Spengler on Jesus Christ

The significance of Jesus Christ for Oswald Spengler was as a representative of a newly born springtime culture trying to make sense of the aged world that was smothering it. His teachings were not refined by a thousand years of civilisation, but are spoken, with wide appeal, like a child who knows not the refined means of expression of adults or those in old age.

“They are not sociological observations, problems, debatings. Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesareth in the midst of the age of the great Tiberius, far from all world-history and innocent of all the doings of actuality, while round them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples, their refined Western society, their noisy mod-diversions, their Roman cohorts, their Greek philosophy.”

This handful of men, uneducated and unfamiliar with Roman culture, in that pure potency and desire for a form, documented the life of Christ in the Gospel. Its teachings, for their simplicity against the backdrop of complexity, appealed widely across nations and tongues, paling all other heroic mythological tales of other Magian Gods and their messengers in comparison, and not with abstract and fantastical tales, but the real suffering of a real man who for a time lived among them and died for his belief in both God and mankind.

Around the Magian world the pre-sentiment of the end had crystalized, perhaps spurred by the shift of the classical world into its hardened forms of Caesarism. The lesser known Mandaean faith considered John the Baptist to be its final prophet, who, scornful of the idea of a national messiah who would merely save the Jews and no one else, prophesised the coming of the Bernasha, the son of man who would bring about the end of the world.

Spengler considers this Mandaean influence to be what initially motivated Christ at the age of 30, gazing at the meaningless Classical civilisation and wanting nothing to do with it. In this time, he would feel himself a mere prophet, but rapidly, mounting in his journey to Jerusalem, he felt himself to truly be the son of man himself.

This conviction remains ever there until his death, and he lived his apocalyptic vision even when it meant the death of him. The romans beneath his cross saw the world as a plain reality, paralysed by Truths, but for Christ above them the world was a mere fact, able at any point to collapse and change, impermanent. From his hill he would have been able to look on at both the calcified culture of the classical that permeated Jerusalem, and the rigid laws that made up Pharisaism, which for he would have repulsed him as the apparent singular path to salvation. His Passion was a protest of facts against truths, it rung so against the Jews, against Pontius Pilate, in his arrest and torture and even his resurrection, his final triumph against actuality.

Spengler then hones in on a specific phrase of Christ’s: “My kingdom is not of this Earth”. This reveals the Magian attitude towards time and space. For Christ the things that matter lie beyond the real and actual; in the historyless Greek world, the world is reduced to a singular present moment as time is rejected, pure substance, in the Western world, time and space are co-dependant, unable to be separated yet unable to be unified and thus in constant tension, but the Magian attitude was complete essence. Advancing faith to earthly, political ends failed to grasp his teachings, but equally the same can be said of preaching divinity to the Earthly realm; the two cannot be held at the same time and one ought to see that the world beyond Earth mattered far more for its eternal validity.

Lastly, Jesus illustrates the important distinction between morality and religion. Religion is metaphysics and nothing else. Moralizing is a late stage civilisational phenomenon and has no place in the understandings of early peoples, and Christ, though on a surface glance the opposite, is no different. Jesus said “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” because he was focused only on the maintenance of the soul, and to never let Mammon triumph over God. When Christ says he does not bring peace but a sword, he intends to sever those that know God from those who don’t and certainly does not aim to bring about so petty a violence on Earth for his Father. Indeed we come back to “My kingdom is not of this Earth”:

“Religion is, first and last, metaphysic, other-worldliness, awareness in a world of which the evidence of the senses merely lights the foreground.”

Right conduct on Earth matters far less than the preservation of the soul for the Springtime Christians, and coming as close as feasibly possible to a “beginning” of the Magian higher culture, Christ showcases this in its purest form.

“and so we come ack to the contrast of Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky. Tolstoi, the townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social reformer, and in his metaphysical importance – like the whole civilized West, which can only think about distributing, never renouncing – elevated primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoyevski , who was poor but in certain hours almost a saint, never through about social ameliorations – of what profit would it have been to a man’s soul to abolish property?”