Nobility and Priesthood

The Estates are the living form of a culture, society as opposed to the unformed masses that surround them. It is within the form of the estates that all meaningful cultural productions are found, because they are of a self-bred type. As such, there always arises a distinction between society and non-society. This is seen in the Faustian idea of the corpus christianum which resolutely expels the Jewish consensus religion from itself, and is seen in the Greek idea of citizenship, which not only excludes barbarians, but also slaves, from the polis’ composition, and, of course, the idea of the believer within the Magian religions is juxtaposed to the non-believer, whose presence is tolerated but seen for its undisciplined nature. Estates are not merely the rulers and landlords, but the population regimented within them.

Spengler distinguishes Estates from the vague idea of caste. ‘The distinction between Estate and Caste is that between earliest Culture and latest Civilization’ (2.10.1). Though the two prime estates of nobility and priesthood perhaps loosely correspond to the Kshatriyas and Brahmins of the Indian caste system, what the former signify are the launching of a culture towards its future, whereas the caste system shows the hardened end[1].

The two great prime estates are nobility and priesthood. They are different from occupation groups like artisans or officials, and instead are emblems in flesh and blood, their whole vocation is symbolic of the culture they herald from. Peasantry is without form, slaves and barbarians too, and have a thoroughly impersonal character. Nobility and priesthood however are the result of heavy breeding and shaping of forms such that all who are not to its standard are simply residue, the ‘people’ or the ‘laity’. When the civilization and fellah age arrive, only then do they become caste when living form becomes a formula to follow.

In the primitive period, class relations typically follow the facts of life; in Mycenaean and Carolingian times, there were lords, slaves and free persons. But entering into the gothic the lords and priests rise up above the peasantry and close rank against them as felt inward significance versus no felt inward significance. At their foundation, is a pursuit of something higher, strict self-discipline is felt as duty and not whim, be it the shame-fueled deeds of the castles or the fear- and love-induced morality of the temples and monasteries, because the reward for such behaviour is a meaning to life that goes beyond the simple plant-like existence of the estate-less.

And what is this meaning being attained for each?

“Every nobility is a living symbol of Time, every priesthood of Space. Destiny and sacred Causality, History and Nature, the When and the Where, race and language, sex-life and feeling-life — all these attain in them to the highest possible expression. The noble lives in a world of facts, the priest in one of truths; the one has shrewdness, the other knowledge; the one is a doer, the other a thinker. Aristocratic world-feeling is essentially pulse-sense; priestly world-feeling proceeds entirely by tensions.” (2.10.2)

I don’t think I could put it into more concise words, like all polarities in the Decline of the West, Nobility and Priesthood attain to Time and Space respectively. The nobility and the peasantry find themselves quite close because of this. Nobility and peasantry alike have race, they are rooted in the landscape, knights will intermarry with farmer’s daughters and the noble never denies his development, passing it on in links of generations to his children. They are cosmic, plantlike, but the priesthood attempts to negate it. It denies successive generations, becomes aware against impulse, seeks truths over facts, detaches from the earth, and wherever the nobility says yes the priesthood says no. The need for women is channeled towards greater heights by the nobility, but the priesthood rejects and overcomes it. From Icelandic sagas to Chinese ancestor worship, it is understood by men of race that you do not entirely die when you have passed on sons and nephews – even today this is still felt – but in denying this, what the priest passes on is intellectual work.

The first estate is nobility, the second estate is its negation in the priesthood, and the estate’s negation is the peasantry and barbarian as non-estate.

---

[1] I had a thought whilst going through this, one of the biggest critiques of Spengler by academics is his failure to address the history of India and China properly, not recognising the supposedly great cultural and political waves of the last two millennia, particularly in India. Simultaneously, we lament that the caste system held India back in this time, causing it to stagnate allowing Europe to exploit it in its weakness. The seeming contradiction here is that India simultaneously breaks the mould, but also stagnated because of political forms Spengler explicitly describes as symptoms of the death of a soul.