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
darkness.[401] For Paul, the Saviour is the heavenly Pneuma.[402] In
the John Gospel he fuses as Logos with the Light; in Neoplatonism he
appears as _Nus_ or, in the Classical terminology, the All-One opposed
to _Physis_.[403] Paul and Philo, with their “Classical” (that is,
western) conceptual criteria, equated soul and body with good and bad
respectively, Augustine, as a Manichæan[404] with Persian-Eastern bases
of distinction, lumps soul and body together as the naturally bad, in
contrast to God as the sole Good, and finds in this opposition the
source of his doctrine of Grace, which developed also, in the same form
(though quite independently of him) in Islam.
But souls are at bottom discrete entities, whereas the Pneuma is
one and ever the same. The man _possesses_ a soul, but he only
_participates_ in the spirit of the Light and the Good; the divine
descends into him, thus binding all the individuals of the Below
together with the one in the Above. This primary feeling, which
dominates the beliefs and opinions of all Magian men, is something
perfectly singular, and not only characterizes their world-view, but
marks off the essence and kernel of their religiousness in all its
forms from that of every other kind of man. This Culture, as has been
shown, was characteristically the Culture of the middle. It could have
borrowed forms and ideas from most of the others, and the fact that
it did not do so, that in the face of all pressure and temptation
it remained so profoundly mistress of its own inward form, attests
an unbridgeable gulf of difference. Of all the wealth of Babylonian
and Egyptian religion it admitted hardly more than a few names; the
Classical and the Indian Cultures, or rather the Civilizations heir to
them--Hellenism and Buddhism--distorted its expression to the point of
pseudomorphosis, but its essence they never touched. All religions of
the Magian Culture, from the creations of Isaiah and Zarathustra to
Islam, constitute a complete inward unit of world-feeling; and, just as
in the Avestan beliefs there is not to be found one trait of Brahmanism
nor in early Christianity one breath of Classical feeling, but merely
names and figures and outward forms, so also not a trace of this
Jesus-religion could be absorbed by the Germanic-Catholic Christianity
of the West, even though the stock of tenets and observances was taken
over in its entirety.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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