The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

IX

No one has yet perceived that Arabian art is a single phenomenon. It is an idea that can only take shape when we have ceased to be deceived by the crust which overlaid the young East with post-Classical art-exercises that, whether they were imitation-antique or chose their elements from proper or alien sources at will, were in any case long past all inward life; when we have discovered that Early Christian art, together with every really living element in “late-Roman,” is in fact the springtime of the Arabian style; and when we see the epoch of Justinian I as exactly on a par with the Spanish-Venetian Baroque that ruled Europe in the great days of Charles V or Philip II, and the palaces of Byzantium and their magnificent battle-pictures and pageant-scenes—the vanished glories that inspired the pens of courtly literati like Procopius—on a par with the palaces of early Baroque in Madrid, Vienna and Rome and the great decorative-painting of Rubens and Tintoretto. This Arabian style embraces the entire first millennium of our era. It thus stands at a critical position in the picture of a general history of “Art,” and its organic connectedness has been imperceptible under the erroneous conventions thereof.[^[247]]

Strange and—if these studies have given us the eye for things latent—moving it is to see how this young Soul, held in bondage to the intellect of the Classical and, above all, to the political omnipotence of Rome, dares not rouse itself into freedom but humbly subjects itself to obsolete value-forms and tries to be content with Greek language, Greek ideas and Greek art-elements. Devout acceptance of the powers of the strong day is present in every young Culture and is the sign of its youth—witness the humility of Gothic man in his pious high-arched spaces with their pillar-statuary and their light-filled pictures in glass, the high tension of the Egyptian soul in the midst of its world of pyramids, lotus-columns and relief-lined halls. But in this instance there is the additional element of an intellectual prostration before forms really dead but supposedly eternal. Yet in spite of all, the taking-over and continuance of these forms came to nothing. Involuntarily, unobserved, not supported by an inherent pride as Gothic was, but felt, there in Roman Syria, almost as a lamentable come-down, a whole new form-world grew up. Under a mask of Græco-Roman conventions, it filled even Rome itself. The master-masons of the Pantheon and the Imperial Fora were Syrians. In no other example is the primitive force of a young soul so manifest as here, where it has to make its own world by sheer conquest.

In this as in every other Culture, Spring seeks to express its spirituality in a new ornamentation and, above all, in religious architecture as the sublime form of that ornamentation. But of all this rich form-world the only part that (till recently) has been taken into account has been the Western edge of it, which consequently has been assumed to be the true home and habitat of Magian style-history. In reality, in matters of style as in those of religion, science and social-political life, what we find there is only an irradiation from outside the Eastern border of the Empire.[^[248]] Riegl[^[249]] and Strzygowski[^[250]] have discovered this, but if we are to go further and arrive at a conspectus of the development of Arabian art we have to shed many philological and religious prepossessions. The misfortune is that our art-research, although it no longer recognizes the religious frontiers, nevertheless unconsciously assumes them. For there is in reality no such thing as a Late-Classical nor an Early-Christian nor yet an Islamic art in the sense of an art proper to each of those faiths and evolved by the community of believers as such. On the contrary, the totality of these religions—from Armenia to Southern Arabia and Axum, and from Persia to Byzantium and Alexandria—possess a broad uniformity of artistic expression that overrides the contradictions of detail.[^[251]] All these religions, the Christian, the Jewish, the Persian, the Manichæan, the Syncretic,[^[252]] possessed cult-buildings and (at any rate in their script) an Ornamentation of the first rank; and however different the items of their dogmas, they are all pervaded by an homogeneous religiousness and express it in a homogeneous symbolism of depth-experience. There is something in the basilicas of Christianity, Hellenistic, Hebrew and Baal-cults, and in the Mithræum,[^[253]] the Mazdaist fire-temple and the Mosque, that tells of a like spirituality: it is the Cavern-feeling.

It becomes therefore the bounden duty of research to seek to establish the hitherto completely neglected architecture of the South-Arabian and Persian temple, the Syrian and the Mesopotamian synagogue, the cult-buildings of Eastern Asia Minor and even Abyssinia;[^[254]] and in respect of Christianity to investigate no longer merely the Pauline West but also the Nestorian East that stretched from the Euphrates to China, where the old records significantly call its buildings “Persian temples.” If in all this building practically nothing has, so far, forced itself specially upon our notice, it is fair to suppose that both the advance of Christianity first and that of Islam later could change the religion of a place of worship without contradicting its plan and style. We know that this is the case with Late Classical temples: but how many of the churches in Armenia may once have been fire-temples?

The artistic centre of this Culture was very definitely—as Strzygowski has observed—in the triangle of cities Edessa, Nisibis, Amida. To the westward of it is the domain of the Late-Classical “Pseudomorphosis,”[^[255]] the Pauline Christianity that conquered in the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon,[^[256]] Western Judaism and the cults of Syncretism. The architectural type of the Pseudomorphosis, both for Jew and Gentile, is the Basilica.[^[257]] It employs the means of the Classical to express the opposite thereof, and is unable to free itself from these means—that is the essence and the tragedy of “Pseudomorphosis.” The more “Classical” Syncretism modifies a cult that is resident in a Euclidean place into one which is professed by a community of indefinite estate, the more the interior of the temple gains in importance over the exterior without needing to change either plan or roof or columns very much. The space-feeling is different, but not—at first—the means of expressing it. In the pagan religious architecture of the Imperial Age there is a perceptible—though never yet perceived—movement from the wholly corporeal Augustan temple, in which the cella is the architectural expression of nothingness, to one in which the interior only possesses meaning. Finally the external picture of the Peripteros of the Doric is transferred to the four inside walls. Columns ranked in front of a windowless wall are a denial of space beyond—that is, for the Classical beholder, of space within, and for the Magian, of space without. It is therefore a question of minor importance whether the entire space is covered in as in the Basilica proper, or only the sanctuary as in the Sun-temple of Baalbek with the great forecourt,[^[258]] which later becomes a standing element of the mosque and is probably of South Arabian origin.[^[259]] That the Nave originates in a court surrounded by halls is suggested not only by the special development of the basilica-type in the East Syrian steppe (particularly Hauran) but also by the basic disposition of porch, nave and choir as stages leading to the altar—for the aisles (originally the side-halls of the court) end blind, and only the nave proper corresponds with the apse. This basic meaning is very evident in St. Paul at Rome, albeit the Pseudomorphosis (inversion of the Classical temple) dictated the technical means, viz., column and architrave. How symbolic is the Christian reconstruction of the Temple of Aphrodisias in Caria, in which the cella within the columns is abolished and replaced by a new wall outside them.[^[260]]

Outside the domain of the “Pseudomorphosis,” on the contrary, the cavern-feeling was free to develop its own form-language, and here therefore it is the definite roof that is emphasized (whereas in the other domain the protest against the Classical feeling led merely to the development of an interior). When and where the various possibilities of dome, cupola, barrel-vaulting, rib-vaulting, came into existence as technical methods is, as we have already said, a matter of no significance. What is of decisive importance is the fact that about the time of Christ’s birth and the rise of the new world-feeling, the new space-symbolism must have begun to make use of these forms and to develop them further in expressiveness. It will very likely come to be shown that the fire-temples and synagogues of Mesopotamia (and possibly also the temples of Athtar in Southern Arabia) were originally cupola-buildings.[^[261]] Certainly the pagan marna-temple at Gaza was so, and long before Pauline Christianity took possession of these forms under Constantine, builders of Eastern origin had introduced them, as novelties to please the taste of the Megalopolitans, into all parts of the Roman Empire. In Rome itself, Apollodorus of Damascus was employed under Trajan for the vaulting of the temple of “Venus and Rome,” and the domed chambers of the Baths of Caracalla and the so-called “Minerva Medica” of Gallienus’s time were built by Syrians. But the masterpiece, the earliest of all Mosques, is the Pantheon as rebuilt by Hadrian. Here, without a doubt, the emperor was imitating, for the satisfaction of his own taste, cult-buildings that he had seen in the East.[^[262]]

The architecture of the central-dome, in which the Magian world-feeling achieved its purest expression, extended beyond the limits of the Roman Empire. For the Nestorian Christianity that extended from Armenia even into China it was the only form, as it was also for the Manichæns and the Mazdaists, and it also impressed itself victoriously upon the Basilica of the West when the Pseudomorphosis began to crumble and the last cults of Syncretism to die out. In Southern France—where there were Manichæan sects even as late as the Crusades—the form of the East was domesticated. Under Justinian, the interpenetration of the two produced the domical basilica of Byzantium and Ravenna. The pure basilica was pushed into the Germanic West, there to be transformed by the energy of the Faustian depth-impulse into the cathedral. The domed basilica, again, spread from Byzantium and Armenia into Russia, where it came by slow degrees to be felt as an element of exterior architecture belonging to a symbolism concentrated in the roof. But in the Arabian world Islam, the heir of Monophysite and Nestorian Christianity and of the Jews and the Persians, carried the development through to the end. When it turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque it only resumed possession of an old property. Islamic domical building followed Mazdaist and Nestorian along the same tracks to Shan-tung and to India. Mosques grew up in the far West in Spain and Sicily, where, moreover, the style appears rather in its East-Aramæan-Persian than in its West-Aramæan-Syrian mode.[^[263]] And while Venice looked to Byzantium and Ravenna (St. Mark), the brilliant age of the Norman-Hohenstaufen rule in Palermo taught the cities of the Italian west coast, and even Florence, to admire and to imitate these Moorish buildings. More than one of the motives that the Renaissance thought were Classical—e.g., the court surrounded by halls and the union of column and arch—really originated thus.

What is true as regards architecture is even more so as regards ornamentation, which in the Arabian world very early overcame all figure-representation and swallowed it up in itself. Then, as “arabesque,” it advanced to meet, to charm and to mislead the young art-intention of the West.

The early-Christian-Late-Classical art of the Pseudomorphosis shows the same ornament-plus-figure mixture of the inherited “alien” and the inborn “proper” as does the Carolingian-Early Romanesque of (especially) Southern France and Upper Italy. In the one case Hellenistic intermingles with Early-Magian, in the other Mauro-Byzantine with Faustian. The researcher has to examine line after line and ornament after ornament to detect the form-feeling which differentiates the one stratum from the other. In every architrave, in every frieze, there is to be found a secret battle between the conscious old and the unconscious, but victorious, new motives. One is confounded by this general interpenetration of the Late-Hellenistic and the Early-Arabian form-senses, as one sees it, for example, in Roman portrait-busts (here it is often only in the treatment of the hair that the new way of expression is manifested); in the acanthus-shoots which show—often on one and the same frieze—chisel-work and drill-work side by side; in the sarcophagi of the 3rd Century in which a childlike feeling of the Giotto and Pisano character is entangled with a certain late and megalopolitan Naturalism that reminds one more or less of David or Carstens; and in buildings such as the Basilica of Maxentius[^[264]] and many parts of the Baths and the Imperial Fora that are still very Classical in conception.

Nevertheless, the Arabian soul was cheated of its maturity—like a young tree that is hindered and stunted in its growth by a fallen old giant of the forest. Here there was no brilliant[brilliant] instant felt and experienced as such, like that of ours in which, simultaneously with the Crusades, the wooden beams of the Cathedral roof locked themselves into rib-vaulting and an interior was made to actualize and fulfil the idea of infinite space. The political creation of Diocletian was shattered in its glory upon the fact that, standing as he did on Classical ground, he had to accept the whole mass of the administrative tradition of Urbs Roma; this sufficed to reduce his work to a mere reform of obsolete conditions. And yet he was the first of the Caliphs. With him, the idea of the Arabian State emerges clearly into the light. It is Diocletian’s dispensation, together with that of the Sassanids which preceded it somewhat and served in all respects as its model, that gives us the first notion of the ideal that ought to have gone on to fulfilment here. But so it was in all things. To this very day we admire as last creations of the Classical—because we cannot or will not regard them otherwise—the thought of Plotinus and Marcus Aurelius, the cults of Isis, Mithras and the Sun-God, the Diophantine mathematics and, lastly, the whole of the art which streamed towards us from the Eastern marches of the Roman Empire and for which Antioch and Alexandria were merely points d’appui.

This alone is sufficient to explain the intense vehemence with which the Arabian Culture, when released at length from artistic as from other fetters, flung itself upon all the lands that had inwardly belonged to it for centuries past. It is the sign of a soul that feels itself in a hurry, that notes in fear the first symptoms of old age before it has had youth. This emancipation of Magian mankind is without a parallel. Syria is conquered, or rather delivered, in 634. Damascus falls in 637, Ctesiphon in 637. In 641 Egypt and India are reached, in 647 Carthage, in 676 Samarkand, in 710 Spain. And in 732 the Arabs stood before Paris. Into these few years was compressed the whole sum of saved-up passions, postponed hopes, reserved deeds, that in the slow maturing of other Cultures suffice to fill the history of centuries. The Crusaders before Jerusalem, the Hohenstaufen in Sicily, the Hansa in the Baltic, the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East, the Spaniards in America, the Portuguese in the East Indies, the Empire of Charles V on which the sun never set, the beginnings of England’s colonial power under Cromwell—the equivalent of all this was shot out in one discharge that carried the Arabs to Spain and France, India and Turkestan.

True, all Cultures (the Egyptian, the Mexican and the Chinese excepted) have grown up under the tutelage of some older Culture. Each of the form-worlds shows certain alien traits. Thus, the Faustian soul of the Gothic, already predisposed to reverence by the Arabian origin of Christianity, grasped at the treasures of Late-Arabian art. An unmistakably Southern, one might even say an Arabian, Gothic wove itself over the façades of the Burgundian and Provençal cathedrals, dominated with a magic of stone the outward language of Strassburg Minster, and fought a silent battle in statues and porches, fabric-patterns, carvings and metalwork—and not less in the intricate figures of scholastic philosophy and in that intensely Western symbol, the Grail legend[^[265]]—with the Nordic prime-feeling of Viking Gothic that rules the interior of the Magdeburg Cathedral, the points of Freiburg Minster and the mysticism of Meister Eckart. More than once the pointed arch threatens to burst its restraining line and to transform itself into the horseshoe arch of Moorish-Norman architecture.

So also the Apollinian art of the Doric spring—whose first efforts are practically lost to us—doubtless took over Egyptian elements to a very large extent, and by and through these came to its own proper symbolism.

But the Magian soul of the Pseudomorphosis had not the courage to appropriate alien means without yielding to them. And this is why the physiognomic of the Magian soul has still so much to disclose to the quester.