Suddenly a most hilarious thought would shatter the whole set-up. An idea such as this: However deep one’s knowledge of abstruse philosophy, it is like a piece of hair flying in the vastness of space. A Japanese thought, this. With it came a return to a more ordinary sort of equilibrium. Back to that frailest of all footholds—solid earth. That solid earth which we now accept as being as empty as space.
In Europe it was I, and I alone with my yearning for Russia, who was free, said Dostoievsky somewhere. From Europe, like a true Evangel, he spread the glad tidings. A hundred, two hundred years hence, the full import of this utterance may be realized. What is to be done meanwhile? A question I propounded to myself over and over.
In the early pages of the chapter called Problems of the Arabian Culture, Spengler dwells at some length upon the eschatological aspect of Jesus’ utterances. The whole section called Historic Pseudomorphoses is a paean to the Apocalyptic. It opens with a tender, sympathetic portrait of Jesus of Nazareth vis-a-vis the world of his day. The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. So begins this section. In Jesus’ utterances, he points out, there were no sociological observations, problems, debatings.
No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order…
Then follows this: Religion is metaphysic and nothing else—’Credo quia absurdum’—and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic—that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this.
He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is … His teaching was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last Things with whose images he was constantly filled: the dawn of the New Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the Last Judgment, a new heaven and a new earth. Any other conception of religion was never in Jesus, nor in any truly deep-feeling period of history … ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them.
It is at this point that Spengler voices his scorn for Tolstoy who elevated primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. It is here he makes a pointed allusion to Dostoievsky who never thought about social ameliorations. (Of what profit would it have been to a man’s soul to abolish property?)
Dostoievsky and his freedom…
Was it not in that same time of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky that another Russian asked—Why is it stupid to believe in the Kingdom of Heaven but intelligent to believe in an earthly Utopia?
Perhaps the answer to this conundrum was inadvertently given by Belinsky when he said: The fate of the subject, of the individual, of the person is more important than the fate of the whole world and the well-being of the Chinese Emperor.
At any rate, it was definitely Fedorov who quietly remarked: Each person is answerable for the whole world and for all men,
A strange and exciting period in the land of holy miracles nineteen centuries after the birth and death of Jesus the Christ! One man writes The Apology of a Madman; another writes a Revolutionary Catechism; another The Metaphysics of Sex. Each one is a revolution in himself. Of one figure I learn that he was a conservative, a mystic, an anarchist, an orthodox, an occultist, a patriot, a Communist—and ended his life in Rome as a Catholic and a Fascist. Is this a period of historic pseudomorphosis? Certainly it is an Apocalyptic one.
My misfortune, metaphysically speaking, is that I was born neither in the time of Jesus nor in holy Russia of the nineteenth century. I was born in the megalopolis at the tail-end of a great planetary conjunction. But even in the suburb of Brooklyn, by the time I had come of age, one could be stirred by the repercussions of that Slavic ferment. One World War had been fought and won. Sic! The second one was in the making. In that same Russia I speak of Spengler had a precursor whom you will scarcely find mention of even today. Even Nietzsche had a Russian precursor!
Was it not Spengler who said that Dostoievsky’s Russia would eventually triumph? Did he not predict that from this ripe soil a new religion would spring? Who believes this today?
The Second World War has also been fought and won (!!!) and still the Day of Judgment seems remote. Great autobiographies, masquerading in one form or another, reveal the life of an epoch, of a whole people, aye, of a civilization. It is almost as if our heroic figures had built their own tombs, described them intimately, then buried themselves in their mortuary creations. The heraldic landscape has vanished. The air belongs to the giant birds of destruction.
The waters will soon be ploughed by Leviathans more fearful to behold than those described in the good book. The tension increases, increases, increases. Even in villages the inhabitants become more and more, in feeling and spirit, like the bombs they are obliged to manufacture.
But history will not end even when the grand explosion occurs. The historical life of man has still a long span. It doesn’t take a metaphysician to arrive at such a conclusion. Sitting in that little hole in the wall back in Brooklyn twenty-five years or so ago I could feel the pulse of history throbbing as late as the 32nd Dynasty of Our Lord.
Nevertheless, I am immensely grateful to Oswald Spengler for having performed this strange feat of skill—describing to a nicety the unholy atmosphere of arterio-sclerosis which is ours, and at the same time shattering the whole rigid thought-world which envelops us, thus liberating us—at least in thought. On every page, virtually, there is an assault upon the dogmas, conventions, superstitions and mode of thinking which have characterized the last few hundred years of modernity.
Theories and systems are battered about like nine-pins. The whole conceptual landscape of modern man is devastated. What emerges are not the scholarly ruins of the past but freshly recreated worlds in which one may participate with one’s ancestors, live again the Spring, the Fall, the Summer, even the Winter, of man’s history. Instead of stumbling through glacial deposits one is carried along on a tide of sap and blood. Even the firmament gets reshuffled. This is Spengler’s triumph—to have made Past and Future live in the Present. One is again at the center of the universe, warmed by solar fires, and not at the periphery fighting off vertigo, fighting off fear of the unspeakable abyss.
Does it matter so much that we are men of the tail end and not of the beginning? Not if we realize that we are part of something in eternal process, in eternal ebullition. Undoubtedly there is something far more comforting for us to apprehend, if we persist in searching. But even here, on the threshold, the shifting landscape acquires a more pregnant beauty. We glimpse a pattern which is not a mould. We learn all over again that the death process has to do with men-in-life and not with corpses in varying stages of decomposition. Death is a counter-symbol. Life is the all, even in the end periods. Nowhere is there any hint of life coming to a stand-still.
Yes, I was a fortunate man to have found Oswald Spengler at that particular moment in time. In every crucial period of my life I seem to have stumbled upon the very author needed to sustain me. Nietzsche, Dostoievsky, Elie Faure, Spengler: what a quartet! There were others, naturally, who were also important at certain moments, but they never possessed quite the amplitude, quite the grandeur, of these four. The four horsemen of my own private Apocalypse! Each one expressing to the full his own unique quality: Nietzsche the iconoclast; Dostoievsky the grand inquisitor; Faure the magician; Spengler the pattern-maker. What a foundation!
In the days to come, when it will seem as if I were entombed, when the very firmament threatens to come crashing down upon my head, I shall be forced to abandon everything except what these spirits implanted in me. I shall be crushed, debased, humiliated. I shall be frustrated in every fibre of my being. I shall even take to howling like a dog. But I shall not be utterly lost! Eventually a day is to dawn when, glancing over my own life as though it were a story or history, I can detect in it a form, a pattern, a meaning. From then on the word defeat becomes meaningless. It will be impossible ever to relapse.
For on that day I become and I remain one with my creation.
On another day, in a foreign land, there will appear
