and piety spread, not downwards, but upwards. Philosophy had much to

receive and little to give. The Stoa had begun in the materialism of

the Sophists and Cynics, and had explained the whole mythology on

allegorical lines, but the prayer to Zeus at table--one of the most

beautiful relics of the Classical Second Religiousness[542]--dates

from as early as Cleanthes (d. 232). In Sulla’s time there was an

upper-class Stoicism that was religious through and through, and a

popular syncretism which combined Phrygian, Syrian, and Egyptian

cults with numberless Classical mysteries that had become almost

forgotten--corresponding exactly to the development of Buddha’s

enlightened wisdom into Hinayana for the learned and Mahayana for the

masses, and to the relation between learned Confucianism and Taoism as

the vessel of Chinese syncretism which it soon became.

Contemporary with the “Positivist” Meng-tse (372-289) there suddenly

began a powerful movement towards alchemy, astrology, and occultism.

It has long been a favourite topic of dispute whether this was

something new or a recrudescence of old Chinese myth-feeling--but

a glance at Hellenism supplies the answer. This syncretism appears

“simultaneously” in the Classical, in India and China, and in popular

Islam. It starts always on rationalist doctrines--the Stoa, Lao-tse,

Buddha--and carries these through with peasant and springtime and

exotic motives of every conceivable sort. From about 200 B.C. the

Classical Syncretism--which must not be confused with that of the

later Magian Pseudomorphosis[543]--raked in motives from Orphism, from

Egypt, from Syria; from 67 B.C. the Chinese brought in Indian Buddhism

in the popular Mahayana form, and the potency of the holy writings

as charms, and the Buddha-figures as fetishes, was thought to be all

the greater for their alien origin. The original doctrine of Lao-tse

disappeared very quickly. At the beginning of Han times (_c._ A.D. 200)

the troops of the Sen had ceased to be “moral representations” and

become kindly beings. The wind-, cloud-, thunder-, and rain-gods came

back. Crowds of cults which purported to drive out the evil spirits

by the aid of the gods acquired a footing. It was in that time that

there arose--doubtless out of some basic principle of pre-Confucian

philosophy--the myth of Pan-ku, the prime principle from which the

series of mythical emperors descended. As we know, the Logos-idea

followed a similar line of development.[544]

The theory and practice of the conduct of life that Buddha taught were

the outcome of world-weariness and intellectual disgusts, and were

wholly unrelated to religious questions. And yet at the very beginning

of the Indian “Imperial” period (250 B.C.) he himself had already

become a seated god-figure; and the Nirvana-theories, comprehensible

only to the learned, were giving place more and more to solid and

tangible doctrines of heaven, hell, and salvation, which were probably

borrowed, as in other syncretisms, from an alien source--namely,

Persian Apocalyptic. Already in Asoka’s time there were eighteen

Buddhist sects. The salvation-doctrine of Mahayana found its first

great herald in the poet-scholar Asvagosha (_c._ 50 B.C.) and its

fulfilment proper in Naganjuna (_c._ A.D. 150). But side by side with

such teaching, the whole mass of proto-Indian mythology came back

into circulation. The Vishnu- and Shiva-religions were already in 300

B.C. in definite shape, and, moreover, in syncretic form, so that the

Krishna and the Rama legends were now transferred to Vishnu. We have

the same spectacle in the Egyptian New Empire, where Amen of Thebes

formed the centre of a vast syncretism, and again in the Arabian

world of the Abbassids, where the folk-religion, with its images of

Purgatory, Hell, Last Judgment, the heavenly Kaaba, Logos-Mohammed,

fairies, saints, and spooks drove pristine Islam entirely into the

background.[545]

There are still in such times a few high intellects like Nero’s tutor

Seneca and his antitype Psellus[546] the philosopher, royal tutor and

politician of Byzantium’s Cæsarism-phase; like Marcus Aurelius the

Stoic and Asoka the Buddhist, who were themselves the Cæsars;[547]

like the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton), whose deeply significant

experiment was treated as heresy and brought to naught by the powerful

Amen-priesthood--a risk that Asoka, too, had, no doubt, to face from

the Brahmins.

But Cæsarism itself, in the Chinese as in the Roman Empire, gave birth

to an emperor-cult, and thereby concentrated Syncretism. It is an

absurd notion that the veneration of the Chinese for the living emperor

is a relic of ancient religion. During the whole course of the Chinese

Culture there were no emperors at all. The rulers of the States were

called Wang (that is, kings), and scarcely a century before the final

victory of the Chinese Augustus Meng-tse wrote--in the vein of our

nineteenth century--“The people is the most important element in the

country; next come the useful gods of the soil and the crops, and least

in importance comes the ruler.” The mythology of the pristine emperors

was without doubt put together by Confucius and his contemporaries,

its constitutional and social-ethical form was dictated by their

rationalist aims, and from this myth the first Chinese Cæsar borrowed

both title and cult-idea. The elevation of men to divinity is the

full-cycle return to the springtime in which gods were converted into

heroes--exactly like these very emperors and the figures of Homer--and

it is a distinguishing trait of almost all religions of this second

degree. Confucius himself was deified in A.D. 57, with an official

cult, and Buddha had been so long before. Al Ghazali (_c._ 1050), who

helped to bring about the “Second Religiousness” of the Islamic world,

is now, in the popular belief, a divine being and is beloved as a saint

and helper. In the philosophy-schools of the Classical there was a

cult of Plato, and of Epicurus, and Alexander’s claim to descent from

Heracles and Cæsar’s to descent from Venus lead directly to the cult of

the _Divus_, in which immemorial Orphic imaginings and family religions

crop up afresh, just as the cult of Hwang-ti contains traits of the

most ancient mythology of China.

But with the coming of the emperor-cults there begins at once, in each

of the two, an attempt to bring the Second Religiousness into fixed

organizations, which, however named--sects, orders, Churches--are

always stiff re-constructions of what had been living forms of the

Springtime, and bear the same relation to these as “caste” bears to

“status.”

There are signs of the tendency even in the Augustan reforms, with

their artificial revival of long-dead city-cults, such as the

rites of the Fratres Arvales, but it is only with the Hellenistic

mystery-religions, or even with Mithraism,[548] that community or

Church organization proper begins, and its development is broken off

in the ensuing downfall of the Classical. The corresponding feature

in Egypt is the theocratic state set up by the priest-kings of Thebes

in the eleventh century. The Chinese analogue is the Tao churches of

the Han period and especially that founded by Chang-lu, which gave

rise to the fearful insurrection of the Yellow Turbans (recalling the

religious provincial rebellions of the Roman Empire), which devastated

whole regions and brought about the fall of the Han dynasty.[549] And

the very counterpart of these ascetic Churches of Taoism, with their

rigidity and wild mythology, is to be found in the late Byzantine

monk-states such as Studion and the autonomous group of monasteries on

Athos, founded in 1100, which are as suggestive of Buddhism as anything

could well be.

In the end Second Religiousness issues in the _fellah-religions_. Here

the opposition between cosmopolitan and provincial piety has vanished

again, as completely as that between primitive and higher Culture.

What this means, the conception of the fellah people, discussed in an

earlier chapter,[550] tells us. Religion becomes entirely historyless;

where formerly decades constituted an epoch, now whole centuries

pass unimportantly, and the ups and downs of superficial changes only

serve to show the unalterable finality of the inner state. It matters

nothing that “Chufucianism” appeared in China (1200) as a variant of

the Confucian state-doctrine, when it appeared, and whether or not

it succeeded. Equally, it signifies nothing that Indian Buddhism,

long become a polytheistic religion of the people, went down before

Neo-Brahmanism (whose great divine, Sankhara, lived about 800), nor

is it of importance to know the date at which the latter passed over

into the Hinduism of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. There always are and

always will be a handful of superlatively intellectual, thoughtful,

and perfectly self-sufficing people, like the Brahmins in India, the

Mandarins in China, and the Egyptian priests who amazed Herodotus.

But the fellah-religion itself is once more primitive through and

through--the animal-cults of the Egyptian XXVIth dynasty; the composite

of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism that constitutes the state

religion of China; the Islam of the present-day East. The religion of

the Aztecs was very likely another case in point, for, as Cortez found

it, it seems remote indeed from the intensely intellectualized religion

of the Mayas.

VII

The religion of Jewry, too, is a fellah-religion since the time of

Jehuda ben Halevi who (like his Islamic teacher, Al Ghazali) regarded

scientific philosophy with an unqualified scepticism, and in the

_Kuzari_ (1140) refused to it any rôle save that of handmaid of the

orthodox theology. This corresponds exactly to the transition from

Middle Stoicism to the later form of the Imperial period, and to the

extinction of Chinese speculation under the Western Han Dynasty. Still

more significant is the figure of Moses Maimonides,[551] who in 1175

collected the entire dogmatic material of Judaism, as something fixed

and complete, in a great work of the type of the Chinese _Li-ki_,

entirely regardless of whether the particular items still retained

any meaning or not.[552] Neither in this period nor in any other is

Judaism unique in religious history, though from the view-point that

the Western Culture has taken up on its own ground, it may seem so. Nor

is it peculiar to Jewry that, unperceived by those who bear it, its

name is for ever changing in meaning, for the same has happened, step

by step, in the Persian story.

In their “Merovingian” period--approximately the last five centuries

before the birth of Christ--both Jewry and Persia evolve from tribal

groups into nations of Magian cast, without land, without unity of

origin, and (even so soon) with the characteristic ghetto mode of life

that endures unchanged to-day for the Jews of Brooklyn and the Parsees

of Bombay alike.

In the Springtime (first five centuries of the Christian era) this

landless Consensus spread geographically from Spain to Shantung. This

was the Jewish Age of Chivalry and its “Gothic” blossoming-time of

religious creative-force. The later Apocalyptic, the Mishnah, and also

primitive Christianity (which was not cast off till after Trajan’s and

Hadrian’s time) are creations of this nation. It is well known that in

those days the Jews were peasants, artisans, and dwellers in little

towns, and “big business” was in the hands of Egyptians, Greeks, and

Romans--that is, members of the Classical world.

About 500[553] begins the Jewish Baroque, which Western observers are

accustomed to regard, very one-sidedly, as part of the picture of

Spain’s age of glory. The Jewish Consensus, like the Persian, Islamic,

and Byzantine, now advances to an urban and intellectual awareness,

and thenceforward it is master of the forms of city-economics and

city-science. Tarragona, Toledo, and Granada are predominantly Jewish

cities. Jews constitute an essential element in Moorish high society.

Their finished forms, their _esprit_, their knightliness, amazed the

Gothic nobility of the Crusades, which tried to imitate them; but the

diplomacy also, and the war-management and the administration of the

Moorish cities would all have been unthinkable without the Jewish

aristocracy, which was every whit as thoroughbred as the Islamic.

As once in Arabia there had been a Jewish _Minnesang_, so now here

there was a high literature of enlightened science. It was under the

guidance of the Rabbi Isaac Hassan, and by the hand of Jewish and

Islamic as well as Christian savants, that Alfonso X’s new work on

the planets was prepared (_c._ 1250);[554] in other words, it was an

achievement of Magian and not of Faustian world-thought.[555] But

Spain and Morocco after all contained but a very small fraction of

the Jewish Consensus, and even this Consensus itself had not merely a

worldly but also (and predominantly) a spiritual significance. In it,

too, there occurred a Puritan movement, which rejected the Talmud and

tried to get back to the pure Torah. The community of the Qaraites,

preceded by many a forerunner, arose about 760 in northern Syria, the

selfsame area which gave birth a century earlier to the Paulician

iconoclasts and a century later to the Sufism of Islam--three Magian

tendencies whose inner relationship is unmistakable. The Qaraites, like

the Puritans of all other Cultures, were combated by both orthodoxy

and enlightenment. Rabbinical counterblasts appeared from Cordova

and Fez to southern Arabia and Persia. But in that period appeared

also--an outcome of “Jewish Sufism,” and suggestive in places of

Swedenborg--the _chef-d’œuvre_ of rational mysticism, the Yesirah,

germane in its Kabbalistic root-ideas to Byzantine image-symbolism

and the contemporary magic of Greek “second-degree Christianity,” and

equally so to the folk-religion of Islam.

But an entirely new situation was created when, from about the year

1000, the Western portion of the Consensus found itself suddenly in

the field of the young Western Culture. The Jews, like the Parsees,

the Byzantines, and the Moslems, had become by then civilized and

cosmopolitan, whereas the German-Roman world lived in the townless

land, and the settlements that had just come (or were coming)

into existence around monasteries and market-places were still

many generations short of possessing souls of their own. While

the Jews were already almost fellaheen, the Western peoples were

still almost primitives. The Jew could not comprehend the Gothic

inwardness, the castle, the Cathedral; nor the Christian the Jew’s

superior, almost cynical, intelligence and his finished expertness

in “money-thinking.” There was mutual hate and contempt, due not

to race-distinction, but to _difference of phase_. Into all the

hamlets and country towns the Jewish Consensus built its essentially

megalopolitan--proletarian--ghettos. The _Judengasse_ is a thousand

years in advance of the Gothic town. Just so, in Jesus’s days,

the Roman towns stood in the midst of the villages on the Lake of

Genesareth.

But these young nations were, besides, bound up with the soil and the

idea of a fatherland, and the landless “Consensus,” which was cemented,

not by deliberate organization, but by a wholly unconscious, wholly

metaphysical impulse--an expression of the Magian world-feeling in its

simplest and directest form--appeared to them as something uncanny

and incomprehensible. It was in this period that the legend of the

Wandering Jew arose. It meant a good deal for a Scottish monk to visit

a Lombard monastery, and nostalgia soon took him home again, but when

a rabbi of Mainz--in 1000 the seat of the most important Talmudic

seminary of the West--or of Salerno betook himself to Cairo or Merv

or Basra, he was at home in every ghetto. In this tacit cohesion lay

the very idea of the Magian nation[556]--although the contemporary

West was unaware of the fact, it was for the Jews, as for the Greeks

of the period and the Parsees and Islam, State and Church and people

all in one. This State had its own jurisprudence and (what Christians

never perceived) its own public life,[557] and despised the surrounding

world of the host-peoples as a sort of outland; and it was a veritable

treason-trial that expelled Spinoza and Uriel Acosta--an event of which

these host-peoples could not possibly grasp the under meaning. And in

1799 the leading thinker among the Eastern Hasidim, Senior Salman, was

handed over by the rabbinical opposition to the Petersburg Government

as though to a foreign state.

Jewry of the West-European group had entirely lost the relation to

the open land which had still existed in the Moorish period of Spain.

There were no more peasants. The smallest ghetto was a fragment,

however miserable, of megalopolis, and its inhabitants (like those

of hardened India and China) split into castes--the Rabbi is the

Brahmin or Mandarin of the ghetto--and a coolie-mass characterized

by civilized, cold, superior intelligence and an undeviating eye to

business. But this phenomenon, again, is not unique if our historical

sense takes in the wider horizon, for _all_ Magian nations have been in

this condition since the Crusade period. The Parsee in India possesses

exactly the same business-power as the Jews in the European-American

world and the Armenians and Greeks in southern Europe. The same

phenomenon occurs in every other Civilization, when it pushes into a

younger _milieu_--witness the Chinese in California (where they are the

targets of a true Anti-Semitism of western America), in Java, and in

Singapore; that of the Indian trader in East Africa; and that of _the

Romans in the Early Arabian World_. In the last instance, indeed, the

conditions were the exact reverse of those of to-day, for the “Jews” of

those days were the Romans, and the Armæan felt for them an apocalyptic

hatred that is very closely akin to our West-European Anti-Semitism.

The outbreak of 88, in which, at a sign from Mithridates, a hundred

thousand Roman business-people were murdered by the exasperated

population of Asia Minor, was a veritable _pogrom_.

Over and above these oppositions there was that of race, which

passed from contempt into hate in proportion as the Western Culture

itself caught up with the Civilization and the “difference of

age,” expressed in the way of life and the increasing primacy of

intelligence, became smaller. But all this has nothing to do with the

silly catchwords “Aryan” and “Semite” that have been borrowed from

philology. The “Aryan” Persians and Armenians are in our eyes entirely

indistinguishable from the Jews, and even in South Europe and the

Balkans there is almost no bodily difference between the Christian

and Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish nation is, like every other nation

of the Arabian Culture, the result of an immense _mission_, and up to

well within the Crusades it was changed and changed again by accessions

and secessions _en masse_.[558] One part of Eastern Jewry conforms

in bodily respects to the Christian inhabitants of the Caucasus,

another to the South-Russian Tatars, and a large portion of Western

Jewry to the North African Moors. What has mattered in the West more

than any other distinction is the difference _between the race-ideal

of the Gothic springtime_,[559] which has bred its human type, and

that of the Sephardic Jew, which first formed itself in the ghettos

of the West and was likewise the product of a particular spiritual

breeding and training under exceedingly hard external conditions--to

which, doubtless, we must add the effectual spell of the land and

people about him, and his metaphysical defensive reaction to that

spell, especially after the loss of the Arabic language had made this

part of the nation a self-contained world. This feeling of being

“different” is the more potent on both sides, the more breed the

individual possesses. It is _want_ of race, and nothing else, that

makes intellectuals--philosophers, doctrinaires, Utopists--incapable

of understanding the depth of this metaphysical hatred, which is the

beat-difference of two currents of being manifested as an unbearable

dissonance, a hatred that may become tragic for both, the same hatred

as has dominated the Indian Culture in setting the Indian of race

against the Sudra. During the Gothic age this difference is deep and

religious, and the object of hatred is the Consensus as religion;

only with the beginning of the Western Civilization does it become

materialist, and begin to attack Jewry on its intellectual and business

sides, on which the West suddenly finds itself confronted by an even

challenger.

But the deepest element of separation and bitterness has been one of

which the full tragedy has been least understood. While Western man,

from the days of the Saxon emperors to the present, has (in the most

significant sense of the words) _lived_ his history, and lived it with

a consciousness of it that no other Culture can parallel, the Jewish

Consensus ceased to have a history at all.[560] Its problems were

solved, its inner form was complete, conclusive, and unalterable. For

it, as for Islam, the Greek Church, and the Parsees, centuries ceased

to mean anything, and consequently no one belonging inwardly to the

Consensus can even begin to comprehend the passion with which Faustians

livingly experience the short crowded epochs in which their history

and destiny take decisive turns--the beginning of the Crusades, the

Reformation, the French Revolution, the German Wars of Liberation,

and each and every turning-point in the existence of the several

peoples. All this, for the Jew, lies thirty generations back. Outside

him history on the grand style flowed on and past. Epochs succeeded

to epochs, every century witnessed fundamental human changes, but in

the ghetto and in the souls of its denizens all stood still. And even

when he regarded himself as a member of the people amongst whom he

sojourned and took part in their good and evil fortune--as happened in

so many countries in 1914--he lived these experiences, not really as

something _his own_, but as a partisan, a supporter; he judged them

as an interested spectator, and hence it is just the deepest meanings

of the struggle that must ever remain hidden from him. A Jewish

cavalry-general fought in the Thirty Years’ War (he lies buried in the

old Jewish cemetery at Prague[561])--but what did the ideas of Luther

or Loyola mean to him? What did the Byzantines--near relatives of the

Jews--comprehend of the Crusades? Such things are among the tragic

necessities of the higher history that consists in the life-courses

of individual Cultures, and often have they repeated themselves. The

Romans, then an ageing people, cannot possibly have understood what

was at issue for the Jews in the trial of Jesus or the rising of

Barcochebas.[562] The European-American world has displayed a complete

incomprehension of the fellah-revolutions of Turkey (1908) and China

(1911); the inner life and thought of these peoples, and consequently,

even their notions of state and sovereignty (the Caliph in the one, the

Son of Heaven in the other) being of an utterly different cast and,

therefore, a sealed book, the course of events could neither be weighed

up, nor even reckoned upon in advance. The member of an alien Culture

can be a spectator, and therefore also a descriptive historian of the

past, but he can never be a statesman, a man who feels the future

working in him. If he does not possess the material power to enable

him to act in the cadre of his own Culture, ignoring or manipulating

those of the alien (which, of course, may occur, as with the Romans

in the young East or Disraeli in England), he stands helpless in the

midst of events. The Roman and the Greek always mentally projected the

life-conditions of his Polis into the alien event; the modern European

always regards alien Destinies in terms of constitution, parliament,

and democracy, although the application of such ideas to other Cultures

is ridiculous and meaningless; and the Jew of the Consensus follows

the history of the present (which is nothing but that of the Faustian

Civilization spread over continents and oceans) with the fundamental

feelings of Magian mankind, even when he himself is firmly convinced of

the Western character of his thought.

As every Magian Consensus is non-territorial and geographically

unlimited, it involuntarily sees in all conflicts concerning the

_Faustian_ ideas of fatherland, mother tongue, ruling house, monarchy,

constitution, a return from forms that are thoroughly alien (therefore

burdensome and meaningless) to him towards forms matching with his own

nature. Hence the word “international,” whether it be coupled with

socialism, pacificism, or capitalism, can excite him to enthusiasm,

but what he hears in that word is _the essence of his landless and

boundless Consensus_. While for the European-American democracy

constitutional struggles and revolutions mean an evolution towards the

Civilized ideal, for him they mean (as he almost never consciously

realizes) the breaking-down of all that is of other build than himself.

Even when the force of the Consensus in him is broken and the life

of his host-people exercises an outward attraction upon him to the

point of an induced patriotism, yet the party that he supports is

always that of which the aims are most nearly comparable with the

Magian essence. Hence in Germany he is a democrat and in England

(like the Parsee in India) an imperialist. It is exactly the same

misunderstanding as when West Europeans regard Young Turks and Chinese

reformers as kindred spirits--that is, as “constitutionalists.” If

there is inward relationship, a man affirms even where he destroys; if

inward alienness, his effect is negative even where his desire is to be

constructive. What the Western Culture has destroyed, by reform-efforts

of its own type where it has had power, hardly bears thinking of; and

Jewry has been equally destructive where it has intervened. The sense

of the inevitableness of this reciprocal misunderstanding leads to the

appalling hatred that settles deep in the blood and, fastening upon

visible marks like race, mode of life, profession, speech, leads both

sides to waste, ruin, and bloody excesses wherever these conditions

occur.[563]

This applies also, and above all, to the religiousness of the Faustian

world, which feels itself to be threatened, hated, and undermined by

an alien metaphysic in its midst. From the reforms of Hugh of Cluny

and St. Bernard and the Lateran Council of 1215 to Luther, Calvin, and

Puritanism and thence to the Age of Enlightenment, what a tide flowed

through our waking-consciousness, when for the Jewish religion history

had long ceased altogether! Within the West-European Consensus we see

Joseph Qaro in his _Schulehan Arukh_ (1565) restating the Maimonides

material in another form, and this could equally well have been

done in 1400 or 1800, or for that matter not at all. In the fixity

of modern Islam of Byzantine Christianity since the Crusades (and,

equally, of the life of Late China and of Late Egypt) all is formal

and rolled even, not only the food-prohibitions, the prayer-runes, the

phylacteries, but also the Talmudic casuistry, which is fundamentally

the same as that applied for centuries to the Vendidad in Bombay and

the Koran in Cairo. The mysticism, too, of Jewry (which is _pure

Sufism_) has remained, like that of Islam, unaltered since the

Crusades; and in the last centuries it has produced three more saints

in the sense of Oriental Sufism--though to recognize them as such we

have to see through a colour-wash of Western thought-forms. Spinoza,

with his thinking in substances instead of forces and his thoroughly

Magian dualism, is entirely comparable with the last stragglers of

Islamic philosophy such as Murtada and Shirazi. He makes use of the

notions of his Western Baroque armoury, living himself into mode of

imagination of that _milieu_ so thoroughly as to deceive even himself,

but below the surface movements of his soul he remains the unchanged

descendant of Maimonides and Avicenna and Talmudic “_more geometrico_”

methodology. In Baal Shem, the founder of the Hasidim sect (born in

Volhynia about 1698), a true Messiah arose. His wanderings through

the world of the Polish ghettos teaching and performing miracles are

comparable only with the story of primitive Christianity;[564] here

was a movement that had its sources in ancient currents of Magian,

Kabbalistic mysticism, that gripped a large part of Eastern Jewry and

was undoubtedly a potent fact in the religious history of the Arabian

Culture; and yet, running its course as it did in the midst of an alien

mankind, it passed practically unnoticed by it. The peaceful battle

that Baal Shem waged for God-immanent against the Talmudic pharisees

of his time, his Christlike figure, the wealth of legends that were

rapidly woven about his person and the persons of his disciples--all

this is of the pure Magian spirit, and at bottom as alien to us of

the West as primitive Christianity itself. The thought-processes of

Hasidist writings are to non-Jews practically unintelligible, and so

also is the ritual. In the excitement of the service some fall into

convulsions and others begin to dance like the dervishes of Islam.[565]

The original teaching of Baal Shem was developed by one of the

disciples in Zaddikism, and this too, which was a belief in successive

divine embassies of saints (Zaddiks), whose mere proximity brought

salvation, has obvious kinship with Islamic Mahdism and still more with

the Shiite doctrine of the imams in whom the “Light of the Prophet”

takes up its abode. Another disciple, Solomon Maimon--of whom a

remarkable autobiography exists--stepped from Baal Shem to Kant (whose

abstract kind of thought has always possessed an immense attraction for

Talmudic intellects). The third is Otto Weininger, whose moral dualism

is a purely Magian conception and whose death in a spiritual struggle

of essentially Magian experience is one of the noblest spectacles ever

presented by a Late religiousness.[566] Something of the sort Russians

may be able to experience, but neither the Classical nor the Faustian

soul is capable of it.

In the “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century the Western Culture

in turn becomes megalopolitan and intellectual, and so, suddenly,

accessible to the intelligentsia of the Consensus. And the latter, thus

dumped into the middle of an epoch corresponding, for them, to the

remote past of a long-expired Sephardic life-current, were inevitably

stirred by echo-feelings, but these echoes were of the _critical and

negative side only_, and the tragically unnatural outcome was that

a cohesion already historically complete and incapable of organic

progress was swept into the big movement of the host-peoples, which

it shook, loosened, displaced, and vitiated to its depths. For, for

the Faustian spirit, the Enlightenment was a step forward along its

own road--a step over débris, no doubt, but still affirmative at

bottom--whereas for Jewry it was destruction and nothing else, the

demolition of an alien structure that it did not understand. And

this is why we so often see the spectacle--paralleled by the case

of the Parsees in India, of the Chinese and Japanese in a Christian

_milieu_, and by modern Americans in China--of enlightenment, pushed

to the point of cynicism and unqualified atheism, opposing an alien

religion, while the fellah-practices of its own folk go on wholly

unaffected. There are Socialists who superficially--and yet quite

sincerely--combat every sort of religion, and yet in their own case

follow the food-prohibitions and routine prayers and phylacteries

with an anxious exactitude. More frequent actually is inward lapse

from the Consensus qua creed--the spectacle that is presented to us

by the Indian student who, after an English university-training in

Locke and Mill, acquires the same cynical contempt for Indian and

Western faiths alike and must himself be crushed under the ruins of

both. Since the Napoleonic era the old-civilized Consensus has mingled

unwelcome with the new-civilized Western “society” of the cities and

has taken their economic and scientific methods into use with the cool

superiority of age. A few generations later, the Japanese, also a very

old intellect, did the same, and probably with still greater success.

Yet another example is afforded by the Carthaginians, a rear-guard of

the Babylonian Civilization, who, already highly developed when the

Classical Culture was still in the Etrusco-Doric infancy, ended by

surrendering to Late Hellenism[567]--petrified in an end-state in all

that concerned religion and art, but far superior to the Greeks and

Romans as men of business, and hated accordingly.

To-day this Magian nation, with its ghetto and its religion, itself

is in danger of disappearing--not because the metaphysics of the two

Cultures come closer to one another (for that is impossible), but

because the intellectualized upper stratum of each side is ceasing to

be metaphysical at all. It has lost every kind of inward cohesion,

and what remains is simply a cohesion for practical questions. The

lead that this nation has enjoyed from its long habituation to

thinking in business terms becomes ever less and less (_vis-à-vis_ the

American, it has already almost gone), and with the loss of it will

go the last potent means of keeping up a Consensus that has fallen

regionally into parts. In the moment when the civilized methods of the

European-American world-cities shall have arrived at full maturity, the

destiny of Jewry--at least of the Jewry in our midst (that of Russia is

another problem)--will be accomplished.

Islam has _soil_ under it. It has practically absorbed the Persian,

Jewish, Nestorian, and Monophysite Consensus into itself.[568] The

relic of the Byzantine nation, the modern Greeks, also occupy their

own land. The relic of the Parsees in India dwells in the midst of

the stiffened forms of a yet older and more fellahized Civilization

and is thereby secured in its footing. But the West-European-American

part of the Jewish Consensus, which has drawn to itself and bound to

its destiny most of the other parts of Jewry, has now fallen into the

machinery of a young Civilization. Detached from any land-footing

since, centuries ago, it saved its life by shutting itself off in the

ghetto, it is fragmented and faced with dissolution. But that is a

Destiny, not _in_ the Faustian Culture, but of the Magian.