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
From this basic feeling proceeds the Magian idea of Grace. This
underlies all sacraments of this Culture (especially the Magian
proto-sacrament of Baptism) and forms a contrast of the deepest
intensity with the Faustian idea of Contrition. Contrition presupposes
the will of an Ego, but Grace knows of no such thing. It was
Augustine’s high achievement to develop this essentially Islamic
thought with an inexorable logic, and with a penetration so thorough
that since Pelagius the Faustian Soul has tried by any and every route
to circumvent this certainty--which for _it_ constitutes an imminent
danger of self-destruction--and in using Augustinian propositions to
express its own proper consciousness of God has ever misunderstood and
transvalued them. Actually, Augustine was the last great thinker of
Early Arabian Scholasticism, anything but a Western intellect.[417]
Not only was he at times a Manichæan, but he remained so even as a
Christian in some important characteristics, and his closest relations
are to be found amongst the Persian theologians of the later Avesta,
with their doctrines of the Store of Grace of the Holy and of absolute
guilt. For him grace is the substantial inflowing of something divine
into the human Pneuma, itself also substantial.[418] The Godhead
radiates it; man receives it, but does not acquire it. From Augustine,
as from Spinoza so many centuries later,[419] the notion of force is
absent, and for both the problem of freedom refers not to the Ego and
its Will, but to the part of the universal Pneuma that is infused into
a man and its relation to the rest of him. Magian waking-being is the
_theatre_ of a conflict between the two world-substances of light
and darkness. The Early Faustian thinkers such as Duns Scotus and
William of Occam, on the contrary, see a contest inherent in dynamic
waking-consciousness _itself_, a contest of the two forces of the
Ego--namely, will and reason,[420] and so imperceptibly the question
posed by Augustine changes into another, which he himself would have
been incapable of understanding--are willing and thinking free forces,
or are they not? Answer this question as we may, one thing at any rate
is certain, that the individual ego has _to wage_ this war and not to
suffer it. The Faustian Grace refers to the success of the Will and not
to the species of a substance. Says the Westminster Confession of the
Presbyterians (1646): “The rest of Mankind, God was pleased, according
to the unsearchable Counsel of his own Will, whereby he extendeth, or
withholdeth Mercy, as he pleaseth, for the Glory of his Sovereign Power
over his Creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to Dishonour and
Wrath, for their Sin, to the Praise of his glorious Justice.” The other
conception, that the idea of Grace excludes every individual will and
every cause but the One, that it is sinful even to question why man
suffers, finds an expression in one of the most powerful poems known to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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