Goethe and the Indo-European religiosity

 

Goethe and the Indo-European religiosity

Hans Friedrich Karl Günther

Posted by Eurocontinentalism Journal 

The greatest ideas of mankind have been conceived in the lands between India and Germania, between Iceland and Benares (where Buddha began to teach) amongst the peoples of Indo-European language; and these ideas have been accompanied by the Indo-European religious attitude which represents the highest attainments of the mature spirit. When in January 1804, in conversation with his colleague, the philologist Riemer, Goethe expressed the view that he found it “remarkable that the whole of Christianity had not brought forth a Sophocles”, his knowledge of comparative religion was restricted by the knowledge of his age, yet he had unerringly chosen as the precursor of an  Indo-European religion the poet Sophocles, “typical of the devout Athenian… in his highest, most inspired form”,⁴¹ a poet who represented the religiosity of the people, before the people (demos) of Athens had degenerated into a mass (ochlos). But where apart from the Indo-European, has the world produced a more devout man with such a great soul as the Athenian, Sophocles?

Where outside the Indo-European domain have religions arisen, which have combined such greatness of soul with such high flights of reason (logos, ratio) and such wide vision (theoria)? Where have religious men achieved the same spiritual heights as Spitama Zarathustra, as the teachers of the Upanishads, as Homer, as Buddha and even as Lucretius Carus, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Shelley?

Goethe wished that Homer’s songs might become our Bible. Even before the discovery of the spiritual heights and power of the pre-Christian Teuton, but especially after Lessing, Winckelmann and Heinrich Voss, the translator of Homer, the Indo-European outlook renewed itself in Germany, recalling a world of the spirit which was perfected by great German poets and thinkers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Since Goethe’s death (1832), and since the death of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1835), the translator of the devout Indo-European Bhagavad Gita, this Indo-European spirit, which also revealed itself in the pre-Christian Teuton, has vanished.

 Goethe had a premonition of this decline of the West: even in October 1801 he remarked in conversation with the Countess von Egloffstein, that spiritual emptiness and lack of character were spreading — as if he had foreseen what today characterises the most celebrated literature of the Free West. It may be that Goethe had even foreseen, in the distant future, the coming of an age in which writers would make great profits by the portrayal of sex and crime for the masses. As Goethe said to Eckermann, on 14th March 1830, “the representation of noble bearing and action is beginning to be regarded as boring, and efforts are being made to portray all kinds of infamies”. Previously in a letter to Schiller of 9th August 1797, he had pointed out at least one of the causes of the decline: in the larger cities men lived in a constant frenzy of acquisition and consumption and had therefore become incapable of the very mood from which spiritual life arises. Even then he was tortured and made anxious, although he could observe only the beginnings of the trend, the sight of the machine system gaining the upper hand; he foresaw that it would come and strike (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Third Book, Chapter 15, Cotta’s Jubilee edition, Vol. XX, p. 190). In a letter to his old friend Zelter, on 6th June 1825, he pronounced it as his view that the educated world remained rooted in mediocrity, and that a century had begun “for competent heads, for practical men with an easy grasp of things, who [...] felt their superiority above the crowd, even if they themselves are not talented enough for the highest achievements”; pure simplicity was no longer to be found, although there was a sufficiency of simple stuff; young men would be excited too early and then torn away by the vortex of the time. Therefore Goethe exhorted youth in his poem Legacy of the year 1829:

In increasing degree since approximately the middle of the nineteenth century poets and writers as well as journalists — the descendants of the “competent heads” by whom Goethe was alarmed even in the year 1801 — have made a virtue out of necessity by representing characterlessness as a fact. With Thomas Mann this heartless characterlessness first gained world renown. Mann used his talent to conceal his spiritual desolation by artifices which have been proclaimed by contemporary admirers as insurpassable. But the talent of the writers emulating Thomas Mann no longer sufficed even to conceal their spiritual emptiness, although many of their readers, themselves spiritually impoverished, have not noticed this.

The freedom of the Press, which was introduced through the constitution of May 1816 into the Duchy of Weimar and which had already been demanded by Wieland with his superficial judgment would, Goethe declared, do nothing more than give free rein to authors with a deep contempt of public opinion (Zahme Xenien, Goethes Sämtliche Werke, Cotta’s Jubilee edition, Vol. IV, p. 47; Annalen (Annals) 1816, same edition, Vol. XXX, p. 298). In the Annalen of 1816, he remarked that every right-thinking man of learning in the world foresaw the direct and incalculable consequences of this act with fright and regret. Thus even in his time, Goethe must have reflected how little the men of the Press, were capable of combining freedom with human dignity.

When the descendants of the competent heads of the beginning of the nineteenth century rose, through their talents, to the upper classes, where due to a lower birthrate their families finally died out, the eliminating process of social climbing in Europe seized hold of less capable heads and bore them away into the vortex of the time. Their culture has been described most mercilessly by Friedrich Nietzsche in his lectures of the year 1871-72: Concerning the Future of Our Educational Institutions (Pocket edition, Vol. I, 1906, pp. 314, 332-333, 396). Nietzsche above all concentrated on famous contemporary writers, “the hasty and vain production, the despicable manufacturing of books, the perfected lack of style, the shapelessness and characterlessness or the lamentable dilution of their expressions, the loss of every aesthetic canon, the lust for anarchy and chaos” — which he described as if he had actually seen the most celebrated literature of the Free West, whose known authors no longer mastered their own languages even to the extent still demanded by popular school teachers around 1900. These vociferous heralds of the need for culture in an era of general education were rejected by Nietzsche who in this displayed true Indo – European views – as fanatical opponents of the true culture, which holds firm to the aristocratic nature of the spirit. If Nietzsche described the task of the West as to find the culture appropriate to Beethoven, then the serious observer today will recognise only too well the situation which Nietzsche foresaw and described as a laughing stock and a thing of shame.

In the year 1797, Friedrich Schiller composed a poem: Deutsche Grösse. Full of confidence in the German spirit he expressed the view that defeat in war by stronger foes could not touch German dignity which was a great moral force. The precious possession of the German language would also be preserved. Schiller (Das Siegesfest) certainly knew what peoples had to expect of war:

 

For Patrocles lies buried
and Thersites mes back;

 

but he must have imagined that the losses of the best in the fight could be replaced. The dying out of families of dignity and moral stature (megalopsychia and magnanimitas), had then not yet begun in Europe.

In the year 1929, just a decade after the First World War had ended, that Peloponnesian war of the Teutonic peoples, which caused both in England and in Germany excessively heavy losses of gifted young men, of officers and aristocrats, Oskar Walzel (Die Geistesströmungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1929, p. 43), Professor of German literature at the university of Bonn, gave it as his opinion that after this war the trend to de-spiritualise Germany had gained ground far more rapidly than hitherto: “Is there in German history in general such an identical want of depth in men to be observed as at present?” But for the Germans it is poor consolation that this “de-spiritualising” is just as marked in other Western countries. Another sign of this trend is that today many famous writers are no longer capable of preserving the precious possession of the German language. Other Western languages are also neglecting their form and literature, but this again is poor consolation for the Germans. Such neglect is considered by many writers today as characteristic of, and part of the process of gaining their freedom and liberation from all traditional outlooks. Goethe criticised this as a false idea of freedom (Maxims and Reflections, Goethes Sämtliche Werke, Cottas Jubiläumsausgabe, Vol. IV, p. 229) in the following words:

“Everything which liberates our spirit, without increasing our mastery of ourselves, is pernicious.”

Thus, by freedom Goethe also understood the dignity of the freeborn, not the nature and mode of life of the freed slave.

From The Religious Attitudes of The Indo-Europeans, London 1967. Translated by Vivian Bird.

Europae n°5

EUROPAE

Sumario Nº 5

http://www.revistaeuropae.org

 

 

 

Editorial

Escritores malditos.

Asturias

Introducción

Ducado Asturensis, guardianes del custodio, Jesús Magro

La Carisa y la Mesa. Causas políticas y militarles del Reino de Asturias, Jesús Magro

Nombres, etnias y resistencias, Jesús Magro

 

DOSSIER: LITERATURA MALDITA

Libertad, igualdad, masas y Shakespeare, Adrià Solsona

El Teatro clásico español como elemento políticamente incorrecto, Ramón Bau

Las ideas malditas de Nietzsche, Eurgenio Gil

Brasillach, Joaquín Bochaca.

Heiddeger: filosofía y nazismo. Una visión

Hans Günther: pinceladas de antropológicas sobre España, Santiago de Andrés

Jean Cau. Una breve biblio-biografía, Eduardo Núñez

Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, ideas y contradicciones del intelectual olvidado de la Transición, Enrique Ravello

 

Geopolítica

Cambios en la política exterior turca, Enrique Ravello.

Música

El Pianoforte, Guillermo Jamard

Arte

La esencia de lo bello, Lluís Malgrat

Webs

La agencia de noticias Noreporter.

Der Ordensstaat - Geheimnisse des Baltischen Meeres

P. Vial: bientôt la guerre en Iran?

Pierre VIAL:

Bientôt la guerre en Iran ? 

27 novembre 1431 : LA TOISON D'OR

27 novembre 1431 : LA TOISON D'OR

Ex: http://anti-mythes.blogspot.com/

La première réunion du chapitre de l'ordre de la Toison d'or, tenue à Lille le 27 novembre 1431, fut un moment fort du '"règne" de Philippe le Bon, ce duc de Bourgogne qui voulut reconstituer la vieille Lotharingie fut surnommé le « Grand duc d'Occident » et aimait dire « Je veux qu'on sache que si je l'eusse voulu, j'eusse été roi. » A vrai dire, sans porter le titre royal, le Bourguignon pouvait se permettre de traiter d'égal à égal avec tous les souverains, tant était grande sa puissance.
Son troisième mariage le démontra puisqu'il obtint sans peine la main de l'infante Isabelle de Portugal, fille du roi Jean 1er d'Avis et de Philippa de Lancastre, princesse de la Maison royale d'Angleterre. Le mariage fut fastueux, dans des décors mis en place pour la circonstance afin d'accueillir les réjouissances où les franches ripailles à la flamande et les joutes entretenaient cette ambiance de « fougueuse kermesse, joyeuse et brutale » que décrit Michelet. Philippe le Bon choisit ce moment, peut-être afin de rehausser les fastes du mariage princier, pour annoncer solennellement la foudation du « Très noble Ordre de la Toison d'Or », destiné à réunir les preux d'entre les preux de tous les Etats bourguignons, sur le modèle évident de cette chevalerie de la Table Ronde qui faisait flamber, à la fin du Moyen Age, l'imaginaire de toute l'aristocratie européenne. Philippe le Bon avait pris soin de faire savoir, par la voix du « roi d'armes de Flandre » (le premier des hérauts flamands du prince), qu'il s'agissait d'exhorter les membres du nouvel ordre à se hisser au niveau de vaillance des anciens preux.
Au début de son principat, Philippe le Bon s'était vu proposer, par le duc de Bedford, Régent d'Angleterre, d'entrer dans l'ordre de la Jarretière. Il avait décliné l'offre. Il ne se voyait qu'en Grand Maître d'un ordre créé par lui. Il ne faisait en cela qu'imiter nombre d'autres princes. Charles VI n'avait-il pas créé en 1410 la « Chevalerie du Roi du Soleil d'Or » ? Et Amédée de Savoie, en 1362, l'« Ordre du Collier », qui devait devenir plus tard l'''Annonciade'' ? Le roi René, mais également les ducs de Bourbon, avaient leur ordre bien à eux.
Le duc de Bourgogne, mécène de sculpteurs et de peintres de génie, était homme de culture mais aussi et surtout grand politique. En un temps où les mythes antiques retrouvaient, par le biais de l'Italie, une place d'honneur dans la culture européenne, la force symbolique de l'histoire de la Toison d'Or lui semblait bien digne d'exalter son pouvoir. Et Jason, parti vivre avec ses Argonautes une aventure surhumaine en Colchide pour en rapporter cette Toison si chargée de sens mythique, n'avait-il pas naturellement, comme héritier spirituel, le « Grand Duc d'Occident », qui avait vocation à réanimer l'idéal de croisade ?
C'est dans les rues de Bruxelles, où se trouvait le duc Philippe à la Toussaint 1431, que fut annoncée par le « roi d'armes » de Brabant et ses hérauts la tenue du premier chapitre de la Toison d'or : « Oyez, princes, seigneurs, chevaliers et écuyers. De par très haut et très excellent, très puissant prince de mon redouté seigneur Philippe, par la grâce de Dieu duc de Bourgogne, de Lothier, de Brabant et de Limbourg, comte de Flandre, d'Artois et de Bourgogne, palatin, est à savoir à tous les nobles seigneurs et compagnons de l'Ordre de la Toison, et à tous les autres princes, seigneurs, chevaliers et écuyers, que vous soyez en la bonne ville de Lille en Flandre, la nuit de Saint-André prochainement, pour accompagner le duc, lequel a intention et volonté de commencer la fête du noble Ordre de la Toison d'Or. Si fera très bonne chère à ceux qui y voudront venir ! »
Les premiers statuts du nouvel Ordre furent transcrits en « langue bourguignonne », non en latin. Au cours d'un office, le chancelier de la Toison d'Or, l'évêque Jean Germain, profita de l'occasion pour dénoncer, au cours de son homélie, le caractère franchement trop païen du héros grec Jason, qui devait donc être remplacé par le juge biblique - Gédéon. Le duc l'écouta bien sûr poliment... et, comme on le voit à Dijon et à Anvers sur son beau portrait réalisé par Van der Weyden, n'en garda pas moins Jason comme référence, en portant autour du cou, comme tous les membres de l'Ordre, le collier d'or marqué de l'emblème bourguignon (les "fusils" ou briquets entrecroisés et la « pierre à feu » lançant des étincelles) auquel était suspendue la toison du bélier divin.
Après la mort du dernier duc de Bourgogne, Charles le Téméraire, le mariage de sa fille Marie fit passer l'Ordre de la Toison d'or dans la maison de Habsbourg. Mais la Toison fit rêver, jusqu'en plein xxe siècle, ceux qui voulurent faire revivre une Grande Bourgogne.
P. V. Rivarol 2008