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
Thus again and again we find the Logos-idea getting back to the
light-sensation from which the Magian understanding derived it. _The
world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling._[410]
Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him.
There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings,
and beings, secret letters, Solomon’s Seal, the Philosophers’ Stone.
And over all this is poured the quivering cavern-light that the
spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up. If this profusion of
figures astonishes the reader, let him remember that Jesus lived in it,
and Jesus’s teachings are only to be understood from it. Apocalyptic
is only a vision of fable intensified to an extreme of tragic power.
Already in the Book of Enoch we have the crystal palace of God, the
mountains of precious stone, and the imprisonment of the apostate
stars. Fantastic, too, are the whole overpowering idea-world of the
Mandæans, that of the Gnostics and the Manichæans, the system of
Origen, and the figures of the Persian “Bundahish”; and when the time
of the great visions was over, these ideas passed into a legend-poesy
and into the innumerable religious romances of which we have Christian
specimens in the gospels concerning Jesus’s childhood, the Acts of
Thomas and the anti-Pauline Pseudo-Clementines. One such story is
that of Abraham’s having minted the thirty pieces of silver of Judas.
Another is the tale of the “treasure-cave” in which, deep under the
hill of Golgotha, are stored the golden treasure of paradise and the
bones of Adam.[411] Dante’s poetic material was after all poetic, but
this was sheer actuality, the only world in which these people lived
continuously. Such sensations are unapproachably remote from men who
live in and with a dynamical world-picture. If we would obtain some
inkling of how alien to us all the inner life of Jesus is--a painful
realization for the Christian of the West, who would be glad indeed if
he could make that inner life the point of contact for his own inward
piety--if we would discover why nowadays only a pious Moslem has the
capacity livingly to experience it, we should sink ourselves in this
wonder-element of a world-image that was Jesus’s world-image. And then,
and only then, shall we perceive how little Faustian Christianity has
taken over from the wealth of the Church of the Pseudomorphosis--of its
world-feeling nothing, of its inward form little, and of its concepts
and figures much.
II
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account