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THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY -- VOLUMES 1 & 2 |
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DIVISION II: THE HEIRS
WHO were the heirs of antiquity? This question is at least as important as that concerning the legacy itself and, if possible, more difficult to answer. For it introduces us to the study of race problems, which science during the last quarter of a century, so far from solving, has rather revealed in all their intricacy. And yet all true comprehension of the nineteenth century depends on the clear answering of this question. Here, then, we must be at once daring and cautious if we are to remember the warning of the preface, and steer safely between the Scylla of a science almost unattainable, and so far most problematic in its results, and the Charybdis of unstable and baseless generalisations. Necessity compels us to make the bold attempt. Rome had transferred the centre of gravity of civilisation to the West. This proved to be one of those unconsciously accomplished acts of world-wide importance which no power can undo. The West of Europe, remote from Asia, was to be the focus of all further civilisation and culture. But that happened only gradually. At first it was politics alone which turned ever more and more towards the West and North; intellectually Rome itself long remained very dependent upon the former centre of culture in the East. In the first centuries of our era, with the exception of Rome itself, only what lies South and East of it is intellectually of any importance; Alexandria, Ephesus, Antioch, in fact all Syria, then Greece with Byzantium, as well as Carthage and the other towns of ancient Africa, are the districts where the legacy was taken up and long administered, and the inhabitants of these places then handed it on to later times and other races. And these very countries were at that time, like Rome itself, no longer inhabited by a definite people, but by an inextricable confusion of the most different races and peoples. It was a chaos. And this chaos did not by any means disappear at a later time. In many places this chaotic element was pressed back by the advance of pure races, in others it fell out of the list of those that count through its own weakness and want of character, yet for all that it has beyond doubt maintained itself in the South and East; moreover fresh influx of blood has frequently given it new strength. That is a first point of far-reaching importance. Consider, for example, that all the foundations for the structure of historical Christianity were laid and built up by this mongrel population! With the exception of some Greeks, all of whom, however, with Origenes at their head, disseminated highly unorthodox, directly anti. Jewish doctrines which had no success, [1] one can scarcely even conjecture to what nationality any of the Church fathers actually belonged. The same may be said of the corpus juris, here, too, it was the Chaos (according to Hellenic ideas the mother of Erebus and Nox, of darkness and night), to which the task fell of perfecting and transforming the living work of a living people to an international dogma. Under the same influence, art ever more and more lost its personal, freely creative power and became transformed into an hieratically formulary exercise, while the lofty, philosophical speculation of the Hellenes was displaced by its caricature, the cabalistic phantoms of demiurges, angels and daemons -- conceptions which could not be designated by a higher name than" airy materialism." [2] We must therefore, to begin with, turn our attention to this Chaos of Peoples. Out of the midst of the chaos towers, like a sharply defined rock amid the formless ocean, one single people, a numerically insignificant people -- the Jews. This one race has established as its guiding principle the purity of the blood; it alone possesses, therefore, physiognomy and character. If we contemplate the southern and eastern centres of culture in the world-empire in its downfall, and let no sympathies or antipathies pervert our judgment, we must confess that the Jews were at that time the only people deserving respect. We may well apply to them the words of Goethe, " the faith broad, narrow the thought." In comparison with Rome and still more so with Hellas their intellectual horizon appears so narrow, their mental capacities so limited, that we seem to have before us an entirely new type of being; but the narrowness and want of originality in thought are fully counterbalanced by the power of faith, a faith which might be very simply defined as "faith in self." And since this faith in self included faith in a higher being, it did not lack ethical significance. However poor the Jewish "law" may appear, when compared with the religious creations of the various Indo-European peoples, it possessed a unique advantage in the fallen Roman Empire of that time: it was, in fact, a law; a law which men humbly obeyed, and this very obedience was bound to be of great ethical import in a world of such lawlessness. Here, as everywhere, we shall find that the influence of the Jews -- for good and for evil -- lies in their character, not in their intellectual achievements. [3] Certain historians of the nineteenth century, even men so intellectually pre-eminent as Count Gobineau, have supported the view that Judaism has always had merely a disintegrating influence upon all peoples. I cannot share this conviction. In truth, where the Jew, become very numerous in a strange land, they may make it their object to fulfil the promises of their Prophets and with the best will and conscience to " consume the strange peoples"; did they not say of themselves, even in the lifetime of Moses, that they were "like locusts"? However, We must distinguish between Judaism and the Jews and admit that Judaism as an idea is one of the most conservative ideas in the world. The idea of physical nice-unity and race-purity, which is the very essence of Judaism, signifies the recognition of a fundamental physiological fact of life; wherever We observe life, from the hyphomycetes to the noble horse, we see the importance of "race"; Judaism made this law of nature sacred. And this is the reason why it triumphantly prevailed at that critical moment in the history of the world, when a rich legacy was waiting in vain for worthy heirs. It did not further, but rather put a stop to, universal disintegration. The Jewish dogma was like a sharp acid which is poured into a liquid which is being decomposed in order to clear it and keep it from further decomposition. Though this acid may not be to the taste of everyone, yet it has played so decisive a part in the history of the epoch of culture to which we belong that we ought to be grateful to the giver: instead of being indignant about it, we shall do better to inform ourselves thoroughly concerning the significance of this U entrance of the Jews into the history of the West," an event which in any case exercised inestimable influence upon our whole culture, and which has not yet reached its full growth. Another word of explanation. I am speaking of Jews, not of Semites in general; not because I fail to recognise the part played by the latter in the history of the world, but because my task is limited both in respect of time and space. Indeed for many centuries other branches of the Semitic race had founded powerful kingdoms on the South and East coasts of the Mediterranean and had established commercial depots as far as the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean; doubtless they had also been stimulative in other ways, and had spread knowledge and accomplishments of many kinds; but nowhere had there been a close intellectual connection between them and the other inhabitants of future Europe. The Jews first brought this about, not by the million of Jews who lived in the Diaspora, but first and foremost by the Christian idea. It was only when the Jews crucified Christ that they unconsciously broke the spell which had hitherto isolated them in the pride of ignorance. -- At a later time, indeed, a Semitic flood swept once more across the European, Asiatic and African world, a flood such as, but for the destruction of Carthage by Rome, would have swept over Europe a thousand years before, with results which would have been decisive and permanent. [4] But here, too, the Semitic idea -- "faith wide, narrow the thought" -- proved itself more powerful than its bearers; the Arabs were gradually thrown back and, in contrast to the Jews, not one of them remained on European soil; but where their abstract idolatry [5] had obtained a foothold all possibility of a culture disappeared; the Semitic dogma of materialism, which in this case and in contrast to Christianity had kept itself free of all Aryan admixtures, deprived noble human races of all soul, and excluded them for ever from the "race that strives to reach the light." -- Of the Semites only the Jews, as we see, have positively furthered our culture and also shared, as far as their extremely assimilative nature permitted them, in the legacy of antiquity. The entrance of the Teutonic races into the history of the world forms the counterpart to the spread of this diminutive and yet so influential people. There, too, we see what pure race signifies, at the same time, however, what variety of races is -- that great natural principle of many-sidedness, and of dissimilarity of mental gifts, which shallow, venal, ignorant babblers of the present day would fain deny, slavish souls sprung from the chaos of peoples, who feel at ease only in a confused atmosphere of characterlessness and absence of individuality. To this day these two powers -- Jews and Teutonic races -- stand, wherever the recent spread of the Chaos has not blurred their features, now as friendly, now as hostile, but always as alien forces face to face. In this book I understand by "Teutonic peoples" the different North-European races, which appear in history as Celts, Teutons (Germanen) and Slavs, and from whom -- mostly by indeterminable mingling -- the peoples of modern Europe are descended. It is certain that they belonged originally to a single family, as I shall prove in the sixth chapter; but the Teuton in the narrower Tacitean sense of the word has proved himself so intellectually, morally and physically pre-eminent among his kinsmen, that we are entitled to make his name summarily represent the whole family. The Teuton is the soul of our culture. Europe of to-day, with its many branches over the whole world, represents the chequered result of an infinitely manifold mingling of races: what binds us all together and makes an organic unity of us is "Teutonic" blood. If we look around, we see that the importance of each nation as a living power to-day is dependent upon the proportion of genuinely Teutonic blood in its population. Only Teutons sit on the thrones of Europe. -- What preceded in the history of the world we may regard as Prolegomena; true history, the history which still controls the rhythm of our hearts and circulates in our veins, inspiring us to new hope and new creation, begins at the moment when the Teuton with his masterful hand lays his grip upon the legacy of antiquity. _______________ Notes: 1. Origenes, for example, was confessedly a pessimist (in the metaphysical sense of the word), by which in itself he proved his Indo-European descent; he saw suffering everywhere in the world and concluded from that that its chief end was not the enjoyment of a. god-given happiness but the prevention of an evil (compare Christ's chief doctrine, that of the "conversion of will," cf. p, 188). Augustine, the African mestizo. found it easy to refute him; he appealed to the first chapter of the first book of the Jewish Thora, to prove beyond dispute that everything is good and that "the world exists for no other reason than because it has been pleasing to a good God to create the absolutely good." (See the very instructive discussion in the De civitate Dei, xi. 23.) Augustine triumphantly introduces another argument in this place; if Origenes were right, then the most sinful creatures would have the heaviest bodies and devils would be visible, but devils have airy, invisible shapes, and so, &c. Thus thoughts that arose in the Chaos prevailed over metaphysical religion. (The same arguments are to be found, word for word, in the Fuhrer der Irrenden of the Jew Maimuni.) 2. Burger calls it Luftiges Gesindel (airy rabble) in his Lenores. 3. See p. 238 f. 4. See p. 115. 5. See p. 240.
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