The character of nations differ between the higher cultures, and it would serve us well to recall the posts on Culture and Law to understand them.
The Classical soul, defined by its affinity for the Euclidean and corporeal, gave rise to the city-state. A localized territory that sought not to expand, but multiply across the Mediterranean. It is the political embodiment of the smallest possible body as an expression of men coming together and organising a society, the definitive spatial limits of which were visible in every direction, and the centre of which was visible from every perimeter, and where participation was coherently defined with citizenship.
International politics was always performed with reference to the city-states and not nations as we might imagine them. There was an understanding of ancestral lineages such as the Dorians and Ionians, but no effort to organize a Doric nation as a territory stretching over the Greek landscape was made, nor ever existed. Wars were fought between these bodies, they would ally with one another and define themselves against others, but never did the Polis idea break form, so much so that, and here Spengler cites Mommsen, though we see the Roman empire as a coloured in territory surrounding the Mediterranean, it would have been more accurate to see the empire as a scatter of points across Europe, Asia and Africa, all unified under the Roman (city) banner, these points being the poleis where the strength and wealth of the empire lay. The idea of a collective “Hellenic” people did come into conscience in the 500s, however, this was a consequence of “Greeks” distinguishing civilised society, the city-states, from barbarian outsiders. All in all, the idea of the nation within the Apollinian spirit crystalized as the smallest possible unit it could reasonably attain, as close as possible to the monad.
Following the successes of Alexander, a new spirit in the east began to make itself known with the formation of a new nation type. Magian nations are structured no so with a relation to a spatial extent, i.e. Classical focusing on a point or Western on an infinite outwards, but are instead structured on a belief derived from a holy book. One must be initiated into a faith to become part of that nation – circumcision is for the Jews as baptism is for the Christians – and when they are initiated, it is that belief that makes them part of the nation and not ethnic ties.
“The Faustian nation, though necessarily bound up with a particular religiousness, is not so with a particular confession, the Classical nation is by type non-exclusive in its relations to different cults, but the Magian nation comprises neither more nor less than is covered by the idea of one or another of the Magian churches”
Because of the nation being defined by the rather idealistic premise of adherence to a faith, it has resulted in a very self-secure set of diasporas spread out over enormous distances but still feeling each other to be their kin, as is best exemplified by the Jews in Western Europe. It is this rootlessness that catches the suspicion of peoples around the world for its alienness to the Faustian nation-idea.
Magian nations began to come into being some time between the conquests of Alexander and the birth of Christ as tribal associations in the middle east began to reorganise and take up new names. The names of the Levites, the Magi, and the Chaldeans, all belonged to long-since-dead tribes but were since revived as names of these new identities. Here, previous associations melted into the background and the new cults and faiths became front and centre as identity pieces.
This did not merely impact the new nations of the middle east however. The dying classical world, approaching the life of Constantine, began to also shift the point of national identity away from the city-state and towards the cults that rapidly spread out over the imperium. Polytheism shifted towards a fixation on particular gods. Sol, Jupiter and Mithras, all became pagan, and less consistent, equivalents of Yahweh or Allah. The growth of Christianity is a testament to the Magian culture’s steady creep into the Mediterranean as the faith that understood the change in era the best. But just so, they were still resisted and persecuted, not merely for being an alien and incomprehensible faith to the aged Classical spirit, but also as a threat to the cults which formed out of the carcass of the Roman Empire. In Diocletian’s time, the empire was linked with faith in the pagan-cults as the emperor took on the title of Dominus et Deus. For Christianity to therefore continue to grow inside the Pagan nation would be equivalent to a replacement migration of Africans into Europe today. And when Constantine made moves at Milan, Arles and Nicaea to normalize the faith in the Empire, the Dominus et Deus role of the Augustus was then converted to a Christian position as the emperor became the unspoken centre of Christian politics, and Christianity became the new faith of the empire. Though academics attribute the merging of Church and State in the empire to Constantine, truthfully the underlying forces and concepts were already there, terraforming the pagan cults into nations long before his birth.
Of the “Arab” nation, the religious consensus brought by Muhammad merged the desert tribes into a new nation as well, but most of their growth is derived by the assimilation of existing Magian faiths into the Islamic banner; there was no such Arab expansion or migration as the identity was assimilated along with the Islamic faith.
Then there is the Faustian concept of nationhood. We are most familiar with this in virtue of being Faustian, but specifically what our nations are premised upon is the landscape itself. It is therefore the polar opposite of the Apollinian city-states, which aim towards small walled-in atom-communities which replicate instead of expand. The history of Western nations IS expansion and expansion of the landscape one belongs to. This is evidenced by the unfathomable size of modern nations in comparison to the city-states of a few tens of thousands from the ancient world; England very likely has more land area than all the Roman cities combined. This is only in theme for Western civilisation’s tendency towards the infinite, like the sky-scraping gothic cathedrals and infinitesimal calculus, or the landscape paintings of the baroque period, if the edges were visible like a city wall or a holy scroll, it isn’t Faustian and it isn’t Western.
The flow of time also runs thick through the idea of the nation. In the West, the dynastic idea is taken to its utmost conclusion. The idea of the dynasty is symbolic of the nation’s existence through time and its unity through history. So what if a regent is pathetic and weak? Thousands would still bleed for what the regent’s family represented to the people.
“Classical history was for Classical eyes only a chain of incidents leading from moment to moment; Magian history was for its members the progressive actualization in and through mankind of a world-plan laid down by God and accomplished between a creation and a cataclysm; but Faustian history is in our eyes a single grand willing of conscious logic, in the accomplishment of which nations are led and represented by their rulers. … Rational foundations it has not and cannot have – it has simply been felt so, and because it has been felt so, the companion-trust of the Germanic migration-time developed on into the feudal troth of the Gothic, the loyalty of the Baroque, and the merely seemingly undynastic patriotism of the nineteenth century.”
The early period of Western history saw Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians arise almost overnight out of the Franks, Lombards, and Visigoths, just as the new magian tribes suddenly arose and dissolved all previous connection to old associations. Within these peoples there came that ruling minority, the kings and nobility, who embodied this time idea and took up history as a noble idea. the Western awareness of their history is unparallelled, and within it we trace great genealogical trees running back to the times of Charlemagne. It is this that brings about the pride of blood and race, for within this tree runs the entire history and will of generations. This type of historicity is what causes Italians, though not a classical people, to be proud of their Roman heritage, the Germans of their Teuton forefathers, and the English of every people that ever set foot on their island, be it the Viking pillagers or the druids of stone henge. It is true that the Greeks and Romans had a similar sense for history, and any scholar or student would immediately retort that they too recounted their ancestors with pride, be they individuals or entire ethnicities. But this had its roots in the mythical history of the past, of heros and gods whom they believed they had direct descent from, and is quite different from the feeling invoked within a proud Westerner as he sees his people’s will unfold over thousands of years before and after him.
Through the dynasties of Europe, the nations crystalized into being. Germany was unified under the Kaiser, the French people were forged out of the Franks and Visigoths by its kings. The great houses of Bourbon and Hapsburg virtually terraformed Europe as they spread their family tree across the continent. Even during the Napoleonic wars, it was Napoleon’s self-stylization as king and emperor, without history nor lineage, that invoked the bitter fury of Europe as it attacked the symbol of the West’s identity. Even as we passed into the modern era and dynasties gave away to modern nation-states, being English or German or French still radiated the feeling of heritage, so much so that there were no distinctions of race coined yet within these countries; the idea of “White British” as opposed to “Black British” would have challenged the genealogical tree that unified the people and their historical will and thus the coherence of their identity. The Magna Carta, not to be confused as a proclamation of universal liberal rights like the French revolution, was the earliest expression of the nation emancipating the monarchy from the idea of dynasty, so the English could pursue their ethnic unity without it being centred upon a monarch.
In conclusion, the Greeks, their prime symbol being the body, created close-knit societies premised upon the city as the idea of nationhood. In Magian cultures, nationality and religion were one and the same, one identified as Christian or Muslim with as much conviction as one identifies as French or Spanish, and in the West, our identity is bound up with common history, dynasties were rejected in the Greek world, they are the life or death of European nations, be they embodied in the trees of kings and nobility or the trees of the average citizen. As the Magian culture slowly made the classical world identify with its cults, before abandoning them altogether, so too did Western civilization, as it reached out over the world and gave landscape nations out to tribes and Fellah-peoples alike. In place of diasporas, there are now Jewish, Wahhabist, and Shia dynasty-nations in the Middle East.
As for a future Western culture to replace the fossilized Faustian Civilization, I saw Youtube presentations by John David Ebert on the subject. By memory, Ebert stared that all cultures have: 1) a unique way of treating the dead 2) their dominant form of mathematics.
As for one, I have my preferences. For the second, my guess is fractals. The appeal is a culture that develops within watersheds as its natueal boundaries - similar to city-states and their visible terrain. Also, I would like to see politically a fractal democracy that starts at the hamlet, then village, town, city, nation, federation, and confederation.
Any thoughts on this to further the concepts?