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Continuation of "A very Popular German writer Predicted Russia would
Inherit the Earth - Oswald Spengler"...
The hatred of the 'West' and of 'Europe'
is the hatred for
a Civilization that had already reached an advanced state of decay
into materialism and sought to impose its primacy by cultural
subversion rather than by combat, with its City-based and
money-based outlook,
'poisoning the unborn culture in the womb of
the land'.
(Spengler, 1971, II, 194)
Russia was still a land where
there were no bourgeoisie and no true class system but only lord and
peasant, a view confirmed by Berdyaev, writing:
The various lines of social demarcation did not exist in Russia;
there were no pronounced classes. Russia was never an aristocratic
country in the Western sense, and equally there was no bourgeoisie.
(Berdyaev, 1)
The cities that emerged threw up an intelligentsia, copying the
intelligentsia of Late Westerndom,
'bent on discovering problems and
conflicts, and below, an uprooted peasantry, with all the
metaphysical gloom, anxiety, and misery of their own Dostoyevski,
perpetually homesick for the open land and bitterly hating the stony
grey world into which the Antichrist had tempted them. Moscow had no
proper soul'.
(Spengler, 1971, II, 194)
The spirit of the upper classes was Western, and the lower had
brought in with them the soul of the countryside.
Between the two
worlds there was no reciprocal comprehension, no communication, no
charity. To understand the two spokesmen and victims of the pseudomorphosis, it is enough that Dostoyevski is the peasant, and
Tolstoi the man of Western society.
The one could never in his soul
get away from the land; the other, in spite of his desperate
efforts, could never get near it. (Ibid.).
Berdyaev likewise states of the Petrinism of the upper class:
Peter secularized the Russian Tsardoni and brought it into touch
with Western absolutism of the more enlightened kind.
The Tsardom of
Moscow had not given actual effect to the messianic idea of Moscow
as the Third Rome, but the efforts of Peter created a gulf between a
police absolutism and the sacred Tsardom.
A breach took place
between the upper governing classes of Russian society and the
masses of the people among whom the old religious beliefs and hopes
were still preserved. The Western influences which led on to the
remarkable Russian culture of the nineteenth century found no
welcome among the bulk of the people.
The power of the nobility
increased and it became entirely alien from the people. The very
manner of life of the landowning nobility was a thing
incomprehensible to the people.
It was precisely in the Petrine
epoch during the reign of Katherine II that the Russian people
finally fell under the sway of the system of serfdom.
The whole Petrine period of Russian history was a struggle between East and
West within the Russian soul.
(Berdyaev, 15)
Russian
Messianism
Berdyaev states that while Petrinism introduced an epoch of cultural
dynamism, it also placed a heavy burden upon Russia, and a disunity
of spirit. (Ibid.).
However, Russia has her own religious sense of
Mission, which is as universal as the Vatican's. Spengler quotes Dostoyevski as writing in 1878:
'all men must become Russian, first
and foremost Russian. If general humanity is the Russian ideal, then
everyone must first of all become a Russian'.
(Spengler, 1963, 63n)
The Russian Messianic idea found a forceful expression in Dostoyevski's
The Possessed, where, in a conversation with Stavrogin,
Shatov states:
Reduce God to the attribute of nationality?... On the contrary, I
elevate the nation to God...
The people is the body of God. Every
nation is a nation only so long as it has its own particular God,
excluding all other gods on earth without any possible
reconciliation, so long as it believes that by its own God it will
conquer and drive all other gods off the face of the earth.
At least
that's what all great nations have believed since the beginning of
time, all those remarkable in any way, those standing in the
vanguard of humanity...
The Jews lived solely in expectation of the
true God, and they left this true God to the world... A nation which
loses faith is no longer a nation.
But there is only one truth;
consequently, only one nation can posses the true God...
The sole
'God bearing' nation is the Russian nation...
(Dostoevsky, 1992,
Part II: I: 7, 265-266)
Spengler saw Russia as outside of Europe, and even as 'Asian'.
He
even saw a Western rebirth vis-ŕ-vis opposition to Russia, which he
regarded as leading the 'colored world' against the white, under
the mantle of Bolshevism.
Yet there were also other destinies that
Spengler saw over the horizon, which had been predicted by Dostoyevski.
Once Russia had overthrown its alien intrusions, it could look with
another perspective upon the world, and reconsider Europe not with
hatred and vengeance but in kinship.
Spengler wrote that,
while Tolstoi, the Petrinist, whose doctrine was the precursor of
Bolshevism, was 'the former Russia', Dostoyevski was 'the coming
Russia'.
Dostoyevski as the representative of the 'coming Russia'
'does not know' the hatred of Russia for the West.
Dostoyevski and
the old Russia are transcendent.
'His passionate power of living is
comprehensive enough to embrace all things Western as well'.
Spengler quotes Dostoyevski:
'I have two fatherlands, Russia and
Europe'.
Dostoyevski as the harbinger of a Russian high culture,
'has
passed beyond both Petrinism and revolution, and from his future he
looks back over them as from afar. His soul is apocalyptic,
yearning, desperate, but of this future he is certain'.
(Spengler, 1971, II, 194)
Spengler cites Dostoyevski's
The Brothers
Karamazov, where Ivan Karamazov (Dostoyevski, 1880, 34: II: V: 3)
says to his mother:
I want to travel in Europe… I know well enough that I shall be going
only to a churchyard, but I know too that that churchyard is dear,
very dear to me.
Beloved dead lie buried there, every stone over
them tell of a life so ardently lived, so passionately a belief in
its own achievements, its own truth, its own battle, its own
knowledge, that I know - even now I know - I shall fall down and
kiss these stones and weep over them'.
(Spengler, 1971, II, 195)
To the 'Slavophil', of which Dostoyevski was one, Europe is
precious.
The Slavophil appreciates the richness of European high
culture while realizing that Europe is in a state of decay.
Berdyaev
discussed what he regarded as an inconsistency in Dostoyevski and
the Slavophils towards Europe, yet one that is comprehensible when
we consider Spengler's crucial differentiation between Culture and
Civilisation:
Dostoyevsky calls himself a Slavophil. He thought, as did also a
large number of thinkers on the theme of Russia and Europe, that he
knew decay was setting in, but that a great past exists in her, and
that she has made contributions of great value to the history of
mankind. (Berdyaev, 70).
It is notable that while this differentiation between
Kultur and
Zivilisation is ascribed to a particularly German philosophical
tradition, Berdyaev comments that it was present among the Russians
'long before Spengler', although deriving from German sources:
It is to be noted that long before Spengler, the Russians drew the
distinction between 'culture' and 'civilization', that they attacked
'civilization' even when they remained supporters of 'culture'.
This
distinction in actual fact, although expressed in a different
phraseology, was to be found among the Slavophils.
(Ibid.)
Tolstoi, who sought to overcome the problems of Civilisation by a
'return-to-Nature' in the manner of the Western Enlightenment
philosopher J J Rousseau, on the other hand, is the product of the
Late West,
'enlightened and socially minded', and sees only a
problem, 'whereas Dostoyevski 'does not even know what a problem
is'.
(Spengler, 1971, II, 195).
Spengler states that the problematic
nature of life is a question that arises in Late Civilizations, and
is a symptom of an epoch where life itself has become questionable.
It is a symptom of the Late West transplanted as a weed onto the
soil of Russia, represented by Tolstoi who, stands midway between
Peter and Bolshevism, and neither he nor they managed to get within
sight of Russian earth…
Their kind of opposition is not apocalyptic
but intellectual. Tolstoi's hatred of property is an economist's,
his hatred of society a social reformer's, his hatred of the State a
political theorist's. Hence his immense effect upon the West - he
belongs, in one respect as in another, to the band of Marx, Ibsen,
and Zola.
(Ibid.)
Dostoyevski, on the
contrary, was indifferent to the Late West, looking beyond the
physical, beyond questions of social reform and economics, and to
the metaphysical:
'Dostoyevski, like every
primitive Russian, is fundamentally unaware' of the physical world
and 'lives in a second, metaphysical world beyond'.
The living
reality is a religious one, which Spengler compares most closely
with 'primitive Christianity'.
Dostoyevski is a 'saint', Tolstoi,
'only a revolutionary', the representative of Petrinism, as the
forerunner of Bolshevism, 'the last dishonoring of the metaphysical
by the social', and a new form of pseudomorphosis.
The Bolshevists
and other such revolutionaries were 'the lowest stratum of… Petrine
society'.
(Ibid., II, 196)
Imbued with ideas from the Late West,
the Marxists sought to replace one Petrine ruling class with
another.
Neither represented the soul of Russia.
Spengler states:
'The real Russian is the disciple of Dostoyevski, even though he
might not have read Dostoyevski, or anyone else, nay, perhaps
because he cannot read, he is himself Dostoyevski in substance'.
The
intelligentsia hates, the peasant does not.
(Ibid.)
He would
eventually overthrow Bolshevism and any other form of Petrinism.
Here we see Spengler unequivocally stating that the post-Western
civilization will be Russian.
For what this townless people yearns for is its own life-form, its
own religion, its own history. Tolstoi's Christianity was a
misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant Marx.
But to Dostoyevski's
Christianity, the next thousand years will belong.
(Ibid.)
To the true Russia, as Dostoyevski stated it, 'not a single nation
has ever been founded on principles of science or reason'.
Dostoyevski continues, with the character Shatov explaining:
[N]ot a single nation has ever been founded on principles of science
or reason.
There has never been an example of it, except for a brief
moment, through folly. Socialism is from its very nature bound to be
atheism, seeing that it has from the very first proclaimed that it
is an atheistic organization of society, and that it intends to
establish itself exclusively on the elements of science and reason.
Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a
secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be
till the end of time.
Nations are built up and moved by another
force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown
and inexplicable:
that force is the force of an insatiable desire to
go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end.
It is
the force of the persistent assertion of one's own existence, and a
denial of death. It's the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it,
'the river of living water', the drying up of which is threatened in
the Apocalypse.
It's the ćsthetic principle, as the philosophers
call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, 'the
seeking for God', as I call it more simply.
The object of every
national movement, in every people and at every period of its
existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god,
and the faith in Him as the only true one.
God is the synthetic
personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its
end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had
one common god, but each has always had its own. It's a sign of the
decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common.
When gods
begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the
faith in them, together with the nations themselves.
The stronger a
people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation
without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every
people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and
evil.
When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in
several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very
distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear.
Reason
has never had the power to define good and evil, or even to
distinguish between good and evil, even approximately; on the
contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful
way; science has even given the solution by the fist.
This is
particularly characteristic of the half-truths of science, the most
terrible scourge of humanity, unknown till this century, and worse
than plague, famine, or war.
(Dostoyevski, 1872, II: I: VII).
Here we have the expression of the Russian soul, its repudiation of
Petrinism, and in a manner similar to Spengler's, the identification
of faith, not darwinian zoology or economics, as the premise of
culture-nation-race-formation, and the primacy of rationalistic
doctrines as a symptom of decay.
'Conflict
Between Money & Blood'
Spengler states that at the Late - 'Winter' - epoch of a
Civilization where money-thinking dominates, a point is reached
where there is a reaction:
a 'Second Religiousness' which returns a
decaying Civilization to its spiritual foundations.
There proceeds a
revolt against oligarchy and a return to authority, or what Spengler
called 'Cćsarism', and from there the fulfillment of a destiny before
being eclipsed by a new high culture.
The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Cćsarism,
which is the final political constitution of a Late Civilisation…
In
both phenomena the creative young strength of the Early Culture is
lacking. But both have their greatness nevertheless. That of the
Second Religiousness consists of a deep piety that fills the
waking-consciousness…
(Spengler, 1971, II, 310)
Spengler states that the,
'profoundly mystical inner life feels
"thinking in money" as a sin'.
The money-thinking imposed on Russia
as Communism was 'Western' insofar as Marxism reflects the economic
thinking of Western civilization in its Late epoch.
(Ibid., II,
402)
[A]n upper, alien and civilised world intruded from the West (the
Bolshevism of the first years, totally Western and un-Russian, is
the lees of this importation), and a townless barter-life that goes
on deep below, uncalculating and exchanging only for immediate
needs.
We have to think of the catchwords of the surface as a voice,
in which the Russian, simple and busied wholly with his soul bears
resignedly the will of God. Marxism amongst Russians is based on an
inward misunderstanding.
They bore with the higher economic life of Petrinism, but they neither created it nor
recognized it.
The
Russian does not fight Capital, but he does not comprehend it.
Anyone who understands Dostoyevski will sense in these people a
young humanity for which as yet no money exists, but only goods in
relation to a life whose centre of gravity does not lie on the
economical side.
(Ibid., II, 495n)
Spengler states above that the Russians do not 'fight' capital.
(Ibid., 495).
Yet their young soul brings them into conflict with
money, as both oligarchy from inside and plutocracy from outside
contend with the Russian soul for supremacy. It was something
observed by both Gogol and Dostoyevski.
The anti-capitalism and
'world revolution' of Stalinism took on features that were drawn
more from Russian messianism than from Marxism, reflected in the
struggle between Trotsky and Stalin.
The revival of the Czarist and
Orthodox icons, martyrs and heroes and of Russian folk-culture in
conjunction with a campaign against ' rootless cosmopolitanism',
reflected the emergence of primal Russian soul amidst Petrine
Marxism. (Brandenberger, 2002).
Today the conflict between two
world-views can be seen in the conflicts between Putin and certain
'oligarchs' and the uneasiness Putin causes among the West.
The conflict that arises is metaphysical, but oligarchy and
plutocracy can only understand the physical.
Hence,
'money-getting
by means of money is an impiety, and (from the viewpoint of the
coming Russian religion) a sin'.
(Ibid.)
'Money-getting by means of
money' manifests in speculation and usury. It is the basis upon
which the economics of the Late West is founded, and from which it
is now tottering.
That this was not the case in the Gothic era of
the West's 'high culture' is indicated by the Church's strident
condemnation of usury as 'sin'.
Spengler predicted that in answer to the money-ethos a 'third kind
of Christianity', based on the 'John Gospel', would arise, 'looking
towards Jerusalem with premonitions of coming crusades'.
(Ibid.)
The Russian also eschews the machine, to which Faustian man is
enslaved, and if today he adopts Western technics, he does so,
'with
fear and hatred of wheels, cables, and rails', and will 'blot the
whole thing from his memory and his environment, and create about
himself a wholly new world, in which nothing of this Devil's
technique is left'.
(Ibid., II, 504).
Has time proved Spengler wrong in his observation that the Russian
soul is repelled by the materialism, rationalism, technics and
scientism of the Late West, given that the USSR went full throttle
to industrialize?
Spengler also said that Russia would adapt Western technics for her own use, as a weapon.
Anecdotally, in our time,
Barbara Brothers, a psycho-therapist, while part of a scientific
delegation to Russia in 1993, observed that even among Russian
scientists the focus is on the metaphysical:
The Russians seem not to make the divorce between 'hard' science and
heart and soul that we do in the United States. Elena is probably a
classic example.
In her position as a part of the Academy of
National Economy, a division of the Academy of Science, she works in
facts and statistics all day long; when you ask her how (how in the
world!) she thinks they will make it, she gives you a metaphysical
answer.
The scientist part of her gave a presentation that showed us
how it was absolutely impossible for the economy to begin to work.
Yet, she says, 'I am not pessimistic'.
Again, Spengler's observations of the Russian soul are confirmed by
this anecdote:
the true Russian - even the scientist and
mathematician - does not comprehend everything as a 'problem' in the
Late Western sense.
His decisions are not made by Western
rationalism, but by metaphysics and instinct. It is an interesting
aside to recall that under the USSR, supposedly predicated on
dialectical materialism, the metaphysical and the psychic were
subjects of serious investigation to an extent that would be scoffed
at by Western scientists. (Kernbach, 2013).
By the time Spengler had published
The Hour of Decision in 1934 he
was stating that Russia had overthrown Petrinism and the trappings
of the late West, and while he called the new orientation of Russia
'Asian', he said that it was,
'a new Idea, and an idea with a future
too'.
(Spengler, 1963, 60)
To clarify, Russia looks towards the
'East', but while the Westerner assumes that 'Asia' and East are
synonymous with Mongol, the etymology of the word 'Asia' comes from
Greek Aσία, ca. 440 BC, referring to all regions east of Greece.
(Ibid., 61).
As an ethnic, historical, cultural or religious
designation it means as little as as the World War I propaganda
reference to Germans as 'Huns'. During his time Spengler saw in
Russia that,
Race, language, popular customs, religion, in their present form…
all or any of them can and will be fundamentally transformed.
What
we see today then is simply the new kind of life which a vast land
has conceived and will presently bring forth. It is not definable in
words, nor is its bearer aware of it.
Those who attempt to define,
establish, lay down a program, are confusing life with a phrase, as
does the ruling Bolshevism, which is not sufficiently conscious of
its own West-European, Rationalistic and cosmopolitan origin.
(Ibid.)
Of Russia in 1934 Spengler already saw that,
'of genuine Marxism
there is very little except in names and programs'.
He doubted that
the Communist program is 'really still taken seriously'.
He saw
the possibility of the vestiges of Petrine Bolshevism being
overthrown, to be replaced by a 'nationalistic' Eastern type which
would reach,
'gigantic proportions unchecked'.
(Spengler, 1963,
63)
Spengler also referred to Russia as the country,
'least troubled
by Bolshevism', (Ibid.,182) and the 'Marxian face [was] only worn
for the benefit of the outside world'. (Ibid., 212).
A decade after
Spengler's death the direction of Russia under Stalin had pursued
clearer definitions, and Petrine Bolshevism had been transformed in
the way Spengler foresaw. (Brandenberger, 2002).
Conclusion
As in Spengler's time, and centuries before, there continues to
exist two tendencies in Russia:
the Old Russian and the Petrine.
Neither one nor the other spirit is presently dominant, although
under Putin Old Russia struggles for resurgence.
Spengler in a
published lecture to the Rheinish-Westphalian Business Convention in
1922 referred to the,
'ancient, instinctive, unclear, unconscious,
and subliminal drive that is present in every Russian, no matter how
thoroughly westernized his conscious life may be - a mystical
yearning for the South, for Constantinople and Jerusalem, a genuine
crusading spirit similar to the spirit our Gothic forebears had in
their blood but which we can hardly appreciated today'.
(Spengler,
1922)
Bolshevism destroyed one form of Petrinism with another form,
clearing the way,
'for a new culture that will some day arise between
"Europe" and East Asia. It is more a beginning than an end'.
The
peasantry,
'will some day become conscious of its own will, which
points in a wholly different direction'.
'The peasantry is the true
Russian people of the future. It will not allow itself to be
perverted or suffocated'.
(Ibid.)
The 'Great Patriotic War' gave
Stalin the opportunity to return
Russia to its roots. Russia's Orthodox foundations were returned on
the basis of a myth, an archetypically Russian mysticism.
The myth
goes that in 1941:
The Virgin appeared to Metropolitan Ilya of the Antiochian Church,
who prayed wholeheartedly for Russia.
She instructed him to tell the
Russians that they should carry the Kazan Icon in a religious
procession around the besieged city of Leningrad (St Petersburg).
Then, the Virgin said, they should serve a molieben [2] before the
icon in Moscow. The Virgin said that the icon should stay with the
Russian troops in Stalingrad, and later move with them to the
Russian border.
Leningrad didn't surrender. Miraculously, Moscow was
also saved. During the Battle of Stalingrad, the icon was with the
Russian army on the right bank of the Volga, and the Nazi troops
couldn't cross the river.
The Battle of Stalingrad began with a molieben before the Kazan Icon.
Only when it was finished, did the
troops receive the order to attack. The Kazan Icon was at the most
important sectors of the front, and in the places where the troops
were preparing for an offensive. It was like in the old times, when
in response to earnest prayers, the Virgin instilled fear in enemies
and drove them away.
Even atheists told stories of the Virgin's help
to the Russian troops.
During the assault on Königsberg in 1945, the
Soviet troops were in a critical situation. Suddenly, the soldiers
saw their commander arrive with priests and an icon.
Many made
jokes, 'Just wait, that'll help us!'
The commander silenced the
jokers. He ordered everybody to line up and to take off their caps.
When the priests finished the molieben, they moved to the frontline
carrying the icon. The amazed soldiers watched them going straight
forward, under intense Nazi fire.
Suddenly, the Nazis stopped
shooting. Then, the Russian troops received orders to attack on the
ground and from the sea. Nazis died in the thousands.
Nazi prisoners
told the Russians that they saw the Virgin in the sky before the
Russians began to attack, the whole of the Nazi army saw Her, and
their weapons wouldn't fire.
(Voices from Russia).
The message to Metropolitan Ilya from The Theotokos [3] for Russia
was that:
'The cathedrals, monasteries, theological seminaries and academies
have to be opened in the whole country. The priests have to be sent
back from the front and released from incarceration.
They must begin
serving again… When the war will be over, Metropolitan Elijah has
to come to Russia and witness how she was saved'.
The metropolitan
contacted both Russian church representatives and Soviet government
officials.
Stalin then promised to do everything God indicated.
(Russia before the Second Coming).
During 'The Great Patriotic War' 20,000 churches were opened.
In
1942 the Soviet Government allowed Easter celebrations. On 4
September 1943 Stalin invited the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox
Church to the Kremlin to discuss the need for reviving religious
life in the USSR and the prompt election of a Patriarch.
This is the type of Myth that is nation-forming. It exists as a
constant possibility within Russia. Spengler stated in his lecture
to the German businessmen in 1922 that,
There can be no doubt: a new Russian people is in the process of
becoming.
Shaken and threatened to the very soul by a frightful
destiny, forced to an inner distance, it will in time become firm
and come to bloom. It is passionately religious in a way that we
Western Europeans have not been, indeed could not have been, for
centuries.
As soon as this religious drive is directed towards a
goal, it possesses an immense expansive potential. Unlike us, such a
people does not count the victims who die for an idea, for it is a
young, vigorous, and fertile people.
(Spengler, 1922)
The arch-Conservative anti-Marxist, Spengler, in keeping with the
German tradition of realpolitik, considered the possibility of a
Russo-German alliance in his 1922 speech, the Treaty of Rapallo
being a reflection of that tradition.
'A new type of leader' would
be awakened in adversity, to 'new crusades and legendary conquests'.
The rest of the world, filled with religious yearning but falling on
infertile ground, is,
'torn and tired enough to allow it suddenly to
take on a new character under the proper circumstances'.
Spengler
suggested that,
'perhaps Bolshevism itself will change in this way
under new leaders'.
'But the silent, deeper Russia,' would turn its
attention towards the Near and East Asia, as a people of 'great
inland expanses'.
(Ibid.)
Berdyaev, discussing the Slavophil
outlook, wrote:
Russian reflections upon the subject of the philosophy of history
led to the consciousness that the path of Russia was a special one.
Russia is the great East-West; it is a whole immense world and in
its people vast powers are confined.
The Russian people are a people
of the future; they will decide questions which the West has not yet
the strength to decide, which it does not even pose in their full
depth.
(Berdyaev, 70)
There are no certainties.
While Spengler postulated the
organic
cycles of a High Culture going through the life-phases of birth,
youthful vigor, maturity, old age and death, it should be kept in
mind that a life-cycle can be disrupted, aborted, murdered or struck
by disease, at any time, and end without fulfilling itself.
Each has
its analogy in politics, and there are plenty of Russophobes eager
to stunt Russia's destiny with political, economic and cultural
contagion.
The Soviet bloc fell through inner and outer contagion...
What Spengler foresaw for the possibilities of Russia, yet to
fulfill
its historic mission, messianic and of world-scope, might now be
unfolding if Russia eschews pressures from within and without.
The
invigoration of Orthodoxy is part of this process, as is the
leadership style of Putin, as distinct from a Yeltsin for example.
Whatever Russia is called outwardly, whether, monarchical, Bolshevik
or democratic, there is an inner - eternal - Russia that endures and
awaits its time on the world historical stage.
We see it now with
the re-emergence of Eurasianism, for example; not of the 'East' nor
the 'West', but of Russia.
Back to 'A
very Popular German writer Predicted Russia would Inherit the Earth
- Oswald Spengler'
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