Hereunder
follows the transcription of the introductory to the third division of
Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
The Foundations of the 19th century,
2nd ed., published by John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
i
FOUNDATIONS OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
VOL. II
ii
(Blank page)
iii
FOUNDATIONS
OF THE
NINETEENTH
CENTURY
BY HOUSTON STEWART
CHAMBERLAIN
A TRANSLATION
FROM THE GERMAN
BY JOHN LEES,
M.A., D.LIT. (EDIN.)
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY LORD REDESDALE,
G.C.V.O., K.C.B., ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES:
VOLUME II
LONDON: JOHN LANE,
THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY: MCMXII
iv
Printed by BALLANTYNE
& CO. LIMITED
Tavistock Street, Covent
Garden, London
v-vii CONTENTS
(Contents
of the second volume are moved to volume
1 for convenience's sake.)
viii
(Blank page)
ix
FOUNDATIONS OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
x
(Blank page)
1
DIVISION III
THE STRUGGLE
2
(Blank page)
3
DIVISION III
THE STRUGGLE
Your high-engender‘d battles.
— SHAKESPEARE.
INTRODUCTORY
LEADING PRINCIPLES
WITH this division
we enter a new field — the purely historical. Although the legacy of antiquity
and its heirs were manifestations of history, it was possible to free these
manifestations from their surroundings and so to consider them under the
light of history, and yet not quite as history. Henceforth we have to deal
with a succession of events and processes of development, that is to say,
with history pure and simple. But there will be a certain sameness in the
method, because, just as we formerly noted what remains constant in the
stream of time, we shall now choose out only individual points in the incalculable
crowd of events that hurry past our mental eye, points which have permanent
significance and are, so to speak, “constant.“ The philosopher might offer
the objection that every impulse, even the smallest, exercises perpetual
influence; the answer is that in history almost every individual force
very soon loses its separate importance and possesses only the value of
one component among countless others which are only
4 INTRODUCTORY
present as ideas, while one single great
“resultant“ remains behind as the perceptible issue of many manifestations
of contradictory powers. But now — to maintain the mechanical comparison
— these resulting lines unite again to form new parallelograms of forces
and produce new, greater, more evident events, which have a deeper influence
upon history and more enduring importance — and that goes on until certain
heights of power-manifestation are reached, which cannot be surpassed.
Only the highest of these must be dealt with here. I shall take it for
granted that the historical facts are known; and my task consists merely
in properly emphasising and grouping what appears indispensable for an
intelligent judgment of the nineteenth century with its contrary currents,
its crossing resultants and its leading ideas.
I intended originally
to call this third and last division of the first part “The Time of Wild
Ferment.“ I felt, however, that this wild ferment continued long after
the year 1200. In fact, even at the present day in many places there seems
to be quite enough and to spare. I had also to give up the plan of three
chapters — the Struggle in the State, the Struggle in the Church, the Struggle
between State and Church — since this would have led me much deeper into
history than I could have reconciled with the purpose of my work. But I
thought it proper in these introductory words to mention my original plan
and the studies that it involved, in order that the far simpler method
which I have adopted with the division into two chapters “Religion“ and
“State“ may be accepted as the final result of my studies, while some criticism
may be disarmed. At the same time it will be understood how far the idea
of “The Struggle“ has been the leading motive of my exposition.
5
INTRODUCTORY
ANARCHY
Goethe in one passage
describes the Middle Ages as a conflict between powers which to some extent
already possessed, and to some extent endeavoured to gain, considerable
independence, and calls the whole an “aristocratic anarchy.“ * I do not
like the expression “aristocratic,“ for it always implies — even when viewed
as aristocracy of intellect — rights of birth; in contradiction to which
that mighty power, the Church, denies all hereditary rights: even the right
of succession, recognised by a whole people, does not confer legitimacy
on a monarch unless the Church of its own free will ratifies it; that was
and still is the Roman theory of the legal powers of the Church, and history
offers many examples of Popes freeing nations from their oath of allegiance
and inciting them to rebel against their lawful king. In its own midst
the Church recognises no individual rights of any kind; neither nobility
of birth nor of mind is of any moment. And though we certainly cannot call
it a democratic power, yet still less is it aristocratic; all logocracies
have been essentially anti-aristocratic and at the same time anti-democratic.
Moreover, other powers, genuinely democratic, were beginning to assert
themselves in the period which Goethe calls aristocratic. The Teutonic
races had entered history as free men, and for many centuries their kings
possessed much less power over them than over the subjects whom they had
conquered in the various countries of the Roman Empire. The double influence
of Rome — as Church and Law — sufficed to weaken and soon to abolish these
rights. † But the impulse towards freedom
* Annalen,
1794.
† This
can be followed more clearly in Savigny‘s Geschichte des römischen
Rechtes im Mittelalter than in general works of history,
6 INTRODUCTORY
could never be entirely checked; we
see it assert itself in every century, now in the north, now in the south,
at one time as freedom of thought and faith, at another as a struggle for
city privileges, such as commerce, the defence of rights of class, or a
revolt against them, occasionally too in the form of inroads of rude, unconquered
tribes into the half-organised mass of the post-Roman Empire. But we must
agree with Goethe when he says that this prevailing state of warfare is
anarchy. Individual great men had scarcely time to think of justice; moreover
every power fought unscrupulously for its own ends, regardless of the rights
of others: that was a necessity of existence. We must not let moral scruples
bias us: the more unscrupulously a power asserted itself, the greater was
its capacity of life. Beethoven says in one passage, “Power is the morality
of men who excel others“; and power was the morality of that epoch of the
first wild ferment. It was only when nations began to take shape, when
in art, science and philosophy man became once more conscious of himself,
when, through organisation for the purpose of work, the exercise of his
inventive gifts, and the grasping of ideal aims, he entered once more into
the magic circle of genuine culture, into “the daylight of life,“ that
anarchy began to give way, or rather to be gradually dammed up in the interests
of a new world and a new culture which were assuming final form. This process
is still going on, for we are living in all respects in a “Middle Age,“
* but the contrast between the pure anarchy of former times and the moderate
anarchy of to-day is so striking that the fundamental difference must be
very obvious. Political anarchy probably reached its height in the ninth
century; compare the nineteenth with it and we shall be forced
because he gives a fuller
and more vivid account: see especially in the fourth chapter of the first
volume the division dealing with “The Freemen“ and “the Counts.“
* See
vol.
i. p. lxix.
7
INTRODUCTORY
to admit that in spite of our revolutions
and bloody reactions, in spite of tyranny and regicide, in spite of the
uninterrupted ferment here and there, in spite of the shiftings of property,
the nineteenth century is to the ninth as day is to night.
In this section I
have to deal with a time when there was hardly anything but conflict. In
a later age, as soon in fact as the dawn of culture began to appear, there
was a shifting of the centre of gravity; the outward conflict still continued
and many an honest historian sees even in this age only Popes and Kings,
Princes and Bishops, nobility and corporations, battles and treaties; but
henceforth there is side by side with these a new invisible power, remodelling
the spirit of humanity, and yet making no use of the anarchical morality
of force. However slowly this may reveal itself, the sum of intellectual
work, which led to the discovery of the heliocentric system of the world,
* has entirely undermined the foundations on which Church theology and
Church power rested. The introduction of paper and the invention of printing
have raised thought to a world power; out of the lap of pure science have
come those discoveries which, like steam and electricity, completely transform
the life of humanity as well as the purely material relations of power;
† the influence of art and of philosophy — e.g., of such personalities
as Goethe and
* Augustine
comprehended quite well and admitted expressly (De Civitate Dei
xvi. 9) that if the world is round and men live at the Antipodes, “whose
feet are opposite our feet, separated from us by Oceans, their development
going on apart from us,“ then the sacred writings have “lied.“ Augustine
in fact must admit as an honest man that in such an event the plan of salvation,
as the Church represents it, is inadequate, and so he hastens to the conclusion
that the idea of such antipodes and unknown human races is absurd, nimis
absurdum est. What would he have said if he had lived to see the heliocentric
system established as well as the fact that untold millions of worlds move
in space?
† Thus
poor Switzerland is on the point of becoming one of the richest industrial
States, since it can transform its huge water-supply into electricity at
almost no cost.
8 INTRODUCTORY
Kant — is incalculably great. But I
return to this in the second part
of these “Foundations,“ which discusses the rise of a new Germanic world;
this section has to deal solely with the struggle of the great powers for
possession and supremacy.
RELIGION
AND THE STATE
If I were to follow
the usual custom and, as I had originally planned, contrast State and Church,
not State and Religion, we should be in danger of dealing with mere forms.
For the Roman Church is first and foremost a political, i.e., a
national power; it inherited the Roman idea of imperium, and, in league
with the Emperor it represented the rights of an absolute universal empire,
supposed to be established by God. It thus conflicted with Germanic tradition
and the Germanic impulse to form a nation. Religion it regarded as a means
of closely uniting all peoples. Since earliest times the Pontifex maximus
in Rome was the chief official in the hierarchy, judex atque arbiter
rerum divinarum humanarumque, to whom (according to the legal theory)
the King and later the Consuls were subordinate. * Of course the remarkably
developed political sense of the old Romans had prevented the Pontifex
maximus from ever abusing his theoretical power as judge of all things
divine and human, just in the same way as the unlimited power (according
to the legal fiction) of the paterfamilias over the life and death of his
family never gave rise to excesses; † the Romans in fact had been the very
reverse of anarchists. But now, in the unfettered human chaos, the title
and its legal claims were revived; never before or since has such weight
been attached to theoretical “law“; vested legal rights were never so much
flaunted
* See
especially Leist: Graeco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, § 69.
† See
vol.
i. p. 162.
9 INTRODUCTORY
and insisted upon as at this time, when
violence and malice were the sole ruling forces. Pericles had expressed
the opinion that the unwritten law stood higher than the written; now only
the written word was valid; a commentary of Ulpian, a gloss of Tribonian
— intended for quite different conditions — was ratio scripta and
decided the rights of whole peoples; a parchment with a seal on it legalised
every crime. The heiress, administrator and advocate of this view of political
law was the city of Rome with her Pontifex maximus, and it stands
to reason that she employed these principles to her own advantage. But
at the same time the Church inherited the Jewish hierocratic idea of State,
with the High Priest as supreme power; the writings of the Church fathers
from the third century onwards are full of Old Testament utterances and
ideas; and there cannot be the shadow of a doubt that the Roman ideal was
the establishment of a universal State with the Jewish priestly rule as
a foundation. * Here, therefore, the Roman Church must be viewed as a purely
political power: here it is not Church that is opposed to State, but one
State to another, one political ideal to another.
But apart from the
political struggle, which never raged so bitterly and irreconcilably as
when the Roman imperial idea came in conflict with Germanic national aspirations,
and the Jewish theocracy with Christ‘s pronouncement, “Render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar‘s,“ there broke out another very important battle,
that about religion itself. And in the nineteenth century this struggle
is no more at an end than the other. In our secular States at the beginning
of the century the religious contrasts seemed to have lost all acuteness,
the nineteenth century had the appearance of an epoch of unconditional
tolerance;
* Naturally
the oldest are to be excepted, who, like Origenes, Tertullian, &c.,
had no idea of the possible predominant position of Christianity.
10 INTRODUCTORY
but during the last thirty years the
Church agitators have been once more zealously at work, and the night of
the Middle Ages still lies so black around us that in this field every
weapon is considered good, and actually proves itself good, though it may
be lying, falsification of history, political pressure or social compulsion.
It is no mere trifle that lies at the root of this religious strife. Underneath
a dogmatic strife, so subtle that it seems to the layman senseless and
indifferent, there slumbers not seldom one of those fundamental spiritual
questions which decide the whole tendency of a nation‘s life. How many
laymen, for instance, are there in Europe who are capable of understanding
the conflict concerning the nature of communion? And yet it was the dogma
of transubstantiation (issued in the year 1215, exactly at the moment when
the English forced the Magna Charta from their king), which inevitably
broke up Europe into several hostile camps. Race differences are at the
bottom of this. But race is, as we have seen, plastic, inconstant and composed
of manifold elements almost always striving with each other for the mastery
; frequently the victory of a religious dogma has given one element preponderance
over the others and thus determined the whole further development of a
race or nation. Perhaps even the greatest thinker of the time has not quite
understood the dogma in question: for dogma deals with the Inexpressible
and Unthinkable; but in such cases the direction is the important matter
— the orientation of the will, if I may so express it. Thus we can easily
understand how State and Religion can and must affect each other, and that
not only in the sense of a tussle between universal Church and national
Government: there is also the troublous fact that the State possesses the
means (and till lately possessed almost unlimited means) of checking a
moral and intellectual movement revealing itself in religion; friction
may also
11 INTRODUCTORY
arise through the complete victory of
some religious view directing the State itself into an entirely new course.
Any one who glances impartially at the map of Europe cannot doubt that
religion was and is a powerful factor in the gowth of States and the development
of culture. * It not only reveals, but makes, character.
I think that I shall
be doing justice to the object which I have in view if, when dealing with
this epoch, I choose for special treatment the two great objects of contention
— State and Religion, the struggle in Religion and for Religion, the struggle
in the State and for the State. But I must defend myself from the appearance
of postulating two separate entities, which became a unity only by their
capability of influencing each other; I am rather of the opinion that the
complete separation of religious from civic life, which is so popular to-day,
rests upon a dangerous error of judgment. It is in reality impossible.
In former centuries it was the custom to call Religion the soul and the
State the body; † but to-day, when the intimate connection of soul and
body in the individual becomes more and more present to us, so that we
scarcely know where we are to assume the boundary-line to be, such a distinction
should make us pause. We know that behind a dispute about justification
by faith and justification by works, which is apparently carried on entirely
and exclusively in the forum of the soul, very “corporeal“ things may be
concealed; the course of history has shown us this; and on the other hand
we see the moulding and the mechanism of the corporate State having a great
and decisive influence upon the nature of the soul (e.g., France
since the night of St. Bartholomew and the Dragonades). In decisive moments
the ideas State and Religion coalesce
* Very
beautifully shown by Schiller at the beginning of the first part of his
Thirty
Years War.
† E.g.,
Gregory II. in his frequently mentioned letter to Emperor Leo the Isaurian.
12 INTRODUCTORY
completely; we can without figure of
speech assert that for the ancient Roman his State was his Religion, and
that for the Jew his Religion was his State; and even to-day, when a soldier
rushes to battle with the cry: for God, King and Fatherland! that is at
the same time Religion and State. Nevertheless in spite of the importance
of this caveat, the maintenance of a distinction between the two ideas
is a practical necessity; practical for a rapid survey of the summits of
history, and practical for a later attempt to connect them with the phenomena
and currents of our century.
End of page. Last update:
September 4th, 2003.
