Speaking of Spengler...

Franz Rosenzweig

(Image from Asia Times Online)

I had previously -- possibly yesterday -- wondered about the theological debt owed by 'Spengler' to Franz Rosenzweig.

With that wondrous query in mind, I did more scrounging about at Spengler's webpage on the Asia Times website and found an article reviewing a recent German edition -- by Gesine Palmer and Yossef Schwartz -- of Rosenzweig's Der Stern Der Erlosung (The Star of Redemption). Spengler's review article, "Oil on the flames of civilizational war" (December 2, 2003), has some choice quotes from Rosenzweig's book, framed by Spengler's observations:

Most of the German-language material in the Palmer-Schwartz collection can be found easily in Rosenzweig's book The Star of Redemption, available in English translation. Few Americans have the training to read it, for Rosenzweig writes in the extinct dialect of Kantian idealism. What he says about Islam, however, is reasonably straightforward. I translate from the present [Palmer-Schwartz] edition and summarize below.

Judaism began with a people, and then became a congregation, and eventually a religion, Rosenzweig argues. Christianity began with a congregation into which it then selected its people, the "new Israel". Islam, he avers, was concocted as an institutionalized religion to begin with, as a parody of Judaism and Christianity. This, however, had dreadful consequences. "Mohammed took over the notion of Revelation from the outside, which left him stuck with the pagan idea of creation as a matter of course," Rosenzweig wrote.

Allah merely is the apotheosized image of an Oriental despot, emphatically not the Judeo-Christian God of love. Rosenzweig altogether repudiates the notion of Islamic culture. As a caricature, Islam is entirely sterile: "Islam never created an Islamic art, but rather took into its service pre-Islamic art ... The pre-Islamic state, namely the Oriental state in its Byzantine form, made Islam into its state religion; the pre-Islamic spirit of the Koran adopted either pre-Islamic rationalism or mysticism and orthodoxy. In Europe, by contrast, in Christian Europe, there arose something new: Christian art, and a Christian state."

Love requires the Judeo-Christian God to create the world. By contrast, "the God of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily. By contrast, it is most characteristic of rabbinic theology that it formulates our concept of the divine power to create in the question as to whether God created the world out of love or out of righteousness."

Allah's creation for Rosenzweig is a mere act of "magic". Muslim theology "presumes that Allah creates every isolated thing at every moment. Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the God's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism."

By paganism Rosenzweig refers to a specific mindset as well as a political system which crushes individual identity into the whole. In the pagan state, he wrote in the Star, "The individual does not stand in relation to the state in the way that a part stands in relation to the whole. On the contrary, the state is all, and its electricity pulses through the veins of every individual." Unfortunately, Palmer and Schwartz do not include in their edition this and other relevant passages about paganism in general.

Spengler's agreement with Rosenzweig's portrayal of Islam as a type of monistic paganism dressed up as monotheism reminds me of Alain Besançon's query posed as an article, "What kind of religion is Islam?" (Commentary, May 2004, Volume 117, Issue: 5), which I have previously noted and which answers with this:

Christians and Jews ... may well be struck by the religious zeal of the Muslim toward a God whom they recognize as being also their God. But this God is in fact separate and distinct, and so is the relation between Him and the believing Muslim. Christians are accustomed to distinguish the worship of false gods -- that is, idolatry -- from the worship of the true God. To treat Islam suitably, it becomes necessary to forge a new concept altogether, and one that is difficult to grasp -- namely, an idolatry of the God of Israel. To put it another way, Islam may be thought of as the natural religion of the revealed God.

Both Rosenzweig and Besançon as well as Spengler consider Islam a form of pagan belief. Muslims would, clearly, find this label objectionable if not insulting, but an emotional response would be inappropriate to the intellectual critique.

Anyway, this would be neither here nor there if Spengler weren't arguing that Islam's pagan core is responsible for the current wave of jihadist attacks here, there, and everywhere. If one asks Spengler, "But why now -- why is Islam so radical right now if it's always had a pagan core?", then he will respond (cf. "Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World, Part 2: The Islamist response") that Islam's pagan core makes the Islamic world a traditional society that emphasizes not the individual but the 'tribe' and that this communal reality is threatened with annihilation by modern individualism, against which "The Islamists feel that they have nothing to lose, for the fear of cultural extinction surpasses the fear of physical death."

One possible flaw in this argument is that Spengler has also argued that 'pagan' culture does not recognize individual immortality and thus emphasizes the corporate immortality of the tribe. Yet, Islam surely offers immortality to individuals.

Or does it?

Spengler would likely assert that Islamic immortality gives no individual guarantees, aside from the immortality accorded to the martyr -- but even that is left up to the unfathomable, arbitrary will of Allah. What therefore remains, Spengler would emphasize, is the 'pagan' immortality of the tribe.