Oswald Spengler: The opposite of noble is not poor, but vulgar

Pride and quietly borne poverty, silent fulfilment of duty, renunciation for the sake of a task or conviction, greatness in enduring one's fate, loyalty, honour, responsibility, achievement: All this is a constant reproach to the "humiliated and insulted".

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934), p. 94.

Tom Holland, author of DOMINION, observes that Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism, just as Oswald Spengler had maintained

Inescapable Influence, ‘How the Christian Revolution Remade the World’:

“That’s fine,” I seem to hear a skeptical reader saying. “This may work in the case of the Enlightenment, but you are not going to say that Marxism or Communism, for example, also had Christian roots, are you?” That’s precisely one of the subtler points Holland is making in Dominion. In the foundational texts of Christianity there are places where a fundamental solidarity with the poor and the hungry, the powerless and downtrodden, is formulated.  Jesus himself called these people “brothers,” and identified with them unreservedly (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”), whereas for those at the other end of the power spectrum, he had a different message (“Woe to you who are rich!”). And the first generations of Christians understood quite well what Christ had meant: “We have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world,” writes Paul (1 Corinthians 4:13). Importantly, such a social vision is not just a peripheral feature of Christianity, or something added later by charitable souls, but stems from the central doctrine of Christianity: the Incarnation. As Holland puts it, “by making himself nothing, by taking on the very nature of a slave,” Christ had “plumbed the depths to which only the lowest, the poorest, the most persecuted and abused of mortals were confined.” In early Christian communities, all were “brothers” and “sisters,” everything was held in common, and power was deliberately shunned—a radical response to the radicalism of Christ’s own message. Various forms of what would later be called “socialism” or “communism,” recurrent throughout Christian history (from the Taborites to the Münster Anabaptists to countless other fringe groups) took those early communities as a good model to follow.

By the time Karl Marx entered the scene, then, Christianity already had a long and colorful history of toying with the communist idea. Coming from a solid rabbinical environment as he did, Marx didn’t fail to recognize a great Jewish teacher when he saw one, even when that teacher had ended up inspiring another religion altogether. Even the terminology used by Marx “to construct his model of class struggle—‘exploitation,’ ‘enslavement,’ ‘avarice’—owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets.” Marx’s famous formulation “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” looks to Holland like a cheeky act of plagiarism from the Acts of the Apostles: “Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had needed.” 

The Evangelicals also are the grandmothers of Bolshevism

How Evangelicals Invented Liberals’ Favorite Legal Doctrine:

[T]he political and moral perfectionism of antebellum Protestants created standards of public morality that “threatened the core ideals of the commercial republic” that the Constitution was drafted to engender and protect. That is, evangelicals wanted to regulate public morality in ways that impinged upon commercial and business practices that had been legal, if not always favorably smiled upon, since the country’s founding. ...

[John] Compton’s thesis demonstrates that within the many ironies of history, the social and political instruments a perfectionist movement deploys may be easily co-opted for ends and purposes never imagined in their development.

American education also failed Rod Dreher, who remains unaware that Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism

Ye shall know them by their materialism

Most people nowadays do not realize at all how materialistic they are in themselves and their thought. They may be zealous in prayer and confession and have the word "God" for ever on their lips, they may even be priests by calling and conviction, and yet be materialists. Christian morality is, like every morality, renunciation and nothing else. Those who do not feel it to be so are materialists.

-- Oswald Spengler, 1933

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.

-- Luke 14:33

The grandmothers of Bolshevism: For every Republican on religion faculties there are 70 Democrats

Historian Phil Jenkins discovers that Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism

Here and imbedded links (he hasn't really yet thought through it):

"Engels had something like a love for the early Christians, and he imagines talking to them as fellow-sufferers who came from exactly the [same] kind of setting."

Attacked in the comments at one point, he responds:

". . . the early Christian movement was very diverse in its theologies. By the way, one common explanation for the ebionites was that they were the remnants of the original Jewish followers of Jesus, including the bulk of the Jerusalem church, who never accepted Paul's innovations."

Keep it up Phil! You are on the right track! Too bad you didn't train in philology . . . it wouldn't have taken you this long to figure out that Pauline Christianity is a double-edged sword leaving us with two forms of materialism which now war for our imaginations, even though you'll probably become bored and get side-tracked away from this also.

Jewish Christians renounced the material, as did Jesus, believing the kingdom of God was coming down to earth from God, right quick like, as they say in the holler. Paul's Gospel by contrast baptized entrepreneurialism and made free-enterprise and Judaism safe for the world. Hence the tithers of today, and the spread of the congregation on the synagogue model.

Historians would be better engaged figuring out what went wrong there with Paul. Albert Schweitzer figured out what went wrong with Jesus.

Dull Humanitarianism At Blog and Mablog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The dull humanitarianism of contemporary Christianity came up here recently, humorously (to me anyway) attacking itself in a mirror:

What I mean is this — many who claim to love Jesus with their theology hate the poor with their economics, and I think we should stop being okay with that. I frankly think we should knock it off — the gospel is not some airy fairy thing that fails to apply to how people have to live out their actual lives. When Jesus taught us to feed the poor, instead of turning their place of habitation into a desolation, this necessarily excludes every form of Keynesianism.

This swipe at the left's hypocrisy is hypocritical and blind in its own way, but it is difficult to appreciate it when we are captives of an historical moment full of unexamined assumptions and unresolved historical contradictions and loyalties. For one thing, it can be demonstrated that neither side in this debate loves "Jesus with their theology". Unfortunately, their love of him picks and chooses what it wants from "his" teaching just as they pick and choose whom to help from the poor. And for another, polite discussion of the poor amongst Christians left and right these days merely objectifies, patronizes and condescends to the poor, so that a great gulf yet remains fixed between them and the poor.

Take the statement, "When Jesus taught us to feed the poor". That's a nice sounding phrase which no one on either side finds objectionable, except that Jesus didn't teach us to feed the poor. Unfortunately this is not only the accepted and false premise of Christians left and right, but it has become the accepted and false premise of our entire politics, and it is wrong. What are the poor, dogs, who once fed get to go gamboling on their way? And who are we then but their owners?

Yes, Jesus fed the 5,000 (Matthew 14:21; Mark 6:44; Luke 9:14) and the 4,000 (Matthew 15:38; Mark 8:9) and spoke very positively of the poor and very negatively of the rich, even though the poor who hung on his every word he addressed as "you who are evil" (Matthew 7:11; Luke 11:13). But nowhere do you get from Jesus' teaching a programmatic statement like that, which is surprising when you have a Sermon on the Mount or a Sermon on the Plain replete with programmatic statements of all sorts. You know, like "Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you" (Matthew 5:42; Luke 6:30).

 

How many times have I heard from Christian pulpits that one should not give money to people who beg on the streets because they'll just "use it to buy liquor"? Isn't that what we use ours for?

If there is any programmatic statement of Jesus ignored by all and sundry today it is the very basic one you were likely to hear from Jesus every time he showed up in a new venue and set up his soap box:

Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.  

 

-- Mark 10:21; Matthew 19:21; Luke 18:22

No, far from being "some airy fairy thing that fails to apply to how people have to live," Jesus expected his followers, as a condition of discipleship, actually to stop living as they "have to" and demonstrate repentance by the act of wealth liquidation and divestiture to the poor, and by becoming poor themselves. In other words, Jesus demanded that his followers change places with the poor and turn their own "actual lives" into a "habitation" of "desolation". This is repentance as reversal, a literal turning upside down of every thing, every relationship, every obligation.

Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

 

-- Mark 1:14f.

This point cannot be stressed enough. Jesus demanded that people divest themselves of everything that they are and have as the way to "fill the hungry with good things", and, more to the point, become poor themselves and escape the wrath that is to come, and come soon.

When was the last time you heard a Christian talking like that, especially in the "Bible-believing" churches which promote both Biblical inerrancy and free-market capitalism? Christians are supposed to take personal responsibility for the poor, sell everything they have, and give it to them.

 

I think the last time I heard anything remotely like this was from Anthony Quinn as the pope in The Shoes of the Fisherman. Needless to say, I've frequented liberal Methodist churches and witnessed the dull humanitarianism at its best, which is indeed impressive in its way, but it's still what it is. Those Methodists still have a place to lay their heads at night, and money to go out to lunch together on Sundays after church. And they all have churches, and indeed keep building more of them, maintaining them, heating them, cooling them and filling them with very noisy machines to entertain themselves with.

Divestiture of everything one has, owns and is, dare I say including even all social connections and their obligations, is now the lost meaning of repentance in the teaching of Jesus. Very few people are familiar with this anymore in America, except for some priests and members of monastic orders who actually take vows of poverty.

 

Writing way back in the early 1930s one Oswald Spengler observed that this understanding was already then long lost in Europe, and goes on at some length to show how this original doctrine of Christian renunciation as a moral doctrine was replaced with materialist philosophy by the church itself in the wake of the Enlightenment. One cannot help but think that had Europe's Christians actually practiced their faith instead of selling-out wholesale to materialism there might not have been a Great War. And of course not long after Spengler died Europe exploded again, proving one more time that its Christianity was a complete fraud, just as ours is today.

To repent includes sorrow over personal sinfulness and what it has done to other people, to be sure, but nothing so ephemeral as an emotion can encompass the true meaning of repentance as Jesus understood it. Unfortunately, however, emotion epitomizes the current understanding of Christianity in the West. It is nothing but an evanescent, psychological phenomenon.

 

To Jesus, by contrast, to repent is actually a physical turning away from the direction in which one is going, which is the conventional way of the world, the way of the many, the easy way which leads to the certain destruction which comes upon you in your sleep after you sat up late planning to build bigger barns to hold all your gain (Luke 12:18). You know, physically turning away from your house, your job, your 401k. And your beautiful wife and children, and the dog. With all these goods Jesus expected one to make a sort of restitution when repenting and following him, a settling up of accounts so to speak, in addition to getting rid of the entangling alliances they involve, and rely wholly and utterly on God for his salvation.

The cost of this discipleship in the teaching of Jesus is the same for everyone, whether rich or poor or in-between: 100% of one's very self and all that that means. From the ruler whose possessions were so very great that he went away sorrowful (Matthew 19:22; Mark 10:22; Luke 18:23) instead of giving them all away to the poor and following Jesus, to the disciples who complained (!) that they had in fact left everything and followed him (they had: Matthew 19:27; Mark 10:28; Luke 18:28), to the old widow who inconspicuously (to everyone but Jesus) put into the Temple alms box just two mites (which constituted "her whole life" Mark 12:44 says), there is nothing which may be held back by anyone no matter what their station in life. And lest we forget, that goes for the poor, too, who often cling to the mean, squalid conditions of their existence as tenaciously as the rich cling to theirs.

Like death, Jesus' call to discipleship is the great equalizer of humanity, wherein all the distinctions of human existence bleed away into nothing. Not obeying this call will get you turned into a pillar of salt like Lot's wife, or laid out at room temperature as Ananias and Sapphira found out. The repentant will escape the coming judgment, but they are few, and those who turn back from the plough, or go home first to say goodbye, or insist that the obligation to bury a dead relative has priority, these are many, and it is they who get taken for tares by the suddenly appearing Reaper Angels of the Last Judgment, are gathered up with all who do iniquity and bundled together with all those who offend, and are thrown into the fire. Which is when the meek finally inherit the earth.

The repentance doctrine of Jesus survives in its starkest form in an unlikely place, the Gospel of Luke, where kingdom interpretations "already realized" and "not yet realized" clash in the same long historical narrative and form a sort of interpretive bridge between the kingdom coming-now-before-even-Israel-is-fully-evangelized idea found in Matthew 10 (and assumed in Mark) and the kingdom relegated-to-the heavenly-realms idea of the much later Fourth Gospel:

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.  

 

--Luke 14:33

It doesn't get much plainer than that.

But it occurred to somebody along the way that there was a certain moral inconsistency in the teaching of Jesus which became difficult to resolve in the years after Jesus' death. This had everything to do with the historical inconsistency, the failure of the coming kingdom "now" idea which Jesus entertained throughout his career right up to the bitter end of his tragic life. After the kingdom failed to arrive during the mission of The Twelve as he famously but mistakenly predicted in Matthew 10, Jesus nevertheless continued to believe in it, as Albert Schweitzer first showed us long ago. The debacle of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem may be another example of it, where he made a big show in the Temple but got such an unexpected response that he had to use crowds by day and escape out of the city under cover of darkness by night for his own personal safety. And Mark shows Jesus still angling at the very last moment for a dramatic finish when at his trial Jesus tells the high priest that the high priest himself will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven (Mark 14:62).

It was not to be.

This coming kingdom "now" idea eventually got pushed back to a "coming back soon" idea in the form of Christ's return from heaven, as in St. Paul, to the point that mockers arose by the end of the first century saying "Where is the promise of his coming?" (II Peter 3:4). The Fourth Gospel came to the rescue just at this moment, complete with a Holy Spirit who revealed the real gospel, to give us a Savior who descended from heaven, instead of a Davidic King who brought us a restored monarchy of Old Testament prophecy and the Rule of God in a "kingdom come". This Eternal Logos of John's invention accomplished his work of redeeming humanity, and ascended once again to prepare a place for all who believe, helpfully omitting all the urgency implied by an impending end of the world, or even of an imminent second coming.

So in this context what do you suppose would happen to a doctrine of total renunciation predicated on the imminent end of the world? Of course it would get pushed aside just to avoid having to explain that Jesus was just a little off about the timing of the Apocalypse. But it is at once a measure of the thoroughness of our sources that they should still preserve the memory of it, as it is evidence of the deep respect with which Jesus' teaching was held, however difficult to integrate it might have been, Holy Spirit guiding into all truth notwithstanding (John 16:13).

The moral problem, I think, is less well appreciated. In the context of an imminently coming end of the world, suddenly saddling the poor with riches arguably could be justified on the grounds that the possessions wouldn't have time to corrupt them. The world would end too soon and be transformed for the no longer poor to succumb to the temptations. But introduce delay and now Jesus' teaching could possibly be guilty of hanging millstones around their necks which would keep them out of the kingdom of heaven forever (Matthew 19:23f.; Mark 10:23ff.; Luke 18:24f.).

Under such circumstances there was every reason to minimize the renunciation doctrine found in the Synoptics in favor of the new perspective enunciated in John where Jesus now merely says "the poor ye have always with you" (John 12:8). In John the poor still exist, but the rich no longer do.

 

Few appreciate that in that new framing the Evangelist has now put the objectification of the poor into the mouth of Jesus, as if Jesus and The Twelve are no longer to be identified as one and the same as the poor. No, now the followers of Jesus aren't the poor; they have the poor and are distinct from them in a way which is foreign to the equalizing message of the historical Jesus from the Synoptics in which the followers of Jesus become one with the poor. This also means that the world isn't going to end anytime soon, there will always be rich people and there will always be poor people just as there have always been, and really the only important thing now is the Savior, the Heavenly Redeemer, on whom rich ointment may indeed be lavished (John 12:3), or later . . . on his Vicar on earth, the pope. In that vignette from the Fourth Gospel is the birth of the church as charitable organization, following on the pattern of Jesus and The Twelve it presents, and gone is the directive to become poor. Rather, as that Gospel famously concludes, the directive now is that Peter "feed my sheep" with the gospel, with which the church is now rich.

Consider that according to John Jesus' followers kind of got left holding the bag quite literally when Jesus left them behind. For something like three years, or perhaps eighteen months on John's chronology, they had depended on the almsgiving of the people as they followed the man expecting God's kingdom to arrive at any minute. Judas was their Treasurer and kept "the purse". From it they not only paid their own expenses, but from it they themselves gave to "the poor". As givers of alms themselves and encouragers of same, the focus now turned to them in the absence of Jesus and they began to attract the poor as the place where the poor could beg and not be refused, just as Jesus taught. Soon The Twelve were transformed into the leaders of a self-perpetuating poverty relief machine as the poor, and the donations, kept rolling in.

So yes, the church repented Jesus' definition of repentance, and made its accommodation with the world. To that extent it may be decided by left and right in the church today that there is a basis for its materialist view of life and that they have a right to argue about the relative merits of various "economics" as if it were a category separate from "theology". The man they claim to worship, however, demonstrably had a different opinion of the matter.

Interesting Description Of Catholic Right Wing

Interesting description of the American Catholic right wing (seen here in the comments):

• Libertarian in economics -- The Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan

• Pro-torture -- Rev. Robert A. Sirico, President of The Acton Institute, and Raymond Arroyo, EWTN News Director

• Pro-preventative war -- George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Richard John Neuhaus, First Things

Interesting description of inter-war period Catholic Europe:

• Grandmothers of Bolshevism -- Oswald Spengler

Long lay the world in sin and error pining, but no more?

The irony of those lines penned by John Sullivan Dwight in 1855 is the horrible, bloody history of the world which soon followed in their wake, mocking them more loudly with every passing decade, from the American War Between The States through the murderous World Wars right on to the present-day, but purposely-ignored, inhumanities of man in Africa, China and the United States.

Yes, in the United States, where over 50 million unborn have been slaughtered in the last 40 years while we go about our business, often go to church and generally think we enjoy ourselves, and Francis Fukuyama tells us with a straight face that thankfully we no longer engage as a species in montrous projects of social transformation.

People who say, as this one does, a Roman Catholic named Howard Kainz, that the world is no longer in the condition it had been in for most of human history because in the Church God provided a firm basis for Christian life do not have their eyes open to the sorry facts of the world. Religious denial of reality is no less pernicious than the ideological sort, say, of Marxism, which may have something to do with the fact that the former often prepares the way for the latter.

If we are not still in sin and error pining I don't know who ever was, or why or how they were ever redeemed from it. If the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, it is not self-evident that we have it (Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 9:10).

The Protestants, at least, helped begin the process of recovering the reality of man's sorry state, beginning with Luther's open hostility to the denial of reality implicit in the Catholic tradition, most famously that in the purchase of absolution a spiritual difference was made between the one who bought it and the one who didn't. If the Catholics are still afraid of this all these years later, as Kainz is, they are right to be, because Protestantism actually means death to all such ideology, if but for the fact that it has succumbed to it itself. Carried through to its logical conclusion, Protestantism would finally detect in Christianity's own origin the denial of reality which is the seed of its own destruction, but by and large this has not happened except among some academics, starting with Albert Schweitzer, whose long but thin line of followers bears witness to the recalcitrant inelasticity of human nature. 

If we were to be honest brokers of the essential message of Jesus, we would admit that it is followed by next to no one claiming the name Christian because it cannot be, at least for very long, not without being possessed of the fundamental conviction that God is about to bring the world to final judgment: 

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

 

-- Matthew 3:2; 4:17; Mark 1:15 

Christians today run away from that message and all the texts in the Gospels which support it, not in the least because Jesus was tragically mistaken about the future, as disappointed true believers perennially discover. To have anything to do with it is to associate error with deity, and this cannot be allowed, for the obvious reason. But Christians also run away from true repentance because if it were followed, they would not be able to utter all this nonsense about leading "the Christian life" while holding down jobs, paying off mortgages, entering into marriages, raising families, enjoying relative ease and saving for a "safe" retirement.

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.

 

-- Luke 14:33 

To repent would mean turning one's back on all this, on one's former way of life, with a desperate urgency which does not exist.

But God said unto him, [Thou] fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?

 

-- Luke 12:20 

Accordingly the urgency has been transformed in the wake of the failure, spiritualized, internalized and specialized, as in the special calling to monasticism practiced by the few, but even that is now nearly forgotten, its last bastion the priest's call to celibacy. Luther himself was close to the original understanding, though he did not follow it himself and thus contributed to the continuation of its "spiritualization":

And take they our life, goods, fame, child and wife, Let these all be gone, they yet have nothing won; The kingdom ours remaineth.

 

-- Martin Luther, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God (1529) 

Faint echoes of this message have been heard in living memory, for example in the popular 1965 film "The Sound of Music" where we see a young woman torn between her feelings of love for a man and her desire to renounce the world, not for an imminently coming kingdom and judgment, but for a life closer to God in the convent.

In 1933 Oswald Spengler reflected correctly on this residuum of the original teaching, now divorced from its apocalyptic setting in the modern "spiritualized" consensus, that 

Christian morality is, like every morality, renunciation and nothing else. Those who do not feel it to be so are materialists. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" means: do not regard this hard meaning of life as misery and seek to circumvent it by party politics.

But if the Marxists try to circumvent the "hard meaning of life" by party politics, the Christians try to circumvent it with their notions of the realized kingdom of God in the Church and its sacraments, where the vagaries of existence are spiritualized away into a denial of reality no less mendacious than the failed achievements of Soviet five year plans.

We are no closer to becoming Peter's partakers of the divine nature (II Peter 1:4) than we are to Trotsky's superman who will become incomparably stronger, wiser, more subtle.

The way forward for people of faith is to stop denying reality, and to begin by saying, "God be merciful to me, a poor, sinful being" (Luke 18:13; Luther's Small Catechism; Confession of Sins, Lutheran Liturgy).

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.         

-- Psalm 51:17 

The Grandmothers Of Bolshevism Celebrate ObamaCare

"[W]e are convinced that health care is not a privilege, reserved for those who can afford it, but a right that should be available, at high quality, to all."

-- National Council of Churches

"[A] huge step in the right direction [single payer health care] and we celebrate provisions in that law that continue to fill the gaps and expand existing health care, particularly to low-income Americans."

-- United Methodist Board of Church and Society

"We rejoice today as the Supreme Court rules to uphold [the] constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act."

"[S]ingle payer [is the] best vehicle for providing such health care resources."

-- Presbyterian Church USA 

"The Supreme Court decision today is a clear signal that we as a country are moving toward the realm of God on earth -- the realm of this merciful, compassionate God, full of love for all."

-- United Church of Christ

(source)

"Now, all Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought: More's Utopia, the Sun State of the Dominica Campanella, the doctrines of Luther's disciples Karlstadt and Thomas Münzer, and Fichte's State Socialism. What Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen, Marx, and hundreds of others dreamed and wrote on the ideals of the future reaches back, quite without their knowledge and much against their intention, to priestly-moral indignation and Schoolmen concepts, which had their secret part in economic reasoning and in public opinion on social questions. How much of Thomas Aquinas' law of nature and conception of State is still to be found in Adam Smith and therefore - with the opposite sign - in the Communist Manifesto! Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism. All abstract brooding over economic concepts that are remote from any economic experience must, if courageously and honestly followed out, lead in one way or another to reasoned conclusions against State and property, and only lack of vision saves these materialist Schoolmen from seeing that at the end of their chain of thought stands the beginning once more: effective Communism is authoritative bureaucracy. To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow."

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 1933

Spengler on 'Womanish Love of One's Neighbour'

From The Hour of Decision, 1933:

"There is one other thing that belongs of necessity to a ripe Culture. That is property, the thought of which causes delirious outbursts of envy and hatred from the vulgar-minded. Property, that is, in the original sense: old and permanent possession, inherited from forefathers or acquired over long years by the heavy and devoted work of the owner and cherished and increased for his sons and grandsons. Wealth is not the mere background of superiority, but, above all, the result and expression of it, a function not only of the way in which it has been acquired, but also of the ability needed to shape and use it as a true cultural element. Let it for once be said outright, though it is a slap in the face for the vulgarity of the age: property is not a vice, but a gift, and a gift such as few possess. For it, too, is the product of long training through generations of distinction; occasionally it is acquired in families that have worked their way upward - by self-education on a groundwork of sound and strong race-character, but practically never by original talent alone, without some precondition of educated environment and past example. It is not a question of how much one has, but of what one has and the way in which one has it. Mere quantity as an end in itself is vulgar.

"One can have, and will to have, property as a means to power - this is a subordinating of economic successes to political aims, and it affirms the ancient experience that money belongs with leadership in war and State. This was Caesar's conception when he conquered and plundered Gaul, and that of Cecil Rhodes when he got the mines of South Africa into his hands in order there to found an empire after his own heart. No poor nation can have great political successes, and so long as it regards poverty as virtue, and riches as sin, it does not deserve any. This was the fundamental though only half-conscious meaning of the old Germanic expeditions by sea and land, for with the booty acquired, ships were built and followers enlisted. This type of will-to-power is hallmarked by a royal generosity. It is the opposite of greed and miserliness and equally remote from parvenu prodigality and womanish love of one's neighbour.

"But this is beside the point. I am speaking of property-owning in so far as it implies the tradition of a Culture. It signifies inward superiority, it marks a distinction from whole classes of people. Not much is needed: a small well-preserved homestead, a worthy craft reputably practised, a tiny garden bearing evidence of cultivation by loving hands, a miner's spotless home, a few books or reproductions of classical art. The point is that these objects should be transformed into a personal world, should bear the stamp of the owner's personality. True possessions are soul, and only through that soul Culture. To estimate them by their money value is, however you look at it, either an incomprehension or a desecration. To divide them after the owner's death is a sort of murder."

Christian Morality is Renunciation and Nothing Else

Oswald Spengler, 1933:

What are, actually, Christian trade unions? Christian Bolshevism, neither more nor less. Since the beginning of the Rationalist age - that is, since 1750 - there is materialism both with and without Christian terminology. As soon as one mixes up the concepts of poverty, hunger, distress, work, and wages (with the moral undertone of rich and poor, right and wrong) and is led thereby to join in the social and economic demands of the proletarian sort - that is, money demands - one is a materialist. And then the pressing inward need for a high altar is supplied by the party secretariat, for a poor-box by election funds - and the trade-union official becomes the successor to St. Francis.

This materialism of the Late megalopolis is a practical cast of thought and action, whatever the "faith" may be that accompanies it. It is the mode of regarding history and public and personal life "economically" and of looking upon economics, not as a thing of vocations and the content of lives, but as the method by which with the least exertion the most money and pleasure can be secured: panem et circenses. Most people nowadays do not realize at all how materialistic they are in themselves and their thought. They may be zealous in prayer and confession and have the word "God" for ever on their lips, they may even be priests by calling and conviction, and yet be materialists. Christian morality is, like every morality, renunciation and nothing else. Those who do not feel it to be so are materialists. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" means: do not regard this hard meaning of life as misery and seek to circumvent it by party politics. But for proletarian election propaganda the precept is certainly not suitable. The materialist prefers to eat the bread that others have earned in the sweat of their face, the peasant, the craftsman, the inventor, the captain of industry. But the famous "eye of a needle," through which many a camel passes, is not too narrow for the "rich man" only; it is equally narrow for the man who extorts bigger wages and shorter working hours by means of strikes, sabotage, and elections - and for him, too, who engineers these for the sake of his own power. It is the utility-moral of the slave-souls: slaves, not because of their situation in life - for that we are all without exception, from the destiny of being born at a particular time and place - but because to regard the world from below is mean. Does one regard the state of being rich with envy or with contempt? Does one acknowledge the man who has by personal superiority worked his way up to the rank of a leader - from locksmith's apprentice, say, to founder and owner of a factory - or hate him and try to pull him down? That is the test. But this materialism, to which renunciation is incomprehensible and absurd, is nothing but egoism of individuals and classes, the parasitic egoism of inferior minds, who regard the economic life of other people, and that of the whole, as an object from which to squeeze with the least possible exertion the greatest possible enjoyment: panem et circenses. Such people look upon personal distinction, industry, success, joy in achievement as wickedness, sin, and treason. It is the moral of class war, which lumps all this together under the name Capitalism (which had from the first a moral significance) and sets it up as a target for proletarian hate, while on the other side it aims at welding the wage-earners into one political front with the underworld of the great cities.