Ignoring altogether the Classical soul

Goethe on his Italian tour speaks with enthusiasm of the buildings of Palladio, whose frigid and academic work we today regard very skeptically: but when he goes on to Pompeii he does not conceal his dissatisfaction in experiencing “a strange, half unpleasant impression,” and what he has to say on the temples of Paestum and Segesta — masterpieces of Hellenic art — is embarrassed and trivial. Palpably, when Classical antiquity in its full force met him face to face, he did not recognize it. It is the same with all others. Much that was Classical they chose not to see, and so they saved their inward image of the Classical — which was in reality the background of a life ideal that they themselves had created and nourished with their heart’s blood, a vessel filled with their own world feeling, a phantom, an idol. The audacious descriptions of Aristophanes, Juvenal or Petronius of life in the Classical cities — the southern dirt and riff raff, terrors and brutalities, pleasure boys and Phrynes, phallus worship and imperial orgies — excite the enthusiasm of the student and the dilettante, who find the same realities in the world cities of today too lamentable and repulsive to face. “In the cities life is bad; there are too many of the lustful.” — also sprach Zarathustra. They commend the state sense of the Romans, but despise the man of today who permits himself any contact with public affairs. There is a type of scholar whose clarity of vision comes under some irresistible spell when it turns from a frock coat to a toga, from a British football ground to a Byzantine circus, from a transcontinental railway to a Roman road in the Alps, from a thirty knot destroyer to a trireme, from Prussian bayonets to Roman spears — nowadays, even, from a modern engineer’s Suez Canal to that of a Pharaoh. He would admit a steam engine as a symbol of human passion and an expression of intellectual force if it were Hero of Alexandria who invented it, not otherwise. To such it seems blasphemous to talk of Roman central heating or bookkeeping in preference to the worship of the Great Mother of the Gods.

But the other school sees nothing but these things. It thinks it exhausts the essence of this Culture, alien as it is to ours, by treating the Greeks as simply equivalent, and it obtains its conclusions by means of simple factual substitutions, ignoring altogether the Classical soul. That there is not the slightest inward correlation between the things meant by “Republic,” “freedom,” “property” and the like then and there and the things meant by such words here and now, it has no notion whatever. It makes fun of the historians of the age of Goethe, who honestly expressed their own political ideals in classical history forms and revealed their own personal enthusiasms in vindications or condemnations of lay figures named Lycurgus, Brutus, Cato, Cicero, Augustus — but it cannot itself write a chapter without reflecting the party opinion of its morning paper.

It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the spirit of Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads to the end. In sum, each school permits itself to bring into high relief that part of the Classical which best expresses its own views — Nietzsche the pre-Socratic Athens, the economists the Hellenistic period, the politicians Republican Rome, poets the Imperial Age.

Oswald Spengler
The Decline of the West