Hereunder
follows the transcription of the introductory to the second division of
Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
The Foundations of the 19th century,
2nd ed., published by John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
251
DIVISION II
THE HEIRS
Der hohe Sinn, das Rühmliche
Von dem Gerühmten
rein zu unterscheiden
GOETHE.
INTRODUCTORY
WHO were the heirs
of antiquity? This question is at least as important as that concerning
the legacy itself and, if possible, more difficult to answer. For it introduces
us to the study of race problems, which science during the last quarter
of a century, so far from solving, has rather revealed in all their intricacy.
And yet all true comprehension of the nineteenth century depends on the
clear answering of this question. Here, then, we must be at once daring
and cautious if we are to remember the warning of the preface, and steer
safely between the Scylla of a science almost unattainable, and so far
most problematic in its results, and the Charybdis of unstable and baseless
generalisations. Necessity compels us to make the bold attempt.
THE
CHAOS
Rome had transferred
the centre of gravity of civilisation to the West. This proved to be one
of those unconsciously
252 THE
HEIRS
accomplished acts of world-wide importance
which no power can undo. The West of Europe, remote from Asia, was to be
the focus of all further civilisation and culture. But that happened only
gradually. At first it was politics alone which turned ever more and more
towards the West and North; intellectually Rome itself long remained very
dependent upon the former centre of culture in the East. In the first centuries
of our era, with the exception of Rome itself, only what lies South and
East of it is intellectually of any importance; Alexandria, Ephesus, Antioch,
in fact all Syria, then Greece with Byzantium, as well as Carthage and
the other towns of ancient Africa, are the districts where the legacy was
taken up and long administered, and the inhabitants of these places then
handed it on to later times and other races. And these very countries were
at that time, like Rome itself, no longer inhabited by a definite people,
but by an inextricable confusion of the most different races and peoples.
It was a chaos. And this chaos did not by any means disappear at a later
time. In many places this chaotic element was pressed back by the advance
of pure races, in others it fell out of the list of those that count through
its own weakness and want of character, yet for all that it has beyond
doubt maintained itself in the South and East; moreover fresh influx of
blood has frequently given it new strength. That is a first point of far-reaching
importance. Consider, for example, that all the foundations for the structure
of historical Christianity were laid and built up by this mongrel population!
With the exception of some Greeks, all of whom, however, with Origenes
at their head, disseminated highly unorthodox, directly anti-Jewish doctrines
which had no success, * one can scarcely even conjecture to what nationality
any of the Church
* Origenes,
for example, was confessedly a pessimist (in the metaphysical sense of
the word), by which in itself he proved his Indo-European descent; he saw
suffering everywhere in the world and con-
253 THE
HEIRS
fathers actually belonged. The same
may be said of the corpus juris; here, too, it was the Chaos (according
to Hellenic ideas the mother of Erebus and Nox, of darkness and night),
to which the task fell of perfecting and transforming the living work of
a living people to an international dogma. Under the same influence, art
ever more and more lost its personal, freely creative power and became
transformed into an hieratically formulary exercise, while the lofty, philosophical
speculation of the Hellenes was displaced by its caricature, the cabalistic
phantoms of demiurges, angels and daemons — conceptions which could not
be designated by a higher name than “airy materialism.“ * We must therefore,
to begin with, turn our attention to this Chaos of Peoples.
THE
JEWS
Out of the midst of
the chaos towers, like a sharply defined rock amid the formless ocean,
one single people, a numerically insignificant people — the Jews. This
one race has established as its guiding principle the purity of the blood;
it alone possesses, therefore, physiognomy and character. If we contemplate
the southern and eastern centres of culture in the world-empire in its
down-
cluded from that that its
chief end was not the enjoyment of a god-given happiness but the prevention
of an evil (compare Christ‘s chief doctrine, that of the “conversion of
will,“ cf. p. 188). Augustine,
the African mestizo, found it easy to refute him; he appealed to the first
chapter of the first book of the Jewish Thora, to prove beyond dispute
that everything is good and that “the world exists for no other reason
than because it has been pleasing to a good God to create the absolutely
good.“ (See the very instructive discussion in the De civitate
Dei, xi. 23.) Augustine triumphantly introduces another argument in
this place: if Origenes were right, then the most sinful creatures would
have the heaviest bodies and devils would be visible, but devils have airy,
invisible shapes, and so, &c. Thus thoughts that arose in the Chaos
prevailed over metaphysical religion. (The same arguments are to be found,
word for word, in the Führer der Irrenden of the Jew Maimuni.)
* Bürger
calls it Luftiges Gesindel (airy rabble) in his Lenore.
254 THE
HEIRS
fall, and let no sympathies or antipathies
pervert our judgment, we must confess that the Jews were at that time the
only people deserving respect. We may well apply to them the words of Goethe,
“the faith broad, narrow the thought.“ In comparison with Rome and still
more so with Hellas their intellectual horizon appears so narrow, their
mental capacities so limited, that we seem to have before us an entirely
new type of being but the narrowness and want of originality in thought
are fully counterbalanced by the power of faith, a faith which might be
very simply defined as “faith in self.“ And since this faith in self included
faith in a higher being, it did not lack ethical significance. However
poor the Jewish “law“ may appear, when compared with the religious creations
of the various Indo-European peoples, it possessed a unique advantage in
the fallen Roman Empire of that time: it was, in fact, a law; a law which
men humbly obeyed, and this very obedience was bound to be of great ethical
import in a world of such lawlessness. Here, as everywhere, we shall find
that the influence of the Jews — for good and for evil — lies in their
character, not in their intellectual achievements. * Certain historians
of the nineteenth century, even men so intellectually pre-eminent as Count
Gobineau, have supported the view that Judaism has always had merely a
disintegrating influence upon all peoples. I cannot share this conviction.
In truth, where the Jews become very numerous in a strange land, they may
make it their object to fulfil the promises of their Prophets and with
the best will and conscience to “consume the strange peoples“; did they
not say of themselves, even in the lifetime of Moses, that they were “like
locusts“? However, we must distinguish between Judaism and the Jews and
admit that Judaism as an idea is one of the most conservative ideas in
the world. The idea of physical race-unity and race-purity, which is the
very
* See
p.
238 f.
255 THE
HEIRS
essence of Judaism, signifies the recognition
of a fundamental physiological fact of life; wherever we observe life,
from the hyphomycetes to the noble horse, we see the importance of “race“;
Judaism made this law of nature sacred. And this is the reason why it triumphantly
prevailed at that critical moment in the history of the world, when a rich
legacy was waiting in vain for worthy heirs. It did not further, but rather
put a stop to, universal disintegration. The Jewish dogma was like a sharp
acid which is poured into a liquid which is being decomposed in order to
clear it and keep it from further decomposition. Though this acid may not
be to the taste of every one, yet it has played so decisive a part in the
history of the epoch of culture to which we belong that we ought to be
grateful to the giver: instead of being indignant about it, we shall do
better to inform ourselves thoroughly concerning the significance of this
“entrance of the Jews into the history of the West,“ an event which in
any case exercised inestimable influence upon our whole culture, and which
has not yet reached its full growth.
Another word of explanation.
I am speaking of Jews, not of Semites in general; not because I fail to
recognise the part played by the latter in the history of the world, but
because my task is limited both in respect of time and space. Indeed for
many centuries other branches of the Semitic race had founded powerful
kingdoms on the South and East coasts of the Mediterranean and had established
commercial depots as far as the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean; doubtless
they had also been stimulative in other ways, and had spread knowledge
and accomplished merits of many kinds; but nowhere had there been a close
intellectual connection between them and the other inhabitants of future
Europe. The Jews first brought this about, not by the millions of Jews
who lived in the Diaspora, but first and foremost by the Christian idea.
It was only when the Jews crucified Christ that they
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HEIRS
unconsciously broke the spell which
had hitherto isolated them in the pride of ignorance. — At a later time,
indeed, a Semitic flood swept once more across the European, Asiatic and
African world, a flood such as, but for the destruction of Carthage by
Rome, would have swept over Europe a thousand years before, with results
which would have been decisive and permanent. * But here, too, the Semitic
idea — “faith wide, narrow the thought“ — proved itself more powerful than
its bearers; the Arabs were gradually thrown back and, in contrast to the
Jews, not one of them remained on European soil; but where their abstract
idolatry † had obtained a foothold all possibility of a culture disappeared;
the Semitic dogma of materialism, which in this case and in contrast to
Christianity had kept itself free of all Aryan admixtures, deprived noble
human races of all soul, and excluded them for ever from the “race that
strives to reach the light.“ — Of the Semites only the Jews, as we see,
have positively furthered our culture and also shared, as far as their
extremely assimilative nature permitted them, in the legacy of antiquity.
THE
TEUTONIC RACES
The entrance of the
Teutonic races into the history of the world forms the counterpart to the
spread of this diminutive and yet so influential people. There, too, we
see what pure race signifies, at the same time, however, what variety of
races is — that great natural principle of many-sidedness, and of dissimilarity
of mental gifts, which shallow, venal, ignorant babblers of the present
day would fain deny, slavish souls sprung from the chaos of peoples, who
feel at ease only in a confused atmosphere of characterlessness and absence
of individuality. To this day these two powers — Jews and Teutonic
* See
p.
115
† See
p.
240.
257 THE
HEIRS
races — stand, wherever the recent spread
of the Chaos has not blurred their features, now as friendly, now as hostile,
but always as alien forces face to face.
In this book I understand
by “Teutonic peoples“ the different North-European races, which appear
in history as Celts, Teutons (Germanen) and Slavs, and from whom — mostly
by indeterminable mingling — the peoples of modern Europe are descended.
It is certain that they belonged originally to a single family, as I shall
prove in the sixth chapter; but the
Teuton in the narrower Tacitean sense of the word has proved himself so
intellectually, morally and physically pre-eminent among his kinsmen, that
we are entitled to make his name summarily represent the whole family.
The Teuton is the soul of our culture. Europe of to-day, with its many
branches over the whole world, represents the chequered result of an infinitely
manifold mingling of races: what binds us all together and makes an organic
unity of us is “Teutonic“ blood. If we look around, we see that the importance
of each nation as a living power to-day is dependent upon the proportion
of genuinely Teutonic blood in its population. Only Teutons sit on the
thrones of Europe. — What preceded in the history of the world we may regard
as Prolegomena; true history, the history which still controls the rhythm
of our hearts and circulates in our veins, inspiring us to new hope and
new creation, begins at the moment when the Teuton with his masterful hand
lays his grip upon the legacy of antiquity.
End of page. Last update:
July 8th, 2003.
