VI

It is the primitive feeling of Care which dominates the physiognomy of Western, as also that of Egyptian and that of Chinese history, and it creates, further, the symbolism of the erotic which represents the flowing on of endless life in the form of the familial series of individual existences. The point-formed Euclidean existence of Classical man, in this matter as in others, conceived only the here-and-now definitive act of begetting or of bearing, and thus it comes about that we find the birth-pangs of the mother made the centre of Demeter-worship and the Dionysiac symbol of the phallus (the sign of a sexuality wholly concentrated on the moment and losing past and future in it) more or less everywhere in the Classical. In the Indian world we find, correspondingly, the sign of the Lingam and the sect of worshippers of Paewati. In the one case as in the other, man feels himself as nature, as a plant, as a willless and care-less element of becoming (dem Sinn des Werdens willenlos und sorglos hingegeben). The domestic religion of Rome centred on the genius, i.e., the creative power of the head of the family. To all this, the deep and thoughtful care of the Western soul has opposed the sign of mother-love, a symbol which in the Classical Culture only appeared above the horizon to the extent that we see it in, say, the mourning for Persephone or (though this is only Hellenistic) the seated statue of Demeter of Knidos. The Mother with the Child—the future—at her breast, the Mary-cult in the new Faustian form, began to flourish only in the centuries of the Gothic and found its highest expression in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. This conception is not one belonging to Christianity generally. On the contrary, Magian Christianity had elevated Mary as Theotokos, “she who gave birth to God” into a symbol felt quite otherwise than by us. The lulling Mother is as alien to Early-Christian-Byzantine art as she is to the Hellenic (though for other reasons) and most certainly Faust’s Gretchen, with the deep spell of unconscious motherhood on her, is nearer to the Gothic Madonna than all the Marys of Byzantine and Ravennate mosaics. Indeed, the presumption of a spiritual relation between them breaks down completely before the fact that the Madonna with the Child answers exactly to the Egyptian Isis with Horus—both are caring, nursing mothers—and that nevertheless this symbol had vanished for a thousand years and more (for the whole duration of the Classical and the Arabian Cultures) before it was reawakened by the Faustian soul.

From the maternal care the way leads to the paternal, and there we meet with the highest of all the time-symbols that have come into existence within a Culture, the State. The meaning of the child to the mother is the future, the continuation, namely, of her own life, and mother-love is, as it were, a welding of two discontinuous individual existences; likewise, the meaning of the state to the man is comradeship in arms for the protection of hearth and home, wife and child, and for the insurance for the whole people of its future and its efficacy. The state is the inward form of a nation, its “form” in the athletic sense, and history, in the high meaning, is the State conceived as kinesis and not as kinema (nicht als Bewegtes sondern als Bewegung gedacht). The Woman as Mother is, and the Man as Warrior and Politician makes, History.

And here again the history of higher Cultures shows us three examples of state-formations in which the element of care is conspicuous: the Egyptian administration even of the Old Kingdom (from 3000 B.C.); the Chinese state of the Chóu dynasty (1169-256 B.C.), of the organization of which the Chóu Li gives such a picture that, later on, no one dared to believe in the authenticity of the book; and the states of the West, behind whose characteristic eye-to-the-future there is an unsurpassably intense Will to the future. And on the other hand we have in two examples—the Classical and the Indian world—a picture of utterly care-less submission to the moment and its incidents. Different in themselves as are Stoicism and Buddhism (the old-age dispositions of these two worlds), they are at one in their negation of the historical feeling of care, their contempt of zeal, of organizing power, and of the duty-sense; and therefore neither in Indian courts nor in Classical market-places was there a thought for the morrow, personal or collective. The carpe diem of Apollinian man applies also to the Apollinian state.

As with the political, so with the other side of historical existence, the economic. The hand-to-mouth life corresponds to the love that begins and ends in the satisfaction of the moment. There was an economic organization on the grand scale in Egypt, where it fills the whole culture-picture, telling us in a thousand paintings the story of its industry and orderliness; in China, whose mythology of gods and legend-emperors turns entirely upon the holy tasks of cultivation; and in Western Europe, where, beginning with the model agriculture of the Orders, it rose to the height of a special science, “national economy,” which was in very principle a working hypothesis, purporting to show not what happens but what shall happen. In the Classical world, on the other hand—to say nothing of India—men managed from day to day, in spite of the example of Egypt; the earth was robbed not only of its wealth but of its capacities, and the casual surpluses were instantly squandered on the city mob. Consider critically any great statesman of the Classical—Pericles and Cæsar, Alexander and Scipio, and even revolutionaries like Cleon and Tiberius Gracchus. Not one of them, economically, looked far ahead. No city ever made it its business to drain or to afforest a district, or to introduce advanced cultivation methods or new kinds of live stock or new plants. To attach a Western meaning to the “agrarian reform” of the Gracchi is to misunderstand its purport entirely. Their aim was to make their supporters possessors of land. Of educating these into managers of land, or of raising the standard of Italian husbandry in general, there was not the remotest idea—one let the future come, one did not attempt to work upon it. Of this economic Stoicism of the Classical world the exact antithesis is Socialism, meaning thereby not Marx’s theory but Frederick William I’s Prussian practice which long preceded Marx and will yet displace him—the socialism, inwardly akin to the system of Old Egypt, that comprehends and cares for permanent economic relations, trains the individual in his duty to the whole, and glorifies hard work as an affirmation of Time and Future.

VII

The ordinary everyday man in all Cultures only observes so much of the physiognomy of becoming—his own and that of the living world around him—as is in the foreground and immediately tangible. The sum of his experiences, inner and outer, fills the course of his day merely as a series of facts. Only the outstanding (bedeutende) man feels behind the commonplace unities of the history-stirred surface a deep logic of becoming. This logic, manifesting itself in the idea of Destiny, leads him to regard the less significant collocations of the day and the surface as mere incidents.

At first sight, however, there seems to be only a difference of degree in the connotations of “destiny” and “incident.” One feels that it is more or less of an incident when Goethe goes to Sesenheim, but destiny when he goes to Weimar; one regards the former as an episode and the latter as an epoch. But we can see at once that the distinction depends on the inward quality of the man who is impressed. To the mass, the whole life of Goethe may appear as a sequence of anecdotal incidents, while a very few will become conscious, with astonishment, of a symbolic necessity inherent even in its most trivial occurrences. Perhaps, then, the discovery of the heliocentric system by Aristarchus was an unmeaning incident for the Classical Culture, but its supposed rediscovery by Copernicus a destiny for the Faustian? Was it a destiny that Luther was not a great organizer and Calvin was? And if so, for whom was it a destiny—for Protestantism as a living unit, for the Germans, or for Western mankind generally? Were Tiberius Gracchus and Sulla incidents and Cæsar a destiny?

Questions like these far transcend the domain of the understanding that operates through concepts (der begriffliche Verständigung). What is destiny, what incident, the spiritual experiences of the individual soul—and of the Culture-soul—decide. Acquired knowledge, scientific insight, definition, are all powerless. Nay more, the very attempt to grasp them epistemologically defeats its own object. For without the inward certainty that destiny is something entirely intractable to critical thought, we cannot perceive the world of becoming at all. Cognition, judgment, and the establishment of causal connexions within the known (i.e., between things, properties, and positions that have been distinguished) are one and the same, and he who approaches history in the spirit of judgment will only find “data.” But that—be it Providence or Fate—which moves in the depths of present happening or of represented past happening is lived, and only lived, and lived with that same overwhelming and unspeakable certainty that genuine Tragedy awakens in the uncritical spectator. Destiny and incident form an opposition in which the soul is ceaselessly trying to clothe something which consists only of feeling and living and intuition, and can only be made plain in the most subjective religious and artistic creations of those men who are called to divination. To evoke this root-feeling of living existence which endows the picture of history with its meaning and content, I know of no better way—for “name is mere noise and smoke”—than to quote again those stanzas of Goethe which I have placed at the head of this book to mark its fundamental intention.

“In the Endless, self-repeating
flows for evermore The Same.
Myriad arches, springing, meeting,
hold at rest the mighty frame.
Streams from all things love of living,
grandest star and humblest clod.
All the straining, all the striving
is eternal peace in God.”

On the surface of history it is the unforeseen that reigns. Every individual event, decision and personality is stamped with its hall-mark. No one foreknew the storm of Islam at the coming of Mohammed, nor foresaw Napoleon in the fall of Robespierre. The coming of great men, their doings, their fortune, are all incalculables. No one knows whether a development that is setting in powerfully will accomplish its course in a straight line like that of the Roman patrician order or will go down in doom like that of the Hohenstaufen or the Maya Culture. And—science notwithstanding—it is just the same with the destinies of every single species of beast and plant within earth-history and beyond even this, with the destiny of the earth itself and all the solar systems and Milky Ways. The insignificant Augustus made an epoch, and the great Tiberius passed away ineffective. Thus, too, with the fortunes of artists, artworks and art-forms, dogmas and cults, theories and discoveries. That, in the whirl of becoming, one element merely succumbed to destiny when another became (and often enough has continued and will continue to be) a destiny itself—that one vanishes with the wave-train of the surface while the other makes this, is something that is not to be explained by any why-and-wherefore and yet is of inward necessity. And thus the phrase that Augustine in a deep moment used of Time is valid also of destiny—“if no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.”

So, also, the supreme ethical expression of Incident and Destiny is found in the Western Christian’s idea of Grace—the grace, obtained through the sacrificial death of Jesus, of being made free to will. The polarity of Disposition (original sin) and Grace—a polarity which must ever be a projection of feeling, of the emotional life, and not a precision of learned reasoning—embraces the existence of every truly significant man of this Culture. It is, even for Protestants, even for atheists, hidden though it may be behind a scientific notion of “evolution” (which in reality is its direct descendant), the foundation of every confession and every autobiography; and it is just its absence from the constitution of Classical man that makes confession, by word or thought, impossible to him. It is the final meaning of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and of music from Bach to Beethoven. We may choose to call that something which correlates the life-courses of all Western men disposition, Providence or “inner evolution” but it remains inaccessible to thought. “Free will” is an inward certitude. But whatever one may will or do, that which actually ensues upon and issues from the resolution—abrupt, surprising, unforeseeable—subserves a deeper necessity and, for the eye that sweeps over the picture of the distant past, visibly conforms to a major order. And when the Destiny of that which was willed has been Fulfilment we are fain to call the inscrutable “Grace.” What did Innocent III, Luther, Loyola, Calvin, Jansen, Rousseau and Marx will, and what came of the things that they willed in the stream of Western history? Was it Grace or Fate? Here all rationalistic dissection ends in nonsense. The Predestination doctrine of Calvin and Pascal—who, both of them more upright than Luther and Thomas Aquinas, dared to draw the causal conclusion from Augustinian dialectic—is the necessary absurdity to which the pursuit of these secrets by the reason leads. They lost the destiny-logic of the world-becoming and found themselves in the causal logic of notion and law; they left the realm of direct intuitive vision for that of a mechanical system of objects. The fearful soul-conflicts of Pascal were the strivings of a man, at once intensely spiritual and a born mathematician, who was determined to subject the last and gravest problems of the soul both to the intuitions of a grand instinctive faith and to the abstract precision of a no less grand mathematical plan. In this wise the Destiny-idea—in the language of religion, God’s Providence—is brought within the schematic form of the Causality Principle, i.e., the Kantian form of mind activity (productive imagination); for that is what Predestination signifies, notwithstanding that thereby Grace—the causation-free, living Grace which can only be experienced as an inward certainty—is made to appear as a nature-force that is bound by irrevocable law and to turn the religious world-picture into a rigid and gloomy system of machinery. And yet was it not a Destiny again—for the world as well as for themselves—that the English Puritans, who were filled with this conviction, were ruined not through any passive self-surrender but through their hearty and vigorous certainty that their will was the will of God?