The decline of the West, Volume 1 : $b Form and actualitySpengler, Oswald
Philosophy
The decline of the West, Volume 1 : $b Form and actuality
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
Of this world-experience neither Apollinian nor Magian man, neither
Homer nor the Gospels, knows anything whatever. The climax of the poem
of Wolfram, that wondrous Good Friday morning scene when the hero, at
odds with God and with himself, meets the noble Gawan and resolves to go
on pilgrimage to Tevrezent, takes us to the heart of the _Faustian_
religion. Here one can feel the mystery of the Eucharist which binds the
communicant to a mystic company, to a Church that alone can give bliss.
In the myth of the Holy Grail and its Knights one can feel the inward
necessity of the German-Northern Catholicism. In opposition to the
Classical sacrifices offered to individual gods in separate temples,
there is here the _one never-ending_ sacrifice repeated everywhere and
every day. This is the Faustian idea of the 9th-11th Centuries, the Edda
time, foreshadowed by Anglo-Saxon missionaries like Winfried but only
then ripened. The Cathedral, with its High Altar enclosing the
accomplished miracle, is its expression in stone.[199]
The plurality of separate bodies which represents Cosmos for the
Classical soul, requires a similar pantheon—hence the antique
polytheism. The _single_ world-volume, be it conceived as cavern or as
space, demands the _single_ god of Magian or Western Christianity.
Athene or Apollo might be represented by a statue, but it is and has
long been evident to our feeling that the Deity of the Reformation and
the Counter-Reformation can only be “manifested” in the storm of an
organ fugue or the solemn progress of cantata and mass. From the rich
manifold of figures in the Edda and contemporary legends of saints to
Goethe our myth develops itself in steady opposition to the Classical—in
the one case a continuous disintegration of the divine that culminated
in the early Empire in an impossible multitude of deities, in the other
a process of simplification that led to the Deism of the 18th Century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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