The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-historySpengler, Oswald
History
The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-history
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
The Classical religion lived in its vast number of _separate cults_,
which in this form were natural and self-evident to Apollinian man,
essentially inaccessible to any alien. As soon as cults of this kind
arise, we have a Classical Culture, and when their essence changes, in
later Roman times, then the soul of this Culture is at an end. Outside
the Classical landscape they have never been genuine and living.
The divinity is always _bound to and bounded by one locality_, in
conformity with the static and Euclidean world-feeling. Correspondingly
the relation of man to the divinity takes the shape of a local cult, in
which the significances lie in the _form_ of its ritual procedure and
not in a dogma underlying them. Just as the population was scattered
geographically in innumerable _points_, so spiritually its religion
was subdivided into these petty cults, each of which was entirely
independent of the rest. _Only their number, and not their scope, was
capable of increase._ Within the Classical religion multiplication
was the only form of growth, and missionary effort of any sort was
excluded, for men could practise these cults without _belonging_ to
them. There were no communities of fellow believers. Though the later
thought of Athens reached somewhat more general ideas of God and his
service, it was philosophy and not religion that it achieved; it
appealed to only a few thinkers and had not the slightest effect on the
feeling of the nation--that is, the Polis.
In the sharpest contrast to this stands the visible form of the Magian
religion--the Church, the brotherhood of the faithful, which has no
home and knows no earthly frontier, which believes the words of Jesus,
“when two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in
the midst of them.” It is self-evident that every such believer must
believe that only one good and true God can be, and that the gods of
the others are evil and false.[313] The relation between this God
and man rests, not in expression or profession, but in the secret
force, the magic, of certain symbolic performances, which if they are
to be effective must be exactly known in form and significance and
practised accordingly. The knowledge of this significance belongs to
the Church--in fact, it is the Church itself, qua community of the
instructed. And, therefore, the centre of gravity of every Magian
religion lies not in a cult, but in a doctrine, in _the creed_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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