A History of Magian Faiths Part Two – The Three Faiths and Nations
In last week’s post, part one addressed how the pre-culture, and first two hundred years, of “Magian culture” consisted of a grand pre-sentiment, followed by the welling of spirituality through a range of epic-like tales of sufferers, and flourishing of religious movements in no particular direction, followed, after 200AD, by a steady approach into systematization of these stories; prophecy was fulfilled, the end of the world faded into the backdrop of memory, and as such the new task was to solve for the Cavern worldview they now found themselves entrenched within, and by 300 a contraction to a handful of primary churches, orbited by smaller irrelevant orders and sects, occurred.
Well as the 3rd century pushed forward into scholasticism, the world of politics finally caught up, inviting the Magian religions to embrace a new definition of community. Rulers of domains became caliphs of creeds, orthodoxy became the standard for citizenship and the unbelievers, and even false religions, had to be persecuted. The region of Osroene adopted Christianity around 200, Mazdeism became the Sassanid religion in 226, the Divus, Sol Invictus and Mithras syncretic church solidified itself under Diocletian in 295, Constantine tolerated Christianity in 313, followed by Armenia converting in ‘21 and Georgia in ’26.
As this occurred, monasticism became steadily more popular (that is, the monastery lifestyle) which radically opposed the world of actuality, politics and history. The opposition of religion and politics in a Western setting does not exist for the Magian peoples, which under God are unified in faith, state and nation. Thus, every one of those possessing the divine pneuma, identifying one with the community/creed, was a monk in some respect, and the difference between a farmer or a king, a warrior or a man of the cloister was a difference of degree to which they devoted themselves to religion.
“Every Magian Church is itself an Order and it was only in respect of human weakness that there were stages and grades of askesis, and these not ordered, but only permitted, as among the Marcionites and the Manichaeans (electi auditores). And, in truth, a Magian nation is nothing but the sum, the order of all the orders, which, constituted in smaller and smaller, stricter and stricter groups, come out finally in the eremites, dervishes and stylites, in whom nothing more is of the word, whose waking consciousness now belongs only to the pneuma.”
Before 250, Christianity found itself a small but loud community, but breaking past this point it swells to center stage. 250AD is for Spengler the death point for the Pagan cults, evidenced by the breaking off of the Fratres Arvales in 241 and the last cult-inscriptions at Olympia standing at 265, before transitioning from the cult to the Pagan church.
“…the culmination of the most diverse priestly characters in one man became customary, implying that these usages were felt no longer as specific (to a plurality of separate cults), but as usages of one single religion.”
Whilst the pagan church spread itself over the Hellenistic-Roman peoples, Christianity sought alone to spread over Arabia, and thus it destined itself to be split into various separate religions, not by intellectual dispute, but for covering a plurality of landscapes, each with their own innate spirituality. This is what sparked the inner contradictions of the faith.
The nature of Christ became a central question for Christians as the “substance” debate, which played out in all other Magian religions. This debate was considered in the West with the same considerations as were paid to the relationships between the One, Nus, Logos, the Father and the Mediator: “Was the process thereof one of emanation, of partition, or of pervasion? Was one contained in the other, are they identical, or mutually exclusive? Was the Triad at the same time a Monad?” In the East at the time of Chalcedon and Ephesus the Avestan faith saw the triumph of Zrvanism as a solution to its own problems regarding the relations between Ahura Mazda and the holy spirit (Spenta Mainyu) and the nature of Vohu mano - Zrvanism solving for the mysteries of the twin spirits with a father-hypostasis of Time that bore the good and evil twin spirits. In the south, Islam upon its arrival took the same problems and attempted to solve it with the nature of Mohammad and the Koran.
To put this problem in perspective, the Faustian equivalent is the will-problem. It was there at the beginning of Faustian thought and has seen a wide range of solutions indicative of the persons and nations that bore them. The most obvious difference in perspective would be the difference between a more Liberal and individualistic solution to the will problem posed by the English, versus a Prussian, collective solution shown by Spengler to be inherent in the Germans. And understanding that it was an island off the coast of Europe that protected the soul of Liberalism, whilst Germany was accosted on all fronts by its neighbours, causing that difference in solution, the middle east, too, had its own East/South/West divisions of the substance problem, indicative not of a Truth, but of the land and “races” those Truths came from.
Spengler asserts that the motif of the Western branch, lying underneath the pseudomorphosis, was “the word became flesh”. I note for the reader that he daringly and perhaps objectionably brings the Pagan and Christian churches closer than ever in this assertion. Athanasius opposed Arius by asserting that the Father and Son are of one substance, and Christ had assumed a “soma”. His Pagan contemporary Iamblichus also wrote in this time of the power of statues to make the gods substantially present and perform miracles as a consequence, which Spengler notes is the metaphysical basis for Christian “image-worship”, “which presently is in and of the appearance of the wonder-working pictures of Mary and the Saints”. The West is thus grounded on the classical cult-churches, and “the understanding of the Word upon constant contemplation of the picturable.”1
Thanks to Actium, Greek is the tongue and Rome is the Caliphate under which much of Christianity was worked upon, with Constantine overseeing Nicaea where Athanasius’ doctrine won out. This served to cause rupture in the East where Aramaic had preserved a different sentiment towards Christ; Ephesus broke the Christian world between the Persian and Greek churches, but this rupture was indicative of a far older problem relating to the landscapes they heralded from. For the West, Mary was the Mother of God, with the divine and human formed into a unity within Christ, but for the East, Mary bore a man-child whose created human substance coincided with his uncreated divine substance.
Before Islam, the Monophysite doctrine was the closest Christian manifestation of the Southern soul. Specifically, Spengler cites Apollinaris of Laodicea for his denial of a human substance within Christ and only the divine substance, which is to say God did not mingle himself with a lower realm but transmuted himself into a human substance maintaining a singular nature. Monophysitism was both against the Greek and Persian church conceptions of Christ’s divinity and found itself displaying violent unrest and rebelliousness against the northern orders in Palestine and Egypt, daring to call the Chalcedon conception of Christ “the idol with the two faces”.
All this is to say that Monophysitism, Nestorianism and Roman Catholicism, though all Christianity, were different receptions with diverging solutions to its problems as a function of the land. These religions equally correspond to nations that occupy the old race-areas of the Jews, Greeks and Persians and have corresponding to them the languages of Aramaic, Greek and Pehlevi. In this post we’ve seen how the intellectual life corresponded to its own political history which manifested in the three pre-Islamic Christian blocks which correspond to their own landscapes and attitudes to the same sources. The West’s political dominance meant that many of their interpretations took precedence historically over the other two nations, but that gave no incentive for the other blocks to pay homage to their conclusions, many of which were explicitly seen as idolatrous.
The assessment here seems to imply that Catholicism, the Western, Mediterranean Christianity, because it shares a landscape with the Classical world, is thus moved and inspired and a continuance of that classical spirit, or at least what was derived from the land the Apollinian worldview took root upon. To be clear I don’t think Spengler is suggesting that Christians Idol-worship because Catholicism is psuedo-Pagan, but it does lend an explanation to the low-guard attitude displayed in European Christianity towards depicting material things (namely statues) versus the Middle-East and Africa which since Islam has been explicitly iconoclastic.