[166] _Gesch. d. Deutsch. Kunst_ (1919), pp. 14, et seq.
[167] This practice of inscription survives till deep into the
Civilization. Even in 1914 the guns of the German Army, true products
of the advanced machine-shop though they were, carried a Latin threat
to the foe. From the magic rune of the blade it is a step to the motto
on the shield, and then to the motto alone as unity-charm of the
regiment or the Order.--_Tr._
[168] W. Altmann, _Die ital. Rundbauten_ (1906).
[169] A striking case in point is the Roman military camp. See Vol. I
(English edition), p. 185, foot-note.--_Tr._
[170] Bulle, _Orchomenos_, pp. 26, et seq.; Noack, _Ovalhaus und
Palast in Kreta_, pp. 53, et seq. The house-plans still traceable in
Latin times in the Ægean and Asia Minor may perhaps allow us to order
our notions of human conditions in the pre-Classical period; but the
linguistic remains, never.
[171] _Medieval Rhodesia_ (London, 1906).
[172] Cf. Ch. X.
[173] Though magic or prestige may of course be involved in their
ornamentation, these are supervening and not radical virtues.--_Tr._
[174] In this connexion it ought to be someone’s business to undertake
physiognomic studies upon the massy, thoroughly peasantish, Roman
busts; the portraits of Early Gothic; those of the Renaissance, already
visibly urban; and, most of all, the polite English portraiture from
the late-eighteenth century onward. The great galleries of “ancestors”
contain an endless wealth of material.
[175] The sudden fear of some animal or object seen, believed to result
in her child’s bearing the mark of it. Cf. Jacob and the speckled
cattle (Genesis xxx, 37). The attitude of biologists to this question
is not negative, but non-committal.--_Tr._
[176] J. Ranke, _Der Mensch_ (1912), II, p. 205.
[177] This suggestive sentence should, of course, be read with its
reservation. The cranial evidences of Crete are highly illustrative in
this connexion; they would not indeed be trusted by a modern historian
without weighty collateral evidence, but here this evidence exists.
Up to the latter part of Middle Minoan, the “long” head predominated
heavily, not only from the outset, but increasingly as the Culture
rose, until it included two-thirds of the whole, intermediates forming
a quarter and “short” heads a mere handful. But from about the time
of the catastrophic fall of Late Minoan II, the long heads fall to
a startlingly low figure, while intermediates account for half,
and short heads for more than a third. It marks the end of Minoan
Civilization and the coming of the Achæans. But just as the Minoan
skull held its own throughout the Minoan Age, so now, after its fall,
the short head maintained itself, as stated in the text, through
all subsequent vicissitudes, from the “Sea-peoples” through Roman,
Arab, and Turk, to this day. Thus the Cretan landscape has had two
skull-types successively; but the change from one to the other occurred
in connexion with an immense cataclysm, nothing less than the collapse
of a Civilization. The rough deduction that seems to emerge from this
case is that a great Culture holds its skull, no doubt in the course of
its striving towards ideal physical type of its own (see p. 127), but
that where that major organism does not exist, the skull endures as the
land endures and the peasant endures. This applies also to the Alpine
region, which has received the deposit of migrations, but has never
been the centre of a high Culture.--_Tr._
[178] Cf. D. Randall-MacIver, _The Etruscans_ (1928), Ch. I.--_Tr._
[179] Art is fully developed in the animals. So far as man can get
at it by way of analogy, it consists for them in rhythmic movement
(“dance”) and sound-formation (“song”). But this is by no means the
limit of artistic impression _on_ the animal itself.
[180] Jesus says to the Seventy whom he is sending out on mission: “And
salute no man on the way” (Luke x, 4). The ceremonial of greeting on
the high-road is so complicated that people in a hurry have to omit it.
A. Bertholet, _Kulturgeschichte Israels_ (1919), p. 162.
[181] Exekias--represented in the British Museum by his “Achilles
and Penthesilea” (_Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Ceramics,”
Plate I)--stands at the end of Black Figure as the master of
the possibilities of refinement in it--on the verge of the
style-change to Red Figure, yet apart from it. Sebastian Bach is his
“contemporary.”--_Tr._
[182] “All forms, even those that are most felt, contain an element of
untruth” (Goethe). In systematic philosophy the intent of the thinker
coincides neither with the written words nor with the understanding
of his readers, as it consists in his thinking meanings into words
in the course of using the words themselves (_da es ein Denken in
Wortbedeutungen ist, im Verlauf der Darstellung mit sich selbst_).
[183] Jespersen deduces language from poesy, dance, and particularly
courtship. _Progress in Language_ (1894), p. 357.
[184] See Vol. I, p. 80.--_Tr._
[185] Sentence-like complexes of sound are known also to the dog.
When the Australian dingo reverted from domestication to the wild
state, he reverted also from the house-dog’s bark to the wolf’s
howl--a phenomenon that indicates a transition to very much simpler
sound-signs, but has nothing to do with “words.”
[186] The gesture-languages of to-day (Delbrück, _Grundfragen d.
Sprachforsch._, pp. 49, et seq., with reference to the work of Jorio
on the gestures of the Neapolitans) without exception presuppose
word-language and are completely dependent upon its intellectual
systematism. Examples: the mimicry of the actor, and the language
which the American Indians have formed for themselves for the purpose
of mutually understanding one another in spite of extreme differences
and fluidity in the verbal languages of the various tribes. Wundt
(_Völkerpsychologie_, I, p. 212) quotes the following to show how
complicated sentences can be handled in this language: “White soldiers,
led by an officer of high rank, but little intelligence, took the
Mescalero Indians prisoners.”
[187] See Vol. I, p. 172.--_Tr._
[188] The case of voice-differentiations of the same word in Chinese is
not analogous. It arose only out of scholars’ work in the later phases
of the Chinese Civilization as understood in this work. And it is a
mechanical expedient and not a structural character--i.e., it lacks the
_polarity_ mentioned in the text. Voice-management distinguishes, not
“great” from “small,” but “pig” from “God,” “bamboo” from “to dwell.”
English students will find a clear and understandable account of this
and other Chinese differential devices in Karlgren’s little book:
_Sound and Symbol in Chinese_ (English translation, 1923).--_Tr._
[189] Possibly connected with this is the _emphatic antithesis_
characterizing many of our proverbs and everyday idioms--e.g., “up hill
and down dale” (“_par monts et vaux_,” “_bergauf bergab_”), meaning
hardly more than “everywhere.”--_Tr._
[190] _Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus_, 1910.
[191] See the article “Bantu Languages,” by Sir H. H. Johnston, _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[192] Even calling something “invisible” is a definition of it under
the light-aspect.
[193] Only technics are entirely true, for here the words are merely
the key to actuality, and the sentences are continually modified
until they are, not “truth,” but actuality. A hypothesis claims, not
rightness, but usefulness.
[194] See pp. 29, et seq.
[195] The English reader may refer to Karlgren’s _Sound and Symbol in
Chinese_, already mentioned, for details.--_Tr._
[196] See the article “Indo-European Languages,” _Ency. Brit._, XI
ed.--_Tr._
[197] Translation, it must be remembered, is normally from older into
younger linguistic conditions.
[198] See p. 140 above.--_Tr._
[199] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. XVI, p. 251b.--_Tr._
[200] See the articles “Sanskrit” and “Indo-European Languages,” _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[201] P. Jensen, _Sitz. Preuss. Akademie_ (1919), pp. 367, et seq.
[202] L. Hahn, _Rom und Romanismus im griech-röm. Osten_ (1906).
[203] See the article “Book-keeping” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[204] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. des Alt._, I, §§ 455, 465.
[205] See below.
[206] Radio broadcasting does not controvert this. Its characteristic
quality is not (as is often supposed) dissemination to vast numbers
irrespective of physical distance, but a special intimacy of address to
the listening individual.--_Tr._
[207] See the article “Semitic Language,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[208] Similarly the modern Jews of the Dispersion write Yiddish, which
is a modified German, in Hebrew characters.--_Tr._
[209] See Lidzbarski, _Sitz. Berl. Akad._ (1916), p. 1218. There is
plentiful material in M. Miese, _Die Gesetze der Schriftgeschichte_
(1919).
[210] P. Kretschmer, in Gercke-Norden, _Einl. i. d.
Altertumswissenschaft_, I, p. 551.
[211] See the articles “Romance Languages” and “Latin Language,” _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[212] Cf. p. 122.
[213] For this reason I am one of those who believe that, even quite
late, Etruscan still played a very important part in the colleges of
the Roman priesthood.
[214] Precisely for this reason it has to be recognized that the
Homeric poems, which were first fixed in the colonization period,
can only give us an urban literary language and not the courtly
conversation-language in which they were originally declaimed.
[215] So much so that the workers of the great cities call themselves
_the_ People, thereby excluding the bourgeoisie, with which no
community feeling conjoins them. The bourgeoisie of 1789 did exactly
the same.
[216] The dominant nucleus within the Spartan ensemble.--_Tr._
[217] Ed. Meyer, _Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen_ (1912), pp.
128, et seq. [An extended summary of Mormon history will be found in
the article “Mormons,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[218] Ex-mercenaries of Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse, who seized and
settled in Messina. The questions arising out of this act precipitated
the First Punic War.--_Tr._
[219] A still more celebrated case is the “ambulatory Polis” formed by
Xenophon’s Ten Thousand.--_Tr._
[220] And in numerous Classical instances.--_Tr._
[221] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. IX, p. 860.--_Tr._
[222] In Macedonia, in the nineteenth century, Serbs, Bulgars, and
Greeks all founded schools for the anti-Turkish population. If it
happens that a village has been taught Serb, even the next generation
consists of fanatical Serbs. The present strength of the “nations” is
thus merely a consequence of previous school-policy.
[223] For Beloch’s scepticism concerning the reputed Dorian migration
see his _Griechische Geschichte_, I, 2, Section VIII. [A brief account
of the question, by J. L. Myres, is in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article
“Dorians.”--_Tr._]
[224] C. Mehlis, _Die Berberfrage_ (_Archiv für Anthropologie_ 39, pp.
249, et seq.) where relations between North German and Mauretanian
ceramics, and even resemblances of toponymy (rivers, mountains) are
dealt with. The old pyramid buildings of West Africa are closely
related, on the one hand, to the Nordic dolmens (_Hünengräber_) of
Holstein and, on the other, to the graves of the Old Kingdom (some
illustrations in L. Frobenius, _Der kleinafrikanische Grabbau_, 1916).
[225] _Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt_ (1886).
[226] _Geschichte der Kriegskunst_ (from 1900).
[227] Rameses III, who defeated them, portrayed their expedition in the
relief of Medinet Habet. W. M. Müller, _Asien und Europa_, p. 366.
[228] Which, therefore, have discovered for themselves the nonsensical
designation “aristocracy of intellect” (_Geistesadel_).
[229] Although--or should we say “thus”?--Rome accorded citizenship
to freedmen, who in general were of wholly alien blood, and sons of
ex-slaves were admitted to the Senate even by Appius Claudius the
Censor in 310. One of them, Flavius, had already been curule ædile.
[230] See articles “Persia (history: ancient),” “Behistun,”
“Cuneiform,” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., or indeed almost any work upon
Babylonian and Persian antiquities.--_Tr._
[231] Sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald in both languages.
The manuscript of the oath, however, is later--say, 950.--_Tr._
[232] “_Die ältesten datierten Zeugnisse der iranischen Sprache_”
(_Zeitschr. f. vgl. Sprachf._ 42, p. 26.)
[233] See above, p. 145.
[234] Ed. Meyer, op. cit., pp. 1, et seq.
[235] Compare the absorption of the Norman conquerors into England and
the subsequent development of an English aristocracy.--_Tr._
[236] For what follows, cf. Ch. VII-IX.
[237] _Geschichte des Altertums_, I, § 590, et seq.
[238] Andreas and Wackernagel, _Nachrichten der Göttingischen
Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften_ (1911), p. 1, et seq. [On the subject
generally, see articles by K. Geldner, “Zend-Avesta” and “Zoroaster,”
and by Ed. Meyer, “Parthia,” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[239] See, further, below.
[240] Dynasty I.--_Tr._
[241] Albertus Magnus; St. Thomas Aquinas; Grosseteste, and Roger
Bacon.--_Tr._
[242] Cf. p. 105.
[243] Cf. Ch. X.
[244] See p. 60 above. The slave did not belong to the nation. On this
account the enrolment of non-citizens in the army of a city, which on
occasions of dire crisis was inevitable, was always felt as a profound
blow to the national idea.
[245] Even in the Iliad we can perceive the tendency to the
nation-feeling in the small, and even the smallest, aggregates.
[246] And she had rarely to deal with anything more formidable than a
loose partial confederacy. Often Etruscan cities were in alliance with
Rome against other Etruscan cities.--_Tr._
[247] It is not to be overlooked that both Plato and Aristotle in
their political writings were unable to conceive of the ideal people
otherwise than in the Polis form. But it was equally natural for the
eighteenth-century thinkers to regard “the Ancients” as nations after
the fashion of Shaftesbury and Montesquieu--it is _we_ their successors
who ought not to have stayed on that note.
[248] Mommsen described the Roman Empire as a “universal Empire founded
upon municipal autonomy.” And even Alexander’s empire was originally
conceived, and to a great extent actually organized, in this spirit.
See P. Jouguet, _L’Impérialisme macédonien_ (1926), Ch. IV.--_Tr._
[249] See p. 67.
[250] F. N. Finck, _Die Sprachstämme des Erdkreises_ (1915), pp. 29, et
seq.
[251] About the end of the second century of our era.
[252] See foot-note, p. 197, et seq.--_Tr._
[253] A loose group of Edomite tribes which, with Moabites,
Amalekites, Ishmaelites, and others, thus constituted a fairly uniform
Hebrew-speaking population.
[254] See p. 167.
[255] Aristotle says that “philosophers are called Calani among the
Indians, and Jews among the Syrians.” Exactly the same is stated by
Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador at Pataliputra, of Brahmins and
Jews.--_Tr._
[256] The district south of Lake Van, of which the capital was Arbela,
the old home of the goddess Ishtar.
[257] As evidenced by the Falasha, the black Jews of Abyssinia.
[258] _Arch. f. Anthrop._, Vol. XIX.
[259] _Zeitschr. f. Ethnol._ (1919).
[260] _Digesta_, 50, 15.
[261] Geffcken, _Der Ausgang des griech.-röm. Heidentum_ (1920), p. 57
[English readers may refer to the article “Neoplatonism” and shorter
articles under the personal names, in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[262] See Vol. I, pp. 63, 71.--_Tr._
[263] Which we translate by “Gentiles,” but which literally means “the
nations” or “peoples.”--_Tr._
[264] See the article “Nestorians,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[265] See the articles “Jews” (§ 43), “Exilarch,” and “Gaon,” _Ency.
Brit._, XI. ed. In Europe, too, far into the Dispersion, there are
rabbis recognized by the State as governors of their communities, such
as the famous Rabbi Löw of Prague (1513-1609).--_Tr._
[266] It may not be at all fanciful to connect the Reception of
“Roman” law in Germany and the rise of the doctrine of _cujus regio,
ejus religio_ which played so great a part in the religious wars and
treaties of our sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At any rate,
“practical politics” so-called provides an inadequate motive by itself
to account for the latter. Considering it in contrast to the notion of
Mortmain, and having regard to the intensity of religious belief in
many of the princes who applied it, the idea appears as something much
more positive than a mere formula of compromise.--_Tr._
[267] See p. 70. The “capitulations” under which until recently
Europeans were exempt from the jurisdiction of Turkish courts are
regarded nowadays as a right enforced by more civilized powers to
protect their subjects from the laws of a less civilized state, and
their abolition is a symbol of the rise of the latter to the rank
of a civilized power. But originally it was quite the reverse. The
first “capitulation” was sued for by France in an hour of danger when
Turkish aid was essential to her. See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article
“Capitulations.”--_Tr._
[268] See Vol. I., p. 212.
[269] The author’s meaning may perhaps be precised thus: so much of the
old Magian nations as was not Arabized became fellah peoples, either
outside the Magian sphere (as in Europe and India) or within it, under
the Turkish (Mongol) domination, but even the old Arab-element itself
was largely ripe for the change into the fellah condition when the
Turks came.--_Tr._
[270] I am convinced that the nations of China which sprang up in
members in the middle, Hwang-Ho region at the beginning of the Chóu
dynasty, as also the regional peoples of the Egyptian Old Kingdom
(which had each its own capital and its own religion, and as late as
Roman times fought each other in definitely religious wars), were in
their inward form more closely akin to the peoples of the West than to
those of the Classical and the Arabian worlds. However, research into
such fields has hitherto been conspicuous by its absence.
[271] That the dynasts themselves have contributed heavily to the
catalogue of perjury and bad faith only reinforces the argument.--_Tr._
[272] His desertion of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in the Lombard
war, 1176. The details of the long struggle between Frederick and Henry
will be found in any fairly full history of Europe or in the respective
articles devoted to them in the _Ency. Brit._, XI ed. While Frederick
stood--and with real hopes as well as ideals--for the inclusive
Empire, Henry through all his vicissitudes stood for Germany’s eastern
expansion, the colonization of the Slavonic north-east, and the
development of the Baltic.--_Tr._
[273] In mediæval hymns the cross is symbolically regarded as a tree
bearing Christ as its last and grandest fruit; it is identified,
indeed, with the Tree of Knowledge. (See Yrjo Hirn, _The Sacred
Shrine_.)--_Tr._
[274] And every English schoolboy knows the meaning of the “Early
Plantagenets.”--_Tr._
[275] Against the Swedes, 1675.--_Tr._
[276] Against the French and their German dependent allies, 1757.--_Tr._
[277] See pp. 166, et seq., and 174, et seq.
[278] Less than one per cent of the population.
[279] It is to be noted that the home of the Babylonian Culture, the
ancient Sinear, plays no part of any importance in the coming events.
For the Arabian Culture only the region north of Babylon, not that to
south, comes into question.
[280] The victory of L. Æmilius Paullus over Perseus, 168 B.C.--_Tr._
[281] This has an important bearing also in the histories of the
Western literatures. The German is written in part in Latin, and
English in French.
[282] See Professor Geldner’s article “Zend-Avesta,” _Ency. Brit._, XI
ed.--_Tr._
[283] See Wollner, _Untersuchungen über die Volksepik des Grossrussen_
(1879). [A convenient edition of the Kiev Stories is Mary Gill, _Les
Légendes slaves_ (Paris, 1912).--_Tr._]
[284] The former is dated about 800, the latter about 930.--_Tr._
[285] These two figures--the one an authorized Mayor of the Palace
before he was Tsar, the other a crude usurper--dominate the period of
Russian history called the “Period of Troubles”--i.e., that between the
death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584 and the election of Michael Romanov
in 1613.--_Tr._
[286] Covering, before its later extensions, Persia and Iraq to the
Euphrates.--_Tr._
[287] The region south of Damascus and east of the Sea of
Galilee.--_Tr._
[288] Saba (Sheba) is, roughly, the modern Yemen, though the centre
of gravity of the Sabæan Kingdom may earlier have been in northern
Arabia. See Dr. D. H. Müller’s article “Sabaeans” in _Ency. Brit._, XI
ed.--_Tr._
[289] Schiele, _Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart_, I, 647.
[290] The “Minæan” and the Sabæan kingdoms were the two outstanding
hegemonies of early Arabian history. Ma’in, in southern Arabia, should
not be confused with the Ma’an which lies north-east of the Gulf of
Akaba.--_Tr._
[291] Bent, _The Sacred City of the Ethiopians_ (London 1893), pp. 134,
et seq., deals with the remains of Jeha, the inscriptions of which are
dated by Glaser between the seventh and fifth centuries before Christ.
See D. H. Müller, _Burgen and Schlösser Südarabiens_.
[292] Grimme, _Mohammed_, pp. 26, et seq.
[293] German Axum Expedition record (1913), Vol. II.
[294] An ancient trade-route from Persia crossed the straits of Ormus
and of Bab-el-Mandeb, traversing South Arabia and terminating in
Abyssinia and the Nile region. It is historically more important than
the northern route over the Isthmus of Suez.
[295] So little is known as to these events by British (or any other)
students that a brief record may be useful. The original Himaryites or
Homerites, a people of the south-west angle of Arabia, had displaced
the Sabæans in control of South Arabia in the second century B.C.
The Himaryite hegemony was overthrown by invaders from Axum over the
water about A.D. 300, and the Axumite rulers were, _inter alia_,
kings of Hadramaut--hence the mention in the text of the Persian
Gulf. But a Himaryite opposition continued, and, adopting Judaism
as a counter-religion, it succeeded for a time in throwing off the
Abyssinian rule. Axum, however (aided, as a Christian state, by Rome),
reasserted her dominion in 525 and held it for fifty years, till an
attack of Sassanid Persians displaced them again. Thereafter southern
Arabia fell into the swaying chaos in which the coming of Mohammed
found it.--_Tr._
[296] The capital of Saba.--_Tr._
[297] Grimme, p. 43. Illustrations of these immense ruins of Gomdan,
ibid., p. 81, and reconstructions in the German Axum report.
[298] The country of Ghassan extends east of the Jordan, parallel to
and inland of Palestine and Syria, approximately from Petra to the
middle Euphrates.--_Tr._
[299] The Lakhmids were the ruling dynasty, from the third to the
sixth century after Christ, of the realm of Hira, which ran in a strip
between the Euphrates and the present Nejd coast on the one hand and
the desert of Arabia on the other.--_Tr._
[300] Brockelmann, _Geschichte der arabischen Literatur_, p. 34.
[301] The whole structure of Mithraism (so far as we know it) presents
strong analogies with that of a military order.--_Tr._
[302] As well as it is said 220,000 at Cyrene. At Alexandria, too,
there were _émeutes_ and counter-_émeutes_.--_Tr._
[303] Roth, _Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Byzantinischen Reiches_,
p. 15.
[304] Delbrück, _Geschichte der Kriegskunst_, II, p. 222. [For British
students C. W. C. Oman’s _Art of War: Middle Ages_ will be more readily
available, although Oman treats the subject more as a matter of formal
military organization than does Delbrück. Neither writer deals with
any special features of the change as it worked itself out in the
East, both being concerned almost entirely with its Western aspects
and phases. The origin of the late-Byzantine army system, as military
historians are aware, is an obscure and difficult subject. By what
stages, after the decadence of the legion, was the “_Landsknecht_” army
of Justinian reached? Like other elements of middle-East history in the
epoch of the Arabian Culture, it still awaits the full investigation
that the West has already had.--_Tr._]
[305] _Gesammelte Schriften_, IV, 532.
[306] _Gefolgstreuen_ in German. The choice of an equivalent
mediæval term in English is difficult, since any one that may be
selected carries with it certain implications for students of feudal
origins.--_Tr._
[307] Domaszewski, _Die Religion der römischen Heeres_, p. 49.
[308] The typical form, for instance, of the Swiss in their
independence-battles, and of Western infantry generally in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the transition from hand-arm
to fire-arm warfare.--_Tr._
[309] _Buccellarii_; see Delbrück, op. cit., II, 354.
[310] Georg von Frundsberg (1473-1528). Short article in _Ency. Brit._,
XI ed.--_Tr._
[311] _Gothic War_, IV, 26. [The same holds good for Belisarius’s
armies.--_Tr._]
[312] Nisibis and Edessa in the up-country between Euphrates and Tigris
are represented to-day by Nasibin (Nezib) and Urfa respectively;
just to the west of them, east of the Euphrates above Sura, were the
three Jewish academies, in which Talmudic Judaism took shape after
the Dispersion. Kinnesrin lay just south of Aleppo. Ctesiphon is, of
course, the classical city on the Tigris, still dominant under the
Sassanids, and Resaina lies in the up-country south-west of Nisibis.
Gundisapora is Gunder-Shapur (Jundaisapur), near the site of the old
Elamite capital Susa in Arabistan.--_Tr._
[313] Not “non-existent.” It would be a misconception of the Magian
world-feeling to attach a Faustian-dynamic meaning to the phrase “true
God.” In combating the worship of godlings, the reality of godlings and
dæmons is presupposed. The Israelite prophets never dreamed of denying
the Baals, and similarly Isis and Mithras for the Early Christians,
Jehovah for the Christian Marcion, Jesus for the Manichæans, are
devilish, but perfectly real, powers. _Disbelieving in them_ would have
had no meaning for the Magian soul--what was required was that one
should not _turn to them_. To use an expression now long current, it is
“Henotheism” and not Monotheism.
[314] Schürer, _Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu
Christi_, III, 499; Wendland, _Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur_, p.
192.
[315] Contrast with this the exactly opposite process in Jewry before
the Pseudomorphosis had begun to affect it,--to wit, the battle
against the local “high places” and the concentration of sanctity in
Jerusalem.--_Tr._
[316] With the result that Syncretism is presented as a mere hotchpotch
of every conceivable religion. Nothing is further from the truth. The
process of taking shape moved first from East to West and then from
West to East.
[317] The Haoma plant symbolized the Tree of Life (Gaokerena) like the
Soma plant of Brahmanism.--_Tr._
[318] Hence the expression “profaning” the mysteries, which meant, not
revealing them, but bringing them outside their fane.--_Tr._
[319] J. Geffcken, _Der Ausgang des griechisch-römischen Heidentums_
(1920), pp. 197, et seq.
[320] Geffcken, op. cit., pp. 131, et seq.
[321] Geffcken, op. cit., p. 292, note 149.
[322] “_Res ipsa, quæ nunc religio Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud
antiquos nec defecit ab initio generis humani, quousque Christus
veniret in carnem. Unde vera religio, quæ jam erat coepit appellari
Christiana_” (_Retractationes_, I, 13).
[323] The name Chaldean signifies, before the Persian epoch, a tribe;
later, a religious society. See p. 175 above.
[324] A. Bertholet, _Kulturgeschichte Israels_ (1919), pp. 253, et seq.
[Clear and useful English manuals are G. Moore, _Literature of the Old
Testament_; R. H. Charles, _Between the Old and the New Testaments_.
See also the article “Hebrew Religion” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[325] According to Williams Jackson’s _Zoroaster_ (1901).
[326] Research has treated the Chaldean, like the Talmudic, as a
stepchild. The investigator’s whole attention has been concentrated
on the religion of the Babylonian Culture, and the Chaldean has been
regarded as its dying echo. Such a view inevitably excludes any real
understanding of it. The material is not even separated out, but
is dispersed in all the books on Assyrian-Babylonian religion. (H.
Zimmern, _Die Keilinschriften und das alte Testament_ II; Gunkel,
_Schöpfung and Chaos_; M. Jastrow, C. Bezold, etc.) On the other hand
the subject is assumed by some (e.g., Bousset, _Hauptprobleme der
Gnosis_, 1907) to have been exhausted.
[327] See Vol. I, p. 184.--_Tr._
[328] The fact that Chaldean science was, in comparison with Babylonian
empiricism, a new thing has been clearly recognized by Bezold
(_Astronomie, Himmelsschau und Astrallehre bei den Babyloniern_, 1911,
pp. 17, et seq.). Its data were taken and developed by different
Classical savants according to their own way of reasoning--that is, as
a matter of applied mathematics, and to the exclusion of all feeling
for distance.
[329] See Jastrow’s articles “Babylonian and Assyrian Religion” and
“Marduk” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[330] J. Hehn, _Hymnen und Gebete an Marduk_ (1905).
[331] For Chaldeans and Persians there was no need to trouble here
about proof--they had by their God conquered the world. But the Jews
had only their literature to cling to, and this accordingly turned to
theoretical proof in the absence of positive. In the last analysis,
this unique national treasure owes its origin to the constant need
of reacting against self-depreciation. [For example, the repeated
restatement of the _date_ of the Messiah’s advent in the successive
works of the age of the prophets.--_Tr._]
[332] Glaser, _Die Abessinier in Arabien und in Afrika_ (1895), p. 124.
Glaser is convinced that Abyssinian, Pehlevi, and Persian cuneiform
inscriptions of the highest importance await discovery there.
[333] The inscription and sculptures of Behistun (on an almost
inaccessible cliff in the Zagros range on the Baghdad-Hamadan road)
were reinvestigated by a British Museum expedition in 1904; see _The
Inscription of Darius the Great at Behistun_ (London, 1907). “Thus
saith Darius the King. That what I have done I have done altogether by
the grace of Ahuramazda. Ahuramazda and the other gods that be, brought
aid to me. For this reason did Ahuramazda and the other gods that be
bring aid to me because I was not hostile nor a liar nor a wrongdoer,
neither I nor my family, but according to Rectitude have I ruled” (A.
V. Williams Jackson, _Persia Past and Present_).--_Tr._
[334] Isaiah xl-lxvi. For the critical questions arising on
Deutero-Isaiah see Dr. T. K. Cheyne’s article “Isaiah” in the
_Encyclopedia Biblica_, the same scholar’s summary in _Ency. Brit._, XI
ed., article “Isaiah,” or G. Moore’s summary, _Literature of the Old
Testament_, Ch. XVI.--_Tr._
[335] This “King of the Banishment” (Exilarch) was long a conspicuous
and politically important figure in the Persian Empire. He was only
removed by Islam.
[336] As Christian and Jewish theology both do--the only difference
between these is in their respective interpretations of the later
development of Israelite literature (recast in Judea as the literature
of Judaism), the one inflecting it towards Evangelism, the others
towards Talmudism.
[337] Later it occurred to some Pharisee mind to Judaize it by
interpolating chs. xxxii-xxxvii.
[338] See the articles “Tobit,” etc., in _Jewish Encyclopædia_ and
_Ency. Biblica_.--_Tr._
[339] If the assumption of a Chaldean prophecy corresponding to Isaiah
and Zarathustra be correct, it is to this young, inwardly cognate, and
contemporary astral religion (and not to the Babylonian) that Genesis
owes its amazingly profound cosmogony, just as it owes to the Persian
religion its visions of the end of the world.
[340] S. Funk, _Die Entstehung des Talmuds_ (1919), p. 106.
[341] E. Sachau, _Aramäische Papyros und Ostraka aus Elephantine_
(1911).
[342] Josephus, _Antiq._, 13, 10.
[343] Much as, say, the destruction of the Vatican would be felt by the
Catholic Church.
[344] See p. 198.--_Tr._
[345] Cf. p. 69.
[346] Pyrrho himself had studied under Magian priests. See, for
Pyrrhonism, _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., articles “Scepticism,” “Megarian
School,” “Pyrrho.”--_Tr._
[347] Schiele (_Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart_, III, 812)
reverses the two latter names; this, however, does not affect the
phenomenon in any way.
[348] The Cosmogony and the Law, in the Zoroastrian Scriptures.--_Tr._
[349] Bousset, _Rel. d. Jud._, p. 532.
[350] Baruch, Ezra IV (2 Esdras), the original text of John’s
Revelation.
[351] For instance, the Book of Naasenes (P. Wendland,
_Hellenistisch-römische Kultur_, pp. 177, et seq.); the “Mithras
Liturgy” (ed. A. Dieterich); the Hermetic Pœmander (ed. Reitzenstein),
the Psalms of Solomon, the Gospels of Thomas and Peter, the
Pistis-Sophia, etc. [Information as to these will be found in the
articles “Ophites,” “Mithras,” “Hermes Trismegistus,” “Apocalyptic
Literature,” “Apocryphal Literature,” “Gnosticism,” in the _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[352] Any more than Dostoyevski’s “_Dream of a Ridiculous Person_” is
so.
[353] Our definitive ideas of this early Magian vision-world we
owe to the manuscripts of Turfan, which have reached Berlin since
1903. It was these which at last freed our knowledge and, above
all, our criteria from the deformations due to the preponderance of
Western-Hellenistic material--a preponderance that had been augmented
by Egyptian papyrus finds--and radically transformed all our existing
views. Now at last the pure, almost unknown, East is seen operative
in all the apocalypses, hymns, liturgies, and books of edification of
the Persians, Mandæans, Manichæans, and countless other sects; and
primitive Christianity for the first time really takes its place in
the movement to which it owes its spiritual origins (see H. Lüders,
_Sitzungen der Berliner Akademie_, 1914, and R. Reitzenstein, _Das
iranische Erlösungsmysterium_, 1921).
[354] Lidzbarski, _Das Johannesbuch der Mandäer_, Ch. LXVI. Also
W. Bousset, _Hauptprobleme der Gnosis_ (1907) and Reitzenstein,
_Das Mandäische Buch der Herrn der Grösse_ (1919), an apocalypse
approximately contemporary with the oldest Gospels. On the Messiah
texts, the Descent-into-Hell texts, and the Songs of the Dead see
Lidzbarski, _Mandäische Liturgien_ (1920); also the Book of the
Dead (especially the second and third books of the left Genza) in
Reitzenstein’s _Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium_ (especially pp. 43,
et seq.). [The Mandæan religion survives to-day in the region of the
Shatt-el-Arab and the Karun valley or Khuzistan.--_Tr._]
[355] See Reitzenstein, pp. 124, et seq., and references there quoted.
[356] In the New Testament, of which the final redaction lies entirely
in the sphere of Western-Classical thought, the Mandæan religion and
the sects belonging thereto are no longer understood, and indeed
everything Oriental seems to have dropped out. Acts xviii-xix,
however, discloses a perceptible hostility between the then widespread
John-communities and the Primitive Christians (see Dibelius, _Die
urchristliche Überlieferung von Johannes dem Täufer_). The Mandæans
later rejected Christianity as flatly as they had rejected Judaism.
Jesus was for them a false Messiah. In their Apocalypse of the Lord of
Greatness the apparition of Enosh was also announced.
[357] According to Reitzenstein (_Das Buch von Herrn der Grösse_)
Jesus was condemned at Jerusalem as a John-disciple. According to
Lidzbarski (_Mand. Lit._, 1920, XVI) and Zimmern (_Ztschr. d. D. Morg.
Gesellschaft_, 1920, p. 429), the expression “Jesus the Nazarene” or
“Nasorene,” which was later by the Christian communities referred to
Nazareth (Matthew ii, 23, with a doubtful citation), really indicates
the membership in a Mandæan Order.
[358] E.g., Mark vi; and then the great change, Mark viii, 27, et seq.
There is no religion which has given us more honestly the tale of its
birth.
[359] Similarly in Mark i, 38, et seq., when he arose in the night and
sought a lonely place in order to fortify himself by prayer.
[360] The method of the present work is historical. It therefore
recognizes the anti-historical as well as the historical as _a fact_.
The religious method, on the contrary, necessarily looks upon itself
as the _true_ and the opposite as _false_. This difference is quite
insuperable.
[361] Hence Mark xiii, taken from an older document, is perhaps the
purest example of his usual daily discourse. Paul (1 Thess. iv, 15-17)
quotes another, which is missing in the Gospels. With these, we have
the priceless--but, by commentators dominated by the Gospel tone,
misunderstood--contributions of Papias, who about 100 was still in a
position to collect much oral tradition. The little that we have of his
work suffices amply to show us the apocalyptic character of Jesus’s
daily discourses. It is Mark xiii and not the Sermon on the Mount that
reproduces the real note of them. But as _his_ teaching became modified
into a teaching _of Him_, this material likewise was transformed and
the record of his utterances became the narrative of his manifestation.
In this one respect the picture given by the Gospels is inevitably
false.
[362] Jesus himself was aware of this (Matt. xxiv, 5, 11).
[363] Made more uncertain perhaps by the failure of previous prophecies
that had been so confidently dated--e.g., Jeremiah xxv, 11; xxiv, 5-6;
reinterpreted in Daniel vii, ix; 1 Enoch lxxxiii-xc; and again to be
reinterpreted in 2 Baruch xxxvi-xl and 4 Ezra x-xii.--_Tr._
[364] The designation “Messiah (Christ)” was old-Jewish, those
of “Lord” (κύριος, _divus_) and “Saviour” (σωτήρ, _Asklepios_)
were east-Aramæan in origin. In the course of the pseudomorphosis
“Christ” became the _name_ of Jesus, and “Saviour” the _title_; but
already “Lord” and “Saviour” were titles current in the Hellenistic
Emperor-worship; and in this was implicit the whole destiny of
westward-looking Christianity (compare here Reitzenstein, _Das
iranische Erlösungsmysterium_, p. 132, note).
[365] Acts xv; Gal. ii.
[366] Acts i, 14; cf. Mark vi.
[367] As against Luke, Matthew is the representative of this
conception. His is the only Gospel in which the word “_Ecclesia_” is
used, and it denotes the true Jews, in contradistinction to the masses
that refuse to listen to Jesus. This is not the missionary idea, any
more than Isaiah was a missionary. Community, in this connexion, means
an Order within Judaism. The prescriptions of Matt. xviii, 15-20 are
wholly incompatible with any general dissemination.
[368] It fell apart later into sects, amongst which were the Ebionites
and the Elkazites (the latter having a strange sacred book, the Elxai;
see Bousset, _Hauptprobleme der Gnosis_, p. 154). [See the articles
“Ebionites” and “Sabians” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[369] Such sects were attacked in the Acts of the Apostles and in
all Paul’s Epistles, and indeed there was hardly a Late Classical or
Aramæan religion or philosophy which did not give rise to some sort of
Jesus-sect. The danger was indeed real of the Passion story becoming,
not the nucleus of a new religion, but an integrating element of all
existing ones.
[370] Of this he was fully aware. Many of his deepest intuitions are
unimaginable without Persian and Mandæan influences (e.g., Romans vii,
22-24; 1 Corinthians xv, 26; Ephesians v, 6, et seq., with a quotation
of Persian origin. See Reitzenstein, _Das iran. Erlös.-Myst._, pp. 6,
133, et seq.). But this does not prove familiarity with Persian-Mandæan
literature. The stories were spread in these days as sagas and
folk-tales were amongst us. One heard about them in childhood as things
of daily hearsay, but without being in the least aware of how deeply
one was under their spell.
[371] The early missionary effort in the East has scarcely been
investigated and is still very difficult to establish in detail.
Sachau, _Chronik von Arbela_ (1915) and “_Die Ausbreitung der
Christentums in Asien_” in _Abb. Pr. Akad. d. Wiss._ (1919); Harnack,
_Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums_, II, 117, et seq.
[372] The researchers who argue with such over-learnedness about a
proto-Mark, Source Q, the “Twelve”-source, and so on, overlook the
essential novelty of Mark, which is _the first “Book” of Christendom_,
plan-uniform and entire. Work of this sort is never the natural product
of an evolution, but the merit of an individual man, and it marks, here
if anywhere, a historical turning-point.
[373] Mark is generally _the_ Gospel; after him the partisan writings
(Matthew, Luke) begin; the tone of narrative passes into that of legend
and ends, beyond the Hebrew and John gospels, in Jesus-romances like
the gospels of Peter and James.
[374] If the word “catholic” be used in its oldest sense (_Ignatius
ad Smyrn._, 8)--namely, to signify the _sum_ of the cult-communities,
_both_ the Churches were Catholic. In the East the word had no meaning.
The Nestorian Church was no more a sum than was the Persian: it was a
Magian unit.
[375] A brief survey of the Mary doctrine is given in article “Mary,”
_Ency. Brit._, XI ed. The symbolism involved in the details of the
story of Mary, as told in writing and in art, is very fully gone into
in Yrjo Hirn, _The Sacred Shrine_.--_Tr._
[376] Ed. Meyer, _Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums_ (1921), pp.
77, et seq.
[377] _C._ 85-155. See the recent work of Harnack, _Marcion: Das
Evangelium vom fremden Gott_ (1921). [Harnack’s article “Marcion” in
_Ency. Brit._, XI ed., is dated 1910.--_Tr._]
[378] Harnack, op. cit., pp. 136, et seq.; N. Bonwetsch, _Grundr. d.
Dogmengesch._ (1919), p. 45, et seq.
[379] This is one of the profoundest ideas in all religious history,
and one that must for ever remain inaccessible to the pious average
man. Marcion’s identification of the “Just” with the Evil enables him
in this sense to oppose the Law of the Old Testament to the Evangel of
the New.
[380] About A.D. 150. See Harnack, op. cit., pp. 32, et seq.
[381] For the notions of Koran and Logos, see below. Again as in the
case of Mark, the really important question is, not what the material
before him was, but how this entirely novel idea for such a book, which
anticipated and indeed made possible Marcion’s plan for a Christian
Bible, could arise. The book presupposes a great spiritual movement (in
eastern Asia Minor?) that knew scarcely anything of Jewish Christianity
and was yet remote from the Pauline, westerly thought-world. But of the
region and type of this movement we know nothing whatever.
[382] Vohu Mano, the Spirit of Truth, in the shape of the Saoshyant.
[383] See the article by Harnack and Conybeare “Manichæism,” _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[384] Bardesanes, too, and the system of the “Acts of Thomas” are very
near to him and to “John.” [See the articles “Bardaisan,” “Thomas,” and
“Gnosticism,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[385] Harnack, p. 24. The break with the established Church occurred at
Rome, in 144.
[386] Harnack, pp. 181, et seq.
[387] It had, like each of the other Magian religions, a script of its
own, and this script steadily came to resemble the Manichæan more and
more closely.
[388] Matthew xi, 25, et seq., on which see Eduard Meyer, _Urspr. u.
Anf. d. Christ._, pp. 286, et seq.; here it is the old and Eastern
(i.e., the genuine) form of gnosis that is described.
[389] See further, below, p. 321.
[390] As a drastic instance, Galatians iv, 24-26.
[391] Loofs, _Nestoriana_ (1905), pp. 176, et seq.
[392] The best exposition of the mass of thought common to both
Churches is Windelband’s _Geschichte der Philosophie_ (1900), pp. 177,
et seq.; for the dogmatic history of the Christian Church see Harnack,
_Dogmengeschichte_ (1914), while--unconsciously--Geffcken (_Der Ausgang
des griechisch-römischen Heidentums_, 1920) gives the corresponding
“dogmatic history of the Pagan Church.”
[393] Geffcken, op. cit., p. 69 [article “Neoplatonism” in _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._].
[394] See the following chapter.
[395] Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, p. 165.
[396] See Vol. I, p. 209.
[397] The expression is Leo Frobenius’s (Paideuma, 1920, p. 91). [See
Vol. I, p. 184.--_Tr._]
[398] The soul-stones on Jewish, Sabæan, and Islamic tombs are also
called _nephesh_. They are unmistakable symbols of the “upward.” With
them belong the huge storeyed stelæ of Axum which belong to the first
to third centuries of our era--i.e., the great period of the early
Magian religions. The giant stele, long overthrown, is the largest
monolith known to art-history, larger than any Egyptian obelisk (German
Axum Expedition report, Vol. II, pp. 28, et seq.).
[399] On this rests the whole theory and practice of Magian law (see p.
72 above).
[400] Isaiah xxxii, 15; 4 Ezra xiv, 39; Acts ii.
[401] Reitzenstein, _Das iran. Erlösungsmysterium_, pp. 108, et seq.
[402] Bousset, _Kyrios Christos_, p. 142.
[403] Windelband, _Gesch. d. Phil._ (1900), pp. 189, et seq.;
Windelband-Bonhöffer, _Gesch. d. antiken Phil._ (1912), pp. 328, et
seq.; Geffcken, _Der Ausgang des griech.-röm. Heidentums_ (1920), pp.
51, et seq.
[404] Jodl, _Geschichte der Ethik_, I, p. 58.
[405] M. Horten, _Die religiöse Gedankenwelt der Volkes im heutigen
Islam_ (1917), pp. 381, et seq. By the Shiites the Logos-idea was
transferred to Ali.
[406] Wolff, _Muhammedanische Eschatologie_, 3, 2, et seq.
[407] Mandæan Book of John, Ch. LXXV.
[408] Usener, _Vortr. u. Aufs._, p. 217.
[409] The “devil-worshippers” in Armenia; M. Horten in _Der neue
Orient_ (March 1918). The name arose from the fact that they did not
recognize Satan as a being, and accordingly derived the Evil, by
a very complicated set of ideas, from the Logos itself. Under old
Persian influences the Jews also busied themselves with the same
problem--observe the difference between 2 Samuel xxiv, 1, and 1 Chron.
xxi, 1.
[410] M. Horten, op. cit., p. xxi. This book is the best introduction
to the actually existing popular religion of Islam, which deviates
considerably from the official doctrines.
[411] Baumstark, _Die christl. Literaturen des Orients_, I, p. 64.
[412] Cf. p. 205. The Babylonian view of the heavens had not definitely
distinguished between astronomical and atmospheric elements; e.g., the
covering of the moon by clouds was regarded as a kind of eclipse. For
this soothsaying the momentary _figure_ of the heavens served only
the same purpose as the inspection of the victim’s liver. But the
Chaldeans’ intention was to forecast the _actual_ course of the stars;
here, therefore, astrology presupposed a genuine astronomy.
[413] B. Cohn, “_Die Anfangsepoche der jüd. Kalenders_” (_Sitz. Pr.
Akad._, 1914). The date of the first day of Creation was on this
occasion fixed by calculation from a total eclipse of the sun--of
course with the aid of Chaldean astronomy. [See, in general, the
articles “Chronology,” “Calendar,” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[414] The Persian notion of total time is 12,000 years. The Parsees of
to-day consider A.D. 1920 as the 11,550th.
[415] M. Horten, _Die religiöse Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen
Islam_, p. xxvi.
[416] It shows a great gap in our research that although we possess
a whole library of works on Classical religion and particularly its
gods and cults, we have not one about Classical religiousness and its
history.
[417] “He is in truth the conclusion and completion of the Christian
Classical, its last and greatest thinker, its intellectual practitioner
and tribune. This is the starting-point from which he must be
understood. What later ages have made of him is another affair. His own
real mind, the synthesizer of Classical Culture, ecclesiastical and
episcopal authority, and intimate mysticism, could not possibly have
been handed on by those who, environed by different conditions, have to
deal with different tasks” (E. Troeltsch, _Augustin, die christliche
Antike und das Mittelalter_, 1915, p. 7). His power, like Tertullian’s,
rested also on the fact that his writings were not translated into
Latin, but _thought_ in this language, the _sacred_ language of the
Western Church; it was precisely this that excluded both from the field
of Aramæan thought. Cf. p. 224 above.
[418] “_Inspiratio bonæ voluntatis_” (_De corr. et grat._, 3). His
“good will” and “ill will” are, quite dualistically, a pair of opposite
substances. For Pelagius, on the contrary, will is an _activity_
without moral quality as such; only that which is willed has the
_property_ of being good or evil, and the Grace of God consists in the
“_possibilitas utriusque partis_,” the freedom to will this or that.
Gregory I transmuted Augustinian doctrines into Faustian when he taught
that God rejected individuals because he foreknew their evil will.
[419] All the elements of the Magian metaphysic are to be found in
Spinoza, hard as he tried to replace the Arabian-Jewish conceptual
world of his Spanish masters (and above all Moses Maimonides) by
the Western of early Baroque. The individual human mind is for
him not an ego, but only a mode of the one divine attribute, the
“_cogitatio_”--which is just the Pneuma. He protests against notions
like “God’s Will.” His God is _pure substance_ and in lieu of the
dynamic causality of the Faustian universe he discovers simply the
logic of the divine _cogitatio_. All this is already in Porphyry,
in the Talmud, in Islam; and to Faustian thinkers like Leibniz and
Goethe it is as alien as anything can possibly be. (_Allgem. Gesch. d.
Philos._ in _Kultur der Gegenwart_, I, v, p. 484, Windelband.)
[420] Here, therefore, “good” is an evaluation and not a substance.
[421] The period at which it was written corresponds to our
Carolingian. Whether the latter really brought forth any poetry of like
rank we do not know, but that it may possibly have done so is shown by
creations like the Voluspa, Muspilli, the Heliand, and the universe
conceived by John Scotus Erigena.
[422] See, for example, Bertholet, _Kulturgesch. Israels_, p. 242.
[423] Horten, op. cit., p. xii.
[424] See p. 67 above.
[425] It is almost unnecessary to say that in all religions of the
Germanic West the Bible stands in a quite other relationship to the
faith--namely, in that of a _source_ in the strictly historical sense,
irrespective of whether it is taken as inspired and immune from textual
criticism or not. The relation of Chinese thought to the canonical
books is similar.
[426] The Holy Spirit, different from Ahuramazda and yet one with him,
opposed to the Evil (Angra Mainyu).
[427] Identified by Mani with the Johannine Logos. Compare also Yasht
13, 31. Ahuramazda’s shining soul is the Word.
[428] _Aletheia_ (Truth) is generally employed in this way in the John
Gospel, and _drug_ (= lie) is used for Ahriman in Persian cosmology.
Ahriman is often shown as though a servant of the _drug_.
[429] Sura 96; cf. 80, 11 and 85, 21, where in connexion with another
vision it is said: “This is a noble Koran on a treasured tablet.”
The best commentary on all this is Eduard Meyer’s (_Geschichte der
Mormonen_, pp. 70, et seq.).
[430] Classical man receives, in states of extreme bodily excitation,
the power of unconsciously predicting future events. But these visions
are completely unliterary. The Classical Sibylline books (which have no
connexion with the later Christian works bearing that name) are meant
to be nothing more than a collection of oracles.
[431] See p. 73.
[432] IV Ezra xiv; S. Funk, _Die Entstehung des Talmuds_, p. 17;
Hirsch’s commentary on Exodus xxi, 2.
[433] Funk, op. cit., p. 86.
[434] For example, Ed. Meyer, _Urspr. u. Anf. d. Christ._, p. 95.
[435] In the West, Plato, Aristotle, and above all Pythagoras were
regarded as prophets in this sense. What could be referred back to
them, was valid. For this reason the succession of the heads of the
schools became more and more important, and often more work was done in
establishing--or inventing--them than was done upon the history of the
doctrine itself.
[436] Fromer, _Der Talmud_, p. 190.
[437] We to-day confuse _authorship_ and _authority_. Arabian thought
knew not the idea of “intellectual property.” Such would have been
absurd and sinful, for it is the _one_ divine Pneuma that selects the
individual as vessel and mouthpiece. Only to that extent is he the
“author,” and it does not matter even whether he or another actually
writes down the material. “The Gospel _according to_ Mark” means that
Mark _vouches for_ the truth of this evangel.
[438] On the pseudonyma and anonyma of Biblical apocryphal literature
the English reader will find much of interest in three small books
(already referred to) of the “Home University” series: Moore,
_Literature of the Old Testament_; Charles, _Between the Old and the
New Testaments_; and Bacon, _The Making of the New Testament_.--_Tr._
[439] See p. 73.--_Tr._
[440] Vendidad 19, 1; here it is Zarathustra who is tempted.
[441] M. J. ben Gorion, _Die Sagen der Juden_ (1913).
[442] It is reasonable to suppose that he must through oral tradition
have had a very accurate knowledge of the fundamental doctrines of the
John Gospel. Even Bardesanes (d. 254), and the “Acts of St. Thomas”
that originated in his circle, are very far removed indeed from Pauline
doctrines, an alienation that in Mani rose to downright hostility and
to the historical Jesus’s being described as an evil demon. We obtain
here a glimpse into the essence of the almost subterranean Christianity
of the East, which was ignored by the Greek-writing churches of the
Pseudomorphosis and for that reason has hitherto escaped the attention
of Church history. But Marcion and Montanus also came from eastern
Asia Minor; here originated the Naasene book, basically Persian, but
overlaid first with Judaism and then with Christianity; and further
east, probably in the Matthew monastery of Mosul, Aphrahat wrote, about
340, those strange epistles whose Christianity the Western development
from Irenæus to Athanasius left wholly unaffected. The history of
Nestorian Christianity, in fact, was already beginning in the second
century.
[443] For the later writings of (for example) Tertullian and Augustine
remained wholly without effect save in so far as they were translated.
In Rome itself even, Greek was the true language of the Church.
[444] See p. 177.--_Tr._
[445] The Faustian monk represses his evil will, the Magian the evil
substance in himself. Only the latter is dualistic.
[446] The purity- and food-laws of the Talmud and the Avesta cut far
deeper into everyday life than, for example, the Benedictine rule.
[447] Asmus, “Damaskios” (_Philos. Bibl._, 125 (1911)). Christian
anchoritism is _later_ than pagan: Reitzenstein, “Des Athanasius Werk
über das Leben des Antonius” (_Sitz. Heid. Ak._ (1914), VIII, 12).
[448] Even to the point indicated in Matt. xix, 12, which Origen
followed to the letter.
[449] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Qaraites.” The outlook
of these Protestants so resembled that of the Western Protestants
that their name was used as a term of contempt for the latter by the
Catholics, and not greatly resented. It is significant also that this
movement in Jewry almost coincided in date with the vaster Reformation
of Islam.--_Tr._
[450] The followers of Baal Shem above mentioned (p. 228) not to be
confused with the Hasidim or Assideans of the second century.--_Tr._
[451] Wissowa, _Religion und Kulturs der Römer_, p. 493; Geffcken, pp.
4, 144.
[452] This is the metaphysical basis also of the Christian
image-worship, which presently set in and of the appearance of
wonder-working pictures of Mary and the Saints.
[453] See p. 60.
[454] The Nestorians protested against Mary _Theotokos_ (she who bore
God), opposing to her the concept of Christ the _Theophorus_ (he who
carried God in him). The deep difference between an image-loving and an
image-hating religiousness is here clearly manifested.
[455] Note the “Western” outlook on the substance-questions in the
contemporary writings of Proclus--his double Zeus, his triad of πατήρ,
δύναμις, νοήσις or νοητόν, and so forth (Zeller, _Philosophie der
Griechen_, V, pp. 857, et seq.). Proclus’s beautiful “Hymn to Athene”
is a veritable Ave Maria:
“But when an evil lapse of my being puts me into bondage
(And, ah, I know indeed how I am tossed about by many unholy deeds
that in my blindness I have done),
Be thou gracious to me, thou gentle one, thou blessing of mankind,
And let me not lie upon the earth as prey to fearful punishments,
For I am, and I remain, thy chattel.”
(Hymn VII, Eudociæ Aug. rel. A. Ludwich, 1897.)
[456] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Apollinaris, the
Younger.”--_Tr._
[457] And Russia, too, though hitherto Russia has kept it as a buried
treasure.
[458] The Christian missionary efforts of the West very generally
followed the same method, maintaining the local places of prayer, and
merely substituting crucifixes or relics for the idols. Gregory the
Great even sanctioned the sacrifice of animals in Britain.--_Tr._
[459] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., art. “Khazars.”--_Tr._
[460] The Albigensian movement of the twelfth century.--_Tr._
[461] Hermann, _Chines. Geschichte_ (1912), p. 77.
[462] A third, “contemporary,” movement should follow in the Russian
world in the first half of the coming millennium.
[463] Cf. pp. 3, et seq. and foot-note p. 3.
[464] See p. 116.
[465] “He who loves God with inmost soul, transforms himself into God”
(Bernard of Clairvaux).
[466] For religious _thought_ Destiny is always a causal quantity.
Epistemology knows it, therefore, only as an indistinct word for
causality. Only so long as we _do not_ think upon it do we really know
it.
[467] See p. 25.
[468] The distinction between the two is one of _inner_ form. A
sacrifice made by Socrates is at bottom a prayer; and generally the
Classical sacrifice is to be looked upon as a _prayer in bodily form_.
The ejaculated prayer of the criminal, on the contrary, is a sacrifice
to which fear drives him.
[469] And herein philosophy differs not in the least from soil-sprung
folk-belief. Think of Kant’s category-table with its 3 × 4 units, of
Hegel’s method, of Iamblichus’s triads.
[470] See p. 133.
[471] Cf. p. 24.
[472] And even so the thought has a different disposition according as
it is primitive or cultured; Chinese, Indian, Classical, Magian, or
Western; and even German, English, or French. In the last resort, there
are not even two individuals with exactly the same method.
[473] Anatole France’s story _Le Jongleur de Notre Dame_ is something
deeper than a beautiful fancy.--_Tr._
[474] See p. 33.
[475] Was it that highly civilized Crete, the outpost of Egyptian
modes of thought, afforded a pattern (see p. 87)? But, after all, the
numerous local and tribal gods of the primitive Thinite time (before
3000), which represented the numina of particular beast-_genera_, were
essentially different in meaning. The more powerful the Egyptian deity
of this preliminary period is, the more particular individual spirits
(_ka_) and individual souls (_bai_) he possesses, and these hide and
lurk in the various animals--Bastet in the cat, Sechmet in the lion,
Hathor in the cow, Mut in the vulture (hence the human-formed _ka_ that
figures behind the beast-head in the figures of the gods)--making of
this earliest world-picture a very abortion of monstrous fear, filling
it with powers which rage against man even after his death and which
only the greatest sacrifices avail to placate. The union of the North
and the South lands was represented by the common veneration of the
Horus-falcon, whose first _ka_ resided in the Pharaoh of the time. Cf.
Eduard Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, I, §§ 182, et seq. [See also Moret and
Davy: _Des clans aux empires_ and Moret: _Le Nil et la civilisation
égyptienne_ (available in English translations).--_Tr._]
[476] _Eumenides_, 126.
[477] Moreover, in the full maturity of Athens, every little girl of
the upper classes was consecrated as a bear to this Artemis.--_Tr._
[478] For further information the reader may consult the articles
“Demeter,” etc., in the _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.; and, for a suggestive
introduction in the fewest possible words, Dr. Jane Harrison’s
pamphlet, _Myths of Greece and Rome_.--_Tr._
[479] Bernoulli, _Die Heiligen der Merowinger_ (1900)--a good account
of this primitive religion.
[480] For an account of Russian sectarian movements see A. P. Stanley,
_Hist. of the Eastern Church_; for a summary, _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.,
Vol. XXIII, p. 886.--_Tr._
[481] Kattenbusch, _Lehrb. d. vgl. Konfessionsk._, I (1892), pp. 234,
et seq.; N. P. Milyukov, _Skizz. russ. Kulturg._ (1901) II, pp. 104, et
seq.
[482] Borchardt, _Reheiligtum des Newoserrê_, I (1905). The Pharaoh is
no longer an incarnation of godhead, and not yet, as the theology of
the Middle Kingdom was to make him, the son of Re; notwithstanding all
earthly greatness, he is small, a servant, as he stands before the god.
[483] Erman, “_Ein Denkmal memphitsiche Theologie_,” _Ber. Berl. Ak._
(1911), pp. 916, et seq.
[484] Not, of course, to be connected in any profound sense with that
which emerged under the name in the Magian Culture.--_Tr._
[485] And because they were the gods of the eternal peasant, they
outlived the Olympians.
[486] Even though Hesiod is two centuries nearer to the source of his
Culture than the German mystic is to that of our own. See the article
“Boehme,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[487] Insolent prosperity tempting Nemesis.--_Tr._
[488] The work of J. J. Bachofen in this field has recently been
assembled in concentrated form under the title _Mythus von Occident und
Orient_ (1926).--_Tr._
[489] Wissowa, _Religion und Kultus der Römer_, p. 41. What has been
said above (p. 191) concerning the Talmudic religion applies also to
the Etruscan religion by which all Italy--i.e., no less than half
of the Classical field--was so deeply influenced. It lies outside
the province of both the conventional “Classical” philologies and in
consequence has been practically ignored, as compared with the Achæan
and Doric religions. In reality (as its tombs, temples, and myths
prove), it forms with them a single unit of spirit and evolution.
[490] It is immaterial whether or not Dionysus was “borrowed” from
Thrace, Apollo from Asia Minor, Aphrodite from Phœnicia. It is the fact
that out of the thousands of alien motives these particular few were
chosen and combined in so splendid a unity that implies the fundamental
newness of the creation--just as does the Mary-cult of the Gothic,
although in that case the whole form-material was taken over from the
East.
[491] As in De Groot’s _Universismus_ (1918), where, in fact, the
systems of Taoists, Confucians, and Buddhists are handled without a
qualm as _the_ religions of China. This amounts to the same as saying
that the Classical religion dates from Caracalla.
[492] Conrady, in Wassiljew, _Die Erschliessung Chinas_ (1909), p. 232;
B. Schindler, _Das Priestertum im alten China_, I (1919).
[493] The Shu-Ching or Canon of History is a collection of ancient
annals, the Shi-King a canonical anthology of rhymed tales made by
Confucius.--_Tr._
[494] Conrady, _China_, p. 516.
[495] Of which an outstanding example is the Edda.--_Tr._
[496] See article “Heliand” in _Ency. Brit._, XI edit., and works there
referred to. A handy edition of the text is included in the “Reclam”
series.--_Tr._
[497] This idea differs essentially from that of the Egyptian duality
of the spiritual _ka_ and the soul-bird _bai_, and still more so from
the Magian duality of soul-substances.
[498] O. Franke, _Studien zur Gesch. des Konfuzianischen Dogmas_
(1920), p. 202.
[499] Reference may again be made to Yrjo Hirn, _The Sacred
Shrine_.--_Tr._
[500] Consider, for example, the fantastic paintings of Hieronymus
Bosch. Breughel’s similar humour, too, is unthinkable without the
tradition of a rank-and-file of evil creatures.--_Tr._
[501] So also in the Classical, the Homeric figures were for educated
people of Hellenistic times nothing but literature, representation,
artistic motive. Even for Plato’s period they were little more than
this. But in 1100 B.C., Demeter and Dionysus were a fearful actuality
before which men collapsed.
[502] The stern object of Roger Bacon’s science; see p. 502,
foot-note.--_Tr._
[503] This is the real conclusion that emerges from Burdach’s
_Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus_ (1918).
[504] In this connexion, it is important to observe that the
education-movement of Humanism took into its field modern Italian,
Hebrew, etc., as well as the Classical knowledge. A Dante professorship
was founded in Florence in 1373. As for the Classical itself, side
by side with all the enthusiasm we find a significant note in
Boccaccio, who thanks Jesus Christ for a victory over unbelief that has
delivered up the _enemy’s camp_ to the victor’s enjoyment. Burkhardt,
_Renaissance_, Vol. I, p. 262 (Reclam edition).--_Tr._
[505] Bezold, _Hist. Zeitschr._, 45, p. 208.
[506] Italian, “Anna Metterza.” The reference is to the St. Anne of the
Louvre and the Royal Academy Diploma Gallery, London.--_Tr._
[507] Cf. Vol. I, p. 232.--_Tr._
[508] Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli.--_Tr._
[509] The sense of such a relativity led to a mathematic (the calculus)
which is literally based on the ignoring of second- and third-order
magnitudes.--_Tr._
[510] See article “Mysticism” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[511] After its confirmation in 1311, the character of this festival as
one of popular joy became still more marked by its association with the
nascent drama (see _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., articles “Corpus Christi,”
“Drama”; and Y. Hirn, op. cit., pp. 144-5).--_Tr._
[512] Or even rediscovered it. For Classical man as a spirit-filled
body is one amongst many quite independent units, while Faustian
man is a centre in the universe, which with its soul embraces _the
whole_. But personality (individuality) means, not something separate
(_einzelnes_), but something single (_einziges_).
[513] Hence it is that this sacrament has conferred a position of
such immense power upon the Western priest. He receives the personal
confession, and speaks personally, in the name of the Infinite, the
absolution, without which life would be unbearable.
The notion of confession as a _duty_, which was finally established
in 1215, first arose in England, whence came also the first
confession-books (Penitentials). In England, too, originated, the idea
of the Immaculate Conception, and even the _idea_ of the Papacy--at
a time when Rome itself thought of it as a question of power and
precedence. It is evidence of the independence of Faustian Christianity
from Magian that its decisive ideas grew up in those remote parts of
its field which lay beyond the Frankish Empire.
[514] The immeasurable difference between the Faustian and the Russian
souls is disclosed in certain word-sounds. The Russian word for heaven
is “_nyebo_,” which contains in its _n_ a negative element. Western
man looks up, the Russian looks horizontally into the broad plain. The
death-impulse, too, of the respective souls is distinguishable, in
that for the West it is the passion of drive all-ways into infinite
space, whereas for Russians it is an expressing and expanding of self
(_Sichentäussern_) till “it” in the man becomes identical with the
boundless plain itself. It is thus that a Russian understands the
words “man” and “brother.” He sees even mankind as a plane. The idea
of a Russian’s being an astronomer! He does not see the stars at all,
he sees only the horizon. Instead of the vault he sees the down-hang
of the heavens--something that somewhere combines with the plain
to form the horizon. For him the Copernican system, be it never so
mathematical, is spiritually contemptible.
While our German “_Schicksal_” rings like a trumpet call, “_Sud’bá_”
is a genuflection. There is no room for the upstanding “I” beneath
this almost flat-roofed heaven. That “_All are responsible for
all_”--the “it” for the “it” in this boundlessly extended plain--is
the metaphysical fundament of all Dostoyevski’s creation. That is why
Ivan Karamasov must name himself murderer although another had done
the murder. The criminal is the “unfortunate,” the “wretch”--it is the
utter negation of Faustian personal responsibility. Russian mysticism
has nothing of that upstriving inwardness of Gothic, of Rembrandt, of
Beethoven, which can swell up to a heaven-storming jubilation--its
god is not the azure depth up above. Mystical Russian love is love of
the plain, the love of brothers under equal pressure all along the
earth, ever along and along; the love of the poor tortured beasts that
wander on it, the love of plants--never of birds and clouds and stars.
The Russian “_volya_,” our “will,” means principally non-compulsion,
freedom not _for_ something but _from_ something, and particularly
freedom from compulsion to personal doing. Free-will is seen as
a condition in which no one else can command “it,” and in which,
therefore, one may give way to one’s own disposition. “_Geist_,”
“_esprit_,” “spirit,” go thus: ↗; the Russian “_duch_” goes thus:
↳. What sort of a Christianity will come forth one day from this
world-feeling?
[515]
_“Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär’
Und wollten uns verschlingen
So fürchten wir uns nimmermehr
Es soll uns doch gelingen.”_
[516] And, as the secession of a reformed Church necessarily transforms
the parent Church, there was a _Magian counter-reformation_ also. In
the _Decretum Gelasii_ (_c._ 500, Rome) even Clement of Alexandria,
Tertullian, and Lactantius, and in the Synod of Byzantium (543) Origen,
were declared heretical.
[517] Boehmer, _Luther im Lichte der neueren Forschung_ (1918), pp. 54,
et seq.
[518] See, for instance, H. T. Buckle, _Hist. Civilization in England_,
Vol. III, ch. iv, for the Scottish outlook, which at times attributed
all this horror, not even to an anti-God, but to God himself.
“Consider, who is the contriver of these torments. There have been some
very exquisite torments contrived by the wit of men ... but all these
fall as far short of the torments ye are to endure as the wisdom of man
falls short of that of God.... Infinite wisdom has contrived that evil”
(_The Great Concern of Salvation_, by T. Halyburton, 1722).--_Tr._
[519] M. Osborn, _Die Teufelsliteratur des 16. Jahrh._ (1893).
[520] Clocks being an outstanding example. See Vol. I, p. 15,
foot-note.--_Tr._
[521] The famous Bishop of Lincoln (1175-1253), scholar and
philosopher, scientist and statesman--the British Oresme.--_Tr._
[522] A clear summary of Grosseteste’s, Pierre de Maricourt’s, and
Roger Bacon’s work and outlook will be found in Ch. ix of E. Gilson’s
short manual, _La Philosophie au Moyen Âge_ (Paris, 1925). _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed., may also be consulted for Roger Bacon, but the article
“Grosseteste” deals almost entirely with the bishop’s political and
ecclesiastical career.--_Tr._
[523] M. Baumgartner, _Gesch. der Philos. des Mittelalters_ (1915), pp.
425, 571, 620, et seq. [Brief account in Ch. xi (3) of Gilson’s manual
above cited.--_Tr._]
[524] See Ch. XIV below.--_Tr._
[525] Nigantha. See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Jains.”--_Tr._
[526] 542. See p. 197.
[527] Mahommedanism must be regarded as an eccentric heretical form of
Eastern Christianity. This in fact was the ancient mode of regarding
Mahommet. He was considered, not in the light of the founder of a new
religion, but rather as one of the chief heresiarchs of the Church.
Among them he is placed by Dante in the “Inferno.” Dean Stanley,
_Eastern Church_ (1861), Lecture VIII.--_Tr._
[528] Krumbacher, _Byzant. Literaturgesch._, p. 12.
[529] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., under these names.--_Tr._
[530] Not to say the twentieth.--_Tr._
[531] To which may be added Edinburgh.--_Tr._
[532] πρὸς τὴν πειθὼ τῶν πολλῶν, _Metaphysics_ XI, 8, p. 1074 (Bekker)
13.--_Tr._ {sic--XII, 1074b 1-5}
[533] Caliphs like Al Maimun (813-33) and the last Ommayads would have
entirely approved of similar measures in Islam. In those times there
was a club in Baghdad in which Christians, Jews, Moslems, and Atheists
debated, and appeals to the authority of Bible or Koran were “out of
order.”
[534] Whereas “_virtù_” in Dante always carries a connotation of
vital force, as also does the older English use of the word; e.g.,
in Chaucer’s “of which vertue engendred is the flour,” (_Canterbury
Tales_, Prol. 4) and in the Bible (Mark v, 30). In Mediæval Latin
“_virtutes_” is used for miracles.--_Tr._
[535] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Jains.”--_Tr._
[536] E.g., “Given eye and visible object, visual consciousness arises;
the conjunction of the three is contact; whereby conditioned, arises
feeling; whereby conditioned, arises perception....” Majjima Nikhaya,
I, 111 (quoted by Mrs. Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_).--_Tr._
[537] Gercke-Norden, _Einleit. in die Altertumswiss._, II, 210.
[538] Compare the renewed controversy as to Transubstantiation in
the English Church, 1926-8, in which a bishop actually proposed that
physical tests could be applied to the altar-miracle.--_Tr._
[539] Which was ordered no less than four times in the decade 58-49.
[540] Horace’s fine lady, Leuconoë.--_Tr._
[541] It is perhaps possible for us to make some guess already as to
these forms, which (it is self-evident) must lead back to certain
elements of Gothic Christianity. But be this as it may, what is quite
certain is that they will not be the product of any literary taste for
Late-Indian or Late-Chinese speculation, but something of the type, for
example, of Adventism and suchlike sects.
[542] Arnim, _Stoic. vet. fragm._, 537.
[543] See p. 202.
[544] The Lü-shi Chun-tsiu of Lü-pu-Wei (d. 237 B.C., Chinese Augustan
Age) is the first monument of this syncretism, of which the final
deposit was the ritual work _Li-ki_ of the Han period (B. Schindler,
_Das Priestertum im alten China_, I, 93).
[545] M. Horten, _Die religiöse Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen
Islam_ (1917).
[546] 1018-78; cf. Dieterich, _Byzant. Charakterköpfe_ (1909), p. 63.
[Or _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., article “Psellus.”--_Tr._]
[547] It was only in old age and after long and heavy warring that both
these Cæsars gave themselves up to a mild and weary piety, and both of
them held aloof from the more definite religions. From the point of
view of dogma, Asoka was no Buddhist; what he did was to understand the
currents and take them under his protection (Hillebrandt, _Altindien_,
p. 143). [Asoka’s life is dealt with in several of the works of Rhys
Davids; for example, Ch. xv of his _Buddhist India_.--_Tr._]
[548] In so far as it is permissible to reckon Mithraism as Classical
at all--for it is really a religion of the Magian Spring.
[549] De Groot, _Universismus_ (1918), p. 134.
[550] P. 169.
[551] See the article “Maimonides” in _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[552] Fromer, _Der Talmud_, p. 217. The “red cow” and the ritual
of anointing a Jewish king were treated in this work with the same
seriousness as the most important provisions of private law. [See J.
and J. Tharaud, _Petite Histoire des Juifs_, Ch. I (1927).--_Tr._]
[553] See, for the following paragraphs, the articles “Jews,” “Hebrew
Religion,” “Hebrew Literature,” “Kabbalah,” “Qaraites,” etc., in _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[554] Strunz, _Gesch. der Naturwiss. im Mittelalter_, p. 89.
[555] Only with Nicolaus Cusanus was this state of things reversed.
[556] P. 174.
[557] The reader is recommended to study, in the light of all this,
recent literature of the type of Hajim Bloch’s _Golem_ and the works of
the brothers Tharaud.--_Tr._
[558] See pp. 259, et seq.; 174, et seq.
[559] P. 127.
[560] P. 48.
[561] Prague contains a veritable corpus of commentary upon these
pages.--_Tr._
[562] A.D. 132. See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. XV, p. 402, and Vol.
III, p. 395.--_Tr._
[563] Instances--besides that of Mithradates and the Cyprus massacre
(p. 198) quoted above--are the Sepoy Mutiny in India, the Boxer
Rebellion in China, and the Bolshevist fury of Jews, Letts, and other
alien peoples against Tsarist Russia.
[564] P. Levertoff, _Die religiöse Denkweise der Chassidim_ (1918),
pp. 128, et seq.; M. Buber, _Die Legende des Baalschem_ (1907).
[Brief account in J. and J. Tharaud, _Petite histoire des Juifs_, Ch.
vii.--_Tr._]
[565] Levertoff, op. cit., p. 136.
[566] O. Weininger, _Taschenbuch_ (1919), above all pp. 19, et seq.
[567] Their ship-building was in Roman times more Classical than
Phœnician, their state was organized as a Polis, and their educated
people, like Hannibal, were familiar with Greek.
[568] See p. 260, et seq.
[569] Cf. p. 3 and foot-note.
[570] And not until women cease to have race enough to have or to
want children, not until they cease to _be_ history, does it become
possible for them to make or to copy the history of men. Conversely,
it is deeply significant that we are in the habit of calling thinkers,
doctrinaires, and humanity-enthusiasts of anti-political tendency “old
women.” They wish to imitate the other history, the history of woman,
although they--cannot.
[571] No exact equivalent exists in common English for the German word
“_Stand_.” “Aristocracy” is too narrow, as under most aspects the
clergy and under some even the _Tiers_ have to be reckoned in. “Class”
fails because, for logical completeness, it has to be stretched so
as to bring in the qualitatively unclassed as a distinct category.
(A whole social history is contained in the use of these and similar
words at different periods.) The word “Estate” itself is used nowadays
for the “masses” (“Fourth Estate” = “Proletariat”), but this very use,
by Socialists, is an assertion that the masses, as workers, possess a
qualitative peculiarity and condition of their own, and the word thus
continues to connote ideas of differentiation, specific constitution,
and oriented outlook. It may, therefore, be employed here without fear
of misunderstanding or reproach of pedantry.--_Tr._
[572] Cf. pp. 120, et seq.
[573] Mitteis, _Reichsrecht und Volksrecht_ (1891), p. 63.
[574] Sohm, _Institutionen_ (1911), p. 614. [_Ency. Brit._, XI ed.,
Vol. XXIII, pp. 540-1.--_Tr._]
[575] This principle formed the basis of the dynastic-idea of the
Arabian world (Ommayads, Comneni, Sassanids), which is so hard for us
to grasp. When a usurper had seized a throne, he hastened to marry
one or another of the female members of the blood-community and so
prolonged the dynasty; of law-made succession rights there was no
question, nor under this idea could there be. (See also J. Wellhausen,
_Ein Gemeinwesen ohne Obrigkeit_ (1900).)
[576] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p. 574.--_Tr._
[577] See p. 18.
[578] An inversion of Clausewitz’s famous expression that war is a
continuation of policy by other means. (_On War_, I, i, § 24).--_Tr._
[579] Not excluding art, although we are not _conscious_ of them save
through deduction from art-_history_.
[580] Original: “_Sie liegen im gesteigerten Dasein von Einzelnen und
Kreisen, eben in dem, was soeben ‘Dasein in Form’ genannt worden ist,
und durch diese Höhe des Geformtseins erst die Kultur repräsentirt._”
[581] So in the German, but see foot-note p. 329. “_Stand_” would have
expressed the sense better.--_Tr._
[582] R. Fick, _Die soziale Gliederung im nordöstlichen Indien zu
Buddhas Zeit_ (1897), p. 201; K. Hillebrandt, _Alt-Indien_ (1899), p.
82. [Also the article “Brahmanism,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._]
[583] See Vol. I, p. 157.--_Tr._
[584]
_Got hât driu leben geschaffen
Gebûre, ritter, phaffen._
[Note the collective _ge-_ attached to the first-named.--_Tr._]
[585] The ease with which Bolshevism extinguished the four so-called
estates or classes of Petrine Russia--nobles, merchants, small
townspeople, and peasants--shows that these were mere imitations and
administrative conveniences, and destitute of all symbolism--for
symbolism no power on earth can choke. They correspond to the outward
differences of rank and possessions that existed in the Visigothic and
Frankish Kingdoms, and--as glimpses afforded by the earliest parts of
the Iliad show--in Mycenæan times. It is reserved for the future to
develop a true nobility and clergy in Russia.
[586] As a treaty of reciprocal possession by the two parties which is
made effective by the reciprocal use of their sex-properties.
[587] Oldenberg, _Die Lehre der Upanishaden_ (1915), p. 5.
[588] P. 124.
[589] “So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I
will spue thee out of my mouth.”
[590] P. 4, et seq.
[591] The case of Egypt is of course similar.--_Tr._
[592] Pp. 272, et seq.
[593] _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, § 260.
[594] In contrast, the Spanish word “_Hidalgo_” means “son of
somebody.”--_Tr._
[595] Conversely, it can successfully be controverted--and often
has been so in the Chinese and Classical, Indian and Western
philosophies--but it does not get abolished.
[596] The possession of movable things (food, equipment, arms) comes
later, and is of much lower symbolic weight. It occurs widely in the
animal world. The bird’s nest, on the contrary, is a property of
plantlike kind.
[597] Property in this most significant sense--the having grown up with
something--refers therefore less to the particular person than to the
family tree to which he belongs. In every quarrel within a peasant or
even within a princely family, this is the deep and violent element.
The master for the time being holds possession only in the name of the
family line. Hence, too, the terror of death without heirs. _Property
also is a Time-symbol_, and consequently it is closely related to
marriage, which is a firm plantlike intergrowth and mutual possession
of two human beings, so real as to be even reflected in an increasing
facial similarity.
[598] See p. 248.
[599] See these headings in _Ency. Brit._, XI. ed.--_Tr._
[600] After death the teachers of error are excluded from the eternal
bliss of the text-book and cast into the purgatorial fires of
foot-notes, whence, purged by the intercession of the believer, they
ascend into the paradise of the paragraphs.
[601] Black Jews, who are smiths to a man.
[602] The genuinely primitive Mir, contrary to the assertions of
enthusiastic socialists and pan-slavists, dates only from after 1600,
and has been abolished since 1861. Here the soil is _communal_ soil,
and the villagers are as far as possible held fast, in order to ensure
that the tilling of this soil shall cover the demands of taxation.
[603] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., Vol. XI, pp. 94, 786, or any histories
of German literature.--_Tr._
[604] See, further, below.
[605] Brentano, _Byzant. Volkswirtschaft_ (1917), p. 15.
[606] Even I-wang (934-909) was obliged to leave conquered territories
to his vassals, who put in counts and reeves of their own choice.
[607] See H. Delbrück, _Gesch. der Kriegskunst_, Vol. II, Book I, Ch.
x; or C. W. C. Oman, _Art of War: Middle Ages_, Ch. i.--_Tr._
[608] The slave in the Classical sense disappears automatically and
completely in these centuries--one of the most significant indications
that the Classical world-feeling, and with it its economic feeling,
were extinct.
[609] Thus, later, under Justinian, Belisarius could furnish seven
thousand cavalry from his own domains for the Gothic War. Very few
German princes could have done so much in Charles V’s time. [The last
of such armies in Western history was the army of the House of Condé in
the seventeenth century. These centuries of ours “correspond” with the
period that set in with Justinian.--_Tr._]
[610] Pöhlmann, _Röm. Kaiserzeit_ (Pflugk-Harttungs _Weltgesch._, I,
pp. 200, et seq.).
[611] See p. 286.
[612] In spite of Ed. Meyer (_Gesch. d. Altertums_, I, § 243).
[613] Our marshal and the Chinese _sse-ma_, chamberlain and _Chen_,
high steward and _ta-tsai_, high bailiff and _nan_, earl and _peh_ (the
Chinese ranks as in Schindler, _Das Priestertum im alten China_, p. 61,
et seq.). Precisely corresponding Egyptian grades in Ed. Meyer, _Gesch.
des Altertums_, I, § 222; Byzantine in the “_Notitia Dignitatum_”
(derived in part from the Sassanid Court). In the Classical city-states
certain official titles of ancient origin suggest court functions
(Colacretæ, Prytanes, Consuls). See further below.
[614] Hardy, _Indische Religionsgesch._, p. 260.
[615] M. Granet, _Coutumes matrimoniales de la Chine antique, T’oung
Pao_ (1912), pp. 517, et seq.
[616] The tournament was an institution in the other, western, half of
the Magian world as well.--_Tr._
[617] The life of John Chrysostom is an instance.
[618] Another example (beloved of artists) stands to this day in the
town of San Gimigniano, which is almost nothing but a group of family
towers ranging up to 150 ft. in height.--_Tr._
[619] Ambrogio Spinola is a case in point.--_Tr._
[620] The memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon give a vivid picture of
this evolution.
[621] P. 75.
[622] Corresponding to our seventeenth century.
[623] K. J. Neumann, _Die Grundherrschaft der römischen Republik_
(1900); Ed. Meyer, _Kl. Schriften_, pp. 351, et seq.
[624] A. Rosenberg, _Studien zur Entstehung der Plebs_, Herm. XLVIII
(1913), pp. 359, et seq.
[625] Pp. 102, et seq.
[626] See pp. 159, et seq.
[627] Pp. 170, et seq.
[628] See Vol. I, pp. 136, et seq.--_Tr._
[629] Hence such codes throw out the privileges of nobility and
clergy and sustain those of money and intellect, and display a frank
preference for movable as against real property.
[630] Pp. 75, et seq. The corresponding attempt of the absolutist
Stuarts to introduce Roman Law into England was defeated chiefly by the
Puritan jurist Coke (d. 1634)--yet another proof that the spirit of
laws is always a party-spirit.
[631] See pp. 65, et seq.
[632] Above all in connexion with divorce, in which the civil and the
ecclesiastical views _both_ hold good, literally side by side.
[633] See p. 330.--_Tr._
[634] Thus come about the much satirized forms of the “patrol-” or
“barrack-state,” as opponents call it with an unintelligent scorn.
Similar points of view appear also in Chinese and Greek constitutional
theories (O. Franke, _Studien zur Geschichte des konfuzianischen
Dogmas_ (1920), pp. 211, et seq.; Pöhlmann, _Geschichte der sozialen
Frage und der Sozialismus in der antiken Welt_ (1912)). On the other
hand, the political tastes of, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who
as a Classicist opposed the individual to the State, belong, not to
political history at all, but to literature. For what he looked at
was, not the capacity of the State to thrive in the real State-world
around it, but its private existence within itself, without regard to
the fact that such an ideal could not endure for an instant in the face
of a neglected outer situation. It is a basic error of the ideologues
that, in concentrating on the private life and referring to it the
whole inner structure of the State, they entirely ignore the latter’s
position in point of outward power, though this in fact completely
conditions its freedom for the inward development. The difference
between the French and the German Revolutions, for example, consists in
the fact that the one commanded the external situation and _therewith_
the internal also, while the other commanded neither and was foredoomed
to farce.
[635] Which is most definitely _not_ identical with economic history
in the sense of the materialist historian. More of this in the next
chapter.
[636] It is to be noted that the author uses the terms “horizontal” and
“vertical” here in the reverse sense to that in which they commonly
figure in present-day _political_ literature, although in _economic_
works the usage is the same as that of the text.--_Tr._
[637] Attention is drawn to this phrase, so as to avoid misconceptions
as to the meaning of “subject” in the sequel.--_Tr._
[638] Compare the position of the aristocratic families of the South in
the history of the United States up to 1850-60.--_Tr._
[639] For in those centuries the high dignities of the Church were
invariably given to the nobility of Europe, who put the political
qualities of the blood at her service. From this school in turn
emanated statesmen like Richelieu, Mazarin, and Talleyrand, to name but
a few.
[640] See p. 180.
[641] I.e., Domesday Book.--_Tr._
[642] See p. 350.
[643] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. a. Altertums_, I, § 244.
[644] Even by Chinese critics. See, however, Schindler, _Das
Priestertum im alten China_, I, pp. 61, et seq.; Conrady, _China_, p.
533.
[645] See pp. 349, et seq.
[646] “_Compotus_,” “_contrarotulus_” (the counter-roll retained for
checking), “_quittancia_,” “_recordatum_.”
[647] See p. 279.
[648] “For the ruler of the Middle there is no foreign land”
(Kung-yang). “The heaven speaks not; it causes its thoughts to be
promulgated by a man” (Tung Chung-shu). His errors affect the whole
cosmos and bring about cataclysms in Nature (O. Franke, _Zur Geschichte
des konfuzianischen Dogmas_ (1920), pp. 212, et seq., 244, et seq.).
Such mystic universalism was completely alien to Indian and Classical
state-notions.
[649] It must not be forgotten that the immense domains of the Church
had become hereditary fiefs of the bishops and archbishops, who were no
more disposed than the lay peers to permit interferences on the part of
the overlord.
[650] After the overthrow of the Tyrannis, _c._ 500, the two regents
of the Roman patriciate bear the title _prætor_ or _judex_. But it
seems to me probable that these go back beyond the Tyrannis and even
the preceding oligarchic period into that of the kingship proper,
and that as court-offices they have the same origin as our _Herzog_,
duke (_præ-itor_); _Heerwart_, in Athens polemarch; and _Graf_, earl
(“_Ding-graf_,” hereditary arbiter, in Athens archon). The name
“_consul_” (from 366) is philologically thoroughly archaic, and
therefore implies no new creation, but the renascence of a title
(king’s adviser?) which oligarchic sentiment had long repudiated.
[651] Beloch, _Griechische Geschichte_, I, 1, pp. 214, et seq.
[652] The Spartiates mustered in the best period of the sixth century
some 4000 warriors, out of a total population of nearly 300,000,
including Periœci and Helots (Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, III, §
264). The Roman families must at that time have been of about the same
strength relatively to the _clientela_ and the Latins.
[653] Men’s messes. See the article Συσσίτια in Smith’s _Dictionary of
Classical Antiquities._--_Tr._
[654] Ed. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alt._, I, § 264.
[655] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, I, § 267, et seq.
[656] See Ehrenberg, _Die Rechtsidee im frühen Griechentum_ (1921), pp.
65, et seq.
[657] P. 18.
[658] Pp. 171, et seq.
[659] P. 181, et seq.
[660] F. Cumont, _Mysterien des Mithra_ (1910), pp. 74, et seq. The
Sassanid government, which about A.D. 300 changed from the feudal
union to the aristocratic State, was in all respects the pattern for
Byzantium in ceremonial, in the knightly character of its Empire, in
administrative management, and above all in the type of its Ruler. Cf.
also A. Christensen, _L’Empire des Sassanides, le peuple, l’état, la
cour_ (Copenhagen, 1907).
[661] Ed. Meyer, _Kl. Shriften_, p. 146.
[662] See p. 243.
[663] Krumbacher, _Byzant. Literaturgesch._, p. 918.
[664] A bright light is thrown upon the formation of this picture by
the fact that the descendants of the repeatedly overthrown dynasties
of Hia and Shang reigned in the states of Ki-Sung throughout the Chóu
period (Schindler, _Das Priestertum im alten China_, I, p. 30). This
shows, firstly, that the picture of the Empire was mirrored back on
some earlier or even perhaps a contemporary eminence of these states;
and, secondly and above all, that here too “dynasty” was not what we
currently mean by the name, but followed some quite different idea of
the family. We may compare the fiction which made the German King, who
was always chosen on Frankish territory and crowned in the sepulchral
chapel of Charlemagne, into a “Frank,” so that if circumstances had
been different, there might have evolved the notion of a Frankish
dynasty running from Charles to Conradin (see Amira, _German. Recht_
in Herm. Paul, _Grundriss_, III, p. 147, note). From the Confucian age
of enlightenment this picture became the basis of a State-theory, and
later still it was turned to account by the Cæsars (p. 313).
[665] O. Franke, _Studien zur Gesch. d. Konfuz. Dogmas_, pp. 247, 251.
[666] An illuminating example is the “personal union” of the Ki and
Tseng states, contested as contrary to law (Franke, op. cit., p. 251).
[667] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, I, § 281.
[668] G. Busolt, _Griech. Staatskunde_ (1920), pp. 319, et seq. U.
von Wilamowitz (_Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen_, 1910, p. 53),
in disputing the existence of the patriarchal kingdom, misunderstands
the immense difference between the conditions of the eighth century,
indicated in the Odyssey, and those of the tenth.
[669] A. Rosenberg, _Der Staat der alten Italiker_, pp. 75, et seq.
[670] Estate or Class was the basis, too, of the two great political
associations in Byzantium, which are quite wrongly described as “Circus
parties.” These Blues and Greens called themselves “Demoi” and had
their regular leaders. The circus was simply like the Palais Royal of
1789, the scene of public manifestations, and behind them were the
class-associations of the Senate. When in 520 Anastasius I gave effect
to the Monophysite tendency, the Greens sang orthodox hymns all day
there, and so forced the Emperor publicly to cry off. The Western
counterpart to this is formed by the Parisian parties under the “three
Henries” (1580), the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Savonarola’s Florence,
and above all the insurgent faction in Rome under Pope Eugene IV. The
suppression of the Nika Rebellion by Justinian in 532 was thus also the
foundation of State-absolutism _vis-à-vis_ the Estates.
[671] This contrast gives rise to a corresponding contrast in idea of
colonization. Whereas, e.g., the Prussian sovereigns invited settlers
to their _land_ (Salzburg Protestants, French Huguenots), Gelon
forcibly transferred the populations of whole cities into Syracuse,
which thus became the first megalopolis of the Classical world (_c._
480).
[672] The Greek lecythi found in graves on the Esquiline date form this
period.
[673] Wissowa, _Religion der Römer_, p. 242.
[674] W. Schulze, _Zur Geschichte lateinischen Eigennamen_, pp. 379, et
seq., 580, et seq.
[675] See p. 351.
[676] This is seen also in the relation of the _Pontifex Maximus_ to
the _Rex Sacrorum_--the latter with the three great Flamens to the
kingship, the Pontifices and the Vestals to the aristocracy.
[677] See p. 62, et seq.
[678] P. 173, et seq.
[679] This is clearly to be seen from Wilcken, _Grundzüge der
Papyruskunde_ (1912), pp. 1, et seq.
[680] Ed. Meyer, _Cæsars Monarchie_ (1918), p. 308.
[681] Plutarch and Appian describe the masses of humanity that moved in
by all the roads of Italy to vote on Tiberius Gracchus’s land-bills.
But this in itself shows that nothing of the sort had ever happened
before; and immediately after his violence upon Octavius, Tiberius
Gracchus saw downfall staring him in the face because the masses had
streamed off home again and were not to be assembled a second time.
In Cicero’s day a Comitia often consisted only in speeches by a few
politicians, without participation by others; but never did it occur
to a Roman to transfer the place of voting to the residence of the
individual voter--nor even to the Italians when they were fighting for
citizenship in 90 B.C. So strong was the feeling of the Polis.
[682] In the Western dynasty-states the domestic law of each is valid
for its _territory_ and applies therefore to all persons present
therein, irrespective of allegiance. In the city-state, on the
contrary, the validity of its domestic law for a person arises from
that person’s possession of citizenship; _civitas_, therefore, means
infinitely more than present-day nationality, for without it a man was
without rights at all--as a “person,” non-existent.
[683] See p. 60.
[684] Gercke-Norden, _Einl. i. d. Alt.-Wiss._, II, p. 202.
[685] Busolt, _Griech. Geschichte_, II, pp. 346, et seq.
[686] Cf. pp. 282 and 305. Fronde and Tyrannis have as intimate
a connexion with Puritanism--the same epochal phase, but in the
religious instead of the political world--as the Reformation with the
aristocratic State, and the “Second Religiousness” with Cæsarism.
[687] G. Wissowa, _Religion der Römer_, pp. 297, et seq.
[688] Beloch, _Griech. Geschichte_, I, 1, p. 354.
[689] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, § 281.
[690] Ibid., §§ 280, et seq.
[691] On the means taken to secure the succession, cf. p. 379.
[692] Ed. Meyer, op. cit., § 286.
[693] Ibid., § 283. A. Erman, _Die Mahnworte eines ägyptischen
Propheten_ (_Sitz. Preuss. Akad._), 1919, pp. 804, et seq.
[694] S. Plath, _Verfassung und Verwaltung Chinas_ (_Abb. Münch. Ak._,
1864), p. 97, O. Franke, _Studien z. Gesch. d. Konfuz. Dogmas_, pp.
255, et seq.
[695] After armed rebellion.--_Tr._
[696] The fifty-year interval of these critical points, which is seen
with special distinctness in the clear historical structure of the
Baroque, but is recognizable also in the sequence of the three Punic
Wars, is yet another hint that the Cosmic flowings in the form of
human lives upon the surface of a minor star are not self-contained
and independent, but stand in deep harmony with the unending movedness
of the universe. In a small but noteworthy book, R. Mewes, _Die
Kriegs- und Geistesperioden im Völkerleben unde Verkündigung des
nächsten Weltkrieges_ (1896), the relation of those war-periods with
weather-periods, sun-spot cycles, and certain conjunctures of the
planets is established, and a great war foretold accordingly for the
period 1910-20. But these and numerous similar connexions that come
within the reach of our senses (cf. pp. 5, et seq.) veil a secret that
we have to respect and not to infringe with causal expositions or
mystical brain-spectres.
[697] See C. von B(inder)-K(rieglstein), _Geist und Stoff im Kriege_
(1896); F. N. Maude, _War and the World’s Life_ (1907), and other works
by the same author; also, in more summary terms, the articles “Army”
and “French Revolutionary Wars” by the present translator in _Ency.
Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._
[698] “Rule, Britannia” is an eighteenth-century product.--_Tr._
[699] For this, and what follows, see my _Preussentum und Sozialismus_,
pp. 31, et seq.
[700] Mr. Asquith (Lord Oxford) was the first British Prime Minister to
be officially so styled.--_Tr._
[701] “Landed” and “funded” interests (J. Hatschek, _Engl.
Verfassungsgeschichte_, 1913, pp. 589, et seq.). Walpole, the organizer
of the Whig party after 1714, used to describe himself and Townshend
as “the Firm;” and this “firm” with various changes of proprietorship
governed without limitation till 1760.
[702] R. von Pöhlmann, _Griech. Gesch._ (1914), pp. 223-45.
[703] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._ V § 809. If Latin became a literary
language, only very late--after Alexander--the only deduction to be
made from the fact is that under the Tarquins Greek and Etruscan must
have been in general use--which, after all, goes without saying for a
city that was of a size and position to have relations with Carthage;
that waged war in alliance with Cyme and made use of the Treasury of
Massalia at Delphi; whose standard weights and measures were Dorian;
whose mode of warfare was Sicilian; and whose walls contained a large
foreign colony. Livy (IX, 36), following older statements, observes
that about 300 the Roman boy was still brought upon Etruscan culture,
as he was later on Greek. The ancient form “Ulixes” for Odysseus shows
that the Homeric sagas were not only known, but popularly known here
(cf. p. 284). The provisions of the Twelve Tables (_c._ 450) agree with
the more or less contemporary law of Gortyn in Crete (cf. p. 63), not
merely as to substance, but even stylistically--so exactly that the
Roman patricians who drew them up must have been entirely at home with
juristic Greek.
[704] This measure--a usurpation of the administration by the “nation
in arms”--corresponds to the setting-up of Consular Tribunes in Rome in
the military disturbances of 438.
[705] According to B. Niese. Modern investigators are right in the
view that the Decemvirate was at first intended to be temporary; but
the question is--what were the views of the party that backed them
concerning the _new_ constitutional order that was to follow. It was on
that that a crisis had inevitably to come.
[706] A. Wahl, _Vorgeschichte d. franz. Revolution_, II (1907); this
work is the only presentation of the subject from the world-historical
point of view. All Frenchmen, even the most modern, such as Aulard
and Sorel, see things from one or another partisan angle. It is
materialistic nonsense to talk of economic causes for a Revolution like
this. Even the peasantry was better off than in most other countries,
and in any case it was not among them that it began. It was amongst
the _educated_ that the catastrophe started, the educated of _all_
the classes--in the high nobility and the clergy even sooner than in
the higher bourgeoisie, because the course of the first assembly of
Notables (1787) had disclosed the possibility of radically reshaping
the form of government according to class-desires.
[707] Even the highly provincial March Revolution of 1848 in Germany
was a purely urban matter; hence the vanishingly small proportion of
the population involved as participants.
[708] Hence also the exclusive bourgeois character of the National
Guard in France from 1815 to 1851, the period between two phases of
popular Tyrannis. In the _coup d’état_ by which Napoleon III seized the
throne, Paris was filled with regular troops, and the National Guard
was forbidden to assemble on pain of death.--_Tr._
[709] Pp. 97, and 305.
[710] See pp. 348.
[711] J. Hatschek, _Engl. Verfassungsgesch._, p. 588.
[712] On the other side of the Channel, it is well known that the
Rothschild fortune was founded in a dramatic play upon the varying news
from the front in Belgium.
In the second phase of the Franco-German War of 1870-1 the bankers
of Frankfurt took up holdings in the loans floated by the French
Government of National Defence.--_Tr._
[713] But even during the Reign of Terror in the middle of Paris, there
flourished the establishment of Dr. Belhomme, in which members of the
highest aristocracy ate and drank and danced out of all danger for so
long as they could pay (G. Lenôtre, _Das revolutionäre Paris_, p. 409).
[714] The great movement which makes use of the catchwords of Marx has
not delivered the entrepreneur into the power of the worker, but both
into that of the Bourse.
[715] Both the old parties possessed clear lines of tradition back to
1680.
[716] The moral and political “Enlightenment” movement was in England
also a product of the Third Estate (Priestley and Paley, Paine,
Godwin), and for that reason was unable to grasp things with the fine
discrimination of a Shaftesbury.
[717] Pelham, the successor of Walpole, paid to members of the Commons,
through his secretary, £500 to £800 at the end of each session
according to the value of the services rendered by each recipient
to the Government--i.e., the Whig party. The party agent Dodington
described his parliamentary activities in these words: “I never
attended a debate if I could help it, and I never missed a division
that I could possibly take part in. I heard many arguments that
convinced me, but never one that influenced my vote.”
[718] Here it was actually the interest of bourgeois and
“enlightenment” ideals that the personal régime of dictatorship was
thought to favour, for the opposition to these ideas lay in the strict
state-ideal of the Polis, which according to Isocrates was marked with
the curse of inability to die.
[719] Diodorus XIV, 7. The drama was repeated in 317, when Agathocles
the ex-potter let loose his mercenary bands and the mob upon the new
upper classes. After the massacre the “people” of the “purified city”
assembled and conferred the dictature upon the “saviour of true and
genuine freedom” (Deodorus XIX, 6, et seq.). On the whole movement see
Busolt, _Griech. Staatskunde_, pp. 396, et seq., and Pöhlmann, _Gesch.
d. soz. Frage_, I, pp. 416, et seq.
[720] Already that part of the Prussian army which had been in Russia
had declared against Napoleon--and that, though its general, Yorck, was
no liberal, but the old strict type of the Frederician officer.--_Tr._
[721] Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, IV, §§ 626, 630.
[722] H. Delbrück, _Gesch. d. Kriegskunst_ (1908), I, p. 142.
[723] Three to six “_tribuni militares consulari protestate_”
instead of the Consuls. Just at this juncture, as the result of the
introduction of pay and longer duration of service with the colours,
there must have come into being a nucleus of true professional
soldiers, who would have the election of centurions in their own hands
and by whom the spirit of the army was determined. It is entirely
erroneous to speak of a peasant-levy at this stage, quite apart from
the fact that the four great city-tribes contributed a considerable
part of the rank and file and a part, too, whose influence was even
greater than its numerical strength. Even in the “good old days”
picture presented to us by Livy and others we can clearly perceive
the influence exerted by the standing formations upon the contests of
parties.
[724] It is perhaps not a mere coincidence that 367 is the year of
Dionysius’s death.
[725] According to K. J. Neumann, this goes back to the great Censor.
[726] According to Roman law, the freed slave at once acquired
citizenship, with some few limitations. As the slave-material came
from all over the Mediterranean region and most of all from the East,
it was a vast rootless mass that collected in the four urban tribes,
alien from all the tendencies of the old Roman blood; and it quickly
destroyed these when, after the Gracchan movement, it had succeeded in
bringing its weight of numbers to bear with effect.
[727] From the end of the fourth century the nobility developed into
a closed circle of families that had, or claimed to have, consuls
among their ancestors. The more strictly this condition was enforced,
the more frequent were the falsifications of the old consul-lists
in order to “legitimize” rising families of strong race and talent.
The first (and truly revolutionary) outburst of forgery occurs in
the epoch of Appius Claudius the Censor, when the curule ædile C.
Flavius, the son of a slave, put the list in order--that was the time
when even royal cognomina were discovered amongst plebeian families.
The second was in the days of the battle of Pydna (168), when the
dominance of the nobility began to assume Cæsarian forms (E. Kornemann,
_Der Priesterkodex in der Regia_, 1912, pp. 56, et seq.). Of the 200
Consulates between 232 and 133, 159 fell to 26 families, and thereafter
blood-quality being exhausted, but the form as such being all the more
studiously preserved in consequence--the rise of _novi homines_ like
Cato and Cicero became a rare phenomenon.
[728] Another instance, among many, is its rôle in preparing the German
crash of 1918.
[729] And even in France, where the judicial class in the parlements
openly scorned the Government, and with impunity tore down royal
proclamations from the walls and put up their own _arrêts_ instead (R.
Holtzmann, _Französ. Verfassungsgesch._, 1910, p. 353); where “orders
were given, but not obeyed, laws enacted, but not executed” (A. Wahl,
_Vorgesch. d. franz. Revolution_, I, 29 and passim); where high finance
could overthrow Turgot and anyone else whose reform-schemes disquieted
it; where the whole educated world, headed by princes and nobles,
prelates and generals, was Anglomaniac and applauded opposition in
any shape or form--even there nothing would have happened but for the
sudden concurrence of a set of incidents--the fashion which set in
amongst French officers of aiding the American republicans in their
struggle with the English King; the diplomatic reverse in Holland (27
Oct. 1787) in the middle of the reforming activity of the Government;
and the perpetual change of ministers under pressure from irresponsible
quarters. In the British Empire, the falling-away of the Colonies was
the result of attempts of high-Tory circles (in collusion with George
III, but in reality of course in their own interests) to strengthen the
Royal power. This party possessed in the Colonies a strong contingent
of royalists, notably in the South: these elements, fighting on the
British side, decided the battle of Camden, and after the final victory
of the rebels mostly emigrated to Canada, which had remained loyal.
[730] In 1793 there were 306 members of the House of Commons who were
elected by 160 persons in all. Old Sarum, the constituency of the elder
Pitt, consisted of one tenement, returning two members.
[731] Afterwards--from 1832--the English nobility itself, through a
series of prudent measures, drew the bourgeoisie into _co-operation_
with it, but under its continued guidance and, above all, in the
framework of tradition, within which consequently the young talent
grew up. Democracy thus actualized itself here so that the Government
remained strictly “in form”--the old aristocratic form--while the
individual was free to practise politics according to his bent. This
transition, in a peasantless society dominated by business interests,
was the most remarkable achievement of inner politics in the nineteenth
century.
[732] Early, that is, in the post-revolutionary era here
considered.--_Tr._
[733] The reassertion of this tradition after the emergency-army of
the Wars of Liberation (1812-15) had dispersed into the body of the
community is a remarkable story, in which military and political
standpoints cannot be separated. See Vidal de la Blache, _La
Régéneration de l’Armée Prusse_ (1910), Ch. vi.--_Tr._
[734] See _Preussentum und Sozialismus_, pp. 40, et seq.
[735] The genesis of the Roman Tribunate was a blind incident,
the happy consequences of which no one really foresaw. Western
Constitutions, on the contrary, have been thoroughly thought out and
their effects precisely calculated--whether the calculation proved to
be correct or incorrect, the care is undeniable.
[736] From the few European works that concern themselves with
questions of ancient Chinese history, it emerges that Chinese
literature contains a very great amount of material bearing on this
period, which corresponds in innumerable parallels to our own present
time. But there is a total lack of any political treatment of it that
can be taken seriously. References: Hübotter, _Aus den Plänen der
Kämpfenden Reiche_ (1912); Piton, “The Six Great Chancellors of Tsin,”
_China Review_, XIII, 202, 255, 365, XIV, 3; Ed. Chavannes, _Mém. hist.
de Se-ma-tsien_ (1895 and following); Pfizmair, _Sitz. Wien Akad._,
XLIII (1863) (“Tsin”), XLIV (“Tsu”); A. Tschepe, _Histoire du royaume
de Ou_ (1896), and _de Tchou_ (1903).
[737] Corresponding more or less to the province of Shen-si.
[738] On the middle Yang-tse-kiang.
[739] Biography 13 of Sze-ma-tsien. So far as the translated evidences
allow us to judge, the preparation and dispositions of these campaigns,
the boldness of the operations by which he drove the enemy on to ground
where he could beat him, and the novel tactical execution of the
separate battles, stamp Pe-Ki as one of the greatest military geniuses
of all time, a figure worthy indeed of adequate treatment by a military
expert. It is from this period that we have the authoritative work of
Sun-tse on War: Giles, _Sun-Tse on the Art of War_ (1910). [Or Capt. E.
R. Calthrop, _The Book of War--Sun and Wu_ (1908).--_Tr._]
[740] See pp. 312, et seq.
[741] Now approximately Shan-tung and Pe-chi-li.
[742] Piton, “Lu-puh-Weih,” _China Rev._ XIII, pp. 365 et seq.
[743] Even if the Chinese authors themselves misunderstood the
expression in the same, or anything like the same, way as their
Western translators, the fact would only prove that the appreciation
of political problems vanished as rapidly in the Chinese Imperial Age
as in fact it did in the Roman--because they were no longer personally
and livingly experienced. The much-admired Sze-ma-tsien is after all a
compiler of the same rank as Plutarch (with whom he corresponds in date
also). The high point of historical comprehension, _which presumes an
equivalent experience in life_, must for China have lain in the period
of the Contending States, as it lies for us in the nineteenth century
and after.
[744] Both, like most of the leading statesmen of the time, were pupils
of Kwei-ku-tse, whose knowledge of men, deep sense of the historically
possible, and command of the diplomatic technique of the age (the “Art
of the vertical and the horizontal”) must have made him one of the most
influential personalities of the period. Another figure of the same
sort of weight after him was the thinker and war-theorist above alluded
to, Sun-tse, who amongst others was the tutor of the Chancellor Lui-Si.
[Sun-Tse’s book of war, as presented in Calthrop’s translation,
is comparable to nothing in Western military literature short of
Clausewitz’s _Vom Kriege_. Clausewitz was a contemporary and product of
the Napoleonic epoch, and the glow of Romanticism has not yet passed
from him; Sun, on the other hand, came “later,” and his atmosphere is
the shrewd factual atmosphere of pre-Cæsarism.--_Tr._]
[745] A story is told of Sun, that when for a jest (or a demonstration
of tactics) opposed forces were made up from the court ladies, one of
the commanders, the sovereign’s favourite wife, was executed by Sun’s
command for disobeying an order.--_Tr._
[746] Frederick’s “conscripts” (_Landeskinder_) were a long-service
element, small in proportion to the population, and of serf status.
Only the relative poverty of Prussia compelled this much of departure
from the then normal procedure of recruiting volunteers, to which the
Prussian army reverted as soon as its treasury could afford to do
so. Maurice de Saxe is the one outstanding soldier of the period who
advocated universal citizen service. But the famous “_Rêveries_” were
written (“in thirteen sleepless nights”) in 1732, before he had held
high command. The military works of Leibniz touch upon the subject,
but he was a practical man as well as a philosopher, and his detailed
proposals are in the spirit of the time. On the contrary, the pure
philosopher Spinoza definitely advocated universal service.--_Tr._
[747] Large, that is, relatively to the general development of
Classical technics in other fields, which was of the slightest--not in
any way outstanding if judged by, say, Assyrian or Egyptian standards.
[748] The book of the Socialist Moh-ti, of this period, treats of
universal love of mankind in its first part, of fortress artillery in
its second--a singular example of contraposition of truths and facts.
Forke in _Ostasiat. Ztschr._, VIII (Hirth number).
[749] A whole literature exists for Napoleon’s “case-shot attack,”
which was closely studied in the years before 1914 with the definite
aim of finding a key to victories that the mechanical developments in
the defensive rifle had made doubtful.--_Tr._
[750] On the side of the North, more than 1½ million men out of barely
20 million inhabitants.
[The total of men of military age in the North was 4,600,000, of whom
2,780,000 actually enlisted. The figure of 1,700,000 is a reduction to
a three-year level--i.e., men who served throughout the war counting
as 1⅓ each and men who served for one year as ⅓ each. The Southern
states put into the field, on the same three-years’ basis, 900,000 out
of 1,065,000 men of military age. (Dodge, _Birds Eye View of our Civil
War_.)--_Tr._]
[751] To which should be added, though on a small scale, the
first serious attempts at submarines, machine-guns, and magazine
rifles.--_Tr._
[752] Amongst the wholly new problems was that of rapidly restoring
railways and bridges; the bridge at Chattanooga, for the heaviest
military trains, 240 metres long and 30 metres high, was built in 4½
days.
[753] Modern Japan belongs to the Western Civilization no less than
“modern” Carthage of the third century to the Classical.
[754] For the politico-social history of the Arabian World there is the
same lack of deep and penetrating research as for the Chinese. Only the
political evolution of the Western margin up to Diocletian, regarded
hitherto as within the Classical pale, is an exception.
[755] It was a few thousands only that accompanied the first conquerors
and spread themselves from Tunis to Turkestan, and these everywhere
constituted themselves a self-contained and close Estate in the
entourage of the new potentates. An “Arabian _Völkerwanderung_” is out
of the question.
[756] J. Wellhausen, _Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz_ (1902), pp.
309, et seq.
[757] Compare the inner divisions of the English Parliamentary army in
and after the Civil Wars.--_Tr._
[758] See p. 261.
[759] K. Dieterich, _Byz. Charakterköpfe_, p. 54: “Since thou wilt have
an answer from us, receive it then! Paul has said some in the Church
are ordained by God to be Apostles, some prophets, but he said nothing
about Emperors--we will not follow though it were an angel that bade
us; how much less if thou!”
[760] Cf. p. 316.
[761] Huart, _Gesch. d. Araber_ (1914), I, p. 299.
[762] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., art. “Carmathians.”--_Tr._
[763] Krumbacher, _Byz. Lit.-Gesch._, p. 969.
[764] For all this see Krumbacher, op. cit., pp. 969-90; C. Neumann,
_Die Weltstellung des Byz. Reiches vor den Kreuzzügen_ (1894), pp. 21,
et seq.
[765] Krumbacher, op. cit., 993.
[766] And perhaps not in Baghdad alone, for the gifted Maniakes, who
was hailed by the army in Sicily as Emperor and fell in 1043 in his
march on Byzantium, must have been a Turk.
[767] 1785-1580. See, for the following, Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._ §§
298, et seq.; Weill, _La Fin du moyen empire égyptien_ (1918). That Ed.
Meyer’s assignment is correct as compared with the 1670 years of Petrie
has long been proved by the thickness of the strata in which objects
have been found and the tempo of the style-evolution (Minoan included).
Here it is demonstrated afresh by comparison with corresponding
sections in the other Cultures.
[768] P. 387.
[769] Erman, “_Mahnworte eines ägypt. Propheten_” (_Sitz. Preuss.
Akad._, 1919, pp. 804, et seq.): “The higher officials are displaced,
the land robbed of its royalty by a few madmen, and the counsellors of
the old state pay their court to upstarts; administration has ceased,
documents are destroyed, all social differences abolished, the courts
fallen into the hands of the mob. The noble classes go hungry and in
rags, their children are battered on the wall, and their mummies torn
from the grave. Mean fellows become rich and swagger in the palaces on
the strength of the herds and ships that they have taken from their
rightful owners. Former slave-girls become insolent and aliens lord
it. Robbery and murder rule, cities are laid waste, public buildings
burned down. The harvest diminishes, no one thinks now of cleanliness,
births are few--and oh, that mankind might cease!” Here is the very
picture of the megalopolitan and Late revolution, as it was enacted
in the Hellenistic (p. 405) and in 1789 and 1871 in Paris. It is the
world-city masses, will-less tools of the ambition of leaders who
demolish every remnant of order, who desire to see in the outer world
the same chaos as reigns within their own selves. Whether these cynical
and hopeless attempts start from alien intruders like the Hyksos or the
Turks, or from slaves as in the case of Spartacus and Ali; whether the
division of property is shouted for as at Syracuse or has a book for
banner like Marxism--all this is superficial. It is wholly immaterial
what slogans scream to the wind while the gates and the skulls are
being beaten in. Destruction is the true and only impulse, and Cæsarism
the only issue. The world-city, the land-devouring demon, has set its
rootless and futureless men in motion; and in destroying they die.
[770] The Papyrus says: the “archer-folk from without”--that is, the
barbarian mercenary troops. To these the native youth attached itself.
[771] Glance also at the Negro-state in Irak and the “contemporary”
attempts of Spartacus, Sertorius, and Sextus Pompey, and we get a fair
idea of the variety of the possibilities. Weill assumes, 1785-1765, the
collapse of the Kingdom, a usurper (a general); 1765-1675, numerous
small potentates, in the Delta wholly independent; 1675-1633, struggle
for unity, especially the rulers of Thebes, with an ever-increasing
retinue of dependent rulers, including the Hyksos; 1633, victory of
the Hyksos and defeat of the Thebans; 1591-1571, final triumph of the
Thebans.
[772] As an inspiriting idea it may be retained; translated into
actuality it will never be again.
[773] Piton, op. cit., p. 521.
[774] _Hist._, III, 1.
[775] Including the constitution of the United States of America. Only
thus can we account for the reverence that the American cherishes for
it, even where he clearly sees its insufficiency.
[776] Cæsar recognized this clearly. “_Nihil esse rem publicam,
appellationem modo sine corpore ac specie_” (Suetonius, _Cæsar_, 77).
[777] See p. 48.
[778] See p. 48.
[779] Cicero, in his _Pro Sestio_, draws attention to the fact that
five people for each tribe attended plebiscites, and these really
belonged to tribes other than that which they were representing. But
these five were present only in order to have themselves bought by the
possessors of the real power. Yet it was hardly fifty years since the
Italians had died in masses for this franchise.
[780] And, strangely, Ed. Meyer also, in his masterpiece _Cæsars
Monarchie_, the one work of statesmanlike quality yet written
about this epoch--and previously in his essay on Augustus (_Kleine
Schriften_, pp. 441, et seq.).
[781] _De Re Publica_, 54 B.C., a monograph intended for Pompey.
[782] P. 395.
[783] See p. 409.
[784] In _Somnium Scipionis_, VI, 26, he is a god who so rules the
State _quam hunc mundum ille princeps deus_.
[785] It was with every justification that, in the presence of the
corpse, Brutus called out the name of Cicero, while Antony, on his
side, denounced him as the intellectual author of the deed. But this
“freedom” meant nothing but the oligarchy of a few families, for the
masses had long ago become tired of their rights. Nor is it in the
least surprising that Money was behind Intellect in the murder, for
the great fortunes of Rome saw in Cæsarism the beginning of the end of
their power.
[786] Taoism, on the other hand, was supported, as preaching the entire
renunciation of politics. Said Shakespeare’s Cæsar:
“Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’nights.”
[787] Tacitus, even, failed to understand. He hated these first Cæsars,
because they defended themselves by every imaginable means against a
stealthy opposition--in _his own_ circles--an opposition that from
Trajan’s time no longer existed. (Yet a little longer, and the Emperor
Marcus Aurelius could himself be a Stoic.--_Tr._)
[788] P. 329.
[789] Pp. 89 and 349.
[790] P. 310.
[791] “Empires perish, but a good verse stands,” said W. von Humboldt
on the field of Waterloo. But, all the same, the personality of
Napoleon preformed the history of the next century. Good verses!--he
should have questioned a peasant by the way-side. They “stand”--for
literary teaching. Plato is eternal--for philologists. But Napoleon
inwardly rules _us_, all of _us_, our states and our armies, our public
opinion, the whole of our political outlook, and the more effectually
the less we are conscious of it.
[792] P. 361.
[793] P. 116 and 339.
[794] P. 363.
[795] This is what is expressed in the English proverb: “Men, not
measures,” which is the very key to the secrets of all political
achievement.
[796] Pp. 18 and 364.
[797] See p. 341.
[798] The same, too, holds good of the Churches, which are different
in kind from the Religion--namely, elements of the world of facts and,
therefore, political and not religious in the type of their leadership.
It was not the Christian evangel, but the Christian martyr, who
conquered the world, and that which gave him his strength was not the
doctrine, but the example, of the Man on the Cross.
[799] It should scarcely need to be emphasized that this is the basic
principle, not of an aristocratic régime, but of government itself.
Cleon, Robespierre, Lenin, every gifted mass-leader, has treated his
office thus. Anyone who genuinely felt himself as the delegate of
the multitude, instead of as the regent of such as do not know what
they want, would not remain master of his house for one day. The only
question is whether the great popular leaders apply their powers for
their own benefit or for that of others; and on that much might be said.
[800] Originally an assembly of nineteen princes and free cities (1529).
[801] See pp. 355, 398, et seq.
[802] Hence it is that on the soil of burgher equality the possession
of money immediately takes the place of genealogical rank.
[803] See p. 354.
[804] Pp. 424, et seq. Compare also Wellhausen, _Die relig.-polit.
Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam_ (1901).
[805] It is an important factor in the democracy of England and America
that in the first the yeomanry had died out and in the second has never
existed. The “farmer” is spiritually a suburban and in practice carries
on his farming as an industry. Instead of villages, there are only
fragments of megalopolis.
[806] And wherever, as in Egypt, India, and the West, there exists a
_political_ opposition between the two primary Estates, there is also a
clerical party--the party, so to speak, of the Church as distinct from
religion and of the priest as distinct from the believer.
[807] And with its content of race-strength it has an excellent chance
of successfully doing so.
[808] P. 409.
[809] _Plebs_ corresponds to the “Tiers” (burghers and yeomen) of
the eighteenth century, _populus_ to the megalopolitan masses of the
nineteenth. The difference manifested itself in their respective
attitudes towards the freed slaves, mostly of non-Italian origin. These
the Plebs, as an order, sought to thrust away into as few tribes as
possible, but in the Populus as a party they very soon came to play the
decisive rôle.
[810] P. 412.
[811] Simultaneously, too, the Roman Catholic Church quietly changed
the basis of its politics from a class to a party, and did so with a
strategic sureness that cannot be too much admired. In the eighteenth
century it had been, as regards the style of its diplomacy, the
allocation of its offices and the spirit of its higher circles,
aristocratic through and through. Think of the type of the abbé, and
of the prince-prelates who became ministers and ambassadors, like
the young Cardinal Rohan. Now, in the true liberal fashion, opinions
took the place of origins, working-power that of taste, and the great
weapons of democracy--press, elections, money--were handled with a
skill that liberalism proper rarely equalled and never surpassed.
[812] For what follows see M. Gelzer, _Die Nobilität d. röm. Republik_
(1912), pp. 43, et seq.; A. Rosenberg, _Untersuchungen zur röm.
Centurienverfassung_(1911), pp. 62, et seq.
[813] The reputation of Tammany Hall in New York is universal, but
the relations approximate to this condition in all countries ruled
by parties. The American Caucus, which first distributes the offices
of State amongst its members and then forces their names upon the
mass-electorate, was introduced into England by Joseph Chamberlain in
his “National Liberal Federation,” and in Germany its advances have
been rapid since 1919.
[814] P. 305.
[815] P. 18, et seq.
[816] For the story of this tragic experiment, see Ed. Meyer, _Gesch.
d. Alt._, § 987, et seq.
[817] See p. 417. The “plans of the Contending States,” the
Tchun-tsiu-fan-lu, and the biographies of Sze-ma-tsien are full of
examples of the pedagogic in interventions of “wisdom” into the
province of politics.
[818] For this “Sun-state” formed of slaves and day-labourers see
Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencycl._, 2, 961. Similarly, the revolutionary King
Cleomenes III of Sparta was likewise under the influence of a Stoic,
Sphærus. One can understand why “philosophers and rhetors”--i.e.,
professional politicians, fantastics and subverters--were expelled
again and again by the Roman Senate.
[819] P. 310.
[820] P. 114.
[821] The early democracy, which in our case reaches up to Lincoln,
Bismarck, and Gladstone, has to learn this by _experience_. The later
democracy, in our case mature parliamentarism, starts out from it; here
truths and facts finally separate out in the form of party ideals and
party funds. It is the money that gives the real parliamentarian his
sense of being freed from the dependence which is implicit in the naïve
idea that the elector has of his delegate.
[822] P. 452.
[823] P. 354.
[824] That the mass all the same _feels_ itself as freed is simply
another outcome of the profound incompatibility between megalopolitan
spirit and mature tradition. Its _acts_, so far from being independent,
are in inward relation with its subjection to money-rule.
[825] The German Constitution of 1919--standing by virtue of its date
on the verge of the _decline_ of democracy--most naïvely admits a
dictature of the party machines, which have attracted all rights into
themselves and are seriously responsible to no one. The notorious
system of proportional election and the Reichslist [see _Ency. Brit._,
1922 Supplement, II, 249.--_Tr._] secures their self-recruitment. In
place of the “people’s” rights, which were axiomatic in the Frankfurt
Constitution of 1848, there is now only the right of parties, which,
harmless as it sounds, really nurses within itself a Cæsarism of the
organizations. It must be allowed, however, that in this respect it
is the most advanced of all the constitutions. Its issue is visible
already. A few quite small alterations and it confers unrestricted
power upon individuals.
[826] And _legislation_, too, was bound up with an office. Even when,
as a formality, acceptance or rejection by an assembly was requisite,
the law in question could be brought in only by an official; for
example, a Tribune. The constitutional demands of the masses, therefore
(which in any case were mostly instigated by the real power-holders),
expressed themselves in the issue of the elections to office, as the
Gracchan period shows.
[827] Even Cæsar, at fifty years of age, was obliged to play this
comedy at the Rubicon for his soldiers because they were used to it
and expected it when anything was asked of them. It corresponds to the
“chest-tones of deep conviction” of our political assemblies.
[828] But the Cleon type must obviously have existed also in
contemporary Sparta, and in Rome at the time of the Consular Tribunes.
[829] Gelzer, _Nobilität_, p. 94; along with Ed. Meyer’s _Cæsar_ this
book gives the best survey of Roman democratic methods.
[830] “_Inaurari_,” to which end Cicero recommended his friend
Trebatius to Cæsar.
[831] “_Tributim ad prandium vocare_,” Cicero, _Pro Murena_, 72.
[832] For from that time sesterces flowed through his hands by the
million. The votive treasures of the Gallic temples which he put up
for sale in Italy sent down the value of gold with a rush. From King
Ptolemy he and Pompey extorted 144,000,000 (and Gabinius another
240,000,000) as the price of recognition. The Consul Æmilius Paullus
(50) was bought for 36,000,000, Curio for 60,000,000. We can guess from
such figures how enviable was the position of his closer associates.
At the triumph of 46 every soldier in an army of well over 100,000 men
received 24,000 sesterces, officers and other leaders much more. Yet at
his death the state treasury was still full enough to secure Antony’s
position.
[833] Gelzer, op. cit., p. 68.
[834] Extortion and corruption were the usual charges. As in those
days these things were identical with politics, and the judges and
plaintiffs had acted precisely in the same way as the defendants,
the art consisted in using the forms of a well-acted ethical
passion to cover a party speech, of which the real import was only
comprehensible to the initiated. This corresponds entirely with the
modern parliamentary usage. The “people” would be very much astonished
to see party opponents, after delivering wild speeches in the chamber
(for the reporters) chatting together in the lobbies, or to be told how
a party passionately champions a proposal after it has made certain
by agreement with the other side that it will not be passed. In Rome,
too, the judgment was not the important thing in these “trials”; it was
enough if a defendant voluntarily left the city and so retired from the
occupancy of, or candidature for, office.
[835] See Pöhlmann, _Griech. Gesch._ (1914), pp. 236, et seq. [Cf.
Aristophanes, _Wasps_.--_Tr._]
[836] Thus it was possible for Rutilius Rufus to be condemned in the
notorious case of 93, because as proconsul he had in accordance with
his duty proceeded against the extortions of the concessionnaire
associations.
[837] Radio broadcasting has now emerged to enable the leader to make
personal conquests of the million, and no one can foretell the changes
in political tactic that may ensue therefrom.--_Tr._
[838] The most striking example of this for future generations will be
the “War-guilt” question, which is the question--_who_ possesses the
power, through control of press and cable in all parts of the world, to
establish in world-opinion that truth which he needs for his political
ends and to maintain it for so long as he needs it? An altogether
different question (which only in Germany is confused with the first)
is the purely scientific one--to _whose_ interest was it that an event
about which there was already a whole literature should occur in the
summer of 1914 in particular?
[839] In preparation for the World War the press of whole countries
was brought financially under the command of London and Paris, and
the peoples belonging to them reduced to an unqualified intellectual
slavery. The more democratic the inner form of a nation is, the more
readily and completely it succumbs to this danger. This is the style
of the twentieth century. To-day a democrat of the old school would
demand, not freedom for the press, but freedom from the press; but
meantime the leaders have changed themselves into parvenus who have to
secure their position _vis-à-vis_ the masses.
[840] The great Burning of the Books in China (p. 433) was innocuous by
comparison.
[841] P. 434.
[842] Herein lies the secret of why all radical (i.e., poor) parties
necessarily become the tools of the money-powers, the Equites, the
Bourse. Theoretically their enemy is capital, but practically they
attack, not the Bourse, but Tradition on behalf of the Bourse. This is
as true of to-day as it was for the Gracchan age, and in all countries.
Fifty per cent of mass-leaders are procurable by money, office, or
opportunities to “come in on the ground-floor,” and with them they
bring their whole party.
[843] P. 415.
[844] See _Preussentum und Sozialismus_, p. 41, et seq.
[845] _Political Discourses_, 1752.
[846] The celebrated _Wealth of Nations_, 1776.
[847] It was the opinion of the expert, almost everywhere, that
the economic consequences of general mobilization would compel the
breaking-up of hostilities within a few weeks.
[848] P. 81.
[849] Pp. 1, et seq., and 335.
[850] P. 327, et seq.
[851] Pp. 95, 120, et seq.
[852] P. 5.
[853] “_Negotium_” (by which is meant every form of gainful activity;
business is _commercium_) “_negat otium neque quærit veram quietem quæ
est deus_,” are the words of the _Decretum Gratiani_ (cf. p. 77).
[854] Pilate’s question settles also the relation of economy to
science. The religious man will always try in vain, catechism in hand,
to improve the instincts of his political environment. But it goes
on its way undisturbed and leaves him to his thoughts. The saint can
only choose between adapting himself to this environment--and then
he becomes a Church politician and conscienceless--and fleeing from
it into a hermitage or even into the Beyond. But the same happens
also--and here not without a comic side to it--in the intellectualism
of the city. The philosopher who has built up an ethical-social system
that is replete with virtue and (of course) the only true one, may
enlighten the economic life as to how it should behave and at what it
should aim. It is even the same spectacle, whether labelled liberal,
anarchistic, or socialistic, or derived from Plato, Proudhon, or Marx.
Here, too, economy carries on undisturbed and leaves the thinker to
choose between withdrawing to pour out on paper his lamentations of
this world, and entering it as an economic politician, in which case he
either makes himself ridiculous, or else promptly throws his theory to
the devil and starts to win himself a leading place.
[855] See pp. 1, et seq.
[856] See p. 6.
[857] Exactly the same is true of wandering bands of hunters and
pastorals. But the economic foundation of the great Culture is always a
mankind that adheres fast to the soil, and nourishes and supports the
higher economic forms.
[858] See p. 331.
[859] Undershaft in Shaw’s _Major Barbara_ is a true ruler-figure of
this realm.
[860] P. 344. As a means for governments it is called finance-economy
(financial policy). Here the whole nation is the object of a levy of
tribute, in the forms of taxes and customs, of which the purpose is not
to make, so to say, the upkeep of its life more comfortable, but to
secure its historical position and to enhance its power.
[861] Using the phrase widely, as including, for instance, the rise of
workmen, journalists, and men of learning to positions of leadership.
[862] P. 331.
[863] P. 31.
[864] See pp. 172 and 280.
[865] Including the medical profession, which indeed is
indistinguishable in primitive times from the priests and magicians.
[866] Herdsmen, fishermen, and hunters included. There is, moreover, a
strange and very profound relation between peasant and miner, evidenced
in ancient sagas and rites. The metals are coaxed out of the shaft as
the corn out of the earth, and the game out of the thicket. And for the
real miner even metal is something that _lives_ and grows.
[867] This is true from the earliest sea-voyaging to the Bourse of the
world-city, and all traffic, whether by river, road, or rail belongs
with it.
[868] With this belong the machine industry, with its purely Western
type of the inventor and engineer, and practically, also, a great part
of the modern agronomy, as, for instance, in America.
[869] Even to-day the mining and metal industries are felt to be
somehow nobler than, for example, the chemical and electrical. They
possess the most ancient patent of nobility in the technical world, and
a relic of cult-mystery lies over them.
[870] That is, up to the limit of servage and slavery, although very
often--as in the present-day East and as in Rome in the case of
“vernæ”--slavery itself may be nothing but a form of compulsory-labour
contract and, apart from that, hardly sensible. The free employee often
lives in far stricter subjection and enjoys far less respect, and his
formal right to “give notice” is in many cases practically valueless to
him.
[British readers will recall in this connexion the “Chinese slavery”
controversy in South Africa in 1904, and the questions of indentured
labour that come to the surface not infrequently in Australian
politics. And in an older generation defenders of slavery as practised
in the sugar islands of the West Indies are still to be found--not to
mention the survivors and tradition-bearers of the “Old South” in the
United States.--_Tr._]
[871] P. 60.
[872] We know this accurately for the Egyptian and the Gothic
beginnings, and in general terms for the Chinese and the Classical;
as for the _economic pseudomorphosis_ of the Arabian (see pp. 189,
et seq., 349) it may be summarized, after Hadrian, as a process
of disintegration of the highly civilized Classical money-economy
culminating in the appearance, under Diocletian, of a Springtime
barter-economy with, in the East, the true Magian element of bargaining
visibly superposed.
[873] P. 343.
[874] Neither the copper pieces of the Italian Villanova-graves of
early Homeric times (Willers, _Gesch. d. röm. Kupferprägung_, p. 18)
nor the early Chinese bronze coins in the form of women’s drapery
(_pu_), bells, rings, or knives (_tsien_, Conrady, _China_, p. 504)
are described as money, but quite distinctly symbols of goods. And the
coins struck by the governments of early Gothic times (in imitation of
the Classical) as signs of sovereignty figured in economic life only as
wares; a piece of gold is worth as much as a cow, _but not vice versa_.
[875] Hence it is that so often he is not an outcome of the fixed and
self-contained life of the countryside, but an alien appearing in it,
an alien having neither importance nor antecedents. This is the rôle
of the Phœnicians in the earliest period of the Classical; of the
Romans in the East in Mithradates’s time; of the Jews, and with them
Byzantines, Persians, and Armenians, in the Gothic West; of the Arabs
in the Sudan; of the Indians in East Africa; and of the West-Europeans
in present-day Russia.
[876] And, consequently, on a very small scale. As foreign trade was in
those days highly adventurous and appealed to the imagination, it was
as a rule immensely exaggerated. The “great” merchants of Venice and
the Hansa about 1300 were hardly the equals of the more distinguished
craftsmen. The turnover of even the Medici or the Fugger about 1400
was equivalent to that of a shop-business in a small town to-day. The
largest merchant vessels, in which usually several traders held part
shares, were much smaller than modern German river-barges, and made
only _one_ considerable voyage each year. The celebrated wool-export
of England, a main element of Hanseatic trade, amounted about 1270 to
hardly as much as the contents of two modern goods-trains (Sombart,
_Der moderne Kapitalismus_, I, pp. 280, et seq.).
[877] P. 91.
[878] Cf. Vol. I, Ch. II.
[879] Marks and dollars are no more “money” than metres and grammes are
“forces.” _Pieces_ of money are real values. It is only our ignorance
of Classical physics that has saved us from confusing gravitation with
a pound-weight--in our mathematics, with its Classical basis, we still
mix number with magnitude, and our imitation of Classical coinage has
brought about the same confusion between money and pieces of money.
[880] Conversely, therefore, we can call the metric system (cm., g.)
a valuation, and in fact all money-measures proceed from the weight
theories of physics.
[881] Similarly all value-theories, however objective they are meant to
be, are developed--and inevitably so--out of a subjective principle.
That of Marx, for example, defines value in the way that promotes the
interest of the manual worker, the effort of the discoverer or the
organizer seeming to him, therefore, valueless. But it would be wrong
to describe this as “erroneous.” All these theories are “right” for
their supporters and “wrong” for their opponents, and it is not reasons
but _life_ that settles whether one is a supporter or an opponent.
[882] The Western introduced (on a very modest scale) by the Bank of
England from the end of the eighteenth century, the Chinese dating from
the period of the Contending States.
[883] And is thought of as “amount,” whereas we speak of the “extent”
of a property in goods.
[884] Even to the modern pirates of the money-market who intervene
amongst the interveners and gamble with money as “wares.”
[885] Preisigke, _Girowesen im griechischen Ægypten_ (1910). These
trading forms of the Ptolemaic period were already in vogue, and at the
same high level, under the XVIIIth Dynasty.
[886] So also with the bourgeois ideal of freedom. In theory and,
therefore, constitutionally, a man may be free _in principle_, but
_actually_, in the economic private-life of the cities, he is made free
only by money.
[887] The name “bourse” can be applied even in other Cultures, if by
that word we mean the thought-organ of a developed money-economy.
[888] Preface to _Major Barbara_ (Constable, London 1909).
[889] P. 343.
[890] The “farmer” is the man whose connexion with the piece of land is
no longer anything more than practical.
[891] The increasing intensity of this thinking appears in the
economic picture as a _growth of the available money-mass_, which is
abstract and imagined and has nothing to do with the visible supply
of gold as a ware. The “stiffening” of the money-market, for example,
is a purely intellectual process played out in the hands of a small
handful of men. The increasing energy of money-thinking consequently
awakens, in every Culture, the feeling that the “value of money is
going down”--enormously so, for example, in the time between Solon and
Alexander--with reference, namely, to the unit of calculation. What
actually happens is that the mercantile units of value have become
artificial and no longer comparable with the primary and livingly
experiential values of the peasant economy. In the end it ceases to
matter in what figures the Attic treasure of the Delian League (454) or
the sums involved in the peace-treaties of 241 and 201, or the booty
of Pompey in 64 are reckoned, and whether we ourselves shall pass in a
few decades from the milliards--still unknown in 1850, but commonplace
to-day--to the billions. There is no common standard for the value of
a talent in 430 and in 30 B.C., for gold, like cattle and corn, has
continually altered not only its own numeration, but its significance
within an ever-advancing urban economy. The only steady element is
the fact that quantity of money--not to be confused with the stock of
tokens and the means of payment--is an _alter ego_ mirroring thought in
money.
[892] Cf. Vol. I, Ch. II.
[893] Friedländer, _Röm. Sittengesch._, IV (1921), p. 301.
[894] Sallust, _Catilina_, 35, 3.
[895] P. 458.
[896] How difficult it was for Classical man to figure to himself the
transformation of a physically indefinable asset like land into bodily
money is shown by the stone posts (ὅροι) on land in Greece, which were
meant to _represent_ the mortgages on it, and by the Roman method of
sale _per æs et libram_, in which a clod of earth was handed over for
a coin in the presence of witnesses. Consequently, trade in goods
(properly so called) never existed, nor anything like, for example, a
current price for arable land. A regular relation between land-value
and money-value was as unthinkable to the Classical mind as such a
relation between artistic value and money-value. Intellectual--i.e.,
incorporeal--products like dramas and frescoes possessed economically
no value at all. For the Classical idea of law, cf. p. 81.
[897] Not very much can have been left of Classical art-treasures even
by Augustus’s time. The refined Athenians themselves thought far too
unhistorically to be moved to spare a chryselephantine statue merely
because it was the work of Phidias. It is worth remembering that the
gold parts of the famous Athene-figure of the Parthenon cella were made
removable and tested for weight from time to time. Economic use of
them, therefore, was provided for from the outset.
[898] _Ges. Schriften_, IV, 200, et seq.
[899] P. 600.
[900] The belief that slaves ever constituted, even in Athens or
Ægina, as much as a third of the population is a complete delusion. On
the contrary, the revolutions of the period after 400 presuppose an
enormous surplus of free paupers.
[901] P. 480.
[902] Herein lies the difference between this slavery and the
sugar-slavery of our own Baroque. The latter represents a threshold
phase of our _machine industry_, an organization of “living” energy,
which began with man-fuel, but presently passed over to coal-fuel; and
slavery came to be considered immoral only when coal had established
itself. Looked at from this angle, the victory of the North in
the American Civil War (1865) meant the economic victory of the
concentrated energy of coal over the simple energy of the muscles.
[903] Pp. 371, et seq. The resemblance with the Egyptian administration
under the Old Kingdom and the Chinese in the earliest Chóu period is
unmistakable.
[904] The _clerici_ of these exchequer offices were the archetype of
the modern bank-clerk. Cf. p. 371.
[905] Hampe, _Deutsche Kaisergeschichte_, p. 246. Leonardo Pisano,
whose _Liber Abaci_ (1202) was authoritative in accountancy till well
beyond the Renaissance, and who introduced, besides the Arabian system
of numerals, negative numbers to indicate debit, was promoted by the
great Hohenstaufen.
[906] P. 75.
[907] Sombart, _Der moderne Kapitalismus_, II, p. 119.
[908] There is a close relation between our picture of the nature of
electricity and the process of the “clearing-house,” in which the
positive and negative money-positions of several firms (centres of
tension) are equated amongst themselves by a purely mental act and the
true position made presentable by a booking. Cf. Vol. I, Ch. XI.
[909] Vol. I, ch. II.
[910] P. 81.
[911] In our Culture the credit of a country rests upon its economic
capacity and the political organization thereof--which imparts
to the operations and bookings of finance the character of real
money-creations--and not on any quantity of gold that may be put
into this or that. It is the Classicist superstition that raises the
gold reserve to the status of an actual measure of credit--actual in
that the level of credit is thereby made dependent, not upon “will,”
but upon “can.” But the current coins are _wares_, which, relatively
to national credit, possess a _price_--the poorer the credit, the
higher the price of gold--so that thenceforth it can only be upheld
against that of _other_ wares. Thus gold is measured like other wares
against the unit of book-reckoning, and not vice versa as the term
“gold standard” suggests. It serves also as means of payment in minor
transactions, as for that matter a postage-stamp does. In old Egypt
(whose money-thought is astoundingly like the Western) there was
nothing resembling the coin even under the New Empire. The written
transfer was entirely sufficient, and the Classical coins that filtered
in from 650 to the founding of Alexandria and the Hellenistic régime
were usually cut to pieces and reckoned by weight as a ware.
[912] That is why it does not exist for our (present) jurisprudence.
[913] All this equally holds good for the case of “workers” taking over
the leadership of the works. Either they are incapable of management,
and the business collapses, or they are capable of something, and then
they themselves become inwardly entrepreneurs and think thenceforward
only of maintaining their power. No theory can eliminate this fact from
the world, for so life _is_.
[914] Thus it is only since 1770 that the banks have become centres of
an economic power which made its first intervention with politics at
the Congress of Vienna. Till then the banker had in the main concerned
himself with bill business. The Chinese, and even the Egyptian, banks
had a different significance, and the Classical banks, even in the Rome
of Cæsar’s day, may best be described as cash-tills. They collected
the yield of taxes in cash, and lent cash against replacement; thus
the temples, with their stock of precious metal in the form of votive
offerings, became “banks.” The temple of Delos, through several
centuries, lent at ten per cent.
[915] The idea of the Firm took shape even in Late Gothic times as
“_ratio_” [hence the modern French phrase “_raison sociale_”--_Tr._] or
“_negotiatio_.” It is impossible to render it exactly in a Classical
language. _Negotium_ meant for the Romans a concrete process, a “deal”
and not a “business.”
[916] Pöhlmann, _griech. Geschichte_ (1914), p. 216, et seq.
[917] Gercke-Norden, _Einl. in der Altertumswissensch._, III, p. 291.
[918] Kromayer, in Hartmann’s _Röm. Gesch._, p. 150.
[919] The “Jews” of those times were the Romans (p. 318), and the
Jews themselves were peasants and artizans and small traders (Pârvan,
_Die Nationalität der Kaufleute im röm. Kaiserreiche_, 1909; also
Mommsen, _Röm. Gesch._, V, p. 471); that is, they followed the very
callings that in the Gothic period became the _object_ of their
merchant activity. Present-day “Europe” is in exactly the same position
_vis-à-vis_ the Russians whose profoundly mystical inner life feels
“thinking in money” _as a sin_. (The Pilgrim in Gorki’s _Night-asylum_,
and Tolstoi’s thought generally; pp. 194, 278.) Here to-day as in the
Syria of Jesus’s time we have two economic worlds juxtaposed (pp. 192,
et seq.): an upper, alien, and civilized world intruded from the West
(the Bolshevism of the first years, totally Western and un-Russian,
is the lees of this infiltration), and a townless barter-life that
goes on deep below, uncalculating and exchanging only for immediate
needs. We have to think of the catchwords of the surface as a voice,
in which the Russian, simple and busied wholly with his soul, hears
resignedly the will of God. Marxism amongst Russians is based on an
inward misunderstanding. They bore with the higher economic life of
Petrinism, but they neither created it nor recognized it. The Russian
does not fight Capital, but he does not _comprehend_ it. Anyone who
understands Dostoyevski will sense in these people a young humanity
_for which as yet no money exists_, but only goods in relation to a
life whose centre of gravity does _not_ lie on the economical side. The
horror of values supervening from nowhere which before the war drove
many to suicide is a misconstrued literary disguise of the fact that,
for a townless barter-thinking, money-getting by means of money is an
impiety, and (from the view-point of the coming Russian religion) a
sin. To-day, with the towns of Tsarism in ruin and the mankind in them
living the village life under the crust (temporarily) of urban-thinking
Bolshevism, he has freed himself from the Western economy. His
apocalyptic hatred--the same that the simple Jew of Jesus’s day bore
to the Roman--is directed against Petersburg, as a city and the seat
of a political power of Western stamp, but also as the centre of
a thinking in Western money that has poisoned and misdirected the
whole life. The Russian of the deeps to-day is bringing into being a
third kind of Christianity, still priestless, and built _on the John
Gospel_--a Christianity that stands much nearer to the Magian than to
the Faustian and, consequently, rests upon a new symbolism of baptism,
and looks neither at Rome nor at Wittenberg, but past Byzantium towards
Jerusalem, with premonitions of coming crusades. This is the _only_
thing that this new Russia really cares about. And it will no doubt let
itself fall once again under the economy of the West, as the primitive
Christian submitted to the Romans and the Gothic Christian to the Jews.
But inwardly it has no part nor lot therein. (Cf. pp. 192, 226, 278,
293, 295.)
[920] See the article “Diocletian, Edict of,” _Ency. Brit._, XI
ed.--_Tr._
[921] P. 6.
[922] Pp. 9 et seq.
[923] P. 25.
[924] P. 25.
[925] P. 268.
[926] P. 134.
[927] Pp. 25, et seq.; 267, et seq.
[928] And not vice versa. Cf. p. 268.
[929] The “correctness” of physical data (i.e., their applicability
never disproved up to date, and therefore ranking as an
_interpretation_) is wholly independent of their technical value. An
undoubtedly wrong, and even self-contradictory, theory may be more
valuable for practical purposes than a “correct” and profound one, and
physical science has long been careful to avoid applying the words
“right” and “wrong” in the popular sense, and to regard their syntheses
as images rather than flat formulæ.
[930] What Diels has managed to assemble in his work _Antike Technik_
amounts to a comprehensive nullity. If we take away from it what
belongs to the older Babylonian Civilization (such as water clocks and
sun-dials) and to the younger Arabian Springtime (such as chemistry or
the wonder-clock of Gaza), there is nothing left but devices, such as
door-locks of a sort, that it would be an insult to attribute to any
other Culture.
[931] The Chinese Culture, too, made almost all these European
discoveries on its own account--including compass, telescope, printing,
gunpowder, paper, porcelain--but the Chinese did not wrest, but
_wheedled_, things out of Nature. No doubt he felt the advantages of
his knowledge and turned it to account, but he did not hurl himself
upon it to exploit it.
[932] P. 301.
[933] It is the same spirit that distinguishes the Jewish, Parsee,
Armenian, Greek, and Arab ideas of business from that of the Western
peoples.
[934] P. 301. Albertus Magnus lived on in legend as the great magician.
Roger Bacon meditated upon steam-engines, steamships, and aircraft. (F.
Strunz, _Gesch. d. Naturwiss. im Mittelalter_, 1910, p. 88.)
[935] P. 268. According to Roger Bacon the “third rôle of science,”
which is not relative to the other sciences, consists in the power that
makes it to search the secrets of nature, to discover past and future,
and to produce so many marvellous results that power is assured to
those who possess it.... The Church should take it into consideration
in order to spare Christian blood in the struggle with the infidel and
above all in preparation for the perils that will menace us in the days
of Antichrist (E. Gilson, _Philosophie au Moyen Âge_, p. 218).--_Tr._
[936] P. 288.
[937] Greek fire was only to terrify and to ignite, but here the tense
force of the gases of explosion are converted into energy of motion.
Anyone who seriously compares the two does not understand the spirit of
the Western technique.
[938] Marx is quite right; it is one of the creations (and what is
more, the proudest creation) of the bourgeoisie. But, spellbound as he
is by the ancient-mediæval-modern scheme, he has failed to note that it
is only the bourgeoisie of this one single Culture that is master of
the destiny of the Machine. So long as it dominates the earth, every
non-European tries and will try to fathom the secret of this terrible
weapon. Nevertheless, inwardly he abhors it, be he Indian or Japanese,
Russian or Arab. It is something fundamental in the essence of the
Magian soul that leads the Jew, as entrepreneur and engineer, to stand
aside from the creation proper of machines and devote himself to the
business side of their production. But so also the Russian looks with
fear and hatred at this tyranny of wheels, cables, and rails, and if he
adapts himself for to-day and to-morrow to the inevitable, yet there
will come a time when he will _blot out the whole thing from his memory
and his environment_, and create about himself a wholly new world, in
which nothing of this Devil’s technique is left.
[939] Compared with this mighty contest between the two handfuls of
steel-hard men of race and of immense intellect--which the simple
citizen neither observes nor comprehends--the battle of mere interests
between the employing class and the workers’ Socialism sinks into
insignificance when regarded from the distant world-historical
view-point. The working-class movement is what its leaders _make_ of
it, and hatred of the owner has long enlisted itself in the service of
the bourse. Practical communism with its “class-war”--to-day a long
obsolete and adulterated phrase--is nothing but the trusty henchman of
big Capital, which knows perfectly well how to make use of it.
[940] In this sense the interest-politics of the workers’ movements
also belong to it, in that their object is not to overcome the
money-values, but to possess them.
[941] P. 345.
Transcriber’s notes
Apparent typographical errors in English were silently corrected, while
non-English text is almost always rendered as printed, with occasional
corrections (especially in citations) when further inquiry was made.
The index contained dozens of incorrectly spelled or variant proper
nouns; where this was noticed, the index spelling was made consistent
with the main text. The index entry was not moved even if the new
spelling would require it.
Any “{sic}” in this text is the transcriber’s.
Italics are shown by _underscores_.
Redundant part-title pages for chapters have been removed. This
accounts for three-page gaps in page numbering (including associated
blank pages) in the formats that display page numbers.
Chapter XI lacks a section numbered IX. This error was not corrected in
later reprints (e.g. Knopf 1965). Chapter IV does not have an explicit
section I.