ISSN: 2158-7051 ==================== INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN STUDIES ==================== ISSUE NO. 5 ( 2016/2 ) |
OSWALD SPENGLER ON THE SOUL OF RUSSIA
K. R. BOLTON*
Summary
It would be easy to regard Oswald Spengler, author of the epochal Decline of The West in the aftermath of World War I, as a Russophobe. In so doing the role of Russia in the unfolding of history from this era onward could be easily dismissed, opposed or ridiculed by proponents of Spengler, while in Russia his insights into culture-morphology would be understandably unwelcome as being from an Slavophobic German nationalist. However, while Spengler, like many others of the time in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, regarded Russia as the Asianised leader of a ‘coloured revolution’ against the white world, he also considered other possibilities. This paper examines Spengler’s views on Russia as a distinct culture that had not yet fulfilled its destiny, while Western civilisation was about to take a final bow on the world historical stage. His views on Russia as an outsider are considered in relation to the depiction of the Russian soul by seminal Russians such as Gogol.
Key Words: Berdyaev, Dostoyevski,
Gogol, Petrinism, Russia, Slavophil, Spengler, Tarus Bulba.
Russia’s ‘Soul’
Spengler regarded Russians
as formed by the vastness of the land-plain, as innately antagonistic to the
Machine, as rooted in the soil, irrepressibly peasant, religious, and
‘primitive’. Without a wider understanding of Spengler’s philosophy it appears
that he was – like Hitler – a Slavophobe. However, when Spengler wrote of these
Russian characteristics he was referencing the Russians as a still youthful
people in contrats to the senile West. Hence the ‘primitive’ Russian is not
synonymous with ‘primitivity’ as popularly understood at that time in regard to
‘primitive’ tribal peoples. Nor was it to be confounded with the Hitlerite
perception of the ‘primitive Slav’ incapable of building his own State.
To Spengler, the
‘primitive peasant’ is the well-spring from which a race draws its healthiest
elements during its epochs of cultural vigour. Agriculture is the foundation of
a High Culture, enabling stable communities to diversify labour into
specialisation from which Civilisation proceeds.
However, according to Spengler, each people has its own soul, a German conception derived from the
German Idealism of Herder, Fichte et al. A High culture reflects that soul,
whether in its mathematics, music, architecture; both in the arts and the
physical sciences. The Russian soul is not the same as the Western Faustian, as Spengler called it, the ‘ Magian’ of the Arabian civilisation, or the Classical of
the Hellenes and Romans. The Western Culture that was imposed on Russia by
Peter the Great, what Spengler called Petrinism,
is a veneer.
The basis of the
Russian soul is not infinite space –
as in the West’s Faustian (Spengler,
1971, I, 183) imperative, but is ‘the
plain without limit’ (Spengler, 1971, I, 201). The Russian soul expresses
its own type of infinity, albeit not that of the Western which becomes even enslaved by its own technics at the end
of its life-cycle. (Spengler, 1971, II, 502). [9]
(Although it could be argued that Sovietism enslaved man to machine, a
Spenglerian would cite this as an example of Petrinism). However, Civilisations cannot do anything but follow
their life’s course, and one cannot see Spengler’s descriptions as moral
judgements but as observations. The finale for Western Civilisation according
to Spengler cannot be to create further great forms of art and music, which
belong to the youthful or ‘ spring’ epoch of a civilisation, but to dominate the
world under a technocratic-military dispensation, before declining into
oblivion that all prior world civilisations. It is after this Western decline
that Spengler alluded to the next word civilisation being that of Russia. At
that stage Spengler could only hint at the possibilities.
Hence, according
to Spengler, Russian Orthodox architecture does not represent the infinity
towards space that is symbolised by the Western high culture’s Gothic Cathedral
spire, nor the enclosed space of the Mosque of the Magian Culture, (Spengler,
1971, I, 183-216) but the impression of sitting upon a horizon. Spengler
considered that this Russian architecture is ‘not yet a style, only the promise
of a style that will awaken when the real Russian religion awakens’ (Spengler,
1971, I, p. 201. Spengler was writing of the Russian culture as an outsider,
and by his own reckoning must have realised the limitations of that. It is
therefore useful to compare his thoughts on Russia with those of Russians of
note.
Nikolai Berdyaev in The
Russian Idea affirms what Spengler
describes:
There
is that in the Russian soul which corresponds to the immensity, the vagueness,
the infinitude of the Russian land, spiritual geography corresponds with
physical. In the Russian soul there is a sort of immensity, a
vagueness, a predilection for the infinite, such as is suggested by the
great plain of Russia. (Berdyaev, 1).
‘Prussian
Socialism’, ‘Russian Socialism’
Of the Russian soul, the ego/vanity of the Western
culture-man is missing; the persona seeks impersonal growth in service, ‘in the
brother-world of the plain’. Orthodox Christianity condemns the ‘I’ as ‘sin’
(Spengler, 1971, I, 309). Spengler wrote of ‘Prussian Socialism’, based on the
Prussian ethos of duty to the state,
as the foundation of a new Western ethos under the return to Faith and
Authority during the final epoch of Western civilisation. He contrasted this
with the ‘socialism’ of Karl Marx, which he regarded as a product of English
economics, (Spengler, 1919) as distinct from the German economics of Friedrich
List for example, described as the ‘ national system of political economy’,
where nation is the raison d’etre of
the economy and not class or individual.
The Russian
concept of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, and of impersonal service
to the expanse of one’s land implies another form socialism. It is perhaps in
this sense that Stalinism proceeded along lines different and often
antithetical to the Bolshevism envisaged by Trotsky et al. (Trotsky, 1936), and
established an enduring legacy on Russia.
A recent comment by an American visitor to Russia,
Barbara J. Brothers, as part of a scientific delegation, states something akin
to Spengler’s observation:
The Russians have
a sense of connectedness to themselves and to other human beings that is just
not a part of American reality. It isn’t that competitiveness does not exist;
it is just that there always seems to be more consideration and respect for
others in any given situation.
Of the Russian concept of
property and of capitalism, Berdyaev wrote:
The social theme
occupied a predominant place in Russian nineteenth century thought. It might
even be said that Russian thought in that century was to a remarkable extent
coloured by socialistic ideas. If the word socialism is not taken in its
doctrinaire sense, one might say that socialism is deeply rooted in the Russian
nature. There is already an expression of this truth in the fact that the
Russian people did not recognize the Roman conception of property. It has been
said of Muscovite Russia that it was innocent of the sin of ownership in land,
the one and only landed proprietor being the Tsar: there was no freedom, but
there was a greater sense of what was right. This is of interest in the light
that it throws upon the rise of communism. The Slavophils also repudiated the
Western bourgeois interpretation of private property equally with the
socialists of a revolutionary way of thinking. Almost all of them thought that
the Russian people was called upon to give actual
effect to social troth and righteousness and to the brotherhood of man. One and
all they hoped that Russia would escape the wrongness and evil of capitalism,
that it would be able to pass over to a better social order while avoiding the
capitalist stage of economic development. And they all considered the
backwardness of Russia as conferring upon her a great advantage. It was the
wisdom of the Russians to be socialists during the period of serfdom and
autocracy. Of all peoples in the world the Russians have the community spirit;
in the highest degree the Russian way of life and Russian manners, are of that
kind. Russian hospitality is an indication of this sense of community.
(Berdyaev, 97-98).
Here again, we see with
Berdyaev, as with Spengler, that there is a ‘Russian Socialism’ based on what
Spengler referred to as the Russian ‘we’ in contrast to the Late Western ‘I’,
and of the sense of brotherhood dramatised by Gogol in Taras Bulba, shaped not by factories and money-thinking, but by the
kinship that arises from a people formed from the vastness of the plains, and
forged through the adversity of centuries of Muslim and Mongol invasions.
The Russian Soul - Русская душа
The connections between family, nation, birth, unity and
motherland are reflected in the Russian language.
род [rod]: family, kind, sort, genus
родина [ródina]: homeland, motherland
родители [rodíteli]: parents
родить [rodít']: to give birth
роднить [rodnít']: to unite, bring together
родовой [rodovói]: ancestral, tribal
родство [rodstvó]: kinship
Russian National Literature starting from the 1840s
began to consciously express the Russian soul. Firstly Nikolai Vasilievich
Gogol’s Taras Bulba, which along with
the poetry of Pushkin, founded a Russian literary tradition; that is to say,
truly Russian, and distinct from the previous literature based on German,
French and English. John Cournos states of this in his introduction to Taras Bulba:
The spoken word,
born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth,
the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the
Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus
into an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into
its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day.
Taras
Bulba is a tale on the formation of the Cossack folk. In this folk-formation
the outer enemy plays a crucial role. The Russian has been formed largely as
the result of battling over centuries with Tartars, Muslims and Mongols.
Cournos writes of the Gogol myths in reference to the shaping of the Russian
character through adversity and landscape:
his same Prince
Guedimin freed Kieff from the Tatar yoke. This city had been laid waste by the
golden hordes of Ghengis Khan and hidden for a very long time from the Slavonic
chronicler as behind an impenetrable curtain. A shrewd man, Guedimin appointed
a Slavonic prince to rule over the city and permitted the inhabitants to
practise their own faith, Greek Christianity. Prior to the Mongol invasion,
which brought conflagration and ruin, and subjected Russia to a two-century bondage, cutting her off from Europe, a state
of chaos existed and the separate tribes fought with one another constantly and
for the most petty reasons. Mutual depredations were possible owing to the
absence of mountain ranges; there were no natural barriers against sudden
attack. The openness of the steppe made the people war-like. But this very
openness made it possible later for Guedimin’s pagan hosts, fresh from the fir
forests of what is now White Russia, to make a clean sweep of the whole country
between Lithuania and Poland, and thus give the scattered princedoms a
much-needed cohesion. In this way Ukrainia was formed. (Cournos,
‘Introduction’, ibid).
Their society and
nationality were defined by religiosity, as was the West’s by Gothic
Christianity during its ‘Spring’ epoch. The newcomer
to a Setch or permanent village was
greeted by the Chief as a Christian and as a warrior: ‘Welcome! Do you believe
in Christ?’ —‘I do’, replied the new-comer. ‘And do you believe in the Holy
Trinity?’— ‘I do’.—‘And do you go to church?’—‘I do.’ ‘Now cross yourself’.
(Gogol, III).
Gogol depicts the scorn in which trade is held, and when commerce has entered among Russians, rather than being confined to non-Russians associated with trade, it is regarded as a symptom of decadence:
I know that
baseness has now made its way into our land. Men care only to have their ricks
of grain and hay, and their droves of horses, and that their mead may be safe
in their cellars; they adopt, the devil only knows what Mussulman customs. They
speak scornfully with their tongues. They care not to speak their real thoughts
with their own countrymen. They sell their own things to their own comrades,
like soulless creatures in the market-place. The favour of a foreign king, and
not even a king, but the poor favour of a Polish magnate, who beats them on the
mouth with his yellow shoe, is dearer to them than all brotherhood. But the
very meanest of these vile men, whoever he may be, given over though he be to vileness and slavishness, even he, brothers, has some
grains of Russian feeling; and they will assert themselves some day. And then
the wretched man will beat his breast with his hands; and will tear his hair,
cursing his vile life loudly, and ready to expiate his disgraceful deeds with
torture. Let them know what brotherhood means on Russian soil! (Spengler, 1971, II, 113).
Here we might see a Russian
socialism that is, so far form being the dialectical materialism offered by
Marx, the mystic we-feeling forged by the vastness of the plains and the
imperative for brotherhood above economics, imposed by that landscape. Russia’s
feeling of world-mission has its own form of messianism whether expressed
through Christian Orthodoxy or the non-Marxian form of ‘world revolution’ under
Stalin, or both in combination, as suggested by the later rapport between
Stalinism and the Church from 1943 with the creation of the Council for Russian
Orthodox Church Affairs (Chumachenko, 2002). In both senses,
and even in the embryonic forms taking place under Putin, Russia is conscious
of a world-mission, expressed today as Russia’s role in forging a multipolar
world, with Russia as being pivotal in resisting unipolarism
Commerce is the
concern of foreigners, and the intrusions bring with them the corruption of the
Russian soul and culture in general: in speech, social interaction, servility,
undermining Russian ‘brotherhood’, the Russian ‘we’ feeling
that Spengler described. (Spengler 1971, I, 309).
However, Gogol also states that this materialistic decay will eventually be
purged even from the soul of the most craven Russian.
And all the Setch
prayed in one church, and were willing to defend it to their last drop of
blood, although they would not hearken to aught about fasting or abstinence.
Jews, Armenians, and Tatars, inspired by strong avarice, took the liberty of
living and trading in the suburbs; for the Zaporozhtzi never cared for
bargaining, and paid whatever money their hand chanced to grasp in their
pocket. Moreover, the lot of these gain-loving traders was pitiable in the
extreme. They resembled people settled at the foot of Vesuvius; for when the
Zaporozhtzi lacked money, these bold adventurers broke down their booths and
took everything gratis. (Gogol, III).
The description of these
people shows that they would not stoop to haggling; they decided what a
merchant should receive. Money-talk is repugnant to them.
The Cossack
brotherhood is portrayed by Gogol as the formative process in the building up
of the Russian people. This process is, significantly, not one of biology but
of spirit, even transcending the family bond. Spengler treated the matter of
race as that of soul rather than of zoology. (Spengler, 1971,
II, 113-155). To Spengler landscape was crucial in determining what
becomes ‘race’, and the duration of families grouped in a particular landscape
– including nomads who have a defined range of wandering – form ‘a character of duration’, which was
Spengler’s definition of ‘race’. (Spengler, Vol. II, 113). Gogol describes this
‘ race’ forming process among the Russians. So far
from being an aggressive race nationalism it is an
expanding mystic brotherhood under God:
The father loves
his children, the mother loves her children, the children love their father and
mother; but this is not like that, brothers. The wild beast also loves its
young. But a man can be related only by similarity of mind and not of blood.
There have been brotherhoods in other lands, but never any such brotherhoods as
on our Russian soil. It has happened to many of you to
be in foreign lands. … No, brothers, to love as the Russian soul loves, is to
love not with the mind or anything else, but with all that God has given, all
that is within you. Ah! (Golgol, IX).
The Russian soul is born in
suffering. The Russian accepts the fate of life in service to God and to his
Motherland. Russia and Faith are inseparable. When the elderly warrior Bovdug
is mortally struck by a Turkish bullet his final words are exhortations on the
nobility of suffering, after which his spirit soars to join his ancestors:
‘I sorrow not to
part from the world. God grant every man such an end! May the Russian land be
forever glorious!’ And Bovdug’s spirit flew above, to
tell the old men who had gone on long before that men still knew how to fight
on Russian soil, and better still, that they knew how to die for it and the
holy faith. (Gogol, IX).
The depth and duration of this cult
of the martyrs attached to Holy Mother Russia was revived under Stalin during
the Great Patriotic War. This is today as vigorous as ever, as indicated by the
celebration of Victory Day on 7 May 2015, and the absence of Western
representatives indicating the diverging course Russia is again taking from the
West.
The mystique of
death and suffering for the Motherland is described in the death of Tarus Bulba
when he is captured and executed, his final words being ones of resurrection:
‘Wait, the time
will come when ye shall learn what the orthodox Russian faith is! Already the
people scent it far and near. A czar shall arise from Russian soil, and there
shall not be a power in the world which shall not submit to him!’ But fire had
already risen from the fagots; it lapped his feet, and the flame spread to the
tree.... But can any fire, flames, or power be found on earth
which are capable of overpowering Russian strength? (Gogol, XII).
The characteristics of the
Russian soul that run through Tarus Bulba
are those of faith, fate, struggle, suffering, strength, brotherhood and
resurrection. Tarus Bulba established
the Russian national literature that articulated the Russian soul.
Pseudomorphosis
A significant
element of Spengler’s culture morphology is ‘Historic Pseudomorphosis’. Spengler
drew an analogy from geology, when crystals of a mineral are embedded in a
rock-stratum: where ‘clefts and cracks occur, water filters in, and the
crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course only their hollow mould
remains’. (Spengler, II, 89).
Then comes
volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten masses pour in, stiffen
and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to do so in their own special forms. They must fill out the spaces that
they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner
structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind presenting the
appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists call this phenomenon Pseudomorphosis. (Ibid.).
Spengler explained:
By the term
‘historical pseudomorphosis’ I propose to designate those cases in which an
older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born
in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and
specific expression-forms, but even to develop its own fully
self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast
in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile works,
and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate
the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous. (Ibid.).
Russia is the example of
‘Historic Pseudomorphosis’ given by Spengler as being
‘presented to our eyes to-day’. A dichotomy has existed for centuries, starting
with Peter the Great, of attempts to impose a Western veneer over Russia. This
is called Petrinism. The resistance
of those attempts is what Spengler called ‘Old Russia’. Spengler,
1971, II, 192). Spengler described this dichotomy:
…This Muscovite
period of the great Boyar families and Patriarchs, in which a constant element
is the resistance of an Old Russia party to the friends of Western Culture, is
followed, from the founding of Petersburg in 1703, by the pseudomorphosis which
forced the primitive Russian soul into an alien mould, first of full Baroque,
then of the Enlightenment, and then of the nineteenth century. (Ibid., II, p. 192).
Spengler’s view is again in
accord with what is spoken of Russia by Russians. Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in
terms similar to Spengler’s:
The inconsistency
and complexity of the Russian soul may be due to the fact that in Russia two
streams of world history East and West jostle and influence one another. The
Russian people is not purely European and it is not
purely Asiatic. Russia is a complete section of the
world a colossal East-West. It unites two worlds, and within the Russian soul
two principles are always engaged in strife - the Eastern and the Western. (Berdyaev, 1).
With the orientation of
Russian policy towards the West, ‘Old Russia’ was ‘forced into a false and
artificial history’. (Spengler, II, 193). Spengler wrote that Russia had become
dominated by Western culture from its ‘Late’ epoch:
Late-period arts
and sciences, enlightenment, social ethics, the materialism of world-cities,
were introduced, although in this pre-cultural time religion was the only
language in which man understood himself and the world. In the townless land
with its primitive peasantry, cities of alien type fixed themselves like ulcers
– false, unnatural, unconvincing. ‘Petersburg’, says
Dostoyevski, ‘it is the most abstract and artificial city in the world’.
After this
everything that arose around it was felt by the true Russdom as lies and
poison. A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe, and ‘Europe’ was all
that was not Russia… ‘The first condition of emancipation for the Russian
soul’, wrote Aksakov[1] in
1863 to Dostoyevski, ‘is that it should hate
Petersburg with all this might and all its soul’. Moscow is holy, Petersburg
Satanic. A widespread popular legend presents Peter the Great as Antichrist. (Spengler, 1971, II, 193).
Berdyaev also discusses the
introduction of Enlightenment doctrines from France into Russia:
The Western
culture of Russia in the eighteenth century was a superficial aristocratic borrowing
and imitation. Independent thought had not yet awakened. At first it was French
influences which prevailed among us and a superficial philosophy of
enlightenment was assimilated. The Russian aristocrats of the eighteenth
century absorbed Western culture in the form of a miserable rehash of Voltaire.
(Berdyaev, 16).
The hatred of the ‘West’ and
of ‘Europe’ is the hatred for a Civilisation 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-à-vis
opposition to Russia, which he regarded as leading the ‘coloured 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’. [65] (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 realising 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 Civilisations, 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 dishonouring 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 civilisation 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
organisation 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 æsthetic
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 Civilisation where money-thinking
dominates, a point is reached where there is a reaction: a ‘Second
Religiousness’ which returns a decaying Civilisation to its spiritual
foundations. There proceeds a revolt against oligarchy and a return to
authority, or what Spengler called ‘Cæsarism’, and from there the fulfilment of
a destiny before being eclipsed by a new high culture.
The Second
Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Cæsarism, 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 civilisation 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 recognised 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
industrialise? 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 programme 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 westernised 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).
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[1]Ivan
Sergyeyevich Aksakov (1823-1886) a Pan-Slavic leader, established the
‘Slavophil’ group at Moscow to restore Russia to its pre-Petrine culture.
[2]Orthodox service
for the sick.
[3]Mary.
*K. R. Bolton - is a Fellow of the World Institute for Scientific Exploration, and a contributing writer for Foreign Policy Journal
© 2010, IJORS - INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN STUDIES