VII
As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual creations, the men of the “New Order” upon whom every decline-time founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt. They are the fluid megalopolitan Populace, the rootless city-mass (οἱ πολλοί, as Athens called it) that has replaced the People, the Culture-folk that was sprung from the soil and peasantlike even when it lived in towns. They are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome, the newspaper-readers of our own corresponding time; the “educated” man who then and now makes a cult of intellectual mediocrity and a church of advertisement;[[448]] the man of the theatres and places of amusement, of sport and “best-sellers.” It is this late-appearing mass and not “mankind” that is the object of Stoic and Socialist propaganda, and one could match it with equivalent phenomena in the Egyptian New Empire, Buddhist India and Confucian China.
Correspondingly, there is a characteristic form of public effect, the Diatribe.[[449]] First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an efficient form in all Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and plebeian through and through, it replaces the old meaningful and far-ranging Creation of the great man by the unrestrained Agitation of the small and shrewd, ideas by aims, symbols by programs. The expansion-element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. We must not confuse this hurried and shallow activity with the Faustian will-to-power. All it means is that creative inner life is at an end and intellectual existence can only be kept up materially, by outward effect in the space of the City. Diatribe belongs necessarily to the “religion of the irreligious” and is the characteristic form that the “cure of souls” takes therein. It appears as the Indian preaching, the Classical rhetoric, and the Western journalism. It appeals not to the best but to the most, and it values its means according to the number of successes obtained by them. It substitutes for the old thoughtfulness an intellectual male-prostitution by speech and writing, which fills and dominates the halls and the market-places of the megalopolis. As the whole of Hellenistic philosophy is rhetorical, so the social-ethic system of Zola’s novel and Ibsen’s drama is journalistic. If Christianity in its original expansion became involved with this spiritual[spiritual] prostitution, it must not be confounded with it. The essential point of Christian missionarism has almost always been missed.[[450]] Primitive Christianity was a Magian religion and the soul of its Founder was utterly incapable of this brutal activity without tact or depth. And it was the Hellenistic practice of Paul[[451]] that—against the determined opposition of the original community, as we all know—introduced it into the noisy, urban, demagogic publicity of the Imperium Romanum. Slight as his Hellenistic tincture may have been, it sufficed to make him outwardly a part of the Classical Civilization. Jesus had drawn unto himself fishermen and peasants, Paul devoted himself to the market-places of the great cities and the megalopolitan form of propaganda. The word “pagan” (man of the heath or country-side) survives to this day to tell us who it was that this propaganda affected last. What a difference, indeed what diametrical opposition, between Paul and Boniface the passionate Faustian of woods and lone valleys, the joyous cultivating Cistercians, the Teutonic Knights of the Slavonic East! Here was youth once more, blossoming and yearning in a peasant landscape, and not until the 19th Century, when that landscape and all pertaining to it had aged into a world based on the megalopolis and inhabited by the masses, did Diatribe appear in it. A true peasantry enters into the field of view of Socialism as little as it did into those of Buddha and the Stoa. It is only now, in the Western megalopolis, that the equivalent of the Paul-type emerges, to figure in Christian or anti-Christian, social or theosophical “causes,” Free Thought or the making of religious fancy-ware.
This decisive turn towards the one remaining kind of life—that is, life as a fact, seen biologically and under causality-relations instead of as Destiny—is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with which men now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and hygiene. Alcohol-questions and Vegetarianism are treated with religious earnestness—such, apparently, being the gravest problems that the “men of the New Order,” the generations of frog-perspective, are capable of tackling. Religions, as they are when they stand new-born on the threshold of the new Culture—the Vedic, the Orphic, the Christianity of Jesus and the Faustian Christianity of the old Germany of chivalry—would have felt it degradation even to glance at questions of this kind. Nowadays, one rises to them. Buddhism is unthinkable without a bodily diet to match its spiritual diet, and amongst the Sophists, in the circle of Antisthenes, in the Stoa and amongst the Sceptics such questions became ever more and more prominent. Even Aristotle wrote on the alcohol-question, and a whole series of philosophers took up that of vegetarianism. And the only difference between Apollinian and Faustian methods here is that the Cynic theorized about his own digestion while Shaw treats of “everybody’s.” The one disinterests himself, the other dictates. Even Nietzsche, as we know, handled such questions with relish in his Ecce Homo.