Oswald Spengler on Western Christianity

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WESTERN mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say "thou shalt" in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable.

That, and nothing short of it, is for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. here Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to general and permanent validity... ... The moral imperative as the form of morale is Faustian and only Faustian. It is quite wrong to associate Christianity with the moral imperative. It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity--and he not only made it a new religious but also gave it a new moral direction. The "it" became "I," the passion- charged centre of the world, the foundation of the great Sacrament of personal contrition. Will-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set up a proper morale as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted--nothing is more characteristically our own than this is. And in virtue of it the Gothic springtime proceeded to a profound--and never yet appreciated--inward transformation of the morale of Jesus. A quite spiritual morale welling from Magian [he uses this term for culture of the Near-East] feeling--a morale or conduct recommended as potent for salvation, a morale the knowledge of which was communicated as a special act of grace-- was recast as a morale of imperative command....

-- J. Fernandes (goananda@hotmail.com), February 19, 2004

Answers

Kindly translate this gobbledygook into standard English -- provided you can justify posting this seemingly non-Catholic essay on a Catholic forum.

-- (We@Aren't.Geniuses), February 20, 2004.

It is hard to distill the ideas of Oswald Spengler's thousand page work "Decline of the West" into a few sentences. I fail to see how the essay does not concern catholicism. Spengler is describing the changes wrought on Christianity by western individualism and western metaphysical assumptions about the world.

-- J. Fernandes (goananda@hotmail.com), February 20, 2004.

It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity

Kinda depressing, isn't it?

Oh well, he placed the interests of the State above those of the individual he called it "Ethical Socialism". Spengler emphasised that the only way forward was into an Imperial Europe. (see "The Hour of Decision" )

-bill



-- Bill Nelson (bnelson45@hotmail.com), February 20, 2004.


Thank you so much for translating the gobbledygook ... not.

-- (We@Aren't.Geniuses), February 22, 2004.

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