Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West

In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untraveled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfillment — the West European-American.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West, Vol. I: Form and Actuality . Rogue Scholar Press. Kindle Edition.

The most appropriate designation for this current West European scheme of history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round us as the presumed center of all world happenings, is the Ptolemaic system of history. The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Copernican discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico — separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power. VII The scheme “ancient-medieval-modern” in its first form was a creation of the Magian world sense. It first appeared in the Persian and Jewish religions after Cyrus, received an apocalyptic sense in the teaching of the Book of Daniel on the four world eras, and was developed into a World history in the post-Christian religions of the East, notably the Gnostic systems.11 This important conception, within the very narrow limits which fixed its intellectual basis, was unimpeachable. Neither Indian nor even Egyptian history was included in the scope of the proposition. For the Magian thinker the expression “World history” meant a unique and supremely dramatic act, having as its theater the lands between Hellas and Persia, in which the strictly dualistic world sense of the East expressed itself not by means of polar conceptions like the “soul and spirit,” “good and evil” of contemporary metaphysics, but by the figure of a catastrophe, an epochal change of phase between world creation and world decay.12 No elements beyond those which we find stabilized in the Classical literature, on the one hand, and the Bible (or other sacred book of the particular system), on the other, came into the picture, which presents (as “The Old” and “The New,” respectively) the easily grasped contrasts of Gentile and Jewish, Christian and Heathen, Classical and Oriental, idol and dogma, nature and spirit with a time connotation — that is, as a drama in which the one prevails over the other. The historical change of period wears the characteristic dress of the religious “Redemption.” This “World history” in short was a conception narrow and provincial, but within its limits logical and complete. Necessarily, therefore, it was specific to this region and this humanity, and incapable of any natural extension. But to these two there has been added a third epoch, the epoch that we call “modern,” on Western soil, and it is this that for the first time gives the picture of history the look of a progression. The oriental picture was at rest. It presented a self-contained antithesis, with equilibrium as its outcome and a unique divine act as its turning point. But, adopted and assumed by a wholly new type of mankind, it was quickly transformed (without anyone’s noticing the oddity of the change) into a conception of a linear progress: from Homer or Adam — the modern can substitute for these names the Indo-German, Old Stone Man, or the Pithecanthropus — through Jerusalem, Rome, Florence and Paris according to the taste of the individual historian, thinker or artist, who has unlimited freedom in the interpretation of the three part scheme. This third term, “modern times,” which in form asserts that it is the last and conclusive term of the series, has in fact, ever since the Crusades, been stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at which it will bear no more.13 It was at least implied if not stated in so many words, that here, beyond the ancient and the medieval, something definitive was beginning, a Third Kingdom in which, somewhere, there was to be fulfillment and culmination, and which had an objective point. As to what this objective point is, each thinker, from Schoolman to Present day Socialist, backs his own peculiar discovery. Such a view into the course of things may be both easy and flattering to the patentee, but in fact he has simply taken the spirit of the West, as reflected in his own brain, for the meaning of the world. So it is that great thinkers, making a metaphysical virtue of intellectual necessity, have not only accepted without serious investigation the scheme of history agreed “by common consent” but have made of it the basis of their philosophies and dragged in God as author of this or that “world plan.” Evidently the mystic number three applied to the world ages has something highly seductive for the metaphysician’s taste. History was described by Herder as the education of the human race, by Kant as an evolution of the idea of freedom, by Hegel as a self-expansion of the world spirit, by others in other terms, but as regards its ground plan everyone was quite satisfied when he had thought out some abstract meaning for the conventional threefold order.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West, Vol. I: Form and Actuality . Rogue Scholar Press. Kindle Edition.

On the very threshold of the Western Culture we meet the great Joachim of Floris (c. 1145-1202),14 the first thinker of the Hegelian stamp who shattered the dualistic world form of Augustine, and with his essentially Gothic intellect stated the new Christianity of his time in the form of a third term to the religions of the Old and the New Testaments, expressing them respectively as the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son and the Age of the Holy Ghost. His teaching moved the best of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, Dante, Thomas Aquinas, in their inmost souls and awakened a world outlook which slowly but surely took entire possession of the historical sense of our Culture. Lessing — who often designated his own period, with reference to the Classical as the “afterworld”15 (Nachwelt) — took his idea of the “education of the human race” with its three stages of child, youth and man, from the teaching of the Fourteenth Century mystics. Ibsen treats it with thoroughness in his Emperor and Galilean (1873), in which he directly presents the Gnostic world conception through the figure of the wizard Maximus, and advances not a step beyond it in his famous Stockholm address of 1887. It would appear, then, that the Western consciousness feels itself urged to predicate a sort of finality inherent in its own appearance.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West, Vol. I: Form and Actuality . Rogue Scholar Press. Kindle Edition.

Instances — besides that of Mithradates and the Cyprus massacre quoted above — are the Sepoy Mutiny in India, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Bolshevist fury of Jews, Letts, and other alien peoples against Tsarist Russia.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World-History . Arktos Media Ltd. Kindle Edition.