Introduction

The Dialogue of Europe and the Levant

During the reigns of Trajan (98–117 a.d.) and his successor Hadrian (117–138) the forms of the dome and arch had begun to appear in the architecture of Rome, and therewith — as Spengler recognized — the world-feeling of the rising Levant was announced. In his words: “The Pantheon … is the earliest of all mosques.”^{Note 1} And at the same time the eyes of the portrait busts of emperors began to have their pupils bored, whereas in earlier Classical sculpture eyes had been as though blind: there had been no gazing forth of an interior spirit into space.^{Note 2} For, just as the Greek temple had stressed the exterior with its columns, there being but a simple cella within, affording no sense of interior space but only of outside physicality, so (again to use Spengler’s words) for Classical man “the Temple of the Body, too, had no ‘interior.’ ”^{Note 3}

The mosque, in contrast, was all interior: an architectural likeness of the world-cavern, which appears to the Levantine mind to be the proper symbol of the spiritual form of the universe. “An ingeniously confusing interpenetration of spherical and polygonal forms,” as Spengler writes of it, “a load so placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weightless on high, yet closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines concealed; vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of the dome but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling-in — such are the characteristics that we see in the masterpieces of this art, St. Vitale in Ravenna, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock (the Mosque of Omar) in Jerusalem.”^{Note 4}

An awesome, all-pervading sense of bounded space and time, as a kind of Aladdin cave within which light and darkness, good and evil, grace and willfulness, spirit and soul, interplay to create, instead of history, a mighty fairy tale of divinely and diabolically motivated agents, fills all the mythologies of the Levant — whether of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Manichaeism, Eastern Christianity, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, the late Classical Mysteries, or Islam. And the cognate view of the individual in this world is not of an individual at all, but of an organ or part of the great organism — as in Paul or Augustine’s view of the Living Body of Christ. In each being, as throughout the world cavern, there play the two contrary, all-pervading principles of Spirit and Soul — Hebrew ruach and nephesh, Persian ahu and urvan, Mandaean manuhmed and gyart, Greek pneuma and psyche.

“Ruach,” as Spengler observes, “means originally ‘wind’ and nephesh is always in one way or another related to the bodily and earthly, to the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is the ‘upward.’ The ruach belongs to the divine, to the above, to the light. Its effects in man when it descends are the heroism of a Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlightenment of the judge (the Solomon passing judgment), and all kinds of divination and ecstasy. It is poured out.”^{Note 5}

The manifestation of a newly developing culture through the forms of an alien heritage — such as is represented by the appearance of the dome in late Roman architecture and the pupils in the eyes of Roman portraits — Spengler has denominated by the term “pseudomorphosis.” The word, derived from the vocabulary of mineralogy, properly refers to the deceptive outer shape, the “false formation,” of a crystal that has solidified within a rock crevice, or other mold, incongruous to its inner structure. As Spengler defines the category:

By the term “historical pseudomorphosis” I propose to designate those cases in which an older alien culture lies so massively over the land that a young culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression forms, but even to develop fully its own self consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old molds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous.^{Note 6}

In the case of the Levantine culture, as he shows, this condition prevailed, one way or another, from start to finish. Its earliest stage of germination lay entirely within the ambit of the ancient Babylonian civilization; the next, from c. 529 b.c., was marked by the dictatorship of a small Persian clan, primitive as the Ostrogoths, whose domination of two hundred years, till the victory of Alexander, was founded on the infinite weariness of the worn-out Babylonian populations. “But from 300 b.c. onward,” Spengler states “there begins and spreads a great awakening in the young Aramaic-speaking peoples between Sinai and the Zagros range.” Yet precisely at this juncture came the Macedonians, who laid down a thin sheet of Classical civilization as far as to India and Turkestan. With the victories of Pompey in Syria and then of Augustus at Actium (30 b.c.), the heavy toga of Rome fell over the land. And for centuries thereafter, until the veritable explosion of Islam into sudden form, Levantine thought and feeling had to express itself — except in the released realm of the Persian Sassanian kings — under forms that our scholars have consistently misinterpreted as representing an interval largely of transition from the Classical to the Gothic stages of our own European civilization.

“The Magian Culture,” as Spengler seems to have been the only historian to observe,

geographically and historically, is the midmost of the group of higher Cultures — the only one which, in point both of space and of time, was in touch with practically all others. The structure of its history as a whole in our world-picture depends, therefore, entirely on our recognizing the true inner form which the outer molds distorted. Unhappily, that is just what we do not yet know, thanks to theological and philological prepossessions, and even more to the modern tendency of overspecialization which has unreasonably subdivided Western research into a number of separate branches — each distinguished from the others not merely by its materials and its methods, but by its very way of thinking — and so prevented the big problems from being even seen. In this instance the consequences of specialization have been graver perhaps than in any other. The historians proper stayed within the domain of Classical philology and made the Classical language frontier their eastern horizon; hence they entirely failed to perceive the deep unity of development on both sides of their frontier, which spiritually had no existence. The result is a perspective of “Ancient,” “Medieval,” and “Modern” history, ordered and defined by the use of the Greek and Latin languages. For the experts of the old languages, with their “texts,” Axum, Saba, and even the realm of the Sassanids were unattackable, and the consequence is that in “history” these scarcely exist at all. The literature-researcher (he also a philologist) confuses the spirit of the language with the spirit of the work. Products of the Aramaean region, if they happen to be written in Greek or even merely preserved in Greek, he embodies in his “Late Greek literature” and proceeds to classify as a special period of that literature. The cognate texts in other languages are outside his department and have been brought into other groups of literature in the same artificial way. And yet here was the strongest of all proofs that the history of a literature never coincides with the history of a language. Here, in reality, was a self-contained ensemble of Magian national literature, single in spirit, but written in several languages — the Classical amongst others. For a nation of Magian type has no mother tongue. There are Talmudic, Manichaean, Nestorian, Jewish, or even Neopythagorean national literatures, but not Hellenistic or Hebrew.

Theological research, in its turn, broke up its domain into subdivisions according to the different West-European confessions, and so the “philological” frontier between West and East came into force, and still is in force, for Christian theology also. The Persian world fell to the student of Iranian philology, and as the Avesta texts were disseminated, though not composed, in an Aryan dialect, their immense problem came to be regarded as a minor branch of the Indologist’s work and so disappeared absolutely from the field of vision of Christian theology. And lastly the history of Talmudic Judaism, since Hebrew philology became bound up in one specialism with Old Testament research, not only never obtained separate treatment, but has been completely forgotten by all the major histories of religions with which I am acquainted, although these find room for every Indian sect (since folklore, too, ranks as a specialism) and every primitive Negro religion to boot. Such is the preparation of scholarship for the greatest task that historical research has to face today.^{Note 7}

In the remaining pages of the present volume we shall regard only in broad lines — hardly touching even the most important of the numerous special traditions — the interplay of the two great spiritual worlds of the Levantine and European souls, through a colorful maze of mutual and self misunderstanding; and herewith two contrary pseudomorphoses will appear. Of the first, Spengler has just informed us; namely, the germination of Levantine forms beneath an overlay of Hellenistic-Roman formulae. And the second might be termed the Levantine revenge; namely, the massive diffusion of Pauline Christianity over the whole culture field of Europe, after which the native Celtic and Germanic sense of being, and manner of experience, were compelled to find both expression and support in alien terms, antipodal, or even antipathetic, to every native sentiment and impulse. The breakthrough of the released Levantine spirit in a late yet powerful statement will be seen in the vivid, definitive victory of Islam from the seventh century on. And the comparable breakthrough of the released European mind will appear in the double victory of individual conscience with the Reformation and of unencumbered science, joined to a revived humanism, with the Renaissance. We shall attempt an aerial survey, so to say, first of the Levantine province and then of the European to c. 1350 a.d., when the cracks in the old pseudomorphy began to split apart. And our aim will be to bring out through a few significant forms the main lines both of each native order and of the distorting force of each overlay on the proper growth.