Spengler’s hermits

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) considered historiography as a morphology, like the biologist studying an organism, from birth to maturation to eventual decline and death. This trajectory does not necessarily represent a circle, like that proposed by the historian Giambattista Vico (1688-1744), or the eternal recurrence proposed by the philosopher Nietzsche. In biology, the same entity does not return, but a new entity is generated. At the same time, study of the entity is examined for its form and structure, while Spengler refrained (or presumed to refrain) from examining its function. The latter exercise would presume a valuation, an opinion about the value of the culture and its values and ideas. Of course, the whole exercise suggests a valuation of the cultures Spengler examines, but his goal is ostensibly to demonstrate a process, a biological process. The inevitability of this process, applied by Spengler to the Western world, is grounded in the morphological analogy.

The theme of Spengler’s Decline of the West is that the institutions and values of the West had proven not sempiternal but moribund, that the process of decay and collapse dissipated the strength of the West, leading not only to internecine conflict of states and potentates but within the fabric of power and culture itself. The result would be slow or precipitous, depending on events and on one’s vantage point, but inexorable.

Spengler perceives this process in numerous and representative examples and historical instances, contrasting ancient and classical forms of thought, contrasting the West and other civilizations, wherein the universe is given as being, and the restless morphological processess and sheer movement (social, technological, etc.) connote only “becoming.” Thus:

In the world as seen by the Faustian’s [i.e., Western] eyes, everything is motion with an aim. He himself lives only under that condition, for to him life means struggling, overcoming, winning through. The struggle for existence as ideal form of existence is implicit …

To Spengler, even the Western religious orders, presumably originating with the goal of providing paternal stability in religious practice, are “movements” not orders, in sharp contrast to what Spengler calls the “askesis of the early-Christian hermit.” Askesis is asceticism, the hallmark of the hermits. Spengler sees the stability of the hermits in terms of identification with “being.” In contrast, the rush of war and acquisition in greater society, and the spinning of elaborate dogmas and religious privileges among churchmen, reflect “becoming.” The process of becoming accelerates the morphological process, planting the seed of self-demise. Asceticism means “being.”

The moral collapse of the medieval monasteries (among other events), engendered the mystics as alternatives, among them hermits being prominent. But the late Middle Ages were too late to recover the simple and stolid askesis of the past. The reform movements within and outside of the Church were not restorative but self-destructive.

But the last reformers, too, the Luthers and Savonarolas, were urban monks, and this differentiates them profoundly from the Joachims and the Bernards. Their intellectual and urban askesis is the stepping-stone from the hermitages of quiet valleys to the scholar’s study of the Baroque.

Part of this dissolution of institutional religion in the West, Spengler maintains, was due to the priesthood itself, turned to hollowed form and superficial function. The ancient spirituality bound up in what he calls the Magian, its shamanistic and ascetic character, was lost: “the priest of true Magian cast is the monk and the hermit, and becomes more and more so, while the secular clergy steadily loses in symbolic significance.” Thus, over time, the religious function devolves into an irrelevance to the world’s circles of power and authority. “The religious man will always try in vain, catechism in hand, to improve the instincts of his political environment. But it goes on its way undisturbed and leaves him to his thoughts. The saint can only choose between adapting himself to this environment -— and then he becomes a Church politician and conscienceless -— and fleeing from it into a hermitage or even into the Beyond.”

With the devolution of the West, in a process witnessed many times before in other world civilizations, war and struggle for power lay waste the earth, and the masses are thrown into despair, until the end. Even then, Spengler notes, the triumph of the hermits endures.

There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual -— and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it -— but it is there.